Eric slumps down on the porch, looks up at Wayne. ‘What if it was Tish up there?’
Wayne refrains from saying the first thing that occurs to him; that Tish isn’t the kind to starve herself and threaten suicide; Tish, who was in and out of hospital when they were kids, finding blood in her pee, getting tumors removed from her kidneys. ‘I’d be mad, too … But you have to try to be objective.’
Eric puts his head in his hands and starts to cry.
When it becomes clear to Wayne that Eric isn’t going to stop any time soon, he slips inside to find Tish. She isn’t there, but Father is, drinking cocoa and talking solemnly with Molly, Joya, and Diane. He tilts his sleek head at Wayne. ‘Thank you for being here, son.’
The main thing that stops Wayne from throwing any punches himself is the sight of Danny, nose stuffed with tissues. ‘Thanks, brother,’ Danny mumbles.
Soon after, Tish and Mother appear on the stairs with Polly, who’s dressed in a long frilly nightgown. They’re talking between themselves, even laughing. Wayne gives Tish a what-the-hell look and in return she rounds her eyes, who-knows. Father raises his mug at Polly.
‘Hungry, sweetheart?’ He smiles. ‘Want some warm cocoa?’
During the ride back to college, as Tish’s head rolls against the Ford’s window and Cat Stevens plays on the radio, Eric tells Wayne, ‘The bullet didn’t go deep enough.’
Wayne pretends not to hear.
‘Whoever shot Father last summer. The bullet didn’t go deep enough.’ Eric meets Wayne’s eyes in the rearview. ‘Tell him I said that. I don’t give a shit. He deserves to die.’
Wayne doesn’t tell. Since what Bobbi Luce said that day in the woods, Wayne is wary of being seen as a tattle-tale. But somehow word gets out, or maybe Father reads the violence on Eric’s mind, because that same week all Eric’s security duties are taken over by Terrence. A couple nights after that, Eric shows up at Wayne’s dorm asking if he can borrow the Ford again, he needs to get out of the place, just drive, and Wayne goes one better; loads up the trunk and drives the two of them out to the woods to shoot, shoot, shoot.
3.
In retrospect, it makes sense, but until Father orders all the men and women who’ve ever begged him for sex to stand up in the members-only meeting, Bobbi Luce never imagined her dad could be one of them. Not because he’s her dad, or because he’s married to her mom, but because she’s always imagined those men to be young, hip, college-educated, and her dad is just a dumb old cracker who says things like, ‘tough tomatoes’ and ‘’55 was a good year.’
And yet, she remembers things. Snippy remarks from her mom over the years. How he never even looked at Terra when she walked around the house in too-short nightgowns, though Bobbi and her brothers couldn’t look enough. How weird he was around Lenny Lynden, and how his weirdness made her mom even more of a bitch than usual.
‘That time you fucked me up the ass all those years ago,’ Bobbi’s dad blubbers, the crude words strange on his lips. ‘That was the only time I was ever happy.’
Bobbi hates her dad. Not as much as her mom, but enough to be surprised by how little hate she actually feels, seeing him stand up with all those younger, better-looking people.
‘Of course, they’re all white,’ Bobbi overhears Eunice Mosley bitch to Flora Armstrong, a black girl whose style she’s always liked, on their way out of the building that night, and she’s ashamed she didn’t notice something so obvious. Because white skin is the most obvious thing Bobbi’s dad has in common with doll-pretty Polly Hurmerinta, and Evelyn’s sister Sally-Ann Burne, and Harry Katz, the moody med student, and dreamy blue-eyed Lenny Lynden, and Bobbi’s big brother Roger, and every other person who admits to having forced Father to make a sacrifice of his body.
‘What do you expect?’ Flora catches Bobbi looking. ‘White folks always want to think they’re something special.’
And it’s true, Bobbi does want to think she’s special, though all evidence seems to be to the contrary. While her mom says she has an ‘artistic temperament’, Bobbi knows she doesn’t have the talent to match it: she can’t sing like Flora, can’t turn their sappy Temple stage-plays into genuine tragedy like Tish Bud, can’t play drums like her brother Danny, can’t even bead and crochet like her sister, Dot, who’s got about as much imagination as a filing cabinet. She isn’t pretty like Dot, let alone beautiful like Minnie and Alice, and while she isn’t particularly interested in being beautiful, at least that’d be something. She isn’t a good horse-rider, though she’s been riding practically since she could walk. She likes writing, but she doesn’t trust herself to use big words correctly. Graduating Evergreen High without distinction, it’s a relief to no longer worry about being brought up for her mediocre grades, shouted down as a slack-ass counterrevolutionary. Yet it’s also clear that now she’s an adult, her time for believing she’s special is over.
