When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  “Dad, pass that Big Gulp!” Craig yelled from the back seat. Music was blasting, one of Tara’s mixtapes. I was lying on Craig’s lap and got squished when he leaned forward to take the giant cup from Riley.

  “Mom,” yelled Craig again, “do you have any cigarettes?”

  “What kind of mother would let her son smoke!” said Tara from the driver’s seat.

  “What kind of father would hand his son a bottle of whiskey!” laughed Riley from the passenger’s seat, unscrewing the cap from a bottle of Old Grand-Dad.

  “If you want to smoke, you’ll have to ask your uncle,” Tara said.

  “Spoon?”

  “Shit, dude, you know I don’t smoke,” I said.

  We were a family. Kevin Riley was called Dad. He was Irish, the middle child of six. He and his siblings had cell phones and pagers before the rest of us even knew what they were. The only one of us who knew about responsibility, he would forgo hanging out on the weekends to clean newly built houses with his dad. He bought a truck with his own money while the rest of us were driving our parents’ old beaters. After my St. Patty’s Day party, it was Riley who brought over the steam cleaner to get the puke out of the carpet before my parents woke up.

  The nurturing Tara and Courtney were both called Mom. Craig was their wild son, and I was their uncle. For unknown reasons, Craig’s nickname for me was Spoon.

  “How do you do it, Riley?” Tara asked.

  “What?”

  “Stay here and not get freaked out! I feel like this place is eating me alive, but you said you’re thinking of buying a house?”

  “Yeah,” said Riley. “So?”

  “So—don’t you even want to get away from your parents?”

  “Well, I work with my dad.”

  “But how can you even stand them? Aren’t you pissed at them for raising you here in the first place?”

  “My parents moved up here so we could have a better life,” Riley said.

  “Jesus, Riley, you sound just like my father!” said Tara. “What’s ‘better’ about being in the suburbs? My dad’s a parole officer and used to take me to the city with him when he’d go check on his parolees. I got to see DeVon at his barbershop. That’s where I used to get my hair cut! Those people have real lives and real trouble—”

  “That’s the point, Mom.”

  At the concert, we merged with the stream of bodies working its way up to the dark heights of the amphitheater. We spiraled up the concrete stairwell, grasping the sticky handrail, breathing the air humid with warmth and voices. The crush of bodies made my head spin. A few steps above me, Tara’s rear was in my face. Craig was pushing me up the steps with his whole body.

  Craig came to our high school a year before we graduated, a rare transfer from out of state. His parents moved a lot for business, although we never learned which. They moved from California, but we never learned where he was actually from. Tall, with sandy hair and an easy laugh, he’d put his arm around me when we were sitting in Riley’s basement and I was getting into some heated philosophical debate. He’d say, “Why do you always have to be so deep, Spoon?” He worked out at 5:00 a.m. before school every day and played varsity football, but you wouldn’t know it from his baggy T-shirts and go-with-the-flow attitude.

  Once when his parents were away in South America, he called me at six in the morning. He told me that he and Riley had been up all night drinking, and Riley had just gone home.

  When I got there, he went down to the basement and came up with an unmarked bottle.

  “You have to try this, Spoon,” he said. He got out two glasses and poured the golden liquid. He gave one to me, clinked glasses, and downed his in one gulp. I sniffed at mine and tentatively sipped. All of a sudden, I felt a wave of sweet sun, like I was transported to a carnival, laughing and twirling in the warm breeze.

  “This could be our place,” he said, putting his glass down and moving toward me.

  “When are your parents getting back?” I asked.

  “They were supposed to be back yesterday.”

  We were almost at the top of the amphitheater. “What do you want to do after this?” Craig said in my ear.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Tara and I were probably going to spend the night in Oakland.”

  “Maybe Mom can go home,” he said.

  “Mom’s driving.”

