I turned my attention to the outfit I’d chosen: a short-sleeve blouse with a blue-and-green print, a round neck, and neat buttons that I’d tucked into a pair of crisp white jeans. I had started to develop breasts, but wasn’t yet wearing a bra, and suddenly felt self-conscious that the shape of my nipples might be visible under my blouse. I untucked my blouse and let it fall over the top of my jeans, trying to create more distance between the fabric and my bare chest.
Splotches of soapy watermarks that had splashed up from the tub onto the mirror started to appear bigger than they were, crowding the view of my reflection. I tilted my head to the side, in between the marks, trying to give a pose, Bonne Bell lip-glossed lips slightly open, my face the darker brown color it got from long summer days at the lake without sunscreen. I stared back at my reflection a few minutes longer, trying to reconcile who I saw with who I was, and what was about to happen. But what was about to happen was happening for the first time, and who I was was about to change forever.
* * *
Downstairs, I took a seat at the kitchen table along with Riana and Sean, who were seated across from each other, with Mom off to the left sitting in a chair next to Riana. Dad stood positioned toward the door, hands on his hips, one knee bent forward, shoulders straight—a gallant guardian of his carefully laid plans.
A large bouquet of fresh, seasonal wildflowers formed a centerpiece on the table. Maybe there was lemonade, pink from the frozen can. Or fresh cucumbers sliced with dark purple basil from the garden. The air was thick with who we were as a family—traces of hay and horse manure from the bottom of Riana’s sneakers; the vague scent of pond water and fish entrails emanating from Sean’s hands; pulses of Jean Naté after bath splash that Catherine had given me for my birthday; the gummy, sweet fragrance of Mom’s watercolor palette; and the smell of damp leaves and dirt that had worn into Dad’s dark blue sweatshirt from hours spent in the nearby swamp, looking for turtles.
My left arm was hitched over the back of my chair, upper body angled toward the door, when the same yellowish, beat-up Chevy Nova with the car seats in the back that Roy and Claire had driven to visit pulled into the driveway. I jumped out of my seat; the rest of my family stayed where they were, except for Dad, who walked toward the door behind me and said, “Rebecca Anne Carroll, this is your life!” I barely even acknowledged his lighthearted effort at lifting some of the tension in the room by echoing a line from a famous TV show that predated me by twenty years. With my eyes locked on the driveway, I watched as the driver and passenger doors of the car opened simultaneously like the hatches of a spaceship, and Roy and Tess emerged from either side.
They walked together across the driveway and toward the door in what felt like slow motion. Tess stepped onto the porch first, and I opened the door to welcome her inside. With the door still ajar, Roy’s hand holding it just above us, Tess and I sank into each other’s skin. She smelled like sandalwood and peaches, and her body felt liquid as we embraced, not just fluid but vast, like a wide body of water in which I should have felt like I was drowning, but instead felt like I’d suddenly developed gills.
“I have to sit down for this.” Those are the first words I can remember hearing Tess say. She may have said “hi” or “hello” before we hugged, but I only registered the physical sensation of her arms around me before hearing her voice, which sounded cool and distant, incongruous with what I was feeling, a visceral familiarity. She had shoulder-length, beach-wavy brown hair and hazel eyes, and I could hardly believe how stunning she was. I searched hard for flickers of our resemblance, but found nothing.
Tess settled into a chair at the table, while I stood next to her, hands at my side, like a servant ready to deliver myself in whatever form she might order. Roy stood, too, and when our eyes met briefly, his expression was softer than I’d seen before, vulnerable almost. It was the first time in the eleven years I’d known him that he remained quiet in a roomful of people. He hovered protectively over me and Tess at a safe distance while we tried to intuit how to move around each other. I didn’t know what to say. I’d never not known what to say.
“Maybe you two want to go for a walk into town?” Mom suggested, breaking the silence.
I looked at Tess for her answer, and she nodded, “Yes, that’s probably a good idea.”
