Space Between the Stars (4 page)

Arnzy must have left before I reached my locker. I missed the shiver that rolled through my stomach when he smiled at me. His skin was like mine, his hair kinky and dark. Kitsaun— always correcting me with her ninth-grade smarts—told me he was a punk with a pretty face. But it didn't matter, I was smitten.

Dad's tunes serenaded me as I ate my chicken. I wished Arnzy would hold my hand. Dad would never let me date him. He glared if I talked to our neighbor Danny up the street. It was
as though, with boys, Kitsaun and I had to keep moving or they would do something bad to us. Dad would never understand my being in love, so I hid it from him. I could talk to Mom about anything, but Dad was not easily approachable. Wary of anything outside our front door, Dad did not trust all of our friends or their motives, and he watched carefully any boy who came over. He did not tell us why; and as a teenager, I sometimes thought he was mean and too gruff.

If I said I was going up the street to Danny's or Johnny's, Dad said, “You don't need to go to his house. He can come over here.”

“He won't let us do anything!” Kitsaun and I wailed to Mom.

“Your father wasn't raised to be at other people's houses. They were a church family who stuck close together and had strict rules,” she explained.

Kitsaun and I fought with Mom and Dad to let us go places with our friends. Their response was always, “If all of your friends jump off a cliff, are you going to follow them? Think for yourselves, girls.”

There was not much trouble I could get into, anyway. Hawkeyed Dad was home every afternoon before late-night gigs with his trio at a nightclub in Sunnyvale. We did not have friends over because we had homework. I practiced my viola, and Kitsaun went to dance lessons. Kitsaun and I began ballet and tap when I was five and she was seven. We wore black Dan-skin leotards with soft pink leather ballet slippers and changed to shiny black patent-leather tap shoes to make noise. Kitsaun's steps were fluid and her long arms graceful, and I tried to
mimic her grace. We started piano a few years later; it was easier for me to reach my fingers across the keys than move my feet, so I stopped dancing. Kitsaun stopped piano, and we flew after different dreams.

Even at thirteen, I hoped Arnzy and I would date when I was older. I imagined him driving me to dances and kissing me in the front seat of his car. My heart stirred with longings.

I picked up my Nancy Drew mystery, knowing that I should get my schoolbooks off the dinette table and start my homework before Mom got home. Mom worked downtown at her government job until five o'clock, but she always called to check in by four. Dad's voice sang from the living room, “What a life, trying to live without you.”

I listened to his beautiful tone, so soothing to my life. Dad's music drifted through every room of our house; his love of jazz became a living expression of our emotions and spilled from baseboards and light fixtures every moment we were awake. Mom sang, too—soft gospel tunes when she cooked and while we fell asleep; hymns that told us “everything would be all right by and by.” Art Tatum, Louie, Miles, and Billie serenaded us from our Motorola record player. I loved to take the twelve-inch black plastic discs from their waxed-paper shells, hold them by their edges until they were around the steel pin on the turntable, and then gently drop the stylus between the grooves. When I was home alone I would sing along with Morgana King and Nina Simone, standing in front of our picture window— the living room my stage, our view to San Francisco Bay my audience. I belted out ballads, hitting high notes with outstretched arms and grinding out low ones with a swing of my
hips. I ended every song with a bow, as though imaginary fans were wildly applauding.

One of Dad's most famous songs, “SK Blues,” was written before I was born. We had it on a 78 rpm record along with Dad's other recordings. Dad sang, “Give me back that wig I bought you; let your head go bald.” The song had become a hit, and Dad had traveled with his sextet, playing in nightclubs and supper clubs. Mom told Kitsaun and me that Dad stopped touring when we were born—to be at home with us. She said that when Dad's music was popular in the 1940s, he left hundred-dollar bills on top of their dresser. Now, Mom supported the family with her job at Social Security as a claims adjuster. I had never seen a hundred-dollar bill.

Many Friday nights Mom took us to the Emporium in Stonestown, where she charged dinner for us in the cafeteria. She said she put things on credit until her check from work would come. She was stretching our money so that Kitsaun and I could take lessons in the arts.

My first piano lessons were with Ms. Gaynor. I walked over the hill to her house with a small transistor radio in my hand, a white plastic earphone plugged into my ear as I listened to Aretha Franklin, Jerry Butler, and the Temptations on the R & B station, KDIA. Gold stars collected on my sheet music, even when I did not practice during the week. I did not know whether I was a natural talent or Ms. Gaynor was hard of hearing.

I progressed to classes at the Conservatory of Music, on Nineteenth Avenue, which required more practice and discipline. I studied music theory along with classical piano in halls that smelled of old sheet music and resin. Behind classroom
doors, muffled notes of concertos, minuets, and scales were repeated over and over until perfection was touched for one moment. My teacher wound the metronome on top of the Steinway, willing me to play in time. Practice became a requirement for my keeping up; and Mom sat and listened to my songs in the evening after dinner.

