You Are Free: Stories

by Danzy Senna

  We discovered that Nick at Nite was running what they called “Huxtapalooza”—back-to-back episodes of The Cosby Show. Hewitt and I both hated The Cosby Show, with venom and vigor—for its smugness, for the cloying sweetness of the vignettes pretending to be plots, for the surrealism of a rich black family who had no problem integrating into white America.

  And yet in those early weeks after the birth, we watched it every night in drop-jawed stultification, our baby suckling away at my sore bosom. I think now, looking back on it, we were in some strange way defending our right to exist as a well-to-do black family—because the world outside our door, in that strange, tilted, black-and-white cookie of a universe that was the Chandler, insisted we were just another interracial couple with a butterscotch baby in a $700 pram. The world out there insisted that as soon as a black man made it, he should marry a white woman. As soon as a black woman made it, she should marry a white man. But at night, in the privacy of our lair, we were that strange rare bird called a black family that squawked and flitted across the screen for a festival and was gone.

  Of all the characters, I hated Claire Huxtable the most—a black woman lawyer who had five children and no trouble making it as a partner in an old boys’ firm. Hewitt hated Denise the most. The actress was mixed, like us. Something about her bone-pale pallor and drugged-out eyes unsettled him, he said. That first night, we watched the episode where Cliff makes Theo return a pricey designer shirt, and Denise agrees to sew him a replica that turns out to be a disaster. Hewitt, beside me on the couch, shook his head and said in a fake southern accent, “Sometimes when y’all mix you come out real pretty—but sometimes y’all come out real fucked up.”

  George was asleep and we should have gone to bed, but we couldn’t tear our eyes away.

  The next episode was the one where Cliff’s parents celebrate their forty-ninth anniversary. As a gift, the family commissions a painting from a photograph of the couple, and performs a dance and lip-synching performance to Ray Charles’s “(Night Time Is) The Right Time.”

  Afterward, in bed, I spooned Hewitt from behind. It had begun to rain outside, and I saw through the window the glittering lights on Rossmore, and could hear the sound of the cars moving through the wet night. George was asleep in the pram next to me. Two years earlier I had been single and lonely and working as a graphic designer for a magazine in New York. It was a job and a life I’d been happy to walk away from. I had a pleasant feeling of surprise as I took stock of my life, as if I’d gotten away with something.

  That fall there were reports in the Metro Region section of the Los Angeles Times about a spate of racial incidents in the Brentwood public schools.

  Hewitt told me about the latest incident over breakfast.

  “Some white kids called their black substitute teacher an ‘N-word,’ ” Hewitt said. “The kids got suspended but now the parents are protesting, saying that their kids did nothing wrong.”

  I stared down at my baby’s face. He was in what they called “the fourth trimester”—not yet fully of this world. His eyes were gray and looked almost blind. I wondered what he could see, if he could make out shapes or colors or features, or if I was still just a smell and a taste to him.

  I shook my head. “They called the teacher a nigger? What’s the world coming to?”

  “No, not a nigger,” Hewitt said. “They called him an N-word.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Hewitt put down the paper and picked up his coffee and said, “Literally. They said, ‘Hey, N-word!’ Not ‘Hey, nigger.’ ‘Hey, N-word!’ ”

  Helga invited me to take a walk with her and her baby that week and I agreed readily. Hewitt was spending several days a week at the university and I was alone with George for the first time and eager for adult companionship.

  To the world we passed on those city streets we must have looked like two wealthy white women out with their mixed babies. And in a funny way, to a passerby Helga must have appeared the blacker of us two, by association at least. Gia with her dark skin and corkscrew curls was a clear giveaway that Helga had—as Hewitt put it—“the fever for the flavor.”

  Somewhere on that long walk, Helga leaned her head into George’s stroller and shook her head at the sight of his pale skin and flaxen hair. “He’s so fair. I would never know.”

  “Never know?”

