Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (13 page)

I also found myself, for reasons that were entirely different, envying kids at school whose parents were doctors or dentists and who lived enshrouded by redwoods in the hills known as Green Valley. When I visited their houses, I looked longingly out their
floor-to-ceiling windows onto the hillsides that sloped down into a maze of trees. I’d been perfectly comfortable my whole life, lacking in nothing, but rolling up their long winding drives in Mom’s Plymouth Volaré, I’d sometimes try to see if I could trick myself into believing I was stepping out of a Mercedes. What did real wealth feel like, I’d wonder, knocking on the massive doors of the rich, doors that stretched up, it seemed, to a cathedral-like height. Did Conrad ever feel this way, too? Stanford was a place so full of wealth that my father had felt it necessary to remind my brother, almost sternly, that we weren’t rich. He said, “Don’t let this place put strange ideas into your head.”

Sometimes my mother reminded me, “We are a peculiar people.” She was quoting the Bible. Other times, she’d caution me. “Be in the world but not of the world.” I think she meant for me to cleave to the differences between myself and the people who surrounded me, those who were rich, or white, or who lacked faith in God. Spotting those differences was easy. Even when the people in question were black—like Dr. Murray’s girls, who invited my brothers to a white-tie cotillion but whom my mother seemed to distrust as overly high-toned; or Michelle, the daughter of one of my father’s air force friends in Sacramento, who wore pink lipstick and nail polish and flipped her hair like a white girl—the distinction was easy enough to tease out, if difficult to name. Why, exactly, did my mother want me to stand apart? And why was it so important to her that I guard myself against too much sameness with everyone? When, if ever, was I supposed to relax? What, exactly, was my vigilance supposed to be protecting me from or guiding me toward?

The year before, on Conrad’s first day of college, my parents and I had caravanned down to Palo Alto with both my brothers,
who had ridden ahead in Dad’s blue Toyota station wagon. Already, the hand-me-down car, with Conrad at its wheel and Michael in the seat beside him, seemed to know its way around the campus. Whenever the boys would sail through a yellow traffic light that turned red before my parents and I could get across, part of me would worry that we’d be separated from my brothers forever. The blue Toyota found shortcuts that weren’t on our father’s map, and whenever Dad complained that the boys didn’t know what they were doing, a turn or two later, it would become clear that they did. It was as if Conrad had already learned to fit in even before he’d arrived. It wasn’t long before Michael, who was only sixteen, started paying weekend visits to Stanford, designating himself a citizen of that place, too. Conrad’s friends even learned Michael’s nickname, which he’d earned for the way his long arms and legs spindled out from a compact torso. “Hey, Spider,” they’d call out in greeting. At times like those, I wondered if Michael and Conrad had been given the same admonitions from our mother to remain peculiar, apart.

When Mom and Dad and I paid visits to Conrad on campus (it was easy enough to drop in when we were just up the road at Dad’s apartment in Mountain View), my brother didn’t make an effort to keep his college life from us or hide his home-self from his friends, many of whom had already come to our house in Fairfield with him over long weekends. The Christmas he was a freshman, our entire family had been invited to a holiday party hosted by the aunt and uncle of one of his new friends. We’d brought along our eighty-year-old great-uncle Ike, who was visiting at the time from Cleveland. Uncle Ike had mortified me with his country ways—he flung litter out of the car onto the highway, flirted unabashedly with girls less than a quarter his age, and was always
fixin’
to do
this or
fi’n
to do that. But Conrad hadn’t seemed worried. He’d introduced Uncle Ike to his friends and their parents, not bothering over what they made of the old man in the flannel shirt and pinstriped dress pants, just as he didn’t seem overly concerned with what they thought of his kid sister setting up camp alongside a platter of crackers and port-wine cheese.

Over Christmas break his sophomore year, Conrad brought home one of his roommates, a kid named Dwight from Maryland. On the afternoon they arrived, I was looking through a big box my mother had come across in the attic, full of papers and projects from first and second grade, things I’d forgotten about, stories and rhymes, worksheets and drawings. Right away, Dwight asked me what it all was.

“It’s just some stuff from when I was little.”

“Can I see?” Anyone would have asked that, but Dwight sat crouching over the coffee table, his long arms and legs folded up in what may have been an attempt to make himself closer to my size. He sifted through the box with me, scrutinizing the pages and commenting on what I’d written. I knew there was nothing overly interesting among the things, but his interest didn’t feel like the interest of someone who was just trying to be polite.

Later, in the evening after I was already tucked into my mom’s bed (it was still my habit to sleep there when Dad was away during the week, and neither Mom nor I seemed eager for me to outgrow it), I heard the blurred murmurings of Dwight and my mother speaking together in the hall. She must have been giving him the towels and all the extra bedding he might need for the night. I should have been asleep, but I was being nosy. Dwight had been so friendly, so solicitous, as if I weren’t just a little kid getting in the way of his time with my brother but a person worth listening
to. He made me feel the way Conrad made me feel, perhaps even a little better, because he wasn’t my brother and didn’t have any obligation to love or even to like me. He made me feel just a hint of what I hoped a young man might make me feel when I was in college myself. As I lay awake listening to the rhythm of his conversation with my mother, imagining the words they were exchanging, I strained to catch just one comment devoted to me, one quick affirmation that I was a person of interest to a person of such interest to me.

I couldn’t make out much, but I did hear the inflection of “Good night” in each of their voices, and then my mom’s footsteps as she made her way to her bed.

The next morning, Dwight had a flight to catch. I was disappointed to see him go, but at least I could count on more of Conrad’s attention once his roommate had left. On his way out the door, Mom handed Dwight something. I knew right away from the size and shape of it that it was one of the advertisements for God she always had in the bottom of her purse. I winced inside, hoping it wouldn’t turn Dwight off from all of us and that it wouldn’t undo the good feelings that had been accruing since his arrival. What if he were to judge Mom or Conrad or me for the things printed inside the booklet?

