by Dana Johnson
“What are you doing? He didn’t take anybody’s purse.”
“Ma’am, I’m handling this.” He puts one hand on his gun, which looks like a prop. He holds the other one out, palm up and flat, telling me to stop. He has the face of a baby. Dimpled and smooth, even though he towers over all of us.
“Take somebody’s purse,” Dae-Jung says. “What?”
At first, I do what the security guard says. I stop. I wait. But momentarily, this strikes me as absurd. I’m one of the artists here. This is my show. My nephew stands before me, those startling eyes making demands. You need to tell this man that I didn’t steal anybody’s purse.
“This is my show,” I say loudly. “Mine. This is my nephew. He is a guest. My guest.”
But the louder I speak, it seems the less this person who is supposed to bring me security is listening. More eyes fall on us, people causing a scene in an exhibit. With all those eyes, I feel as though we’re an exhibit: Me, looking like a boy in jeans and a T-shirt, Dae-Jung with his afro and pick buried in it, the guard, seemingly the voice of reason—unless you look very closely—and a respectable older man seeking justice. Part of me goes somewhere else, goes numb. I can hardly feel my legs beneath me. Somebody else, a voice from somewhere in the crowd, says, “Do we need to call the police?”
“It’s under control,” Massimo says. “We know each other. We’re family,” he says, by my side suddenly, grabbing me by the elbow. “Do I need to do something?” He stands with his hands at his sides and his fists clenched. Ready to raise them. “What’s happened to Dae-Jung? What’s going on?”
“This motherfucker says I stole somebody’s purse.” Dae-Jung, for some reason, puts his skateboard flat on the floor, as if he is about the skate out of the gallery.
And then, the guard puts a hand on Dae-Jung, saying, “Calm down, young man.”
“Calm down? You need to calm down,” Dae-Jung says. He yanks his shoulder back. “You don’t even know who I am and you over here asking me about a purse. Why me? Why are you asking me?”
But the guard tries to do it again. Touch Dae-Jung, perhaps to calm him. A stranger’s hand on my nephew, a stranger in uniform, is something that I thought I would never see. “Don’t you touch him,” I say. “He’s a boy. He hasn’t done anything.” But Dae-Jung resists, not so gently this time. He tries to jerk his hand away, and then, I see the security guard jerk him back. Hard. He says to my nephew, “Do you want me to throw you down on this floor?” The sound accompanying my pieces is ending Elton John’s song, and the crowd is cheering again.
I don’t know everything that happens next. I get between Dae-Jung and the guard and push him. I push and push again. He pushes me back and tries to grab me, but in the scuffle, I fall on the floor and split my lip on the edge of Dae-Jung’s skateboard. I jump up as though I have springs in my shoes. Massimo shoves the guard and raises both hands as if he means to punch him but gets an elbow in the eye when the guard raises an arm to protect himself, and Dae-Jung picks up his skateboard as if he’s about to swing it against the guard’s head.
“What are you doing?” I scream, holding my T-shirt to my lip. “Stop it! You’re a surfer for God’s sake.” Both Massimo and Dae-Jung look at me as if I’ve gone crazy. We all stand together breathing heavily. It seems very quiet. But I haven’t gone crazy. I have a vision of fierce clarity. I’m simply reminding my nephew of all the beautiful vastness, wherever it may take him, that lies ahead.
27
MASSIMO, DAE-JUNG, and I are sitting side-by-side on a curb outside the gallery while Dae-Jung shakes and wipes his hands on his jeans over and over as if to cleanse his hands of what they almost did. My lip is still bleeding, blood smeared on the front of my shirt, and Massimo’s palms are bloodied, torn open somehow in the scuffle, and one of his eyes is turning black and blue. Massimo keeps asking me, while gently patting my lip with his own shirt, “What did you think you were doing? Are you crazy? Are you trying to get yourself killed, pushing the guard like that? Why did you have to do anything at all?” But he was doing something, and even Dae-Jung was about to do something, and finally, I was tired of not doing something, except for in the safety of my home studio. I shake my head, and Massimo asks, “No? No? What do you mean, No?”
The security guard has been relieved of his duties and the crowd inside has thinned, presumably because we ruined the nice time everyone was having.
“You’re a surfer, for God’s sake!” Dae-Jung cries abruptly, and we all laugh. “Stop, Dae-Jung,” Massimo says, “My eye!” “My lip,” I say. “It hurts to laugh.” But we all keep laughing because what happened hurts a little. Massimo is alternately cursing and laughing. “I’m going to sue their asses,” he says, shaking his fist into the air. “They will see why they do not fuck with us.”
“Sue them?” I lick my lip, liking the metallic, salty taste of the blood. “For what? For being a clueless guard and some idiotic purse losers?”
