“Girl, you right. She ’bout to find that out.”
“Uh huh.”
“Black is black is black is black. Has always been black, and always will be. I don’t care what no one says.”
“Everybody just got to think they better than someone else—’specially if they light. That’s why we still can’t get nowhere as a race.”
“Now that’s some real talk.”
My ears were burning, and I concentrated intensely on the paragraph in front of me, wishing I could actually fall into the book. But it was futile; the language on the page could as well have been Russian for all I was understanding. Was it true? Did most mixed people think they were better than most black people simply because they were lighter and whiter? And what was the difference, the important difference anyway, between mixed people and black people? These women were saying that there really was none, that that was just something mixed people used to feel superior to black people, but I couldn’t quite believe it.
I was sure that my hair was completely fried by the time Naomi came back for me, took me to a chair by a sink, and took off the clear plastic cap.
“Yeah, this is going to look so pretty,” she said as she squirted shampoo into her gloved palm. Then she sat me back, pushed me up against the lip of the sink, and began to wash the cream out of my hair.
Her hands on my scalp felt so strange; I couldn’t believe how easily they moved their way through my hair—catching on nothing. Reggie would no longer pull my curls and then let them bounce back.
Naomi washed all the shampoo out of my hair, shampooed and rinsed it again, and then squirted on something she called a deep conditioner.
“See,” she said, sitting me up and turning me toward the mirror. “Beautiful.”
I slowly looked up at the face in the mirror. It was a narrow face, much narrower than I had ever realized, with full lips and big, sad eyes. My hair was longer than I ever imagined it could be—running past my shoulders all the way down past my upper back. The crazy curls that defied both gravity and water were gone now, and in their place were long, stringy strands that left me feeling exposed and naked.
“It might take a minute to get used to because it’s so different, but wait till you see it blow-dried,” said Naomi. She squirted an oily substance in her hand, rubbed it on my hair, and then blew it dry. Then she went around me and snipped the ends off. Scissors. Creams. Oils. Blow drying. More scissors. Each new step in her process was another mystery to me, and before she’d finished them all, an hour had gone by.
“You just put this cream I’m going to give you on it every morning, and then blow it dry just like this, and then you’re set, voilà!” she said, and then she made liked she was Vanna White and I was one of the letters she was turning over.
I stood up and peered at myself carefully. My hair was parted perfectly, right down the middle. The cut was layered in the front, with chic, jagged edges that framed my face. Naomi beamed at me in the mirror, obviously pleased with her work. Then I started to cry.
“What…” said Naomi, and she leaned closer to me. “Are you okay?”
All I could think was that I looked like an Indian—the kind you might see in a John Wayne movie. My hair, it suddenly occurred to me, wasn’t this straight because it wasn’t supposed to be this straight. My face was too angular, my features too defined. It was all wrong. And now I would have to wait at least a year to get my hair back.
Naomi tried to hug me. “Honey, whatever it is, we can fix it.”
I need to stop crying. But the more I tried to stop, the more the tears fell.
“Even if you want it back curly again, we can put curlers in it to make the curl even cuter than it was before—and less frizzy, too,” Naomi was telling me. She looked at me hard. “You know, that’s really what we should have done in the first place, anyway. You’re right, maybe this is too drastic.”
I covered my mouth with my hand, so that I wasn’t exactly sobbing. I wished I could just run out of there, but home was a good twenty-minute drive away. This was the second time recently I had cried hard in public.
“Okay, yeah,” said Naomi. “That’s it, that’s exactly what we’ll do—we’ll just give you a set of rods you can use every morning, it’ll be easy. You won’t even be able to tell the difference, except that the curl will be lighter, prettier.” She clapped her hands. “Yeah, that’s it.” She bent down and began to rummage through the cabinets. “Just let me find that set…”
I need to stop crying. Now. Before Mom gets here. I wiped my eyes and face clean with the backs of my hands and took a deep breath. “No, no, it’s okay,” I told her. “Don’t worry, I like it.”
