In Maryland, in our newly built suburban cul-de-sac that cozied up to the old woods, there were shacks that seemed to have been left over from the last century. Wandering down dirt roads into the backwoods during the early seventies, one would come across entire black communities gathered with loud laughter on their wooden porches. School busing finally introduced these porch families to the cul-de-sac families, and so I quickly made friends with a girl named Karon who often came over to our house after school to make bread. She would bring her cousin Jan, and the girls would shift from pounding basketballs in the gym to pounding dough on our cream counter. Dad loved that. He would come home in his uniform, take off his white or black cap with the black plastic brim, and begin flouring the counter and pounding and kneading the bread with the girls, his golden commander stripes bouncing with each hard pulse, teaching and learning at the same time. My sisters would join in, with Mom in the background “hoppin and choppin,” as we called it. Mom provided everything for everyone, but never took center stage; instead she flitted about wiping and cleaning, sweeping flour from the floor, happy her kitchen was being used in this way.
When the bread began to rise and the wheat smell spilled through the cracks of the oven, I got the butter ready on the counter, slightly softened, slather-ready. Butter dripped off our many-colored chins around the wooden kitchen table. We were all loud and seemingly performing for each other, with our throaty laughs and our “yeaaaa gurrrrls!” Performing, and yet really feeling it, too: happiness and community and what neighborhoods and childhoods are supposed to feel like, as if we are all one and there is nothing more important in life than making bread and sharing it. The only reason it also felt like a performance was because I wondered if we would have still acted this way if the adults, or any other eyes, weren’t watching. When it was just me and Karon, there was no power struggle. We were simply friends. It’s not like we didn’t know she was black and I was white, but without eyes watching, our friendship didn’t need the teeter-totter of proving ourselves, or apologizing for the actions of our ancestors.
Mom wrapped up loaves in shiny tin foil for the girls to take back to their families in the mysterious wood. She smoothed the foil perfectly, sliding her small hands over and over the tops of the loaves, folding the sides like hospital corners, exact and beautiful. She wrote with a Magic Marker in elegant, cursive slants on the foil: “wheat bread” or “sourdough bread,” and she beamed with pride as the girls gave her a floury hug, heading back to the darkening wood path.
Mom never understood—nor did I, for that matter—why or how I got beaten up a year later in eighth grade by these same girls. Maybe it had something to do with territory and position and privilege; maybe it had to do with me flirting with the star basketball player named Mohammed; but it was a betrayal that pierced Karon’s and my budding friendship, and we never quite recovered. We were all in the awkward middle school transition. My profile was something like this: Pimply unibrow hateful hormones budding breasts sneaky cigarette puffs and eighth grade! Friendships that meant everything one day could be entirely vanished the next. Friendships actually defined you and your group: the jocks, the nerds, the popular girls, the theater boys and backstage girls, the cheerleaders and pom-pom girls, the intellects, the freaks, the campers and the hikers, the dancers and the fighters. I was the new girl who had lived in Japan and was now going to middle school in Maryland. I was the new girl who was making friends with Karon, who liked to do drama, who hiked the Appalachians with her sisters. I was the new girl who was a volunteer JANGO (aka, candy striper, stood for Junior Army Navy Guild Organization) at Bethesda Naval Hospital. I was the girl who was making bread with her parents and Karon and Jan, and who was hoping to be in the elite group of basketball players so Mohammed would notice me.
Here’s what happened: we were playing basketball during gym class, and I was adorned with a pixie haircut and scrawny hairy chicken legs that were only made more unsightly due to the white bloomers the school forced us to wear. My parents wouldn’t let me shave yet, and the black hair on my legs stood out against my white skin like print on a newspaper. I was a walking unibrow with dark hairy chicken legs. To make matters worse, Mom insisted we wear skirts to school, so I used to sneak my one pair of pants, my green high-water jeans, in my satchel and scoot them on under my skirt to hide my offensive legs. But in gym class there was no escape, no cover. We had to wear short white bloomers and white socks with tennis shoes. My tennis shoes were red hand-me-downs and one size too large. I looked like a circus clown.
