Heads of the Colored People

by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

  In fact, most interactions were easier with Violet than they were with others. Violet understood things. Fatima never had to explain why she might wrap her hair in a silk scarf at bedtime or why she always carried a tube of hand cream to prevent not only chapped hands, but also allover ashiness. Those shared practices validated Fatima, and so did Violet’s understanding of Fatima’s fears about her body. “Sometimes I just feel horrible about all of it, the sweating, the bleeding. I don’t always feel like a regular girl, you know?” Fatima said one day, “But what is normal anyway?”

  “Word, that’s deep,” Violet said, and explained that she, too, felt the weight of her body, because it did not look “like what people expect black to be.” In spite of her seeming confidence, Violet confided, she had a complex about her albinism. Fatima understood when Violet intimated that albinism marked her as both desirable for her lightness, her hair color, her eye color, and yet despised for some perceived physical untruth. Fatima had seen the way people glanced two and three times at Violet, deciding where to place her and whether she warranted any of the benefits of whiteness. Violet could call other black people like Fatima white, but to be called white herself pushed Violet to violent tears. Just ask her ex-boyfriend and her ex-friend Kandice from middle school, who had called her Patti Mayonnaise in a fit of anger and gotten a beatdown that made her wet her pants like Fatima’s preschool friend.

  “Why Patti Mayonnaise?” Fatima said.

  “You know, from Doug, she was the black girl on the DL who looked white, and mayonnaise is white. It’s a stupid joke.”

  “Patti was black?” Fatima said.

  “Girl, a whole lot of everybody got black in them,” Violet started.

  Fatima had heard some of Violet’s theories before during a game they sometimes played on the phone. The list included Jennifer Beals, Mariah Carey, and “that freaky girl from Wild Things,” Denise Richards, and now, apparently, Patti Mayonnaise. When Fatima suggested Justin Timberlake, Violet said, “Nah, he’s like that Wally kid at your school.”

  The nuances of these and other things Emily, Fatima’s best friend since second grade, just couldn’t understand, no matter how earnestly she tried or how many questions she asked, like why they couldn’t share shampoo when she slept over, or “What does ‘For us, by us’ even mean,” and why Fatima’s top lip was darker than her bottom one.

  Fatima picked up some theories on her own, too, without Violet or the literature. The thing about the brown top lip and the pink lower one, Fatima had pieced together after what she learned from Violet and what she had learned at school, was that you could either read them as two souls trying to merge into a better self, or you could conceal them under makeup and talk with whichever lip was convenient for the occasion. At school and with Emily, she talked with her pink lip, and with Violet, she talked with her brown one, and that created tension only if she thought too much about it.

  • • •

  Fatima passed the time at school by imagining the time she would spend after school with Violet, who promised to teach her how to flirt better on their next excursion and to possibly, eventually, hook her up with one of her cousins, but not one of her brothers, because “Most of them aren’t good for anything except upsetting your mother, if you want to do that.” Fatima did not want to do that.

  Now at school when Wally the Wigger looked like he was even thinking about saying something to her, Fatima made a face that warned, “Don’t even look like you’re thinking about saying something to me,” and he obeyed. In her mind, she not only said this aloud, but said it in Violet’s voice.

  She didn’t mind the laughter in her parents’ eyes when she tried out a new phrase or hairstyle, because it was all working. There was something prettier about her now, too, and people seemed to see it before Fatima did, because a guy named Rolf at Westwood—a tall brunette in her history class, with whom she’d exchanged a few eye rolls over Wally—asked her for her phone number.

  Without pausing to consider anything, she gave it to him.

  • • •

  IT MIGHT SEEM, up to this point, that Fatima simultaneously wore braces, glasses, and forehead acne, when you hardly needed to glance to see the gloss of her black hair or the sheen on her shins, with or without lotion. Fatima knew this truth instinctively, but buried its warmth under the shame of early-childhood teasing and a preference for melancholy self-pity. It was more romantic to feel ugly than to pretend she couldn’t hold her head just right, unleash her beautiful teeth, and make a skeptical man kneel at her skirt’s hem. She just didn’t have the practice, but she was hopeful that she might get it, with Rolf or one of Violet’s cousins, hopeful that the transformation had taken hold.

