Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  Dot was quiet, and I continued to shovel the food into my mouth—tasting its salty richness, but more intensely, tasting a metallic panic. I pretended to be too hungry to speak, and bowed my head, glancing up from time to time to smile greasily and say, “Yum.” Dot would smile back slightly, twisting her own daughter’s hair around a finger, and say, “Eat up, girl, just eat your food.” I hoped if I took long enough to eat, she would forget to ask me where I had been, where I was going. That the question in her gaze would disappear, turn to something else. But it continued to sit there. I tried to remind myself that this was family. That this was the woman who had always loved me, who had loved me from the start, as I was.

  When mere was no more food on my plate to devour, I wiped my face and sat back in my seat. “That was so good, Dot. Thanks a million. I was ravenous.” I heard the anxiety in my voice and felt a cool trickle running from under my arm down the length of my side.

  Dot whispered in Taj’s ear, “Tajikins, why don’t you go watch television? Mami wants to talk to Birdie alone.”

  A song was stuck in my head, a song that reminded me of Jim’s burly red and silver form, a song I couldn’t shake. You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.

  Taj made a face and sucked her teeth, but slipped off her mother’s lap without comment and went skipping down the hall. I could hear the little girl turn on the television. I wanted to go join her, to spread myself out on the sofa and watch cartoons all day long.

  Dot folded her arms across her chest. She looked older, I could see now. There were crows’ feet creeping out from the corners of her eyes, and small smile lines around her mouth. But she was still the same Dot, perpetually young in some way that would never be altered by time. I studied her, noticing for the first time our similarities, the invisible genetic twists that had skipped over my father and come to me through Dot. She had my wide shoulders and flat chest. My big, misshapen feet. And my exact fingers. Long, delicate fingers. Piano-player fingers, like wands, with big bony knuckles, only hers were the color of coffee, mine of café au lait.

  I drummed the table with those fingers, a crazy beat, for a minute, looking around the kitchen for something to catch my eye, until Dot laid her hand on top of mine.

  “Bird, where in the hell did you come from? You look like you haven’t eaten or slept in forever. Look at you.” She frowned. Then asked, “Does your mother know where you are?”

  I tried to look casual, smiling as I patted the corners of my mouth with a napkin. My mother’s training came back to me as it always seemed to in times of need. How to be crooked. How to tell a lie.

  “Oh, yeah. She knows where I am. She’s the one who bought the bus ticket.” I waved my hand in the air, enjoying my own story. “You know how my mother is, so spur of the moment. She told me just the other morning that she thought I should find you. Of course, it was too dangerous for her to come with me, but she’s hoping I can find Cole and Papa. That’s why I’m here. To find them. My mom was sad and all that, but she said not to worry. When I found Cole and Papa, we’d be together again. She said to give you her love.”

  I looked at Dot and smiled, and I could feel how fake my smile was, how plastered on it must have looked to Dot.

  I forced a giggle, saying: “Oh, Dot, let’s not get into all of that right now. My life’s a big bore. Now I want to hear about you. Where did this child—”

  She cut me off again. “I don’t think your life’s boring at all.” My game was up. She knew what she was dealing with, and the warmth she had greeted me with was gone, replaced with a kind of clinical concern. I regretted lying. She stood up then and said in a soft voice, the kind nurses use to subdue mental-health inpatients, “Listen. I have to take Taj to a recital she’s in. Why don’t you take a nap? Just sleep. Until I get back with Taj. Shouldn’t be too long. And I think you need some rest, honey. Just till I get back.”

  Gently she led me by the arm into her bedroom. I didn’t want to be left alone, and asked her if I could go to the recital with them. But Dot insisted that I stay and sleep. I had another flash of panic—wondering if she was going to get the cops—but then exhaustion took over and I didn’t care. Just as long as I could sleep for an hour or two before they brought me to the police station. I changed into a white nightgown that she gave me, leaving my grubby clothes in a pile by the closet, then slipped under the sunflower-yellow comforter.

