“Just tell her how you feel,” I’d say, thinking, Just tell me how you feel.
They broke up, and my determination to be noticed by Billy only grew. At one of the parties at his house around November of sophomore year, Billy gave me a sign. He looked at me in such a way that I just knew.
“We should hang,” he said.
I felt invincible.
HERE’S HOW IT WENT: ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1988, BILLY AND I made a plan for him to pick me up at my house after I went to a Warriors game to celebrate my little sister’s birthday. I still remember the score: the Warriors beat the Portland Trail Blazers, 107–100. I borrowed my friend Danielle’s light blue denim skirt, and as my parents slept upstairs and I waited for Billy to pull up in his GMC, I checked myself in the mirror roughly fifty-six times. When he finally showed, I walked out the front door and left it unlocked.
We drove to his house and he led me straight to his parents’ bedroom. Remember how it felt as a kid when you went into your friends’ parents’ bedrooms? They just felt grand. Holy shit, I remember thinking, I’m so not supposed to be in here. We’re in here and we’re going to fuck.
I lay down and the panic set in. He’d already had sex with Alice, the ball-fondling sex acrobat, so in my mind I saw Alice smirking at me, always so sure of herself in those fucking soccer warm-ups, that neon scrunchie barely able to hold the glory of her hair.
In comparison, I was so black, I was so not cool, and I was so inexperienced.
Billy started to kiss me. My mind was racing. What if my vagina looked like a fucking dragon? I had another friend who was really into trimming and shaving her pubic hair. This same girl would even sometimes shave her vagina using a mirror. She would then brag-slash-explain to all of us using very adult words: “Well, if you don’t know yourself . . .”
And I don’t know myself! At all! And now Billy’s going to see me and even I don’t know what he’s going to see. Then it occurs to me: Oh my God, he is going to have sex with black pussy.
I knew, even though I was so inexperienced, that in interracial porn there is a lot of “Give me that black pussy” talk. And I had always thought it sounded so dirty. Now I realize that in fact I have black pussy. Did he have sex with that black girlfriend back in Fremont? I hadn’t thought about my vagina in relation to other vaginas he’d seen. And I hadn’t done anything to mine in preparation. So now, I thought, he is going to see this black Teen Wolf pussy. It’s going to look different, smell different, be different. He is going to be repulsed. And if this doesn’t go well it will be because he is rejecting my black pussy.
We got under the covers and I pulled up my skirt to fumble out of my underwear, doing as inelegant a job as possible. We left our shirts on.
“I’m a virgin,” I said.
He smiled. I later found out that this was his thing. He was the Deflowerer. It’s not why he had sex with me, but he was known for being a lot of people’s first time.
He didn’t even look at my vagina. He started to put his dick in and then he looked at me, trying to gauge: “Am I killing you?” I was silent. It was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t, like, crazy painful.
And then it was. I start making this bug-eyed look that I knew could not be sexy. I flashed through every book I’d ever read that included a sex scene and landed upon the words, “Look him in the eye.” So I tried that. Weird. It’s too much to maintain eye contact with a guy when you’re sixteen years old and mortified.
He was very gentle and so determined, like he was solving a math problem. But he still hadn’t laid eyes on my vagina. I was still wearing Danielle’s skirt and I started to panic, because I realized that when I gave it back to her it was going to smell like sex. She would know. Because at first you don’t want anyone to know, but then you want the whole fucking world to know.
I waited for all the things I had read about to happen, while trying to mask the pain, horror, and humiliation.
It started to not hurt anymore. Maybe even feel good. And then, with a strange sound, it was over. Where was the magic? Where was the cuddling? The fireworks and the I-love-yous? Something. Anything?
He got up to flush the condom, and I saw his bare butt for the first time, watching that bow-legged walk across the room. He was a dude strutting around in a white Hanes tee and tube socks. I let out a contented sigh. He was just so sure of himself that it was infectious. I had just lost my virginity.
When he came back to the bed, we locked eyes, and all my newfound self-assuredness disappeared. I felt ridiculous. I felt exposed. He hadn’t seen my black pussy, but did it feel different to him? Did he like it? Did he hate it? Is that why he came so fast?
He leaned on my side of the mattress.
“We’re gonna have to wash these sheets.”
“Huh?”
“You bled all over the sheets.”
There was no sweetness. It was simply a statement of fact, like a detective at a crime scene. I got up, and I saw what he saw. It was a crime scene, there on those light gray sheets. The books never described it that way. The books never said there would be this much blood.
Inside, I wanted to die. In fact, I decided I was dying. A little of humiliation, and a little physically. I crossed some weird boundary, turned around, and found that the door had vanished behind me. I was stuck in a weird space of middle earth.
I had unleashed my black pussy on the world, and look what happened. Here’s this perfect man, and I’ve ruined the sheets of his parents’ bed. I wanted to crawl into a ball and call my best girlfriend and write it in my diary—all at once. And now I had to wait for a whole laundry cycle?
Yes, I did. We sat there in his living room, barely talking. And as we waited for the dryer to ding, I felt myself slip-sliding right back into the friend zone. I was already mourning all the flirtation, the touching, the little signals of interest.
