by Danzy Senna
A photograph of my parents. The old-fashioned kind, sepia-toned, with a scalloped edge. It must have been the year she met him, when he was a graduate student at Harvard and she was reading Camus. In the photo, they are standing on some steps in front of a marble statue. My father wears an old-mannish tweed coat, and stands behind my mother, his arms wrapped around her waist, his head resting on her shoulder. They both are smiling. But their smiles are tight, frozen, fierce, as if they are clenching their teeth, as if they are biting into something soft and slippery, and their eyes—grasping, solemn, despite the smiles—seem to search the invisible photographer, as if looking for solutions in his lens. I felt sad looking at them. It seemed that the threat was already there, pressing in on them from the outside.
The next photograph was of my sister and my mother. It was taken while my mother was pregnant with me, when my sister was only three and wore her hair held in two afro puffs, with a zigzag part down the middle—my mother’s sloppy invention. My mother is holding her on her lap, and the two of them are reading a book together—I couldn’t read the cover, but could tell it was Stuart Little, my sister’s favorite all throughout her childhood, the one she couldn’t get enough of. And my mother—so young, still chubby, her hair in pigtails and wearing a psychedelic-print minidress, me still an invisible lump buried in her flesh—is pointing at the page in front of them, while my sister’s head lolls against her chest. Cole has her thumb stuck in her mouth, and her eyes are lazily focused on the story before her, and she seems utterly content. Behind them you can just make out the corner of a poster—one that hung on our living room wall, opposite the Cotton Mather print—a poster of a black child’s afroed silhouette, the words “Not Yet Uhuru” above the face. When I was little, I thought the child looked hungry and imagined that Uhuru must mean “dinnertime” in another language.
Looking at those photographs, I remembered how my parents had never said “I love you” to each other. How they had said only “I miss you.” At the time, I hadn’t been able to figure out what this meant. But now it seemed clear: this was how they defined their love—by how deeply they missed each other when they were together. They felt the loss before it happened, and their love was defined by that loss. They hungered even as they ate, thirsted even as they drank. My mother once told me to live my life as if I were already dead. “Live each day as if you know it’s gonna be gone tomorrow,” she had said. That was how my parents loved each other, with a desperate, melancholy love, a fierce nostalgia for the present.
There was something stuck in the middle of the book, like a bookmark, but bigger. I opened to it. A postcard. Of somewhere familiar. The silver slab of the John Hancock building against a bright blue sky. The word “Boston” emblazoned beneath it. Tiny pedestrians in bright coats could be seen milling around at the bottom like M & M’s. I turned the card over, expecting to see my father’s handwriting, sharp and tiny. Instead, it was big loopy letters, female script, that went across the entire postcard, leaving no room for an address or stamp.
S: I don’t know if this will reach you, but I am giving it to someone who swears they can get it to you. I am back in America. So much to tell you. So much has changed. Are you okay? Alive? Is B with you? Boston is deserted, not a family member in sight. Everyone has disappeared, including my brother. Somehow, send word. 46 Montgomery Street. Apt 2. Love and blessings, Dot.
I didn’t breathe for the whole time that I looked at the postcard. There was no postmark, so I didn’t know where it had come from, when it had come. The fact that she hadn’t mentioned it to me made me cold. Suspicious. It reminded me of the day we left Boston, when she had lied to me, telling me that my father and sister had never been there when in fact they had. I stuck the card in my back pocket, placed the photographs carefully back where they had come from, into the duffel bag, and shut the closet door. I could hear the front door opening downstairs, my mother calling out my name. I hastily made my way back to my bedroom and closed and locked the door behind me. I put Dot’s card into my box of negrobilia and tucked it into my closet. Afterward, I lay with my face down on the bed, biting into the pillow as hard as I could, till my teeth were sore.
The next morning, when my mother and Jim had gone into town to buy some food for brunch, I sat at the edge of the couch, my hands trembling, as I called Boston information.
“What city?”
