Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (5 page)

Before dinner, my mother sat down to finish stitching up my costume. It wasn’t merely a sheet into which eyeholes had been cut but a two-piece affair with bell sleeves and a removable head. The holes for my eyes had stitching around the edges so the fabric wouldn’t fray. At the top of the head, the mask wasn’t as round as I’d envisioned it would be. In fact, it was rather pointy. I wouldn’t look like Casper the Friendly Ghost at all, yet it did remind me of something I’d seen before but couldn’t quite put my finger on. No matter. My heart raced at the prospect of venturing out into the night.

Conrad’s eyes got bigger and rounder when he saw me in my costume. It seemed to remind him of something else, too, and because he was older—fifteen and already in high school by then—he surely must have known exactly what it was. He looked at my mother with what appeared to be bewildered disbelief. There must not have been too much riding on it, though, because she merely shrugged him off with a cryptic smile.

“Remember your manners,” she told me as I stepped up onto the landing by the front door. “And don’t wander off from Kim and her dad.”

Outside, the evening was warm. I saw plenty of superheroes bought right off the shelf and packs of homemade
Star Wars
characters pieced together by all the kids whose parents had taken them to see the movie. (I recognized them from the lunchboxes and stickers my friends carried to school, though I didn’t know them firsthand or why they’d caught most everyone else up in an intergalactic frenzy.) Older kids out on their own in hastily conceived costumes scared me, they were so riled up with freedom and lust for candy. One had thrown a paper bag on his head like the Unknown Comic; others were draped in makeshift togas or parents’ bathrobes.

For every three or four times I shouted “Trick or treat,” one person handing out candy would point at me and ask what I was supposed to be. When I answered that I was a ghost, most seemed relieved, though one or two appeared to remain skeptical. Once, looking up for an explanation of all this adult confusion, I caught Kim’s dad shaking his head, an expression of mild exasperation plastered to his face. I knew this had to do with me and with the silent conversation that had taken place between Conrad and our mom, but I couldn’t figure out what the precise terms were. What if I asked Kim’s dad what the fuss was all about, and his answer
was that I had done something wrong? Or what if my mother had made a mistake in her rush to be done with Halloween? Wouldn’t it be worse if all the to-do revealed that the error was hers and not mine? It didn’t even occur to me that no error had been committed, only a subtly calculated act, a trick instead of a treat, directed not so much at me but at the very ethos of the holiday itself. If I had, my child’s mind could not have unraveled the convoluted logic that had driven a black woman from the Jim Crow-era South to dress her daughter, even only allusively, as one of the most despicable emblems of racial hatred, as someone worse than the devil himself.

I’m not sure I can claim a clear understanding even now. My mother was in her early forties that autumn, nearly the same age I am now. The KKK, with its flaming crosses and its lynching sprees and the ghastly apparition of those white hoods, would have been real to her—not merely symbols of an earlier era but artifacts of a time she had known, specters from the real-life stories that would have haunted her childhood. Was stitching up a mini Klan costume for her unsuspecting five-year-old a way of depleting the image of whatever lingering private terror it might have held for her? I suspect she wasn’t fully conscious of what she’d done until she’d done it, at which point the only thing to do was remark to herself, “Ain’t that a blip,” and then get on with things. Of course, none of this occurred to me then. At the time, I did what any five-year-old would do. I continued along, holding out my bag, smiling my biggest, most exemplary smile, even though nobody could see it behind my great big pointed white hood.

“Is it okay if I take this off?” I finally thought to ask, lifting the top part of the costume off over my head as we turned into the last cul-de-sac of the evening.

“That sounds like a good idea,” Kim’s dad answered, sensing it might be easier that way for all of us.

