Your Face in Mine

by Jess Row

  What would she think of all this? I won’t ask myself this question, I’ve decided. Why should she, in particular, be my tribunal on matters of race? She hated to talk about it. Generalizations of any kind drove her to tears. Once, in a squabble over the remote, I forced her to watch ten minutes of Chappelle’s Show, some inane skit about white men wearing grass skirts and Latinos playing bongo drums, and she went into the bathroom and vomited. No one I’ve ever met took the ideal of a colorblind society more literally. In one of her college essays—one I edited, though she hardly needed it—she wrote, the idea of e pluribus unum means that all labels are deceptive. We could even say they are lies. Skin color, religion, and nationality are all beside the point, which is that human beings are individuals.

  She would never have forgiven me, I think, for taking up Martin’s cause. If that’s what I’ve done. Any more than she would forgive me, even for a moment, for wishing I was somehow other than who I am, that I had been born in Wudeng. She would never find it funny that I would call up a passage from the Tao Te Ching and pretend it matters. Even if I don’t think I’m pretending. Isn’t the most basic lesson of Taoism, I would have said, that we should see things from every side? The yin-yang. Complementary forces. Strength flows into weakness, and vice versa. What are ideas of race but complementary forces, constructions that depend on each other? What Chappelle is doing, I told her that night, is just playing with stereotypes. Not embracing them. He’s making them ridiculous. He’s signifying. I got up to pull a Henry Louis Gates book down from the shelf, and she leaped up behind me and ran to the bathroom. When she returned, patting her blotchy face with a damp washcloth, she said, you can play. You can tell me it’s okay. Because you’re already here. And then she went to bed.

  —

  I look down at the characters; I finish the red-eye and contemplate asking for another. It’s been forty-five minutes, but I’m not at all hungry; probably I’ll just have a dry sandwich from the pastry case.

  I look back at Souls, at the next paragraph, and the next, not thinking, not stopping, just reading:

  No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil! If one must have gone, why not I? Why may I not rest me from this restlessness and sleep from this wide waking? Was not the world’s alembic, Time, in his young hands, and is not my time waning? Are there so many workers in the vineyard that the fair promise of this little body could lightly be tossed away?

  Your self-pity is unbelievable, I tell myself, as my sinuses begin to stick, a little contorted sob rattling in my throat, you myopic, narcissistic, privileged motherfucker, with your brand-new offshore bank account, your severance checks, your sheer, everyday whiteness, your get-out-of-jail-free card, you who can have it both ways, any way you like, but I am still looking toward the wall, so no one can see me frantically scrubbing the tears off, and getting up to slide the book onto its shelf where it belongs.

  15.

  Recording #2 (24:23)

  Source: Maxell cassette tape, 60 minutes, condition +

  Labeled side one “Tape 2 PRIVATE DO NOT DESTROY”

  I have to say a little more about him. It’s not right, leaving off the way I did.

  This is the story he always told me: he grew up on a turkey farm in South Carolina. His dad died of liver failure at age six. His stepfather beat him with a rake. He spent three hours a day feeding turkeys and dragging the dead ones out of their cages and burning them. His dissertation was on Alexander II and the freeing of the serfs, and by god, he used to say, I was a serf. By those lights, could I really blame him? He went to Vanderbilt, by some miracle, and then when he was a junior some frat boys caught him coming out of a gay bar with his boyfriend. They were in the classics club together. The frat boys broke both of his legs and left the boyfriend a paraplegic. He used to say, I had a hard time making it to twenty.

  But here’s the thing: it was all a pack of lies. Except for the part about going to Vanderbilt. His mother—my grandmother—came down for his funeral. From Tuxedo Park, New York. Some of his colleagues posted an obit in the Times: that was the only way the family found out. He’d never changed his name, but in every other way he’d disappeared, lock, stock, and barrel, for twenty-five years. I asked her, what was he like, what was Dad’s childhood like? and she said, uneventful. When did you know he was gay? Horrified: I had no idea he was gay. His dad, my grandfather, was some kind of executive in the early years at IBM; he had two older sisters, a handful of nieces and nephews. Grandnieces and nephews, surely, by this point. Afterward she sent me a whole file of photos, clippings, the works. His bar mitzvah tallis, his Bible. You should have these things, she said. They wanted to have me up there, a big family reunion, all the Lipkins together again. Thanksgivings, Passover Seders: until I moved out of the house, I got a call, every time.

