Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  The cabby’s eyes, I could see through the mirror, were a grayish blue, and his hair was silver, slicked back into a ponytail. Barry Manilow played from his radio. He watched me, and I wondered what he saw on my face. I glanced away, down at the rip in the green vinyl seat, which revealed the dirty Styrofoam stuffing beneath.

  “You visiting family out here?”

  “Um, yeah, family. Kind of. My dad and my sister.”

  He laughed. “That qualifies as family.”

  While he rattled on about the weather, I glimpsed my face in his rearview mirror. I looked yellow, and my eyes seemed sunken, surrounded by dark-brown circles, the color of nicotine stains. I wished I looked better. I wished Mona had been there to make me up before this visit. I wished I had taken a shower at my grandmother’s, as she had offered. I looked dirty and sick.

  “Are they expecting you?”

  I felt my face flush. He knew, somehow, that I was lost. I looked away. “Of course, they’re expecting me.”

  He nodded, his eyes still on me in the rearview mirror. I changed my mind and said in a small, tense voice, “No. Actually, that’s not true. They aren’t expecting me at all. They haven’t seen me in six years. I don’t even know if they’ll remember me.”

  The driver was quiet. I suspected that he didn’t care. Truth or fiction, it made no difference to him. He had just been making small talk. But it had seemed important for me to say.

  He shrugged and said only, “Well, kid, I wish you luck.”

  The music on the radio turned to Neil Diamond. Something verging on Muzak. My palms hurt. It sounded so crazy—me coming here, unexpected. It was so clearly a bad idea. I could die here, on Western soil, so far from anyone who had ever loved me. I could become one of those girls who turns up in a Dumpster and whose identity stays a mystery for twenty years, or forever. They’d have an open file on me that some fat detective would obsess over. Staring mournfully down at my file, he’d say, “It could have been my daughter.” White girl, fourteen, flat feet. In her backpack, a box containing queer useless objects–Black Power junk from the seventies, and a Star of David, the only object that seems to make any sense. That’s all they’d know of me once I was gone: the lies of my body and the artifacts of my life.

  I had him drop me off at the corner of the street where the address had been listed. He told me to take care of myself. I gave him a big tip, and then stood on the curb, waving foolishly at him, until the car was out of sight. I turned and made my way up Brighton Street, squinting at the numbers on the houses. I found what I was looking for about halfway down, and it was the oldest and most dilapidated apartment building on the block. Its blue paint was flaking to reveal an undercoat of pink. Objects littered the overgrown lawn—a beer can, dirty diapers, the head of a black Cabbage Patch Kid, its pugnacious face dimpled with laughter even in decapitation. The block itself was bustling with children coming home from school, screeching and tugging up kneesocks, while jiggling-armed women pulled their laundry out from the rain.

  I stood surveying the house from across the street for a while, maybe fifteen minutes, looking into the faces of every man who made his way down the street, to see if he were the one.

  Finally, a white Cadillac pulled up in front of the house. Because of the reflection against the windshield, I couldn’t see who was inside, and I held my breath when the door opened. An obese white man stepped out, hiking up his sagging jeans, running a hand over his glistening bald head, and I laughed for a moment at my mistake. It seemed that every man who walked down the street—Asian, white, black, tall, short, thin, or obese—was some imposture of my father, some crude imitation that caused me to wonder if I really even remembered what he looked like. It seemed that now, in particular, his image had faded, dusted over, and I knew only the vital statistics, those facts so impersonal as to be written in a police report: black, six feet, thin, medium complexion.

  People walking by cast curious glances at me, and I hugged the coat tighter, looking away in some absurd fear of recognition. At one point, a skinny blond woman, strung out, wearing flip flops, flew past me, looking back only to shout, “Get lost, you fucking bozo!” and I watched her as she strode down the street, laughing to herself, wondering who she was, how she had come to this.

