White Girls (34 page)

Even as a grown-up, so-called, Gary thought: Maybe if women like my mother are not loved in the world, they can give me more of what they’ve stored up. Maybe if I make one more bed and some extra cash, they’ll put a wedding ring under my pillow. Who’s to say that if Gary had been filled with enough Oh, my!s as a child, he wouldn’t
have worked so hard to hear it? But his mother loved him and his father couldn’t.

Maybe absence is all we hear. It’s the shell we can’t pry our ear away from. Gary was human, despite his goodness, and so he fell in love with its lack in others, fell in love with Fran, who, like his father, made him believe what others said about him: that his care was a covert bid for attention, a shitty star turn. Fran made him ashamed of his own nature, and made him feel that all the girls in high school were right for having exclaimed, as he approached: “Here comes the leech!”

Now, at thirty-one years old, he wasn’t any different. He was sitting at the kitchen table. It was five o’clock in the morning. He was looking for a clean plate to eat an egg on. He couldn’t find one in the pile of filthy dishes Fran had stacked in the kitchen sink. He had no woman to wife him. He saw a roach crawling over the pots filled with Fran’s hair chemicals and old macaroni and cheese. In his heart, Gary couldn’t believe that that roach wasn’t a love bug after all.

Where had the time gone? he wondered. Perhaps, he thought, this wasn’t enough for Fran: the sour breath of morning. She didn’t even stir when he got out of bed. (He had time to sleep for only three or four hours; just enough time to get the poison of dreams out of his head.) She’d never even made him a lunch, let alone gotten up and fixed him an egg.

There was a certain beauty in that, he reasoned, boiling his own eggs. He toasted some about-to-go-bad bread. Wasn’t there a beauty in her bad moods, too? Wasn’t that love enough, he thought, seeing love in the bugs feeding on her dirty pots in the way he always wanted to feed on her?

Talk about roaches! Imagine my brother as Kafka. Imagine Richard as Kafka or his roach. Those are the parts he could play. Richard and Franz had the same nose and fears—the Jew and the Negro. At the end of that story, after the roach in fact and at last dies, a bug to martyrdom, the family—the roach’s parents, and his sister, Grete—leaves for the countryside. As they travel away from the city, the air grows sweet. Kafka writes:

It struck both Mr. and Mrs. Samsa, almost at the same moment, as they became aware of their daughter’s increasing vivacity, that in spite of all the sorrow of recent times, which had made her cheeks pale, she had bloomed into a pretty young girl with a good figure. They grew quieter and half unconsciously exchanged glances of complete agreement, having come to the conclusion that it would soon be time to find a good husband for her. And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body.

I could play that sister, if I had a brother who would play Kafka.

I could play the horror of her young flesh as it promises to grow old. Her innocence, even in the face of her brother’s dead feelers—so stiff and cold—is the real tale. We can survive anything, if we make it up.

Fran shut the door. She took off the trench coat she had thrown over her bra and panties. She threw the coat over the banister. It was a
Thursday, around two or four. (This was in 1991, two years before Gary was leaning drunkenly against the drunken fence.) She had just gotten rid of her kid again. He was seven. His birthday had passed days before. September. That month also marked her eighth year of marriage to Gary. This was the longest she had ever been with anyone. She had stayed with Gary largely because he paid for her drugs; now she didn’t even care about that.

She had put on her raincoat to go to the door—many afternoons, when she got up, she’d go to the front door half dressed, looking for someone to take her child away. She’d throw her raincoat on over her bra and panties and wait until a teenager—they were more irresponsible; she liked that; danger lurked wherever they stood—passed by. She’d let the pimply kid see her tits a little bit, like they were the promise of something to come, and then she’d beg the kid to take her little boy up the road for a burger. She’d say there were a few dollars in it for him if he did. She didn’t say her tits were his if something happened to her little boy on the way home, but that’s what she hoped for.

