After hearing “nigger lover” and “there goes nigger and his sister” hurled at our backs too many times, I stop walking into school with him.
Seems we can never just be brother and sister like in other families. Our whole lives, people have felt an urge to make up special names for what we are. At Lafayette Christian, we were the “Oreo twins” or “Kimberly and Arnold” after the characters on Diff’rent Strokes. And while those nicknames bugged us, they were certainly preferable to what they call us at Harrison.
“See ya later!” I tell David when the bus door flaps open in front of Harrison. As I rush down the sidewalk ahead of him, I feel a pinch of guilt, but a greater relief as I melt into the sea of white bodies. Alone, I am part of the crowd. Together, we invite notice and ridicule. Why do I always have to be the “black boy’s sister” anyway? Why can’t I be my own person? It’s not fair. This is a new school, and I want a fresh start.
Besides, people will think David’s a sissy if he’s always hanging around me. It’s best for him, too. We’re sixteen, and it’s time we struck out on our own.
Sometimes I run into him between classes, always alone, always rushing and looking straight ahead, his face a blank mask. He’s easy enough to spot because he’s the only black kid at Harrison. A couple of times, he’s rushed right by me without seeing me—I must have been just another white face to him, blurring by. Once I almost reached out a hand to touch him and say his name, but then thought better of it. It’s better for both of us like this.
During Algebra, I’m tipsy enough to start making small talk with Elaine. One day I compliment her white hoop earrings. The next, I ask to borrow her eraser. Then I run into her while I’m buying lunch from the basement vending machine.
She’s crouched outside the glass door leading to the parking lot, her body hidden but her unmistakable red hair blowing sideways across the glass. I buy an extra can of Tab.
She jumps up when she hears the door open and chucks something into the grass before whipping around to face me.
“Jesus Christ, don’t sneak up on people like that!”
I wince at this blasphemy as she bends to search for whatever it is she threw into the grass. Today she’s wearing a pink-and-black striped top that slumps off one shoulder, a jean miniskirt, and ankle boots that have these lacey white baby socks frothing out of them. She looks like that whorish new singer, Madonna. I’ve heard preppy girls poke fun at her behind her back and call her a slut, but Elaine doesn’t seem to care whether she fits in at Harrison or not. I admire her for it.
She straightens, a lit cigarette in her hand. “Sorry, I’m a little on edge,” she says. “How’d you find me?”
“It’s alright,” I say. “I was just buying some food and saw your hair in the window.”
She gathers it to the side of her neck with her free hand and laughs. “Oh damn. Didn’t think of that.”
I stand awkwardly holding the two cans and a Snickers bar as she sucks at her cigarette and squints at a pile of dark clouds on the horizon. I’ve never met a Jew before. Didn’t know there were any in Lafayette, or Indiana for that matter. Jesus-killers, we called them at Lafayette Christian. But Elaine doesn’t seem like a bad person. A gust of wind tugs at our hair.
“Want some pop?” I finally ask her, holding out a can.
“Sure,” she says, taking it from me. “Thanks.”
Maybe I could invite her to church one Sunday. I could convert her, introduce her to Jesus. Maybe she secretly hankers for Him like those Third World heathens.
A cow moos loudly across the road, and we turn to watch it plod into the mouth of the graffiti barn, which was raided last weekend by Westsiders. “Harrison Hicks Suck Dick” it says in big red letters.
“Where you from?” I ask her.
She takes a sip before answering.
“Chicago,” she says, looking at me. “Ever been?”
She is from a big city; I knew it!
“Yeah, in seventh grade,” I say nonchalantly. “We went on this field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry.”
I don’t tell her that our bus driver got lost in the ghetto and a policeman took pity on us and escorted us to the museum.
“My dad was hired as a chemist at Eli Lilly, so that’s why we had to move here,” Elaine says.
The wind shifts, blowing the stench of fresh cow manure over us, and she wrinkles her nose and tells me how sorely she misses “civilization.”