Her accent was thickly Boston. Working class. Nasal. I had a brief fear that she had been expecting my call. That she had a picture of me and my mother on the wall beside her, with the word “Wanted” across the top. Maybe the whole city of Boston was out to get us. But I forced myself to speak.
“Boston.”
“What name?”
“Dot. Dot Lee.”
“Address?”
“Forty-six Montgomery.”
Clicking sounds as she entered the information. Then a sigh. “No listing. No such person. Is that all?”
I didn’t say anything. Just hung up in her face.
THERE WAS A TIME when I told my mother everything. But the postcard was the end of all that. It seemed there was nothing more to say between us. I began to watch her with a distant suspicion. Jim was no longer the focus of my investigation. My mother was the betrayer, had withheld vital information from me—information that might help us find Cole and my father.
She tried talking to me, but I was sullen, hostile even. She told Jim I was just going through puberty, but I think even she knew it was more than that.
Mona was my way out of the house, out of my mother’s world, and I became her shadow over the next few months. Jim liked to say we were connected at the hip. Around school, we were known as the awesome twosome. But it was a strangely cold friendship on my part. There was none of the intimacy that there had been between me and Alexis. Around Mona, I was usually performing, trying to impress her, but never letting her in. From the outside, it must have looked like I was changing into one of those New Hampshire girls. I talked the talk, walked the walk, swayed my hips to the sound of heavy metal, learned to wear blue eyeliner and frosted lipstick and snap my gum. And when I heard those inevitable words come out of Mona’s mouth, Mona’s mother’s mouth, Dennis’s mouth—nigga, spic, fuckin’ darkie—I only looked away into the distance, my features tensing slightly, sometimes a little laugh escaping. Strange as it may sound, there was a safety in this pantomime. The less I behaved like myself, the more I could believe that this was still a game. That my real self—Birdie Lee—was safely hidden beneath my beige flesh, and that when the right moment came, I would reveal her, preserved, frozen solid in the moment in which I had left her.
JIM FINISHED INSTALLING the skylight sometime in November. My mother wanted to celebrate Jim’s work-well-done with a ten-dollar bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and a spinach and cheese quiche Lorraine—her specialty. She said we would have an indoor picnic underneath the skylight.
Jim came to my room to ask Mona and me to go food shopping with him and my mother. Mona and I were lolling on my floor side by side, lazily flipping through Archie comics and popping huge Bubble Yum bubbles. Mona said she was Betty, the blond, and I was Veronica, the dark-haired rich girl. She thought I was rich because I lived on the Marsh land.
“You gals want to join us?” Jim said, leaning against the doorjamb, a dish towel looped through his belt.
“Nah, we’ll just stay here,” I told Jim.
He frowned and crossed his arms. “No, young ladies. I don’t think you will. We’re gonna need help carrying bags. Now move your tushies.”
Mona giggled and stood up. She liked hanging out with Jim and my mother, watching them kiss in public. I glared at Jim but followed him downstairs.
As we drove to town, my mother and Jim sat in the front, singing along to a song—Take this job and shove it, I ain’t workin’ here no more—while Mona and I lay in the back of the van amid spilled tools. Mona was telling me a story about Dennis, how he had been arrested the week before for drunk driving and how s
he and her mother had to drive to the police station in the next town over to pick him up. “My mom was ripshit. Ohmigod. You should have seen her.”
The grocery store was crowded with Saturday shoppers, and Mona and I walked together, leaning in toward each other conspiratorially. My mother had relented and had finally taken me shopping for new clothes. I wore Nikes, Jordache jeans, and a fluffy pink angora sweater with silver sparkles sewn in. Mona’s mother had cut my hair into layers so that it feathered around my face.
The women who milled around us wore housedresses with bright floral prints. I stared hungrily into their shopping carts as they walked past me, stared at the lumps of ground beef and the Kool-Aid and the boxes of powdered mashed potatoes—food my mother never let me eat anymore, food that seemed exotic somehow in its trashiness. Ahead of me, my mother wore a Guatemalan smock and silver cowboy boots, and her copper hair in two braids like an Indian princess. Just the week before she had finally given her hair another henna. I had helped put the green clay on her head. Jim had come over in the middle of our beauty shop, and had been surprised to find that my mother wasn’t a real redhead. I was worried, but my mother had simply laughed and said he would have found out one way or another.
