Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  At Aurora, when I was with Alexis, everything beyond us became the generic outside. And we had become the inside, where I had wanted to be. With her, at Aurora, it had been okay to be nobody, to be nameless, just a blur girl who roamed the hallways of that dank farmhouse playing make-believe, because there everybody had been playing make-believe. Everything had seemed secret and intimate and playful. Here, in this locker room, with the smell of dirty sneakers, the violent clang of metal, the siren bell that rang every hour to announce the next period, and the glare of the fluorescent lights overhead, everything seemed suddenly real to me, utterly public, and I yearned to be a part of it. The visible world.

  I WENT INTO the girls’ room on my third day of school, only to find the cluster of girls from the summer standing by the open window, blowing smoke rings out into the cold air. They checked me out from head to toe. The blond girl had been the boldest, and I could see from her posture that she was the leader. I ignored them and went to pee. As I sat reading the graffiti on the wall of the bathroom stall, I heard them whispering.

  “She’s that weird chick from the summer.”

  “Yeah, the fuckin’ freakazoid.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “Fuck if I know. She looks like she’s from another planet. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I heard she lives with her mom on the Marsh land. Where that cutie Nick Marsh lives. I heard someone saw them hanging out over the summer.”

  When I came out to wash my hands, they all were staring at me with pinched smiles.

  It was the blond leader of the pack who spoke first.

  “You know Nick Marsh?”

  I turned to them, leaning back against he sink. “Yeah, I live over on his land. Me and Nick are friends,” I said. They had big hair and frosted lipstick, and one of them—a pudgy one—held a can of diet cola in her hand, which she kept sipping nervously while she eyed me up and down. I added, using some lingo I had picked up at Aurora, “We smoked together, you know, Maui Wowie.”

  I turned back to the mirror and saw the girls exchange impressed glances. One of them said, “Nick Marsh is fuckin’ hot. Totally.” The blond girl came up behind me. She wore her hair in stiff layers, and a baseball shirt with an iron-on unicorn emblem across the front. She inhaled deeply on her cigarette, watching me in the mirror through her smoke, then said, “So, what kinda music do you listen to?”

  Besides my mother’s folk and country-western, the last group I had really loved on my own was Earth, Wind, and Fire. I was glad I had befriended Nicholas over the summer. I repeated some of the groups he had played for me: “J. Geils Band. Kim Carnes. Hall and Oates. You know. Rock.”

  The girl smiled and said, “I’m Mona. What’s your name?”

  I told her I was Jesse. I had said the name so many times before, but this time it felt more significant.

  Mona glanced back at the girls. “Jesse’s an autumn. Don’t you think?”

  They nodded vigorously. I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “An autumn what?”

  “That’s your season. It tells you what colors look good on you and what don’t. You know. I’m a winter. Dawn’s a summer. I’ll show you sometime. My mom’s got a book at home.”

  I was surprised at how easily they had let me in, and stumbled after them for the rest of the day in a pleasant state of shock. I kept reminding myself that I was pretending, that they didn’t know the real me, that this was all part of the game. But I had forgotten the pleasure of sitting around a cafeteria table with a huddle of gossipy girls, popping french fries in my mouth and gabbing about who was who, what was what. There was something safe about it. It reminded me of being with my sister and Maria and Cherise and Cathy. I welcomed the company, moved with it, forward, down the corridor.

  IT WAS LATER that same afternoon that I sat beside Mona on the curb, watching our classmates mill around us. I was waiting for Jim to pick me up. My mother couldn’t come. She had to be at the university for the afternoon, helping her sociologist enter data on police bonding. So Jim had said he would pick me up and he seemed excited about it, excited to have a chance to act like father and daughter. There was a school bus in front of us, and I watched the students who were lined up to get on. A redheaded boy kept snapping a girl’s bra and then running away before she could see who had done it. A fat boy with a crew cut held a smaller boy in a headlock, while the smaller boy’s face turned redder and redder from lack of oxygen.

  Mona pointed at them and whispered their faults. “She’s a total bitch. A man stealer. And watch out for him. Pervert. He tried to finger fuck me last year.”