‘I’m going to be a nurse,’ Bobbi starts telling people, and immediately sees a change in the way they look at her, like she’s not as selfish and useless as they assumed.
Nurse is a good job for a young Temple woman. The Temple needs more nurses, and plenty of girls Bobbi looks up to or has crushes on are studying to be nurses: Tish Bud; Sally-Ann Burne, with her pretty oval face and eyes that crinkle small when she laughs (which is often); Junie Crabb, a Pomo Indian girl, with a pretty round face and glossy waist-length hair, who plays flute. If these girls with actual talents are happy to devote themselves to caring for sick people, there’s no reason Bobbi shouldn’t be, and really, she is happy when her mom presents her with a pile of textbooks at the beginning of the summer, when her adopted sister, Hattie, makes her a paper hat with a red crayon cross.
Bobbi packs textbooks with her for the Temple’s cross-country bus tour that July, but mostly they go untouched; it’s her last summer before college, after all, and there’s other stuff going on, like Hedy Gore’s pet rat Pinkeye crawling from seat to seat, and making up stupid variations on ‘Hail to the Bus Driver’ with Sally-Ann, who seems like she’s been riding buses with them forever, even if she only joined last year. Then there’s Brother Ralph, who’s the one responsible for those sappy stage-plays, giving her a book about lesbians to read. Brother Ralph is gay — a real slinky gay man with flowy shirts and a degree in Dramatic Arts — and works at a second-hand bookstore in Stanford, which is where he gets all his books, Bobbi guesses. ‘It’ll probably go way over your head,’ he tells her loftily when he gives her the lesbian book, with a little wink that makes it okay, and sure enough it does go way over, but she likes the way the characters are tortured and European, and the pages thick with words like effulgence, raiment, intaglio. At one point, when Bobbi assumes everyone around her is sleeping, Wayne Bud reaches a lanky arm across the aisle and plucks the book from her hand.
‘Hey!’ she whines.
He reads a page. Pulls a face like her dad, gives it back, and pretends to nod off.
Bobbi hasn’t had a lot to do with Wayne since the previous summer, but she’s seen him around, wearing his uniform and beret like a softcore Black Panther, surlier by the day. It’s his surliness that interests her, not his uniform, not his looks, though she supposes Wayne is good-looking … for a guy. All the Buds are, with their blackest-black skin and long limbs, which seem built for another climate — the plains of Africa, maybe, though Bobbi knows better than to say this. Until recently, though, Bobbi always preferred looking at Tish, who’s got cute buckish teeth, long whipping cornrows, a waist that curves in and hips that curve out. Always, she’s preferred looking at women, and she’s never understood why other girls don’t as well; why anyone would waste time on men when there are waists and hips, and walks that flow like water.
‘Alert! Alert!’ Bobbi hears her dad’s stupid cracker voice come over the bus PA, sees the sleeping bodies stir. ‘All buses to evacuate! Father predicts an explosion!’
‘A gas explosion,’ Sal
ly-Ann quips, and a few guys obligingly supply raspberries. Bobbi can’t imagine Evelyn ever responding to an alert like that, and that’s what she likes about Sally-Ann; how she makes jokes even when it’s ‘inappropriate’.
But then there’s Wayne: Mr. Perfect.
Bolting up from his seat, treading the aisle and calming a few hysterical seniors, wailing toddlers. He is perfect, Bobbi thinks, and the thought’s such a shock, she drops her book.
They empty out at a big dark cornfield, all eleven busloads of them. Wayne and some other security guys start helping her dad and Bob Harris check the engines for bombs, until they find the culprit under bus No. 5. Phyllis Clancy faints. Father says, ‘Darlings, stay calm,’ and whispers something to Evelyn, who goes back inside Father’s bus, lucky No. 7. Terra and Jo Harris-Harrison rally a group of seniors into doing jumping jacks, running on the spot. Dot sneaks into the cornfield with Paolo Jones, and some other young couples follow suit, later stroll out with messy hair, munching on ears of unripe corn.