  “I mean, he’s not like Gia, where you can just tell immediately.” Helga looked between the two babies and sighed. “Well, it doesn’t matter. They are both perfect. Mixed kids are the prettiest, aren’t they?” She started down the street but I stood where I was for a moment, watching her rail-thin behind swishing away.

  “Well, George is not mixed, I mean not really,” I said, catching up with her. I waited for her to ask what I meant so that I could explain. But she didn’t ask. She just laughed and said, “Come on, look at him. He’s a blondie!”

  I was about to clarify when she leaned into his pram and said, “Hi, Blondie!” and George said, “Hi!” back.

  Helga glanced at me, suspicious, as if she thought I was throwing my voice.

  I shrugged, laughed. “Isn’t that funny?” I said. “He says that whenever we lean into his pram to say hi.”

  It was true. George had been doing it since he was two weeks old. Whenever we leaned into his pram or his crib and said “Hi,” he would say “Hi!” back. Hewitt insisted I was hearing things, but it happened consistently enough that I knew it was really “Hi!” he was saying.

  I leaned in to show Helga.

  “Hi!” I said.

  “Hi!” George said.

  I clapped and laughed and we did the routine again.

  Helga stepped away from the pram, grim-faced, and shook her head. “You shouldn’t clap at his tricks as if he is a monkey. You must ignore it if it happens again.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” She stared at me for a moment, her mouth set into a straight, firm line. “American mothers,” she said, “they turn their babies into dolls. Chimps. In Germany we are more nonchalant. We don’t hover, we don’t smother our babies. I leave Gia alone on a rug most of the time. I let her figure things out on her own. She doesn’t need me getting in the way of her learning process. You understand?”

  I nodded, a little taken aback by the harshness of her tone.

  Helga took off her sunglasses and stared at me as if she was trying to decide something about me. From the pram I could hear George saying “Hi!” over and over again, as if daring me to look at him. Helga pretended not to hear him, so I did too.

  “I have a book for you,” she said. “I will give it to you when we get home.”

  Sure enough, she left it on our doorstep later that evening with a Post-it attached that said, For your interest.

  It was slim, more a pamphlet than a book, and showed a photograph of a woman with long, dark hair, smiling and leaning over a baby on the floor. The baby—in a simple white onesie—was kicking its bare legs and clapping, but not smiling. There was a disconnected feeling to the two figures, as if they’d been cut from separate photographs and pasted together.

  The book’s title was Dear Mother: Treating Your Baby with Respect.

  I read it in bed while George slept. The writing was awkward and reminded me of a Dianetics pamphlet I’d once been handed on a subway platform. The gist of the book was that you should not treat your infant like a baby. You should talk to your baby in full sentences and in an adult tone of voice. You should tell your infant that you are going to pick him up before you do it and that you are going to change his diaper before you do it. You should not speak to your baby in a shrill or condescending voice, should not clap for your baby, and should never say “good boy” or “good girl” to your baby. Most of the time you should leave your baby alone on the floor, thus not interfering with his self-motivated learning process. The author had developed the philosophy while she worked at a Romanian orphanage.

  “Hogwash,” Hewitt said as he stepped out of the bathroom, ho
lding the book in his hand. He’d been locked in there for the past twenty minutes reading it on the toilet. “This is complete bunk, and written by illiterates to boot. Tell your fräulein friend that we don’t need her parenting advice, thank you. If George wants to say ‘Hi,’ and if George wants to say ‘Back off, bitch,’ and if George wants to say ‘Kiss my black—yes, black—ass,’ we’re going to cheer and laugh like any normal motherfucking parents. You don’t create an authentic baby by acting fake.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said.

  Hewitt tossed the book on the floor and threw his body down on the bed beside me.

  “But by the way, sweetie,” he said, in a gentle voice he used when he was about to piss me off. “I hate to tell you this, but George didn’t really say, ‘Hi.’ You’ve got to stop insisting on that. It just makes you sound crazy.”

  “He did too.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did too.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did too.”

  We watched Cosby that night in stony silence.

