Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  “Hold your horses,” I called back. “I’ll be right out.”

  I came outside smiling, composed, and we made our way over the grass together toward the chili-dog stand, flicking our feathered hair in unison, like a strange flock of birds.

  AT THE DAIRY QUEEN, we all sat huddled in our favorite booth with our drinks, making a list of boys we liked. Just as we were scratching off a name, the bells on the door jingled and we looked up to see who it was.

  Samantha had been away all summer. Someone had mentioned that her family had rented a house on Cape Cod and that she wouldn’t be back until high school began. Now, in the neon lights of the Dairy Queen, I saw that she was back with a vengeance, a new person, as she came striding through the door with her head in the air.

  She looked like an “After” picture from a magazine makeover. She must have discovered lotion over the summer because her skin glowed, cinnamon brown, no longer ashy gray. Her hair was still a little confused, half-nappy and pulled into a high ponytail, but it didn’t matter. We all were speechless for a moment as she made her way to the counter and asked for a strawberry milk shake. Nora tagged along behind Samantha like a mad scientist with her creation. She was still bespectacled and skinny, but she now wore her hair in a feathered bob, and also a halter top just like Samantha’s.

  In the past, Samantha had tried to camouflage her skin in dark colors. Now she stood before us in a hot-pink miniskirt and a light-blue halter top. Her body, we all could see, was at least as developed as Mona’s—she had pert, small, but undeniable breasts. We had never really seen her in this light before. She had always worn layers to cover up the back brace for her scoliosis. Now the brace was gone, and she stood revealed, no longer embarrassed by the flesh she had discovered.

  She wore too much makeup. So did the rest of us, but the heavy makeup was more visible on Samantha because it didn’t match her skin color. Didn’t match mine either, but my mother wouldn’t let me go overboard—she had told me I looked like a tart and wiped my face with a dish towel.

  It was the way Samantha looked sideways, batting her eyelashes at the pimply teenage clerk, that let me know she meant trouble. Samantha once had been just a dark shadow, taking up space but not attention in the halls of the junior high, eternally depressed and weighty. Now she seemed determined to be seen.

  When they got their milk shakes, Samantha and Nora walked past us without so much as looking our way. They sat outside in the sunlight at an umbrella table, sipping their shakes.

  I was the first to speak. “Samantha’s—different.”

  I wasn’t sure how I should judge this change, and looked to Mona for leadership.

  Mona looked angry, dejected. She fixed a glare at Samantha through the window and said, slowly, “She looks like a hooker, if you ask me. God, I wonder what happened to her over the summer.”

  Dawn agreed, wiping the chocolate off her face with a napkin. “I know. I don’t know what she’s trying to prove. So she’s got tits. Big deal. She shouldn’t dress like that.”

  I bit my lip and looked at my friends. I didn’t say anything and went back to sucking my milk shake.

  THE BLACK KID, Stuart, was short and boxy, but good-looking enough, with a strained, pleasing smile and a distinctive girlish laugh. His running-back position on the football team deflected any trouble he might have gotten into as the only black boy in the school. In fact, the other boys seemed to look up to him in a way. They called him “Bro” and talked in mock slang to him, but he seemed used to the flak and would just laugh nervously and answer them in his tight New Hampshire accent.

  At first the other kids shoved him toward Samantha, saying, “There’s a girl for you, man. Look at her, man. She’s a hot mama.” But Stuart and Samantha seemed mutually disinterested, if not repelled by each other. In fact, they actively avoided each other, as if proximity might cause them to combust. Stuart wanted only Marcy, the chubby blond cheerleader, and Samantha was immediately transfixed by Matthew, the thin-lipped and freckled junior with an identical twin brother named Michael.

  Over the course of the year, she became Matthew’s girlfriend, in a way, though she always walked behind him when they were at school. He treated her with ambivalence, feeling her up in the hallways, talking down to her in public. I heard that one day at football practice he came into the locker room and had all the boys smell his finger, sayings, “Want a sniff of Samantha?”

