Heads of the Colored People

by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

  “I was thinking we could rearrange the shooting schedule and you could get some footage of me working on the blog or in the back gardens,” Lisbeth said, walking him through the kitchen to the family room but offering him no place to sit.

  Mike didn’t like it when the talent tried to direct, even if she had a point. “When do you think Ryan and Inedia will be back?” he asked, shaking his hand no at the maca-matcha tea Lisbeth offered.

  “I don’t know,” Lisbeth said, flicking a matted blond dread over her shoulder. “I could talk more about the lifestyle. Why can’t we just shoot me?”

  He couldn’t put his finger on what Lisbeth reminded him of, but he could use that sound bite for all kinds of things; a crescendo, for instance: “Why don’t you just shoot me? Just shoot me. Shoot me.”

  • • •

  “Please, Daddy.” Ryan paused to look warningly at Inedia, who pointed to a bright blue sleeping bag with Disney characters printed on it. “I mean, Ryan,” she self-corrected. “Could we get this one?”

  Her quiet begging seemed muffled among the voices of shrieking, crying, or otherwise noisy children in Walmart as Inedia’s eyes darted around the warehouse, taking in the colors. The lights buzzed in Ryan’s ears, punctuated the grinding sensation around the right side of his forehead, loosening teeth from his jaws. His prana hurt.

  Ryan had given up on his search for a used children’s sleeping bag after the fourth thrift store, on the other side of town, produced no results. Probably because even thrift stores wouldn’t take dingy used sleeping bags stained with child’s pee and drool. A bag from Walmart or any other big-box store—he imagined Lisbeth lecturing—sent the wrong message, as did Snow White, Elsa, and any other Disney princess who came in a full line of pastel products, but at least the sleeping bag would be clean.

  He shook his head, not looking at Inedia, but at the large cage-like display of children’s sleeping bags. He pointed to his left, where the utilitarian bags were stacked, and touched the fabric of a gray adult-size bag. The adult bag cost $49.95; Elsa, $14.99. The adult bag was weatherproofed and down filled; Elsa, flimsy and filled with synthetics.

  • • •

  “This one,” he said, pointing again to the gray bag, though it pained him to pay extra for a bag they needed only for show.

  Inedia didn’t cry like most kids would, and there was something about her lack of reaction that made Ryan both angry and sympathetic. He had not set out to be subversive that morning, to miss his call time while scouring Goodwills from El Camino to Santa Cruz only to end up at Walmart, but he was here now. Lisbeth would already be mad. Mike was really missing out, he thought, by not capturing this.

  • • •

  FUELED BY A surge of spontaneity, he placed the Elsa bag into their basket and felt a small sense of fulfillment. He could make choices, too; she was his daughter, too.

  “Thank you, Ryan.” Inedia barely smiled. She had a way of doing that, of not reacting the way he expected her to. When she was a few months old, before Lisbeth had gotten the fellowship that took them to Costa Rica, he’d pinched Inedia’s arm a little as she sat in one of those sit-up baby chairs, just to see what would happen. She didn’t cry. She looked at him, rocking herself in her footed onesie forward with her legs and back, and matched his gaze for a while, as if saying, “I understand.”

  An old man stared into Ryan’s face and then Inedia’s before he shuffled away, mumbling “Cute kid.” Regardless of which parent took her out (though it was usually Ryan), people stared at Inedia, equally interested in her sharp contrast to her father’s deep brown as in her softer sable to Lisbeth’s pinkness. Ryan took Inedia’s hand. He craved pineapple, something acidic and stinging to cleanse his mouth. Lisbeth wouldn’t approve of the purchase from this store. To get to the fruit section, he cut across from the camping gear, past the fishing poles, the smell of chicken-blood bait sitting heavy in his nostrils. The fishing aisle gave way to the craft and sewing sections, which led, after the small city of baby products, to a quick detour through the beverage aisles and eventually a straight line to the produce. For all his resistance to Walmart, he didn’t want to go home.