  I watched the kids, their faces settling behind the school-bus window. One face caught my eye, and I breathed in sharply. It was a girl I hadn’t seen before today. My books tumbled out of my hand onto the pavement, and I heard Mona say distantly, “What’s your problem?” I didn’t answer. I was staring too hard at the face behind the window.

  The girl was black like me—half, that is. I could spot another one immediately. But her blackness was visible. Deep-set eyes, caramel complexion. She looked tired, with dark bruises of exhaustion around her eyes. Her features were a jumble of tribes and unplanned unions—full lips, a tangle of half-nappy black curls that she wore pulled away from her face with a headband. She was staring rather languidly out the window, at nothing, but she must have felt my gaze on her because she looked down at me, abruptly, meeting my eyes.

  She blinked, bored, it seemed, by what she saw on my face, then sighed and put her head in her hand and closed her eyes as if to take a nap.

  Mona followed my eyes to the girl’s face and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s Samantha. She just moved here last year from Maine. She’s disgusting. We call her ‘Wilona,’ you know, like the lady on ‘Good Times.’ The boys call her ‘Brown Cow.’ She’s got tits already. She’s on the baton squad. Fucking bitch. I was supposed to make it.”

  Jim’s car pulled up just then, and I stood abruptly. “I gotta go.”

  She looked at Jim, who was waving wildly in my direction. “That your dad?”

  I shook my head. “Naw, he’s just my mom’s boyfriend. See ya.” Then I was jogging toward his car, trying not to cry, while my book bag banged heavily at my side.

  Inside, Jim’s car was comfortable, the way American cars are, with big bucket seats and the smell of cigarette smoke embedded into leather. The car didn’t really suit Jim. It seemed governmental, sterile except for the red, gold, and green beads he had hung from the rearview mirror.

  “Hey there, Jess,” he said, starting up the engine. It purred, unlike my father’s old clunker, which had spat and sputtered and coughed before going anywhere.

  “Looks like you got a new buddy there.”

  I didn’t answer.

  As we stopped at the red light beside the school bus, I craned my head up at the windows, where the faces sat in a row like stuffed animals at a shooting gallery. A couple of boys saw me staring at them from the car below, and one of them put his lips against the glass and blew so that his mouth and cheeks opened up with air. He looked like some strange form of fish in a bowl. Some other kids waved and laughed. I ignored them and searched the windows until I saw the girl again. She was looking down at me with an expression I couldn’t read.

  Our car moved forward, ahead of the bus, and we turned off onto a side street toward home. Jim was humming to the radio. If you like piña coladas, and getting caught in the rain…He turned to me and ruffled my hair. “Cat got your tongue, kiddo?”

  I shook my head. I was trembling and digging my nails, hard, into the sides of my blue jeans. Jim didn’t seem to notice and began to sing louder, with real passion, carried away by the song. If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the Cape, then you’re the one that I’ve looked for, so come with me, and we’ll escape…

  HER NAME WAS Samantha Taper. She was in the eighth grade, too. She had only one friend—a tiny white girl named Nora. Nora was the town genius, a pr
odigy who had already skipped two grades and was constantly away on math tournaments, leaving Samantha to wander the halls and cafeteria alone. The two of them were inseparable when Nora was around. Visually, they were an odd pair—a tiny eleven-year-old genius with Coke-bottle glasses and a cowlick in the back of her wispy blond hair, and a thirteen-year-old black girl who walked unusually upright because, as I would find out, she had scoliosis and had to wear a back brace.

  As I became closer to Mona and her gang over the next few weeks, details about Samantha Taper trickled down to me, and I held on to those facts, turning them over and over again in my mind, as if they would hold clues to my own disappearance. She was adopted. Only three days after her birth, she had been left on the steps of a church with a note stating her name and birthday. She had been adopted by a Quaker couple who had been unable to bear children. Nobody, not even her adoptive parents, knew the truth of Samantha’s origins. They could only imagine.

  She was smart. Not as smart as Nora, but she had made it into all the advanced classes. Her main forte was baton twirling. She was a master at it and had beaten Mona out of the prized baton-squad spot. She carried her baton—a silver rod decorated with red, white, and blue tape—at her side wherever she went, like a weapon.

