Mrs. Mansfield rubbed her hands together. “This is great, Nina.”
“Don’t give me the credit. Our housekeeper made them.”
“Lucky you.”
Dale found a chair in the corner and sat down. He wasn’t really bad looking. He just looked . . . soft. And he had our dog Oscar’s sad eyes, as if he’d given up on trying to please. He smiled over at me where I’d taken a chair across from him. I smiled back. He glanced at Lily, who was pointedly ignoring the poor guy. I felt sorry for him. Lily had perched herself on the piano bench and looked prepared to be amused.
Now that Lily and I had discussed Dr. Mansfield, I had a new way of looking at him. He wasn’t a handsome man, but he had a way of carrying himself as if he were—like my father. I compared him with Dale, and then Dale with his birdlike mother with the long thin nose and hair so dark and dull looking, I bet it was dyed.
Lily said that it doesn’t matter what you look like when you’re a surgeon. You’re still going to get plenty of women fawning over you. In fact, she bet Dr. Mansfield had lots of women. She could tell just by looking at him.
I wanted to know how she could do that and she said she had her ways.
“Haven’t you noticed how he raises his eyebrows so that they go up in the middle—all debonair-like?” she asked. “That makes him look like a man who believes that everything will naturally go his way. Men like that cheat on their wives. They think, ‘Why should only one woman get to love me? I am so great, I need to spread it around.’”
“Do you think Daddy thinks like that?”
She looked at me and said nothing.
The Mansfields weren’t close family friends—they were convenient family friends. It was all about people noticing who got invited where. It was so crazy.
I glanced over at Dr. Mansfield to see if he looked like a ladies’ man. Then I peered at Dovie Mansfield popping a shrimp on a cracker into her mouth and chewing slowly while Nancy Wilson played in the background on the stereo. Robin had been listlessly working on her shrimp, which she nibbled and then replaced on her napkin for a minute or so before taking another nibble. It was as if she was just going through the motions.
Daddy finally came in, rubbing his hands together and putting on his big company smile. “So what do we have here?” My mother didn’t like what he was wearing either (casual tan pants and an open-collar white shirt). I could tell by her appraising look.
Dale and his father stood and shook hands with Daddy. Dale returned to his seat while the men backslapped each other and said jovial things back and forth.
“Ahhh . . .” my mother said, settling in her chair. “Finally, the busy man is off the phone.” She looked at my father and he lost his smile for a second.
“We just picked up Dale from Dartmouth this morning,” Dovie Mansfield said.
For a moment I had a picture of them driving all the way there and back, but then I knew she meant they picked him up at the airport.
Dale ducked his head, probably embarrassed, and Lily pretended to scratch her chin with her forefinger. One finger . . . That was it. Lily was signaling brag number one: the mention of Dartmouth. I tried not to smile.
Our mother’s voice was full of sympathy when she said, “Oh my . . . you must be tired, Dale.”
Daddy was handing Dr. Mansfield a drink—something brown, which meant strong liquor.
He turned to Dale. “So how’s college treating you?”
“He’s loving it,” Mrs. Mansfield answered for him. “In fact, he’s on his way to getting out in three years instead of four. He insisted on taking two additional courses during the first summer session.” She grinned demurely at Dale. “He is so ambitious.”
Lily looked at me and rolled her eyes, making me nearly burst out laughing. Then she ran two fingers through her hair to signal brag number two. I had to bite my tongue to keep a straight face.
Meanwhile, Dr. Mansfield took a swig of his drink, set it down, then leaned back and formed a church steeple with his fingers. He didn’t contribute to the conversation. He just looked thoughtful. He was doing that to look like an authority figure, I realized. My pediatrician did the same thing with his fingers when he was sitting behind his desk getting ready to tell my mother something about my allergies or what booster shots I needed.
“And—drumroll,” Dovie Mansfield went on, looking around. “Dale made the dean’s list!”