  • • •

  “As you can see, these tubs are well organized, and all the fruit is fresh,” Lisbeth said facing the camera, walking the crew to the container of mangoes. She smelled one and overemoted its visible ripeness. “That life-giving flesh; there’s strong prana in living food. You can absorb it through the third eye. Can you bring the boom in closer?” She looked above the camera to the large man, who looked at Mike. “I don’t like to raise my voice.”

  “Talk a little about your process for prepping meals,” Mike said, feeling a headache building at his temples. “What do you do with all the durian?”

  “So we store the fruit in these tubs, and we also use them as sorts of troughs to eat from. Ryan and Inedia make a big batch of whatever we’re eating, say, durian pudding, mango salsa, or tomato with avocado and lemon, early in the morning. And then we graze from the tubs all day. Fruitarians have to eat a lot to stay full.” Lisbeth patted her nonexistent paunch for emphasis.

  Mike motioned for the cameraman, Jonathan, to come in for a medium shot that would show Lisbeth’s missing back tooth.

  “It sounds like a lot of food,” she continued, “but it goes right through you. We—well, Ryan actually—does the shopping twice a week. We buy crates directly from the farmers at the farmers’ market or from organic grocers we’ve built relationships with. We harvest our own avocados and the maca out back,” she said, pointing to the screen doors. “It’s Inedia’s job to organize and wash the fruit with a white vinegar solution.”

  “What do you do?” Mike said from off camera.

  “I manage it all, and I run our blogs and vlogs.” With each hand, Lisbeth twirled a thick dread in contrasting directions, like some kind of double dutch tic, or as if the hair were saying “Muy loca.” “I’m more the philosophy behind the practice,” she said, letting the hair fall.

  Mike wasn’t sure if he could stand a whole day of filming with her alone. “Why don’t we have you sit in one of the papasan chairs and shoot some confession-cam footage? Talk about the bed situation, in the present tense.” It was hard to set up the shots so that they both accentuated and blurred Lisbeth’s skin. You couldn’t let all the ugly cracks and spots show on camera, or no one would watch; too clean, though, and the realness of the thing would be minimized.

  “Oh, sure.”

  • • •

  This was Ryan’s first time at Walmart in a year or so. They’d started buying the toilet paper in bulk there after the first two months of the transition, but they didn’t need as much now. Before Inedia was born, Ryan and Lisbeth had each gone through a roll a day, dabbing at the liquid tar the online community had warned them about. There had been so many lifestyle experiments with Lisbeth: from ayurvedic eating based on their individual doshas to macrobiotic to vegan to raw. The groceries became more expensive and the lifestyle more time-consuming the closer they tried to get to earth, to original man, to whatever: ceramic knives instead of metal ones—to prevent oxidization—glassware and BPA-free everything, not that there were ever leftovers.

  Looking back on his decision, Ryan must have been hungry when he agreed to quit his job to manage Lisbeth’s Web presence and “fully commit to the lifestyle.” It certainly didn’t make sense. The former financial planner in him couldn’t always look away. If the mortgage hadn’t been paid by Lisbeth’s father’s estate, they wouldn’t have been able to afford it for the food. They had blown through what was left of Ryan’s investments on the first failed durian distribution business, and the compost wasn’t making much money, but the YouTube channels were picking up subscribers and ad revenue, enough to pay for groceries each week, enough to attract Mike and the network.

  After the transition to fruitarian, they continued to buy the cheap toilet paper because even Lisbeth agreed that the recycled bamboo stuff was too expensiv
e. The toilet paper, and the diapers after Inedia was born, were the only things Lisbeth would allow Ryan to buy from a big-box store that, she said, traded in child or third-world labor and that stood for some kind of capitalistic, imperialistic, or otherwise -istic enterprises. Technically and ethically, they were supposed to use cloth diapers, but Lisbeth said, “The solvents and energy used to launder the diapers, even with a cleaning service, are way worse for the earth than tossing the diapers.” She said something about putting compost back into the earth this way.

