Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  I never joined her, but I practiced my own form of praying. I would sit, fingering the objects in my box of negrobilia, usually humming a little tune (some old, long-gone soul song), while I tried to imagine what Cole was doing at that very moment.

  We played up my Jewishness only some of the time; other times we nearly forgot about it. She had bought me a Star of David somewhere along the way, a cheap one from a pawn shop. It hung from a thick gold rope and left a vaguely greenish tint on the skin below my collarbone. Another time she bought me The Diary of Anne Frank, a book that had been Cole’s favorite once upon a time. Sometimes, when she was feeling particularly paranoid in public places, she would call me her meshugga nebbish with exaggerated relish. She enjoyed telling the women at Aurora that I got my dark looks from my Semitic side and that she had been on the verge of converting to Judaism before David died. When we were alone she also liked to remind me that I wasn’t really passing because Jews weren’t really white, more like an off-white. She said they were the closest I was going to get to black and still stay white. “Tragic history, kinky hair, good politics,” she explained. “It’s all there.”

  But mostly my Jewishness was like a performance we put on together for the public. Only in the privacy of our car, on those long drives up and down the eastern seaboard, was I allowed to ask her about our real past. Off limits were questions about the basement, the FBI, anything to do with why we were in this predicament. But the past was okay. So I grilled her about the before, her past, before me, even, looking into it for clues to the present situation.

  I was consoled by those stories, by my mother’s faith in Cole’s return, and by the fleeting nature of our lives, which kept the reality of our situation from ever closing in. And I believed our lives would go on more or less in that darting way until Cole and my father returned to fetch us.

  Then one day, four years into our flight, while pulling out of a drugstore parking lot in upstate New York, this Sheila woman, this mother of mine, announced to me that she wanted an end to this purgatory, an end to the squeal of tires on an icy road, an end to ideological phonies. She wanted a home surrounded by good country people; she wanted the salt of the earth in its raw, unadulterated form; and she picked New Hampshire.

  the color of underneath

  Our van radio picked up only AM, making Patsy Cline sound tinny, washed out, like an echo of music, not quite the real thing. I’d been reminding my mother for more than a month that we needed new wheels, but I figured we were out of money because she’d just run a hand through her hair and say, “We need a lot of things, baby.” And then she’d go through the list of all the things we were due for: a job, a house, a Pap smear (for her), new shoes, fresh blue jeans, and new fake IDs. The lamination on her driver’s license was peeling at the corners, and it had expired more than a year before. My doctored passport wasn’t much better. A pen had leaked in my knapsack, leaving a smudge of blue across my small, anxious face.

  Our rule all along had been to switch vehicles every six months, but we’d been driving this one for close to two years. It was a paint-stripped van with a cracked and drafty floor and a vague smell of turpentine wafting up from the corners. It once had been yellow. I could tell because some of the paint was left on the interior, a nice buttery chrome yellow. Now it was no color at all; the color of something stripped clean for the sake of starting over. Some nights the van had served as our home, parked in the darkened lot of a Roy Rogers, our bodies wrapped together in an afghan, limbs twisted around the other’s for warmth. On particularly cold mornings the van wouldn’t start at all and we just called the space where it had stalled our home, as good as any other.

  The town we circled now was to be our latest home. My mother had chosen it a week before, when she had gone on a scouting trip to New Hampshire. She had come back in a state of excitement, saying she had found the perfect place—a town that offered the best of both worlds. It was made up mostly of poor farmers and trailer parks, the world she said she most admired. But it also sat near a university town, the world that could provide her with a job. Academics were a naïve bunch, she maintained, and rarely thought to check her referrals. She could play the part when she needed to, and, these days at least, she looked like an eccentric professor’s wife.

  Now she pointed to the license plate on the pickup truck in front of us. It read: “LIVE FREE OR DIE.”

  “That,” she told me, “is the official state slogan. Anyway, there’s a lot of free spirits living up in these parts.” She smiled, and repeated the slogan—“Live Free or Die”—as if savoring the words on her tongue.

