No Such Thing as the Real World

by M. T. Anderson

  So when he asked about a roommate, I knew right away I’d have to let him know me and him wasn’t going to happen.

  “A roommate, huh?” I said.

  “Yeah, a roommate.” Tony said. He threw his bag over his shoulder. “Rent’s cheap, but I’m not trying to swing it on my own.”

  “How’ve you been swinging it?” I was wearing Timberlands and was busy trying to get the laces right. I had a long train ride home, and it’s good to look as butch as you can on the subway so brothers don’t start talking that mess they like to talk. And so those old men who are on their way home to their tired wives and whiny children don’t start rubbing themselves on the sly while eyeing you.

  “I had a friend living with me. But he moved out.”

  “A friend, huh? Now you trying to get me to be your ‘new friend’?”

  Tony looked at me a minute. Then he threw his head back and laughed. I hadn’t seen him laugh before, and I liked it. The way it just came out of nowhere like that. Real honest, you know?

  “Man I am SO not trying to push up on you,” Tony said. “I mean, you’re cute and all, but that’s not how I roll.”

  It wasn’t until after I moved in that I learned Tony rolled snow. I guess if you half snow yourself, you can see the beauty in it.

  So that’s how we ended up living together. The place was sweet—two bedrooms, with a kitchen and a living room between them. Lots of light, and Tony being a big plant guy, he’d already put lots of plants all around—in the bathroom and kitchen and on the living-room windowsill. The apartment looked out over a small park, and sometimes I’d look out my window and see the little kids swinging and running and climbing and it made me think I want something like that—a family. Some kids. Maybe even a big old black dog. And it made me wonder if I’d ever have it. And if I was going to have it, it made me wonder with who. I didn’t want to be one of those fake-ass straight guys tryna have a normal life, kicking it with their wives while they think about guys like me. That was crazy. I wanted my old queenie self and somebody to love me for being the girl-boy I am. Wasn’t deep.

  When I was five, my daddy left. Not regular—like, Here’s a big fight with me and my woman and now I’m packing some stuff and getting the hell out. Seemed a lot of the people I knew whose daddies left either had some kind of jump-off somewhere and finally just moved in with them or the parents just fought all the time until the daddy finally said, “I’m done. I’m gonna get my own place.” And then for a while he’s trying to stay in touch with the kids and all—taking them out for ice cream on a Saturday afternoon or taking them to the park and sitting on a bench while they pushed their own damn selves on the swings and whatnot.

  My daddy left different. Summer, he’d always take us to White Castle—the burger joint that was kinda far from where we lived. After church, we’d all walk back to the house—me, him, my sister, Marie, and my moms. We’d be dressed up in our churchgoing gear—me always in some damn ugly tie because my daddy wore a tie and he thought every man needed a tie. And even though I was only eight, he was steady trying to man me up, and so Sunday came, he was standing behind me in the mirror showing me how to tie that damn thing. Always felt like a noose, and some mornings I’d get to pulling on it, having these deep visions of people swinging from trees somewhere. I didn’t know then that it was my daddy trying to choke the faggot out of me. “Tie it like this, son,” he’d say. My daddy was tall and beautiful—deep brown skin, a thick head of nappy hair, and shoulders like a plank across his chest. I’d stand in front of him looking at the two of us in that mirror—me all skinny and standing with my hip stuck out until he snapped at me to stand up like a man, and him all broad and handsome and strong behind me—all the things I’d never be. I’d stand there feeling the weight of that tie and his able hands flying through the air making that perfect knot, then untying it again and saying, “Your turn, brother man.” And then my hands all clumsy doing it all wrong, never understanding how one end moved into the other, how one loop knotted into something straight and even and sure like that. And standing there sometimes, watching my daddy trying to help me figure it out, it was all I could do not to start crying like a baby because a big-ass part of me knew I wasn’t ever gonna be the man my daddy wanted his baby boy to grow into.

