by Danzy Senna
He smelled like stale beer, and he playfully held me to him, saying to his friend, “Stu, this is Jesse. We go way back.” He gulped from his cup, then turned back to Stuart. I noticed that he had acne now, on his neck—little red bumps. But he was still thin and delicate. “Did you hear I got kicked out? For mooning the headmistress. She was a fucking bitch. I’ll tell you the whole story some other time.”
Stuart was laughing. “Dude, you’re a fuckin’ riot. That’s awesome. Well, it’s good to have you here, anyway. Fuck all those rich kids.”
Nicholas kind of grimaced and looked back at me. “So, Stu, my main man, what do you think of Jesse? She’s gonna be mine when she’s old enough.”
Stuart looked at me and smiled. “She looks old enough tonight.”
Nicholas pulled me into a tighter hug. “Maybe she is old enough. You think you’re old enough, Pocahontas?”
I wanted Stuart to leave us alone, and as if he could read my mind, he said, “Nick, dude, I’m gonna get some more beer. Want anything?”
Nicholas said, “Nah.”
When he was gone, Nicholas held me out in front of him, taking me in with his eyes, turning me around. “You look good—different.”
I wasn’t sure whether I saw disapproval in his eyes, so I said, “Yeah, Mona showed me how to do my makeup.”
He nodded and punched me lightly across the chin. “I hope you didn’t change too much.” He paused, then asked, “Want to go outside? Where it’s quieter? Onto the porch?”
“Okay.”
We went onto the porch, where a couple of kids stood smoking weed. Dennis’s house lay next to a forest, like the one near my house. Crickets screeched in unison over the rock music that wafted out from the party. I hugged myself and leaned against the railing, looking out at the vast darkness.
He pulled me close to him then, and I tipped my head up to his. The music that played now was “Centerfold” as I felt his tongue on my lips, his gentle mouth parting mine. Heard him say, “Relax, Jess,” as he stroked my arms.
Mona had said that when a boy kissed her the right way, she “creamed” her panties. Although Nicholas’s kissing techniques seemed fine, I still felt none of the cream that Mona had told me I would. Instead, I felt outside of myself, as if I hovered over the scene, staring down at these two bodies as their tongues darted toward, then away from, each other’s. I watched myself—this stranger with the brown feathered hair, the thick meeting eyebrows, the one who no longer wore a Star of David—and thought how impressively she kissed. It was Alexis who had taught me this. Afterward, Nicholas held me away from him and said, “I just want to look at you.” In a flash of anxiety I wondered what he saw—if he knew that my perky breasts were made of shoulder pads.
Mona’s voice broke into our moment.
“Jesse, I’ve been looking all over for you. I have to talk to you. Now.”
She teetered before me, holding a bottle of Budweiser in one hand, tapping a cigarette with the other.
Nicholas winked at me and said, “See you around,” then wandered off in the direction of the party.
I was annoyed by Mona’s interruption, but she seemed upset. She pulled me into a corner of the porch.
“She’s here,” she whispered to me, smelling of clove cigarettes and perfume.
“Who?”
“That fucking bitch, Samantha. That’s who. She’s here and she’s all over Matthew. You wouldn’t believe it. Someone said she was giving him a blow job in the bathroom. I think I’m going to puke.”
I wasn’t sure if she was serious, but I moved away from her. She did actually throw up then. I watched it shoot, projectile yellow fluid, into the bushes in front of us. A little of it splattered on my shoes. When she was through, I held her arm and led her through the party to Dennis’s bedroom.
On the way, I saw Samantha leaning against the wall in between Matthew and Dennis, while Michael rolled a joint near them on the couch. I could see why Mona was mad. Samantha looked good. She had let her hair loose for once, and it sat in black ringlets around her face. She wore a pink tank top that hugged her body, and a white denim miniskirt.
Dennis stood beside her, leering at her chest, his arm around her shoulder, running his finger up and down her arm. Samantha looked repulsed by him and seemed to be trying to pull away, toward Matthew, who was too busy chugging beers to notice.
