Color Me In

by Natasha Díaz

  “It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay to fight for yourself. You deserved more.”

  She looks from me to Anita to Mr. Goldberg.

  “When Samuel was in law school,” she whispers, “I paid for the apartment we lived in with money I’d saved up during college. I was going to use it to go to school, and then…”

  She trails off, looking at me, the real reason we are in this predicament.

  Mr. Goldberg stands and, in only a few strides, blocks my mom from leaving the room.

  “Sit down, please, and tell me more about this apartment.”

  My mom takes a seat next to Anita.

  “Nevaeh,” she pleads. “Go.”

  This time, I listen.

  * * *

  —

  I sit in bed, hoping to receive an update on what is happening in the living room, but the house remains quiet. So I wait and listen to the ticking of the clock.

  “Nevaeh,” my mom says as she enters the room with puffy eyes and dry lips.

  I shoot up and into her arms.

  “How did you know?” she asks when I finally let go.

  I pull the journal from my backpack and put it into her hands. I wrap her fingers around it with mine, releasing her private thoughts and memories and mistakes back to her, freeing the truth between us. She opens the cover. All that’s left are jagged stubs of paper that bloom from the spine.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t even finish reading it. I got too upset,” I say.

  She puts her arm around my shoulders and closes the book.

  “You should know the whole story,” she says, and begins to recount what I destroyed in my tantrum of rage.

  “Your father applied to a bunch of law schools senior year, but the only one he wanted to go to was Yale. The day he found out he was wait-listed was the day I found out I had been accepted into Teachers College at Columbia.

  “Things had been good since we got back together. Samuel was attentive and kind and playful. You know how your father can make you feel like you’re the only person in the room? Like the fact that he sees you is the only thing you need to make it through the day?”

  It’s been so long, but I remember. I would wait for the knob on the front door to turn and for him to walk into the house and give me a kiss before tickling me to the ground until I couldn’t even breathe from so much love. I nod.

  “I was afraid to tell him about Columbia. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to throw it in his face with the news from Yale, but deep down, I knew he would never be happy for me to succeed if it wasn’t on his terms. I waited as long as I could to tell him, but finally, the deadline to enroll was coming up and I couldn’t wait any longer. We went to the Cuban sandwich shop, and then we went to the quad to eat. He was quiet the whole time, which was offputting. We sat there for a while, listening to the conversations around us, and right before I decided I was going to tell him, he interrupted….

  “ ‘Do you love me?’ he shouted at me.

  “ ‘You know I do,’ I whispered, and prayed for him not to break my heart as he held me with both hands, rooting us to the ground.

  “ ‘Will you move to Connecticut with me?’ he asked, smiling so big that he almost split his face in two. ‘Yale called this morning. I’m in.’

  “He was so excited that he talked on and on, making plans for us, telling me it would just be a few years in New Haven; then we’d move to New York.

  “I reasoned with myself in my head. Columbia was only an hour and a half from New Haven. I had saved almost twenty thousand dollars over four years of jobs on campus and other part-time work I had picked up along the way. I could use that to travel back and forth, maybe even stay with him on the weekends. We could make long-distance work for a year until I transferred to Yale or another school nearby. But I couldn’t say the words.

  “ ‘Please,’ he begged, and kissed me deeply. ‘I need you.’

  “He needed me. He wasn’t perfect, but he needed me. So I decided to defer a year.

  “I told myself, We’ll get settled and then I’ll go get my degree. Love is about compromise; it was just my turn first. So I said yes to him and he kissed me and together we drank my salty tears and dreams away.”

  * * *

  —

  I know how the story ends. She didn’t go to Columbia; she stayed home to take care of me after she got pregnant just a few months after graduating; my birth is what stopped her from having a life of her own.

  “Why didn’t you leave him?” I ask her.

  She closes her eyes.

