Go Home!

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  Walking to our respective homes one day after getting off of the bus, Jessica quipped, hardly looking at me, “You’re wearing that?” as if we were getting dressed to go somewhere and I was weighing outfit options versus it being the end of a school day. This caught me off guard. Yes, I was awkward and unpopular, and she had succeeded from the get-go in securing the affection of a cool older girl who just happened to be my sister. But this. It was something else.

  I wondered how it had grown. I knew the seeds were planted early, nurtured by my silence and the shame they all heaped upon me for my coarse unruly mane, ashy knees darker than Rekha’s, a unibrow, and a dusky shadow over my top lip even when I should have been too little to be ugly. But when had it borne such fruit?

  I had on magenta jeans and a white button-down shirt with little cowboy boots sewn along the placket. In what I thought was a clever move, I wore my own brown cowboy boots with a stitched design on the toe to match. Under Jessica’s gaze, I wished I had chosen something else. What, I couldn’t be sure. Just not the Western-themed getup.

  She still ended up at our house sometimes.

  “Rekha, will you do my makeup?” she asked one night.

  They crouched together in the narrow alcove near the door of the bedroom that Rekha and I shared, just enough light reaching the full-length mirror through their huddled bodies.

  “Oh my god, I’m going to make your blue eyes look so pretty,” Rekha said.

  Jessica sat with her legs folded beneath her, frozen, looking up and her mouth stretched downward as if her cheekbones were in the way. Rekha, thirteen then, tried to draw a line along or through Jessica’s bottom lashes in a way that I thought must be painful. In this moment, the redness of the area immediately around her eyes reminded me of how raw her mother looked in the few fleeting instances I had caught her barefaced in the morning, once with what I swore was a bandage over her nose and the surrounding area puffed and purple.

  When Rekha finished with the pencil, she took out the mascara. I was used to this part, but it got me every time.

  “You have such long eyelashes,” she told Jessica. “They’re, like, perfect.”

  Rekha glanced at me so quickly it was almost imperceptible. But she did, and I knew why. Jessica might have been the pretty Maureen Peal to my position as the cul-de-sac’s Pecola Breedlove with her shimmering hair and even the way her top lip didn’t fully exist or touch the bottom one if she didn’t make a concerted effort—the opposite of what my sister called my big black-people lips—but she did not have eyelashes. They were short, sparse, and the same color as her skin. I was the hairy one. And along with this gross misfortune, I was also the one with the lashes, ones you could actually see. But I swallowed the tide of bile that welled in my core: even I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that such a concession was grantable.

  JESSICA HAD LOST most of her friends come middle school, and she needed to get back in with me. I can’t remember how or why, but she found her way into my circle. I think people like her were just good at that. Plus in a sixth grade class of sixty-odd students, the burnt-out mean girls had to be put somewhere. Briarcliff, as shrouded as we were by the many trappings of innocence afforded by wealth, was the kind of place where a young woman could hit peak it-girl status by twelve. In Jessica’s case, I probably got her because of the cul-de-sac.

  Some things stayed the same or otherwise just evolved from their earlier iterations. The same guys we’d known since kindergarten who now provided Jessica and the other girls I hung out with a steady rotation of boyfriends were also the ones who etched GO BACK TO INDIA BABU into the desks at school for me to find after the period changed. We had both grown up some, but I did not grow out of my difference. Her hair was colored like Angela Chase from box dye labeled “Chestnut,” a hue that brought out the harsh pallor of her skin; I rocked chola bangs, curled each morning with high heat and a round brush, with silver hoop earrings that matched my braces. I admit that, for a little while, I still had a moustache.

  When I was alone, I obsessively monitored the radio to make mixtapes of AZ with Miss Jones, Lauryn and Erykah, The Lost Boyz, Gina Thompson with Missy, and for the first time I imagined I could be a person in the world. But since I got in trouble for breathing or walking while Rekha studied for the SATs, much less turning up the bass on Hot 97, I once again found myself in Jessica’s room overlooking low hills of freshly cut lawn and the rock wall that separated the vast splay of her backyard from the intermittent whoosh of the Taconic. We lay on the floor listening to Biggie and Wu-Tang, pressing our fingers into molten candle wax and thinking we were really gangster.

