Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  She glanced down and breathed her loss just long enough. Her bony nose, her blue eyes, flickering, nervous—an educated voice. They heard her accent, so like their own, and knew she would do just fine. Never mind that thin, glowering, dark adolescent by her side, they thought. They saw a woman and a child. No man? No problem. They knew she was one of them.

  I examined their house while they sorted out the details of the rent and responsibilities. The rugs were tattered Persian artifacts, and dust flaked everything like gold.

  MY MOTHER’S WIDOW ACT seemed to have done the trick, because the Marshes took pity on her. I think they saw something old-fashioned, almost quaint, about our situation, and took pleasure in the romance of it all. Libby brought us over extra blankets, a potted fern, and dishes that they didn’t need, and told my mother where to shop in the nearby towns. Libby spent one wet afternoon introducing me to the horses in the barn. There were three of them. My favorite was a dappled mare whom Libby introduced as Mr. Pleasure, though the horse was clearly female. Libby hadn’t explained why, and I hadn’t asked. She told me I was free to ride them whenever I pleased, as long as I learned how to saddle them up properly.

  The Marshes even helped my mother get a job. Walter came over to tell her about it three weeks into our stay there. A sociologist friend of his at the university was going on sabbatical to write a book and wanted help putting together his notes. My mother would be his research assistant.

  “His book’s a load of crap,” my mother told me after her first day with the sociologist. “He’s studying police culture. You know, how there’s this brotherhood there, the loyalty they feel toward one another. But the man has no politics. And you can’t study police without showing what pigs they are. You just can’t. Honestly, now.”

  She blew smoke from her cigarette toward the ceiling, and I watched it evaporate, float into nothing. “But he’s paying me well. Ten bucks an hour to read his chicken-scratch handwriting and put it in a computer. I’ll still need to get another job. Walter Marsh said he might know of some tutoring I can do. For special-ed kids. I told him they were my specialty, and he laughed and said there were plenty of slow kids in these parts. God, that man is a snob! But anyway, the point is, he didn’t think I’d have any trouble getting work here.”

  We lay side by side on her bed. There were two bedrooms in the cottage, but I didn’t like sleeping alone in this new house. It gave me the creeps. It was all too quiet, removed. Even on the commune there had been the noise to lull me to sleep—raucous women debating politics in the kitchen or just giggling and telling one another stories while they baked the week’s bread. Something to assure me that the world wouldn’t end when I closed my eyes. Here there was nothing, just an emptiness. The few times I had slept alone here, I had stayed awake till morning, listening to the clock beside the bed tick louder and louder, and playing a game with myself, a game I hadn’t played since those first few years on the run. A game where I would try to remember as many details about Nkrumah, the house on Columbus Avenue, my father’s Roxbury apartment, Maria’s mother’s bedroom, as I possibly could. Not the obvious details—the portrait of Cotton Mather, or the mirrored ceiling at Maria’s, or even the half-moon window looking out from our attic bedroom—but the small, trivial, utterly forgettable details: the sweet chemical smell of Queen Helene hair grease on Cole’s pale scalp; the smudged pencil graffiti on my desk in Mrs. Potter’s classroom that read “Tarik Luvs Candice”; the taste of cafeteria chocolate milk gulped from the carton. And Elemeno—the grunts and phrases that were only now beginning to sound like gibberish.

  My mother snubbed out her cigarette and rolled over to face me. Her mood had shifted within seconds. Something sad had crossed her mind, and she brushed the hair out of my eyes. She was staring at me intensely, with a kind of anguished hunger. I knew it wasn’t me she was seeing. I rolled over so that I had my back to her.

  I heard her say behind me: “I used to think that if I could just learn to cornrow, she would stay mine. Remember the way her hair looked that first time she got it done, at Danny’s His and Hers, so tight and gold and pretty? She was a gorgeous child, wasn’t she?”

  I swallowed hard and closed my eyes. There was nothing I could say to make my mother feel better, nobody I could become. I just had to wait for her sadness to pass, till morning, when I would find her transformed, frying an egg at the stove and singing along to some country-western tune on the Realistic. And then we both would try to forget.

