See, none of our friends would’ve ever moved beyond the level of Novice.
The ritus transitionis of our sisterhood, the final ceremony, was the It’s Always About Race and It’s Always About Gender talk, which we received before leaving home for college. (There were endless lectures to follow, but this was the one that announced to the D.A.M. Nation that you were now, in fact, an adult.) Friends have accused my Mom of being racist and/or sexist, but she’s not. She’s experienced with how things go in the world, and perceptive enough to see below the surface. Also, since most of the people who said this to me were white and/or male, they really didn’t have the correct perspective of the issues.
All Mom was saying to us was to be careful, watch out. When you think the situation has nothing to do with race, it’s about race, and when you think it has nothing to do with your being a woman, it’s about your being a woman. She wanted us to understand that there are going to be people who will make decisions about us long before we even have the chance to speak, so we need to be prepared and prove their preconceptions wrong.
What the hell is racist or sexist about that?
Okay, so Angel and I would flirt and play around, and he was plenty hot. A tall, sweltering Latino who kept himself fit by playing soccer, not lifting a whole bunch of weights. Kel looked good with his big muscles because he had the off-kilter personality to counter it, but, in general, I go for trim, fit men. And Angel said that he liked the way I looked too, that I reminded him of that woman in The Fast and the Furious. He meant Michelle Rodriguez, which, okay, I guess. He must’ve thought she was sort of short, like me, but Michelle Rodriguez is a good bit taller than me. She hangs out with some pretty tall actors, is all. But she’s cute, so I guess he was saying I was kind of cute. I could live with that.
He was born there in L.A. but Angel had none of the barrio accent. He said that people speaking with him on the phone always assumed he was a white guy because apparently only white guys can speak American English without an accent. He said it was fun, to see their eyes when they would finally meet face-to-face. Some people thought it was a joke, or that he was faking his “non-accent,” but in the end, they would see him as another barrio beaner and go on their way, feeling that Angel had somehow been disingenuous, not that they’re being racist.
When he was joking around, he would “perfect his barrio” by working on his accent, sounding very much like Freddie Prinze from Chico and the Man, a show on Dad’s list of qualifying reruns. I would laugh my ass off, because he was a perfect imitation of a white guy doing a lousy imitation of a Latino guy.
That last day, I should’ve noticed that something was up, but I was in a good mood about…. Actually, I can’t even remember why I was in such a good mood, but it caused me to disregard the signs of things going on, blinded me to the marked difference in Angel’s personality.
He used to grab me, pick me up, and spin me around as I laughed, like I was a little girl. I mean, he was so much bigger than me, and stronger than me. He could lift me over his head if he wanted to but usually he would fly me around the room and finally toss me onto the lumpy, broken couch that was left behind when the house was abandoned. The couch had a smell, not a good one, but it wasn’t gross, and Angel had put one of those slipcovers over it, so at least it didn’t make my skin crawl. And sometimes, after I came to a landing, he would throw himself on top of me. He would cry out as he sailed across the room and come right down on top so that he knocked the wind out of me, which was painful when I was laughing, but it only made me laugh harder. He would then pretend to gnaw on my neck, my ear, my nose, and it made me ecstatic. Boy, I wished he would go further, but I couldn’t say anything. It would ruin what we had.
One time, as he was on me and we were both coming down off our breathless fits, his deeply tanned, somewhat sweaty shoulder was right there in front of my face and I licked it, making him laugh again. I liked it and kissed it and it tasted nice, for an arm. Angel was also not one for tattoos, which was good because I don’t like guys with tattoos. I always imagine getting the ink on my tongue.
But he also had those damned dogs there, and they were watching us.
I blacked out. No, not really blacked out, like passing out, but I become aware that I’m missing a block of time. The last thing I can remember is the confrontation in the middle of the street with the albino poser drug dealer and his three friends. I look up the street, in the direction of the club, where music is still thumping ceaselessly, only louder because the front door keeps opening as people spill out to see what’s going on. They are staggering up the empty street like zombies, drawn by the flashing lights. The lights are on a police vehicle — flashing, spinning, blue — making the high brick walls that line the road look almost…. I don’t know.
Why are the police here, and why is Mia shouting and gesturing at one of the officers? The other officer is down the road a bit, speaking with what I assume are other people from the club. I don’t see the albino poser, or any of his friends. Is that a Volkswagen Rabbit the police are driving? I had one of those once.
I really want to ask Mia what it was about this club that she found so thrilling that she had to bring me here, but I can’t. She’s already embarrassed about the whole ordeal. We came because our KLM flight from Abu Dhabi was delayed and we missed our connection to Brussels, so she decided we would take the train down in the morning, spending the night in Amsterdam to go out clubbing. She told me that she used to visit this place maybe ten or twenty years ago, so either it’s changed or she has.
It’d be interesting, meeting the younger, wilder Mia, like the one in the picture with the unkempt hair, marching in the streets. Allegedly, she had a life before I came along.