  The mist in the air remained, but the sky had brightened into a pale film, as if the sun were struggling to come out into the rain. It struck me only now that I had come this far from home. The air even smelled different. I had a twinge of excitement and fear. I wondered what had drawn my father to this particular neighborhood, the same part of the world, I recalled Ronnie telling me, where Linda had lived before she was turned in by her lover. My mother had once said that Oakland and Berkeley were haunted, always living in the shadow of some unfinished revolution. In California, she had said, even the ground moves. And indeed, as I crossed the street, looking down past the bottom of the hill to the bay, there did seem to be a sense of something lurking, not willing to die.

  I knew I had to cross the street, ring the bell, sooner or later. But I wasn’t ready; my entrance felt too sudden. I wished I had done something sensible like written a letter first, as Dot and my grandmother had recommended. I couldn’t even be sure if Ronnie had actually seen my father, and if he had, that my father still lived in the same place two years later.

  The address Ronnie had written on the napkin said apartment number one. The first floor. I stared at the nameless mailbox and buzzer for a moment before ringing. Then I waited. It seemed like forever, but when I looked at my watch it had been only two minutes. I rang again and waited a few more minutes, kicking my sneaker into the mat on the ground. There were menus hanging on the doorknob, from Chinese restaurants and pizza joints. Someone didn’t care enough to throw them out. When nobody came to the door, I turned to see the street, almost empty now, the light seeming to have dimmed considerably. If he didn’t live here, if he didn’t exist, I would be alone for the night. I couldn’t imagine going back to Boston, to my grandmother, without an answer. It would confirm everything she believed about children like me.

  I tried to imagine what my mother would do in this moment, and that’s when I decided to go around the back.

  My shoes sank into the mud as I slithered between the fence and the side of the building, trying not to rustle the branches that hung in my path. When I finally reached the small fenced-in backyard, I stood on my tiptoes and peered into a room, which was hidden only by crooked and broken Venetian blinds. It was a living room, with a television running, and a dog snoozing on the couch.

  There was another window about ten feet away, and I moved slowly over to it. It was open a crack.

  A shortwave radio on the windowsill marred my vision, and it crackled a BBC news brief in a female British accent. Beyond the radio, I could see that the room was someone’s study. I stood to full height and took a better look. A typewriter and stacks of papers and books covered the desk at the far end. There were a few framed posters on the walls, but nothing I recognized. The one closest to me was a reprint of an Impressionist painting of women with parasols at a picnic.

  Despite the chattering of the radio, nobody seemed to be at home. I had no clue whether my father lived here. It could have been anyone’s house, from where I stood. I needed to get inside. I knew if I hesitated, I would never do it. So in one swift motion I pushed open the window and clambered through.

  The apartment smelled of strong European cigarettes, the kind my mother’s brother, Randall, used to smoke on Beacon Hill. The smell was overlaid with a kind of sweet, thick, musty odor.

  On the far wall, a large bulletin board announced the words “While you were out…” in bubble letters across the top. Instead of messages, though, there were newspaper clippings tacked to the cork below, some yellow and dated from the mid-seventies, others more recent. They were on a wide variety of topics, from science articles debating gene-tissue research to Central American death squads to Soviet missiles. But the majority of the clippings
were articles about famous black people—scholars, athletes, entertainers, scientists—with select phrases highlighted in green marker and with black lines drawn from one person to the other, creating a kind of web pattern among the clippings. There were a couple about one man in particular, a notorious black scholar whose name, Chip Dewey, was vaguely familiar. One was a rave review of his latest book on race in the popular culture. Another was an interview which included a photograph of him seated in an armchair, books and degrees surrounding him. Scribbled beneath the picture in somebody’s tiny handwriting were the words “Chip the Janitor.” I wasn’t sure if it was my father’s handwriting. It was too small to tell.

  I sat down in the swivel chair at the desk. The seat was comfortably worn to the shape of someone else’s behind. The typewriter on the desk was an old-fashioned Olympus with several of the keys missing. Reams of manuscript pages littered the tabletop. A mug on the desk held the cold remains of coffee. I took a sip, and it was sweet and pale—too much milk, too much sugar. A page sat in the typewriter, blank and ready. I typed in the name “Birdie” and sat staring at the word for a moment. The house was oddly barren and impersonal, despite its messiness. Yet everything seemed to point to him. I thought I even smelled him in the air. Mothers have a particular scent, but so do fathers. My father’s was sharp and smoky and serious.

