Without my mother, I was as useless as a single shoe.
“Do you want something to drink?”
“What do you have?” James wanted to know.
I opened the refrigerator wide. My mother had just been to the store, and I was proud of the ful produce drawers, the two dozen eggs safe in their holders, and the glass bottles of juice. “We have Diet Coke.”
James made a face.
“Cucumber water?” This was my mother’s concoction; a doctor’s wife had told her that they serve it at day spas.
“Just ice water is fine,” Raleigh said.
“Go on in the living room,” I said. “I’l bring it out.”
James headed in the direction of the living room, but Raleigh looked over his shoulder.
“My mother’s not home,” I said.
He gave a disappointed little nod and fol owed my father.
Both James and Raleigh preferred my mother’s company to mine, and I couldn’t quite blame them. They belonged to her. Al three of us did, real y.
In the summer, the four of us enjoyed smal parties on our patio. Knowing the neighbors never complained about the music when James’s wax-slick car was out front, my mother cranked up the console stereo in the living room, so the sounds of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes streamed through the dusty screen door, mingling with James’s cigarette smoke, which kept mosquitoes away. My mother would try to dance with James first, knowing that he wouldn’t. She might twirl around shaking her pretty shoulders and gorgeous hair, cal ing his name, until James would say to Raleigh, “Dance with this beautiful woman for me.”
My job was to keep the glasses fil ed with ice and to mix the gin-and-tonics. With a paring knife, I carved perfect twists of lime. When I dropped the curving rind into my father’s glass, he would kiss my fingers.
While my mother was dancing with Raleigh, she kept her eyes firmly on James. When Raleigh held her waist, she let her torso fal backward, her hair leading the way, laughing until she righted herself quickly. She and I had the same hair, but I hadn’t learned yet to make it move for me. When the music stopped, Raleigh let my mother go, his arms fal ing to his sides. I kept my eyes peeled for that moment, so I could be there, ready with an icy glass for his empty hand.
Mother would leave the dancing area — just a smal space between the rusting railing and the wire patio set — to sit on James’s lap and wrap her arms around his neck. Raleigh usual y sank to the concrete floor where he had just been dancing and leaned himself against the railing, not caring about the rust marks on his shirt. I would sit beside him, leaning my head on his chest. My mother, taking a big drink from James’s gin-andtonic, would look over the rim of the glass and say, “Raleigh, you may be white on the outside, but when the music starts you are one hundred percent American Negro.”
Then Raleigh would blush as red as my mother’s shiny toenails and I wondered what it felt like to live inside such disloyal skin.
The last song was always Bobby Caldwel . When he sang, “Makes me do for love what I would not do,” my mother would close her eyes, and James would touch her eyelids. On those summer nights, my parents lived in a space al by themselves, breathing only each other’s air. I sat beside Raleigh, breathing normal y, and he sat beside me, so stil , as though he were taking in no air at al .
But on the evening that my father came to talk to me about life, my mother wasn’t home, so Raleigh sat on the vinyl couch, drinking water and fooling with the 35mm camera strung around his neck with a red strap. This was before he was serious, when James encouraged his photography because it was a good tie-in for the limo business. They could offer marrying couples a package: photos and a ride.
“Can I get you something else?” I said, hoping James would drink his ice water and leave before Marcus came to pick me up.
“No,” he said. “Not unless you want something for yourself.”
“No,” I said, “I’m fine. What about you, Raleigh? You need something?”
“I need a tripod.”
“Sorry,” I said. “No tripods today.”
My father said, “Just sit down. I want to talk to you. You don’t mind if old Raleigh is in here when we talk, do you?”
“Is there something wrong?”
I can’t say for sure if the talk that came next was prompted by the little circle of skin showing below my col ar bone or if he had visited for the very purpose of explaining to me the benefits of chastity, but he told me again to sit down. I did, with a glance at the clock and a certain busyness of breath.
“Sir?” I said.
“Don’t cal me sir. I feel like an overseer when you cal me sir.”
Raleigh chuckled. “You can cal me sir whenever you want.”
“You going somewhere tonight?” James asked me.
I knew I couldn’t lie. The makeup I could have explained away but not the keyhole blouse. I shrugged. “Sort of.”
“With who?”
“Some people I know. They have a car.”
“Does your mama know about this?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Would you lie to me, Dana?” James said.
