Crossing the Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “I did,” I said. I still do, I thought.

  “And now, to realize that what I thought was keeping us apart was something that needn’t keep us apart…”

  “You feel betrayed,” I said.

  Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

  “And you hate me now.”

  There was surprise in his eyes. Then, with a sad smile, he shook his head.

  “I almost wish I could hate you,” he said. “It would make things easier.”

  As much as those words hurt, I thought I understood them.

  “What do you feel for me now, then?” I asked.

  He looked at Emma. She was sleeping. He could say whatever he wanted.

  His voice was a whisper. “I have no fucking idea.”

  Quiet as his voice had been, I felt as though I’d been slapped.

  “Oh.” I looked down. “I see.”

  Then I felt his fingers, soft, beneath my chin.

  “I do know this,” he said, sounding stronger than he had in a while. “I do know that this baby needs to be properly taken care of. I do know I don’t want her processed through the system, sent off to a home where she may or may not be well off. I do know you’re taking good care of her. I do know that you love her. I do know that I want to help you, if helping you means helping Emma.”

  Once upon a time, he had believed in me. Maybe, one day, he would again. I would have to re-earn his trust; it was that simple.

  I let myself relax for just a moment, leaning into the strength of that hand as he moved it to the side of my face. I felt that hand I knew so well, wanting more, so much more. But for now, this had to be enough.

  January, really and truly the first month

 

  In television programs of all kinds, whenever a baby comes into the picture, it’s like the kiss of death. Ironic, isn’t it, that new life would have that effect? And yet it always comes across as an act of desperation on the part of the writers: “Well, there’s nothing new we can do with these characters. Might as well throw a baby at them. We’ll at least get one more season out of it.” Of course, it doesn’t solve anything. Either the audience never sees the baby afterwards, because the writers have realized what a mistake they’ve made, and are left wondering, “Did they really have a baby? Or did the country just mass-hallucinate that one? Ah, well. Pass the crisps.” Or every episode centers around the baby, with the main characters seeming to recede into a brain-dead zone of sickly niceness.

  Well, I for one wasn’t about to become Mary-fucking-Poppins, I can tell you that.

  In Martin Amis’s nonfiction book Experience, he passes a remark something to the effect that—paraphrasing here—the instant you become a parent, you immediately forgive your own parents everything. I can remember thinking, “Huh. What a way he has with human nature, not to mention, words,” because he makes these comments that are so stunningly self-assured, the reader starts thinking he must be right. I can also remember thinking, about a half second later, Bollocks.

  Just because I now had a baby, sort of, it didn’t mean that I was going to begin to see the world through rose-colored glasses. I would see Emma through them to a certain extent, naturally. But the dysfunctional relationships that predated her would continue on as such, the people who made me feel like life was one long, jagged scraping of Cher’s nails down an endless chalkboard…

  Which leads us, as all roads seem to lead in one way or another, to…drumroll, please:

  My. Mother.

  I was waiting for her at a table at Meat! Meat!! MEAT!!!

  She’d called earlier in the morning. “Jane, I really think we need to talk about…that baby. I’m getting my hair done at eleven and my nails at one—damned shop was too booked to do it all back-to-back.”

  Well, now, how could I refuse an offer like that?

  “Meet me at David’s place,” she’d added.

  Hard to believe but my mother, who’d never liked any of the few friends I had in life, had taken a shine to David.

  “He’s just, oh, I don’t know,” she said, “so many things at once. The man is a real conversation piece.”

  Good thing she didn’t know what he had to say about her.

  She bustled into the restaurant, all champagne-helmeted hair, wielding a handbag that could have doubled as a weapon, and parked herself next to me at one of the many square tables, all of which were covered with butcher’s paper.

  “Your nails look awful,” I said, hoping to start on the offensive, rather than the defensive she’d undoubtedly soon put me on.

  “You have a formula stain on your blouse,” she said.