Mia’s voice becomes loud, even louder than the thumping music, and it echoes down the narrow street, off the buildings. The officer she’s speaking with is becoming impatient with her, and by the way he’s standing, the way he holds himself, he’s now invoking his right to become menacing. They’re speaking in Dutch but I can’t understand any of it — the music’s too loud, the fucking spinny blue lights too distracting, and the hum in my head is trying its best to push all of it out of the way.
“Are you okay?”
I didn’t even see her come over, so there she is suddenly, standing over me.
“What’s going on?”
“This hufter wants us out of Amsterdam,” she says, her tone bitter as she gestures back towards the officer with a flick of her head. She’s standing with her hands on her hips, looking fierce, as she did before, right before she slapped the poser — sharply — across the face. I can remember his expression, the shock as his hand went up to touch his cheek before he said something to her that I didn’t hear. She then slapped him again, twice, in hard succession, causing him to stumble to one side.
What started that?
“He wants us to go with them,” Mia tells me, putting out a hand to help me up off the curb. I take it and struggle to my feet. My legs are weak, wobbly, and they ache. “They’re going to drive us to the hotel, wait for us to pack, and then take us to the train station. They want us out of the city tonight.”
“What? Why? We didn’t do anything.”
We hadn’t. Not really. I mean, it was the poser and his gang that followed us out of the club, calling us dyke, kakker, nikker as we tried to ignore them. He was the one who called us a couple of bosneger dykes inside the club, after I refused to listen to his offer of drugs in exchange for sex. Mia had come to my rescue, returning from the bar with our drinks and, seeing that I was being hassled, lectured the guy in Dutch until he scowled and threw up his hands. That was supposed to have been the end of it, but they were the ones who followed us out. We were leaving to find a taxi after Mia decided that the club wasn’t what she remembered.
Her left cheek is darker than the right — a flush of crimson that comes from a blow. Did the poser hit her? Why don’t I remember that?
I ask her if it hurts, touching my own
cheek to signify hers, and she touches her face and winces, surprised by the injury as if she had forgotten about it. She smiles at me and shakes her head.
“Don’t worry about it. I know you didn’t mean it.”
What? I did that? When?
All I can remember is that when the poser finally regained his composure, he cocked his arm back and tightened his hand into a fist. That was when I stepped in, ready to put him down, but was stopped when one of the friends came up behind me and put his arms around my waist, lifting me off the ground.
That’s a very specific feeling — the falling away of the world beneath your feet.
I was laughing. Laughing! How could I do that? How could I laugh?
I hate myself. Fuck, I hate myself.
And that’s the last thing until I find myself sitting on the curb, hearing the music, seeing Mia, and being irritated by those fucking blue spinning lights.
Jesus, I need help.
15
Amsterdam — Rotterdam — Brussels
I was closest with my sister Naddie because she was the only one in the family who did not see me as an add-on. (Or, as Tonya would say, an interloper.) I arrived when she was two, so she had no memories of a time when I wasn’t there. I was her Big Sister, always and forever, and the fact that we looked that different didn’t seem to matter to her. She had Mom’s broad nose; I had Ma’s small one. She had Dad’s large, widely set eyes; I had a watered-down version of those eyes, pushed closer together by Ma. She had Mom’s full, almost pouty, lower lip and Tonya ridiculed mine as “white girl lips,” meaning thin and pink and almost invisible on my face.
I needed “white girl lipstick,” Tonya said, for my “white girl lips” because the lipstick Mom wore, the lipstick we tried on when we girls invaded our parents’ room while they were away, looked terrible on me. Tonya laughed, telling me that it looked like I was wearing what she called “whiteface” and I ran to my room and cried, though I was really too old to be crying about such things. That was the terrible secret power Tonya had over me — my entire childhood was spent trying to get her, my “Big Sister,” to accept me, like me even, or maybe at least not be so mean.
It was always Naddie who would come sneaking into my room and crawl up on top of me as I lay on my bed with my face pressed down into the pillow. She would lay there, moving up and down with each sob, her weight soothing me until she was gently swaying, like a tiny boat out on a calm sea. I would then roll onto my back and she would log-roll with me so that she ended up laying on top of my stomach, her chin resting on my chest and her arms at her sides, watching me without a word. Her large, blinking eyes were so big, so brown, so tender that I called her my little Naddie Bear, which she liked because she loved Winnie the Pooh, despite Mom’s contention that it was all really about British Colonialism and the English attempt to maintain their position as an empire.
I don’t know where she came up with some of this stuff. We all three agreed that strange things must sometimes go on inside Mom’s head.
Mia is particularly attentive after Amsterdam. She blames herself for what happened and, yeah, I kind of blame her too, though it wasn’t intentional. She was only trying to show me a little bit about herself, her past, the memories that she remembered fondly, which would’ve been a great if it hadn’t all gone to shit.
We’re put onto the first train to Brussels, by way of a slow IC to Rotterdam. There are more trains and transfers to follow, but we instead stay in Rotterdam for the night at an exquisite boutique hotel — a suite Mia manages to wrangle at two in the morning — and we sleep until well into the early afternoon. I then allow her to pamper and pet on me, bringing me coffee and croissants in bed.
