Zora and Nicky: A Novel in Black and White

by Claudia Mair Burney

  “You left?!”

  “Yeah. Awful isn’t it?”

  I can’t believe how in sync we are. How in the freakin’ world?! “You left this past Sunday, in the middle of your dad’s sermon?”

  “I did.”

  “You said it suddenly became unbearable?”

  “Yeah. I couldn’t stand it, Nicky. Not for another minute.”

  I put my elbows on the table. I lean so close to the table I almost knock my water over. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know now. I got sick of it. Sick of me. I feel like I don’t know anything now.”

  “I’m so with you. You have no idea.”

  This time she reaches across the table and takes my hand, and I’ve rarely felt so needy. She holds it for a long time.

  God, is it possible that somebody in this world can understand me?

  “Miles isn’t going to like this Zora Zekora.”

  “Neither is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

  But she keeps holding anyway. Then she gets an idea. She lets me go, which I don’t like, and she stands up.

  “Where you going?”

  “Just wait.”

  She glides away in her white dress and I can’t take my eyes off her. I feel guilty. I don’t feel the things I feel with Zora when I’m around Rebecca. Oh, I feel some pleasure watching Rebecca walk to and away from me. But Rebecca doesn’t tick me off. She doesn’t mystify me. She doesn’t make me wildly happy or bring me to the brink of tears all in the space of a few minutes. Rebecca doesn’t peer effortlessly into my soul. And when she takes my hand in hers, I don’t feel like I’d want to go on a little bit longer just because of it.

  Zora comes back with a paper placemat and a pencil in her hand.

  “What are you doing? You’re not going to make me write you something are you?”

  “Not yet, but you should prepare yourself. I’m demanding.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I’m going to sketch you.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Really. Now just get comfortable.” She sits down and right away gets going.

  “Do I have to stop talking?”

  “No, I’m actually good. But you can’t look down at it. I want your eyes looking somewhere else.”

  “Can you keep talking?”

  “I’m talking aren’t I?”

  “So can I bombard you with questions?”

  “Ask away.”

  I ask her silly things like what her favorite color was in the first grade. Who her first crush was.

  She asks me to tell her about my first kiss.

  “That’s off limits. Tell me about yours.”

  “Off limits.”

  “Fair enough.”

  She asks me about the things I wrote about in California. I end up yakking about mountains and what it’s like to stand at the ocean and not see an end to the water on the horizon. I tell her about sand dollars and my hair turning blonder, and she smiles at me when I say that. Then I tell her about Lake Superior when we used to go away for the summer. Back when I was innocent.

  It takes her a long time to sketch my portrait, but I have a lot of Lake Superior stories to fill up the time. Finally she’s finished, but she doesn’t hold it out to me.

  I reach for it.

  “No,” she says.

  “Let me see it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not? You made me sit here boring you to death for what, a half hour? And now you won’t let me see?”

  “Nicky, I haven’t worked in a long time, either. It’s been a year for me.”

  “I won’t judge it. I promise. I just want to see it.”

  She gazes at me with her doe eyes, and I can tell I’m going to have to pry it out of her grip. I try to do so with kind words.

  “I’ll bet it’s lovely. I’ll bet it’s earthy and wild, like you.”

  “You’re the one who’s wild.”

  “Nah. I’m as tame as they come. I’ll bet it’s as phenomenal as the woman who sketched it. Do you know that poem by Maya Angelou, Phenomenal Woman?”

  She laughs. “Do you know it, white boy?”

  “I don’t have it memorized, but I read it in college. You’d be surprised at the subversive literature I’ve read just to tick my father off.”

  “I guess I would be. What about Phenomenal Woman?”

  “You gotta know that’s what you are. So, give up the sketch, Dreamy.”

