Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (12 page)

A few weeks into his new job, when the daily drive back and forth to Sunnyvale got to be too much, Dad decided to rent an apartment in neighboring Mountain View. It was a simple one-bedroom on the second floor of a bare-bones apartment complex, the kind with exterior stairways leading to the apartments and a covered carport instead of a yard. He drove there on Monday mornings and drove back home to us after work on Fridays. It wasn’t new for Mom to be lonely for her husband. He’d traveled plenty during his years in the service, though now that she was no longer part of a community of air force wives, being apart from her husband must have felt different—but not insurmountable.

In the weeks before my school year started, Mom would sometimes drive down to spend a few nights with Dad during the middle of the week, taking me with her. I got used to the quiet of the car, listening to FM radio together, watching all the landmarks go
past: the Golden Gate Bridge shrouded in fog off to the west as we crossed over the bay; the Coca-Cola sign lit up on the northbound side of the highway with lights that flashed off and on like effervescent soda bubbles once we hit Interstate 101; the It’s-It ice-cream factory beckoning deliciously out beyond the San Francisco airport. We’d leave in the early afternoon and make it to Mountain View just before the commuters came out, bottlenecking the road with their cars and their impatience to be home.

While Dad was at work, Mom and I took walks in his neighborhood. Sometimes, we’d stop by a nearby playground in the afternoon so I could jump rope or climb up on the big tire swing. There was hardly ever another child in sight, though one day my mother pushed me to strike up conversation with another black girl there by herself. She probably wouldn’t have pushed if the girl had been white, though I’d have likely ended up playing with her, regardless. When I walked up and said hello, the girl told me that her mother was Wonder Woman.

“What?” I asked.

“You know, Wonder Woman? Lynda Carter? She’s my mom.”

“Really?” I could tell from looking at her it was a lie. She was just as black as I was, and her pants were a few inches too short.

As if she heard my thoughts, the girl persisted, telling me she lived in a mansion, since her mother was a famous movie star.

“Want to play on the bars?” I asked, trying to change the subject. It worked, and we ran over to the bars and dangled there for a while. I told her that my mother and I were in town visiting my father.

“Are your parents divorced?” she asked, brightening with hope.

“No, but we live far away. My dad lives here during the week. For work.”

“You have two houses? Are you rich?” she asked. Then she
added, in case I’d forgotten, “I’m rich, because my mom is Wonder Woman.”

Some version of that same dance went on the whole time while we played. I found myself wishing I had the playground to myself, so it was a relief when Mom walked over to say Dad would be home soon. I was excited to get back to the apartment, that new nook in our life that still felt like a vacation from reality. When the three of us were together there in the evenings, I felt like a girl in a different family. One where the father worked all day in an office and then, before dinner, loosened his collar and poured himself a glass of scotch. The kind of girl who was never bored, who didn’t have to worry, as Conrad had taught me to worry, about being
too sedentary
. Maybe my father’s new life, with its promise of business trips and company picnics, was trying to tell me something about what my life would be like come September, once I finally landed in MGM. But what was it, exactly?

“Hey!” the girl called out when Mom and I were almost to the edge of the playground. We waved goodbye from opposite ends of the park, and then she called out again.

“I was just pretending earlier!” Her voice danced across the distances in the park. If I’d wanted to, I could have seen it as the force behind the swings, which were still swaying in the wind. “I’m not Wonder Woman’s daughter. I’m a little black girl!”