  Yeah—my daddy left different. Every Sunday, we walked the six blocks home from church, our perfect churchgoing family—Mama, Daddy, me, and Marie. Then me and Marie would change out of our church clothes and Daddy would take us on two buses to the White Castle over in Brownsville. Mama’d stay at home, lie down on the couch, and catch up on her Bible studies.

  I guess from the outside it might look all stereotypical and whatnot. Bible-thumping Mama and deadbeat dad. That ain’t where I’m going, though. Mama read that Bible because she liked good stories. She wasn’t trying to convert nobody or get her preaching on. Sometimes she’d get so into Noah bringing those two-by-two animals or Lot’s wife looking back and turning to a pillar of salt that she’d take out a notebook and start writing her own stories. She said the Bible inspired her, but not to be no God-fearing sister. Just to write. And mostly, my Mama just wanted to write.

  The day my daddy left, it was raining. We didn’t have umbrellas, but me and Marie had our raincoats and rain hats and we probably looked real corny, but I tell you, my rain set was red and it was fierce, and when I put it on, you couldn’t tell me nothing about nothing. Marie’s was yellow, all traditional like her. She was two years older than me and had two long braids and I swear it took her a long-ass time to work those braids up under her rain hat before we left the house. Mama had straightened her hair the night before, and she didn’t want the rain making it all curly again, so she tucked and tucked, and by the time we left the house all rain-geared up, you couldn’t see one strand of my sister’s hair.

  I wish I could remember what we ate at White Castle. I wish I could remember what we talked about. I wish I could remember if I saw something in my daddy’s eyes that afternoon that gave me some clue that that was going to be the last day of tie tying and churchgoing and White Castling with him.

  “I’ll be right back,” my daddy said. He glanced at Marie and said, “You keep an eye on him.”

  Me and Marie sat in that White Castle all afternoon. The rain stopped coming down. People came in, bought bags of burgers and left. Cars pulled up and ordered from the drive-through window, the voices of the people inside sounding all loud and gravelly. Marie had eaten three burgers and had two left. I had one left. By the time we reached in the bag to eat the rest of our food, it was near dark outside. I don’t remember either one of us saying anything for most of the afternoon.

  But then Marie got up, threw out all our trash, and said, “You wait here.” And that’s when I started crying like a baby. Then Marie started crying and the teenager who’d just been selling burgers and fries and looking at us every now and then picked up the phone behind the counter.

  That’s when the cops came.

  The night of Roger’s soirée, me and Tony got dressed real nice—he wore this blue shirt that was shimmery—said he’d got it at H&M for cheap, but it looked like something that cost more than a shirt you’d get at H&M. I didn’t know then that it was actually from Armani, but I’ll get to that in a bit. And he had on some jeans that fit him real cool. I was looking fabulous myself—red turtleneck fitting me all tight and some black pants. It was December, and New York had gotten crazy already with the decorations—lights on every avenue. Christmas music coming from everywhere. Whole buildings blinking red and green and gold. Lit-up candy canes on lampposts. Me and Tony lived in Fort Greene—in Brooklyn, right off of Fulton Street—and as we walked, we looked inside different restaurants and kept seeing all those damn straight couples that come out to be in holiday love around that time of year. We walked to the subway talking about this and that, making fun of the couples and planning what we’d drink first when we got to Roger’s—I was gonna throw back a rum and Coke and Tony said he was go
nna start slow, with some white wine. Mostly we talked about dancing, though. I’d wanted to be a dancer since I could crawl.

  “How’d you know?” Tony asked as we stood there waiting for the train that would take us straight up to Harlem.

  I looked at him.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t.”

  “I was watching Zoe’s Dance Moves—that Muppets video with Paula Abdul in it.”

  Tony laughed that crazy big laugh. “Man, I used to love that!”

  “Me too. My moms said she’d try to turn off the TV and I’d just start hollering.”

  “So that’s when you knew?”

