by Laura Newman
The quake was felt throughout the Japanese Alps. In Kamikochi the trout jumped out of the Azusa River; half miscalculated the return. North in Shibu, snow monkeys soaking in the hot springs were insulted by the water aggressively slapping their furry, icicled faces. Down in Matsumoto’s old city, the Black Crow castle flew away and came back again while no one was looking. Just for a moment, while the earth was letting go, it flew.
Lake Tahoe, Nevada 2018—Fiona
Rand proposed to me right after I landed the best dismount of my career. I did a 180 front salto tuck and stuck it. As providence would have it, I was backlit by a beam of sunlight coming from a high window, standing in a halo of white chalk dust. The crowd went wild. In my head. In reality we were in the high school gym with about twenty spectators, and I didn’t even place. Emily Garrett chewed gum while receiving her winner’s ribbon, green-and-white stripes. She was going on to State. I think she won because she wore her leotard one size too small and favored leg splits from the high bar. And she was white. Black girls win track—because the results are black-and-white.
“Fiona, you don’t need to watch this, let’s go.” Rand and I left the gym, and I was still sweaty and almost naked, barefoot, chalk dust ghosting me. I jumped up on his back and he took off for the forest that everyone knows should never be allowed to grow around a high school. It was spring, the dangerous pinesap time. He jogged the winter-softened pathways. “Listen Ducky, let’s get married and kick this place. Two weeks to graduation,” said Rand, spinning me off his back. I fell to one knee. He took that for a yes. I was never off balance. “I love that your feet are like bars of Lava soap.” He pushed me back into the damp forest bed, one hand on my foot, the other traveling north. “I’m going to snort the chalk right off your thighs,” he said, and I didn’t know if that was romantic. A beetle with blue-black wings walked over the mountain of me and flew away. Rand shimmied my legs apart with his hips and kissed me and I could taste grape jelly and peanuts, which isn’t bad. But it isn’t grown-up. A marriage proposal should taste of flint and wine. But that wasn’t what stopped me, wasn’t what caused me to flip him over. Let’s face it, I have the thighs of a chastity belt. What I really didn’t want was for Rand to see the bruises on my hips, every time I slammed into the uneven bars, blooms of wisteria and violet. The gum-purple of me. It seemed more personal, more private than my privates. I don’t have words for such places, for such feelings.
“Nope,” I said bouncing up, “not getting married. Rand, you’re an idiot.” Honestly, he looked relieved. The things boys will say to get laid.
“Was it the Lava soap line?”
“You really know how to get the pants off a girl.”
“Well, technically, you’re not wearing pants, so it wasn’t that hard.”
The forest breathed us out, the compost smell of us, and we left that place forever.
“But you know I meant it, Fiona,” Rand said, reaching for my hand. I stopped for a moment and enclosed his hold, made Oreo hands.
George and Roxayn
Fiona was born when Roxayn was forty-four years old. The baby wasn’t an afterthought or a surprise. She was a prizefight, a to-the-death struggle with Roxayn’s body. Hormones and silver needles. Four pounds six ounces delivered on a December night when the clouds froze and fell to earth in a prickling of rime ice. Fiona came out a lovely shade of lavender but oxygenated when the doctor removed the garrote Roxayn’s body had so intimately placed around her neck in one last attempt to remain childless. Hearing Fiona’s victory cry, Roxayn’s rebellious body chose to bleed out and die rather than surrender.
Fiona wanted her mother as much as Roxayn had wanted her baby. Fiona wailed, called for her mother in the most instinctual way, but they passed in the night. Roxayn held her baby’s hand and let it go. Fiona could have used her mother when she was in the woods with Rand, tried to ask her what it meant when she wanted to be touched and not touched at the same time. Maybe Roxayn was the beetle, leading by example. Fly away, Fiona.
Fiona’s father is George and Fiona thinks he’s the greatest. A sort of Father Goose for her, downy-white skin and hair so light it flies away in any puff of air. When people talk to him the push of their voice makes it look like he’s trying to escape. But he isn’t. Every night he’s home. Wire half-glasses when he reads, Fiona tucked up in his lap. Good-night glass of milk.
