Surviving the White Gaze

by Rebecca Carroll

  “He was just trying to pick you up, you’re overreacting,” Tess said on the way home, disparagingly, her hands gripped tight on the wheel. I started to cry, which annoyed her even more. I’d wanted to cry the night before, when I’d attracted too much attention on the dance floor, but had managed to keep it together by just staying quiet. But now she was angry at me for being hit on by a guy at a club that she had taken me to—a fact she didn’t mind using to push her own point further.

  “What did you expect? You were sitting at a bar.” She never faltered when she spoke, or lost her cool, as if it were totally normal to take an eleven-year-old to a club and let her sit alone at a bar. Would she have let any eleven-year-old sit at a bar? What if it had been Sebastian or Mateo in ten years? Or the daughter of a friend? Or a girl she’d never met, but who was just sitting there by herself? I couldn’t understand if she was more upset because her eleven-year-old daughter didn’t know how to handle the advances of a creepy older guy, or if she just expected eleven-year-olds in general to have a better grasp on such things.

  When we got home, though, she softened some, and we stayed up talking. She gave me a lecture about how most men are ultimately scared of women like her, like the woman I would grow up to become, strong and opinionated.

  Bancroft women, she said, had a history of bringing men to their knees. “Don’t be passive,” Tess told me, sitting at the end of the couch, shoes off, bare toes curled up under her legs. “You were passive back there at the bar, and that’s not who Bancroft women are.”

  That’s when it started. When I felt my breath slowing and my muscles loosening, when I first felt her words begin to replace mine, the sound of her voice rising up under my own. Her cadence was so confident, her points so precise. I felt hooked up to her, as if her language, her thoughts and explanations, were all coursing through my veins like a blood transfusion.

  “One time, when I was hitching across the country with a girlfriend,” Tess said as the sun began to rise through the window behind us, “I was just a few years older than you, and we stopped at a gas station to pee. This big machismo guy started talking shit to us. And I just said to him, ‘You wanna fuck right now? Let’s go.’ ” She laughed, shaking her head out of pity. “He got right back in his truck and drove off. Men can’t handle strong, assertive women. They just, like, can’t.”

  * * *

  This idea of women having power over men was a first for me. In Warner, we all lived within the narrative that Dad had written for us—where we lived, how we interacted with one another, what we should believe about the world outside our home, and the blurred boundaries we should accept inside our home. The open marriage, Mom had told me, was Dad’s idea, but she trusted him, she said, his creative genius and his vision for a beautiful life.

  * * *

  Tess and I slept only a few hours that morning before the boys woke up, and then soon it was time for Tess to drive me home. She had a different car now, a blue Chevy Chevette, and we buckled in, just the two of us, for the drive to Warner. Tess had decided at the last minute that she wanted to take this opportunity to introduce me to her grandmother Frances, my great-grandmother by birth, whose house in New Durham was on the way, the same house where Tess had lived when she was pregnant with me, and where I spent the first three weeks of my life. Frances, Tess said as we drove, had grown extremely attached to me during those three weeks, when she took over responsibility for my care. She would be happy to see me.

  The house was dark inside, and slightly eerie. Frances was sitting in a rocking chair near a window in the living room. She was quite old but still somewhat lucid. I recall her wearing glasses, a housedress and slippers, with weathered skin, gray hair, and a wide girth that filled out the seat of her chair. She smiled and held out her hand to me when Tess introduced us. Frances didn’t say anything, but she held onto my hand for an extra few minutes, slowly smoothing her thumb over the tops of my knuckles.

  We didn’t stay long, and after Tess delivered me safely back home in Warner, we said our goodbyes and promised to write. Tess wished me luck with middle school, which I’d be starting in a couple of weeks, and said she would work on my dress when she had time, and send it as soon as she could. The dress came as a package in the mail a week later. A straight, calf-length shift with thin shoulder straps in the material I’d picked out from the fabric store, along with a little matching satchel stitched to perfection, and maybe even lovingly.