  I didn’t mention Samantha to my mother. I told her about the other kids, about the teachers, about the books I was reading, but I left Samantha out of the equation. I did ask my mother and Jim one night over dinner what scoliosis was. Jim, who loved facts, loved being right, answered excitedly, “It’s curvature of the spine. Common among girls your age. Why do you ask?” I told them that a girl in my class had it, and they accepted that answer, which was true.

  I didn’t talk about Samantha, and I didn’t speak to her, either, but I did watch her with a wary fascination, glancing over my shoulder at her in the hallway, never stopping to look too closely, rubbernecking, the way one slows to look back at a freeway accident.

  Her hair especially stood out to me.

  It tried hard not to be nappy, tried hard to consider itself just a little frizzy, but I saw what was happening in the kitchen of her skull, at the base of her neck—what she tried to hide with scarves and upturned collars. I knew, watching her, that she should have either let it go natural or straightened it, but she did neither. Instead she settled for the in-between, the halfhearted frizzies with the naps in the kitchen.

  Her eyes were a color I had never seen on eyes before—a dark charcoal gray, the color of slate, of dirty blackboards. I imagined what a field day Maria could have had with her, a bottle of Queen Helene hair grease, some cocoa butter lotion for her skin, which was now so dry it appeared to be covered in a layer of dust, like the books on the Marshes’ shelves. Ash-colored, like the dead. I knew something better lay underneath. A slathering of sweet-smelling lotion would make her brown skin glow, but she seemed oblivious to this simple fact. I once caught her wetting a finger, drawing a wet line in the dust that coated her, drawing what turned out to be an X there on her gray knee, the way you sign your name through the steam in the fog of a car window. And I could see what color then lay underneath. The color of cinnamon.

  MONA LIVED IN A TRAILER with her mother, a young, wiry, chain-smoking factory worker with spiky black hair and a foul mouth. She and Mona got along like sisters—sometimes fistfighting on the bed over a pair of earrings or a tube of lipstick, other times laughing and cooking brownies together on a Saturday afternoon. Mona had a half brother named Dennis, who lived across town in a place with two other guys. Her mother had given birth to Dennis when she was only fourteen, and blamed him and his runaway father for destroying her life. She referred to Dennis as “that fool” and liked to slap him on the head when he did something stupid or bad, which was often. She had been slapping Dennis all of his life, Mona told me, and now, at twenty, he was skinny and mean with a chipped front tooth and a tattoo of a demonic leprechaun on his shoulder. He chewed tobacco, his bottom lip packed so tightly it bulged, carrying as his spittoon a Dunkin’ Donuts plastic cup filled with the swirling black liquid from his mouth.

  Dennis had dropped out of the high school years before, but he continued to hang around in the park across the street from school, selling pot, buying liquor for the underaged, and hitting on jail bait. He made me uncomfortable, the way he always found a way to touch Mona—giving her a wedgie when she walked by, whipping her with a wet towel, snapping her bra, and teasing her for “growing titties.”

  But Dennis showed up only on rare occasions, and when he wasn’t around, I liked nothing better than to escape to Mona’s trailer. My mother didn’t seem to mind that I would disappear there for whole weekends. She and Jim concluded that they liked Mona. “She’s a great little fighter. You can see that she’s struggled,” my mother said. Jim agreed. “Tough cookie. New Hampshire’s in her blood.” I didn’t know about all that, but I liked watching her mother get ready to go out for pool on Friday nights. She’d put on sparkly blue eye shadow and “vixen red” lipstick, and Mona and I had to help her slide into her skintight jeans while she lay stiff as a board on the trailer bed that she and Mona shared.

  I preferred trailer life to the world of my own house, but Mona always wanted to be at my house and thought Jim and my mother were “stoners, really fuckin’ cool.” We spent a good amount of time fighting over whose house to spend the weekend at.

  I was playing catch-up with Mona, learning how to be a girl. There were little things the women at Aurora hadn’t taught me—how to apply lipstick properly, how to stick in a tampon, how to stuff your bra with shoulder pads ripped right off a department-store mannequin.

