In the air-conditioned dimness of the living room, the girl is almost giddy, going on about all that she suspected, her features complicated by the dancing light from an aquarium in the corner of the fussy little room, cramped with dark-stained shelves, books, and brass knickknacks—the teacher’s vanity, Frankie assumes.
“Are you here to tell her?” the daughter asks, and Frankie can sense that some part of the girl wants this, that she’s convinced herself there must be retribution for whatever crimes mothers commit against their daughters.
“Would you want me to?”
The girl scratches her arm. Looks away. “It’s better to know,” she says defensively. “Maybe if she wasn’t so concerned with my life, she already would.” Frankie wonders if she means it, if this near-universal disdain a daughter can feel for a mother might be necessary for the appreciation that comes later, if this is what it takes to love. If she can just understand this girl, maybe she can decode her own.
Frankie inches closer—this daughter smells of green apple and rain and something slightly sour. She considers how easy it would be to let her hand fall to the girl’s shoulder, let her fingers trail down the arm and trace the concave places that held those scents. It would only be fair: a biblical retribution, one daughter for another, her fingers continuing as she lays the girl back and searches out the warmth between her legs. Frankie reaches out her hand.
The phone rings, breaking the moment, and the girl’s expression changes again. Now she looks wary and a little ashamed, as if she realizes that, in her resentment, she’s gone too far. She tells Frankie to wait, and disappears into the adjacent room.
In her absence, Frankie recoils, catching herself on the edge of the tank, the light carving up her face. She stares into it, unseeing, at first. She feels like a monster, but what recourse does she have? If she confronts the teacher, she loses; if she doesn’t, the same. But Frankie is not the teacher; she can’t do the worst thing she could do, and with this realization she regains a semblance of herself. She remembers what she’s good at; that sometimes, it’s a mother’s burden to settle.
Inside the aquarium, the teacher’s snails are placid and small as plums. Now cooled, her anger suffuses her with prophecy and Frankie knows what happens next.
Margot waits outside for her mother, watching the evening disperse in bold orange and pink, a shawl of purple creeping at the edges of the sky. She’s eaten, but feels an emptiness she won’t learn to recognize until later as the expansion of herself—a good sign, but easy to mistake. Her mother had dropped her off at three, as planned, with two warm dishes in her arms, and she and some others helped decorate, strung up balloons and folded paper flowers into a centerpiece. She had watched Mr. Klein carry in tablecloths and cutlery, how he, brushing past his wife, leaned in and kissed the tip of her ear. The wife—attractive, as Margot had suspected—had swatted him away but was clearly pleased, and Margot found herself not jealous, but merely sad. Already too comfortable with being a phase.
During the dinner, Mr. Klein let his hand linger each time he passed a dish. The third time, Margot yanked her hand away, violently, as if burned, and the blue bowl toppled and shattered against the floor. “Not to worry,” he repeated, too jovial, jumping up to grab towels. Other students scurried to snatch the roasted vegetables from the tile, but Margot didn’t help them. There was no apology on her lips, and after this, the teacher made too many jokes, talked too much. He didn’t touch her.
Her mother pulls up and Margot sees her first. She watches Frankie inside the car as she taps the steering wheel, adjusts the rearview so that she is peering at herself. From here, her mother looks young—could be any of the girls, making sure the face she’s wearing is the one the world wants—and at this thought, Frankie suddenly breaks through, not just a mother, but a whole person. Separate and full of awe. It dawns on Margot that, old as she is, it’s her mother’s first time on this earth, too. Against her will, she softens.
She remembers when she used to let her mother pack her lunches, brown paper bags full of foods other kids had never heard of—endives, rambutan, tiny ramekins of fish roe to spread on pumpernickel toast. The kids, being mostly animal, were cruel at that age, intolerant of what they hadn’t been taught to understand. She remembers Frankie slicing beets, fresh from the oven and steaming, their juice staining the tips of her fingers pink. I don’t want those, she’d told her mother, though she liked them, and Frankie had asked her why. Other kids got peanut butter, cheese and deli meats, instant mashed potatoes from the lunch line. Margot said: They look like body parts. Frankie had set the knife down and faced her daughter. Her eyes went wide. But they are! she had exclaimed. And if anyone bothers you, you tell them, “In my house, we eat the hearts of our enemies.”
