Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (10 page)

The girl on
Gettin’ to Know Me
never clammed up when she felt herself getting close to the pain of Home. She knew which questions to ask. She was brave, strong in her sense of what that heavy history added up to—at least she was scripted to be. She didn’t even seem to feel the faintest glimmer of discomfort when Mama Violet told her about how this home remedy or that quilt pattern had been passed down from slave times. I liked her because she stood as proof that girls like us were central to certain stories. Riding around the neighborhood with Anthony, sitting across the table from him at lunch, or playing in the next room while our mothers went on about their jobs, helped to counteract the quiet negation of California, a place with low, bare hills and a history as blank and clear as the sky on a sunny day.

Why was it so much easier to call out to the future than the past? I still couldn’t bring myself to actually talk with my parents about what it must have meant to grow up in an age of racial violence. Any time the conversation crept close to that reality, I shut down. Yet my view of 1980 was peopled with victims and refugees, with emblems of struggle I had gleaned from the nightly news. I can still see the children who seemed to watch me in those daydreams. They were tired, expressionless. Once, watching a TV telethon with me in her trailer after school, Mrs. Kureitza caught sight of one of those children’s faces, and she looked at me and said, “Why do black people always have such white-white teeth?” Those faces hadn’t made her feel a part of the wider world at all but more like a spectator, someone on safari, it seemed to me, watching from the kind of distance that facilitates judgment or fear. It didn’t stop me from liking her or from thinking of her as an ally or a friend, but it did remind me that simply because of who we were, she and I had been equipped to see certain things differently.

Sometimes, the faces in my 1980 were old and white, just like Mrs. Kureitza’s, which is to say that, one way or another, I knew them. They were familiar faces, but in my mind they were yelling for change, for some wrong to be undone. Where did that image come from, and why did I view it as something to anticipate with a hungry alacrity? I sometimes sat in my classroom just drifting from one image of this kind to another, telling myself that the world was a place I would get to one day, and that when I was there, my presence would mean something. It was a promise I felt comfortable making to myself, a promise that must have had to do with what I could see that Mrs. Kureitza couldn’t.
It’s not that our teeth are any whiter, just that our skin is a whole lot blacker
.

I never thought to wonder what my mother spent her in-between times dreaming about. I had no way of knowing then, as I do now, that when a woman delivers her children to a safe place, even for just a few hours, a part of her becomes free in a way that a child cannot understand, reverting in an almost physical way to the person she was before she had children, as if she is testing to determine whether that person is still there. Who was my mother with her students gathered around her? Who was she with her back to them, writing on the chalkboard at the front of the room? Who was she in her boots and winter clothes, with her makeup and jewelry that might have been chosen to say to the world what Mrs. Hurley’s Christmas lights said night after night and day after day to the stars and the clouds alike?
Here I am! Here I am!

“Has anything changed in Tracy’s home life?” Mrs. Alexander finally asked my mother over the phone one evening toward the spring of that school year, adding that I’d been acting quiet and far-off for some time. My teacher had no way of knowing what was going on in my thoughts, no way of determining what my dreamy silence was a symptom of. Had she asked me about it, I doubt I’d have known how to say much more than, “I’m fine,” which wouldn’t have been a lie, but neither would it have done much to assuage her fears. So she did what teachers must do when their concern is piqued, just as my mother, on the receiving end of that question, did what parents must do in those kinds of situations. She worried. She dwelled upon the worst imaginable scenarios:
Had anyone tried to hurt me? Was there anything I needed to tell her, anything at all, no matter what someone else might have warned me not to say, and no matter how hard it might be to put into words?
My mother conjured a flood of dark possibilities from what was once merely
a trickle of working-mom guilt.
If damage has been done
, she told herself,
it was done because I was elsewhere, otherwise occupied
. If her absence had been the cause of the problem, then her presence, she determined, would be its solution. Mom sometimes told her version of the story when I was older: “When Tracy’s teacher called to ask if anything was wrong, I realized that my being at work every afternoon was affecting her. So I quit.” In her view, the story was proof that some things matter more than others, that parents must make sacrifices to keep their children safe and happy.

Because I was never asked to weigh in on the topic, I never got the chance to bring into language what I had actually been feeling in the weeks before the new decade had arrived. I never told my mother or anyone else how the faces that had appeared in my mind brought with them the certainty that I, too, belonged to what contained them—and that I wanted it that way. I certainly didn’t want to be like Mrs. Kureitza, watching from an innocuous distance, a tourist snapping pictures and making jokes. I wanted to be there on the ground, waiting to be caught up—by history? agony?—and claimed.

The last time Mom collected me from her house, Mrs. Kureitza said goodbye, adding that I should stay in touch. After that, it was Mom waiting for me outside the school every day.

