“Jesus, Jo, you don’t even have a real table?” I say.
“Not everybody gets everything handed to them,” Jo says. She totaled not one but two new BMWs in high school.
Harrison sets me back down on the ground.
“Where’s Daddy?” I ask.
“He’s not coming,” my mother says.
“Work, apparently,” Jo says, like she doesn’t believe it. “You smell like chlorine.”
“What happened to your hair?” My mother inspects me. She’s haughty and very tall, but also always wears exquisite sky-high heels so that, according to Grandma Opal, “Don’t nobody look down on her, not ever.”
“Water,” I say.
“I can only handle one problem child at a time.”
“Thanks a lot, Valerie,” Jo says. She loves to call my mother by her name because she knows it pisses her off.
Harrison places a record on their old record player. On its cover, a beautiful lighter-skinned woman with a wispy Afro rocks a space leotard. In her hands are person-size steel chopsticks, and her long brown legs are spread and bent at angles like a spider’s. She looks confident, defiant. She looks like exactly the kind of woman my sister wants to be.
“Do you like Betty Davis?” Harrison asks me, or my mother; I’m not sure.
“Is that her?” I say, picking up the album cover.
“She was married to Miles Davis. Maybe she would’ve been taken more seriously if she hadn’t been. She kicks ass. Listen.”
The music coming out of the speaker is about what you’d expect from a sexy black space lady. She growls and purrs all over funk that sounds like the past and the future all at once. It also sounds like an album you might have sex to—like they might have sex to, which… gross.
When my mother isn’t looking, Harrison smacks Jo’s butt, and she breaks into a grin, the biggest I’ve seen her smile in ages. Their bodies are easy together, like a pair of matching socks folded into each other, worn in slightly different places but made of the same stuff.
For dinner, Harrison has made some sort of chicken dish with potatoes and vegetables, which is much more delicious than anticipated, given that they don’t seem to have much of a kitchen.
“This is great,” I say. “Who knew you could do all this with a Crock-Pot?”
“Harrison did all the real work.” Jo looks over at Harrison adoringly. “He’s a great cook.”
“You chopped up all the vegetables!” he says, and squeezes her shoulder. Blech.
They keep their hands on each other under the table. It’s as though she has to keep touching him, and he her, or they’d be lost. My sister the sock.
“Yes. It’s quite the culinary experience you’ve created here,” my mother says. This is not a compliment. The sweat beads like pearls along her collarbone. Jo’s apartment lacks air-conditioning, and the whole place is already stuffy with the weight of everything unsaid.
There’s a fridge and a sink with some cupboards, but no stove. There’s an archway that separates the art deco kitchen from the living room, but the living room is also a bedroom. It’s a studio, but it gets a lot of light. The sunset feels warm on its walls. Nothing has been remodeled since at least the 1930s or ’40s, and so there are the ghosts of would-be actresses and writers and singers and dancers, of all the people who moved back home, or moved on, or up. Jo and the construction worker have decorated it so that it looks like the inside of a genie’s bottle.
Jo seems more relaxed in her skin around Harrison. Maybe it’s because Harrison sees Jo—not who she used to be, not who she could be, just who she is right now in front of him. Maybe he makes her feel like that’s enough.
Jo retrieves a bottle of champagne from within one of the cabinets. “In honor of our special day.”
My mother purses her lips as Jo pours the champagne into mismatched glasses.
“Ashley’s underage,” my mother says as Jo pours for me.
“I’m pretty sure Ashley’s had a drink or two by now.” She continues to pour.
“Don’t encourage bad behavior,” my mother says.
“You know French kids don’t binge drink. Because it’s not a big deal there.”
“Last I checked, we weren’t French.”
Jo sets the bottle down on the table and raises a glass that reads “Hawaii: The Aloha State.”
“Ohana!” Harrison says, and together we clink.
