White Girls (36 page)

It was a Sunday in spring, fleecy-clouded. Even though Gary had been going out with Fran for two years and change, he hadn’t fucked her yet. Fran didn’t care as long as he kept giving her pocket change, and anyway, what was it to her, his old dick, the fact that it made him feel like a stupid interloper in her presence? He was too mother-soft for her anyway. There were plenty of hard motherfuckers around. She wasn’t even boy crazy unless the boys were crazy. If she did have to fuck Gary one day, she reasoned, she could get high first. She knew he was dick-soft that first night at Olivia’s, but she didn’t care. Drugs made her hard enough for the both of them. Maybe all she meant for him to be was a brother.

So while Gary cut sandwiches, she dealt drugs. There was so much money to be made, you had to be stupid not to develop some angles. Fran’d take little schoolkids into someone’s hallway and get them high on a variety of glues she’d mixed together and charge them fifty cents a pop. Or she’d buy bennies she got on Gary’s straight dime and drop them in her older sister’s hand for a dollar. She bought shoes with her money, too, but she didn’t wear any of her new shit when Gary dragged her over to his mother’s house for her first visit. Nor did she
get high. She didn’t want that woman—a mother—to know who she really was. In any case, getting high would have been redundant, she thought, once she got a look at his mother’s Technicolor Jesus. It was such a trip.

“You like my Jesus?” Mrs. McCullough asked her, by way of an opening gambit. There was a pitcher of lemonade and three tall glasses on the kitchen table, with little rings of liquid sweat underneath them. Fran was standing in front of the stove, facing the kitchen windowsill. Jesus was standing on it. Gary sat across from his mother, not looking anywhere at first, and everywhere, as one does when one looks at a movie.

“He’s all right.”

Beat.

“I’m glad Gar brought you home for a Sunday, Fran. After church is the best time for visiting.”

“Huh,” Fran said.

“Don’t you find it so, Gary?” Mrs. McCullough asked, turning to her son. Gary twisted in his chair, not looking at either woman. There they were, together, because of him; the realization prickled his skin with sweat and made him feel trapped and slightly sick.

“Gary?”

“Yes, Mama?”

“It’s nice that you could bring Fran over on a Sunday.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Fran, why don’t you sit down, honey. You’re making me nervous.”

“Oh, I’m all right.”

Beat.

Mrs. McCullough got up, brushing one of the wet glass rings off
the table at the same time. It was something to do, and having done it she couldn’t figure out what to do next, so she sat down. The kitchen was small enough without another woman standing up in it.

“Do you go to church, Fran?”

“No.” Pause. “Ma’am.”

“Oh, your mother—”

Fran cut her off.

“She just never—”

“I see.”

“Pardon.”

“Your mother.”

“She just never mentioned him. Jesus and all. Too many kids, I guess.”

“Well, it would be a shame if she knew what she was missing and still didn’t do it. He is a comfort. And the church! People just enjoying being together in His name. People like us. Like me and Gary. We go together all the time. Of course, Gary’s daddy never gets to church, because he works so hard every day, doing something or another. Like today. He won’t be here for supper.” She turned to Gary. “He’s working.”

“Oh.”

Gary thought he could say something, just on principle, but if he did, then the attention would be on him instead of the women, his two stars. So he shut up before he had a chance to speak. In this way, he was becoming a man.

“And you’ve lived here for how long?” Mrs. McCullough asked, knowing the answer. She was staring straight into the side of Fran’s
head. Fran couldn’t stop looking at Jesus. If she wanted Him so much, Mrs. McCullough reasoned, then she might as well go on and take him, since she was in a taking mood.

“I don’t know,” Fran said. “A long time. Always over on Fayette.”

“And how many of you are there?”

“You mean in my family?”

“Yes.”

“Five.”

“And I bet you’re the baby!”

Mrs. McCullough knew as well as anyone that Fran’s younger sister, Denise, had been the baby. But she had burned up in a fire. Fran didn’t want to talk about that.

“I am now,” Fran said. She fingered Jesus’ long, shoulder-length plaster of paris hair.

“He’s got good hair,” Fran continued. “Does he always look like this?” she asked, turning to Mrs. McCullough, who said: “He looks like the person you imagine.”