Lily caught my eye and began tapping her mouth with three fingers. She kept tapping until I laughed out loud and everyone turned to look at me. There was a moment of awkward silence. I coughed to show that they’d heard a cough, not a laugh. Still, Mrs. Mansfield frowned at me and looked puzzled. After a moment she turned toward my mother, but Robin’s eyes lingered on me suspiciously. Then she looked down at her hands in her lap and smiled faintly.
“These are delicious,” Dovie Mansfield said, finishing off another hors d’oeuvre. This time she plucked the shrimp off the cracker, ate it separately, and then popped the cracker into her mouth. She turned to Dr. Mansfield. “Remember that wonderful seafood place down the beach from our summer house? Didn’t they have the best shrimp?” She reached for another one.
Dr. Mansfield looked over at her as if he’d been deep in thought about something else. “Yeah, sure,” he said. I saw my sister look at me slyly and tap the space between her eyebrows slowly four times. I was fascinated. She was right.
At dinner, Mrs. Mansfield gave a detailed account of the AKA North Atlantic Regional Conference in Atlanta: who was there, the activities, the pink and green merchandise you could buy (mugs, headbands, knitted gloves, and on and on). The AKA was a popular colored sorority. It was big on on the Howard campus in D.C., where Mrs. Mansfield had gone. But Spelman, where our mother went, didn’t allow sororities. They probably thought that being at an all-girls college was enough sisterhood for anybody.
Lily ran her hand over her hair, wiggling all five of her fingers ever so slightly for my benefit. Dovie Mansfield knew our mother wasn’t an AKA. She was just rubbing it in. But even if they’d had sororities at Spelman, my mother would have never pledged. She’d never felt she fit in with girls from the city in college. She was a poor sharecropper’s daughter who happened to be very smart. So smart that her high school teachers had raised money to provide her with a college scholarship. She wouldn’t have wanted to chance a rejection.
“Why didn’t you attend, Nina? You would have loved it.”
My mother smiled and said simply, “I’m not an AKA, Dovie. I thought you knew that. And anyway, this is my busy time with the Links. And I’m now president of the Wives of the Bench and Bar—you know, it’s the club for colored judges’ and lawyers’ wives. It’s very time-consuming.” She shrugged. And that seemed to shut Dovie up.
Lily smirked at me, but I could tell she was proud of our mother for subtly brushing off Mrs. Mansfield’s attempt to one-up her.
Our father suddenly piped up with, “So, Dale, what’s your sport?”
Dale stopped cutting his lamb off the bone and put his utensils down. He cleared his throat and glanced at his father. “I’m a lacrosse fan, sir, and I used to play it.” He checked his father again, who stared at him without expression.
Daddy said, “Oh. Well. I really know nothing about lacrosse. Isn’t that like baseball only with a different kind of bat?”
“You’re thinking of cricket,” Dale said.
Dr. Mansfield buttered his roll and took a bite out of it. It seemed that he’d decided to have no part in the conversation.
Mrs. Mansfield spoke up then. “Oh, Dale was an excellent lacrosse player in high school. Excellent.” She looked quickly to Dr. Mansfield (giving me the impression that this had once been a touchy topic—Dale playing such a foreign kind of sport).
“So, Lily—you’re going to Spelman in the fall,” Mrs. Mansfield tried again.
“Yes,” Lily answered.
“Where else did you apply?” Her closed mouth twitched as
if she was about to hear something that would satisfy her.
“Just a couple of the UCs. UCLA and UC Berkeley. Oh, and Brown.”
“And did you get in?”
“Yes, I got into all three of them.”
“My, my,” Mrs. Mansfield said, looking a little let down for some reason. I sneaked a glance at Robin. She rolled her eyes as if it was no big thing. She planned to be accepted by all the schools she applied to as well. What was the big deal?
Then silence—except for the clinking of forks against plates.
“But I bet you’re excited about leaving home and going off to Atlanta, right?” Dovie Mansfield asked after a bit.
I waited for Lily to answer and took a sip of water to make the knot suddenly forming in my throat go away. She was really leaving. Then there’d be no one to tell me what to do—or how to think about things when I was going along thinking the wrong way.