* * *
“So, who are you, Ashley Bennett?” Harrison runs his tongue over the bit of chicken stuck in his crowded teeth. Jo reaches over and scrapes it off with her nail. My mother looks like she’s going to vomit.
“I’m her sister… and her daughter.” I laugh. “Um… I’m gonna graduate this year.”
Harrison looks at me intently. His eyes are the color of dirty ocean water, refracting blue and green and brown all at once. His hair can’t decide if it’s red or brown. Everything on his head is indecisive. Also, he has three big red pimples on his left cheek that I know my mother will mention as soon as we’re alone.
“What do you like? Who do you want to be?”
His probing seems earnest, but I don’t have answers for any of it. My mother and sister look at me expectantly, like they’re waiting for answers, too.
“I don’t know,” I mumble. “A doctor, maybe.”
That answer usually gets adults off my back.
“It’s okay. I didn’t know at your age, either,” he says.
“How old are you again, exactly?” my mother says.
“Twenty-one, same as Jo.”
“A regular font of wisdom.” My mother finishes her second glass of champagne.
“Have you been following the trial?” Harrison asks me.
There’s only one trial to be following right now.
“Not closely,” I say. I haven’t really been following it at all.
“There’s no way they won’t convict them,” Harrison says. “The evidence is right there, on video camera. That’s the best thing about this new technology: It’s so small that it democratizes the act of documentation. You can’t just cover things up and lie to the people. Thank goodness that dude went to KTLA with it.”
I nod. It’s a very enthusiastic way to talk about grainy camcorder footage. The wound on my foot is starting to pulse like it’s got its own heartbeat. If before it felt like a dull ache, now I’m convinced there’s a chance I might have to amputate the whole thing.
“If they don’t convict them, all hell’s gonna break loose,” Jo says. “The people are angry.”
“The people?” My mother squints and somehow also raises her eyebrow practically all the way up to her scalp.
Jo ignores her and continues. “We have friends who are already planning on protesting if they don’t convict those assholes. ’Cause, like, it’s not just about the cops, right? It’s all of it. Yes, the LAPD is racist as hell, and black and brown communities get policed differently than white ones. That’s a fact. But also, the schools suck. There’s no jobs. You don’t give people any opportunities to make something of themselves or to see a way out of the shit they’re dealing with every day. There’s no hope. And when kids turn to gangs or drugs, people act all surprised. Like, what the fuck did you think was gonna happen?”
She pauses for emphasis, and I’m pretty sure she threw the “fuck” in there just to fuck with our mother. I think my mother’s gonna say, “Language, Josephine!” but she doesn’t. After a sufficiently dramatic length of time, Jo continues.
“You can’t disenfranchise a huge portion of the population and not expect shit to go down. I mean, what they did to him is awful, but really, Rodney’s just the tip of the whole goddamn iceberg.”
Harrison nods enthusiastically and adoringly. The way he looks at her makes me want to gag a little bit. She’s just my sister, not Che or Mother Theresa or, like, Naomi Campbell or whatever.
“Yes, Josephine.” My mother sighs.
This is how we spent a good number of dinners in high school: Jo ranting about he
r injustice of the week, the rest of us agreeing with her and occasionally interrupting to say “Please pass the peas/salt/hot sauce.” There are so many battles Jo and I don’t have to fight. We’re lucky black girls. My parents worked really hard to make us so. It’s like Jo feels guilty for all that good fortune. Why can’t you just be lucky? Be happy? Be grateful, they think. Harrison’s a white dude, so maybe all our good luck he just thinks of as his birthright. Maybe that’s why Jo can be indignant with him, why they can be indignant together, without all the business of being too grateful getting in the way.
“You know, you haven’t asked to see my ring yet,” Jo says to my mother.
“I didn’t know there was anything to see.”
Jo reaches her hand across the table. My mother looks over at the ring and takes my sister’s hand in hers, bringing it in closer. It seems that right there, in that moment, the full weight of my sister comes crashing down on her head.
