KIN

Whenever 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?

My mother was proud of my decorum. She liked having a little girl who instinctively wanted to obey. She would give me instructions once, and I’d do just as she said, never considering the alternative. Obedience came so naturally to me that I am sometimes now perplexed by my own daughter’s equally adamant belief in the primacy of her own free will. Sometimes, I catch myself feeling cheated out of what I had naturally expected would be my due: a child so willing to please me she’d be incapable of doing anything other than what I ask.

Nina struck me as my inverse, my photographic negative. She wasn’t dangerous or bad—I see her behavior now as quite adorably spirited—but she knew how to test things, there on the sidewalk or in our living room shimmying to her own tune: If you want my body, and you think I’m sexy, / Come on, sugar, let me know.

“Why don’t you tell Nina about Jesus,” my mom suggested to me one morning before my cousin had ventured downstairs.

Anticipating the conversation that would ensue, the engine in my chest picked up speed. Not because I was embarrassed or because I was being asked to attest to something I didn’t believe, but because I wanted to make a good case, to get it right and convince Nina of how happy she would be—as happy as the kempt boys and girls who clasped their hands in prayer or smiled up at firm but loving parents in the pages I studied every night before sleeping—if she opened her heart and asked Jesus to come inside. For if it wasn’t belief that accounted for our differences, what could it have been?

I went upstairs and sat on the foot of Nina’s bed. I held the copy of Little Visits in my lap, thinking it might be helpful to show her how all the children in the book had found use for God’s word and His will in their lives.

“Have you ever invited Jesus into your heart?” I asked her.

Nina knew full well who Jesus was, of course—everyone did—but had she ever prayed for Him to help her when she needed help or to guide her to do good things when it would have been easier (and, I suspected she might believe, more fun) to do bad?

“Well,” I continued, “if you ask Him, He’ll never leave you. When you’re afraid, you can call on Him, and when you need it, you can pray to Him for help.”

Nina asked a sensible follow-up question. “He’ll give me whatever I ask for?” And, not wanting to mislead her, I explained that there are three answers that God or Jesus will give you when you pray for something: Yes, No, or Wait. When it appeared that the odds of getting a No seemed to be giving Nina some pause, I tried to step up my pitch. I told her about guardian angels, making it sound like God would give her her own personal bodyguard, and about the many mansions and gold-paved streets in Heaven.

But Nina was shrewd. Her face held on to just the hint of a smile, and I couldn’t quite tell what she was thinking. Was I getting through to her, or was she simply humoring me, letting me go through my spiel so that she could more carefully observe this strange breed of girl she had never before encountered? I sat at the foot of her bed, which was normally my bed, while she leaned back against a pillow, watching me talk. I felt like a guest, like someone brought in to amuse a queen, and when I ran out of things to say, I stood up and backed away. It strikes me that I must have been afraid, not of failing God or disappointing my mother so much as having to accept the fact that my cousin’s understanding of the world was incontrovertible, nothing I would manage to rein in or tamp down in fifteen minutes on an April morning. Nothing I, in my limited set of experiences, was likely to comprehend. Her view of the world stood on sturdy block letters, just like the word she’d written on the windshield of my mother’s car, and it cast shadows of doubt upon the hard-and-fast absolutes I’d been taught to accept.

Soon after that, Nina and I started bickering. Not constantly and not for very long, but there were moments each day when she would roll her eyes at my Pollyannaish outlook, and I would frown at some tidbit of the Big Bad City that had crept into our play. I was on edge, afraid that another ticking bomb (like MOTHERFUCK, which I couldn’t stop remembering) would be held out for me to turn over in my hands.

My mother knew things were tense between us. “Nina is family,” she reminded me, adding, “If you’re having a hard time, pray about it.”

So at night, I did. When my mother tucked me into the bed Wanda had left behind when she’d gone away to college, I asked Jesus to watch over Nina and show her how to be good. It was easy to close my eyes and believe that if I could show Nina Jesus’s love, everything would be as bright and cheery between us as a bowlful of cheesy grits.

One afternoon, while we were outside hitting tennis balls against the garage door, Nina and I fell into another disagreement. If it had to do with tennis, the game was merely a pretext, a more acceptable instigator of anger than, say, the fact that we were fed up with one another’s company. Instead of laying out her case (she knew it wouldn’t have persuaded me) or agreeing to disagree (she’d already done that when she’d erased MOTHERFUCK from the windscreen of the car or sat patiently while I told her all about Heaven), Nina lifted her tennis racquet in the air and brought it down upon me as if it were the hammer of some pagan god.

When it hit, the racquet, which she had swung in an act of emphasis—emphasis and exasperation—hurt like a slap to my sensibility, a smack at my notion of all that mattered in the world. It hurt harder than an ordinary blow (at least I thought it must have; I’d never actually been struck by anyone but a calf before), and it made one thing clear: if I wanted to salvage things with my cousin—if I wanted to return to the easy rapport we’d had as babies posing for pictures in our white sun hats—I’d have to swing back.

