“Where’s that?”
“Nevada.”
“What’s there?”
“I don’t know. Desert. It’s a ghost town.”
“Rye-oh-LITE!” shouted Phil. Much louder than before—people were looking. “The capital of Nerdland!”
Someone snickered. A narrow smile flickered on Phil’s lips.
“I’m getting out of here,” he said. “I don’t want the nerds to catch up with me. Whole hordes of them are on their way from Rhyolite, even as we speak.”
He pushed back his chair and walked away. The others flocked behind him, laughing. I opened my mouth to say good-bye, see you later, in a flip, offhand way, but nothing came out. He was only kidding, the way he teased his friends. No he wasn’t.
This is high school all over again. College was supposed to be different. Do we ever start being grown-ups?
Right in the middle of my misery, I imagined a business lunch. Bankers or lawyers or something, all in suits, getting into a food fight like little kids. One banker gets hit between the eyes with a glob of mashed potatoes. As they plop down onto his pin-striped vest, I see he looks a lot like Phil.
I stifled a laugh—if I let it start, I’d end up crying. I pulled myself together and looked around. Curious faces turned hastily away. Well, that was one way to get an empty table. Too bad I’m not hungry anymore.
I went on to my next class. Psychology 101 was a survey—a one-size-fits-nobody kind of course. I was an art major, but the university made all the freshmen take a social science class, and this was the one I’d picked. I was already wondering why I’d thought it might interest me. A graduate assistant gave the lectures in a big hall, almost an auditorium. After the first day, I always sat in the back, trying to take notes but mostly doodling. I usually slipped in as class started, or even late. That day, I was early.
The lecture room was empty when I got there, but another student came in almost on my heels. I’d noticed him before, mostly because he was the only black guy in the class. He sat across the aisle from me and read a book, looking up a couple of times. Smiles, here, gone, private. Here again. I imagined thoughts tumbling around his mind like a rock polisher.
I sketched his face in my Psych notebook, but the expression wasn’t right. I tried again—closer. He’s so alive. He’s different—not just because he’s black. Except why do we say “black?” He’s some shade of brown. Sienna, maybe? Just not “café au lait” or some polite little phrase like a lot of people use. Rude-polite—a person isn’t a piece of food. I’m the color of cheap bread, but no one ever says so.
The room had filled up while I was drawing. The teacher came in and opened her notes on the lectern. The class quieted obediently, and she started the lecture, droning away like she always did. “In 1937, Lorenz established the pioneering research on imprinting in young animals,” she said. “Imprinting is the process by which animals learn their species identity. By substituting himself for the animals’ mother during the critical period, Lorenz induced them to imprint on him.”
The guy I’d noticed before class raised his hand. The teacher stopped, with a slightly put-upon air. “Yes, Richard?”
He stood, holding up a book for the class to see. “Here’s a picture of Konrad Lorenz and his geese,” he said. “He hatched these goslings in an incubator, and the first thing they saw was him. They thought they were junior Konrad Lorenzes. They followed him everywhere.”
Suddenly the idea was interesting. How could a goose think it was a man? How did he ever get rid of them?
Here’s Konrad Lorenz, trying to give the geese the slip so he can get together with his girlfriend. Here’s Richard, a jack-in-the-box with a pile of helpful books, one for every subject the teacher talks about. Boooiiiinnnng! “Funny you should mention the psychodynamics of Martians, I happen to have a book here.”
My fantasies unreeled like old black-and-white slapstick movies. I stifled a laugh. Richard caught my eye and smiled. It wasn’t quite a real smile, but it was better than one of those smiles you have to do. Maybe he could see the movie too.
After class, I hurried down the hall until I caught up with him.
“Hi, I’m Kathy,” I said. “That was neat, what you said in class. How did you know all that stuff about the geese?”
He shrugged. “It’s interesting, how we learn what we are. Normally, the first thing goslings see is their mother. That first look tells them they’re geese. Maybe people do something similar—probably over a longer period of time. But when a baby learns what he is, he also learns what he’s not—and then, maybe all his life, he’d see it as a threat.”
“You make it a lot more interesting than Miss Sharpe does.”
“I’m probably more interested in the subject than Miss Sharpe is.”
We fell into step, headed for the Student Union. The sidewalks were thronged—almost everyone was either going to the Union or leaving it. A few people smiled at us, and some frowned. Everyone seemed to feel entitled to a political opinion about a black guy and a white girl walking together. But I wasn’t political—I was just interested in Richard.
He waved to a few people as we walked through the Union, but when we reached the cafeteria, no one signaled us to join them. We bought coffee and took it to a small table of our own, abandoned near the edge of a loud group. There weren’t any chairs. I stood by the table to claim it while Richard scrounged a couple of chairs.
“So, how did you know Miss Sharpe would talk about imprinting?” I asked, as he dragged the second one back.
“I had a similar course in high school. The subject came up then.”
We both sat down. “You had Psych in high school? Where did you go to school?”
“All over. I’m an army brat. My father’s family is from here, but he joined the military to get off the farm, then he stayed in. I grew up on army posts—Texas, Missouri, Virginia, and Oklahoma. Even Germany for a while. Some of them had good schools.” He gave me a quick look, then a longer one.
