All about Skin (21 page)

I would just do my hair and stare at the street.

Moms had tried putting extensions in a couple times, but the braids always fell out.

“Tasha, girl,” she would say to me. “You have your daddy's hair.”

Why she bothered to try and blame him, I don't know. Me and Moms had the same stubby coarse hair and I didn't wear the kind of slick black wigs she did, so the fake hair just slipped off. I was nine the year I started doing my own hair, planted on a toilet seat in the P.S. 26 bathroom, holding the dingy, tattered braid that had unraveled and dropped like a hanky full of snot. I fumbled with my hair for thirty minutes and my ass got numb. It wasn't a perfect braid, but at least when I got back to class, I didn't look like some ghetto unicorn with that one section of my hair shooting up from my forehead.

Moms only cared what I looked like when we went to Lego-looking New Jersey once a year. I was the quiet tomboy nerd wearing extra-large T-shirts and jeans that made me look closer to Moms's size. The rest of the Washington clan was pure Jersey suburbs by way of Alabama—country loud, beans cooked in turkey neck and pork.

I sat at the edge of everything, counting the hours until we could leave. While Moms cussed and drank, I parked myself on the plastic-covered couch in Uncle Larry's living room, partway between the kitchen, where a Spades game was already in full swing, and the back porch, where somebody had already lit a joint.

“She used to be a looker like you, Tasha,” Uncle Larry said. He had these dimples so deep you could hide quarters in them, and he must've had that couch since he was born. Anytime you sat down on it, it sounded like ripping scotch tape from a wall.

“Boys ran after her so much,” he said, shaking his head. “You don't remember this, you were a baby then, but she used to do all that she talked about—running the streets, hitchhiking and shit to get to the Lenox Lounge. You ain't heard that from me, though,” he said, dimples tucked in from his secretive smile.

“I won't say nothing.”

“Your daddy was one of those shady cats she liked—lots of game—but she barely finished high school when she got pregnant and he left. She blew up after that. She'd just be eating and carrying you around like a football under her arm. That Janet is something else.”

“Yeah,” was all I said back. The question was what else she was.

“Look after her, Tash,” Uncle Larry would say, not knowing it was me who needed looking after. The first thing I noticed heading back into the city was how quiet it had been outside of Uncle Larry's house. The loud honks of cabs and fire trucks greeted us as soon as we walked out of the train, muffled by the roof of Penn Station.

Moms couldn't move around without pain from the weight, and her fat made her wheeze while she slept next to me. She only cared about everything above her neck and her feet. She kept a stack of razors in the bathroom cabinet, to peel off her corns and to shave off her eyebrows real neat so she could draw them back on straight.

I would be hearing Uncle Larry's voice in my head,
Take care of her
, when I would sneak some food off her plate in the kitchen. I got bolder as I got older, bored at home after school by myself with just the radio and TV for company. I never knew where she was going, when she was coming back. She was like a sneaky roommate.

She kept the fridge full of leftovers, and this moldy half-eaten ham and cheese sandwich from the corner store tumbled out from in front of two others. I tossed it out, found some leftover corned beef hash, and warmed it up. I fell asleep watching
Square One
on the couch and woke up with the tight pulling of her chubby hand on my ponytail.

“What did you do?” she yelled, snatching me up by my hair. It felt like the hair would rip right from my scalp. “Get up. Get up!”

I leaned into her hand as she yanked me toward the kitchen. She opened the trash lid, holding my ponytail toward the can, like I was a dog she wanted to see the poop it crapped out.

“Mom, let go.”

“What the fuck happened that you throwing out food now?”

“It was old. I was just cleaning out the fridge.”

I couldn't shake my head without a sharp pain shooting through my scalp. She let my hair go and started punching me hard, like open stinging sores on my skin, warning me not to touch her food again. Her fists on my skin sounded like the start of a storm: hard rain, thunder, lightning, then the slow, fading clap of water, but they felt like hail scraping against my thighs and my arms.