Jesus, life seems pretty damned terrific. Wasn’t it a couple of weeks ago that I was living in a hovel somewhere? And aren’t I supposed to be doing something for someone?
When we were little, but Naddie was old enough to attend school, she proudly told her friends that I was her Big Sister. Her friends pointed out the obvious, that we looked different, but she simply shrugged and offered She’s older as an explanation. That was what she loved about me, that she had an older sister — a much older sister. Almost a grown-up, as far as she was concerned. And I was hers.
Right after the point where I was supposed to hit puberty, Naddie was often coming into my room to talk to me about the things she learned that day, or about her favorite book, or something she thought of while she skipped circles in the playroom, which she did for hours on end it seemed. She was five or six and she started coming into my room in both the morning and the evening, laying on the bed and making “bed angels” that got me in trouble because Mom thought I hadn’t done a proper job of tidying up my room.
She was sharing a room with Tonya, and would be until we moved out of the city. One of the many reasons Tonya was so angry with me.
One morning — it wasn’t a school morning, Saturday maybe — she stopped all angel-making activity and was quietly regarding me. I had taken off my nightgown and was looking for clean underwear in the dresser, so I became self-conscious of her attentive gaze. I asked her what she was doing.
“I’m watching for your boobies to grow!” she said with childlike enthusiasm, as though she expected that it would happen right before her eyes one of these mornings. That was okay with me, because I was watching for them too, and they were something meant to be showed off as soon as you produced them. What we didn’t know, though, was that my “boob DNA” came to me by way of Ma’s paternal grandmother, the Old Man’s mother, who was rather tall, slender, and waif-like. And by “waif-like,” I mean flat as a board.
Anyway, I grew up with the presence of Naddie Bear in my boudoir, as they say, and changing in front of her never bothered me because it was the time for us to talk and sing and dream and for me to try to hold up my chest in the mirror and for her to stand on my bed and poke at it with her little index finger to see whether she could find any evidence of anything going on.
Her finger hurt, because I wasn’t growing much padding to protect myself, and her reports were rather disheartening.
We arrive in Brussels in the late afternoon, and on the following day, I accompany Mia to a meeting with two Belgians and a German, though my role is to sit to one side, watch, and listen. With the only two languages spoken being French and German, I’m at something of a loss, though the German I learned while in the Army is coming back. Problem is, no one’s talking about the location of der bahnhof, or die toilette, or asking for ein Bier bitte, so it’s not much help.
I really want to be with Naddie, who said she would wait for us at a café down on the Grote Markt, a couple of steps from the door of the residence. She’s only in the city for the day, looking for a particular type of bed frame for her place in Antwerp. Actually, her exact words were our place, because she’s married to Robbe, a guy she met while attending graduate school there in Belgium years ago. I knew she was with a guy, but I didn’t know that she had married him. They’ve been married for some time, because Naddie’s now a Belgian national. She also has dual citizenship.
I didn’t even recognize Naddie. I mean, the last time I saw her, at seventeen, she was still a girl wearing a high side ponytail, big colorful shirts, and denim overalls with the cuffs rolled up. This woman coming to us now was like Mom age, and she dressed seriously, with her hair down, and she was a whole lot taller than me. Jesus, it was Mom. (Though I wouldn’t ever tell Naddie that.)
It was Naddie who noticed me. Something in the way I walked, the way I held myself as she watched Mia and me strolling across the square arm-in-arm. She cried out Lissie, a nickname only my family uses, so I didn’t even turn. Mia looked, though, and I was following her gaze.
Now, I want so terribly to be with her that it’s distracting me from my job. Mia can sense my ambivalence — she glances in my direction from where she sits as the German is speaking. She and the three men are seated in four chairs, placed in a square so that Mia’s facing one of th
e Belgians and the other Belgian is across from the German, no table between them. On occasion, she stands up and circles the outside of the seats, all eyes following her as she speaks, pauses, and touches a shoulder lightly.
When I pay attention, I can read what’s going on, even without understanding the words. It’s like that trick, where you block out the letters of a passage and have someone read it. It’s much easier than many would think because we tend to read the shape of words, not the letters themselves. It’s like that, only I’m understanding the shape of Mia’s movements, her actions, her tones, the shape of her intentions.
It’s fascinating to watch, as long as I can keep myself focused.
When the discussion ends, Mia calls me over to bid my farewells to the men. It’s strange, but she had taken the time to introduce me to each of them when we arrived, as though I would be part of the negotiation, but then sent me to sit where I would be out of the way. And now, here I am again, shaking each of their hands and accepting their offered business cards. It’s awkward, having no card of my own. Still, I don’t know how many names I’ve mangled by this point, so these will be useful.
They all seem happy with what had been said, which is different from the last two meetings, but Mia’s still playing them. Sitting off to the side, it was clear how she’s manipulating all three with her voice, her gestures, and her body language. Controlling them, without the benefit of strings.
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