by Danzy Senna
The music he played sounded like a bunch of trash cans rolling down a hill. But I tapped my fingers on my knee, pretending I liked it and trying to find the beat behind the noise. We were speeding down the winding country road, and I looked up at the trees that curled over us, letting dappled sunlight onto the road. I felt like a teenager and turned my face to the window so Nicholas wouldn’t see my smile.
He had to shout over the music: “So, what were you doing in town, Jesse James?”
I giggled at his nickname for me. “I was getting a corn dog. My mom’s working today. I was just bored.”
He nodded, sucking on the tiny stub of his cigarette, then tossing it out the window. “Yeah, I was fuckin’ bored out of my mind, too. I hate this town. It’s full of losers.” He ran a hand through his dark hair, then glanced at me. He held his eyes on me for a minute, and I felt myself blushing. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He was smiling mischievously, and his eyes were red and puffy. “You like this town?”
I shrugged. “Nah.”
“What was it like where you lived before?”
“Um. You know, upstate New York. Cold. Ugly.”
“That’s where you went to school?”
I played with the fringe on my jean shorts and tried to think of an answer. I hadn’t prepared for his questioning. I was about to describe a public school I had never attended, when I saw, with relief, that we had reached my house.
“So, I’ll see you soon, kid,” he said, pulling up to the curb, still smiling as if he were holding back a laugh.
I tried to think of something cool to say. I managed only, “Sure. I mean, we should hang out. You know, since we’re both bored.”
He snickered and sped off. I went inside feeling giddy. I’d really forgotten about the zoo comment at the chili-dog stand. For the rest of the afternoon, I stared in the mirror over my mother’s dresser, brushing my hair and practicing different smiles, trying to decide which was the most natural-looking.
On the days my mother had off from work, she never left my side. She told me she needed to prepare me for ordinary school in the fall. She wanted me to start in eighth grade, where I belonged. No child of hers would stay back a grade. This usually involved me reading aloud to her from our novel of the week, borrowed from the university library under her professor’s name. While I read to her from Zora Neale Hurston or Simone de Beauvoir or J. D. Salinger, she would lay stretched out before me on the porch, eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips. Afterward, we would drive to the chili-dog stand and discuss what we had learned.
But one day she announced that she wanted me to write a novel, not just read one. She handed me a black-and-white-marbled composition book she had bought me at the five and dime. She said my novel could be about anything I chose, and that if I finished it, I would officially graduate from our seventh-grade class. I was bored and lonely, so I took on her assignment with vigor. I pondered the assignment for a few days and finally decided I wanted to write about a Mexican-American family. I had seen such a family on a news show about alien abductions, and had decided, watching the rowdy, exotic lot, that I wanted to be Mexican. The television family lived in El Paso, Texas, and so that became the name of my novel. “El Paso.” It featured a religious, perpetually pregnant mother; a banjo-playing, sombrero-donning papa; and their teenage son, the main character, Richie Rodriguez, who is a bad seed looking for a way out. Throughout the course of the novel, Richie gets in knife fights, beats and impregnates his girlfriend, and fails out of high school. I was in love with Richie and dreamed of him each night, his shining black pompadour hair, his bronze skin, and his leather jacket. I also dreamed about his sexy, abused girlfriend. A few times, alone at the house in the afternoon with only my notebook and the television set, I touched myself while thinking about Richie and his girlfriend intertwined in a lovemaking ritual. I was never a part of these fantasies, and it wasn’t clear to me which one of them I was supposed to be identifying with—the burly, macho Richie, who lay on top, or his soft, ultrafeminine girlfriend with the pink lipstick and matching toenails, who lay on the bottom. But I would press the spot between my legs while I thought about them, and feel a pulsing warmth.
