“What’s the problem?” I asked. “Is it that darn seat belt?”
(Who smiled like this?)
The officer squinted at me, then at the van.
“One of the male passengers wasn’t wearing his seat belt.” But then he said drily, “He’s wearing it now.”
He asked for license and registration and insurance, and I made jokes about how deep in the glove compartment the registration might be, and I pulled the insurance card from my wallet, and the registration was outdated and he glared at me but went back to his patrol car.
The Scholar started a low invective about California’s urgent need for revenue, and I leaned into the window to say to our Laurie, “You weren’t wearing your seat belt? You always wear your seat belt!”
He said, “It wasn’t me. It was Bink.”
Bink is darker than he is, nineteen, wearing her hair tucked into a black cap, wearing a huge black T-shirt. She rolled her eyes, furious.
“He’s coming back,” someone said. The officer approached the other side of the van. “I need the male passenger to open the door. Open the door,” he said.
Bink opened the door slowly.
He asked Bink for her license. He didn’t let on that he’d thought she was a guy. He didn’t ask her or our Laurie to get out of the car. I stopped having visions of people lying on their faces in the dirt. He wrote the ticket, our Laurie looked straight ahead, at The Scholar’s hair, and The Baller looked straight ahead, out the windshield, and I knew Feets was watching in the rearview without moving. I stood awkwardly near the driver’s-side window until it was done.
It wasn’t until that night that I felt my mouth slide over my teeth again and I remembered. A foolish, dazzling smile. Custard.
Toni Morrison’s novel Sula. The mother and daughter are on a train traveling from Ohio to Louisiana, and when the white conductor berates them for being out of the Colored car, the mother smiles at him, a placating, unnecessary show of teeth, and the black passengers hate her, and her daughter is ashamed of the custard-colored skin, and her weakness.
About twenty miles earlier, outside Corona, I’d been telling my ex-husband what I’d heard three days ago. I’d given one of our many nephews a ride home after football practice, with The Scholar. We’d spent a long time in the driveway of my father-in-law’s father’s house, talking to two of his brothers, three cousins, and a family friend. There is always a crowd in the driveway, because the house is not air-conditioned, and the beer is in a cooler, and there are folding chairs, card tables, and stereo speakers hung on the wrought iron supports for the carport. It’s the nerve center of communication for the entire neighborhood.
We talked about the newspaper article about the police review of the 2006 shooting of our coach’s brother. The commission had found no fault, though the brother was pulled over three times in thirty minutes, the first time because “he had a weird look” and the second time because after the patrol car continued to follow him, he ran a stop sign and made a U-turn. The official report said he had struggled when the officers attempted to put him in the back of the car for questioning. Witnesses said he was trembling, his hands shaking, and that the officers said they were arresting him. His brother had been shot by deputies when he was very young. One officer said the man’s brother reached for his Taser; the other officer shot him. The witnesses, who spoke mostly Spanish, said the man’s brother did not reach for the Taser.
Mr. T, a friend, said he’d been pulled over this year in the mostly white neighborhood where he’d lived for a decade. The officers said he fit the description of a robbery suspect. He gave them his ID. The suspect was described as six feet, 185 pounds, and in his thirties. Mr. T is five-eight, rotund, and in his sixties. He was told to get out of the car and lie on his stomach on the sidewalk. He refused repeatedly, and was kept there for over an hour while the officers berated him and asked him questions.
One brother-in-law was stopped while riding his bicycle to work at 5 A.M. He is a custodian at the community college. He was told drug dealers often use bicycles now. He was given a ticket for not having reflective gear.
The father of a basketball teammate was made to lie handcuffed in his own driveway for an hour by city police, who’d been called because his neighbors didn’t recognize him when he sat on his block wall. He was wearing sweatpants, working in the garden. He is an LAPD officer.
Every single friend and relative in the driveway had a story.
