by Danzy Senna
I turned away from him, onto my side, smelling the damp earth. Something about his story reminded me of Jim, of his talk of Jamaica. Something about the way Jim talked about his time there always set my teeth on edge.
I ripped up grass in tufts and sprinkled it on the ground before me. Carmen used to say to my sister that white boys were trouble. She said they might seem nice at first, but they can never forget your color. It’ll come up sooner or later, and then you’ll see that they always saw you as a black chick—a curiosity, a dabble in difference—nothing more. I thought of Dot and what my father had said about her, that she liked those ofay boys who just wanted their thirty minutes of difference.
I felt Nicholas behind me, pulling me over toward him, onto my back, so that I was looking up at him. I felt dizzy from the glare of the sun behind him, the loud hum that seemed always to be there, coming from the forest, like a faint electric buzz, but from some invisible power source. I closed my eyes, feeling his breath against my face, a pendulum swinging at the base of my belly, and the prickling sense that something was about to happen.
Then I felt it, wet and grainy against my face, like a dog’s kiss, but not a dog. It was Nicholas’s tongue against my cheek, and I opened my eyes to see him chuckling over me.
“You have a mustache.”
“Shut up,” I said, rolling over to hide my stinging eyes. I tried to get up, but he pulled me back down.
He whispered, “I like it. It makes you look dirty, like I could lick you clean.” Then he laughed and rolled away, holding his stomach, while I stood up and wiped the butt of my jeans.
By the time we got back to his house, it was already five o’clock. No cars were parked out front. The house stood empty.
“Well, I guess I better get going—” I started to say.
He shook his head and made a face. “Aw, come on, Jess. Why don’t you come up and see my old riding trophies? Remember I was gonna show you them? I got them out of the attic.” He paused, then smiled crookedly. “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna bite.”
I nodded, and my own voice surprised me. It sounded quick and unsure. “Okay. I guess so. I’ll come up for a while. That would be cool.”
His room smelled sweet and mysterious, and his bedsheets were piled into the shape of a body. I had never been up to his room before. We had kept our relationship confined to the stable or the television room. I sat perched on the edge of his bed, while he threw laundry into a closet hamper. He seemed slightly embarrassed to have me there.
I picked up a comic book beside his bed, Tintin in the Congo, and began to flip through it. He sat at his desk across from me, strumming the same notes over and over again on a guitar. The sun was going down outside, and I could faintly hear Pudd’nhead barking in the woods behind the house.
I recognized the tune Nicholas played as a Fleetwood Mac song, something from my mother’s music collection. He hummed gently to himself, curled over the instrument so that his hair covered his face. I pretended to read but really watched him.
Finally he looked up at me and asked, “Do your mom and Jim smoke pot?”
“Yeah, of course.”
He laughed. “Shit. That’s awesome. Your mom’s pretty cool. You’re lucky. My parents are old fogies. Tight asses. I can’t wait to get away from them.”
He pulled out a plastic baggie with weed in it and said, “Wanna join me?”
Though my mother and her friends had been smoking pot around me since I was little, I had never gotten high before. My mother wouldn’t have let me, and besides, it had always seemed boring—a grown-up game, like drinking—and hadn’t interested me. But now, looking at Nicholas’s hands, I said sure, as if I had done it before.
Nicholas sat deep in concentration, methodically crumbling the leaves into the paper, then rolling it, licking it.
He lit the joint, taking a long puff. Then he handed it to me, saying in a raspy voice, “Go ‘head.”
I did, and coughed. He laughed and came to sit beside me on the bed, showing me how to do it better. I felt my head grow lighter after the second puff and wanted more.
When we were done with the joint, Nicholas began to tickle me under my arms and on my stomach, and I shrieked uncontrollably, flailing around wildly on his bed. Before I knew it, he was straddling me, his knees pinning my arms down. I panted beneath him, still giggling from the tickle attack. But he had stopped smiling.
“Jess, how old are you, again?”
