God's Gym

by John Edgar Wideman

  But like the dying marriage I read about in the sister's story, it was not to be. It in this instance being the project I imagined in my nappy head of saving Jill from herself, salvaging from the ruins and handing her on a platter my own strayed, lost and found head, the head returning home from its long wilderness of chasing what I couldn't have, shouldn't have, didn't need, tan blond girls and black brown girls who tried their best to make me forget what they were or weren't, I forget which way it was supposed to go, we were all confused back then, weren't we baby, we all needed to be counseled, hipped, switch partners, forsake and reclaim our innocence, have certain matters—fears, inadequacies, lies, paradoxes—lobotomized as I hoped to do for you, Jill, offering my funny valentine bloody head on a platter I presented as a heartfelt gift after you'd danced for me naked to a slow-drag Coltrane blues and I'd nearly died I was so happy. So I presented you my head—what's a little talking head between friends—in my solitude, my gratitude, baby, I said I love you just as you are, as you've always been, you are perfect who you are, brown and kinky-headed, tender-headed just like my tender, preachy head on a dish I wish was a silver platter, babe. As if words could restore peace, as if I could extinguish a fire burning for centuries and simultaneously with shout and chant rekindle what had waned between us. Let me touch your hair. Kiss it. Bundle it in a spirit bundle and weigh its incalculable wealth on the scientific scale I hold in my hands, my battered body parts barely functioning on autopilot, Sweet, cause you stole my heart and blew my mind, but here's what's left of my head, the wide eyes, thick lips plastered too high above my chin, my big nose wide open for you, babe. Please, please, please, don't go, girl, don't take my love away, just one more chorus. Encore the part of your naked dance where you sorta collapse or rather get down, down, loosen everything you own, giving it up, giving it all up and sinking, flowing down slinky to the floor onto your back and elbow, then roll, coil, twist like the sacred python rubbing the earth's rich life-giving juices into your gloriously colored, speckled skin, the part like one strand of hair bonding, braiding with others till your dance thickens and rises again royally, like Nefertiti's snake-twined crown above her bronze forehead.

  It didn't work, did it. You didn't dance for me with your clothes off ever again. Damage done to you too deep to be undone by words, wishes. You never had a chance. Is that hopelessness part of what I love in you. No chance from the jump, even though you excelled in those areas where everybody expected not to see you represented, didn't count on you being present, let alone deserving of praise. My Jill outstanding at math. Blew tuba in the all-city orchestra. Captain of the county champs, undefeated debating team of her 97-percent-white suburban high school. You aspired to become an astronaut, didn't you. Took flying lessons, I bet. As skilled at aeronautics as aerobics. Earned an AAU Junior Olympic bronze medal swimming the 1500 meters, in spite of denser bones and less buoyancy than your pale opponents, in spite of banks of fast-twitch muscles and minimal slow-twitch, you overcame the biological burdens of African descent predisposing you to sprints and attention deficits and dooming poor me to quick starts, rapid acceleration, early burnout, premature ejaculation some whispered when they weren't dissing my slower, reptilian brain's brawn, how its muscles retarded mental activity, rendering me sluggish and thuggish, intent they said on one and only one thing, my one-track mind chasing beasty, fleshy pleasure, you know, what your mom meant when she told you again and again, Boys are nasty (read black boys). Boys are only after one thing. What others, higher up than your mom on the image-making chain, proclaimed and proved by lynching Emmett Till.

  But this story's not about black boys, is it. Not my story. It's about Jill, whose early successes weren't enough to allow her to shed her skin. So let's stick to her. Leopards can't change their spots. She simply sank deeper into the miring clay of other people's perceptions in which she played the role of exception to the rule. As perfectly as she performed everything she wasn't spozed to be able to perform, she couldn't alter the rule. Found herself adrift, stranded on a raft, the lonely floating island of her gifts, her achievements, her exceptional status. Jill's teenage heart saddened, began to harden. No room on the stone raft for anybody else.

  This movable feast followed her to the best schools. Girls' schools, a women's college, because you can't trust nasty boys. No point placing yourself at risk. Your pussy in harm's way. Because that's how boys see you. Black booty. That's what these cracker college boys (because it's all white boys or almost all in the best schools) thought of you, Jill. A walk on the dark, wild side. Your allegedly weak morals and naturally lascivious inclinations what they see in spite of or maybe because you display time and time again just the opposite of what they expect. You can't escape what their science predicts, what they teach, what you learn about yourself in the best schools.

