I Am Not Sidney Poitier (4 page)

We passed under the sweeping suspension bridge, and Ted turned to me and said, “This is the Not Sidney Lanier Bridge.” He chuckled. “Just joking. I think Sidney Lanier was a poet or something.”

I looked at the bridge, looking both east and west along its length, but could not see where or if either end ever found land.

Once past the bridge Ted switched off his motor and raised the mainsail. The feeling of moving under the power of the wind was thrilling even though we weren’t making great speed. The motion of the sloop was hypnotic, at least to me. To Betty, it was nauseating. She swayed against the boat’s rhythm and took on a greenish cast.

Wanda Fonda came back with a tray of glasses of lemonade. The sweating glasses made me instantly wish that I had said I wanted some.

“You look like you’re going to upchuck, Betty,” Ted said. “Do me a favor and lean over the side when you do.”

Betty looked at the glass of lemonade being held out to her by the freckled Wanda Fonda, then turned to release her last meal into the Atlantic.

“Attagirl,” Ted said.

“Uncle Ted?”

“Yes, Wanda Fonda?”

“I’m glad you brought Nu’ott with us.”

Ted smiled warmly at me. “Of course I brought him out here. He’s a sailor at heart. A lover of the sea. An admirer of the wind. A free spirit. A mighty Viking! Or perhaps a Moor.”

My eleven-year-old ears liked the sound of that.

“Go up there and raise the foresail, Wanda Fonda.”

I watched as she did. The girl pulled a line and the sheet of canvas slid up the front side of the mast and I thought it was just beautiful. The sun found Wanda Fonda’s face and I thought she was beautiful as well.

We sailed on, tacking once to make a forty-five-degree turn. Betty tried to put on a strong front. Ted tried to talk to her over the roar of the wind, and she politely pretended to listen, but she was not faring well. Wanda Fonda had found again her station next to me and had even managed to inch her arm close enough to mine that we ever so slightly touched.

“I’d say we make a run!” Ted shouted. “Ready to come about, Wanda Fonda?”

Wanda Fonda’s lithe body sprang into action as she made her way forward and grabbed a crank and some line, I didn’t know what, and clearly listened for Ted’s next words.

Which were, “Hard-a-lee!,” if hard-a-lee is three words and not one. Ted let loose the line behind him, then pushed me down into the cockpit and let the boom swing quickly over me. The sail luffed, making a sound I immediately loved, then caught the wind as the boom swung out well to the starboard side of the boat.

Wanda Fonda dropped the foresail, then cranked as fast as she could, and the blue and white spinnaker went up and ballooned out.

“That Wanda Fonda is a heckuva sailor,” Ted said.

Now, with the full strength of the wind, we were really moving. The spray, the sun, the breeze, Jane’s thighs, it was all intoxicating. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the movement, the smells, the wet luxury of it all. The sky was the bluest I had ever seen, and the ocean seemed a part of it.

Betty was lying on the long cushion now, her face turned to the sky, as green as I had ever seen a person and growing paler. Jane was unimpressed by the coming about and lay still and magnificent under the sun; her skin seemed to bronze in front of me. She grew darker as Betty grew lighter.

Betty looked from stem to stern and then to Ted and asked, “How much did this boat cost?”

“A lot,” Ted said.

“Does it bother you to have so much?” she asked.

Ted paused, perhaps considering the question, perhaps considering lunch, and said, “Not yet.”

“Well, it bothers me,” Betty said.

“Then I won’t share it with you.” Ted laughed. “Did you know that horses can’t throw up? That’s all a cow does, back and forth, stomach to stomach, but a horse can’t. Strange.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Wanda Fonda asked me.

“No, and I don’t want one,” I said.

“I go to a private school. All girls.”

“Girls beat me up, too.” I turned to hear Ted telling Betty about how to make perfect pickles every time. “Where the bathroom?” I asked.

“The head,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s called the head. The bathroom is called the head.”

“Where’s the head?”

“Below,” Ted said. He turned to Betty. “Now, Nu’ott’s mother, she had a head on her shoulders. Brilliant woman. I wish I’d hired her, but, you know, I never thought to do that. Perhaps because I’m a privileged white male.”

“Come on,” Wanda Fonda said, taking my hand. “I’ll show you.”

I peed into the toilet, mostly into the toilet as the rocking of the boat made the project a challenge. When I came out, Wanda Fonda had pulled her pants to her ankles, revealing loud pink, high-waisted panties.

“Would you like to see my tattoo? We’ve all got them.”

I had never seen a tattoo, and I was, honestly speaking, interested, but I said, “You should pull up your pants.”

“Are you scared?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Of me?” she asked.

I nodded. “What’s the tattoo a picture of?”

She pulled down the front rim of her underwear and revealed a red circle with a stem, obviously a fruit, and I said, “An apple?”

“No, stupid, it’s a cherry.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It has to do with sex.”

Oddly, it was when she called me stupid that I first took a liking to Wanda Fonda. Enough of a liking that I decided to try my cyclopean eye at Fesmerizing her. I leaned into my stare. Before she could complain or clock me one across the head, she relaxed into that cow-eyed state that I so welcomed. I looked about the cabin and wondered what I might have her do, and I came up with nothing. I did have her pull up her pants. Then I remembered that I was eleven, almost twelve, and though sexual activity or exploration with Wanda Fonda was clearly out of the question, I did very much enjoy the idea of seeing actual tits. I instructed Wanda Fonda to go up on deck, make her way to Jane, and toss Jane’s bikini top overboard. I knew that it was already undone; the ties were lying teasingly alongside her as she lay facedown on her towel. I gave a post-Fesmer suggestion that she would remember none of my instructions and spend the rest of the trip fawning over Betty.

