See No Color (10 page)

“Not once in the weeks we been together do you ever talk about introducing me to anyone. Not once do you even talk about your family and friends to me. Now … I don't know if this is about you being embarrassed of me or what, but I want to know what the problem is.”

My eyes were about to pop out of their sockets. I couldn't help it; I started to laugh. “Me embarrassed of
you
?”

“What's so goddamn funny?” he asked, staring me down. He was pissed.

“I'm sorry—I just … The thought of me being embarrassed of you is just so ridiculous that I just couldn't even believe you could think that.”

“What am I supposed to think?” he asked, wiping the sweat from his brow.

I looked down the trail, at another couple jogging together—were Reggie and I a couple? They looked forty-ish and exhausted. Perhaps they had had this conversation years ago and had dealt with it so appropriately that they could now enjoy long runs together on Sunday morning without incident. But there was Reggie, in front of me, tired and sweaty. I had to answer him. I had to say something. “I didn't want to bring this up, but it's … my dad.” I bit my lower lip. Why was lying to him so easy? “He kind of freaks out about me and guys. I just … haven't wanted to deal with it.”

Reggie studied me, deciding whether or not to believe me. Deciding whether or not I was worth his time. “Is that the truth, Alex?” he asked. He stepped closer. “Because sometimes I get the feeling that you're not telling me the whole truth.”

I hiccupped and stepped away from him. He was black and my family was white; he wouldn't want me if he saw how much of that whiteness—the speech, the walk, the attitude—had become ingrained in me. Just seeing me alone like this, without them to compare me to, he could really believe that I was “my own person,” as he often told me. But stacking me up against my family, he would come to quite a different conclusion.

“It's the truth,” I said softly.

Reggie took a long sip from his water bottle and then sighed. He stared at a birch tree beside us, thinking. I hiccupped again, and finally he said, “Okay. We can work around that.”

I nodded, and then we started running again, in silence. But my mind was screaming in my skull:
You're just like him. A fucking liar.

• • •

“So why did they adopt you?” Reggie asked the next night as he stirred vegetables in a wok. His mom had worked nights since he was little, so Reggie was quite used to cooking himself dinner. And I had gotten quite used to lying to my parents every time I saw Reggie. I wondered if Jason noticed I was doing stuff with “friends” a lot more. “I don't get it—they were able to have Jason and Kit.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “They couldn't get pregnant, so they adopted me. Then, right after all the papers went through, my mom got pregnant with Jason. He was a minor miracle, apparently, like Kit.”

“For real?” Reggie asked, turning down the heat. “That's some shit.”

I tapped my heels against the wooden stool I was perched on. “My mom used to say that she was always scared to meet with the people from the adoption agency right before they got me, because she was worried they wouldn't give me to them if they knew she was pregnant.” It was weird saying all this stuff out loud. They were stories I had known since I was little, but I had never told them to anyone.

Reggie shook his head. “They'd do that? They'd give you to someone else?”

I shrugged. “Probably not. My mom is prone to exaggeration.” Reggie's dog nudged my knee. I bent down to pet him, trying to think of something else to talk about. But Reggie beat me to it.

“Must be strange being the only black person in the family,” he said.

There it was again, that word
black
. But it sounded so different coming out of Reggie's mouth than Dad's. When he said it, it was like he meant we were part of one big family—and a strong one, too.

“Yeah,” I said. “It's … weird.” I felt a strange sense of loneliness wash over me.

Reggie pushed the vegetables onto the steaming rice in front of him. “This stuff's ready. Want to help me bring it to the table?”

“Yeah,” I said, and walked toward him. I grabbed the plates, and suddenly his arms were around me and he was kissing my neck. His lips felt soft on my skin—not at all how I had imagined. The plates were wobbling in my hands. I put them down. He turned me around and kissed my chin, my nose, my forehead, and finally my lips.

“The fine Ms. Kirtridge,” he said, pulling away from me. “Been wanting to do that all day.”

Once again, I resisted the urge to laugh. “Really?” I asked, trying to savor the sensation of my first kiss. I wanted my lips to remember.