  “Sometimes, if something bad happens to you, you blame yourself. I thought no one was ever going to love me after what Raymond did, but then I met Samuel and he loved me and it felt so good. It got to the point where I couldn’t function without him. Him loving me was the only way I could love myself, so I stopped seeing the bad stuff. I ignored it. I told myself it could be worse. I took a teacher’s assistant role in Connecticut while I was pregnant, to pass the time while he was away, to keep myself motivated for the future. Then you came along, and the only thing that mattered was you and giving you the best life possible, and I couldn’t do that without him. I was stuck because I believed that I could never amount to anything or give you what you deserved on my own.”

  “It’s all my fault,” I say through my tears.

  “No, baby,” she says. “You gave me purpose again. You are what saved me.”

  Chapter 42

  SAMUEL LEVITZ, 39, RENOWNED PRIVATE ATTORNEY, AND ASHLEIGH HADDOCK, 27, AN ENTREPRENEUR, WILL BE WED AT THE SUPER-EXCLUSIVE WEBSTER HOTEL IN RYE, NEW HAMPSHIRE, ON LABOR DAY WEEKEND.

  “I’ve always gotten what I wanted. It’s a skill I’ve crafted over many years,” Ms. Haddock said proudly, rubbing her pregnant belly. Her left hand is almost completely obstructed by a four-and-a-half-karat princess-cut-diamond engagement ring, which catches the sun from the skylight above and casts rainbows on the nursery walls around us.

  “I think our story is really culturally relevant at the moment because we’re such a blended family,” Haddock states.

  Levitz is Jewish, whereas Haddock is of Scottish descent.

  “And four percent Iberian Peninsula!” Haddock adds with a wink.

  Stay up to date on the festivities with I!Online, where we’ll be following the newlyweds through the whole journey this fall on Love, Marriage, and a Baby Carriage.

  “GET OUT!” Jordan shouts once she has finished reading the press release and scrolls down to a photo of my father and his bride-to-be.

  In it, Ashleigh sits on a throne, her naked belly protruding from her two-piece spandex crop top and skirt, with my father positioned behind her, only half visible.

  “How’s Auntie handling it?” Janae asks, shivering like she caught cooties just from looking at Ashleigh’s face.

  “Better than expected,” I say. “She’s taking him to court—this public embarrassment is just the icing on the cake.”

  Jordan stands. “We’ve got to get going. You don’t want to keep Lucia waiting.”

  My cousins surprised me with a hair appointment for the big day. Jordan hops down from the counter and unplugs the white fan she positioned in front of her. Janae and I do the same with ours, and we stack them neatly against the wall before heading out to the living room, where my mom sits sewing furiously in her corner.

  “It’s almost ready!” she calls.

  With Janae and Anita’s help, we talked her out of the ambitious goal of making my bat mitzvah dress and settled on the tallit that will be presented to me during the ceremony.

  * * *

  —

  Until this week, the weather has been tame and lovely, with days that beg to be spent rolling around the grass in Central Park or exploring random streets with a cherry-mango flavored ice in hand. But on Monday, the heat arr
ived and is making up for lost time with record highs and the unrelenting aroma of hot ass across the city.

  We pass the new coffee shop that replaced the bodega a few blocks away. This place sells eight-dollar pour-over coffee with no seating available because they claim the artisanal beverage tastes best standing up. One more storefront furthering the gentrification of Harlem. Miss Clarisse’s store, however, is still open, and business is booming. Once she debuted her ScRUMPtious Gurl Pantyhose, some underground fashion blog featured them, and now she’s got a media influencer campaign on Instagram that’s selling her out of stock every week.

  “Hey, ladies!” she calls, and shimmies in our direction to a chorus of laughter from her customers.

  We wave back but don’t stop. Miss Clarisse can talk for days, and we’re already running behind.

  “Isn’t that product a little bit problematic?” I say. “Like…how many centuries have the voluptuous bodies of Brown and Black women been objectified? And what, now that butts are back in style, she’s selling them for $14.99 so every Becky, Susan, and Taylor can pad their behinds when they feel like it?”