  Eleven

  We’d always lived hand to mouth on Dad’s meager teaching income and the occasional sale of one of Mom’s paintings, but I’d never felt poor before I started middle school. On the first day of sixth grade, in my blue Sassoon baggies and the brown lace-up shoes from TJ Maxx that Catherine had bought for me, because my parents couldn’t afford new school clothes, I immediately realized that middle school was going to be about name brands and money—who had it and who didn’t. Nike sneakers, Northern Isles sweaters, white turtlenecks with little red hearts, L.L.Bean canvas backpacks, and colorful Trapper Keepers were everywhere.

  Kids arrived in Jeep Wagoneers, Volkswagens, and Volvos, dropped off by their parents. They didn’t take the same yellow school bus that I took the fifteen miles from Warner to New London, where Kearsarge Regional Middle School was located. The middle school served a district of seven neighboring towns. As in elementary school, I was the only black student at Kearsarge.

  The girls, all pretty with shiny hair and perfect skin, traveled in cliques, small groups of palpable power, and the boys watched them. One clique stood out in the lunchroom, where the social caste system of a school is always laid the barest. Nicole, from ballet, who had since moved from Warner to New London, was part of this group, but the clear leader was Ella, who looked to me exactly like Brooke Shields from The Blue Lagoon, which I’d seen with Catherine over the summer. Her long brown hair pulled back into a neat ponytail, its smooth, slick strands brushing her shoulder blades when she turned to talk to the girl sitting next to her. She had varnish-brown eyes, a perfectly proportioned nose, and unblemished, glowing skin.

  Standing in the line for hot lunch, I could almost hear the confidence in Ella’s voice, the cadence of her laughter, the pitch of her privilege, as she and her friends opened their brown bags of carefully packed sandwiches and carrot sticks and cookies. Popular girls never ate hot lunch. It was completely stigmatized. If you ate hot lunch, which was served up on orange marbled-plastic trays with small compartments for a meat, a vegetable, a starch, and a dessert, you were immediately labeled a second-class citizen—someone who ate disgusting processed food, whose parents couldn’t afford to buy healthy groceries.

  I was determined on that first day of middle school to become part of the popular clique. I wanted what Ella had, what she embodied. I watched as the boys looked at her and then laughed among themselves, holding the same power. One boy, who looked like Ella’s twin, in kelly green chinos and a pale yellow Izod shirt, walked over to her table and said a few words, grinned inside the frame of his straight, preppy haircut, and then returned to his own table. This, I soon learned, was Nate, Ella’s boyfriend, who sat at the corollary popular boys’ table with his best friend, Ryan, an achingly beautiful boy with greenish eyes and flecks of white in his eyelashes and hair.

  I introduced myself to Ella, who was either amused or impressed by my verve, standing in front of her holding my hot lunch tray, and gestured for me to sit in the empty seat of a girl who was absent that day. It was a temporary arrangement, and even though I felt like she and the other girls liked me, including Nicole, whom I already knew, the next day I was relegated to a second-tier, adjacent table with Tammy from ballet. I worked hard to gain Ella’s attention and approval, and morphed almost overnight into a brown-skinned imitation of her—forcing my hair back into a ponytail, begging Catherine to buy me Izod shirts and Nike sneakers and white shoelaces with red hearts.

  After that first day in the lunchroom, Ella and I were friendly in the classes we had toge
ther, and waved to each other in between the classes we didn’t. “Hey, Becky!” she’d yell, from inside the circle of friends she was always surrounded by. “Hey, Ella!” I’d shout back, enthusiastically.

  In the second month of school, Ella invited me to her house for a sleepover. Her home was neat and spacious with a long staircase where three large black-and-white framed photographs lined the wall. The photos were close-ups of young black children, some wearing school uniforms or printed smocks, all with braided hair and glistening faces, round ebony cheeks and skinny limbs. In one of the photographs, a little girl in just a white tank top and underwear sat in a chair outside, facing the camera with a wide grin, while getting blood drawn from her arm.

