by Danzy Senna
Something else changed in New Hampshire, something I never told anyone for fear of being called crazy and sent away, like a girl I had seen on an after-school special. It was simply a sensation I had at times, when I experienced a sense of watching myself from above. It happened only occasionally. I would, quite literally, feel myself rising above a scene, looking down at myself, hearing myself speak. I would gaze down at the thin girl sitting by the fence, the one with her brown hair falling into her eyes, drawing patterns in the dirt, and watch this girl with the detachment of a stranger. And in these moments I would notice things about myself, about my body—the faint dusky mustache that made me look dirty in the wrong light; the bunions on my feet that twisted my toes inward like sad, beaten dogs; the remarkable length of my fingers; the knobby knees; and the flat feet. I saw these things as neither beautiful nor ugly, but simply as facts. I would look at my own body the way that I looked at another’s. I would think, “You,” not “I,” in those moments, and as long as the girl was “you,” I didn’t feel that I lived those scenes, only that I witnessed them.
SHIATSU CRIMSAY PETULAAA. I whispered the words to Mr. Pleasure. The barn was dank and dark and seemed the safest place to remember, the safest place to practice the language that was becoming harder and harder to speak lately. I had been coming here a lot since Jim had entered the picture. Just to be alone. Just to be away from them. Here I would tell Mr. Pleasure the real story of my father and sister, repeating the same cold facts over and over again as if to convince myself that they had existed. I told Mr. Pleasure about Cole’s face and body, her curling hair, ocean-green eyes, and cocoa-colored birth mark. The way her breath felt against my back when I lay beside her. Cole hadn’t faded on me. She was still clear as sunlight—her face, her hair, her smell.
I felt someone behind me and turned, startled, out of my trance. It was Nicholas, his hair falling into his eyes. He had strawberry patches on his cheeks like a Rugby player. He wore cutoff Army fatigues, a powder-blue polo, and Top-Siders without socks. It was the first time I’d seen him since our drive home from town that day, though I’d thought of him many times.
“Who are you talking to?” he asked, a laugh spilling from his lips.
I felt my face heat up. “Nothing. I mean, nobody. I was singing a song.”
“Strange song,” he said, loping up to me.
“Yeah,” I said, standing up to his level. I wiped my dirty palms against my Toughskins. “You want to ride Mr. Pleasure?”
“I was thinking about it. But if you were going to—”
Our conversation fuddled on from there, and before I knew it I was being hoisted onto Mr. Pleasure and then Nicholas was behind me, his hands brushing across my sides as we rode out into a glare of green and blue.
He said, his lips brushing my ear, “So, why did you and your mother leave upstate New York?”
“Just ‘cuz. My mother didn’t like it anymore.”
“Is it because of your dad? I heard he died. How’d he die?”
I wanted to get off the horse all of a sudden. I remembered my mother’s face as she drilled me one night in a putrid-smelling motel bathroom. Trust nobody. I mean, nobody. You are no longer Birdie Lee. You are Jesse Goldman, and your father was a professor of classics who died suddenly last year. I’m his widow. He was Jewish, dark, and that’s where you get your looks. Repeat after me…
Nicholas’s question rung in my ears again.
“Jesse? Earth to Jesse…” He leaned forward and let his chin brush across my shoulder. The horse had stopped now to graze, and Nicholas loosened Mr. Pleasure’s reins. “So, aren’t you going to tell me? How’d he die?”
I craned my head to look at him. “He died of a brain aneurysm. He was a genius. He thought too much and it affected his brain.” That was a new one. I hoped it wouldn’t show that I was bluffing.
“Oh, bummer,” was all Nicholas said. I could tell he didn’t know what a brain aneurysm was. That was why my mother had chosen that disease. She didn’t want me to have to elaborate on anything, and she figured kids wouldn’t ask questions if the disease sounded complicated. They wouldn’t want to show their ignorance. She was right. Nicholas switched the subject. “You’re funny. My dad says he thinks you and your mother are running from something, but he doesn’t know what. Is it true? Are you running from something?”