  It was during these years that I learned the word “exotic.” Jessica would tell me, with the blind confidence of her toddlerhood preciousness, that this quality, this bird-of-paradise-esque thing I supposedly possessed, is what had the guys at the Westchester Mall gawking and, if they were older, trying out their game.

  “They fucking love you,” she said, they delineating a specific set of boys, with names like Chauncey and Terrell instead of the Jakes and Scotts we knew and coming from places like Sleepy Hollow or Ardsley, surrounding towns with a broader mix of people and closer, by mere miles, to the city. “It’s because you’re so exotic. You have these big almond eyes and tan skin. You’re just so exotic.” I guessed she’d failed to notice from our childhood baths together and all the subsequent years of knowing me that my skin was just plain brown. I hadn’t, like, gone to the beach.

  It remained apparent through high school that to be desired, and to desire, were rights I had no business exercising within the confines of my own existence: home, the brick buildings of school, and a Friday night house party here and there, many of such gatherings taking place in the cul-de-sac itself. “Sac Parties,” as they came to be known, had cases of beer stacked in the back of shiny SUVs no matter the weather, white kids hooking up in the bushes, and the Goldmans in house number six eventually calling the cops on us. In a way though, Jessica was right—once we had cars and later curfews, there were places we went that allowed me to shed, even if momentarily, the hatred of my body.

  One night junior year while we danced in a warehouse in neighboring town, a skinny dark-skinned kid with a baseball cap trailed me with his eyes from a far corner of the scuffed wood-floored hall. “Damn. You are fine,” he whispered as I walked past him to leave. I paused to look at him. The boys I knew didn’t say “fine.” I smiled, an invisible flush rising fast to my cheeks.

  HIS NAME WAS Jason. Jason and I kissed and talked on my sun-drenched bed in the afternoons while my parents were at work, tiny particles of dust suspended in the bright light above us which then fell in stripes on his lithe, muscular, mahogany legs. His mouth had hints of peppermint even if I hadn’t seen a stick of gum for hours, and he sometimes left a trail of vivid fuchsia welts down my neck to my collarbone along with his scent of baby powder and musk. These bits of him anchored me at times, stymieing my disappearance. But with all that was being spun around us, they proved too slippery to hold.

  Jessica showed a picture of him to her mother one day. “Mom, look at the guy Chaya’s going out with!” she said. “He’s really hot.”

  “Woooo,” Cheryl let out a low whistle as she took him in. “Chaya, he looks nineteen! And how handsome . . .”

  She was one of the girls for a moment. Jason had a sly half-smile and lean biceps peeking out from under the sleeves of his white T-shirt—he was handsome. But as Cheryl held the photo between her French-polished fingertips, I felt the flicker of her morphing back into a Briarcliff mother, and, seeing him through her eyes, I grasped something I had foolishly disregarded: looks, among other attributes we had learned to covet, mattered little in this case. I sensed a stiffening in the air around us, the obvious tension of words unspoken, but since I was not really her daughter, she kept whatever she was thinking to herself.

  My mother was not one of the girls. If she was around when I had friends over, she made us Swiss Miss vanilla hot chocola
te in a maroon kettle, repeating “wanilla-wanilla-wanilla” in a singsong lilt because her accent brought endless amusement. In sweatpants and with a bindi punctuating her round face, she danced around in the syrupy glow of the kitchen, her long hair swinging limply below her butt.

  “Your mom is so cute,” Jessica would say, laughing, whenever my mother came up in conversation. Even if I had said something like, “My mom was being such a whore today and told me I can’t stay out past midnight,” she somehow always fell within the realm of cute. For me, though, seeing as that my mother had gone to medical school at sixteen and come to America alone to do her residency in Brooklyn before it was Brooklyn, and that these days, after long hours checking babies who may or may not have been born with HIV, she spent her evenings changing my grandfather’s diapers, “cute” was not really the descriptor that came to mind.

