1980
Ma stayed home from work again today. Pop says she can’t ever go back.
A few days after the Campbells’ barbecue, a strange guy wearing big black boots and a bandana on his head started hanging around outside the dance studio. Pop said it was someone Tom Campbell sent to scare us. Ma said it was just a regular creep, that she was safe with all of those people around her. “Nobody’s gonna mess with me and the girls. Too many witnesses.” I imagine them all in their leotards and leg warmers, charging after the man, chopping him with high kicks and jazz hands.
There are two different Mas; this is the brave one. Regular Ma will make me come into the basement with her to hang up wet clothes. I sing my songs for her when we hear scurrying in corners, hold her hand on the way back up the stairs while she digs her nails into me. Brave Ma stands up to Grandma Sylvia whenever she says something bad about Pop, telling her we’d rather be out on the street than disrespected. A few times Brave Ma started packing our things into garbage bags until Grandma said she was sorry.
“We don’t have a choice. I have to go back to work,” she says to me while making saltine and jelly sandwiches for us. I don’t remember the last time she’s been home during snack time.
“My job pays for this,” she says, pointing to her mouth, full and spraying cracker dust.
“Don’t worry, sweet pea, I’m pretty sure that man thinks I’m a friend of his,” she adds. “He’s just coming to say hi.”
I smush a cracker sandwich on my plate; I don’t believe her.
Later that night, when I’m supposed to be asleep, I crouch down by their bedroom door and listen.
“You sure it’s not mill people? The owners?” Ma says.
Pop laughs like a madman.
“This is funny to you?” Ma says.
“Annabelle. We are arguing over which of the many people out to get me is responsible for sending that jackass.”
Ma is quiet.
“It’s Tom. I know it,” Pop says. “I don’t care what he does to me—he’s not gonna fuck with my wife.” He pounds his fist on something in rhythm to the last few words. Things fall to the floor. “He is sending me a message you could never understand,” Pop says.
“Baby, please,” Ma says. “Don’t do it. It’ll ruin everything. We’re not even sure Tom knows what happened.”
“I put my hands on his kid! That’s what happened.”
“Just his arm! You can explain it…”
“Who knows how that little piece of shit told the story. It’s too late. I shoulda been the one to tell it.”
“What about Diamond?” Ma says. I am her weapon and her shield.
“God help us, Tom was about the last person who could have stood up for me,” Pop says.
“Tell me how to help you,” Ma begs.
“To help us, you mean,” he says.
I haven’t screamed once since the barbecue and the fireflies night, but Champei won’t even be around for me to tell. The Allens are moving before school starts; me and Pop will be the only browns again. Now I eat snacks instead of screaming. It doesn’t help—this is all my fault. When I close my eyes to sleep, all I can see is Pop dangling Tommy Jr. over the ground, Tommy kicking at the air furiously, looking over his shoulder like he’s trying to outrun a monster.
The next morning, Pop and me go out to the garden to pick tomatoes. Yesterday they’d been bright red, hard and soft in just the right way, fat with skins about to split. Pop smelled the stems and said in one day they’d be the perfect sweet and sour for our sauce.
But the garden is wrecked.
Plants are smashed, all of those pretty curves and angles flattened, bright colors mushed into a dull green-brown. A whole bag of trash has been scattered: empty cans of Yoo-hoo, Manwich sauce and Schlitz beer, kitty litter and TV dinner trays—licked clean except for the veggie section, where tiny peas stick to the plastic like green sprinkles. Wads of toilet paper and dirty napkins hang from beanstalks and tomato vines. It’s a garbage garden.
Pop bends down to pick up one of our beautiful, perfectly ripe tomatoes lying on the ground, the only thing left that is close to being whole. It looks like someone has taken a bite out of it, then decided they didn’t like it. Pop throws it down as if the tomato itself has insulted him.
“You see?” he screams at Ma, but since she’s inside, he’s yelling at the house.
“Pop, remember you stabbed the neighbor’s basketball and threw it back into their yard?” I say. “Maybe you made them mad.”
