Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (24 page)

There was one thing I didn’t like about Diane. She never called me Tracy. In keeping with her penchant for blunt irreverence, she insisted upon calling me Black Girl. “Hey, Black Girl!” she’d call out from behind, and I’d cower on the inside before turning around to greet her. “What’s up, Black Girl?” she’d ask when I bumped into her in the quad, and I’d miss a beat trying to find something equally sharp-edged to throw back in her direction. I never found anything equally sharp-edged. I couldn’t even find anything adequately witty to say about her height, and through trying, I learned that it’s generally not productive to mock someone taller than you are; no matter what you say, they are always up there looking down at little you.

“Oh, come on,” I said more than once. “Stop calling me Black Girl, White Girl.” But Diane didn’t mind being called White Girl. I guess she took it as a given that there was nothing inherently wrong with calling a white girl White Girl. Like calling a tall person tall, it didn’t sting.

In May, when everyone was passing out school photos, two-by-three-inch
pictures of themselves that would be printed in the yearbook come June, Diane surprised me by asking if I wanted to swap photos with her. It was a gesture loaded with meaning. The more pictures you exchanged, the more popular you were. I bent down to retrieve one of mine out of my backpack and thought about how I should fill up the space on the back. It seemed like an earnest moment, though I also knew that it, like everything in high school, was an opportunity to show how cool—or betray how clueless—you really were.
Hey Diane
, I wrote on the back, and tried to walk the line between kind and funny. This, after all, was something that would outlast our high school friendship, something meant to say that no matter how glib or word-shy we’d been on a daily basis, the feeling between us was one of warmth and friendship. Maybe even belief that the future for the recipient would be filled with success. I jotted down a message that seemed befitting of the occasion, signed my name, and handed Diane the photo, making a mental note of how many pictures I had left to distribute and to whom they should or shouldn’t be offered.

“Thanks,” Diane said. “Here’s mine.”

I didn’t read what she’d written right away. I held on to the photo, wanting to will it great meaning. My collection was already growing, and I liked the heft of the stack of photos in my hands, a stack I could shuffle, like a deck of cards. When I got to class, I flipped the picture over and read the back—but first, I held my breath and made a tiny wish: “Let this be nice.” I knew the odds of that were grim, but I thought a genuine inscription would prove that I mattered to Diane, which would mean that I might one day come to matter to the others, the ones on the inside of all the fun I watched each week from afar.

Thanks for being my friend
, the inscription read, though the only
thing I saw, the thing that spoke loudest or truest, was the salutation at the very top:
Hi Black Girl!
I carried the photo in my backpack with the others for the rest of the day, but when I sat showing the pictures I’d collected to Jean and Mom, I edited Diane’s out. Later that night, I dropped it in the trash compactor, a place I was certain no one would see it and from which it wouldn’t manage to escape.

Maybe Diane was a bully. Probably she was that catchall word that applied to most of us:
insecure
. She might also have sensed that, deep down, her friendship represented a social opportunity to me, that I hoped it might grant me permission to jump several social lanes to merge with Becca and her friends. Had Diane grown adept at sussing out that kind of opportunism? I told myself mine was hidden, but it turned somersaults in my stomach whenever Becca or someone like her acknowledged me. It’s funny. Where did I think all my discomfort—the social anxiety that left me, for the most part, without a single word in my mouth or head—would disappear to on the day Diane finally delivered me to the popular kids? At that point, would I just wave to her over my shoulder or look at her with such transparent intent that she’d understand that my use for her had vanished? Did she sense what I really wanted from her and choose to ignore it? Or did she know it was so impossible it didn’t matter, that I’d never get past her, I’d never make it to her sister’s world.

Black Girl
. Every time Diane said those two simple and accurate words, I fed my own voice to the familiar silence that came around whenever it smelled pain. I fed the silence every time this strange tall girl called me out of my name, just as I fed the silence every time I failed to ask my mother and father what names Jim Crow had tossed their way when they were my age. Perhaps the shame
that ensued and that I mulled over sometimes at night, wondering what Qiana or Nigel would say if they ever heard Diane refer to me that way, was enough of a distraction to keep me from acknowledging my actual dislike for that big, ugly, rude, brazen, cunning girl I so desperately wanted to claim as a friend, as an intermediary between myself and the kids whose easy, happy, carefree belonging I craved.

SHAME

M
y mind was in too many places. I’d be applying for college in a year, and everything I did, whether it was my intention or not, became an item for my college calling card: student leadership; French club; dance company. I wrote for the school paper, trying to come up with gritty features that had to do with the world outside our campus bubble. I conducted two or three interviews for a long piece about a new homeless shelter in town and felt a flush of professional gratification when our faculty adviser allowed me to keep the word
damn
in one of the quotes. With a teacher who had chaperoned a trip to Washington, DC, the year before, I started a relatively inactive branch of the Junior State of America club. I stuck a “Dukakis for President” bumper sticker to my locker and rode some nights with a friend’s parents to meetings of the local Democrats Club, or whatever it was called. Behind all of this activity was the notion that if I could just get out of Fairfield—get to a real
somewhere
—I’d be able to do something genuine with all my theoretical interest in the world. I’d converge with the people I’d been waiting all my life for, and together we’d find our true place. It was a different time from the one kids live in now, an era when someone in my position could have the luxury of not knowing and not worrying, when the specifics were still far enough in the future that I could trust them to work themselves out. All the details had to do, in the meantime, was wait for me and exert whatever magnetism they could in my direction.

My teachers recognized something in my ambition. One afternoon, Mr. Catania, who’d agreed to let me take economics as an independent study, told me, “You’re going to get lots of opportunities because of who you are.”