A woman at the hair dryer in a yellow jogging suit was staring right at me, her eyebrows knitted together in concern. Other women at the salon were beginning to notice all the commotion, too. It was definitely time to go.
Naomi turned away from the cabinet and looked at me incredulously. “You what?”
My heart, my heart. Heat rising from my chest, from deep down in there, the aorta and its ventricles, trying to contain this friction that just kept on bubbling up. My heart would burst, I was sure of it; I could see its red pieces splattered on the bright white walls. I can breathe. “I like it,” I told her, sniffing. “I mean, it’s different and everything,” I faked a laugh, “but I’m getting used to it.” I pushed out a smile.
Naomi crossed her arms and leaned back on a small table. “You’re getting used to it,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. The tick of the clock on the wall was like a new, tiny nail ramming my skull every second. I wanted to grab onto it; I thought that maybe its sound could keep my heart together.
Then Mom walked in the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Wow!” Mom clasped her hands over her mouth. “I just … cannot … believe it. You’ve done an amazing job, Naomi. She looks like a real, grown-up young woman now, doesn’t she?”
Naomi looked at me questioningly, and I forced out a fake smile.
“Well, yes. I think it came out quite nice,” she said.
“That’s an understatement,” Mom said, laughing. She came around the high barbershop seat and patted my hair down. “It’s so soft, isn’t it? I had no idea her hair was so soft. Or even that it could do this.” She laughed again.
Women at the salon were beginning to notice the spectacle of us and give Mom the evil eye. Of course, she had no idea.
“I just can’t believe it. We should have done this years ago.”
I gingerly lifted her hand from my head and stepped down from the chair. “Mom, we better go.” I pulled my cell from my pocket. “The time.”
Mom laughed, a little too happily, I thought. She was almost as good at acting as I was. “Yes, you’re right.” She turned to Naomi. “How much do I owe you?”
• • •
When we got home, Dad and Jason could not stop talking about it. “It’s fantastic,” said Dad.
“It does look pretty damn good,” said Jason, chomping on a handful of peanuts.
The rest of the day they came up behind me while I was getting a glass of water or watching TV and touched my hair very carefully. “It’s so smooth,” they said, smiling. “It doesn’t even look like your hair.”
I just smiled back at them. I couldn’t tell them that it wasn’t actually me they were looking at, that it was rather who I had wanted to be. I couldn’t tell them that I wanted to take it all back, that I would have given anything for my crazy curls, because I was too embarrassed. I couldn’t even admit this to Kit, who was, of course, less impressed by my new look than everyone else.
Her first response was a frown when she saw me. “What’s that about?”
“By ‘that’ you mean this new haircut?” I asked.
“Yeah … or whatever it is,” she said, peering at me sideways, like I was some kind of new zoo animal. “Is that really your hair? Or is it fake?” She shook her head. “Whatever. It just doesn’t look
like you. Sorry.”
I laughed. “You’re underestimating the value of looking like someone else. Sometimes it’s better.”
Kit stuck her tongue out at me. “And sometimes it’s not,” she said, and left the room.
By evening I had to get out of the house. Just moving, walking, could sometimes quiet my mind. I knew we needed milk, so I grabbed some change and quickly walked out the door before Mom had a chance to say anything.
Anil’s Market was just six blocks away, but by the time I walked in, I felt like myself again. Walking by the oak trees and seeing their leaves blowing around in the wind but not falling down calmed me somehow. Hair grows back. Every time I pulled at my too-slick ponytail, I felt a little sick. So I put my hands in my pockets and tried to think of something else. Before long, I was remembering Reggie’s touch and smiling to myself. Until I walked into the shop and spotted a group of black kids congregating at the counter. They weren’t from West High, but they might as well have been. They lived in the neighborhood and watched me as I watched them: silently, and in judgment. I went straight to the back, where the cold stuff was housed in refrigerators, but it was already too late because they had seen me. I pulled at the ends of my ponytail. At least they couldn’t come at me about my hair.
