Context

One summer, almost ten years ago, I brought my lover down to Greenville to visit my aunt Dot and the rest of my mama’s family. We took our time getting there, spending one day in D.C. and another in Durham. I even thought about suggesting a side trip over to the Smoky Mountains, until I realized the reason I was thinking about that was that I was afraid. It was not my family I feared. It was my lover. I was afraid to take my lover home with me because of what I might see in her face once she had spent some time with my aunt, met a few of my uncles, and tried to talk to any of my cousins. I was afraid of the distance, the fear, or the contempt that I imagined could suddenly appear between us. I was afraid that she might see me through new eyes, hateful eyes, the eyes of someone who suddenly knew fully how different we were. My aunts’ distance, my cousins’ fear, or my uncles’ contempt seemed much less threatening.

I was right to worry. My lover did indeed see me with new eyes, though it turned out that she was more afraid of my distancing myself from her than of her fear and discomfort coming between us. What I saw in her face after the first day in South Carolina was nothing I had expected. Her features were marked with a kind of tenuous awe, confusion, uncertainty, and shame. All she could say was that she hadn’t been prepared. My aunt Dot had welcomed her, served ice tea in a tall glass, and made her sit in the best seat at the kitchen table, the one near the window where my uncle’s cigarette smoke wouldn’t bother her. But my lover had barely spoken.

“It’s a kind of a dialect, isn’t it,” she said to me in the motel that night. “I couldn’t understand one word in four of anything your aunt said.” I looked at her. Aunt Dot’s accent was pronounced, but I had never thought of it as a dialect. It was just that she hadn’t ever been out of Greenville County. She had a television, but it was for the kids in the living room. My aunt lived her life at that kitchen table.

My lover leaned into my shoulder so that her cheek rested against my collar bone. “I thought I knew what it would be like—your family, Greenville. You told me so many stories. But the words …” She lifted her hand palm up into the air and flexed the fingers as if she were reaching for an idea.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought I understood what you meant when you said ‘working class’ but I just didn’t have a context.”

I lay still. Although the motel air conditioner was working hard, I could smell the steamy moist heat from outside. It was slipping in around the edges of the door and windows, a swampy earth-rich smell that reminded me of being ten years old and climbing down to sleep on the floor with my sisters, hoping it would be a little cooler there. We had never owned an air conditioner, never stayed in a motel, never eaten in a restaurant where my mother did not work. Context. I breathed in the damp metallic air-conditioner smell and remembered Folly Beach.

When I was about eight my stepfather drove us there, down the road from Charleston, and all five of us stayed in one room that had been arranged for us by a friend of his at work. It wasn’t a motel. It was a guesthouse, and the lady who managed it didn’t seem too happy that we showed up for a room someone else had already paid for. I slept in a fold-up cot that kept threatening to collapse in the night. My sisters slept together in the bed across from the one my parents shared. My mama cooked on a two-burner stove to save us the cost of eating out, and our greatest treat was take-out food—fried fish my stepfather swore was bad and hamburgers from the same place that sold the fish. We were in awe of the outdoor shower under the stairs where we were expected to rinse off the sand we picked up on the beach. We longed to be able to rent one of the rafts, umbrellas, and bicycles you could get on the beach. But my stepfather insisted all that stuff was listed at robbery rates and cursed the men who tried to tempt us with it. That didn’t matter to us. We were overcome with the sheer freedom of being on a real vacation in a semi-public place all the time where my stepfather had to watch his temper, and of running everywhere in bathing suits and flip-flops.

We were there a week. Twice my stepfather sent us to the beach while he and Mama stayed in the room. We took the opportunity to follow other families around, to listen to fathers praising their sons and watch mothers blushing with pride at how people looked at their girls. We listened to accents and studied picnic menus. Everyone was strange and wonderful, on vacation.

My stepfather lost his temper only once on that trip. He was horrified at the prices in the souvenir shops and made us keep our hands in our pockets.

“Jew bastards will charge me if you break anything,” he cursed.

I flinched at his words and then realized that the man behind the counter heard him. I saw his blush and outrage as his eyes followed my stepfather’s movement toward the door. Then I saw his eyes flicker over to me and my sisters, registering the same contempt with which he had looked at my stepfather. Heat flamed in my neck and I wanted to apologize—to tell him we were not like our stepfather—but I could do nothing. I couldn’t speak a word to him in front of my stepfather, and if I had, why would he have believed me? Remember this, I thought. Don’t go deaf and blind to what this feels like, remember it. I gritted my teeth and kept my head up, looked that man in the face and mouthed, “I’m sorry,” but I could not tell if he understood me.

What context did he have for people like us?

After my lover fell asleep that first night in Greenville, I lay awake a long time thinking. My lover was a Yankee girl from a good family, who had spent the summers of her childhood on the Jersey Shore. I had gone there with her, walked with her on the beaches of her memory, wide and flat and grey-white, so clean I felt intimidated. Seeing where she had grown up, meeting some of her family, I had understood her better, seen where some of her fear came from, and her pride. What had she understood about me today? I wondered.

I turned my head to the side to look at her asleep, her mouth soft against my skin. Her hair was dark and shiny, her teeth straight and white. I wondered what she would have thought of Folly Beach, the poor man’s Jersey Shore, or of us if she could have seen us there. I burned with old shame and then stubbornly shook it off.

Context is so little to share, and so vital.