How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  The bald Holy Warrior, the one who’d led my father and me to our seats, handed me a towel and ushered me back to my seat. When I glanced back at the tub, the announcer was helping an older lady in. She’d removed only her shoes, and the skirt she wore made the climbing over more precarious and awkward than mine had been. The bald Holy Warrior asked me how I felt. “Any different?” he said, and I lied. “I feel great,” I told him. He smiled, showing off his crooked yellow teeth. “Now you have to be the light and spread it to other people so they can feel great, too.” I was shaking the water out of my ears when he came in for a hug. The sour smell of his body sent shivers through mine, and I was immediately heartsick by how loathsome and hungry for touch I was. Nothing had changed. My father was no longer at his seat but standing by the entrance. I was crying when I reached him. I wanted to tell him how I hadn’t done it right. Something was wrong with me. But before I could speak, he was embracing me. “I know,” he said. “I know, I know.” But he didn’t, and so I cried harder.

  —

  I had first met Suzette Jin because of Henry Musclewhite, the ne’er-do-well son of one of my father’s deacons.

  In the spring of my mother’s last year on this planet, the Musclewhite boy announced his engagement to Ginger Jin, Suzette’s older sister. The news shocked the Musclewhite clan, and Henry’s parents, Jim and Patricia, took it the hardest, claiming to anybody who’d listen, mostly to the people at Second Baptist sitting near their pew, that no son of theirs would marry some Chinese girl. My father opposed the match, too, but for different reasons. Because my mother had taken ill and couldn’t cook anymore, we ate out with more frequency, spending at least one night a week at the China Belle. Ginger was often our server. We knew she was studying chemistry at Delta State University and wanted to go to medical school, and my father thought Henry Musclewhite jeopardized her future. Henry never held down a job for long, was dull-witted, and had recently been expelled from Ole Miss for driving his Silverado through the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity house after drinking too much tequila. “If anybody in that relationship is taking a step down,” my father told my mother, “it’s not the boy.”

  My parents took great pleasure in discussing the gossip surrounding Henry’s engagement. It provided a necessary distraction from my mother’s lingering infections. Every day my father came home with new bits of information to rouse her from the naps and the misery: The Musclewhites were threatening to take Henry to court and make him change his last name, or Henry was seen at the car dealership trading in his big truck for a midsize sedan, or Ginger had registered their wedding at Walmart. My father liked the idea of the Musclewhites having to reckon with a different sort of people. “It’ll do them good,” he said. “Maybe will do the whole church good—if we can get the Jins to come.” (This was before he set his eyes on the African-American population; that would come later.) When Brother Mims came to the parsonage, he’d share his thoughts on the impending matrimony. He claimed his objections had nothing to do with the girl being Chinese. “Absolutely not,” he maintained. “Everybody knows Asians are the model minority.” Brother Mims took issue with her faith. “Buddhists!” he cried, his loud talk filling the house, making all of us participants in his conversation. “Bowing down to little idols and burning that foul-smelling incense and mumbling tommyrot!” My father contended that this was exactly why he hoped the Musclewhites were more open to the marriage. “We can change their hearts,” he said. “But first we have to change our own, don’t we?” Brother Mims said how that sounded fine and good in theory, but he pointed out that the Jins kept a Buddha in the China Belle, front and center for all to see. “They seem pretty settled to me. That little fat man is made of pure jade!” And here my mother piped in, saying, “Oh, it’s the prettiest green, too, like something right out of The Wizard of Oz!” Neither of the men knew what to say about that, so she went on to speculate about Buddhists. “Where do you suppose they get married?” she asked. “Tents? Gazebos?”

  The matter of Henry’s engagement soon resolved itself when Ginger revealed she was pregnant. Henry Musclewhite—a heavy- lidded boy who always reminded me of the three-toed sloth I’d once seen at the Memphis Zoo—surprised absolutely no one with his failure to use birth control. But it was a wonder that Ginger hadn’t. With the prospect of a new grandchild, Henry’s parents relented, and it was decided that the wedding should happen as soon as possible. The Jins offered their backyard, and the Musclewhites roped in my father to officiate. He agreed to do it only after privately meeting with the couple for a consultation and deciding that the best thing he could do for them, and the new baby, was to ask God to bless the nuptials. “I’ll do my best to give them a good start because I feel they are going to need it,” he told my mother, who would be too sick to attend. She would send me along in her place, with instructions to report back everything I saw.