  • • •

  She had just returned from a movie with Violet—where not one but two guys had asked for her phone number, though three had asked for Violet’s, pronouncing their approval of her “thickness” with grunts, smiles, and by looking directly at her butt—when her mother said, “You got a phone call, from a boy.”

  It couldn’t be one of the boys from the theater already; that would make anyone look desperate.

  “Who is Rolf?” her mother asked with a smile, “and why didn’t you mention him before?”

  Fatima nearly floated up to her bedroom. She thought about calling Violet but called Rolf back instead, waiting, of course, for an hour to pass, a tip she had learned from Violet in the event of a hypothetical situation such as this.

  By now, and with some authenticity, Fatima could intone the accent marks in places they hadn’t been before, recite all the names of all the members of Cash Money, Bad Boy, No Limit, Wu-Tang, Boyz II Men, ABC, BBD, ODB, LDB, TLC, B-I-G-P-O-P-P-A, Ronny, Bobby, Ricky, Mike, Ralph, Johnny, Tony, Toni, and Tone, if she wanted. But when she called Rolf, all they talked about were skateboards and the Smiths, in whose music Fatima had dabbled before Violet.

  “The Smiths are way better than Morrissey,” Rolf said. His voice was nasal but deep.

  “You can barely tell the difference since Morrissey’s voice is so overpowering,” she said, from her pink lip.

  “No, but the Smiths’ stuff is way darker,” Rolf said. “You should hear the first album. Then you’ll get it. I’ve got it on vinyl.”

  “Okay,” Fatima waited.

  She noticed that he didn’t invite her over to listen or offer to lend her the album, but he did call back two days later and ask if she wanted to hang out over the next weekend, “like at the mall or something, see a movie?”

  Fatima counted to twelve, as per the rules (the universal ones, not just Violet’s) and said, “Yeah, that’d be cool.” She almost left the “l” off the end of the word, but caught herself. “Which mall?”

  “Where else?” Rolf said. “The Montclair Plaza.”

  This would be her first date, and though that was the kind of thing to share with a best friend, especially one with more experience, Fatima felt—in some deep way that hurt her stomach—that Violet didn’t need to know about Rolf, not yet at least. She would keep her lips glossed and parted, her two worlds separate.

  • • •

  The week leading up to the first date, Fatima tried to play extra-cool, asking Violet more questions than usual when they spoke on the phone. Neither of the guys from the movie theater had called Fatima, but one of Violet’s three had asked Violet out, and she was “letting him stew for a while before I let him know. Anyway, I thought you wanted to check out Rush Hour this weekend.”

  “This weekend?” Fatima said.

  “This weekend.”

  “I told my parents I would babysit this weekend, I forgot,” Fatima lied, feeling a bit like a grease stain on a silk shirt.

  “Since when?” Violet pushed.

  “We can go next weekend, or during the week,” Fatima said, and changed the subject.

  Before they got off the phone, Violet said, “I guess I’ll call Mike back, then, and tell him I’m free after all.”

  • • •

 
; Fatima would say that she wasn’t embarrassed by Violet or Rolf, but she wasn’t ready for them to meet. She felt relief, then, when their first and second dates went without a hitch—and ended with a gentle but sort of indifferent kiss—and even more relieved that Rolf was okay with seeing each other during the week so that Fatima wouldn’t have to explain to Violet why she suddenly had other plans on Friday and Saturday evenings.

  “Tell me more about your other friends,” Rolf had said on the phone one night, when Fatima was starting to think she might love him. He knew Emily from school. He knew she went to an AME church.

  He’d met her parents and siblings by then, though she still hadn’t met his. When he first came over to the house, he shook hands with Fatima’s father—noting Mr. Willis’s height with a “Whoa, you’re tall”—and hugged her mother and patted her six-year-old brother’s head awkwardly, in a way that reminded Fatima of someone stroking a rabbit’s foot for luck.