I opened the refrigerator and pulled out a gallon of two-percent milk. They were silent, taking me in as I walked up to the counter. I hadn’t counted on seeing anyone of importance while running the errand, so I was wearing a five-year-old pair of faded jean shorts and a ratty T-shirt. My Tevas completed the look. I smiled at them and at their friend who was working the cash register. There were four of them: two girls who looked about my age, a guy who looked older, and another guy behind the counter. One of the girls rolled her eyes at one of the guys as I approached.
“Four fifty-six,” said the guy behind the counter. He grabbed the milk and put it in a plastic bag. I dug in my pocket for the five I had grabbed.
“Nice shorts,” the girl’s voice came from behind me. The guy beside her laughed. My face burned.
“What are they, Jordache?” she continued, and the guys almost fell out. They were holding their sides, covering their mouths with their hands.
I put the five on the counter and waited for my change.
“She don’t never speak,” said the boy. “Maybe she mute or something.” The girl giggled.
The kid behind the counter got himself together and cleared his throat. “Okay, enough already. She a paying customer. Let her alone.”
The girl snickered. “Oh, Jamal’s working for the Man now, he can’t be playing with the likes of niggas.”
I winced. Jamal handed me my change, and I picked up the bag and walked toward the exit.
“Your hair do look nice though,” the girl called out as I pushed the door open. “You actually decent now.”
I kicked sharp stones on the sidewalk all the way home, trying to cut my big toes, thinking about how Reggie could have been one of those kids. If he hadn’t already known me from playing baseball, he probably would make fun of me just like all the others. He was nice to me, sure, but maybe just because he wanted something from me. And he doesn’t need anything from you anymore. Had I really done it? Had I touched him, let him touch me everywhere? I punched my fist into my hip bone. You are not the same; you will never ever be the same. He’s probably out right now, telling everyone he knows about it.
• • •
Reggie ran his cool, light fingers from my scalp to the base of my neck. “I can’t believe you did it,” he said.
I sighed. We were in his living room the next day, the television tuned to Jeopardy, but neither of us was really watching. “It was your idea.” His touch made my skin prickle, deliciously.
He took his hand from my hair. “How can you say that?” His dark brown eyes looked genuinely hurt. “All I told you was about my mom and my sisters, and what they do. It wasn’t meant as a suggestion. You were just going on and on about how you hated your hair, so I thought I’d offer you another option…”
I slouched down into the couch. “You don’t like it, do you?”
Reggie reached for the bowl of chips on the coffee table in front of us. “I never said that.” His biceps rippled nicely under his T-shirt.
I worried that he would catch me staring, so I looked away. “You didn’t have to.” Yeah, this is going to look so pretty. I laughed at the absurdity of it all. “There’s really nothing to apologize for, anyway. I don’t like it either.”
He shoved a few corn chips into his mouth. “Really?”
I laughed again. “Yeah, really.” My right hand moved toward his right arm, almost with a will of its own. Stop. Now. You like him, but you are not what he really wants. Quit lying to yourself. I ran my finger across his bicep, transfixed.
“Girl, what you doing?” he asked, crunching the chips.
I shrugged, repositioning myself on the couch so that I was facing him, straddling him with my knees. I kissed the top of his earlobe, then the middle, then the bottom.
He pulled me toward him, and pushed his hands up my shirt under my bra.
I shivered.
He pushed his hand down back the way it had come, so that it was fondling my ass. “Grandmom’s taking a nap in the other room,” he whispered in my ear. “Let’s go to my room.”