At home, I wasn’t given access to any of the loot until it had all been spread out on the family room floor and examined. We’d been hearing rumors of kids eating Halloween candy that had been spiked with hallucinogens. One child, the story went, had even been given a candied apple with a whole razor blade inside. (In one version of the tale, he’d sliced his tongue open biting into the treat. In another, he’d bitten into the apple just shy of the blade.) Anything that had come open in my trick-or-treat bag was relegated to the trash. A box of raisins was discarded, too, just in case. What was left was a confectionary spectacle: candy enough for all seven of us and then some. My parents laid claim to anything with coconut: Mounds and Almond Joy bars and the chewy tricolor Neapolitan squares wrapped in clear cellophane. My siblings cozied up to their own small share of the stash even as the last witches and robots of the season climbed up our stone-speckled front steps.

Where exactly was the occult? I wondered, staring out the storm door into the finally quiet evening. Was there really a place where spirits and demons—all the beings God disliked—came from or congregated? Who made them and what did they want? Had they been good at first and only turned bad, like the Klansmen still alive in my mother’s memory, the ones who must have watched quizzically from the margins of her mind, not knowing whether, at the sight of me, to feel a sense of victory or defeat? They must have been far from God, but how could that be, if God was everywhere? Maybe they hovered between Him and us, though that, too, seemed wrong, for didn’t God live in the hearts of those who believed? What was it like for God as we went about
our lives, doing the things He loved and the things He hated, sometimes without even knowing the difference between the two? And what was it like for the strange in-between beings, the ones we pretended to run from on Halloween? How many worlds were there, and what did they want from us, there, in our houses, under the low roofs of our lives?

KIN

W
henever my father talked about New York, his face pinched in and words like
filth
and
squalor
darted out of his mouth. “Why would anyone
choose
to live in New York?” he’d ask, and, not knowing any better, I’d figure it must be the kind of place where life was so relentlessly mean that people often came to blows with whatever object was closest at hand. If it was, what did it mean for my aunts and uncles—women with thick legs and strong arms who clapped their hands and threw back their heads when they laughed; men who called everyone by nicknames, kicked off their shoes, and ate sandwiches at midday made from biscuits and peach preserves and thick strips of leftover bacon that stuck out past the bread? What kind of lives were they, not to mention my innocent cousins, living in a place like New York?

When I was six years old, my cousin Nina visited from Manhattan. In one of our family photo albums, there is a picture of the two of us together as babies, sitting on the porch of our grandmother’s house in white sun hats with elastic bands under our chins. I hadn’t met her many more times than that, but just about every autumn, I’d inherit a large box full of Nina’s outgrown dresses. Those two things, the photo and the dresses, always gave me the impression that Nina and I were the best of friends, but when she arrived, it dawned on me that I was greeting a stranger.

Nina was two years older than me, tall and thin, with long legs covered in mosquito bites, which she scratched with an exquisite
vigor. When my mother told her that scraping away at her legs like that would leave scars, Nina said she knew, and then she scratched them anyway, grating her shins with her fingernails and sighing in pleasure. She scratched with such gusto that she made my legs itch, too, but I sat on my hands, remembering what I’d been taught. Nina further fascinated me in the first hours after her arrival by singing Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” over and over like her very own theme song. When she sang it, she shimmied her hips from side to side and smiled a smile that told me she was being deliberately provocative. If it was a stunt, it worked. I watched in breathless disbelief, timid and stunned, hotly curious about what else she was capable of.

The next morning, I looked on in wonder as Nina stirred a slice of American cheese into a bowl of piping hot grits. She didn’t want the eggs my mother offered her, or the toast, and it had been her idea to ask for the cheese, which turned the white grits pale orange.

“Try it!” she urged me, lifting a forkful up to her mouth. The melted cheese dangled over the bowl like ticker tape.

At first I hesitated asking for my own slice of cheese—I liked putting the scrambled eggs and the grits side by side on a plate and then mixing the two discrete mounds together until they formed one lumpy porridge, just like my dad—but Nina’s conviction intrigued me. I unwrapped a sheet of cheese from the pack of singles and lay it atop the grits, watching it wilt and wrinkle in surrender to the heat. It didn’t quite look right to me, but it sure tasted right, especially once I’d shoveled my eggs onto the heap, and I wondered why I’d never been taught to do that before.

When my plate was empty, I stood up and called to my mom, “I enjoyed my breakfast,” laying my napkin on the table and pushing in my chair, just like my dad always did.