  I shook my head. “That’s when my moms knew. She said when I was nine months old, I stood up all wobbly and whatnot. And then I put one hand on the couch to balance myself and just started moving. She said I walked across that floor like I’d been walking for a year instead of two minutes.”

  “You lying.”

  “Nah, I ain’t. Swear to God. Two days later, I’m standing in the center of the living room…” I did a spin and one of the kicks from the video. “And I’m doing the whole routine.”

  “For real?”

  “For real as I want to be. How about you?”

  Tony walked to the edge of the platform, then leaned over and looked for the train. Nothing was coming.

  “I just danced all the time,” he said. “And my dad said to butch up and act like a man.”

  His voice got real quiet.

  “He said, ‘You keep dancing like that, you’re going to grow up to be a faggot.’” Tony looked at me. “And since I knew I already was a faggot, I kept on dancing.” He circled his arms, did a perfect brisé, and landed in arabesque. Tony moved like he’d always been moving.

  “You are too fabulous,” I said. “And I know your ass ain’t get that shirt from H&M.”

  Tony smiled but didn’t say anything. He was wearing a dark wool coat over the shirt. The coat reminded me of my mother. A week after my daddy left, she put her writing notebooks up into the closet, and me and Marie never saw them again. Two weeks later, she took a job cleaning people’s houses, and sometimes they gave her their old clothes. A year after my daddy left, she came home with a brown coat like Tony’s. I always hated the clothes she brought home, but something about that coat took the hatred to a whole new level.

  “That coat’s from Bloomingdale’s,” my mama said. “You’re gonna put it on and wear it till it’s so raggedy it falls off your skinny behind.”

  Mama held the coat out to me and I just stared at her—all the hate in my body seeping past that coat right on up to her.

  “I ain’t wearing no white people’s old clothes anymore,” I said.

  Sometimes you wish you could just chassé your ass way back in time and snatch all the nasty stuff you did and said and thought back out of the world. It’s like it hangs there, in the air, forever. And every time you look back into the past, it’s there, screaming back at you—your own dumb-ass words, all loud inside your head again.

  Mama looked at me, closed her eyes for a moment, then left the room. I never saw the coat again.

  “Where’d you get that coat?” I asked Tony.

  He shrugged, then checked the track again. I could hear a train.

  “It’s coming,” Tony said.

  Class shit is funny. Either you got crazy dollars and you don’t want anybody to know, or you grew up broke and don’t want anybody to know. Either way, for a little while, you meet in the middle—like me and Tony had done—trying to just gray out that shit and be.

  The train was crowded. Me and Tony stood by the door, Tony with his foot bent up on it, looking around. At Borough Hall a couple of people got off, and me and Tony sat down across from each other, him with his legs all spread and butch until an old black lady got on at Park Place and gave him a look that made him close them up so she could squeeze into the little bit of space between him and a heavyset lady. Some punk-asses stood against another train door giving me fever. I paid them no mind and could hear them laughing. One said, “How you doing?” all sissylike to his friend. Yeah, I had a how-you-doing for him, but I wasn’t about to get up and read his baby-punk ass unless he tried talking some junk directly to me. Me and Tony looked at each other but didn’t try to sit there talking across the subway car. Tony leaned back and squeezed himself in. The old lady gave him a look and moved over one whole inch.

  Last year Marie called me. She was finally finishing up her graduate stuff and had been offered a job in California, where she’d been going to school. We talked about this and that and how she was hoping to get to New York by Christmas to see me in my first solo and whatnot. Both of us knew it wasn’t going to happen. After my daddy left, it was like Marie left too. She made Mama transfer her to a school on the other side of Brooklyn and started taking the train by herself everywhere. Then she got into a high school in Manhattan that was for strange smart-ass kids like she’d turned out to be. After that, seems we saw less and less of her until she was going to college. You’d think that something like what my daddy did would have made us mad close and scared of losing any more of our family. But it kind of had the opposite effect. We all just sort of went to our own little corners to figure out our own little lives. But that morning when the phone rang, Marie sounded real different. There was a lot of quiet in the conversation, like there was something she wanted to say but couldn’t. Then she finally came out and said it.