I think it might make him feel better to believe it’s just that one family—one mom and dad, one teenage boy, and one baby girl—instead of a whole army of people, including a man with a bandana and big stomping boots, out to get him, out to get us. He looks over at the neighbor’s house for a long time.
But he doesn’t say anything. He just looks at the garbage garden and then walks back to the house.
Since we can’t make tomato sauce for dinner, we have spaghetti and margarine with chunks of spam made to look like meatballs, instead. Pop won’t look at Ma or me, just his plate. He jabs at the noodles and gets mad at them for sliding off of his fork. Ma keeps staring at him; she tries to touch his hand. He doesn’t pull it away, but he stops eating and sits perfectly still until she takes it off. There’s a knock at the door and we all jump. I start to run and answer it, like I usually get to, but both Ma and Pop say “Sit!” at the same time.
Pop answers the door. It’s a policeman.
“Evening, Rob. I’m sorry to disturb your supper, but I need to talk to you. Can I come in?” He looks friendly but has a hand on the door like he might push it open without permission. The air behind him is the blue-gray of almost night. I can hear the neighborhood kids playing an after-dinner game of Red Light, Green Light. They’re all yelling, Go Go! Go!!!!!! I wish I was them—full with dinner and ice cream sandwiches and games and nighttime without parents—everything that can be squeezed in between now and bedtime.
“Why?” Pop asks. One hand is on the top of the door, the other taps at the doorknob.
“I need to ask you some questions about a theft at the paper mill.”
“Outside,” Pop says, and moves past him through the doorway.
When I turn to Ma so she can explain it to me, she focuses on slurping a very long string of spaghetti. She looks up at me and her eyes go wide, flashing something like help, like asking for me to explain it all to her, like begging me not to ask any questions. It happens in the time it takes for a noodle to be sucked in through her puckered lips, a splash of wet at the end, then gone.
“Everything’s fine,” Pop says when he comes back inside. He’s holding his own head in his hands like it might fall off.
“Stay here and finish your dinner,” Ma says, following Pop to the bedroom.
A chewy piece of Spam jiggles a front tooth loose. I’ve already lost a lot of my baby teeth, but this will be my last front. I think about the cool air rushing into each new hole, how I couldn’t stop my tongue from dipping inside, over and over, even though it burned each time. The penny-flavored blood. The dull white ridges of grown-up teeth hiding just beneath the surface. The Tooth Fairy money. The Tooth Fairy money.
“Hey!” I say, but then decide to keep it to myself.
After day camp the next day I see the bandana man for myself. While I’m waiting for Ma to pick me up, I lie on top of the metal railing on the YMCA stairs, stomach down, arms and legs dangling on either side. It’s hard to balance like this, and I spot the bandana man just as he smiles and nods, like he’s impressed. He’s leaning up against a car in the nearly empty parking lot; it looks too small to fit his big body.
I’m so scared I can’t move.
He waves, in the way a kid would wave, hard and fast. That wave confuses me. Before I can think what to do, I see Ma charging at me from the side. She grabs my arm and nearly drags me to our car. My legs can’t keep up with her. “Well if that’s a friend of yours, you should say hi back!” I say into her red, red face.
“Why doesn’t he just come for me?” Pop says to Ma behind their closed bedroom door. Ma is crying.
“What kind of man tries to scare a little—” And here Ma stops herself.
Like me, I bet she sees Tommy Jr. dangling in Pop’s hands as he squeezes him to black and blue.
We’re going on an adventure down South to Georgia, stopping off along the way to camp and roast marshmallows. Grandma Sylvia is not coming with us; she’s going to visit her cousin Eileen in Pittsburgh. She gives me her favorite blue suitcase for the trip—just small enough for me to drag, with a travel set of matching lotion and mouthwash containers that snap onto the inside pocket. She knows I’m crazy about that set. Before she leaves to catch her bus, she hands me two family-sized bags of Starburst candy and tells me, “Don’t share with your mom and dad but only eat three a day.” It’s like a brain twister. “Then there will be enough left for me and you when we’re back together, which will damn sure happen, sweetheart.” She seems worried and in a hurry to get away from us.