She couldn’t face it again: hitting that bedroom and all that would ensue, crawling back into bed and the chemical migration to some other place. What would be the point in starting all that up again now, when Gary would be home soon? Asking her, again, to crawl out from under Morpheus? He was always bugging her to be a wife. She didn’t know how to do that. She stood at the kitchen door. Dull, dull, dull. Dull dirty dishes, dull flies on stiff, dull dirty dishrags. Her failure at domesticity didn’t turn her on like it had in the old days, when she began her descent into fucking everything up. That was five years ago now. Then it had been thrilling to watch Gary get mad, or rather,
complain, since she thought it would lead to other things—namely her challenging him and not winning. But she could not drive him to bloodlust. So all she was left with was her failure.

What did it matter that she was in a better house, in a better neighborhood? It was like she told Gary when they moved in: “What am I supposed to do here? Twirl around baking cookies? It ain’t me, Gary.” He didn’t listen. She knew that the minute his back was turned, she’d be inviting dope fiends in—her sister and brother, Scoogie—to fuck it up and make it more like the kind of home she had grown up in. After a while, she didn’t even care when Gary came home to watch her destruction; her siblings and friends went on in front of him, blowing blow in each other’s depressed and giddy direction.

She moved toward the sink. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, she thought, stretching on a pair of yellow rubber gloves. But the congealed grease and dead hair in the burned once-enamel pot she’d used to rinse the relaxer out of her hair turned her stomach, making everything in her bra feel queasy. And anyway, the gloves were cracked, dry from disuse. They made her hands clammy. But she didn’t take them off when she returned to the kitchen table, annoyed that the smell of Gary’s customary breakfast—hard-boiled eggs and toast—eaten hours before, was, for her, more awful than all the things she had done to foul up the kitchen put together.

She was an actress, fond of props. They gave meaning to the scene. She sat back down and enjoyed the image she had of herself, dressed only in her bra and panties, hair half-done, wearing a pair of cracked yellow gloves. The gloves were a distinctly domestic touch, and therefore useless, which interested her.

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You ask about my brother’s fame—what that was “like.” It’s the same for all of them, the ones who eventually make it. They have the same generator. It’s fueled by hysteria and self-interest. Their hysteria is based on a kind of screaming insecurity about whether or not people will take an interest in their self-interest, which the public often interprets as a kind of love, thinking, How could anyone withstand that much self-regard, it must spill out into the world just for me, a sharing of their private self (or selves), how brave!

And how brave, too, that what would be so embarrassing for the rest of us—singing, acting, dancing, telling jokes—would be the thing that would make the performer feel so present and available. Surely that is a gift. And it is. But there’s something else that goes along with that (I know this because I can look at it now, not being a star, but being related to one): their self-interest isn’t satisfied onstage. All the world’s that for them, and every living room and every mother and all of a sister’s love are swallowed up and eventually pissed on because you can’t love them enough. Stars like my brother don’t feel convinced of other people’s concern and fidelity until God yells, “Cut!”

Like Richard, Gary was fucked from the first because he was a star growing up in a neighborhood that hated him for it. Unlike Richard, he lacked the core of self-interest that would have made his charisma pay. What interested Gary about his allure was using it to make other people feel like star attractions, especially women. He encouraged them to overwhelm him with their charisma, but a lot of women—his mother, girls in high school, Fran—were confused by his desire,
because they had been raised to be an audience for men. Gary was fucked because it’s awful for women to be told they’re stars when they’ve been raised not to believe it.

At first, Fran thought Gary’s desire for her to be seen was just what she wanted. In their high school, Gary was one of the few boys who wanted to talk to Fran. Her confusion about his interest interested her for a while, so she pursued it.

When she was fifteen, she would go by the candy store where Gary worked after school, making sandwiches. An elderly Jewish couple owned the place. Some people thought the Jew people, as the colored people called them, were using Gary as a front to make the store feel more Negro friendly, but really everyone knew they only hired Gary so the colored people would feel friendlier toward them. Not rip them off so much. That’s how bad the neighborhood was getting.

