Loving Day

by Mat Johnson

  “So, I’m a black. That’s just fucking great. A black. That’s just what I need right now.”

  “You’re not ‘a black.’ You’re black. It’s a good thing, nowadays. You can be president.” I grin for her. Her smile back is quick and fraudulent. She’s trying to act composed and mature, and she’s not old enough to know how to pull off the illusion like the rest of us.

  “Jesus, I thought you would be Israeli or something. I hate rap music,” she says, then looks off. “You know, I was the best dancer at Kadima, since like third grade. Guess that’s explained.”

  “I can’t dance, sorry.”

  “Maybe it skips a generation. God, school. He told you to tell me to go back to school, didn’t he? He told you to tell me to get back in high school, finish up and go to a good college. That’s why he’s doing this to me, because it’s easy to get into college for blacks. Don’t they get scholarships or something? That’s what this is about.”

  My daughter is a racist, I think. I adjust that to, My daughter is mildly racist. My daughter is casually racist, I settle on. She’s casually racist. “You dropped out of high school?”

  “I’m an artist too. I’m a dancer. I’m going to dance school anyway, so I just need my GED and an audition piece. Irv doesn’t understand that. I’m going nuts in his apartment. You’ve met Irv; you have to see what he’s like. I’m going to graduate, like, any minute. I’m almost eighteen. I want to get out of the house now. Tell him to let me go, and I’ll leave you alone. You can go back to not being a dad.” I want to protest this, but my mind doesn’t have the words my mouth needs, so I choke on nothing for a bit till I raise my water glass.

  “I’ll take the year off, backpack in Europe, take some classes, just build my repertoire,” she keeps going. “That’s what matters. Ol’ Irv doesn’t understand that. I’m sure as hell not going back to Kadima Hebrew Academy. Look at you. Look at me. I don’t even know if I’m even Jewish anymore.”

  “You’re definitely still Jewish.” Where is her old man? I ask myself, then realize this is the same question Irving Karp has been asking himself of me for seventeen years.

  “Oh right. The whole Jewish Vagina Clause. I guess that fact hasn’t changed.” When she says “Jewish vagina” I think of her mother’s literal one before I can catch myself. I’m so damn light, my blushing looks like the igniting of a funeral pyre. She sees this, and then her face goes red as well.

  “I didn’t know about you until a week ago, okay? Irv saw that you were coming to town, finally decided to tell me. I didn’t know you were a black till today.”

  “Okay, look, it’s not ‘a black.’ It’s never ‘a black,’ okay? Just ‘black.’ Or African American.”

  “You don’t look very African, but whatever.” My newfound daughter rolls her eyes at me, twirls her straw. “God, I guess I’m going to have to start using hot sauce on all my food now.”

  “No, you don’t. You can’t possibly believe that,” I say, kind of laughing, hoping she’ll start laughing with me. She doesn’t. “Hey, I didn’t know you existed at all. But I’m glad, okay? I’m really glad,” I tell her. I just say it. I don’t say it because I mean it. But when I hear it out there I can tell it’s true. Hey look, Becks, I’m finally a father. My own father’s gone, Becks is so gone, but here is new family. Seventeen, but new to me.

  “I saw your illustration, online. Some of it’s okay.” Tal shrugs. I want to tell her about her other grandfather, about my father, about how she just missed him, but don’t. I want to tell her that my mother died when I was young, too, but it’s morbid. Instead, I find myself saying, “You should go back to school. Your grandfather is right about that.” It’s a safe thing, an easy thing to latch onto, probably the only fatherly advice I’m qualified to give.

  “I am so not going back to Kadima. I don’t fit in there. I never fit in there. I never fit in anywhere. Especially not now.”

  “Then you’ll go somewhere you do. It’s important. I’ll help you. Let me do that for you. For your future. Whatever you decide to do once you get your diploma, that’s up to you. But you need to have the choices available to make—”

  “You want to help me, want me to go back to school? Want us to be daughter and daddy? Fine. Just get me the hell out of here, and you got a deal. Take me back to Wales with you, that would be awesome. I could go to school there. Or just send me to boarding school. Send me someplace, like, Phillips Exeter. I have the grades. That’s it, Exeter. Send me there. Irv will go for that.”