On this particularly fateful day, I had joined Karon and Jan and their tight group of friends on the court. It just happened to be an all-black team of excellent players, with whom I hoped to improve my game. But it was hopeless. I really wasn’t very good, double dribbling and undershooting, arms flailing “I’m free. I’m free!,” and then missing the one ball that was thrown my way. I was attempting a layup and missed several baskets as we were playing the game, and one of the leader bully girls bounced a basketball off my head. I held back tears and kept playing, certain that Karon or Jan would come to my rescue. We had, after all, just pounded sourdough together a week or two ago, and the taste of salted butter and boysenberry jam mixed with the tart sour of the bread still made my head spin. But a rescue didn’t happen. It would have seemed like trespassing, I guess, protecting someone out of the “family,” and soon several more basketballs were bounced off my head.
As the bell buzzed for class to end, I scurried into the gym locker room, where the rule was we had to strip down to our undies, and mine were of course mortifyingly high-waisted like a grandmother’s. We had to grab a towel and walk around the large square shower room dabbing our underarms, and then back out the way we had come to the lockers. As I approached the tiled exit of the shower room, with baggy underwear and my towel in hand, Karon was commanded by another girl to bounce her fist on my head like a basketball. She hesitated. We looked at each other, and her eyes seemed to freeze, her brown pupils misted over instantly. Then she did it. She hit me with her fist, bounced it on my head and said, “Boooiiiiinnnnnngggg.”
“That’s not funny!” I blurted. Everyone laughed.
Then Karon did the unthinkable. Of her own volition she bounced her fist on my head again. “Boooiiiinnnnngggg.” More laughter. Again. “Boooiiinnnnggg.”
“Stop it!” I shouted. And I snapped my towel at her. My wet towel. I snapped it, and it popped right in her face.
She was stung, and stunned, and then her fist came up firmly under my jaw and the fight was on. I flew backward and stumbled over the bench, then landed with my feet in the air. Just me and my granny underwear, knees at a 90-degree angle on the bench, flat on my back. I jumped up and started hitting Karon and she was hitting me and there was a lot of noise. It was jumbled and slow motion and I was crying, tears streaking down my newly blooming breasts and mingling with blood. People were shouting, “Fight, fight . . .” and more rhyming ugliness, and we kept hitting each other and knocking into the blue lockers.
Before long the social studies teacher pulled us apart but not until I had sobbed to her, “I’ll hit you, too!” As I was getting dressed to go to the office, the teacher discreetly waited to the side, and I noticed I had wet my pants. I would have thrown them away, but I was afraid someone would find them and tell everyone, so I wadded them up in my satchel and covered it with paper towels.
We got suspended. Waiting in the principal’s office, I watched out the window as my mom pulled up in her gray Volvo. She had been doing accounting work for Sears to make the paychecks of my dad stretch a bit longer, and she had been called away from work to come and get me.
Nothing about the fight could match the pain lurching in my stomach when I saw my mother’s face. She was scared and blinking rapidly, and everything about her halting movement as she staggered to hug me was full of guilt because she hadn’t protected me from the slings and arrows of life. Her ladylike Dallas upbringing hadn’t prepared her for the
violence and struggles of my Maryland middle school. She didn’t care that blood was now on her polyester bow-tied shirt, perfectly tucked into her skirt. She held me tightly, so tightly, her breast heaving against mine. She tucked me into the car like a toddler, and I had to push her away from fastening my seatbelt. Her stockings and her heeled loafers pressed firmly on the gas, and she burst into tears as we drove through the streets, past the woods, and toward home.
“I’m sorry, Marcia. I am so mad at those girls. Are you okay?”
“It was Karon, Mom. It wasn’t just those girls. It was Karon and Jan. They were making fun of me.”