Dad's minor chords and red-hot rhythms were a continuous backdrop to our lives—touching our thoughts, coloring our perspectives. He played his blond, hollow-body guitar for hours, running his wide hands up and down the steel strings, practicing scales or strumming along with Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell. While the news on TV showed civil rights demonstrators mowed down by fire hoses, he played his “box,” minor chords and slow dirges rising from his fingers. My teenage body shook in anger and terror as Bull Connor and George Wallace shouted brutal orders against innocent people with brown skin like mine. Dad's fingers kept moving on his guitar strings. His tunes created a safe shelter I could hide within. I slept in the cradle of his notes in the midst of a harsh world.

he front door slammed, reverberating throughout the house. Kitsaun's voice mingled with Dad's, and I heard her drop her books on the table in the kitchen. “I am so mad!” she growled.

I jumped off my bed and ran to the hall. “What happened?”

“We're graduating in four weeks. And now, I'm the only one in my whole class going to Lowell. Carol was going, but now she's thinking of going to Balboa.” Balboa was right next to our junior high, James Denman, which was next to San Miguel Elementary. They were the local schools everyone attended, on the edge of the Mission District and our Ingleside neighborhood. Lowell was an academic high school where only the best students went, and you had to have a 3.5 GPA to get in.

“Mom says you'll love Lowell,” I said. “The teachers are better, and the campus is prettier than Bal.”

Kitsaun shrugged and went downstairs to her room. After a few minutes I heard the whir of her sewing machine. A flawless seamstress, she had made my cheerleading outfit and my
orchestra uniform, and she'd helped me finish my apron for homemaking class so that I would not get an F. It took me longer to hand-sew the turquoise rickrack edging around the hem than it took Kitsaun to make the whole apron.

Kitsaun graduated junior high on February 1, 1963. She bravely left her friends to attend Lowell and eased into new friendships. She began dating a fullback on the junior varsity football team, and never regretted that she didn't go to Bal. Two years later, I graduated junior high and followed her to Lowell because she loved it so much. I wore my hair rolled into a flip like Marlo Thomas on
That Girl.
Every morning, Kitsaun and I took the bus together, getting off at Stonestown, and walked to the campus down a street lined with eucalyptus trees. Karmen went to Balboa, so I plied fresh waters while holding on to Kitsaun and her friends. Karmen and I spent Saturdays walking from our street to West Portal to buy ice-cream cones at Baskin-Robbins. We sat on the giant sundial on Entrada Court, licking our cones and sharing high school stories. We could never figure out how the shadow hitting the Roman numerals on the concrete circle could tell us what the time was. We would stop at Saint Emydius to pray, Karmen laying a lace hanky on her head as we entered the dark Catholic church. Before entering the pew, I knelt as Karmen did, and savored the silence and vanilla smell of candles burning in rows along the sidewall. The cool, quiet sanctuary gave me a sense of God's presence and a feeling of completeness. In prayer and silence, I felt whole and strong from within.

In my sophomore year I put away my viola to sing in Lowell's choir, maybe because Karmen no longer was next to me as
first chair, second violin. Our class was at 7:30
A.M.
and Kit-saun and I both sang tenor, a low part for some girls but just right for our vocal register. The sound of Dad's pure, clear voice reverberated in my head as I sang. Sometimes I felt as though his voice were coming from inside me. I heard his distinct enunciation of vowels, the way his mouth closed around every sound. Mr. Blackburn taught choir like a dictator, yelling at us if we sang a wrong note. But when harmonies wafted from our rounded mouths, my heart opened wide, carrying pieces of me out into the world. At the end of our concerts, we held candles and stood around the perimeter of the auditorium, singing, “The Lord Bless You and Keep You.” We stood—soprano, alto, tenor, and bass—having to hold on to our intonation and part with great effort, our notes hanging in the air right before us. Sometimes I cried: the feeling of God stirring inside my body, too immense to hold. I could feel a celestial joining of who I was with what I learned about God's Spirit in church; and I knew that there was blessing possible through praying and grace. It spun as an ache in my chest, but a good ache that made me long to be full of the vibrating warmth.

My crush on Arnzy turned into a crush on our sophomore class president, Jimmy, and then Calvin, a star halfback on the football team of a rival school. Calvin's father was a minister, and Calvin's Sundays, like mine, were spent in church. He read the Bible and studied scriptures. At his church, the congregation prayed out loud as we did in our Oakland church. I observed a great difference between our Pentecostal church and the other black churches in my neighborhood and the Catholic and Lutheran worship services. Karmen's church listened to
the priest and repeated his words. We did that at the Lutheran service, too. But most of my childhood had been spent at Christ Holy Sanctified, where we spoke out and praised God from what we felt inside. People testified out loud, during the service, about the manifestation of God's work in their lives. When I kneeled at night to pray before sleep, I thought of all that had troubled me or touched me, and I spoke out loud to God, never doubting He listened. Karmen had a little book that she read from, and she said a Hail Mary prayer from memory. I saw nothing wrong with either of the methods, but I'm glad I learned to be spontaneous with Spirit. There's nothing as comforting as being able to pray when I'm not sure of what's lurking around my soul, or when I'm thankful for a benevolent gesture from life.