* * *
The last time my cousin Morgan came to stay with us was when Uncle Ronnie and Auntie Eudora went on their belated honeymoon. Morgan’s older sister, Tanya, came too. Tanya and Morgan are light-skinned, with long curls like Jo’s, and they always made it a point to remind us of how we were the darkest in the whole family, even though we really weren’t that dark, comparatively. Anyway, my cousins weren’t particularly pretty or smart or funny, just light-skinned. The world had already taught them that was enough, I guess. Ronnie and Auntie Eudora got divorced several years ago, and Eudora moved all the way to Las Vegas. Now Ronnie’s a single dad trying to make it in the world, which I guess during the middle of a riot means making sure his livelihood doesn’t burn down. Tanya’s away at college, which is good, because I don’t think I could handle both my cousins at once.
Whenever Jo and I would beat them at anything, Tanya and Morgan would start in:
“Whatever. You black as coal.”
“You black as the La Brea Tar Pits.”
They must’ve just gone on a field trip.
“Black as a butthole!”
“We are not black. We’re brown!” I’d yell.
“Ignore them,” Jo said.
Jo and I both somehow knew that whatever they said to us, we weren’t allowed to respond with the obvious insult, which was that they were poor. So instead we refused to share our toys and got into a fistfight the last night before they left, which may have culminated in some biting, and Uncle Ronnie and Auntie Eudora never left them at our house again. Until now.
Morgan doesn’t want to be at our house. I know this because she says very loudly over and over, “Do not leave me here.”
Uncle Ronnie pretends not to hear her.
“ ‘Sorry, yo’? Yo?” Uncle Ronnie says. “Seriously? Those motherfuckers—”
“Don’t start in front of the girls.” My father sighs.
“Motherfuckers pulled a gun on me in front of the girls,” Uncle Ronnie snaps. “I think I can call them motherfuckers, right, girls?”
“Two guns,” Morgan says.
“Coulda lived in View Park, or Ladera Heights, or—” my uncle says to my father.
“Don’t start,” my father interrupts. “How’s the store?”
“Still standing. Guadalupe and her husband have been helping me keep guard. You should be there, Craig. It’s yours, too. It’s Mama’s. It’s our blood.”
“I gotta get stuff done here.”
“Of course you do.”
My father and my uncle stand around awkwardly facing each other.
“We have insurance, Ronnie. It’s not worth risking your life over vacuums.”
“Not enough for this. Besides, do you know I got that brand-new Dyson in the other day? The one that won the International Design Fair. Put me back a pretty penny, had to order it by catalog. Anyway, I’m gonna take it apart and figure out how they work so we can get a head start on being best in the neighborhood for Dyson repairs. They’re gonna be huge soon, Craig.”
“Fuck the Dyson, Ronnie,” my dad says.
“Don’t start in front of the girls, Craig.” Ronnie smirks.
“Why don’t you show your cousin your room?” my mother says.
* * *
Morgan and I don’t say anything to each other as we dutifully climb the stairs up to the bedrooms.
“What happened in here?” Morgan says as we pass by Jo’s room.
“They’re converting it into a guest room.”
“But you have a guest room already.”
I shrug.
Inside, Jo’s books are on the floor, their spines savagely splayed. Her tape tower has been felled. Her posters are torn under the weight of thrown clothing still on the hangers. Her trophies peek out golden from under the wreckage. She would be pissed about her records, which lie flat like tipped cows. It looks like a store in the process of being looted. Her room is painted like the inside of a pistachio and still smells faintly of boardwalk Rasta incense. I wonder what kind of cheese Jo is. I’d like to be a robust brie or Manchego, maybe, but I’m afraid I might actually be a sharp cheddar. It’s better than being a Kraft Single, I suppose.
Morgan walks through the room, running her hand along Jo’s former life.
“You guys got a lot of stuff,” she says.
“Yeah, I guess,” I say. We have about as much as everyone else I know, so I’ve never really given it much thought.