The city was bustling outside, music playing, sirens wailing far off in the distance. I needed them closer, I thought, while I was trying to slip out from underneath her. Maybe it was because I hadn't screamed, because I knew from seeing my cousins get beat that that was just how it was supposed to be—kids got hit, sometimes with switches or cords or curtain rods. While it was happening, I would rap a few lyrics in my head, imagining my body on the fire escape, where I sat when she was sleep. It wouldn't take too long before our bodies ended up rumpled like tossed clothes by the side of the bed where we slept, near the windows with the rusty safety bars.

The next day, the next hour, the next moment, it would be like nothing happened. I knew not to touch her things. From then on, I saved all my cleaning-shit-out for my hair, eating only when Moms came home and then, only a little bit.

At school, it was like the world saw a sign on my back that said, “Kick me, I don't fight back.” The year I turned twelve, it started getting me aggravated. When you're weak and don't know how to be strong, it helps to keep your hands busy braiding, but there was only so much keeping my hands busy with that.

Moms would come home and after dinner she'd be slicing at her corns with a razor, watching
Jeopardy
. She would put the old banana-colored skin on a perfectly folded piece of toilet paper before she threw them out. “My dogs are killing me,” she would say, rubbing at her callouses. I would just look straight ahead. Wouldn't be so hard to walk if you wasn't so big, but that wasn't something I was brave enough to say.

Moms didn't move real fast but she had a smart mouth. I got that from her.

She got into it with a neighbor once because the lady from 4B said something stupid. Something like “fat man bitch” when we were all walking up the narrow staircase together and Moms was moving slow and breathing heavy. We were about to keep on going up the stairwell when Moms flew behind the couple, pounding her fist on the door like a slab of meat tossed against metal. “You said I look like a man, bitch?”

“Get off my door with that bullshit!” the lady said, her hands touching the hairnet that held her big pink rollers together.

“Say it to my face. Don't you ever talk that way in front of my child again, or it'll be me and you. Come on, Tasha,” Moms said to me, waddling back to the steps. The Child Protective Services cat said Moms had mental problems. Bipolar something. She wouldn't take medicine, though. She said medicine was for pussies.

The good thing about Moms beating my ass was that I stopped caring for a while about getting beat up at school. It took a couple of fights before I finally went off. I'd been proud for keeping my temper under wraps, and then one day it just got the best of me.

I saw this one commercial about MedicAlert bracelets, how they could help you in an emergency, so people would know what was wrong with you. All that other shit they sell late at night, it ain't no good—shit to get the dirt from the soles of your feet or make white girl ponytails look fluffy.

But I needed something to tell people what was wrong with me, so they couldn't say they didn't know. Maybe that's why those sirens were always headed past me; they didn't know there was someone who needed them in 4B at Daly Avenue Projects.

The bracelet was $9.99—sterling silver.

The one time I saw a doctor, he did say I had an irregular heartbeat sometimes. He made it sound like my heart hiccupped in my chest. Even my fucking organs weren't reliable.

Anyway, I had the MedicAlert people inscribe that on the inside of my bracelet, so if anybody ever came to save my ass, they would know what happened to me.

I slipped out of bed that night, after Moms started snoring, and put the bracelet on my wrist. I ran my fingers over the top of it, like I was blind trying to read Braille. It was dull silver with a snake in the middle and MedicAlert in red. It felt cool against my wrist. It made me feel wild safe, almost powerful, like I was rocking a low-budget Wonder Woman cuff. I wondered if I could use it to make Moms's knuckles bleed. I made up this little story in my head about how I was a tough girl now, as ghetto and hard as all these other chicks. All I needed was the chance to show off my new superpowers.

I needed the bracelet for more than just Moms, though. This dumb broad named Michelle liked to catch me after school and fuck with me. Michelle was big as hell, bigger than Moms. She probably had the heart of an elk in that big-ass barrel chest. She'd been in sixth grade for like four years, mad as fuck, staring at that same math workbook year after year.

Michelle was like the Puerto Rican version of Macho Man Randy Savage. Even the big kids got punked by Michelle. She wanted your tater tots? Gone. She wanted your wack-ass pizza with bad tomato sauce and too much crust? Housed.

The teacher sat me right next to her in the back of the dummy class. I never got a bad grade at any of the schools I went to, but I'd been to so many, the district said I had to be in the slowest class in the sixth grade.