  “Exeter? That’s, that’s a lot of loot. And it’s so white,” I catch myself saying.

  “But I’m white,” she says, and I look hurt. I must look hurt, because she leans over the table and adds, “I’m as white as you look.” Then my new daughter pulls back again, twirling her hot-combed hair with a nail-bitten finger, my own snarl on the adjective mirrored.

  4

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE you’re here. I didn’t think you’d ever come back,” Tosha tells me from across her kitchen table. She’s got a table, a house, kids, her chosen husband. A whole established life. All new to me, and already old to her. She’s done so well since she rejected me. “And you’re a father, too! To a racist white girl.”

  “Not racist. I said ‘casually racist.’ She just…she just doesn’t know better.”

  “Because you haven’t been there to teach her. We never even met the wife, besides on Facebook, and now you’re a single dad of a teenager just as fast.”

  “Biological. Biological father.” And then I think of Tal’s face and muster up all the nostalgia for yesterday and amend my statement. “Tal has a cleft chin. She got my mom’s cleft chin. All this time there was someone walking around with a chin I loved, and I didn’t even know it. She’s my daughter. I got a girl. An almost grown, pre-woman, girl.” This is the third rotation of this discussion. Apparently, we’re going to keep cycling through this information until both of us firmly accept it. “And she’s a white girl.”

  “She’s not a white girl. She’s black. You’ve got a duty. To let her know who she really is, who we are. What blackness means, not the pathology you see on TV. What it is to be an African American woman in this world. That’s deep.” Tosha shakes her head at it, or me.

  The fact that I wasted a decade of my life being in love with Tosha doesn’t seem to get in the way of our friendship now. This is largely because it’s also been more than a decade since we’ve actually seen each other, as well as our mutual understanding that I never really had a chance with her anyway. There is a story of our never becoming lovers, a mythology that I have for us that is boring and false, filled with details that I use to try and convince myself otherwise. I met her the same time George did, at the Greek Picnic, the summer of my freshman year. I had seen her on occasion before this, biking around the neighborhood, once on the R8 train, once at the Value Village shopping for jeans; she was too beautiful to approach or forget. But that summer began our friendship, which over the following summers and Christmas breaks grew from casual to intimate, though all the while George’s shadow hovered, as “I have a boyfriend at college” kept our relationship platonic. But because so many beautiful young women in my orbit had some placeholder boyfriend somewhere in the ether, Tosha’s relationship wasn’t something I took too seriously either. It was supposed to run its course, as was the norm.

  After graduation, there was no formal announcement of their impending engagement. It was never mentioned to me, despite near daily interaction. It wasn’t said until Tosha nervously invited me to be a groomsman, a role I was unable to fulfill, as I decided soon after the invitation to leave the country instead.

  Tosha married George because she loved him more, or despite our connection she loved me only as a friend. It was either or both reasons, or one or the other. That is the story I eventually accepted.

  But I have another scenario, still in my head. That scenario says that Tosha went with George because I am a pale fail of a Negro who would never be enough
for a “Nubian Princess,” a title which one of Tosha’s T-shirts declared. This is a product of my paranoia and profound insecurity but also of that time a cousin of George’s saw us at the movies and called him to warn that his girlfriend was “seeing some white boy,” a moment laughed off when it was revealed it was just her castrato, high-yellow nerd. And from the time we left a club on South Street and she was called a “cracker lover” for walking next to me, and from the look of shame that stayed on her face as we continued to the car. And of all her light-skinned jokes, though not numerous, and usually focused at women “damn near white,” and laughed off each time by me as I mentally catalogued. It was a product of the time I sprawled next to her on a park bench at Rittenhouse Square, studying our bare legs stretched out into the heat of July, noticing how pasty and inadequate my epidermis was lined up against her rich mahogany norm. I have never felt whiter than when next to her. I don’t like feeling white. It makes me feel robbed. Of my heritage. Of my true self. Of my mother. So when I found out that Tosha was lost to me, I regrouped by enrolling in an illustration program in Swansea, Wales, where dear Lord I have never felt blacker.