  Only a handful of Musclewhites attended: Henry’s parents, his older brother and sister, and their spouses and children. But on Ginger’s side, several people came into town, mostly cousins from Memphis and Atlanta. The Jins’ backyard was minimally decorated for the event: a latticed archway where the couple delivered their vows, ribbons of gossamer laced through the dogwoods and mimosas, and a couple of rows of metal chairs anchoring a dozen or so silver and white balloons. My father led the couple in a simple ceremony, reading some verses from Psalms before asking God to share his wisdom to guide them along the rocky road of matrimony. Afterward, we were invited to a small reception at the China Belle. The Jins’ was the first Chinese restaurant in Hawshaw and, for many years, the best in all of the Delta, known for its large buffet. The restaurant was in an old VFW building remodeled to look something like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. My father and I were partial to their homemade wontons and the cherry sauce, and on the drive over, we wondered how exotic the menu would be for the reception. He worried the Musclewhites would react poorly to the food. “This could,” he said, “be tense if not handled properly.” I asked him what he meant, and he replied, “Oh, the Musclewhites will probably think they are being served cat and won’t touch a bite of the food, and I can imagine hard feelings all around.” But we found the buffet had been cleared of food, and the deep-red curtains had been pulled back, exposing the room to natural light. Everything gleamed like the inside of a jewelry box: the cushioned booths, the gold dragons spiriting across the red walls, the glass chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling. In the corner of the room, beside a potted Ficus plant, sat the fat Buddha. The little man’s face was depicted in midlaugh, his chubby features the perfect expression of contentment. When my father saw it, he whispered to me, “You know, I think Mims doesn’t like that thing because it looks like him.”

  The Musclewhites and the Jins had kept their distance during the wedding, and now the Musclewhites were making an effort to mix, sitting at different tables amid the Jins. My father and I followed suit and sat apart from each other. I ended up next to Suzette Jin, who had not spoken a word to anyone the whole day. She mildly frightened me. She was a sulky girl, her bridesmaid dress a pink boll of cotton that she wore, whether meaning to or not, ironically. During the ceremony, her hair had been pushed in her face, but now it was kept behind her ears as she stared plaintively at the tablecloth. She looked like a younger version of her sister, but where Ginger had a smile, Suzette wore a snarl. To make conversation, I asked Suzette if she was hungry. She glared at me, and I blurted out that I thought Buddhism was cool, prompting her snarl to evolve into a smirk. I interpreted this as progress. Then I told her that Tina Turner was a Buddhist and she was my favorite singer in the whole world. A waiter appeared and filled our glasses with water, and Mr. and Mrs. Jin hurried off to the kitchen. They returned balancing steaming plates of steaks on their slender arms, looking like acrobats. Delicately, they placed the dishes in front of each of the guests, several of the waiters following their lead. We were served a lean cut of meat, a cloud of mashed p
otatoes, and a bundle of green beans. They were making an effort, too, so it seemed to me, to meet the Musclewhites more than halfway and not frighten them with their cuisine. After everyone was served, Mr. Jin—a serious-looking man in a gray suit—asked us to stand and hold hands. When Suzette tucked hers into mine, she dug her neon-green fingernails into the meat of my palm. She gripped tighter when I tried to struggle free. “Now,” Mr. Jin was saying, “I will ask Mr. Musclewhite to bless the food.” Mr. Musclewhite appeared surprised. He told everyone to bow their heads and proceeded to thank God for the Jins and for those who had prepared the meal that would, he said, “nourish the body, so that you may nourish the soul.” Then I heard sobbing and looked up. At their table, Mrs. Musclewhite had lost her composure and was weeping into a napkin, trying to be quiet as her husband finished the prayer. Suzette whispered something.

  I leaned toward her. “What?”

  “Retards,” she said. “You people are retards.”

