“Just everyone shut the fuck up!” As I screamed this—and I did scream it; there is no sense in arguing otherwise—the male owner of Tegucigalpa’s loomed over me, over us, over our table, his arms across his chest, and clearly he meant business. Yes, he stood there like Judgment himself, and we all sucked in our breath, us and the other customers, and even the kids, who stopped chanting, although they were still cramming chips into their mouths, munch-munch-munching away while we waited to hear his verdict.
His verdict was laughter. He started laughing, first chuckling softly to himself and shaking his head and then really busting a gut, laughing nearly as loudly as the kids had been chanting, and his laughing was such a relief and so infectious that we started laughing, too, not knowing what we were laughing at, exactly, which somehow made the whole thing funnier (you know how it is), until all of us were wiping tears from our eyes and other diners were roaring and banging on the table and Sharon was flapping her hands in front of her face saying, “Oh, stop it, stop it. I can’t stop laughing.”
“Oh, that was good,” the owner said, finally getting ahold of himself. “You really had me going for a second, didn’t you?”
“We really did,” I admitted, because even though I had no idea what he was talking about, the kids were laughing and Sharon was laughing and I was laughing, and we were happy, as a family, for the first time in god knows how long, and I didn’t want to clear up this misunderstanding and put the kibosh on our happiness; not yet I didn’t.
“I’ve heard about stuff like this,” the owner said. “You’re just terrific. Did Aaron at Salsa’s put you up to this?”
“He did, he did,” I said. This was a lie: Salsa’s was a restaurant I knew all too well, but I had no idea who Aaron was, or what he’d supposedly put me up to.
“Oh, that son of a bitch,” he said, and you could tell he was trying hard to not break into laughter again, and throughout the restaurant, people were calming themselves down, saying, “Hoo, hoo,” like owls. “He really is a son of a bitch, isn’t he?”
“He is,” I said. “He really is.”
“Listen,” the owner said, “I want you to get back at him for me. I want you to do to him what you did here tonight. At Salsa’s. Can you do that? I’ll pay for your meal tonight and for your meal at Salsa’s, plus another hundred dollars if you get back at him for me. Can you get back at him for me?” And so on and on until it became clear that he, the owner, assumed that our screaming and bad familial behavior had been part of a joke, some sort of prankish guerilla dinner theater paid for by a rival restaurateur. Sharon understood this, too, and was staring at me, as if to say: Are you going to clear up this misunderstanding? But her staring also had a knowing quality to it, as if to say, You’re not going to clear up this misunderstanding, are you? No, I was not going to clear up this misunderstanding, not when it was going in my favor, which so many things recently had not. So I said, “Sure, sure. we’ll get back at Aaron at Salsa’s for you.”
We did, the next Wednesday. Although the intervening week had been rough; I should say that. Because what, at first, had been merely a misunderstanding at Tegucigalpa’s became, the more Sharon thought about it, a lie, which reminded her of the other lies I had told over the years. I tried to argue that a misunderstanding was not the same as a lie, in the same way that a cousin by marriage was not the same as a blood cousin, but she wouldn’t have any of it. It was a lie all right, Sharon said, and it reminded her especially of my most recent, monstrous deceit, which was, of course, my affair with my student. And to make matters worse, during the course of that affair, I had taken my student and lover out to dinner at Salsa’s many times, where I had used my credit card to pay for dinner, my credit card, which was also Sharon’s credit card, which, along with some other missteps, was how I was eventually caught. In the week between our first misunderstanding and our second, Sharon really gave me the business over the affair, which had been over now for nearly a year. Even so, she had every right, and I didn’t completely begrudge her the opportunity to remind me, again, what a louse I had been, and an awful husband and father and human being, and how lucky I was that she didn’t dump my ass out on the street, with the rest of the bums.