  By the time we reached our seats, we were dripping sweat, dizzy with vertigo and liquor. My vision became kaleidoscopic as we filed into the long, horseshoe curve of our row. Thousands of waving bodies spun and fragmented into more thousands. We had to hold onto each other for support. The seats were bad, but it didn’t matter.

  “Here you go, Son,” said Tara, fumbling around in her bag. She opened her backpack, took out a bottle of vodka, and handed it to Craig.

  “Thanks, Mom,” he said. He opened it and took a long swig. He passed it to me, but I shook my head.

  “Pop!” he said, handing it to Riley.

  “Thanks, Son,” he said. He put his arm around Tara. “We sure are proud of our boy.”

  When the lights went down, the crowd’s roar greeted the band onstage. In a sea of swaying lights, the band played “Hello City.” They jumped around, improvised, switched instruments, but I felt as if I were on a different planet.

  Craig’s hand was resting against my leg.

  “Maybe none of this, these people, this concert, really exists,” I said to him. “Maybe we’re dreaming them, and when we wake, we’ll realize we’re in some other time.”

  “Spoon!” he said.

  “Don’t you ever have the feeling that you aren’t really you? That the face you see in the mirror, the eyes you’re looking out of, is someone or something else? Do you know what I mean?”

  Craig took another swig of vodka. “I think you think too much, Spoon!” he said and laughed.

  “I know you think about this, too!” I said. My eyes were closed, and I was slurring my speech. I was drunk. Craig laughed, and I let myself fall against him, laughing, too.

  “Come back with me after,” he said, brushing his lips against my neck.

  Mother, Son, and Uncle went back to my place in Oakland after the show. Dad went home so he could get up early for a job.

  I lived on the attic floor where the roof slanted nearly to the ground. My three roommates, two of them former basketball teammates, were away for break with their own families.

  The dark, empty house swayed around us as we climbed the stairs. Unopened mail covered countertops; the basement was filled with old bikes, philosophy books, broken furniture, and desk lamps abandoned by students who’d lived there before. Metallic ferns crept along green wallpaper.

  Tara watched Craig and me undress each other. My futon was rickety, and from the way Craig let himself fall against it, I knew he wouldn’t last long. Soon Craig passed out, naked, in my bed. Tara went back to the cot in the adjoining room. I threw the covers over Craig and myself and went to sleep.

  It was still early when we got back to Wexford. Craig was still groggy. Tara helped me dress him, load him into the car, and drive him home. We had to pull over a couple of times on the way back so he could open the car door and vomit.

  After we dropped Craig off at his parents’ house (they weren’t home), Tara and I drove to Denny’s.

  We ordered coffee and began to flip through the sticky, plastic-coated menus.

  “I can’t stand this,” said Tara. “I live in constant agonizing terror that the best ideas of my life are being sucked away.” She took a sip of coffee and lowered her voice. “I dream I’m visited by messengers from the future. People come to me, whispering in a language I can’t understand, giving me instructions, telling me to follow them—but I don’t know how, and they vanish.”

  “We’re all going to die,” I said, wincing at the bitterness of my coffee. When I went to college, I stopped adding cream and sugar.

  “I want to be cremated,” Tara said. “My aunt was buried alive. They th
ought she was dead, had a funeral and everything. Someone walking through the graveyard heard a noise coming from one of the headstones. They dug her up and found her lying there, eyes wide open.” Tara waved to the waitress for more coffee.

  “Conflict, sensitivity to pain…,” I continued.

  “Eggs. Scrambled. Coffee…” Tara was studying the menu.

  “I mean, it’s 1998—”

  “With cream. Toast—”

  “People say Chekhov wrote about despair—”

  “Wheat. With butter.”

  “But he wrote!” I said, slapping the table.

  “Bacon. Four pieces—”

  “How is that despair?”

  “French toast. Powdered sugar.”

  “And how do we know if that peace or despair is outside or within us? A hundred years later and we’re still asking the same questions!”

  “Three sixty-nine.”

