Because I Said So (8 page)

Sometimes at night
I lie awake and think about how fast time goes with children. For years adults said this to you and you never knew what it meant. And then you had children and the baby time was molasses slow and then it seemed to go faster and faster, and you could imagine far too clearly all the things your children, who are so sweet and full of blooming affection now, wouldn’t want to do in just a few years time—like hug you in public. I see the ridiculousness of brooding about the inevitable and desirable—we want our children to grow up, which means, in part, away from us—not to mention the not-even-here-quite-yet.

But there it is. Talia’s mother probably feels something like the same sentiment, and Talia probably senses it.

It’s odd what will draw a child into history, and into history’s particular way of vouchsafing a sense that our world is not the only world. And it’s odd how we can’t know or always plan for the edifying moments. Not long ago, on a trip to Boston, my husband and I and our two children wandered into a very old graveyard. It was a place I’d always liked when I’d lived near it in my early twenties—a quiet place on a hill, with a view of the Boston Harbor, gleaming like a nickel in the sun. We had planned to stop there for a few minutes on our way to get pizza. But our children loved it and wanted to linger. The seven-year-old lay on his stomach in front of a stone and read the inscriptions as though he were cracking a code, which in a way he was. His younger sister traced the words with a long stalk of grass and rubbed her fingers over the little death’s heads with wings that you see in old New England graveyards—not quite angels, something harsher. They
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asked a lot of questions. What did the skeletons look like? Where were their souls? Where was their skin? Why were African Americans buried in a separate part of the cemetery? Why did people die so young then? What sort of a name was Hephzibah?

Children are like us, but they are not us. That’s the thing we forget sometimes: that their world is in some sense ineffable for us, as passionately as we love them. And in that sense, imagining their inner lives—as immediate as a horse’s in some ways and yet much more mystical than mine—is like imagining history. I can no more remember what it felt like to be four years old or seven, not really, than I can know what it felt like to be a person of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. I have little pictures, just as I do of history—magic lantern slides, backlit, endlessly fascinating, and somehow just beyond my grasp. We’ve all heard that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Well, childhood is too. American Girl dolls are one way to visit both those foreign countries, I suppose. But every day my children surprise me with where they want to go, and how they want to get there.

Prayin’ Hard for Better Dayz

C a m i l l e P e r i

I have to tell you: I hate rap.
I hate the bitches and the asses and the ’ho’s. I hate the in-yo’-faceness, the pumped-up testosterone, the butted-out chests, the finger-jabbing, the ice, the six-packs, the balloon pants, the rings like brass knuckles. The pervasive boxer shorts, the Jockey bands where belts used to be.

In yo’ face is not an attempt to connect. It means shut up, stay away.
Move bitch. Get out the way,
as the song says.

I know the socioeconomic justifications and the political roots. I like some of the bravado and the clever wordplay. There are songs that have opened my eyes and forced me to think. But most of it pretends that glamorizing guns and gangstas is keeping it real; it is misogyny decked out like a Courvoisier ad.
I’m into
havin’ sex, I ain’t into makin’ love,
50 Cent sings. No intimacy or mystery or love, God forbid any allusion to or regard for what comes next. Just poses and postures selling a crude idea of what it means to be a man.

The hills are alive with the sound of rap—blasting in suburbs, in Paris clubs, out of the cars that cruise up our street from the projects down the hill. Ghetto is a state of mind. To kids of every color—black, Asian, Latin, or white, like my son Joe—it’s an adjective, the coolest, the best.
Now dat’s ghetto
, you say if you’re ghetto. It came out of the ghetto, but now it’s not anywhere, it’s in kids’ heads. You can live in the ghetto and not be ghetto. On the other hand, my son Joe doesn’t live there, but he’s ghetto.

