Silver Sparrow (5 page)

“Calm down,” my mother said, rubbing his neck. “Don’t curse like that in front of Dana. Do you want her to grow up attracted to violent men?”

I couldn’t turn around and look at him. The planetarium didn’t have anything to do with Bunsen burners.

“Tel your father thank you, Dana,” my mother said.

“Thank you,” I said with my back stil facing him.

“Dana,” she said, “what kind of appreciation is that?”

I turned to him and said, “Thank you. I real y want to take the science lessons.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and then I couldn’t help adding, “It’s not fair.” Looking up at him, I wanted a hug. That was the ful extent of my ambition. I knew he wouldn’t say that I could go ahead and go to the Saturday Academy, even if I promised not to bother Chaurisse. But I hoped he would hug me and tel me that he was sorry that I had to get second pick for everything and that he was sorry that my mother couldn’t wear a fox-fur coat and that I couldn’t tel anybody my daddy’s real name. But he didn’t say anything and his neck wasn’t twitching so I knew that he wasn’t stuck. He just didn’t have any
sorry
s to say.

Since Mother was reared by her father with no mother in sight, she believes herself to be an expert in the ways of gentlemen. She says she knows how to hear al the things they leave unsaid. Some nights, after she kissed me good night, she would add, “Your father wishes you sweet dreams.” I asked her once why he couldn’t cal and tel me himself. “He’s your father, but first he is a man. A man is just a man, and that’s al we have to work with.”

After the Saturday Science Academy incident, just after James left our apartment for his house on Lynhurst, my mother sipped from his abandoned glass of sherry and said, “He’l be back. And I bet there is a fox fur involved.” And she was almost right.

Less than a month later, I was up late, watching
Saturday Night Live,
and my mother was asleep on the couch. I turned the volume down low so she wouldn’t wake up and make me go to bed. My face was pressed to the felt-covered television speaker, leaving me to feel the jokes when I couldn’t real y hear them. On the coffee table near my passed-out mother, the ice in her glass popped as it settled.

James didn’t knock; he used his key to open the burglar door and the wooden door. My mother sat up with a start. “James?”

“Who else could it be? You got another man you didn’t tel me about?” He laughed, fol owing her voice into the den. “Dana!” he cal ed, angling his

voice toward my closed bedroom door.

“I’m in the den, too,” I said.

“Glad I didn’t wake anybody up.”

James wasn’t wearing his uniform. This evening he was wearing jeans and a crisp blue shirt. In his arms was a large white box. He grabbed my mother around the waist and kissed her. “I love me a woman that can appreciate a cocktail. What you been drinking?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” my mother said.

“Cuba Libre.”

“I can’t believe you are running the streets this time of night.” Mother was smiling while they talked. We both acted like we didn’t notice the big white box.

“Can’t I come over any time I like because I miss my woman? Can’t I deliver a special gift for my baby girl?”

I perked up. “That box is for me?”

“You know it is.”

“James, I know you haven’t been shopping at this hour.”

“Who said nothing about shopping? I been playing cards, and I been playing wel .” He pul ed off the top of the box with a flourish, revealing a waist-length fur jacket, junior size 7 — too big, but I’d grow into it.

“James,” my mother said, feeling the soft fur, “tel me you did not win this in a card game.”

“Yes, I did. My buddy Charlie Ray was playing so bad; al his money was gone so he put this coat on the table.”

My mother said, “James, you have to take it back. That coat belongs to someone.”

“You are absolutely right. It belongs to me. And soon as she comes over here and gives me some sugar, it wil belong to Dana. Come on, baby girl, p-p-put this on, and let your daddy see how p-p-pretty you are.”

I paused for a second at the hitch in his voice, but he smiled and I knew that it would be okay.

The coat was piled on the floor beside him, and he held his arms outstretched. Feeling like I was in a movie, I hugged him around the neck and kissed him loudly on the cheek. James smel ed sweet, like liquor and cola. To this day and for the rest of my life, I wil always have a soft spot for a man with rum on his breath.

I think about the world and the way that things take place and in what order. I am not one of those people who believe that everything happens for a reason. Or, if I am, I don’t believe that everything happens for a good reason. But the first time that I encountered my sister, Chaurisse, when I wasn’t under the careful supervision of my mother, was at the Atlanta Civic Center in 1983. There’s only so much that you can chalk up to coincidence. I believe in the eventuality of things. What’s done in the dark shal come to the light. What goes up comes down. What goes around comes around. There are a mil ion of these sayings, al , in their own way, true. And isn’t that what’s supposed to set you free?

The citywide science fair was held on the day of my fourteenth-and-a-half birthday. This was my own private holiday that I celebrated each year.

My real birthday, the ninth of May, was real y my mother’s day. She made a big deal of it, forcing me to dress like a pageant queen for a special meal at the Mansion restaurant on Ponce de Leon Avenue. The waiters brought food I couldn’t identify and my mother would say, “Isn’t this nice?

Happy birthday! You’re growing up.” Mother’s attempts to make it special for just the two of us only reminded me how isolated we were. She and James were suspicious of outsiders, worried that someone might know someone who could expose us. You know what they say about southwest Atlanta.

On my fourteenth-and-a-half birthday, I set my alarm for 5:37 a.m., the precise minute of my birth, and shuffled a deck of playing cards. I’d heard that there was a way you could use an ordinary pinochle deck to divine the future. The first six cards I dealt were hearts, and I hoped that this meant that there was love in my future. My mother laughed and sang a chirpy Sam Cooke song about how a girl of sixteen is too young to fal in love. And I told her that I may not know what love is, but I did know what exclusivity was. Now that real y surprised her, me using that word. I learned it in school, not in English class, but in the guidance counselor’s office. Miss Rhodes was her name. I’d been sent to her because I had been caught exchanging kisses with three different boys in six weeks. “There is something to be said for exclusivity, little girl.”