  The booths were yellow, the carpet a horrible paisley. We hated the neckties worn by the waitstaff, with drawings of suns, houses, kids, and doggies made by children who were either in cancer hospitals or who were raising money to support children in cancer hospitals. We hated the smudged glass of the claw machine, the cheap stuffed animals inside, and the fact that nobody could ever win.

  Just then, we saw Denise, the manager, a pale, flustered woman with a limp ponytail, going up to tables on the other side of the restaurant and escorting customers out the door. Even those mid-meal looked up, confused, and left their seats.

  “See that?” Tara said. “You live your life in this cistern, and one day you crack. Look—she’s totally lost it!”

  I took another sip of coffee.

  “Hey, I think something’s going on—”

  There was a loud crash in the kitchen, and that’s when we saw it. The line cook yelled something to Denise, but he was soon obscured by billows of black smoke that poured out of the order window. We didn’t wait for Denise, who was screaming by then. As we filed out the door, Tara noted that it would be a good time to break the glass and raid the pie case and the claw machine, but we didn’t.

  Once in the parking lot, we heard the pops and cracks of the roof buckling under the flames. Smoke filled the sky over Denny’s like an evil cloud.

  We got into the car and pulled into a used car dealership across the street to watch the scene. The roof had caved in by then, and flames shot freely into the sky. Smoke trickled out the windows and rose from the crack under the door. Sirens sounded in the distance and grew shrill as fire trucks came speeding up Route 19. Firefighters jumped from the truck, unwound the hose, and began to spray arcs of water into the flames.

  We sat in silence for a few moments. The time for philosophizing was over. I was going to Moscow and one of our childhood hangouts was burning down before our eyes. I felt schadenfreude, triumph, and some other feelings I couldn’t name.

  Nine

  My senior year in college, I stole a ring. It was a claddagh ring, cheap, not even real silver. My friends and I were at a St. Patrick’s Day festival in Pittsburgh. Under the beer tents and strung lights, we browsed vendor booths, looking, hoping, for something magical to spring forth from the usual hoards of KISS ME I’M IRISH T-shirts, novelty flags, plastic hats, shamrocks, and costume jewelry. My friends went to get a beer, which I declined. One had already splashed down my leg when a drunken stranger knocked into me. My skin was sticky, my wet sandaled foot attracting gravel. Stale beer, a smell I hated, clung to me like sweat. I shrugged off the irritation as I browsed the display cases of jewelry while I waited on my friends.

  Chunky veined turquoise, Celtic knots and crosses, and the familiar symbol of two hands holding a heart. In high school, my friends and I all had rings like that; it was a common token of Irish heritage. We wore the rings, called claddagh, upside down with the heart pointing toward our bodies to symbolize friendship and family loyalty.

  The festival was loud, and the booth was busy with people coming and going. As my fingers slid down the surfaces of the rings, I felt how loosely they were held in the little slits of fake black velvet. The vendor’s back was turned. Before I realized what I was doing, my finger slid one of the heart-shaped rings into the cuff of my sleeve and held it there. I browsed for a few more seconds and then went to find my friends.

  I found them in front of a stage where a folk band was getting ready to play. The ring was in my pocket, and I was nervous. Maybe it was my foul mood after having a beer spilled on me, maybe it was the feeling that this debauchery was no way to celebrate Irish heritage.

  On St. Patrick’s Day, my mother always made Irish soda bread and lamb stew. My grandfather taught us the Wolfe Tones’ version of “My Heart Is in Ireland” and bought us CDs of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, wearing their cream-colored Aran sweaters. Every member of my family had one of those sweaters. I had a turtleneck version, with a thick rolled collar and long cuffed sleeves. As I stood in the crowd, I could still remember the smell of the wool, wet with melted snow, as I peeled my coat off in the kitchen on a snow day.

  That evening, I was wearing a red minidress and a light jacket. I was conscious of my bare legs because of the beer and because I didn’t usually wear short skirts. With the ring in my pocket, my nervousness became paranoia, and I wished the droning band would stop. I looked around. Had somebody seen me take the ring? Would they confront me?