George met Roxayn at the El Rancho Drive-in in the late 70s. Roxayn was pushing popcorn for summer money and he was buying popcorn and dumping it out back for the magpies so he could go buy more. George would hate to admit it, but he fell for Roxayn partly because of her color, fell for the conjured image of the yin-yang-ness of their twined and sleeping bodies. But Roxayn didn’t need a doughboy. Her parents had money; Dr. Tallis, if you please, and her husband, Roman, TV sportscaster. Roman Tallis was on billboards—Reno’s Dynamic 8. Granted, no one took him seriously—of course the black guy does sports. But Roxayn wasn’t running around with homies in hoodies and she certainly wasn’t playing Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner with white boys. The albino could buy all the popcorn he wanted. By his third purchase she had buttoned up the next-to-top button of her neon-orange polyester uniform. But George still got something he wanted: Roxanne announced the plastic tile name badge. (“Spellin’ it with an A-Y-N will just confuse ‘em,” dismissed her boss, controller of the Bakelite labeling gun, master of the letter wheel.)
Internet porn was several garage inventions away. The best thing going in Reno was the sign for the Primadonna Club: Five girls, twenty feet of painted plaster each, and not just girls, but showgirls. And they were showing it. Practically tweerkin’ it, fat thighs and sweetheart necklines. Feathers and fishnets. There was the American Giantess in the middle, flanked by her slightly smaller Spanish, Hawaiian, Chinese, and French sisters. Oh, a boy could dream. Despite their implied ethnicity, all were white, just like dress-up Barbie, the classic plastic tease. In San Francisco, in L.A., or even Sacramento, there were black people and Hispanic people mixing in like an infusion of probiotics. Everybody knows purebreds get hemophilia while mutts duke it out. But in Reno, George had never really even seen a black girl, not one pinned behind a counter, forced to put change in his hand, finger slightly tracing across his palm, lighting up his lifeline. Not one that almost glowed garnet, just below the surface.
Lila and Roman Tallis had moved to Reno from Richmond to get away from garbage strikes and shipyards, the big sound of steel, and the small sound of the corner homeless woman pushing the grocery cart with the rusty wheel. Reno smelled clean, the Washoe Zephyr wind delivering the sharpness of spruce and sage. If there weren’t any black kids in Reno, well, they would make some. Like cookies. Lila got a job teaching at the university school of medicine (token black professor) and Roman at KOLO-TV (token black broadcaster). Tokens pay the bills. They bought a house on Skyline, looking east to the manzanita-covered Pine Nut Mountains, where the ghosts of Paiute women weave baskets in an ever-setting sun. Watch out for Falling Rock, signposts warned, knowing what ghosts can do. Oakland doesn’t have that kind of sign.
It seemed to the Tallises a good time to be black. The Jeffersons had their own TV show. People wanted to invite them over, made a point of using the china, decanted wine, never serving fried chicken. The awkwardness passed; they made real friends. But what were they thinking? Whom did they expect their kids to date, to marry? They had to ask themselves if they were the prejudiced ones, wanting to send their kids to a West Coast college, Berkeley, UCLA. Places the N-double A-CP assuredly stocks with black people, like a trout pond. They never directly said to Rex and Roxayn, marry black, stick to your own, but the kids knew. Lila and Roman embarrassed themselves. They had pushed so hard on the door of racism that they had no choice but to go through it themselves and accept that it swings both ways, like saloon doors.
When the El Rancho closed for the season, George didn’t know if he would ever see Roxayn again.
But he couldn’t get her out of his mind. It didn’t help that KGLR was blasting The Police—Roxanne. You don’t have to put out the red light. He didn’t think that of her, but once, flirting with a fantasy and a DUI, he drove down Fourth Street looking for her, in case he could save her from her song. He drove past Louis’ Basque Corner, past the Coney Island Bar, more or less looking for someone to punch in her defense. Young men never know what to do with themselves. It was a relief when college classes started, really for communities everywhere.