When Margot thumps into the front seat, Frankie turns slightly toward her, her fingers still drumming away. “Did you have fun? Did your teacher like his special dish?” Frankie tries not to appear too eager. She’d made puff pastry filled with spinach and brie for the kids and told her daughter the smaller meal was for the teacher, a gift of gratitude. She knew the gesture would go unnoticed by her daughter, the girl inclined to think her mother always did too much. Before long, the teacher or his wife would notice the snails were missing, and the daughter would have to tell them about her visit. It would take him a moment, but then suddenly, with great horror, he’d realize what she’d done. Frankie can’t help but grin at this vision; after all, what can the teacher say?
Margot refuses to talk about Mr. Klein, does not tell Frankie that he sucked the shells until his mouth had glistened. She opens the glove box and retrieves the cigarettes she’s known all along have been there, her mother too sheepish to say a word. Margot takes one out and sticks it between her lips to light it, then without looking, extends it to her mother. After a pause, Frankie takes it, puts it to her own mouth. She inhales.
Outside the Raft
That summer we were nine and ten, our birthdays rolling over one another as if playing leapfrog—first hers, then mine, five days apart. I was envious of my cousin’s double digits in the same way she coveted my silver-wrapped presents, the balloons and white-frosted sheet cake, the way my parents shouted, “Happy birthday!” Except next year I would be ten, and Tweet’s parents would still be locked up, serving life sentences for holding up a pawnshop and killing a man, something like Bonnie and Clyde, but no one made a movie. She lived with our grandmother, who didn’t believe in birthdays and so hers passed quietly, leaving only the gift of age.
It was a typical Floridian summer, both sweltering and sweet, stretching out before us like a wide-open hand. I was giddy at the prospect of long, uninterrupted days where my cousin and I could be together. My mother never understood it, why I would want to spend all my time at my grandmother’s small, slant-slatted house on the bad side of town—no cable, no PlayStation, no fresh air. What was there for two little girls to do?
I used to hear her on the phone with her friends—Toni Braxton crooning through the house on Saturday mornings, my mother decked out in sweats and an old boyfriend’s T-shirt she only wore to clean in—talking about how she couldn’t wait to leave Grandma’s when she was a teen.
“Woman sees devils in everything,” she said once, the jewels on her acrylic nails flashing as she dusted the tops of the cabinets. “Except when they’re right in front of her face.”
“What devils?” I asked, and she startled. She would often forget I was there, quiet, listening.
“Go play,” she said, instead of answering. “Grown folks are talking.” I went back to my room thinking of devils you could see—red skin, horns, and black beards. Plucked out of the pages of my grandmother’s books, sitting across from you eating bologna sandwiches thick with mayonnaise. Chugging sweet tea. What did my mother think my grandmother couldn’t see?
Whatever she felt about her mother, that summer she took me whenever I wanted to go. Tweet and I didn�
�t need to leave the yard; our possibilities were endless in that small house. We spoke a secret language, and we always understood each other.
Before bed one weekend, our grandmother ran us a bath, the strawberry scent of Mr. Bubble rising with the steam. She bent over the tub, large behind bouncing, filling up our view with faded blue denim.
“Full moon,” Tweet said, and we giggled over it, sticking out our own skinny rumps in poor imitation. Tweet grabbed a Magic Marker lying out of place on the sink and marked the back of Grandma’s dress.
“Tweet colored on you!” I tattled, the words leaping from my mouth before I could think about them.
“No I didn’t!” She whipped the marker out of sight. Our grandmother looked between us and then said, “Maybe the mark was already there,” though I’d seen Tweet do it with my own eyes. After she left, Tweet pinched me in the tub, and I bore the hurt in silence as penance for my transgression. Without apology, she made me a beard of bubbles and told me I was Old Man River from the songs we learned at school.
“What am I doing?”
“Searching for your daughter,” she said, then held her breath and slipped under the foamy water. And I looked and I looked, but couldn’t find her because she’d turned into a fine mist floating over the sea.
