When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  As she walks out, we feel Don’s apathy; he got himself into a rut years ago and doesn’t have the energy or desire to change.

  Afterward, we see him sitting on a sleek leather couch. The pink letter drops through the mail slot; its bright color stands out among the neutral tones of the high-end mid-century modern furniture around him.

  Bill Murray reads the letter out loud:

  “Dear Don,

  “Sometimes life brings some strange surprises. It’s been almost twenty years since we’ve seen each other, but now there’s something I need to tell you. Years ago, after our story ended, I discovered I was pregnant. I decided to go through with the pregnancy, and I had a baby—a son. Your son. I decided to raise him by myself because our time together had come to a close.”

  She tells him her son is nineteen and has gone on a road trip to find his father.

  My brother looked at me, and we both giggled.

  “I swear to God I didn’t know this is what the film was about!” I said.

  It felt like an uncanny coincidence that the film was about a man learning he has a son who has set off to find him. The letter contains no names, no return address—no real information. To me, that made it feel like something was off; why go through the trouble of writing someone this kind of letter if you didn’t want him to know the details? The letter writer didn’t even know if she had Don’s correct address but decided to write anyway. How did she even know he was the father?

  Don’s neighbor Winston, played by Jeffrey Wright, helps him make a list of his past lovers and persuades him to go on a journey of his own to find out who the mother is and, hopefully, meet his son. Even though I didn’t want to admit it, the scene made me wonder if there was someone out there looking for me. Don seemed to be searching for meaning in his life; he didn’t have a family and he wasn’t sure he even wanted one. Maybe he felt a sense of responsibility, or maybe he had enough time and money to indulge his curiosity. The only thing I could tell for sure was that he was lonely and didn’t know what would make him feel complete.

  At the airport, Don meets a young man who is wearing sunglasses and carrying a duffel bag identical to his. They look like they could be father and son. They pass each other with a brief nod. Don seems like he wants to speak to him, but he doesn’t.

  One of the women he visits, Dora, played by Frances Conroy, has become a real estate agent who lives with her husband, Ron, in a model of the prefabricated homes they sell. The décor is chilly and white with accents of pink roses.

  “Shooter McGavin!” My brother and I exclaim when we see Christopher McDonald, who plays Ron onscreen.

  Shooter McGavin was the villain from Happy Gilmore who famously tried to intimidate his rival, played by Adam Sandler, with the phrase “I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast.”

  “You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?” Happy replies.

  Outwitted, Shooter can only yell, “No!” before quickly walking away.

  Happy Gilmore was one of our favorite movies growing up, and the actor who played Shooter showing up in the film eclipsed Don’s bittersweet narrative and brought us back to a simpler time. It felt good to share something from my childhood that had nothing to do with who my real father was, nothing to do with my parents’ denial or the fear I felt about what the next day with my family would bring.

  Don visits three other women who also lead vastly different lives from what they had in the past. Don discovers that a fifth woman, the one he originally thought had written him the letter, died five years prior. He buys flowers to place on her grave.

  While my mother and I were arguing that evening, one of the points she raised was that my biological father could be dead. I didn’t know why she would say that, especially because she insisted she didn’t know who he was. Was she trying to dissuade me from looking for him, or did she know something else?

  In the end, Don returns to New Jersey, having not discovered the mother of his son or if he has a son at all. He has a bandage over his eye from getting punched in the face at the last home he visited.

  Back home, he finds another pink envelope, identical to the first. The letter is signed this time, and it turns out to be from the ex-girlfriend who’d left him at the beginning of the film. She says she still has feelings for him.

  He meets Winston to debrief him about the trip. Winston, an aspiring mystery writer, is excited, but Don is suspicious. Was the whole thing a hoax? Did his ex-girlfriend want to get back at him? Did Winston get in touch with Don’s past lovers beforehand and send him on a wild goose chase? Was it a ploy to make Don consider having a family?

  Outside the restaurant, Don spots the young man he saw at the airport at the start of the film. He is wearing a track jacket, black with red stripes, nearly identical to Don’s.

  Don offers to buy him lunch as “a guy who wants to buy another guy a sandwich.” They eat outside, sitting on overturned milk crates, in the alley behind the restaurant. The young man says he is on a “sort-of” road trip. Don asks him about his interests, and he answers, “Philosophy.”

  After a moment, the young man asks, “As just a guy who gave another guy a sandwich, do you have, like, any philosophical tips or anything?”

  Don pauses for a moment, then replies, “Well, the past is gone. I know that. The future isn’t here yet, whatever it’s going to be. So, all there is, is … is this. The present. That’s it.”

  Don tells the young man he thinks he is his father, but he’s taken the conversation too far, and the young man flees.

  In the end Don never learns if the young man he met was his son, or if he has a son at all. His visits only show him that the women in his life have moved on; that what happened between them twenty years ago is in the distant past. Would that have changed if one of them were really the mother of his child? The film’s plot was farfetched, but its themes weren’t. People reunited with their biological parents all the time. It was a natural instinct, wasn’t it?