“I wonder if they found the purse,” Dae-Jung says. His feet are still on his skateboard, and he slides it back and forth as he sits.
“Who cares?” Massimo says, leaning forward a little so Dae-Jung can see his face. “Worry about your own purse.” Dae-Jung pantomimes modeling a purse for us, exaggerating his gestures to make us laugh. But I can see it, the skateboard and the surfboard and the tattoos and his afro, pick high in his head. Everything complemented by his big purse, glittery and resplendent as stardust, bursting with all kinds of currency, turning it all into his latest look. Stellar. The next step beyond.
I wrap my arm around Dae-Jung briefly, before letting him go. “Massimo’s right. She’ll get another. You worry about your own.” Such a simple thing to finally know, that there’s always going to be another fight for another purse and for another work of art. You just have to show up ready to fight. And you can’t sleep or lie down. You put one foot down and then the other until you get to where you’re going, until you’re there.
The night is warm, and I smell eucalyptus in the breeze. When I take deep breaths, the feeling in my lungs is so clean and refreshing, I feel it in my brain, in my eyes, in my heart. Overhead, the palm trees loom like guardians, fronds gently rustling, sounding like the faint roar of a distant ocean. I think of my father arriving. He still hasn’t made it yet. Neither has Keith. Maybe Keith won’t come at all tonight. Or maybe when he gets here, we’ll be long gone. But none of us in the family are out of the woods yet. Keith will always be here, in some way, a haunting voice on the other end of the phone. Strange disturbances in the home as if someone has been there, but has vanished into thin air. A memory. But my father will be here. In the flesh. How to explain the three of us sitting here in bad shape, looking as though someone has gotten the best of us, except they didn’t. We all fought for what was right. We didn’t take what was happening. We won.
Still, I can just see my father’s face as he walks up to the gallery in a nice suit and maybe cufflinks, seeing me sitting there with Massimo and Dae-Jung. He’ll see Dae-Jung’s big hair first, but then return to the bigger problem of all of us sitting on a curb collectively looking rough. He’ll walk up, slowly recognizing faces that are familiar to him. His arm will reach out, and his face will have a look of resigned horror as though witnessing someone’s inevitable tumble and slide down some rocky, jagged mountaintop. He’ll ask me, “What are you doing sitting on a curb, bloody? Isn’t this your night? You. Of all people. This is a mess,” he’ll say.
But I’ll say, “No. No. It’s good that it’s come to this. Sink or swim. This is the beginning of something. A new season, right? We’re all going to get up off this curb. Let’s go inside. Look, in the corner, at all the things I have put together. All that stuff tells a story. Trust me. Please don’t think, ‘I see all of this stuff, but it’s just junk. What value is it to anyone, Shirley Temple, letterman sweaters, artichokes, sugar toast, white girls with afros, Leif Garrett, our old neighbor Joan, a baseball stadium made out of flimsy sticks, a black Richie Cunningham? Mohawks and a bro
wn-skinned cholo wearing a Dodgers cap? Remnants of people and things that are memories.’ Please look at it,” I’ll say to my father when he gets here.
But I’m not just telling him. I’m telling everybody. Come in. Look at everything. Take in the show. Ask yourself, what kind of story does this tell? What, in the world, does all of this stuff have to do with us?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have received support from many people since the conception of this book many years ago. I would especially like to thank the following people whose help was essential to my completing this book and getting it out in the world: My deep gratitude goes to Rosalie Siegel, my first agent. I thank her for her patience, stamina and generosity. I thank my current agent, Jennifer Lyons, whose faith in the book and all that I am trying to accomplish through it has sustained me. My heartfelt thanks to Dan Smetan-ka, for his vision and thoughtful edits. For their support, insight, and expertise, I must thank Veronica Gonzalez, Victoria Patterson, Danzy Senna, Michelle Latiolais, Michelle Huneven, Jane Ingram, Linda Sims, Tom Ingram, Aimee Bender, Leah Mirak-hor, Alison Umminger, Karen Tongson, Tania Modleski, Walton Muyumba, Amos Mogliocco, William Handley, Zohreh Partovi, Ellie Partovi, Sabrina Williams, Mimi Lind, Bruce Smith, Gordon Davis, Chris Freeman, Michelle Gordon, Jeffrey Johnson, Dyeann Johnson and Wynell Burroughs Schamel. Much thanks to everyone at Counterpoint; how lucky I am to have landed there. My deepest thanks and appreciation goes to my husband, Kerry Brian Ingram, the writer and scholar I most admire.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dana Johnson is the author of Break Any Woman Down, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, California, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Copyright © 2012 Dana Johnson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data is available.
eISBN : 978-1-619-02083-2
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