It took me a week to write it. When I was finished, my mother read all forty pages of “El Paso” on the porch while I paced around her, wringing my hands. I feared from her pinched expression that she was disappointed. It wasn’t about the revolutionary heroine she had imagined. I was afraid she’d keep me back a grade. But when she reached the last page, she put it down beside her and hugged me so tight it hurt. She said “El Paso” was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Afterward, she took me out for a celebratory graduation dinner at the Hunan Dragon in town.
I felt safe going into town with my mother, even if she did attract hostile stares from strangers. She dressed in long peasant skirts and halter tops with no bra, or tattered overalls and a baseball cap on backward. The men smiled at her as if she were something exotic and amusing. The women sneered, disgusted by the free bounce to her breasts and the sass in her step. But she never seemed to notice. She was in her own world. I wondered if something in her blue-blood upbringing spared her shame, made her feel slightly superior to the people around us. Whatever the case, some of that nonchalance rubbed off on me when I was with her, and I stared boldly into the faces of teenagers, daring them to say something, to test my mother’s wrath.
BUT AS TOUGH as my mother was, she was lonely. She had nobody in her life except me and the university professor, whom she hated and referred to as “Morning Mouth” because, she said, his breath smelled of rotten milk. She said she didn’t trust the Marshes as far as she could throw them. She even admitted to missing the women of Aurora sometimes. But there was no way we were going back. She had left Aurora on bad terms with them. She had called them crazy dykes and said that my father was right: Women can’t organize a movement because deep down, they don’t like one another very much. The day we left she had a fight with Zoë, the Israeli who was the founder of the commune. I was never totally clear on what the fight was about. I know it had something to do with my mother referring to feminism as being an excuse for “white, bourgeois bitches to complain about something.” As we sped away, my mother had cursed them all under her breath, using every foul word in the English language. But now she missed them. She had taken to drinking at night on the front porch, singing along loudly to some sad melody, while I lay upstairs, hoping her voice wouldn’t travel across the woods to the Marshes’ house.
On nights when the solitude became too much for her, when my company was not enough, she would drive us to the bar in the center of town. There she would play the only two songs she liked on the jukebox: Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” and Joan Baez’s “John Riley.”
One Wednesday evening I sat beside my mother at the bar, grimy from horseback riding, wolfing down a cheeseburger and sucking on a coffee milk shake from Dairy Queen. The local farmers were drinking in the back, and the huddle of grisly men kept turning to look at us.
There had been a time when the slightest lingering look from a stranger was enough to send us running. One time, at an Arby’s in Syracuse, my mother hadn’t even allowed me to finish my roast beef sandwich before she was giving me the sign—a sharp tug to her earlobe—which meant “Get out while you can, but act natural.” (A pinch under the table meant “Get out by any means necessary, and don’t worry about acting natural.”) Then she hadn’t acted natural at all but had instead pulled me out of the doors and into the autumn air, whispering, “Don’t look now, but that guy in the back, with the newspaper—The Wall Street Journal—was a Fed. Just keep walking. Don’t look back.” I had in fact glanced back, as we peeled away in the lime-green Duster (our getaway car of the moment), long enough to see a bespectacled, wide-jawed man at a window booth watching us with a bemused expression. When we got back to the Howard Johnson’s, my mother had paced the room, sweating and cursing, looking out of the closed blinds every now and then, while I st
uffed our get-up-and-go life into a duffel bag, trying to beat my own packing record of one minute and twenty seconds.
Here, in this bar at the center of this New Hampshire town, I believed I saw a twinkle—an “I’m gonna get you one of these days” look—in the eyes of one of the thick, brawny men who glanced back at us, whispering and laughing. I believed one of them—all of them—might be Feds, and half-expected my mother to start tugging on her earlobe. But she seemed oblivious to their stares as she played with her cheese fries and gulped down a pint of draft, a white froth forming over her lip.