“No, sir,” I said, leaning on the last word.
“Jim-Bo,” Raleigh said, “lighten up.” Then he said to me, “We’ve had a couple of drinks. Pour us a couple glasses of that cucumber water, whatever the hel that is. It doesn’t have alcohol, does it?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just water mostly.”
“Then we need that,” Raleigh said.
I popped up from my chair, just to escape my father, who was staring at the keyhole like he’d only now noticed that I had developed into a teenager. I’d had my breasts for five years now and my period for four. I was past the embarrassment I had felt when things first started changing, when I wore a sweater wel into the spring to hide my bra straps. At fifteen, I threw my box of tampons on the drugstore counter along with my packs of gum and nail-polish remover. But under my father’s eyes that evening, I felt shy again and obscene.
“Sit back down,” James said. “We don’t need no cucumber water. What we need here is to have a conversation. Raleigh, you got eyes in your h-head. What we n-n-need to do is s-s-it down and talk.”
Sitting back down, I faked a cough to give myself a reason to pat my chest and cover the keyhole with my palm.
“You’re going on a date,” James said. “Don’t lie to me.” His voice was turning angry. I looked over at Raleigh, who picked up a magazine from the coffee table and stared at the pages.
“It’s not real y a date,” I said.
“It’s something,” James snapped back. “When did you start wearing so much makeup?”
The real answer was that I started wearing Fashion Fair when Ronalda and I figured out how to swipe the testers from the counter at Rich’s. The eye shadows were fastened down to the displays, but a person could get away with the lipstick and blusher if she knew what she was doing.
James went on, “Look at that shirt you’ve got on.”
I didn’t speak to my father. I told myself to be calm, that he would start to stammer soon, that whatever conversation he seemed bent on having could never take place.
“Where did you even b-b-buy that top? Y-y-y-you’re about to b-b-b-bust out of it.”
“I was going to wear a jacket,” I said.
“She’s just growing up,” Raleigh said. “Both the girls are growing up.”
James shrugged Raleigh’s hand off his shoulder. “That’s easy for you to say. They’re not your daughters.”
I looked up at James. Had he ever spoken of me and Chaurisse in a single breath? It was like we were regular sisters, driving our dad crazy like the light-skinned daughters on
The Cosby Show.
“Dana,” James said, “I know your mama has talked to you about this already.” He looked at me for confirmation so I bobbed my head a little bit, stil smiling like fool. “You’re a good girl. I know you’re a good girl. I love you, right? Your uncle Raleigh, he loves you, too. Right, Raleigh?”
“Of course, Jimmy,” he said. “Both of us love you, Dana.” He raised his camera to his face and snapped it at me.
“I love you, too,” I said. “Daddy.” Feeling brave, I repeated the whole sentence. “I love you, too, Daddy.” The word tasted a little sharp, like milk about to turn, but stil , I wanted to say it again and again.
Raleigh pressed the shutter once more, and it was like the Fourth of July. I blinked in the purple flash; the spots left in front of my face were like those little cartoon hearts around Popeye’s head when he looks at Olive Oyl. My father loved me.
He said it, right here, not to please my mother, but just because he wanted it to be said.
MY FATHER LICKED his thumb and reached toward my cheek. There was a part of me that knew that his damp finger meant that he wanted to wipe something from my face, that he was probably aiming for my chocolate raspberry blusher. I understood this in the brain, but my body twitched.
My shoulder rose to protect my face.
I should have been over it by then, but I cringed, jumping back the way I did whenever Marcus raised his hand, even if he was just reaching for the light switch to give us some privacy. “Don’t be scared of me,” he had said just the day before, when I ducked as he was adjusting the light in the top of his car. I told him I wasn’t scared. I didn’t want to get into it al over again. It wasn’t like it happened al the time, and when it did, people had been drinking.
Twitching like that in front of James shamed me as much as the keyhole in the shirt. It wasn’t normal, this aversion to being touched. Marcus let me know that other girls didn’t behave like this, which only aggravated the situation. This flinching had become worse than a reflex; it was a stammer of the body.
I let my head hang heavy on my neck and said, “I’l change my clothes before I go. I wasn’t going to wear this, anyway.” I got up and I glanced at the clock, careful y, not wanting to draw attention to my nervousness.