  And she does. It’s a striking likeness of me, but it’s not me now. I mean, it’s me, but it’s a different me. She finds the me who’s twelve years old. Nicky full of innocence and freedom. Nicky with Lake Superior sand between my toes, and the freshest lake water in this whole freakin’ country glistening on my skin. Oh, she doesn’t sketch all of that. Just my face. My hair in need of a hair cut. This cocky “It’s all here; everything I need is in me” expression on my face. She finds everything pristine and good in me, and it’s right there in my eyes, staring back at me. I haven’t seen that Nicky in so long, tears come to my eyes.

  I shove the sketch back at her. “Doesn’t look like me.”

  Her mouth opens, but she doesn’t say anything.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Nicky, are you o—”

  “I said let’s go.”

  She stands up, and I’m surprised she doesn’t protest. I want her to protest so we can fight, but she doesn’t. She just goes along.

  We get into my truck, and neither of us breaches the silence stretched between us. I want to tell her I’m sorry, but she’s exposed my soft center, and I can’t stand it. I’m glad I didn’t take her far from home. Only fifteen minutes of discomfort before we say good-bye.

  I pull up to her apartment, and she says, “I’ll let myself out.”

  “That’s not necessary. Wouldn’t want you to go around saying white boys don’t open the door for you.”

  She doesn’t take the bait. I open the door for her, and she steps out, but I can tell I’ve hurt her feelings, and not just with that comment. But I don’t know how to take it back.

  I walk with her to her apartment door, and she has to buzz several apartments before someone buzzes her in, which reminds me …

  “How are you going to get into the apartment?”

  “I’ll ask the super to let me in.”

  “Will they charge you?”

  “Probably, but I can probably get them to give me another key. For a price, of course.”

  “Do you need some money?”

  “I’m not going to take anything else from you, Nicky. Thanks for everything, but this is it for us.”

  I just nod. I think she’s right.

  Then the craziest thing happens. Something literally falls out of the sky. An earring. And it lands at her feet.

  We both look up. I start laughing because it’s so freakin’ weird.

  “Maybe it fell from somebody’s balcony,” she says.

  I pick it up. A circle of gold. Absolutely perfect. Smaller than the silver pair Zora is wearing. Thicker in width. Beautiful. I decide to give her a final offering. Why not? It literally fell at her feet anyway. “For you, the dreamy rascal.”

  She refuses it. “No, thank you. I think you’ve given me quite enough. Besides. What am I supposed to do with one earring?”

  I don’t know, but I’ve got the weirdest feeling she’s supposed to do something with it. It feels surreal and absurd, but what she says next sobers me. “I don’t want to see you again.”

  “Okay.”

  “Bye, Nicky.”

  “Bye, Zora.”

  I thought that was my last offering to her, but when I get home, I’m thinking in poetry. Can’t write my name most days but she pulls a poem out of me in a single afternoon. I even get enough courage to scrawl it down on a piece of paper. Maybe I’ll mail it to her.

  An earring falls, From lowly Jesus’ ear. we find this treasure full of holy whispers. Listen. Love is whispering secrets in this sad and silly poem.


  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ZORA

  I should have taken the earring, just to feel him put it in my hand. Let his magic fingers graze my palm. That would have meant our time together wouldn’t have ended like it did, and I would have had something of him to keep. A simple touch. His fingers brushing mine. Now I feel stupid because I’m longing for him, and I don’t have the earring, or the memory of his touch—anything, much less the drawing.

  What a fool I’ve been. I let that white boy get to me. He played me the whole time. I thought his friend had the jungle fever, but it was him. Have a little fun with the natives. I almost let him kiss me. My first kiss would have been from a white boy who wanted to see what it’s like to take a walk on the wild side.

  I thought about what he said, Zora Zekora sounds like a Lion King character. Never mind it’s true. What gives him the right to say something so racist?

  I didn’t feel like it was racist when he said it. I just thought it was funny then. And now, I don’t know. That’s why I stick to my own kind. White people have a way of being racist in ways they don’t even realize. And I have a way of knowing it. Sorry, Dr. King. Sorry, Rosa Parks. Integration didn’t do what you thought it would. There’s a lot to be said about voluntary segregation.