“Going on fourteen.” As I said it, I reasoned that it wasn’t exactly a lie. I was going on fourteen, only next year instead of this one. Besides, we had discussed my age once before, and if he didn’t remember, it was his fault.
“That’s pretty old,” he said, swaying slightly from side to side. He looked dizzy, like he might topple over at any minute. He had smoked most of the joint.
He slid down so that he was lying on top of me. He was heavier than I thought he’d be. He kissed me quickly on the lips, tentatively. “Is this okay?”
I didn’t answer. I was thinking about Alexis. Once I had bitten her neck so hard that there was a mark in the morning. When her mother asked her where it came from, she told her I had pinched her during a game of Chinese torture.
Nicholas kissed me again, wetter this time, probing my mouth with his tongue. His mouth tasted of cigarettes. He pulled out my ponytail rather roughly and held a tuft of my hair in his hand. He ground his pelvis into mine and slid a cold hand under my T-shirt. I jumped at his touch on my nipples.
We necked for a while, him rubbing my flat chest and pressing his groin against me, while I played with his hair and kissed him back and tried to feel something. It was difficult. With Alexis I had always been the one on top, the one doing the groping and the grinding, the one doing what Nicholas was doing. I wasn’t sure how to act now that I was on the bottom. After a few minutes, he took my hand and gently led it toward his shorts.
“Touch me,” he whispered in my ear.
It was warm and hard and soft all at once, and he guided my hand over it. The tip was moist. I felt a slight tingling between my legs, the kind I had felt with Alexis. His breath was coming out quicker, and his hand guided my hand quicker and quicker over his penis. Then he put his hand behind my head and began to push it down, in the direction of his crotch. I heard him whisper, “Suck me, Poca.”
I panicked and jerked out of his grip.
He closed his eyes and furrowed his brow, making a pained expression. He said in a tight voice, “You want to stop?”
I liked kissing him. But touching him felt too real, proof that the game had gone too far. It wasn’t Birdie, but Jesse, who lay beneath him, who held him in her hand, who made his eyes turn all glassy and his breath come out uneven. I nodded that yes, I wanted to stop. I wondered if he’d think I was a baby, or a crazy dyke, as my mother had put it about the women of Aurora. I wondered if he’d ever kiss me again.
But then he smiled crookedly, back to his old self. He tweaked my nose. “That’s cool. Let’s just hang out, Poca.” He wasn’t mad at all, and his features looked pretty. Watching him, I felt a warm flush on the surface of my skin. I wondered if I was in love.
He rolled off of me.
“You kiss pretty good, Jess. Where’d you learn to do that?”
I picked up the Tintin comic that had fallen on the floor, and hid my face behind it as I said, “With this friend of mine, Alex. We used to make out all the time.”
“Never went all the way, though?”
“Nah. I left town before it went that far.” I wondered, as I said it, if it was possible for two girls to go all the way.
He sat up and rubbed his eyes roughly, as if trying to stay awake. “Hey, you want some more weed? My folks aren’t back yet.”
I felt pretty high already, but said, “Yeah, sure.”
We smoked a half of another joint, and soon we were laughing over the pictures in Tintin, tears streaming down our cheeks. The pictures were horrible, making the Congolese into hideous ca
ricatures, but I laughed anyway at the absurdity of it.
“They’ve made us look like animals,” I said, holding my belly, my vision blurred by the tears of laughter. I cut up again, pressing my wet face into his sheets. They smelled good, and I breathed in.
He giggled into his hand and said, “You said ‘us.’ You said it made us look like animals.” The hilarity of my statement sent him into hysterics, and he rolled over, silently quaking beside me. Finally he looked at me sideways through his slittish red eyes. “Shit, maybe you could be colored in the right light. Better stay out of the sun.”
I felt a constriction in my chest as he spoke, and turned onto my stomach, hiding my face into his dingy gray pillow. It didn’t smell so good all of a sudden.
He lit up again and took a long toke of the joint. He held his breath as he said in a raspy voice, “All right. Get this one. I heard it at school last year. When they’re born, what’s printed on the inside of every black baby’s lip?” He was holding his breath, sucking in deeply to get more out of the hit.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t think I could talk.
