by Tayari Jones
Jamal told me that he wasn’t sure he believed that God is looking in on each and every one of us. He said he had some questions about the whole dynamic with the sparrow. He agreed that God made the world; the universe had to come from somewhere, but after that, who knows who’s in charge? I was thinking that the human mind and the power of suggestion are real y something, because I could sort of smel something like Doublemint on the rocks. He kept going and I pressed my lips together, imagining what peppermint schnapps must taste like.
The robes parted on the rod, Red Sea—style, and who was there but Mrs. Reverend Schnapps herself, tal and steep as though she had been designed by an architect. I had to hand it to her; Jamal’s mother’s asymmetric junior-miss flip had been cut by someone who real y knew what she was doing.
“Jamal,” she said. “That’s enough, son.”
“We weren’t doing anything,” he said. “Just talking.”
“Is that what you cal it?” said Mrs. Reverend.
As I waited on the curb for my mother to pick me up, Mrs. Reverend told everybody how worried she was about me. The women on the usher board and some of the deaconesses were told to pray for me. Even while Mrs. Reverend’s words were tel ing them to pray, her tone was tel ing them to remember Salome. Even before my mother confirmed this to me in a whispered-but-urgent conversation in her bedroom, under the watchful eyes of the wig-heads, I knew the women at church were aiming their sharpened prayers at me.
I was a quiet girl back then. Not that I was shy, I just didn’t have anything to say.
“I haven’t told your father,” my mother said.
“Told him what?”
“About Jamal Dixon.”
“There’s nothing to tel .”
“I know, baby,” she said.
I was stil defending myself a week later, as we drove to Decatur for my appointment with her ob-gyn. The last time he saw me, I was being born. I told him the same thing: “I’m not doing anything.”
“It’s just to regulate your cycle,” he said.
Heading home on 1-20, we hit a traffic jam, and I tried again. “I’m not doing anything.”
“Do you know how lucky you are that these pil s exist? Do you know how lucky you are that I am taking you to the doctor?”
“But I’m not doing anything,” I said again.
“Take them for me, baby,” Mama said. “Just to be on the safe side.”
JAMAL DIXON WAS the first one. We arranged to meet at Marcus McCready’s house one afternoon after school. While I stared at a Jayne Kennedy swimsuit poster on the ceiling, he apologized for his mother’s behavior. He didn’t mean to get me involved. He knew I was a nice girl and he felt bad that everybody was talking about me like that.
“I don’t care if people talk about me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “She was never like this before.”
“I understand,” I said.
He looked at me and turned his head. “What grade are you in?”
“Ninth,” I said.
“I’m a junior,” he said.
I didn’t tel him to stop or to come hither. I was curious, real y, to see what would happen. Jamal looked like a younger, thinner version of his father, whom I’d often admired standing in the pulpit with his arms outstretched in his beautiful robes. He preached in a thunder-deep voice, but he sang sometimes in a sweet Al Green tenor.
“You’re a nice girl,” Jamal said in the tone you might use to soothe a dog that may or may not bite.
“Pretty?” I said.
He nodded. “You have nice lips.”
I was a little afraid, but I knew I was now on the safe side.
“Don’t touch my hair,” I said. “Don’t mess it up.”
He said he was sorry. He said it twice.
Then I was different, although I looked exactly the same.
THE PILL WAS A SECRET between my mother and me. My father was not to know about the peach dial pack, the white pil s tasteless but potent and those seven green sugar pil s that al owed the blood to come. This was women’s business. Besides, my father loved me best when I was his baby girl, his Buttercup. Fathers are that way. Al they want is that you be clean, entertaining, and adoring. When he came home from work, I fetched Daddy a gin-and-tonic, kissed the top of his head, and petted his tired shoulders.
ALTHOUGH FATHERS ARE SIMPLE , husbands are not. Marriages are tricky, but children bring love into even the most complicated situation. They are gifts from God. I was my mother’s miracle child, a replacement for the baby boy who died. It was a close cal , my entry into the world, four weeks early. They almost lost me, too. I spent more than a week in an incubator. My mother couldn’t commit to loving me until it was clear I was going to live, but my daddy was al in from the start, bal ing his hands into fists, muttering, “Come on, champ. Come on.”
If we were real Africans, my daddy would have held me up to the sky like Kunta Kinte’s daddy did. Instead, he took me to Olan Mil s and bought portraits, even paying extra to have the images printed on stretched canvas, etched with brushstrokes. He made a large donation to the church and gave up smoking. Of course, the habit got the better of him after a week and some change, but he never smoked in my nursery. The wal s of our house have to be repainted every year to cover the yel ow smoke-tinge on the wal s, but my bedroom remained the same hopeful pink of my birth announcement for six years. My father loved me. My birth changed him. Everyone says so.
14
A SILVER GIRL
THE SUMMER BEFORE my last year in high school was a hard one for our family. Grandma Bunny dying nearly kil ed al three of my parents. I can’t say which one of them got hit the hardest, because al of them fel apart in their own ways. For Uncle Raleigh there was no comfort except in crying.