But the one thing Sharon had never done was bring up my student-and-lover’s race. She was black. Sharon knew this. But it hadn’t come up, and I thought it was heartening—both as a husband and as a free-thinking progressive citizen of the world—that I was married to a woman who had such high principles that she could call her husband’s young student mistress a whore, homewrecker, bimbo, slut, and so on, and never refer to her race in a disparaging way, and that maybe as a culture, we’d moved beyond such problems, and that maybe as a married couple, we could move beyond my interracial affair, too. So, no, Sharon had never raised the subject of my lover’s race, and she didn’t bring it up in the week between our first and second misunderstanding, either.
But it came up at Salsa’s. Again, this was a Wednesday. To be true, I’d all but forgotten that we were there on Tegucigalpa’s behalf, to get back at Aaron, whom I assumed was the owner of Salsa’s. Because the owner of Tegucigalpa’s had given us a gift certificate, and you know how easy it is, once you have the certificate, to forget who gave it to you and why. No, it was just another Wednesday, where I hadn’t yet gotten dinner on the table and the kids were a mess and Sharon was tired and hungry after a long day at work and we needed something to eat, and so I said, “Let’s go to Salsa’s.”
Sharon looked at me in shock, eyes bulging thyroidally and theatrically (her thyroid was fine), and said, slowly, making sure I understood: “Are you sure you want to go to Salsa’s? Are you sure that’s where you want to go for dinner?”
I know now, just as I knew then, why Sharon was asking this question. She was giving me a chance to change my mind, a chance to remember the awful week that had just passed, a week devoted to long, teary discussions of my crimes of passion and how it was possible that we’d never truly recover from them, and how some of these crimes of passion from which we might not ever truly recover took place at Salsa’s, where I now wanted us to go to eat. I know this now, and I knew it then, too: but we were all so hungry, and I had been in the house all day and wanted to get out, and we had this gift certificate, and we weren’t exactly rolling in money, because of my joblessness, which over the previous week had been a common topic of discussion, along with my affair. And speaking of my affair, it had been a year now, nearly, since it was over, and I figured, dammit, it was high time to forgive and forget, which is what people say when they’ve never had to forgive and forget anything or -one before.
In any case, I knew why Sharon was asking this question, but I pretended not to, and said, “We have a gift certificate.”
“Are you sure you want to go to Salsa’s?” she asked again, this time in stiff, threatening military fashion, as if to say You do not want to go to Salsa’s.
“We have a gift certificate,” I repeated.
“Are you sure you want to go Salsa’s?” Sharon asked again, and this time there was a heartbreaking, begging quality to her voice, as if to say Please don’t make us go to Salsa’s. If you love me, if you’ve ever loved me, you won’t make us go to Salsa’s.
“We have a gift certificate,” I said again: because apparently when you break someone’s heart once, then it’s almost impossible not to keep breaking that heart, and breaking it and breaking it, until it’s completely broken and gone, and then you wonder how you could have ever fallen in love with a person so heartless.
“Fine,” Sharon said, sighing in huge you-asked-for-it resignation. “We’ll go to Salsa’s.”
So we went to Salsa’s. I hadn’t been there since Sharon had discovered my affair with my student, Torina, which was only a few days before the school discovered it and fired me, and only a few days after Torina herself dumped me. She had dumped me, in fact, at Salsa’s, over a plate of tofu burritos. Salsa’s was vegetarian, and since Salsa’s was also envir
onmentally conscious, they served tofu burritos without napkins, because of the vanishing trees and the rapacious paper industry and the diminishing ozone, and since Salsa’s liked to think globally and act locally (it always said so on the chalkboard menu on the wall; they didn’t pass out actual individual menus—again, because of the paper) they called their tofu burritos World Burritos, and a year earlier I was about halfway through my World Burrito when Torina dumped me.