Dad and Roy fell into their familiar conversational pace behind us as Tess and I walked out of the house and headed toward town. Tess carried her sandals in her hand and walked barefoot on the shoulder of the highway, wearing a pale green cotton wraparound skirt she’d dyed herself—she loved to dye her own clothes, she told me—and a casual, ribbed tank top that showed off her smooth, sun-kissed shoulders.
I felt overdressed in my blouse and jeans, and too hot as the July sun blazed down on our backs. We walked the near mile into the center of town, with me mostly silent and Tess talking about dyeing her clothes, what colors she gravitated toward (neutrals), and how essential cotton was as a basic summer item. Her mood was more relaxed than it had been back at the house, if not entirely warm, less distant, almost chatty. She mentioned her love of sewing and quilting, both passions passed down from her mother, Lena, whom she called by name but didn’t say much else about.
We walked past the small stretch of road before town, after Dr. Levis’s office, where there were no houses, just overgrown briar patches and hilly, vacant sandlots that some of the kids from town used as a track for riding their ATVs. Suddenly Warner seemed dismal and limited as I walked alongside this woman, my birth mother, who appeared so effortlessly polished, so organically nonchalant, and from a place where, I was absolutely certain, kids didn’t get drunk and drive their ATVs around and around in circles for sport.
At the Variety Store and Restaurant, we sat on bar stools and ordered milkshakes, while I tried to find the nerve to say something. I felt distinctly not myself, the self I’d known for eleven years—never without words. Tess was not quite a stranger, but neither was she an acquaintance, or immediately familiar. I stared over the counter, through the open service window of the prep kitchen where food was ordered and placed, and a large fan faced outward, whirring like a windmill.
“You don’t have any questions for me? I thought a daughter of mine would have more questions,” Tess said, reverting to the distant tone she had back at the house after we’d first hugged.
“I do, I mean…”
Salt and pepper shakers sat in twos spread evenly apart along the counter, like couples at a wedding altar, the tall silver napkin dispensers as wedding officiants. I hadn’t taken more than one sip of my milkshake when I blurted out what I thought was a logical question, and one that I realized only after I said it that I wanted an answer to: “What was my father like?”
“Basically, he was a dog,” Tess answered, without a moment’s pause. I’d never heard a man described as a dog before, and I wondered what it meant. “He was a jive-ass black man who could bullshit like nobody’s business.”
I felt chastened for asking such an unwelcome question, and resolved not to ask anything else for fear this moment together would disappear as quickly as it had materialized. Tess asked me about school, and what my interests were. I tried to give the right answers after failing to ask the right question. She seemed mildly unimpressed as I told her about ballet, that my teacher was black. “Oh,” Tess said. “A token, like you.” I didn’t know what she meant—the only tokens I knew about were in the set of green, yellow, blue, and red wood tokens used as game pieces for our Parcheesi board game.
Tess paid for our milkshakes, and we walked back home, again with Tess taking the lead talking about her baby boys, how poopy and smelly their diapers were sometimes, and her best friends, Joy and Nancy, who also each had baby boys. But I only heard fragments of what she was saying because I was trying to think of how to be better for her. I was not prepared for how unlovable I felt in her company. I did not anticipate how shocking the bone-deep ache of wanting her approval would feel.
Back at th
e house, I disappeared upstairs to my room to quickly make her a card out of drawing paper and markers. In it, I wrote, cheerfully, an appeal of sorts: I love you always! I also brought my autograph book, where I collected signatures and notes from friends and family members, and asked her to sign it. After reading my card, she wrote: Love always, too. Tess.
I was too overcome by the experience to be able to articulate or even fully understand the swirl of emotions raging within me, but I knew one thing: I needed to see Tess again. As soon as she and Roy pulled out of the driveway to head back home, I asked Mom and Dad when that could happen. A month later, Dad and Catherine drove me to Portsmouth and dropped me off at Tess’s apartment for a weekend visit with her and her family.