We hit the road while it’s still dark out. Ma is scowling and Pop is cheerful in a crazy way, cracking jokes and trying to tickle. This is normal now—one of them happy while the other is sad and then they switch places. They both seem jumpy, like Ma on too many cups of coffee. As we move farther and farther away from Swift River, they start to meet in the middle. We all lean our heads back on our seats. On the radio, country and rock stations crackle in and out, then soul and jazz ghost into their places without us ever touching the dial. That takes me back, Pop keeps saying, singing along. We go wherever the songs on the radio take us. Stevie Wonder makes us the happiest.
I’m in the back seat with a bed of blankets, my books, and the Starburst bags. No one pays attention to how many pieces of candy I eat. I decide not to listen to Grandma; I have a mission. I’m making woven bracelets with the colorful Starburst wrappers, just like I’ve seen kids at the Y wearing. I’m careful to chew with side teeth, so as not to disturb my loose-y.
“Have you ever seen two male peacocks fight over a female peacock?” Pop asks.
We’re playing a game.
“Never!” I say.
“Well you will in Woodville,” Pop says. “It looks like two feather fans with heads and legs going in circles around each other.”
“You ever had a taste of scrapple and eggs?”
“No!” I say.
“Oh, it’s outta this world, Diamond.”
“Can I get some down South?” I ask.
“That’s the place for it,” Pop says.
“You ever laid under a weeping willow tree and looked up at the stars on a hot night?”
“We have stars and weeping willows in the North, too,” Ma says with a flat voice.
“And hot nights!” I say.
Pop turns up the radio again.
We pull into a rest stop in another state. Ma brought our lunch from home in a bread bag: cheese sandwiches with mayo and mustard. There is a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, a store, and some bathrooms all inside a big building next to the gas station. I beg Ma and Pop to buy us even just a snack, like fried clams or chicken pot pie, but they say no. Families sit outside, their picnic tables covered in delicious-looking food that does not come from a bread bag.
Ma takes me inside to use the bathroom; there’s a long line that starts near the entrance. In the HoJo’s cafeteria, people carry trays filled with hamburgers and soda and colorful Jell-O squares; they sit in comfy-looking booths. I’ve never in my life seen so many different looking people together in one place, or so many people who look like me and Pop. They stare at Ma and me, but I stare at them, too. Black people, white people, young people, weird people. A white kid covered in puke. Triplet brown girls in matching jumpsuits. An older Black woman in a fancy dress and a hat with a feather. A basketball team in uniform, legs as long as I am tall. Everyone is moving fast, winding through the crowd, darting in between people. Everyone is in the way. Ma’s hand on my head makes my stomach feel tight. For the first time ever, it seems like she’s more of a stranger in the room than me.
Outside, Pop has found an empty picnic table near a large brown family. They have a radio that plays fast music with trumpets and maracas. I ask Pop what the music is. “Salsa, I think,” he says. I’m sitting next to Pop; Ma is across from us. I wonder if people think I belong to him and she is just our friend.
“Go stretch your legs out,” Ma says to me, pointing at the kids around us running in circles. A brown girl does cartwheels and roundoff back handsprings on the grass near the tables, yelling, Watch! Mira! to her parents, who pause every now and again to clap and whistle.
I go to the edge of the grass and do a backbend—something I’ve taught myself. I try to kick my legs back over but fall in a heap to the side. I look up and the cartwheel girl is leaning over me, her thick black hair hanging near my face. She smells like shampoo and hot dogs. We look like we could be sisters. I think she might help me up, but instead she flops down next to me.
I see Ma and Pop looking over at me in that stupid, hopeful way. Ma’s hair is flat and greasy, while Pop’s Afro is big and lumpy—he hasn’t combed it. Their heads look tiny and giant. Ma is wearing her favorite Rolling Stones T-shirt with the big red lips and a big red tongue sticking out, and Pop has on a white mesh tank top; his brown nipples like two unblinking eyes underneath. They’re both slouching. They look like goofy kids, kids who couldn’t possibly have their own kid. I don’t know why that’s what I think about right now. Ma waves.