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C a m i l l e P e r i

For the past couple of years, since the summer Joe turned ghetto, I have felt like I live in a rap video—rappers crowding the camera frame above me, looking down like they just kicked my butt and are ready to do it again. As my husband, David, and I have watched Joe take on the gangsta swagger and pout, we have wandered around like the iguana in Eddie Murphy’s
Dr. Dolittle
, muttering, “So young, so angry. Damn that rap music!” What did we do that our kid has embraced such a dark view of the world?

Where did all we raised him with go? Where did who he was go?

The star athlete, the student leader, the boy who wrote screen-plays and directed the neighborhood kids in films, the kid who composed music on the piano so beautiful that other mothers cried . . .
He thuggin? Oh he a thug. On da real
.

Looking back,
there was no way that summer could have been normal. It began not with a party at the beach or a banana split.

It began with me taking off my wig.

The autumn before, I had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Two things stand out from the misty light that bleached most of those first few days from my memory. One is that I had not been given a death sentence; there was a lot I could do to fight it. The other is Joey on the soccer field the day after we told him about my diagnosis. He said he was going to make a goal for me, and he did. In the slow-motion replay in my head, I can see him right after, his summer blond hair gone brown, turning to find me in the stands, pointing to me from the field.
Just do it,
his burning eyes said. He was eleven years old.

I began chemotherapy after Thanksgiving and started brushing out handfuls of my shoulder-length hair just before Christmas. As part of the instructions on helping kids cope with that side effect of chemo, they suggest making it fun, having your kids draw funny faces on your bald head. Joey and his younger brother, Nat, wanted no part of that. The coping mechanism for them was not to see my smooth, bare head ever, if possible. I searched out a wig that approximated my tight, dark, Italian
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curls, but the standard dealers had only shiny flips and big loopy ringlets. Then I found a woman who specialized in wigs for women of color. Through her, I bought a hand-me-down from a wealthy black woman that was a near-perfect match for my hair.

It wasn’t that the cancer was a secret. Everyone knew. But the boys could cope with my occasional nausea and fevers as long as we kept the rhythms of our routine—as long as I could pick them up at school and look normal. This worked pretty well until my eyelashes and eyebrows started thinning out too. Without those familiar signposts on my face, my hair seemed to get bigger. I looked like a country singer. So I switched sometimes to a cheap, short pageboy wig that I could wear with a baseball cap pulled down low. That had its problems too. Arriving at school in our family car with straight hair was one thing, but the day I told Nat I’d be coming with a friend in her car, it was too much. “You
will
have curly hair though, won’t you?” he asked with a worried look.

By summer I had a feathery mantle of baby hair, just enough to let me abandon my wig. “It looks good, Mom,” Joe said cheerfully. “You look like Cal Ripken.” Actually, I wish I had looked as good as Cal Ripken. With a pale man-in-the-moon face still puffy from chemo, I scared even myself sometimes when I caught a glimpse of me in a mirror. Taking off my fake hair was supposed to be a relief. Instead, it seemed to lay open all our anxieties and fears that had somehow stayed tucked neatly away under my wig.

Through the long winter and spring, I had just wanted life to go back to normal. But there was no normal, or at least normal wasn’t going to be what it used to be. We went through the usual motions of summer—the drive from swimming lessons to art camps to piano lessons to the grocery store—and sometimes we had an extra stop: radiation. I was required to go for fifteen minutes a day and therefore, some days, so were my sons. They would sit in the waiting room with women in hospital pajamas doting over them—two brave little men, their arms folded across their chests. Only God knows what they were thinking; I chose not to ask.

Sometimes we stopped at Mission Dolores on the way home.

I was a long-lapsed Catholic; my religion by then was incense,
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C a m i l l e P e r i

candles, and the “Ave Maria” sung in Latin. David and I and the children had gone to church recreationally, mostly for the spectacle of the Christmas pageant, where children dressed as angels and shepherds tripped on their robes down the usually austere aisle—

accompanied by live goats, donkeys, and bunnies—and everyone prayed that the Baby Jesus stand-in would make it to the altar without slipping from little Mary’s arms. One Christmas, in a fabulous faux pas, a pregnant goat went into untimely labor in the vestibule, her screams punctuating the telling of the Christmas story, something that perhaps only a mother could appreciate: a truly wrenching evocation of birth in a manger.

