by Danzy Senna
But this music wasn’t disco, though the underlying tune was somehow familiar, something I had known once, long ago. The kids were grooving now, and had drawn a small audience. They were competing in acrobatic leaps and dives.
I stood up, and Mona followed me to the circle of onlookers. I clapped my hands, laughing at their expertise, and began to move to the music. Mona stood stiffly by my side, her hands shoved in her pockets. I was surprised at Mona’s transformation. She was so clearly uncomfortable, I almost felt sorry for her, but at the same time I wished she would get lost. She felt like a weight I didn’t need.
Mona slipped her arm through mine. She whispered in my ear, “Didn’t your mom and Jim want us to wait on the steps?” I was ashamed to be seen with her. I had imagined, vainly, that the whole of New York City was watching me, wondering who I was, and I wanted them all to think I was alone.
“Oh, who cares,” I said, and pulled my arm away from hers.
It was dawning on me as I watched these kids dance how long I’d been away. Six years. I felt that I had missed some great party and was now hearing about it the day afterward. A lump of disappointment and envy rose in my throat.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. My mother’s voice: “Jesse, don’t run off like that. We didn’t know where you were.”
I turned around. Jim was grinning at me and stroking his beard, amused. “You were shaking it, Jesse. Can’t leave you alone for a minute in this city, can we?”
My mother ruffled my hair, but she wore a severe look. It was a warning glance I had seen before, at Aurora, when I would start to talk to the women too much, when I would slip up and mention the earlier life. But she smiled for the sake of Jim, I suppose, and simply said, “Jess, there’s a lot of dangerous people out here. Next time stay where I tell you to.”
Jim watched the kids dancing, listened to the music for a minute, then shook his head. “Jesus, it’s like some ancient African instinct that gets these kids dancing. Unbelievable. Doesn’t sound like the reggae I used to listen to in Jamaica. But it’s still got that bass. Always got that bass.”
I looked at the ground, not wanting him to touch me.
He suggested, “Shall we get lunch? It’s already one o’clock.”
Mona and my mother groaned that, yes, they were hungry. Jim threw his arm over Mona’s shoulder and said, “Now you’re going to find out what a pastrami sandwich on rye is supposed to taste like!” As we made our way down the block, the talking music faded. I trailed a few steps behind my mother, Jim, and Mona, fantasizing for a brief moment that I didn’t know them, that they were strangers to me, that I lived in this kaleidoscopic city, and that my name was Chevell.
WE GOT LOST the next night on our way back to New Hampshire. Seriously lost. Jim had refused to stop for directions at the gas station some ways back, and now we were beyond help. No gas stations or late-night stores in sight. We were somewhere in New Haven. That much we knew. Jim had wanted to show my mother a landmark near Yale, the school he had dropped out of once upon a time. But somehow he had taken a wrong turn.
He cursed and slapped the steering wheel. My mother was silent, her head resting against the glass. Mona sat next to me, pretending to read a Teen Beat article about Deney Terio. But I could see she was distressed. She thought we’d never get back to New Hampshire.
We had been around the same set of blocks four times. The houses were run down, graffiti-spattered, and there was a huddle of teenagers on the corner, drinking out of paper bags. They must have been sixteen or seventeen, three black kids, and I stared at them as we passed by. The third time around the block, I caught one of their eyes. He wore a wave cap on his head. He smiled at me, and I smiled back and waved.
He raised something in the air then, and I watched silently as he hurled it toward me. It was a rock, and I flinched only when it hit the back windshield. The window didn’t break, but the rock left a small indentation, like a pellet wound, with little delicate cracks branching out from its center. I saw the boys laugh and turn away from us, quickly, as if nothing had happened.
Jim screeched to a halt and swore, “Holy fucking shit!”
My mother twisted around to see what had happened, and said, “Jess, you okay?”
I nodded. I was shocked, but not hurt in any way. I had felt detached watching the rock float toward us, as if it were a movie and I wanted to know what would happen next.
