White Girls

by Hilton Als

  Mrs. McCullough said: “Well, let me get my plates on the table. You children must be starved.”

  She got up. As she walked to the corner of the kitchen where the dishes were stacked, standing in neat rows, she rubbed Gary’s head. It was a mother’s gesture, an acknowledgment of this fact: if she had accomplished anything in this world by way of bettering the species, Gary was it.

  Looking on, Fran felt something nasty-tasting well up in her throat. But it was too late to look away and not be sick. Mrs. McCullough called from the corner: “Honey, would you put a fire under those pots?” That first word, like Mrs. McCullough’s gesture of ownership moments before, caught Fran off guard and turned her saliva to tin. She did not know what that kind of female meant by anything. Words and gestures that are inexplicable to us annihilate the self, since we cannot prove we exist in a language we do not understand.

  Fran was never one to be overwhelmed or discouraged, though. If being a girl in the presence of a boy-loving mother put her at a disadvantage, she wouldn’t show it. Just to contradict everything, she took Mrs. McCullough’s “Honey” as her own. She walked over to the stove. She turned the gas on when she was certain she was in Mrs. McCullough’s and Gary’s line of vision. She could tell, as they set the table, that they were surprised she was standing at the stove; they kind of flinched. But since Fran was a guest and they were colored, they didn’t make any remarks about it. Then Fran did this: she pulled a leaf of collard greens out of Mrs. McCullough’s big stew pot, ate it, and said, a star fully aware of her audience: “Needs more salt.”

  That’s the worst thing one black bitch can do to another: say your shit needs any kind of seasoning. It’s not we don’t ever do it to one another, but being colored we never talk about it. That would be grandstanding. Mostly, competition and need stay in our hearts, until they kill us. That’s just how our bodies work. Look at Richard, a perfect example of Negro genetics: all fucked on MS and living to crack jokes about it. What would Richard say about Fran looking into Mrs. McCullough’s pot? He’d pretend he was Fran, and imagine getting all up in Mrs. McCullough’s face with: “That your son over there? Was, I should say. He’s mine now. Come on over here, baby, and say good-bye to Mama.” Then, raising his voice, Richard would say: “I said come over here and say good-bye to your Mama—bitch. And bitch, say good-bye to your son, otherwise known as your wuzband.” Richard could get away with stuff like that onstage because we don’t say it in life. He was our id. Fran didn’t know from a stage, but to her, everyone was an audience. And like any star, she was annoyed when other people didn’t perform their parts in a way that complemented her own—or, worse yet, upstaged her. Mrs. McCullough as the Mother. Was that role greater than her own? She wouldn’t know how to play that. And Gary letting Mrs. McCullough pat his head like a dog. What kind of performance was that? After leaving the Mother’s home, she took Gary back to her own so-called home and made him fuck her.

  They did it, after a fashion, in Fran’s dirty room. Cranberry polyester sheets. The TV was on. I say they did it after a fashion, because it didn’t feel real to Fran. When she’d been with a girl like Olivia, Fran did her in the boy way. She could even hate her in the boy way. But Gary was too gentle, using his fingers instead of his business when other guys would, you know, just hit it. He wouldn’t even have known what she was talking about if she brought all of that up—other guys and such. If she did, maybe he’d go back to his mother. That would be worse than his hands.

  Fran was quite the little performer, though, I can tell you. What she projected was a kind of Geraldine Page–like meanness. By the time she got to Gary, she’d been so evil for so long that she’d reduced her parents to sniveling roommates. She’d never quelled her desire to be a child, which is to say an actress, overtaken by a power greater than her own, told when to have the glass of milk and turn the light off: life as a stage direction. But now Gary was showing her what was inside her own body by pushing up against it—fear, which her meanness masked. He was using his mouth now. She could tell because fingers don’t breathe. He was offering her what he presumed she wanted: love. Exhaling it all over her wet.