George loved the University of Nevada. He was always a sucker for September, the muffled sound of erasers behind the puff of chalk, the creak of an opening book. He took to studying outside, resting against one of the twenty-four Dutch elms lining the quad. The last of summer seemed to sequester in the tree house of leaves. Then one morning the air snapped and all the leaves turned gold, a ransom paid; the price of summer. The branches shook the leaves off as if they hurt and the gold accumulated on the ground. On the first of November a hobo-wind shuffled through the quad, spinning little whirlwinds that dervished the gold away.
All through the fall George’s eyes tracked every black girl (very few), and one early embracer of Goth whom he kept confusing for black, that passed. No Roxayn. But he had at least some hope that she was there, because standing in line at the El Rancho, he had heard Roxayn say she was majoring in nursing, or mining, he couldn’t quite pick it up.
Roxayn was there. A freshman to his junior. She liked to study in the depths of the library, bookshelf sentries on either side, discouraging nonsense with their straight spines. A tiny desk carved so many times it looked like it had Dutch elm disease. Dust motes, rather large in size, that made Roxayn wonder if they were disintegrated pages, if she was breathing in letters, words. She took a deep breath and hoped for a haiku. Once a little mouse stopped by for a whisker of a chitchat.
Other kids stayed up late in cinderblock dorms watching Saturday Night Live on garage sale black-and-white TVs, went dancing at Del Mar Station. Roxayn was cloistering, wrapping herself in a social shroud of text. She knew it. She was worried about grades—her mom was a doctor, for God’s sake, she couldn’t bring home Cs. Maybe she should join the Black Student Union, but it seemed so expected. Why should she join a club based on her skin color? Maybe she should have gone to school in the Bay Area, where her tidy Afro wouldn’t stick out like stick-out hair.
The alchemy of autumn gave way to the clear intentions of winter: Cover the whole mess up with snow and no one will ever know what happened here. Start again next year; a Mulligan. It was on such a night of obliteration that George happened to be looking for a philosophy book in the lowest level of the library. And there she was. There was no mistaking her. Her nail beds, the veins on her arms, they were amethyst in the dim spotlight of the desk lamp. She looked like art. George quickly darted into the book aisle next to her. He was so excited it exhausted him. Why should he even care about this drive-in girl? He sat down on the floor and maneuvered a few books to one side to get a look at her. Roxayn’s peripheral vision caught the quiet shuffle.
The Noble H. Getchell Memorial Masturbator! she thought. The peril of the deep library. She got up with the intent of slamming the books back together on any digit that appeared in the gap. But nothing appeared until George came round the corner. “The Albino!” Roxayn said in her outside voice and immediately regretted it. He wasn’t technically an albino, just quite white and blond, plus that was racist to albinos. No, discriminatory. Her brain was a little jumpy. She did feel somewhat trapped and George could tell. He was walking the creeper line. Truth or less than truth?
The truth was he’d been hanging around the Black Student Union after he was denied entrance on the grounds of his race. His memory did a quick reboot:
“That’s racist,” George complained to the kid at the sign-in desk, a black student in an enviable paisley shirt George could never pull off.
“Man, you’re not black. It’s the Black Student Union. You got the Jot Travis. Go there.”
“My grandfather was black.” Take the long shot.
“Right. So you some lily-white pickaninny?”
“Don’t use that word, that’s not nice.”
“Man, whaddya doin’ here?”
George decided to confess. “There’s this girl—”
“Ooooh,” interrupted the desk monitor. “You after some Sister. There’s only like twenty of us in this whole shit town and you gotta go after one of ours. Get the fuck out.”
George dismissed the conversation with the desk monitor from his mind and decided not to go full confession. He could tell that Roxayn recognized him. “Hey, Roxayn, may I interest you in going for some popcorn?”
And she smiled! Is there anything more singularly beautiful on the face of the earth than a spontaneous smile, a shoulder that releases the cold?