  “I saw Daddy last week,” she said.

  I felt something inside me drop away. It’d been ten years since I’d seen my father, and some parts of me had forgotten about him. But most of me hadn’t.

  “Yeah?” I said. I felt like I was nine years old again and wanted to ask her if he’d asked about me, if she’d told him I made The Company, if he regrets that Sunday—so many questions all crazy up inside my head.

  “He’s doing well,” Marie said. “You know, we have a brother and a sister in Chicago.”

  “Nah,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah,” Marie said. “He moved there after he left…New York.”

  “How’d you see him?”

  Marie didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “I went looking. I called around. Did a little research, talked to some people, and finally tracked him down.”

  I was in my and Tony’s apartment, standing by the window. Outside, the sun was bright white and cars were moving slow back and forth along the street. I couldn’t hear anything but Marie’s voice in my ear.

  “He ask about me?” I finally said. Even as I said it, I was hating on myself for even wanting to know.

  “You know he did. He’s real proud.”

  “Yeah,” I said. We talked for a little while longer. Marie said if I wanted, she’d send me all his info. I told her I’d let her know.

  Me and my sister haven’t really spoken since then.

  A few days later I moved out of Tony’s place and found my own up near where Roger and Snow live. It’s small, has some good light coming in; and there’s a few other queens up in the neighborhood, so I don’t be having a lot of problems. Yesterday, this cool homeboy saw me limping with this damn ankle and my laundry and offered to carry it up the stairs for me. I let him, and even though he reads mad butch, turns out he’s one of the children. Come Saturday, we heading over to Ruthie’s Fish Fry for dinner, then checking out a movie.

  The night Tony and me went to Roger’s soirée, the whole company got to really hang for the first time. We drank and smoked and gossiped about Roger and Snow, then showed our stuff when Roger finally put on some music worth moving to. Roger was in rare form—pouring drinks and proudly bragging about us like we were truly his children. When he got to Tony, he was halfway drunk and said, “Don’t ever tell me rich boys can’t dance,” and Tony smiled, but it was the saddest smile I’d ever seen on a person.

  A week after the party, there was Tony in the Sunday Styles sectio
n of the The New York Times—pictured with his mama, who, it turns out, surprise, surprise, lives on the Upper East Side and comes from a long-ass line of rich people.

  “Is this your people, Mr. H&M?” I asked Tony that Sunday morning. We were sitting at the kitchen table—him drinking coffee, me drinking a glass of orange juice and eating a leftover egg sandwich.

  Tony shrugged and said, “Yeah.”

  We didn’t say anything for a moment. It was like the line that divided us had gotten a whole lot thicker.

  “We still cool,” Tony said. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” I lied. “We cool.”

  The damn ankle swells when I put too much weight on it. But the damn legs hurt from not dancing, and the whole body feels like it’s trying to jump out of itself to move.

  The Company’s performing Giselle at the end of the month. Tony has the part of Count Albrecht. I’ll be there. I’ll cheer him on from third row center. Roger says it’s not “The Company.” It’s “The Family.” And I guess, this being the world I’m living in now, it’s high time I get to realizing that, yeah, it’s true—we’re a big-ass, complicated, all shadows-and-secrets-and-hopes-for-a-different-future kinda family.

  About Jacqueline Woodson

  Jacqueline Woodson was awarded Newbery Honors for her books Feathers and Show Way, and was a National Book Award finalist for her books Hush and Locomotion, the latter of which also received a Coretta Scott King Honor, as did her books I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This and From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun. Miracle’s Boys won the Coretta Scott King Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Woodson won the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults and, most recently, the Virginia Hamilton Literary Award. Woodson lives with her partner and family in Brooklyn, New York. You can visit her online at www.jacquelinewoodson.com.