1987
I sit in the driver’s seat of Ladybug staring at Ma and Pop’s wedding day photo. I focus on Aunt Clara, a rain-sogged old lady in a clump of grown-ups, distinguished only as much as her role in that story, in that strange, hole-filled day, which is to say not a lot. She was always the source of Pop quotes that were meant to teach me something, a strong and wise woman but never a girl, a young girl. I have always looked at this picture and seen myself there in Ma’s long eyelashes, Pop’s smile that took up half his face, Grandma Sylvia’s big forehead. But for the first time, I see me inside the twin pits in Aunt Clara’s cheeks, like God poked his finger in dough and the hole stayed, Pop would say as he tweaked my dimples. Me in her. How had I missed this?
We live in a house full of Ma’s family heirlooms: feathery yellowed papers announcing ancient births and deaths and marriages, diaries of war generals, antique wedding chests, lacy baptism dresses. Grandma Sylvia hated for nice things to stay locked up in trunks, so we used to have fashion shows and put on Irish skits in Irish accents with whatever wasn’t in danger of turning to dust. It was like frolicking with the ancestors.
With Pop, it was as if he sprang up from the ground like one of his plants; there was no evidence he ever had parents, of Aunt Clara having raised him; nothing from family that you could hold in your hand. I’d heard about “down-South kin,” but those were just words for the hole in Pop, not real people.
Until Lena sent Aunt Clara’s letters. These letters are real. They’re like the best book I ever read, but I’m in there somewhere, too, the beginnings of me. We are two Black girls with dimples, looking out a window at sundown in Swift River. Sundown. The start of a daily prison sentence for Aunt Clara. She was just a few years older than me! Sunset, a warning shot. Get inside, or get killed. I wonder if it changed colors in her mind—turned hazy stripes of red into a knife blade, made orange a fist. Like Lena said, I’ve been sleeping on top of a graveyard. My whole life I’m strolling through the very place once filled with the smoke and fire of that night. It’s messing with my head. I don’t know this town at all, I don’t know anything about anything.
Except that Aunt Clara and Lena are mine. I won’t share them with Ma.
They don’t belong here in the world of Ma and me, of bills and bank notices, back pain and pills and pills and dead deer being dumped on our lawn furniture, propped up and flopped over like they’re having a drunken tea party. I don’t want them to live in this heavy house with us. I keep all the letters in the car, where I know Ma will never go, where I can visit.
Ma barely notices how much time I spend in the car or out of the house. We are separate like this, now. Before, we huddled together in rooms, even if in silence, doing our own things—close—as if sitting by a crackling fire in a cold house. Now we keep to our own spaces. Sometimes I hear her stop outside my bedroom door, a long inhale of her cigarette before the smell of smoke worms inside, before she shuffles off to dig inside boxes of papers behind the couch.
We are as broke as ever and our court date is next month. A week ago Ma had to put a notice in the Swift River Valley Register telling Pop about the hearing. Like, If you’re alive, come out come out wherever you are. This is your final chance! Once a week for four weeks, if he is still around, he will be able to read it in the back of the paper next to the tractor sales and bingo schedule. It’s not that we think he’s alive somewhere reading the Swift River Valley Register; it’s because Jerry the ponytail lawyer said we had to, that it’s part of the legal process to get a death certificate. It’s like sending a letter to nowhere, to no one, but that everyone in the world can see, too.
Word gets out. Then the photos come. Of Black men. All shapes and sizes, blurry and captured at odd angles, out and about in nearby towns, at the Grand Union in Ashfield, the Rock N’ Bowl Alley in Conway, an Indian man at CVS.
“Don’t even look at them,” Ma says. “Throw them right in the garbage.”
But we store them away in a scratched-up Tupperware container, for keeps, as if they are long-lost Black uncles. Or clues in a treasure hunt leading to Pop or the reasons why he’s gone. I admit, I study those pictures looking for a trace of me in their faces, too. It makes me not trust my own brain.
Shelly says people have been seeing my dad for years, just far enough away to not get caught.
“They think he might finally turn up,” she says. “That would be wicked crazy, right?”
We’re in her car after class, parked at Cumbies, one of the hangout spots in a rotation where kids come to smoke and drink before they get chased out by cops and on to the next.
“Remember when that Harlem Globetrotter came to town to sign autographs at Bart’s Sport Shop?” I ask. It was a highlight; we don’t get famous people coming around here, just the circus or actors from the lame soaps, not like, General Hospital.
“He was wicked cute,” Shelly says.
