LILY HAD GIVEN ME a list. She said to me, “This is what you need to do before you get to ninth grade. You know ninth grade is really a preparation for high school. So you need to get rid of the weirdness. You need to not be such a bookworm. You need to have more friends than just the little white girl across the street. And there’s more stuff—but you’ll have to wait for it.”
So now I was waiting for it. It was Saturday and Mrs. Baylor had been with us for a few weeks. She usually left for her weekend on Saturday mornings, but she’d asked my mother if she could work overtime. Her daughter in Jamaica was having some kind of problem and Mrs. Baylor needed to send her some money.
I could hear Lily in the bathroom taking a shower. I was still in bed, reading. In seven weeks’ time Lily would be going off to her college in Georgia and I’d be left alone in this house with no one to talk to but myself.
Our house could feel lonely because my mother was busy with her life and my father was busy with his. And then there was me. Lily promised to write, and to call once a month when she got to Georgia, but I knew she’d forget. That she’d get too busy to remember me. And when fall came I’d be off to ninth grade at a new school by myself—because Jennifer went to Marlborough in Hancock Park.
I had no idea what to expect from my new school. Lily had heard from someone that there were only a few colored kids there and nobody talked to them and they had to huddle together at lunchtime while people ignored them. That was good to know.
Lily was letting the water run and run and it had already been twenty minutes. Earlier, at the breakfast table, our mother had mentioned the business with the long showers. She said, “Lily, you’re not the only one who lives in this house. There are other people who’d like a hot shower besides you, and—” My mother stopped midlecture because just then Lily pushed back her chair, stood up, and quietly walked out of the room—not even clearing her bowl from the table. My mother went on eating her half grapefruit with her special serrated spoon, and I looked back at Mrs. Baylor and caught her with her head bowed and smiling to herself.
My mother was on a diet. That’s why she was eating half a grapefruit and drinking a can of Metrecal for breakfast. She was always on a diet. But it never lasted. It wouldn’t be long before she’d be sneaking a box of See’s Candies into the house and slipping it under the stack of sweaters in her closet—to pick at later while she waited for my father to come home from the Flying Fox. He stopped by there most nights after work to unwind.
While I waited for the shower to shut off, I thought about writing a new novel. I was only in the thinking stage for this one, but it was going to be about my daddy’s secret sister. Minerva. She was an outside child. He hadn’t even known about her until he was in high school. What a great subject. I came across her picture tucked under the blotter on my father’s desk in his home office. Lily knew all about her and explained to me who she was. That’s what gave me my great idea.
I listened to the shower going full blast as if Lily had a point to prove. I sank down into the bedcovers, thinking and thinking and occasionally reading a couple of pages of Anne of Green Gables, to help put me in a writing mood.
The shower cut off and there was a period of silence. I waited, breathing softly and listening, debating if I should tell Lily what had happened a few days ago—down at the Bakers’. I risked annoying her, but I wanted her opinion. I’d have to see what her mood was first.
She could be moody. I could usually judge her frame of mind by the way she searched for what she wanted to wear. If her mood was bad, then there’d be a lot of jerking drawers open, rummaging around, and slamming them shut in a violent way. Or there’d be stomping over to the closet we shared and sliding clothes back and forth on the closet rod. If she didn’t find something quickly, there’d be accusations about people messing with her stuff. People—meaning me.
So I braced myself when the door opened and a cloud of apple-scented steam followed her into the room. She had on her white terry-cloth robe and her hair was making a wet splotch on the back of it. In her hand, her transistor radio was belting out Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave.”
She stopped, held the radio like a microphone, and began to sing the words at the top of her lungs, moving around as if she was on a stage. When the song ended she fell back on her bed and yelled, “I love that song!” Then she got up, walked over to me, and said, “You know what I think? I think I’m going to remember this song forever.”
Apparently, her friend Lydia had played it over and over at her pool party the week before and Lily had felt pure happiness when everyone began to sing the song at the top of their lungs.
“You know you only feel pure happiness like ten times in your whole life.”
“Only ten times?” I asked.
“Okay—maybe twenty times.”
As she and her friends sang, Lily said, it was as if the music drifted up into the sky and hovered over all of LA. As though everyone she knew was dancing to Martha and the Vandellas. And they were all in this heat wave together. It was like magic, she told me.
Lydia was Lily’s best friend. She lived around the corner on Escalon. Her family had been the first colored family on her block, just like us. Her father was a judge and her mother a lawyer. So she was way more bourgeois than we were. She already had a car. It was a used Corvair, but still, to me it represented freedom and independence.
I thought of those twenty times and soon disputed that “fact.” People had to have more than twenty experiences of joy in their whole life. They had to.
“It’s never going to be like that again. Because I’m going away and they’re going away. Next year, I’ll hardly know those people. Or the knowing will change and we’ll all be half forgotten in each other’s lives because we’ll be busy making new lives.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. I didn’t like when she talked about her new life to come. She sat down at her vanity and began to examine her face. Lily liked looking at herself. She liked checking up on her beauty. When we walked down Crenshaw, she looked in the big plate glass windows of the stores along the way over and over.
“I’m going by Marcia Stevens later,” she said. “I saw a Help Wanted sign in their window and I’m going down there to check it out. I know I’m only going to be here for another month or so but, hey, why not?”
Marcia Stevens was a boutique in Marlton Square.
“I’ve never seen any colored people working there,” I said.
“So? We don’t know for a fact that they don’t hire colored.”
“They probably won’t hire you?”
“I’m going to try anyway.”
When we first moved to Montego Drive, the stupidest thing happened. One of the Baker girls walked up when I was sitting on the porch reading and stood there at a safe distance at the end of our walkway. I hadn’t yet met them, but from what Jennifer told me, I knew there were three girls in the Baker family and they were the ones who’d locked me out of their rope jumping. I knew this one was the youngest and her two older sisters had probably put her up to it.
I looked at her and waited. Was she going to ask to be my friend? Was she going to introduce herself? Finally, she said, “Why do you have that white girl living with you?”
I didn’t know who she was talking about, so I thought it was a joke. “What?”
“That white girl. Why is she living with you?”
Then it became clear. She was talking about my sister. I suppose with her gray eyes and light brown hair, Lily could look white to some white people, but she’d never fool anyone colored. Any colored person could tell right off she was one of them.
“That’s my sister and she’s not white,” I said, and the Baker girl just turned on her heels and trotted back down the street. I guess to make her report to her sisters.
“The one who asked you that question,” Jennifer said later, “that’s Marcy. They’re always putting her up to stuff. Because she’s kind of slow.”
Slow, I thought, thankful I wasn’t slow.
I watched Lily begin to roll her hair on giant rollers.
“I have something to tell you,” I said.
“What?” she asked. But just then The Temptations’ “My Girl” was suddenly coming out of her radio. With only half her hair rolled, Lily stood up and started doing the Temptation Walk. She pulled me up next to her and said, “Follow me.” Then it was as if she was climbing stairs, slowly, with her head going this way and that, her eyes closed, and I knew she was drifting off to that place where someone was calling her “My Girl.” Someone who had to just stop in his tracks and do a slow pivot like Smokey Robinson with his brilliant smile that slid over his mouth and drifted right up to his laughing eyes.
That was going to happen to me one day, I thought. Someone was going to call me “My Girl!” As soon as I got my figure and my mother let me get my hair cut.
The song ended and Lily flopped down on her little bench in front of her vanity and began to scrutinize her highlights.
“So what were you going to tell me?” she asked.