Just the night before, she had sat on the front porch of our house, smoking and crying until three A.M., while upstairs I lay sideways in my bed, rubbing my feet against the wall and trying to remember my father’s living room—the white leather beanbag chair; the glass coffee table with the crack, like lightning, across the middle; the frayed black-and-gold Egypt poster; and beside the television, a pile of books almost as high as me. Downstairs, my mother had wept, talking to herself, words I couldn’t quite understand. But here, in the bar, you wouldn’t have known it. She was transformed. She wore her hair in twin pigtails, and a long black skirt that made her look like a gypsy as she chattered to me about a book she was reading on the origins of evil.
“There are people in your life who seem good, and people who seem just all right,” she told me, twirling a copper strand of hair and chewing thoughtfully on a fry. “But when it comes to a crisis, there are only those who will save you and those who will abandon you.”
I thought about Redbone. My mother had informed me one night at a Chinese restaurant in New Haven that it was Redbone who had “sold us down river.” She rarely talked about him, but when she did, she called him “that high-yellow Uncle Tom sellout motherfucker”—a phrase she had borrowed from my father. She said he was responsible for our downfall, for the breakup of our family. If I closed my eyes, I could almost smell his breath, the stench that had emanated from his body that night at Dot’s when he had carried me to the guns and informed me that the revolution lay inside those long, thin, gleaming objects.
“Think about it this way, baby,” my mother continued, becoming more animated with her own ideas. “If the Nazis came to get you, who would sell you out to save their own skin? And who would protect you against all odds? You’d be surprised at who steps forward at moments like that. Who’s brave, and who’s a sellout. I mean, if the Nazis came to get you, who would you trust?”
“I don’t know. I guess you—” I started to say, when the door to the bar opened with a jingle, bringing forth a gust of air and a man wearing a denim jacket, a white beard, and a New York Yankees cap. His age was unclear because of the stark whiteness of his hair against the youthfulness of his features. A couple of the farmers acknowledged him with restrained nods of their heads, which he returned. He glanced at my mother, and his gaze lingered for a minute. He looked surprised and a little amused to see us there, as if we were old friends he had been expecting to meet up with later.
I immediately checked his shoes. My mother told me that you could always tell a Fed from his shoes. He might get the rest of the disguise right, but his shoes would give him away. The clue was usually in the newness—the spanking-white tennis sneaker, or the shiny leather Loafer without any scuffs around the heels.
This man wore clogs, and fairly well-worn ones, from the looks of things. I wondered whether that meant he was safe, or simply good at his job.
My mother had stopped listening to my explanation, and her eyes were suddenly shadowy and secretive as she glanced at the man out of the corner of her eye.
He was also looking at her in a way that made me invisible—erased me from the stool and the bar. I went back to drawing my horses.
AFTER THAT EVENING she and I started going to the bar every Wednesday after I was done riding. The man always came in about twenty minutes after we did, in either cowboy boots or clogs, wearing his slightly belled dungarees, each time daring to look a little longer at my mother. I ignored them, instead watching the callused men who sat hunched over their sweating glasses. I liked to pretend I was one of them—a regular. I would ape their postures, and would nod my head and raise a finger to the beefy bartender, Gus. Most nights Gus humored me in my endeavor, asking if I wanted “the regular” (a Shirley Temple) and if it was to go on my “tab” (my mother). He was an old guy with a bulbous and veiny alcoholic nose and a Boston Celtics baseball cap, and he seemed amused by my presence in this surly male den.
My mother became more and more dolled up for those visits to the bar and even deigned to wear lipstick one particular evening when the sun hung on long over the town, leaving a muted orange light that turned everything into shadows.
That was the night the man approached her. Kenny Rogers was playing on the jukebox. You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em…I was trying to read, but I could barely concentrate in the dim light of the bar, with the music in my ears…know when to walk away, know when to run…The man came toward us, smiling rather goofily, a beer in one hand and his keys jingling in the other. It struck me that he looked like a thinner version of Kenny Rogers, and I wondered if he had planned his entrance to coincide with the music playing, a soundtrack to his pass.
They spoke softly to each other, like bashful school children. He told her he had been watching her and wanted to know her name.
