by Nina Revoyr
"She's a real good talker, you know," said Kim.
I didn't know. I didn't know her much at all. And Claudia's public life was as much a mystery to me as the personal lives of the famous.
"Anyway," said Claudia, "let's change the subject. All this buildup's making me tense." She went back over to the oven and looked in. "Besides, the chicken's ready, so why don't you all move out to the dining room?"
Rochelle, Kim, and Paula refilled their glasses, and went to sit down at the table. Claudia prepared plates for Raina and me, then shooed us away so she could talk with her friends. After saying goodbye, we left them, Raina heading upstairs to her room, me standing with my plate around the corner. I wanted to hear more about this Claudia I didn't know, this Claudia who laughed with her friends, and spoke well in public, and influenced the policies of the Los Angeles Times. The four of them covered movies, and local news, and gossip about people I'd never heard of. I thought they'd get through the meal safely, that things between them were back to normal, but then I heard Paula ask, "Where's Wendell?"
Claudia answered, "Oh, he wanted to get out of the house again, and not interfere with our dinner."
"Out with some of the white people he works with?" asked Paula, and I could feel the ice in her voice.
"No," said Claudia, carefully. "He went to dinner in Gardena with some friends. I thought we'd finished with this subject, Paula."
Nobody spoke for several moments. Silverware clinked brightly against a plate; somebody cleared her throat.
"I've been with Wendell for more than a year," Claudia went on, "and you never said anything before. Why are you on my back about it now?"
"You weren't living with him before," Paula answered, and her words were slow and deliberate.
Claudia was quiet for a moment, but I could almost feel the waves of her anger. "Oh, so if I'm just sleeping with somebody, then that's okay. But if I want to make a life with him, well, that's some kind of crime?"
"Yeah, that doesn't make any sense," agreed Rochelle.
Paula sighed. "I'm not saying it's bad to commit to somebody. Shit, I wish I had someone to commit to." She paused. "But we've been friends for a long time, Claudia, and I just feel like, I don't know. Like I'm losing you to the other side."
"What do you mean, the other side? It's not like Wendell's white."
Paula scoffed. "Oh, come on, Claudia. He's Asian. Same thing."
"What the hell are you talking about?" said Claudia, voice rising. "Do you have any idea what his family has been through at the hands of the white people you seem to think he's so close to?"
"All that war shit was forty years ago," said Paula. "No one even remembers it now. But that's not really even the point, though." She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice sounded sad. "Claudia, I know I'm not being completely fair to you, but this is just the way I feel. I don't like him, okay? And I'm uncomfortable with the idea of you bringing him to the conference party."
"You're uncomfortable with . . . wait, you can't really be saying this."
"I'm just afraid that it might send the wrong message. I don't know. It might suggest that black women have to turn their backs on the community in order to succeed."
"Wait a minute, Paula," said Kim. "You're talking about two different things here. This is Claudia you're dealing with, not some sellout sister. Shit, half the women on the board of directors are married to white men, and I'll bet you're not telling them to leave their husbands at home."
"Maybe not," said Paula, "but it's different. Claudia's my friend, so this is closer to home."
"If you're my friend," said Claudia, "then you should see my relationship for what it is and not turn it into something else." She took several deep breaths. "I can't believe you come into Wendell's house and tell me that you don't want him to go to your damn party."
Just then, I heard a car pull into the driveway—my father was home from dinner. I ran up the stairs as quietly as I could, still holding my now-cold plate of food. A few minutes later the front door opened. "Hello!" I heard him call. He went into the dining room, and I could only imagine what he encountered, what the mood was like in there. I was still trying to process the conversation I'd heard. My feelings were complicated and hard to separate. I was angry at Paula for what she'd said about my father, but it was a different anger than I would have felt if she were white. Underneath it was a mixture of other feelings—I felt betrayed, deserted, hurt. In some other part of my mind, I found myself wondering what Claudia really thought—whether she was as resolute as she sounded, or if she didn't, on some level, agree with her friend. I also wondered what my father was going through. Did he think he was selling out by being with someone who wasn't Japanese? Was he having to face, like Claudia, the disapproval of his friends? If so, I didn't hear about it—he wouldn't say anything, of course, and I couldn't tell for myself, since I never saw his friends anymore. I wondered if he and Claudia ever talked about these matters. I wondered if their relationship could accommodate such pain.