  Let me digress a moment. Our lives, Jill's and mine, parallel each other in numerous particulars. I emphasize the parallel only to remind the reader I know whereof I speak. In a way. Of course there are important differences, too, between Jill and me. Differences, beginning with gender, she's quick to point out, when I presume to know too much about her. As I often do. Anyway, for simplicity's sake and because it's kind of cute and wicked to sustain the Jack and Jill club bourgey riff, let's call me Jack, Jack attending one of the best schools on a hoop scholarship, and here's one difference already, Jack's vita more predictable than Jill's in a way, more a classic pulling himself up by his bootstraps from the slough of the ghetto black Horatio Alger thing, a jock who could read and ace exams and submit without too much fuss to microscopic examination within the glass cage immuring him. Jack, the first of his penniless family, maybe his race, to achieve this or that, Jack who recalls the first September of his matriculation at an Ivy university, dressed up and in the company of his new white basketball teammates, mostly poor boys themselves also on scholarship, gunfighters all with mile-wide chips on their shoulders Don't Tread on Me sauntering coolly into a mixer at College Hall. Turns out what was being mixed was Jack's brown body with approximately six hundred white bodies. No contest. He ducked out after three minutes. Belly-flopped on the bed in his dorm room, KOed by the avalanche of whiteness at the threshold of College Hall he had crossed only to save face, his black face he believed maybe his teammates hadn't noticed till that moment at the entrance—mixing.

  Ironically, since arriving on campus, he'd been praying to be seen for what he thought he was, just another frosh boll weevil looking for a home. Then all the boys and girls—My God, Jack, what happened to your hair—saw him for what they thought he was and the shit got worse after that.

  Enough of my story. Jill doubtless endured similar and more. And different too, she reminds me every chance she gets. It wasn't always about race, she says. Which to me means she meant she chose to participate in activities (some of which she may very well have enjoyed) that set her apart, but ideally, if the strategy worked, if she performed successfully in these activities, her choices would also ensconce her firmly in the larger life of the institution—read white life or colorblind life—the larger life in turn graced, integrated, equal-opportunitied by her presence. Race, then, in a way, would disappear. In my view this strategy also doomed her to hang with white boys. Giving in to any nasty boy, black or white, of course, would be breaking a rule, going against the grain of how Jill'd been raised to respect herself and carry herself and save herself, but wouldn't she be tempted to consider dalliance with a boy not black, if not entirely kosher, still, wouldn't it be a bit more like being different, like earning her wings as herself, an individual, being her own person, on her own terms, one more sign she was not who she was spozed to be. Her choice of not-colored lovers a breaking away, breaking expectations, breaking new ground like long-distance swimming, excelling in calculus, etc. Mixing into the larger life. Race disappearing.

  Woe is me. Do you see why it's not them I'm angry with. We should know them by now. Haven't they inscribed their superior biology, their superior culture, th
eir crimes on the record. Their record as indelible as our records they steal and play and play and play over and over again. We know what they think of us. We know what they are capable of doing to us when they psyche themselves into ignoring—for profit or pleasure—their Protestant or Catholic belief systems, their hard-won Judeo-Christian moral and ethical principles. We know how they work us, play us, smother us, integrate us, exhaust us, kill us. Know what they say about our bodies and hair.

  We know all this. So why fuss. Why feign surprise when they invite us in for a cup of tea and the rest happens. Why whine after we permit them to enter our heads, our beds. Whose race disappears. Who's the one who belonged to a race in the first place.

  What would it mean then, to know what I know and not act on it. Not do to them as they do to me and mine. Would my restraint, my turning another cheek, one of my big round butt cheeks, for instance, mean I'd transcended racism. Freed myself of its coils. The deep self-destruct of race's grasp.

  I don't think so.

  So there we were one day, a beautiful sunny June day, lounging in a grassy meadow where we'd hiked after escaping far from the ugly city on a bus. Just the two of us talking, exchanging stories, cooing, speculating on our miraculous survival, the possibility of Jack and Jill withering away, melting down, and the two of us getting it on in new terms, shit we'd invent as we plowed along, after first burying the hatchet, the nasty past, the hate suspicion jealousy anger at what had conspired to turn us both into so much less than we desired to be, turned us into antagonists in some evil scriptwriter's dumb show, in the perverse theaters of our minds conditioned by unlove of self and each other we'd learned in the best schools, a lesson and discipline passed on to us as the sole means of making it, getting ahead, getting along, surviving, entering the mainstream, transcending race, you know what I'm saying. Rapping in the grass, busy regretting and redefining ourselves, and I admit, yes, maybe I was also hoping maybe Jill might be turned on by our prospects, the lovely summer day, our isolation, our positive vibe, our escape to this primal, sylvan sort of green garden and we'd hug and I'd weave wildflowers into her nappy crown, and eventually, though it wasn't the only thing on my mind, braid flowers as in Lady Chatterley's Lover into the cashmere thicket between her chocolate thighs, get down finally to our personal, intimate shortcomings and longcomings, exploring what we might offer each other, do for one another once we'd molted, once we'd discarded if we could the silly skins of Jack and Jill and rebap-tized ourselves in Zion's cool, clear, crisp waters, our spirits hungering, loving the chance for a new day like that dawn Coltrane blasted in his solos or hard-pressed Malcolm preached near the end before they wasted him...