“I’ll think about it,” he said in the way people speak when they don’t want to sound like they’ve already made up their minds. Suddenly, I realized that this was the continuation of their conversation from the night before in the hall—a conversation that had been about more than just linens and towels or how to find the bathroom in the dark.

The next time we saw Dwight was in the days after New Year’s. He hugged my mother. He had a curious expression in his eyes.

“I read the booklet you gave me on the plane,” he told her. It was a hook meant to draw her out somewhat, though I wasn’t sure yet for what. He stood there smiling. I worried it was just a polite smile or, worse, that it was the predatory smile of someone about to take aim and fire. That was what people tended to do, wasn’t it, who didn’t like being reminded of God and His son Jesus, who didn’t believe in them in the first place?

I’d forgotten just how tall Dwight was. Michael, Conrad, Mom, and I all stood looking up at him, waiting.

A long time seemed to pass before I heard my mother ask, “And? What did you think?” She sounded like a parent fishing for information but also like someone readying herself to defend her God against an attack.

Michael and Conrad and I watched, still waiting.

The cartoon tract, which had a cover that read, “Hi There!” took, Dwight said, a mere eight frames to get to a two-page color spread of the raging fires of Hell. “Well,” he continued, “it wasn’t exactly…subtle.” Dwight couldn’t help it. A few beats of laughter got past him. It wasn’t the kind of laugh that pelted us like hail. It pattered out and bounced around our ankles.

“Mom!” Conrad said, drawing the word out into two syllables. But Dwight’s manner told Conrad it was all right to relax and join the laughter. He did, though beneath it was a surge of embarrassment. Michael and I followed suit. Ours was an ashamed laughter that pointed to how right Dwight was, but it was grateful laughter, too, signaling our relief that he hadn’t been angered or dismayed by the gesture. I scrutinized the sound. It had something else in it—something unresolved that might not have known how to make its way out into the open air otherwise. Something like the discomfort of knowing we lived straddling an awkward divide: the
divide between belief in the realness and the comfort of God and the need to be at ease in the world of our friends. Was that what our mother’s laughter, which she’d finally been coaxed to loose, said, too?

Mom must have known full well how bluntly simplistic the booklet she’d given Dwight was. Was it only just then, with Dwight standing jocular and unfazed before her, that she recognized how outrageous such a tactic had been? Or was sending Dwight home to Bethesda with a pocket-sized lake of fire something she felt obliged to do, something she’d decided upon quickly, before her courage floundered, out of obedience to God’s admonition to
Lead my sheep
?

Already I could feel myself wishing it were easier to stand up
to
some of the things I’d been taught I ought to stand up
for
. Yes, I believed what my mother believed, that God was real and that we were better off with Him in our lives than out of them, but if God’s love was worth having, why did Bible tracts have to resort to such ham-fisted tactics? Wasn’t it silly to try to scare a person into God’s arms? Wasn’t God a choice to be arrived at with calm assurance?

“How many of you have ever been to camp before?” Ms. Dyer asked.

A few hands went up into the air, but mine continued to rest on my desk.

“You’ll need to bring your own toiletries, like soap and lotion and toothpaste.” I used lotion every day, like most other black people I knew, to ward off “ashy” skin; I wondered to myself if a white teacher would have been concerned enough to mention it. “And
flip-flops for the showers. Oh—and the showers are communal, which means you’ll be in there with other campers, boys with boys and girls with girls.”

Did she hear my heart thumping up against my ribs? She must have, because the next thing she said was that if you didn’t feel comfortable showering in front of other people, you could always shower in your bathing suit.

My cheeks were hot. This sounded to me like a lose-lose situation. Either I’d be forced to stand naked in front of my peers or else let everyone know how frightened I was to do so.

The camp would be held at a place called Whiskeytown and would last a week for all the MGM kids—except, as of then, we were no longer known as MGM but rather GATE, for Gifted and Talented Education, an acronym that proved more difficult for the regular kids to sabotage. Ms. Dyer told us about camp songs and s’mores. She explained how we’d be bunking and that we’d be hiking past beaver dams and waterfalls. There were a lot of other details she rattled off, things that whizzed past me because I was still in a panic about the showers.

Despite my trepidation, at home, I lobbied for the trip. “I really want to go,” I assured my mom. I even convinced myself to panic over the possibility that she and my father might find reason to say no.

“What about your hair?” my mother asked. “You’re not a little white girl who can just shake her head and go.”

We agreed that a dozen cornrows should keep me from having to struggle too much on my own. Cornrows were a big compromise for me. The last time I’d worn them, they’d lasted only one day because I’d insisted on taking them out as soon as my friend next door told me, “Your hair looks funny.”

Whiskeytown was a three-hour bus ride northward into mountainous forest. It was a California I’d never before seen, north past cities and suburban sprawl. There were winding roads and rivers and lakes where gold prospectors—the state’s original forty-niners—had sought their fortunes. It was beautiful and astounding. I’d never been farther north than Sacramento and so had no idea that I lived this near to a place that remained so untouched, bare open fields that appeared more free and alive somehow than the hillsides closer to home. Perhaps it was the utter quiet, and the relative absence of traffic, that seemed to account for the landscape’s autonomy. I wondered whom it belonged to. Wealthy ranchers? Doctors and dentists? In my heart, I hoped it was nobody’s, that it belonged to itself. It struck me as the kind of place where God might come in order to take stock of His creation: eagles, foxes, centuries-old redwoods. I felt nervous and lucky, sensing this north country as the kind of place that, if there was any truth to fairy tales or pagan legends, housed the potential for some sort of magic.