I glanced back. The boys were looking over at our parked car from the corner. Jim was struggling to free himself from his seat belt. He was breathing heavily.
My mother said, “What the hell are you doing? Just drive, idiot.”
“No way,” Jim said, wagging his finger close to her face. “I’m not taking that from a bunch of little fucking—” He didn’t finish his sentence. He was out of the car then and storming toward the boys on the corner, with his hands on his hips. My mother got out of the car and stood at the side, watching. She ran a hand through her hair and cursed under her breath, “Oh, Jesus, he’s stupid.”
Mona had gone pale. She looked as if she were going to cry. “Mrs. Goldman,” she called to my mother, “what’s he gonna do? Those niggers are gonna kill him.”
I punched Mona’s shoulder hard and hissed, “Shut the fuck up. What do you know?” The reaction had been automatic, and I stared at my balled fist now, as if it were somebody else’s. Mona gaped at me, open-mouthed, stunned. Then her face crumpled into a cry. I ignored her and stuck my head out the window. A few yards away, I saw Jim approaching the group.
I listened as Jim demanded to know which one had done it. The young men laughed sheepishly and looked at their feet. The one who had done it smiled over Jim’s shoulder at me mischievously, daring me to tattletale.
“Who the fuck cracked my windshield?” Jim bellowed. “‘Cuz you’re going to pay for it. Now speak up!”
“Can you believe this clown?” I heard one of the kids say.
A stocky boy with braids walked up and stood close to Jim so that they were face-to-face. “Why don’t you go home, man? You’re not in your neighborhood now. Take your little wife and your little girls and get the fuck out.”
I thought it was pretty sound advice. But Jim shoved the kid so that he stumbled into his friends, who caught him. Then I heard Jim say, “Listen, kid, don’t tell me where I belong. I used to live in Jamaica.”
There was laughter from the group, and it sounded almost jolly. But suddenly a punch was thrown. I don’t know which of the kids did it, but I saw Jim hurtling backward and falling heavily onto the pavement. Mona was sobbing, “Oh my God, oh my fucking God. I shouldn’t have come. Dennis told me not to come.”
In a matter of seconds, my mother had slipped into the driver’s seat, revved the motor, and swerved the car around to where Jim lay. The kids stood over him. “You want to mess with me, motherfucker? Pig-faced bitch. Come on!”
I slid low in the seat. I was scared, but also embarrassed. Jim looked like a fool lying there, holding his face and groaning. I didn’t want the teenagers to think I belonged with these white people in the car. It struck me how little I felt toward Mona and Jim. It scared me a little, how easily they could become strangers to me. How easily they could become cowering white folks, nothing more, nothing less. But unlike them, my mother didn’t seem frightened at all. She was back to her old self as she jumped out, stormed up to the teenagers, and dragged Jim to his feet. She said as she led Jim roughly to the car, “All right now. The fun’s over. Enough of this silliness.” The kids were still mumbling obscenities at Jim, but appeared satisfied with the one blow. They didn’t seem to know what to make of my mother, this tall white lady who didn’t behave in the least bit ruffled by their bravado. She didn’t say two words to them.
She just shoved Jim into the passenger side, got in the driver’s seat, and took off. We all were quiet as my mother zoomed toward a freeway entrance. It hadn’t been that far away after all, making Jim’s circular route seem all the more absurd. I heard Mona sniffling, bu
t didn’t look at her. Now that the threat was passed, I thought of something my father had once lectured to Cole over dinner at Bob the Chef’s while I played with my spare ribs and mashed potatoes and listened in silence. “See, baby, white boys have a primitive fixation on black men,” he had told Cole, who was busy reading a comic book under the table. “They envy black men and despise them and lust after them all at once. They want to be them, but first they have to destroy them.” He had referred to black men as “them.” He never brought himself into any of his theories. It was always about somebody else.
Jim cradled his face in his hands, and only when we were well on our way north did he look up. He glanced back at Mona and me. His top lip was cracked down the middle and was beginning to bleed.