In the top bunk that night, after our grandmother prayed for Jehovah to watch over us in our sleep, we stayed awake, kicking the covers off, knobby knees bumping like small rocks, our cotton underwear luminescent in the moonlight sliding through the blinds. We wondered why we weren’t born as tigers roaming the green hills of India—carrying our young in our mouths, sandpaper tongues lapping blood at the kill.
“Or eagles?” My hands jumped up over my head, as if with feathers and the possibility of flight.
“Or mice,” Tweet answered. I could hear her teeth chattering, and I pictured her eating cheese in tiny, hurried bites, whiskers prickling, sensing danger always. We wondered why we weren’t born silver-scaled fish, instead of black girls with brown eyes and stick insect legs.
“Go to sleep in there,” our grandmother called, and at the sound of her heavy footsteps in the hall we skittered back beneath the covers, holding in giggles, that soft, intimate scraping at the back of our throats. We lay together at opposite ends—long, thin feet next to heads of billowy braids and ponytails, her dark brown arm pressed against my light one. She grasped my hand in the dark, as if to check that I was still there, her nails sinking softly into my palm. “I love you, Shayla,” she said.
The next day, our grandmother pulled us from our play for Bible study. We groaned and dragged our feet, made our bodies dense, hoping to be immovable, but our grandmother was a capable shepherd. She ushered us into the living room, big hands fanning us forward; we imagined wind at our backs.
“Why was Jonah punished?” she asked.
“He disobeyed God,” we answered in the drawling unison of students at school. God sent a storm and the sailors tossed Jonah off their ship to calm the sea and save themselves.
“Jehovah knows your heart,” she told us, giving us the eye. I thought of Jonah in the belly of the whale, his hands pressed to his lips in prayer, and what he might have said to make God spit him back up. I wouldn’t let them throw me overboard, I thought, and my heart pitter-pattered a defiant beat against my birdcage chest. I had never seen a god, nor smelled one. Never tasted its sunshine flesh.
“Maybe there is no God,” I told Tweet later in the backyard. The grass had shriveled and died. I threw rocks at a wasp’s nest that hung from the limb of our grandmother’s river birch. They missed and bounced off the papery bark, making new gouges next to scratches where the cats climbed up.
“What if He’s just some big joke? To make us behave?”
I chucked another rock, and Tweet put her hand flat on my back. “Don’t,” she said.
I didn’t know if she meant the wasps or God. I looked into her face, her large dark eyes, searching for some answer the grown-ups wouldn’t give. I wanted to ask if—when she pressed her palms together before bed—she prayed for her parents’ salvation or the man they killed. And to what did she pray? Did her God have two faces that looked like hers, and a gun hidden in the waistband of Its jeans? Was hers a God of pawnshop gold and two-dollar scratchers, promising We’ll be back soon, but never coming home? Even then, I wanted to let her speak the answers into my ear like a psalm. But the subject was “grown folk talk,” forbidden even between us, and so I said nothing. I threw again and missed.
Tweet wound back her arm and let her own stone fly; it found the nest with a soft thwap and knocked it loose. The nest hit the ground and we ran for cover as the wasps flew out, their violent droning filling the air as they searched for somewhere to place the blame. They disappeared into the unmoving sky, leaving silence in their wake.
“God’s real,” Tweet said, and headed for the house. She left me standing in the yard alone.
Our exchange made my skin itch, made my mind arc back to another conversation I wasn’t meant to hear. My mom’s best friend Shawnie had come over, and she and my mother ate crab legs in the living room, watching Sex and the City and trading gossip while it was off to bed for me. I was supposed to call Shawnie “Auntie,” which made her own little girl my play-cousin, though I didn’t enjoy Yana’s company as much as Tweet’s. Yana’s feet smelled like toe jam and she wiggled too much in her sleep. While she snored, I listened to my mother and Shawnie talking through the door.
“How’s your momma and them?” Shawnie asked, and I heard the sharp crack of a crab leg being broken between teeth.