  MY MOTHER LIKED to call Walter Marsh “the man.” She would imitate his aristocratic demeanor, sending me into hysterics. He reminded her too of her long-lost brother, Randall. “They have that same broken preppie look to them—too much privilege leads to bad manners,” she told me one afternoon while we sat on the porch of our cottage. I sat on the step in front of her, between her legs, my head hanging forward. She was braiding my hair lazily, a cigarette hanging precariously from her lips. She had pulled the Realistic radio to the window, and it played her old Joan Baez tape. She had an open Rolling Rock beside her; I held a sweating can of Pepsi in my hands.

  The air was comfortably cool, and the only noise was the sound of the ash trees brushing against one another. The trampoline at the edge of the field was still filled with water and old leaves, and I stared at the sagging bulge, thinking I should empty it, put it to some use. Sometimes, in moments like this, I thought I could be happy with just my mother. I thought she was the funnest and coolest mother in the whole world.

  She was telling me how to spot a real Wasp from a fake one. I could feel her fingers moving on my scalp. I wore cutoff jeans and a T-shirt the women at Aurora had given me on my birthday. It said across the front: “A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle.” I wore a gold-and-green anklet that Bernadette had made for me one afternoon. It was getting dirty, but I didn’t want to take it off.

  “Now get this straight,” my mother was saying now. “I’m talking about liberal Wasps. Not Republican ones. And they might as well be two different races. The liberals have more class than the conservatives, and tend to be more interesting. We never mingled with Republicans growing up.” She paused in her braiding to take a drag of her Marlboro. “Your grandmother thought conservatives were vulgar, lacking in modesty. Too blatantly interested in money.”

  My mother loved making lists. On the road over the years, she had entertained us both with lists about a variety of topics, from the serious to the ludicrous: “How to Spot a Fed”; “Favorite Countries to Visit,” in order; “Movie Stars”—men and women—“I Could Fall in Love With”; “Countries to Liberate”; “Great Names for the Children I Never Had.”

  Here, while the polluted sunset spread orange and gold light over the field before us, between sips of Rolling Rock and drags on her cigarette, my mother laughingly explained to me “How to Spot a Real Wasp.” It took one to know one, of course, and my mother grudgingly admitted to being a real Wasp, at least by birth. It wasn’t long before I was piping in my own additions to “the list”:

  A Real Wasp drinks everything out of a gin tumbler, never out of a wineglass.

  A Real Wasp speaks with a drunken slur, even when he has had nothing to drink.

  A Real Wasp is generally a failure in life, though not always, and is thoroughly self-deprecating. He is comfortable with insults and being the butt of jokes, like someone who has never had to defend his own existence. This accounts for his charm.

  A Real Wasp is eccentric, often prematurely white (haired), fascinated by the ironies of history, and often finds salvation in Asian religions late in life.

  A Real Wasp doesn’t like it when people chew food loudly in his presence.

  A Real Wasp doesn’t really like food, except eaten standing up in the shadows, hunched over, in guilty little bites.

  And finally, in a strange, cruel law of physics, the harder a Real Wasp tries to reject his social caste (e.g., joining a Tibetan monastery, marrying a Jew or a Negro, giving all of his money to the Moonies
), the more authentically Waspy he becomes.

  She said Walter and his family were Real Wasps. The proof, she said, was the layer of dust covering their house—and the way Walter sucked on a toothpick, picked his nose, hacked into his hand, and performed other blatantly rude personal habits in public, oblivious that they might be offensive to the people around him.

  We stayed out on the porch till all the light had faded and Mr. Pleasure was just a dark silhouette in the distance. We grew quiet, and I was shivering, hugging myself, though I didn’t want to go inside just yet. My mother finally said: “I think I could learn to like it here. I really do. Imagine us here. Living here for real. What do you think, kiddo? Don’t you think we should make this our home?”