  I wander inside of my building, feeling hurt as thick and palpable as fog hovering around me.

  Don’t you cry, girl. What’s so disappointing? Once again you’ve been proven right? That’s why you stay away from them. It’s simpler that way. You don’t have to explain anything. Your hair, for instance. Why you use a flat iron to straighten your hair. Why your hair products are different. Why you hate it when white people say nappy. Let them try being four hundred years in a strange land without the right kind of comb. Before a Madame C. J. Walker came along to tell us how to look more like them. Let’s see what they’d look like if we took their stuff.

  Man. I gotta stop thinking like this.

  The supervisor isn’t in the maintenance office. He isn’t in the rental office. Where the heck is he? Of course it’s Friday evening; people disappear like the Rapture took place. I miss the convenience of my cell phone.

  My mind goes right back to my blacks-only tirade, but I know racism is not what’s bothering me at all. I felt like we were beginning to enjoy each other. Every race thing I threw at him, he took. I went out of my way to call him “white boy,” and he dealt with it just fine. But he takes one look at my work and blam—a wall goes up. And it’s worse than with Miles. At least Miles thought my work was nice. Not good obviously, but nice enough to make a hobbyist out of me.

  I think again about that earring Nicky held out to me. A perfect circle, and he offered it to me. Sometimes I wonder if signs and wonders don’t follow us. Not big miraculous ones, but little ordinary wonders, if we only have eyes to see them. A golden circle falls from the sky at the end of a miserable day. Why did he offer it to me, even after what happened? Did he think it was as beautiful as I did?

  Why did it fall at that moment? What could it mean?

  Maybe it’s some sign for us to hang on to the good from the day. There was some good. There was him playing in my hair.

  Was that good? He called me Dreamy. Or was that just a line? I don’t know.

  I finally go back to my apartment. All I can do is wait for MacKenzie. I sit with my back against the door until I fall asleep.

  It’s Linda and Billie from Bible study who wake me up instead of Mac.

  I rub the sleep from my eyes.

  “Linda? Billie?”

  Linda greets me with her smile, her red hair all wild over her head. Billie winks at me. “Hey, baby.” They’ve come bearing their own gifts. Bags and bags of them.

  I clear my throat, but I still end up croaking out, “What time is it?”

  Billie glances at her watch. “It’s almost ten. Sorry it took us so long. We had to kick Nicky’s butt.”

  I smile, though I try hard not to. “Why did you have to kick his butt?”

  “He told us how the day went. Did he really try to kiss you?”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  Linda, the gentle, looks annoyed. “All I asked him to do was bring you some clothes.”

  “You sent, Nicky. That’s all I gotta say,” Billie quips.

  She helps me up. “We would have come ourselves. Some things are woman to woman, but Linda and I couldn’t get away, and we didn’t want to send someone you didn’t know at all.”

  “He was really sweet sometimes.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet he was. You couldn’t get inside?”

  “No. I didn’t see the super, and my roommate must not have come in.”

  “Let me have a look.” Billie steps over to my door and digs through her massive leather hobo bag. She finally exhumes a sharp instrument of dubious origin and proceeds to successfully pick my lock.

  The whole thing cracks me up. “Billie, you got skills.”

  “You don’t want to know, baby.”

  We take the bags into my apartment. Billie whistles. “He really cleaned the joint out, didn’t he?”

  “He let my roommate Mac keep her stuff. It was packed up. She’s going to design school tomorrow. Maybe that was a no-brainer for him.”

  Billie shakes her head. “What a gentleman.”

  Linda shoots a look at her.

  She shrugs. “Sorry.” She doesn’t mean it. “So, was he awful?”

  “My daddy?”

  Billie laughs. “Sorry, baby. My transitions can be rocky. No, was Nicky awful?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll bet he was.”

  “And sometimes, he wasn’t.”

