A Simple Distance (3 page)

I turned into the tight driveway that separated my building from the next, parked in the dirt under the lemon tree in back, not really a spot but big enough for my practical hatchback.

Jean, you’ll have to back up for me to get out. I’m right in the dirt here.

I backed up, let her out on the cement, re-parked, and began unloading her bags as she walked up to the back door; the curve of her neck, more pronounced than ever before, made her look older than merely middle-aged.

Here, Mom, I’ll let you in. You must be tired.

I unlocked the door for her, returned to the luggage as she disappeared inside.

By the time I’d carried in the last of her belongings, she was asleep on my futon, still folded into a couch. That night, I slept on the air mattress.

CHAPTER 4

She woke me placing her bags one by one by one on my creaky futon, though I lay still a minute before I mumbled,
Morning
, wiped the sleep from my eyes, and rose from the air mattress.

She’d done that to me all my life. When I was a teenager, she’d vacuum right outside my bedroom door weekend mornings when she thought it was time for me to get up and get to work on something or another.

I mustered up maturity.

Jean
, she said,
why haven’t you done anything with these walls? I feel I’m in an insane asylum.

Irritated, I ignored her, retreated to the bathroom for an inordinately long time, washing my hair squeaky-clean; wondering if we couldn’t, maybe, catch a double-feature that afternoon at the theater down the street; kicking myself for not thinking—scheduling her arrival to fall on a weekend instead of a weekday when I’d have a reason to be at work.

Perhaps I had no excuse to be acting like such a child. But her being in my space, it all came back. Ours was an uneasy reunion.

Everything would be fine if we could just speak to each other as little as possible.

I was thinking about a movie later, Mom. Maybe a double-feature, down the street.

I didn’t tell her the only double-feature was back-to-back
Star Wars
: the last one, and then the prequel. She might have balked.

The movie didn’t start until 2:00, but it was hard enough spending the entire morning locked in my studio with her, unpacking and unpacking and unpacking for what seemed like forever, her clothes taking up more of my closet than mine. Every five minutes commenting on my absence of décor.

So we bought our tickets right after lunch. I figured we’d wait out the last forty-five minutes standing first in line at the theater.

But I hadn’t figured on running into anyone. My heart stopped for just a second when I saw walking toward us on the same side of the street as our nonexistent queue: Linda, my client Cynthia’s ex, and their daughter Sadie—the subject of the custody battle. Hand in hand.

Neither of them knew my face. Cynthia kept Sadie far away from our firm, wanting her to be around as little conflict as possible regarding the suit. And there’d been no reason for us to meet with Linda as yet. The hearing was still a week away and any attempts at negotiation would not likely happen until just before. There was nothing for them to recognize in me, although I felt I knew them both intimately from my meetings with Cynthia and the family photos in her file.

My stomach started to tighten. More than I’d realized from Sadie’s photos, there in person, by both looks and predicament, she could have been me at her age. They had gotten the sperm from an international bank and didn’t know much about Sadie’s father, only those things he chose to report—ordinary illnesses, education, race. A Jamaican intellectual with a predisposition toward melancholy.

* * *

The night before my father left, I caught them. I’d pulled off my thin cotton sheet to get out of bed, stepped to the creaky wooden floor, walked only in the places I knew wouldn’t give me away—close to the walls—and moved toward their voices. Down the hallway and the dark back stairs. My breathing short. My eyes wide.

The door to the kitchen, at the bottom of the stairs, was ajar. Just enough.

My mom was pressed up against the sink, plates stacked precariously by her side. Earlier that evening she’d made me pull up a chair, like always, so I could reach the faucet and wash the dinner dishes, but I hadn’t taken care to place them properly in the rack. She wore a white nightshirt and her skin was glowing through it, dark and red, under the florescent light from the ceiling.