He let his breath out finally, and I heard him say, “‘Inflate to five thousand.’”
He didn’t laugh, just hawked spit loudly and sat up quickly to spit it out the window. “Shit, this stuff leaves a taste in your mouth, huh?”
My breathing was coming out funny, in irregular wheezes, like my father’s when he had an asthma attack. He used to make me walk on his back at moments like that, “to push the air out.” Cole was too big and too heavy to do it. At the time I was the perfect weight. It must have made a strange picture. My father, all six feet of him, lying flat on his stomach across the linoleum kitchen floor, while I did a kind of cake-walk up and down his spine. I felt useful then, listening to the air come out of his chest, the relief in his voice when he hugged me to him afterward, saying, “You saved my life again, Doctor Birdie.” It was a little routine with us. And I would answer, “Anytime, Professor Lee.” I felt important, as if only my body could give him air at those moments. I would be too heavy to do it anymore, and I wished I had my own little seven-year-old girl right then to walk up and down my spine and push the air out.
“You all right, Jesse James?” Nicholas said. “Why you breathing so funny?”
I peeked up at him. He smiled slightly, and pushed some hair out of my face. “I was just kidding about you looking colored. I mean, you don’t look it at all. You’re—” He paused, then turned his face away as he said, “You’re pretty. You’re gonna look really hot in a few years. I mean it.”
His compliment stung, and I didn’t say anything, just stared at him blankly. It reminded me of my grandmother, when she would stroke my hair and say what a “lovely child” I was. Even then, her compliments had struck me as sinister, though I hadn’t known why at the time. I had known only that Cole was the girl I wanted to look like, Dot was the woman I wanted to look like, and if my grandmother couldn’t see their beauty, she must be blind.
I wanted to be outside, near Mr. Pleasure, where I could breathe. Before Nicholas’s jokes, I had believed I was falling in love. Now the feeling in my chest—the dropping—had turned to a kind of soreness. He looked stupid all of a sudden, like a golden retriever, his blue eyes vacant and naïve, a boy who had been around the world but at the same time had been nowhere. I felt older than him, though I was only twelve.
Just then I heard a car come rolling over gravel into the driveway.
“Fuck,” Nicholas said under his breath.
I wheezed, still feeling high and slightly paranoid from the weed. “I better go. They’re gonna find me in here and tell my mom.”
He put a finger to my lips and said, “Shhh. Just calm down. Who cares? Your mother won’t give a shit. She smokes all the time herself. Just wait here for a little while, until you come down a little. Then I’ll walk you home.”
We stayed on his bed, beside each other, both of us silent and looking at his ceiling, where there were glow-in-the-dark constellations. In the afternoon light they were just pale-green stickers.
Finally Nicholas’s voice cut into my thoughts. “What are you thinking about?”
I snapped out of it. “Nothing. Just wondering where he is.”
“Where who is?”
“My father.”
He shrugged. “In heaven, I guess. If you believe in heaven.”
I laughed. “Yeah, in heaven. I bet it looks like Brazil. Lots of beaches and pretty women in tiny bikinis.”
“Huh?” he said, turning toward me.
I turned my face away from him so he couldn’t see my expression. “Never mind.”
He seemed to accept my answer and threw his arm back over his eyes. I spied on him like that. Only his mouth and the tip of his nose showed from under his arm, flung like a blindfold. His arm was flecked with golden hairs, and his skin had browned from the summer rays, so we were almost the same color. His mother was right. We could have been brother and sister.
After a while it seemed he had fallen asleep. His mouth went slack, and his breathing came louder, more regulated. My own breathing had stabilized, my lungs had opened up, but the room felt small and cramped all the same.
I said softly to the ceiling, “Can I tell you a secret?”
He shifted beside me, making a soft noise in the back of his throat, like a word, but something untranslated from its dream meaning.