“Do you take gymnastics?” Cartwheel says to me.
“No. I just mess around by myself,” I say.
“I’m on the gymnastics team. Last meet I medaled in two events.”
“That’s really neat,” I say.
“That your mama?” she says, nodding toward Ma.
“Yes.”
“She’s white,” she says.
“Uh-huh.” My face prickles.
“Mira!” She smiles, gets up, runs away from me and does the most beautiful flip I’ve ever seen. She could be a professional. I think with awe that I might see her on TV in the Olympics someday. And then she’s gone, heading back over to her family, who are packing up their food and radio and children. She never looks back to see if I liked the flip.
“You made a friend,” Ma says in between drags of her cigarette. Pop rubs his hands together like, This is getting good.
“Yes,” I lie. “We’re going to be pen pals. She’s going to be a famous gymnast, someday,” I say. Smiles crack their faces open.
“Well how about that,” Pop says, shaking his head.
Ma stubs out her cigarette. “Let’s go. This place is nuts,” she says, as a new wave of people come rushing up the walkway, let loose from their cars to eat and pee.
Back on the road, I wake once at a tollbooth to a man giving Pop directions. Then again as we cross a bridge, the chucka chucka chucka of tires hitting metal. There’s a slow song on the radio and Pop’s big hand is wrapped around Ma’s little one. They’re both squeezing. The next time I open my eyes we’re at the Funtimes Campground.
Because it is almost dinnertime, the whole place smells like smoke and barbecue. A ranger in a ranger hut points out the bathrooms and the area that has the most empty campsites. He hands us a map and a list of rules and says, “No, there aren’t any bears,” even though we didn’t ask that question. He talks a lot about trash and noise; Pop nods extra hard as he explains it, making sure the ranger knows we’re not rule breakers.
All I can see around us are tall trees, like the woods at home, but the bay is hiding behind them; the ranger says there’s a path that opens up to the water. The bay is the ocean without waves. I can smell it—heavy with salt and fish—even though I can’t see it.
Our campsite is flat and covered in wood chips; we have our own firepit and picnic table. There are others next to and across from us, but the woods are thick enough that you can hear things but not really see people: a laugh, a stick breaking, someone hocking a loogie. Pop pitches our orange tent and Ma spreads the blankets inside. I get twigs and small branches for our fire. It’s like our own little house and yard. Ma sings “This Little Light of Mine” and Pop snaps along. I forget all about Georgia and home. I think maybe we could live here in the middle forever.
It’s still early enough for a swim before dinner. Just like the ranger said, the dirt path opens up and the bay is wide and everywhere. Now I understand how the ocean is inside of it—the way the water still comes in and out, small laps at the shore like a promise of big waves somewhere else. There are a few families left on the beach, but most are packing up their coolers and towels for the day. Gray clouds dragging night behind them are just about to push out the orange sky. The three of us stand in our bathing suits, holding hands with me in the middle. We walk out until the water is up to my chest. Ma and Pop hold me—one on each side—as I float. We don’t say anything. Just Pop with a low humming that means he’s happy. I don’t need their help to stay above the calm water, but I let them think I might.
After a dinner of hamburgers and chips, Ma and me take flashlights to pee while Pop builds a fire. We go behind a tree since the bathroom is too far. We squat and listen to the night; it’s a dark web of sounds. One thing on the left answers a thing on the right and then behind us, like they’re all talking to each other.
“Stay close,” Ma says. I move next to her. Our pee makes two streams in the dirt. We splash on each other’s feet. Ma puts her hand on my head, runs her fingers down one of my braids.
“Sometimes I wish I was Black like you and Pop,” she says.
“Me, too,” I say for the first time.
When I see her face get scared, I change it to, “I like your skin how it is, Ma.”
I decide to forgive her for having greasy, flat hair today.
“OK,” she says.
