by Mat Johnson
“You need to clear your head, get out in the open air,” George says. “You need to get back on your bike. I still got the Harley. Needs to be run and I don’t have time. I poured a couple thousand into it since you sold it to me, but I’ll give you a good deal on it. You want to impress your daughter, let her see her old man rolls in style.”
“Buy the bike back, Warren. I’ll show you where it is,” Tosha tells me. When George briefly turns his back to Tosha, she mouths Please! and makes shooing motions with her hands.
“Look, they say being a father’s just about showing up,” George says when he turns back around. “It’s true, too, the standards really are that low. You show up, you don’t beat them, you love them, you pay for stuff. That’s all there is to it.” On this final phrase, George slaps my back. He slaps hard, not hard enough to hurt me but enough to say he could do it if he tried. He is a man. He is a father. He’s licensed to carry a gun. It makes me love Tosha even more, because she saw all the way back then that he would become a man and I wouldn’t. I used to want a time machine so I could go back and stop George from taking her from me. Now I want one to go back even further and make him my father too.
—
“George’s fucking some white dude and he hasn’t lived here in a year,” Tosha tells me in the garage. It seems so improbable, illogical, that I just say who?, but she ignores me. “He just comes over for breakfast, tells the kids he’s working the late shift. He tells me we’re just separated, but he’s leaving me. I know it, I fucking know he is.”
“Who is?” I ask again, but it’s such a stupid question she doesn’t answer and I don’t expect her to, so I follow with “Who with?” after an appropriate pause.
“I don’t know but I’m going to prove it, too. I’ve got him under surveillance,” Tosha tells me. I look at her, and I try not to smile, but there’s a little hint there because I’m thinking she must be wrong. I’m not willing for her marriage to be in trouble. They have everything I am sure brings happiness. They have two beautiful kids, and one okay-looking one. They have a big house, a big solid six-bedroom house made of fieldstone and old wood and it looks sturdy enough to withstand a hurricane or tornado, even though none of those things happen in Philadelphia. George is a detective. George is a black detective. That’s about as close as you can get to being a superhero. Tosha, her lips still full, her nose still broad and bold, is an African goddess sent to humble the racists who would mock any aspect of black femininity. She still stuns me, when I look over at her. Tosha’s thick thighs can run half marathons and her red tongue can quote from Hamlet in the exact voice of Maya Angelou. If these two aren’t happy, if they can’t make it work with all the tools at their disposal, we are all doomed, and I refuse to accept that. I shake my head no, but she doesn’t heed me.
“He’s not supposed to see anyone, that was the agreement. Keep things clean. But when I call him at night? Not there. He says he’s going to the gym when he isn’t at the place he’s renting. For hours? Yeah, right. I don’t have, like, prosecutable evidence. But I know. It’s over. He’s just too much of a coward to make it official.”
“You don’t know,” I tell her. She’s filing her nails with an emery board she just plucked from her back pocket. The filing thing: I have seen her do this over the years when she is angry. First time I saw her do it, I thought she was sharpening them to scratch someone’s eyes out. “You don’t know. You’re probably just in a rough patch. Relationships go up, they go down. It’s just in a recess right now. Why would he be with anyone else? Especially another guy?”
“He swore it wasn’t another woman, and it has to be someone. I tried to have sex with him, four months ago, tried to put my head down there. It smelled like hair conditioner. I did the research, Warren. That’s what they do. That’s what lying scumbag husbands do: they wash their cocks with perfumed conditioner so you can’t smell the whore on them.”
“That crackhead: she was actually in my house. She broke in my house last night,” I shoot back at her. “Just in and out. Didn’t take anything, but still.” It’s a horrible transition. It’s supposed to be a horrible, noticeable transition. It’s supposed to signal that I am not comfortable with the chosen topic, so let’s leave it behind. I almost tell Tosha I’m planning on burning the place down just to shut her up, but I really am so keep that bit quiet.