“I swear, I try to be liberal,” he said to no one in particular. “I try really, really hard. But when you meet fucking punks like that, you start to wonder. I mean, Jesus, what did we do to deserve that? We’re on their side, and they don’t even know it.”
My mother turned to him. She wore an expression of extreme disgust. She stared at him for a minute. Then she shouted, “You didn’t have to get out of the car, Jim. How idiotic was that? Trying to be a big man for a little crack in the window. They were children. Teenagers. Pranksters. I swear, sometimes your honky ass—”
She ate the words she was on the verge of saying and turned back to the road.
But Jim had heard enough. His face was the deepest crimson I had ever seen it. “What did you just say? My ‘honky ass’? Who were you rooting for, anyway? Those ghetto thugs, or me? I mean, fuck, Sheila. Sometimes it’s hard to tell with you.”
She simply shook her head. “Jim, you’re full of shit. We’re all tired. The girls are terrified. Now let’s just get home.”
We didn’t speak. Mona had stopped sobbing and was rubbing her shoulder angrily where I had hit her. I could see, out of the corner of my eye, that she was glaring at me, mouthing some vague threat that involved the words “kick your butt,” but I didn’t bother to look. I’d think of an excuse later. Damage control, as my mother called it. I’d explain that I had been scared and didn’t know what I was doing. But for now I couldn’t talk to any of them. Instead, I watched the darkness fly by outside, the yellow of cars coming toward us, the red of cars moving away.
I HAD SECRETLY hoped, listening to them fight, that Jim and my mother would break up. I had hoped that they would finally see each other for what they really were and fall promptly out of love. But it was as if the woman my mother had exposed to him that night—the brave, loud, foul-mouthed one—had made her more attractive to him, not less.
By the following morning, they were giggling about the incident at the breakfast table. From my bedroom I could hear them talking. He was saying, “I guess I’m just a country boy trying to act city smart. But you were cool, babe, cool as a cucumber. Where’d you learn to act like that?” I heard my mother laugh, a Tinker Bell laugh that floated up to my bedroom, and I rolled over in bed, feeling a little sick.
When I came downstairs to go to school, my mother had already left for the professor’s. Jim stood at the sink, washing dishes. He turned around, and I gasped. His top lip had swollen grotesquely overnight. He laughed at the expression on my face. “That kid sure knew how to throw a left hook. I still wish your mom woulda let me at him.”
He threw a fake punch into the air and turned back to his pile of dishes, chuckling.
When I got to school, I expected to face Mona’s wrath. But she only grinned when she saw me in the cafeteria at lunch, and waved me over to her table. She was in the midst of telling a group of girls the story of our New Haven adventure. As I neared the table, I heard her say, “Those fuckin’ coons were out of control.” When I sat down beside her, she put her arm around me and said she had forgiven me for my outburst. “Jess totally freaked out and socked me,” she explained to the girls, pulling up her shirt sleeve to show us all the big purple bruise I had left her with. They oohed and aahed, impressed, and it seemed that all of them, including Mona, had newfound respect for me. Now I was not just Mona’s sidekick, but her equal.
“Jesse’s dad,” Mona continued, “he was awesome. He got out of the car and told all these huge black dudes where they could shove it.” She often referred to Jim as my dad. I’d grown tired of correcting her. The girls laughed and begged her to tell the story again.
Over the next few weeks, Mona obsessed over what had happened, and the more she talked about it, the more outrageously exaggerated the event became. One day I heard the story related back to me from a boy named Billy in my class. He said he heard that Mona and I had been attacked by a group of “crazy niggers in Harlem.” Was it true?
I tried to explain to him that it hadn’t happened that way at all. “They didn’t attack us,” I said. “Jim turned it into this big deal. And they were just kids, you know, playing around.”
But Billy had wandered off already, bouncing a basketball down the hall, bored by my version of the events. When I asked Mona why she had been making things up, she just shrugged and laughed and said, “Well, it coulda happened that way.”
