Third Girl from the Left (25 page)

My mother took a long pull on her cigarette and stared out the window. “Baby, I don't know. I don't half know why people act the way they do.” She touched the back of my neck tentatively. “But I know you can't let them get you down. You can't let them stop you. I kept going toward what I wanted 'til I just had to stop. Just had to. You hardheaded, just like me. I never did fit into Tulsa, not for one minute. But I just stood it until I could leave. You gonna have to stand it too.” She took another long drag. I was silent. “Sheila and me. I don't know. We . . . She's always been there for me, since before you were born. If that makes me a dyke, then maybe I am, even though I see these people on TV sometimes and I can't hardly say I'm like them. I'm not. We've just got each other and we do what we can. That's the best we can do.” She blew some smoke rings and smiled a little. “You used to love when I did that. But you're growing up. I wish I could make it easier for you. But I can't. Can't always get what you want in this life. But you gotta live it the best way you know how anyways. You know?” I nodded. “Just flip them girl's trays first next time you see them. They'll leave you alone after that. Listen,” she said suddenly, “this is kind of perfect, but Sheila's gotta work late, and they're showing
The Breakfast Club
down at the dollar show at the Pavilion. Wanna go? Just you and me. Girls night out.”

I took a deep breath.
The Breakfast Club
, which we'd seen three times when it first came out, was one of our favorites. We even agreed about its virtues, which was rare. She hadn't helped me figure out what to do. She never did. It'd be nice to sit next to her in the dark with a big old bucket of popcorn, though. I always loved the feel of her leg next to mine. “Sure, Mama. That'd be great.”

“Great. I'll get you a hot dog too. You must be starving. Those little bitches.”

I looked out the window. “Yeah, Mama. I am pretty hungry.” The lights outside were just beginning to pierce the dusk all around us. I wondered if I had the nerve to flip over Toni Evans's lunch tray. I thought about Ally Sheedy. “That'd be good.” Beside me, my mother smoked and drove. Just the two of us, going to the movies.

E
VER SINCE TAM WAS LITTLE, SHE HAD POSSESSED
the ability to get under Angela's skin like nobody's business. She was the kind of a kid who wanted to know everything, for one thing. Everything that Angela didn't know how to answer. How things worked, where her daddy was, what was going on with Sheila, why Angela wasn't in movies anymore. “Hell, I don't know” was Angela's answer to most of these questions. And she felt the weight of each word. Hell. It was hell. It was hell not knowing. It was hell never understanding why she didn't get what she wanted when so many women who were not as pretty, not as willing, not as keen, got to make it in the pictures. It was hell once she decided to have the baby and came back to Sheila and they stood over the crib at night, together, looking at the wailing bundle inside and trying to figure out what in God's name was going on. “Look, Angie. I gotta be at the club at eight. I gotta get some sleep. You figure out what to do,” said Sheila. Then she walked out of the room and went to bed. And Angela didn't know. Couldn't Sheila see that she didn't know? She rocked, she walked, she gave bottles and burped, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't and there was no logic to it. Tamara, her beautiful, maddening little Tamara, was impervious to logic. She was just a baby.

Things got better after Sheila quit the club. She came home late one morning, saw Angela on the sofa with the baby, sat down heavily next to them, and said, “You know those old bags at the club that you see still squeezing into that goddamn costume, and we used to say, ‘Oh man, that's pathetic, don't let that happen to me.' Well, I'm just about there. Time to move on. Ain't no movie stars around here.” Angela, still in her bathrobe at 10:00
A.M.
, unshowered and covered with spit-up, had to agree.

They never said what they were doing. They never
decided
what they were doing. They just did it. That was how they'd always lived. They got in bed together every night, sleeping spoonstyle, got up together every day. Sheila paid rent and managed things until Tam was old enough for daycare, and then Angela got a job too, but they never said,
This is a family. We are each other's loves. We belong with these other women we've been hearing about, these lesbians
. They both kept going out on dates with men at first—guys at the advertising agency where Angela first worked and then later at the doctor's office, and guys at the rental car office where Sheila landed. But then those same guys would meet the other woman and hear about the daughter and gradually put one and one and one together and hit the road. Neither Sheila nor Angela really minded. They had each other. And Tam kept getting bigger. Eventually, they stopped giving their numbers out.