I froze. Then forced a laugh, harsh and throaty, as I said, “No, what do you mean? My mom didn’t want to stick around. It was too painful, you know. All those memories of my dad. He was writing a book when he died. He never finished it.”
After I had said it, I liked the sound of my story. It sounded dramatic—tragic. I repeated some lines I had heard in a movie: “He died really suddenly, thank God. You should have seen the funeral. Tons of people came and wept.”
Nicholas sounded impressed. “I’ve never known someone with a dead father. That must be weird.”
I picked up Mr. Pleasure’s reins and clicked my tongue. Mr. Pleasure began to walk back toward the barn. “Yeah, it is weird.”
Inside the barn, we tied up Mr. Pleasure, and Nicholas ruffled my hair and said, “I think I’ll call you Pocahontas.”
“Why?” I asked him, unbuckling the thick leather strap of the saddle.
“Because you turn all brown in the sun. Like a little Indian.”
He was standing behind me, and stepped closer then, so that I could feel his breath tickling my neck.
MY MOTHER DISAPPROVED of the time I spent with the Wasps across the forest and said that they were “seductive sons of bitches” and that I should be careful. When we decided to move to New Hampshire, she had envisioned me coming of age with tough farmers’ daughters, and it irked her that I had chosen the town’s one upper-crust family to make my own. But given her love affair with Jim and my continuing suspicion of him, she couldn’t exactly scold me. Instead she teased me about my growing friendship with the Marshes, saying, when we were alone, “It’s your blue blood coming back to haunt me. I thought I had washed it all out.”
Nicholas was my entrée into the Marsh world. Although he was fifteen, three years older than I was, we both were outsiders in New Hampshire. I was on the verge of joining the exposed world, having been hidden for so long. Likewise, Nicholas was only biding his time in this small town, waiting till the summer ended, before joining his ilk at boarding school. He had been going to private schools and boarding schools all of his life and had no relationship really to the other kids in his town. I became his entertainment until the real show began.
At Nicholas’s encouragement, I spent most afternoons just lounging around the Marsh house, pretending it was my own. His parents were fascinated by my mother and me and seemed to like having me around to amuse them with stories. They told me to consider their house my second home, and even gave me permission to enter without knocking.
One time when I had barged in to visit Nicholas, I passed the kitchen and heard my name mentioned. I hid behind the doorjamb, peeking around at them from the darkness.
Walter said, nursing a tumbler of red wine, “Well, she’s a saucy kid, eccentric, you know, but awfully well brought up. I mean, I just can’t figure them out. The mother hasn’t a penny to her name, but you get the feeling she should.”
Libby, flushed and bent over a steaming vat of pasta, agreed. “I know what you mean. They’re a funny pair, but they both just reek of class.” She pulled a strand of linguini from the pot and said, dangling it on a fork, “Taste this and tell me if it’s done, sweetums?”
I liked the sound of it—“reeks of class”—and felt a surge of pride. I knew my mother would say they were classist fucks, old-money snobs, but for me it meant that they liked me, that I could keep coming over to be near Nicholas.
Sometimes, when I was with the Marshes, I would secretly imagine I was the daughter they never had. And sometimes I got carried away with my fantasy and would start talking differently, affectedly, trying to imitate Libby’s long nasal drawl, and using expre
ssions I had heard Nicholas use, as if they were my own. Fuckwit. Loser. Awesome. Bummer. Neither Nicholas nor his parents seemed to notice, but my mother would, later, when I came home talking that way, and she would sneer and say, “What the hell’s got into you?”
IT WAS LATE into the summer. Nights grew darker faster, a prelude to the fall. Libby and Walter sat on their back porch, sipping iced tea and reading, while Nicholas and I brushed Mr. Pleasure on the grass. The air was quiet around us except for a crackling baseball game coming from Walter’s transistor radio.
Libby, sprawled out on a deck chair and wearing a broad straw hat, broke the silence. “Jesse’s got such classic features. Almost old-fashioned. She looks Italian. Wouldn’t you say, Walt?”