He drove me across town, back to my house. When we finally pulled up, he jerked his head toward the car door like I didn’t understand how it worked. I sat. I waited.
“Y’all right?” he said.
The car was still running.
“Yeah, yeah.”
He nodded. I wanted him to kiss me the way Molly Ringwald got kissed. In my head I was screaming, “I want you to be Jake Ryan! Kiss me like that!”
He didn’t.
I let myself out of the car and closed the door softly.
As I walked to my house, I pretended not to watch him drive away.
BILLY GOT BACK WITH ALICE SHORTLY AFTER WE HAD SEX.
When Billy showed interest in me, I felt myself vibrating with sexual energy. I wasn’t Gregory Hines in the eunuchs’ chamber anymore. What’s more, people could see it. Everyone around me knew that I was a viable option. My confidence swelled—and promptly deflated when he moved on to someone else. For a few weeks, I remembered looking around, scanning the halls and classrooms for signs of other interested suitors. “Anybody else? Anybody? No?”
No. I was back to eunuch status. But now I’d had a taste. I knew what was on the other side.
I wanted a do-over. Later that school year, I got it. It was in February. Billy and I had sex on the ground outside an industrial park. I drank a Mickey’s big mouth. This time, I thought, it was for real.
That one didn’t do the trick either. We did have a pseudo-romance of sorts and hooked up many more times. Throughout my teens, I never dated a guy without cheating at least once with Billy. Even now, I google him. I’ll be with someone from Pleasanton and he’ll come up in conversation. The other person might say, “I wonder what he’s . . .” and immediately it’s “Hold, please,” as I start typing. Or if I’m with a mutual friend from home and they have a laptop open, I direct them: “Go to his Facebook.” I don’t want to actually connect. I just want to be a voyeur. I want to see how his kids turned out. I want to see if they’re ballsy like him.
But it doesn’t matter. As many times as we hooked up, there would never be BILLY AND NICKIE painted on the back of t
hat GMC. I was never his Chosen One.
five
OPEN HOUSE
When I was little, my mom would take me with her to open houses. We’d drive out to Oakland and San Francisco—cities she loved far more than our town of Pleasanton—and we’d wander from house to house. These were homes that we no way in hell could afford, but we toured them just to see how other people lived. People who were not us.
I was eight when we toured a huge San Francisco Victorian, all light wood and curving staircases with a bay window that actually looked out on the bay. I ran to the window to take in all the blue of the water.
“Your world is only as small as you make it, Nickie,” she said.
That was the same year she took me to see Nikki Giovanni recite poetry at the Oakland Children’s Museum. We sat high up in coliseum seating, listening as Nikki talked about dragonflies and strawberry patches. My mother kept nudging me into listening. “Isn’t this wonderful?” she asked again and again.
Mom was always taking my sisters and me to events like this. She loved the ballet and would take us to see The Nutcracker at Christmas. She would buy tickets for the Alvin Ailey dance company whenever they were in the Bay Area. On every one of these excursions, she would inevitably start talking to a stranger. My sisters and I called them Random Acts of Conversation, rolling our eyes. “Where are you from?” she would ask the rando she had found, whose existence we would then be dragged into acknowledging. “Oh, wow,” she would say.
Mom was so bored and lonely in the small world of Pleasanton. When my parents moved there, my father simply stopped including her when he went out. And Cully Union, an extremely social person who could also talk to anybody—except his wife Theresa—went out a lot.
My parents both had telecommunications jobs, he at AT&T and she at Pacific Bell. Back in Nebraska, they also worked a night shift cleaning a day-care center so I could receive free care when I was little. My father was obsessed with upward mobility and after he got his BA degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, he later got an advanced degree going to night school. My mother was pursuing her master’s at Holy Name, a Catholic college in Oakland. My dad thought that her studies would help her move up the ranks at Pacific Bell. But learning for my mother was about her love of literature. Her time at Holy Name was meaningful for her. To this day, she talks about two classmates, a Chinese American and Mexican American who took her out to try Thai food for the first time. When my father realized her higher education was in the humanities and would not result in more money for the household, he stopped funding it. He hadn’t cared to know what she was studying, because Dad is always oblivious to things he isn’t interested in. She never completed her master’s.
Meanwhile, he was funding his second life. Around my junior year of high school, I discovered a green ATM card in a drawer. I brought it to my older sister, Kelly.
“There’s a lot of money in that one,” she said.
It was the card Dad used to finance his life with another woman. Kelly was aware of the reality long before I was. She had gotten a sales job with AT&T, working out of the Oakland office while my dad was in San Jose. Kelly’s job took her up and down the bay, and whenever she was close to San Jose my dad would say, “Let’s link up and have lunch.”
But it came with the caveat, “Just let me know before you come to the office.”
One day she surprised him. Dad was in a meeting in the conference room, and someone gave Kelly a folder to leave on his desk. He had a glass desktop, under which he kept several family photos. Where there was usually one photo of my mom and dad, this time there were instead several photos of my dad with another woman.
