by Nina Revoyr
I grinned. "Well, how do I know what they think of you guys? And what do they think of you guys?"
He sighed. "Well, when we first started dating, I don't think they were exactly thrilled, and I still think they'd prefer for Claudia to be with a black man. But they've warmed up to me a lot in the last few months. Like any parent, they believe that their daughter should be worshipped, and they know I do a good job of that."
I nodded. "What do you think Grandpa and Grandma would do if they knew you were with a black woman?"
He raised his eyebrows. "Oh, they know."
"And what do they think of it?"
He smiled. "They're twirling in their graves."
"But Dad," I said, "they were cremated."
He smacked his forehead. "Oh, you're right. Well, then each individual ash is twirling in its canister. They're upstairs in the attic. You can check for yourself."
I thought for a moment, uncertain. "They are not," I finally said.
My dad grinned. "Right again. I scattered the ashes, up where they honeymooned at Big Bear. How'd I get such a brilliant daughter?"
We were a patchwork family, and the edges were starting to fit. I'd finally gotten used to Claudia's presence, and to the laughter which woke me up on Sunday mornings. I'd also gotten used to seeing Raina every day, although this meant only that it no longer surprised me and not that I felt any calmer about it. After my triple-double game, and Raina's response, I wasn't annoyed, anymore, by the little things she did, and our relationship went back to normal again. I stopped counting the letters that came, and tried to stop caring about games at the park. We took to doing our homework together, splayed out on the carpet in my room, and I was more diligent about getting it done then, as an excuse to be with her, than I had ever been before she moved in.
Later in those evenings the phone calls would come, sometimes from college coaches but more often from friends—Telisa and Q for me, Toni for her, and Stacy for both of us. Stacy was always up to some kind of mischief or another, and Raina and I both lived vicariously through her decidedly more interesting social life. She went out to clubs almost every weekend night, usually with some girl she'd met at a game. Raina and I both had phone extensions in our rooms, so we were able to have three-way conversations.
"So how was your date?" I asked one evening when I knew she'd been out the night before.
She chuckled wickedly. "I saw, I conquered, I came."
Raina and I both laughed. "You ho," Raina said.
"Hey, don't be callin me a ho," Stacy said. "Besides, I'm givin up girls when I turn eighteen."
"Well, who you gonna move onto next?" I asked.
Stacy sighed dreamily. "Women."
From there our conversation turned to specific details of the previous night's encounter, to general gossip, to what we had done with our weekends, and finally, of course, to basketball. Sometimes, when Raina was talking, I'd lie on the floor and close my eyes and just listen to the sound of her voice.
Our parents did all they could to promote the myth of familial normality. Maybe for them, though, it really had become normal. Their own relationship, at least, seemed unquestionable now; despite his problems at school, my father was happier than I'd ever seen him, and Raina said the same about her mother. By now, too, Claudia's presence in our house was old news to our neighbors. She and my father still got occasional glares when they walked around the 'hood, but these were getting more and more rare. There were other signs of trouble, though. At one point, I asked my father what had happened to Tim Nakanishi, a friend from college he used to play paddleball with on weekends. "Tim," my father had answered, keeping his eyes on his paper, "is not a fan of Claudia." My mother, for her part, would write in that year's Christmas card, I'm concerned about you. I hear your father's taken up with a black woman. And Claudia, of course, had Paula. Judging from a phone conversation I overheard around this time, Paula had not shown up for their last group dinner at Kim's place, and Claudia was sure it had to do with their argument. "She won't return my calls," Claudia said over the phone to Rochelle. "And did you see how she completely avoided me at the last meeting?" She paused and nodded at whatever her friend was saying. "I know. But I don't know what to do anymore, Rochelle. Shit, I wish she'd just get over it."
For the most part, though, people were fairly accepting of my father and Claudia—especially those who had liked my father before, and even more so, especially those who were basketball fans. I was glad about this, because people's discomfort with our parents tended to make me uncomfortable; I didn't like to think much, then, about how different the patches in our patchwork actually were.
On the first Sunday morning of that month, just as on every other Sunday morning since the beginning of September, our parents emerged from their room about eleven. They were sleepy-eyed, yawning, and pajamaed, and they immediately slipped into the gentle teasing that seemed to characterize all their dealings with each other.
"How about some sausage this morning, love?" my father said as they entered the kitchen. Sunday was Claudia's day to cook—only one cook at a time was allowed in our small kitchen—and he liked to milk his advantage as much as possible.
"We only have bacon," she said. "Will that do?"
"Bacon! The last time you made bacon the fire alarm screamed for two hours!"
"Why are you always so hard on me, you lazy bum?"
He squeezed his bicep. "Hey. Don't complain. A hard man is good to find."
They grinned at each other. Raina and I rolled our eyes.
Claudia brought in the morning paper, and then, while she cooked, Raina, my father, and I all fought over the sports section. This was immediately dissected at the kitchen table and never made it out to the postmeal newspaper perusal session we conducted later on in the living room. That morning, my father got it. I had to settle for Metro and Raina for Travel, which was her second-favorite section. She spread the paper out on the table and folded her hands together on top of it. I noticed the flesh beneath her nails, which was the color of toffee; her fingers were a darker brown at the knuckles. Raina's long, squarish hands were covered with nicks and tiny wrinkles; they had the beauty and strength of old women. Two veins pushed up the skin just inside each of her wristbones, like legs beneath a blanket.
