Losing My Cool (14 page)

“Do you know I'm actually a twenty-eight waist?” I asked Stacey. “All these years I've been wearing a thirty-six, I didn't even know my right size.” I looked over at her. The most familiar face in the world. Somehow it was one of the strangest now, too. She was eighteen, all curves and ripe flesh with copper in it, fresh out of high school, no plans, hadn't bothered to take the SAT, didn't care. “I think we should take a trip to Italy or France or somewhere, see some shit, you know?” I said, really just to have something to say.

“Italy, nigga? Them white niggas at school got you buggin',” she said.

I laughed. “Why not?”

She rolled her eyes.

Since the day I met her when I was fifteen, I wanted her anytime I saw her. Now was no different. My right hand rested on her left thigh. I pulled the car into an empty corner of Tamaques Park, took out the keys, and kissed her. She tasted like bubble gum. I probably tasted like San Pellegrino, which I'd started drinking all the time and which was harder to find in our part of Jersey than in Georgetown. We fucked in the backseat of the car, but she was gone, off in another world I couldn't come to.

“What's wrong?” I said when I finished.

“Nothing,” she said, looking into the distance, refastening the buttons on her fly. She could fill out a pair of Miss Sixtys like no one I had ever known. I flicked the condom out the window, put the car in reverse, turned the music all the way up.

It was just getting dark when we got to Pup's crib in Maple-wood. I had a lot of trouble finding it, missed several turns, went back and forth on what turned out to be the correct road at least four times before breaking down and asking for directions at a Mobil station. “Don't you know where you goin'?” Stacey said in a tone I found less than friendly.

“No, it's been a minute since I've been out around this way,” I confessed. She sucked her teeth and drummed her acrylic nails against the wood grain in the armrest. It was a habit of hers, which up until then I hadn't noticed drove me crazy. The attendant explained to me my error, and we were off.

Pup came downstairs, gave me a pound, and climbed into the backseat. He had grown up in Newark, not far from where we were, then got shipped in ninth grade to a little Christian boarding school somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, far from the Jupiterian pull of the corner, which his parents knew was powerful enough to drag brothers right out of their houses and into its orbit like tiny satellites. Pup told me once that his father drove taxis in Manhattan. I don't know what his mother did. Somehow the two had managed to put all three of their sons through boarding school and college (his brothers were at Duke), which seemed to me like a kind of miracle.

At Georgetown, Pup and I lived across the bathroom from each other, the only black kids on our floor. We became fast friends over video games, pickup basketball, and midnight hero sandwiches. He was a different kind of black than I had ever known—first-generation, the son of Ghanaian immigrants, not the descendant of Southern slaves like Stacey and me. He had another culture, another point of reference; the images he saw here weren't addressing him specifically. Which is to say, he hadn't been taught to despise himself from the moment he could talk the way Stacey had been and the way I would have been were Pappy not so hell-bent on preventing that from happening. Which is also to say, he was African-American (in the literal sense) as much as he was black. The difference such an accident of time and birth can make, I was learning, is both subtle and difficult to overestimate.

Besides that, Pup was short and muscle-bound, bald, the color of a Hershey bar, and the owner of an infectious laugh. I'd seen him disarm the hardest brothers and the aloofest white boys with the same easy smile. His presence in the car, as the poet said, momentarily evaporated whatever disagreeables hung in the air between Stacey and me.The three of us sped up the Parkway toward Mary's house in Glen Ridge.

All day I had ricocheted between fits of excitement and stark raving terror at the thought of bringing Stacey with me to a party full of college friends—all of whom, with the exception of Pup and some Indian kid named Raj, were white. “Do you want to meet some of my friends?” I'd asked her the day before, trying to sound mad casual, expecting she'd say no.

“I don't care either way,” she told me.“If you want me to come, I'll come.”

 

 

 

 

Shit went sour from the drop.“Would you like a beer or something to drink?” I heard a girl ask Stacey as we walked through the kitchen and out onto the back deck.

