1980
When I am eight years old, Ma and me start to keep secrets from Pop. He is leaving us in slow drips. In six months, he will disappear.
It’s deep winter, and the snow has painted our house normal again. Gone is the missing row of roof shingles, the overgrown grass, the junk-filled yard; we are buried under the smooth white lines that cut through the neighborhood. Drifts as tall as me hide broken toys and buffer the cars that dare to skid down our curvy street. All that whiteness is loud and sharp. Pop has gone quiet and still.
Ma puts a curtain around the two of us girls, shielding him from our noise and fumbles. Inside the curtain we are messy and break stuff by accident; we do things we’re not supposed to do and we don’t get punished. “It’s OK. This is just between us,” Ma says with a soft voice and a pinched face when she gets called into school after I wet myself in class because teacher wouldn’t give me a pass to the bathroom. Ma’s eyes dart toward the living room to make sure my badness has not broken the spell between Pop and the TV.
This goes against my nature as a teller of everything, a tattler on myself and others. Pop has always been my best audience. Nestled under his armpit on the sofa, I would describe what I heard and saw from my hiding place under the porch: a woman going through the neighbor’s trash, a man dragging his wife by the ponytail, two cats fighting a raccoon.
Sometimes I didn’t have to snoop; I could be invisible in plain sight. “You’re like a goddamn ninja,” Ma said, jumping when she realized I had been watching her stare at nothing for fifteen minutes. I would melt into walls, as quiet as breath, as breath being held. Or I made playing sounds—dolls talking, cars vrooming. Adults thought my ears had been shut off.
“I got hemorrhoids the size of meatballs,” I said to Pop. I pushed out my belly to imitate the pregnant Mrs. Duffy, who hung out her kitchen window to smoke cigarettes while talking on the phone. Pop never made me feel bad for having a chubby tummy; he patted it like there was a baby inside.
“You’re a born comedian.” His belly laugh vibrated through my whole body like we were the same person. “Or a spy.”
This same reporting to Ma was met with sleepiness, a kind of tired that seemed directly inspired by my talking. If she had just come home from work cleaning rooms at the Tee Pee Motel or teaching a dance class at The Creative Talent Dance Studio, sometimes she responded by putting a finger to her mouth, Shhhh. With my dad, I was the most interesting person who had ever spoken words.
Once, while reading him my book about the brown Indians, I asked him if we were supposed to have our own private language, too. Pop is the only other brown I know. No one else in town has dark skin like ours, not even Ma, which is what makes our family different. In the book, the Indians talk to animals, the wind talks to the trees, and the wolves talk to fire so it will never leave them.
“No, silly,” he laughed. “We speak English.”
Instead, Pop taught me a language called Nostralis.
Two flares of the nostril means “Hello.” Three means “Your breath stinks,” and so on.
He invented this language with his cousin when they were my same age so that they could plan secret adventures right in front of parents or aunties and uncles. In the town where he spent the first seven years of his life, he told me, they didn’t have hobbies, daycare, or time-outs. Children looked after themselves, fetched cigarettes and bottles of pop at the store for the adults, did chores around the neighborhood for anyone who needed help, and listened to grown-ups tell stories on screened-in porches at night. They lived in a cluster of families on a dead piece of farmland, their houses squeezed in close to each other, making one long row of boxes like teeth across the mouth of the street. Some of the families moved around “like gypsies,” he said, a new box and a new landlord each time the money ran out.
“We are not gypsies,” Ma said when I asked, since we run out of money, too. “This will always be your house, Diamond.” It was where Ma had grown up, where her own Ma had been raised, and her mother before that. “These are your roots.”
I pictured all of those women holding my ankles so I wouldn’t float away.
Pop does not want this house, these roots.
“I need my family,” he says as I listen outside their bedroom door one Saturday morning. “And Diamond needs to be around people who look like her.”
“When’s the last time you spoke to them? They don’t give two shits about us. We are your family. Me and Diamond.”