  The other boys, meanwhile, would snap her bra then run away hooting, whip her with their gym towels, make mooing noises and licking motions with their tongues when she passed them in the hall. And Samantha would frequently laugh along, a nervous laugh that bounced and echoed down the halls of the school.

  The girls ignored Samantha with an active distaste. But none of them hated her with Mona’s vengeance. Samantha not only received the attention which Mona craved from the boys, but also she was a majorette in the school band, a position Mona had wanted. Samantha was a wizard with her baton, and could do elaborate twirls and throw the silver wand what seemed to be miles in the air. Mona sought her revenge in nicknames for Samantha. Besides “Wilona,” she called Samantha “Chunky Monkey,” “Big Butt,” and “Samanthapantha.”

  Mona liked to make up stories about Samantha and then recite them in public, where she would pretend they were the gospel truth. She said that Samantha had given the whole high-school football team blow jobs in the locker room after the big game. That Samantha had a night job as a nude dancer in a strip joint in Concord. That Matthew and Michael traded off having sex with her, pretending that they were both Matthew so that she wouldn’t know the difference. Mona’s favorite was that she had seen Samantha get picked up after school one day by her pimp, a “huge black guy with a gold tooth and a Jheri-kurl.” When the other kids laughed and said they didn’t believe her, Mona would pinken and look to me for confirmation. “Right, Jesse? It’s true, huh?” And I would just laugh, a hollow laugh, and look away.

  plastic bubbles

  Jim came into the living room and slumped down beside me on the couch. I stuck my nose in a book and ignored him. My mother was out at a student’s house. Mona was in Saturday school detention. It was one of those rare moments when I couldn’t avoid being alone with him.

  Lately he had been stepping up his campaign to befriend me. I had resisted him for the past year and a half, and wasn’t going to stop now. But it was getting difficult. He brought back comic books and fancy fudge from Boston for me each week. Whenever my mother refused to buy me new clothes, he was the one to sneak me off to the mall in the next town over. And I had to admit that he was the one who had gotten me up to speed on my math and science. He had taught me real science to supplement my mother’s quackery about maggots. Jim stayed up many nights, bent over the kitchen table beside me, showing me the basics of algebra with a steady patience. It often struck me in those moments that my own father had never paid this kind of attention to me. But instead of making me warm to Jim, this fact somehow made me angry and more resistant to his efforts.

  “So, kiddo,” he said, spreading his legs out before him. “Whatcha reading?”

  I mumbled, “Ethan Frome.”

  He was batting around a throw pillow, tossing it in the air and catching it. “Want to go out for a ride or something?”

  I looked up at him. “In your car?”

  “No, silly girl. On the horses. You know, show me some of those trails you’re always disappearing to.”

  I shrugged. He’d been trying to get me to do something father-daughter for a while. I had to face the music sometime. Now was as good a time as any.

  It was late November. The air smelled of burning wood, and the sky was a billowy white. I took Mr. Pleasure, Jim took Coffee. I led him to the trail that Nicholas had taken me on that strange afternoon. I hadn’t seen Nicholas in more than a year; after his summer in Paris, he’d gone straight back to boarding school to begin his junior year. I had remained remarkably pure over the past year. I told myself I was wa
iting for Nicholas, but really, I wasn’t sure if that was it. Mona had slept with several high-school boys over the summer, pretending with each of them that she was a virgin. She said she thought it would make it more special if they thought it was her first time. But they always grew tired of her once they were finished, which left me to comfort her in a sea of snot and tears.

  Jim rode behind me, talking loudly about how important I was to him. “Jess, I know this has been hard for you. Your father’s death. This move. And now me.” I dug my heels into Mr. Pleasure to quicken my pace, but Jim was right behind me.

  “But I just want you to know, I’m here for you guys. I’m not going to abandon you. You two are my family now. The first I’ve ever had.”

  I was embarrassed. I wished I had never agreed to go out alone with him. His words made me feel sad, defeated. The closer I got to him, the more foggy my memory of my father became.

  “You’re a tough cookie, Jess, and you’ve kept your mother going these past few years. You got her through the grieving. But everything’s going to be okay now.”