“Sit back down,” James said. “Sit back down. What time is he picking you up? I want to meet him.”
“Nobody is coming to pick me up,” I said. “I am meeting the people over at their house. It’s not a date. It’s not just one person I’m going out with.”
“So you wearing that top with al your business hanging out just to see what you can catch?”
“Aw, Jimmy,” Raleigh said. “It’s not fair to talk to her like that.”
“I’m fair,” James said. “I would be the same way with Chaurisse. I’m fair. Evenhanded. Fifty-fifty in everything.”
Raleigh said, “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Speak for yourself,” James said. “I am trying to talk to my child here. It’s my duty.”
I touched my earlobes, disturbing my earrings. My mother’s mother had given them to her when she was born and when I was born, my mother gave them to me. She told me to give them to my daughter. I asked what would happen if I didn’t have one, what if I had only a son, or no children at al . “In that case,” my mother said. “You get to keep them and wear them in your coffin.”
James wet his finger again and aimed for my brow bone. Again, I jerked away.
“Dana?” Raleigh said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. Reflexes. Nothing.” I kept repeating the last word, unable to stop myself.
“Dana,” Raleigh said again.
“Are you scared of me?” James said.
“No,” I said. “You’re wrong.”
“I’m not,” James said softly. “You’re scared of me. I’ve been a good father to you. You have no cause to be scared of me like that.”’
“I’m not scared,” I said, pleading now. I knew the feeling was cal ed déjà vu. “I’m not scared,” I’d said to Marcus in the dark of his parent’s bedroom. “I’m not,” I’d said, bal ing my shaking hands into fists and stuffing them under my thighs.
THAT HAD BEEN only two weeks earlier. I’d taken the 66 Lynhurst bus to Marcus’s house. When the bus passed right in front of my father’s house with its orange-sherbet bricks, I opened my mouth and swal owed air. The address was written out in cursive letters, SEVEN THIRTY-NINE, instead of just numbers like regular people. The sign staked in the yard read CHAURISSE’S PINK FOX. After West Manor Elementary, I pul ed the cord and the driver let me off. Marcus’s parents, whom I had never seen, were away at a bridge tournament. The house was stuffed with kids, some of them from other schools. I went into the bedroom looking for Marcus but found only Angie, a wild girl who wore keyhole tops even to school. She lay on his bed, talking on the telephone, looking up at the poster of Jayne Kennedy mounted on the ceiling. When I lay on Marcus’s bed, I always closed my eyes against the beautiful woman spread above me.
Wandering back into the living room, I found Ronalda who asked me what was wrong.
“Angie’s in his room.”
She corrected her eyeliner with her finger and frowned. “Are you going to leave?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Ronalda gave a deep sigh like she had already seen everything in the world. “You know what my mama says? ‘Your pride or your man. You can’t have them both.’”
The guys came in then from the backyard, where they had been working on the barbecue gril .
“The coals are hot,” Marcus said. He smel ed dangerous, like lighter fluid.
“Hi, Marcus,” I said, and waved. Maybe I sounded a bit too eager, because he tensed.
“Don’t get carried away,” he said. “It’s not that serious, babygirl.”
Everyone in the room laughed, except Ronalda.
Now I must have looked hurt, because Marcus approached me from behind, touching my waist and saying hel o into my hair. He greeted me like my father greeted my mother, except we were in front of other people. “You look good,” he said, pressing himself against my backside. I wanted to melt into him, but the laughter of his friends stil hung in the air.
“It was a joke,” Marcus said softly, stil directing his words into my scalp. “A joke. Why do you have to be so serious al the time?”
“I’m not mad,” I said.
“It wasn’t funny,” Ronalda spoke up from the couch.
Now al his friends laughed at him, although Ronalda hadn’t even made a joke.
“Bald-headed bitch,” Marcus said, but if Ronalda heard him, she didn’t react.
IT WASN’T LIKE on television. It wasn’t
The Burning Bed.
I wouldn’t even cal it violence, real y. Sometimes it was like a shove with a bit of a shake. Yes, there were slaps, but with a slap, the shock was in the sound more than anything else. It scared me, that was al . And I shouldn’t have asked him about Angie. The two of them had known each other forever. They went to the same church. Their houses had identical floor plans. They were bathed together as babies. I needed to learn how to trust people.