LITTLE FEATS OF DARING

O
ur desks were arranged in two rows on either side of an empty aisle, through which Ms. Dyer walked back and forth when she was teaching. Everyone’s desk was touching one other person’s desk, and that person was your partner. Your partner would check your spelling tests and math quizzes. You’d brainstorm with your partner and take down the assignment for him when he was absent. I suspect you were supposed to like your partner, or at least look out for him. My partner was Kenny Moffett, a chubby, freckle-faced kid with reddish hair. He looked like a cartoon to me, with his cowlick and the spaces where a couple of his permanent teeth were still coming in. Kenny wasn’t the partner I’d have chosen for myself. Looking around the room on the first day, I could have imagined sitting next to almost anyone else with more enthusiasm. I’d been hoping to be paired off with Sara, a tall blonde who, in the few moments before the school day officially started, had walked up to me and said, “Wanna be friends?” Or Katie, who looked a little like Kenny but was at least a girl. Katie was the nickname my mother called me at home sometimes, because of my middle name. In the last few weeks before coming to MGM, I’d toyed with asking everyone to call me by that name, but I’d chickened out, not resolute enough to let go of Tracy in the exchange. Sitting next to a Katie would at least have cemented a bond between myself and that name and perhaps eased the pang
of having missed out on an opportunity. I wouldn’t have been surprised to be paired up with Chris, the other black kid. I could tell we each drew confidence from the fact that the other was there but didn’t want to set ourselves apart from the rest of the class; on the first day, we hadn’t done more than flash a perfunctory smile when our eyes first met. As for Kenny, I could tell he’d have been happy sitting next to a boy he seemed to know from before, a white-haired boy named Ellis who looked more than a little like Andrew Jackson.

Kenny’s fingernails were dirty, and within a few weeks, his desk became a vortex of loose papers and crumpled Now and Later wrappers. He was cheerful and friendly, but for some reason, I felt I ought to exaggerate my vexation with every little thing he did. I worried that my being Kenny’s partner might invite the impression that my habits were as slovenly as his, so just to be safe, I put on a show of disgust when he used his pencil to pick his nose. I rolled my eyes when he smeared Elmer’s glue onto his palms and peeled it off in thin, dried layers that looked like skin. If he whispered questions or offhand remarks when we were supposed to be working silently, I’d huff audibly and turn my back. Kenny seemed to like bumping up against my indignation and made a consistent effort to incite it. It became our shtick: we bickered all day like a mini old-timey mom and pop.

Ms. Dyer was warm yet demanding. She could make us laugh and remind us to be serious with equal ease. She remembered what it was like to be a kid and occasionally told us stories about herself when she was in third grade. If one of us was discouraged, she’d say, “Come on now, shooga booga, it’ll be okay.” She wore gold-rimmed octagonal glasses that had a cursive
K
, for Karen, stenciled into the bottom corner of the left lens. We weren’t permitted to
call her by her first name, but the fact that she revealed it to us conveyed goodwill, the way my father had lately started urging Conrad’s college friends to call him Floyd rather than Mr. Smith. Ms. Dyer made us feel valuable, as if our ideas were currency, and we grew to love her rather quickly. The other children might even have stopped noticing that their teacher was black, but I didn’t; it made me feel as though some piece of myself was up there with her, walking the aisle, clouding the chalkboard with questions and facts.

I felt pushed. I acquired new skills: playing clarinet in the school band. And discovered my weaknesses: times tables, procrastination. I was learning to love the feeling of sitting in the blue Queen Anne chair in the living room at home, leaning my head against its velvet-covered wings, and disappearing into the pages of books like
Little Women, All Creatures Great and Small
, or the several titles making up the Chronicles of Narnia. My reading list that year was long, and one book, by association or direct reference, led me to another. Other times, it would be mere whim that caused a book with an appealing picture on the cover or a familiar phrase as its title to garner my attention. Once I was settled in, I thrilled at the way simple words on a page could lift me up and carry me away from myself, away from being a nine-year-old black girl in Northern California in the 1980s and set me down in any kind of elsewhere. I could be Jo March, writing plays for her sisters to perform in, but at the turn of a page, I could just as easily become her sister Amy, declaring, “I want to be great or nothing.” I liked the residue books left me with, the way that, washing my hands for lunch, I would be tugged back into the barn where James Herriot struggled to work up a useful lather from a tiny gray sliver of old soap.

The things I was conscious of learning made me think of Conrad
and how wise college was making him and of how grateful I was for the bits and pieces of knowledge he dispensed to me, small morsels of the ideas his mind was churning through day by day. He’d told me about Plato’s shadowy figures flickering on a cave wall that represented our limited view of the real and about Socrates’s belief that a problem could be solved through the asking of questions. Thanks to Conrad, I wanted to find my way to the things that were powerful and puzzling and substantive—at least I told myself I did. I trusted my brother’s judgment and coveted his approval. I knew my parents had instilled important things in me, things like belief in myself and respect for others, but moving forward, I wanted to be made in my brother’s image.