  He came up beside me on his horse then. I hadn’t even realized I was crying, but when he looked at me, I knew my face showed something I had been trying to keep secret. He looked terrified. “Jess, what is it? Did I say something?”

  I wiped my cheek angrily. “But you don’t understand. You can’t be my dad. I already have a dad. And he was a whole hell of a lot cooler than you. Besides, we were doing just fine without you.”

  Jim stiffened and looked away. I could see he was hurt by my words. I felt guilty and wanted to take them back. I knew how easy it would be to succumb to his gentle silly love, to let him be my father the way he wanted to be. But I couldn’t. Something in me resisted.

  We were quiet on the ride back. My mother was waiting for us in the kitchen. She had cooked a huge feast of rosemary roast potatoes, lemon chicken, and asparagus. She wore a green apron with a Budweiser slogan across the front and her hair in a loose bun. An open bottle of red wine sat on the table beside two long blue candles. She was smiling, flushed, happier than I had seen her in a long time.

  She had planned the whole thing. She had wanted Jim to break through to me so that we would be one unit. It took all my strength to tell her I wasn’t hungry. Her smile disappeared, and she looked behind me to Jim for answers. I went up to my room and flung myself on my bed with my arm over my eyes. I lay there for a while, listening to their muted voices, the clinking of silverware, and reggae music coming from downstairs. I wanted to go join them. I was hungry and lonely and tired of fighting. But I stayed there, listening to my stomach growl and waiting for night to come.

  At some point my mother brought me up a plate of food. I took it without saying thanks and set to eating greedily while she stood over me, watching me with a pained expression. She whispered, “You know, you could show him a little compassion. He’s trying his hardest.”

  I shrugged, keeping my eyes on the food.

  “Anyway, I just came to tell you the good news. We were going to tell you over dinner. We’re going to New York City in a few weeks. The three of us.” When I didn’t look up or even respond, she said, “God, you’re becoming the worst kind of teenager. It’s revolting, really. You used to be such a great kid.” Then she left, stomping heavily down the stairs.

  After I finished devouring my dinner, I set the plate on the floor and lay back down. I thought about New York City, feeling a tingle of excitement despite my desire to remain indifferent. It would be my first time out of New Hampshire in a whole year and a half. I had visited New York once when I was little and my parents were still together. It was a place I never forgot, although I was only six at the time. We had visited a cousin of my father’s named Josephine—a short, round woman who lived in a Harlem brownstone. That weekend a group of bashful, grateful men slept on her living-room floor. Only later did I learn that she was running a safe house. The men had seemed fun, and one of them, a tall, gentle man with acne scars and tired eyes, had taught Cole and me how to play gin rummy. I don’t remember ever once touching the pavement that weekend. It seems that I saw New York only looking down from above, the small peppering of miniature bodies on the sidewalk, the bright-yellow cab roofs weaving in and out of one another like a herd of buffaloes.

  The next morning at breakfast, they both acted normal. Jim cheerfully explained to me that it was a business trip—a computer technology conference to discuss the wave of the future.

  “Boys with their toys,” my mother said, rolling her eyes. She always acted slightly put off by his computer consulting business, but we both knew that we were living off the spoils, so she couldn’t complain too much.

  A part of me believed he was taking us to New York that weekend only so he could entrap us. I imagined he wanted to get us far from home so he could have us arrested away from the eyes of prying neighbors. I agreed to go only if I could bring Mona. It was partly just for the company. But also I wanted a witness if anything shady happened.

  So two weekends later we drove in Jim’s big Buick, and I watched the world transform outside my window. Mona had never been to New York City—she had been on only two trips in her life, one to Niagara Falls and one to Somerville, Massachusetts, for her great-uncle’s funeral. She transformed on the drive from the brassy teenager I knew to a wide-eyed and silent child. It seemed that the farther we got from New Hampshire, the younger she became, so that by the time we entered New York she was leaning forward in between my mother and Jim, pointing at the high-rises that greeted us, and shouting, “Holy shit, look at that building. Oh my God. This is craaaazy.”

