The Importance of Being Dangerous (13 page)

WHEN SIDARRA WAS A LITTLE GIRL
, it was always clear to her family when she was having some crisis of conscience. Her skin would break out. Not just her face but her arms and legs would fill with tiny dark blotches that would deepen, fatten, and spread like pox. It never lasted more than a few days, but whenever it occurred, Aunt Chickie used to call it Redbone Guilt. This strange affliction, and the vague fear of going to hell, kept Sidarra from being a child who stole things or lied on people or cheated in school. Aunt Chickie would know, since she had skin light enough to betray her emotions and mischief enough (at one time) to produce guilt. On the other hand, Sidarra's caramel skin shouldn't have been the moral showcase that it was.

For the first time in some thirty years, it was back. The telltale marks of Redbone Guilt had established a beachhead across her forehead, with small clusters on the move inward from her shoulders and her thighs. Now that Aunt Chickie lived in the brown
stone with them, Sidarra could only hope the old woman's eyes would fail her, sparing Sidarra the obligation to explain her pimpled flesh. But this time was worse than ever before. This time confused her because Sidarra no longer feared damnation, having decided you had to feel God's love before you could lose it. This time the source of any guilt was unclear—her feelings for a married man? That seemed superstitious; they had only flirted shamelessly for months. Purchasing a dream house with a little of other people's money? Maybe, but they deserved it, it was insured, and they made it grow on their own in any event. Still, that summer the mysterious patches migrated and thickened, preventing her from showing her skin just when she began feeling beautiful again. Even Darrius had no cure. Instead, Sidarra spent a lot of time upstairs in her new room. Which is where she would have gone as a child for the only cure there was.

 

“
LET'S GO IN THE ROOM AND TALK
,” Sidarra's father used to say. “I don't want your mother contradicting me.”

That was his usual line, the signal, but Sidarra knew the room was really chosen because it was the one place away from his boys. He had three of them. They couldn't help what they were, but their presence could annoy the hell out of him at times. When Roxbury Parish finally got a girl, he made sure to get her her own room so that she would always have a boundary line of retreat from the suffering caused by the boys' loud voices and flying limbs. His daughter gave him the opportunity to speak freely about serious issues, like growing up, and that was a pleasure he would not deny either of them for the sake of his sons' jealousy.

The room was down the long hallway from her parents' bedroom and the one her brothers shared next to it. Sidarra's room had been the apartment's second bathroom. Just before she was born, her father ignored every imaginable protest and ripped out
the fixtures, painted the walls peach, and installed things he was sure a girl would like. He even made her brothers help in the work, demanding that they learn how to respect a female other than their mother. The room was small—but not to Sidarra, who for most of her childhood thought it was a palace compared to the lion's den her brothers piled up in. She was allowed to hang some of the best family photographs on her walls right next to the one of Dr. Martin Luther King and the life-size poster of Michael Jackson. There was also a large antique mirror her father bought for her at a junk shop on 125th Street. In the corner she had two soft chairs covered in blankets, one for her and one for him. Her father would crouch down and assume his seat, always surrounded in her memory by the glare of the white bathroom tiles that still climbed halfway up the walls. His knees would fork outward, and while they conversed he would raise his elbows and put both hands behind his head. At his feet, she would hear the occasional crackle of ice cubes melting in a glass of bourbon. For a man who was named like a small town in Louisiana, Roxbury Parish seemed more at home with his daughter in that room than anyplace in the world.

“You should always be able to see yourself clearly,” she remembered him telling her often, and he would inspect the old mirror for streaks. Taking a rag, he would dampen one end with a little soap and use the other to wipe it dry. “The secret to cleaning mirrors, Sid—are you listening?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“The secret to cleaning mirrors that nobody seems to know is that you gotta keep wiping, wiping, wiping well after you think you should be done wiping. The mirror will let you know when you're finished. The cleaner the mirror, the clearer the soul.”

