Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  When I was finished, I braced myself for her whirlwind response. But she just sighed. “Shit. It’s my fault. I should have trained you better. I just knew you were getting too cozy over there.”

  I looked up at her. She seemed only slightly anxious. Her mouth was fixed into a little point, but basically she was under control. She raked a hand through her hair. “Well, it’s not the end of the world. I’ll just have to do some damage control.”

  She bit her nails, and I could see her mind clicking away. After a moment she snapped her fingers. She said that if they asked, she’d simply explain that I liked to fantasize about my Jewish grandparents because they had rejected me while they were alive. “They hadn’t wanted David to marry a Gentile, and you spent your childhood cut off from them. Now that they’re dead, you’ve created this fiction. And as for my parents. Hmm. I’ll say they did the same thing. They were old anti-Semites who also rejected you, and you built up all these fantasies about them. Got it?”

  I nodded, impressed by how quickly she had thought up a ruse. But still it struck me that she didn’t seem as worried as I had been. In fact, she seemed fairly jovial about the whole thing. Once upon the time this would have been enough for us to disappear.

  She started to go to the house, but stopped and turned toward me. She smiled slightly. “I told you they were out to get me.”

  I continued to keep my distance from the Marshes until a few days later, when Jim sent me over there to get some lighter fluid. My mother wasn’t home to stop me. She was at the professor’s office. He was almost finished with his research, and she was working long hours, transcribing taped interviews into a computer in his office. It was the end of August, and I figured Nicholas was getting ready to go to Exeter. I had hoped to forget him, but when Jim gave me an excuse to go across the woods, I skipped the whole way, slapping the mosquitoes on my arms and legs and trying to suppress a pang of excitement at the thought of seeing him again.

  I let myself in the front door. It was cool and dark inside, and there was a faint smell of burning sugar. It was strange to me how their house never seemed to get hot like the rest of the world, even on the most simmering summer days. It always felt damp and cloistered, hidden from even the sun.

  I found Libby in the kitchen, reading a cookbook while she pared an apple for baking. The news crackled from the radio on the windowsill. She looked at me over the tops of her glasses.

  “Jesse, darling! We haven’t seen you in ages.”

  I stood in the doorway, shy suddenly. “Jim sent me over. Do you have any lighter fluid we can borrow?”

  “Sure, sweetie. Let me go get it out in the garage. Nicky’s outside. He’s got a few friends here from school. He’s leaving soon, you know.”

  I heard faint laughter. It came from the backyard.

  Libby said, “Why don’t you go say hi? I’ll get the lighter fluid for you.”

  I bit my lip. I didn’t want to see him suddenly. I didn’t want to meet his friends. Libby frowned, sensing my hesitation, and shooed me out with her arm. “Oh, don’t be silly. Go! He’ll be thrilled to see you.”

  Out on the porch, the sunlight sparkled against the light beech wood. There was a bowl of grapes and a couple of open cans of Coke with flies sitting on the rims. Playing cards were sprinkled across the deck from some abandoned game, and Nicholas’s stereo played Cat Stevens from his second-story window onto the lawn below. On the grass, Nicholas was playing a lazy game of Frisbee with a boy and a girl I had never seen before. None of them noticed me standing there. Nicholas had his shirt off and a bandanna tied around his head. He had his back to me.

  I approached them with my arms crossed, shivering, though it was warm and there wasn’t even a breeze. I could see that the other boy had beady eyes and a weak chin and wore a T-shirt that said “Choate” across the front. The girl was pretty, though, in a blond sort of way. She wore a white halter top and cutoff shorts with frayed threads that brushed her thighs. She had small breasts and long, gazelle limbs. As I got nearer I could see that her body was coated in a kind of golden down that glittered under the sun. I wished I had dressed better. I wore dirt-stained dungarees, my old pink Converse high-tops, and a yellow T-shirt with the word “Jujubes” across the front that I’d found in a pile at the Salvation Army a year before.

  “Hey, you,” I said, and Nicholas whipped around, letting the Frisbee sail past him.

  He grinned, and all my anxiety floated away. “Pocahontas! Where’ve you been?”