In the bedroom, we shut the door, and Mona lay curled in a ball on the bed, sniffling into her hands. I sat on the bed, rubbing her shoulders. “It’s okay, she’s just easy. She’s a slut. That’s the only reason Matthew likes her.”
Mona sobbed even harder, drunker than I’d ever seen her. “I want to be easy. I don’t give a shit. I’d suck his cock. I think I love him.”
She went on like that for a while until finally she seemed to pass out. I sat listening to the laughter and shouting from the party outside.
After covering Mona with a ratty blanket, I left her snoring on the bed. My mission was to find Nicholas, to finish what we had started. I looked around the house. Dennis, Matthew, and Stuart were standing over a girl who appeared to be asleep on the couch. They were trying to peek up her skirt. But I didn’t see Nicholas. I didn’t know anyone else in the room. They all were older than me, and they seemed to move in slow motion, heavy, lumbering movements, looking through me, not at me, as I walked over bodies, shoved past couples who made out against walls.
I had to pee and found the bathroom at the back of the hallway. Inside, two girls with eyes black and blue with makeup, faces dripping with beer, sat on the floor side by side, like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, laughing hysterically to themselves.
“Can I use the bathroom?” I asked, feeling dizzy all of a sudden.
They only looked at me and laughed harder. One of them pointed at me and said, “Fresh meat.”
I stood outside the bathroom for a while, but they wouldn’t budge. Finally, the pressure in my bladder got the best of me and I decided to go into the woods to pee. I was usually afraid of the woods at night, but tonight, with the light and clamor of the party behind me, I felt safe shoving through the brambles and stumbling over the sticks. The air was clear and cold and felt good filling my lungs. I hummed a song to myself. It was one of my mother’s favorites. My voice sounded way off-key to me, drunk, and my body felt heavy, cumbersome, like someone else’s.
I reached a clearing in the trees and stopped, balancing myself with one hand on the rough bark next to me.
I saw her before she saw me, and I must have been quite drunk because she appeared as someone else, someone melancholy and sullen and fluent in Elemeno. She appeared as my sister under the broken swatches of sky, and she stood at a distance, just buttoning up her skirt when I came upon her. My foot crunched on a twig, and she turned, not seeing me for a moment, her face frightened and smeared with aging makeup.
“It’s just me,” I said into the space between us.
Samantha’s eyes adjusted to me, and she smiled slightly. “I thought you were a boy. You looked like a guy standing there in the shadows.”
It only struck me right then as strange that we had never spoken. She was kneeling now, rifling around in her cheap leather purse. “Those girls,” she said as she found a compact she had been looking for, “those girls aren’t letting anyone near the bathroom. So I guess we all have to use the woods. As our toilet, you know.” She laughed that same throaty, hollow laugh that she used with the boys. It was grating somehow, and I looked away. She was anxious around me. She knew I was one of them, that she had no friends outside of Nora and had better not try. She was putting on lipstick now, a light frosted pink that didn’t suit her complexion.
I watched her, thinking of the kids dancing in New York. I wondered if she had ever been anywhere like that, seen any world outside of this, where people like her, like us, were not exceptions to some rule.
I spoke my thoughts out loud without meaning to. “Have you ever been to New York?”
She looked at me quizz
ically. “No. I’d be too scared. My dad says there are all kinds of weirdos there. Perverts, you know.”
She put her purse over her shoulder and paused, waiting to see if I was going to talk more. “See you back there. Now I guess you can pee in peace.” She started to walk away.
I shouted “No!” louder than I had meant to. I was drunk, and that must have had something to do with it, but I couldn’t let her walk away so soon. I said in a softer voice, “I mean, could you wait while I pee? I’m kind of scared out here alone.”
Relief spread over her features. She seemed surprised to have me speaking to her like this. Nobody but Nora spoke to her like this. “Okay, sure. I mean, I won’t look.”
And she turned her back to me, staring into the woods. I thought it was a funny modest gesture as I leaned to squat, letting the pee go trickling from my body into the dark soft earth. When I was done, I stood up and she turned around.