My dad was there too, holding a belt in his right, dominant fist, looped like a teardrop. They were saying things, blurry whispers short and angry, more like spitting than speaking. But their words came to me strange, like the flapping of a flock of autumn birds flying south: starting far away, their wings only loud for the second they passed, and then quiet. So all I really heard, for sure, was the clear, crisp slapping.

There, on the stairs, the consequences of my next step in either direction, backward into the dark or forward into the kitchen, held me still.

Maybe if I’d taken more care to sturdy the dishes as I’d placed them to dry, we all could have pretended it never happened. Maybe it was my dad’s fault for pushing her too close to the rack, or hers for letting him. But something happened, some part of them bumped up against it, and all at once, everything came crashing down—all of dinner’s dishes, along with my mom, landing hard and broken on the floor in front of the sink. And it was one of those screams that was halfway out before I realized it was me. So I couldn’t take it back.

Both of their eyes, my father’s and my mother’s, caught mine as my dad raised his arm again. And the awareness that his fist was in a place it shouldn’t have been obscured its purpose for just a moment. But then it came down—again and again and again; their eyes never leaving mine.

The next day, he left us in his old pea-green Mustang.

* * *

I was waiting for my father to pick me up for the weekend the first time I realized I was black. I was standing in the downstairs bathroom, wearing red hand-me-down Garanimals from my sometimes best friend Becky: elastic-waisted pants crawling with fruit trees and monkey faces; plain red shirt, turtlenecked for a cold fall, thin frills at the wrists and just below my chin.

It was never warm enough in our house. My mom would set the thermostat at fifty-five degrees and call it the
comfort zone
. But I knew better. I never felt comfortable in that house. I used to sit, knees to chest, in front of the metal vents when the temperature fell to fifty-four and the forced air clicked itself on.

On really frigid days in winter, I’d fill the sink with water, hot from the tap, keep my sleeves rolled down to my wrists, and soak my hands and forearms until the blood under my puckered skin came closer to the surface. Then I’d sit in front of the vents, because they warmed me even better when my shirt was wet. The water, I learned, had a way of conducting the heat more directly to my body than just plain air.

It was one of those days: bitter cold, made colder by the crack in my father’s broken promise to come get me, letting in the outside air sure as any open door. I’d waited for him since after school, had come straight home.

I always waited for my dad about three feet off the ground, on the ledge of our big picture window in the living room that framed my world: the tall oak across the street, whose lowerhanging branches I’d climb and swing on; the wire fence that separated our house from the old peoples’ home next door; the mulberry trees on the other side of that fence, in easy reach after scaling the links, their fruit bursting dark, fat, and purple on the branches; the blue jays that flew into the glass when it was too clean and the sun reflected only clouds and sky; the three strips of gray concrete my dad put in as a driveway before the divorce, two for the wheels, one for walking, running parallel to our house, where the green Mustang used to rest before he took it with him and my mom started renting parking space to help with the mortgage. That mortgage with the special rate because our town had been told, just before we got there, to increase its efforts at integration.

But I didn’t make it to the heater that day. Or to the ledge. That day, as I turned to open the bathroom door—wet sleeves and wrinkly hands making their way to the white porcelain knob—the mirror, half-broken from one of my parents’ fights, left off the top half of my reflection. So it was my hands, bellyhigh, that stopped me: brown hands against that white knob. It was right there in the mirror. The contrast.

I thought maybe that was why my dad forgot so often to come pick me up when it was his turn. Maybe he was mad at me for coming out like her. And maybe that was why my mom stayed in her room all the time, door closed to my face, reminding her too much of her own. Maybe I’d failed them both, coming out the way I did.

I was in the first grade and just getting accustomed to that idea when I met Mr. Walker, came to find out I wasn’t black enough at all. He had some of the big kids drag me, literally, upstairs to the second floor, where he was sitting on his stool in his classroom: a king surrounded by his subjects, waiting for the offering of my small body. Mr. Walker was the only black teacher at Lincoln. Ever. He was a very large man.