“We could send her to Georgia this summer. Lena would take her, just for a few weeks.”
“You haven’t seen her since you were a kid,” Ma says. “We’re not just gonna send her our daughter.”
“You don’t…” Pop is out of words and his voice falls into a hole. Everything else is whispers.
The next morning I ask Ma if Pop wants to give me away to another family.
“No, baby. You’re not going anywhere,” she says. “Your dad doesn’t want you getting hurt, is all.” She pinches my arm. “Now mind your business and stop listening to grown-up conversations.”
Ma never comes right out and says, Don’t tell your father things, but she doesn’t have to. She is careful with him; he is limp and polite—a tired visitor come in from the cold. Whereas his deep voice used to push itself into every corner of the house, everywhere at once, now Pop takes up almost no space. He comes home from work at the mill and crumbles into his chair. He shoos me away if I’m playing too close to him.
Ma explains that someone at the mill is saying mean things to him, accusing him of things he didn’t do.
“Imagine that meanness making cuts all over his body that his clothes cover up,” she says. “Sometimes you can accidentally bump into a sore spot and not even know it.”
I am gentle with him, too. I make my indoor games quiet games. I fold myself in half.
I am angry at the mill for taking our old Pop, leaving us with this new one.
One day, a blond-haired boy calls me a nigger during recess. I don’t know what this is, and I feel the sharp-edged newness of the word; I’ve never heard it spoken before. I can tell he’s new to it, too. The way he says it, nig-ger, enunciating each syllable; something off of his vocabulary list he’s trying out. It sounds ugly, and his mouth looks all wrong with the word in it.
I react to the reactions around us—jaw drops, squeals, titters. I have just been shot with an invisible bullet.
I go home and tell Ma. She cries and says she wishes she were Black, would give anything to be Black like me. “Look at my ugly white skin,” she says, pinching at her arm violently. But it’s just her pinkness and freckles, the Ma skin I love, nothing ugly.
I want to tell Pop. Ma says don’t, but that night after dinner I work up the nerve to put my face in front of his, one long flare of my nostrils for Help.
“Not now,” he says, barely looking at me.
Ma pulls me away.
“Let’s find the ugliest white thing we can think of to call this boy,” she says after my bedtime story.
“Call him an asshole, sweetheart,” Grandma Sylvia says, resting her chin on my bed as she sits on the floor. She’s on a surprise visit from her apartment across town.
“We don’t use that language in this house.” Ma angles herself to give Grandma her full back.
“My house, you mean?”
“Happy to give it back to you, Mom. We’ll go somewhere else. Say the word.”
“She should be kicking him in his little nuts,” Grandma starts to wind up but stops herself. I wonder if Ma and me will one day get stuck in the same fight forever.
“How ’bout a fish belly? They’re white and gross,” Ma says. “I saw a Jamaican guy in a movie say that to a white man. Call that boy Fishbelly.”
I think of the slimy translucence, the perfect evenness of the belly bulge, the whisper of skin barely covering the inner parts. The way you can see the breath—actually see the breath—like the skin is a part of the air moving through its body.
“It’s not ugly enough,” I say.
“We’ll find something else, then.”
But we don’t. And when I march up to the boy the next day on the playground and spit my newly created insult in his face, he pokes me in my gut and calls me Fishbelly.
“Then you’re the nigger!” I shout.
To the other kids, this is the funniest thing I’ve ever said. More jaw drops and squealing and laughter. The boy punches me in the arm, hard.
For the next week he’s called Nigger Boy and I’m called Fishbelly, until his parents threaten to sue the school if they don’t do something about it. Emergency meetings are had. He is made to say, “I’m sorry,” and I have to say, “I accept your sorry and I’m sorry, too.” This is the end of it, for him. I am still called Fishbelly.
We don’t tell Pop any of it.