  He loped toward me. His chest was all burned in splotches from the sun. He was blushing, and smiling a little bashfully, as if he had been caught in some shameful act.

  Behind him the girl had begun a series of cartwheels across the lawn, while the other boy had picked up the Frisbee and was throwing it to Pudd’nhead, who chased it with his tongue slapping against the wind.

  Nicholas turned to his friends and called out, “Justin, Piper, this is Jesse.” Then back to me, he muttered, “They go to my school.”

  The girl, Piper, sidled up to me, smiling. She said in a scratchy voice, “Oh, you’re the little mystery girl Nick told us about. He said your mom’s really cool.”

  I kicked my sneaker into the grass and grunted, “Yeah, I guess.” She put her hand on Nicholas’s shoulder and rested one leg against the other like a stork. Then whispered to him, eyeing me up and down, “Oh my God. She’s so skinny.” Then louder to me: “You’re so skinny. I hate you!”

  Nicholas rolled his eyes at me, but I could see he found her amusing.

  She leaned forward then, her hand outstretched toward my neck, and I jerked backward. But she was only trying to touch my Star of David. As she held it, her fingers tickled my skin, and I was afraid she’d see where the star had left a green tinge to my skin. But she didn’t seem to notice and wistfully said only, “My best friend, Abbie, is Jewish. I went to her bar mitzvah last year.”

  I corrected her: “Bat mitzvah.”

  My mother had explained the difference to me one night while we drove through the darkness. She had said that I would never have a bat mitzvah, since I wasn’t a practicing Jew. Just a cultural one.

  Piper blushed slightly. “Whatever.”

  I ignored her and turned to Nicholas. “Well, I was just going to borrow some lighter fluid from your mom.”

  He frowned and scrutinized my face, then said: “I’ll only be around for a couple more days. Come see me before I go, okay?”

  I nodded, but I knew I wouldn’t. I felt slightly dizzy, a tingling all over the surface of my skin. The girl had moved behind Nicholas now and had slipped her arms around his waist. “Nicky,” she whined, “you’re such a liar. You said we were gonna get to take the horses on a trail ride. You promised.”

  He blushed as she slapped her hands in a drumbeat against his flat belly.

  I heard Libby shouting to me from the porch, “Jess, doll, I have your lighter fluid.”

  As I turned and walked away, I heard the girl, Piper, say to Nicholas: “She’s adorable. I think she has a crush on you.”

  THE NIGHT BEFORE SCHOOL was to begin, I lay twisted in the sheets, sweating, trying to control the constriction in my lungs. The clock glowed 2:45 A.M. There were only five hours left before my first day of school, and I wished Nicholas had given me some secret blueprint for surviving this place. I hadn’t gone to visit him before he left, but he had come to see me, to say good-bye. He had found me in the barn picking a rock out of Mr. Pleasure’s hoof. The rain made a peaceful pattering noise against the barn. I had felt him behind me and turned to see him leaning against the stable door. Beyond him the clouds hovered close to the earth, like a wet blanket, intensifying the sweet, musty horse smell of the stable.

  We didn’t talk long. Just a few minutes of quiet, shy banter. He had tugged at my braid before he left, and said, “Little Miss Poca. You’ll be fine.” He had paused before adding, “Just don’t get too comfortable.” Then he had turned and jogged away with his head bowed down against the rain
, until he was swallowed by the moist tangle of ash trees.

  It would be my first time in a real school since Nkrumah, and I expected the worst. I knew my reading and writing skills were probably okay, but I had essentially missed four years of math and science. Even at Nkrumah I had been struggling to keep up.

  A noise came from the hallway. The door cracked open, and a blade of yellow light cut through the shadows of my room. I sat up, startled, and my mother peeked in, then made her way across the darkness of my room, wearing a thin T-shirt and Jim’s boxer shorts.

  She sat down on the edge of my bed and held a cool hand against my forehead. She looked pretty in the half-light, and it struck me that the FBI might not even recognize this tall, slender, and elegant woman with the copper hair and the tortoise-shell glasses.

  She sighed as she looked down on me, and I could see that one of her moods had crept up on her. It was in her eyes. The flicker of sadness, memory, paranoia, had spread and engulfed her tonight.