“Did you know that the very word Hoosier means country bumpkin?” she fumes, stubbing out her cigarette on the heel of her ankle boot. “Don’t believe me? Go look it up in the dictionary. Hoosier, it says. Synonymous for hick, hillbilly, back-ass-ward.”
I feel insulted, but bite my tongue. I’m in no position to be choosy about friends. We drink our pops and watch cows lug themselves into the dark barn one by one. The buzzer rings inside the building, signaling the end of lunch, the beginning of rejection, again.
“Will you be here tomorrow?” I ask Elaine, trying to control the desperation in my voice.
“Maybe,” she says, shrugging. “You?”
“Probably.”
“See you then,” she says.
As I turn to walk through the glass door, happiness bubbles through me. I’ve got someone to eat lunch with; I’m not a complete reject after all.
We meet at the cafeteria snack bar, loading up on Tab and Baffy Taffy and Funyuns before going outside.
Elaine prefers to talk, and I prefer to listen, so we get along great. As we eat our junk food picnic on the sidewalk outside the gym, she tells me about Chicago—the Water Tower mall, the Cubs baseball games, the Lincoln Park Zoo—and explains why everything is bigger and better there than in Lafayette.
One day we’re walking toward the stairwell with our food when a figure emerges from the boys’ bathroom ahead of us. It’s David. He ambles up the hallway, head down, kicking at a piece of balled-up trash.
I fight an urge to call out to him and ask him where he’s going and why he isn’t eating. I can’t be my brother’s keeper forever.
“See that black boy?” Elaine whispers, slowing down. “He’d be better off in Chicago.”
I nod and watch David disappear around a corner, then hold out my bag of Funyuns to her.
“Tell me about that shopping mall again,” I ask her as she dips her fingers into the yellow foil. “The one with the seven floors.”
Mary joins us. I spot her one day while we’re standing in line at the snack bar. There’s a commotion in the middle of the cafeteria, and we turn to see a pair of jocks in muscle shirts wrestling across the floor. They bump up against the cheerleaders’ table, and the cheerleaders shriek with delight; this is a show put on for their benefit. When the lunchroom monitor— a grumpy, man-like woman who sometimes works the snack bar—blows her whistle, the boys tumble apart and the cheerleaders stand in unison, clapping their hands in rhythm and chanting.
“Those are some fucked-up mating rituals,” Elaine sneers.
As I nod my agreement, I glimpse a lone figure in a yellow shirt at the far end of the cafeteria. David? He was wearing yellow today. I squint. No, it’s Mary.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell Elaine.
She’s sitting alone hiding behind her long bangs, but she smiles as I walk toward her.
“Where you been at?” I ask her.
“I had strep throat,” Mary says, “but I’m not infectious now.”
I point toward the snack bar. “Me and this other girl are gonna eat outside, wanna come?”
She wraps her cheeseburger in a napkin and follows me across the cafeteria. As we wind through the blue tables, I spot David sitting in a corner with Kenny Mudd, a nerd from my Algebra class. Everyone calls him Casper because he’s albino; his skin is translucent, and his buzzed hair and eyebrows platinum blond. He wears bottle-thick glasses that make his red eyes bug out, and he’s brilliant. Sitting across from each other, David and Kenny look like each other’s photographic nega
tive.
I watch David pick up a French fry and cock his head to one side as he listens to Kenny talk. He’s not looking in my direction, but I grin at him anyway. He’s eating proper and he’s found a friend, even if that friend is Kenny Mudd. The lunch monitor frowns at me as we walk by her, and I smile at her, too, happy that this big grumpy woman is watching over my brother.
We’re okay, we both are.
We organized a “welcome home” party in the basement. Debra put David on the couch and Herb Alpert on the turntable, and while the rest of us boogied across the carpet, David screeched and bounced on the cushions.
Mother raced downstairs and turned off the music.
“No dancing for David,” she scolded. “It’s too much for him.”
