Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (4 page)

I sat beside him while Michael scowled and got in the back.

“I guess we can’t take you home to your mom’s or you’ll be in trouble, huh?” Ron asked.

I wanted to say yes, they could take me home, that I deserved to be in trouble, that I’d let my mother slap me if it meant we’d go get Jasmine and both of us could be at home sleeping in our rooms tonight, but I didn’t.

“No,” I said. “Can I stay at your place? I’m s’posed to be at Jasmine’s.”

“No doubt,” he said, and squeezed my knee, stopping to look at me so hard that I wasn’t even sure what I’d said, but I wanted to take that back too. I remembered my mother saying no one does you a favor who doesn’t want something back sometime. Ron was driving already and I looked out the window again and listened to the radio. Even this time of night they were still playing Tupac, which they never would have been doing when he was still alive.

 

 

Inside at Michael
and Ron’s house, they put me on the downstairs couch and gave me a blanket. When Ron said good night and went into his bedroom in the basement, I thought maybe I’d only imagined the look he gave me earlier. I unlaced my shoes and took down my hair and curled up in the blanket, trying not to think about Jasmine and what kind of a mess I’d left her in. I thought of her laughing, thought of the look on her face when she had closed her eyes and let that man kiss her, and for a second I hated her and then a second later I couldn’t remember anything I’d ever hated more than leaving her. I was sitting there in the dark when Ron came back and put an arm around me.

“You know, you’re too pretty for me to leave you on the couch like that,” he said, pulling me toward him. I didn’t know that, but I did understand then that there was no such thing as safe, only safer; that this, if it didn’t happen now, would happen later but not better. I was safer than Jasmine right now, safer than I might have been. He kissed me, hard, like he was trying to get to the last drop of something, and I kissed him back, harder, like I wanted to get it all back. The noise in my head stopped and I didn’t have to think about anything but where to put all the pieces of my body next.

He grabbed my hand and led me to the bedroom, and he kissed me again and pushed my skirt around my hips. “You’re beautiful,” he said, which must’ve been a lie by this time of night. I sat on the bed and pulled my underwear off and realized they were Jasmine’s. I thought how mad she’d be that it was me and not her doing this. I kissed him and he kept going and I didn’t stop him.

Afterward I was embarrassed because he was embarrassed, and I knew I couldn’t stay there, but instead of going back to the couch I walked upstairs to Michael’s room and climbed into his bed. He smelled the way I remembered him. I just wanted to touch him, really, and not to wake up alone. But he thought I meant something by it, and I let him. I let him kiss me until he felt under my shirt and his fingers found my bra hook, which was still undone because I hadn’t bothered to fasten it.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Right,” he said. He turned away from me and faced the wall. I looked at the back of his ears and thought about a few hours earlier, about him holding my wrist, telling me to be careful with myself. I reached to pull him toward me. I remembered the feeling of his thumb and index finger right there on my pulse as I had nodded yes.

T
he summer I turned nine I went to Tallahassee to visit my grandmother for the first and last time. It was a hot, muggy summer, the kind of weather where you think it’s going to storm any minute, but it rarely does. That much hasn’t changed in sixteen years—not the weather, not my sense of Tallahassee, then and now, as a place where your skin crawls with the sensation that something urgent is about to happen, but you never know what, or when. That first summer I flew to visit, I was skittish as soon as I exited the plane from New Jersey, escorted by a tight-skirted stewardess who handed me a gold plastic set of pin-on wings before we walked to the arrivals gate.

My grandmother had me picked up from the airport by a driver in a company car. The driver worked for a plastics company that still had my grandfather’s name, though he’d been dead since before I was born. The driver reminded me a little bit of my father—he had the same reddish-brown skin, the same big smile—and while we waited for my luggage to come around the baggage carousel, he gave me a stick of cinnamon bubble gum that I folded and tucked into the pocket of my shorts along with the wings, which I could feel pressing into my leg. My parents, as consolation for shipping me off to my grandmother while they spent the summer in Brazil researching indigenous environmental activism, had loaded my suitcase with books. It was something they did every time they went somewhere without me. Along with the small paperback dictionary my parents had given me last summer, I kept a couple of the new books with me to thumb through on the plane:
Introduction to Rites and Rituals; Talismans: A Photographic Record
,
Natural Wonders of the Amazon Rain Forest
.

The book on talismans I found particularly intriguing. I looked at pictures of stones and amulets, brightly dyed pieces of fabric, small and elaborately carved sculptures, and wished that I had brought something magical with me. I wondered if gum or plastic was strong enough to be a talisman; I thought of fashioning the wings into a protective necklace. My own interactions with my grandmother had been limited: my mother avoided family events whenever possible, and at the handful I’d accompanied her to, my grandmother had barely spoken to me. She was the only thing in the world I’d ever seen my mother scared of, my mother who told offhand stories about living through monsoons in Asia and military coups in Africa and near encounters with poisonous foot-long centipedes in South America the way other people’s mothers talked about what they’d had for dinner the night before. Every time she got off the phone with my grandmother, my mother drank a glass of wine, followed by three cups of Zen tea. My father, who almost never yelled, raised his voice at her from behind their closed bedroom door when she made plans that involved seeing her mother, telling her she ought to know better by now and refusing to go with her. They’d fought over sending me to my grandmother’s in the first place, an argument I’d strained my ears to hear and silently hoped my father would win.