  “I think they did your hair too tight this time,” I said.

  “Your skirt’s too short,” she said. “Are you turning tricks on the side now?”

  “What do you have in that purse,” I asked, “an MP?”

  “Some people shouldn’t be allowed to breed,” she said.

  “And how,” I said.

  “Ready to order?” chippered Christopher, who David had originally met when Christopher was the architect behind Meat! Meat!! MEAT!!!, and who helped David in every way now, including waiting tables.

  “I’ll have a big steak and an even bigger glass of wine,” said my mother.

  “I’ll have the fish,” I said.

  “Nobody orders fish here,” said my mother.

  “I just did.”

  “Right,” said Christopher, escaping.

  “Speaking of babies…” said my mother.

  “Were we?” I asked.

  “I’m pretty sure we were,” she said. “Where’s…that baby?”

  “Emma’s in the kitchen. David’s watching her. I figured that whatever we might have to say to one another might get, um, heated.”

  “You left that baby in the kitchen?”

  “Yes, and she’s perfectly safe there,” I said. “David’s just gaga over her. He can barely look at anything else when she’s in the room. The only people at risk here are us. David might forget to put our meals in the oven, in which case we’ll be eating raw.”

  Christopher brought our drinks and hurried away.

  My mother sipped hers in that prissy way she has. I do realize you have to purse your lips to drink, but on her, her lips always looked so pursed.

  “You know you can’t keep her, Jane.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be fair.”

  “To whom?”

  “To her, of course.”

  “I know I’m going to hate myself in the morning for asking this, but why do you say that?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? You don’t know the first thing about being black.”

  “I know how to love her,” I said. “I can do that pretty damned good.”

  “Oh. Love,” she said. “Do you really think that’s all there is to it?”

  “I think it helps if it’s at least there,” I said pointedly, but she obviously missed the point.

  “There’s a lot more to being a mother than just love,” she said.

  “Such as?”

  “Why, there’s a tradition that mothers pass down. What sort of tradition will you have to pass on to her?”

  I thought of the Taylor family tradition that had been passed down to me. Well, that certainly wouldn’t do.

  “I’ll make a tradition for her,” I said. “We’ll make our own tradition together.”

  Our meals arrived. They were cooked, at least, so David must have torn his eyes off Emma for at least thirty seconds, but the veg was arranged in such a haphazard fashion, I suspected he hadn’t been looking when he’d done that part.

  “And you know,” my mother said, lowering her voice, “they talk differently than we do.”

  “Who?”

  “Black people.”

  “Only when they’re born in different countries, Mother.”

  “And they, oh, I don’t know, use different hair products than we do.”

  “Now there’s a good reas
on for giving up on a child.”

  “It’s just that—and I’m really, really not trying to be mean here—I simply don’t think that you can handle it. It’s not fair to the baby. You should give her up, because you can’t be black. I’m sorry, but it’s true, Jane, you just can’t.”

  I laid my fork down and looked her in the eye.

  “Oh. Yes. I. Can.”

  Of course, I hadn’t a clue as to what I was talking about.

  And here was something really weird: Even though my mother, when calling this meeting, had said she wanted to discuss the baby, and we had in fact discussed just that, I got the feeling that there was something else she wanted to talk to me about. I don’t know what tipped me off. An evasive look in her eyes, perhaps? The way, whenever I tried to turn the discussion to her, she turned it back to me? Apparently, though, she’d changed her mind about telling me whatever it was. Because, try as I might to worm it out of her—my worming performing two functions, since it deflected any more nonsense she might have to say about Emma—I couldn’t get her to tell me what it was. Mum was keeping mum.

  Considering that there were no sounds of complaints out of Emma coming from the kitchen, and that I no longer wanted to discuss Emma with my mother and my mother didn’t want to discuss whatever with me, you could say the whole place went mum after that.