The women who passed by my mother whispered to one another, checked her out with clear disdain, and I felt my face burn at her visibility. She held Jim’s hand and laughed loudly, girlishly, slapping him on his butt. She was as oblivious as she had ever been to the stares she got. Mona stared up at them dreamily. She thought it was romantic.
I was standing in front of the cereal rack when I heard Mona whisper in my ear, “Uh-oh. It’s Wilona. Clear the deck.” At the very same moment, I heard the crack of broken glass and a gasp. I looked up. A few feet ahead of us, my mother had dropped a jar of jam, and it lay at her feet, a splatter of purple lumps. She stood still as stone, staring at the vision walking toward her.
Samantha Taper and her mother. My mother had never laid eyes on either of them before this moment. I knew I should have told her about them, but I hadn’t.
Samantha’s mother was petite and blond, her flaxen hair cut into a blunt bob that swung around her pointy face. She was dressed in a gray tweed coat and a cornflower-blue scarf. She looked like the kind of mother I had fantasized about—a pretty, quiet, TV mom who wouldn’t draw the eyes of strangers so readily.
Samantha walked beside her, her hand resting on the cart as if it needed extra guidance, her eyes averted nervously from Mona and me, the way losers learned to do at our school.
It struck me, looking at her now under the bright lights of the supermarket, that she was on the verge of being beautiful, something I had missed before, as she worked so hard to hide it in dark colors, ashy skin, and baby fat. She wore an old ratty down coat with a faux-fur collar, and sneakers on her feet, her hair confused, the way Cole’s used to be before she went to the Nkrumah School, before Carmen got her hands on it. But still, the potential for beauty shone through.
My mother stood before them, frozen and pallid, her hands by her sides in a helpless gesture as she watched Samantha and her mother strolling in our direction, lingering over the boxes of cereal. Jim was on his knees, cleaning up the raspberry jelly with a handkerchief, looking up from the mess in bewilderment. “Sheila, Sheila, what is it?”
Other women around us had turned to stare, and I saw on their faces some twisted pleasure. Seeing my mother this way had confirmed something for them. Made them feel safe. Assured them that things were as they appeared.
Mona said, “What’s up with your mom? She’s freaking.”
I wasn’t embarrassed. More frightened that she was about to blow our cover. That she was about to make the mistake that would give it all away. I should have warned her about Samantha. Shouldn’t have let her find out this way.
My mother glanced around, seeming to have forgotten where she was, what store, town, city, or state she was in. She turned to me and blinked. “Birdie?”
She hadn’t used my name in more than two years. In the beginning she used to slip up regularly, but she’d fought hard to learn Jesse and eventually the name Birdie had disappeared.
I felt Jim’s and Mona’s eyes on us, and I came to her side, saying, “It’s me, Mum. Me, Jesse,” as I touched her arm gently. My heart was hammering in my chest. Jim stood up beside us. He touched my mother’s shoulder. “Who’s Birdie? What is it, babe? You okay?”
She was looking at Samantha and her mother, who were nearly beside us, arguing over some potato chips Samantha wanted to get.
“They’re no good, Sammy. Put ‘em back. I already got some corn chips.”
My mother looked away from them, her cheeks pinkening as she seemed to realize that she had been staring. She turned to Jim and gazed at him as if he were a stranger on the street. Then she sauntered down the aisle ahead of us just like nothing had happened.
Jim turned to me. “Any clue, Jess?”
I gnawed at my fingernails. “I don’t know. She gets like that sometimes. Must be getting the curse.” Then I dashed forward after her, leaving Mona and Jim behind.
My mother didn’t speak until we were outside, loading groceries into the back of the van. When she turned to get a bag from me, she looked spooked, pale, and fragile, like one of the dolls at Hans’s Toy Shop and Doll Hospital, as she said, “Is that girl in your school?”