We drip dry. Then she shows me the kind of leaves you’d use for a number two.
Wind makes the fire catch suddenly, and it jumps up with a whoooosh, toward our faces. The flames light up a circle around us. Where the light ends, it’s a flat wall of blackness and trees. It’s blazing hot inside the circle, but the air on the back of my neck and legs is cool, like I’m in two places at once. Pop looks proud of his fire. Ma looks sad and lost, somewhere else—not with us here at Funtimes Campground. She tells me to go get a book to read by the fire while we roast marshmallows.
I dig through my suitcase, looking for Nancy Drew: The Secret at Shadow Ranch, and realize I accidentally brought A Field Guide to the Birds, a library book that is now past due. Betty, our librarian, sweet Betty, will be so disappointed in me. I think about our town’s little library on the hill, how this is the first year I’ve been allowed to walk there by myself. I think about Betty teaching me the Dewey decimal system; how the books she picks out for me smell like rain and dust; the Pajama Story Time Grandma Sylvia used to take me to. I think about home.
“Ma!” I say, running out of the tent. “I forgot to return the birds book to the library.”
“Oh!” Ma says, looking a little panicked, too. “Well…”
“We can send it back once we get to Woodville,” Pop says.
“But how will I pay the fine?” I ask.
“We’ll put some money in the book,” Pop says.
Ma shakes her head. That’s not how it works.
“I’m supposed to put it in the library drop box!” I say.
In the firelight, Ma’s face droops. She drops her head, and her greasy hair hangs in her eyes. Pop leans in underneath her face to make sure she sees him.
“We are not in Swift River, so we can’t put the book in that drop box.” He speaks very slowly, looking only at Ma. “We are moving to Woodville. We will send it from there.”
“We’re moving?” I say.
“Not necessarily…” Ma begins.
Pop walks over to me, snatches the book out of my hand, and throws it into the fire. The plastic cover crumbles, then there’s a brief shimmer of rainbow before it’s gone. Black smoke and ash rush up into the sky. It smells terrible. Pop looks back at Ma with his chin way up and his arms out. The smoke and the sparks from the embers make him look like he’s on fire, too.
“Why did you do that!” I start to cry.
“Diamond, go in the tent,” Ma says.
Inside, I eat cold marshmallows and Starbursts and put a blanket over my head, a tent inside a tent. I try and cover my ears, but I can still hear them.
“That’s where our life is,” Ma says.
“If we go back my life is over,” Pop says.
I can’t breathe. I rip the blanket off of my head. A Starburst catches my loose tooth and sends a lightning bolt to my head.
“So this is the answer? We hide out in the woods in east bumfuck with Ranger Rick and then go live with strangers?”
One’s voice gets loud, and the other one shhhushes. Then they trade places.
“SELFISH, SELFISH, SELFISH, Annabelle.”
“You’re acting like a lunatic. It’s like you’re not even you anymore. What is happening? This is hard for everybody.”
Ma and Pop shadows are painted on the tent; they look like cutouts from the night. They are my shadow parents, long and distorted and wild. I pretend that my real parents are somewhere else, doing laundry, aerobics, clipping toenails in front of the TV—normal things. My shadow parents are the babysitters.
“Then we’ll go back without you!” Ma yells.
Their voices punch the quiet. We are breaking the ranger’s rules.
“Shut the hell up!” someone yells in the distance. Ma and Pop stop talking.
“Fuck off and mind your own business!” Pop yells back.
My stomach hurts, the sugary goop growing inside it like a rotten marshmallow baby. I want to start the screaming but I made a promise to Pop. My tooth aches; I can’t stop wiggling it with my tongue. The sweet sludge from the candy sticks to my lips like Ma’s lip gloss.
This is all my fault, all of it.
I don’t realize I’m holding on to my tooth until the pain explodes in my mouth. The burning is wide and deep and it hurts so much I wonder if I’ve yanked out all of my front teeth. But no, there is just one baby tooth in my hand, hard and white like a tiny seashell. Blood is everywhere, running down my face, dripping onto the blankets.