  At dinner Rolf chatted to excess, complimenting the drapes, the silverware, and Fatima’s frowny-faced eight-year-old sister and indifferent younger brother. She wasn’t sure how nervous either of them should be. She found his foot with hers under the table and smiled silently, “Calm down. Be quiet.” She tried to signal, but Rolf prattled on, “I think it’s great that you as a black family are so successful.”

  No one addressed Rolf, but her parents stood to clear the dishes. She heard their irritation in faint whispers from the kitchen, could see it in their eyes even with their backs turned. Fatima declined dessert. “We have to get to the movies. We’ll get some candy there,” she said.

  Still, she and Rolf were together a month later, and her parents hadn’t expressed any concrete disapproval. A month later, she was only just telling Rolf about Violet.

  “I guess my other best friend,” Fatima responded, “besides Emily, is Violet.”

  “Violet,” Rolf repeated. “Cool name. She’s not at Westwood, is she?”

  “No, public school.”

  “Ah,” Rolf said, in a tone that Fatima interpreted as neutral.

  “She’s my girl.” She stopped herself from saying “Ace boon coon.” “We hang out a lot on the weekends, actually.”

  “How come you never mentioned her before?”

  “I don’t know.” Fatima felt her mouth lying again, moving somehow separately from her real voice. “She’s kind of shy. She got teased a lot.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Rolf said.

  “They called her Patti Mayonnaise,” Fatima said, and she didn’t know why it was she who was now prattling on.

  “Don’t tell anybody this, but I always thought Patty was cute on Doug,” Rolf said, and shifted to talking about all his favorite cartoons. Fatima exhaled.

  • • •

  Over time they grew to joke, a little awkwardly, about Fatima’s position at school, as one of two black girls. She asked Rolf if this was a thing for him or if she was his first black girlfriend, because by now they called each other boyfriend and girlfriend.

  “I don’t see color,” he said. “I just saw you. Like, one day there you were.”

  Violet would have said that color-blind people were the same ones who followed you in the store and that Rolf’s game was hella corny.

  “Anyway, it’s not like you’re black black,” Rolf said.

  Fatima remembered the lifelessness, before Violet, of feeling like a colorless gas and tried, in spite of a dull ache and the numbness of her brown lip, to take Rolf’s words as a compliment.

  • • •

  The conventions of such a transformation dictate that a snaggletooth or broken heel threatens to return the heroine to her former life. That snaggletooth, for Fatima, was either Rolf or Violet, depending on how you looked at things, and Fatima wasn’t sure how she did.

  When she saw Violet, on April 4—after hiding her relationship with Rolf for three months—approaching from across the lobby of Edwards Cinema with Mike’s arm around her waist, Fatima’s first instinct was to grab Rolf’s hand and steer him toward the exit. But Violet was already calling her name.

  This wasn’t the natural order of things, for these separate lives to converge. Other factors aside, the code went hos before bros, school life before social life, family before anyone else. But Rolf was both school and social, and Violet both social and nearly family, and Fatima’s math skills couldn’t balance this equation.

  “I knew I saw you,” Violet said to Fatima once she got close. “Who is this?”

  “Rolf, Violet. Violet, Rolf,” Fatima said, “and Mike.”

  Mike smiled, and Rolf smiled, and they shook hands, but neither young woman saw the guys, their eyes deadlocked on each other.

  “Ha, so this is Violet,” Rolf said, ignoring or misreading Fatima’s firm grip on his arm. “Even your black friends are white, too.” Rolf laughed.

  “I was gonna tell you—” Fatima started to say to Violet.

  “Wait, Patti Mayonnaise, I get it now,” Rolf said aloud, then, “Oops, I—” and both women scowled at him.

  Fatima made a noise that could be interpreted as either a guffaw or a deep moan.

  When she turned back to Violet, though she opened and closed her mouth several times, no sounds emerged. She didn’t mean to hurt her; some things had just come out, and other things she hadn’t told Violet because she wasn’t sure which lip she was supposed to use. Before she knew it, her voice was over there and then over there, and she was ventriloquizing what she’d learned all at once, but from too many places and all at the wrong time.