After the big kids pried off my banana hat, long and yellow with a green loop on top for hanging, Mr. Walker took one look at me and smiled a great, big Cheshire cat smile, the one he’d wear for years to come, every time he saw me, all the way up from the first grade to the sixth, when he recruited me into his class. If nothing else, he was a patient man.

Even when I was in his class, every day looking at his face, nothing about Mr. Walker felt familiar to me like he thought it was supposed to. He would have our class read books out loud about African-Americans and slavery in the South, and I learned it right along with all the little white suburban kids in my class, but it never hit home. Not really. We learned
cotton
and
Confederates,
ignored
cane
and
Caribbean
and other such things that would have helped me make sense of my hands and their history when I looked in our half-broken mirror.

One day, Mr. Walker kept me back from music class—where Ms. Costa, the music teacher, would sit us in a circle, play “Kumbaya,” “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore,” on her acoustic guitar, and we’d sing along to mimeographed lyrics—to tell me about the way the world was. He sat me down in someone else’s desk, pulled his stool up close. He told me junior high was going to be different; there’d be black kids there and I’d have a very hard time if I didn’t start hanging out with them. Told me I’d need to switch sides.

There’d never been any other side at Lincoln. And all those books we’d read out loud doing nothing but making me feel like I really belonged somewhere else—I wasn’t so sure the black kids would want me on their side in junior high.

My eyes were still red from crying when everyone else came back from music. So they all knew something big had happened. When they asked me what it was, I just sat there speechless, in whoever’s desk.

Sometimes I dreaded the color of my skin because it made Mr. Walker single me out, fixate on me and the salvation of my sixth-grade soul, when all I ever wanted to do was hide. He thought I wasn’t being taught at home to be black enough. So after his talk with me, he called in my mom, made her miss an afternoon of work we couldn’t afford, and gave her the same talk for which he’d held me back from music. Perhaps he even made her sit in the same desk.

My mom may not have been a book, but I’m pretty sure she read herself out loud to Mr. Walker that day.
Who in God’s name
was this crazy, fat man to tell her she’d raised her daughter wrong?

Before that day, Mr. Walker hadn’t a clue that beneath the chipped paint of our porch stairs, her department-store job selling clothes we couldn’t buy ourselves, and our five-dollar trips to the grocery store, ran the blood of Pascal arrogance that matched his own step for step. She told him point blank:
West Indians are not American.
She’s never been a diplomat.

I shut my eyes, held my breath, kept still as possible for the rest of the year. And he never held me back from music class again.

Pity
, my mom said to me once,
pity you didn’t get your father’s coloring. It’s a dark child sees dark days.

* * *

Cynthia and Linda never registered as domestic partners. So when Cynthia gave birth to Sadie, there was never any way to bind them all, by statute, as family. Only by contract was it possible to make Linda Sadie’s mother, through a second-parent adoption agreement.

Improvisation. Doing, simply, the best they could, second-parent adoption afforded them a chance to assert what the law would have liked to forget: that each family was different. For fifteen years, in California, second-parent adoptions had been the only choice for gay and lesbian couples. Our contracts carried our intent because no other rule would.

I let Linda and Sadie pass, averted my eyes. Yet they were all I saw, my mother’s voice yammering on and on about something I’d stopped listening to minutes ago.

Sometimes my ethics as a lawyer ran counter to my ethics as a human being. And the thing I hated most was my first thought—that I should speak with Cynthia about limiting Linda’s time with Sadie until custody and visitation were settled.

Precedent changing so fast back then, who knew? Holding yourself out to be a child’s parent in line for
Star Wars
might have been good enough for a court to agree. Linda acting like Sadie’s mother might have convinced a judge she still was.

They bought their tickets and stood in line right behind us. I could barely breathe.

CHAPTER 5

Monday was a new day. I bussed into work, told my mom I’d come home early so we could walk around the lake and catch an early dinner.

My bus began its route across the bay and into the city. A passenger, I looked to the hills, slouched low in my seat as we approached the bridge; took refuge in temporary suspension between where I’d been and where I needed to go.