“Hey!” I yell.
Ma and Pop go from shadows to terrified faces in the opening of the tent.
When I wake up in the middle of the night, Pop is looking down at me.
“Go back to sleep and I’ll meet you there, sweet pea,” he says.
I do. And like he promised, he’s there in my dream. A bear is chasing Ma and me down our block in Swift River. Neighbors come out on their porches to wave, like we’re in a race or a parade. They cheer. Soon I realize that Pop is the bear.
It’s still night when I wake up again; now it’s Ma watching me.
“Are you in pain?” She looks worried.
“Yes,” I say. The top of my mouth still burns. It hurts underneath my nose.
“While you were sleeping your father went and got you some frozen peas.” Ma wraps the package in a T-shirt and rests it on my top lip.
“That poor tooth wasn’t ready to come out yet.”
“I forgot to put it under my pillow,” I say.
“You can save it. We’re going home. The Tooth Fairy is going to come there,” Ma says.
“How will she know?”
“I told her. I left her a note.”
“Where?”
“At home, under your pillow.”
“But you didn’t even know my tooth was loose.”
“Mas know everything.”
Pop, with his back to us, lets out a chuckle.
“We’re all going together?” I ask.
“Of course,” Ma says.
I leave a Starburst under my pillow, a gift for the Tooth Fairy just in case she forgets and comes here instead.
We’re going home.
I want to ask about our Georgia adventure, if we’ll ever try again, about the peacocks and scrapple and weeping willows at night, if Grandma Sylvia can come with us next time. I want to ask if Ma’s fake friend the bandana man will be waiting for us when we get home. I want to know why Ma is more scared of the Georgia family strangers than the stranger with the bandana and stomping boots and an army of invisible enemies.
The tent is lit orange by the sun coming through; it smells like rubber, smoke, and morning breath in here. Ma and Pop are sleeping with arms and legs spread out, all over each other, blankets kicked off. Each like they think they’re alone in their own bed.
My head brushes up against paper, and I turn to see a piece of money resting next to me. I’ve never seen this kind of money before; it looks pretend. It says one hundred dollars. I touch it; it feels like real money.
“She didn’t listen to you, Ma!”
Ma sits up, squinting. Her eyes are puffy and lined with crust. I hold up the bill in her face.
“The Tooth Fairy! She didn’t wait until we got home!” I say.
She looks at it confused, then mad.
“No, she didn’t, did she,” Ma says.
Pop leans over her, smiles big.
“Is it fake?” I ask.
“Tooth Fairy doesn’t do fake,” Pop says.
“But last tooth I only got one dollar,” I say.
“This means you’re a woman now,” Pop says, laughing so hard tears come down his cheeks. Ma looks at him like he’s lost his mind.
We pack up the car in silence. Pop doesn’t bother to fold up the tent into its tiny case—he throws it in the trunk on top of the dirt-covered stakes. We’re all nervous as we drive past the ranger hut; we sit up straight and don’t move around too much. Luckily the ranger is too busy studying a map to look down at us, even though we stop and drop our bag of trash into the dumpster next to him, as he’d instructed.
In the back seat of the car, I try and make a list of things I want to buy. Nothing feels special enough. This money should make me happy, but it doesn’t. I had put it in the trunk, tucked deep in my suitcase, behind the mouthwash, magnified through the see-through plastic container, colored icy blue from the liquid inside. I keep my tooth in my shorts pocket, wrapped in a leaf. I feel around for it every few minutes, comforted when the sharp edges prick my finger.
“Why don’t you write to your gymnast friend?” Ma says.
“I’m going to pay for the library book with my one-hundred-dollar bill,” I say. This feels right.
Ma and Pop look at each other, then me.
“No,” they both say at the same time, back on the same team again for a few seconds.
I put aside the list for now and focus on my Starburst bracelets. From a distance, each link looks like a bright, square jewel. I finish one for each of us.
“You can’t take these off,” I instruct Ma and Pop.
“We won’t,” they say.
But they fall apart in just a few hours, colorful trash on the car floor.