‘We have defused the bomb!’ Father, who’s been watching over his personal bomb squad, bravely placing his body in as much danger as theirs, announces once they’re done. There’s a peal of applause, miscellaneous right on’s and hallelujah’s, which fall flat on Bobbi’s ears — because she’s watching Wayne. A few paces behind Father, frowning, scuffing his shoe in the dirt. When Wayne’s mom, Antonia, and a couple of his siblings go up and hug him, he forces a smile, but Bobbi notices the limpness of his shoulders, how weary he looks.
‘Of course Mr. Perfect knows how to defuse a bomb,’ Bobbi teases as they’re re-boarding the bus, each with a sibling attached to their wrist. ‘You should get a medal or something. What d’you think, Hat? Should Wayne get a medal?’
Hattie, who’s up long past her bedtime, replies in a stonerish drone: ‘Yeahhh.’
‘Defusing a bomb is one thing. But I don’t know shit about Clydesdales.’
Bobbi laughs and cries, ‘I can’t believe you remember that!’ Wayne’s little brother Henty laughs, probably because Wayne just said shit. Hattie laughs, because everyone else is and that’s enough for a five-year-old.
Without discussing it, they wind up sitting together, siblings on their laps. Henty blows on the glass and draws a H, and Hattie proudly proclaims, ‘H is for Hattie,’ then falls asleep pretty much as soon as the bus starts moving. Henty keeps drawing on the glass with mousy finger squeaks. Wayne closes his eyes and says, ‘Tell me something.’
‘About Clydesdales?’ Bobbi asks.
‘Sure. Clydesdales. Anything.’
So she tells him: Clydesdales are draft horses, they come from Scotland, their feet are feathered, everything. Until her voice is wispy, and Wayne looks like he’s actually sleeping.
He isn’t though, because he confides:
‘I’m sick of his shit. But one of these days it might be for real, and what if I’m not paying attention then, you know …?’
In Chicago, Bobbi is asked to help with the healings for the first time. She isn’t sure what she expects, but presumably something more dignified than accompanying Mother Rosaline into a toilet cubicle to help a Holy Roller shit out a ‘cancer’.
Bobbi’s job is mostly to sweetly encourage the lady to push as she strains over the bowl, not so different to Hattie when she was potty-training. The lady is sobbing a bit — she never suspected she could have cancer — and Bobbi tries her best to tell her it’ll be okay. When the lady’s done, Mother slips a red blob from up her sleeve into the toilet. The lady cries in horror but then fans her face, all relieved; she consents to having the cancer scooped into a plastic bucket and shown around the church.
Bobbi scoops while Mother helps the lady freshen up. At the cubicle door, Sally-Ann and Tish take over the bucket. Bobbi hesitates, but they’re friends, after all. ‘What was that?’
Sally-Ann and Tish glance at each other. Their faces are straight, but only just.
‘Chicken gizzards,’ Tish whispers. Then the straightness is gone.
‘Gross,’ Bobbi says nonchalantly; she’s not some squeamish girly-girl like Dot.
Sally-Ann beams. ‘The white dresses are a lie. We’re real gross.’
Mother shoots them a look from over by the mirrors, and they stop giggling; follow her out to the screaming sanctuary, bucket in tow.
Mother must be embarrassed, though, since she takes Bobbi aside as they’re lining up for the bus that evening. ‘I know it feels like dirty work, but we wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t for the greater good.’ She skims the air between them apologetically. ‘Lotsa these folks wouldn’t come all this way if it wasn’t for the healings. But the real healing doesn’t necessarily happen onstage: diet plans, sickle-cell anemia tests, reproductive health education …’
By the time they reach the east coast, Bobbi can confidently slip a cancer out of her sleeve without any help. The grossness is an okay price to pay for skipping out on services, hanging out with the other nurses and the guys from security, who are the ones to guard the icebox full of gizzards. Darl, biggest of them all, constantly cracks them up by posing with his legs so far apart it’s like an invitation to play leapfrog. Then there’s Terrence, who falls asleep like a senior, but always snaps his eyes open before anyone can steal his beret or draw a dick on his face. And most of all Wayne, who tries so hard to look serious but gets itchy feet every time a soulful beat pulses in from the sanctuary.