He was almost three years old, but he couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t talk. He scooted around on his hands and knees. Such was the legacy of his foster-care “families.” When he wanted something, he’d point at it and scream. If we didn’t understand him, he’d hurl himself to the floor in shrieking frustration, and he’d do the same if he didn’t get what he wanted.
He had other residue from his family services days. He’d bang his head against his crib board and fall asleep in his high chair, face-planting in his oatmeal.
I appointed myself his warden and his keeper. I pulled him around by his arms until he took his first teetering steps alone, and clapped my hand over his mouth until he learned to pronounce the names of the objects he wanted.
My name was too difficult for him. He followed me around chanting “Ju-la-la,” and I called him “Baby Boo-Boo” because he was constantly tripping and falling and scraping his skin. I’d kiss away his pain and hush his cries.
He was my baby.
CHAPTER 4
HOME
“Jerome’s back.”
David informs me of this as we cross the back field after school. I’m studying the cover of the September issue of Glamour, which I pulled from the mailbox after we got off the bus. The perfection of the cover model, dark-haired in a pink argyle sweater, knifes me with envy. Anyone that beautiful must be happy.
Debra got me a subscription for my sixteenth birthday.
“Filth, fornication and vanity!” Mother seethed when the first issue came. She threatened to ban it from the house, and I’ve been mindful to keep it out of her sight ever since, hiding it under my mattress just as Jerome used to hide his dirty magazines in the basement ceiling. When Dad found his porn stash, he burned them in the backyard—I watched from my window as the dark smoke and ash rose into the hot afternoon sky—before marching Jerome to the pole barn. When Jerome started hollering, I turned up my radio.
“Did you hear me? I said Jerome’s back,” David says, louder.
“Yeah, I heard you.”
“He knocked on the window in the middle of the night, scared the crap out of me. He had a key, but figured they’d changed the alarm on him.”
“Oh,” I say, scanning an article called “Eat Your Way to Perfect Nails.” The photo illustration shows long blue nails gripping a cantaloupe.
“Boy, is he gonna get it when Dad gets home.” He pauses before adding in a dramatic voice: “In the country, no one can hear you scream.”
I roll my eyes; it’s a phrase he’s parroted ever since we moved out here and he saw Dad’s belt hung on the pole barn wall. He stole it from that Alien movie: In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream.
At the side of the house, Lecka barks and strains at her chain, shivering with excitement at our arrival, and David jogs ahead of me to play with her.
I imagine the morning’s scenario. Mother would have found Jerome at some point and called Dad at the clinic to recount Jerome’s look and smell and sneering answers to her questions. He’d been gone for three weeks and they didn’t try to find him. Instead, they changed the alarm code, fearing he’d sneak back during the day when the house was empty and burglarize it. Jerome has had a stealing problem ever since he was adopted. When he was little, he stole keys and change from Mother’s purse. Now he steals anything he can get his hands on.
Over the past year, he’s clashed frequently with Father and has taken to leaving for days at a time, staying with friends until their parents throw him out.
There will be hell to pay, now that he’s come home again. Our parents’ child-rearing philosophy is etched into twin paddles that hang on the basement wall: “Spare the Rod,” and “And Spoil the Child.” Proverbs 13:24.
David waits for me by the back door. I stuff the Glamour into my backpack and we go inside together. “Holy! Holy! Holy!” plays loudly on the rec room intercom.
The door to the boys’ room is shut. David walks to it and twists the knob. It’s locked. He shrugs and we go upstairs, where “Holy! Holy! Holy!” booms off the walls and windows. Mother’s at the dining room table with the Bible opened in front of her. Her head is in her hands and her glasses lie on the plastic tablecloth. David looks at me and raises his eyebrows before tiptoeing to the cookie jar.
The ceramic lid clinks just as the music fades, and he freezes, hand in the jar. Mother looks up sharply, a tissue clutched in her hand.
“Oh, hi,” she says in a weak voice. “Was . . .”