  The Huxtapalooza festival was in its second week. The episode that night centered on Sondra, the pale-as-a-bedsheet eldest daughter, and her elfin boyfriend with the unfortunate name Elvin. Sondra gets into a fight with Elvin and breaks up with him, and Cliff tries to set her up with an upstanding young man he seems to have his own crush on, but Sondra has no eyes for the new guy.

  Hewitt tried to make conversation by pointing out to me that the new guy on the date with Sondra was the same actor who returns in a later season to play Denise’s husband.

  “Isn’t that weird—that they cast the same guy in two different roles, as the love interest of two different daughters, and never acknowledge it? Like we’re going to forget that horse face.”

  George was asleep on my breast and we were free to go to bed, but we stayed up to watch the next episode because Hewitt had seen it before and promised me it would be of “personal interest” to me.

  It turned out to be the episode where Theo’s college archaeology professor leads a class discussion about the diverse ethnic backgrounds of the Egyptians, and as an example, encourages the students to guess her own heritage.

  The students shout out their guesses. “Italian!” “Greek!” “Irish!”

  “N-word,” Hewitt muttered beside me.

  Sure enough, the woman reveals to the class that she is part black: Irish, Cherokee, and black. Later, she goes over to the Huxtables’ house to try to convince Cliff and Claire to let Theo go on a class dig in Egypt that summer. Theo makes the whole family gather around the professor—aptly named Professor Grayson—and guess her ethnicity. Everybody guesses wrong and when Theo tells them the truth, they stare at her with a kind of gleaming-eyed hunger, like they’re going to cook her on a spit, or at least ask her to play one of their daughters.

  I put George in his bassinette beside the bed and got into bed. Hewitt rolled over and kissed me and said he was sorry he had been so gruff earlier.

  “Maybe George really did say ‘Hi,’ ” he offered. “What do I know?”

  We kissed and said, “I love you.” Still, afterward, in the dark, I felt a distance between us I couldn’t properly explain.

  Helga left a note on our door a few days later. Dinner? You and Hewitt? This Friday at seven?

  I convinced Hewitt we should go. He knew I was lonely and needed to make friends with other mothers.

  When I called Helga to confirm, she sounded pleased. “Oh, and you can leave George at your place with the baby phone.”

  “The baby phone?”

  “What is the word for it?” she said. “You know—the monitor! The monitor. Leave him at your place with the monitor. We only live a few doors down, so you should get reception.”

  I felt my mouth go dry. “I don’t think—”

  She sighed. “Okay, bring him. I mean, whatever you’re comfortable with. But at some point he will need to learn to be by himself.”

  When Friday night rolled around, I didn’t dare tell Hewitt what Helga had suggested. He already seemed irritated enough. He came out of our room sighing and unshowered, wearing rumpled blue jeans and a polo shirt. His hair was wild, overgrown. I considered asking him to change outfits or fix his hair, but his expression was so sullen I thought better of it.

  I had tried my hardest to look nice in a blue wraparound dress from J.Crew that still fit me, but I felt frumpy in it. None of my other prepregnancy clothes fit, and although my maternity clothes were too big, I still looked four months’ pregnant. More than one smiling stranger on the street had asked me, “How many months along are you?”

  Hewitt lugged a sleeping George down the hall in his car seat.

  Helga and Dave’s apartment was a more expensive model than ours—a model we’d looked at during our tour of the Chandler, just for kicks. Inside, the place looked like a nightclub, with dim lighting, thin hard furniture, no sign of a child’s garish toys anywhere. Dave sat perched on a barstool wearing a blue dinner jacket, a crisp pink oxford shirt, and a pair of tight chinos. Helga wore a complicated silver sheath.

  While Hewitt, still lugging George in the car seat, went to shake hands with Dave, Helga pulled me into Gia’s room to show me the sleeping baby. I sensed that she really wanted me to see the nursery. And once inside, I could see why. It was perfect—the hip nursery for the hip mom, furnished by various French and Scandinavian companies. I’d trawled the Internet for weeks before George was born ogling these very items, but Hewitt had talked me out of spending our life’s savings on baby gear. Instead our house was filled with the plastic degradation of Fisher-Price.