"Hey, Mom," Raina said, pointing to a picture of the Grand Canyon on the front page of the Travel section, "if you dropped a men's basketball and a women's basketball from the top of the Grand Canyon, which one would hit the bottom first?"
"Neither," Claudia answered. "They'd fall at the same rate."
"Okay, but if you put a men's ball and a women's ball in the Colorado River, which one would reach Mexico first?"
"I don't know."
"Well, let's find out. Can we go to the Grand Canyon sometime?"
"Maybe," Claudia said, over the sound of sizzling bacon. "But we've got to see what your grades are like first. You get anything below a B this semester, and you're not going anywhere, not even the bathroom."
Raina looked at her mother seriously. "I don't think you'd like that," she said.
"Listen, Miss Thang," said Claudia, putting her fist on her hip and smiling. "Just 'cos you're bigger than me doesn't mean I can't still whup your butt."
"Ooh, Mom," said Raina, smiling, "I love it when you're tough."
They went on like this for a few more minutes, Claudia threatening to remove all sleeping, eating, and breathing privileges if Raina didn't do well in school, Raina threatening to go live at the beach. I liked watching the two of them interact. They were much closer than my father and me; they'd check in with each other every night after dinner, talk for ten or fifteen minutes about their day. Claudia and Raina were both serious people, but that was not, as I'd believed at first, the state they were always in. And the things that tempered their basic seriousness were different. Claudia could be mischievous, joyfully wicked, as if a very small devil was perched on her shoulder. But Raina was just plain weird. When they'd first moved in
with us, I'd thought the quirky things she said were simply distracting, amusing—garnish for her obvious perfection. It had taken me awhile to realize that this oddness wasn't an addition to who she was; it was who she was. I liked her oddness, though. It made her seem more accessible, more real. And Raina seemed comfortable with the things that made her different, made her strange, in a way I could never be.
"Yo, Mom, look at that," she said now, pointing over my father's shoulder at the sports page as Claudia sat down to eat. "Rockets 117, Rockets 112. Guess you haven't been paying much attention at work lately, huh?" Raina always held her mother responsible for any mistake involving the Times, whether there was a typo, or an incorrect caption, or the delivery boy had thrown the paper on the roof.
Claudia spread a napkin on her lap and smiled. "It's been really busy lately," she said. "I guess that one slipped past me."
"Well, maybe we should subscribe to a better paper," Raina teased.
"Maybe you should shut your mouth."
I looked at the sports page in order to find the mistake, but found something else that distracted me—a picture of Cheryl Miller, holding a Cheryl Miller doll in her hands. She looked as radiant, proud, and self-contained as ever, a lioness who was ruler of all she saw. "Raina, look!" I said, jumping up so fast I hit the bottom of the table and caused the parents' coffee to spill. "Give me the paper, Dad. You gotta let me cut that out."
"No, no, no, no," he said, pulling the paper back and shaking his head. "No one's touching this until I go through the scores."
Every morning my father or Claudia demanded the public reading of the high school scores, which, including pauses for discussion or disbelief, usually took about twenty minutes. On Saturdays, they read the football scores too, but the rest of the time it was just hoops. True basketball parents, they were. Both of them knew who the best high school teams and players were, could name the top twenty men's and women's teams in college ball, made it to as many of their daughters' games as possible. Before we'd gotten our licenses, our parents had driven us the thirty-odd miles to Cerritos every Saturday and Sunday, where we both had spring league games in the morning and AAU practice in the afternoon. My father's dedication had upset a couple of the women he'd dated before Claudia. They'd been of the opinion that he was wasting a great deal of time chauffeuring me around Southern California and a great deal of money sending me to Nationals—time and money which they maintained would have been better spent on them. But he saw all of this expenditure as an investment—fork over a couple of hundred bucks every summer for camps and Nationals now, and get your daughter's education paid for later. Claudia saw things the same way.
After we'd finished eating, we moved out to the living room, where we drank coffee and read the rest of the Sunday Times. The paper got so strewn about that you could barely see the carpet beneath it. It always took us at least an hour to work through the thing, an hour in which the only sound made by any of us was the occasional rustling of paper. That morning the dog came in, nuzzled Raina on the shoulder, turned around three times, and sat down. She usually joined these family gatherings, taking advantage of the late-morning sunlight. For some reason she always lay on the Calendar section, as if she could read the title; we joked that she must have been an entertainer of some sort in a past life. From the stereo came the voice of Billie Holiday singing "Embraceable You." I read sporadically and contemplated the dying carnations on the coffee table, which had been a good-luck present from Toni for Raina's first game.
