Shifting Through Neutral

by Bridgett M. Davis

  Throughout that school year, Lisa LaBerrie and I spent too much time in her parents’ garage, experimenting with cigarettes and playing cards. I introduced her to Kool’s menthols and taught her how to play Tunk. I tried to show her the art of shuffling but could never quite mimic Mama’s lovely waterfall, that flutter and blur of the cards. Lisa and I let hours peel away from one another as we played, bloodthirsty competitors keeping elaborate scorecards on who had won how many games in how many hours.

  Meanwhile, I became obsessed with a boy in my junior high school. Beautiful Jesse Thompson. He was in my math class and already had a deep voice except for occasional cracks that I thought were unbelievably cute. He had a slight gap in his teeth, chipmunk cheeks, and dimples. A warm, delicious smile. He teased me a lot, so I knew he liked me too. But he was popular, and often I’d see him talking to a girl at her locker one day, walking another one home from school the next. “Jesse, Jesse, Jesse,” I whispered while gripping my hall pass on solitary walks to the girls’ bathroom, where I went to experience my obsessive longing in the privacy of a toilet stall.

  I didn’t actually want a relationship with Jesse. I didn’t know what that meant anyway. Derek was still three years into my future. I just wanted to think about being with Jesse all the time, wanted visions of him to crowd out other thoughts, be obsessed for the sake of the obsession. He had once asked for my phone number and actually called me at home a couple times. That didn’t last long because I was so overwhelmed by my crush on him, I could barely keep up my end of the conversation. In school, when we encountered each other, I was tongue-tied, completely unable to respond to his teasing with anything witty or honest. Terrified of rejection, I forcibly suppressed my burgeoning feelings, only allowing them to escape through my little blue diary. It was like a fever, my obsession for Jesse, but worse, because the high temperature was accompanied by sharp sexual desire. I couldn’t stop imagining him covering my neck in tiny, puckered-lip kisses. And yet once in his presence, I would feign indifference. It was too much. Some days, I literally felt faint.

  But now, Jesse had a fast girlfriend. They were inseparable. He seemed to be in love, even though she was the kind of “gal” Aunt Essie said boys didn’t respect, with her tight clothes and wet lip gloss and reputation for putting out. I secretly wished that Jesse would disrespect me that way.

  It was a terrible year.

  Daddy read my diary. I knew he had because it wasn’t in the same spot where I’d placed it in my shoebox under my bed. I asked Aunt Essie first, and she looked at me like I was crazy. Then I asked Daddy.

  “I’m not gonna lie to you, Brown Eyes.”

  “But why? That’s my private stuff!”

  He looked so sad it was hard to focus on my righteous anger. “So who is this Jesse?” he asked.

  “He’s just a boy a school.”

  “Don’t seem like he’s just a boy. He’s all you write about.”

  “That’s just make-believe.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, it’s convincing.”

  I walked out of the den feeling, once again, like the guilty one. Daddy, who had always trusted me, had turned into a spy. I knew he didn’t fully believe me when I told him I was going skating or bowling with friends. I knew he was leaning against the radiator, watching me closely from the den window as I left with Lisa to go to her house. I’d feel his eyes on me and think about how Kimmie must’ve felt that summer when we watched her like hawks.

  Aunt Essie tried to mediate. She said I was all my daddy had in the world and now that I was getting older he was losing his little girl. All of this, I already knew. I still didn’t know how to handle it.

  Mr. Alfred was the one who saved me. He offered me driving lessons in his white deuce-and-a-quarter—an old Buick Electra 225 that he kept parked at the shop. Built to last, with its manual transmission, front-wheel drive, and power steering. Every Saturday, after doing our errands together and barely talking, Daddy and I would swing by Mr. Alfred’s shop. He let me get behind the wheel, and there he’d coach me along the side streets, teaching me how to work the clutch, even briefly letting me drive a main street in the right-turn lane. I got more and more confident, loving the feeling of operating two tons of metal as it eased along the road, shifting gears, discovering what a balm driving could be. I didn’t think about my problems while operating that battle-proof Buick. She was my salvation. After each lesson I was always sad, longing to be old enough to really drive. It made being thirteen even more intolerable.