  She leaned over me, and her dreadlocks tickled my shoulder. She kissed me on the forehead. “You better be here when I get back. I’m still not sure you’re for real, kiddo.”

  Taj came in behind her, a small spot of red and silver at the door. She was scratching her knee. Her costume was falling apart, the tinfoil W curling down at the corners. “We’re gonna be late for the recital. I’m gonna miss it.”

  They left me there with cheery, concerned good-byes, as if they thought I’d escape, as if I had somewhere else to go. The apartment was quiet when they were gone, so quiet I could hear the faucet dripping in the kitchen. I looked at the clock beside the bed.

  Ten-thirty.

  My bedroom door would be wide open by now, my mother would be standing there. Her first thought: My child was raped and left for dead by that Dennis boy. Second thought: No, the Feds got her in the night. Came and took my baby right from that bed. They’re going to use her for bait, going to use her as a negotiating tool. Then the third thought, and the tears would have begun to fall now as she saw that the box of negrobilia was missing. That the Golliwog was missing. She’s run away. She’s gone and left me. She doesn’t want to play make-believe anymore.

  Or maybe she would find me there, in that bed—-the other me, Jesse Goldman. Hung-over, giddy from the kiss last night, thinking only of how she wanted to call Mona and turn the party over and over in giggling whispers. Or perhaps Jesse was planning to run across the woods to the Marshes’, where she would fall into Nicholas’s arms and smother him in real-girl kisses. She would be as golden and casual and free as a prep-school girl. Maybe I was still there. It was too strange to think that Jesse Goldman was really gone, that I had erased her in just one night.

  I felt salt dribbling into my mouth—my own tears—and used the back of my hand to wipe them away, then curled over and clenched my teeth to stop them. I could smell Dot in the pillows. Everyone had a scent. This one was like my mother’s—some faint perfume that seemed to emanate from the bodies of all mothers. I wondered if Cole missed that smell. Strange not to have a father around, but even stranger not to have a mother. I felt a chill, suddenly, as if I could, for the first time, feel Cole’s loneliness being channeled through my own body. She missed our mother. She cried herself to sleep every night for years before she hardened, grew to understand that her mother was never coming back. But the sore spot never left her, the wound in the center of her body as if something had been ripped clean away. If I closed my eyes I could see it: Cole lying on a cot in a hot Brazilian favella, the smells of food from some other family, some other mother, reaching her through the air, and sisters laughing together beyond her small window. I wasn’t sure if the image had been a psychic explosion or if I was simply making things up again.

  THE LIGHT HAD MOVED when I woke several hours later. It lay higher on the wall, and the clock beside the bed read noon. I couldn’t remember what I had dreamed, only a vague sense that I had been falling through the air. My mother had told me that if you wake before you hit the ground, you’ll be okay; if you hit the ground first, bad things are coming. I couldn’t remember whether I had hit or not.

  I was lucid, though, feeling none of the usual confusions of waking in a strange house. Corvette’s face floated in my mind, a benevolent alternative to this world, just in case Dot turned out to be working with the Feds. Braddock Park. I’d have to remember that.

  I sat up on my elbows and called out to Dot and Taj. A paper fluttered to the floor. It was a note from Dot. It said that they had returned but had
decided not to wake me. They had gone shopping for groceries and would be back soon. I got up, steadying myself, before going to explore the apartment.

  Dot’s house was poor but classy. My mother once told me that some people were born with class, some people without it, and it didn’t matter how much money you had or what your family name was. “Class comes from the soul, not the wallet,” she had said. I had asked her for examples. She told me that Dot had class; my father had class; Redbone didn’t; Jane, her old prep-school-turned-radical friend, didn’t, despite her Boston Brahmin background. I wondered as I looked around Dot’s room what this invisible thing called class was. I knew it when I saw it, but I couldn’t describe it.