Even as a little girl, Sidarra understood mirrors as her dad's metaphor for the mind. Roxbury Parish simply wanted his daughter to have a mind more capable than his own. Poorly educated, he was smart enough, but his specific aspirations for Sidarra were
limited by his horizon. If she had wanted to become a great singer, for instance, that was probably okay with him. Yet she knew he always hoped for something more, something that would develop her mind, like a manager, a manager of something. The best word he could ever find to describe his hope for her was “queen.” “Be some kind of queen,” he'd urge. But there didn't seem to be any queen openings, so Sidarra became a schoolteacher instead. It wasn't the most original choice, but it was the best she could figure out, and just beyond his raising, it pleased him. He'd come from no place worth mentioning, the son of a preacher whose indiscretions taught Roxbury to distrust God, raised by relatives Sidarra never knew, and he made up his rules as he went along. The story he told of his life before her always began with him wandering for several years, then to New York City in the fifties, and finding work in the subways as a sanitation man. He was one of the men who rode the flatbed maintenance cars that roared very slowly into the stations after midnight, stopping briefly so that they could jump out, empty trash canisters, sweep and spray the platforms down with water, and jump back before entering the tunnels again. It was a job like his journey: stop in a place only long enough to find what's rotten there. Yet once he married, Roxbury couldn't leave.

Sidarra's mother, on the other hand, was a Dean. She belonged to a clan, brought her daughter to church where they sang in the choir, and preferred to have her talks with Sidarra outside the home, like walking through Central Park. Zester Dean loved the idea of Sidarra becoming a singer in a lounge as her sister Chickie had done in Paris.

“Why not?” she would say. “Shoot for the stars, girl. Shoot
at
'em!”

That sort of encouragement led eventually to the shared coveting of a special hat by Sidarra, her mother, and Aunt Chickie, who happened to be its owner. It was mostly purple, floppy and felt,
with a fuchsia bow, garish enough for the burlesque stage with the hippie soul of a seventies album cover, and perfect for a nine-year-old's view of womanhood. Zester had managed to borrow it from her sister after several months of trying. She paid for the privilege by enduring an onslaught of biting Chickie snipes about her lack of the requisite sexiness, charm, and cheekbones to wear such a hat outside. Shortly after the loan, Chickie traveled to Spain with her performing husband. When she returned two months later, it was as though she'd packed a tracking device. She wanted the hat back. She'd even made note of it in the letter telling of their arrival in New York. But Zester couldn't find the hat. The hat was gone. And with the announcement of her Aunt Chickie's return, Sidarra promptly turned into a leopard. Her smooth skin became awash in tight red, then wide brown pimples. Yet she remained mute on the hat's whereabouts, and her silence was catching: Zester and Chickie didn't speak to each other for a full year over the saga of the missing hat.

“Why'd you take the hat, child?”

Sidarra raised her big eyes up at her father, stared for a while, then smiled. “I like the hat, Daddy. For a long time, I liked it every day, in private. I sang in it. I danced in front of the mirror when everybody was asleep. I even hoped that Aunt Chickie would never come back. Then, after a while, I forgot about it.”

“Even though you looked so great in the thing?”

“Yessir. I did.”

“Hmm.”

“What I didn't forget was the bad stuff she said to Mama about not looking good enough to wear it.”

“So you thought it would be a good idea to keep it from Chickie altogether? Even when you saw the sadness it caused your mother when they fought and stopped talking. You still thought you'd teach your aunt a lesson?”

Sidarra thought about it for a while. She knew she could come
up with any answer at all. Knowing what her father would want her to say and saying the opposite had no predictable repercussions in that room. She could tell it like she saw it.

“Yeah. I think so, Daddy.”

Roxbury Parish was quiet. He put his hands on his knees and cast his gaze around the room a few times. At some point he picked up his bourbon, took a sip, and as he scanned around again, he caught his daughter's expectant expression. He raised his glass to her in a customary toast, sipped, and continued his slow scan of the room. “You finished? You ready to come clean and let 'em know what happened?” She looked out the window, then back at him. “If you're done, I think you should tell 'em.” She stared at his glass of bourbon and waited for the ice to crack, then nodded. “You wearin' your trouble, you know?” Sidarra looked up at him and nodded again. “And don't plan to go no place for a while, 'cause you're grounded, y'understand?” She nodded and actually smiled a little, realizing she was already serving the sentence. He too smiled slightly. “'Course I'll be here if you need me.”