“Seven feet tall. People would stop us on the street to ask if my dad was back.”
“Back from the dead where he learned to twirl a basketball on his finger,” Shelly says.
I had begged my ma to take me to get an autograph, for no good reason since I didn’t even like basketball. She wouldn’t do it, but Grandma Sylvia did.
The line to meet the Globetrotter went almost out the door. When Grandma and me walked in the store, he saw us right away. He was sitting behind a normal-sized table, but it looked like a school lunch tray on his lap. He was from another planet—dark and awkward against all of those happy white and pink people.
He saw me and smiled, and it was a smile that was just for me, different than what he was giving all of the white kids crowded around him. They were either so scared they couldn’t look him in the face, or so hyper they grabbed at any part of his body they could get their hands on. The little ones crawled under the table to touch his big sneakers, and he shook them off of his feet like they were puppies.
Grandma went right to the front of the line, leaned down and whispered something to him I couldn’t hear. He nodded and stood up, and a force, like a strong wind, came with him as he unwound his body and walked over to me. Ma and me and Pop never got special treatment like this. We never asked for it. The whole room gasped at his full height, then bitched when he autographed a Bart’s flier for me. Wrote a special note just for me, Diamond the linecutter, courtesy of Grandma. He bent down and gave me a hug—pulled my head right into his chest. I remember his knuckles were dark and dusty, like they’d been dipped in powder, just like Pop’s. I couldn’t stop staring at the line on the side of his fingers where the dark brown front skin met the beige underside—it was beautiful. I could smell sneaker rubber and cologne with sweat creeping through.
I started to cry. Grandma was so embarrassed. Yanked me out of there, apologizing, She’s had a really bad day. A very shitty day. That wasn’t true.
I had all this love for Pop left over. I didn’t know where to put it.
“That’s gross,” Shelly says. “People in this town are gross.”
I scored a point. But I still wonder if I’ll ever stop feeling like it’s my job to change people’s minds about me, about us, like I’m connected to them by an invisible thread until I can crack the code to their kindness and understanding.
“I like it when we talk about stuff,” I say, tugging at the thread.
Jerry the ponytail lawyer also informs us that Ma can’t look like she’s just “sitting around waiting for the money.” She gets and then loses a job as a salesperson at an appliance store, then as a receptionist at Tootsie Roll—where they make custom wheelchairs for handicapped dogs (she’s allergic). Then she lands a paper route. Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Williams, an older lady who had taken over the route after her son joined the army, decided she wanted to sleep in now that her kid was grown.
“These routes are so hard to come by,” Ma tells me. She says there are only seven covering all twenty-five square miles of Swift River. I know from kids at school that they’re passed along from one generation to the next, like a family inheritance. The lore of the Christmas tip goldmine is known far and wide.
“All you have to do is push the cart and count the money. I’ll deliver the papers.”
I smell her in my sleep before I hear her voice. Nicotine, cough drops, and damp hair form a vaporous cloud around her. It’s the still-dark of a Sunday morning—I’d guess 5:00 a.m.—and she’s sitting on my bed, leaning over my face; after-shower sweat and hair-water drips all over me. Around an hour before, I’d been woken up by the sound of the delivery van pulling up in front of our house, rolling open its doors and dropping stacks of uncollated papers onto the ground with a loud thwap, like a body getting punched in a kung fu movie.
“Say yes, Diamond.”
A pillow over my head is my answer.
“I’m already late and the Sunday papers are so heavy. I’m losing tip money right this very moment.”
“Nope.”
“My back, it’s bad again—” Her breath catches on the words. “That last job, sitting at that desk all day, it did me in. Please, if I lose this, no one else will hire me.” I can feel her shaking.
Ma has become like a kaleidoscope of a person; her shape changes depending on the ache and the drug used to squelch it. It shifts fast. I can’t think about it for too long or else I start to shake, too.
“I have to work in an hour, Ma.”
She sighs, pulling herself up with the resolve to go it alone.
“Maybe, if you want, someday you can have this route?”
She sees my expression and realizes that she has just offered up her same life to me.
“Just for pocket change and exercise, you know. Not your main real job.”
“Sure, Ma.”
I watch her through the window, dragging those thick paper stacks further into the driveway, where she separates them into piles for each section—comics, sports, news, real estate, travel, Parade magazine—before putting them together, one paper at a time. I don’t move to help.
This is the best day of my life.