* * *
A few days later, there was a special girls' basketball preview in the South Bay section of the LA Times. It included black-and-white photos of both Raina and me, and I bought an extra copy so I could cut the picture of Raina out without my family asking what I was doing. I stuck the picture—in which Raina was diving toward the camera for a loose ball—inside my folder for Trig, and carried my backpack to school as carefully as if it held the world's most precious jewel. Once there, I taped the picture up on the inside of my locker—my regular locker, not the one in the gym—so that I'd be able to look at Raina several times a day.
In the midst of basketball and my nail-biting over Raina, I did manage to make it to school on most days. That in itself was a minor victory. When I was dating Yolanda my sophomore year, the seniors were released at lunchtime, so I'd go home with her and skip my afternoon classes, returning only for basketball practice. This had started a pattern of truancy that I was just then breaking out of. By my senior year, I was a capable but erratic student; I still didn't take my classes very seriously. Despite my spotty academic record, I liked being in school, although like most other jocks I pretended not to. Actually, though, there was nothing more reassuring to me than sitting at my desk, exchanging hastily scribbled notes with Telisa or Q while the class discussion floated past our ears unheard. School was security, school was home, and it was painful to imagine that in just a year's time, I'd no longer have those hallways to roam through, no longer have lockers to gather around with my teammates, or friends wherever I turned. I did not want to leave this familiar world. Sometimes, when I was feeling especially attached to the place, I'd want to hug everyone who passed by, people I recognized but hardly knew, but who'd existed in the periphery of my life for years, and who I'd probably never see again after June.
The axis around which the day revolved was basketball practice. Every afternoon we rushed out of our fifth-period classes and hauled our butts to the gym. Practice was from two to four, Monday through Friday, and the atmosphere of those two hours varied, depending on our coach, everyone's personal lives, good or bad test scores, and me (because I was captain and top shit, my mood affected everyone else's). Practices were sometimes loose and easy and punctuated by frequent laughter, sometimes silent and hard and endless. As the first games approached they got more intense and more directed, because then we had tangible opponents to prepare for instead of the ambiguous "other team."
School was also a welcome break from Raina, although in truth it wasn't much of a respite because I never forgot her. I could never quite expel her from my consciousness; it was like she was a weed that had grown into the cracks of my mind. I didn't really have to think about her, though, because she was already in my head, lived there with me, one step ahead of my thoughts. In practice her name was always on my lips as I conjured the energy to run faster, jump higher, play harder. In class, when I wasn't passing notes with Telisa or Q, I was jotting poems and song lyrics into the
margins of my notebooks, still hearing whatever she'd said to me that morning, until the pages marked with lyrics far outnumbered the pages which had actual notes. Once the season started, I especially thought of her on game days. As I walked through the halls, sat on the bus, eyed the opposing team, I'd wonder how Raina was faring that day, how much her skill and determination were frustrating her opponents in some other gym a few miles away.
* * *
Our season opened on the first of December. The morning of my first game, I woke up tense, full of adrenaline, ready to step out of my bed and immediately onto the court. We were playing Santa Monica at their place, and they were a team we were expected to beat. I wolfed down my breakfast, kissed the dog, received good luck wishes from the parents and Raina, who also had a game that day. Then I packed up my schoolbooks and went outside. It was cloudy that morning, but it didn't matter—the world couldn't have been any brighter.
I walked down the sidewalk, practically skipping. Down the block, I saw several adults getting into their cars and rushing away. Although I knew they were going to work, I'd always seen this mass morning exodus in another way—the morning was probably the safest time, and perhaps by leaving the 'hood then, they thought they were escaping something. Several of the adults I saw were people I knew, and now, as I walked by, a few of them spoke to me.