  I was still on “maternity leave” and I had to be grateful that Churchill & Stewart was willing to let me remain on that status; after all, they could have sacked me for being a pathological liar. I still hadn’t decided yet if I was going back. I’d delivered The Cloth Baby to Alice Simms, who thought it was going to be a huge success, so much so that the publisher was interested in having me write another book, but there was no immediate rush to decide on what.

  So I had time on my hands, what little time wasn’t taken up by Emma, but time enough to come to at least one startling realization.

  I realized that my mother—God, how I hate to say these words!—was right. Oh, of course she’d said everything, as usual, in a completely wrongheaded fashion, and she was most definitely wrong about Emma not belonging with me, but she was right in her implications that Emma was going to need to grow up with a sense of heritage. I realized that I was going to need to find a way to meet some black people, for Emma’s sake.

  I hadn’t known many black people in my life, but what few I’d known, I’d liked. I realize that sounds like one of those backhanded compliments, like when someone says, “Some of my best friends are Jewish”—which really is true in my case, but only in the singular, since my only best friend is David and he is Jewish. (At least, I’m pretty sure he is; he never really talks about it.) And, anyway, what would be better, to say that some of my enemies are Jewish or that the few black people I’d known I’d hated? Neither of which would be true, of course. As a white Christian, my random sampling of other races and religions was just too limited to make any kind of meaningful generalizations. All of this said, if anyone else ever comes up with a way to say, “I’m not a racist” without people automatically knee-jerking to “Ah, she’s a racist” or “I’ve liked what few black people I’ve known” without sounding like some kind of insufferable prig, please drop me a line.

  Here’s one last interesting part on that subject: I can say “I haven’t known many black people in my life, but what few I’ve known, I’ve liked” and fully realize that there will be someone who will find the remark offensive. And yet, any observation I make about the white people I’ve known would have to be more offensive, the truth being that having known a ton of white people in my life, there have been precious few I’ve genuinely liked. So there.

  As I say, though, having come from a white family, having gone to school in situations where the majority was overwhelmingly white, having previously lived with a man whose own work circle was unicolor with a pale bias and working myself in a publishing firm that was lily-white, I’ve had little opportunity to develop deep friendships with people of color. And, to be fair to myself, it wasn’t exactly as though the black community was knocking down my door, begging me to come on over and liven things up for them. As if they needed me.

  But now things were going to have to be different. Now, instead of waiting on the vagaries of chance and personal circumstance to populate my inner circle for me in a more culturally diverse way, I was going to have to make a conscious effort to live my life on a broader canvas.

  I had no illusions. Not that I expected people to throw rocks at me or even be mean or anything like that. But I also wasn’t expecting people to be eager to get to know me. To be fair, sometimes I didn’t feel so eager to get to know me.

  But where to start?

  A funeral seemed like the right place to start. After all, I couldn’t very well go door-to-door looking for new friends and you can’t crash a wedding in the same way you can crash a funeral. I mean, in the case of a wedding, the guests of honor are there, all alive and everything and able to point the finger at you as being someone who neither had put on their list. Go through the receiving line at a wedding you’ve not been invited to, and you’re basically screwed. At a funeral, on the other hand, the guest of honor…

  “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  Before setting out on this particular errand, I’d checked out the obits in the paper, hoping to come up with a likely prospect. I sat at the dining-room table, my own half-eaten lunch of microwave pizza—I was officially A Mother! I cooked things now!—pushed to one side, burping Emma after her own repast of formula, as I studied the page. I spoke aloud to Emma as I studied, because, well, they do say you should talk to your baby as much as possible and this was the subject on offer at the moment.

  “Pakistani, Pakistani, Pakistani,” I muttered. “Rupert Hampstead-Hyde. Well, he’s obviously white,” I said to Em.

  Then one leaped out at me.