Katherine and Sam were good this time; I have to say that. They didn’t terrorize each other like they can do, and mostly they just sat there quietly, reading the books they brought with them while we waited for our food. All in all, they were model children, the kind of children you might admire if you were another diner at the restaurant and were yourself thinking about having children. Even I was admiring them—Sam’s ruddy cherubic face and Katherine’s long pigtailed black hair and smart black eyes—I mean, I was really scrutinizing them and so proud, and I wanted to stand up in the restaurant and shout These beautiful children are mine. I made them. But I didn’t stand up and shout that, because, for one, it would have been seen as patriarchal, and Salsa’s hated patriarchy, and, for another, I didn’t want to draw any extra attention to myself. Salsa’s was a college hangout, and on my way in I’d noticed Bob, who taught criminal justice, and Cheryl, who taught travel and tourism, and Lawrence who taught Portuguese, Spanish, French, and German. All of them, I knew, were looking at me, judging me, wondering how I could do what I had done with Torina—something so immoral and stupid and against college policy—and now my beautiful children were less something to be proud of and more condemnation, because how could I have done that to them, too?
I bet Sharon was wondering the same thing. She hadn’t said anything other than to place her order—mostly she was sitting there staring at me, breaking her stare once in a while to shake her head, as if to clear it of something—and only when the food came did she break her silence. She said, “Do you still have the fever?” She said this in a voice that wasn’t her voice, something meaner and higher than a hiss. “I bet you still have the fever, don’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Jungle fever,” she said.
“Sharon!” I said, and I knew right then that I’d made a huge mistake, another one, and that we shouldn’t have gone to Salsa’s, gift certificate or no gift certificate. I’d never heard Sharon say anything remotely like that in our fifteen years together, and it was as if I were sitting across the table from someone else’s wife, someone I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. I bet that’s the way she felt, too, looking at the liar and cheater I was, thinking that she knew me and didn’t. And maybe this is what you do when you hurt the people you love—you turn them into something you don’t love—because Sharon asked, loudly this time, like she didn’t care who heard, “I bet she smelled different, didn’t she? I bet she smelled like Africa. I bet she was a real black skank.”
Everyone in the restaurant heard this, and their private conversations just about fell off a cliff. Even the cooks, waiters, and dishwashers stopped banging their Peruvian clay bowls and cups.
“What’s a ‘black skank’?” Katherine asked.
“Why don’t you ask your father?” Sharon said. Her voice went back to normal for a second, and then she looked at me, pretty much lost it again, and said in a voice a snake might use if she were talking to another snake who was hard of hearing, “Why don’t you ask your father what a ‘black skank’ is?”
“Dad,” Katherine said—because she really is quite a student; her quarterly report cards can’t say enough about her wide-ranging, inquisitive mind—“what’s a ‘black skank’?”
What do you say to a question like that? Maybe someone working in high-rise construction might have answered it one way; maybe someone in the radio business would have answered it in another. But I was a teacher, or had been, and when Katherine asked her question, my teacherly instincts kicked in. In fact, this was why Torina dumped me—I’d been talking about the origins of the tofu in her World Burrito, and she’d said, “You’re always teaching me something I don’t need to know,” and then, “I don’t think this is going to work”—but I tried not to think about Torina, and answered Katherine’s question the best I could.
“A ‘black skank,’” I said, “is a derogatory term for an African American woman. It’s an incredibly offensive term, and you should never, ever use it. Not in public. Not in private, either.”
“Oh,” Katherine said, and went back to her book, which, I believe, was an Encyclopedia Brown, about how he found his neighbor’s missing wallet.
But Sharon wasn’t done. “Tell us about her booty, Steven,” she said. “Tell us about her big lips on your thang. Was she happy with your thang? Was it smaller than what she was used to? Were you bling-bling enough for her?”
Katherine looked up from her Encyclopedia Brown again and said, “Dad . . .”
But I knew what she was going to ask, and so I said, “Your mother is using a number of racist stereotypes—mostly physical. For instance, that black women have big”—and here I struggled for the right way to put this—“rear ends, and big lips, and that black men have large . . .” And here again I struggled—who wouldn’t have? “Things,” I finally said.
“But Mom didn’t say ‘things,’” Sam said. “She said ‘thang.’”