  I was self-conscious because of something else, too. That night when I told my friends I was Irish, they responded, “Yeah! Everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day!” and raised their glasses in a cheer. That wasn’t what I meant, I thought. I knew my classmates saw me as somehow “ethnic,” but I still felt connected to a sense of identity I got from my parents, how we defined ourselves and our culture as a family. In my heart, I knew there was a difference between us, one I was terrified to confront. I felt a pang that night with my friends, and it didn’t take me long to notice that no one in the crowd was “Irish” like I was.

  Mercifully, the music ended, and we shuffled along with everyone else to the exit. The crowd made our bodies invisible, and with a slight movement of my hand, I reached into my pocket, palmed the stolen ring, and dropped it into the dust. Good, I thought. I had corrected my strange, criminal act before anything happened. I had brought balance back to my universe. The ring was gone now. My conscience should have been clear—but it wasn’t.

  Before we could exit the fairground, a security guard stopped us. He was standing with the vendor from the booth where I’d found the ring. He looked me up and down and told me the vendor said I’d stolen something from the booth. Blood rose to my cheeks, adrenaline surged, and my chest tightened. I acted indignant, enraged. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. I turned out my pockets, revealing only lint. I didn’t dare look the vendor in the eye. The guard nodded and reluctantly let us pass.

  My friends stayed silent through the whole scene. I was alone at the booth, so they didn’t know whether anything had happened or not. When we got to the parking lot, one of them broke the silence.

  “I can’t believe they did that,” she said. “Just because you’re the only—” She stopped, not knowing how to say what I was out loud. I said nothing. I liked that she was indignant on my behalf. I liked that she assumed I was innocent and had been singled out because I was different. I didn’t want to think about how things would have gone if I hadn’t unloaded the ring in time. I didn’t even know why I’d taken it in the first place.

  As we drove back to campus, the conversation shifted to other things, but I was still raw and shaking from the confrontation. I felt transparent and vulnerable, like I’d been found out, like the guard knew exactly who and what I was and—unlike my friend—would not have been afraid to say it. In the glare of those lights, I let my silence cast me as the victim, my friend’s defense wrapped around me like a warm but itchy sweater. The telltale ring was gone, ground down like a beer tab, a scrap of no consequence. But tears burned in the back of my throat, and a
ll the way home, I wanted to confess.

  I wrote about the incident in my poetry class. Like always, my professor, Jim Daniels, gave detailed feedback, filling the margins with check marks and suggestions. The semester was almost over, and I had already decided to apply to doctoral programs in Russian literature instead of MFA programs for writing. I went to Jim’s office to ask him about writing opportunities outside of graduate school.

  “I liked the poem you wrote for class,” he said. “There’s a summer workshop for African American poets I think you should attend. It’s called Cave Canem.”

  I demurred. I wasn’t sure this was for me, even after my experience at the St. Patrick’s Day festival, even after all the experiences throughout my life that told me in whispers and shouts that I was not who I thought I was. I thought about my family and how, in their eyes, my identifying as anything but Irish and Italian was dishonest.

  I looked up to Jim. He showed me what it was like to be a poet in real life. He was a regular person; he had a family. He invited students over to his house for a barbecue at the end of the year, and we played four square with his kids in the backyard. He showed me you didn’t have to be a crazy drug addict or some cliché from a Jack Kerouac novel to be an amazing writer. His example made me feel validated. If I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t have to be anything other than who I was. But that was the problem; as I sat in his office, I wasn’t sure.

  “Toi Derricotte runs the workshop,” Jim continued after I failed to give him a response. “She teaches over at Pitt.” He pulled a slim book down from his shelf. “You should read this,” he said.

  I took the book in my hands. It had a red cover with a small house made out of black bars in the center. At the bottom was the author’s name, and at the top was a single word: Captivity.

  “Okay,” I said and got ready to leave the office. “Thanks.”