  Most showgirls, I can tell you, are interested in the audience member they can’t get at, the guy in the third row riffling through his program while you’re pouring out your heart. Richard was that way. Even when he played stadiums, he could spot the guy in the fourth tier who wasn’t amused and work on him. Be an audience member that withholds and that tap-dancing bitch will beat the boards forever. Most showgirls, they’d get steamed if you told them they weren’t particularly giving out of makeup. That wasn’t Fran’s fear—that someone like Gary would say she wasn’t giving. She didn’t mean to be. What she feared that afternoon was that he would make her play a part he thought was perfect for her: the supplicant’s beloved. Before, boys had handled Fran like a passing moment descended from a larger moment starring them and the first woman they hated: Mother. Their hatred worked on Fran like the guy in the third row works on a performer: as the only lack of attention worth having. No matter how difficult or hard those boys thought she’d been when they were together, she was with them for their lack of attention. And now Gary was giving her nothing but.

  He spent more time on her than any boy she’d ever known. That pushed her cowardice to the fore, plus her panic over not knowing how to act in relation to this slurping writer intent on making her play the role he’d written for her. His mother had been too much; now he wasn’t even reading a script—her script—that she could follow. Her instinct was to drag him out of that dark mess—she could only imagine what he saw down there—but fear gripped her stomach before she could act. Gary pushed harder. So hard, in fact, that she believed she’d relieved herself. She wondered if her meanness, fear, and cowardice—shaped like bullet-shaped turds—were smashed against the cranberry sheets. She would not roll over and take a look. She didn’t know how to act. She couldn’t do anything, least of all see if she’d shat. In any case, Gary would have scooped her shit up, wrapped it up in Kleenex with a bow, and put it in her purse had he known that’s what she was looking for, instead of the happy ending his imagination insisted upon.

  I can tell you that despite what was in her mind, she would have won the Hot D’Or Award for her performance that afternoon anyway. Sometimes the camera is less interested in what’s in your mind than in how you use your head. Eventually she got used to Gary’s probing what she hated, because she could get high while he did it. Eventually the drugs she liked helped her not only bear the tedium and horror of their life together, but cultivate it. Billie Holiday once said that she knew she didn’t want to be on junk anymore when she couldn’t bear to watch TV. The flat sameness of it, you know. That’s what Fran introduced into her marriage to Gary, almost from the first. An affectlessness—when she wasn’t being evil—that was meant to squash Gary’s Walt Disney approach to marriage. Are we happy? I don’t care. Isn’t our newborn baby a champ? I don’t know. Isn’t it amazing we got out of the old neighborhood and into this new house? Let’s call it love. I don’t care.

  I have here the short article you wrote about Fran and the woman who eventually played her, in 2000. Now why can’t I have that? I was up for the same part. So what if Miss Alexander is younger than me by some twenty years? I feel a certain resentment about the Diana Sands comparison you make, saying Miss Alexander reminds you of Cancer Bitch. I felt Fran when I read the book. So much so that I could make her backstory up. All I get is being a sister to celebrity. What am I supposed to do with that? Write children’s books about Kwanzaa and hope my brother dictates a five-hundred-word introduction that would sell it? Write a memoir that betrays family secrets? Or produce a documentary with, let’s say, Prince’s sister, about star brothers who overwhelm their equally gifted, barely lauded siblings? That’s what you want to hear. I am an actress. Maybe I could have done something different in this life, different than talking dirty to get you to be interested in me. I couldn’t have worked hard
er on Fran. Everything I’ve told you about Fran—it wasn’t even in the movie or the book. I know her so well, I could make her up and it would still be nonfiction.

  An out-of-work actress is a terrible thing to see. They’re always acting bright, ready, and available, because they’re trying to seduce men—writers, directors, and so on—who can claim them and put their bodies and imaginations to work. Longing to be claimed, an out-of-work actress is always trying not to show her true desperation. They act more “girlish” than they would ordinarily, just to get some dick interested. That kind of girlishness always comes out as brittle tasting. You can smell their fear: about getting old, tits falling, work drying up. If you’re not working, you can take classes, think about plastic surgery, do stuff that makes you think you’re doing something. But what if you’re an actress with no kind of access to show business? Auditions and the like? Take it from me.