I liked the sound of that. Didn’t it mean I was special, deserving of opportunities?

We were standing near his desk in the classroom, with the door open to after-school comings and goings. I was on my way home, just dropping by to deliver a paper on the topic of opportunity cost.

“You’re an African American woman,” he continued. “You should take advantage of the opportunities that will bring you.” My heart sank. Where he’d said “opportunities,” my mind revised the statement to hear “handouts”—a word that instantly conjured the look and taste of those ancient bricks of government cheese Nella had once brought around, the ones we’d eventually ended up throwing away. I’d been brought up to do the kind of work that would put me above such offerings, to shine so brightly I’d have to be rewarded for my merits and nothing less.

Mr. Catania could surely read the distrust in my face, which he tried to quell by suggesting it was a new time in the world. It was the Oprah era, and suddenly people were not only willing but
eager
, falling over one another to listen to someone who looked and even sounded a lot like me. Exceptional Oprah, who’d changed the world—hadn’t she?—with her cocktail of intelligence, empathy, and affability. Of course I wanted a life and a voice—a public voice—just like hers. But the advice stung nevertheless, because it also told me that it might be hard to be seen for who I was beyond or beneath the category to which I most visibly belonged. I told myself that Mr. Catania was wrong, though I didn’t erase his advice from my mind. At home every afternoon, the mail brought
brochures from colleges across the country. Mr. Catania’s voice whispered in the back of my mind whenever the word
diversity
was printed among the catalog copy.

I was one of a group of prospective students flown out to Connecticut for a weekend visit to Trinity College. It was my first solo flight, but I’d been seated in the row beside an Asian girl named Audrey, who would be one of my roommates for the weekend. We hit it off in the air and bonded on the very first night in Hartford over the fact that neither of us was interested in the Jell-O wrestling event our hosts planned for us to attend. Looking out at the audience (a fairly homogenous sea of white faces, who on the whole seemed rather engaged by the sticky affair), I realized we must have been asked to campus in an effort to recruit students of color.

Audrey wanted to go to Yale just like her father had, and so did our other roommate, a black girl named Carol, who was a junior at a fancy Connecticut boarding school. Later that night, shivering in the dorm where we were camped in our sleeping bags, I decided that my dream was to go to Harvard. Conrad was living in Boston; he’d graduated from medical school and earned a prestigious fellowship in internal medicine at Massachusetts General, and so I’d told Audrey and Carol, “My brother lives in Boston,” as a way of cementing my own blood link to such an ambition.

When I got home and asked my mom if she thought I could get into Harvard, she’d looked at me with those large eyes of hers and smiled, saying, “You can go to Harvard or anyplace else you put your mind to.”

—

Settling back in to things in our household, I noticed tension. There was something upsetting our mother, and she whispered
about it with Jean. Well, they weren’t whispering really, but they spoke about it in fragments and quiet tones, as if it were something they no longer needed to reference by name. This vague
it
seemed to bother my mother more, but her disappointment—or was it anger?—rubbed off on Jean. They’d gossip about it, then pray about it. Their tension seemed to hover in the room, lingering but never rising very high, like the smoke off dry ice.

I guess I trusted that whatever it was, it didn’t apply to me. If it did, I’d surely at least have had some guilty inkling about what I’d done, a feeling of shame just waiting to be summoned. I was so in the dark about the
it
in question, I knew I had to be in the clear.

But the murmurs continued. When Easter rolled around, I observed how Mom seemed to be preparing for the family gathering (Conrad wouldn’t make it home from Boston; he’d be on call, but the rest of us would be there) with an unusual preoccupation. She still baked the cakes and the rolls, still stuffed the bird and glazed the ham, but the girlish eagerness that usually characterized her preparations for such occasions wasn’t present. There was something dogging her mind. I helped in the kitchen, trying to amuse her with stories from school like I’d always done. She laughed when she was supposed to, but at night the prayers resumed, and so did the whispers.

On Easter, the revelation came. Michael arrived with his girlfriend, a slight, pretty, timid-seeming girl who didn’t say much and followed him everywhere he went, as if she were afraid of being left alone with the rest of us. She was white, but that couldn’t have been what upset my mother. My siblings had already brought the occasional white boyfriends and girlfriends home for visits without alarm. No, something else was at stake.

I could read the tension—and judgment?—in Jean’s movements
and my mom’s. They were perfectly cordial, but the warmth, the ease, the play with which we always welcomed guests, especially special guests, were absent. Then, while we were all waiting for dinner, Michael and his girlfriend (her name was Kathleen, like my middle name and like Mom’s name used to be before she’d changed it to Kathryn) lay down together on the couch for a nap, their arms around each other and limbs entwined. The way their bodies fit together so easily and relaxed like that into such a familiar, unselfconscious sleep made perfectly clear what had been causing our mother such unrest.

“Did you see that ‘nap’?” Jean had asked me that night after Michael and Kathleen had left. Of course I had; it had taken place right in the middle of the family room. We’d all seen it. I’d practically sat and watched it, for a moment at least, before busying myself someplace else out of a feeling of intrusion or impropriety.

They were living together. Was this Michael’s way of showing that he was an adult, of embracing or even validating his decision to live as he wished? I was too young then to think about how natural it was for a man his age (he was twenty-five, after all) to fall in love and have sex and make a life with someone, even without waiting for the certainty or the ceremony of marriage. I was too young and living too much in my own head to have feelings like that of my own. Or else I still believed that I should be ignoring those feelings, apologizing for them, talking myself into putting them off for a later time.