“I think he could be black.”

“I mean, he should look like love,” Mrs. McCullough said sharply.

There it was; there was no taking it back. She didn’t equate blackness with love. Coloredness was so trying, why add love to it? And anyway, what did Fran know about praising anything? My son, my Jesus. Mrs. McCullough knew where Fran lived, all right; that’s what accounted for her flat, trashy affect. It was due to her family tradition, too, and its legacy of smells. When she closed her eyes for a moment, as she did now, Mrs. McCullough could smell and then see Fran’s parents smoking reefers while their children ate boogers, their
nappy hair looking like hairy boogers on top of their idiot heads with their slack jaws underneath, dribbling snot from their flat, ashy noses, snot being what they fed on from generation to generation. And besides being nasty, Fran’s family was tearing down the McCulloughs’ neighborhood. Mrs. McCullough knew they were doing it out of nigger boredom and neglect. If that was the kind of love that Fran came from, what did she know about the Good, which was to say Mrs. McCullough’s son Gary, who was, after all, herself?

Mrs. McCullough said: “Well, let me get my plates on the table. You children must be starved.”

She got up. As she walked to the corner of the kitchen where the dishes were stacked, standing in neat rows, she rubbed Gary’s head. It was a mother’s gesture, an acknowledgment of this fact: if she had accomplished anything in this world by way of bettering the species, Gary was it.

Looking on, Fran felt something nasty-tasting well up in her throat. But it was too late to look away and not be sick. Mrs. McCullough called from the corner: “Honey, would you put a fire under those pots?” That first word, like Mrs. McCullough’s gesture of ownership moments before, caught Fran off guard and turned her saliva to tin. She did not know what that kind of female meant by anything. Words and gestures that are inexplicable to us annihilate the self, since we cannot prove we exist in a language we do not understand.

Fran was never one to be overwhelmed or discouraged, though. If being a girl in the presence of a boy-loving mother put her at a disadvantage, she wouldn’t show it. Just to contradict everything, she took Mrs. McCullough’s “Honey” as her own. She walked over to the
stove. She turned the gas on when she was certain she was in Mrs. McCullough’s and Gary’s line of vision. She could tell, as they set the table, that they were surprised she was standing at the stove; they kind of flinched. But since Fran was a guest and they were colored, they didn’t make any remarks about it. Then Fran did this: she pulled a leaf of collard greens out of Mrs. McCullough’s big stew pot, ate it, and said, a star fully aware of her audience: “Needs more salt.”

That’s the worst thing one black bitch can do to another: say your shit needs any kind of seasoning. It’s not we don’t ever do it to one another, but being colored we never talk about it. That would be grandstanding. Mostly, competition and need stay in our hearts, until they kill us. That’s just how our bodies work. Look at Richard, a perfect example of Negro genetics: all fucked on MS and living to crack jokes about it. What would Richard say about Fran looking into Mrs. McCullough’s pot? He’d pretend he was Fran, and imagine getting all up in Mrs. McCullough’s face with: “That your son over there? Was, I should say. He’s mine now. Come on over here, baby, and say good-bye to Mama.” Then, raising his voice, Richard would say: “I said come over here and say good-bye to your Mama—bitch. And bitch, say good-bye to your son, otherwise known as your wuzband.” Richard could get away with stuff like that onstage because we don’t say it in life. He was our id. Fran didn’t know from a stage, but to her, everyone was an audience. And like any star, she was annoyed when other people didn’t perform their parts in a way that complemented her own—or, worse yet, upstaged her. Mrs. McCullough as the Mother. Was that role greater
than her own? She wouldn’t know how to play that. And Gary letting Mrs. McCullough pat his head like a dog. What kind of performance was that? After leaving the Mother’s home, she took Gary back to her own so-called home and made him fuck her.

They did it, after a fashion, in Fran’s dirty room. Cranberry polyester sheets. The TV was on. I say they did it after a fashion, because it didn’t feel real to Fran. When she’d been with a girl like Olivia, Fran did her in the boy way. She could even hate her in the boy way. But Gary was too gentle, using his fingers instead of his business when other guys would, you know, just hit it. He wouldn’t even have known what she was talking about if she brought all of that up—other guys and such. If she did, maybe he’d go back to his mother. That would be worse than his hands.