  Back, I’m glad I didn’t try to stay and keep waiting for her, because Tosha still loves George. I like George enough, he’s okay, and if I had to pick between the two of us, then or now, I would have picked him over me without hesitation. I see him in his white undershirt, serving scrambled eggs and cheese to their three kids, making them laugh, and yes, I would rather be him than me. He’s a cop, detective grade, with a mortgage, and he knows where he belongs. I am a boy, still in my father’s house. He puts cheese in the eggs. He puts sharp cheddar cheese in the eggs, and soy bacon bits, stirs it all together and calls it “Daddy Eggs.” His kids, they love saying, “Daddy Eggs.” They ask for more, comment on how much they’ve eaten, and who’s all done, and they throw in that “Daddy Eggs” descriptor every time and it doesn’t seem to be getting old for anyone.

  “Why don’t you just work on being a dad first, and then build up the expectations from there?” George offers, already on the dirty dishes. He’s washing the damn dishes. He’s not letting them sit in the sink till it overflows with shame.

  All this sensationalistic talk about the long-lost mystery daughter, it’s wonderful. I dreaded coming here to these two people and having to say that my marriage failed, that my life has failed, that I wasn’t strong enough to do a basic thing like properly fulfill the one person on earth I was legally bound to love. I never gave Becks her family, and that’s why I have none. Tosha and George are of my generation, my tract in life: their familial growth, in such contrast to the wilted state of my own, is a direct reminder of all my shortcomings. Not that they would ever gloat over this fact, to my face or elsewhere. It would be worse than that. There would be pity there. Someone would say something like, “You’ll get it together,” and I would smile and shrug and know that I wouldn’t. I thought of not coming by at all—I hadn’t seen either since before their wedding. But being in Germantown and not stopping by would be an insult. And now, who cares about something so mundane as another marriage turned to disaster when there is tabloid-level fodder like this being served for consumption? In comparison, talk of the ex-wife is mere canapé. I have a synopsis for that too now, a convenient story that offers everything but detail. It goes like this:

  “It turns out when someone is brilliant and driven and hardworking, good things happen to them. Even in Britain. So Becks, she’s got her practice going now, consulting, all that. She fronted me the money for the comic-book shop and I think she thought, I mean maybe I did too, that it would be a hit, that it would grow to a chain, maybe into an online juggernaut. But I’m not a businessman. I wasn’t really driven, like she is. And also, you know, I’m a flake.”

  “You’re an artist,” Tosha offers generously.

  “And Becks started to hate me for that. I think. Not for not being a success like her, but for not moving on. Having kids. She was getting older, the window was closing, she really wanted them. I just wasn’t ready, you know? To double down on more responsibility. So I kinda pulled away. Then she tugged me back, couples therapy, all that. And then I got pissed and pulled away harder. Then she stopped tugging, and it was too late.”

  “That’s horrible,” she says to me, but she’s looking at George, who must be listening but is pretending to keep on with his endless kitchen tasks. Tosha is more jarred by my divorce than I am. For me it’s been happening for over a year, after four other years of misery.

  “Becks is really very happy now. She’s replaced me with another black American. A proper dark-skinned one with dreadlocks and everything.”

  This is true. Becks is ecstatic. Becks is a new life. Becks is a great weight has been lifted. Becks is so overjoyed, on her Facebook page she’s become a Welsh greeting-card machine. If there is a greeting-card company in Wales, and they just need someone to write platitudes for a line of divorce congratulations, Becks has a good decade’s worth of phrases for them. She now produces the happiest posts I have ever read in my life. The messages I get from her solicitor, those are straight venom and threats of financial apocalypse if I don’t get her the money back, but on Facebook she still comes with lots of exclamation points. All that’s missing is Wish you were here!

  “What you need to do is relax, make sense of things. Your dad’s passing, this girl, the crazy house.”

