The Song and the Silence Page 4

  As I woke from my waking dream, I knew I was in trouble. I stopped walking and looked around; surely there were witnesses. What would my mother say? How would I explain this? There was no explanation for this. I clumsily tried to untangle my dark, ashy fingers from her soft blonde hair, accidentally taking strands of it with me as I worked faster and faster to free myself. Finally, she fell to the ground with a lifeless thud and lay there, whimpering pitifully like a wounded fawn.

  Then I ran. And when I did, she began to howl.

  The sounds of her screaming and crying followed me like an accusatory soundtrack that pulsated in my head as I ran to the edges of the playground, past other kids, through the opening in the fence, and into the packed parking lot where I found my babysitter’s dusty white car parked in a row with several others. Miraculously, it was unlocked and empty. I climbed into the backseat and crouched on the dark floor. I shut my eyes and an image floated up behind their closed lids—a sketch of my face on the evening news. “A sweet, innocent, angelic White child was brutally attacked by a wild Black girl. Tune in at seven for the horrifying details.”

  Through the cacophony of laughing kids, mothers calling for their children, horns honking, engines starting up, and the distinguished voice of the newscaster in my head, I heard her—choking, crying. Her sound was getting closer, getting louder. I tried to hunch down even lower, willing myself to be smaller, mashing my brown limbs into the floorboard. I knew if I peeked they’d see me, but I couldn’t help myself. I lifted my head for less than a second, not even enough time to locate her, but that was all it took for the girl with the magic hair to find me. “There she is! I see her! I see her!” I crouched down and shook wildly, my knees banging against the floor, my head knocking the seat.

  I forced myself to take a deep breath. Something in me said that cowering on the backseat of a car was unbecoming of even the vilest bully. Plus, hiding was a sure admission of guilt. Bewildered denial was my best defense.

  I decided to get up and sit on the seat. When I slowly began to rise, I saw something that let me know there was a God in heaven who understood my anguish—the unrelenting pain of being different that could turn from sorrow to rage just by the sound of a taunting laugh from one of the most beautiful girls in the world.

  I hardly recognized the girl with the magic hair. Most of it looked like a cloud of swarming bees on top of her head; the locks that usually framed her delicate face were now stuck to it with goo from her snot and tears. She was being dragged again, but this time it was by a teacher who probably just wanted to go home. All I could see were the back of his white shirt and the shiny, over-starched beige slacks pulled up high on his waist. His hand held her elbow as he pulled her back toward the playground. She was facing the other direction, facing me, eyes desperately locked onto mine. In those eyes, I could see her burning with pain and confusion at the unfairness of what had just happened. As I studied her expression, I realized she hadn’t yet discerned, might never discern, that her looks—her magic hair and the creamy, soft skin that covered her long, slender limbs—afforded her a level of privilege in life.

  The more he pulled her away, the more she flailed against him, kicking her knees high. The magic hair that had been stuck to her cheeks lifted into the air in snotty clumps while she stomped and screamed, aggrieved eyes penetrating mine, face dark and twisted like a pounded beet, “There she is! I see her! I see her! I see her!” I turned away, covered my ears, and lowered my head just as my bones liquefied and my body slid back down to the floor. Her cry became more and more faint.

  After several minutes, I opened my eyes and looked up at the sky. It was usually a deep shade of ocean blue, with a brilliantly orange sun. Floating above me that day were dingy clouds locked in a slow, reluctant dance. My chest heaved, searching for air, as shame and shock threatened to suffocate me. There, in that artificial silence, I was overcome because I’d never felt so afraid, so very afraid of myself.

  Coming to Terms

  A few years after my mother’s revelation about my father’s nighttime activities, a knee injury ended his football career. He’d spent his life in the limelight, honing the skills of tackling and sprinting. When he played ball, the crowds were always cheering, the parties never ended, and a hum of adoration and awe followed him around like a repeating sound track. When his body gave way, the silence that followed came so quickly and was so consuming that it sucked up everything—dinner party invites, autograph requests, and, of course, the money.