 

Rafe called one night when Tam was about ten. She was already asleep, thank God. Angela was laid out on the sofa half watching
The Trouble with Angels
, which she'd rented out of sentiment. Sheila was out with a friend. She nearly dropped the phone at the sound of his voice. “Rafe? Rafe? What the hell?”

“It's me, Angie. I know it's been a long time. How you been?”

“I been all right. Well . . . yeah. I'm OK. How'd you get this number?”

“You're still listed, sweetheart. I just . . . I just haven't had the nerve to call before now. Are you still in the business?”

Angela laughed shortly. “Me? No, no I'm not still in the business. The business got sick of us. Didn't you notice?”

Rafe laughed too. “I surely did. I own a little store down on Crenshaw now. Health food, vitamins, stuff like that. Trying to help people get healthy.”

“Really?” Her hand spun in the hair at the back of her head. “Yeah. It's good. It's a good life.” He paused. “Listen, Angie. I know things didn't end . . . well. They didn't end well. But I think about that baby every day. What . . . what happened?”

“Well, she ain't a baby anymore.” Angela couldn't breathe properly, but she got the words out. “She's asleep in the other room. She's ten now. Her name's Tamara.”

“Tamara,” he breathed. “That's beautiful. Tamara.”

They were both silent for a few long moments. Finally Rafe spoke. “And what about you? Are you . . . is Sheila still around?”

“Yes. She's still around. We're . . . we're still friends.”

“Friends like you were before?”

“Yes,” she whispered. Why did she feel so funny?

“Well . . . that's all right. I . . . I thought you would be. You two were always kind of special together. The prettiest girls in show biz.” He laughed thinly. “Really, girl, I wish you all the best. I don't . . . Could I meet her some time?”

Angela's hand froze in her hair. “Who?”

“Tamara.”

“You want to meet her?”

“Yeah.”

“Ten years go by, and then you want to meet her?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh, no, my brother. Not this way. I don't think that's a good idea. Not at all.”

Rafe backed down immediately. “Well . . . I guess I ain't been there. Can't expect you to be happy about having me trying to jump in at this point. But I'm gonna give you my phone number and address and all. You keep it. And when she wants to know. You tell her that she can come to me if she wants to.” He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was ragged with tears. “I'd like to meet my daughter.” He gave her the information. She wrote it down. She put it away in the box where she kept special things. She went to bed with Sheila that night without a word. But she didn't forget the way his voice broke when he said “my daughter,” either. So she kept the number. Every time Tamara asked about him, she said something like, “I met him through the business, but he's gone now.” Then she'd stop talking. Sometimes she thought about the way he used to look at her, the way he used to touch her. He was the only man she'd ever really loved, but it turned out that a man's love wasn't what she needed. Sometimes she thought she ought to tell Tamara that. Or at least tell her that she knew where he was. She might want to know. So she thought about it. Sometimes.

W
HEN RODNEY KING GOT BEAT DOWN LIVE AND
in color, I was seventeen. That's when I started to truly know the power of an image. The tape was everywhere. Everywhere. Mama and Sheila and I didn't pay too much attention to the news, but you didn't have to watch the news to see that tape. It was the air we breathed that spring.

The night of the verdict, Mama got home after I did. I was sitting in front of the TV. I couldn't look away, and I was too scared to move until she came in. As she walked through the door, I jumped up and hugged her like I hadn't since I was little. “Mama, none of those cops got found guilty and people are burning up South Central.” I was crying.

“What?”

“Come see.” She sat next to me and we watched for a while, the words stricken out of us. “Damn,” she finally said. “Damn. I guess them old folks back home were right.”

“Right about what?”

“Oh, nothing you need to worry about. Something that happened in Tulsa a million years ago. Damn.” She turned back to the TV. The video played silently again. Again. “Mama, didn't the jury see this?”