I said, zipping up my jeans and trying to steady myself, “Samantha, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” she said, snapping on her gum in loud cracks.
I shivered. Suddenly, I wanted to go to her, to tell her who I was. I thought it might make her feel better to know she wasn’t the only one.
But instead I said, “What color do you think I am?”
She was silent, staring at me in a new light, it seemed, taking in my features one by one. I tried to look different, more serious, and thought the word “black” to myself, hoping through telepathy to transmit the correct answer to her.
Finally she smiled kind of sideways, as if she were trying not to laugh. “Nora said you were Jewish. I saw you wearing that star thing they all have to wear. Yeah, Jewish.” She repeated the words and they felt heavy, like drumbeats in my ears. Far off at the party I could hear them playing the Doors. Hello. I love you. Won’t you tell me your name?
“Why do you ask?” she said.
I looked away. “I’m not really Jewish. It’s a lie.” I said it slowly, hoping to gather some kind of courage as I spoke.
She laughed. “What do you mean?”
I paused. My mother’s words tickled my ears. Trust nobody. You are Jesse Goldman. Everybody is suspect.
“I mean,” I said, feeling a sinking weight of resignation in my chest, “I’m not Jewish. My mom’s not Jewish. She has to be Jewish for me to be Jewish, really, and she’s not.” As I said it, I wondered, for the first time, if the same was true with blackness. Did you have to have a black mother to be really black? There had been no black women involved in my conception. Cole’s either. Maybe that made us frauds.
Samantha looked bored now, like she wanted to get back to the party.
She said, “Well, you want to start back?”
We walked, our feet crunching in unison as we made our way toward the loud burst of adolescent fever and debauchery. It had begun to drizzle softly, like a veil brushing my skin. I could hear the moisture touching the leaves of the forest; it made a mild hissing sound. Samantha held her hands over her hair so that it wouldn’t get wet.
Just as we reached the lawn before the house, I pulled her to a stop and said, “One more question.”
She looked impatient now. She didn’t want to be popular this badly. “What?”
“What color are you?”
There was a prolonged silence, then she smiled sideways the way she had in the woods. She said so softly that I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right: “I’m black. Like you.”
A hoot of male laughter and a feminine squeal that sounded like Mona belted out at us from the house. “Fuckin’ A, Dennis! Get off of me!”
Samantha glanced longingly back toward the house, the source of the shrieks, the windows, which glowed yellow, revealing the hunched silhouettes of wanton bodies. It had begun to rain harder, and the hissing of the woods had turned to more of a slapping sound.
Her face glowed wetly, and her makeup seemed to run in little rivulets of paint down her skin. Her curls had tightened up from the moisture, making her hair appear shorter than it was. “So, are you coming inside with me, or what?”
I must have said no, because she shrugged, then walked away from me toward the party and the people, nearly slipping on the wet grass in her flat white shoes.
I WALKED THE TREK from Dennis’s with my head bowed down to the asphalt, as if the only thing that mattered was that my feet kept moving, not where they led. It must have been about three miles, and by the time I reached my house, I was drenched.
Inside, a heavy silence filled the house. I crept up the creaking stairs to my mother’s bedroom at the top, and stood outside her door. I felt a sob rising to my chest. I wanted to sleep with her in the big bed once again. I wanted her to be my mother right then, the mother she had been—heavy, angry, buck-wild, and dangerous. During our first year on the run, back when everything still seemed temporary, she used to tell me stories about the years I didn’t remember—the years when Cole and I spoke Elemeno and my grandmother thought we were possessed. My mother used to describe those days to me in great detail, how Cole and I had walked in that goose step, me four steps behind Cole, our lips moving in incomprehensible babble. And she would recount the years when she and my father were so in love that their friends stopped coming over (it was boring, they told my parents, to be around two people so intensely focused on only each other).
She hadn’t told me any of these tales in years, since we arrived at Aurora, really, when her silence began to set in. I wanted those stories. I wanted her to remind me of who I had been, who we had been. I opened her door.