Her words are drowned out by opening chords of the next hymn, and I reach to turn down the intercom volume.
“Pardon me?” I ask.
“Was there any mail?” Her voice is brusque now, back to normal. She puts on her glasses.
“Some,” I respond. I walk to her and lay a sheaf of envelopes next to the Bible. It’s open to Psalm 23: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul. . . . I will fear no evil, for You are with me, Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. We had to memorize it in fifth grade. It’s a good passage to read to yourself, Reverend Dykstra says, whenever you feel troubled.
When Mother lifts her head to study an envelope, I notice her eyes are red.
David pours grape Kool-Aid into two glasses and brings one to me.
“So, Jerome’s back?” he asks casually.
Mother’s jaw tightens as she shuffles through the rest of the envelopes, separating the junk mail from the bills.
“I’d prefer not to talk about it,” she says, drawing her elbows into her sides, clamping up.
David and I are both standing next to her, over her.
“Does Dad know?” I ask. I want her to look up so I can see if she was crying. I’ve never seen her cry before . . . if that’s what she was doing. . . . I thought she was too strong for that.
“Of course he knows!” she says in an irritated voice.
“Do you want any help with supper or anything?” I persist. If she really is crying, I’d feel bad for her.
“What I want is some peace and quiet!” she says, shaking an electric bill in her hand, and still refusing to look up at us. “Don’t you kids have homework to do?”
David elbows me and nods toward the basement door. I hesitate—not wanting to see Jerome, but curiosity getting the better of me—before following him downstairs. The door is still locked, and there’s no answer when David knocks. In the kitchen, Mother turns the volume up on Rejoice Radio. The hymn is “Blessed Assurance.”
“Jerome. Open up,” David calls. Nothing. He kicks the door with his sneaker.
Silence.
“Open the door!” he shouts, pounding the wood slab with both fists. The door implodes, sucking David into the room. Jerome stands there, tall and glowering in the shadows. He has turned off the intercom, and the blinds are shut. The room smells sour, like dirty laundry. I follow David inside, and Jerome locks the door behind me. He’s several shades darker than David, almost coal-colored. No one would confuse them for brothers.
David sits on his bed and I walk to the far wall and open the blinds and window to let in fresh air. The popped-out screen still leans against the wall beneath the window frame.
“So . . . where you b
een?” David says.
“Around,” Jerome says, turning to squint at the bright window; his left eye is swollen shut.
“What happened to your face?” I ask.
He sneers.
“You should see the other guy.”
“What’d you come back for?” David asks. “When Dad gets home . . .”
“To fulfill some basic needs.”
Jerome keeps his one good eye on me. I turn my back to him and lean out the open window, my cheeks flaming. Why didn’t he stay away? It would be better for everyone if he just disappeared once and for all. A flock of grackles falls onto the fruit trees in the back field.
“I got tired of eating beer and potato chips,” Jerome continues. “I really missed our mama’s delicious home cookin’.”
David snickers. I turn back around as Jerome stretches out on the narrow bed next to me, his size-14 feet poking over the end of the mattress. He leers at me, and I walk over to the door and lean against it.
David swivels his legs over the side of his bed to face Jerome.
“Seriously, what are you going to do when Dad gets home?”
Jerome draws his arms behind his head and yawns. His T-shirt is ripped at the neckline, as if someone had yanked on it.
“Yell real loud and act scared,” Jerome says, staring at the ceiling. “But then again, maybe tonight will be different. Maybe tonight I’ll give the good doctor a taste of his own medicine.”
“As if you could!” David erupts, looking at me in alarm.
“Could? Or would?” Jerome snarls. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a lot bigger than the old fart, and a lot stronger.”
“But he’s our dad,” David interjects, half angry, half pleading. “You can’t do that.”
Jerome leaps to his feet.
“Our dad? You looked at yourself in a mirror lately, boy? If he was your real dad, do you think he’d get such pleasure out of whipping your sorry black ass?”
He jabs a finger at me.
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