I giggled.
“What?” he said. “I’m just being real with you. It’s amazing.”
I moved my hand down to his stomach and made circles there. I felt him shiver, and I felt powerful. “What makes an ass ‘tremendous?’” I whispered in his ear.
He squeezed it again. “Its shape,” he said into my ear. “Its … fullness. Trust me when I say that there are few asses in the world that are stacked like this one.” He moved his lips up and down my earlobe, nibbling and kissing, and I felt my pelvis grind into him. My body was mine, and it was not mine. I didn’t know what it was doing, and yet it was me.
Late at night in my bed I sometimes touched myself, had even brought myself to orgasm once or twice, but this was so different. For someone else to touch you, to react to you touching them, and to then respond in turn, was compelling in a way I had never experienced before. I knew my right arm could throw an out to first in a second, but I had no idea that it would send shivers through the rest of me if stroked the right way. In some ways, it was like he knew my body better than I did. This was another kind of power, I realized.
Reggie’s tongue flicked around my ear, and I moaned and brought him closer to me. We pressed together and he was so hard and his hands were everywhere—I couldn’t keep track anymore. When he slid his finger into me, I just held on tight. There was no baseball, there was no Dad, nobody was black and nobody was not black enough, there were just hands and bodies, everything grasping, everything opening.
• • •
I think I slept in the crook of his arm afterward. When I woke up, I texted Kit to tell Mom and Dad that I was on my way back from a long run and would be back within the hour. It wasn’t completely a lie, which was why I thought they might believe it—especially if Kit spun it right.
“Gotta go?” Reggie asked, awakened by my movement.
I leaned over and kissed him. “Yeah. They’ll be starting to worry.”
He nodded and ran his hand over my shoulder.
I shivered and finished tying my shoe. “Thank you,” I said, as I stood up. I couldn’t quite meet his eyes.
He smiled. “You gonna be okay out there? Running in the night?”
“I do it all the time. Don’t worry.”
“You,” he said, standing up and pulling on his shorts. “I know better than to worry about you. At least out loud.”
I laughed. Then we left his bedroom and walked down the hallway to the front door.
“Just text me you’re home when you get there,” he said, kissing me one more time on the steps. “Not ’cause I’m worried, but you know … just ’cause.”
I laughed, held up my phone and nodded, taking off at a measured pace under the streetlights. The steady tread of my foot soles on the pavement fell right in line with what I whispered into the hazy summer night, almost all the way home: Reggie. Reggie. Reggie. Reggie.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dad and I stood in the backyard a few days later, dusk coming behind us, throwing the ball around. We each took a step back after every throw, and our voices were rising as the exercise went on.
“Waukesha got word that they might have to play us. They’re not pleased.” He grinned, catching the ball.
The Wisconsin State Baseball Tournament would be held in late June this year, over three days. The top teams from sectionals would battle each other the first day. The winners of those games would advance to the semifinals the next. The two teams left standing in each division would face off on day three for the finals.
“Better us than Eau Claire,” I said. Eau Claire had won States three out of the last seven years, although they weren’t playing so well this year for some reason.
Dad frowned. “What do you mean? Eau Claire sucks.” He threw the ball back, and I watched it spin toward me.
“They don’t.” I reached out and grabbed the ball. “They suck right now, but they might not suck in a couple of weeks. There’s a difference.”
Dad snorted. I wondered if he knew that we weren’t really talking about Eau Claire, but about me. “Eau Claire sucks,” he repeated.
I shivered. It would soon be dark. I heaved a high, arcing throw toward Dad.
“They couldn’t find their asshole if it bit them in the face right now,” said Dad, making a lazy basket catch. “A winning team has to win games. Everything else is just nice stories for the history books. What have they done lately?” He skimmed the ball across the grass at me—a not quite hard grounder.
I charged the ball, taking it barehanded a few hops earlier than he probably expected and whipped it back at him sidearm. The ball rocketed toward his head. “Hey!” He had to twist awkwardly to glove the ball. “What are you trying to do, kill me?” He glared at me.
I wasn’t grinning. Not quite. “Sorry, Dad.”
He looked at me funny from across the yard. Even though he had thrown around with me in this very spot and at the same time of day thousands of times, I got the feeling that in that moment, he wasn’t sure he recognized me. And then it passed. “It’s okay,” he said. “Just be more careful next time.”
I punched my glove, nodding. “Sure,” I said.
• • •
The next night, Reggie and I sat under an elm tree in the park with branches that twisted and turned in the wind. His arms were around me, and I felt safe again but also anxious.
“You okay?” he asked me, in my ear.
I nodded.
“You’re a little quiet.”
I didn’t say anything, just watched a squirrel dig up acorns in the dirt around us.
“Did you tell anybody? About what happened the other night?” he asked, his voice a little strained.
“No,” I said.
He kissed the top of my head. “Me neither.”
The wind was swirling in my ears. I remembered his lips on my neck, his hand pushing the small of my back into him, the sound of my breath catching, his fingers inside me.
He pulled at a strand of my hair so that the curl straightened, and then he let it go and it bounced back. Reggie laughed. “You got pretty curls, especially in the back.”