Fran was quite the little performer, though, I can tell you. What she projected was a kind of Geraldine Page–like meanness. By the time she got to Gary, she’d been so evil for so long that she’d reduced her parents to sniveling roommates. She’d never quelled her desire to be a child, which is to say an actress, overtaken by a power greater than her own, told when to have the glass of milk and turn the light off: life as a stage direction. But now Gary was showing her what was inside her own body by pushing up against it—fear, which her meanness masked. He was using his mouth now. She could tell because fingers don’t breathe. He was offering her what he presumed she wanted: love. Exhaling it all over her wet.

Most showgirls, I can tell you, are interested in the audience
member they can’t get at, the guy in the third row riffling through his program while you’re pouring out your heart. Richard was that way. Even when he played stadiums, he could spot the guy in the fourth tier who wasn’t amused and work on him. Be an audience member that withholds and that tap-dancing bitch will beat the boards forever. Most showgirls, they’d get steamed if you told them they weren’t particularly giving out of makeup. That wasn’t Fran’s fear—that someone like Gary would say she wasn’t giving. She didn’t mean to be. What she feared that afternoon was that he would make her play a part he thought was perfect for her: the supplicant’s beloved. Before, boys had handled Fran like a passing moment descended from a larger moment starring them and the first woman they hated: Mother. Their hatred worked on Fran like the guy in the third row works on a performer: as the only lack of attention worth having. No matter how difficult or hard those boys thought she’d been when they were together, she was with them for their lack of attention. And now Gary was giving her nothing but.

He spent more time on her than any boy she’d ever known. That pushed her cowardice to the fore, plus her panic over not knowing how to act in relation to this slurping writer intent on making her play the role he’d written for her. His mother had been too much; now he wasn’t even reading a script—her script—that she could follow. Her instinct was to drag him out of that dark mess—she could only imagine what he saw down there—but fear gripped her stomach before she could act. Gary pushed harder. So hard, in fact, that she believed she’d relieved herself. She wondered if her meanness, fear, and cowardice—shaped like bullet-shaped turds—were smashed against the cranberry
sheets. She would not roll over and take a look. She didn’t know how to act. She couldn’t do anything, least of all see if she’d shat. In any case, Gary would have scooped her shit up, wrapped it up in Kleenex with a bow, and put it in her purse had he known that’s what she was looking for, instead of the happy ending his imagination insisted upon.

I can tell you that despite what was in her mind, she would have won the Hot D’Or Award for her performance that afternoon anyway. Sometimes the camera is less interested in what’s in your mind than in how you use your head. Eventually she got used to Gary’s probing what she hated, because she could get high while he did it. Eventually the drugs she liked helped her not only bear the tedium and horror of their life together, but cultivate it. Billie Holiday once said that she knew she didn’t want to be on junk anymore when she couldn’t bear to watch TV. The flat sameness of it, you know. That’s what Fran introduced into her marriage to Gary, almost from the first. An affectlessness—when she wasn’t being evil—that was meant to squash Gary’s Walt Disney approach to marriage. Are we happy? I don’t care. Isn’t our newborn baby a champ? I don’t know. Isn’t it amazing we got out of the old neighborhood and into this new house? Let’s call it love. I don’t care.

I have here the short article you wrote about Fran and the woman who eventually played her, in 2000. Now why can’t I have that? I was up for the same part. So what if Miss Alexander is younger than me by
some twenty years? I feel a certain resentment about the Diana Sands comparison you make, saying Miss Alexander reminds you of Cancer Bitch. I felt Fran when I read the book. So much so that I could make her backstory up. All I get is being a sister to celebrity. What am I supposed to do with that? Write children’s books about Kwanzaa and hope my brother dictates a five-hundred-word introduction that would sell it? Write a memoir that betrays family secrets? Or produce a documentary with, let’s say, Prince’s sister, about star brothers who overwhelm their equally gifted, barely lauded siblings? That’s what you want to hear. I am an actress. Maybe I could have done something different in this life, different than talking dirty to get you to be interested in me. I couldn’t have worked harder on Fran. Everything I’ve told you about Fran—it wasn’t even in the movie or the book. I know her so well, I could make her up and it would still be nonfiction.