A Gate at the Stairs (25 page)

“A fool’s game.”

“And this pertains to our discussion how?”

“Since when did pertaining pertain?”

“Oh, yes, military recruitment of minorities.”

“The schools are off to begin with. Busing and integration are never done right, and so it’s a fool’s game.”

The fool’s-game person again. Or the fool’s-game person’s brother.

“Look at the schools in this town. The only one that’s not failing black kids is the magnet one where whites are only twenty percent of the school. Now, that’s empowering! Put them in a white school, they are all relegated to the tech courses. They get put in the basement with the vocational teachers. Then they have dropped out by junior year, while the white parents continue to hoard the resources for their gifted and privileged. They want money for stringed instruments! They demand it! They get violins, we get
violence
. Man, you’d better get some money for some black teachers, I say.”

“Plus, the school boards are hiding the real numbers. The figures they offer show only dropout rates from senior year. If you drop out before you’re not in the tally, because you’re going to make them look bad. You’re MIA.”

“So the numbers are a fairy tale.”

“They’re a bad fairy tale.”

“Told by a bad fairy.”

“Oh, I think I know who you mean.”

“Stop!”

“The weird thing is that as fudged numbers go, they are still socially and racially unacceptable.”

There were murmurings and bursts of laughter and indecipherable ebbs and crashes of seeming silence that would suddenly bring forth from a great distance, like the approaching music of Ravel’s
Bolero
, some new monotonous melody.

“So what are you saying? That nothing short of a revolution will do?”

“Well, maybe.”

“Well, that’s hogwash.”

I had once seen a hog washed. In whey. The hog was Helen, and she really liked it, the slop of the whey, then later a cool hose.

“It is the most unhelpful stance.”

“Darling, maybe it looks unhelpful, but it seems to help others. I mean, someone has to be an idealist.”

“That kind of idealism is cynicism of the most extravagant and ostentatious sort.”

“Everything has to be doable here and now?”

“Everything has to be less stupid.”

One of the biracial girls—Althea—stepped forward toward me with a joke. Her face was lit bright with it. “Why do black people get so tall?”

“Why?”

“Because their knee grows!” she squealed with delight.

“Who told you that?” I asked, and she pointed to one of the white girls in the corner. My having been told this joke was a source of such hilarity that both she and Althea covered their faces with their hands and laughed so hard that I laughed, too.

Reynaldo and I went to movies on campus, ones I deemed romantic date movies, and he would shift his legs around restlessly and joke about the drama’s predictability. “Oh, I knew that they would do that. Of course.”

“How did you know?” I whispered in the theater’s musty dark.

“A call came in on my cell phone.”

And I would squelch a laugh, then minutes later he might say in his intermittent accent, “My cell phone says she turns and walks away right now but then looks quickly over her shoulder.” And of course he would be right. And I would laugh. We would go back to his house and drink tea.

“The first time I used a cell phone I felt so ashamed walking along talking. Talking to no one. Like a mad person. But God when he made this great world put everything in it. He knew what to put in it so we could someday have cell phones.”

“Kiss me,” I would say.

Sometimes we would go to a Palestinian rally, then come home, light little tea lights, and go to bed, candlelight vibrating the room like a handheld camera. He kissed like he’d been kissing for decades. I tried to learn what he knew.

At night he wrapped himself around me, legs and arms, and we slept spooned like that until in sleep one of us had to move a little. Still, we never let our skin pull entirely away from the other. “Do you believe in spiritual mistakes?” he whispered into the dark one night.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you believe an entire country could embark on a spiritual mistake?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe an entire country could
be
a spiritual mistake?”

“Yes.”