The Baller got her first citation earlier that year, in January. The highway patrolman followed her for five miles on the highway and had her pull over into the parking lot of a strip club. Our Laurie was in the passenger seat. He was questioned at length, about his identification, his address. The patrolman didn’t believe that he was seventeen. When our daughter called me, she was crying. She said she was afraid of what I would say.
She was right. I was furious, but not about the ticket. “When you get pulled over, you put D—— in danger,” I shouted at her. “You’re risking his life. Don’t drive even four miles over the speed limit! He could have been shot and killed!”
Only some mothers say that to their children.
It took two more hours to get to Huntington Beach and find a parking space.
The six-four Black Guy and the six-five Black Guy arranged themselves on chairs. They were surrounded by us and six more girls on the blankets now, friends of The Baller’s, eating chicken and watermelon and cupcakes.
Feets didn’t go in the water, as he usually did when the girls call him the whale and, even now, try to jump on his back. He read and dozed. He had slept two hours.
Our Laurie went in the water. He was alone for a long time, the farthest out in the powerful waves of that day, and because he was so tall the water reached only his chest.
Feets had a huge natural. We used to stand in the mirror together, back in 1979, and with his ancient, tiny black blow dryer I did my hair like Farrah Fawcett and then he blew out his Afro.
His hair is short now, with a lot of gray, under his ballcap.
Our Laurie always has braids, under his ballcap. It’s the braids that make people nervous. The hat. The long shorts. The intricate tiny braids that his mother makes every week, that cross his skull in complicated patterns and just touch his shoulders.
The Baby said, “Why does everyone make fun of watermelon and fried chicken anyway? Why did people always talk about Ba-rack and watermelon?”
The Scholar said, “Oh, my God, could you be any more annoying? Learn your history, okay?”
“Why don’t you ever eat watermelon, Daddy?” she asked him.
“‘Cause it’s nasty,” he said. “Just like green peas. They made me eat it when I was a kid, and I ain’t a kid now.”
He was slumped in his chair, half asleep. His feet were covered with sand.
When I was pregnant with The Scholar, everyone in the driveway teased us. “You got size-five feet and he got them size-fourteen boats. What the hell is that baby gonna look like?”
Who said it? Him, or one of his brothers? Or did I dream it? “What if it’s a short baby with his feet? It’ll be like one of those plastic clowns—you can punch it and punch it and it’ll pop right back up, on them cardboard feet.”
That night, he called at eleven fifteen. He was on shift. “They make it back okay?” he said, quietly, anxiously, in the echoing vacuum of the cement walls.
We had left the beach in his truck after only two hours. He had to sleep before work. “They came back about forty minutes after we did,” I told him.
“For real?”
“I guess they got cold,” I said.
Maybe they had been nervous. We didn’t talk about it. “You working security?” I said. “You gonna fall asleep?”
He said he had court calendar, making the schedule for juvenile offenders who would be escorted in in the morning. He has to shackle and prepare them. He’d already told everyone at work about the seat belt. A lot of coworkers had gotten tickets this s
ummer. “Revenue,” he said again. Then he said, “I just wanted to know they made it back,” and hung up.
I stood in the kitchen doorway. Our Laurie was on the couch, with the little women heckling him while he took out his braids, which were full of sand. They had never seen his shoulder-length curls before, and they kept trying to take pictures with the cell phone.
A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay
Christy Vannoy
FROM McSweeney’s
I AM A PERSONAL ESSAY and I was born with a port wine stain and beaten by my mother. A brief affair with a second cousin produced my first and only developmentally disabled child. Years of painful infertility would lead me straight into menopause and the hysterectomy I almost didn’t survive.
I recently enrolled in a clinic led by the Article’s Director and Editor for a national women’s magazine. Technically, we were there to workshop and polish ourselves into submission. Secretly, though, we each hoped to out-devastate the other and nail ourselves a freelance contract.
