When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  Seven

  My freshman year, I met Dave Jefferson, a football player in my World History class. The class was boring; a stout man with a gray beard and tweed jacket lectured to us on Guns, Sails, and Empire. Dave sat next to me and made jokes the whole time, raising his hand and giving absurd answers, which the professor mostly ignored. Dave had a raspy voice, a gap in his teeth, and a birthmark under his right eye. He was African American. He was kind of chubby, and I thought he was annoying but also kind of cute.

  We began to talk outside of class, he mostly following me around campus, trying to make me laugh. His persistence paid off, and I started to see his personality—smart, charismatic, ambitious, quick-witted, but also attention-seeking and risk-taking. We began dating. We were both underage, but there was a bar near campus that always served him, and they served me as well. I liked that he seemed to have a pull with people, and I felt like a VIP when I was with him. One night, we stayed up all night in his apartment, talking. I finally fell asleep, and when I woke up on the couch, there was a single red rose next to me.

  That morning, I had sex with Dave for the first time. Afterward, I sat in the bathroom, wondering if I felt different. Growing up in the Catholic Church, my teachers and parents made sex seem like a big deal. It was a sin unless you were married. Any person, especially a girl, who wanted to be good and moral should remain abstinent until marriage. My parents, who I knew conceived me before they were married, told me their situation was different; they were in love, and our family was destined from the start. My mother told me she had never been with anyone until she met my father. In high school, when she was a junior, she’d dated the captain of the basketball team, someone she’d had a crush on for years. But she waited and didn’t give into temptation. Until she met my dad, she remained a virgin. We never talked about my dad’s history, but it was implied that he had never been with anyone but my mother, even if that wasn’t true. Their love for each other and me, the fact that they got married before I was born, and the fact that they told us our family was destined to be meant they could bend the rules a little. But the rest of us, especially good Catholic girls like me, should remain pure.

  Still, before I went off to college, my mom took me to the doctor and told her to give me a prescription for birth control. I was offended. I was still a virgin, and my mom knew it. I was serious about my studies and about playing basketball; I had no intention of having sex in college. She explained to the doctor and me that it was to regulate my periods. As an athlete, my periods were irregular; this was true. But when my mom left the room, I voiced my concerns to the doctor. I wondered if knowing I was on the pill would lead me to do something I wasn’t ready for. She replied, “You’ll make the right decision.”

  When I lost my virginity with Dave, I was already on the Pill, and he used protection. I knew my mother became pregnant when she was nineteen, but at the moment, I wasn’t worried about that. I thought about the girls in high school we knew who had sex and how my friends and I judged them as sluts. As I sat in the bathroom in Dave’s apartment, I took a mental inventory of my body; everything felt normal. I’d heard you bled after having sex for the first time, but I didn’t. It wasn’t traumatic or life changing. I didn’t feel like a different person. I realized sex wasn’t as big a deal as everyone, including myself, made it out to be.

  When Dave introduced me to his friends, his friend James, who was also black, asked me point-blank, “Are you black?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, you’re the blackest white girl I’ve ever seen.”

  When Dave took me to visit his family in Cincinnati, we stayed with his mother and grandmother. They were warm and welcoming. When we were in the car on the way to his dad’s place, he leaned over and said, “Don’t tell him you’re white.”

  I introduced Dave to my parents, and they were kind and welcoming to him. My mom didn’t protest, maybe because my relationship was happening while I was at college and not under her roof. Maybe she wasn’t worried that I would get pregnant as long as I was on the Pill. When we talked, she never asked about Dave or my social life at school. She wanted to make sure I had enough food, clothes, and money, that I got the care packages she sent, and that I was keeping up with my studies.

  Dave didn’t seem to mind that I identified as white. He also didn’t seem to mind when one of my friends from Russian class called me her “ghetto pass.” I never mentioned my race to his father, or to his mother for that matter. Around his family I felt like I was passing as black. Dave knew my parents were white and he never confronted me about my racial identity. He never asked if I was adopted or mixed. Except for that moment in the car, my race was never an issue. We dated for almost two years until we had a messy breakup that ended with books flying and me chasing him out of my apartment with a frying pan.