  I stuck my head out the window. It was summer, and the air here was thick, sweet with the smell of cow manure. I studied the world outside, searching the landmarks for clues to my future. What I saw: a small shack that read “Bing Bros. Guns ‘n’ Stuff”; an American flag in the center of a town green; a billboard of a shining red apple with a bite taken out of it, advertising fresh produce at some nearby marketplace. It all looked strange to me, like some imitation of life I had witnessed before only in movies—grainy colors, Dolby stereo, flat props to be knocked down after the day’s shooting was over. We cruised past a Dairy Queen, where a crowd of listless teens stood in a parking lot, eating Softee cones. They turned to watch our van go by as if they had nothing better to do than wait for strangers. I met eyes with one of them—a thin-lipped, freckle-faced girl with her hand raised over her eyes like a visor. She followed our car with her gaze, sneering in a way that made me blush and turn away, back to the road ahead. The look on her face reflected just how strange I had become. I was twelve, but I dressed like a much younger child, in high-water dungarees and a pair of hot-pink Converse sneakers my mother had stolen off a rack at Mammoth Mart. My T-shirt announced some truckers’ convention, and my hair hung unevenly from one of my mother’s bungled attempts at hairdressing. I saw myself in that girl’s eyes, and I appeared wild and ill-fitting, like a girl raised by wolves.

  I looked down at the map that was spread across my lap, tracing the web of thin red and blue veins, in search of Bridgewater Road. My mother had seen the house listed for rent in a local paper the next town over: “Cozy two-bedroom cottage on scenic farmland. Family preferred. References required.”

  We pulled into a gas station, and she told me, “I’ve got to call the landlords, tell them we’re on our way.” She dug into her pocket, pulled out a couple of crumpled bills, and smoothed them out in her palm. “Want anything to drink?”

  “Fanta, please, with a straw. And a beef jerky.”

  She was out of the van then, and I watched her go inside, roaming the aisles of the little stop-and-go shop; picking out food, drink, and a newspaper for herself. She talked to the boy behind the counter while he rang up her stuff. She was asking him for directions. He was laughing at something she said, trying to flirt with her, while she gesticulated wildly, hamming it up for him. The guy was half her age, a plump baby-faced kid with a baseball cap on to go with his Chevron uniform. When she left through the jingling door, he leaned forward and watched her blue-jeaned butt sashay away. I stuck my tongue out at him, but he couldn’t see my face behind the glass reflection. I didn’t like it when she flirted with white men. It seemed to be taking our game one step too far, becoming the other woman rather than just playing her.

  She was seventy pounds lighter than she had been when we’d left Boston. Back then, white men had never so much as looked at her, except maybe in disgust, the way her own mother did. But now she was the woman her mother always wanted her to be—willowy, fragile, feminine, a shadow of her former self—and I often noticed white men glancing at her butt when we passed them on the street. Which was odd, since she had no butt anymore, just a flat board of a backside and slim boyish hips.

  I watched as she went outside to the pay phone. She bent over the receiver, her hair swinging into her eyes so that I couldn’t read her expression. I had reminded her that we didn’t have references, that they probably wouldn’
t even bother meeting with us. But she hadn’t seemed worried. Now her lips were moving silently to somebody on the other end. She was taking too long. The guy behind the counter was on the phone now, too, watching her through the glass. I felt a familiar lurch in my stomach. I imagined he was calling the Feds. He had seen her face in the post office just yesterday. I could hear him: “Yup. It’s her. I’d know her anywhere. Hair’s different now, and she’s lost all that blubber. Cute little redhead woman with a great ass. But it’s her. She’s driving a van. Color? Sorta gray or black or something. Like a tin can on wheels. Looks like someone’s in the passenger seat, but I can’t make out the face. Might be a guy. Yeah, it’s a guy…” I imagined the conversation and bit my nails, watching the scene play out before me.