  “Can’t sleep either?”

  I shook my head.

  “Scoot,” she said.

  I moved over toward the wall. She slipped under the covers beside me and hugged herself, staring up at the ceiling.

  I asked her where Jim was.

  “In my bed.” She paused, then frowned at me. “I woke up from a nightmare and I didn’t remember who he was. I got scared. I mean, for a full minute or so I just couldn’t place where I was or who this big white man in my bed was. And when I remembered it didn’t matter—because I started thinking all these crazy thoughts about him, you know. Wondering if maybe you were right.”

  She turned toward me, onto her side, and ran a finger across my eyebrow. She said so quietly that I had to strain to hear: “You’ve got to be careful at this new school tomorrow. Kids ask a lot of questions, and kids don’t keep secrets. I’m happy here, babe. I don’t want to have to leave town again. I’m tired. I need a break from all the running. So right now, I want you to promise me to keep it quiet no matter how safe anyone seems. Got it?”

  I closed my eyes, feeling the sparks of some new emotion. I dug my fingernails into the sheets and said: “Okay, Mum. I got it. I’m the daughter of a dead Jewish intellectual. My name’s Jesse Goldman. I never heard of anyone called Deck or Cole Lee, and we never lived in Boston and you never—”

  I felt her hand slap my mouth, clamping it tight. A stinging on my lips. I wondered if there’d be a mark in the morning. I had said the names. She hoisted herself up onto one arm so she was looking down at me, her red hair hanging over us like a theater curtain. I stared up at her, trying to breathe out of my nose.

  Her eyes seemed to flow into her face. Tears. Her breath smelled faintly of beer as she hissed into my ear: “Imagine if Cole had come with us. Imagine her in this town. She would have been miserable. That fucks up a kid. Being the only one. A token. I’ve seen it happen.” She had never said this before, had never imagined what it might have been like with Cole with us. Her grip loosened, and I could breathe a little bit through my mouth.

  I pulled my face out from under her hand and panted freely, wiping my mouth.

  She went on talking in a quick breathless voice, as if she were trying to convince herself and not me: “I think she’s happy wherever she is. Your father was a good father, no matter what kind of husband he was. He adored her more than anything. Always did, from the day she was born. And as much as Carmen could be a bitch, she loved Cole too. They’re taking good care of her. I just know it—”

  “Yeah, right. That’s what you’ve been saying for four years.”

  She leaned in closer to me. “Listen, don’t think a day goes by when I don’t agonize about this. About what’s happened. But if anyone finds out the truth, you’re going to wish you were back here. You’re going to wish you were still Jesse Goldman. I’ll be sent away—for life—and you’ll end up in foster care somewhere.”

  “Yeah? Well maybe that would be better. Maybe I’d get adopted by a normal family and I wouldn’t have to pretend anymore.”

  She shook her head. I had hoped to hurt her, but she only laughed a little and said, “You think anyone’s gonna adopt a kid as old as you? And a half-black twelve-year-old, at that? Not on your life, kiddo. You’ll be shuttled around for years, until you’re old enough to be considered an adult. Then you can come visit me in jail. And by then I’ll be a four-hundred-pound dyke with a ‘Mommy’ tattoo.”

  She started to giggle, and I joined in, despite my wish to stay angry. I had an image of her in jail, her hair cropped close to her scalp, a whale of flesh in zebra-striped jail costume. It had hit us at the same moment, and our bodies shook silently against each other as tears ran down my cheeks and into my mouth. It struck me that we hadn’t laughed this way together since we had arrived in New Hampshire.

  I heard the sound of a toilet being flushed. We both caught our breaths.

  A moment later, a shadow appeared at the door. A man, his silver hair shimmering. Jim. He pushed open the door to my room.

  “What’s going on in here?” he whispered. “Having a little middle-of-the-night pow-wow?”

  My mother sat up. I heard anxiety in her voice. “Yeah, sweetie. Jess couldn’t sleep. First-day-of-school jitters. I was trying to convince her that she’ll be fine tomorrow.”