High school was difficult for me. Any guidance counselor worth her salt should have understood that something heavy and barbed was behind the hostile attitude I adopted whenever I was cal ed into her office. In my heart, I was a nice girl, and a smart one, eager to study biology. During my last year in middle school, I’d studied endlessly to pass the exam to be admitted into the math-and-science magnet. I crammed each night, memorizing the names of the noble gases and the quirks of various isotopes. I studied hard even though I was sick with fear that I would not be al owed to accept an invitation if Chaurisse decided that she wanted to go to Mays High School.

James and Laverne lived on Lynhurst Road, just a half mile from Mays, which had just been built as the flagship high school of black Atlanta.

Because of her zip code, Chaurisse was entitled to enrol , even if she wasn’t accepted into the magnet program. My mother’s apartment was only three miles away, but we were in the district of Therrel High, which didn’t have a magnet at al . I received my acceptance letter in June, but I had to wait another month to find out that Chaurisse was accepted to Northside High School, which specialized in the performing arts. Apparently she was somewhat gifted with woodwind instruments.

It would be too easy to say that I rejected high school before it had a chance to reject me, but even now, when I drive down 1-285, I feel a stirring in my stomach when I see Mays High School on the right side of the expressway, not so modern now, but stil imposing against a backdrop of kudzu and pine trees. I remember how it felt to be a student there, feeling like a trespasser, afraid each day that Chaurisse would change her mind about Northside High and the piccolo, deciding instead to claim my place.

About two weeks into the ninth grade, I decided that having a boyfriend, a real one, an exclusive one, would tether me to my school. That was the purpose of al the kissing that caused me to be banished again and again to the guidance counselor’s office.

The reason that there were so many boys in such a short time was that I’d catch each of them passing notes to, looking at, or even talking to some other girl within days of making an overture toward me. I couldn’t bear it. I dumped them and set out again. I would give any boy a chance if he seemed interested — I felt I couldn’t afford to be particular — but again and again I was disappointed.

Not even the nerdy boys could be trusted. Just a month before my fourteenth-and-a-half birthday, I’d gotten tangled up with Perry Hammonds. He was tal and lanky and styled his hair into a high-top fade that was always in the need of a good mow. I picked him because he liked science, just like me, and because he seemed to be too weird to have other girls to cheat with. He was in the eleventh grade and had never kissed a girl before.

(I liked the idea of historical exclusivity.) So, while working after school on our biology practicum, I let him kiss me. What I didn’t realize was that there was a difference between
opportunity
to cheat and
will
to cheat. Perry didn’t actual y get together with another female human being during the course of our brief relationship, but I came into the practicum room to check on the germination of my project, and there was Perry, al crushed out on a substitute teacher. I knew he was serious because he had trimmed up the sides of his hair with a razor. The skin there was smooth, white, and nicked with tiny cuts.

Perhaps I overreacted. Maybe this is what my father was talking about when he warned me to stay away from emotion and al of its messy extremes. But I couldn’t get over Perry. While he was running errands for the substitute teacher, a ful y grown woman who would never kiss him in the band room, I used an eyedropper to add bleach to his tanks of brine shrimp. I didn’t put in enough to kil al the ugly little creatures, but just enough to confuse his research. My mother had been right. I was a precocious child. A bitter woman at age fourteen.

A little bit of justice was meted out. Perry’s project failed to qualify for the citywide fair, and I was tapped to go. My work, “The Effects of Acid Rain on the Germination of Some Selected Seeds,” would represent the ninth-grade class of the Benjamin E. Mays Academy for Math and Science.

Perry moped in the practicum room as the magnet director encased my project in Bubble Wrap to get ready for my big day. “I just don’t understand it,” he said, thinking of his brine shrimp and maybe thinking a little bit about me and why I wouldn’t talk to him anymore. I didn’t say anything, although I think it would have given me some satisfaction to explain myself. But I lived in a world where you could never want what you wanted out in the open.

MY SESSION WITH the judges was not chal enging. They seemed mostly concerned with whether or not I had done the work myself, trying to confuse me by quizzing me about the procedure for blending chemicals. They didn’t even ask me what I thought about the issue of acid rain and whether I thought it was going to destroy the whole world.

Irritated, I tossed my hair around while answering the questions. Girls my age would hem me up in the bathroom for flaunting my excel ent head of hair, but the men on the committee fidgeted in their chairs as I shifted my curls from one shoulder to the other. Against my mother’s advice, I had applied a coat of liquid eyeliner, electric blue, to the pink rim above my lower lashes. It burned like crazy, but I just wet my lips and tried to look bored as tears leaked from my irritated and iridescent eyes.

One of the judges, a heavyset man with processed hair, said, “How did a pretty girl like you get so interested in science?”

The woman judge said, “Michael, that’s out of line.”

The other male judge said, “Michael, that’s a misdemeanor.”

I said, “I care about acid rain. It’s going to destroy the world.” The three judges exchanged glares while I pul ed on my rabbit-fur jacket.

“Nice coat,” the woman judge said.

“My daddy won it for me in a poker game,” I told them, rubbing my eyes with the backs of my hands.

I knew I wasn’t going to win a gold key. I could tel by the way that the judges looked at one another as I was leaving the smal room. I searched the hal way for my sponsor, but she was nowhere to be found. The civic center was swarming with kids, al excited about the competition. Everyone from Mays High had to wear baby blue and gold shirts. I wore mine, as it was the only way I could participate, but I kept my rabbit-fur jacket buttoned and belted even though the building was warm.