  “Those are pictures from Kenya,” Ella explained when she saw me looking at them. “We lived there for a year so my dad could help them. Children in Africa need a lot of help because lots of them don’t have hospitals.”

  That night, Ella had planned for Ryan and Nate to come over to play pool with us in her basement rec room. It couldn’t possibly be this easy to suddenly be friends with the popular kids, I thought. “Yeah, it’s just Becky Carroll and Ella here, Ann,” I overheard Ella’s mother tell Ryan’s mom, Ann, on the phone in the kitchen. “Becky Carroll, from Warner.” Ella and I were finishing up our pizza at the raised island in the center of the kitchen.

  “Oh, OK. Sure. Next time then, OK, bye.” Ella’s mom hung up and, with an oh-well shrug, told us that Ryan couldn’t come because his mom said he had homework to do, even though it was a Friday night. I was devastated. Why had they made a plan and then changed it so suddenly? And what about Nate? Was he still coming? He was not, but nobody said why. Did this have to do with me? Would Ryan have canceled if it were Nicole who was staying over? Or another white friend of Ella’s? Did Nate and Ryan decide, or did their parents decide, that Ella was just being nice to me, but that I could never earn or live up to their social status? Ella’s mom made us popcorn while we watched TV, and after that, we went to bed.

  Back at school on Monday, I couldn’t face the fact that Ryan and Nate had canceled on us, and instead lied to a few friends and told them that Ryan and Nate had come over, and we played pool and it had all been super fun and great. Word spread quickly, and when Ella found out that I’d lied, she approached me in the hallway when she saw me walking back to class after using the bathroom, while she was on her way to the library.

  “I’m not mad, Becky,” Ella said, charitably. “We just want to help you.”

  Like the people in Kenya, I thought.

  Ella forgave me, so everyone else did, too. The next day, she even bumped another girl from the top-tier popular girls’ table in the lunchroom so that I could sit there now. Popularity worked in strange and arbitrary ways, and I wasn’t about to question it.

  Nate and I had math class together, and knowing that I would never pose a threat to Ella as girlfriend material—she was the prettiest and most popular girl in school; how could I possibly compete with that?—I positioned myself in service to Nate, and became his friend and confidante. We talked on the phone almost every night. The call to New London was then a toll call, billed by the minute if the number was out of a certain radius. Somehow, even though I was the one between us without any money, I was always the one who called Nate, whose father was a teacher at our regional high school, as well as a member of the New London Country Club. My phone bills are the stuff of my family lore, and we had our phone shut off more than once because of them.

  Ryan, though, who held out for weeks before forgiving me about the lie after Ella’s sleepover, was the boy I longed for. We were often playful with each other, but he didn’t like me “that way,” Nate told me. None of the boys did. I accepted this, but didn’t give up hope. Or perhaps I knew it, but didn’t believe it.

  There was something about Ryan that seemed different from the other boys. He was quietly charismatic, a gentle thinker with a placid demeanor. I thought that if any of the popular boys would ever be able to actually see me, it would be Ryan.

  Twelve

  I had just brushed my teeth to get ready for bed when Riana stormed up the stairs and shoved past me through the bathroom, into our bedroom on the other side. I could feel the rage ricochet off her body before she slammed the door so hard behind her that Mom’s big jar of Noxzema and our toothbrush cup both tumbled off the shelf above the sink and fell onto the floor, cracking the jar’s cover. I’d never seen Riana drenched in fury, radiating raw pain, and it was terrifying.

  “Are you OK?” I said quietly through the door.

  “Shut up! Go away!!” Riana shouted back. I could hear the tears catching her words, and the fight in her voice.

  I went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table with Mom, who said, herself on the verge of tears, that there’d been an accident, and someone had hurt Riana.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “We don’t know yet, Beck. Let’s just give Riana the space she needs right now.”

  My sister and I had become less close since I’d started middle school and insisted on being popular, something Riana didn’t care about, but we still shared a room and some secrets, talked together like sisters. I wanted to go and try to talk with her again, to make sure she was OK, but the sound of her anger when she’d shouted “Go away!” kept me downstairs with Mom, who made us hot chocolate that we drank in silence.