  To make ends meet, my dad hired some guys and started a janitorial service. So many people had loved being with the football star that my parents spoke frequently and confidently about how his business would certainly thrive. They talked and talked about how well it would go, each time seeming to fall just short of convincing themselves.

  One afternoon, I was sitting on the carpet in our family room reading a book, when the phone rang and my father rushed from the kitchen to answer it. He was six feet eight inches tall and was covered in muscle, so whenever he moved quickly or spoke with anger, he reminded me of the coming of thunder.

  I listened to his deep, faltering voice. “What do you mean they didn’t do it?” Distant rumble. “They shoulda done it—I tol’ ’em to.” Thunder crackling.

  I pretended to keep reading, but I listened. I knew he was talking about work. Whoever he was talking to must have been cutting him off because my father kept starting sentences and then abruptly stopping. Then the storm erupted. He shouted, cursed, and slammed the phone down so hard that I glanced up to see if it had shattered. Our eyes met.

  He looked down at me from his great height, and I felt as though I was seeing him for the first time, or at least the first time in years.

  A messy beard swallowed up his cheeks, his upper lip was hidden behind an uneven mustache, his brows were unruly, and his medium length, ill-kept afro sprouted in varying directions. From behind the thick, curly vegetation that hid his face, he peered at me with eyes black as night, filled with fury. He knew I’d been eavesdropping.

  I looked away from his gaze, down at his neck. I feared that if I completely looked away it would seem disrespectful, but staring into those eyes felt like a challenge to something in him that had turned primal.

  I heard air rush out of his nose and he seemed to want to shake his head, but instead a tremor moved through his body, making his chest swell. He curled his long, thick fingers not into a fist but into a kind of claw, the way he had so many times before when holding a regulation-size football. Finally, he turned and stomped out of the room. I realized I’d been holding my breath.

  A few years later, when I was fourteen, right before I was supposed to start high school, my mother decided it was time to leave my dad. His janitorial business had never taken off, and neither had the job selling Simple Green, or anything else he tried after football. She’d secured a position answering phones at the local university and was finally making enough money to move out. My sister wanted to stay with my dad, so my mom, my brother, and I made plans to move from our spacious house in the hills to an apartment behind a strip mall.

  For weeks, boxes piled up in our formal dining and living rooms while my father spent most of his days in the small world he’d created, which consisted of the family room and the kitchen. If he wasn’t staring at the TV from his recliner, he was in front of the refrigerator searching for sandwich fixings, and he always wore the same thing: a loosely tied, navy blue bathrobe. It was too short for his large frame, so the hem of it knocked against his knees as he paraded around the house like he was the stuff of greatness, the orb around which our lives floated. He seemed to think by simply being, by breathing, he could keep us from going, that the very sight of him would knock sense into us.

  Whenever one of us was in the same room with him he’d mutter, “She ain’t goin’ nowhere,” followed by a chuckle.

  Then one day, the moving truck came. People arrived to help my mom load it while my father sat in his recliner, fli
pping through channels. Several times throughout the day I heard him say, with that same chuckle, “You ain’t really leavin’.”

  Finally, we were all packed up and making our way through the house to confirm we hadn’t missed anything, when the doorbell rang. My mother answered it to find a man with pale skin, salt-and-pepper hair, a matching mustache, and an easy smile. He told her he was a substance abuse counselor and that my father was addicted to alcohol and cocaine, but was getting help. With a soothing voice and passionless logic he encouraged her to stay.

  Without a sound, my mother headed out the door. I hurried to follow so she wouldn’t leave me behind. I don’t think she even looked back, but I did. My father was no longer in his recliner. He was in the rec room, sitting on the brown leather couch, staring at his hands where they hung between his knees while a stranger tried to save his family. I turned away and followed my mother out the door. Ten years would pass before I’d spend more than a few minutes with my father again.