  I had quit the basketball team by then because I decided to major in Russian studies and knew that my basketball season, which took place during the winter, would conflict with the study-abroad program.

  Carnegie Mellon wasn’t a school known for its sports. The workouts and practices were grueling, but hardly anyone came to our games, and we didn’t have a winning record. Playing basketball didn’t give me the same celebrity it had in high school. It was a lot of work without any payoff, and I realized my heart was no longer in it. I went to see the coach with a lump in my throat, knowing that quitting went against the values my parents taught me. The longer I was away from home, though, the more I questioned those values. I knew I wasn’t giving up; I was deciding to pursue a new passion and new opportunities. I knew my parents and coach would be disappointed, but my drive to study in Moscow overrode my fear.

  My interest in Russia was piqued by a history course I’d taken as a senior in high school. The dramatic rise and fall of the tsars, the Russian Revolution, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks—it was a history that came alive for me, not like the stale triumphs of the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War that had been drilled into my head since elementary school. I never saw myself in American history, but for some reason Russian literature and history struck a chord. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gogol were writers who fought against the odds, writing against injustice, poverty, and censorship. I read about male and female characters wrestling with life’s big questions and persevering when the world didn’t make sense. Amid brutality, these writers saw beauty; amid absurdity, meaning. Asking questions was more important than finding answers, and searching for the truth—even when the truth was ugly—was its own reward. Books like Anna Karenina and Poor Liza trod the worn ground of female protagonists annihilated by their own desires, but I found more that was familiar in these foreign worlds than I even had in the places I called home. The Russian language seemed laden with secret knowledge, and I wanted to unravel its mysteries. It was difficult, and I wanted the challenge. It was exotic, and I wanted to escape the mundane. Russia was foreign but not as inconceivable to me as the world of World Cultures had been in high school. In the end, my parents weren’t upset that I chose my studies over basketball, but they were concerned that I’d decided to major in Russian with a secondary major in writing poetry.

  “Can you get a job in that?” my mom asked. “Are you sure you don’t want to go into medicine?”

  I knew my parents would support me no matter what, and I promised myself that I would become the best writer and Russianist I could to prove I was worthy of that support.

  Eight

  In December 1998, I turned twenty. Two and a half years at college made me feel like a different person. I thought differently, spoke differently, and fancied myself one of the great minds of my time.

  It was snowing in Pittsburgh, and the lampposts in Oakland were strung with wreaths and lights. In a few weeks, I would board a plane to Moscow, Russia. I was excited and nervous, eager to spend time with my friends over Christmas break before heading off into the unknown.

  There was another unknown I was approaching, one mu
ch closer to home. I never talked to my friends seriously about my identity or race; I didn’t have the language to talk about those things in a personal way, and more important, I was afraid to. But after two years of reading Heidegger and Dostoevsky I knew how to talk philosophy, and that is what I did.

  As Tara and I drove the twenty miles north from Pittsburgh to the North Hills, the city gave way to gray rolling hills and bare-branched trees. A familiar malaise came over us.

  “What are we going to do?” Tara said as we pulled into her parents’ driveway. “Spend another night at Denny’s? It’s the pit of despair, the trough of mediocrity. We have to be past that now. We’re in college.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “The mind that strives toward higher realization is stifled there at the very gates. But we’re not old enough to drink.”

  “So what, go to King’s?”