Raina read the paper while lying on her stomach, feet sticking into the air. Her feet were surprisingly large, as if all the extra inches and bulges that had been spared from the rest of her had sunk down and reconvened below her ankles. She put one fist on top of the other and rested her chin on it, which made her look very thoughtful and very young at the same time. I glanced at her around the edge of my paper as often as I could. I was trying to memorize her face. Every morning when I left her I forgot what she looked like, and every day when I returned I was surprised again at her beauty. It was as if consciously trying to recall her image was exactly what chased it away.
I doubt her reunions with me were quite so dramatic. We measured the progress of our relationship, I imagine, quite differently. For her, I suppose, our relationship just existed, a uniform whole that was not particularly altered by new incidents or occurrences. But for me each new development was something to take apart and analyze endlessly, both for its own meaning and for the light it cast on our relationship as a whole. I took her words and actions away with me and sifted through them like a stack of papers. Did she hold that smile a little too long at dinner last night because I told a particularly funny joke, or was she pleased with me for some other reason? Did she sigh like that in the living room because she was bored with the TV program, or because she was bored with me? And what about that frown while we were doing our homework last night? And that strange nod of approval when I scored on her at the park? And her refusal to speak at breakfast the other day?
She must have known how huge a part she played in my life, but if so, she never mentioned it. It was as if we had an unspoken agreement not to deal with the issue of my feelings. For my part, I never brought it up—I just didn't have that kind of courage, nor did I have the strength to withstand an outright rejection. And if I didn't want to talk about it, then she'd keep quiet too; she'd never do anything to embarrass me or make me uncomfortable. I realize this pact of silence did not indicate a great deal of courage, in either of us. I also realize that being unable to express my feelings may have actually served to make them all the stronger. But those feelings were complicated, and I'm not sure that I could have explained them, even if I had wanted to. As much as I loved Raina, I always limited what I imagined could happen between us, and I wouldn't allow myself to hope she'd want me back. My goal was not to win her; I wasn't trying to achieve her. What I wanted, more than anything, was to deserve her.
CHAPTER 9
Normally, the end of the football season brought rest and relief for my father. He would be sad about it—especially if he was particularly attached to that year's group of seniors—but after a week or two, I could see the pressure lift off him, and he would ease into a slower pace of life. My senior year, though, his level of stress only seemed to increase once the season was over. His team's banquet was held the week of my opening game, and the players had chosen Eddie Nuñez as the Most Improved Player and a linebacker as the MVP. Eric Henderson went home empty-handed, and Larry Henderson had been so upset that he wouldn't even speak to my father—believing, apparently, that he had influenced the vote. Once the banquet was over and the team had officially disbanded until spring practice, the drama moved off the football field and permeated the rest of my father's life.
One night a few days after the banquet, Raina and I were upstairs doing homework in her room. In addition to the pen she held in her hand, there was one behind her ear and another sticking out of her mouth; she insisted that the extra pens helped her concentrate. I was just about to ask if I could borrow an eraser when I heard my father come in from school. He went directly to the kitchen, where Claudia was sitting, and I decided to take a break and say hello. I walked down the stairs in my stocking feet, but as I was about to turn the corner, I heard my father's voice. And there was something about it, a strange nakedness, which prevented me from taking another step.
". . . his progress report," I heard him say to Claudia. "So Larry called me in this morning and asked what was the meaning of this, and I told him that it was exactly like I wrote: Eric's work had not been satisfactory for the first half of the semester, and if I gave him a grade now it would be a D, and if he didn't improve in the remaining few weeks he was in danger of failing the class."
"How much weight does a progress report have?" I heard Claudia ask.
"None. It's just a thing we give all the parents halfway through each semester in order to tell them how their kids are doing. But that was just the first of ma
ny things that happened today."
At this point, Ann came around the corner. Delighted to find me, she grabbed a toy and crouched down into a play bow. When I didn't respond, she gave me a hurt look and went back toward the kitchen, and I had the sudden irrational fear that she'd tell the parents I was eavesdropping.
"So, what else happened?" Claudia asked.
I heard my father sigh. "Well, last week, this kid came to see me—not a football player, just a kid who's in one of my classes. And he told me he'd been in a history class with Eric Henderson last year, and that Eric somehow managed to get a C in the class even though he failed all the tests. And their teacher was Jennifer Corbitt, who is not an easy grader."
Claudia was silent for a moment. "You think maybe something strange went on?"
"I didn't know," my father said. "I didn't know what could have happened. So I went and talked to Jennifer this afternoon." He paused, and I imagined he took a sip of whatever drink was sitting in front of him. "Jennifer's a good woman, and we're pretty much friends—we grab a beer together now and then after a staff meeting—so I figured she'd be straight with me. I asked if it was true that Eric Henderson had failed all his tests last year but still passed the class, and she said yes, it was true, and I asked her how. And she looked at me kind of funny and said, 'I thought you were in on this,' and I said no, I wasn't in on anything. And she told me that actually, originally, she'd given Eric an F. But then last June, the day after she'd turned in her final grades, Larry Henderson came in to see her while she was cleaning up her room. And Jennifer said that Larry told her she should reconsider Eric's grade. Jennifer refused at first, but then Larry got threatening and said that he could arrange for her to lose her job. And what could she do, you know? She has three kids. She couldn't afford to risk getting fired."