  Helga pointed at Gia where she slept on her belly in a pair of white satin pajamas, an orange silk bandanna tied Aunt Jemima fashion in her hair. “This crib,” Helga whispered as she pointed to her daughter, “it costs a fortune but it’s so worth it. It converts to a toddler bed. You should buy one for George.”

  Gia shifted, moaned, and Helga hissed, “We’d better talk outside.”

  After she shut the door behind us, she said, “Gia cried for an hour last night. I think she has a cold, but we’re sleep-training her, so I just let her cry it out. That child has lungs on her.”

  I had heard of this mythic sleep training crafted by a man named Ferber. But we were using the Cosby method: Watch Huxtapalooza all night, so that baby never misses you and you never miss baby.

  I followed her into the kitchen and stood while she moved around putting food from the stove onto platters.

  She handed me a glass of white wine.

  “Have you found a nanny yet?” she asked.

  “Actually, we’re not sure we want one,” I said. It was true. Hewitt and I had decided we didn’t like the nanny culture in L.A.—all those shadowy Mexican women trudging along, pushing sullen white children. It was positively antebellum.

  “You’re very brave,” Helga said. “I would just die without Teresa. I like being around Gia too, but not all the time. I mean, it’s awfully difficult to get anything done. I have Gia in day care during the week, of course. It’s wonderful. They let the babies hang out on the floor. But evenings and weekends I have Teresa.”

  I nodded. I had seen Gia with the woman, rolling around town. And now I watched Helga move around the immaculate kitchen, thin and angular in her silver sheaf, so elegant and rested, as if she had never given birth. There was something alarming about it to me, even as I half hungered to look that way too.

  In the living room, Hewitt was rocking George’s car seat with one hand and nursing a highball with the other. He nodded his head sympathetically while Dave, still perched on the stool, ranted, his smooth newscaster veneer gone and his face twisted with rage.

  “It’s outrageous,” Dave was saying, “the way these people on the street act like they know everything about me, sucking their teeth, shaking their heads, sometimes even making comments under their breath. I don’t even know these people! And they’re judging me? Judging my choice for a wife? Judgi
ng my child? I mean, I’ve had people say, ‘You must be into white women,’ just because I’m married to Helga. ‘Into white women.’ I mean, what does that even mean? Oh, it makes my blood boil.”

  “I hear you man, I hear you,” Hewitt said. He gave me a sly smile and said, “I can relate,” in an earnest voice I’d never heard him use before. He lifted his glass. “To a color-blind future.”

  “Right on,” Dave said, and lifted his glass.

  I looked at Hewitt, trying to figure out what he was up to, but he avoided my eyes and stared into his glass intently.

  Over dinner, Dave was a good host, asking all the right news-castery questions of each of us about work and baby, laughing at the appropriate moments. George woke once for a feeding but otherwise dozed on the floor.

  The food was rich beef stew that Hewitt had to beg off of since he didn’t eat meat.

  I guzzled it. I had given birth. I was nursing. I felt keenly my place in the animal kingdom.

  At one point Dave began to talk about why he preferred Los Angeles to New York, where he and Helga had lived before. He said he hated the rats and the subway and the dark winter afternoons. He hated the claustrophobia of everybody living on top of everybody, and let’s face it, he told us, he hated the filth.

  “And I’ll be honest with you, man,” he said, looking at Hewitt, “I got tired of trying to catch a cab, you know what I mean?”

  Hewitt emitted a little laugh. “Tell me about it. When we lived back East, I always used to have to send Rachel out to the curb ahead of me to nab one.”

  Dave laughed. “Me too! Helga was the bait. You should have seen the cabbies when they saw me coming up behind her.” He looked at Helga and I sensed some ice behind his smile. “I try to explain to Helga but she’s not American, so it goes right over her head.”

  Hewitt looked at me and grabbed my hand and said, in a saccharine voice, “I try to explain to Rachel too. Don’t I, sweetie? She’s an American and she still doesn’t get it.”