  Violet didn’t curse or buck up as though she might hit Fatima—though perhaps one of those options might have been better; she just grabbed Mike’s arm and walked away.

  And like that, Fatima was a vapor again, but something darker, like a funnel cloud, or black smoke that mocked what was already singed.

  THE SUBJECT OF CONSUMPTION

  No one had come right out and said it, but Mike intuited that he might never advance past this stage in his career. The rule was that you couldn’t go backward. Whatever baseline he established with the first show could curve only upward, never down. If he’d started with, say, some original series about dating with disabilities and sold it as straight realism, he could do what he wanted now. But since he started with filth, he could get only grittier. The people were always hungry, the viewers and the “talent,” as they called the fame whores; they were downright gluttonous. Mike wanted to shift toward ironic documentaries with a sharp lens, but who would respect the artistry of the man who brought the world such jewels as Pet Psychics of Rhode Island and My Big Fat Gay Dads? So, here he was, at the house, heaping muck upon muck in order to form a more perfect dross pile.

  The neighborhood’s landscape belied the inner contents of the house. Oak and spruce trees stretched over Tudor roofs and lawns so smooth they looked vacuumed; women in gardening hats bent over patches of flowers gradated by height; lawn tools filled truck beds. Mike had pitched his first two series for the network—one on a set of twin sisters married to the same man and one on a pair of married white pastors raising ten adopted black children—with similar “behind these walls” premises. Mike’s use of cutaways from outside to inside—from the family looking suburban in the front yard, to the real workings of the house—attracted indignant viewers who couldn’t believe anyone lived this way. One of the sister-wife twins had stumbled across the blog of Lisbeth Hoag and tipped Mike off to this family he was preparing to shoot.

  “We’ll set up across the street for the long shots of the house, and then you’ll set up again in the driveway and come in close on the family.” Mike flattened the collar on his fitted pink polo shirt and walked up the drive toward the front door. A few men in jeans and Dickies began unloading cameras and stands from the van, the large man with the boom watching awkwardly, not really helping anyone.

  Before Mike could ring the doorbell, Lisbeth opened the red oversize door, a mismatch for the otherwise English architecture, and told him
to come in.

  “Liz. Good to see you. So we’re setting up outside, for now. Where’s the family?”

  Mike had gotten used to Lisbeth’s appearance and the appearance of the inner house after their first few meetings. Her small frame was all angles and melasmic patches of skin, the missing tooth jarring, yet she might have been pretty at some point. He made a mental note to ask for pictures of her younger self.

  Inside, the house at 406 Wedgewood was immaculately organized but felt almost third world if not vaguely tropical. Each of the three times he’d previously visited to talk about the pilot, the smell—a mix of sulfuric eggs and perspiration—had overwhelmed Mike before he saw its source. Eighteen-quart storage tubs of bananas, young coconuts, mangoes, tomatoes, and durians sat in a neat row along the perimeter of the kitchen, each fruit type separated into its own tub, the durians’ essence overpowering the freshness of the other food and permeating the few pieces of furniture. Mike wondered how the lighting guys could best capture the gnats and vinegar flies surrounding the tubs. Each common room included bookcases and at least one papasan chair, but there were no couches. A couple of twin mattresses without frames lined the floors of two of the three bedrooms; the mattresses, covered with gray-green and navy blue sheets, seemed to absorb the smell of the durians as well.

  “They got the schedule, but they’re out, actually,” Lisbeth said, and Mike sensed irritation in her voice. “Ryan’s not answering his phone, but knowing him, he probably lost it.”

  “Out,” Mike repeated, running through possible revisions that wouldn’t waste the daylight needed for the exterior shots with the whole family. He’d already stressed in his phone calls and emails the importance of call times and the tightness of the schedule. “Okay,” he started. A better director would have pried for more information about Ryan’s silence. Were the marital problems escalating? Maybe he should get Lisbeth to say that again on camera. The story arc should show the lifestyle’s strain on the family.