  I was quiet. It was true, there was a certain joy and comfort here. The beauty of the nature around us, and the thrill of sleeping in the same bed each night. Our own place. The first in so long. But I tried to imagine my sister and father here, trying to figure out where they would fit in. Cole would say it was boring, a hick town. My father would say he couldn’t live around these rednecks. They wouldn’t want him, and he certainly wouldn’t want them. I hugged my knees to my chest and rested my chin on them. “You mean, stay here till Cole and Papa come?”

  She paused for a moment too long, and I could sense her holding her breath. Then she said, “Yeah, until they come.”

  In bed beside her that night, I thought about what she had said. Could I learn to live permanently in this place, or anywhere, for that matter? At some point during our wanderings, the gypsy life had grown on me. Staying still for too long felt unnatural. I had begun to savor even that moment upon waking up when I had no idea which city we were in, which day of the week it was, even where we had been just the day before. I felt somehow more lucid in that half-waking state, as if that place of timelessness and placelessness and forgetfulness was the only space one could possibly inhabit. I cared in that moment only that my mother was nearby—in the bathroom, balanced cross-legged on the floor, doing mantras for her firstborn child’s safe return. I wasn’t supposed to disturb her during that time before breakfast, so I would curl up in the queen-sized motel bed with the scratchy sterile sheets, a hokey painting of a faraway seascape beckoning to me from the opposite side of the room, and I would whisper to myself in Elemeno, whisper to my sister, finding comfort in these words, this gibberish.

  A part of me believed New Hampshire was as temporary as any of those motel rooms. Just another stop along the way. But another part of me yearned, like my mother, to stay still, to land on this broad country earth and make a home, for once.

  MY MOTHER STILL had her lapses. Today was one of them. She had remembered what was missing, and there was no cheering her up. I had been trying to ignore her all afternoon, to lose myself in a book smeared with car grease, which I had found in the back of our van. She sat in the kitchen under a haze of gray smoke, trying to scrape the lettering off of the green Rolling Rock bottle with her fingernail, pausing only to rewind the Joan Armatrading tape at her side. She had been sitting like that for hours and had played the same song twenty times now—“Love and Affection”—rewinding without even stopping the tape, so that there was a sick, squealing sound of the song going backward. It was beginning to drive me crazy. I usually liked the song, but after the twentieth time it was too much. Finally I threw down my book on the couch and stomped into the kitchen. It was the expression on my mother’s face that made me stop in the doorway. I felt I had caught her in some clandestine act. The fading light outside threw butter-colored bars across the table. Her eyes rose from the bottle and settled on my face, but there was no spark of recognition, no reaction.

  “Mum?”

  She sighed, and looked back down at the bottle; the painted-on words weren’t coming off easily. She took a swig from the bottle. There were four empty ones lined up in front of her.

  “What are you doing in here, Mum?”

  During our first year on the run, there had been many nights when I would wake to her weeping over my body. It had been more regular then, more constant, this sadness that showed itself to me only in flashes now.

  She said to me in a whisper, “I wasn’t around for her to get her period. We split up before she could get it. I wasn’t there to show her what to do.”

  I too had wondered this: When had Cole finally gotten her period, and had Carmen been the one to show her what to do? Last time we all had been together, Cole had worried that she hadn’t gotten her period yet and all of her friends were getting theirs.

  I first got mine when we were living at Aurora. That evening my mother had been out on the fire escape, talking to Bernadette, telling her about her dead Jewish husband while they passed a bong back and forth. I stood in the first-floor bathroom and could hear them talking, their words floating across the night air and into the open window. My mother was telling Bernadette how her husband’s death freed her up for such braless jaunts. I stood alone in the group shower, trying to wash the stains out of my underwear while the showerheads around me seemed to stare one another down, ready for a cockfight. I watched as my own dark mess floated into the drain, and thought about Cole, wished she was there so I could tell her, so she could show me what to do. The blood was darker than I had expected, not the cartoonish crimson I had imagined it would be. After my shower, I folded toilet paper into my underpants, dressed, and went outside to break up the herbal rendezvous and tell my mother the news.

  My mother was staring at me, the corners of her mouth turned down in anguish. I had to get out of there. The house felt oppressively small all of a sudden.

  “I’m going out, Mum. For a ride.”

  I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. She showed no response. I grabbed my denim jacket and left.