Usually when my parents traveled, I stayed with my aunt Claire, my father’s sister, but she’d been in poor health, and my mother worried that having me for the summer would be too much for her to keep up with. My father pointed out that I didn’t need much keeping up with: I read books, I ate when compelled, I sometimes wrote embellished accounts of my day in a leather-bound black diary. I was the sort of child who generally had to be coerced into playing with other children—the kind whose parents took her to anthropology department cocktail parties so often that their colleagues referred to me as their youngest graduate student—but my mother had said it was too much to impose on Aunt Claire, and anyway, it wasn’t me my grandmother hated, it was her, to which my father had responded,
Give her time.
I rolled the words over and over in my head, willing him to be wrong, but if I thought my grandmother would like me better when my mother wasn’t around, our reunion quickly disabused me of the thought.

“Unbelievable,” was the
first thing my grandmother said when she saw me. From the airport to her house, it had been twenty minutes of loopy, winding roads, packed so densely with trees that looking out the windows from the backseat of the car, I could often see nothing but the green canopies that shaded us. My grandmother’s house was at the end of a circular driveway, a white wooden old southern masterpiece, with columns on the front porch and a veranda above it. Coral vines crept gently up its sides, and although it was only four bedrooms inside, at the time I thought of it as a mansion: it could have contained at least three town houses the size of the one I lived in back in Camden. The driver removed my bags from the trunk and walked me up the stairs to the front door. Instinctively, I held his hand as he rang the bell, and squeezed it tighter as the door opened to reveal my grandmother behind it, squinting at me as if her eyes were playing tricks on her.

But for the expression on her face, the way her eyes went from startled to angry as she said
Unbelievable,
she looked remarkably like my mother. They had the same delicate upturned nose and wide brown eyes, and the same fine blond hair, though my mother generally wore hers loose, and my grandmother’s was held back in an immaculate twist, and threaded with fine streaks of gray. She stepped out of the doorway and gestured toward the driver with one hand, motioning for him to take my suitcase up the spiral staircase. She ushered me into the house, shutting the door behind me. She gave me a perfunctory kiss on the top of the forehead and reached a hand out to tentatively touch one of my cornrows. She shook her head. “Did your mother do this to you?”

“My hair?” I asked. I looked down at the polished hardwood of the floor beneath me. My mother could barely do my hair herself, and knew I’d never manage to keep it untangled on my own. It was one of those things white mothers of black children learn the hard way once and then tend to remember. Just before I’d left, she had gotten one of her undergraduates to braid my hair in tight pink-lotioned cornrows, so recent they still itched and pulled at my scalp.

“Mommy can’t do my hair,” I said. “A girl from her school did it for her.”

“I swear, even on a different continent, that woman—When you go upstairs, take them out. You’re a perfectly decent-looking child, and for whatever reason your mother sends you here looking like a little hoodlum.”

“I’m wearing pink,” I said, more in my own defense than in my mother’s. I had dressed myself, and Aunt Claire had driven me to the airport: my parents had left for Rio the day before. My grandmother considered my argument, evaluated my hot-pink shorts as if prepared to object to them as well, but before she could, my cousin Allison came bounding down the stairs to hug me, blond pigtails flying behind her. When she threw her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek, she smelled strongly of sour-apple Jolly Ranchers and women’s perfume that she later confessed she’d stolen from her mother.

“I think you look nice,” whispered Allison. She took me upstairs to the room we were sharing for the summer, and then spent the next half-hour helping me undo each braid, my hair spiraling out into tight, disheveled curls. Allison had been my parent’s ace in the hole, the only thing that kept me from trying to secretly squeeze myself into one of their suitcases so they’d have to take me to Brazil with them. Her parents were spending the summer on a Caribbean cruise, and my uncle had suggested to my mother that since she’d be at my grandmother’s all summer anyway, it might be nice for us to spend some time together. Allison was my playmate at awkward family gatherings, the person I made faces at across the table at Christmas dinner the one year we’d all gathered at her parents’ house in Orlando. (It was the last holiday my mother had agreed to spend with her own mother. I’d heard her on the phone last Christmas a year later, saying almost angrily,
No, we’re not coming. Last year she said she was dying, and then she didn’t.
)

Allison made those first few weeks at my grandmother’s house bearable, almost pleasant. I’d never had a backyard before, but at my grandmother’s we had an acre of greenery. There was a lawn of impossibly bright grass, landscaped with flowering hydrangea bushes and neatly clipped ornamental shrubbery. Half a mile down the block, the manicured lawns of my grandmother’s neighborhood gave way to almost tropical lushness: hanging crape myrtles with vivid pink flowers and twisted, many-stemmed trunks, tall oaks brushed with Spanish moss. When we followed the gravel path off the main road, we found ourselves at a lake about a mile wide; it took us the better part of a day to circle its swampy edges. We shaded ourselves from the thick summer heat by resting underneath one tree after another. The first time we went to the lake, our grandmother admonished us never to do it again, screamed at us that we had worried her by running off and the lake was a dangerous place for little girls to be alone. It went in one ear and out the other: we were already in love with what we’d found there.

 

 

It wasn’t that
my grandmother didn’t try. She woke us up one morning with the enthusiastic promise that we’d be going swimming. She had laid out clothes for us, and though usually when we went to the pool at home I climbed into the car wearing nothing but my swim-suit and jellies, I wanted my grandmother to be happy with me, and wore the yellow sundress she’d picked out. Allison’s dress was blue, which matched her eyes, and the bow my grandmother put in her hair after she brushed it. My grandmother tried to brush my hair, too, but between the muggy, humid summer air and the ineptitude of my attempts to control it, it had turned itself into a tangled baby afro, one that Allison’s fine bristled brush did nothing for. That morning my grandmother set out to comb it into pigtails, but after I began to cry from the pain of her yanking on my scalp and demanded hair grease—which of course she didn’t have—the comb finally snapped and my grandmother gave up.