Michelle sat right next to me, chomping on all the Bubble Yum in the world, spit at the sides of her mouth. Halfway through our spelling test, this gust of sugar wind interrupted me staring out the window.

“Yo, let me see,” gum face whispered.

I covered my loose leaf with my arm.

She sat straight up in the cramped chair, taking her gum breeze back with her. “I'ma fuck you up after school,” she said.

“Michelle!” Ms. Boswell said her name like it was a curse word.

Michelle sucked her teeth and pretended to write. I got 100. Michelle got a zero.

I should have been proud, but bullies don't fuck around. I should've given her the answers just so I could have some peace, but it was too late.

I thought I was slick, leaving out a side door when school was over, but Michelle spotted me in my worn-out denim jacket and my raggedy jeans with my regular-ass, no-name book bag before I saw her.

She grabbed the hook of the bag with one of her meaty fingers.

“Punk bitch,” she said in that husky voice. She sounded just like Moms. She didn't say much else and I knew better than to say anything, either. I didn't fight her back, I just let the beat down happen. Last thing I knew, I was crawling out of the empty dumpster on the far side of the parking lot that doubled as our playground.

“Fuck you,” I said to myself while I climbed out. An ambulance raced down Southern Boulevard on the far side of school. Somebody out there was getting rescued.

I went home with old banana smudges on my jeans. Moms didn't go to the Laundromat; it cost too much—all the quarters and the detergent. I washed those jeans in dishwashing liquid like we washed everything else and put them on the radiator to dry. The radiator left these rusty-looking bars on the few clothes we had, like the backs of our bodies were in prison.

“What happened?” Moms asked. She had a razor in her hand, her left foot crossed over her right thigh.

“I fell.”

“Girl, be careful,” she said. Then she went back to slicing off the rough skin on her heel with the razor.

That bracelet seemed to work, though. Maybe two weeks passed and Moms was calm and we didn't have a test every minute, so I'm thinking that the red snake on the bracelet had power, even if no one noticed me wearing it.

Michelle cornered me in a stairwell on the way out of school one day, anyway, just for fun. She was chewing the hell out of some gum. I pretended to scratch my eyebrow with my right hand to make sure she saw the bracelet. I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, too, so it was easy to notice.

“I got a heart condition,” I said.

“I need candy money,” she said, towering over me. This time she smelled like bologna and tropical fruit and sugar.

“All I got is pennies and food stamps,” I said.

“Oh, snap, you on welfare?” Her chubby face had a hint of pity in it for a second, then she busted out laughing. “Welfare kid!”

I wanted to call her retarded. Stupid bitch, you been left back since kindergarten. You gonna be a welfare queen when you grow up.

That's what I wanted to say. And then I heard this raspy voice say, “You probably on welfare, too.”

We both looked up. It was this white girl, Jeanie. She got to C.S. 67 around the same time I did. She was in the smart class, 6A. She always had fly nails, though—acrylics—and heavy brown braids that weren't extensions braided perfectly even in two rows on either side of her head. She was the only white girl I ever saw in the Bronx, and the only one at school, which is how I knew her name.

“Yo, white girl, shut the fuck up,” Michelle said, turning around. “This ain't your business.”

I found a $1 food stamp. “You can have it,” I said, showing off my MedicAlert bracelet again when I squeezed my arm up through the small alley she left between us.

“Nah, stop playing. I don't want no food stamps,” she said, backing off, looking at me like I was a fly distracting her from Jeanie on the top step. “Jeanie, give me some candy money.”

Jeanie looked bored. She was digging in her JanSport all calm, like a ninja. She plucked out this bright orange box cutter and flicked up the edge of it. It looked just like the razors Moms kept at home. She didn't say a word, just clicked the black button on the side, showing off the blade without looking at us.

“I got a heart problem,” I said again, folding my food stamp and putting it back in my pocket. My bracelet was still dangling from my wrist. I wanted Michelle and Jeanie to know that they couldn't go too far with the box cutter in this dark stairwell without repercussions. “Doctor said if anybody startles me, my heart might give out.”