I shrugged. “Yeah. She’s adopted.”
Mona stood beside me, ripping into a chocolate bar. She piped in, “You mean Samantha? She moved here last year. Everybody hates her.”
Jim was busily opening a jar of peanuts and digging his hand into it. “Jeez, I’m famished. You know, Sheila, it might be hunger that’s got you so dizzy.”
My mother ignored him and narrowed her gaze at me. “Why didn’t you say hello to her?”
I shrugged again. “Like Mona said, she’s a loser. Everybody hates her. Nobody speaks to her except the school genius, Nora, and she’s a loser too.”
I avoided my mother’s glare, looking toward the electric poles and trees in the distance. I could see that her arm was shaking from the weight of the groceries. Jim was smacking away at his peanuts, and Mona was teasing her hair and gazing at her reflection in the van’s window.
My mother’s voice sounded thick as she said, “A loser? Jesse Goldman, I never thought I’d hear you talk about another human being in such terms. What the fuck have I been trying to teach you all these years? That girl is no different from you. Do you hear me?”
“You mean we’re both black?” It had come out before I could stop it.
My mother breathed in sharply, and we stared at each other.
I heard Mona beginning to giggle. She had her hand over her mouth and was trying to stifle her laughter. She said, “Sorry, Mrs. Goldman. It’s just what Jesse said. It’s kinda funny.”
I looked at Jim. He appeared confused and was looking back and forth between my mother and me, wiping the salt and peanut grease from his lips.
My mother put her hand to her temple, as if to stop a migraine. Then she began to giggle as well, loudly, in a way that made even Mona’s smile disappear.
sit and spin
I had dreamed it once before. That I woke to the sound of Stevie Wonder playing faintly from the driveway. When I went to the window, I saw a flash of rust-colored chrome from between the trees. The same color as my father’s Volvo. I tore down the steps, nearly knocking Jim down the stairs, and out into the yard. I was still in my pajamas, and it was cold outside, frosty, not yet spring. Icy grass crunched under my bare feet. When I came to the driveway, an orange Volvo was parked behind Jim’s Buick, and a girl who looked a little like my sister sat in the passenger seat, wearing sunglasses and an African head wrap. She was nodding her head to the music. The hood to the Volvo was open, and a man stood with his head bent into the engine, fiddling. I called to them—“Yoohoo!”—but they didn’t seem to hear me over the music. Finally I barked loudly, “Papa!” The man pulled his head out from under t
he hood and looked up at me, squinting in the morning light. It was someone else. Someone I knew. But not my father. A red-haired man with skin the color of burnt sienna. He smiled and said, “Hey there, little girl. Bet you thought we weren’t coming for you.” When I looked back at the passenger seat, the girl I thought was my sister had taken off her sunglasses and was staring at me. She was no one I knew. She was deformed. Her face was swollen and pink, and there was a deep scar running jagged down the middle, making her face look like an overripe fruit that had been split, then stuck roughly back together. I wanted to run away, but couldn’t move.
When I woke from the dream, my sheets were soaked and my face was wet. It was still dark. I hugged my knees to my chest and sobbed dryly now. When I had a nightmare, when I was little, my sister would sometimes wake before I did, as if she could hear danger coming from inside my head. She would push me gently, saying, “Birdie, wake up. It’s only a dream.”
My room looked strange in the darkness—the Bruce Springsteen poster over my desk, the horse calendar by the window, the makeup and perfume and blow-dryer cluttering the top of the dresser—the objects suddenly unfamiliar, like props. I slipped out of bed and fetched the box of negrobilia from the top of my closet. I brought it downstairs to the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. Jim liked gourmet coffee from Kenya and brought some back each week from Boston. He got it at some café on Newbury Street. My father had preferred Dunkin’ Donuts brand and always drove with a cup in one hand, the other hand on the steering wheel. He had mastered this balancing act so that no matter how quickly he stepped on the brakes, the cup of coffee didn’t spill. I used to watch him, holding my breath, waiting for the burn that never came.