And though he continued never to express a single word of love for me, not in any of his several languages, I could not take a hint. Let the hint be written across the heavens in skywriting done by several planes—I was dense. Even skywriting, well, it wasn’t always certain: it might not cover the whole sky, or some breeze might smudge it, so who could really say for sure what it said? EVEN SKYWRITING WOULDN’T HAVE WORKED! Several years later, I would wonder why I had thought my feelings for this man were anything but a raw, thrilling, vigilant infatuation. But I still had called them love. I was in love. I had learned the Portuguese and the Arabic for
love
, but all for naught. At night in his apartment bedroom, with only the little red eyes of his stereo and phone and laser printer to light up the dark, he told me in a sighing way how I was his only friend, how he had just moved here in January after his business in New York fell apart—a delivery business that took things to and from New Jersey and Queens in a white van painted
NO PACKAGE TOO SMALL.
After 9/11, his van could no longer make it through the tunnels and bridges in a timely fashion. As a brown man, he was constantly pulled aside and fleeced for drugs. One by one, he lost clients. Packages did not arrive quickly enough. And by December he had sold the panel truck to a white man and with the money was registering online for classes out here. “I thought I would go back to school a little.”

I liked the way he said “a little.” “Why out here?” I asked him.

“Good question!” he said. Some friends in New York had recommended it. “Besides, there are no tunnels for everyone to be terrified of.”

“No, no terrorism. What you have to worry about here is—
corn mold
!”

“You are a farmer’s daughter,” he said.

“Did you have any green card issues, running that business?”

“Green card?”

Neither one of us really knew how that worked.

“Immigration status and all that.”

“Oh, no. No problem there. How do you think Mohamed Atta got in? It’s easy. Hasta la vista, baby.”

“I wonder if Mohamed Atta ever said ‘Hasta la vista,’” I said now.

“Oh, I’m sure he did,” Reynaldo said quite seriously.

And then he would turn me over and begin to massage me, his fingers made of some kind of steel, and like the cracker and digger used to splay open a lobster his hands dug in. The muscles of my back and neck and legs slid apart, and even my feet seemed to spread like the bones of a fan. When I would reciprocate he would say, “Take your long guitar nails and scratch my back,” and so I would.

“Where does it itch?” I would ask.

“Uh, yes, over there.”

“Don’t do that there-over-there thing. You’ve gotta say up, down, left, or right.”

“Copy,” he said, and then, “Yeah, right there, right in there, a little back and over …”

“See, no, don’t do that back-and-over stuff.”

“I said ‘right.’”

“But not the directional right. I’m not a psychic. The itch travels. But the—”

“—witch does not?”

“Yeah, the witch does not …”

“Ah, but she is lovely.”

Most everything was beyond words, in a plateau of pleasure and pain that lifted out the tongue and stomped it on the floor.

On the other hand, for him I seemed just a diversion. After lovemaking he would turn on his back and stretch and proclaim his relaxation.

“Relaxed? You just feel relaxed—that’s it?”

“Oh, no,” he said, turning to look at me. “I also see fireworks and Jesus flying by in a cape and all that.”

“Good!” I would let him mock me. I would find any time, any moment, any excuse to get on my Suzuki and zoom over to him. I would go bareheaded, letting my hair whip stick-straight in the wind. I had stopped wearing my helmet in all things, though I would sometimes don a muslin headscarf to keep my hair out of my teeth, and would walk into his apartment wearing it. He thought I’d called it “Muslim” rather than “muslin.” He would place his hands on my head as if he were blessing me. “You could have my child,” he would whisper, and I would hum and nod and say “OK.” But it was Mary-Emma, whom I already loved, whom I would imagine us having, we would have her, and love her, her giggle, her smile, her caramel skin. And sometimes it was true: the three of us would go out together, and we were like a family. If he had loved me, or even if he’d just have said so, I would have died of happiness. But it didn’t happen. So I didn’t die of happiness. Words for a tombstone:
SHE DIDN’T DIE OF HAPPINESS
.

Wednesday nights Sarah’s group still congregated and the remarks once again quickly wafted upward toward the attic nursery. The laundry chute conducted them even more than the staircase: maybe the words just climbed the stairs themselves, not even halting on the landings. The voices were alternately operatic, vaudevillean, sybillant, and tedious. Sometimes what sounded like singing was mockery. Sometimes what sounded like mockery was a request for food. Sometimes comments sounded seasick, or shopworn, or shot down, or like a station on the radio.