When Fran would go by the store, Gary would be wearing a starchy linen apron tied high above his waist. If it was summertime, as it was now, Fran would be wearing shorts, knee-high tube socks, and Candies, bergamot plastering her bangs to her forehead. For Fran, Gary’s interest in her was like trying to learn a foreign language at a late age: frustrating and pointless but maybe there was something to it.

One summer day, near the end of the school year—they were sixteen now—she walked into the store and went up to him and said, “Hey.” Gary looked up from the hoagie bread he’d been slathering mayonnaise on. He said “Hey” back. Then he put his mind back on his work. Fran looked around at the cans of wieners and beans and saw nothing in them but dust on top of the lids. She was thinking about how to steal something she didn’t want. “So how long you got to work
here?” she asked, fingering the cellophane packaging wrapped around some pink and white Sno Balls. Gary was over near the store’s cookie and candy section.

“Till eight. Then I stay to help them lock up.”

“Oh,” she said, less than mildly interested. She pulled one of her socks up; the elastic was loose. When she stood up again, she caught Gary looking at her tits or bra straps. That made her think about trying to act modest, because girls should, she’d heard that somewhere, but what did modesty mean when everything was so obvious, like dust on old cans of Chef Boyardee macaroni and such?

“So what you doing after work? I mean, after you lock up?” She scratched the back of her knee, still staring at him. He cut the sandwich in half.

“Homework; I mean, nothing.”

“So, you want to hang out a little bit? It’s nice out. You know Olivia?”

“That’s the girl from your class? The one who beat her teacher up?”

“Yeah,” Fran said, not bothering with the hurt in Gary’s eyes. She was more interested in ignoring the Jew people who were staring at her, this girl who was taking up Gary’s time. Gary wrapped the sandwich in wax paper, then put it in a brown paper bag and carried it to the front of the store, where the Jew people were waiting on a customer. Gary was back before Fran could shake the memory of the mayonnaise sticking to the wax paper. Upon returning, he offered her a little smile. Mayonnaise teeth. “I don’t know if we should, Fran,” he said. “That was an old lady she hit.”

“So?”

“So if we went to her house, wouldn’t that be bad? Like agreeing with a bad idea she had once?”

“Bad for who?” Fran asked. “That old white lady was getting on Olivia’s nerves. I’m surprised it took her that long to get around to knocking her down. I would have fucked her up more, and before.”

Gary bent his head low, started wiping bread crumbs off the counter. He didn’t like that kind of language. Fran was the best kind of actress: one who wouldn’t take direction from some director who believed he had a right to her, no matter how nice he thought he was, or could be.

After he agreed to at least walk her over to Olivia’s, she pulled on his heart a little more by stealing a package of Ring Dings. She didn’t hide them in her shirt or socks. She just crushed them in her left hand, like a purse she kept forgetting to throw away. She didn’t even want the cakes. What she wanted she got when she walked out the door with that mess in her hand: the look of incredulity on Gary’s employers’ faces as she sashayed past them, defying them to stop her for not paying. What Fran didn’t see and never would was Gary motioning to his employers that he would take care of it, pay for the damage. And he did.

Opening the door to her house, Olivia—small, busty, doe-eyed—let her smile of greeting curdle noticeably when she saw Gary standing there. “What you bringing him up in here for,” she said. It wasn’t a question, but a command. She eyed Gary, who was standing a little behind Fran. Fran didn’t say anything at first. In that moment, she felt less like a woman than a wall he couldn’t scale. Or write his name on.

“Gary,” Fran said, after a while.

“I can see that. Why?”

“’Cause I want him to be here. I didn’t want to walk over by myself.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I didn’t want to walk over here by myself.”

“Does this look like a hotel? I can’t be having all these people in my house, Fran.”

“Shut up, girl. Nobody’s trying to make you feel like anything.” Fran didn’t turn back to see if Gary was following her up the three white steps—an architectural detail germane to Baltimore, but who cared?—where Olivia stood sentry, but he did. Fran pushed past her. Gary followed. Olivia sighed, less annoyed than exasperated, and maybe something more. “I thought it was just going to be us,” she said, closing the door after them.