Ten
We pulled into a paved parking lot with two brown clapboard tenement houses on opposite ends. A few beat-up cars with broken windows and rusty fenders lined the lot, and a lone motorcycle leaned on a short kickstand, threatening to fall over. It was drizzling, and the air was wet and damp; when Dad and I got out of the car, a mangy-looking cat darted underneath the one parked next to ours. Catherine stayed behind—Dad told her he wouldn’t be long. Two plastic Big Wheel bikes, a doll with her arm missing, and a couple of empty soda cans littered the front lawn as we walked up the path to Tess’s front door.
We were greeted by a handsome man with a full head of dark black curls and beautiful, beaming eyes. “Welcome,” he said. “I’m Miguel, welcome, welcome!” Miguel had a just barely noticeable accent, and I remembered that Tess had told me during our walk back to the house after milkshakes that her partner was Puerto Rican.
“I can’t stay,” Dad said, shaking Miguel’s hand. “But thank you for having Becky for a visit.”
“Of course!” Miguel said with a smile. “Tess’s upstairs. Come in, Becky.”
I was carrying a little bamboo suitcase that Catherine had given me, round with a wooden latch key.
“OK, bye, little one,” Dad said, and gave me a squeeze at the doorstep.
“Bye, Dave,” I said.
Dad jogged back to the car, where Catherine sat waiting, and I watched as they pulled out of the lot.
Tess and Miguel’s two-bedroom apartment was cozy, with a modest-sized living room, where there were pretty cotton curtains, a well-worn couch with patchwork quilts that Tess had sewn, hanging plants, a TV, and a midsize stereo system, with records by Phoebe Snow and Earl Klugh stacked below. Throw pillows on the carpeted floor against the wall served as both seats and safe play space for the boys, and a spindle-back wooden chair sat near a door to the back, where a clothing line stretched across the yard to the apartment units on the other side.
“Hello, Rebecca,” Tess said, midway down the staircase between the front door and the living room. She smiled, but didn’t hug me. Instead, I hugged her, but let go quickly after feeling her body tense up in my arms. “The babies are sleeping,” she said. “But they’ll be up soon and then you can meet your brothers.”
I loved them instantly. Mateo had his father’s jet black hair and warm brown skin, and an undeniable raw magnetism. Sebastian had Tess’s skin tone, unusually long eyelashes, fat baby cheeks, and wisps of brown curls. I held and changed them, played with them, rocked and read to them, and made them laugh all day on the first day of my visit. These were the children my birth mother had kept, and in their company, I felt kept, too.
That night, Tess and I left the boys with Miguel to go see a movie called The Rose, starring a very young Bette Midler, at the Portsmouth Music Hall, an old Victorian theater in the center of town. It was packed, and in the hot, muggy August heat, the room smelled like sweat and cigarettes and stale buttered popcorn. We went with a couple of Tess’s girlfriends, and the crowd was raucous, a range of merry, austere, and fervent faces all around us. It was exhilarating to be surrounded by such an animated audience of adults, each a wild and captivating character to watch, even before the movie started.
I loved the movie, entranced by Midler’s lead performance as a feverishly talented and troubled rock star in the ’60s, so full of ache and grit and sorrow.
The next night, Tess decided we should go dancing at a disco called the Uptown, which didn’t open until after midnight. We arrived at about 1:30 a.m. At eleven years old, I was thrilled to be staying up so late, although it also felt a little like a test. As if Tess was giving me another opportunity to prove myself as the daughter she hoped I would be. Dancing was something I was good at, so I felt confident and excited.
Young people, mostly in their twenties it appeared, also mostly white, gathered at the entrance behind velvet ropes in bell-bottom jeans, platform shoes, long silk scarves, and tight T-shirts. I had borrowed one of Tess’s elastic-waisted skirts to wear as a strapless dress, which made me look older than my eleven years. I loved how it flowed when I twirled around. Once we were inside, strobes threw hatchets of light across the dark, shadowy dance floor, while bodies shimmied and bumped up against one another.