Walter, lying stretched out beside his radio with a Boston Red Sox cap balanced over his face, chuckled. “Hmmph. Yes, she does. She reminds me of one of those Byzantine icons, you know, the ones we saw in Venice.”
They spoke about me as if I weren’t there, as if I were painted on a wall over their heads, to be observed and studied, never touched. Nicholas smiled at me from over Mr. Pleasure’s back and rolled his eyes.
Every time he looked at me I felt a tingling in the base of my belly and I would catch my breath. I liked to look at him sometimes when he didn’t know he was being watched.
Libby sat up and began to brush out her hair, then tied it in a knot so it sat in a messy bun at the nape of her neck. She watched me and Nicholas for a moment with a slight smile. “You kids could be brother and sister. Don’t you think they could, Walt? It’s uncanny.” I grinned back at them, as if I were posing for a camera. She winked at me, then went on, “Oh, by the way, Jess, I saw your mother yesterday, shopping on Green Street with her new friend, that Jim Campbell.”
There was a pause, the parents waiting for me to elaborate on my mother’s new relationship.
I muttered, “Yeah, they’re going out.”
Libby smiled. “That’s wonderful. I’m glad to see she’s not lonely. This can be a lonely town if you don’t chew tobacco.” She giggled. “Well, tell her we’d love to see more of her. She’s very private, isn’t she?”
“Oh, yeah, I guess since my dad died she’s been that way.”
“Of course. It makes perfect sense. Such a tragedy. That must have been so awful for the two of you.” She paused, peering at me over the tops of her reading glasses. “Do you look much like your father?”
I glanced up at her. “Oh, kind of, I guess. Except his hair was curlier.”
I thought of my father’s hair. He had kept his afro short. It wasn’t nappy enough to get really big. Cole’s hair had been nappier, and she could pick it out into a real afro, the kind that had always eluded my father. My father tried growing it big one year and it looked funny. Someone—I think it was his friend Ronnie—patted it, giggled, and said, “Man, you got a Jewfro!”
“My dad had a Jewfro.” I blurted it aloud without really meaning to.
Libby blushed, and said, “Oh, I see….”
I wished I hadn’t said it. She was no longer smiling. Walter sat up then and looked at me as well over the tops of his reading glasses.
“Jewfro,” Nicholas repeated, clearly liking the sound of it.
Libby said, “So, tell me, Jesse, do you have a lot of family in upstate New York?”
I nodded. “Oh, yeah. I have a grandma. A grandpops. We’ll probably go see them at some point. My grandmother makes some killer matzo ball soup. It’s delicious.”
Libby laughed. “I’m sure it is. What about your mother’s parents? Are they still alive?”
I stroked Mr. Pleasure’s soft nose. I felt a cool drop of sweat roll down from my underarm. I knew I should change the subject, but couldn’t think how. I no longer could remember what my mother and I had agreed on. So I just said, “They’re dead. I never met them.”
Libby was rifling through the newspapers and seemed distracted as she said, “Oh, yeah? Sorry to hear that. What line of work were they in?”
“Um, my grandfather was a high-school history teacher. And my grandmother was a”—I fumbled—“a beautician.”
Libby nodded vaguely. I had lost her attention. She was deep into an article. But Walter was frowning at me, stroking his chin. “Hmm,” he said. “That’s odd. I thought your mother said her mother was still alive. And I believe she said her father was a businessman. I could have sworn—”
I laughed a loud false laugh. “Oh, yeah, right. He did both. Grandpa ran a business, but he liked to teach too. He was a really talented guy.”
Walter and Libby exchanged perplexed looks. I had blown it. My mother was going to kill me, if she didn’t go to prison first.
I needed to get out of there, out from under Walter’s pale-blue gaze. Nicholas was bent over on the other side of Mr. Pleasure, trying to get a stone out from her hoof, and seemed oblivious to the mounting tension. I said to him, “Nicholas, let’s go riding. Anywhere. Now.”
WE RODE for more than an hour, until the insides of my thighs were chafed raw. My panic had subsided, and I tried to put the Marshes out of my mind. I’d let my mother use me if she had to. She could say I was still getting over my father’s death and had been coping with it by telling lies. She could tell them I was crazy if she needed to.