  I heard a clicking noise and looked over. The dog from the living room stood at the door, wagging his tail, watching me with a goofy smile. It was a puppy, maybe one year old. A black-and-tan mutt with long legs and oversized paws and ears. I put out my hand to him. He came to me, licking me as if we were old friends. “Is this where Papa lives?” I asked aloud. The dog just groaned excitedly before pattering out of the room. I stood up to follow him.

  The dog led me to the bedroom. It was as bare as the study had been. There were no photographs, no sign of anyone’s personal taste—just a lumpy full-sized bed with a flowery polyester comforter across it. On the night table sat a dying brown fern by the window, a half-empty glass of water, and a book about the history of Liberia. I picked up the book and turned it around in my shaking hands, flipping through it for clues. It was unmarked. I spoke softly to the dog, asking him what the book meant. He just tap-danced around me, laughing, it seemed, at my situation.

  Next I headed for the bathroom. The dog was following me now, whining anxiously as if he wanted to play. The bathroom was basically empty, except for a ratty white Budweiser towel and a roll of paper towels beside the toilet. At the edge of the tub sat an industrial bottle of cheap green shampoo and some soap-on-a-rope. I opened the medicine cabinet. There sat a large bottle of Pepto Bismol and an asthma inhaler, the kind both my father and I used. I took out the inhaler and turned it over in my hands, then looked at myself in the mirror as I inhaled from it, sucking in three times until my chest expanded and my head lightened and that familiar jittery excitement set in from the steroids. The mutt was looking up at me expectantly. I reached out to scratch his forehead, and said, “I think we’ve got our man.”

  The kitchen was small, with dirty curtains looking out onto the street, which had grown dark. The refrigerator held only a carton of milk and a can of dog food, but the freezer was stacked with frozen dinners. The orange light of the coffeemaker was on, and a ring of scalded sludge sat at the bottom. I turned it off and leaned against the counter, trying to imagine my father in this house. He had never been particularly interested in the domestic world. But he had usually had a woman to clean up after him. When he was single, it was Cole and I who scrubbed his toilet. Looking around at the apartment now, I knew one thing. It was a house without a woman. Neither Carmen nor Cole would have let him live like this.

  It was then that I heard the door open. The dog took off clicking down the hall, and I stood utterly still, coffee pot still in my hand. I thought briefly of running, jumping out the kitchen window. The apartment could belong to any old psychopath. The possibilities flashed through my mind from all the horror movies I’d ever seen. I listened without breathing to the sound of someone locking the door behind them, putting bags down, and then a man’s voice that was too familiar to be anyone else: “Hey there, Spanky. Pissing on my floor again, you dirty mongrel?”

  Then footsteps, heavy and hard-soled, coming toward me, in the kitchen, where I stood by the counter, holding the coffee pot.

  He stopped at the doorway, his lips parted, and the words just escaping: “What the—?”

  Then he was silent and we watched each other. There was no mistaking him. He was the same, only thinner, more bedraggled, with the salt just starting to creep up at the temples of his pepper hair. Dot was right. We did have the same eyes.

  Finally I managed to say, “It’s me.”

  His expression changed only slightly, a barely perceptible twitch at the corner of his mouth as he looked down at me with widened eyes. I touched my hair, self-conscious under his stare.

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. He just looked at me. When he spoke, it was quietly, almost a whisper. “I told her you’d show up sooner or later. I told her.” Then, after a pause, he cracked a slight and sad smile and said without much enthusiasm, “So, welcome home.”

  He came to me with outstretched arms, awkward and seeming vaguely embarrassed by this moment. We hugged, the coffee pot still in my hand behind him, and I closed my eyes, stifling a sob. His body smelled like cigarettes and newspaper ink, the way it had always smelled, and yet he was a stranger to me. When we split apart I saw that he had a strained expression on his face, and he looked away rather harshly, saying in a tight voice, “Well, have a seat. You look tired.”