Tess and I danced in a group with her friends, but when “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang came on, I got lost in my own world. American Bandstand was one of my favorite shows, and I had just watched Kool & the Gang perform this song as guests. I both saw and didn’t see these agile black men singing and moving in stylistic relays on American Bandstand—caught somewhere in between internalizing the raceless indoctrination by my parents and untangling the visceral pull toward blackness, as I’d felt with Easy Reader, Mrs. Rowland, and Anita.
Soon, without my even realizing it, a circle of people had gathered around me on the dance floor, clapping and cheering me on, impressed by this little brown girl bold enough to steal the spotlight at a disco club full of people twice, even three times her age.
When I realized what was happening, I looked to find Tess in the crowd. Her face flickered in and out, and I saw her signal for me to come back to where we’d been dancing with the rest of the group. And then we left, abruptly. Our drive home began quiet, and I looked out the window at quiet buildings and houses illuminated by the soft glow of sunrise.
“Listen,” she finally said. “Just because people in Warner have objectified you as this precious, exotic child doesn’t mean you’re anything special here.” Her response to my dancing and the attention it garnered, the tone of her voice, was so captious that I instinctively looked down at my dress to make sure my boobs hadn’t accidently popped out. Again, I felt chastised, just as I had when I’d asked about my birth father the day we met.
“It’s a disservice to you, too, because your packaging misrepresents your substance,” Tess said, stringing together words I’d never heard before. “Do you know what that means? It means people think you’re something special just because you look different. Because you can be charming and are maybe a little precocious,” she explained, using another word I’d never heard before.
“Oh,” I said, quietly, feeling overwhelmed with sorrow.
“If you keep believing all these adults who are constantly telling you how special and exotic you are, you’re going to end up cultivating a sense of entitlement, which is a super unattractive quality,” Tess said.
“I’m sorry.” That’s all I could think to say. I felt like Tess was shaming me for believing my parents, the people she had entrusted to raise me, a decision it seemed almost immediately clear after we met she regretted having made.
It was almost three a.m. by the time we went to bed, so I slept for much of the morning. When I got up, I played with the boys, whose skin smelled so good, and who giggled with such delight, that I forgot about what Tess had said to me about my packaging and my substance, and those other words like “exotic” and “precocious” and “entitlement.” We went fabric shopping at the mall, where Tess said I could pick out whatever material I wanted, and she would sew me a sundress with a matching cloth purse. I chose a modern design with blues and grays and pink flowers.
We went back to Uptown again that night. This time I knew not to draw too much attention to m
yself, and decided to sit out the first few songs at the bar, where Roy worked as a bartender. He hastily served me a ginger ale and then disappeared at the other end to serve real drinkers, who were shouting out their orders, trying to be heard over the din of disco music from the dance floor.
It would have been uncharacteristic of Roy to pay special attention to me, even though I was visibly anxious and looked out of place. I wore a tank top and a long striped skirt, this one my own, and sat at the far end of the bar against the wall, opposite the dance floor. I was trying to be as innocuous as possible, while still pulling off enough maturity so that I didn’t appear to be the child I was. Two sips into my ginger ale, a white man probably in his late thirties sat down on the stool next to me, and asked if he could buy me a drink. He had greasy brown hair and ruddy skin. His eyes looked like Jell-O balls through the tint of his ’70s eyeglasses, wiggly and gelatinous, and his upper lip curled when he spoke.
I told him no thanks, that I already had a drink and was fine, trying to maintain my composure, trying to call up role models for such circumstances but unable to think of any. He inched closer, and I could feel his breath on me. “I bet you’re a real spitfire in bed,” he whispered, his words snaking into my ears.
All I could think to do was look away from him, but he kept at it. “You playing hard to get, huh?”
I jumped off my stool and ran out onto the dance floor to find Tess.
Surviving the White Gaze Page 5