  “We have to watch all the credits,” I said as Pat shifted, ready to get up. It was late. We waited until almost all the credits rolled until we saw my friend’s name.

  “See!” I said, pointing to the screen. “The first name under Interns: Tara Anderson! She said everyone on the production team got one of those black-and-red jackets.”

  We turned the TV off.

  “This doesn’t change anything,” Pat said after a silence. “I mean, it changes everything, but not between us.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  Nineteen

  The next day, we woke up early and drove to New York City for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  None of us wanted to be there, but my parents had planned it as part of the trip, and my mother insisted that we go.

  “When I was little, I always wanted to go to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade,” she said. “But my parents never took us on any vacations.”

  As we walked through the cold streets filled with people and noise, I tried to ask my mother about the guys she knew in college. It was a small, rural school in western Pennsylvania.

  “I mean, how many black guys could there have been?” I asked, my voice getting lost in the din. We fell behind my dad and brothers. It seemed like she wanted to talk to me.

  “There were two I knew,” she said.

  “Did you date them?” I asked.

  “One of them, Ed, worked in the dining hall with Karen and me on work study.” Karen was one of the girls whose face I recognized in the photo. She and my mother grew up in the same town and were roommates in college.

  “He was tall and shy,” she said. “He wore glasses. He used to talk to me, and I was friendly with him. I didn’t want him to think I didn’t like him because he was black.”

  “Was it him?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” my mother said. “We didn’t hang out with him outside the cafeteria. I don’t think he was at the party that night.”

  “What do you remember from
that night?” I yelled, drowned out by the marching band.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  Spider-Man and Mickey Mouse filled the sky. I wanted to find somewhere quiet to talk, but we had to keep moving, jostled forward by the throng of parade-goers in dark coats.

  “What about the other guy?” I yelled. “How did you know him?”

  “Isn’t this great?” she said, looking up at the floats and tall buildings. “I wanted us to be able to see a Broadway musical while we were here, or a play. Don’t you want to see a play?”

  I didn’t know whether she couldn’t hear my question above the cheers and marching bands or was avoiding the subject, but from that moment on, we only talked about how nice New York City was and how much she’d wanted to come here as a kid.

  For Thanksgiving, we always had a big turkey. My mother used Martha Stewart’s technique of basting the turkey in butter and white wine and covering it with cheesecloth so it didn’t burn. It always turned out delicious. My grandmother brought the traditional green bean casserole, made with Campbell’s mushroom soup and topped with French’s fried onions. Mashed potatoes, glazed sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and my personal favorites, gravy and stuffing, filled out the table. My mom made everything from scratch. My dad tore up the loaves of sliced white bread for the stuffing, which he dropped into a brown grocery bag. My mom then put it into a chafing dish with the other ingredients, covered it with tinfoil, and put it in the oven to roast. Because she was wary of us getting salmonella she didn’t put any of the stuffing inside the turkey.

  Dessert was also homemade: pumpkin pie, apple pie, cookies and biscotti, my grandmother’s iced nut roll. My mother and grandmother were great cooks and bakers.

  When my brothers and I were younger, my grandparents hosted Thanksgiving dinner. My mom’s younger brother, Rob, and I didn’t like mushrooms, so the stuffing never had mushrooms in it. If we found mushrooms in any of the dishes on the table, we would complain. Luckily, the mushrooms in the green bean casserole were undetectable, and I didn’t learn until I was much older how it was made. By then, I was mature enough to accept it, but I still wouldn’t eat mushrooms in anything else.

  After we got a dining room set for our house on Ash Court, my mother started hosting Thanksgiving. By then, my uncle Rob was married to Lorie, and soon their three kids, in addition to my mother’s parents, joined us. Liane, my mother’s older sister, who was my favorite aunt when I was little, moved away years ago and did not keep in touch. Sometimes members of my father’s family would make the journey from Philadelphia, but usually we celebrated with just my mother’s side of the family.

  We had leftovers for days. There were always fights; my mom would tell my dad he got a wrong ingredient at the store; my dad insisted that he got the thing she’d asked for, and the argument would continue until he went out to the store again. In the end, though, good food, family, and warmth prevailed.

  * * *

  When we got back to Princeton, the sun had already set. By the time we realized we needed to do something for Thanksgiving dinner, all the restaurants in the area were closed. We ended up going to the Wawa convenience store near campus and getting frozen Stouffer’s pizzas and Hungry-Man meatloaf dinners to heat up in the hotel room’s microwave. The harsh fluorescent lights made our faces look even more haggard, the tension between us more edged. I avoided making eye contact with the cashier, a young dark-skinned man, possibly Indian, as he rang up the purchases my father paid for. I wondered what he thought of this adult family coming in to buy microwaveable food on Thanksgiving when the only other customers were a few college students. Did he wonder why I, an African American, was with them?