“Thank you, Aunt Kathy,” Nina chimed as she carried her own bowl all the way over to the sink.

That wasn’t how we usually did things, but it struck me as polite, so I picked up my plate and utensils and followed suit. Then the two of us excused ourselves to the front yard to play.

When we got outside, after she had made certain that no one was watching, Nina licked her index finger and wrote
MOTHERFUCK
on the dirty window of my mom’s car. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and my initial reaction was silence—the kind of silence a child feels when some new gear in the world begins to turn for the first time.
MOTHERFUCK
revolved slowly in my stomach and my head and my heart, pushing every other thing away.

There were kids who whispered or occasionally even yelled the word
fuck
on the playground at school, bigger kids who seemed to relish the shock and the weight of it.
Fuck
was mostly just that, a shock and a weight, pure inflection, a word without precise meaning. It signified something bad, worse than bad. The kind of thing that would cause a teacher to march out to whomever had launched it into the airspace and yank him (it was always a him) off the playground by his elbow or the neck of his shirt. Those boys wore happy, wicked smiles all the way to the principal’s office, reveling in the thrill a word like that leaves in its wake. Still, no matter how much I’d thought I knew about
fuck
, I had never witnessed it buttressed against a word like
mother
. Was
MOTHERFUCK
a noun or a verb? Whatever it was asking me to imagine tugged me into an alien zone.

“That’s not a word,” I tried to insist.

“Yes it is,” Nina countered, though she didn’t need to; I knew in my heart she was probably right. She had picked up the word in
barbarous New York and carried it with her all the way to sunny California. She wouldn’t have done that if it had no value.

I must have struck my cousin as so traumatically perplexed—were my eyes really beginning to well up with tears?—that she felt obliged to lick her whole palm and wipe the word from view. It disappeared, but every time I saw the smudge where it had been, the dark feeling returned, a feeling like being out of my depth in water that, only a few yards back, had felt safe. I think it might have weighed upon Nina, too, to be disappointed so immediately by the cousin she’d traveled such a distance to see.

It was spring break. I wonder if Nina’s mother, my aunt Ursula, searching for something to hold her daughter’s attention during the string of unstructured afternoons, had had to convince Nina to leave her friends behind for a week or if my cousin had been eager to glimpse the fabled Golden State, that place with the wide sun-smacked streets, Disneyland, and its own cavalcade of television stars moving freely among ordinary mortals. Whatever her reasons were for coming, and whatever she had been expecting, what Nina found in Fairfield was a hot, dry, low-to-the-ground expanse of white-, yellow-, and olive-colored stucco houses set behind uniform rectangles of lawn. Disneyland was a whole eight hours away by car, though in me, perhaps she’d run up against what may have struck her as a Disney-like fantasy of the way the world worked:
if you’re a good girl, everything will be okay
.

I couldn’t help it. I was steeped in the wisdom of
Little Visits with God
, fearful of disappointing my heavenly Father—and worse, wounding my mother with anything less than exemplary behavior (or infuriating my actual father, whose eyes would redden when he was about to scold us with one of his go-to phrases, like “Stop that infernal racket,” or if one of us had really done it, “Get out
of my sight”). When I saw other boys or girls misbehaving, I was shocked, pained for their parents, who would have to take them aside and explain how things ought to be done. I’m not sure, now, why it is the parents with whom I identified. Perhaps having so many older siblings helping to reinforce our parents’ wishes had made me hyperaware of what was expected of children and what kind of work went into showing them right from wrong. Once, sitting in the grocery store aisle in a metal shopping cart, I watched a boy my own age pump his legs back and forth as if he were on a playground swing. His mother had turned her back, comparing labels or price stickers on boxes of cereal, and in the few moments he had to himself, the boy worked up enough momentum to wheel himself several feet up the aisle. At one point, he and I made eye contact. He smiled recklessly, waiting to see if I was going to imitate him, but I was too dismayed by the thought of sending my mother scurrying after me to give it a try. Besides, what he was doing was naughty. If it wasn’t, why had he waited until his mother’s back was turned to try it?