  The living room was a cocoon of colors and soft light, in sharp contrast to the northern urban gloom that lay beyond the window-pane. Dot had transformed her home into a shrine to foreign lands, with bright cloths, Buddhas, masks, tropical plants, and the persistent smell of sweet and smoky incense. There was a cluster of framed photographs on the mantelpiece. I stood in Dot’s nightgown, studying the pictures one by one, the strangers that were now her life. Most were of Taj. Taj as an infant. Taj as a toddler. Taj as a terrible two on Halloween wearing a kitty-cat costume, a smudge of black on the tip of her nose. Dot nude and pregnant, a silhouette against a window, her balloon belly making me think of how my own mother must have looked. Dot as I remembered her, short-haired, skinny, at an airport ticket counter, a backpack on, smiling over her shoulder at the picture-taker. It must have been taken just as she left for India, and it was tucked crookedly in a cheap plastic frame. There were more pictures stuffed in behind it—photographs yet to get their own frames. Pictures not to be seen.

  I pulled them out. The first one was of a handsome Indian guy holding Dot around the waist on a couch. Dot’s hair is in a short afro and she wears next to nothing—a pair of underwear and a white tank top, the dark stain of her nipples showing thorough the thin mesh. She’s laughing. The man is looking at her with a lusty grin. I felt embarrassed by the secrecy of their smiles, and turned to the next one. It was an old sepia photograph I had seen once before—of Dot and my father as children outside of a tenement. My father is about ten, Dot about seven, and they hold hands, looking a little haunted and destitute—like welfare kids. It struck me, looking at them now, how different they were from each other. My father’s mocha skin beside Dot’s dark chocolate; his mixed features, hers clearly African; his hair curly and loose, hers nappy and stretched into tight braids. Neither of them ever spoke of their father. I wondered for a moment who he was, this man who could make multicolored babies out of one woman’s dark body. I turned to the next photograph.

  For a brief moment I thought it might be some of Dot’s friends from India. It looked hot, wherever it was—hot and Third World. But then I looked closer. It was my father and Cole—and Carmen standing next to them. In the picture, Cole looks angry, pouting, suspicious of the photographer, the way she often does in pictures. Her clothes are ordinary, more American than I would have expected—shorts and a halter top and sandals. She’s rolling her eyes at something my father’s saying. He appears to be waving his hands expressively, and has on a white button-down shirt with short sleeves and a wide collar, jeans, sandals. An outfit I would place in the late seventies. He looks sunbaked, darker than I’d ever seen him, dark and happy. Carmen is squinting at the camera and has her head wrapped high in a yellow cloth. She wears a long lime-green dress. She’s put on weight.

  My hands trembled as I held the picture.

  I started at the sound of jingling keys in the front door.

  I turned around, holding the picture behind my back. I half-expected to see two white men in suits. But it was just Dot, and Taj behind her, carrying a bouquet of daisies. She ran up to me. “My teacher said I stole the show. We got flowers and food to cook for dinner. Are you better now?”

  I looked over at Dot, who rested a grocery bag on her hip. “What’s up? Did you just get up?”

  I nodded. “Just taking a look around.”

  She looked behind me at the row of pictures. Then said, “Did you find the one of Deck and Cole? In Brazil?

  I gulped, surprised to hear their names spoken so openly. I held out the photo in my hand. “Yeah, I found it. Sorry. I was snooping.”

  She smiled. “What else would I expect from Sandy’s little girl?”

  She said no more. I followed them into the kitchen and placed the photograph face up on the kitchen table while I helped them unpack the groceries.

  She was quiet for a while, then she turned to me, nodding as she said, “Yep. That’s them, all right. My incredible disappearing brother. Taj, go change out of your costume. And wash that stage makeup off your face.”

  She turned on the small radio on the counter, a jazz station. Then handed me the perishables and told me to put them in the fridge.

  I did as I was told. The photograph lay still on the table, begging the question.

