by Danzy Senna
I asked her why she was sitting there in her pajamas.
She didn’t answer my question. Instead she said, “Go look out the window, sweetums. Tell me what you see.”
I went to the window. It looked pretty normal outside. There was a tiny kid walking a huge Doberman pinscher on a leash; an old woman shuffling by, stooped over from the weight of her groceries; a couple of teenagers loitering on the steps of the housing projects, smoking, and playing music from a boom box.
I shouted back to her, “I don’t see nothing.”
“Anything! You don’t see anything!” she hissed back from behind the sofa.
“Anything,” I mumbled. She didn’t like my new way of talking. Sometimes a piece of her that she tried to keep hidden seemed to sneak out—a piece of her that had grown up in a big old Victorian house in Cambridge, had been educated at one of the best prep schools, had spent evenings reading Sartre aloud to her father, the Harvard classics professor, in the den off the living room.
“Well, look again, baby,” she barked across the room. “See that van?”
Sure enough, there was an olive-green van parked across the street. I had never seen it before. As far as I could see, there was nobody in the front seat.
“Yeah, I see it. What about it?”
“Come back here!”
I returned to the couch, and she yanked on my arm so that I plopped down next to her. She looked funny, with her hair all wild, the pajamas still on in the middle of the afternoon, and I almost started to giggle.
But the expression on her face told me not to. She said: “Those motherfuckers, they’re trying to drive me mad. They’re trying to drive us all mad. They’re everywhere. They’re in the house now, you know. They’re listening to us as we speak.”
“Who?”
She started to cry then, quietly, into her hands. I put my hand out and touched her shoulder, gingerly.
“You want me to go over to the van and tell them to leave?” I didn’t know who was in the van. I had no idea. I imagined a little man living in there, with a little kitchen and a little bed and a little toilet, and a pair of binoculars that would watch us from a hole screwed into the wall. The year before, we had had a visitor named Joel, a bedraggled guy with a sharp, pungent odor who my mother whispered to me had lived in his car for three months. I had been fascinated by the thought and had secretly wished he would take me with him when he left, so I could see what living in a car was like.
She shook her head and peeked out at me. “Don’t you dare go near there. You hear me?”
I nodded. “Want me to go get Papa? Maybe he can help.”
She shook her head and began to sniffle, wiping her face roughly. “No, baby. Your papa’s too busy trying to grow a fucking afro. Nothing can help me now.”
Later, when the rain came down like sheets of metal outside our window, she came into our room while Cole and I were busy painting our toenails and listening to the radio. She rifled through our trunk of costumes haphazardly, humming along to the music. Cole and I ignored her for a while, until I turned around to see her watching me with our African mask on. It was the warrior mask from Kenya, and she was wearing a granny nightgown with it, creating a strange contrast.
I nudged Cole, who turned and looked at her as well.
“What the hell are you doing, Mum?” Cole said.
I knew what she was doing. It was a game we had played when we were little, a game I’d almost forgotten. She would put on a mask, any mask, and say, “I’m not your mother,” in a scary voice. At first Cole and I would laugh, but eventually my mother always took it just a step too far and we’d start to scream and cry and beg her to come back to us. Only when we were nearly in hysterics would she take the mask off, and we’d shower her in kisses and hugs and all would be well again. It was a strange game to play with children. But we must have liked being scared, because once the mask was off and we had wiped away our tears, we always begged her to put it back on.
I giggled, but there was a strain to my laugh. “Put it back, Mum. You look crazy.” I was remembering her squatting behind the sofa with all those half-moon toenails sprinkled around her.
She came toward us quietly, her head tilted inquisitively to the side. When she was upon us, standing over us, she said in a fake witch voice, “I’m not your mother. Where’s your real mother?” Then she cackled and twisted her body into a hunchback.
Neither Cole nor I laughed. We didn’t cry either. We just watched her from the floor, our feet stuck out before us, cotton balls wedged between our toes the way we had seen it done in a magazine.