“Your father’s family had a farm near here?” I asked.
“Right in town.” He laughed. An embarrassed laugh, awkward. “My grandfather is one of the local characters. He still farms his land, right on the edge of that business park near the airport. Behind a pair of mules.”
“Oh, him. He’s your grandfather?” I’d seen the old man for years, every time I went to the airport. I always wondered what he was thinking about, walking behind those mules, ignoring the traffic a few yards away. “I think he’s kind of cool. People must have offered him a fortune for his land.”
“They have. He’s stubborn. Like his son. And his grandson.”
I wondered what it would be like to live on army bases. I didn’t think I’d like it. On the other hand, you’d live in different towns, even in foreign countries, instead of in the same house year after year. Would you get to start all over again every time you moved? Be someone different, try something new?
“What’s it like, living on an army base?” I asked.
He grimaced. “You don’t want to know.”
“Does your dad want you to join the military, too?” I asked.
“I already did. He didn’t like it much.”
“Why not?”
“I enlisted right out of high school. He wanted me to wait and get an engineering degree—go in as an officer. Maybe in the air force.” Richard fiddled with the sugar packets, looking uncomfortable. “Now I’m starting college, five years later than he wanted, but I am majoring in engineering. Maybe he thinks his dream is back on track. I don’t know—we haven’t discussed it.”
“Are you planning to go back after you graduate?”
“In the military? No, thanks. I don’t think so.” He shook his head sharply. “What about you? Where did you grow up?”
“Right here. I was born in Illinois, but we moved when I was three. My dad teaches here.”
“What does he teach?”
“Philosophy. Mostly graduate students.”
The coffee was nearly gone, and Richard began to gather his things. He’s about to leave now. He won’t ask if we can get together again, I know he won’t. He’s not supposed to ask a white girl. Girls can’t ask boys, either. But why not?
“I was wondering, I mean . . . .” I felt like a fool, but I made myself go on. “My sister was supposed to go to a movie with me tonight, and she backed out. Would you go with me?”
His hands stopped moving. He didn’t look at me, or at anything. “Do you live at home?”
“Yes, why?”
“What will your parents think when I show up to take you to a movie?”
“Nothing.”
“You really think—nothing?”
“Yes, I do. They’re not like that. I’m not like that. Please go to the movie with me.” I wished he didn’t look so sad about being invited to a movie.
“What time should I pick you up?” he asked.
* * *
Telling my parents at dinner that night about my date with Richard, I felt awkward, and ashamed of being awkward.
“Sharon had to cancel for the movie tonight, but I’m going with a guy from school,” I said.
“Oh, how nice,” Mom said. “Now that you’re in college, maybe you’ll be dating more. What’s his name?”
“Richard Johnson.”
“Johnsson?” she asked. “Is he from around here? He’s not related to Erik Johnsson, I suppose?” Erik Johnsson was one of Dad’s colleagues, a math professor whose classes I had managed to avoid.
“No,” I said. “He’s from around here, but I doubt he’s related to Erik Johnsson. He’s black.” Better let them know right away. But it’s weird that I have to prepare them so they won’t look surprised when they see him. Like we were bigots or something. Are we? I’ve never come home and said, “Oh, by the way, I’m going to a movie tonight with so-and-so. He’s white.”
Dad glanced at Mom, then turned to me.
“What’s his major?” he asked casually.
“Engineering.”
“Ah. What year is he in?”
“He’s a freshman. He’s a few years older than me, though. He was in the army.”
“Well,” said Dad, “we’ll look forward to meeting him. Are you planning to be out late?”
I had no idea what they thought. We finished dinner without saying much more and then sat in the living room, lined up one, two, three on the couch. Backs straight, feet together, already on our good behavior, we waited for Richard to ring the doorbell.
* * *
In the weeks that followed, Richard and I kept going out. But he didn’t come to the house. I’d meet him somewhere or pick him up, since he didn’t have a car—he’d borrowed one for our movie date. I loved setting out on autumn afternoons to go to dinner or a movie with him, driving my Volkswagen off by myself instead of waiting passively for my date to take me from my parents.
One Saturday in early November, as Dad and I cleaned up the garden for the year, he said, “Haven’t seen Richard in a while. How’s he doing?”
“He’s fine.” I struggled to pull up a tomato stake that was taller than me.
Dad gave me a hand. “He never comes to the house,” he said.
“Magnolia Woods isn’t too convenient. It’s better for us to meet near campus.” I pulled out the next stake without help.
“Are you sure he feels welcome?” Dad sounded anxious.
“Sure,” I said. “That’s not the problem. He just doesn’t have transportation.” Or is that an excuse? Guess who’s not coming to dinner.
“Why don’t you pick him up one evening and bring him over?” Dad asked. “He seems like a nice young man. We’d like to get to know him better.”
I noticed some crabgrass had sneaked in where the tomato vines had been particularly lush. I pulled at one of the clumps, but it came off in my hand the way crabgrass always does, leaving its roots behind to spread.
“One evening or a particular evening?” I asked. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished I hadn’t asked.