She picks a dress from out of the pile, looks at the label, raises her eyebrows, and places it back down on the bed without a word.
“How can you guys even breathe with people like that around you?”
“They’re not all like that.”
She gives me another eyebrow raise. Morgan’s eyebrows are assholes. I want to shave that right one off in her sleep.
“I wanna stay in this room,” she says. “We can be right next door to each other.”
Morgan used to be afraid of our house, I remember. When we were little and my parents had her and Tanya staying in our guest room, Morgan would climb the stairs and hop into bed with my parents, or with Jo, or sometimes with me. There were too many noises, too many windows for burglars to climb through; everything echoed, and everyone was too far away, she said.
“Suit yourself.” I shrug.
“Do you have a car?” Morgan says.
“Not yet. I’m saving for one.”
“I thought your parents bought your sister her car.”
“They did. But she crashed it, so now they’re making me buy my own.”
“That sucks.” She makes a space for herself on the bed and plops down.
Before Morgan can get to it, I quickly snatch up Jo’s diary from among her things.
It’s puffy, plastic, and ink-stained, with blue lines across pink pages. A tiny lock secures the cover, to be opened by an even tinier key that I had to dig through the rubble to find. I used to read it sometimes when we were really little and I was feeling sneaky.
“It’s kinda weird that I’m here and your sister’s not,” she says.
I shrug.
“She graduates this year, right?”
“Um… She’s taking time off from school right now,” I say.
“To do what?” Morgan says.
I’m not sure if my parents told Uncle Ronnie and Morgan about Jo’s getting married, but I’m sure as hell not gonna be the one to say anything.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Live?”
Morgan once again raises her eyebrows but says nothing.
When Morgan leaves to use the restroom, the first thing I do is pry Jo’s diary open, waiting for my sister to speak to me, only to find the pages torn from the spine. Her book of secrets is like an open mouth with all its teeth yanked.
Outside, my uncle and my father argue inside the orange halo of a streetlight.
“Dammit, just stay here, Ronnie!” my father says to his big brother. “Stay!”
“I ain’t no damn dog,” Ronnie says before he gets in his truck and heads away.
CHAPTER 9
Me and Kimberly: A Friendship in Three Parts
PART I: 1981
I didn’t even know I was black until Kimberly’s sixth birthday party, back when she was still Courtney Two. When I found out, I tried to drown her. The reason I did it was because she told me I couldn’t be a mermaid, which is admittedly not the best reason to attempt murder. The sun was shining, and her birthday presents were piled up like a Christmas tree. Every once in a while, a newcomer would add another present to the pile, and one or two others would tumble onto the pool deck.
The concrete was hot and our fingertips Cheeto-stained when she announced, “Now, we’re going to play mermaids. Except Ashley. Because black people can’t be mermaids!”
Then she giggled.
It hadn’t even occurred to me yet that there was anything I couldn’t be, and the shame of the moment dug itself into my chest so deep that I couldn’t breathe. And while I was sta
nding there unable to breathe, all the other girls were doing cannonballs into the water. I don’t remember how it happened exactly, but I know I grabbed her shoulders, wrapped my legs around her waist, and pulled us both down beneath the surface.
For a few seconds while I held us underwater, our bodies tangled up in each other, I could’ve sworn I saw the rainbow shimmer of scales and fins.
“Look!” I said to her in big bubbles.
“Help!” she bubbled back, unable to breathe.
I don’t know why I did that. I’m not trying to excuse my behavior at all. But maybe I wanted her to know what it felt like.
When we got out and her mother started to yell at me, I looked down, and they weren’t fins at all—just little brown legs with wet sunscreen leaking down.
Needless to say, they kicked me out of the party.
When we got home, my mother quietly walked inside the house to take an aspirin and lie down. Jo sat by our pool reading a tattered copy of The Phantom Tollbooth. I sat down on the broken pool chair next to her.