A few weeks later, me and this same boy play “making love” after school at the Boys & Girls Club. All has been forgiven over graham crackers and disco lessons, and Ma has just filled my head with the book Where Do Babies Come From? In it, an enormous, naked white man and woman rub their fleshy parts together. Out come cartoon, dancing sperm with top hats and pretty lady eggs swimming around in a colorful, swirly womb. There’s an explosion of some kind and they make a glorious sperm-and-egg sandwich.
The no-clothes part doesn’t translate. Me and the boy have on our boots and snowsuits. We’ve just finished our disco lessons, and I’m still wearing a sparkly disco crown. We know enough not to make love out in the open, heading instead to the shrubbery in front of the parking lot. It has just started to snow.
He lies on top of me and I hug him.
And then, my first kiss, stiff lipped and spit drenched, held for at least thirty seconds. Our eyes are wide open the whole time, and I marvel at the delicate whiteness of his eyelashes; they are the only things in focus. I feel the air move up through his stomach and into my mouth; we puff each other’s cheeks out for fun. I breathe in his day through my nose: ivory soap, orange juice, and melting-snow-on-sweater.
“That’s it?” he says finally, rolling off of me.
“I think there’s more,” I say. I don’t want him to leave.
It’s getting dark, and the light from cars passing through the parking lot washes over us in speckles through the bushes. We are hidden from view. A horn blast jolts us off the ground and we stand up, dizzy and scared.
My dad is leaning up against our car with his arms folded. He’s far enough away that I can’t make out the look on his face, but I know he is staring right at us. He is tall and lumpy, and I can tell he’s wearing his layers of clothes to keep warm—T-shirt, long john shirt, two sweaters, sweatshirt, scarf, and his rain jacket. He likes to peel himself like an onion. Sometimes Ma peels him, too. I feel a rush of love for him. And panic.
“Get over here,” I see his mouth say.
The boy looks back and forth between Pop and me.
“It’s OK,” he says, and then kisses my hand.
“What’s OK?” I ask. He’s already off and running.
“That your dad is a nigger,” he calls over his shoulder.
The night is thick and holding its breath.
Snow comes down in mini fistfuls, looking like cotton balls piling up in Pop’s Afro.
“What were you doing in the bushes?” His eyes are furious, but his voice belongs to the flat and lifeless Pop who lives with us now. As the club’s door opens and closes in the distance, a Bee Gees chorus yelps into the cold. I feel suddenly protective of the fun times we have in there.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Who was that boy with you?”
I am quiet until we’re all the way inside the car.
“I can’t say.”
“What was that he said to you?”
“I can’t…”
“I’m gonna ask you one more time.”
He doesn’t ask and I don’t answer.
The car fills up with our silence. I stare at his face, waiting for what’s next. A winter cold rattles in his chest, and he coughs uncontrollably as the heater kicks on. The whole car smells like his cherry cough drops and the pine air freshener dangling from the mirror.
“OK then,” he says.
His hair sags as the snow melts into his eyes and drips off his mustache. He blinks back the water and leans into the windshield, clicking on the wipers. They paint half-moon roads in front of us. It’s only snowing inside the headlights.
By the time we get home, it has turned into light rain, forming a crispy crust on the top of the snow. My boots make popping sounds through the ice skin, leaving giant holes behind me.
“Go straight to your room and don’t come out until you’re ready to talk,” Pop says without looking at me.
“What happened?” Ma calls after me as I run to my room without taking off my snowsuit or snow boots. I flop face down on my bed.
I listen to their voices in the kitchen. Pop is fuming now, his voice thawing like the snow. Ma is whisper-yelling. A few minutes later she sits on my bed and takes off my wet things, not getting mad even though my covers are soaked.
“Come tell your father what happened.”
“I can’t,” I say. I’ll just take my punishment. I know if I tell he will send me away to the other family.
“Please, Diamond,” she says with the voice of a little girl.