That’s probably the worst thing any mom wants to hear, that her child is being ridiculed and bullied by someone in their school. Mom looked baffled and asked, “Why?”
It was too much to try and explain basketball and how much I sucked at it, and Mohammed, and the stupid shower room. I stared glumly out the window, dreading returning to school, dreading getting home. “Am I going to get in trouble with Dad for being suspended?”
“Well, I just don’t understand,” she said. “Why were you suspended too? They were the ones fighting!”
“I guess ’cause I fought back,” I said guiltily. I would definitely get into trouble.
“You did?” She looked at me with a mixture of confusion and admiration. She should’ve been mad, because fighting was wrong—that was what we had always been told. But she wasn’t mad; she was more . . . hurt . . . dismayed, I guess. Bereft. She didn’t know the lesson to teach. The boundaries were too blurry here—I had needed to defend myself, and so the fighting back wasn’t wrong; the rules were wrong. “I’m glad you stood up to her,” Mom finally said. Then, softly, she added, “I admire that about you, Marcia.”
My eye was hurting. My jaw was bruised.
Mom made sure I didn’t get in trouble, and in truth, after Dad accepted that I hadn’t been acting like “a Goddamn hooligan,” I could tell that he too was confused as to why the bread pounding had turned into fist pounding in the locker room. We couldn’t explain it. For three days, Mom nursed my black eye, taking off work Friday, resisting the ticktock of the weekend clock, and dreading Monday’s approach.
“Okay, sweetheart. Here we go.” Monday morning, in a skirt with shorts hidden underneath, and my two still-hairy chicken legs, I climbed into the car. We drove to school and had to go to the principal’s office for her to sign me in. The principal tried to give Mom a lecture about fighting and middle school unity, but she politely smiled and said, “I’m late for work.” Her tone said “Skip it.” I thought that would be the end of the conversation; it was a bit out of character for Mom to be curt, and then she really surprised me by clearing her throat and going on: “You need to do something to make this school safe. My husband and I didn’t teach our children to be fighters. But we also didn’t teach them to be cowards. We taught them to stand up for themselves, and what happened last week was just that—my child standing up for herself.” I thought she was going to cry, but, thank God, she didn’t. “I don’t want to see it happen again to my daughter Marcia Gay.” With that, she turned and left the office, with me in tow. We hugged good-bye, a long, tight embrace, and then I tugged my skirt down to cover my legs and walked down the hallway to class. I had hoped that at least my parents’ guilt would have led to my being able to shave for school, but no. They didn’t seem to understand the correlation, and though I couldn’t quite articulate it, I knew there was one. Hairy legs made me more vulnerable . . . they made me a target. In my little plaid skirt, I had to walk past my crush, Mohammed, who muttered, “Is you a girl or a boy?” I pulled my skirt lower.
I was late since my mom had had to sign me back into school, and the hall was empty, except for at the very, very end, where gathered around my locker stood Karon and her small cluster of basketball friends. The hall seemed a mile long, and I could see the girls watching me as I walked the gauntlet. I slowly started to wet myself again. Thank God I was in the skirt; if I had been in pants, they would have seen the wet spot.
At my locker, Karon stood right behind me; I could feel her breath on my neck. “You the first white girl ever hit me back.”
I said, “Mmmmhmmm,” fumbling with my combination lock, completely forgetting the numbers. I was sure she was about to hit me again, and I held my books to my stomach to protect myself.
Karon then looked at me with misted brown eyes and said, “I got ’specs for you.”
I said nothing. It was a small victory. I would rather have made bread. I had earned her respect, but had lost the pure friendship of no eyes watching.