I picked up a stick and began digging in the dirt. “I don’t like it,” I said. “It’s too frizzy.”
“No one wants the hair they got, no matter what kind it is,” he said and then pulled on another curl. “I bet your mom doesn’t know what to do with it either.”
I laughed and dug deeper. The sky was turning from purple to deep blue.
“I don’t really get what ya’ll do with your hair, but I know my mom, Grandmom, and my sisters get theirs straightened,” said Reggie. He shrugged. “They seem to like it well enough.” His sisters were both away at college, so I had never met them, had never seen their hair. He snaked his face around so that he was looking at my profile. “You ever been to a black hairdresser?”
I shook my head, thinking that I just might dig all the way to China.
“Well, maybe you should go, see what you think.”
I paused in my digging. “Would you really walk in there with your white mother if you had one?” I asked.
“If I needed to get my hair done I would,” he said. So many things were so simple for him.
My face colored. “You think I need to get my hair done?”
He snickered. “Now, don’t put that on me. You’re the one who said you wanted it less frizzy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The lights of Glenda’s were a raucous, neon blue that left my eyelids scorched. The sign was in cursive and “Black Hair Designs” was written in print below it. Mom pulled the Jeep into the only free available spot, sandwiched between an ancient pea-green Chevy station wagon and a navy Ford Escort. She had picked me up after work at the Cultural Affairs Office and was still dressed in a khaki pantsuit. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was swept back neatly into a bun, not a strand of it out of place. The whole drive over, all I could think about was why I wasn’t given hair like that, why mine had to take so much tim
e and effort to tame, why none of the stylists my mom went to ever seemed to know how to cut it. If I had had hair like Mom’s, I could just have brushed it in the mornings, pulled it back, and gotten on with the day. Instead, I had to spend at least fifteen minutes every morning dealing with it, and it still looked too frizzy, no matter what I did.
“Okay, ready?” Mom asked. “I have a good feeling about this; this place looks really professional.” I got the sense she was saying this mostly to herself. When I had hesitantly brought up going to a black salon after I got home from being with Reggie, she had read some Yelp reviews and gotten me an appointment for the next day, just like that. But I could tell she was nervous.
My stomach began to churn and my palms were hot. I grabbed my weathered copy of American Gods and got out of the car. Mom’s hairdresser, a middle-aged white woman, was the only other person besides Mom who had done my hair. Usually, she somewhat fearfully trimmed up the ends.
Walking to the door of the new salon, my skin felt paper-thin, almost translucent. A sweetness overwhelmed my nose as we entered the waiting room, a pungent, chemical odor. Peeking over the divider, I saw three black women seated in high salon chairs, their heads encapsulated with Saran Wrap. One had huge thighs that burst from her shorts like bread rising in an oven; earrings the size of my fists hung from another’s ears. The last one, who was more my color than the other two, was absently flipping through the pages of Jet magazine, sighing every now and then. Her eyes met mine suddenly, and it seemed like they were asking, “Who the fuck are you?” so I darted my head back into the waiting room, resolving firmly not to look at any one of them again. My fingers clasped American Gods even tighter. If things got really uncomfortable here, I could always retreat to my book.
“Alexandra Kirtridge,” Mom was telling the woman at the counter.
She moved her light green fingernails down the pages of the datebook. “Ah, yes. Alexandra. I see you right here.” She stuck out her hand. “You’re my two o’clock. My name’s Naomi, and I’ll be doing your hair today.”
“Nice to meet you,” I heard myself say. I began to feel like I was in the middle of a game, up to bat, and the pitcher was about to throw me something I knew I had no chance of hitting. My fingertips tingled the same way they did then.
“So, I’ll pick you up in about hour, then?” Mom said to me. She turned to Naomi. “Will that be enough time?”
“Well,” said Naomi, looking me over. “That depends on what she wants.”
Mom had already grabbed her purse and turned on her heel, poised to leave. “Oh,” she said, surprised. “Well, what do you want, Alex?”
They were both staring at me, waiting for me to say what it was I wanted. I could see that they needed to know right then, that it was urgent, that I should say something. Tell them what you want.
“I want it less frizzy.”
Mom’s eyelids fluttered slightly, and she stepped back—probably trying to get me in focus. Then she recovered and swept an imaginary hair out of her face. “Okay,” she told Naomi. “Less frizzy.”
But Naomi was not fooled. Her eyebrows knit together. She knew that I didn’t know what I wanted. “You want it straightened? Is that what you mean? Do you want me to relax the curl a bit? Or maybe straighten it, and give you a set of rollers to take with you? I got some really fly extensions in this week that customers have been raving about. We could even put in a weave if you really want to try a new look. Just ’cause we live in the Midwest doesn’t mean we can’t be as fly as the coasts.” She grinned at me, like we were both in on a joke.
Straightened, curled, re-curled, relaxed, weave. It was like a whole new language. I looked up at Mom, but her face only reflected my own questioning and uncertainty. I could see I would just have to pick an option and hope that it worked out; that was the best I could hope for.