  Of course by then I knew I was Jewish. Part Jewish, of course, not technically Jewish at all, since Mom wasn’t. Apparently, he knew that much. But Jewish enough that as soon as I went to Roland Park someone asked me which temple I went to, where I did Hebrew school. When I went home and asked Dad about it, he said, tell them you’re a Hare Krishna. He wouldn’t discuss it. It means nothing to me, he said; it means nothing to you. Just because you’re surrounded by them doesn’t mean you’re one of them. And so what was I going to do, at age twenty-four, with his tallis, his old yarmulke, from 1958? Eventually I had to mail it all back. It was either that or burn it. His secrets, not my secrets. He was given something; he disowned it. I never had the chance.

  What do you do with a guy like that? I mean, I should try to list, now, all of the small kindnesses, the little delights, of our life together. I should try to make him lovable. He was a good cook, of a kind. Much addicted to phyllo pastry, and anything pressed, pickled, or salted. A maniacal housekeeper. A catalog shopper—everything he bought for me came from Lands’ End, L.L.Bean, or Sears, through the mail. If the Internet had existed then, he’d have bankrupted himself in an afternoon. He had none of the campy habits you’d expect—old movies, Judy Garland, opera—except he loved ballet. A mad fan of Maya Plisetskaya. He insisted I play the piano. He insisted I learn French. He taught me how to tie a Windsor knot. Which is more than most men can say of their fathers these days. There, is that a good enough list? Because the fact is, I think about him and I’m just blinded, still, even now, with this rage, that I will never know why he pissed so much of his life away on useless, pointless schemes for avoiding companionship and love. You can’t simply call it agoraphobia. You can’t call it trauma. Yes, maybe he nursed some secret pain; maybe, just maybe, he was abused, or what have you, violated. But I don’t think so. He was in full command of his faculties. He knew what he was doing. In the end that was the kernel of his whole being, it was all he cared about.

  For the longest time I thought it all went back to Beneficent. And believe me, I scoured the country, looking for any text, any article, something in an archive, a pamphlet, anything. Maybe with Google I would’ve found something. In any case—and this was later, when I was in college—it finally dawned on me: there’s nothing there, really. There’s no secret. There doesn’t have to be a reason for human perversity; it just is. Spend enough time in Baltimore and you see that pretty clearly. There are people who are just a teaspoonful less human than the rest of us. And you take a decaying city, a ruined city, like this one, where the rents are cheap, where no one’s looking over your shoulder, and it’s just a magnet for them. Dad was just letting his freak flag fly.

  This is what I mean. This is my whole point. About Sherry and Tamika. What do I think about Dad? Does it really matter, now, in itself? What do I do with Dad? is more the question. What did I learn? No mysteries. No questions unanswered. One day they’ll know everything. Total sunlight on the whole fucked-up picture. Sunlight is the be
st disinfectant. Why am I making these tapes? Because now is not the time. But there will be a time. They won’t have to wonder what I was thinking. Call it revenge? All right, then. All right, Dad. That’s my revenge.

  16.

  By the second week of my new life—my post-work life, my early-bird retirement, as a friend from WBUR put it, when I forwarded him the news—I’ve reached a kind of equilibrium, if not a routine. There are still a few hours of work to do every day at the office, signing unemployment applications and writing letters of reference, packing files into boxes and sealing them for storage. BCC has hired a new program director, Ken Wong, a twenty-five-year-old fresh from the Towson college station, and Ken’s first order of business has been to blanket the office with the new station’s call letters: WZAK, the Zak!—a bolt of yellow lightning across a royal blue field. On our desks, overnight, appeared The Zak! coffee mugs and pens, mouse pads and refrigerator magnets, and thus Ken’s second order of business was an interoffice memo posted on the front door and every other surface: Throwing away WZAK promotional materials is theft and violators will be prosecuted. This applies to current and former employees. He turned off all our swipe cards, too, so we have to buzz, like deliverymen, and wait for Matilda, the poor security guard, to leave off watching The Price Is Right in the maintenance closet and let us in.