  Once they began, the giggles were hard to suppress. I bit my bottom lip, asking God that Mr. Musclewhite—who went on and on thanking everybody he’d ever met, it seemed, since birth—would hurry up before I ruined the solemn moment. Every head in the dining hall was bowed except for three: mine, Suzette’s, and—strangely enough—my father’s. Later I would learn that this was the moment he felt the Lord speak to him. It was here, as the Musclewhites held hands with the Jins in prayer, that my father first envisioned the possibilities of an integrated church service, where all comers came together to worship as one. And it was here, too, that Suzette was exploring possibilities of her own. She was sizing me up—for what exactly I wasn’t sure until afterward. I told my mother about all I had seen and done at the Jin-Musclewhite wedding. When I got to Suzette, my mother rose up from the bed and took my hand. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You’ve made a friend!”

  —

  The day after the Holy Warrior baptized me, I walked over to the China Belle. Hawshaw was small enough to travel anywhere on foot. The problem was the humidity. The walk from the parsonage to the restaurant might as well have been underwater. I was drenched in sweat by the time I reached the China Belle’s parking lot, the heat like a wet tongue licking me clean. A clot of gray clouds blotted out the sun, and lined along the front door, several grim jack-o’-lanterns grinned at me as I passed, their craggy smiles wilting in the heat.

  The restaurant did the bulk of their business on weekends, so most of the tables were empty tonight. Henry Musclewhite sat at the table closest to the cash register, gutting a pumpkin. He looked up when I walked in and asked, “Raining yet?” and when I told him no, he went back to scooping out the pumpkin’s stringy insides with a metal ladle. He knew I was there, like always, for Suzette. According to her, he had been a godsend at the restaurant. He did whatever they asked of him, waiting on tables and bussing them and sweeping the floors and answering the phone. He was also put in charge of seasonal decor, expressing a creative spirit no one knew he had, least of all me. In addition to carving pumpkins, he’d already hung orange and black streamers from the ceilings, and on the wall behind the cash register, he’d stapled a cardboard cutout of a witch riding her broomstick with a black cat perched on the broom straw, hissing.

  I found Suzette in her usual booth: the one in the back, behind the buffets and beside the kitchen doors. She was staring at an open textbook, her face cupped in her hands. I slid into the empty seat across from her, and without looking up, she said, “Well?” I didn’t know if I would tell her about the baptism. Suzette was weary of organized religion—she claimed to be agnostic. When I admitted the show hadn’t been terrible, she glanced up from the book: “You can’t be serious,” she said. I told her I was and added how she would have had fun had she tagged along with me. She dropped her face to the table and pretended to bash her skull into the book. “This day, man,” she said, “has been hell.” Without her having to elaborate, I knew it was about her ex-boyfriend. The dreamy Derrick Wood.

  Suzette was three years older and in tenth grade at the academy in Hawshaw. My father wouldn’t send me there because he claimed it was a racist institution. Established not long after the public school system was finally integrated in the early 1970s, the academy had a predominantly white student body. After Ginger graduated, Suzette became the only nonwhite person enrolled there. I’d asked my father why the Jins were allowed to skate through admissions without any prejudice, and he said racism explained that, too. “Just a different kind,” he told me. “The board of trustees probably believed the stereotype about the Chinese being all geniuses and good at math.” Suzette was a good student, but she hated the school and struggled to fit in. The girls in her class, to hear her tell it, didn’t quite know what to make of her. She swore, wore makeup, and didn’t care a lick about cheerleading or football. And she was a little weird. If not for the school uniform—a pleated khaki skirt and collared kelly-green blouse—she probably would go to school dressed like some femme fatale from one of the film noir movies we liked to watch together. (She already did her eyeliner to match Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity.) Before she started dating Derrick, she begged her parents to send her to a prep school in Memphis. She had an aunt and uncle who would take her in, she said, and the city was like this promise to a better world and more opportunity. “Just think, Willy,” she’d tell me. “When you’d visit, we could drink old-fashioneds at the Peabody and watch the march of ducks.” But I didn’t give a damn about the ducks and told her so. I wanted her to stay put. I knew enough to know that once you left Hawshaw you rarely came back. When she and Derrick Wood started going out, she stopped all her talk of leaving, and for that I was thankful. Friends were hard to come by when you didn’t attend a proper school and your father was a well-known preacher—most of the kids who attended my father’s church treated me like I was an extension of him, fearing I might report back to him all their sins if I saw any.