Our backyard stretched out across a grassy lawn, where on special evenings we built bonfires next to the vegetable garden and disco danced to Michael Jackson and slow grinded to Billy Paul’s “Meeee eeee aaannnnddd Mrs. Mrs. Jones . . . we got a thaaang goin’ on . . .” I could grind my way to excitement and loved my little secret, and loved our neighborhood boys for knowing just how to get into the groove and grind of a slow, sexy song. Undulating hips. The smell of Afro Sheen in the tight curls, warm necks entwined like dark swans. The firelight from the bonfire cast flickers into the thick woods, just barely outlining the edges of trees and bushes and the faint dirt path that led to my hidden fort. Sometimes we made S’mores. When Dad called brusquely for us to come in—several scotches down the pipes by now—I could just make out the eyes of my new crush, Theodore, melting smaller and smaller as he disappeared into the woods, his last-minute teeth flashing a sly smile.
In the winter, these woods filled up with snow. The trees lumbered down under the weight of the snow, the ice broke branches, and the ditch in the front yard where our family played “hit the dirt!” seemed on level with the rest of the lawn. Stepping into it, one thin tennis shoe after another, I could feel my green jeans freeze in stiff attention up to the knee. There was no sound when the flakes were fat, the silent hush whispered to my mom . . . her face relaxed without frown or smile, her chin tilted up to the sky, and the biggest flakes fell flat against her black lashes, like frozen tears melting against the heat of her serenity.
It was a cold January morning, yet the excesses of Christmas still lingered, cloudlike, in my mind. Gone now the eggnog, the shiny Santa-patterned wrapping paper, the last smelted foil ashes scooped out of the fireplace. Gone the mistletoe we had tried so hard to get caught under, screaming with fake surprise when we were kissed. Gone the Fannie May chocolates, gone Grandmother’s white powdery divinity, gone the fudge, and gone the caramel-colored candied pecans. Mom’s counters were now restored to their spartan sugarless display of a coffee can, a percolator, a toaster, a recipe box, and The Joy of Cooking cookbook.
The now-full cardboard Christmas boxes were nestled between boxes marked XMAS TREE STAND, HALLOWEEN PUMPKINS, and EASTER BASKETS on a high shelf in the garage. The once-aromatic evergreen tree, resplendent with aluminum icicles and colored balls and precious family ornaments, had been taken down and now sat unceremoniously abandoned at the curb.
A little wooden side table by the arching front window usually provided the setting for a nativity the size of a shoebox. The manger, with its glittery cardboard star balancing precariously at the peak of the thatched manger roof, sent a slightly bent ray pointing heavenward. It was a tradition for me to carefully set up the holy family with my mom—small china figures in a bed of straw. We acted as a team each Christmas to see if we could vary the relationship within the sacred grouping. Perhaps Joseph was actually talking to one of the wise men? Perhaps a shepherd and an angel shared a joke with another wise man, the one with the myrrh? What if the animals were still walking in from the desert, and only the sheep were in the manger? But Mary must always be holding Jesus, because that was what mothers did. They held their little children, and I knew that even if I was not the Son of God, my mother held me just as tightly as Mary held Jesus.
The tape tightly closed the brown box marked NATIVITY, and the wooden side table was returned to its proper position. It was here tha
t my mother would place her January flower arrangement.
After the mash of presents and paper and sweets and peanut brittle, after the inevitable fights and glorious laughter, after the anticipation disappeared and Barbies were dressed in their now new clothing, after Monopoly was won by those smarter with money than I was, the New Year began. And Mom arranged white flowers in clear vases filled with crumpled foil so that it looked like water reflecting on the ice, little crumpled bits of crackling water, giving rise to a burst of snow-white chrysanthemum nestled in deep green hemlock.
Shin Soe Hikae. Heaven. Earth. Man.
Summer
My mother flies with Superwoman
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME, “HOW did you get your start?” It’s an understandable question: the life of an actress is seemingly unattainable, and who wouldn’t be curious? Indeed, my start had as much glamour and adventure attached to it as you can imagine: My dad was stationed in Greece, and he was the commanding officer of a small naval station named NAVCOMSTA Nea Makri, and we lived in a jasmine-surrounded home with marble floors in a little town called Mati, which meant “eye.” It sat atop a hill, and a picturesque village and the sea lay at its feet.
The Seasons of My Mother Page 6