“Can black people be mermaids?” I asked.
She peered down from her book. “Why?”
“Courtney Two said no.”
Jo placed her book on the chair next to her. She leaned toward me, stared into my face, and said very somberly, “Courtney Two is a Demon of Insincerity.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Don’t let her keep you from your castle.”
“What are you even talking about?” Like I said, I was six.
Jo gestured with her index finger to come close, then even closer still. When I was good and close to her chair, she raised her foot and pushed it into my stomach, launching me into the water.
“Why’d you do that?” I sputtered when I popped up for air.
“Mermaids die if they’re out of the water for too long.” Jo looked at me over the top of her book. “You should say thank you. I just saved your life.”
PART II: Earlier This Year
In January, Kimberly and I volunteered to deliver meals to the elderly as a service project. We would go to the volunteer center and pick up a bunch of meals to deliver to seniors after school. Kimberly is slightly afraid of old people, but I like them more than I like people my own age. Our favorite person was Doris. Her skin was delicate, like a butterfly’s wing in my hand, and her hair was dyed a shade of blue like a cloud before the rain. She had a seemingly endless wardrobe of pastel tracksuits.
We were only supposed to be bringing her meals, but sometimes she insisted that we take her out into the world itself before she’d eat. This wasn’t part of our duties, but Kimberly and I did it anyway.
We helped Miss Doris take out all her curlers, which weren’t so much curlers as shredded bits of paper bag tied around her hair that did the trick. Then, Miss Doris had me pass her a lipstick that was coral and a shade too bright for her thin lips, but it made her happy, so even Kimberly didn’t say anything.
Right before we headed outside, Miss Doris would say “Tweet, tweet” to a little bird about the size of a balled fist, before tapping its cage with her nails.
She turned her face toward the sky to drink it up.
“Any boyfriends?” she said.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Same as before,” Kimberly said.
“When I was your age, I was wild. I tarted it up all over town. Why, there was this boy who lived down by the marina who had the most beautiful car. He loved my ankles.”
She lifted one of her ankles up out of the wheelchair for inspection.
“They’re still beauties, aren’t they, dolls? If you ignore all the spider veins.”
Kimberly and I would take Miss Doris home, and Miss Doris would keep finding reasons for us to stay—something that needed to be fixed, or cookies she’d made that needed to be eaten. Finally, we’d have to pry ourselves away. Sometimes literally. Then afterward, Kimberly and I would talk about how getting old and being unable to do things for yourself must suck. Being an old person is a lot like being a kid, before you get your driver’s license and the whole world splits wide open.
“You wanna drive us home?” she asked after one of these conversations.
“I don’t have my license yet,” I said.
“No shit, Sherlock. I know.” She threw me the keys.
Kimberly started up where Jo left off. Jo taught me the basics, but Kimberly helped me practice each week as we drove back and forth to Miss Doris’s and the others. She was a surprisingly patient teacher.
“Don’t forget to use your blinker, Ash,” she’d say through a mouthful of gum.
“You’re jackrabbiting. Just slowly apply more pressure to the gas,” she’d say as a light turned green.
Every so often, while driving from old person to old person, “I Touch Myself” came on the radio, and we would roll down the windows, all giddy and shit, and sing at the top of our lungs, “I don’t want anybody else, when I think about you, I touch myself,” to random strangers on the street.
For a few years after the attempted drowning incident, before Michael, and after her dad left her mom and her mom was having a rough go of it, we were closer to each other than to the others. She would stay over at my house so often that my parents bought Kimberly her own toothbrush. She and Lucia and I would make those little pizzas out of English muffins and dance in my room to “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and sometimes we would fall asleep in my bed whispering little secrets in elaborate pillow forts.
“I missed you,” I told her once after I nearly drove us into a bus. I’m pretty certain I actually saw my life flash before my eyes and was feeling extra sentimental. “I miss us.”
Kimberly looked over at me. “I’m right here.”