“It belonged to my mother,” Harrison says. In the center of the ring is a big pearl from some prize oyster. It looks like Harrison dove into the depths himself to pick it out special for Jo, it fits her so perfectly. It’s ornamented with a halo of tiny diamonds and sapphires that rests on a simple gold band. It doesn’t look particularly expensive—at least not compared to the mass on my mother’s hand—but it is elegant.
On the wall above Harrison’s head, there’s a simple framed photo of Harrison and Jo at the courthouse. He wears an ill-fitting blue suit, something grabbed last minute at the big and tall store. She wears a simple white minidress with long sleeves. I know that dress, like I know nearly everything beautiful in my sister’s closet, but I can’t remember why. I know it like I know the blue satin dress that looked like the sky and nearly showed her ass. It was ruined when she got too drunk and spilled wine on herself at my father’s office Christmas party. Or the black suit with the slightly cropped shirt she wore to my grandma’s funeral. My great-uncle Wally’s wife, Evaline, made a fuss about how disrespectful Jo was for wearing pants and a crop top to Grandma Opal’s funeral, but Grandma Opal was a sassy old bag herself—her words, not mine—so Jo looked straight at Great-Aunt Evaline and said, “Grandma thought you were boring.”
“Your parents are okay with this?” My mother shakes a bit as she speaks to Harrison, a soda bottle about to blow.
“My mother is dead, and I don’t much care what my father thinks,” Harrison says. There’s an edge to his politeness now.
This is not going to end well. I’m glad my father isn’t here. Once he yelled at some guy my sister was seeing the summer after her freshman year of college just for bringing her home too late. “Nothing good happens after midnight!” he said.
“I’m an adult! We were just talking,” Jo said.
“You can talk in the daytime. I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck!” he said.
I swear, sometimes my parents sound like the white people in a 1950s sitcom—minus, like, the segregation, etc. I wonder what Harrison’s parents and grandparents were doing then, which side they were on. Did they sign petitions or hold up signs and fight alongside us, or did they stand idly by? Or worse? I wonder if my mother’s wondered the same thing, or Jo. Maybe that’s what my mom really meant by “Your parents are okay with this?”
Anyway, in moments like these, I’ve found that it’s best to provide a distraction. I take my foot out of my shoe and lift it to the card table.
“I ditched school and cut myself on a dirty beer bottle today. I should probably get a tetanus shot, right? It kinda feels like my foot could fall off.”
“Get your foot off the table, Ashley,” my mother says. “Now.”
“It’s not a real table.”
“Tetanus is for nails, not beer bottles,” Jo says. She seems vaguely annoyed I’m there. But she always seems vaguely annoyed at my general existence. Of course she’s not grateful.
“Why were you ditching school?” my mother says.
“Senior ditch day,” I lie.
“Were you drinking?”
“No. We cut through a construction site to get to Michael’s house.”
She can tell I’m lying, but she’s too mad at Jo to have any anger left for me.
“Let me see.” Harrison takes his big bear hands and places them around my foot. “Once when I was a kid, I was on the roof helping my dad with this project he was working on. Anyway, I stepped on this nail, and it went clean through my Chucks. Ripped right through my foot.”
For a few seconds, my mother and sister forget to antagonize each other. Both stare at Harrison, enthralled.
“Did you have to go to the emergency room?” my sister says.
“Nah, my dad said it was too expensive.” He laughs.
My mother and sister look on, horrified. Mouths agape, they look like the exact same person. Two people who belong to each other.
“Got a bit of a fever and the area was kinda swollen for a month, but it healed up. No lockjaw!” He laughs again. “Dessert?”
* * *
Jo and the construction worker have started a band together. After dessert, they sit down with their guitars and sing for us. Jo’s voice is raw, and Harrison’s guitar is tender. Together, they’re magic. They don’t have a name for themselves, not yet. When they’re done, Jo looks at my mother, expectant.
“That was nice.”
“That’s it?” Jo says.