The sun was setting, suffusing the land in a peach glow, and the heated swelter of the day was turning into something crisper, something fed by shadows. The pain on the insides of my legs had turned numb, but I didn’t want to go home just yet, to the kitchen where my mother was seated at the butcher-block table, tutoring a dyslexic boy from another town, and where Jim was building a bookshelf in the living room and sucking on a joint. I wanted to stay here, amid the trails that wound through the forest behind the library.
Nicholas promised me there was an amazing field just beyond the woods. We were mostly quiet for the ride, and I took in the land around me—the patches of moss (a strangely artificial bright green), the tangle of brown limbs and thick brush that surrounded our path and tickled my bare arms, the hum of insects, and the rustling movements of unseen animals. It reminded me of Aurora and brought me back to that place in a flash of memories—the smell of freshly baked bread and soybean stew, the curve of worker women in the garden outside, picking vegetables before dinner, while two female forms—my mother’s long golden one and Bernadette’s thicker and shorter one—sprawled naked and snoozing on the back porch. Things had been less complicated there. Everyone there had had her own secrets to keep. Secrets were respected.
We were coming to an opening in the cloistered spruce forest, a broad green expanse of land that Nicholas had promised me was his own private spot. There was no one around for miles, but it was a clear day and you could see the town in the distance—the top of the Unitarian church, the billboard of the bitten red apple, the town green with the American flag. From this distance it looked like somewhere I might like to live.
After we had tied the horse to a tree, Nicholas jogged off toward the center of the field and began spinning in circles, his head tilted toward the sky, his arms spread out. I approached him, grinning, my arms crossed over my chest. He was laughing and making himself dizzy, and I just stood with my hand over my mouth, giggling along until he finally fell into the soft earth. He threw an arm over his eyes and lay there, breathing heavily. I sat down next to him and hugged my knees to my chest.
“Hey, Jess?”
“Hmm?”
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Have you gotten laid yet?”
“Huh?”
“Are you still a virgin, or what?”
I had done some strange things with Alexis at Aurora. Some nights, on the mattress we shared, I had straddled her in a game we called “honeymoon.” She would say, “You be the guy, and I’ll be the girl. Pretend you have to hold me down. Pretend you’re the boss.”
And I would hold her down and rub my body against hers, my face hot and moist in the croo
k of her neck, while I felt a sharp pleasure that turned to melting between my legs. Afterward I always felt a little bit nauseous and would pretend to be asleep so she wouldn’t talk to me. She had wept when my mother and I left Aurora (the only one besides Bernadette who seemed sorry to see us go). She had stood at the edge of the road, watching us as we drove away, and we could see her—a tiny speck of orange hair—for a long time. My mother had glanced at Alexis’s diminishing form out of the rearview mirror and said as we sped off, “Jeez, I think that Alexis really fell for you.”
“Yeah, I’m a virgin,” I said to Nicholas.
“I figured you were,” he said. Then blurted out, “I’m not.”
I lay down next to him. “I don’t believe you.” I wondered what girl would sleep with him at an all-boys boarding school. He was only fifteen, after all.
But he insisted, saying, “Well, believe it, Poca. Me and a couple of kids from school went to stay in Amsterdam last Christmas. One of my friends’ mothers is this old drunk who lives in this amazing house on the canal there and does a lot of drugs with her German boyfriend. So anyway, hookers are legal there. I mean, you can just buy ‘em off a fucking window display. And we went out one night, got totally fucked up on hash, and bought one.”
He was quiet.
I was curious. “So, what was it like?”
He said, “Well, kinda weird. She was this fat black chick from Africa or something. They have white girls, too, and some Chinese girls, but they cost more than we had. I heard that black girls were supposed to be good, anyway, so we bought this one. It was all right. We all took turns with her. She just lay there, looking up at us with this blank expression. But if you closed your eyes you’d kinda forget about it, you could pretend you were somewhere else. She was okay, though. I don’t remember her face much.”