Tosha, grinding with her emery board fiercely enough that I can see cuticle dust pouring down, ignores this response and answers whatever question I should have asked instead.
“Am I ugly now? Am I hideous? You used to say I was attractive. Am I still attractive? I’m a frumpy mom. Look at me. What happened to me?”
“You’re still beautiful. Very beautiful,” I tell her, and she is, but I can’t look at her right now. Instead, I look at the motorcycle, parked on the side of the garage. It’s still never been dropped. There’s some slight grinding wear on the foot pegs, but that’s it. It’s just like when I sold it to him. Nothing has touched this bike but dust. George has done an amazing job of taking care of it. George has done a better job of taking care of the bike than he has his marriage. George has done a far better job of this than he has with his marriage.
“I’ll talk to him,” I tell her, and the fact that we both know I have nothing to offer George allows her to break the moment she created. Tosha puts the file down.
“Are we going to talk, then? About it? About what happened? Or is it just going to hang out there?”
“About what?” I shouldn’t have come here. I should have just left. I should have saved more money. I should have stuck out my marriage. I shouldn’t have come here.
“About what? Warren, you take off twelve years ago and don’t write once? You don’t respond to one letter? I had to get your address from Sirleaf—which you know took multiple attempts because you know how he is—and you never even bothered to write back to me? You were supposed to be a groomsman in our wedding”—Tosha says “wedding,” and I hear her say “wedding,” and even though I don’t think of her that way anymore, the ghost of the me who did flashes in, then goes dark again—“but you just ran away! Like nearly five years of friendship didn’t matter anymore! You missed my kids being born! We were close!”
“I’m sorry,” I think to preface before I say, “I did friend you on Facebook.” I did. And I looked at her pictures, and pictures of her kids, and her and George, a lot. I hit LIKE often too, which I feel right now should count for something, but I don’t mention this. I got over it. I came back. I ain’t staying but I came back.
Tosha glares at me. Then she sighs and says, “Yes you did. And so did your wife. And it was good to see the pictures she posted. Even though you never bothered to message me back. And I love you like a brother. And that’s why I’m not going to smack the black off you for saying some stupid shit to me like ‘I friended you on Facebook.’ ”
“Well thanks because I don’t have a lot of black left and I really don’t want to lose the rest through slapping.”
“I need a friend right now,” Tosha says, and then she’s crying.
I’m trapped in a hug again, surprisingly. Every time I want to escape someone starts hugging me.
—
The bike is a gorgeous monument to nostalgia over practicality. Working the clutch is like trying to negotiate with a drunken bill collector. I was wrong: George ignored this bike as badly as he did his wife. Under twenty miles per hour, I’m riding down Germantown Avenue on the cobblestones and the motorcycle is shaking like it’s scared of black people. Its roar bounces off the row houses, echoing accusingly back at me. The vibration feels like the bike’s plea for me to slow down, to rethink the whole movement idea, but I don’t. I’m late, supposed to be at my dad’s place before Sirleaf comes through, but I’m looking down at the ground whenever I can because I have no idea where George’s money went. He put a new, roar-enhancing muffler on the thing, but he attached it so poorly the main noise it’s making implies it’s about to fall. The t
ires are narrow and I’m trying to keep my front one out of the trolley grooves. I’m looking down on the ground right in front of me the whole time, which is dangerous but I have a scar on my right knee from getting my bicycle stuck in these tracks in fifth grade and I can’t help myself. I know I’m late, but I can feel that scar on my knee now, the dead skin miraculously itching as it rubs on the inside of my jeans.
There’s somebody at the front gate. It’s not Sirleaf Day. It’s a white woman. It’s a white girl. My white girl. It’s my black girl who looks like a white girl with a tan and a bad hair day.
“You shouldn’t be out here, on your own. It’s not safe,” I tell her when I pull up. Tal pretends she doesn’t hear me over the motor so I yell it again.