He looked at me incredulously. “You don't know?”

I looked down at the floor.

Reggie ran his fingers down my right arm, making my hair stand up. This was the arm that fielded catches, that swung the bat with power and precision. “
Fine
is definitely the word.
And
smart,
and
a kick-ass ball player,” he said in my ear. “Naw, you ain't like them other girls.”

I laughed and leaned into him, the first boy I had touched, the first black person who had wanted me. He held me in a hug like that for a few minutes, while our food got cold. I thought about my birth father then and wondered if he had held my mother this way, if they had talked about having me, or if it had just happened.

Reggie's grandmom was at her weekly card game, but his mother came home not long after that, so things didn't progress much beyond that kiss. But not because I wasn't interested.

“Girl, you reaping the benefits of my home-training now,” Mrs. Carter said to me, as she picked up a sautéed vegetable from Reggie's overflowing wok. “You know how many men I woulda shacked up with if they just knew how to cook some damn rice?”

She and Reggie cracked up. It was cool looking at each of them, seeing the obvious closeness and affection, the way they just “got” each other. And the language they used with each other made me feel a comfortable kind of warm, but also nervous, like I would soon be asked to participate in something I admired but could not produce. Black English, I was just beginning to see, often had that effect on me. It was beautiful, but so foreign, and a liability around black people. Once it began, I became filled with fear that it would reveal the whiteness that was not just on the outside.

“Ma, stop playin',” said Reggie. “Dad knew how to cook rice, and some legendary barbecue, greens—the whole nine. But it still didn't stop you from throwing his ass out on the doorstep.”

I could not imagine anyone in my family swearing at the dinner table, much less talking about a family breakup in this way. Under the table, I squeezed my fingers together and felt the usual hiccups forming in my windpipe.

Mrs. Carter snorted. “No, you right. You right,” she said, waving a half-eaten carrot slice at Reggie. “Niggers don't know how to act right, they get they ass on the curb. No matter how good they greens is.”

My fork fell on the table, and the sound made me jump. If I was embarrassed at my reaction, I need not have worried because the two of them completely collapsed in laughter after this outburst, snorting and falling over each other on the table. I was the last thing on their minds. “I have to use the bathroom,” I said, almost whispered really, as I stood up.

They nodded, and Mrs. Carter pointed behind me. “Down the hall to the right, honey.”

I pushed out my seat too fast, and almost ran away from the table. The house was a modest ranch with what looked like two bedrooms. Reggie's bedroom was about the size of the walk-in closet in my parents' master bedroom, and his door was bent at an odd angle, and wouldn't really shut. Since there was only one other room, Reggie's mom and grandmom must have shared it. I grimaced a little, thinking of being a grown, professional, and self-possessed woman like his mother and having to share such a small, personal space with your mother. I wondered how they did it—not like they had much of a choice. With Reggie's dad gone, his mom had to be the only breadwinner in the family. I was sure that this house in this run-down neighborhood was what they could afford. And it was funny because I would have been embarrassed of the peeling paint on the walls, the dirty vinyl flooring that obviously hadn't been changed in years, the pockmarked and broken molding everywhere. But they didn't seem to notice it, or maybe just didn't care. This was a world apart from my house, where the whole house had to be cleaned, everything in its proper place and spotless before any “outsiders” (and for my parents this included friends and even extended family) could be let in.

Worn pictures of Reggie playing baseball in elementary and middle school hung in cheap frames at awkward angles on the hallway walls. He was even cuter as a kid, I thought to myself as I hurried to the bathroom. With a big dimple in his right cheek and bright bursting eyes he must have been a favorite of the girls since kindergarten. I turned to the right and faced a door with a large wooden placard with “Family Makes a Home” plastered across it in cursive with long wildflower stems winding through each letter. I stifled a laugh and pushed open the door. The bathroom was perhaps the tiniest I'd ever seen, with an aging toilet and sink almost mashed together on the other side of the room. I put my hand over my mouth and nose as a sickly rose scent flooded my senses. It was like being in Grandma Kirtridge's bathroom—everything was spotless but almost funereal. I opened the door quickly and sat down on the toilet before I had time to follow this line of thought further. The truth was that I liked the Carters; really liked them, in fact. And I felt guilty for judging them. They had never been anything but nice to me. But at the same time, there was a part of me that couldn't turn it off.