"Kick some ass today, girl," said Mr. Johnson as he got into his car.
"Beat up on those rich kids, Nancy," said Mrs. Rose, although the kids on Santa Monica's team weren't as rich as some of the other kids we'd play.
"Hey, Nancy, kill those motherfuckas!" offered some prepubescent schoolboys who passed by on their bikes.
"We will," I said to the various well-wishers I encountered. "You got it." I walked through the 'hood proudly, loving it, never wanting to leave. It struck me again how easily the community had adopted me; how people placed their hopes in me now and expected me to represent them well. I took this faith in me as a compliment, which it clearly was—but I also worried that it was misplaced; that I didn't deserve it.
On Crenshaw Drive, an offshoot of the larger Crenshaw Boulevard, I stopped at the liquor store I'd pointed out to Raina on the day she'd moved in. It was a small place, and run-down, with none of the slickness or cookie-cutter sameness of the 7-Eleven on Manchester. Inside, the gray paint on the walls was peeling off; yellowing posters were taped onto the sliding glass doors of the refrigerators; and one lonely, uncovered bulb provided all of the light. There were a few unstable-looking shelves, propped up by stray pieces of wood, and they held simple things, basics, like bread, soup, and spaghetti. Out in front there were always four or five men, standing around because they had no place else to go, passing their days by rehashing the old times and discussing the decline of the 'hood. The men were vocal about their views, and often drunk, but essentially harmless. In the early evenings, though, younger guys would start to mill around, spray-painting the walls, selling crack and everything else you could think of in the alley behind the store, amid the trash and discarded furniture. Toby Wilson, the old man who owned the place, chased them away whenever he could, and the kids would laugh at him, and slink away for a while, and be back within an hour. Often the crack lady was back there with them, doing whatever it was she needed to in order to get her fix.
When I walked in, Mr. Wilson was sitting down, watching the news on the tiny black-and-white television he kept behind the counter. "Morning, Nancy," he said, standing up slowly. He was just about my height, but stooped; when I'd first met him, a decade earlier, he'd been two or three inches taller. Mr. Wilson was a dark brown, the color of the bark on an oak tree; the deep wrinkles on his face were spaced wide apart and there was smooth-looking skin between them. He was almost bald, with little scraggles of gray hair on either side of his head, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses that always slid down his nose. I'd been coming to Mr. Wilson's store since I was seven. At first I'd only come for the candy—SweeTarts and bubble gum, then chocolate-covered raisins and Tootsie Rolls, and finally, potato chips, Twix, and the occasional granola bar—but what had kept me coming for all those years were his stories. Stories were something I didn't get much of from my parents and grandparents, whose way of dealing with the past was to try and forget it. But Mr. Wilson knew more and talked more—about history, about sports, about Los Angeles—than anyone I'd ever met, and I never tired of listening to him. I think I was the only one, though, or one of very few; he was like a walking history book that nobody wanted to read.
"Good morning, Mr. Wilson," I said. "How you doin today?"
"Well as can be expected," he said, scratching his forehead slowly, "considerin Mike and Robert and all them outside tryin to eat me out my own store."
I smiled. He often gave food to the people who needed it, then complained when he did not pull a profit. "What's goin on in the world?" I asked, pointing toward his TV. I noted that my team's schedule, which many of the local stores had posted, was displayed prominently on the wall behind him.
"Ol' Reagan's up to no good again," he said, shaking his head and rubbing his fingers together, as if trying to convince them to work better. "Caught lyin 'bout sellin some weapons. Seem like the only thing that ol bag can do is lie. I remember when he was governor, he never did have a good thing to say. But that's government folks, I suppose. Riots happened in Watts back in '65, all they could say was that we don't know how to act right."
"That was before my time," I said. "I think my dad was there, though. He don't like that Reagan much either." I picked up a Twix bar—I always ate one on the day of a game—and set it down on the counter. When I looked up at Mr. Wilson, I found him considering me thoughtfully.