I am not allowed to leave my room. Not for school. Not for Boys & Girls Club. Not for disco lessons. Not for anything except going to the bathroom. I drag out each trip across the hallway, taking the tiniest of baby steps, my eyes grabbing at all the things I took for granted. Hello, my old friend dirty clothes hamper. I miss you, Ma’s broken exercise bike. I stop to touch Grandma Sylvia’s watercolor painting of mallard ducks in a pond.
“You’re gonna be pissing in a bucket if you don’t keep it moving,” Pop threatens from the living room, his voice wobbly.
Three times a day Ma brings me food like I’m a prisoner from TV, begging me, “Please tell your dad what happened so this can end. Please.” She looks at her lap when she speaks and says nothing of the fact that until now she has been my partner in keeping secrets. In the mornings I wake with the loose memory of her cool hands touching my forehead, checking for signs of damage while I sleep.
In my room I dig out my old Fisher-Price village from when I was four. The people are small and hollow with no arms. Their skin is a pale peach color, except the dog, who is white with black spots. Two at a time, they make love to each other. Even the dog gets to play. On top of the farmhouse. At the general store. In the fire station. Sometimes my finger is the penis, poking inside their hollows.
Day and night trade places. While it’s light out, the house is silent. Darkness hits with a storm of sound. First: the flutter of Ma’s footsteps, pierced by the loud clanging of a pot or the closing of cupboard doors; then static fuzz finds music on the portable radio she carries from room to room, shaking away silence from dusty corners. Doors slam, and Pop’s voice climbs a ladder, rising like it’s coming from somewhere deep underground. He is back to life, yelling at Ma. She is selfish. She is bad. She is going to ruin me. She talks back to him calmly, as if part of a different conversation. I am too far away to hear her side, and too scared to sneak out of my room for a better listen. Things are smashed and walls are pounded; an avalanche of plaster-crumble follows each thud. It sounds like a giant bird—a Microraptor—flapping its wings. I imagine the patch job to come—a new raised sheetrock square joining the others spread throughout the house, painted over like poorly hidden doors that make me think, What’s inside there? even though I already know. I picture other ruined things: books I tore to shreds, dolls with their eyes poked back into their heads, the baby hole I punched in my own bedroom wall, covered up by a Yoda poster. I wonder what I will be like as a ruined girl.
After a week, Pop comes to see me in my room. He looks nice and new in what he calls his “church pants” and a stain-free white shirt with a big collar, like he dressed up just for me. Also new: a look on his face I can’t read—wild and groggy, like someone shaken from sleep. He joins me on the floor with my Fisher-Price lovemaking village.
“Nice tiara,” he says, touching the sparkly wreath around my head.
“It’s a disco crown,” I say. He nods as if he’s learned something important.
“You want to talk about anything?” he says.
“Not really.”
His new face crumbles.
“For chrissake, I’m your father! You don’t keep things from me!” he says. “Tell me what happened!” He snatches off my disco crown, like maybe this will allow good sense back into my head.
“I want to stay,” I say.
“Stay where?”
“Stay here in our house. I don’t want to give it back to Grandma. I don’t want to be sent to the brown family.”
“What kind of nonsense has your mother been telling you?”
“You ruined my skin!” I yell.
It comes so fast and loud, I scare even myself.
Pop looks at his hands, like he’s silently asking them what to do.
He puts the disco crown back on my head.
I didn’t mean it, I want to say, but can’t.
A tear slides down his face; I stretch up toward him to wipe it away with a Fisher-Price cowboy. He takes it from me before I reach him.
“They can’t even give them goddamn arms?” He picks up the fireman, who’s making love to the farmer’s wife in the stable.
His voice is limp, again.
I want to kiss his hand, a peck for each knuckle, even the ones blackened with scabs. Instead, I pick up the dog and make him punch the fireman in the face; I add a sound effect, Pow! Pop smiles. And then we cross over to the other side of something. Not bad to good. Just bad racing toward something else.
Later that night, I look out my window and see him standing in the yard, smoking his pipe as the snow comes down. A curlicue of smoke floats past me and escapes into the night sky. Soon, he’s covered.