“Next Saturday,” Dad said. “Ask him over for dinner next Saturday.”
So, Richard came to dinner. Over roast lamb and Potatoes Anna, he and Dad debated the war. Dad was a pacifist. Richard agreed the war was wrong, but he thought most of the soldiers were only trying to stay alive.
“I didn’t meet any monsters in the army,” he said. “Everyone I knew did what they had to and that’s all.”
“What about Lieutenant Calley?” asked my father. The scandal had been going on for years—the My Lai massacre and then William Calley’s court martial.
“It wasn’t all like that. The war is no good. We shouldn’t be there. But not one man in a thousand is like Calley.”
“‘An isolated incident’?”
“Not isolated enough. But most of us weren’t anything like that. And things like My Lai will go on happening as long as there’s war. It’s no good to blame each and every soldier.”
At first I was happy at how well Richard and Dad were getting along. After a while, that wore thin. Neither of them seemed to know how to bring the bull session to an end and talk about something else. Mom would ordinarily have diverted a runaway conversation at a dinner party, but this time she didn’t. She sat stiff and wordless, with a vacant look in her eyes. Except for her fixed hostess smile, she might as well have been at the dentist’s.
They’re not even talking to me. Mom’s never liked me, and Sharon’s moved out, and I haven’t even been able to talk to Dad for a while, not the way we used to. And Richard—when I asked him about the army, I could see he didn’t want to talk about it, but here he is yakking with Dad like they were at a VFW meeting. Damn it, I was afraid they wouldn’t accept him, but it’s me they don’t accept.
The next day at school, I ran into Richard in the library. First words out of my mouth, I tried to pick a fight with him.
“You seem to have more in common with my dad than I do.”
Richard laughed. “Well, at least we don’t have the opposite problem—your parents refusing to let me in the door.”
“What about the other way around? Maybe the two of you won’t let me in the door.”
He shrugged.
“Don’t take it personally, Kathy. Your dad is way to the left, for Baton Rouge. He probably can’t say stuff like that to his friends. He likes to talk politics, and I happen to be someone he can talk to.”
“Well, I happen to be someone he has nothing to say to anymore.”
“Join the club. I don’t talk to my father at all.”
That made me feel less alone. “Why? Because of the army?”
“It’s a long story. The army was the last straw.”
“I have time for a long story.”
A librarian frowned at us and put a finger to her lips. Richard gestured toward the door. “Let’s go somewhere else, and I’ll tell you.”
We went out onto the long main quadrangle. The prettiest buildings on campus were here—tan, tile-roofed, connected with arched breezeways. Small oak trees spotted the inner court with patches of shade.
We sat on an out-of-the-way bench. Richard stared at an azalea bush like he’d never seen such a thing before. He didn’t look my way at all.
“My father has a real thing about the army. He enlisted one week after I was born. My mother hated that—a new baby, and her husband decides to go fight in Korea.”
“Wouldn’t he have been drafted anyway?”
“Probably. He made it a crusade, though. Most of the officers were white, and some of them said right out that black soldiers were cowards.”
“Why?” I pushed my books off my lap and stacked them on the bench, fingering the edges carefully, lining them up. Anything to keep from looking right at Richard. I’ve never talked with a black person about prejudice. I didn’t know you could.
“Partly racism. There was also a scandal about a mostly black regiment that ran. He set out to prove single-handed the racists were wrong
. Sometimes when Dad talked about it, I wondered who the enemy was—the Communists, the white officers, or the black soldiers who fell short of his ideals.”
“Why did he stay in the army after the war?”
“It was a good place for an ambitious black man in the fifties. The army cared more about rank than race. He ended up a master sergeant in a transportation company.” Richard kept staring into the azalea bush, like he was reporting a story shown there on a little TV screen.
“What’s a master sergeant?” Dumb question, just to keep him talking. The way girls are supposed to do. All the magazines say that—though, most likely this kind of conversation isn’t what they have in mind.
“It’s an NCO, non-commissioned officer. Dad should have been a general—he’s perfect for the military—neat, pressed, polished, the whole nine yards. I used to be proud to be his kid. All the same, it was hard on me.”
“What do you mean?” I reached out to touch his arm, but as my fingers brushed his shirt, he glanced at me, startled. I jerked my hand back. At least I’d gotten his attention away from the azalea.
“He expected me to be perfect too. Even when I was knee-high. Anything I did reflected on his career, and on all blacks in the army—on all blacks, period. Like I was an ambassador to another planet. Some ambassador.” His voice was hoarse, like he was about to cry.
“Were you that bad, or just a kid?”
“I was just a kid. I made good grades, but they were never good enough. Sometimes I wished I could quit trying, wished I could cut loose and give him a taste of ‘bad son.’ I never did. Over the years, I quit talking to him instead.”
“Is it still like that?”
He frowned, hesitated. He seemed less open when he went on, almost dismissive. “I’ve only seen him once since I got back from ’Nam. I still wasn’t an officer and he was still mad about it.” He laughed, but he didn’t sound amused. “And if I had been, I doubt he would have liked that either. He didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat. He said he didn’t like my Afro, and that was about it.”
“Maybe that was all he could say.”
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