  Ryan had enjoyed the shopping less since Lisbeth started double- and triple-checking the labels and the receipts. Still, there was something comforting about the expansive space of a Walmart, despite the unrelenting brightness: the sight of an old woman with a heavy lipstick line drawn just above the vermillion border bouncing an orange in her hand or squeezing a melon for firmness, the heavy, genetically modified cotton shirts and sweatpants that came in extra-large sizes, the rows of colorful school supplies and greeting cards printed with animal-tested inks and artificial dyes.

  So today, the trip to Walmart felt just as right as the Frozen-branded sleeping bag in their shopping cart. Lisbeth would want a point-by-point summary of their excursion, but she’d pantomime for the cameras, wait until the crew left to explode. He pulled Inedia out of the self-checkout line, the sleeping bag and pineapple still in the cart, and retreated back into the comfort of the crowd. “Let’s look at the toy aisle,” he said to Inedia.

  • • •

  Per Mike’s direction, Lisbeth pretended to spell-check the post before pushing Submit and flipping through her handwritten notes for ideas for Wednesday’s installment. She read some of the ideas aloud directly to the camera, then explained that the blog had picked up a lot of traffic ever since she’d started including pictures of Inedia and the neighborhood, as if the images crystallized the rhetoric.

  She stared at the man behind the camera in a way that Mike read as flirtatious before continuing, “When he first started formatting the website, Ryan was always whining that he and Inedia should have been in the picture, too, to emphasize the familial part. But I said, ‘As the principal researcher and author, I don’t think I should undermine my credibility with a traditional Western hausfrau picture.’ Now he doesn’t even want to be on the site—or in this show,” she said, lowering her voice.

  “Talk more about that,” Mike stalled.

  “Well, the blog was Ryan’s idea, but you would never know it. I had come home crying after a meeting with my dissertation adviser. After I passed my orals, she said she thought I should seek a new direction. Whatever. The IRB—this review board that makes sure you’re doing ethical research—wouldn’t approve of the project. So Ryan suggested that I choose a different official research project and keep my interests in detachment parenting alive in some other form; hence the blog and the vlog.”

  She continued, “We’re like our own focus group. Inedia takes agency over her homeschooling, and she’s good—for a seven-year-old, she’s good. Ryan does the Web design, shopping, food prep, deals with the produce vendors. I told you about the harvesting.”

  “You did,” Mike said, realizing that he was sweating. “Tell us about some of the stuff you put on the websites and people’s responses to it.”

  They shot an hour and a half of footage of Lisbeth reenacting responses to comments on her various Internet platforms. She was not a good actress. She tried to squeeze out a tear as she recounted the “many, many people” who asked how any self-respecting upper-middle-class family could live like this. Mike still couldn’t pinpoint who she reminded him of, someone weather-beaten and frazzled. The tearfulness seemed insincere, but when Lisbeth cursed the entire child-welfare system of Palo Alto and Northern California more generally, her anger was genuine.

  “I swear it was Alice Faye, two houses down, who made the phone call,” Lisbeth said, looking past the cameras and directly at Mike. “That was after the first time Inedia ran off and they found her in the neighbor’s yard eating grass. I could have made her a green juice if I had known her body needed the chlorophyll.”

  Mike shot a look at the crew member who’d elbowed him. With his eyes, he said, “Just humor her for a minute.” He didn’t tell Lisbeth that they would incorporate content from the blog later, that her computer screen would interfere with the camera, making wavy lines; he let her keep talking for a while before asking her to try Ryan’s phone again.

  • • •

  With the Frozen sleeping bag, the pineapple, and now a trinket for Inedia in his hands, Ryan and Inedia made their way back toward the registers. The self-check line was short but barely moved as customers struggled to find bar codes or as the machine told them to “please place the item back in the bagging area” and to “wait for the attendant.” Ryan thought what a spectacle it all was, how Lisbeth would criticize him for returning home with not only an Elsa bag, but one from Walmart, for his own kid, whom he took care of better than she did.

  “Inedia,” he said—and realizing the unkemptness of her black curls, the crusty smear of something orange near her chin, he felt self-conscious—“don’t tell Liz where we got this, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, playing with a box of pink Tic Tacs.

  “It’ll be our secret, like the others.” He nodded with her, almost wishing he could buy her some candy, something king-size and chocolate, but that would add to the number of secrets, not conceal it.