  Finally I barked it out, with my head submerged in the white glaring glow of the refrigerator: “Where are they, Dot?”

  She held a can of soup in her hand as she shook her head. “I don’t know, hon. Haven’t heard from them in years—not since 1977, when I got a letter and this photo from Bahia, Brazil, saying they were doing just fine. I lost track of them. I moved to another part of India, and I did send them my new address, but I never heard from them again. I have no idea where they are. We lost touch. I don’t know what else to tell you, Bird. I just don’t know.”

  I had been traveling without a plan until this moment, not knowing what I was going toward, only what I was leaving behind. That was my mother’s method. Her way of living. But now the disappointment I felt made it clear to me that I had been expecting an answer. I had been expecting six years’ worth of letters for me here at Dot’s, stamped from Brazil, letters that had never found me in New Hampshire, letters addressed not to Jesse Goldman, but to Birdie Lee.

  And not finding these letters, I felt pitiful. I wanted Dot to tell me it was going to be okay, that Cole and Papa were on their way back. I wanted lies, sweet lies. Good lies. Lies made the world go around, my mother had taught me that.

  I wondered what my mother was doing right now. I could see her supine on the sofa, her arm draped tragically across her eyes in old-movie-star fashion, while Jim paced before her, wringing his hands, trying to stay cool. He would want her to call the cops, to report me as missing—a logical solution to the problem on their hands. And she would laugh harshly, never exposing her eyes, and remind him, through gritted teeth, that she couldn’t call the cops. “Don’t you realize? The cops are the fucking bane of my existence. Did you miss that part of my story? They’d just love for me to call them so they can throw my ass in the slammer. So I can pay for my goddamn fucking sins against the system.” And as she spoke, Jim would see that piece of her that leapt out at certain moments when alcohol or emergency were involved. The piece of her that had once stored ammunition and had talked about making pig meat of the Boston Police Department, pig meat for her dinner. He would see that she was bigger and braver and crazier than he had ever been himself. And he would see what he had gotten himself into, and feel a little dizzy.

  Dot stood before me, arms akimbo. “Now,” she said, “I want some answers.”

  WE SAT CROSS-LEGGED, facing each other on her futon, while I explained to her, in as vague terms as she let me get away with, that I had been living on the road for six years with my mother. I told her about our life on an unspecified women’s commune, and about our life in an unspecified small Northeastern town. I told her that my mother was still on the lam, living under a different name. She listened quietly, and her expression was not as impressed or excited as Jim’s had been that morning after he found out. She looked more concerned, more parental, more knowing.

  I waited till the end to tell her that I’d been living as a white girl. Jesse. A white girl who wasn’t even Jewish at the end of the day.

  She was quie
t. I hugged my knees and looked sideways at the man in the picture beside her bed. Taj’s father. Dot’s guru. The same man whose image seemed to be everywhere in this house—the man who seemed to watch us, crinkly eyed, seductive, enlightened. He had deep brown-red skin and straight black hair.

  When I looked back at Dot, she took my hand and squeezed it. We let my words, my secrets, dance in the air around us. Let them settle on her, and it seemed that in telling her, I had grown a little lighter. Once spoken, the secrets seemed to lose some of their weight. The secrets that had owned me seemed to become my own all of a sudden—my history lesson to play with, to mold, to interpret and revise as I pleased. I wondered if my mother had felt this way when she told Jim.

  Dot leaned back on her elbows and said, “Well, shit, Birdie. You went right into the belly of the beast, didn’t you? Your mother took you for some ride.”

  She was twisting a dreadlock around her finger and thinking, her gaze turned toward the ceiling. She seemed to be calculating something, and finally she said, “So, why’d you run away? Why’d you leave?”

  I looked at her. “I don’t know. New Hampshire was—” I had let the state slip. Not the town, but the state was specific enough. I touched my hand to my mouth and shook my head. Damage control. “I mean—”