  So I hid that photo as well as any other evidence of my tryst with Jason because it was easier that way. But I ought to have known there were things one could not escape. My sister, distant as she was then, living on a college campus down South, made sure I knew he didn’t count. “Black guys like anybody,” she said.

  “Fuck you,” I responded.

  WHO GETS TO claim innocence or righteousness, beauty or truth? Who gets to be good? These are the questions that have haunted me since leaving Briarcliff after high school. The Post-it happened years later, when I was home for a weekend in my twenties. And it was only then that I began to understand the deceptions of the cul-de-sac—to try, ever so slowly, to find upright in the crooked room. The failures I knew more intimately, namely because I had, for as long as I could remember, been inseparable from them. That its carefully engineered perimeter might not hold all of us, our dreams, but moreso the wretched, closeted beasts of our human grief and rage, was not something one considered upon choosing such handsome real estate. We thought only of its charm, never of its ugliness. We saw what we wanted.

  But then, of course, the distortions were of our own making.

  And these were the memories. They cannot capture the whole of our lives at Briars Corner, but there is something waiting to be revealed to us in the indelible. “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real,” Cormac McCarthy wrote. For someone whose realities were hazy, whose gaze was elusive and its objects evanescent, the grit of a memory that endures is the gift of knowing you were, in fact, here.

  An early memory stays with me.

  Jessica had a mole that covered the entirety of her knee. It was brown and uneven around the edges. When we were still small, three or four, a doctor cut it out and sewed together the pale skin of the surrounding area, leaving a flat, beige, waxy caterpillar of a scar in its place. I did not wonder what happened to the dark scrap that had been ripped away; that it was dangerous had been a given.

  After the removal, she wore a soft canary-yellow brace around her leg while the incision healed. This was her uniform: a high ponytail sprouting from one side of her head with a scrunchie, an oversized T-shirt featuring the large, speckled face of a leopard, its whiskers glittering with rhinestones, and the mesh brace. We climbed onto the bed one day in the guest room at my house, where the carpet was a vintagey shade of rust and a checkered sheet covered the mattress. We hadn’t been jumping for very long when the stitches popped. Blood soaked the brace and then the sheet and Jessica screamed and her mother was there, from across the cul-de-sac, before I could see anything but red.

  “You know she shouldn’t be playing rough! How could you be so irresponsible?” Cheryl demanded, looking down at me, as she cradled Jessica through her wailing. It was a brief but bitter scolding and then they were gone. My own tears of shock from the bleeding and of merciless badness that possessed me never came.

  My mother? She’s absent from the frame that lives doggedly in my mind.

  NOW, MOSTLY EVERYONE has left, the families clearing out one by one for the next round who can benefit from the schools and let their children play unsupervised in the cul-de-sac. My parents, now eight miles away in a sparkling new riverfront complex in Tarrytown, have replaced the flimsy bedroom doors and finally begun to gut the kitchen, but only piecemeal. My mother refused to acknowledge the definitively retro look of it—and not cool way, its microfloral linoleum flooring conjuring an era that may never be fashionable again—but as realtor after realtor explained that rich people only like stainless steel appliances, she begrudgingly succumbed. A gleaming brushed-nickel oven and granite countertops meet the glossy beige cabinets she once assaulted twice daily with a damp paper towel.

  Upstairs, the room I shared with my sister appears shrunken—the walls are impossibly closer together and the slanted ceiling lower despite my not having grown since the seventh grade. I catch my fishbowl reflection in a spherical track light above, the space sprawled out 360 degrees around me. Still. Empty. Skylights catching dots of dust floating in luminous squares of white. In fairness to my mother, the whole place is surprisingly well kept; if not for the style, it could pass for just a few years old. “We lived lightly,” is how I always put it. Stayed inside the lines.