  She seemed to understand. “I’ll bet he wasn’t.” Billie looks at me. I don’t know what she’s been though with her wild tattoos and crazy platinum rainbow-tipped dreads, but she looks like she knows a few things.

  “He’s young,” she says. “There are a lot of things I can say about Nicky Parker, but I can tell you this: he’s a doll, baby. He really doesn’t mean any harm. That’s why we opened up a can on him.”

  Linda adds, “That’s enough about Nicky. I promise you that won’t happen again. Zora, we were honored that you came to join us Wednesday. We’d like for you to come back. We’ll keep Nicky in line.”

  Oh, no. They’ve put me on the spot.

  “I appreciate all that you’ve done for me, Linda, but I wasn’t planning on coming back.”

  “Why not? It seemed like the Lord really met you there.”

  Billie starts taking stuff out of the bags. They’ve got all kinds of food and necessities for me. A few gift certificates from Meijer. I can’t believe their generosity.

  “God did meet me, Linda, I just don’t know if your Bible study is right for me.”

  “Why not?”

  I don’t want to tell them it’s because I’m the only black person, because honestly, did that make a difference? Did God withhold His blessings from me because four white people were in the room with me? Not at all.

  Billie takes my hand in hers. “Tell us how you’re feeling, Zora. We can take it.”

  I didn’t know if I could take saying it. “You’ve been very kind to me. I know you don’t know me from Adam, and you’ve brought me necessities and groceries.”

  “This isn’t all,” Billie says. “I run a house of hospitality for homeless women. I don’t have new clothes, but we’ve got some really nice used clothes. You’re welcome to come by and get whatever you need.”

  “Nicky got me a few things for now. I don’t feel right about asking for anything else.”

  “You didn’t ask, baby. You shouldn’t have to.”

  I can hardly find my voice because I want to cry so much. “Thank you.”

  “Come back. Nicky just has a crush you. He’s a little stupid, but it’ll pass.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Linda takes my other hand. “You need some friends, and despite his failures today, he tried to be that, too.”

  “We were h
aving a great day, and then he just shut down.”

  “He didn’t tell us that,” Linda says.

  “And that’s telling,” Billie says. “Maybe you touched a nerve. I don’t know, baby. I just know none of us are finished with you. At least we don’t want to be. I know it looks like you don’t know who to trust right now, but let the fruit tell you what kind of tree you got.”

  I thought about what she and Linda said. Daddy has a church of thousands of members, but not one has come to help me, not even Miles. I can’t even say they probably don’t know, because news spreads like wildfire at LLCC. And here I am flanked by two crazy white women. Didn’t the Scriptures say “By their fruit you shall know them”? Just like Billie said?

  “Maybe I’ll come back. I don’t know how the rest of the week is going to go.”

  They give me a group hug and let me go.

  “You won’t regret it. I promise you,” Billie says.

  But I had regrets already, the main one being a six-foot-two rascal who calls me Dreamy.

  ONE O’CLOCK in the morning, and MacKenzie’s finally coming through the door, exhausted and content in that way people look when they’ve put their old life right in the best way they know how, and they’re about to move on to the new one.

  I stand up to greet her.

  Mac scans the room. She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. She walks from room to room like she’s in a daze. Finally, a wide grin spreads across her face. She gathers me in a hug.

  “You’re going with me!”

  Oh, God. I know she didn’t mean to break my heart just now, but she did. Lord, Lord, Lord. I’m not going with her.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  That snake, once a little garter snake in this garden of my heart, coiled, ready to strike, has grown now. A wily snake. I pull away from her embrace. I repeat myself just so we’re both clear. “You’re the one going off to Parsons to be fabulous. I’m staying here.”

  Concern and confusion war on her face. “What happened here, Zora, where’s our stuff?”

  The serpent in me hisses. Our stuff?

  “Unfortunately, it’s not our stuff. Daddy decided it’s his stuff, and he took it.”

  “Zora, I told you to call him!”