  Jordan and Janae stare at me, mouths open so wide a fly almost lands on Jordan’s tongue.

  “Bish, when’d you get woke?” Janae cries.

  “But for real, though, if Miss Clarisse didn’t do it, it woulda been a Becky, Susan, or Taylor. At least she’s the one selling it,” Jordan says.

  We stop in front of the hair salon. Condensation from the air-conditioner gathers on the window. I watch the drops slide down the glass, making the magazine cutouts of women with outdated hairstyles plastered to the inside cry.

  “What are you waiting for?” Jordan asks me with irritation before opening the door.

  We are sucked into a whirlwind of gum smacking, hand clapping, and laughter. The space is small, with salon chairs at each corner so everyone else can congregate in the center and make sure not to miss any of the action. Despite the air-conditioner blasting, the hair-dryer station on the far wall fills the room with a thick heat that smells like burnt hair product.

  Lucia is short, barely five feet in her two-inch platform flip-flops, and has a look of slight annoyance plastered across her face at all times.

  “You’re late,” she states, pointing a comb in our direction.

  Her words mute the room as every female in there stops mid-gossip to watch me. I march through a cluster of women in the center of the store who moments before were chattering a mile a minute, probably comparing the lack of space between their thighs.

  “You want it up or you want it down?” she asks me in a tone so serious I have to work up the courage to answer.

  My cousins talk over one another, throwing out suggestions, with additional commentary from the rest of the clientele. In this village, everyone has a say, but Lucia has the final word. She taps her toe on the laminate floor, maintaining a beat throughout the commotion until she claps her hands once. Silence falls over the room, as if she has grabbed all twenty sets of lips and stapled them shut with a single pinch.

  “Umm.” I look over to my cousins and try to read all their charades clues at once. “Half and half?”

  Lucia squints and tilts, projecting a hairdo onto my head that only she can see. I hold my breath and stay as still as possible so as not to blur the vision.

  “Okay!” she agrees, and shuffles to the cabinet to get the necessary supplies.

  “Better not be tender-headed,” she mutters as she comes toward me like a cowgirl in a western, each hand primed with a tool: in one, a large round brush, and in the other, a giant maroon blow-dryer with a missing switch.

  Lucia turns the chair so my back faces my audience and pushes my neck down, flipping my hair forward and leaving a little in the back to rip at with her brush.

  “Ah!” I cry.

  She swats my hand away as it flies back to comfort my aching scalp.

  “Mierda, blanquita!”

  My cousins look on with sympathetic eyes as Lucia repositions my head to begin again, and I say a prayer to the powers that be that it’s worth the pain.

  Chapter 43

  I Slept Sitting Up Last Night So As Not to Flatten My Twisty Hair Crown the Night Before My Belated Bat Mitzvah is the title of my future tell-all memoir. It’s also the reason I cannot turn my neck this morning.

  I carefully dress in the mirror. Ironically, the blue linen dress from Miss Clarisse is the most appropriate thing I own for this sort of affair. My mom peeks her head into the room. She wears a flowy yellow dress that makes her look like she’s draped in sunflower petals.

  “You are beautiful,” she says, and stops to fan her watering eyes so as not to mess up her makeup.

  “I love you, Mom.” I hug her tight so she’ll feel it in every inch of her person.

  We walk down the stairs to the living room, and Jordan turns the corner into the hallway. The puffed sleeves on her purple top make her look like royalty.

  “I know this is an emotional time and everything, but I need at least one hour if you want me to do my best work.”

  Peace and quiet is required while Jordan reconstructs my face in the makeshift beautician station she has set up in the living room, so I focus on Janae, who has been appointed both decorator and photographer of today’s festivities. She works methodically, hanging the dozens of multicolored paper orbs she got at Party City from the ceiling. The final product provides this overwhelming sense that a huge multicolored meteor is headed straight for us.

  “Masterpiece!” Jordan calls out, pleased with herself, after she places the last of the forty single lashes onto my eyelid. “Keep your eyes shut for five minutes so they can dry.”