“It’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, now that it turns out I’m a black? I get a pass on ‘the streets’ now, right?” There are a lot of bags. Four big ones, a human-size duffel bag, and a portfolio case. There’s a hamster cage, sitting right on the pavement. There’s a hamster inside it, running along the sides manically as if some of the local rats might try to jump it.
“Tal, what’s going on here?” I ask her, but I know.
“Irv kicked me out.” She shrugs. “I told him I wasn’t going back to Kadima. And about my GED plan. And he said if I didn’t go back to school I couldn’t stay there. So here I am.” I keep staring at the hamster. But I don’t say anything. I’m waiting till the right words come, but my tongue gets no offers. After a few seconds, Tal steps closer, puts her hand to my chin and aims my face back at her own. “I’m moving in. Dad.”
When she uses the d-word, with such palpable derision, my first thought is: I’m not old enough to be your father. The next thought is that not only am I old enough, but that I literally am her father. I look at her face. The neck, the cheekbones, the eyes, I recognize. Family. But the whole face, her face, I barely recognize it from the day before. This is a stranger. I feel some love there, or feel the need to want to love her, but I don’t know this person. The clearest emotion I can identify is a sense of responsibility. I will meet that responsibility. Or try. I will try to make sure she graduates high school. Then after, when I burn the place down, I will use the money to take care of her. I will make sure she gets out of this town. Hell, we could run together. Someplace nice, with temperate weather and a low crime rate. And then I feel the Umoja flier Tosha printed for me scratching at the inside of my coat pocket and the impulse is given physical form.
“Here’s the deal: you come with me, then you have to finish up at another school. You have to graduate, then you can do what you want.”
“Fine. You get me in a school, you find somewhere I can still graduate on time, let me stay here, then we can make a deal.”
“A school with black folks in it. Trust me, it’s important. You need to know who you are. Who we are. I’m not going to have a daughter of mine who goes around saying things like ‘the blacks’ all the time. Agreed?”
Tal sighs, rolls her eyes a little, but says, “Fine,” at the end of her performance.
“And no smoking. And you have to keep calling me ‘Dad.’ But in a non-sarcastic manner,” I throw in, feeling momentarily sure of myself.
“I’ll call you ‘Pops,’ ” she says, and that feels okay. “ ‘Cocoa Pops,’ ” she adds, and I get uncomfortable again.
—
Tal unpacks, and I try to make the house more livable. The painting equipment, the strewn tools, I pick them up, put them in the closet behind the stairs. In there, I find three poster-sized pencil sketches of Germantown. One of the long-vacant pool beside the Boys’ Club. One of Chelten Station, from the perspective of the street, looking down to the tracks. The last, a façade of the Whosoever Gospel Mission. They’re mine, or at least I created them.
They’re the ones that didn’t sell, the ones that weren’t purchased out of mercy by Becks’s coworkers at the gallery show she arranged. My father had them framed. He actually spent money on that. With his hammer and nails, I hang them in the living room.
As it gets dark, I wait for the crackheads to show back up. All the doors are checked, all the windows are locked, but crackheads have special piper powers and can probably flatten their skulls like mice and squeeze through the smallest cracks. Perhaps this is how they got their name. I have something to protect now, so I electric tape a steak knife to the paint roller stick.
“If you don’t want people to say racist things, you probably shouldn’t carry a spear,” Tal offers, looking up from her phone to watch me pace around with the stick. Besides that, she doesn’t seem to care much about her decrepit surroundings. After Tal does a little unpacking, she doesn’t ask for a tour, or accept my offer of one. She doesn’t ask why it’s in a state of ruin. She doesn’t ask why there’s hardly any furniture. I try to explain to her too, start to tell her the story, but she walks around the room ignoring me, holding her cell in the air like it’s some kind of ghost detector.
“There’s almost no reception in here. I’m getting, like, one bar. It’s true what they say about the ghetto,” and then she pulls her empty suitcase over to that one corner, sits on it, and goes back to texting.