“She looked so much like Mom,” Kelly told me. “But she’s not Mom.”
Kelly said that once she discovered the reason for the green ATM card, she would ask Dad to lend it to her—basically daring him to say no. After a while, I told him he also needed to give me the card.
“Take out twenty dollars,” he’d say, expressionless.
I’d take out two hundred.
Then Kelly found the secret photo album. She always did know where to snoop, although my father didn’t put much effort into hiding it. It was right under the bed, almost in plain sight. The other woman had put together an old-school family photo album of all their trips together, thick and loaded with time-stamped pictures in plastic sheaths. My sister and I examined the dates, realizing he had been lying to us for years about his whereabouts.
Kelly pointed at a photo of my father with this woman who was not our mother in front of a waterfall, wearing leis.
“February 14,” I said.
“That was the conference . . .” Kelly said.
“In Parsippany!” we said together.
“You were in Kona, asshole,” I said, turning to the next page.
Kelly had been right. My mother and this other woman were the same woman: short, light-skinned, with freckles. They each had short blond hair.
He had a type.
I started calling the green ATM cash “Hawaii money.” My dad never acknowledged in any way that Kelly and I knew about the other woman or what this card was for. Life simply continued, with him feeling he still retained his full authority over us. During my senior year, my soccer team was in a tournament against our archrival Fremont. Dad loved those soccer games, sitting in the all-white audience with a megaphone, watching his daughter outrun everyone. That day, I shanked a penalty kick in Sudden Death. Game over. I looked to my dad. He put the megaphone down and wrapped his hands around his neck. His eyes bugged out and closed, his tongue lolled.
Then he stopped, looked me right in the eye and mouthed the word “Choke.”
The parents to the left and right of him saw the act and laughed. He laughed with them, his chosen people.
“Fuck you!” I yelled, stomping off the field. Up until that point, I had never sworn at my dad in my entire life. Only once did I allow myself to look back at him: his bemused expression showed the slightest bit of pride. Like, “Look at you, kiddo.”
FOR THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF THEIR MARRIAGE, MY PARENTS DID NOT speak to each other. Not to say “Excuse me” in the kitchen during the morning rush, or even a reflexive “Bless you” after a sneeze. This was during my senior year of high school and into my college years. My mother slept on the couch in the living room, like a boarder. My sisters and I all led separate lives.
One morning, it looked like my mother caught a glimmer of hope. She discovered two tickets Dad had bought for the ballet. It was the kind of thing my father would never want to do, much less with his wife.
So Mom took off early from work that day, had her hair done, and bought a new outfit. It goes to show how much my mother worked, because I remember distinctly how bizarre it was to see her at home while the sun was out, in the middle of the week.
Dad came home shortly after her. She sat on the couch, pretending to read a magazine and waiting patiently as he moved about the house. She didn’t let on that she knew about his ballet surprise, even though she was completely done up. I can imagine her, in her mind, practicing her surprised face.
He strode over to the side table, where the tickets were. He bent over, picked them up, and strutted out the door. My mother’s face took on a faraway look. She pretended none of this humiliation had happened.
The next morning, I didn’t ask him where he’d been. Inside, I felt humiliated on my mother’s behalf, but on the outside, I showed the passive politeness of a fellow boarder in this house.
I CALLED RECENTLY AND I ASKED HER ABOUT THOSE TICKETS.
“You know, what I want you to know more than anything,” she said, “is that everything you remember is what you remember.”
After a long pause, she sighed. “The tickets,” she said. “I just thought . . . perhaps.”
The word hung in the miles between us. I myself say “maybe” when I don’t want something to happen. I reserve “perhaps” for when I get asked about things I hope for.
&n
bsp; “Those weren’t the first tickets to something that I would have liked to go to, nor the last,” she said. “I was ready, in case he, on this day, thought to take me. But I was also prepared for him not to take me.”
“When did you know he was cheating?”
“I didn’t,” she said.
“Mom,” I said.
“We never had the conversation once in our entire marriage,” she said. “I wasn’t looking for it. I loved my house. I loved the swimming pool. I loved my life with you girls. I loved having money in the bank. I loved having the creature comforts that we worked so hard for. My feeling about him was ‘I’m happy, and as long as you don’t disrupt that, I don’t care what you do.’”
Everything you remember is what you remember.
My mother told me that on Sunday nights Dad was always out late. So she began to go out herself, something I don’t remember at all. I only recall Mom waiting at home for Dad. She would leave after Tracy and I were in bed. I was probably sneaking out the same nights.
“There were a lot of live jazz places that your dad didn’t go to,” she said. “One of my good friends from work, her husband was in a band, and I would meet up with her.”
Her girlfriends considered her bait to draw men in. “A blond black woman, I don’t care if you’re rail thin or four hundred pounds, you’re gonna get a lot of attention,” my mother told me. “And I always got a lot of attention.” She never acted on it, she said, but relished the idea that she was pulling them in for the team.
“Most of the time I wouldn’t run into any of your dad’s friends,” she said. “And most of the time it wouldn’t get back to him. But sometimes it did, and that was okay, too.”
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