“That’s right,” I said, and truth be told I was proud of him, because—unlike his sister—Sam had never done particularly well in school, and, as his first-grade teacher had pointed out, he was never really particularly interested in anything, and that he’d noticed that his mother had said “thang” instead of “thing” was a real breakthrough. “Your mother said ‘thang,’ and she also said ‘bling-bling.’ Both are part of the African American lexicon, or at least we’re led to believe that this is so by popular media. Truth be told, African Americans speak in lots of different ways, and it’s important that we not essentialize in any way.”
“But why is Mom saying these things?” Katherine asked.
“Your mother is talking about a specific woman, sweetie,” I said. I’d never told the kids about Torina. In fact, Sharon and I had agreed that we wouldn’t, that it wasn’t something they needed to know. But maybe it was. As any teacher knows, you sometimes don’t know what needs to be taught until you teach it. “The woman she’s talking about is African American.”
“But why,” Katherine asked, “is she saying all these bad things about the woman?”
“She’s saying these bad things,” I said, “because I did some bad things with the woman. The bad things have nothing to do with her being an African American, though. I think it’s important to remember that.”
“And are you sorry you did the bad things?” Katherine asked. Because if we’ve taught our kids nothing else, we’ve taught them all about being sorry. We’ve pretty much drilled it into their little heads that you have to admit to being sorry about the bad things you’ve done before you can go on and do something else for which you’ll eventually have to apologize.
“Yes,” I said, looking straight at Sharon, who was looking down at the table and refusing to meet my eyes, for which I didn’t blame her; I didn’t. “I’ve never been so sorry about anything in my life.”
“And is Mom sorry? For saying all those bad things?” At this, Sharon started crying, which I took to mean yes, she was sorry. I put my hand gently on her shoulder and said, “Please don’t cry, I’m sorry, it’s OK, it’s all my fault, I love you, it’s OK, you were right, we should have never come to Salsa’s, I’m so sorry.”
“I know, I know,” she said. She wiped her face with the back of her sleeve—again, because there were no napkins—and then said, “I think I’m crying because I’m so hungry. Are you so hungry, too?”
I wasn’t so hungry. I wanted to get out of Salsa’s, pronto, because of the scene we’d just made and what my ex-colleagues might have to say about it—on top of the many other things they’d
already said in the halls, in the student newspaper, and in the faculty meeting where I was fired. The restaurant was still graveyard quiet, and I wanted to get the hell out of there. But we are the accumulation of the debts we owe and the way we pay them, and if Sharon wanted to stay and eat, then we would stay and eat. I looked up to see if our food was on its way, and in doing so I could see the eyes of Bob, my ex-colleague, the criminal justicist. It was strange: Bob’s eyes weren’t full of recrimination and disgust, the way I thought they’d be. They were wet and soft, and this surprised me, and it also surprised me when Bob stood up and started clapping—slowly at first, then faster, and then other people stood up and joined him, and soon the whole restaurant was on its feet, giving us an ovation.
They were giving us a standing ovation, and this scared the kids a little. Sam climbed into his mother’s lap, and Katherine hugged her Encyclopedia Brown book tight to her chest. Who could blame them? I was pretty unnerved by the whole thing, too—even more so when a large white man with an overgrown red beard and dreadlocks came over to our table, applauding as he walked toward us. This turned out to be Aaron, the owner of Salsa’s, the “son of a bitch” the owner of Tegucigalpa’s wanted us to get back at for him.
“I just wanted to tell you,” Aaron said, “that was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“It was?” I asked.
“It was,” Aaron said. He told us that, as a member of Greenpeace, he’d confronted whaling ships in a tiny leaking dinghy; he told us that, as an Earth Firster, he’d chained himself to a nuclear reactor, or at least a fence surrounding it. “But I’ve never seen anything as brave as what you just did.”
“Well,” I said.
“I mean, it’s easy to forget how racist we all are,” Aaron said. And then he turned to face his customers and said, “All of us. You are all racist. Don’t think you’re not.” The customers put their heads down when he said this, but they kept clapping, as if applauding their own racism.
Price of the Haircut : Stories (9781616208240) Page 10