I wasn’t there to learn. I’ve been published as many times as I’ve been brutally sodomized, but I need to stay at the top of my game. Everyone thinks they have a story these days, and as soon as they let women in the Middle East start talking, you’ll have to hold an editor hostage to get a response. Mark my words.
There were ten of us in the room. The Essay Without Arms worried me at first, but she had great bone structure and a wedding ring dangled from a chain on her neck, so I doubted her life has been all that hard.
Two male essays wandered in late. They were Homosexual Essays, a dime a dozen, and publishers aren’t buying their battle with low self-esteem anymore. Even if their parents had kicked them out, I’d put money on a kind relative taking them in. It wasn’t as if they’d landed in state care, like I had, and been delivered straight into the wandering hands of recently paroled foster parents. Being gay is about as tragic as a stray cuticle, and I wasn’t born a Jehovah’s Witness yesterday.
I presented my essay first, and tried not to look smug as I returned to my seat. The Article’s Director let out a satisfied sigh and said, “I see someone’s done this before.” Yes, someone had. I’ve developed something of a reputation in the industry for taking meticulous notes on my suffering. It was a lesson learned the hard way after my year in sex slavery was rendered useless from the effects of crank on my long-term memory.
The third essay that read absolutely killed. She’d endured a series of miscarriages and narcoleptic seizures living in a work camp during her youth in communist China. Initially I was worried, but then I thought, whatever, good for her. There are twelve months in the year, and if Refugee Camp walked away with January, the April swimwear issue would be the perfect platform for my struggles with exercise bulimia. I don’t mean to sound overly confident, but much of the unmitigated misfortune that has been my day-to-day life has taught me the importance of believing in myself.
Next up were two Divorce Essays, which came and went, forgettable at best. The Editor’s critique suggested as much. Alopecia followed. She had promise, but was still clearly struggling for a hook. Every essay who’s been through chemo or tried lesbianism ends up bald. Bald isn’t the story. Alopecia was heading in the right direction, loving herself, but she was getting there all wrong. I think she needed to focus on not having eyelashes or pubic hair. Now that’s interesting. That’s an essay.
The last kid was unpublished and new on the circuit. It was hard to figure out what we were up against with this one. He walked up to the podium unassisted, bearing no visible signs of physical or mental retardation. Maybe it was something systemic, or worse still, the latest wave of competition to hit the market: a slow-to-diagnose mental illness. I tried to relax. It was hard to build story arcs off problems cured by pills. Problems caused by pills, on the other hand, sold on query alone. Shit. Maybe he was an addict.
His essay was weird. I think he was about a Tuesday. Not the Tuesday of an amputation, just a regular any old Tuesday. He persisted on beginning sentences without the personal pronoun I and comparing one thing to another instead of just out-and-out saying what happened. I was trying to track his word count but lost myself momentarily as he described the veins in a cashier’s hands. It reminded me of my grandmother, her rough physical topography a testament to a life of hard work. We all leaned in during one of his especially long pauses, only to realize he wasn’t pausing, he was done.
The Refugee Essay applauded loudly, but quite honestly, I think her tepid grip on English and admitted narcolepsy barred her from being a qualified judge. The Gay Essays joined in too, but they’ll clap for anything with a penis and a Michelangelo jawline.
My ovations, on the other hand, are earned, and this essay never once told me how he felt about himself. Although, I have to admit, if I’d been him during that section where his father didn’t even open the gift, I’d have been devastated by the rejection. Not of the thing itself, but of what it represented. Like it wasn’t a gift so much as it was longing in the shape of a box, wrapped up in a bow.
Look, it wasn’t like this essay didn’t have potential. I think everyone in that room agreed he had a certain something. But talent takes time. Inoperable tumors just don’t sprout up overnight, and psychotic breaks are nothing if not slow to boil.