I have nothing to say to my daughter. I want to say, I can’t believe you’re here and I can’t believe you exist, and I want to know all about your life, but it’s impossible to hold a conversation when the person you want a response from is furiously typing away with just her thumbs. Instead I ask, “What do you want to eat for dinner?” and this gets her to pause, look up even.
“I don’t eat red meat. I don’t eat meat that’s not organic, or at least kosher, and I don’t eat produce that isn’t locally grown. And I’m not eating anything that was frozen. I don’t play ‘reheated.’ ”
I’ve got nothing in the house. My father has a little fridge in the kitchen, sitting about two feet out from the wall, and it’s a museum of beer and condiments. I look for take-out menus in the only full drawer in the pantry.
“The best I can do is halal.” I hold the flier up. It says, Still 2 Getha in Arabic-styled letters.
“Not exactly the same team, but whatever.”
When the food arrives, the bag has napkins and plastic forks, so now we have toilet paper and silverware. Tal takes her chicken cheesesteak hoagie out of the bag, unwraps the foil, which she flattens out beneath the food as a plate. I watch her. The lettuce and tomato she takes off, and then makes a separate pile for each. Then Tal removes the meat from the bread, scooping it out with her plastic fork until it sits in a gray ball. She rips bite-sized pieces from the roll, then lays them down one by one until they form a pyramid. When Tal catches me looking, I turn back to devouring my own serving. I haven’t eaten a cheesesteak in a decade, and many a drunken doner kebab has failed to fill the void. Mine’s gone before she’s even done her preparations. So I watch her.
“I like to keep things organized,” Tal says without looking up. She says it and the words are lifeless and congealed together as if they’ve been recited on many occasions.
“Your mother did that,” I tell her as I remember. It is one of the only things I remember about her mom. I don’t remember her face, but this bit I find within me. The time I went over there, I brought fried rice. I brought fried rice because I must have said I would bring her lunch, because she was sick, and it was the cheapest takeout I could find. And she took it on her plate, then separated the peas, then the carrots, then onions, till the rice was oily and naked. I’d never seen anyone else do that, and haven’t since. Now I’m proud of myself. I have remembered something, something about my time with Cindy, that isn’t horrible. But when I look at Tal, I see her staring back at me, her fork at her side, limp and hanging in her hand like she won’t be using it.
There’s anger there and I know Tal’s going to curse me, for all I’ve done and haven’t done. But she only says, “Irv. He was a nutritionist. Before he retired and became a drunk. It’s not OCD; it’s about portion control. He taught me.” Tal pushes her foil plate
away from her on the hardwood floor, sliding it carefully to nearly beyond her reach. Unfolding a napkin, she lays it over top like the sheet on a corpse. “And my mom.”
“Do you remember her? Your mother?” I ask, and I regret it completely because I’ve been asked the same question, and it is one of the stupidest acts of small talk.
“Uh…yeah?”
“She was in her twenties then, right? She was in college?”
“She didn’t go to college. That’s why for Irv, it’s, like, pathological for him. You take the Jewish ‘go to college get a good education’ thing, and then you multiply it times a thousand. It’s like, if I don’t go to college, I’m going to die. Too.”
Tal looks as if she’s about to start crying. And the combined threat of seeing a stranger cry and seeing my daughter cry for the first time is too much. I get up, find the flier for the Umoja Charter School in my jacket pocket, and stick it right under her face before the tears can come. She takes it, sighs, flips it open.
“Everyone in this is black. Why is everyone in this black? You said go to a school with some blacks, not all blacks.”
“You ever looked at a flier that had all white people on it and said, ‘Why is everyone white?’ ”
“Sorry,” Tal says, and starts wrapping up the food that’s remaining. It’s a shutdown move, meaning the conversation is over, but I start cleaning up with her and pretend we are both still united in action.
“It’s a black school,” I tell her as we walk to the kitchen, greasy paper balled in hand. “An Afrocentric-themed school. It’s not like white people can’t go there though. You went to a Jewish school, now you can finish off at a black school. Makes sense. It will help you develop a black identity.”