  Outside, the sky was a wash of powdered pinks and purples, like one of my mother’s tie-dyed T-shirts—swirling shades of blue and purple illuminated by the lowering sun. The meadow was turning a sudden simple black. I made my way across the darkness to the barn.

  Mr. Pleasure snorted and rustled her tail in greeting. I put my nose to her flat brown one and kissed her long and hard. She smelled of hay and salt, and tried to lick my face as I saddled and bridled her the way Libby had taught me to. I had taken up Libby’s offer to use the horses and in the past few weeks had taken Mr. Pleasure for mild walks around the field in front of our house. My mother always watched from the porch, smoking and lazily reading a book. She told me she didn’t want me going off the property. I had been thrown once, which had left a big blue lump on my thigh, but I was getting better.

  I took Mr. Pleasure out for a canter around the meadow. She whinnied and stomped and galloped around, her breath coming out like white smoke in the darkening air.

  I let Mr. Pleasure take me into the forest, let her lead the way, as I sang loudly, way off-key, a Barry White song, trying to imitate his voice, just making up the words I couldn’t remember. “Oh, there are some things I can’t get used to, no matter how I try, yeah, baby. The more I give, the more you take, and baby, that’s no lie…”

  I hadn’t been able to listen to black music for a long time. The music they played at Aurora was mostly folk music, skinny white girls with bad attitudes and bad voices who always sounded to me like they were imitating black women. The only time I got to hear old soul music was when by chance it came on the car radio—and that wasn’t too often in the parts we were driving through. The few times it did, my mother would let the tuner linger, and we both would be quiet, not meeting each other’s eyes as we listened.

  The last time I saw Cole, she had been twelve, the same age I was now. She would be sixteen now. I tried to imagine her in Brazil. Did she have a boyfriend? Did she wear her hair differently? What did Brazilian teenagers dress like, talk like? I had dreamed about Cole just the other night. We were still young in the dream—she was around twelve, I was around eight, and she was pulling me into the ocean with her. I was scared. I kept looking back at the shore, where our parents sat, h
aving a picnic. My mother was still fat, and my father still had an afro, and they were fighting about something. I couldn’t hear the words they were saying, just the clipped angry tone of their conversation. They didn’t notice us going in. Cole was a better swimmer, and the water looked choppy, violent, and tumultuous. I kept telling Cole I didn’t want to go in, but she didn’t listen and pulled me along by the hand, laughing. She was wearing an aqua-green bathing suit, and her hair had tightened up into little curls from the moisture. I saw a wave growing in the distance up ahead, so big it created a shadow on the beach. Cole said, “Just ride it, Birdie. Don’t fight it.” I had woken up before the wave hit us.

  Now I was lost. Seriously lost. Mr. Pleasure had turned onto a trail I didn’t recognize. An overgrown trail. Branches stung me as they hit me in the face, and I wanted to turn back, but as hard as I pulled at Mr. Pleasure’s reins, she just kept moving. I was breaking my mother’s rules. Stay out of any trivial trouble or accidents that could lead to questions of the wrong sort. I knew I should have been frightened. But instead I felt strangely exhilarated to be lost in the forest. If I never found my way home, I thought, it wouldn’t be my fault.

  But then we were coming out of the forest, onto someone’s lawn, and there were bright lights from the house before me. It was the Marsh residence, and I was in their backyard, near the big porch that Mr. Marsh had built. Mr. Pleasure had taken the long route, a trail that hadn’t been used in a while, but she had known where she was going. Now, as I loosened the reigns, she grazed. There were barbecue supplies cluttering the porch, and from where we stood I could see through the sliding glass door to where the family moved in and out of sight, from living room to kitchen. The screen door was open, and I could hear their voices echoing out into the night.

  There was Libby, wearing a long denim skirt and a wool sweater. She had her hair piled up in a French bun and a highball in her hand and was saying, sardonically, in a nasal voice that reminded me of my mother’s family, “Christ, Walter, he did not steal our yellow roses. I cut them just this afternoon to bring to Mrs. Stuart for lunch. I think you owe that poor little man an apology.”