“Sure they did, Tam.”

“Well, then how could they decide what they did?”

“I don't know, Tam. White people . . .” She trailed off. “White people always funny about this stuff. They always stick together. Can't trust 'em, even when you think times have changed. That's . . . that's what my daddy always said.” I knew she was truly rattled then. She hadn't mentioned her father since that long-ago time when we didn't go to his funeral.

She didn't make me go to bed that night. There'd be no school in the morning. When Sheila came home she sat right down without a word next to us in front of the television. We watched the city burn until night eased toward day. Then we fell asleep like puppies, curled up uncomfortably on the sofa, the television's colored lights playing restlessly across our faces.

I was the first to wake up. There was a slight smell of smoke in the room, not just Mama and Sheila's old cigs but the smell of buildings burning. My first thought, unbidden, was,
I should go down there with my camera
. I know, I know, I was only seventeen—but that's the kind of seventeen-year-old I was. Mama woke up, rubbing her eyes and pushing at her hair, just a minute after I did. “Tam? Tam, baby, you all right?”

“Yeah, Mama. I'm all right. We all musta fell asleep right here.”

She smiled ruefully. “Yeah, I guess we did. Well, I'm glad we were all together.”

“Yeah.” I paused. “Listen, Mama. I want to go down there. Down to South Central and film some of it. I think somebody ought to. Can I take the car?”

Her eyes got huge. “What?”

“Can I take the car? It's good practice to film something like this, Mama. I'll be careful.”

“Little girl, you have truly lost your mind if you think I'm gonna let my seventeen-year-old daughter go get shot at by a bunch of crazy niggers while she carries around her little camera. You have truly lost your mind.” She paused, and then her indignation reared up again. “You see they ain't too discriminating who they beating up. No, honey, your little narrow butt is staying right here today. Out your goddamn mind.” She started digging around in her bag for a cigarette.

“Mama—”

“Not another word. Look. I know . . . people get killed in shit like this. They told me about it. My mama and daddy . . . well, not them . . . but in town, everybody knew. I used to go to the movies in a theater that was built up from where one got burnt to the ground in some shit like this. No. That's the end of it.” When Sheila woke up a few minutes later, we weren't speaking.

I was furious. But I knew she had me beat. I could have tried to take the car keys or something, but really, I was scared. There was one little corner of me that was relieved. Finally she was acting like she cared what I did. But after that long day of watching the city burn, I brought my camera out from under my bed where I kept it and I held it and I thought. I thought about what pictures could do. What they could do if you weren't afraid.

 

When I told my mother how film school worked, I thought she'd have a stroke. “You pay?” she screamed. “You pay all that money to go there and then you have to pay for everything on top of that? You are out your goddamn mind.” I never did tell her that thesis films can run upwards of $50,000. I never did tell her that if you ain't got the money, you have to get your friends to crew for you and actors to work for free and eat nasty fried chicken and just save money any goddamn way you can.

And on so many days, I wondered if she wasn't right, if I wasn't out my goddamn mind. I had gotten through college (nothing fancy, just a community college in LA) on a scholarship and worked shitty jobs for years and years saving up and borrowed a ridiculous amount of money for NYU and there I was.

My third year began after September 11. Even with the city going insane, I could think only of what it would take to finish. I had to finish. The women were dropping off the directing track of the program like flies. Film school was kicking their asses. They were fleeing to producing, screenwriting, anything but directing. There were hardly any black people left either. Just white-boy filmmakers. They were so sure, so unbelievably sure that the way they understood the world was the way the world was. They were very loud. I had to be small and still and solid just to bear it.

When Colin came in to film production class the first day, we hardly could have missed each other—we were two flies in a sugar bowl, as my mother might have said. He was the last student to come in, and he stood at the door as though he were looking for something special, some particular seat. Then he saw me and came and sat right down. He had dreadlocks the color of wet sand and a scattering of freckles across his nose. “Anybody sitting here?” he asked.