  About an hour later, I went back upstairs and pressed my ear to the door, before tiptoeing into our room and slipping quietly into my bed. I stared at the ceiling while Riana finally slept. Nobody talked about that night, after which Riana shut down completely. But I was too distracted to be worried about what was going on with my sister, as she became distant and moody. I was focused almost obsessively on my new relationship with Tess and our next visit: a day trip to Boston.

  * * *

  The city of Boston was a big deal if you lived in rural New Hampshire. It was the closest major city, and had tall buildings and museums and fancy restaurants. It’s also where Tess’s mother, Lena, lived and worked as a cab driver, and Tess wanted me to meet her, just as she had wanted me to meet Frances. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Tess thought it was more important for me to meet these women in her and my matrilineal succession, or for these women to see me as proof of concept that Tess had given birth to a daughter.

  Tess’s love and admiration for Frances was certain, but her loss of Lena, when she spoke her name aloud, was palpable.

  “She was so self-aware, and always commanded the attention of everyone in the room,” Tess said as we crossed the park inside the Boston Common, Sebastian squawking from his stroller, a little wheeled chariot, as dozens of gray squirrels darted across the path in front of us. I’d never seen so many gray squirrels before. “And Lena’s love for her children, us, it knew no bounds.”

  About halfway through the park, Tess paused. “This is where I met your father,” she said. “He was playing guitar right there on the grass, serenading any woman foolish enough to stop and listen.”

  Since the disastrous response to my asking about him the day Tess and I had first reunited just a few months before, I hadn’t brought him up again, and when she gave me this small piece of unprompted insight, I decided not to push it further. Instead, I just nodded and smiled. We continued walking, headed toward a nearby McDonald’s, where Tess had arranged for us to meet Lena, who had taken Mateo out for a birthday lunch. Tess, Sebastian, and I were coming to pick him up.

  The park had been fairly empty of people until we came upon a couple of black men walking toward us in the other direction. “Hey, little mama,” one of them said to me, his man chest puffed up under his dark leather jacket. “How you doin’, brown sugar,” the other echoed, cranking his neck as we passed. “Mmmmm-hmmmmm, whew, mama! You look good!” Their overtures were frightening to me. These black men weren’t at all like Easy Reader, who was so graceful, gentle, and good-natured. Instead, these men in the park seemed erratic and slick, and made me
think of a different black male TV character.

  Huggy Bear was the loose-lipped street hustler on Starsky & Hutch, a show that I watched religiously because I had an enormous crush on David Soul, the blond, blue-eyed actor who played Hutch. Huggy was always ogling and objectifying women on the show, staring at their behinds when they bent over, trying to charm them into bed. It was never completely clear whether he was an actual pimp—which I wouldn’t have known anything about anyway—but he was always dressed in a leather jacket, with a wide-collared shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest, or no shirt at all, a large-brimmed hat, and a scarf tied around his neck.

  These men were looking at me the same way that Huggy looked at the women on Starsky & Hutch. We could still hear them when we reached the other side of the park and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Tess hadn’t flinched, and when I turned to her, clearly rattled, she looked at me, exasperated. It seemed there was no end to the ways in which I could disappoint her. “They’re just jive, bored black men, don’t pay them any mind. They’re tired is what they are.”

  Beyond her exasperation, though, I had also started to notice that Tess often seemed to be trying to emulate the way certain black people sounded, like Nell from the TV show Gimme a Break! She’d say things like “Girl, please” or “Listen, sugar britches.” It was mostly her inflection, but this was just my third visit with her, and I felt stupid even trying to read her voice, much less her emotions.

  When we arrived at the McDonald’s, Lena and Mateo were already there, sitting at a booth in the back. Lena was smoking a cigarette; a paper cup of coffee that looked like it might be cold sat on the table in front of her. Mateo ran into my arms, and Tess picked up Sebastian out of the stroller and held him on her hip. The four of us stood in front of Lena, waiting for someone to speak.