Finally she pulled the mask off, and her face underneath was red and a little moist from her own breath. She raked a hand through her hair. “You two are changing on me. You used to be so much fun. What’s happening?”
Cole dropped her head back into a book and curled over it, twisting a braid around her finger.
But I patted my mother’s leg. “I’m still fun, Mum.”
THAT NEXT DAY, my mother woke Cole and me bright and early and informed us we weren’t going to school.
We exchanged looks of initial thrill. Then we saw that my mother was fully dressed. It wasn’t a day of hooky. She had something planned.
“Why?” Cole said, sitting up and hugging the duvet around her. She had stolen all the covers, and I shivered in a corner with a tiny ratty blanket wrapped close to my body.
“Because!” my mother exclaimed. “We’re going to Concord! Let’s do something fun for once. Okay?”
Cole shrugged. “But Mum, I’m supposed to hand in a report to Professor Abdul.”
My mother scoffed and waved Cole’s worry aside. “Silly child. Don’t you know? I’m the parent. I get to call you in sick if I feel like it. It’s a cardinal rule. Now, do you want to go have fun, or what?”
Cole and I dressed slowly. We wore our disco finest—skintight jeans with elaborate labels, sparkle shirts, and high-heeled sneakers. I was excited, but I could see that Cole had wanted to go to school. She had stayed up late into the night, obsessing over her project. It had been a report about the black Indians of Rhode Island. She was proud of it.
As the Pinto wound around the long, tree-lined main road, my mother pointed at the houses of note along the way, trying to talk over the music that Cole blasted from the radio. “What a world it must have been. Emerson, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott. All in the same vicinity. Oh look, girls. We’re coming up to the Minute Man National Park. Would you take a look at the size of those trees? Oh man, here’s the Concord River. Daddy used to take me on the canoe here. Isn’t it lovely—”
Cole and I just chewed our gum, tapping our feet and mouthing along to Natalie Cole booming “This Will Be” from the radio.
My mother seemed to have been overtaken by a fit of nostalgia. While she had nothing but venom for her mother, her father was, as she put it, “a good, decent man, in the best tradition of America.”
My mother drove us to Emerson’s house—The Old Manse—where her father had taken her to walk among the flowers called “loose strife” and had given her lessons on those trips about the literary history that had been made in that small town. Now it was winter, and the ground was hard, cracked by the cold, devoid of any blossoms.
Later in the afternoon we bought fresh husks of corn at the side of the road, and the locals stared at my mother, the strangely garbed woman—corpulent, blond, boisterous, wearing a Mexican scarf around her neck and her hair in twin Indian-style braids, shrieking at the size and color of the tomatoes this year—and us, her glowering dark daughters, who must have stunk of the urban fiasco most of them had fled.
On the drive home, my mother’s good mood evaporated. She grew pensive, her eyebrows furrowed and her mouth moving in a silent whisper as if she were rehearsing lines for some impending performance. She was worried about something. Cole sat in the front next to her, and I lay stretched out on the backseat, munching on an apple.
I heard Cole say, “Can we go back
to school tomorrow?”
My mother reached out and stroked Cole’s braids. “Of course you can, sweetie. I just needed to get away. From it all. You can hand in your report tomorrow.” She sighed then and stared out at the road. “I just don’t know when I’ll get a chance to come up here again.”
When we got back into Boston, we stopped at Star Market to buy some groceries for dinner. My mother’s strange mood escalated again. She zigzagged up and down the aisles, throwing food into the shopping cart haphazardly—food we never ate. She usually had Wasp tastes in food, left over from her childhood, but here she was throwing in macaroni and cheese, Doritos, a mammoth box of Cap’n Crunch, and a gallon of no-name soda pop. I skipped beside her, excited, telling her what else I wanted. This was the food I had craved all my life. Not the peas, red potatoes, white rice, broccoli, creamed chicken, and asparagus we were usually force-fed. Cole didn’t join in my festivities, though, and walked behind us at a cautious distance, a dubious frown on her face. She kept looking around her, as if afraid someone would see us together.