  King’s wasn’t open twenty-four hours on weeknights, so when the doors closed around eleven, we would hang out in the darkened parking lot, sitting on the curb by the dumpsters or squatting on the asphalt between our cars. As we slid into the rust-colored booth, a waitress served us coffee in the puffy-sleeved blouse and teal apron I’d worn just a few years before. It felt surreal. In high school, my privilege of driving the old blue Buick station wagon was passed to my brother Pat when he became a freshman, so during the summer, I walked up the highway shoulder to King’s, stepping around broken bottles and roadkill, hoping the cars speeding around the winding road stayed in their lane. One day at the end of my shift, Pat came to pick me up, and instead of finishing wrapping my share of silverware in paper napkins, and despite the manager’s protests, I decided to leave. The next day, I went in and was informed I had been fired for insubordination.

  Tara and I sat in the smoking section, not because we smoked but because it was open later than the dining room. Diane, the waitress who served us our coffee, was legendary. She had worked at King’s for thirty years, had no teeth, and was famous for her dirty mouth (“I’m going to come in my pants!”) and racist humor (“That man just asked for a intentional of water!”). The smoking section was closest to the door and included a counter with stools that mainly served truckers who were coming in off the road for a quick no-frills meal and a smoke. You had to be fast to work in this section. No one wanted to hear the list of daily specials, and they didn’t care what your name was. You couldn’t take time writing orders down in your pad. Diane served her customers with a permanent frown and few pleasantries, but she was the only one who could keep up.

  “Hi, girls. Back on break?” Diane asked as she poured our coffee, but she was gone, pulling orders from the window before we could answer.

  The waitress working the next section over saw us and waved. Her name was Linda, but we called her Trailer Trash Barbie. She was also a veteran waitress, with thickly caked foundation that only accentuated the hard lines of her face. She ignored the King’s rule banning excessive jewelry, and there were rumors as to how she got away with it. Her unbuttoned blouse exposed tanned décolleté. The fitted apron barely reached the bottom of her skirt, and beneath that she wore thick tan pantyhose, white socks, and black sneakers. Her section was where the truckers usually sat for coffee.

  I used to work in the section across from the stainless steel island of the dessert bar, with ladles sticking out of bins that held the dozen or so toppings for King’s famous sundaes. I loved topping the sundaes with whipped cream not from a can but from a gun that was attached to a jug under the counter, or laying a slab of cinnamon ice cream onto a piece of hot apple pie. But my section was near the entrance to the kitchen, and diners had too clear a view of waitresses slopping soup into cups from crusty tureens and draining the water out of premade bowls of iceberg lettuce salads, one hand braced over the lettuce like a sieve.

  After we got our coffee, Tara and I started in on the same conversation we’d been having for the last two and a half years.

  “A set of values is given to you,” I said, placing my hands on the table for emphasis. “You don’t know how they function, but you use them anyway to uphold your happiness.”

  “Until they crumble,” Tara said, “and you realize they were never your values.”

  “And it wasn’t your happiness they were upholding.”

  There was a pause.

  “When you live in a town where everyone knows you, you can live there for a long time and not change.”

  “Fuck, dude!” I said, slapping the table.

  Tara could tell there was something on my mind that I wasn’t saying. She said, “So what about tomorrow? The concert?”

  “Dude, I don’t even like Barenaked Ladies.”

  “I know, but it’s something to do. Tomorrow’s Friday, and if we end up sitting in a booth like this again, it will be clear to me—and I hope to you, too—that there really is no hope for us.”

  “Suppose we go to the concert. What then? Will our lives be any different? What about the next day and the day after that?” I paused. “Plus, tickets are, like, thirty bucks.”

  “Dude, your dad will give you thirty bucks.”

  I looked at the fake cuckoo clock on the wall. “We have one hour until Courtney can meet us. What do you want to do until then?”

  “We could go to Perkins.”

  We liked Perkins because it was cleaner than Denny’s, Eat’n Park, and King’s, and an outstanding number of items were included in the price of a single meal. Items was a system of value-to-price ratio that my friends and I worked out from a story Tara told us about an old aunt who would sit her down in the kitchen and say, stabbing her finger into her palm, “Coffee. Eggs. Scrambled. Toast. Rye. Buttered. With jelly. Home fries. Sausage. Four links.”