Looking up at the cracked ceiling, I began to hiccup, and I cursed each one as it left my mouth. This was what always happened when I got too nervous, or when my anxiety got the better of me.
This is all there is
, said the voice in my head, the same voice that had said it for years, mostly lying in bed in the dead of night while the rest my family slept, but also occasionally in moments like this. Moments in daily life that felt out of whack for some reason I couldn't pinpoint.
This is all there is, and this is all there will ever be
, the voice said again, louder. I knew in a moment it would be screaming in my ears if I couldn't get control of myself. I balled my hands into fists and rested them on my forehead, rocking.
No, this can't be it. There has to be something more.

I willed myself to think of something different, something concrete, in order to distract myself. Images of baseball games and laying out for fly balls came into my head, but they were fleeting. Instead, what came to mind was sledding on the huge hill at McKnight Park, sixth grade, two black kids from another school snickering at me,
We ain't got all day!
while I fiddled with my sled in line at the top of the hill.
Make it snappy, nappy!
They and some white kids laughing at me and my disheveled hair. My stomach churning, my face coloring. Now more hiccups coming.
This is all there will ever be.
I rocked my collapsed legs back and forth on the toilet lid, and pressed my palms into my eyes, pushing my brain to envision something—anything—else.

You a real mess, you know that? You muthafucking Oreo wanna-be white girl.
A brash mass of black bodies huddled in hallway corners at West High, always somehow finding me, even when I did my best to blend in and avoid them. They always found me.
What the hell is going on with your hair, anyway?
A hand pulling one of my curls. My head yanked back, then snapping forward. The endless search for words, a rebuttal, anything to make them leave me alone. Nothing coming. Just my legs moving me along as fast as possible, to get away from that blackness that would engulf me otherwise—and then what would I be?
I'm not black anyway
, my mind would scream, but the phrase would never make its way to my mouth.
I'm mixed.
Dad's answer. I hiccupped now, disappointed that that was still all I had on them.
And at least I'll be going to college, unlike you idiots.

I bowed my head in shame and tried to come back to the present—even if it was a present in which I realized that Reggie would never want me if he knew how the black kids really saw me, and how I saw myself. The truth was, I wasn't black at all. Not by objective assessment, and certainly not by choice. I opened my eyes again and looked up at the ceiling, counting the cracks that radiated from the dingy fluorescent fixture. When I got up to fourteen, the hiccups had almost subsided. Then a knock at the door.

“Alex, you okay in there?” Mrs. Carter's voice was warm with concern on the other side of the door. “You just been in there a minute, so I thought I'd check.”

I thrust my feet down to the ground—probably a little too forcefully—and tried to make my voice as level as possible. “I'm fine, Mrs. Carter. Sorry. Almost done in here.” I stood up and turned on the sink, letting the water fall into the drain as my dry hands gripped the basin.

“No problem at all,” she said. “Take as long as you need.” She sounded a little embarrassed now. “I was just checking.”

I opened the door abruptly and faced her. She wore a simple blazer and matching beige skirt, her hair straight but curled inwards at the ends. She had given Reggie her bright eyes, which I suspected and feared could see as much as his could.

“All set,” I said, stepping toward her. “Let's eat.”

She put her hand on my back and lightly directed me toward the kitchen table.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I
n 2009, when I was ten and Jason was nine, Hank Aaron came up to Madison to scout out some local talent and visit friends. At the time, Hank was director of player development for the Brewers and was always traveling somewhere to look at a prospect. Dad had somehow convinced Hank's personal assistant that it would be worth his time to stop by batting practice of the number-three-ranked Little League team in the country that afternoon, since he would be in the area anyway.