How could she say, “Yes, I’m excited,” and smile so politely?
“Let me tell you something,” Mrs. Mansfield said, as if it was only the two of them sitting there at the table. “You go to Spelman and you’ll make friends you’ll have for years. You go to one of those big universities, and you’ll be just a student ID number.” Mrs. Mansfield even got some color in her cheeks as she was explaining this.
I was the only one who knew for a fact that Lily didn’t want to go to Spelman, the college for Negro women. Her first choice was UC Berkeley, but she’d settled on Spelman to please our mother.
“That’s where I’m sending Robin,” Dovie Mansfield said.
“I’m not going to a Negro college,” Robin stated evenly.
Lily looked at her quickly as if a tiny bit surprised.
Mrs. Mansfield didn’t miss a beat. “We can discuss that later,” she said, looking at everyone but her daughter.
“Just so you know,” Robin added.
Mrs. Mansfield stared at Robin meaningfully, but Robin went on eating her stuffed potato as if she had merely stated neutral information.
Mrs. Mansfield recovered quickly, suddenly turning to me—showing the uneven application of her foundation, which made me think of my mother getting hers specially mixed. “I have someone for you to meet, Sophie. The child of a colleague of Dr. Mansfield’s at the hospital. He has a daughter just your age. They’re fresh from London. She’s smart like you and she’s new here and would love to have a friend. It would be nice if she and Robin could get to know each other, but Robin’s leaving to go back to boarding school soon and . . .” She let her voice drift off.
I smiled, not knowing what else to do.
“You’ll meet her at our barbecue in a few weeks.” She nodded and winked. I wondered what the wink was for. I was still thinking about it when the dinner concluded and the grownups went into the living room and Mrs. Baylor cleared the table and started the cleanup. Robin, Lily, Dale, and I went up to the den to watch television.
Robin sat with her arms crossed, staring at the blank screen as the TV warmed up. It was clear she thought she was enduring the last hour of an extremely boring evening.
I looked at her and immediately hated her flip all over again. And the white headband, too, while I was at it. I hated her Wildroot Cream Oiled hair. And the way she made sure her eyes never met mine for more than a few seconds; the way she had no questions about my life or revelations about hers. Well, I could be quiet, too. I could out-quiet her. Let’s just see who can be the queen of quiet, I thought.
Then, out of Dale, came the most astonishing words. “My parents are the phoniest people I know. I mean, could they be any phonier?”
Lily and I turned to him at the same time, surprised.
“What do you mean?” Lily asked, and I knew that she was just trying to goad information out of him. We knew exactly what he meant.
“My mother all the time bragging about me.” He looked at Lily. “Do you know what that feels like?” It was a question not meant to be answered. Even I knew that.
“Your mother’s proud of you,” Lily said. I thought maybe she was trying to be nice to Dale after badmouthing him to Lydia.
“It wasn’t my idea to be a debutante escort three times. It was hers,” he said, still referring to his mother.
Robin smiled and gazed out the big picture window at the dark sky. Lily and I looked at each other. We’d been too hard on poor Dale. He seemed so relaxed now. He sat forward, his forearms on his thighs, his hands hanging loosely between them, with a different air about him completely. “I’m not going back,” he declared.
“To Dartmouth?”
“Yeah.”
Lily raised an eyebrow, as if seeing him from a new perspective. “So what are you going to do?”
“I enlisted.”
“What?” Lily exclaimed, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“I enlisted. In the Marines. I leave for boot camp next week. Camp Pendleton, near San Diego.”
Lily looked flabbergasted. “Why on earth did you do that? Why?”
Dale seemed cool and confident. “Because I wanted to. I wanted to. Me. And it’s my life.”
Robin sighed audibly and rolled her eyes. She caught Lily’s attention, who frowned as she looked Robin up and down. Robin leaned forward, retrieved an Ebony off the coffee table, and began to flip through it.
“When are you going to tell your parents what you’ve done?”
“I guess I’ll tell them before I leave.”
Lily shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe you did that.” She almost sounded as if he’d betrayed her. “People are trying to stay out of Vietnam. Not join up.”