  One lazy weekend, when her mother was out shopping, Mona showed me in the privacy of the trailer’s tiny bathroom how a real woman got off.

  She held up a bath plug. “This,” she said, winking, and snapping her Bubble Yum, “feels great against your clit.”

  I watched with rapt attention as she washed the round, flat, white plastic disk with its finlike handle and then stuck it in her underpants, with the fin sticking up into the lips of her vagina. She walked around before me, saying, “Oooh, feels good. I wear it around just for kicks some days.”

  I had always been afraid of sticking things inside me—I was still squeamish about using a tampon. Now, with Mona’s eyes on me, I stuck the object in and pulled up my panties. She sat on the toilet, watching me, her eyebrows raised. “Well? How’s it feel?”

  It felt like a bath plug in my underwear, hard and uncomfortable. But I smiled and told her it felt great.

  JIM WAS BUILDING a skylight in the living room. It was something he had seen on the PBS show “This Old House.” He said he wanted my mother to be able to see the stars from inside, even in the deep of winter. It wasn’t his only renovation on the house. Walter Marsh had given him full permission to improve the place. Lately it seemed like every time I turned around, there was something new and improved—a leaky faucet had been mended, the stairs no longer creaked, the bathroom had been retiled. And the more Jim improved our little cottage, the more he seemed to think it was his own. It had gotten to the point where he slept over almost every night. He even had a toothbrush and razor in the bathroom. Often I fell asleep to the sound of the bed squeaking behind the wall, their breaths coming faster and faster, until I heard Jim’s inevitable groan.

  I no longer whispered warnings to my mother about Jim. It was clear to me that she wouldn’t listen. I knew I had to find some kind of evidence against him if she was to believe me.

  So one morning, deep into the fall, I decided to take matters into my own hands. While they were outside doing their Tai Chi on the lawn, I crept into my mother’s bedroom. I had no real idea of what I was looking for. Just a vague sense that it was probably hidden in the closet, in Jim’s overnight backpack. As I fumbled in there, I imagined what I might find. A notepad with scientific descriptions of my mother’s and my every move. An FBI identification card with his real name on it. A Wanted poster with a crude police sketch of
my mother’s face. A book of interrogation methods. A Vietnamese child’s dried ear inside a tin box, a souvenir from his days as a murderer in the war.

  But as it turned out, his backpack had nothing of much interest in it. I did find a black diary, but when I flipped through it, I saw that there were only notes on how to renovate the house, and a couple of Bob Marley lyrics, with crude drawings of a sun and palm trees drawn around them. He was better than I thought at his job.

  The closet smelled of my mother—a mixture of the jasmine oil she wore on her wrists, plain old soap, and something sharp and mysterious that made it her own. I picked up her shirt and inhaled. As I did so, I noticed a bag underneath. It was the one she didn’t let me go through—a silver men’s sports duffel that was tearing at the seams. She hadn’t let me see what was inside all those four years we’d been on the run together. She said it was filled with “grown-up stuff.” I had never tried to look in it before, assuming it was sex devices. Now I picked it up. I wondered if there would be answers in there—answers to the questions I had asked myself so many times: Where are they? What did you do that was so big, that could make us run so hard and so long, that could make us disappear?

  Inside, it was mostly what I’d expected—a diaphragm, a photo of her and Bernadette nude, The Joy of Sex, and Our Bodies, Our Selves.

  But there was something underneath all of that. A book, at the bottom of the bag, beneath the KY jelly. I pull it it out. It was a first edition of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. I remembered my father giving it to her so many Christmases ago.

  I glanced out the window at her and Jim, now riding Mr. Pleasure and the other mare, Sky, side by side, lazily, in circles on the grass. I could hear their voices, muted giggles behind the glass. I pulled the book out and stared at it. My mother had told me she had kept nothing but the clothes on her back when we left Boston. She had told me that holding on to the past would have been a big mistake, a surefire way to get caught. But she had kept this. On the first page was my father’s inscription to her. To my slick, sly, ever-fearless Sandy—for now and forever. Missing you as we speak. Deck. I stared at the words for a while, then turned the page. An envelope fell out and floated to the floor. I picked it up and opened it.