  Anita rushes into the room just then.

  “We have to get moving. Those old ladies are ruthless and only gave up the space for two hours.”

  Mom did everything she could to find a last-minute venue, but with only a couple months’ notice, Mount Olivene Baptist Church ended up being the only place we could afford.

  Anita drops us at the church and then goes off in search of parking. Zeke stayed behind to prepare the food for the party and put the final touches on the decorations.

  The rest of the family races up the stairs of the church, but I move slowly, fighting the tremors of anxiety that rush through my body as I trudge to the top in my mom’s four-inch stilettos.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I say to the portrait who greets me in the lobby, his arms outstretched in hospitality.

  “Yeah?”

  His voice comes from behind me, but I can’t risk turning around and losing my balance after how long it took me to get up the stairs. Jesus kisses my neck, careful not to mess up Jordan’s handiwork.

  We walk into the main room, where a few people have already arrived. I see Dania and Paulina, Jordan’s friends, milling around. Mordechai from Hebrew school made it, dressed in his signature old-man attire: corduroy slacks, a bow tie, and a knit Yankees yarmulke. He sits next to Jerry, no doubt schooling him on bat mitzvah etiquette.

  “My parents just got here,” Jesus says. “I’m gonna sit with them, but you got this.” He kisses my forehead before he goes.

  “Whoa, B, you’re lookin’ fresh to death.”

  Stevie’s voice bounces off the fifty-foot ceiling. He wears a slim-fit navy-blue suit with a mustard and white polka-dot top and a thin tie. Also some vintage gold sneakers. The whole look is very comfy couture, something Pharrell would throw on before grabbing a burger on the town.

  He holds his hand halfway out and I meet it for three quick taps, each one coming between a word we say under our breath.

  “Badgers. For. Lyfe.”

  Stevie joins Jordan and Janae, who have taken over the front row, reserving seats for our moms.

  Rabbi Sarah searches under the podium for the microphone cord.

  “Aha! Got i
t.”

  A high-pitched screech accosts us from the mic, brought to life with a jolt of electricity. Rabbi Sarah stands and brushes lint off her pants. In contrast to her usual jeans and wrinkled top, she wears a conservative but well-fitted black suit with a white tallit that hangs over her shoulders. A fancy gold silk kippah adorns her slightly frizzy dirty-blond mane, and her eyes are more frazzled and jumpy than usual.

  My mom rushes into the room with two large flower arrangements that she must have assembled in the kitchen downstairs. She hurries down the aisle and almost trips when her heel catches on the carpeted floor. I hold my breath as she steadies herself.

  “Look at God!” Anita and Miss Clarisse say at the exact same time from the entrance to the sanctuary, narrating the near disaster as if on cue.

  The look of shock on my aunt’s face as she turns to face Miss Clarisse, who is dressed like a firecracker in a pink crushed-velvet jumpsuit accented with white lace, already makes this whole experience worth it.

  Darnell walks in. He tugs at the Black Love patch pinned to his freshly pressed shirt. A flood of shame replaces the nausea that’s been coursing through me all morning, reminding me of the disappointment on his face at the BSU fund-raiser. He takes a seat behind Jordan, who sits up a little bit taller and elongates her neck for him to admire, much to Stevie’s chagrin.

  “All right, how you doin’?” Rabbi Sarah asks me.

  I give her a hug. Her body feels small and stiff in my arms. I hope one day she’ll allow herself to know what it feels like to be safe and loved. I hope that one day she finds arms she can crumble into, even if they are her own.

  Rabbi Sarah squeezes my shoulders, unable to articulate her feelings, and walks to the small podium. I sit on the altar next to my grandfather, who is in his full Sunday robes. The space is huge—it could easily hold three hundred people—and until now, I’ve only ever seen it full. Today, about twenty-five people line the first few center rows, leaving the remainder to stand as the promise of a community I need to build for myself.