Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (20 page)

At home, the first thing I did was head to the bathroom, thinking to get to the bottom of the situation once and for all. When I finally did unfasten my pants and pull them down, the dark stain that had covered the entire inside of my pants and seeped through to the other side, like a new continent, shocked me. I was mortified. Everyone else must have thought I knew.

My mother took the pants and managed to get them clean. “You’ll need to remember this in the future,” she told me. “You can get bloodstains out of your clothing with cold water and salt. Don’t use hot; that will set the stain and it will never come out.”

“How does it feel?” my friend Terry asked me the next day at school. The way she asked confirmed my suspicion that the arrival of my period had become a scrap of gossip.

“Gross,” I told her. And then, deciding I might as well try to convince her that it had caught me unawares, “I had no idea what was happening until I got home.”

Fifth grade was the year when the first promised changes began to arrive, like relatives from an old country. They brought secrets. The worry they carried was the worst kind, based as it was on evidence, history. Alone in my body, I found myself at the center of a bewildering crowd. There was the self I felt like, which was
different from the self others saw. And, thanks to changes my body had wrought, there was the self I had been made to expect, which was different, still, another transitory state that would last only as long as it lasted. There was the self my mother had urged me to embrace, in a spotless white dress for the world to see. And the potential self to which that virginal bride stood in contrast: the self I’d be when, according to Conrad, my body began to desire what it didn’t yet know how to desire; the self that might choose to act upon what it wanted, then try to hide it. Is the self that is hidden different from the self that hides? What about the one sequestered in the imagination, no less real for lacking form? How many was I? How many were here for good, and how many were merely passing through?

My head started to feel like a Volkswagen Beetle into which had been crammed a hundred clowns. That must have been part of it, too: staring life down until it teaches you to laugh.

I could feel myself sliding over to the far side of a line, standing beside my mother and sisters, where before I’d only been facing them from a distance. My mother had taught Jean and Wanda to help her in the kitchen, something she believed a woman ought to know how to do, and sometimes when they did, they’d talk to one another not like mother and daughters but like peers. More and more, I was allowed to hear and know these things, too.

There was the story of an older Japanese man living in Fairfield with his daughter and her husband. My mother saw him almost every day on her daily morning walk. They greeted one another with smiles or waved from across the street. But one evening, with a troubled face, Mom told Jean and me that just that morning the old man had reached out and squeezed one of her breasts as they passed one another. Mom was upset. She already carried the walking
stick my father had made for her, to scare away the neighborhood dogs that would sometimes appear from out of nowhere, defending what they viewed as their territory Was she now supposed to raise it against an old man? Should she change her walking route? The man lived in our neighborhood. How could she realistically avoid him? Hearing her dilemma, I knew I was no longer a child. I understood the physical things a person must attend to, guard against, and protect from others when that person is a woman.

Mom did see the old man again on other of her walks—walks where he had waved and smiled broadly, even stepped in close and reached out as if to grab at her again, though she knew by then to cross her arms over her chest and hurry past. One day, weeks later and quite reluctantly, she knocked on the old man’s door and, without being asked in, told his daughter what had been going on.

The daughter grew distressed. “Wait here,” she’d told my mother. Then she disappeared from the doorway and returned with the old man, speaking to him in Japanese. He had shaken his head, looking surprised, staring at my mother as though she were crazy, as though he’d never seen her before.

“Tell him I’d rather not have to go to the police,” Mom had said.

At word of the police the woman grew pleading. “
Papa-san
does not even know what ‘breast’ means! Please,
please
don’t call the police!”

“Tell him,” my mother had repeated.

The woman turned to her father and said something else in Japanese, and the old man nodded and dropped his gaze to the floor. Then, quickly, he had looked up at my mother with an expression she interpreted to mean,
Okay, you win
.

“He won’t bother you,” the daughter had said right before closing the door.

After that, when Mom saw
Papa-san
on walks, he stared straight ahead, though more than once she caught him shooting her an angry sidelong expression that told her he was upset at having been ratted out.

Hearing the resolution to my mother’s story, I was reminded once again that I was no longer a child; again, I understood the choices a person must weigh in her mind and live with when that person is a woman.

Outside, everything seemed full. The hills were still that barren straw brown, but so much else was heavy with blossoms, birds, and butterflies—an abundance so exuberant and, I understood for the first time, so female, converged upon by a thousand demands. Some evenings, when the sky was still shimmering with that nearly invincible spring light, we’d sit up in the kitchen and joke together, the women in the family, about things only women understand.

III

UNINVISIBLE

A
t Charles L. Sullivan Junior High School, the gifted kids and the regular kids converged like two prison populations let loose in the yard. It was fitting, then, that the school should sit at the top of a hill like a blocky fortress or a squat penitentiary. I had walked those same halls once or twice when I was just a toddler, following my mother to Michael’s classroom so we could deliver his forgotten lunch or pick him up for a doctor’s appointment. Those times, he’d knelt down with his arms spread wide and flashed his huge front teeth at me in a smile. No matter that he was just a gangly seventh grader; to me, he was a giant who’d scoop me up in his arms and spin me around or kneel down and let me climb up onto his back. Walking those same halls for the first few times as a seventh grader myself, I’d felt confident that I was indeed fulfilling some small but necessary bit of my destiny, taking my first steps along the path that my older siblings had mapped for me: junior high, then high school, and then, finally, the enchanted kingdom of college, where I’d find myself in a society of people just like the ones my brothers and sisters had brought home on weekends—the ones who were cultured yet kind; intellectual yet full of good humor. People who spoke with such knowledge and authority about the world that not only did it already seem to belong to them, but they also seemed to possess the ability to break off a piece and offer it to me.