  When we returned to the Marriott, we took turns microwaving our frozen dinners in exhausted silence. We ate with plastic forks and poured our twenty-ounce bottles of soda from the hotel vending machine into paper cups. The french bread pizza I’d gotten was still frozen in the middle, but I didn’t bother reheating it. I just sat on the couch and crunched through the cold, tomato-y dough.

  My mind flashed back to the meeting with my therapist and her comment that I looked so much darker to her after she learned I was African American. After the shock of the session wore off, I wondered how she saw me before I revealed my race. Did she have a definite idea about my ethnicity, or did she think of me as vaguely brown or simply nonwhite? Growing up, people of other ethnicities would often ask me if I was what they were. Was I Indian? Jewish? Arab? I’d politely answer no, and I couldn’t help feeling as though I’d disappointed them. I didn’t know enough back then to answer that my mother was Italian and my father was black. Would that have changed how they saw me? It occurred to me that even other nonwhite people draw a line between black and brown, but I wasn’t sure where the line was drawn or on which side of that line I fell.

  Twenty

  Before my parents left Princeton the next day, we decided that, before we went any further with the discussion of my biological father, we should be absolutely sure of my paternity. The next time I would be home was Christmas break, so my mom said she would order a paternity test, and my dad and I could provide our DNA samples then.

  “We can do it if you think it’s really necessary,” my mother said with exasperation as I agreed, perhaps too enthusiastically. It seemed that, deep down, she believed the test would prove that my dad was indeed my real father and that, once again, I was making a big fuss over nothing. I knew she wanted the specter of this strange man who had entered our family’s life, brought racially charged conflict, and stirred up old trauma for her, out of our life for good. In her mind, a DNA test would provide a medically conclusive end to the conversation.

  My father quietly assented as if he, too, thought the paternity test might be just a formality and that the truth had been there all along.

  “We’re doing this for you, Bean,” he said. “No matter what the result is, it won’t change anything. You’ll always be my princess.” As he spoke, his voice was more affectionate but less sure than my mother’s.

  It felt like there was much more riding on the outcome of a paternity test for me than there was for my parents. They had made their choices in life, but this one big choice had been made for me. Their identities weren’t in question. My mother knew she was my biological mother, and my father had already been my dad for nearly twenty-eight years. When my mother was pregnant, he made the decision to marry her and decided the child she carried was his. She decided to keep the child, and after having me, they decided to have two more children. My parents decided—perhaps tacitly—to never talk about my race and raise me as white.

  I was not taught what it meant to be a biracial African American in a white family, or rather, I never got to decide with my family what that would mean for me and for us. Even though my mother’s revelation wasn’t what I wanted or expected to hear, I thought that maybe now I would at least get to choose how I identified in the world. Given the events my mother described, it seemed like my biological father was not someone I would like to get to know, but at least now I would be able to make that choice for myself rather than having the information withheld. My parents would still be my parents; my brothers would still be my brothers. We would still have all the memories of family vacations to the Jersey Shore, all the first days of school, all the birthdays, Mother’s Days, Father’s Days, and other days that had been special. But a test showing that I was not my father’s biological daughter meant that there was a reason for why I looked the way I looked, a reason why my high school friends had joked about Jerome the milkman, a reason why I always felt like some part of me was missing. It would place my whole personal, social, and family life in a different light.

  “We wouldn’t be having this conversation if he had been white,” my mother said during our argument. She was right. If he had been white, I may have never known I had a different father than my brothers. But if my conception had been as my mother described it, would she even know? If her assailant had been white, how
would she have known I wasn’t my dad’s child when I was born? There may have been no secret to keep—unless she knew more about the person than she let on.

  My parents and brother drove off, and once again I was alone on campus. I drove back to my place through quiet streets. Because it was still Thanksgiving break, most people on campus were with their families. My roommate was staying with her husband at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a graduate student. The house was empty.

  In the silence, I thought about everything that had happened and how I felt about taking a paternity test. Did I want the test to prove my dad was my biological father? No, I didn’t. As much as I loved my dad, I felt there was no going back from the conversation I’d had with my family. Unlike my parents, who hoped the test would disprove their fears and close the Pandora’s box that had been opened, I wanted to know the truth and move forward. Deep down, I knew the test would confirm their fears and my hopes, but I knew that no matter what the test said, my dad would always be my dad.

  The uncomfortable question was how I would feel when the test confirmed that my biological father was also my mother’s rapist. I didn’t even want to think about that. I wanted to know there was someone out there connected to me, who would welcome me as part of his family and provide me with a key to my African American lineage. I wanted to know there was someone out there who was tall, good-looking, athletic, left-handed, and artistic like me, whom I could look to and see resemblances in physique and character and who would allow me to feel more confident in my identity; who would help me feel legitimate.

  But even as I wished for these things, I knew it was a fantasy. In reality, my mom didn’t remember or didn’t want to remember the man who’d impregnated her. He could be a deadbeat, a bad guy. Someone who didn’t remember her, a girl he took advantage of one drunken college night nearly thirty years ago. Who would want to remember that? My heart sank. There was no silver lining to this cloud.