The air was full of a stifling acrid smell from the Callery pear trees blossoming up and down our block. I drew in a deep breath. It was hard to do, but I gripped my racquet in both hands and raised it up near my ears like a bat. It was going to feel just awful bringing the racquet down on Nina’s shoulder or her back, but I knew I had to. She wasn’t going anywhere for several more days, and if I ran crying to my mom, it would only confirm that I was foolish and prim, a Goody Two-shoes and a bore. I closed my eyes and swung. I knew it was the kind of thing that Jesus would be miserable watching me do. Once I managed to get the image of Jesus out of my mind, I thought of my mother and of how, were she to catch sight of us, she would at first be confused, thinking it couldn’t possibly be her daughter there beating the living devil out of Nina with a tennis racquet.

I was crying, which didn’t surprise me, but when I saw that Nina’s face was streaked with tears, too, I recognized that we had reached a kind of draw. We both must have sensed it, because we gave up with the racquets and went inside to sit on the couch. I felt those same gears, the ones set in motion by MOTHERFUCK, spinning freely in a space that had, less than a week ago, been difficult to clear. I was still too shaken to know whether that meant something in me had been broken or whether it had merely broken free. I had no idea what Nina felt. We sat beside one another on the family room couch, our arms just barely touching, neither of us bothering to move away from the other.

Maggie was plump with a scratchy voice, percussive and quick. She wore military fatigues and shiny brogan boots. We’d met her in the meat aisle of the air force commissary, and in the few minutes it had taken for my mother to ask where she was from and how long she’d been stationed at Travis, Maggie dropped phrases like “aw, hell” and “my old man” that gave me the feeling I knew things about her that I ought not to know. When she used a foul word, she glanced my way, then looked back at my mother and said “ ’Scuse me,” smiling.

On the day of Maggie’s visit, my mother wore a beige shirtdress with a brown leather belt and matching flats. She smelled good. The whole house smelled good. She made a Waldorf salad (which I secretly disliked), rice pilaf with chicken, and green beans amandine. She’d even gotten up early to make the dough for homemade rolls. I had been charged with buttering the pan, a task that had earned me bits of the raw, chewy dough for which I’d opened my mouth as wide as a baby bird’s. Most important, there was a still-warm pound cake waiting under a domed cake saver for its turn on the table.

Maggie was nothing like the ladies from the church who came by in their floral dresses to drink coffee and pray, sitting straight as boards; nothing like the military wives we’d meet sometimes in restaurants to swap stories about one posting or another, the ones who disappeared from our lives as quickly as they came, transferred to another base or just drifting along a different axis. Now, I wonder if that was at least part of the reason why my mother had invited Maggie over in the first place. Perhaps she herself was tired of the remoteness and self-control of her relations with other women. Maybe she hoped that Maggie’s presence in our home might constitute an occasion to let her own voice climb up to the top or dive down to the bottom of its register, to slap her thighs in laughter, to stand up and imitate one person or another in the boisterous, free way she did with her husband and children or her own brothers and sisters.

When Maggie walked through our door, she looked quizzical, as if she’d been looking for a nightclub and had been led to a chapel instead. She followed my mother into the living room and sat down, face still frozen in a curious expression. I was sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table, working my way through a new coloring book and not quite fully listening to what they were saying, but the second or third time one of Maggie’s ain’ts landed in my ear, I managed to get in a quick “Don’t say ain’t, say isn’t.” I tried saying it gently, in case Maggie had forgotten or in case she never knew in the first place. After that, my mother asked me to go and make sure there were napkins on the table. I knew they were there, because I had just that morning rolled them up and threaded them through the pewter napkin rings, but I went to check anyway, taking the opportunity to steal a pat of butter from the dish and let it go to liquid on my tongue.

When the three of us sat down to lunch, I recalled the manners that had been instilled in me. Napkin in my lap, mouth closed while I chewed, no smacking, no elbows on the table, no reaching across for extra helpings. I took small, neat bites. If I needed to speak, I prefaced my comment with “Excuse me, Mommy.” If there was a food I didn’t like (like Waldorf salad), I ate it anyway, out of courtesy. Maggie was much easier on herself, heaping her plate and eating quickly, like a boy. During lunch, she looked around as if pulling her questions out of the different corners of the room. She asked my mother, “What do you do all day here in the house?” “Do you all go to church?” and “Do you play pinochle or whist?”

For my mother’s part, she was friendly and smiling. She laughed when Maggie laughed and chuckled sometimes at the undertone of bewilderment in so much of what Maggie asked and observed. But she didn’t ever stop being a hostess. She didn’t take off her shoes or make any jokes. Instead, she comported herself in the same way as she did with the church ladies and the air force wives. There was a line she could have crossed, a line she had allowed herself to cross before with women she’d met and invited over, women whose voices had become legendary in our family, thanks to the way my mother had narrated her encounters with them. One had been German, and she’d confided to my mother, “To German womens, black mens is gold.” Another said, “Aww, sookie sookie, now,” and called my uncle Arthur “just as tender as a little lamb.” I suspected that Mom would repeat one or two of Maggie’s comments, mimicking her deep, raspy voice, once my father and siblings were home, but for the duration of their lunch, the side of my mother capable of clowning like that stayed tucked in tight. For whatever reason, Mom never showed Maggie the version of herself that Maggie was certain to have liked.