  I could tell the deceased must be black because of the neighborhood where the church was located and the particular church (plus, there was a picture): “Mary Johnson,” I read the obit to Emma, “63, died peacefully in her sleep on Jan 10. An employee of U.K. Housecleaning for the past thirty years, Mary is survived by five children—John, Luke, Paul, Matthew and Mary Jr.—and twelve grandchildren. Services to be held at Shakespeare Baptist Revival Church. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be sent to War Child.”

  I was a little taken aback by that at first, thinking it would be more usual to ask that donations be sent to some disease-oriented organization, or her church. But then it occurred to me that maybe that was my own prejudices talking. Why wouldn’t black people be socially conscious? After all, Mary Johnson had died in her sleep peacefully, if relatively young, so why give it to a disease when they could give it to needy children in other parts of the world?

  I held Em up, touched my forehead to hers.

  “Is Mummy a racist sometimes without realizing it? Can you help me out with that?”

  Coo.

  I scribbled out a check for fifty pounds to expiate in advance any guilt I might later feel and called a cab.

  If I’d wanted to soak up some local color, or find out how the other half lives—to the extent of finding out what it’s like to be a minority—I’d certainly come to the right place. Being the only white person at Mary Johnson’s funeral, I was in a minority of exactly one.

  The church looked just about the same as any other church I’d ever been in, save for that there were side-by-side pictures of Shakespeare and Jesus in the entry way, which seemed about right to me.

  I’m not sure what I was hoping to achieve. I guess that, like several months earlier, when I’d gone trawling at a pregnancy clinic for ideas of authentic proof of pregnancy to offer nosy parkers at work, I was once again looking for ideas without knowing what ideas I was looking for.

  It was a lovely service. The reverend—minister, maybe? Whatever it is Baptists have—spoke of Mary Johnson so highly, it made me wish I had actually known her.

  As I came th
rough the receiving line afterwards, I readjusted Emma in my arms in order to shake hands.

  There were four men, who could only be John, Luke, Paul and Matthew, ranging in ages from late thirties to mid-forties—so Mary Johnson must have been very young when she had her first—with a woman I couldn’t see very well at the end of the line.

  I reached to take the first man’s hand, planning to murmur, “So sorry,” but before I could offer my condolences, he took one look at Emma in my arms and gave a little backward jump.

  He held up his hands in a defensive gesture. “Whoa!” he said. “Is that your baby?”

  This was something I hadn’t counted on: that showing up at an all-black funeral with a black baby, and me being white, it would look as though I’d come here to accuse someone of something. It wasn’t as though I thought there must be black men all over the city fathering babies and then failing to take responsibility for them. But I was the only white person in the room, holding a black baby in my arms, no escort anywhere in sight. Plus, I’m sure I looked like A Woman With A Purpose, which I was, but not a purpose anyone could readily guess.

  I tried to ignore him, moving on to brother number two, only to be greeted with that same falling-away jump, hands up as if I were holding a loaded pistol. “Whoa! Is that your baby?”

  And brother number three: “Whoa! Is that your baby?”

  And four: “Whoa! Is that your baby?”

  I felt like I’d just knocked over a line of dominos.

  “Would you please stop that?” I said. “I’m not here to look for a father for my child. I’m here to pay my respects to your mother!”

  No, I do know that shouting in the middle of a post-funeral service in a Baptist church was not my most stellar moment, but it was infuriating. Couldn’t anyone see that I meant no harm?

  Just as I was getting ready to skulk off—what was the use?—the woman at the end of the line came forward. While I couldn’t figure out which brother was which apostle, I knew this could only be Mary Jr. She was very pretty, with chocolate-colored skin and cheekbones the envy of just about anybody, despite the ill-fitting cut of her suit, which was all loose in the stomach area, as though designed for a much larger person. As she came to me, one hand out to take mine, I saw two things: 1) she was substantially younger than her brothers, maybe around my age, making her Mary Sr.’s surprise baby; and 2) she had her own young baby cradled in the other arm. Ah! A lightbulb went off in my dim brain. Maybe the suit was from her recent pregnancy.