I was trembling and I held the Star of David to keep my fingers steady as I said, “I’m not who I say I am. I’m someone else. I mean, I guess what I’m saying is, this isn’t really happening to me. The Jewish thing. It’s a lie. It’s this story we tell to people because if they knew the truth they might figure out who I was, who my mother really was—”
He sighed heavily and turned toward me, throwing his heavy arm across my chest, nuzzling his face close to my neck, so that I could feel his breath against my cheek. It smelled sweet and smoky from the pot.
“Bridge suppa melting for…” he murmured, his eyes still closed.
I said, “Huh?”
“Pumkin cellar…” he said.
Then he was snoring, deeply gone somewhere else, where Bridge suppa melting for made sense.
I gently pushed his arm off of me and slid off the bed.
I tiptoed down the stairs. Libby and Walter were out on the back porch. There was a chance I’d be able to slip past them unseen. They both held tumblers of some brown liquor that looked like Scotch. They had their backs to the house. The glass sliding door was open.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I heard Libby say, “Why would Sheila need to hide anything from us? I’m sure it’s Jesse who’s telling the fibs, Walt. Kids do that.”
I froze where I stood against the wall. I was still reeling from the joints we had smoked, and the hallway’s hardwood floor appeared angled, like a funhouse room.
“Perhaps,” Walter replied. “But it did give me the creeps to hear two completely different family histories like that. We never did check references from Sheila. You just took one look at her and said she was our kind of person.”
“Oh, Jesus, now you’re going to blame me,” Libby groaned. “You said the same thing. You said, ‘She couldn’t be more perfect.’ And she is. She pays her rent on time and adds a little color and culture to this hideous little town. And if she has some skeletons in her closet, so be it. I mean, you don’t go around announcing that your aunt is a lesbian dog trainer, do you, now?” She paused, and I could hear the ice clinking around in her glass. “Hell, maybe the grandparents are shady, and they’re simply embarrassed to tell us the truth. Or maybe Jesse just doesn’t know her grandparents. Maybe Sheila was disowned for marrying a Jew.”
Walter shook his head. “I don’t know, something just doesn’t feel right.” He took a gulp from his glass. “Did you take the salmon out to thaw?”
“Christ, you’ve asked me that five times already,” Libby hissed. Then the two began to bicker about how they would co
ok the salmon, in the broiler or on the grill.
I tiptoed to the front door and slipped out, making sure not to slam the screen behind me. Then I took off, racing through the woods as if there were dogs at my heels.
ashes and elbow grease
I avoided the Marshes for several weeks. Instead, I reverted to childish games, lolling around the house, cheating on myself at endless games of solitaire, and watching soap operas with a tub of ice cream on my lap. My mother took notice and seemed concerned that I wasn’t friends with Nicholas anymore. I had been putting off telling her about my screwup with the grandparent story. I feared she might do something crazy, like pack us up in the van in the middle of the night and move us to a roadside motel, or find some way to intimidate the Marshes into silence. I also knew it was just a matter of time before I had to tell her.
I finally got up the nerve while I stood on my head on the lawn one afternoon. It was two weeks after the incident. The coast was clear to talk. Jim had taken his Buick into town to get an oil change. He wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. My mother had just come home from the professor’s office and had stripped out of her denim skirt and clogs and into her Tai Chi uniform. She stood poised a few feet away in a frozen karate chop.
“Mum, just in case somebody asks, what should I tell them about my grandparents?”
She didn’t move an inch from her position as she spoke: “I thought we discussed this. Your grandparents on David’s side are dead. They kicked the bucket years ago. They were old Zionists. You know, back-to-Israel types, whom David rebelled against by marrying me. And my parents are still alive. My father worked as an executive at a textile company. Grandma was a housewife.” She moved slowly, gracefully, into another position. Then added, “Keep it simple.”
The upside-down world was making me nauseous, and my head was beginning to get sore, so I let my body fall onto the soft earth.
“Why?” my mother asked then, moving rather abruptly out of her Tai Chi position. She turned to face me. “Did somebody bring it up?”
I stood and looked at my big grubby sneakers. In a guilty mumble, I told her then what had happened at the Marshes’.