I think, now, about what my mother had meant when she’d told me, “I was searching.” I imagine her a young woman alone with one or two or four children while her husband, my father, was overseas on duty. Had she reached out to God only after she’d exhausted the communities of women she hoped might keep her from feeling alone and unmoored? It must have been lonely, confiding in a sequence of people who came and went as if through a revolving door, there one day and transferred away the next. Had God become vital to her because, unlike the people in her life, people who moved according to the dictates of their military superiors, He was constant, always present? I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.

If there had been a particular motivation for inviting Maggie over, I must also acknowledge the possibility that it had to do with God. Mom did that from time to time, invited people over hoping our home might serve as a conduit for God’s love. Once, a teenage girl named Faye, who lived in state-sponsored foster care, had spent the weekend with our family. I don’t know how Mom had found Faye, but she’d been put up in Wanda’s empty bedroom and taken with us to church before being driven back to her foster parents on Sunday evening. Faye had been tight-lipped. She only smiled when my brothers went to lengths trying to make her laugh, and then only briefly. She projected a stoicism that made her seem much older than fourteen. It could be that she had been instructed to be on her best behavior or to be on guard against some ulterior motive, by whoever had given her permission to come with us in the first place. Or maybe the foster care system itself had made her wary. I don’t know what our impression upon Faye had been, if we’d made her happy or uncomfortable or if anything in our lives had reached her as a model to be emulated. After she left, my mother spent some time trying to remove signs of water damage from the footboard of the bed where Faye had draped her wet towel.

After Mom and I cleared the lunch plates from the table, the look on Maggie’s face said she had just about decided to collect her things and leave. She craned her neck looking around the room for one last clue. Maybe she caught sight of one of my father’s ashtrays, clean as a whistle (one of my chores), or his pipe-stand on the governor’s cabinet in the family room, because the next thing she came out with was “Do you smoke?”

My mother didn’t smoke, and Maggie didn’t seem inclined to light up all by herself.

“Hmph,” Maggie said, twisting her mouth up into an off-kilter pout. “Well, do you drank?” It was a question asked, it seemed, to verify what she had already come to suspect: that there was nothing other than the coffee they had already drunk or the pitcher of ice water, beaded with condensation and still on the table within her reach.

Ah, but what if things had gone differently? What if my mother had reached under the kitchen sink to pull out a big green jug of Almaden Mountain Rhine, thunking it down on the table as if to say to Maggie, I’ll show you my hand if you show me yours? What if, letting their glasses clink in the air, they’d let the conversation beeline away from small talk about hometowns or military postings to touch upon a topic with real meat and mass, like love? What if Maggie told my mother about the men she ran with and the places they went, the smoky air base lounges where songs like “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late” and “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine” were queued up on the jukebox? And what if my mother had inhaled deeply and then let it out, the long, slow breath of truth about what it really felt like to wait for her husband for months at a time, praying he was safe, praying he was worthy of her trust, while she was home looking after a small battalion of children? What might have transpired there between the two of them then?

My mother’s poise was not an act, but there was something gleaming and spirited beneath it, something that instigated pranks and stunts that could bend the rest of us over in laughter. No matter how decorous she was and how much she lived by the grace and the humility of her faith, there was always this other thing we knew was there, this mirthsome, living thing that set her apart from the church ladies and the military wives and everyone else she knew. I loved when she brought it out and let it run around without reins, like a bareback horse. Like the time, cleaning out the kitchen pantry, she tossed my brothers Tupperware bowls and told them to put them on like crowns and gave them spatulas and turkey basters to hold up like scepters and then made the two of them pose for pictures in chairs perched atop the patio table as if they were a couple of insane Everglades kings. Or the evening when the topic of nicknames came up for discussion in the family. Everyone had a go at choosing a new moniker: Wanda chose Wani to replace her usual Sissy. My dad confided that, when the time came, he’d like for his grandchildren to refer to him as Papa, accented as in the French. I can’t remember what I chose; I was happy with the nickname I already had: Kitten. When it was my mother’s turn, she said that she didn’t want to be called Mom, or Mama, and that we should cease calling her Mommy. She told us with a straight face, “Call me Sexy.” She could be as giddy and unself-conscious as an actor heaving life into a new role or a child inventing a story, and her excitement and freedom ferried some of her exuberance of spirit over to us, but not everyone was lucky enough to know that side of her.

Maggie certainly wasn’t. For whatever reasons on that day, my mother seemed incapable of calling it up or unwilling to let it out, and so our guest emptied her water glass and set it back down on the table, taking on the tone of someone who really must be getting back to work. Before I knew it, the three of us were standing by the front door, and my mother was thanking Maggie for having come.

“Well, ain’t that a blip,” my mother said after Maggie was gone, sighing.

“Ain’t isn’t a word,” I reminded her.

“I know, Tracy. I know.”