  IT SEEMED AS THOUGH he had been expecting me, that in fact we had decided on this exact date to meet up again, as he said, “I’ll put on some coffee and then we can think about dinner. Hungry?”

  While the frozen macaroni-and-cheese dinners thawed in the oven, he fixed us some instant coffee. He said he was out of fresh. We sat across from each other at the small table, our hands clasping our coffee mugs. The dog, Spanky, had come into the kitchen and sat with his head on my father’s lap, staring up at him, forlorn.

  Dot’s words again: What possible excuse?

  I wanted to ask, but there was only one question I really could give voice to at that moment.

  “Where’s Cole?”

  “Cole. She’s doing her own thing now.” I thought I heard disapproval. Then he said, “She’s in Berkeley. Just down the road.”

  Berkeley. It was so close, the next town over. We were breathing the same air. “I need to see her,” I told him. “When can I see her?”

  He seemed nonchalant. “Oh, anytime, I suppose.”

  I was sitting on my hands, rocking back and forth slightly in the chair, trying to keep myself calm. He wasn’t what I had expected. He wasn’t the man in Dot’s picture, the happy, brown, healthy, glowing man. He wasn’t the man who had escaped America, who had found freedom. His was a face that got little sunlight. He was still young—forty-three, I calculated—but he seemed older. A person who had been so distracted by thought, he had neglected his body.

  I said, “How long have you been here?”

  I still didn’t really believe what Ronnie had told me, and waited for my father to say something that would explain his absence.

  He sipped his coffee and pondered the question for a moment. “I moved into this place about three years ago. The other pad was too small. I needed my own office—”

  “No,” I said, cutting into his sentence. “I mean, when did you move back to America? From Brazil?”

  His eyes flickered surprise. “Oh, that. Back in ‘seventy-seven. Years ago.”

  It was late March 1982. That meant he had been back five years. Ronnie had been telling the truth.

  I picked at a loose piece of linoleum. Underneath, it was grimy from the food and grease that had slipped under the crack. I finally managed to say, “What do you mean, ‘years ago’? Why didn’t you come get me? Why didn’t we get back togeth
er? Like you promised?”

  He was watching me from what seemed a wide distance, the way a scientist looks at an amoeba through a telescope. He said, “Hey, are you okay? You look like you need to lie down, maybe—”

  I cut him off: “You said you’d come back to get me. You said it was just for a little while.”

  He sighed and pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket. He ran it along his brow, though there didn’t appear to be sweat. “Well, Birdie, it’s complicated. You know, your mother was underground, really hard to trace. I thought by the time I got back, your mother would have come up. But word on the street was that she had stayed down. I’m sure that the danger she was in had long passed, but I guess she liked it better down there. Sandy was always such a nut. Anyway”—he glanced up at me, then away toward the window—“I asked around, even tried calling some friends from Boston. But it was going to be difficult—a real project.”

  So, according to him, my mother was out of danger, running from only her own demons. Ronnie said she was in definite danger. Dot said she never had been. My father said she might once have been, but no longer was. I added his to the different versions of her. She was at once a hero, a madwoman, and a fool. It was too confusing. I wasn’t sure it mattered. The fact was clear: He hadn’t tried to find me.

  I just stared at him. “What do you mean, ‘a real project’?”

  He stood up with a screech of his chair and went to the window. It was dark beyond the pane, and I could see cars streak by on the street. He spoke with his back to me. “I mean, a big time commitment. True, I had some leads your mom left me with, but really now. I figured if she wanted to find me, she could.” He turned around. “Your mother wanted to disappear, Birdie. That’s not to say she wasn’t doing some shady shit in the basement, but she needed to believe something was after her. Because there was nothing for her to come back to. She started to fall apart after we split up. You must know that. She just couldn’t handle the fact that things had changed. She wanted them to stay the way they had always been. And when they didn’t, she broke.”