The Article’s Director didn’t bother to give him any feedback. One of the Divorce Essays tried to pipe in about the unsatisfying ending, but the Editor silenced her with the stop sign of her raised palm. Wordlessly, she stared at this essay with a sorrow that reminded me of the last look the man I believed to be my father gave me before heading to Vietnam, only later to return a person wholly different from the one who left. “You deserve something better than this,” the Editor said, “yet for rules I follow, but did not create, I can’t help you.”
I thought about this essay a lot over the next few days, like he was beside me, equal parts familiar and strange. But the thing about life is that you simply cannot settle for melancholy, even when it’s true. You are not a tragedy, you are a personal essay. You must rise above and you must do it in the last paragraph with basic grammar and easily recognized words.
Anyway, come November I will be buying every copy of Marie Claire I can get my one good hand on! You’ll find me on page 124. If you haven’t looked death straight in the eye or been sued by a sister wife, you won’t see yourself in my story. But you will find solace in knowing your own problems are petty and banal. I have ascended victorious from the ashes of immeasurable self-doubt and pain. And I have not simply survived, I have flourished.
Unprepared
Jerald Walker
FROM Harvard Review
WE DROVE CAUTIOUSLY through the downpour, making the kind of small talk one would expect of strangers, when my companion slid a jacket from his lap, exposing his penis. It rose up high through his zipper, like a single meerkat surveying the land for trouble. To be sure, there was trouble to be had because, despite being a skinny seventeen-year-old, I never left home without my razor.
But what I’d really needed that morning was an umbrella. Rain had begun falling in sheets a few minutes earlier as I’d sprinted to catch the Seventy-ninth Street bus, which pulled away just before I reached it. My frustration had not had a chance to sink in when an Oldsmobile stopped in front of me. The driver offered me a ride. I was immediately put on guard, since random acts of kindness were rare for the South Side of Chicago. In the instant before I opened the passenger door, I decided that a robbery would put me back only six dollars, making it worth the risk. But if he had designs on my leather Converse All Stars, as had a previous robber, I might have to offer some resistance, depending on whether or not he drew a gun.
The other robber had not. He’d merely dragged me into an alley and begun punching my face while explaining, “This is a stickup, motherfucker!” Next he searched my pockets, finding and taking my only dollar and a bus transfer. He cursed and hit me once more. Then he jabbed a finger at my shoes. “Give me tho
se!” he commanded. “Give me your coat too!” He didn’t seem to mind that it was winter and the ground was covered in snow. After he fled with my belongings, I went back to where he had accosted me to wait for the bus that would complete the final leg of my trip to basketball practice, due to start in twenty minutes at 7 A.M. When the bus arrived, I explained to the driver what had happened. He waived the fare, gave me a tissue to wipe my bloodied nose, and a few miles later deposited me between stops, right at the fieldhouse door. This had happened five years earlier, when I was only a child of twelve. And unarmed.
“So, do you play sports?” this driver was asking me. He wore a large Afro and lush sideburns that reached to his chin, typical of the current style. I figured him to be around fifty.
“Little bit,” I said.
“What do you play?”
“Hoops.”
“Oh, yeah?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“What position?”
“Point guard.”
“Going to shoot some now?”
I shook my head. “Work.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a lab assistant at the medical center.”
“What does a lab assistant do?”
“Clean piss and shit from test tubes.”
“Does that pay well?”
I looked at him. “Well enough.”
We stopped at a red light. The wipers slapped at the rain, filling the silence. The penis continued its watch. I looked around myself, amazed at how dark it was for midmorning, and at how many people, like me, had been caught unprepared. They darted about beneath newspapers or stood huddled in doorways, while I sat relatively dry, convinced that both my six dollars and my All Stars were safe. It was my body this man wanted, and that, I believed, was safe too. When the subject of sex was broached—verbally, that is—I would simply state that men weren’t my thing. I relaxed in my seat and waited for his proposition, hoping it wouldn’t come before we’d traveled the remaining ten blocks to the elevated train station, where he’d agreed to take me.
The Best American Essays 2011 Page 26