I followed back up the companionway topside. Wanda Fonda went directly to Jane and stood over her, blocking the sun.

Jane lifted her head and looked back at Wanda Fonda. “What is it, Wanda Fonda?”

The girl said nothing, but as Jane raised herself while lifting her shades to get a better look at the face over her, Wanda Fonda snatched the bikini top from the towel and tossed it into the air. The wind played with the abbreviated garment top for many seconds before letting it fly away from the boat and high into the air. Jane sat up and watched the article’s flight.

I looked at her breasts, and though I was sort of thrilled to be seeing them, I thought finally that her chest looked a lot like mine, only puffier.

“Why did you do that, Wanda Fonda?” Jane asked.

“Do what?”

Jane didn’t become even slightly upset, she just lay back down and said, “Never mind.”

It was all terribly disappointing, the breasts and the reaction. The sight of Jane’s breasts was made the more uninteresting by the fact that she simply didn’t care that I was seeing them. She paraded her boobies out and about for the rest of the time on the boat. Her eyes, hidden behind the dark glasses, became of far more interest to me. It was her eyes, the ones I couldn’t see, that seemed to work on my under-construction libido. I wanted, needed to see Jane Fonda’s eyes. I therefore set to the business of casting my cyclopean stare her way.

“What’s wrong with you, Nu’ott?”

I was terrified once again that I would be thought insane, but I persisted, raised my left brow another millimeter.

“Excuse me, but would someone, Ted, please ask this child what’s wrong with him?” Jane said.

I wondered as I worked on her, if her sunglasses would diminish the effectiveness of my gaze. I could not see behind them to detect any shift toward the desired cow-eyed state, so I pushed my suggestion that she toss her glasses overboard. It turned out that the dark lenses must have actually amplified my power because she whipped them from her face and tossed them out into the ocean without the slightest pause. Jane’s eyes were sad-making, not weak, not really sullen, but cheerless, tenebrific. I pushed the suggestion that I was sorry and that she should not associate me with the action, but I knew that I needed to back off. My ability, two successes in a row, scared me greatly. I remained quiet for the rest of the trip. Betty was entertained mercilessly by the cherry-tattooed Wanda Fonda and Jane sat around with eyes and tits unabashedly uncovered and Ted railed on about the first television—“It was nothing but static, but what moving static it was”—and how baseballs were made—“In Haiti, by women who bend all the way down and stand all the way up with every stitch”—and whether inflammable and flammable were really the same word—“I mean, invariably and variably don’t mean the same thing.” Except for the wind-driven ride itself, I had pretty much controlled the action on the boat.

I never saw Wanda Fonda again, and Jane barely acknowledged me when I would greet her by the pool. I continued to sail with Ted, and time went by. Tutors came and went. My wealth grew, or so I was told by Ted’s accountant, an Indian man named Podgy Patel.

“You have vast money,” he said in his singsong accent. “Vaster this week than last.”

“How much money do I have?” We were sitting in the living room of my quarters.

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Let me just say ‘vast.’ The actual figure might frighten you.”

“Tell me.”

“I cannot.” He smiled the smile he always smiled, a smile I imagined he would wear whether he was being tickled, being praised, or being fired. “I can only say that your wealth is … ”

“Vast,” we said together.

“Very good,” he said.

“What if I want some money?” I asked.

“Just ask.”

“What if I want fifty thousand dollars?”

“Just ask.”

“What if I don’t want to ask?”

“Write it down.”

“Can’t I just go to the bank?”

“You are thirteen. They will not give you fifty thousand dollars.”

“But you will,” I said.

“Of course, it is your money.”

“And I can do anything I want with it? I can throw it off a building downtown if I want to?”

“That sounds foolish, but yes.”

“Okay, I want fifty thousand dollars,” I said.

“Do you really? Or are you just saying that?”

“No, I want it.”

“I’ll bring it by this afternoon.”

I felt for some reason defeated, even though this smiling Podgy Patel man was telling me that I was insanely wealthy. “Never mind,” I said. “I guess I don’t want the money.”

“I knew it.”

Like most people I am smarter than some, dumber than others, skinnier than most, and fatter than a few, but none was ever more confused than I was. I flew with confusion always parallel to me, and a whole internal chase at my rear. The one matter that was not confusing to me, but seemed to escape all others, was the fact that the only thing that was certain to become obsolete, would necessarily become wearied and worn, was the truth. I knew this in spite of the
truth
that I had had little truck with the
truth
in my life. It was not that I considered myself a resident in a den of lies, but rather that my history was shrouded and diced and soaking wet with hysteria and contradiction. Contradictions or no, my trajectory through life, though different from most, was, nonetheless, a trajectory. The move from my bizarre early childhood in Los Angeles to my strange latter childhood in Atlanta was abrupt, yet somehow seemingly seamless, the sudden death of my mother and my induction into the world of a media icon notwithstanding.

A few years disappeared into wherever time goes and with them my childhood, Claudia, the cook, and my karate instructor. Betty graduated from college and married a Morehouse man from Ohio whom I never met. For a couple of years I received the occasional, uninformative postcard from Akron, usually depicting something called the Soap Box Derby. I lived in my part of the house pretty much alone as the Russian woman who cooked for me spoke no English and the woman who cleaned refused to speak to me. I saw Ted often.