“Relax the curl,” I said, almost in a whisper. I liked the way the word sounded: relaxed. My curls were tightly wound like small springs, and in my mind I could almost see them becoming new, unfamiliar, cascading down my back in dark waves. Mornings I would rise from bed and shake them out, shaking not just my head but my shoulders also, like those women in Pantene commercials. I would trade my pick for a brush, one with a shiny gold handle, and when I sat at my bureau, I would run the brush all the way through, scalp to back. The brush wouldn’t catch on any nasty curls, any split ends, like my pick did now. As Naomi walked me to the salon chair, Mom stood there in the waiting area, watching us. I could almost hear her say, as she always did, “You never know how something will be if you don’t try it.”
I sat down in the high swivel seat.
“Okay, let’s get you going,” Naomi said. She threw a plastic sheet around my body, and snapped it at the neck. Mom waved at me from the waiting room, moving toward the door to go. Naomi removed my barrette, and hair sprayed out behind me like a lion’s mane.
“Girl, you got a lot of hair,” Naomi said, with a laugh. She turned the pick over and began to divide my hair into sections using its sharp, pointed end.
My fingers clutched the armrests.
Naomi clipped the portion of my hair she had finished with a bright pink hair clip and started on another one.
“Does she know what to do with it?” she asked.
I closed my eyes. “Who?”
“Your mom,” said Naomi. “She’s your mom, right? The woman who dropped you off?”
Does she know what to do with it? “Yeah,” I said. “I … I guess so.” I willed my eyes open; I knew I needed to see what she was doing.
Naomi laughed. “You guess she’s your mom, or you guess she knows how to do your hair?”
“She knew how to do it when I was little,” I said. “But now I do it.”
Naomi grabbed another hair clip and fastened it onto the section she had just finished dividing. Then she started on a new section, whipping my neck toward her. “And how do you do it?” she asked.
It wasn’t at all like talking to Reggie; when he asked a question, it was like we were talking, not like I was an interesting and rare animal specimen.
“I dampen it with water every morning, then put on some hair gel,” I said. “Then I usually pull it back.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Gel isn’t good for hair like yours. Dries it out. Use some kind of leave-in conditioner.”
Leave-in conditioner. Where would I find it? I would look for it in the black hair care section of Walgreens. Boxes and boxes of products with photos of women with the very same cotton-candystyle hair as Naomi.
She was leaning me back, I think in an effort to get a better angle on my scalp. “You never had a relaxer before, have you?”
“Nope.”
“That’s too bad,” she said, clipping the last section. “Could’ve saved yourself a whole lot of trouble combing out this mess.”
She need a black mother to tame that mess.
Naomi opened a violet package that had a smiling black girl with long, super straight hair across the front. I hiccupped.
“You okay?” Naomi asked. She was opening a container of something that looked an awful lot like shortening.
I hiccupped again. I’m going to look beautiful. “Yeah.”
She stirred the white, plastic-like substance with a small wooden spoon, unclipped one section, and then began to smear it across my roots. “You don’t have any scabs or open sores or anything on your scalp, do you?” she asked.
I frowned. “No.”
“Okay, good,” she said.
In the mirror, I saw that her finely manicured hands were covered in translucent plastic gloves, and I wondered if that was because what she was putting on my head was toxic. She must have sensed my uneasiness because she said, “It’s nothing to worry about—all the chemicals are safe. You just want to try to avoid getting them into anywhere they shouldn’t be.” A fleeting image of Reggie’s grandmom and her sparse hair came to me then, and I wondered if that was what your hair looked like after a lifetime of putting
these “safe chemicals” on it.
The cream felt hot on my scalp, and it smelled like toilet bowl cleaner.
Naomi mashed the substance into a clump of hair and flattened it against my head with her gloves. “How does your head feel? Does it feel too hot?”
I shook my head. This was like a suicide sprint. I just had to get through it.
“Once you do it this one time, it’s so much easier the next time, because you don’t have to start all the way down at the roots,” she said, moving on to another section of my hair and smoothing it straight as she went.
My scalp began to burn, but I knew I couldn’t say anything. Maybe I had some scabs or bruises or something that I didn’t know about. I looked sideways; she was getting to the bottom of the container. It would soon be over.
“Okay, now just sit here for a few minutes,” said Naomi. She pulled a clear plastic cap over my head.
“Okay,” I said, and watched in the mirror as she walked over to the receptionist and began to talk about nails.
I reached over and opened my book, praising myself again for remembering to bring it. It was amazing how many people didn’t see you at all if you were lost in a book, or pretended to be. After a few minutes, however, I noticed that I had read the same paragraph three times. Both of the women who had had Saran Wrap on their heads when I walked in were now getting their hair washed of the chemical cream that had apparently done its work. Their hairdressers were rinsing their scalps with the highest pressure water I had ever seen. It was so loud that they were almost shouting through the salon.
“What, so she think she better than her sister?”
“Well, you know she got that good hair and high yellow complexion. All the mens be after her.”
“Uh huh. But don’t they got the same father?”
“Girl, you know she got that white daddy. She think she a child of Obama or something.”
Laughter.
“Calling herself ‘mixed’ and all. Like there’s some difference between the way white folks’ll do a high yaller gal and a dark-skinned one.”
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