“The healthcare system and the school system and social security have to have means testing. It has to be the reverse of the way it’s been: poor people in, rich people out.”

“This whole racial blindness thing. These people who insist they don’t notice what color other people are. These parents who come to pick up their kids at daycare and pretend they’ve never noticed Jared’s skin. I wanna say, ‘Honey, if you’re racially blind like you say, that’s something of a handicap. Let me give you a cane! You’ll notice, by the way, that it’s white. Or maybe, since you’re colorblind, you won’t.’”

“The phrase
race card
, as in ‘playing the race card,’ where did that come from?”

“O.J.”

“Before that, I think.”

“Race card—
what the hell does that even mean? Another white idea.”

“Hey, as I said, we white people had a lot of bright ideas.”

“A black person can’t accuse a white person of playing the race card, as the white race card is played every day.”

“In fact, it’s not really even a card. It’s more like a deck.”

“It’s more like the whole game.”

“Do you know Alta?”

“She’s an awful fake poet. Oops—did I say that?”

“I do feel I know a whole lot about her body just by reading her work.”

“Oh, her work is so fake, that’s not even her body.”

“A poet with a body double.”

“I would like a body double—just for grocery shopping.”

“Do you get those looks in the aisles when you’re with your kid? That look that says
I see you’ve been messing around with colored people—we hope you’re paying cash.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“The suspiciousness.”

“And the suspiciousness of religion, too. I find that antiblack.”

“Don’t get me started on Islam.” It was the don’t-get-me-started-on-Islam person.

“What is the purpose of busing? They bus in the poor black kids and then segregate them anyway, sticking them in the basement, in the shop classes.”

“Were you here last week? Or was it longer ago that we were already talking about that?”

“When I first brought Kaz in to have him tested, to see whether he should be entering school as a first-grader or a kindergartner? And I sat outside the room listening while this lady gave him some crazy-ass test that went
‘Foot
is to
shoe
as
blank
is to
muff.’
He was five years old! How’s he supposed to know what a muff is?”

“Someday he will!”

“Stop! I mean, that is just the most antique and ridiculous analogy! I think he said something completely random like ‘rabbit.’ And afterward she came out to me with this worried look and said he was learning disabled and we would have to put him in special ed. He was five years old!”

“They track them early, for funding purposes. They need the numbers to be high enough for hiring. So the black kids take it in the teeth.”

“The internal segregation of even integrated schools is famous.”

“They have no concrete agenda other than that?”

“It’s pretty much a crock.”

I had seen quite a few crocks in my life—some of them moldering in barns, some cracked, some of them beautiful. All of them empty. I couldn’t remember a one that had had anything in it.

“It sure does give you a sense of what it is to be African-American in this world.”

“Well, yes and no.”

“Thank you.”

“Sorry to bring up hair again: Someone mentioned someone before, a woman who can do black hair? I need an address. I’m getting grief for Emmie’s afro.”

“Yeah, she should have some braids!”

“Elva down on South Elm can—she is cool and loves the kids. On Christmas she goes down to the homeless shelters and gives everyone free haircuts, black or white.”

“Is this Sarah Vaughan on the stereo?”

“Sure is.”

“Man, listen to her scat.”

“And you say you don’t believe in such a thing as black culture.”

“I don’t.”

“Ever heard Julie Andrews scat?”

“I don’t believe in gay culture or white culture or female culture or any of that. It’s just so …”

“Dream world, baby.”

“Ever heard Julie Andrews at all?”

“Hey, you don’t need blue eyes if you got blue earrings.”

I didn’t know what they were talking about most of the time. But sometimes, in recalling certain remarks, the context would clarify them. Certain phrases, like a dusting of sand, would float across my mind and heat to a sort of glass. I’d seen scat! And now here it was as an admirable thing.

“Vaughan takes ‘Autumn Leaves’ and turns it into
Finnegans Wake
.”

“Is that your argument?”