  As we drove through the Village, I was quiet. I was feeling something else as I watched the blur of strangers go by. Coming into New York was like being brought back to civilization after years on a desert island. I scrutinized the city people with a kind of hunger, eating up their wild styles and furious features, faces that unearthed some part of me that had been buried for so long. My mother was quiet as well, and while Jim chattered on to Mona about what was what, I could see that my mother was pressing her hands against her purse to stop them from trembling.

  We stayed at the apartment of an old friend of Jim’s, a dancer with a picture of Billie Holiday over his bed. He was away on tour for a stage production of The Wizard of Oz and had lent Jim his keys before he left. The apartment was on West Twelfth Street, in the Village. Mona and I got the pullout sofa; my mother and Jim the back bedroom. That first night, Mona and I stayed up late eating popcorn and watching a television rerun of The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, starring John Travolta as a boy who is allergic to everything and has to communicate with his parents and schoolmates from behind a plastic wall.

  Later, on the pullout couch with Mona beside me, I listened to the honks and shrieks outside, feeling an anguished excitement. I wanted, suddenly, for the first time, really, to run away. I wondered about my father’s cousin Josephine. If she still lived uptown. If she knew where my father was. If I tracked her down, would she remember me? Would she take me in? Hide me in her safe house until the coast was clear?

  But instead I lay stiff while Mona whispered to me about the world out there.

  “Dennis told me there are black guys on the streets of New York that are out for white girls, and that if they catch you, they’ll sell you on the black market to a porn ring. That’s what he said, anyway. Said he learned it on 60 Minutes. I was thinking about it down at the subway stop today.”

  When I still didn’t speak, she sat up and leaned over me. Her blond hair fell forward around her pale face, and the streetlights from outside gave her a haunted look.

  “Why are you so quiet? I thought you were asleep already,” she said, looking down at me.

  I looked away. “I don’t know. Just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  I wanted to tell her. I even made up my mind to tell her right then. If my mother could have one confidant, so could I. But all I could manage was: “You shouldn’t believe
everything Dennis tells you. I mean, your mother calls him ‘that fool’ for a reason.” I heard my weak reply and wondered if it was really my mother whom I was protecting with my silence. Perhaps I was protecting myself from something more obvious than my mother’s invisible enemy—something Samantha faced every day.

  Mona laughed. “Oh yeah, Ms. Tough Gal? We’ll see about that.”

  My mother and Jim spent the next day wandering in museums, and Mona and I were forced to follow.

  But after the third room of Impressionist paintings, I tugged at my mother’s shirt. “Mona and I are going to wait for you guys outside, okay? On the steps.”

  “All right, but don’t go anywhere else. Don’t talk to strangers.”

  Outside, Mona and I bought a pretzel from the burly man on the corner. We settled on a park bench not far from the steps, and watched the people walk by us in bright-colored coats, their heads bent against the wind.

  Before long, a group of black and Puerto Rican teenagers, just around our age, came and sat on the bench next to ours. They were smoking and goofing around and had a boom box. It played some kind of talking music, the first I had ever heard of its kind, and I strained to listen, as if it held some secret. Mona’s chattering was beginning to annoy me—at first I had thought it was my imagination, but now I was sure. There was a note of fear, even hysteria, in her tone as she went on about some cousin of hers who had fed his guinea pig to his Doberman pinscher.

  I blocked her out and stared at the teenagers. One of the boys, a lanky kid wearing a Kangol hat, stood up and started to dance. He jerked his body electronically and, with the encouraging shouts of the other teens, began to spin on one of his hands, his glove the only protection between his skin and the pavement. A chubby girl with straightened and dyed blond hair stood and clapped her hands, moving her hips. Her sweatshirt had her name, “Chevell,” printed on it.

  As well as I had adjusted to New Hampshire, I had never quite gotten used to the music, or the fact that people didn’t dance. The parties the kids threw all focused on drinking, smoking, and making out. Sometimes I would try to move my body to some Pat Benatar song, or a Rolling Stones classic, and the kids would watch me and laugh nervously, saying, “She must think this is a disco.” Disco was a four-letter word in New Hampshire. One of the boys in our class even had a T-shirt he sometimes wore that boldly read, “Disco Sucks.”