  High school wasn’t all that bad: I liked most of my classes, had enough breasts to fill a B cup, and at fourteen was finally old enough to get a work permit.

  No one ever said extra money was needed in the household. Daddy had his modest disability and veteran’s checks coming in. Aunt Essie had her social security check from her dead husband, Mr. Bingham. But the recession was raging, Detroit’s car industry rusting. Gasoline prices were sky-high. The little extras had dried up. Daddy didn’t play poker anymore, and he hadn’t been lucky with the numbers in quite a while. Aunt Essie began taking in laundry, claiming it gave her “a little something extra to do,” and Daddy even tried cleaning up at Big Boy’s after closing a few nights a week. I’d go with him as he swung the sprawling mop back and forth across the tiled floor, his transistor radio blaring Albert King or Lou Rawls against the echoing ceilings. He’d mop a section, stop, lean on the mop handle for a spell, pick up again where he’d left off. Aunt Essie, who heard how hard Daddy panted through the job, put a stop to it. (“Think about that child in there,” I heard her tell him. “She needs you.”)

  When I wasn’t job hunting, I spent nearly all my free time hanging out with Lisa LaBerrie and our fast friend Angie. At Northland Mall, we submitted job applications at clothing stores and shoe shops and fast-food joints and flirted with store managers—stopping for lunch at Elias Brothers’, where Angie found more and more ways to shock us with her talk about boys and oral sex. Finally, I got hired at Red Barn and had to wear a ridiculous uniform that was supposed to resemble that of a milk maiden on a farm, with its white apron tied around a short gray dress. We sold burgers and milk shakes and fried chicken and wore plastic name tags. I liked it, liked the salty French fries and dealing with customers and having something responsible to do. Every night at closing, Daddy waited for me outside, while other girls who worked there slipped into the souped-up hot rods of their boyfriends.

  I still had no boyfriends but now fantasized about a new boy. This one was named Antonio Snapp, and he walked the halls of Cass Tech High School with long strides and sly glances, his towering height and patted-down Afro adding to his aura. He had a coveted locker in the front hall, where he hung out every morning before the first-hour bell, along with other cool guys. With nine floors, and lots of obscure corridors, the school’s physical layout nakedly revealed a student’s social status. Choice locker locations were like prime real estate.

  Once again, I lived out an entire relationship in my head, imagining many scenarios. My favorite had him storming the back hall of the third floor, where those of us relegated to Siberian lockers had banded together into a subset, turning our fringe status into a cool, antipopularity clique. He pushes past the motley group, grabs me in his arms, and French-kisses me in front of them all. Then he smirks, strides off into the crowded main hall, and the next day I am beside him near the front entrance, hanging out and giggling just two lockers down from Marjorie, the head majorette, and Resa, the back-flipping star of the cheerleading squad.

  Somewhere in between my lonely days as a tenth grader at Cass Tech, my job at Red Barn, and my fantasy dates with Antonio, Mama began calling again—after more than a year. One Sunday afternoon the phone rang, and there she was on the other end. She asked, “They treating you okay?” We talked for barely four minutes, just long enough for me to learn that she’d begun an herb garden in the back of her house and that the mint was growing fast and furious, taking over. She asked about school, and I said it was fine
, and then the call ended. After that, she called about every month or so, and it was always the same—a perfunctory conversation about superficial things with a tidbit thrown in about her garden. I never called her, understanding that she needed to be in control of our contact. And I never offered up pieces of my life in confidence to her. It was what it was, my relationship with my mother, and I tried to finally accept that. Still, that protective skein instantly grew back, stretching anxiously across my heart, protecting me from feeling too much.

  And no matter what, I would not become my mother.