I nodded and moved myself off him, and off we went.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
At the bottom of the house, trapped in a filing cabinet, my father’s words spoke to me from decaying paper. That night, time stretched out and covered me, so that I thought I no longer had a body, so that there wasn’t any such thing as my birth or my death, sex, conception, so that my parents had not even given me up, so that everything had happened, had always happened all at once, and I didn’t have to choose or act. All of it, even my legs that couldn’t keep up anymore, and my right arm that was no longer strong, would pass into oblivion anyway. Yet still, in the hot darkness of June, lying on top of my covers, sweating, he would not be silenced: There was a lot of things that could have been better between your mother and I. I would have liked the chance to know you. This will be my last letter to you in awhile. I think I sent enough. Hopefully some day, when you’re ready, we can see each other.
“Shut up!” I said into the darkness. I pressed my hands over my ears and then sat up. The green light of my electric clock flashed in my eyes: 2:10 a.m. I moved to the edge of the bed, kicking at its side gently with my heels, like I used to do when I was a kid.
“He’s not going away,” I said, turning over my hand so that my palm faced me. Was it his? “He never left.”
The next morning, I Googled his name and Detroit. It wasn’t very difficult; the third name I clicked on and there it was:
Keith Mitchell, 2887 51st St., Detroit, MI, 313-995-4322.
The address looked the same as the one scrawled in the corner of those twenty letters I never received. I stared at the digits long and hard, not really believing that it had been so easy to find them. I didn’t even have to open a book on searching. I didn’t know much, but I knew that I was lucky.
It was afternoon before I felt ready. I picked up my phone. Father, father, why did you do it? The way I felt about him was the same way I felt about Reggie, I realized: I just wanted him. He was also the only key I had to my mother. I looked at my bedroom door, making sure that it was locked. 313-995-4322. If I typed the numbers fast, I didn’t even have to think about it. The phone rang; my grip on my phone tightened. 313-995-4322. The phone rang again. Maybe no one was there.
“Hello?”
My lungs could have been collapsing. I had the feeling that I was falling on a roller coaster, weightless and headed straight for the ground.
“Hello?” the voice said. It was a young voice, filled with irritation. The wrong number? The wrong Keith? A landline?
“Is Keith Mitchell there?” I asked. My hand was getting sweaty, so I tried holding the phone with just my fingertips.
“Yeah, just a sec,” said the voice, just like I was the pizza guy checking on a delivery or something. I heard the phone fumbled, then feet stomping, and then, “Dad! Phone!” Dad? It was probably only a few seconds, but it felt like five minutes before a heavier, more balanced set of feet shuffled to the phone. “Hello?” His voice was lower than I would have thought and also a little bit scratchy.
“Hi,” I said. I kicked at my bedposts.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
Your daughter. How are you? I stifled a laugh; the whole thing was ridiculous. Maybe I should just hang up.
“Look, I got things to do. So if you’re a telemarketer, go bother someone else—”
“This is Alexandra Kirtridge,” I blurted.
“You’re … Who are you?” His voice changed; it was a little more hesitant.
“I’m Alexandra Kirtridge,” I said. “You sent me letters.” I was pacing across the carpet like it was my spot in center field.
“Alexandra?” His voice kept on getting quieter.
“Yeah,” I said.
I heard some shuffling in the background and then a few doors shutting. I had the feeling he was moving into another room. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you,” he said.
My stomach churned. This was a bad idea; I knew it. “I’m sorry, I—”
“No,” he interrupted me. “It’s not that. I want to talk to you. I … I been wanting to talk to you for sixteen years.”
I exhaled slowly. My father is still alive. I think that was the first moment I had consciously contemplated that he could have been dead.
“Just after I got no answer to the letters, I didn’t think I’d hear from you.”
I bit my lip, trying to think of something to say. What he wanted was an explanation, and I didn’t have one.
“I mean, I know I shouldn’t have sent them in the first place, that that put you in a strange spot,” he said.
“I just got the letters,” I said. “Just now.”
There was an audible pause. “Oh.”
Someone laughed downstairs.
“So, you live in Detroit.”
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