Moonlight fell through the curtains, illuminating her bed. The duvet shone blue in the light. She lay with her blond locks spread around her face. She had stopped using henna, had let her hair go back to natural, a sure sign that the real danger had passed, even if she wouldn’t admit it. Beside her was Jim, his big brawny arm thrown over her chest with the force of possession, his snore coming out clear and daunting. His back and shoulders were covered with gray hair.
I shifted, and the floorboard creaked. My mother grumbled something and flopped onto her other side. I waited to hear if she’d say anything else, but she was silent.
I watched them for a moment longer and felt that power one feels at being the only one awake in a room of sleeping bodies. I felt sorry for them. Then I left the room, closing the door softly behind me.
I packed the essentials—my box of negrobilia, a few pairs of underwear, a photograph of me and my mother during our first month in New Hampshire, when we still slept together, wrapped around each other like twin sisters. I took the Star of David as well, though I wasn’t sure why. Downstairs in the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed as I shuffled around in our “emergency” drawer with trembling hands, looking for cash. I found it and stuffed it in my pocket.
Outside, I went to the stable. I woke Mr. Pleasure with a kiss to her velvety nose. I stood there for a while, inhaling her skin and fur, hugging her thickness and warmth to me. I don’t remember if I cried. Just that I trembled all over. I left in the darkness, walking in long heavy strides. The invisible crickets and the mysterious electric hum of the forest made a kind of symphony in the night air. It struck me how clear the world was in the hour before dusk, how bright that last darkness was. I had left at this hour so many times before, trailing behind my mother, awed by how private that time was between us, intimate as a dream we had entered together as we moved forward on endless roads, side by side, silent and sleepy-eyed, in the cold drafty van. Now I felt a bit like her, taking to the road this way.
When I reached the center of town, all the shops were closed, the gratings pulled down, the streets bare, seeming slightly apocalyptic in their abandonment. Bing Bros. Guns ‘n’ Stuff, where I had shoplifted with Mona one morning, stolen a Swiss Army jackknife because it was the only thing not under glass. The billboard of the giant apple, the bite revealing an off-white pulp. The trails that wound around the edge of town, where Nicholas had taken me riding. Hans’s Toy Shop and Do
ll Hospital, where I had seen dolls on a gurney. Those landmarks had looked so strange to me once, when we’d first arrived. Now each of them housed a memory.
There was a faint sound of laughter up ahead, and I thought I was imagining things for a moment, but around the bend, several cars were parked in front of the bar. The same bar where my mother had first spoken to Jim that night when Kenny Rogers played like a soundtrack to his pass. I missed the girl I had been then, so dirty and misfit and off-kilter. A girl raised by wolves.
As I got nearer to the bar, I passed a parked Suburban. Inside, I could just make out the shape of two bodies moving. One of the faces—the woman’s—looked up long enough to notice me. I paused. Her face was familiar, and I blinked at it, trying to put together the features behind the glass. It was Mona’s mother. Beside her, the bulbous red face of Gus, the bartender. Both of their expressions were completely blank, rubbed clean from the friction of flesh against flesh. I swayed before them, listening to the rock music that pounded out from the heavy red door.
Mona’s mother turned back to Gus as if she hadn’t seen me at all, and I moved forward, thinking of Nicholas and Mona, about Samantha and Nora. I suspected I would never see them again, and a shudder of grief passed through me. I wondered if my mother had felt that way leaving Bernadette and the rest of the women behind at Aurora. Or when she left Boston that morning in the dim dawn air, knowing she wouldn’t see her mother, her child, her husband, for many years to come, if ever. I wondered, as I passed the clear abandoned lake—silver, still, silent—if I too would forever be fleeing in the dark, abandoning parts of myself that I no longer wanted, in search of some part that had escaped me. Killing one girl in order to let the other one free. It hurt, this killing, more than I thought it would, but I kept walking, repeating a pattern of words under my breath, words that I no longer understood but whispered just the same. kublica marentha doba. lasa mel kin.