  A woman in front of them, black and middle-aged, turned around and looked Ryan over, judgmentally, he thought. Then, still half turned to him, she said to Inedia, “That’s a pretty sleeping bag, sweetie. You going to a sleepover or camping?”

  Inedia became more sullen when strangers spoke to her. She put down the mints and looked at Ryan as if for permission to speak, then said, “No.”

  “Well, what’s it for, then, sweetie?”

  “To sleep in.”

  The woman hesitated for a second, looked back at Ryan, holding a definite glare, and said, “Hmm,” before turning around in line.

  In truth, Inedia slept in one of the twin beds, with a matching bamboo sheet set and comforter, but Lisbeth wanted to strip the beds bare to corroborate her claims about the family’s nomadic Romani-style living—though Ryan didn’t think the Romani even lived that way. And, she speculated, “The more skeletal the house looks, the more likely they are to do a crossover episode with one of the network’s home makeover shows. We could get a whole new interior for free.”

  They could get a whole new interior for free by paying to make their current interior look worse, reverse house-staging—it didn’t make sense to Ryan. Inedia’s bed, according to Lisbeth, needed the sleeping bag, an old one, to pull the look together.

  The woman glanced at Inedia and Ryan again before paying for her groceries. Ryan knew some black women judged him for choosing Lisbeth. He had heard his mother’s and sisters’ and college friends’ appraisals of black men who dated white and could even understand the accusations that some black men chose “any old white woman,” as his first college girlfriend, Jessie, had put it. “I mean, she could be toothless, big as a house, and speaking the fakest-sounding Ebonics you could imagine, and they’ll jump over four highly educated black women to hold the door for a bowser, just to have little light-skinned babies with her.”

  Lisbeth wasn’t a bowser, originally. She had been beautiful once—an eight—with a kind of hard-line assertiveness that still felt soft. They met at UC Berkeley under a tree to which several students had chained themselves. They both skated up on their respective boards, Lisbeth’s a longboard and Ryan’s a skateboard, and paused to see the commotion. Protests were a daily occurrence, and neither could remember what this protest was about, only that their eyes met and that they both laughed at the hippies in the tree. Lisbeth wore little Capri Sun straws in her earlobes, which, she explained, she was stretching. Her top, simple and black, paired with jean shorts, accentuated her breasts, uncontained by a bra. She
complimented Ryan’s short dreads. Their relationship developed quickly, the sex intense, and Ryan could almost drown out the judgment and Jessie’s theory that Lisbeth was just trying to make her parents mad. When Lisbeth was assaulted near campus their senior year, Ryan became her sole source of support, which initially had a damaging effect. They broke up briefly, Lisbeth claiming, “I don’t like how dependent I feel when I’m with you.” But they reunited, spent happy years traveling, making plans, eventually settling, with some recognition of the irony, into their own hippie comforts, the stability of Ryan’s income, and the softness of each other.

  He loved her, but increasingly Lisbeth scared Ryan. He had watched his father, a businessman, take care of his schizophrenic mother, who on lucid days made artwork that hung in galleries from Riverside to Cape Cod. On bad days, she went missing for weeks at a time, leaving no food in the fridge. Ryan’s dad would return home, comfort the kids with expensive toys and fast food, and go back to work. His mother was institutionalized four times during his childhood before her suicide when Ryan was sixteen.

  Lisbeth never went missing, but her shrinking frame and increasing delusions were a kind of disappearing, too, a propulsion toward death. Ryan couldn’t pinpoint when the days began to slow down, when Lisbeth became an embarrassment, the flint of her shrinking body a bone against his own.

  • • •

  The introduction on the blog’s welcome page featured a picture of Lisbeth with fuller cheeks and a peachy glow on her skin, unlike the sallow, patchy face in front of Mike and the camera. She stood next to a tree, wearing a blue tank top, holding a durian, and smiling.

  The note on the webpage read in part:

  Detachment parenting works from the premise that early peoples had it right and babies and children were essentially adults in miniature. If left to perform tasks on their own, they will develop useful skills and become self-sufficient.