The Lost Language of Cranes (9 page)

Jerene knew she was adopted, but from an early age she was instructed to keep this fact a secret within the family. "Just be glad you've got all the things you've got," her mother would tell her, when Jerene asked about her origins. "You would've grown up mighty differently if we hadn't come along." Defeated, she would return to her room, her refugee's good fortune choking her. She could not get over the accidental nature of her blessed life; it made everything else wrong. With frantic exuberance Margaret dressed Jerene up in pink, lacy blouses, curled her hair and tied it with ribbons, sometimes painted her tiny but perfect nails bright red, until she resembled the black dolls that sat on her bedroom shelf—Black Barbie, Black Baby Talks-a-lot, Black Baby Alive—all identical to the originals, but dark, darkened,
wrong,
just as she was wrong, just as her parents were wrong and their friends were wrong, clinking their glasses in the Parkses' living room. They were alone in Westport. Across the street was a house with a F
OR
S
ALE
sign that no one bought for a year, and Jerene understood, from conversations she heard between her parents, that somehow they were responsible not only for one family's leaving but for another family deciding at the last minute not to buy. Coming home from shopping with her mother, Jerene would see notes slipped under the door, notes her mother would snatch up and ball in her fist, unopened. Racism was genteel in Westport, she would later tell Eliot; it always came in an envelope.

Once she was roused early in the morning, put in the car, driven through familiar streets of green lawns and houses, then down a long, grass-lined highway into a region of small, lopsided buildings where children her own age played in earnest among garbage cans and cars. They parked beside a glass door shot through with cracks, above which a sign announced B
RITEVIEW
L
AUNDRY
, and went inside, into that hot room full of steam and the sweet smell of fabric softener that Jerene would never forget. Her grandfather wore a T-shirt browned with sweat and tobacco juice; she did not want to touch him. But her grandmother, a bandanna twisted around her head, glowed and shone like something newly polished as she hoisted huge dripping sheets from washing machines. She turned, smiled, knew not to embrace Sam and Margaret in their suits. And then, as they all left together, Jerene's grandfather pulled the heavy metal grating down over the steamy glass windows of the laundromat, and they got into the back seat of the big car with Jerene. "It's a treat, riding," Jerene's grandmother Nellie said. She held Jerene on her lap, whispering nonsense in her ear as Sam drove them to the tiny apartment of his childhood, with its cracked, impossibly narrow halls, and there they sat for an hour on stiff-backed chairs in the little sitting room, eating cookies and drinking lemonade. Jerene always remembered the hand-shaped splotch on the kitchen wall, which she thought was a part of somebody's shadow; on the way home she would wonder who it was, the poor person whose shadow was missing a hand.

Sam was enraged on the rides home from his parents' house. "Why won't they
do
something?" he said to Margaret. "They could retire to Florida. I'd give them the money." But they wouldn't take Sam's money because of pride. Jerene had trouble figuring out what pride was. In her schoolbooks, the proud boy was haughty and looked down on his friends, but that sounded more like her parents than her grandparents. To Margaret, pride meant you didn't take things that were offered, pride meant you suffered stupidly. She was not above admitting the many times she had swallowed her own pride, and done better for it. Jerene leaned back in her seat, wondering. She knew her father's childhood as mythology—scrubby lots to play in, not enough heat. He had no toys. The streets were full of toughs. "Just be glad you've got all this, my little honeybee," he'd say to her when she was little, pushing her in the backyard swing, and she would look around herself at the twilit green trees, the leaves on the ground, the little gazebo near the gardener's shed. None of it was hers except by refugee's luck. And then an extraordinary thing happened: Her father, pushing her on the swing, suddenly grasped the metal chains, pulled her back, held her suspended in mid-air, so that she thought she could see the world's roundness below her, and buried his head in her back to weep.

She knew certain facts. He had been, at the age of seventeen, the first black boy chosen Boy of the Year by the Bensonhurst Brooklyn Optimists' Club. He had been the first black editor of the paper at his college, and of the Law Review at his law school; the first black lawyer at one firm, the first black partner at another. All through his twenties he stood on podiums, and his hand was shaken and his back was patted. Jerene came along, afterwards many large men smelling like gingerbread lifted her into the air. She'd stand with her mother in the ladies' room, and the wives would politely pass makeup tips to Margaret, then suddenly grow embarrassed and say, "Oh—I guess you people have your own brands, don't you?" Margaret always smiled.