One afternoon, Conrad and I were walking through the neighborhood when a bus full of friends from my old school drove past. Conrad was home for a long weekend and had just retrieved me from the spot where my new school’s bus had dropped me off. When I made out a few familiar faces, I waved. They waved back through the windows. Then I stuck out my tongue. They returned the gesture, and, seeing that I was beginning to get a good rise, I stepped things up even more, doing a silly chicken dance, then flailing my arms and shaking my head like a lunatic until the bus was out of sight. That evening, Conrad said to our mother while the three of us stood putting away the dinner dishes, “I don’t want Tracy to become the kind of kid who’ll do anything for a laugh.” I no longer recall Mom’s reaction, but Conrad’s assessment stuck with me. Why should I act like a clown if what I really wanted was to be gifted, someone with the ability to discern important things?

At recess, the kids in the regular classes would unleash their resentment over the many perks we got for being in MGM. Every Wednesday was a “minimum day” when we got sent home at noon
so our teachers could discuss our special curriculum. Added to that were field trips, a yearly weeklong camping excursion, and elaborate special units on topics ranging from nuclear war to women’s history. We even had our own unofficial region of the playground, an oblong bay of blacktop that sat between the monkey bars and the four MGM classroom doors. None of the regular kids set foot there, and when one of us left that area for the basketball courts or the tetherball poles, we’d be greeted by chants of
Mentally Gifted Monkeys!
and
Mother’s Greatest Mistake!
I found the slurs mildly clever. So did Wanda. When I told her about them during one of her long-distance calls from LA, she laughed and took to referring to me as Mom’s Greatest Mistake from time to time. But the kids who threw around such epithets did so in earnest. It was easy to see where their resentment was coming from. I had just crossed over myself from being a regular kid, and I knew that MGM felt a lot nicer; I was never bored or idle, and I was suddenly conscious that someone somewhere had decided I was special. I wasn’t much concerned with the fairness of the system. Even if we MGM kids didn’t really deserve so much more—even if we’d arbitrarily been given a special standing and all the privileges that went with it; even if it was wrong to acquiesce to the notion that we were the smarter ones and to let smarter become a synonym for better—I liked the way it felt getting the things we got, and doubt I ever saw myself back then as anything but deserving.

Still, even in our elect subset, there were gradations that my eyes eventually learned to see. Kathy lived in a big house and her mom drove a brand-new Cadillac, but she was rougher around the edges than K.C., whose sweaters were monogrammed and who wore a fresh pair of Calvin Klein jeans (worn
in
but not anywhere close to
out
) every day. Some kids seemed to genuinely breeze through
our schoolwork, while others dawdled, struggled, fell behind. One day, I overheard a boy in my class saying, “Well, everyone here is supposed to have an IQ of at least one hundred and thirty-six, but some people’s parents just
got
them in.”

There were so many occasions that autumn where I found myself running down the columns of a strange new social math. I watched the parents of my friends closely, intrigued by those who gave off an air of sophistication or alluring worldliness. They may well have possessed some kind of faith, but they didn’t come off as expressly godly people. On Sundays, they went shopping or to the movies or drove home from Tahoe, where they’d gone to ski. My day-to-day life wasn’t completely saturated with the ceremony of religion, but belief in God was a kind of bedrock; He was under our feet and in our hearts, always quietly present. Every Sunday started at church and ended with a big dinner we’d pray over together before eating, sometimes alongside our pastor or fellow members of First Baptist, where we were members. It intrigued me that hardly any of my classmates, let alone their parents, ever appeared concerned about whether God would be pleased with what they said or did. Even fewer seemed to find themselves conflicted by what science told them was true. None of them, I was sure of it, felt a pang of cowardice when they agreed, as they all did, that prayer did not belong in school. I envied them that freedom, the freedom to decide things based on what struck them as logical or just rather than what they reckoned God was counting on them to do or not to do.