  Everyone in our family was struggling. I watched as other members of my extended family—aunts, an uncle, and favorite cousins—struggled with alcoholism, went to jail, skipped college, had cars repossessed, and got evicted from cheap apartments. What the hell was wrong with my family?

  Before I graduated from high school, I developed a desperate, irrational fear that soon became a conviction. What plagued us must have something to do with the one thing that set us apart from everyone else. We were failing because we were Black, doomed because we couldn’t escape the pitfalls of our racial heritage. Were we marked by something that set us on a direct path for failure? I couldn’t share these concerns with my mom. She was strong. She never seemed to entertain the idea that there was anything she couldn’t do. And somehow, even though she didn’t say it out loud, I sensed that my mother felt something akin to resentment or bitterness—but not exactly either of those emotions—toward White people.

  She was guarded with our neighbors and suspicious of my teachers. It was like there was a part of her, just below her surface, that would dramatically shift each time we entered into a space where White people were present.

  If she ever had even the slightest reason to believe someone was mistreating her or her children because of race, she was instantly whipped up into a frenzy. Like someone performing an exorcism, she’d storm through the house declaring our intrinsic value with moving, passion-filled words. She’d rage at the powers that be and explain out loud, to no one at all, of her plans to write letters, call someone’s boss, hire attorneys and on and on.

  Bringing up questions about race with my mom meant taking the chance that I might set her off, igniting that thing in her that I knew would burn and burn until somehow it cooled off on its own, in its own time.

  Left to my own limited understanding of the history of relations between Whites and Blacks, I spiraled deeper and deeper into despair.

  I began to see myself and the members of my family as beings in a postapocalyptic world, surrounded by people whose own worlds were flourishing, whose lands still produced the seeds for happy tomorrows. Filled with a certainty that something buried in my genetic code would cause my every endeavor to fail, I stumbled through life, waiting for the curtain to fall.

  * * *

  WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN years old I moved out but still tried to keep in close contact with my mom. The truth was that I both clung to her and pushed her away. She was all I had. My father was gone, I hadn’t stayed in touch with my aunts or cousins, and I didn’t have any close friends. I wanted her affection, but I didn’t want to be like her. I tacitly communicated my disapproval of her explosive responses toward Whites. She wanted to stand up for something; what I didn’t know. I just wanted to belong.

  Even though we were no longer living together, we held on to some traditions. We’d always loved a movie called Terms of Endearment. She’d taken me to see it when I was eight. The story follows a mother and her daughter through their lives and examines the myriad of complexities that exist between them. If Terms of Endearment was on television, we’d call to let the other one know and then we’d both watch it, calling again to reconnect while the final credits were rolling. Over the phone I’d laugh through tears as she made jokes about Shirley MacLaine’s wigs and commented on how good Jack Nicholson still looked. I always cried because no matter how many times I watched it, I couldn’t stop hoping that somehow the ending would change and Emma would pull through. But my mother would laugh her lovely songbird laugh and I’d remember that it was just a movie.

  Then when I was nineteen—no longer a child but still pretending at adulthood—I woke up early to start a new job at a call center. I got into my car just before 5:00 a.m. and headed to the grocery store to pick up something for lunch. It was still pitch black outside when I parked, went into the store, made a purchase, and then returned to my car to find that it wouldn’t start.

  This had never happened to me before, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Did I need to call a tow truck? Where would they tow it? I was anxious. I’d be late to work on my first day. I needed a solution. Across a small stretch of grass, I saw a pay phone. I checked to make sure I had change, and went to call my mom.

  I told her what had happened. Toward the end of my explanation my voice cracked and I said, “I just don’t know what to do.”

  In a whisper that sounded like a wire about to snap she said, “If you start crying, I’m gonna hang up on you.” I knew she meant it. A lot of our phone calls ended with my mom hanging up on me.

  I covered my mouth as, silently, I began to cry. I didn’t take in what else she said because I was worried about what I’d do when it was my turn to speak. She’d be able to tell I was crying, and then she really would hang up. There was no one else to call and I only had a few hundred dollars to my name.