"That's right," he said. "Your daddy grew up in Watts, didn't he?" He looked down, scratched his head, looked up at me again. "You know, back in '65, there was a lot of Japanese folks livin in Watts—I remember, 'cos I lived there awhile too. My neighbor was a man name Tanaka, worked as a gardener for some rich white folks up in Hollywood. Good man—our kids used to play together. But then, pretty soon, Mr. Tanaka and his family moved away. All the Japanese done moved away, from all the black towns, soon as the white folks let 'em live in they neighborhoods."
He didn't say this in an accusing way—he was just telling me what had happened—but I felt strange about it nonetheless. "Well, you don't see me leavin here, do you?" I said, trying to sound lighthearted.
"No, child," he said softly. "But you will."
I didn't look at him, just reached into my pocket for some money; I didn't know what to say.
"It's not just you, though," he said. "You'll all leave Inglewood, sooner or later—you and your friends Raina and Telisa, all of you who got something you believe you can do. I'm not try in to make you feel bad; it's just the way of the world these days. Just do yourself a favor, though, and don't forget where you come from, or the people you leavin behind."
I nodded, my heart suddenly full.
Mr. Wilson finally noticed the Twix bar on the counter, and now he smiled, his teeth still white and strong. "You got a game today?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said, glad that the subject had changed. "Our season opener."
He pushed his glasses into place, turned around, and peered at the schedule. "Well, look at that," he said. Then he turned back to me and waved away the dollar I tried to give him. "You show 'em, girl!" he commanded.
I stepped outside, said goodbye to the men who were standing there, heard the crunching of broken vials beneath my feet. I shook the glass off the bottom of my sneakers and began to walk. At Manchester, I waited for the light to change, and watched a bus drive by with graffiti all over its side. ETG, it said, for the Eight-Trey Gangster Crips, an enemy set of the Inglewood Family Bloods. I passed the cemetery to the right and the Forum to the left, saluting the latter place as both a gesture of respect and as a prayer for good luck in the day's game. Across Prairie, the downtown section of Inglewood began, although everything—the discount clothes shops, the discount
furniture places, the Conroy's flower shop, the little restaurants, the free health clinics—was still closed, steel gates drawn shut across the entrances. I walked the remaining mile to school quickly, still bouncing with anticipation, bending over now and then to dribble an imaginary ball.
Despite my excitement about the game, though, I was feeling a little less happy. My mind kept returning to something Mr. Wilson had said, the thing about me leaving the 'hood. He was right, I knew—I would move on, even if it was not for the same reasons as Mr. Tanaka. In a way, I had left already, or perhaps I'd never really arrived. The factors that had brought me to Inglewood were different from the factors that had brought everyone else there, or that were keeping them all there now—and as much as I loved my friends and tried to fit in, I would always be an outsider among them. I loved Inglewood, though—it was by far the best place I had ever lived; it was the place I felt the least uncomfortable. But I would leave it in seven months, just as Mr. Wilson said, and find new spaces I could circle outside of.
I arrived at school twenty minutes before the bell rang. Jake, the security guard who doubled as the school's graffiti-removal crew, was sitting in his chair with his walkie-talkie in hand. I said hi as I approached the gate. That gate would close at exactly eight a.m., and those who got there after the bell rang would have to produce a damn good reason for why Jake should let them in, or scale the fence when he wasn't looking. Jake was a basketball fan, though, so he always made exceptions for me when I strolled up at some odd hour of midmorning.
"Get twenty-five points and twelve boards for me today," he said.
"I'll try," I said, slapping his hand.
All that day at school, I could barely sit still in my classes. Everywhere I turned, both teachers and students offered me high fives and wished me luck. In second-period Trig, the day's announcements were read over the schoolwide intercom, and Nykesha, the student announcer, made sure that everybody knew about the game.
"And finally," came her distorted voice out of the speaker on the wall, "Nancy, Telisa, and the rest of the girls' hoops crew are gonna dismantle Santa Monica in their first official game of the season. The game is at three p.m. at SaMo. Show no mercy, y'all."