By the time Christmas vacation came, I was barely speaking to my mother or Jim. They both tried, but I was sarcastic, cold, and sullen in their presence. One afternoon, my mother came up to my room. I was reading a novel and didn’t look up.
“I want Christmas to be special this year, baby,” I heard her say.
In response I mimicked something she once had said to me: “Christmas is a capitalist’s wet dream. It’s just one more chance to make poor people feel like shit.”
I looked up to check her response. She stood at the door, holding a bitten apple. Her lips were wet, and she chewed slowly, frowning. When she didn’t say anything, I shrugged and added, “Besides, I’m Jewish. I celebrate Hanukkah. Or don’t you remember?”
She pursed her lips, looked around to see if Jim was anywhere near, then hissed across the room at me, “You’re a cultural Jew. Not a religious one. And besides, your father’s dead.” She seemed tired as she added, “Let’s make it good this year, baby. It’s been forever since we had a real Christmas.”
It had been five years. The first year after we fled Boston, we had had a pathetic little celebration in our motel room, complete with a fern dressed in tinsel and dime-store presents wrapped in newspaper. After we opened the gifts (a Magic Eight Ball for me, and a bottle of Bonnie Bell bath splash for her), we had gone out to a traditional meal of turkey and potatoes served at a nearby diner for only $4.99. The only other people taking advantage of the Holiday Special looked to me like either withered escapees from a nursing home, or serial killers. I had made us leave without dessert, because I swore a young man with a shaved head and sunglasses who sat at a nearby booth was laughing at us. After dinner we had avoided going back to our motel room. Instead, we had hidden in the escapist sanctuary of a movie theater, where we saw Rocky. My mother had cheered when the other boxer had beaten Sylvester Stallone to a pulp. The other people in the theater had hissed at us, and my mother had said loudly, “Look at them, Jess. They buy this crap.”
After that, we had just stopped acknowledging the holiday. Not because I was Jewish, but because the holiday depressed both my mother and me. It had seemed designed simply to remind us of what was missing. So instead each year we’d find ourselves in a movie theater, taking refuge in the dark as some imitation of life blared down at us from the silver screen.
But Jim made Christmas different this year. He even bought a tall, crooked Christmas tree that filled the whole house with its scent. My mother and he spent hours listening to reggae and decorating it with old ornaments he had found in the basement of his cabin. He said he hadn’t had a real Christmas in years either. They both went whole hog about it. There was a growing pile of presents for me under the tree, but I pretended to ignore it.
I was out of school for two weeks for Christmas vacation, and it was hard to avoid my mother and Jim. So I spent more and more tim
e at Mona’s trailer, lounging in the chintzy squalor of the trailer’s boudoir while Mona tried on her mother’s makeup, or playing video games in front of their big fake oak television. It was a strange solace I found at Mona’s. Even as she and her mother and Dennis referred constantly to niggers and spies and dykes and gooks, things seemed clearer there. I didn’t punch Mona anymore. Instead I would smile weakly and avert my eyes and try to tell myself what I had maintained from the start: I was a spy in enemy territory. This was all a game of make-believe.
When I woke on the big day, it did indeed feel like a real Christmas, the kind I saw only on television commercials. My mother had succeeded. Fat clumsy snowflakes floated slowly past my window, and the air was rich with the smell of coffee and my mother’s famous huevos rancheros. I wanted to be immune to the holiday spirit, immune to their attempts at family, but despite myself, I felt happy, expectant, the way I used to feel as a little girl on Christmas. Back in Boston, when my parents were still married, Cole and I had always had to wait till after we had eaten breakfast to open our gifts, which made the meal unbearably long. When we did finally open them, I’d always finish first and would be forced to watch, with itching fingers, while Cole took her time, careful not to rip the paper. They often gave Cole and me identical gifts, but in different colors. Usually they got it wrong, mixed up our favorite colors, and I remembered Cole leaning forward over our new matching shirts and saying: “Hey, you got the purple one. Purple’s my favorite. Here, let’s trade. You can have the red.”