* * *
Eventually, when we’d pick Miss Doris up, I would drive the three of us around for a bit. Miss Doris would stick her face out the window like a dog soaking up the world outside.
“Faster, child, faster!” she’d yell.
Kimberly was the one who took me to the DMV for my test. I was number sixty-nine, which we both thought was funny in a stupid way. The instructor was a permed she-devil who made me parallel park two separate times on a hill, and by some divine miracle, I pulled it off. When I passed the test on the first try, we jumped up and down and hugged and screamed in the middle of the DMV, while some girl in the corner across from me blubbered into her mother’s shoulder.
“Freedom!” Kimberly said.
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” I said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” she said.
Miss Doris fell down and broke her hip one afternoon, and her kids sold her house and placed her in a nursing home close to them in Florida. Kimberly and I stopped delivering meals after that. We’d already exceeded our required service hours, and I think both of us felt her absence like an ache. We stopped hanging out one-on-one again.
PART III: Today
The janitors are constantly cleaning, but somehow the girls’ restroom always reeks of period blood. The left stall is flooded, which it does once a month. The toilet water starts to spread to the other stalls. I have to pee really bad, though, so I can’t wait. The rising water barely misses my Keds.
I take a very funky piss. Cool funky, not smelly funky. I’m listening to the album Maggot Brain by Funkadelic, which is another of Jo’s cassettes. The song I’m listening to is called “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks,” which seems like it was written for these times, except these times were decades ago. Eight years after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Six years after the Watts Riots and Malcom X’s assassination. Three years after Bobby Kennedy and MLK died. Bobby Kennedy was shot in Koreatown at the Ambassador Hotel. If you drive down Wilshire, you can still see it, regal and crumbling. You wouldn’t want to drive down there now, though, on account of the rioting.
“You know that hate is gonna keep on multiplying / And you know that man is gonna keep right on dying…”
On the cover is a black woman bu
ried up to her neck in dirt, her Afro reaching toward the heavens, mouth open in a scream somewhere between agony and joy, while maggots squirm on the ground around her. All the songs make you feel like dancing, or like you’re on drugs, or both. “There won’t be no peace…”
This is what was on the news this morning:
Yesterday, Long Beach declared a state of emergency. In Riverside, there are fires. A security guard killed a seventeen-year-old when looters entered a discount store in San Bernardino. In San Francisco, young people smashed windows and set fires. In Atlanta, young people protested, while more than four hundred others gathered at a nonviolent rally in front of Martin Luther King Jr.’s crypt. They carried signs reading L.A. HAS NO JUSTICE; PUT JUSTICE IN THE JUSTICE SYSTEM; KING VERDICT WAS A WAKEUP CALL—STOP THE KILLING; and LIVE AS BROTHERS OR PERISH AS FOOLS. A peaceful protest against the verdict on the steps of Cleveland’s City Hall almost turned violent when a thirty-one-year-old white man drove by in a van with both Nazi and Confederate flags flying from it. So far there have been twenty-five deaths, 572 injuries, hundreds of fires and arrests, and $200 million to $250 million in damages.
No peace.
* * *
In New York City, students at a private school in Queens walked out of their classes chanting, “Rodney, Rodney, Rodney.”
Nobody is walking out of school here.
Walkman still on, I wash my hands. Somebody taps me on the back. I jump up, startled, and my sunshine player crashes to the floor.
“What are you listening to?” Kimberly says as I scramble to get to my Walkman before the flood does. She neatly applies two coats of mascara and flips her hair over one shoulder, smiles, then flips it over the other. For some reason she decides that shoulder’s better.
“Maggot Brain. It’s by Funkadelic. It’s old.”
I take the cassette cover out of my backpack and show it to her. She scrunches her mouth to the side and nods her head. I put the cassette back in the bag. She peers into my backpack. I’ve got a bunch of Jo’s cassettes in there now. Sometimes when you want to disappear, it’s easiest to hide in music.
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