“Girl,” my mother said, like that one word told you everything you needed to know. “Too old to be raising kids again. And look how Mike turned out.” Mike was Tweet’s father, my mother’s older brother.
“I see that same darkness in Tweet,” my mother continued. “She’s going the way of her parents. Bet on that.”
“I don’t know,” Shawnie said. “I see a darkness in Shayla, too.”
At the sound of my name, a deep pang quivered through my stomach, something that felt like recognition and shame. Heat spread across my face. I did a mental check of myself, my fingers and toes, my twiggy arms, the surface of my teeth. I tried to decide if my body felt evil. How could the grown-ups quantify this darkness—could Shawnie see it in my face the way some people picked out a nose like my father’s, or my mother’s lips? I felt for horns in my hair and finding none, put my pillow over my head. I didn’t want to know what else Shawnie saw, or if my mother agreed. I tried to sleep, keeping my legs stiff so they wouldn’t touch Yana’s. Just in case what I had was catching.
I’d been at my grandmother’s almost a week when my father came by. My mother was always talking about how cool she was even though they weren’t together and he was married now. She let him see me whenever he wanted and they always did holidays together. “I don’t want that boy,” she’d say.
It was the hottest day of that summer and the sun hung in the air—a wax lemon melting, oozing light. “Hey, little girl,” my father said, patting my head. I squinched my eyes tight and batted at his hand. His attention both embarrassed and thrilled me. I was aware, then, of my fortune, of my father there, next to me. Tweet stood nearby, and I could feel her eyes, how intensely she took us in. I shot away from him and hid my face in my grandmother’s side so I wouldn’t have to look at my cousin.
“We’re going to the beach,” my father said. “Chris and Tati, too.” They were in the car outside, waiting with my stepmother.
My grandfather had been what my mother called “busy,” which was supposed to explain why my father had siblings who were one year older and one year younger than me. They were bright as medallions and had soft hair like my grandmother’s fake mink. Tati was the youngest and called me cousin because aunt made her feel too adult, but Chris would lord his title over me if he wanted to ride shotgun or have a longer turn on t
he boogie boards at the beach. The previous summer I had kissed him at my dad’s apartment pool—in the deep end, angling our bodies down—six feet of chlorinated blue shimmering above our heads. When we broke apart and surfaced, Tati had cut her eyes at us. “You didn’t see nothing,” Chris said.
Whereas my mother kept a close eye on me, didn’t want me to leave the front step, my father believed in cultivating my independence. When I was with him he’d let me ride my bike through a busy intersection to the McDonald’s fifteen minutes away, or drop me off at the Wet ’n Wild water park in Orlando by myself. That summer, I hadn’t seen him too much. I suspected this had something to do with my stepmother being pregnant. She’d pat her big belly and make comments like how nice it would be to finally be a family, like she couldn’t be a family with me. She was having a boy, and sometimes I found myself wishing all that stomach was filled with air, that when it came time to push, nothing but wind would come out.
My dad handed me my green-and-black striped two-piece, my sometimes-swimsuit that lived at his house folded up in a drawer, waiting for summer. Tweet’s head drooped at the prospect of my leaving.
“Can Tweet come?” I gave him and my grandmother my most winsome smile, the one that showed nearly all of my deciduous teeth, their wavy edges and baby sheen.
My dad packed us into the old station wagon, Chris and Tati scooching close to make room, and we all giggled in the backseat—like hyenas, like loons. Like children ages eight, nine, and ten. Grandma’s house disappeared behind us, the cracked sidewalks and the shaggy dogs that roamed the streets. Tweet and I put the windows down and let the air whip in, sticking our hands out to fly on the breeze, eagles after all.
When we arrived at Jax Beach, my dad pulled a cooler and our inflatable raft from the beat-up back of the wagon and we piled out gracelessly, squabbling among ourselves about who could hold their breath the longest and what flavor ice cream was best. We wanted the adults to hear, to get the hint and take us to the stand-alone ice cream shop shaped like pink soft serve in a cone with sprinkles two streets over; they pretended like they didn’t. We hopped from foot to foot to keep our bare soles from scorching on the blacktop of the parking lot. We complained about how hot it was: the car, the air, the ground.
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