  But by lunchtime—sometimes as early as eleven—I can clock out, no longer required to maintain even the semblance of responsibility, and to avoid the dread of long afternoons in a silent apartment, I’ve taken to walking uptown and depositing myself, my laptop, and a stack of books at Century Coffee, a new place just across the broad avenue from the Johns Hopkins main gate. There have been days warm enough to sit outside on the patio, at least for an optimistic hour or two.

  And what do I fill my mind with, these days, no longer required to fill out a single spreadsheet or calculate a budget, parse the latest policy change from CPB or come up with a new tack for the grant-giving fundocrats at the National Endowment for the Humanities? For the first hour I put on my headphones, silence the Internet, open the folder on my desktop labeled Transcripts, and click on the first file: 4/12/12.

  Sometimes, sometimes I wish I didn’t remember her, but I do. Just barely. She was incredibly pale, with that light, light blond hair, eyebrows, everything, and the one image I have of her is in the kitchen, this enormous kitchen, which had been the conservatory of the house before. She’s standing against the windows, her back to the windows, and it’s as if the sunlight is coming through her. I remember being terrified of that. And fascinated. In any case, there’s my one memory, and then she was off. Untraceable, unidentifiable, or so my father claimed. I have no record of her whatsoever, not even a picture. I used to beg him to tell me whether I had her nose, or her ears, anything, and he would say, sorry, but as far as I can tell, you’re all me. More’s the pity.

  You’re the Alex Haley to my Malcolm X, Martin said the other day, with a hearty laugh, the Quincy Troupe to my Miles. Don’t tell anyone I said that, right?

  What exactly does that mean, Martin?

  What exactly does that mean? You’re my coauthor, not my ghostwriter. I want you to improvise. Create. Be a little bit of a mythmaker. Which doesn’t mean I’m asking you to lie. Be selective, but don’t lie. I don’t want to have to sit there while Oprah rips me a new one like that Million Little Pieces guy.

  Sometimes I wish I didn’t remember my mother, but I do. She was very pale, with light blond hair and eyebrows, and the one image I have of her is in the kitchen of the commune where I grew up. She’s standing against the windows, her back to the windows, and it’s as if the sunlight is coming through

  But that’s just cleaning up the transcription. An oral interview isn’t a story in itself.

  My mother was the epitome of a white woman.

  Ridiculous, and over the top.

  I was an unwanted child.

  What is this, Dickens? In frustration, I close the file, clicking Do not save, and start again.

  I have two vivid memories of women from my early childhood. One is my mother, who disappeared when I was four. She was very pale, with light blond hair and eyebrows, and I remember her in the kitchen of the commune where I grew up. She’s standing against the windows, her back to the windows, and it’s as if the sunlight is coming through her. I was terrified and fascinated. The other is a young black woman who appeared one morning at the picnic table on the back patio, where we had meals in the summer. She wore a caftan, a bright orange-and-red print. She had an Afro. Lots of silver bangles on both arms. She must have been about thirty. I had no idea where she’d come from. I came out to ring the dinner bell—it was a big iron triangle, the kind they use on ranches—and I startled her, but then she looked over and saw me and smiled. She had been crying. There were tracks of tears on her cheeks. But when she saw me her mouth split into an enormous grin, the widest mouth, the friendliest mouth I had ever seen in my life. A slice of the sun. She laughed, and she said, where did you come from? I wanted to run to her. Hell, maybe I still am running to her.

  Transcribing again. I can hear Martin, perched on my shoulder: I’m not asking you to take dictation.

  But you’re a natural storyteller. And you’ve done this before. Any story improves with practice.