“I’m Sheila Goldman,” she told him. Her cheeks were flushed, and she ran a finger around the rim of her glass. “My daughter Jesse and I just moved here from upstate New York.”
She was usually cooler toward strangers, giving them the hint that she wasn’t interested in small talk. With strangers, even with Walter and Libby Marsh, she usually cut conversations to a minimum if she could help it. And she had taught me to do the same. Be a presence that no one quite remembers, the one who blends into the woodwork, so when the Feds come asking questions later on, people will say they only vaguely remember a woman and child. Was the child a boy or a girl? They can’t quite remember. Were they tall, fat, thin, blond, red-haired, white, black, poor, rich, serious, or laughing? Did they look anything like the two in this picture? If the neighbors can’t recall, you’ve done your job.
But that night she let the conversation linger, and I pinched her leg hard under the bar. She ignored my warning, never even wincing or pausing in mid-sentence. She was breaking the rules she herself had drummed into me. She was doing the unthinkable—becoming a presence, making herself memorable, slipping into her boisterous old self, a woman that these small-town folks would surely be able to recall, to identify in a picture. I made a note to scold her when we got home.
She told the man the same lie I was used to hearing her speak for quite some time. But for some reason, at that moment in the bar, the lie sounded different to me, weightier, more like the truth. It was as if the past four years had been only a dress rehearsal in preparation for this opening night.
He told her his name was Jim and that he “fiddled with computers” for a living. He said he lived in a bungalow across the lake. They talked for hours, and it was almost eleven when they exchanged numbers and we all got up to leave. I yawned into my hand and followed them out to the car. There, in the air that had turned cool, they said good-bye, both looking at their feet and interrupting each other in awkward starts and stops. There was something thick in the space between them that even I could feel as I stood watching from the sidelines.
She drove home with the windows down, singing along to a country-western song on the radio. She was blushing, and her lips were moist. She glanced at me. “Don’t look so disgusted, Jess. Even mothers need love lives.”
She tried to take my hand, but I pulled away.
I told her, looking out at the broad, black, country sky: “Do you really think he’s safe? I mean, he’s been there every night we’re at the bar, Mum. And his name is Jim. You were the one who said they have generic names, the kinds they could think up on the spot. And you heard that:
he ‘fiddles with computers’ for a living.” I made a noise in the back of my throat. “I bet he does.”
She sighed, and said, “Oh, Jess. I didn’t get that vibe from him at all. I mean, he seemed real to me. Just a nice guy. Besides, did you get a look at his clogs? Those weren’t Fed shoes. No way, Jose. Trust me on this one.”
Staring out into the clear summer darkness, I remembered a night—a night at Aurora, a night with Bernadette, when she had spoken to me as if I were one of the grown-ups. Five women, along with me, had traipsed down to the lake nearby to go swimming, though it was late in the summer and the air had turned crisp and smoky with the coming of autumn. The leaves crackled, and the dry earth crunched beneath our feet. When we got to the lake, my mother and three other women went skinny-dipping, hooting and flipping around in the dark water like pale seals. They looked unreal in the moonlight, shiny and full-bosomed, high on something, though no one had been drinking. I had preferred to stay dry and fully dressed with Bernadette by the side of the water. She smoked a dark, European cigarette and watched the women with a mysterious smile. She spoke, and although I sat nestled beside her bulky warm body, it seemed she was talking more to herself.
“Right now, they think it’s as simple as this. They think they’ve found some kind of utopia here. But just wait. Once they meet a man, all their defenses go to hell. Can’t trust them for shit once a man walks in the room. I’ve seen it before.”
Her words had made me uncomfortable, and I wanted to tell her that my mother wasn’t like that, wasn’t the same as the women she was talking about, but instead I picked at my shoelace and watched the women come toward us up the bank, laughing and shivering together, their lips nearly blue.
So this was what Bernadette had warned me about. Jim was throwing everything off. I said to my mother, hoping to strike a nerve: “I can’t believe you would risk it all for a man. Typical.”