Shelly and me are in the Tee Pee Motel pool. It’s three o’clock, just after my shift has ended. My boss, Tim, is at Bible study, so I am free to break the “no employees swimming” rule. I make a deal with my co-worker Dawn—I’ll take her shitty night hours for a weekend, and in return she won’t tell on me. The pool is empty of guests; it rained earlier today and the stay-indoors feeling lingers for everyone but us. I am full with my new auntie and cousin.
Shelly had come early to help me finish faster, get more pool time. We polished the motel mascot in the lobby—a wooden statue of an Indian chief holding a peace pipe, totem poles on either side of him. We hosed off the plaster teepee on the roof, a confusing thing that looks more like a school art project, a papier-mâché mountain peak. We scooped out the leaves from the pool, swept the area around it, and poured ice water on the blackened gum blobs till they scraped right up like hardened clay.
The motel is all dull oranges and browns with faded tribal prints, everything just shabby enough that guests feel free to carve their initials in a door or bedframe. We sanded off the curse words, mostly on the chief. “It’s so disrespectful,” Shelly said of the I suck dix on his left cheek. I feel relieved that she gets it. People call him my grandpa. “Yeah, this whole thing,” I swept my arms around, “is disrespectful.” Before the Black people were chased out of Swift River, there was a massacre of hundreds of Native American women and children and elders—it happened while they slept. This ridiculous motel is meant to be some kind of tribute. Tim keeps a fresh supply of pamphlets detailing the history at the front desk. We’re all supposed to memorize them so we can recite facts to guests if they ask. No one ever asks.
Next, we made beds, cleaned bathrooms, and vacuumed empty rooms. Shelly threw people’s nasty things at me with gloved hands—dirty socks, crusty tissues, a giant gray bra, a condom wrapper. I forgot for a moment that I sometimes eat the food they leave behind—cold, cigarette-scarred pizza, half-eaten Whoppers, melted ice cream. I forgot myself.
Today, all these people are yuck and everything that belongs to them is contaminated, because Shelly is here and she’s not, we’re not.
“She new?” Dawn asked when she saw Shelly wiping down walls with a bucket full of scummy water and a rag. “Where’s her uniform?” Tee Pee employees all wear a despised brown sack, fringed at the bottom; we’re meant to look like “Pocahontas.”
“She’s just helping me,” I said.
“For free?” she asked. “Shit, you couldn’t drag me here if there wasn’t no money. That’s a good friend right there.”
She is. There is something about seeing Shelly all sweaty, T-shirt streaked with grime, hair pasted to her forehead, bleeding mascara raccooning her eyes. It makes me love her.
“I didn’t mind it,” Shelly said after we were done. She has a job as a checkout girl at The Colonial Candle, “Home of Scent-sational Souvenirs,” sitting on my ass all day smelling Spicy Pumpkin Patch and Wonderberry. She likes my job better. “It’s kind of like an accomplishment, you know? Making it all clean,” she said. I thought about the junk-house she lives in and her sparkling, orderly car.
“Yeah, I don’t mind it either,” I said. That’s only part true. The stuff I’ve seen, the private stuff, like what people’s bodies leave behind—makes me gag. The thing that allows me to clean up after their foulness, put up with their staring, their ice bucket and clean towel demands, is this: Someone has saved up many paychecks to be here. This is someone’s first time in a pool. Someone has nowhere else to go. Someone is hiding out from someone else. This is the first time someone has ever seen someone Black.
I told Shelly this.
“You’re so, like, nice and understanding,” she said, her head tilted. “When you don’t have to be.”
Don’t I?
“I’ve never met anyone like that.”
We float. My body can do that. I’m not fat in water. The heaviest part of me is my long, wet T-shirt, gripping me down to my knees.
Are you nervous about tomorrow?
So nervous.
Do you want to practice on my car first?
Nope. I want tomorrow to be my first time, so I do it right, no offense.
We do water-dance moves in sync, like old-fashioned swim cap ladies.
What’s it like to be with a boy?
In the summer they go buck-wild and leave you, then come back in the winter when they want to be warm.
We splash, play Marco Polo. Marco! Polo! Summertime words I’ve heard from behind fences, coming from backyards, always just out of sight.
But what’s it like to BE with them be with them?
It feels good. Especially when they go down on you before you do it. Their cum tastes like dirty pennies and sweat.
I think of car rides with dry fingers inside me, pinching my nipples, swirling around my mouth, jagged nails catching my inner lip.
It feels so fucking good, Di.
I want to feel good. Something rises up in me, squeezing my insides.
Do you think there’s something wrong with Mr. Jimmy for liking me?
I think, maybe. But you didn’t do anything yet, right?