  An actress is a liar. An actress’s soul is whatever you’re paying her to shape it as at the time. Why do men fall for it? I can spot an actress a mile away—and then avoid her. I don’t suppose it’s because men like you find some general truth about women under the tits and feathers, is it? Look at all those men around Mary Tyrone—her two sons and husband—drinking themselves to death, waiting for her to be different, waiting for her to become less of a junkie and more of a mother. Why did they do that? Why did Gary? Can’t Mary’s sons and husband see that actress, junkie, mother—it’s all the same? That all those roles are fueled by self-regard and self-pity? What kind of hope do men find underneath all that acting? Are you hoping that one day she’ll stop acting and love you as herself forever? You might as well give that idea up. A mother doesn’t give that part up until God yells “Cut!” Neither does a junkie. Neither does an actress. The hope you all have that women will act differently—somewhere, somehow—is just that: your hope. Actresses are themselves, if only they had one. Women are themselves, if only they could stop acting.

  IT WILL SOON BE HERE

  THE WALL SURROUNDING memory misremembered is clean and wide and high, similar in effect to the wall one finds in certain airports in other countries, clean and wide and high like that, banking in or letting go those who want to remember clearly or don’t. Passengers coming or going in the field of memory are a tangle of arms and legs, hands, hearts, hair and minds that—if you do not stand too close or listen too carefully—speak a shared language, remarkable in its oppressive loneliness, its denial: What a horrible memory, and so forth. Regardless of where many of us believe we land—in that field encumbered by not too much baggage or entirely too much—we all come from the same place, which is a road rutted by experience so banal, nearly remarkable, that memory tricks us into remembrance of it again and again, as if experience alone were not enough. What are we to do with such a life, one in which we are not left alone to events—love, shopping, and so forth—but to the holocaust of feeling that memory, misremembered or not, imposes on us?

  Against that wall, which is clean and wide and high, we fall disastrously at times, when we can no longer be—quite—the fascist-minded custodians of our past that we’d like to be, as in: I don’t remember, I can’t, and so forth. In censoring our past we censor ourselves—a not remarkable observation; nor is the idea that the will to censorship begins, like some weird music, in the home, heard most acutely by the children, or the queer children someone’s mother must love most. Not remembering, or misremembering one’s childhood is a way of allowing oneself the notion that the past does not exist, that it was not lived through in quite that way, that somehow it did not make one different than the rest, as in, I was the one in hellish bliss wearing my mother’s garters behind the closed door, not being a boy; or, I was in my childhood bed with her and our legs were entwined and young ladies are supposed to keep their legs away from one another, and closed, and so forth.

  Some of us regard these memories as accidents, which is for the best if what we want is to forget them. But we condemn ourselves to self-disgust if we insist on not remembering, because memory’s always there, no matter what.

  Something else happens in the process of falling, again and again, against the clean, wide, and high wall of misremembering or not remembering at all. With the blood that eventually appears as the result of this repeated violence to the self, one attempts to write one’s name—with a finger, or nearly broken tongue—but can barely make it out after doing so, it’s just too late, as in, That is the way my parents spell my name, I believe, but I cannot pronounce it, and so forth.

  For as long as my memory can remember, I existed characterless, within no memory at all. Or if I did exist it was in remembering the text of someone else’s life—that is, in the devouring of biography. If there was a general rule to my thinking then it was: This is someone else and it is not me so I will remember this because of that; or: The subject’s having done this means that I need not—no life bears repeating; or: This takes me out of what I am—a self. It was never, ever about a self that belonged to me—that is, myself—which for so long I dreamt did not belong to me, because it didn’t. Or maybe doesn’t still.