We would be eating dinner and he would put a spoonful of potatoes in his mouth and his lips would start shaking and he had to excuse himself from the table. His eyes streamed when he was driving, but luckily the passengers didn’t see anything but the back of his head. My daddy drank and basical y let himself go. The bitter scratch of his unshaven good-night kiss wil always, for me, be the sensation of grief. My mama didn’t change herself in any way that you could easily put your finger on. She stil opened the shop at seven thirty, taking care of the old ladies who got up at five, and she closed down at eight thirty, having taken care of the women who worked in offices. Everything was almost the same with her, but she went about her business in a way that put me in the mind of an old matchbook. You can scratch the head against the strip in the same way you always have, but you are not going to get any kind of spark.
I was as devastated as anyone, but I didn’t have much to take my mind off my grief. There was Jamal, but every time we were together, he made me kneel on the floor with him and beg Jesus to forgive us. After Grandma Bunny passed, I didn’t feel like asking Jesus for much of anything. I guess I should have practiced my flute — that was the whole point of going to the performing-arts magnet — but I wasn’t exactly a virtuoso and who can take comfort in doing something that you’re bad at? That left only the mal .
Greenbriar wasn’t the best place to shop. It wasn’t straight-up ghetto like West End, but it wasn’t swanky like Phipps Plaza, either. Stil it was close enough to my house that I could go there without planning to. Sometimes I would start at 10 a.m. when the mal opened and systematical y work my way through every shop, even the rent-to-own furniture place. I could spend an hour in Pearle Vision staring in the mirror through empty eyeglasses. I would do anything to keep from being alone with my thoughts of Grandma Bunny. Her leg had been amputated eighteen months before she died. The night before the surgery, she cal ed my mama col ect after midnight. I picked up the phone at the very beginning of the ring —
teenager’s instinct. I accepted the charges and yel ed for my mama. She picked up the extension with a voice dry from sleep.
“Hel o?”
“Laverne,” she said. “It’s Miss Bunny.”
“M
iss Bunny,” Mama said, “what you doing up? Where’s James and Raleigh?”
“They in the back room, sleep.”
“Miss Bunny, what’s wrong? If you need something, wake them up. That’s why they down there.”
“Laverne,” said Miss Bunny. “Listen to me, child. I changed my mind. I don’t want this operation. Don’t let them take my leg. What man is ever going to have eyes for me if I don’t even have legs to stand on?”
“Miss Bunny,” Mama said. “Don’t worry about that. Go wake up Raleigh. Miss Bunny, you don’t sound like yourself. Is somebody helping you with your medication?” Then my mama paused, pitching her voice through the air and not through the telephone. “Chaurisse Witherspoon. Please tel me you are not on this telephone.”
I eased the phone back onto the cradle and pretended to be asleep. I lay in the bed, kept up al night by the weight of my grandmother begging to keep her legs, stil hoping to be pretty to someone.
My last stop at the mal was the drugstore. There are two kinds of pretty, my mama always said. Natural Beauty, which is whatever your mama gave you. Everybody can’t be that lucky, so for us, there is Pretty in a Jar. This was for people average or worse, who could use time and cosmetology to put ourselves together. Sometimes she cal ed it “bootstrap beauty.”
In the cosmetic aisle of SupeRx, I laid my hand on an eye shadow crayon. Drawn to the color, I turned it over in my palm, trying to remember where I had seen this particular shade of green before. The gold letters pressed into the side said buried treasure, but that didn’t ring any bel s.
Above the display was a little mirror so you could hold products up to your face and imagine what you would look like with the color rimming your eyes.
It took me a second to register that the girl in the tiny mirror was actual y me. My mother, exhausted by grief and worn down by my pleading, had given in and final y al owed me to augment my hair. That’s the term we used when we talked about it to customers. You never used the word fake.
False, though kinder, was on the forbidden list, too. What my mother stitched on to my head was sixteen inches of synthetic fibers, dark and shiny like motor oil. I moved the eye crayon from my cheek to my hair. Leaning my neck forward, I let the hair swing forward before snapping it back. I smiled at my reflection and repeated the motion. It was beautiful, that hair.
I was just about to go for another toss when I heard a weird noise over my left shoulder. I wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe it was a stifled sneeze, a little shriek, or a gasp. Embarrassed to be caught admiring myself in public, I turned to see a silver girl dropping a tube of cuticle remover into her bag.
“Silver” is what I cal ed girls who were natural beauties but who also smoothed on a layer of pretty from a jar. It wasn’t just how they looked, it was how they were. The name came from a song my mother sang sometimes when she was getting dressed to go out somewhere special. She sang along with Arethra Franklin at the end: “Sail on, silver girl . . . Your time has come to shine. Al your dreams are on their way.”
I never had much luck with the silver population. They were never al -out mean to me, unless you count the one that hemmed me up in the girls’
room at National Six at a matinee showing of Purple Rain. For the most part, silver girls were polite, especial y if their parents knew mine, and especial y if my mama did their hair, but none of them ever took me in, told me their secrets. Take somebody like Ruth Nicole Elizabeth Grant. I’d shampooed her hair once every two weeks for almost three years, but I didn’t know that she was going with Marcus McCready until she strung his class ring on her add-a-bead chain, and even then I had to ask whose ring it was. She answered me in an offhand way that let me know that this was as far from a secret as you could imagine.