  The driver’s door opened, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Here, catch!” My mother tossed me the Fanta and an apple, not a beef jerky. She peered at herself in the rear view mirror and began fiddling with her hair. She said, holding a bobby pin between her teeth, “Beef jerkys’ll kill you. Do you know what they’re made of?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I told her, crunching into the apple. “Did you reach the landlord?”

  Her hair had been transformed into a loose bun. She looked like a real mother, cool, self-possessed, the kind of mother who would be on a television commercial for Ivory soap. She winked at me. “Sure did, Jess. I think they bought it. I think I got ‘em.”

  LATER, AFTER SHE HAD PRIMPED and changed into appropriate clothes in a McDonald’s bathroom, we sat in the van, staring at the house in the distance. It had begun to drizzle on our way over. The defroster was on full-blast, and we were silent, listening to the rhythmic squeak of the windshield wipers. The place did look pretty cozy from the outside, like a gingerbread cottage, promising sweets and familial comfort. It sat at the end of a glimmering field of grass speckled with daffodils. It was two stories high, not really a cottage at all, with dark-brown shingles, white clapboard shutters, a sloping front porch, and an overgrown garden in the front. The yard around it was bare except for a trampoline, which was sagging down in its middle with rainwater, and beyond that, at the edge of the forest of ash trees, a green barn. I wondered whether there were animals inside. The ad hadn’t said anything about that. My mother was clenching the steering wheel tightly. She was nervous. I knew she really wanted us to live here, to settle down for a while somewhere. She had said it to me the night before, hugging me in the darkness: “I’m so tired. So damn tired of moving. Please, let this work out. It just has to. Or I don’t know if I can go on.”

  There was a rap on the window, and we both jumped. It was a man, his face grinning, wet, and huge behind the glass. He must have come around from behind. We both just stared at him for a moment, as if we were seeing a ghost, and then my mother hissed, “It’s the landlord. Roll down the window, for God’s sake.”

  I did as I was told.

  The man said, “I’m Walter. Walter Marsh.”

  We both stumbled out of the van to meet him. He had bad posture and stood hunched underneath a tattered black umbrella, wearing a trench coat that was too small for his large, gangly form. He looked salty, like the sea, with a big bony nose and two startling-green slits of eyes peering from beneath his tanned, rugged skin. His dirty-blond hair was tousled and streaked with silver, giving his face the touch of the intellectual. He seemed young, despite the gray at his temples. There was something about him that struck me as familiar, and it wasn’t until later that I realized he was like my mother’s brother, Randall. They shared a certain rumpled charm, a similar destroyed good looks.

  I followed him and my mother over the spongy grass, breathing in a faint smell of horses, and listening to her lay it on thick. I hoped she wasn’t overdoing it as she said, “We’re both stunned by the beauty of the place. I mean, even from the outside I can see it’s perfect.”

  Inside, the place wasn’t as homey as it seemed on the outside. The furniture was severe, angled, borrowed. Walter Marsh explained that he had once used the cottage as his study, but now that he had built a study off his bedroom at his home across the forest, the cottage was going to waste.

  He pointed to the green barn at the other end of the field and said, “Our horses live in there.”

  My mother nudged me hard, as if to say, I told you so, I knew this would be fun, and winked at me.

  After we had finished examining the cottage, we followed him through the woods, where he lived, to “the big house,” as he kept referring to it. It was huge, brown, and Victorian, and made ours look shoddy in comparison. Walter Marsh showed off his latest renovations to my mother while I loitered by the mantelpiece in the living room. There was a clutter of photographs. One of a pretty, vivacious woman who was clearly his wife. Others of a sullen boy with dark hair, in various stages of growth. There were several snapshots of Walter Marsh with a boat. He was a sailor when he wasn’t teaching English at the university in the next town over. I looked out to where he stood on the porch, talking to my mother. She was nodding her head, hands on hips, and if I blurred my eyes she could have been somebody who belonged here for real.

  We sat with him in the living room, where books held to the walls around us. A familiar smell of must clung to the air. He poured my mother’s tea as if he were in the casbah and she were a veiled princess. He hadn’t paid much attention to me on the walk over, gabbing instead to my mother about his work at the university.