In all the years of conversation in that room, Sidarra knew that her father spoke there as he spoke nowhere else. However, this time was the same, only more so. “And you should always have a room for yourself, like this one, baby queen,” he added for no apparent reason.

Her Redbone Guilt cleared up overnight.

Years later she learned that on that day her father had been fired from his job of nineteen years. It was the beginning of his end. He hid the firing from her and her brothers for a long time, speaking in whispers about it to her mother, leaving and returning home at the same time each day, for years finding only part-time work at best. At his age, he could never find as good a job. Eventually it all merged into an unexplained poverty, with each child who could helping out.

Sidarra was slow to become the queen of her father's wishes,
and she failed to keep her mirrors clean. Instead of grinding toward her teaching certificate, she went to school in fits and starts and worked as a substitute teacher. She had finally finished college with a baby and a certificate when she got her own classroom. There she saw the horror of her dreams. For all of her own doubts and delays, she came face-to-face with pure failure. Sidarra saw the trying-hard faces of lovely doomed spirits soon to be quit upon. Not every child, but too many children. Especially the boys, like Tyrell from her block, whom she first met as a bucktoothed, gangly thirteen-year-old whose sweet eagerness took steady leave of his personality with every day he was shunted to a program for slow learners, sent away to a counselor for disciplinary misdeeds, or ignored. There was nothing for them, she realized, nothing intended. Sidarra tried for five years to be the difference in their lives, just as she was doing alone in her East Harlem apartment with Raquel. She thought she'd gotten a lucky break when a well-known philanthropist—a “white knight,” as they were called then—decided to donate his millions into a special schools program. He wanted fresh, bright, and untainted professionals to administer his plan to expose junior high school students to internships at corporations. Sidarra had already enrolled in school administration classes when she was hired on and moved into an office at the Board of Miseducation in downtown Brooklyn. And there but for the grace of God, she left the classroom and its neglected faces for good. Yet because it looked to her father like a promotion and because he had wanted so little and gotten much less, Sidarra never shared her unhappiness with him.

Her parents were happy before they died. Her father had discovered a problem with his blood. It was killing his bones. The flow to the joints had ceased and the edges were rapidly collapsing. Soon he would not walk or sit comfortably in a chair or make love without great pain. In short order the doctors said he would need his hips, his knees, and possibly his shoulders replaced. There was
no money for all that. So her parents decided to get in all the strolling they could before his health prevented even that. Arm in arm, they walked the city, visiting parts and places they had only vague memories of from years before. One such day, they stood on a midtown street corner together, waiting for the light to change, when along came a terrifying screech, the quick blue smoke of a car's tires, and the errant twist of a steering wheel. Careening over the curb to avoid a swerving yellow cab, the car hurtled straight into their bodies and decided everything once and for all.

After that, trouble seemed to become always for the Parish children, especially Sidarra's big brother Alex. The cabdriver, lucky for him, was soon deported, and her other brothers, mad at an unjust world, wandered aimlessly for a long time. Sidarra needed help with her parents' effects, but the men couldn't find the strength. Alex argued a lot with her; he refused to be her backup. Alex tried hard, but he couldn't move. He too had been crushed. Then one day Alex did move. He moved out to the desert with his young family, to New Mexico, where he became a plumber. And years of silence between Alex and his beloved little sister commenced.

 

A LITTLE MORE THAN THREE YEARS LATER
, Sidarra found herself defiantly examining her naked body in the mirrors of her converted room, wondering just why the smooth bronze skin she was now all too willing to share with Griff chose now to turn into the hide of a poisonous butterfly. The rash was more venomous on an adult body. It had tracked clear across her breasts, tattooing one nipple with laughable discoloration, and freckled the slight paunch of her tummy. Never in childhood would it dare approach her genitals, but now the spotted march was on with a vengeance upon rounded hips she'd come to love again, down her strong inner thighs, and even populated among her outer pubic hairs. In disbelief, Sidarra stood there itching.