Silver girls liked to be friends with each other, keeping al their shine, which, in my opinion, was a little bit selfish. Silverness was catching, but it could only be shared girl to girl, and this could only happen if both parties tried real y hard. Sharing a boyfriend with a silver girl wouldn’t make you silver; that would just make you a slut. But let’s say in the past you’d never had much truck with girls your own age because you had been cooped up in either a limousine or a beauty shop al your life. If that person was you, and you could make friends with a silver girl, she could teach you how to shine.
QUIET AS IT’S KEPT, augmented hair makes you brave, like sweet wedding champagne that goes straight to your head, turning you into a bolder, prettier version of yourself. Knowing the silver girl was watching, I dropped the eye crayon in my purse, feeling like a good girl gone bad. “Hey.”
The silver girl licked her lips but didn’t speak. She looked so scared that I checked behind me to make sure that the manager wasn’t standing there. “What?” I said once I saw that no one was behind us but an old man selecting a pumice stone. She kept staring in my direction, eyebrows up, and taking shal ow breaths through her mouth. I turned, looking al around until I saw what she saw: a smal video camera mounted above the emery boards. “Oh,” I said.
The silver girl stil didn’t move. She stood there like Diana Ross in Mahogany, holding a pose for that crazy photographer guy. Even though this was a bona fide emergency, I couldn’t help noticing that this silver girl was especial y gorgeous. I wanted to kiss her, just on the cheek, where she had smeared fuchsia-colored rouge. I know a lot of people get into redbone girls, but what I love to see is a dark brown girl with a pretty face and lots of hair. This girl had a good twenty inches of the real thing, thick and heavy. A Barbie dol dipped in chocolate, she was the silverest girl I had ever seen.
“Empty out your bag,” I said. “Just put everything back.”
She didn’t move, but I did. I groped down in my flea-market Gucci and pul ed out the eye crayon. For good measure, I also dropped the box of Dexatrim that I was planning to pay for at the front desk like a regular person. The silver girl stood motionless, stil posing for that invisible photographer. I reached for her purse, sliding my hand inside her LV (a nice fake) and found a foil chain of Trojans, pink nail polish, and a package of bath salts that looked like something you would give as a gift to your teacher.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said. Final y, she did something, even though it was something stupid — zipped up her bag just as the manager stormed toward us, almost tipping a display of Sea Breeze.
“Come with me.” The manager was probably my mother’s age, with marcel ed waves and a slick coat of foundation. Its creamy smoothness ended just under her chin.
“We don’t have to go with you,” the silver girl said with a flip of her hair. “We haven’t done anything wrong.” Another toss of her tresses — that’s the word that came to mind. This was storybook hair. So pretty it made both my hands itch.
“Open your bag,” the SupeRx lady said to the silver girl.
“She doesn’t have to do anything,” I offered. “She has civil rights.”
“Both of us do,” said the silver girl.
I smiled at the word both. “I wil cal my parents,” I said. I was grandstanding now. Maybe I was stil under the influence of my new hair, but something about the moment didn’t feel quite real. It was like we were in a movie, a comedy starring the two of us, where she and I were equal y beautiful, equal y charming.
The manager ignored me and rummaged through my purse anyway. When she was done with my belongings, she moved on to the silver girl, but you could tel she had lost her hope of punishing us.
“You owe her an apology,” I cal ed out as the manager went back to the counter after tel ing us to get the fuck out.
As though we were square dancers, I linked my am through the silver girl’s. This close, I smel ed her perfume. Anaïs Anaïs, the same as mine.
Her beautiful hair stank of cigarettes. “You smoke?” I asked. On the busy sidewalk in front of the mal , teenage girls walked by in intense clusters.
The silver ones talked only to each other, but the regular girls looked at everyone they passed, hoping to see somet
hing that would change them.
On the street, boys drove large American cars outfitted with louvers and bras. They blew their horns, activating my smile reflex. The silver girl smiled as wel , waving even, although she nervously fiddled with her add-a-beads.
“You okay?” I pul ed her out of the thoroughfare so she could lean against the wal . I held her by her wrists. “Say something.”
She took a bel y breath and closed her eyes as she blew it out. She did it again, as girls walking toward us cut their eyes and raised their eyebrows.
“Are you having a seizure?”
Final y she opened her eyes, coughing out a whisper. “Is it a wig?”
I took a little step back and touched my nose with the tips of my fingers. My face burned and although I wasn’t light-bright like Uncle Raleigh, I knew the silver girl could see it. Tilting my shoulders, I hid my face in case my eyes started to cry or something like that.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” she said.
“You can tel , can’t you? It looks fake.”
“Not real y,” she said. “It looks real y natural.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better. It was the first thing out of your mouth.”
“Wel ,” she said, “the first thing you did was to tel me that my hair smel s like smoke.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like that. My hair probably smel s smoky, too. My dad smokes two packs a day.”
“Mine, too,” she said.
On the backside of Greenbriar were painted concrete structures that looked like giant corn muffins. I could never figure what they were for.