Of course not.
We hang under the diving board, our own underwater cave.
There’s something wrong with my ma. I don’t know what to do about it.
I know. My dad, too. He just sits in the middle of all that garbage, waiting for my mom to come back. I can’t breathe in there.
We do handstands, handstand splits. We fill our cheeks with water and have spit fights.
My great-aunt was brave and delivered babies and my cousin in Georgia is a nurse.
So cool, I don’t know anyone who went to college except our teachers.
Who knows maybe one day you’ll have a friend in college. Maybe me.
We stay in the pool until our lips are bruise-colored blue and wormy, our eyes red and chlorine-stung. And then we stay some more. Nothing at all is the matter, is how it feels.
Your boss has baptisms in this pool?
We call them the Jesus and Mary Swim Team.
Maybe that’s why it feels so good in here. Like, holy.
When we finally pull ourselves from the pool, the sun is disappearing behind the teepee on the roof. We wrap ourselves in scratchy, too-small towels and head to the vending machines—Cheez-Its for me, Doritos and Skittles for Shelly, a couple of Sprites for us both. Then off to Number 7, the nicest room at the Tee Pee, the one Tim saves for his minister. No scratches on the wood, no stains on the green shag carpet. A pastel, quilty bedspread with matching curtains that look like watercolor paintings. Plus, actual watercolor paintings of birds and frogs and streams hang on every wall, as if the whole place wants to be a lily pad.
“Oh my god, this room is awesome,” Shelly says. “Like a hotel in France, or Canada.”
I feel proud, like I got it just for the two of us. Like my shitty job has some good things. Like my life isn’t a total waste. I wonder if Ma could ever be happy for me, sitting here like this, almost normal.
Shelly starts stripping down before I even have a chance to get out of the room and into the bathroom. I change out of my wet suit and T-shirt with the bathroom door closed. I do it fast and sloppy, terrified she might not care enough about closed doors and private things. When I open it she’s sitting on the bed naked, waiting to get in. I look away quickly, but not before seeing a flash of surprisingly dark pubes, pale boobs traced by hard tan lines. She has pink nipples, like Ma, like other white girls I’ve seen in locker rooms. Mine are dark brown, like African women I’ve seen in magazines.
Shelly takes a long shower. After a while, steam pours from underneath the door, making the whole room dreamy. She finally comes out in a towel looking as happy as I’ve ever seen her, combing her straight, knot-free wet hair for what seems like ten minutes. She pulls lotion out of her purse, parts the towel at the bottom and puts her foot up on the dresser. She rubs lotion into the same part of her leg until I can’t imagine it getting any moister. This ritual is mesmerizing. I can’t stand spending that much time with my body. I remember the fact that she’s probably living out of her car; this clean-body ceremony might be a rare treat.
We sit in the armchairs by the window and look down at the pool. On the edge of the chain-link fence, five deer of all different sizes, looking like some kind of life-sized toy collection, are staring up at us. There’s a meadow and some woods behind the fence; it’s from there that deer come pouring into town as if there’s an endless supply. Because we feed them cereal every day—which it turns out is like deer crack—I recognize these as “the regulars.” There’s White Butt, Sad Eyes, Dummy, Second Biggest, and the little one, Baby, who makes a sound like squeaky shoes.
“They look like they know you,” Shelly says.
“They’re here every day. They just want food.”
“What if the big one is like, your dad come back to life?”
I try and make sense of the rush of relief, the total absence of doom I usually feel with outsider Pop talk. Maybe it’s because she said he was dead, as a fact, that he’s watching over me.
“Goodnight, Pop,” I yell in the direction of the deer, and we crack up.
We lie on the bed and watch TV. It’s one of my favorite episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the one where a waitress and her boyfriend try to poison this old lady to get her fortune. Then the episode of CHiPs where Jon and Ponch confront a gang of dirt bike–riding cattle rustlers.
“I hate this one,” Shelly says. “Ponch doesn’t make out with anyone.”
“I like it when Jon makes out,” I say, even though I like Ponch better. I want Shelly to know I can like the white guy.
“Look, Di.” Shelly’s fingers are covered in orange Dorito dust. She sucks each finger in the way I can only guess she would suck a guy’s dick.
“Nice work,” is the thing I think to say.
It starts raining again. The sound—like the hiss of a crowd cheering—pulls us off the bed. We sit in the chairs and watch the droplets attack the pool, the surface of the water pinged by tiny darts.
“Does rain make you sad or happy?” Shelly asks.