  She’d pause, light a cigarette, take a drag, then finish, “Dollar ninety-nine.”

  Seven items for $1.99 was a mere myth to us, and every time we’d compare the items in, say, a Grand Slam or Moons Over My Hammy, we would see Tara’s aunt’s face, counting with us, serious as the grave.

  Perkins closed early, so we arranged to meet Courtney at the Giant.

  The Giant Eagle, the grocery store where my dad had gotten cupcakes on Pat’s eighth birthday, was now the Super Giant Eagle. Open twenty-four hours, it was the only place other than a parking lot or cemetery that we could hang out late on a weeknight. My friends and I spent many nights combing the fluorescent-lit aisles long after the regular customers had gone home. The cashiers were all high school students, so they didn’t care if we loitered.

  We found Courtney sitting in the patio furniture display in the wide center aisle between candy and plastic dinnerware. We joined her under the pink-, orange-, and blue-striped umbrella, which shaded us from the harsh lights. An open box of powdered doughnuts sat on the table in front of us, their crumbs spilling onto the glass top.

  “It’s so lame,” said Courtney, leaning back in the patio chair so that it rocked slightly. She pulled on the drawstrings of her hoodie. “There is no one in this town except us capable of having an intelligent conversation. All of this”—she motioned with her empty Mountain Dew bottle—“breeds complacency. Vulgarity. And we’re stuck in the middle of it.”

  “Yeah,” said Tara, wiping doughnut crumbs off the corner of her mouth. “The only things worth contemplating are the higher spiritual manifestations of the human intellect. Our entire concept of existence is built around the fact that we are never going to die. That’s what makes this kind of life possible. But no one wants to talk about it. They just fill their carts up and load their shit into their SUVs.”

  I got up from the table and came back with a bag of Oreos, which I opened and put next to the doughnuts. From around the corner came a couple of stoner kids in long sweatshirts and baggy pants. They giggled and fake-punched each other when they saw us but kept stuffing bags of chips and candy into their pockets. Behind us loomed a tower of inflated beach balls. The other patio sets in the aisle were empty. Around us gleamed black and silver grills.

&n
bsp; “Of course, the mind is not immortal; it’s transitory, but I know what you mean,” I said. “When a thinking person grows up and comes to awareness, you can’t help feeling like life is some kind of trap from which there is no escape. Why you’ve been randomly brought into it out of nonbeing against your will … and you try to find some meaning, some goal of existence, but nobody tells you.”

  Each of our manifestoes was a testament to our fears at confronting the real world for the first time. We were talking about privilege and shame, about growing up and not knowing what came next. And we were saying that we would be there for each other, no matter what.

  It was nearly two by then, and we got up from our oasis, stiff from rocking, paid for our half-eaten snacks, and stepped out into the supermarket lights. In the parking lot, Courtney went to her car, and we stood with her for a moment before getting in our parents’ cars and driving home.

  “Are you coming out tomorrow night?” Tara asked her.

  “Can’t. Matt’s coming over.”

  In the car, Tara rolled down the window, letting the night air rush in.

  “Let’s go,” she said, squinting against the sudden cold. “Seriously, we can’t spend another night at the Giant. It’ll be fun.” Then casually, “Besides, Riley and Craig are coming.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Really? Craig’s back?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s back from Boulder on break.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay, then. Yeah, I can get thirty bucks from my dad.”

  The next night when Tara picked me up, Craig and Riley were already in the car. I had a disposable camera, but we took so many pictures on the way to the concert that it ran out of film before we even got out of the North Hills. Tara with her thrift-store scarf and short hair in the driver’s seat, turning around mid-laugh, mid-gesture. A blurred portrait of Craig and Riley posing with a Big Gulp, both of them in leather jackets, Riley with his black hair, looking like a freckled Tom Cruise, and Craig—with his mischievous eyes and broad frame—looking like no one but himself.