  Kap-plow. Crack. Boom. Pow. Pow. Boom. Boom. Boom.

  Forgive me father for telling tales in Babylon's tongue, stories full of Babylon's lies, stories slaying us as surely as we die in Babylon's stories.

  Let the curtain descend, the phoenix rise. Let me scoop up our bloody bodies sprawled on the grass. It's only ketchup. It's only my green jealousy and red anger.

  Let me blow a whistle and start the scene again. All the players on their feet, whole, cleansed of crimson wounds and burns. Let their eyes be clear, expectant.

  And you, love. Forgive the jolt of seeing us undone by my unkind imaginings. Forgive me. Forgive yourself. Let's start again. Let's begin. Let's run.

  Sharing

  MAYONNAISE. He asked for mayonnaise. You can imagine my surprise, since this was the only real word he'd ever spoken to me. For the first two years, every time we passed on the neighborhood streets, he managed to avoid my eyes. For the next two, there was an occasional nod or wave after both of us had figured out that we were going to be around for the long haul, not like lots of families, who seemed to come and go regularly as the seasons, FOR SALE signs sprouting on lawns each spring, moving vans large as whales docked at the curb or backed up into driveways. Though it seemed that his family, like ours, had settled in for the duration, quiet, minding their own business, business the man had made perfectly clear was nobody else's business, you can imagine my surprise after four years of silence when I hear a knock on my door and it's him and he asks for mayonnaise.

  His reluctance to speak in our early encounters had convinced me he didn't like white people. An unwelcoming message in his surly look seemed directed not only at me but at all of us. When I discovered he was married to a white woman, it puzzled me. If he held a grudge against us, why'd he marry her. If he loved his white wife, why would he stay mad at everybody like her.

  "Mayonnaise," he said. "I'm sorry to disturb you, ma'am, but could I please borrow a dab of mayonnaise."

  I'm thinking, Mayonnaise? You've never spoken a real word in the whole four years since you moved here, and now the first real word you say is mayonnaise. Well, well. Is that what you've been waiting for? Your mayonnaise to run out?

  You say mayonnaise, then something about a chicken. And I think, Chicken? What's a chicken have to do with mayonnaise? But you aren't asking me to approve or disapprove of whatever goes on in your kitchen. You are asking for mayonnaise, and if something about mayonnaise and chicken inspired you to come to my door and knock, well, so be it. Still, I can't help being curious about what you're up to. Maybe you started a chicken sandwich with lettuce and tomato, then discovered the mayo missing. Not chicken soup. Nobody puts mayo in chicken soup, do they. Perhaps you're preparing a deli tray with cold sliced chicken and need mayonnaise for deviled eggs. No, you didn't say eggs, you said chicken, but mayonnaise is fall of eggs, isn't it, either way the chicken comes first, doesn't it. And that dumb thought reminds me that people can't answer the simplest questions, and also that I haven't answered yours.

  Then you say, "I can't go to the grocery store. I hate to disturb you, but I just can't make it to the grocery store."

  I look at him, perhaps look closely for the first time. When I say closely, I mean I find myself seeing his color at the very moment I realize color is mostly what I've been seeing for four years. Now, I'm not strange about race. I don't think color makes a difference. People are people. In fact, I thought the man was handsome the first time I saw him. I would have responded to him the way I respond to any neighbor and maybe with more enthusiasm since I seldom run into good-looking men, colored or not, around here. But I was put off by his stern expression, his silly game of pretending not to notice me. I'm certain there wasn't anything I did that prevented a polite conversational exchange from starting up. This man has a problem with white people, I figured. The surly look on his face says he doesn't like white people, and I'm sure not going to force myself on him. After one of our stiff mini-meetings and greetings, a snowy, windy day, nobody out but the two of us, I couldn't help asking myself, If he doesn't like white people, why is he living here in Fairwood, where just about everybody, if you don't count a handful of Asians, is white? One question leading to others, not many others really, but over the years such questions would arise when I'd see him on the street, and since I continued to pass him quite frequently, I guess there were more than a few questions, even though they weren't exactly burning questions because I just kind of left them alone, took them for granted buzzing around in the silent air between us, just like I took his color for granted till the moment I believed I'd sneaked a peek beneath it.

  Today as I look at him in my kitchen I wonder why I've never thought of him eating. Not eating chicken necessarily. Not fried chicken, certainly, not the soul-food cliché of greasy fried chicken. I'm not that kind of person. Not one of those people I really don't appreciate living in our neighborhood. Not thinking anything like those people have in mind when they complain about colored or Negroes or worse. I'm not that kind of person. I raised my children not to hate. But it's strange to look at him, one foot, no, two, three feet inside my door, and realize I've never thought of him in a kitchen, sitting down to a meal with his family. As I study his face, he seems thinner, less dark than I recalled. Then I see from the way he's looking at me, I must be taking too long
to answer his request for mayonnaise. His jaw begins to drop. I see him, believe it or not, start to come apart before my eyes.