Sometimes they would find themselves alone in the car with the statuettes and prizes, driving through dark suburban streets that became increasingly unfamiliar. From the back seat Jerene would stare at the backs of her parents' necks—her father's carefully shaved and trimmed, her mother's shiny and bare in the moonlight, caressed by the clasp of a necklace, a few pearls. They would get lost. Sam would pull the car over, and his neck would be soaked with sweat. "Look, Sam, we're in Noroton Heights," Margaret would say. "I know exactly where we are. There's that mall where I went with Jerene the other day." And slowly, exactingly, she would direct him home.

He was a Nixon delegate in 1968. Jerene was eleven and voted for Humphrey. She prayed that her Humphrey-supporting best friend, Jessica Hudson, and Jessica's Humphrey-supporting parents, wouldn't say anything.

Still, when the convention was on television, she watched with her mother and was thrilled to see Sam's face suddenly filling up the screen. "We're talking to Mr. Samuel I. Parks," the reporter said, "an attorney from Connecticut, and one of the few black delegates here at the convention. Mr. Parks, as a Negro, how do you feel supporting Mr. Nixon in the face of your race's overwhelming support of the Democrats?"

"I fully believe that Richard Nixon is what our country and our economy needs now," Sam said. He was sweating and looked rather uncomfortable, but his voice was sure.

"Mom," Jerene said.

"Hush up!" Margaret said. "How many times in your life are you gonna get to see your father on television?"

And indeed, Jerene could not help feeling a secret pride, for he looked so handsome with the microphone in front of his mouth.

She never talked about it with Jessica.

She grew up, grew taller and kept growing. By the time she was in junior high school she was already five foot eleven and the star of the basketball team. That year her school won every game, and Jerene was named Most Valuable Player.

She brought the trophy home and showed it to her mother. Margaret was cleaning the big house, which over the years had acquired an apparently insurmountable coat of dust. "Why do you have to play that game?" she asked when Jerene showed her the trophy. "It's so—unladylike." She did not approve of Jerene playing basketball; she had said it from the start.

Behind her, Margaret dragged the vacuum cleaner like an unwilling beast of burden. "Why?" Jerene repeated. "Because blacks play basketball? You're worried someone might confuse me for one of them?"

Her mother only shrugged. "That uniform," she said. "Really, Jerene, couldn't they give you something a little more feminine? And why do you always wear those ugly pants, when I've bought you so many pretty dresses?"

"Pretty dresses look stupid on me," she said.

"You never try," Margaret said. "You don't give yourself a chance to be pretty. Ah, there you are. Now I'm gonna get you." She was talking to the dust. She stuck the special vacuum-nozzle behind an antique mirrored table, and Jerene listened to the peculiar, pleasant sucking sound it made.

She slept over at Jessica's all the time now. Jessica's mother, who was a magazine editor, was mild and abstracted and thought nothing of it. Jessica herself was Jerene's best friend, robust, big-breasted, a discus thrower, and had taught Jerene how to make love with her tongue and fingers and hips. They did this most nights when Jerene stayed over now but were only just beginning to gain a consciousness of what it meant—that they were lesbians—a realization to which Jerene's first reaction was, "Of course. That's how it is. I've known it all along." Of course there was more; she realized, distantly, that this kind of love couldn't be easy, that she must suffer more than she had. The word "abomination" kept creeping through her mind—from a church sermon, she supposed, or perhaps from under her mother's breath when they heard about Billie Jean King and her secretary on the radio. Were they lovers, girlfriends, in love? Certainly they had never spoken about the quiet passion that took up most of their nights together. And Jessica was too busy thinking about Harvard in the fall to worry about such things.

Jerene, less ambitious and yearning for the city, went to N.Y.U. Separated, finally, from her parents, she started to attend meetings of the Afro-American Women's Caucus, the Lesbian Caucus, the Radical Women of Color Caucus. In imitation of Cornelia Patterson, a lesbian leader whose stage presence and nearly bald skull impressed her greatly, she shaved off most of her hair one day. "What have you done to yourself?" her mother shouted when she walked in the door at Christmas break. "My God, you've maimed yourself." She and Sam were so appalled they threatened to refuse to pay her tuition for the next term, and she only dissuaded them by promising to grow her hair back. At first that didn't satisfy them, until they realized it was the only choice they had. They relented.