“No,” was all she replied, with no smile and disinclined to let the conversation proceed any further than it had, which was nowhere. There was even something belligerent about the way she said it.The girl flashed a sheepish grin and looked dejected or confused. Pup stepped in and made her laugh and I heard their laughter behind me as I shut the screen door.

“Why can't you just chill and be nice, baby?” I whispered in Stacey's ear as we went to a wooden bench and sat on it, overlooking the rolling green of the deep, landscaped lawn. I thought the lawn looked nice.

“The bitch asked me if I wanted a drink, I said no, what the fuck else do you want?” Stacey snapped. The look on her face—how many times have I seen that look; and on how many faces like Stacey's? It was this wall of a look that said, among other things: I'm not interested in you at all.

It didn't take long for me to realize that night that my two worlds—what was left of my Union Catholic past and what looked like my Georgetown future—were about as easy to fit together as square pegs and triangular holes. The more I tried to coax Stacey into sociable conversation, the more she fortified her wall. I felt a mixture of embarrassment and resentment toward her. It wasn't that she did or said any one specific thing I could pinpoint, or anything that taken on its own would constitute such an egregious affront. It was more like there was this air about her, a certain
steez
or way of carrying herself, an antisocial steez, which made her cold and hard, uncivil.

Like almost all of my old friends, Stacey was a paradox. She had grown up middle-class in a leafy section of Plainfield with two cars parked behind the motorized garage door and a refrigerator full of steak and Asti Spumante (a sparkling white wine of questionable taste, sure, but a sparkling white wine all the same!). An illiterate Chinese rice farmer in a paddy field or a São Paulo orphan in a favela scrap heap would be hard-pressed to differentiate Stacey's lot from Mary's. But economics doesn't explain everything. It would be equally true to say that in Camden, Newark, or Harlem, Stacey was no interloper. She could blend into the most poverty-stricken black ghettos like a spotted leopard in the sub-Saharan brush—seamlessly—and not just owing to the color of her skin, but also because she possessed the requisite savoir faire to navigate that forbidding terrain. She had a very convincing street pose, a pose that she, like all of us at one point or another, had to learn and to master (no one's born that way)—a pose that now she either wouldn't or couldn't turn off. Perhaps she'd been doing it so long it wasn't even a pose anymore; that was also a possibility.

The way she was acting was as familiar to me as my face—how many times had I myself tried to be like this?—and at the same time it was new, new from this vantage, newly incomprehensible. The pose no longer seemed so irresistible to me; it was ridiculous or gratuitous all of a sudden, anything but cool. Observing her on the deck that night, far away from her usual habitat, I felt my nose close; her hold on me was broken. For the very first time since we had met, I could imagine myself without her. Whatever stamp of approval her presence on my arm had provided me in the past, I no longer felt I needed it. The rest of the party, as far as it involved Stacey and me, is a haze of forced smiles and awkward speechlessness.

 

 

 

 

After I dropped off Pup, I drove Stacey to her mother's in Plainfield in what started as silence and escalated into shouts and screams. She hated what I was becoming—had already become. It was “wack” and I wasn't “the same” anymore.There was “another nigga” in the picture now, too, she revealed. I had begun to expect that. Tell me something I don't know, I thought. He was a thug, “real thorough,” she bragged. They had met at a cookout or a birthday party for her girlfriend in Roselle or someplace like that. He asked her number and she said what the hell. I was down in D.C. at the time, doing whatever it was that I did in college with fools like Playboy, she reasoned, and she was lonely or curious or bored— and what did I expect, really? Did I not see this coming while I was running around using “big-ass words” like life was some giant spelling bee, talking “that bullshit” and dressing “like a fag fresh out the Village”? It was my fault, not hers, she said. I didn't say anything, just ground my teeth (nervous habit) and tried to keep the car steady on the road, which was no small task.