  Here is his story: Once upon a time there was this boy who did not have breasts, but he saw them on nearly everyone in his family, men included. Often he would bury his face in his mother’s breasts, feeling no distance and great distance from her and them all at the same time. This was before he spoke much; his mother was in the distance of speech—brown like that, and all engrossing. They lived in this world just on the other side of speech, where reflection lives inside of reflection, until one day this boy, who in looks and manner had often, favorably, been compared to a girl, was in the subway with his mother. While there, this boy and his mother saw two people they recognized from their neighborhood: an older woman who was the mother of a son too, and who was always accompanied by her son, as she was now, underground, except that her son’s appearance in this instance was all different. Almost in direct imitation of his mother, the son was dressed in black shoes with princess heels, and flesh-colored hose through which dark hair sprouted, and a lemon-colored linen shift with grease spots on it, and a purple head scarf, and bangles. He carried a purse with no straps, out of which he removed, after little or no consultation with his mother, a compact and lipstick to dress his face, too. As the boy and his mother looked at their neighbor and son, the boy’s mother sort of brushed his eyes closed for an instant with the back of her hand and said something he had never heard before but thought he know the meaning of. She said, “Faggot.” This boy never forgot that other boy who wanted so to look like his mother. He did not even forget him after the terror of memory reinstigated this memory—something he had censored from his family because of the way in which his mother had used the word faggot in the filth of that underground station, where someone was exercising the courage inherent in being himself.

  Here is a terrible memory: The boy who was favorably compared to women was thought to be the same by a man he did not know. This man covered his mouth in a hallway that stank and stank. He removed this boy’s trousers without removing his own, but this man opened and opened his zipper. When he opened his zipper things were very dark and stank and stank in there and felt larger than awful, terrifying and familiar. This man’s hands went to parts of this boy’s body the boy himself had never known. There was something that hurt him very deeply; there were his trousers down around his ankles and there was this man’s hand on his mouth, which was as big as the memory of what his mother had said once in the underground station, and was saying again in his ear or maybe the man was. Together this man and the boy’s mother said the word, faggot. For a while this was all the boy remembered, besides the pain and the smell, and his body disappearing. That was the motive behind his body disappearing, and turning all of this into a dream, which it wasn’t.

  We often pretend that the profound shame that accompanies our resistance to remembering is fleeting, as though being revisionists of our own past made much of the difference, as in, �
�Actually I believe my childhood to have been quite happy. We had a dog, a psychiatrist, a house...” and so forth. But for the child, the queer child some mother must have loved most, this revision of history takes place even before there is a past to be had—it takes place simultaneously with the realization that the parent may pull the following out of his wig or hat: “You are no son/daughter of mine.” To whom do we belong in this ruined kingdom we all want to belong to, regardless of how wrecked, how stultifying? To be central and apparently loved, one will do a great deal, even exercise, continually, the courage of shutting up, the conviction that yes I am just like you and everyone else or at least exhibit the desire to be. At home, in the face of the parent, self-censorship as the entry fee into the ruined kingdom of their existence, of lies and lies again, means a good-bye to the memory of all the cocks and cunts and hearts and minds that we embrace in our mouths, and our hearts, too, but spit out before we give ourselves the chance to name them. If you choose this, all of those others who fly but fall so disastrously against the clean and wide and high wall of memory misremembered may choose not to remember you, too, as the boy who will not love the other boy because he has never loved a boy whose skin was somehow like mud to him; or who will not love anyone because that love means to remember a hate that consumes his heart; or produces such a memory of the mother saying, “What if your father saw you like that?”; or interferes too profoundly with being something other than himself, which is a Jew and beautiful. There are many stories like this one, but only one, too. Such as the story about the Latvian who died, a white girl no one will ever forget because she not only told the people she cared for they were beautiful and valuable, she told her colored brother, who remains her writer, too. Our recourse in reinventing the love affair with no love, or a surfeit of it, the memory misremembered or tossed altogether, is learning how to write our name—in blood or whatever—on that clean and wide and high wall which only learning to admit oneself to one’s home, recumbent with memory, can destroy.