Over dinner she told them about her new politics, and her involvement in the Black Women's Movement. Margaret, spearing small curlicues of potato with her fork, looked at Jerene warily. "And do you really think," her father asked, staring her down across the table, "that such isolationism will do anyone any good?" It was an old argument, one they'd had many times before. "First the black movement," Sam muttered, gazing disconsolately into his plate. "Now the black
women's
movement. I know it's not a popular opinion, Jerene, but I just don't see the point of all this separatism."

Then he told her again that you had to work through the system to change it from inside, etc. "We're all human," he concluded triumphantly. Margaret looked on in approval. Jerene recognized that tactic—wrapping his snobbery and defeat in the guise of Christian good will—and considered it beneath responding to. She went back to her dinner, and the next morning found a mysterious check for fifty dollars by her bedside table. "For a nice wig" was written on the line where it said "Memo."

Six months later she made a special trip home to tell them that she was a lesbian. For years afterwards she would wonder why she did it—whether it was, as she told herself then, an act of political integrity, motivated by her real need to be honest with her parents; or whether it was revenge she was really after—revenge, and liberation. She had long since convinced herself that her lesbianism was a neutral thing, neither good nor bad in itself. But she also knew that this neutral fact of her life, when presented to them, would be as potent as a machete brandished in front of their faces, and would cut as deep. She had made many preparations, consulted many books. "Afternoon is best," Cornelia Patterson had counseled her, and so she marshaled her parents into the living room in the afternoon to give the news. Her father looked out the window at the oleanders in the garden while she spoke; her mother sat on the sofa and wept. "Are you finished?" Sam asked her when she had been silent for a few seconds.

"Yes, I'm finished."

"Then I will say to you this," he said, turning around. "I will say I would rather you'd told me you were dying of terminal cancer." His eyes did not waver from the flowers.

"Dad," she said. "How can you say that? How can you just stand there and say that to me?"

"You've been a disappointment all along to us, trouble every step of the way. And now to come home with this—this filth, this abomination. What do you expect me to do, just sit back and smile?"

"It's like a death," Margaret murmured softly from the sofa, between sobs. "As if she's died."

"Mom!" Jerene said. "Dad! I'm still me. I'm still your daughter, your Jerene. Please! I'm trying to be honest with you, to tell you the truth for once."

Her father turned from her, looked once again out the window. "You're not my daughter," he said. "Thank God for that, if nothing else. You're not my daughter."

Thus he pulled the machete from where it lay implanted in his heart, turned it around, and sliced her clean off.

Without saying another word to them, she left. She walked the two miles to the suburban train station, waited an hour on the empty platform, on a bench, her knees gathered against her chest, rocking. Back in the city, she wrote them a check for the sum total of all the money they had ever given her. It was something like three hundred thousand dollars. They never tried to deposit it, of course, but she burned the checkbook anyway. Years later, it pleased her to think that the money she actually had in that account—a little over five thousand dollars—might still be sitting there, accruing interest, untouchable.

Once, about a year later, at Eliot's insistence, she called them on her mother's birthday. Margaret answered. "Mom?" she said. "Mom, it's me, Jerene."

Margaret said nothing.

"I'm happy to hear your voice," Jerene said. "It's been so long. I've missed you—"

Still, silence. "Jerene?" Margaret said. "I don't know anyone named Jerene. I don't know any Jerene. You must have the wrong number."

Then she hung up.

A. few years later, walking down Fifth Avenue, Jerene saw her. Margaret's hair was all gray now, and she had put on weight. She was peering at some shirts in the window of Bendel's. For a moment, it was as if the years of silence hadn't passed at all. How could they have, after all? It was ridiculous, embarrassing three intelligent people, and all too stubborn to make a gesture. Her mother stood there, completely unaware of Jerene's presence, staring at the shirts, and then she pulled a tissue from her big pocketbook and blew her nose. It was the same red patent leather pocketbook she had always had, and seeing it, Jerene was moved to tears. She wanted to run up to her mother, to embrace her and refuse to let her go until she cried, until she gave in, until she admitted Jerene was there, admitted she had a daughter. Indeed, standing in the middle of the intersection, she was held back by nothing but fear. Then the light changed, and a crowd swept across the avenue, over the sidewalk. By the time it had passed, Margaret had moved on.