The little mouse, the one with the silver whiskers, watched the whole thing from a quiet corner. He was eating a page from a James A. Michener paperback that the real Noble H. Getchell Memorial Masturbator had dropped from his backpack. Hawaii. The mouse could eat the first hundred pages and make it a better book …
George and Roxayn married after Roxayn graduated (mining!). George had a few more years to finish his PhD in education, but they were on their way. Both sets of parents were inwardly adjusting preconceptions of skin tones of future grandchildren, and outwardly absolutely inclusive. Pretty soon that switched. They became inwardly inclusive, Sunday family dinners, a joint trip to S.F., and outwardly discussing how beautiful (inside and out) their grandchildren were bound to be.
But no babies came. Ten years. George quit riding his bicycle, fast, down the ranchlands of Hash Lane. He went commando, and kind of liked it. He romanced Roxayn with pomegranates and Ethel M liqueur-filled cordials, little sips of whiskey since she self-banned alcohol. Roxayn romanced George by uncrossing her legs. They moved to Lake Tahoe, just thirty minutes away, but two thousand feet higher. If they couldn’t have children they would surround themselves with forest animals, coyote concerts and the backdraft of eagles, snow that smelled like pinecones. They lived off Pioneer Trail down a long, hard-packed driveway they dubbed Bunny Ears Lane. In the winter they could hang a pot, cook campfire beans inside the stone fireplace, and watch the ice fern the windows.
Almost twenty years and they decided to give it one more shot. A lot of shots actually. IVF drugs had improved statistics (now their baby was discussed in terms of statistical probabilities). The drugs bloated Roxayn into a hot-water bottle, all sloshy and running to cold. Her skin lost its beautiful purple sheen and took on shades of ash, as if the Pope had burned all his lovely velvet gowns and she was what remained. But it worked! Eight months of hormones and a fetus showed its little heartbeat on the monitor, fast and blurry as a hummingbird wing. Enter Fiona the Destroyer!
Well, we already know how this part of Roxayn’s story ends.
Would Roxayn have been happy to give up her life in exchange for the life of her daughter? Never ask a mother that. Never ask. Not every mother would say yes.
Fiona
When I was a newborn I looked like an eggplant, purple-dark in George’s white hands. To leave Barton Memorial without Roxayn, to truly burn her body to ash in exchange for this Howling, what a monstrous exchange. Stick your hand down the drain and turn on the garbage disposal – that kind of feeling. Why did they ever even want children?
Everyone who didn’t know us and saw us together assumed my dad had rescued an orphaned African child, a UNICEF baby. This made him an automatic good guy. Women saw him stalled in the baby aisle and helped him pick out formula and offered diaper suggestions, cooed at me. And I answered in the secret language born before letters that we all lose. In the eternal words of P. D. Eastman, I asked, “Are you my mother?” I never stopped asking. Every time I blew out the candles I wished for her. And a pony.
Of course George tamped
down his grief and raised up his daughter. He is a good man. He covered an entire wall of my room in sheets of North African cork. From disorganized cardboard boxes full of photos of his life with Roxayn he assembled a type of historic timeline over the cork, oldest photos lowest. On light gray paper he wrote dates and places and broken poetry in tiny script and worked them in like a stone path for me to follow. He installed a library-style ladder so that as I grew I could climb up to the top, only five and half feet. Above that he had a mural painted—clear sky with the top leaves of a Red Dragon maple laced across. Here we could both visit Roxayn, pick a version of her, pick a fight, talk it out.
My mother was my room. “Are you my mother?” I sometimes asked the wall.
I was surprised when I returned home on the day I turned down my first marriage proposal to find my dad sitting at our kitchen table. I still had pine needles porcupining out of the back of my hair.
“Why are you home early, Dad?” I asked, carefully sitting across from him, hoping the needles wouldn’t fall out and start embroidering some sort of naughty-daughter scarlet letter.
“How’d you do at finals?” he asked, ignoring my question.
Emily Garrett won.”
He shook his head up and down, “White girl always wins.” He didn’t believe that.
“She might have been better than me,” I finally admitted, out loud.
“You think I’m going along with that?” he asked. I smiled. I knew he wouldn’t; I was the Simone Biles of his eye. “So … two weeks to graduation … “ he continued. “All signed up for UNR, dorms. Big life.”
“Yep. Where you goin’ with this, Dad? You’re all fidgety.”