Of course, the panorama of seventh- and eighth-grade boys and girls in my immediate vicinity was a far cry from all the young sophisticates my siblings had introduced me to. Mostly, we were the same piddling lot from last year, with the addition, in some cases, of a smattering of acne. Certain of the regular kids, under the onslaught of adolescent hormones, had become volatile; one or another was always willing, at the tiniest perceived insult, to step in close to the offender and whisper, “I call you out,” the junior high equivalent of throwing down a gauntlet. The park adjacent to campus was the theater for such showdowns. We called it the Bowl, since it looked like someone had spooned out the middle with an enormous ice-cream scoop. Some days, as soon as the dismissal bell rang, a wave of boys and girls could be seen running down the hill toward the action. The first time I set foot in the Bowl was during the archery unit in PE class. The brute strength it took to string up a bow and the primal savagery of shooting an arrow at a distant target (we’d learned from a series of gruesome photographs how much damage a single arrow could inflict) only amplified my sense of the Bowl as a place rife with danger.

From the middle of the playground—well, it wasn’t a playground, just a covered blacktop where we could congregate during lunchtime as an alternative to the cafeteria—it was impossible not to get drawn into people watching. Scanning the crowd, I’d try to gather a sense of what everyone was becoming and where the children we’d so recently been had gone. A lot of the girls had begun to style themselves as
Like a Virgin
-era Madonna wannabes, in tank dresses, fingerless lace gloves, and armfuls of black rubber bracelets. Some white boys had let their hair go long like fledgling rockers. The equivalent for the black and Asian Pacific Islander kids was to start dressing like B-boys in parachute pants and beanies
and practice breaking and popping dance moves with names like
windmill, moonwalk
, and
centipede
upon big sheets of linoleum after school. All of these kids who had chosen to adopt a recognizable look or a style had also somehow taken on a different kind of know-how. I wouldn’t call it knowledge, precisely, since most of it was likely just for show, but they’d caught a glimpse of what they’d wanted to be—on TV or in magazines, or maybe they’d been someplace different and scoped it for themselves—and used that as a pattern for who to become and how to do it. At thirteen, I was still just a taller version of my elementary school self. And though I wasn’t alone, I wondered what it would feel like to be aligned with a movement, a group, a real sector of the wider world. It scared me, too, to think a kid could fashion herself into something she’d seen on TV, and be treated accordingly, and then, over time, start following that path toward wherever it led. My mother called things like that fads and told me they were fleeting. What would it mean to choose a path that was fleeting?

Oftentimes, I’d find myself eating my lunch with friends and talking and laughing about whatever it was that we were used to talking and laughing about, but also watching and concentrating upon one girl in particular. Her name was Emmy. She was beautiful and delicate, like one of the dolls my father had brought back from Thailand when I was just a baby, with dark hair that flowed past her waist. She spent her time with one or two other girls, and though I could see for myself that they talked and gestured with one another just like my friends and I did, Emmy gave off the impression of silence. Silence and grace. When school first started, people whispered about her, but the whispering ceased once her body, so far along in pregnancy, began to corroborate all of their rumors. I never once spoke to her, but I remember watching her
with a mix of awe and fear—the same feeling I got, on one of the first days of school, seeing my friend Eilene’s sister Leilani kissing a boy out on the edge of campus. It wasn’t just one kiss but many, or else it was a kiss in many stages, a long, hungry dance they were doing with their mouths and their bodies. Everything around them seemed to disappear into silence, swallowed up in that same commotion-obliterating air that followed Emmy around, though perhaps this time it was really just a matter of perspective: I was in my mother’s Volaré, watching through the rear window as the car filled up with knowledge.

—

Sex was real. It had gone from being something we learned about and recoiled from in disgust and horror to something people found ways of doing and talking about and flaunting. None of my friends was doing it, that I knew of, but I got the feeling that some of the kids who rushed to the Bowl after school weren’t just fighting. There were rumors that you could find empty packets of rubbers in the bushes there. Once, after school, I saw Junior Jackson, one of the Breakers, and LeKneitah Nixon, an eighth-grade girl with enormous breasts and hips that she stuffed into stretchy tops and stirrup pants, goofing around under an overhang outside the gym. They were with a few other kids I didn’t recognize. It was raining, so at first I didn’t think anything of them all huddled together trying not to get wet, but when LeKneitah pushed Junior off her in a way that suggested she was defending herself, I slowed down. I’d have to pass under the same overhang to get to where my mom was waiting in her car. When I got a few steps closer, Junior and LeKneitah were all over one another, laughing like whatever it was had just been a game. Then I watched him work his hand to
the inside of her shirt. “Smell it,” she told him, laughing, throwing his hand back at him with her own, which had followed his under her top. My heart sped up. I didn’t know what exactly they were up to, but I could sense that whatever it was, I didn’t want to get myself mixed up in it. I worried about passing so close to them, but I was also aware of this: we were all of us black, and if I had chosen to shy away or show them I was afraid, wouldn’t that somehow be worse than whatever it was they might have thought to do?