  The knurly branches of the cherry tree are stripped from the autumn chill, and there’s a fifteen-foot-long dumpster sitting in the driveway near an orange basketball hoop with torn netting. I hoist myself up to look at the carnage, see what ephemera comprises the casualties of downsizing to a townhouse. Beneath mounds of trash, mostly papers, I glimpse the smeared ink of my young handwriting on finely ruled cards—track titles. The mixtapes. I think of jumping in to salvage them, but weeks of rain water and the weight of our lives’ belongings piled on top tells me it’s no use. I jump down, let the color rush back to my knuckles and sigh, helplessness a noose that dangles at my periphery whenever I meet the bend in the ashen curb that opens to the cul-de-sac.

  “This house won’t sell because you don’t want it to,” I say to my mother, back inside. Karmic knots, energetic cords, things like that. The Meyers’ house, a near exact replica of our own, sold quickly and for a reasonable sum. For someone who let go of so much at so many different turns, she’s holding tenaciously to Number Four.

  My parents never told us what they left behind. But over the years I gleaned it was big. I wonder what they erased in order to embrace the existence Briarcliff invited them to call home, and whether severing parts of ourselves is a compulsion we learn or inherit. And on the train back to the city, when I come upon a video Jessica has posted on Facebook of her and Rekha doing a choreographed Roger Rabbit/running man sequence to C + C Music Factory on a wooden stage in an unknown Westchester auditorium, copied from the VHS tapes Cheryl has saved through moves and deaths and other rites of change, I tell myself that what we keep and what we forsake rests not on what we love or long for, but rather on what we ourselves were once given.

  Esmeralda

  Mia Alvar

  That morning you are woken by an airplane, humming so close overhead it seems to want to take you with it. The clock says five—an hour ahead of your alarm. You’ve lived close to two airports for almost two decades. You’re used to planes. They even show up in your dreams. In last night’s dream, you died; your body crumbled into ash. Before you could learn what came next, before you could see where your soul went, a machine—some giant vacuum cleaner, which in real life was this plane—came down to sweep you off the earth like dust.

  After today, you’ll never hear a plane in the same way again. But you don’t know that yet.

  The boy whose bedroom you sleep in is now a man. He moved out long ago. His mother, Doris, keeps his room the way it was when he lived here: school pennant, baseball trophies, dark plaid bedspread. You pay low rent, and have agreed to leave this room and sleep out on the sofa when the son visits. (He never does.)

  You know you won’t fall back asleep, so you switch on the lamp. Because the years of work have given you a bad back, bad knees, and bad feet, you like to pray in bed. A wooden Christ Child and Virgin Mary live inside the nightstand drawer. You la
y them on the pillow next to you like shrunken lovers, wrap a rosary around your wrist. You interlace your fingers, shut your eyes, and squeeze your lips against your thumbs as if kissing His feet.

  The God that you imagine looks like Father Brennan, the man who baptized you: tall and Irish, with white hair and kind blue eyes, shooting a basketball in black vestments on the parish playground. The Virgin is one of the nuns who ran the adjoining schoolhouse: a spinster with a downy chin, her veil a habit. Old and sacred words, they taught you. You would not invent your own any more than you would try to build your own cathedral. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Bead by bead, you whisper the same words Saint Peter spoke in Rome, the same words spoken today by all believers in São Paulo and Boston and Limerick and Cebu:

  He rose again from the dead.

  Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

  You pray by heart the way you’d plow a field of soil, the way you push a mop across a floor. One foot before the other. After looping your way around the rosary, you coil it in its pouch. You tuck Mary and the Santo Niño back into their drawer, thanking them for the strength to rise another day, on two aching feet.

  “LIKE THE GYPSY,” John said, the night he asked your name.

  You weren’t listening. “Eee, Ess, Em, Eee,” you started spelling in reply, as you changed the trash bag from the can beside his desk.

  “Mine’s John. Not quite as fancy as yours.” He held out his hand.

  “Pleased to meet you.” You stared at the freckles on his long, pale fingers. When he didn’t pull them back, you wiped your latex glove, still damp from the dustrag, on your uniform. Then, embarrassed, you snapped off your glove and tossed it in the mother trash bag hanging from your cleaning cart. His hand was moist and smooth. The hand of a man who studied numbers on a screen and now and then picked up the phone.