  She asked me a question, but I didn’t hear it because I was drowning. Did she know I was drowning?

  I heard myself yell, “Fine, fine, hang up! I don’t care anymore!” I slammed the phone down onto the receiver and stared at it.

  I’d never spoken to her that way before. Without panic, I began to wonder what had just happened, but I already knew. I’d flung her—and the hope of help—far, far away. There was no one else. Only one of my roommates owned a car. I could call her or someone from church, but everyone I knew would find a way to tactfully communicate just how much I was putting them out. That was something I couldn’t face, not then, not when I was drowning.

  It was January, cool but not too cold. The San Diego morning was still dark, barely beginning to stir. Out of its silence emerged a knowing, a truth that wrapped itself like a fist around my throat: Everyone needs family; it’s the thing that keeps people tethered to the world, keeps them from drifting away into an irrelevant oblivion.

  I could feel my heart pounding, but the sense of alarm hadn’t yet reached my mind, which was steady and calm. I looked around. In the parking lot, my car sat in what struck me as a kind of slouch, as if it had already given up. The cracks in the sidewalk were growing dark with moisture as the morning fog descended. Drops of dew shimmered in the grass.

  I pushed my hands into my pockets and inhaled deeply. The air that filled my lungs was so salty it felt artificial. I turned away from the pay phone and headed back to grocery store for one final purchase. Then I walked home, where I used my forefinger to push as many sleeping pills down my throat as I could.

  * * *

  ONE OF MY ROOMMATES, the only one besides me who owned a car, returned home from work early and rushed me to the hospital, where I was informed that I’d have to stay for a few days before they’d release me. The people working at the hospital seemed very concerned for my welfare and kept a close watch on me. One nurse noticed, in the middle of the night, that I was having trouble sleeping. She came in and offered to give me a massage. I felt so cared for, but I knew they’d all forget my name within a week. They weren’t family.

  The hospital I was taken to was on the campus of the universi
ty where my mom worked. The front door to her office was about half a mile from the entrance. When she came to visit me, she rushed in wearing a flowing outfit and carrying a large handbag. For a moment, I flashed back to my favorite scene in Terms of Endearment, when Emma’s best friend, Patsy, visits and finally explains what their relationship means to her.

  Naively believing that life could be just like the movies, in the few seconds it took for her to walk to the chair next to the window, I managed to convince myself that this was the time when my mom and I would figure out how to say all the things we needed to say.

  She fell into the chair as her oversize Louis Vuitton bag flopped onto her lap and she said, “Don’t you ever do this to me again!” She crossed her arms and looked away from me. She only stayed for a few minutes before rushing out, her long skirt barely clearing the door before it closed.

  I waited for her to visit me again, but she didn’t.

  Each morning, I imagined her driving by the hospital entrance on her way to work and then passing it again at the end of the day on her way back home. I couldn’t help but wonder if, when she drove past, she looked up toward my window or stared at the road ahead. In my mind it occurred the same way every time. Behind a sheath of thick mascara, her dark brown eyes were fixed on the road ahead, and beneath a perfectly plump, rouged cheek were a clenched jaw and unsmiling red lips.

  I sat in the hospital as hours ticked by without anyone from my family visiting or calling to see how I was doing or to offer me a place to stay while I recovered emotionally. I began to wonder how I’d managed to miss out on an essential aspect of human life. Connection and its offspring, the feeling of being wanted, of being enjoyed.

  I looked out my window and searched the silent sky. I could feel my emotional self going over a waterfall, sliding along a wet rock face, my eyes searching for something to grab hold of, for a way to gain a purchase in an impossible predicament. I didn’t feel sad. This was heavier than that. I didn’t feel alone. This was darker than that. What welled up in me was a burning, raging sense of shame. I was so lonely it was embarrassing, so disregarded it felt like a joke, a comical exaggeration.