  It wasn’t that I thought Mama was a weak woman. She had power, ruling our household when she was there, even in her throne-away distance. She controlled the real cash flow. She convinced Daddy to abandon his lover and return home. She convinced Kimmie to go with her to Louisiana. And for too long, she had me waiting by the phone, convinced we had a real relationship.

  Yet I could never see Aunt Essie making choices for a man that hurt the ones she loved. Aunt Essie despised women who sang the blues, and I despised women who got them. Weak women, ones who cried over a guy or fell in love constantly or dreamed of weddings in puffy white dresses. I never wanted to get married. I decided no one man would have my heart, no man other than Daddy. And once I vowed this to myself, it was easy to stick with my vow to never have children. Children complicated your relationship, led you to love a man more than you should, to abruptly push off from the curb with him.

  In eleventh-grade social studies class, I wrote an essay based on the book A Baby? Maybe. In strident language, my essay outlined how the media hoodwinks women into thinking children are bliss, a covert ploy led by Gerber’s, Johnson & Johnson, and the slew of other advertisers who benefit from baby culture. On that one subject, I was a high school progressive—a radical.

  And then I stopped bleeding. Because I ran track throughout junior year, competing and winning, and was very fast, I apparently chased my period away. At first, I was actually relieved. My period had spawned the awkwardness between Daddy and me, and it had prompted Essie to dole out God-inspired warnings about fornication. Besides, with no period, there could be no children.

  But after a couple months I started to miss it, miss the rituals surrounding its painful presence: the heating pad across my belly, the sipping from huge mugs filled with Women’s Cycle herb tea, the long bath to soak away the leg and back aches. I realized that my period was one of the few things that put me in touch with my body. During those five days every month, I actually felt a deeper connection to Daddy, felt a little more understanding of the pain he faced on a daily basis. And there was something else: my period was the one thing I had in my life not dependent upon whether or not my mother called, or whether or not my father felt good on any given day. It was reliable, and I didn’t realize how comforting and rare that was for me, until it was gone.

  When Dr. Corey wouldn’t help me, I became obsessive. I counted every twenty-eight days and circled the date each month with a green ink pen on a wall calendar from Cobo Cleaners. And when the appointed day came, I rushed to the bathroom, said a little mantra of “yes oh yes oh yes oh yes,” and pulled down my panties. Nothing. Month after month of nothing.

  I believed God was rearing His ugly head, He whom I had ignored for years, despite all of Aunt Essie’s admonitions and chapter-and-verse quotations. I guess I thought of Him as a father figure, and for me that meant a sweet and loving man who was well meaning but limited in power. Since I already had one of those in my life, I hadn’t turned to Him much. Now He was punishing me for vowing with my friend Lisa to never have children. I bargained with Him that yes I would have a baby someday if He just brought back my period. I crossed my fingers to add to the potency of my prayer. God ignored me and my pleas for seven long months, and in that time, dry between my legs, I gave up on Him completely.

  Daddy started getting dark spots in front of his eyes. Because of that, he needed me to drive. Aunt Essie was of no help, as she had never learned how. The little piece of a car he’d bought since Oldie’s demise stayed parked out front for longer and longer stretches. Sometimes, when he was “feelin’ up to it,” he’d still take the car out for a quick spin to do his errands or swing by Mr. Alfred’s body shop. But that was now rare. In fact, Aunt Essie walked to the corner store for groceries when she couldn’t get one of her church friends to drive her to Kroger’s. Whenever I saw her coming back from the party store, I knew it was a trip born out of necessity. She’d vowed more than a few times to never shop in one of those “A-rab stores” because to her the places smelled funny, never seemed clean, and the “folks up in there treat you like they doing you the favor, when you the one whose people done been in this country from the get-go.” Daddy had even asked me to find friends to ride home with from my job at Red Barn. “Not up to that night driving,” he explained. I turned in my apron and name tag, because it was too hard to ask one of the Maybelline queens if I could catch a ride home in her boyfriend’s ridiculous car. I couldn’t tolerate those silly girls, who squished up so close to Rod or Louie or Gino, the poor guys could barely shift gears. Besides, every single breathing female was a potential threat to them. Who needed the grief?