  Derrick and Suzette’s courtship began in secret after Derrick’s family ate at the China Belle. She had been their waitress, and before leaving, he passed her a note. She showed it to me the day after, not knowing what to make of it. He’d written his number on a napkin. “You think I should call?” she asked me, and I told her if she wanted to call then she should. So she did, and then, just like that, they were dating. From his yearbook photo, he looked nice enough. He was her age and had brown floppy hair and wore braces to fix an overbite. I never met him personally—Suzette feared he might get jealous if he found out she was such good friends with a boy—but I probably knew more about his relationship with her than he did. When I dropped by the restaurant on days after one of their dates, she always filled me in on what had happened. The first kiss, the first grope. I even went with her to Eckerd to buy a pregnancy test when she let him screw her without a condom. “It just happened,” she said. “He put it in me and then he was squirting.” Neither of us mentioned Ginger and Henry, but I thought about them and I was sure she had, too, as we waited for the lines on the pee strip to turn a color and tell us her future. Luckily, her fate would not be that of Ginger’s. A week after her scare, Derrick’s parents found out about the relationship and made him put a stop to it.

  The breakup had caused awkwardness between them at school. Their grade wasn’t large, only twenty or so students, so they were bound to see each other every day whether they wanted to or not. Suzette decided to be an adult about it, she had initially told me, but today, during computer science, she had discovered that he’d asked another girl to the Fall Formal. “Becky Dickerson,” she said, spitting the name out of her mouth as if she didn’t think much of it. I told Suzette I knew her. Becky and her family went to Second Baptist, and she was a large athletic girl, with busy blond hair and a pretty face. Her father was the deacon who’d asked for my father’s resignation. “One’s a Wood and one’s a Dickerson,” I said, as if that explained it. Those families liked to stick together, and when I told her this, I added, “And I bet
they are related somehow and their babies will be waterheads.” She kept her face pressed to the book, too forlorn to laugh. It was Thursday, and I knew there was a seven o’clock showing of Postman we could catch if we hurried. But Suzette said she didn’t feel like driving all the way to Greenwood. “What if I see him?” she said. “I’d totally puke.”

  So we spent the rest of the night in the back office on the computer. Waiting for the dial-up connection to work on her parents’ Hewlett-Packard, we sat on the sofa Suzette’s mother sometimes napped on when she was too tired to go home. Mrs. Jin prepared most of the major dishes for the buffet herself and was rarely seen outside these walls. Suzette told me she worked all the time because of guilt. Guilt because she had it so good here and so many of her family back home didn’t. Surrounding us, on the walls of the office, were pictures of Suzette’s grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins who still lived in Hong Kong or thereabouts, people she knew only through stories from her mother. (Her father never spoke of home—he was a man, she said, who lived in the moment.) And when she spoke of her mother’s people, it was clear to me that Suzette thought of them the same way I thought of my own mother’s stories of the Neck—with wonder and suspicion that they had even existed at all. My father once said that the past always looked funny to us because we were appraising it from a backward glance with the heft of everything that came after to distort it. When I’d told Suzette this, she made a face and remarked how my father thought more deeply about shit than any other Baptist preacher she’d ever known.

  Now she had her legs on my lap and was telling me she had decided on a Halloween costume. “Marilyn Monroe,” she said. “From The Seven Year Itch.” I had no idea she still went trick-or-treating; I’d never gone for religious reasons. She said all the employees at the China Belle were dressing up this year. “Henry suggested it—and we are going to hand out fortune cookies instead of candy.” I told her that Henry seemed full of ideas since marrying Ginger, and she said, “He’s good at being told what to do. So was Derrick. That’s the trick—getting one you can boss around.” I didn’t say that Derrick didn’t do everything she had wanted. Otherwise, they’d still be dating.