“Why are we getting all the good stuff today, Mum?” I finally asked, throwing Wonder Bread into the cart. As soon as I’d said it, I worried she’d realize what she was buying and make me put it back.
But she just shrugged. “Because this is how poor people eat, Birdalee. And we’re broke, baby. Seriously broke. It’s about time we started to act it.”
When we were finished, we had more than twenty items, but my mother went into the express line, where it clearly read “10 Items or Less” in bold red letters. Cole whispered to her, “Mum, you’re not allowed—” but my mother cut her off. “Can it, Coley. We’ll be here all night if you follow their rules.”
We were almost at the register when I noticed my mother slipping two Snickers bars into the pocket of her red duffel jacket. I didn’t say anything, but looked at Cole to see if she had noticed. She shook her head and rolled her eyes. When we got to the register, my mother began talking in an excited chatter about Lamaze methods to the pregnant clerk behind the register. When we were safely outside she whooped in the air like a fraternity boy who has just gotten laid, and held out the candy to Cole and me. I grabbed mine and ripped in, but Cole just shook her head with disgust. My mother aped Cole’s prissy expression, then said, already ripping apart the foil wrapper, “Fine, then, Ms. Goody Two-Shoes, I’ll eat it.”
She took an enormous bite of the bar, and as we drove out of the parking lot, she spoke through the goo of chocolate, nuts, and caramel: “Cole, you’re really missing out. I seriously doubt Star Market is going to notice these two bars of chocolate. Jesus, you’d think you were part of the Republican party the way you’re carrying on. I thought my daughters were wilder than that.”
Cole ignored her, staring out the window with a scowl on her face.
My mother winked at me where I sat beside her in the front seat, and said, “Now, Birdie. Birdie’s a real radical. She likes her candy hot. Don’t you, sweet tush?”
“Yes, I do. Let’s get more. Mum, go get us two more!” I bounced on my seat, enjoying the show.
Cole groaned from the backseat, “Birdie, why do you encourage her? She’s crazy.”
My mother screwed up her features and imitated Cole’s voice, making it all British and proper: “‘Why do you encourage her? She’s craaaazy.’ Jesus, Cole. You’ve been spending too much time with your father. Get a sense of humor, kiddo. It’ll get you through the hard times.”
Cole stomped her foot onto the floor of the car and crossed her arms. “God, you’re such a freak. Get me out of here!”
I tried to enjoy my chocolate, but my excitement had passed. It was difficult to swallow and stuck at the back of my throat in a solid lump. My mother was slipping. I could see it sometimes in her eyes when we walked down the street—the way she had begun to glance over her shoulder—that she was scared of something huge and pressing and unsuitable for children. And I understood in those flashes, her hand clutched tightly in my own, that she had nobody—not my father nor Cole nor the radicals in the basement, not even her own blue-blood Cambridge clan—to protect her from this unnamed threat. Nobody, that was, but me.
golliwog’s revenge
A snow storm swept over Boston. It was the biggest in three years, and it brought a silence to the city—a silence like a body smothered by a pillow, muffled out of its misery but still thrashing below the waist. That week, cars were transformed into igloos; sidewalks into tunnels; and Bostonians into Eskimos, traveling with their heads against the wind, their bodies buried under layers of bulky protection.
The weekend the snow began to fall, Cole was staying at our father’s, but I had chosen to stay home, in part to avoid having to beg for their attention, in part because my mother said she got lonely when I left and whispered that we would do fun things if I just stayed home for those few days.
“Let them have some time alone together,” my mother had told me, sucking pancake mix off her finger. I had wanted to tell her that they were always alone together, even when I was there.
Cole was supposed to come back to us on Sunday, but the heavy silent flakes began falling on a Friday night and continued falling, so that by Sunday everyone was quarantined—Cole in Roxbury, me in the South End.