Dale chuckled. “The world’s not going to end.”
“But your parents have plans for you.”
“They’ll have to make an adjustment. Anyway, I’m not going back.”
Robin yawned as if she’d heard all this one time too many.
“You know how many guys would love to have a student deferment? And you’re just throwing it away.”
The opening credits for Lassie had begun and he turned to look at them—probably just to end the discussion.
“Anyway, I don’t fit in at Dartmouth,” he said a little later, surprising us again. His mouth was set in a slight pout.
“Why?” Lily asked.
“Because he doesn’t fit in anywhere,” Robin explained.
Lily and I both turned to give her a hard look. I saw her swallow—which showed she wasn’t so sure of herself, after all.
“Why are you being so mean? What is your problem?” Lily asked.
“I don’t have a problem,” Robin said, raising her chin a little.
“Oh, you have a problem, all right.”
“You know what?” Dale said. “My mother cried for two days when I didn’t get into Harvard. That’s a big secret. That I applied and didn’t get in.” He turned back to the TV. End of discussion. Robin Mansfield continued to flip through the magazine pages as if she couldn’t wait for the evening to be over.
Later, while she was rolling her hair before going to bed, Lily said, “Did you notice how Daddy jumped up when the phone rang right in the middle of dinner? Why didn’t he just let Mrs. Baylor get it? I can’t wait to get out of here.”
I looked up from Footlights for Jean, which was about a young girl who got to be an apprentice at a playhouse. Lily’s words felt like a slap. She’s eager, I thought. She’s eager to leave.
CHAPTER 8
Transfiguration
* * *
I TOLD MY MOTHER what happened and that I refused to stay and swim at the Bakers’ and that I called the Baker girls prejudiced. She didn’t believe me. She wants to hear it from you,” Jennifer said.
We were sitting on her back porch steps. I could hear her grandmother moving around in the kitchen, preparing Jennifer’s lunch, which Jennifer would soon eat at the kitchen table. Jennifer’s family ate dinner together in the dining room, just like families on TV. Plus, Jennifer had to ask if she could be excused before she
got up and left the table. But she never had to do dishes, because her grandmother did them—probably happily. She made Jennifer’s bed and laid out her school clothes, as well. It was as if Jennifer had loving care from all around—and being an only child, she didn’t have to share it with anybody.
My father was rarely home for dinner, and half the time my mother was away at one of her meetings or at her art gallery. Often Lily ate in our room or the den while yapping on the phone and I sat at the kitchen table by myself. I didn’t like that or dislike it. It was just the way it was.
Shirley used to sit across from me when she saw me sitting there alone. She’d drink her coffee, which she’d spiked with some of my father’s brown liquor from the cabinet over the refrigerator. (I’d seen her do it before and it seemed to put her in a good mood.) She’d ask me about my day—all the things that happened at school. Then she’d give me lots of advice on what I needed to do to be popular and hip. “You need to stand up straight, for one thing. You dip a little. Like a turtle peeking out of its shell. Move like you have confidence, girl! Like you’re too cool.” She’d sip her coffee and give me a wink, and I’d think she didn’t know just how far I was from being too cool.
Mrs. Baylor, on the other hand, would only give me a quick glance on her way up to her room with her mug of coffee and her cigarette. Then there’d be quiet behind her closed door and I’d picture her slowly thumbing through the Los Angeles Sentinel, our Negro newspaper. Reading the articles—passing judgment on them in her mind. Approving or disapproving of the opinions in the opinions section.
A couple of years ago, I read about those girls who were killed in a bombing at a church in Alabama in my father’s copy of the Los Angeles Sentinel. I looked at their faces and imagined them getting ready for church, getting their hair done—and I had to think these things on my own because my mother and father shook their heads at the news accounts on TV, but they didn’t say much of anything. I knew it was bad, but we each kept the bad to ourselves.
I waited for Jennifer to finish her grumbling because I wanted her take on my new book. Finally, I had my chance.
It All Comes Down to This Page 6