In Boston, Father beckons Bobbi over and tells her what a good job she’s doing.
New York City, she doesn’t see much beyond the ghettoes where they’re pamphleting, but Che and Flora sneak off to a jazz club and come back smelling of smoke, with stories that make her jealous. Somehow, they don’t get in trouble for that, but there’s a nasty confrontation after Che’s mom turns up to the next day’s service and takes him and Flora to his favorite deli.
‘You think you can just come and go as you please?’ Sister Regina shreds Che at the rest stop outside Philadelphia. ‘You think it’s revolutionary to show off your girlfriend like she’s some kinda Hottentot Venus?’
Though Che argues his mom isn’t racist — she’s been pro-integration longer than he’s been alive, she’s the reason he loves John Coltrane — it’s agreed he has counterrevolutionary tendencies, should shave off his moustache, and would benefit from one-on-one counseling.
‘You know what that means?’ Darl rags on Che as they’re re-boarding the bus. ‘Father wants to fuck you.’
‘Not happening.’ Che reaches for Flora, who asks if he wants to borrow her razor.
Bobbi’s always liked Flora’s style, but she starts paying more attention after that. Flora debating Che about sexism in the Talmud. Flora swapping looks with Eunice Mosley when skinny white women march around with their clipboards giving orders, expecting crowds to part for them like they’re Moses at the Red Sea. Flora, most of all, standing up in a members-only meeting to ask Father why he keeps giving leadership positions to white folks, when their membership nowadays is at least two-thirds black.
‘Sister, if it was up to me, it’d be different. But society is fucking racist. People out there? They more likely to buy our message if we give it to ’em soft. Don’t mean you don’t got power. You make the message, sister. You make it.’
On the homebound bus from Florida, Bobbi hears Flora discussing a book about some bisexuals in Greenwich Village and asks if she can borrow it.
‘You read James Baldwin?’ Flora looks dubious. But, taking pity on her maybe, she tells Bobbi she can have the book once Eunice is done with it.
Back in California, though, there’s not so much time for reading, or at least not for reading that isn’t study. She’s still helping out with healings and, together with some other nursing-students-to-be, Opal, Denise, Janet Lakshmi, starts taking tutoring from the older girls twice a week. She starts taking on more odd jobs: driving seniors to and from t
heir medical appointments; lugging their groceries; tidying their houses — jobs that make her feel as if her whiteness has been smudged away, her selfishness replaced by a guilt-tinged glow. She works in the Temple offices, mostly on the mailouts and letter-writing campaigns, but also calling up prospective members, posing as a telephone surveyor for a pharmaceuticals company.
One night, Terra asks her and Polly to dress in black, gets them to pick through new members’ trash cans for anything Father might use during his predictions the next Sunday.
‘You’ve come a long way,’ Bobbi’s dad says the day they pack her things to take to the dorms. ‘I’m proud, Bobcat.’
Bobbi’s mom says something similar, in different words: ‘The way you’re going, you could be on Planning Committee by Thanksgiving!’
Bobbi knows she should aspire to be on the committee like her parents, like Roger and Minnie, like Danny and Clarisse. But from what she’s heard, it just sounds like more work and more confrontation.
Then there’s Father, one strange afternoon in the Publications Office, coming up behind her at the photocopier, placing a hand on the small of her back. ‘You’re doin’ good work, honey,’ he murmurs, breath warm on her neck. ‘I’m proud of you.’ He doesn’t say anything else, but his hand moves, up her back to her neck, the ends of her hair, which was cropped short at the start of the summer when Father said all the Temple girls needed to focus less on their looks. There’d been a lot of crying, including from Junie Crabb, who’s self-conscious about her weight and said she wouldn’t feel pretty without it, and Janet Lakshmi, who’s been to India and thinks her long hair is sacred, and Hedy Gore, who likes to let her pet rat hide among her red locks during lectures, but Bobbi had been one of the brave ones, not flinching when her mom took her scissors to it, laughing and ruffling her hand through it afterward. Father touches this hair, then her summer-bare shoulders, then her tits, and she feels a splintering of feelings — surprise, disbelief, a blunt hurt and blunt acceptance, like falling off her horse — and amid it all, a single overriding thought: eww.
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