  I wanted just two things in life: to get my license and to find a fun job. I thought about delivering pizza for Domino’s or driving a taxi, even though I knew I was too young for either. Still, I had to find something that kept me in a car rather than behind a counter or a desk. And for weeks leading up to my sixteenth birthday, I studied that little booklet from the Department of Motor Vehicles over and over. I knew everything—how to steer out of a skid, when to yield, what the squiggly arrow on a yellow warning sign meant. On the appointed day, I waltzed through my road test—checking my mirrors as I idled, easing into traffic as I took off, passing responsibly on the right, coming to a complete stop at each stop sign. “Excellent!” the guy giving the test kept saying. “Excellent.” To show off, I parallel-parked with perfection.

  So when Derek and I met in line at the license bureau and he told me his father was a foreman at the GM Proving Ground, explaining what test drivers do, I couldn’t contain myself. Why hadn’t anyone told me this job existed? I flirted with him like crazy because I wanted that job. I would do anything to get that job.

  It took an entire twelve months of begging, of prodding Derek to prod his father, of doing secretarial work in the front office to prove my commitment, of honing my road skills in Daddy’s little piece of a car—but I did finally prevail at the Proving Ground. To pass the entrance test, all I had to do was show that I could both drive a stick shift and back a car up an incline. Easy.

  I kept my entire relationship with Derek a secret.

  I couldn’t have chosen someone whose sensibilities were more unlike my own. He was what Mama’s friend Romey would call overt. Nothing subtle about him. Why wear a black suit when an orange one gets more attention? Why wave at someone when you can yell, “Hey, what’s up?!” across the room? Why develop one or two real friendships when you can be more popular by flirting with all the girls and biting your way into relationships with cool guys? He wanted everyone to call him “D-Dog.” Imagine choosing your own nickname. He wore his false bravado and insecurity like one of those loose, ill-fitted suits he favored on Sundays at his father’s church.

  I wasn’t too picky in choosing my first boyfriend because I had begun to think of myself as a young woman who would have many men over the course of my lifetime. I decided this was best. Otherwise, I might end up like Kimmie, driven to her death by her quest to correct a problem a man had created; or like Mama, who left behind her own child for a man who’d kept her waiting while he stayed married to another. Women with the love jones, as Aunt Essie would say. Women with a condition. I did not want to be one of those women.

  Besides, I couldn’t imagine what man was worth it, who among them could love me unconditionally like Daddy? Men, based on what I could see, were either weak or mean. They were either letting their women steal aw
ay in broad daylight or trapping themselves into sad marriages, or beating on their girlfriends à la Nolan. And according to Vy, only weak men hit women. Basically, men were pussies. And yet I’ve always loved so much about them, they with their deep-voiced, prickly-beard gifts that women do not, cannot possess. Daddy was the perfect man for me because I didn’t care whether or not he was weak; I was his daughter so I got to take full advantage of all that gentle affection, all that yummy male energy, all that unromantic, pure love. And boys who were my buddies? Same thing.

  Sex was another matter.

  Intercourse with Derek was largely unpleasant. He was a heavy guy, and when he lay on top of me I felt claustrophobic. I was forever making him get off so I could breathe. Plus, his penis didn’t work right. It was too huge, and given his vast inexperience, he didn’t know what to do with it. He literally brandished it about. Once I asked him, “Have you had that weapon registered yet?”

  “That’s not funny,” he said.

  “I’m not laughing,” I answered, pushing him off of me.

  I had to settle for some little orgasmic trickle that came at the end of his flopping up and down on top of me for fifteen minutes. Since this made him sweat like a hog, I got drenched.

  But the truth is that as soon as Derek and I started having sex, I got my period back. He got me flowing.

  This fact meant we had to start using protection. Derek was crestfallen. “I don’t think I’m going to like using rubbers,” he said. “My boys tell me it sucks. They’ve been envying me a lot, you know, having a girlfriend who never has that time of the month.”