  “I got crackheads at that house.”

  “Everybody’s got crackheads. Look, Germantown’s changed—it’s come back up. This is the hot new place to live, man. Prices are soaring. But this is still Germantown.”

  “That night was like…it was eerie. I thought they were ghosts. For a second I was like, ‘This is some paranormal ish or something.’ ” I laugh this out, wait to see their reaction.

  Tosha just wags her head.

  “There are no ghosts,” she says.

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because your black ass would already be packed up and leaving town again.” I laugh at this too but she doesn’t, and in the silence I get the feeling I might be being insulted, so I laugh harder till George spares me with his interruption.

  “I’ll make sure a squad car makes a regular drive-by, but don’t let those crack fiends mess with your head,” he says.

  —

  Tosha and George’s children, these three great kids, they are everything my life is missing. I watch George with them, and I’m certain of this. He has purpose and joy, there is a slot in the universe he is fitting, without which there would be a black hole. I totally know, because I live in the black hole. Becks was right. Across the breakfast bar the kids yell out “Uncle Warren” at me and there is an authority in that title. I haven’t earned even “uncle,” and yet still it fills me. I never managed the duties of “son” particularly well, in regard to both my parents. At “husband” I was an even grander disappointment, and I stink of divorced man so bad that even I can smell it, as if every nose hair reeked of its own disappointment. I’ve been failing at “father” for years without even realizing I could claim the title.

  “You got to make up the time.” George leans over, puts a hand on my shoulder. Grips. “You have to educate her, man. Tosha’s right on that one. That’s your path to being her father, a chance to give her something. Make sure she gets back to school, and goes to college. You do that, you’ll have started making an impact.”

  I make the mistake of asking George how much tuition costs. I don’t know where their kids go to school, but I do know he has to send them to private. George is just a public servant, and that ain’t paying but so much. Tosha is an administrator for the school district, but it doesn’t matter. This is Germantown, and they are middle-class, and I know they’re not letting their little angels loose in Lingelbach Elementary to eek out survival. Our childhood was all about Lingelbach Elementary. It was about finding a school to go to so you didn’t have to go to Lingelbach Elementary. Seeing if you could use a mailing addres
s in Mt. Airy, or getting your parents to send you to private. It was about staying inside in the hour and a half after those kids were released back into the community, lest their tsunami of juvenile chaos catch you in its wave. On some days you could hear their mob coming south on Pulaski at 3:30 P.M., watch the streets fill with the lumpen youth parade before disappearing again. Even my father, as oblivious as he was, would manage to keep in the back of the house during that procession. Tal would be too old for Lingelbach, but my father’s mansion is zoned to Germantown High, the teenage equivalent. I had friends that went to Germantown, the ones that couldn’t find their way out to a magnet program. My primary memory of Germantown was that they threw a math teacher off the roof. This story seems suspect now, maybe nothing more than an urban legend, but the fact that it has taken me thirty years to even question it is because Germantown High is the kind of school where a math teacher being thrown off a roof seems perfectly plausible. Still, when George breaks down how much he’s paying for each child to go to their private Quaker school, for a second I imagine Tal Karp roaming the halls of Germantown High, books in hand. A pioneering young Jewess the likes of which those halls have not seen in sixty years.

  “I can’t pay that much.” There’s no sheepishness in my confession. It’s not that I wouldn’t do it; I just don’t have the money. Maybe, maybe if my father’s house sold, I could put that money down, but school starts this week. “Is Germantown High any better now?” I turn to ask Tosha directly. Her strongly negative response involves as much body language as syllables.

  “Charter schools. That’s what people are doing now. They’re free, there’s usually a theme. There’s an Asian one in Chinatown and a black one, not too far from you, past Wayne Junction. Umoja. Guy I used to work with’s the principal. I’ll give you the brochure. That’s what you need for her: real Afrocentric, positive. But not Germantown High.” Tosha grimaces, her hand waving the idea out of the air like so much flatulence. “Don’t let her first real experience with black folks be running from them.”