“Both?” I say. “It makes me sad about some other happy time. This day will be that other happy time the next time it rains. Make sense?”
“Totally.”
On our walk to her car, Shelly pops my bubble. “I think I’d get a job at the Tee Pee if I wasn’t getting out of here.”
Shelly is leaving Swift River as soon as she gets her license. She acts like a person who is leaving soon. Leaving gives her courage for fuck yous and eat mes and the rest. When a woman called me nigger bitch in Cumbies last week after I bumped her by mistake, Shelly yelled, Fuck you dumb bitch, she’s not like that, and I wanted to say something, tell Shelly she didn’t get it exactly right. But I feel the same force in the opposite direction: I live here. I accept stuff I don’t want to. I love people who say terrible things. I want some of her leaving to rub off on me.
Come to Florida.
Maybe.
We can swim in a pool every day! You can go to college. You’re too smart not to go to college.
Maybe.
No, the ocean. We’ll swim in that. Sail in sailboats. Drive convertibles.
Maybe.
We can live with my mom. In her apartment on the second floor with a trash chute and a dishwasher and a fig tree in the yard.
Maybe. But already I’m filling up with it.
When we pull up to my house, it’s dark. The outside light isn’t on, and I can see a candle flickering through the living room window.
“Is your mom gettin’ it on with some dude in there?” Shelly says.
I laugh at the outlandishness of that idea. It does look romantic, though—the perfect surprise for a person in love just coming home from a hard day’s work. I feel a ping of something in my gut; I wish the idea wasn’t so ridiculous. Instead, the truth: the electricity has been cut off.
I walk in the house singing out loud; it’s a song from the radio that Shelly and me love.
Every-body wants to rule the world. I hear Ma trying to sing along with me before I even see her.
“No,” I say, standing over her at the kitchen table. I hold my hand up, Stop singing.
She’s pill-drunk, neck unhinged, pretending to read a newspaper spread in front of her. By candlelight. It’s lucky she hasn’t burned the whole house down.
“Someone’s in a good mood!” she says and points at me. “Electric is off, so we’ll have to camp out in here for a few days.”
She says it with glee, like more misery-adventure should bring us even closer together. It cannot.
“Gas is also off, so we can only eat cold things. It’s perfect timing, really. Too hot to eat hot food.”
“And here’s another bonus from my peeeperroute… a free peeeper!”
Her head bobs over the front page of the travel section, where there’s a photo series of goats on the side of steep, nearly vertical cliffs in the Rocky Mountains. Giant poufy balls of white fur are held up by tiny legs bent in sharp angles, with delicate hooves grabbing on to mere inches of standing room. The space for them to navigate is so impossibly small, they look like they’re baked into the side of the mountain. A mile to go in any direction, they are perfectly still, thinking about their next move. What a miracle. I’d read about them in National Geographic.
“I didn’t want to have to tell you this, but someone’s after my route. They’re trying to get me in trouble. Saying I’m always late, the paper’s crumply, this and that nonsense.”
“Look, Ma.” I point to the picture of the goats. “It’s the wild mountain goats of the majestic Rockies. I think they’re so symbolic, don’t you?” Sometimes when Ma tries to burst my bubble, I say things I know she won’t understand. Or I go sit in Ladybug for hours, where I know she won’t come.
Her face freezes. “Oh, yes,” she says and nods.
“Did you know that seventy years ago Black people weren’t allowed to be seen outside after sundown in this town?”
Her head stutters, her eyes well up. She looks like she’s about to nod yes, but changes her mind.
“No, I can’t say that I knew that. It’s just so… I can’t find the right words for it.”
I take the F encyclopedia from the shelf in the living room, grab a flashlight and head to my room. These books were Pop’s pride and joy. He made payments to the encyclopedia salesman for a whole year before they belonged to us. He read them like they were novels. He had gotten through L.
The common mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) is the Florida state bird. It is a superb songbird and mimic. Its own song has a pleasant lilting sound and is, at times, both varied and repetitive. Often, the mockingbird sings all night long, especially under bright springtime moonlight.
Aunt Clara. Aunt Sweetie. Lena. Pop. Pop. Pop.
Something is happening. The past is gathering itself together, taking a solid shape somewhere I can’t see, like hands on my shoulders from behind.
The lights flutter—on-off and on again with an electric tzzz. A mistake, most likely—the bill is still unpaid. But my brain won’t remember this until later. In the moment, the sound is singular: both sad and hopeful, like the swish-click of counting coins on a kitchen table. Maybe there will be enough. Maybe there won’t.