Then she told me something that I didn't know: “I'm pregnant, nigga. I missed my period last month and an EPT test confirmed that shit.” My heart practically leaped onto the dashboard; Pappy's worst fear made flesh, I thought, only thank Jesus or Jah or Allah I had been in another part of the country when it happened. It's not yours, I told myself, but the revelation still caught me obliquely like a sucker punch to the side of the head. I was dazed.

“You're what!” I screamed, hurling the car to a stop on the road's shoulder and smacking the button for the hazards like it had stolen something from me. I cut the ignition and took a deep breath, trying with what might I could channel through my gaze to grip Stacey with my eyes and wring out any last droplet of familiarity from her defiant and unrecognizable face. There was none left. She was pregnant, she repeated matter-of-factly, as though she were telling me she had hay fever or oily skin, and there was contempt in her eyes, not remorse. She loved her baby's father and had decided to keep the child and move to Newark, and that was that.

“You're having the baby and moving to Newark. Are you serious?” I said, sounding more like a concerned parent than the lover I had been just hours ago. As my mind raced, my stomach felt like a tangle of drawstrings being pulled tighter from every direction. “You don't work! How are you going to support a child? You're only eighteen! What does this motherfucker even do?”

“Nigga, he sells crack!” she shrieked, and her voice and that wall she had so meticulously erected fractured. “He be on the block. What the fuck do you do, huh? You think you better than niggas 'cause you fucking go to college? Fuck you!”

I couldn't tell whether she was telling me the truth or simply trying to amplify my pain, but I let the interrogation drop right there. How do I argue with that? What logical assertions do I posit against that? And what would be the point? “Well, I hope you'll be very happy,” is all I could say, and the car plunged into a deep silence like the lull that precedes a tsunami, like the slow, peaceful quiet that comes over the ocean as it draws itself back and readies to devour. Soon, but not quite yet, the destruction would be total, and whatever we had shared would be wiped away; I knew that. For the moment, though, we sat there, Stacey and me, side by side, locked in a miserable stalemate or undeclared truce. The orangey light from a streetlamp filtered through the moon roof and glared off the wetness on her cheeks. It must have shone from mine, too.

 

 

 

 

I deposited Stacey in her mother's driveway, and when she got out she slammed the door violently. The sound echoed with the ring of finality. I turned off my cell phone to prevent myself from calling after her, after the girl I had loved very imperfectly for four years, and pulled out of there—out of her driveway and out of that part of my life. I let the cool night air whip through the window and wash over my face as I drove. The air felt good, and I decided not to go straight home. I drove around for what seemed like hours, through Plainfield, through the black sides of Fanwood and Scotch Plains and Westfield, through the side streets we had driven together so many times before on the way to the mall or to the movies, past the familiar houses of all the boys and girls who only a year ago had defined my horizons for me and who now I knew I wouldn't see again. I drove and I thought about Stacey.

I remembered when her brother was born and they took him home from the hospital and she held the little boy in her arms and looked happy and proud and nothing like a mother, but rather like a child herself—just a good-looking child—as she stroked the baby's trembling little back and kissed his fat, flushed cheeks. I remembered when, after she had won some local beauty pageant in Rahway or Linden or someplace like that, her family and I piled into her mother's red Tahoe and headed to the nearest Applebee's to celebrate and Stacey put her arm around me in the backseat and said shyly, “See, I got some talent,” and this girl, this fucked-up girl who lived like tomorrow didn't matter, seemed like the sweetest thing in the world to me right then.

I remembered, too, when Pappy tried in vain for nearly a month to get Stacey to be serious about school, convincing her skeptical mother to let him tutor her daughter in the evenings for free, after he had finished a full day with his paying clients. Why on earth did he assign himself
that
thankless task? It was in part an unspoken favor to me, but in part I also think it was simply because black girls like Stacey just break Pappy's heart. I imagine on some level they must remind him of his own beautiful teenage mother. He had been too young to heal or protect her when she could have used a Pappy badly.