  He looked at me for the first time. “We have a son a little older than you,” he said. Then, with a knowing smile at my mother, he added, “He goes to boarding school, though. Exeter. I mean, the schools here are great till the kids reach a certain age. Then the locals start acting like locals, if you know what I mean. Chewing tobacco, loitering. Trailah pahk cultcha,” he said, imitating the New Hampshire accent.

  My mother had a tense smile on her face, and I could almost hear her thought: Fuck you, you elitist pig. But she said only, agreeably, “Oh, of course. Jesse may have to start thinking about boarding school at some point.” Sometimes even I couldn’t tell whether she was lying. I had a brief surge of excitement imagining myself at boarding school, walking, uniformed, across a green with a huddle of other girls. But then it struck me that we had no money, and even if we had, I wasn’t going anywhere far.

  Just then a car pulled into the driveway, a silver Saab. A figure stepped out and came running up the steps to the back porch. We could hear the stamping of feet on the wood. It was his wife, Libby. She wore a man’s Army-green raincoat and L.L. Bean boots. She was delicate and tan, with a brown ponytail and erect dancer’s posture. She laughed as their dog, a golden retriever, danced around her feet, shaking rain from his body. When she had peeled the wetness from herself, she came toward us, smiling approvingly. “You must be Sheila, here to see the little house. I spoke to you this morning on the phone.”

  They shook hands, and the wife laughed, flashing us big, healthy teeth. “I shouldn’t call it ‘the little house.’ It’s really quite spacious. Have you had a look already?”

  She settled next to her husband on their bulky red velvet couch, tucking her legs underneath her and grasping his hand in hers.

  I was hungry for something unnamable as I watched her lean in toward him and whisper, “Be a dear and pour me a little of that Lapsang Souchong? It smells wonderful.”

  We sipped the smoky tea from chipped blue cups. They asked my mother inconsequential questions, but I could see it was a way of proving that she spoke their language. They smiled knowingly at her.

  What did they see?

  A tall, statuesque, blue-blooded woman in her mid-thirties, the delicate etchings of sorrow beginning to creep out from her sapphire eyes. She wore khakis and a white V-neck sweater, her feet in Keds. We had bought the clothes just a few weeks before, in preparation for moments like this. It was paying off. I had never seen my mother so appropriate. Loose strands from her bun brushed against her pale cheek. She shifted next to me and played with the wedding ring o
n her finger. It was the one my father had given her, Russian-style, three different kinds of gold—white, red, and yellow.

  “We’ve seen the house already,” she told Mrs. Marsh. “It’s perfect. Just lovely. I was just telling your husband that I want Jesse to get a chance to ride. So it’s an ideal situation for us.”

  A note of desperation had crept into her voice. I looked toward the door, where the dog sat panting, his head cocked to one side. He was staring at me, and I shifted under his dopey gaze, thinking maybe he was on to us.

  “Jesse,” the wife said, “do you know how to ride horses?”

  I glanced at my mother. She was smiling at me through clenched teeth. She hadn’t coached me on what to say about this. It was true that I had ridden horses at the stables near Aurora. I had ridden bareback, with Bernadette holding the reins from behind me, while my mother stood on the sidelines in a cowboy hat, waving her arms and shouting excited directions.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, I’ve ridden a little. My dad had a horse once. We called her Bernie and I rode her bareback. Nothing fancy. I nearly got thrown once—”

  I caught my mother’s eye and cut the story short.

  But the wife just smiled and worked on undoing then redoing her ponytail. “Then I think you’ll like it here, Jesse. We’ve got a couple of mares. Our son, Nicholas, will be back from camp in a few more weeks, and I’ll make sure he shows you the ropes.” Then back to my mother: “And tell me, Sheila, what brings you to New Hampshire?”

  My mother answered their questions like a pro. “I’m a widow—recently. He had an aneurysm. He was young—and I just couldn’t bear to stay in the area. We needed a change.”