“What happened to your job?” I finally asked, once it had sunk in that she was no longer gone in the afternoons, no longer telling us stories at night about Ray and his cohort.

“It wasn’t important,” she said. She said it like she meant it, like it was simple fact, but it was a statement resonant with silence. Not the fearful kind I knew but another sort that strikes me now as brave, that calls out to loss, or disappointment, or sacrifice, and without hesitating says,
Here I am!

II

MGM

A
t the end of my second-grade year, my mother received another phone call from my teacher, Mrs. Alexander. This time, the news was good. Along with a select group of children in my class and a few others, I had the opportunity to transfer to an elementary school across town and enroll in a program called MGM, for “Mentally Gifted Minors.” The name sounded official, if strange. Not the “Gifted” part, which I liked the ring of, but the “Minors.” It sounded about as natural, and illuminating, as “Earthlings.” What elementary school kid isn’t a minor?

“Will I know anyone there?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Mom answered. “But you’ll be learning a lot more. Go ahead and think about it. You don’t need to make up your mind just yet.”

My father’s advice was “You should rise to the challenge.”

Conrad, who was in his second year at Stanford, also thought it was a good idea. “It can mean the difference between getting into a good college or a mediocre one,” he told me, and then he explained what
mediocre
meant.

Michael seconded Conrad’s opinion, only less charitably, tolerating my presence for a few minutes before letting me know I was a bother. He and his friends were always pretending to beat up on my beloved stuffed animals, then disappearing upstairs, shutting the door behind them to keep me out of their hair.

If MGM had Conrad’s endorsement and my parents’, I suspected my answer would be yes, but I wanted it to be clear that I recognized the decision as the kind a person ought to take her time with.

When I considered what I’d lose by leaving my old school, I pictured the faces I’d known since I was five. I thought of Kerry, with the freckles, who was shy, and of Donna, who was short-tempered and bossy. I thought of Benji’s sister Lee-Anne, who taught me a series of X-rated jokes that I innocently repeated one night before dinner. My best friend, Kim, moved away the summer after kindergarten, but I thought of her, too, and a girl named Kris, who moved after first grade. If I did go, this time I’d finally be the one leaving; it would be nice to know how that felt. I also wanted to know what a real summer vacation was like. All I’d experienced until then was my school’s year-round cycle of “45-15”: 45 days of class and then 15 days of vacation, a pattern that repeated itself from one grade to the next.

Still, there was the faint anticipatory nostalgia of impending departure: wistful recollections of the monkey bars I’d learned to cross two and sometimes three rungs at a time; the foursquare courts, like blueprints for tiny houses with rooms marked A, B, C, and D; Tuesday afternoons, when we bought Astro Pops and Creamsicles after school and ran down the halls chanting,
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!
I was visited by remembered bits and pieces, a mental scrapbook I hadn’t known I was keeping: running across the blacktop one afternoon with my mouth absently open and being startled by the presence of a fly on my tongue; getting accidentally kicked in the face on the jungle gym by David Mavis, and the oddly familiar taste of his brown suede shoe; neglecting to tell Danny Alvarez about the “Wednesday Wedding
Day” plans I’d made for us and being rebuked at the “altar”; paying two quarters for my first hot lunch of a corn dog and Tater Tots, then vomiting it all back up hours later at home. I’m not sure what those snapshots added up to. Nothing it shouldn’t have been easy enough to walk away from. Still, the decision itself seemed significant. I lived with it, contemplative, heavy-headed, as if every moment was the last of its kind, the final scenes of a life I had found reason to hand back in exchange for another.

“Yes,” I told my mother a few days later, “I want to go into MGM.” It was a choice that pushed me into three whole months of slow, unchoreographed free fall.

More than anything else, the long summer felt like institutionalized introspection.

I read the Encyclopedia Brown books, about a child sleuth who solves local mysteries, and the Henry Reed, Inc. series, about a boy who spends the summer with his aunt and uncle in Grover’s Corner, New Jersey, and has adventures with a neighbor girl named Midge. I even somehow got my hands on a copy of
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
, about an adolescent girl and all the strange changes her body and mind are undergoing, a book I knew perfectly well my mother would not have condoned for me at my age. I settled into the daytime TV schedule of reruns:
The Jeffersons, Alice, The Love Boat, One Day at a Time
. I played two-square against the garage door and walked our dog, Sebastian, around and around the neighborhood. Because my friends were in school all day, they gradually began to disappear from my mind altogether, though of course they were all home by three o’clock just the same as before. I guess what I was feeling was the strange zero-gravity hover of being in-between places, phases, of having said goodbye to one thing before laying eyes on its replacement.