  I’m asking you to package me. I want the PG version. Do it this way and you’re just asking people to psychoanalyze me. Lose the stuff about my mother, keep the part about Shirley O’Dell. Streamline. Say I have no memory of my mother. Make it easy on yourself. “The first woman I remember in my life was . . .”

  People won’t psychoanalyze you for idealizing a black woman?

  It’s simple cause and effect. It’s imprinting.

  You don’t want to be seen as running away from whiteness, as choosing between whiteness and blackness? Is that offensive, or something?

  It’s complicated.

  And what you’re asking is for me to not make this complicated?

  —

  This time I hit Save, close my laptop, and leave it out for all to see as I head to the bathroom. Half wishing someone will steal it and put me out of my misery. When I return and find it still there, a mute clam, I switch the music in my iPod to Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, prop my feet on the chair across from me, and close my eyes, hoping the shimmering violins can dissolve my misgivings. Trying to forget I’m in Baltimore at all.

  Every month or so when I was in college I used to flee to Northampton—or if I was lucky, Boston, or once in a very long while, New York—and spend most of a weekend drinking coffee somewhere, preferably at a table by the window, listening to my portable CD player and reading unassigned books. That was what I imagined adulthood would be like: a man drinking coffee by a window on a city street, an anonymous citizen, lightly employed, a cosmopolite of the world of the tactful and restrained. A world full of acquaintances, in which anyone might show up at any time. In the Nineties it was possible to believe you could go on living that way forever. Like now, I’m thinking, opening my eyes, this very moment, that woman over there leaning over the bar to retrieve an extra stirrer for her coffee looks just like Rina, my girlfriend all through junior year at Willow, her rust-colored hair held back in the same short ponytail, even the same three hoops in her right ear, but it couldn’t be, of course, Rina lives somewhere in California, and then Rina turns and sees me and stops short, spilling the foam of her latté down her shirt.

  —

  And here you are, she says, when she’s deposited her shoulder bag and half-empty cup at my table, and dried herself off, as best she can, in the bathroom, here you are, acting as if you have every right to be in Baltimore. I sent an email around to everyone I still know from Willow when I moved back here.

  When was that?

  Last September. Listen, have you seen anybody? Does anybody still know you’re alive?

  I pulled up my stakes in Baltim
ore a long time ago. I’d be embarrassed, frankly. It would be like starting over.

  That’s ridiculous, she says, and scratches herself between the eyebrows. A gesture I remember, and yet never would have recalled in her absence. It’s shocking how little she seems to have changed. Her face is a little longer, thinner; she’s wider at the hips, more freckled, her teeth duller. She had perfect, luminous teeth; in the period of a few weeks when I couldn’t stop staring at her, as if needing to be always reminded, I was fascinated by them, as much as by her tiny nipples, the size and color of pennies. She selected me, in ninth grade, literally grabbed my hand, at a party, and leaned against me, until I let my hands fall around her waist, and kissed me hard on the mouth. We dated, if you can call it that, for three months; then she went off to camp, had a fling with a counselor, and broke up with me by postcard. A mistake, she admitted later, but I never trusted her enough to try again, and we remained wary friends ever after, until our separate adulthoods swallowed us up.

  I’m still in touch with Bill, and Trevor, and Myra—who else? Nellie. That’s all. Ayala, too, though she’s in San Francisco. But the locals would love to see you. Or at least, Jesus, know that you exist. But enough on that sore subject. What the fuck are you doing these days?

  I give her the briefest version of recent events I can, and as I’m doing so, I notice a silver band on her ring finger, engraved with a serpentine pattern.

  That’s brutal, she says. I heard about it on the news, of course. And you want to know what my honest reaction was? I couldn’t believe BCC was still around. Even in high school it always sounded so ramshackle.

  Rina, I say, you didn’t tell me you were married.

  Oh—this? I’m not. I was. Lauren and I are separated. Married at Big Sur, before the ban, which means we’ll have to get a legal divorce. I think. Actually, it’s a little up in the air.