My mother woke me that Sunday morning wearing nothing but her muumuu and a bandanna tied like Aunt Jemima’s on her head. She blew on my eyelids, then dragged me to the half-moon window and pointed to the street below as if presenting me with a gift. The city was a crystal white slate as far as the eye could see. My mother embraced me, and we watched the flakes drift languidly down before us onto the empty street. Her breath in my ear was already sweet and thick with coffee and cinnamon rolls as she said, her words brimming over with excitement, “We’re stuck inside. The city’s all shut down, and we’re stuck inside. Hooky for a week.”
And she was right. It lasted all that week. Cole was stuck at our father’s, as the streets were closed off, and I stayed indoors with our mother, unable to connect with the outside world except through the phone.
I called Cole each day, but she seemed to be keeping herself busy in Roxbury. She had Nkrumah friends in the area, so she could trudge to their houses. And, she confided in me on Tuesday, our father had a new girlfriend. She whispered, “Don’t tell Mum. Her name’s Carmen and she’s so beautiful, Bird. Wait till you see her. She did my hair up last night in a French twist and we listened to music and she told me about—s-e-x.”
She didn’t seem to want to talk to my mother, so I acted as the go-between, shouting out messages between them like a translator of foreign tongues.
At night I was lonely without Cole’s body beside me, snoring, stealing all the covers. I listened to the hiss of the radiator and the constant drone of the television set downstairs, where my mother sat over a plate of macaroons and a mug of hot coffee mixed with brandy, shouting weather forecasts to me deep into the night. I tried to imagine my father’s new woman. All I knew was that her name was Carmen, she was from New York City, and Cole worshiped her.
Carmen answered the phone one evening when I called, and her voice was like I had imagined it would be, bright and fun and yet somehow mysterious. She said, a smile in her voice, “Hey, girl. You must be the famous Birdie. Your sister tells me all about you. Too bad for all this snow. We’ll meet when it melts. Unless you can fly.”
And then she laughed softly and handed the phone to Cole, who picked it up, giggling.
“Isn’t she awesome?” she said, and I whispered, “Yeah, she sounds great,” not wanting my mother, who sang off-key to Joan Baez in the next room, to hear me.
My mother watched the news obsessively that week, seated cross-legged on the couch with a dog-eared book open on her lap, looking over the tops of her reading glasses. She told me that she had discovered during the blizzard how solitary and peaceful her world could be—no dyslexic children streaming through our door with demands to be taught, no activists stamping around our basement, no
t even the mailman delivering the bills that she dreaded. She had found her island of anonymity, silence, contemplation, a rare moment where she was cut off from both Cambridge and Roxbury and was responsible for only herself and, of course, me. She told me at night, lying stretched out on her side next to me, her cream-colored arms glowing in the dark, that she dreaded the melting of the snow, that day when the world would start up again, beckoning her to its aid.
As far back as I could remember, my mother had thrived in states of emergency. She had always thrilled at the prospect of a good crashing storm, and when it came, she would wake me and Cole up and pull the two of us, groggy and groaning, into the kitchen to watch the flash of light against the windowpane. She once told me that the only thing she had in common with my father was a passion for tempestuous weather. “That’s why neither of us could live anywhere but New England. The extremities of the seasons remind us that we’re alive.”
But I felt strangely panicked by the snow, and especially by Cole’s absence. I wanted my mother to travel by foot the distance to Roxbury to fetch her. But neither she nor Cole seemed to want to make the effort, each sleepily accepting the snow-padded rift between them, which had been a long time coming anyway.
A BOMB WENT OFF in Berkeley.
I watched the news report with my mother that Wednesday evening—day five of the blizzard.
I sat in the crook of her arm, lazily listening to the newscaster tell of an organization that had claimed responsibility for the blast, which had killed no one but had blown up an empty police car. The television flashed a wild-looking white man with a black beard being led into a courthouse. He raised his fist at the camera and shouted, “Put the pigs in the pokey and the people—” His words were cut off by the newscaster before he could finish.
My mother held me tight and watched it with a gloomy concentration, smoothing down my cowlick while the newscaster explained how many years the man might face in prison.
“So, why’d he do it, Mum?”