But now I was back at church, slipping in after my treatments, guilty as only a Catholic can be, daring to ask for whatever mercy could be spared, trying this time to deal directly with God and ignore the angry voices of my childhood, which demanded, Why do you deserve this? What have you done for God lately? One day, as I lit a candle at a time when the thought of leaving my children was particularly tormenting, warmth spread through my fingertips to my toes, a sense of calm I had never felt, telling me that everything would be all right. On another visit, as I sat silent in the dark, cavernous church, alone except for a caretaker fussing with the kneelers, the sun suddenly broke through a stained-glass window, drenching only me in a circle of gold, green, and purple light. My mind rationalized that Catholic architects had designed the church for just that effect and that tomorrow it would happen again to whoever was sitting in my spot, but my heart hoped it was a sign from God.

I didn’t talk to my sons about this. I just took them a few times to Mission Dolores to light a
veladora
, and I hoped that in the cool stone and serene faces of the saints, in the red light that is always lit to signify God’s presence, they would breathe in some of the security that Catholicism gave me as a child. Nat, who was eight at the time, seems to have an innate feel for both the simplicity and profundity of things. (He keeps scented candles by his bed to smell at night and once took an empty M&M bag to preschool so the other kids could share its faint odor of chocolate, its
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nostalgic whiff of sweetness.) As I had expected, the mystery of the church did its magic on him: He told me that the wooden eyes of Saint Joseph had looked at him, and another time he saw the statue move.

As summer went on, the boys cut their hair short, shorter than mine. I checked mine daily to see if it had grown. We made jokes about the cancer, but mostly we were quieter that summer.

Strangely, what carried us through, what helped us cope, was rap.

It drifted into our lives through the car radio and became the background rhythm to the strange dance that we were stumbling through. That relentless beat had always seemed so annoying when it boomed from the open windows of cars. Suddenly, it was something reliable, dependable, comforting almost.

And so were the words. The struggle to survive, the defiance, the loss of friends and family, the anger at being dealt a crooked hand, even the fragility of here and now sealed us in a trance.

This was not a Beach Boys summer. We weren’t havin’ fun all summer long. We were shell-shocked street soldiers, trying to get to the next stop. The “angel thug” Tupac Shakur—whose premonition of his own violent death six years before had infused his songs with a poignant intensity—spoke to us from the grave:
Baby, don’t cry. You gotta keep your head up. Even when the
road is hard, never give up.

The rap poet Nas sang to his mother, who had died of breast cancer two years before:

They playing our song the lifebeat my hand on your waist
I grab your other hand and try not to step on your toes
Spin you around with my eyes closed

Dreaming I could have

One more dance with you mama

. . . I’d give my life up ... to have

One more dance with you mama

We never changed the dial when that came on. We listened in silence. It spoke to us more than any cancer self-help manual could.

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• • •

David and I are liberals
in a cosmopolitan city that considers itself one of the outposts of progressivism. We were committed to putting our children in a diverse public elementary school and lucky enough to get them into one where the parents were very involved and the racial mix mirrored that of the nation. This is no easy feat in San Francisco because much of the black middle class has immigrated to Oakland, driven out largely by rising housing costs.

When Joe’s adolescence came on with a bang during the fall when my treatments ended, we were blindsided: a basketball jersey, a headband, a pair of Air Force Ones, and before we could catch our breath, he was talking the gangsta talk. The first time I heard it, I thought it was some other kid outside our door.
I done
got locked out,
an excessively manly voice said. Then I heard it again and again, and like a scary movie, the voice was inside the house.
De popo’s comin. You mess wit dat breezy? Neva dat. She
jockin me. I don chill wit dem.