  Jim smiled at me, squinting into the darkness of my room. “Aw, Jess. I know how you feel. I remember my first day at a new school when I was about your age. It can be hell. Waddaya say I make you some cocoa? Might help you sleep?”

  I nodded, unable, really, to speak.

  He winked at the two of us. “You two look beautiful in the moonlight. Sheila, baby, want some cocoa too?”

  She started to move out of the bed. “Sure, I’ll come down and help you in a sec.”

  He nodded, pausing for a moment. As he turned to go, he looked back over his shoulder at us, and I caught a flash of something on his face: the expression of somebody who has stumbled upon two strangers in the act of something sordid.

  When he was out of sight and hearing range, my mother turned to me and said, “Okay, Jess. Remember what I said. At school, when they ask you where you’re from—”

  I cut her off. “Are you sure about him?” My eyes were on the door.

  She paused, and followed my eyes toward the light of the hall. Then she said: “Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I mean, of course I am. Jim’s cool.”

  Then she was up and gone, toward the kitchen, to help him make cocoa.

  THEY WORE ALLIGATOR SHIRTS and chinos and Top-Siders without socks. Their hair hung ragged as if chewed around their faces. The students at the school were townies, born and raised, eventually married and mated to one another, in this same small town. My mother said their parents were the “workers of the world.” Jim said they were “decent country folk.” But neither Jim nor my mother ever made friends with any of the parents, just looked upon the townspeople from an admiring distance.

  My mother and I watched them in silence from our van. Finally my mother said, “You’ll be fine. You’ll make plenty of friends in no time at all.”

  The engine was running and the windows were sealed tight, but it was freezing inside nonetheless. The weather had turned a sharp seasonal corner, and I rubbed my hands together, feeling the sting of early morning. The heating system in our van was either broken or had never existed, so my mother carried around a ratty afghan for warmth. I had it on my lap, but it wasn’t doing much good.

  I glanced at my mother. The look I had seen in her eyes the night before, the fear and panic, had disappeared, and now she dug around in her jeans pocket for lunch money for me and sang under her breath to the music on the radio.

  After Jim had fixed us both our cocoa, he and my mother had curled up on the couch together, while I had pattered up to my room to drink mine in bed. Later in the morning, I had woken up with a dry throat, my lips parched and cracked. I had tried to drink what was left in the mug beside my bed, but it was only the muddy dregs of the cocoa
from the night before, so sweet and thick and cold that I gagged.

  My mother handed me two crumpled bills and some change. She paused, looking at me, then licked her finger and smoothed down my cowlick. “Buck up, Jesse Besse. These kids have nothing on you. You’re a survivor.”

  Then the look came over her face—the look of the before, the forgotten, the better-left-unsaid. “Think about Cole. She would want you to be brave.”

  Her words about Cole made me shiver, and I said, “You act like she’s dead. You talk about her as if she’s gone for good.”

  She started to say something: “Oh, mush…” Somewhere along the way she had shortened “meshuggana” to “mush.”

  I didn’t let her finish. I was out the door, stepping down from the van into the moist morning light, and striding toward the school, blending into the stream of bodies that flooded through the heavy red doors.

  I DIDN’T KNOW HOW completely cut off I’d been until I reentered the world that morning. I wandered through the locker room, staring in a kind of dazed stupor at the townie girls clustered around one another like football players in a huddle, planning their next move. They were the ones I had run into at the chili-dog stand over the summer, the ones who had called me a zoo animal, and watching them, I felt my face burn. I saw in their reflections the girl I failed to be, someone ordinary and alive and public, girls with one face, one name, one life. Wandering through them, I felt a yearning that surprised me. Something I hadn’t felt at Aurora. A yearning to belong to something ordinary, the same way I had felt at Nkrumah. I looked at these girls with their clownish makeup, their brassy bubble-gum faces, and felt an urge to be one of them. I saw myself from above that first day, saw with a rush of embarrassment what a strange creature I really was: a pitiful creature called Jesse for lack of a better name; a girl who dressed in oversized tomboy clothes, her hair in twin braids, who tapped her fingers against her lips in a rhythmic pattern, a nervous habit that looked like some religious tick. She looked old-fashioned to me. Like someone who has been kept in a box, missed a century, collected dust.