“What? It was.”
The two of them stare each other down across the room.
“Alright, whatever,” Jo says. She bites her lower lip and fixes her gaze on some random spot in the corner.
“You guys are really good,” I say.
She softens. “Thank you.”
“Anyway, we should get going. Ashley has homework to do,” my mother says.
* * *
As we head out the door, out of my mother it finally bubbles up and pops.
“Come home,” she says. “Being poor isn’t romantic. Not for us.”
Jo looks off into the distance, then back. She bites her lip again as if she’s going to cry.
“You’ve been very rude to my husband. In his home,” Jo says quietly. From the front door, you can hear Harrison washing the dishes, humming their shared song to himself.
“Your husband?” my mother scoffs. “You’re a child playing house.”
Jo starts to shut the door on my mother.
“Don’t you dare.” My mother pushes back against her, and back and forth the door goes, Jo’s bare foot versus my mother’s heels. Finally, the door snags my mother’s stockings and the tear runs in a ladder up and up and up. My mother stops what she’s doing to look down and inspect it. Jo uses the distraction to slam the door in her face.
* * *
Honestly, I don’t know why Jo just can’t get it together. But also, why can’t my mother just tell Jo she’s good?
Sometimes I feel like I’m the door being pushed back and forth between the two of them. Why is it that they can never say the right words to each other? Why do they leave so much space between them for all the wrong ones to fall in?
“This is not what we sent you to college for!” my mother yells at the closed door.
Over the buckled sidewalks on our way back to the car, we see three black boys in a row against the white brick of the 7-Eleven, arms spread like stars, a mini constellation. Or starfish stuck to a rock.
The policemen are shorter than the boys are but thicker, two ruddy bricks in uniform. The guns at their sides are terrifying, and I’m not even being patted down.
Earlier, Officer Bradford didn’t pat Courtney or Kimberly or Heather or Trevor or Michael down. Me neither, even if he did look at me longer than he did the rest.
“I ain’t done nothing,” the littlest black boy yells. He doesn’t look much past twelve or thirteen, but maybe he’s scrawny.
“We can’t walk?” the middle one says. “You gon’ arrest us for walking?”
The police officer presses his knee into the littl
e boy’s back, hard, and he begins to cry.
“This is what she chooses to live in,” my mother says, “after everything your father and I sacrificed to make sure she didn’t.”
“You don’t gotta do that to him,” the oldest boy says. “We been doin’ exactly what you say.”
He turns back to talk to the officer, and the officer pushes his head into the wall.
“Should we do something?” I ask my mother. I think of the man in the video, beaten until his brain doesn’t even work right. Her mind’s too fixed on Jo for her to hear me. Or, rather, to actually listen.
“Like what, Ashley?” she says. “She doesn’t want to come home. She wants to be a grown-up, let her be a fucking grown-up.”
I think back to what my dad said that time Jo barricaded herself in her room to cry: “We aren’t living the blues. Not here. Not us.”
The three boys look like each other—cousins, or brothers maybe. The littlest one cries louder and louder still.
“Shut up,” the cop says.
“It’ll be alright, lil man,” the boy’s brother says.
The distance between them is just a few fingertips.
* * *
“God, did you see his pimples?” my mother says.
CHAPTER 3
IT’S A WINDY night, one that makes you fear downed power lines and rotted roots. The kind of night that makes you feel as though the world itself is lifting you up and out of your skin. Every so often, the wind pushes our car gently off course, and my mother corrects it. In the distance, the ocean shimmers and seals bark.
“Ashley, I’m really proud of you.”
“For what?”
“You’re a good kid.” She laughs. “Mostly.”
“Um. Thank you.”
If I’m the good kid, then Jo is the bad one. But why does it feel so shitty to be the good one? I feel like I have to be good so they don’t worry about me, ’cause they’ve got enough to worry about. It would be nice if they worried about me, too, though. At least I’d know they cared.
The Black Kids Page 4
