Black Ice (12 page)

I didn’t see the little guy who came to steal the ball. I didn’t see him at all until he was right in front of me like a sudden insult. I was stunned. The ball was mine. The goal was in sight. I could see the goal tender’s fear, his awkward alarm. I loved how he called out to his fullbacks—as if they could stop me. But who was this little guy who would not be moved?

He put out his foot to snag the ball. He got it, and pulled it just to the side of me. I scooped the ball back with the inside of my foot, and knew I had to move it again, but could not, because he was there, the little guy again, his cleat coming, slender and tenacious. Then I charged. There was screaming around us, coming closer. I had to have the ball. I had to drive it in. I didn’t realize I had fallen until the impact of the hard ground went up through my hip and reverberated inside my
head. The ball rolled away. The whistle blew, and they stopped the game for us. His face contorted to hold back his tears. Clouds drifted overhead, wispy and beautiful.

I saw him a couple days later. He swung himself gingerly between his crutches as if his armpits were sore. He smiled bravely at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said to him, trying to feel more intensely the throbbing in the purplish lump that had appeared on the side of my own leg.

“That’s all right,” he said, shrugging his shoulders above the crutches. “You couldn’t help it. Are you all right?”

“Sure. Got a bruise or two.” I felt like a brutish distortion of those big, black women I so admired, like Sojourner Truth as the actresses portrayed her: “Ah kin push a plow as far as a man—
And ain’t I a voman?!”

I worked harder the rest of the term than I had ever known I could work. I looked up more vocabulary words and wrote papers and practiced grammar. I worked and reworked trigonometry equations. I took to paraphrasing an old nun I’d once seen in a movie. She croaks at the girl whom the Virgin Mary has visited: “I have read the words of our Lord God until my eyes burned like the very fires of hell. Why should God choose
you?”

No longer convinced of the special brilliance I had once expected to discover in myself, no longer certain that my blackness gave me precocious wisdom, or that I could outslick these folks, I held onto that crazy old nun. They might be smarter than I or better prepared or more athletic. They might know the rules better, whatever the unspoken rules were for leaping to the top of this world and staying there. But I could work. I could read until my eyes burned like the very fires of hell! I could outwork them all. (Ain’t I a voman?) Will, it seemed to
me, was the only quality I had in greater abundance than my fellows, and I would will myself to work.

Examinations were the test of my resolve. During exams there were no more classes and no more sports, only studying, and for big stakes—exams were worth large fractions of our final grades. I felt the rush of pure competition. Studying distracted me from other people, thoughts, worries.

At the appointed hour we walked to the gymnasium, where folding tables and chairs were arranged in rows on white mats that muffled the noise of our footsteps. Blue books were stacked, fresh and clean, on the front desks. Teachers handed out their questions and smiled encouragement. Our religion exam asked one question in its final section: “Who is Jesus?”

I was unprepared for the question—and for the gusher of feelings it released. Suddenly it mattered to me that in His name the red-bearded men, missionaries, soldiers, capitalists, adventurists all, clambered over the earth as if it were a woman’s body; that in Jesus’ name they triumphed and we suffered, and in Jesus’ name, too—for Christ’s sake—we both claimed justice, oh, and looked for the faith to unite:

(We sang it in chapel, John Oxenham’s words—he had a name—set to the generic “Negro melody” in the hymnal.)

It mattered to me to get it right about Him: the lamb-shepherd-bridegroom-buffoon, the Way and the Light, the dreamy boy on the calendars tacked onto the wall over my great-grandmother’s side of the bed. It mattered, though I could not write it, and there was no place for it, that she criticized and judged, that she told us, with reference to the color of the man we should marry: Don’t darken your bread. It mattered
that when she died she took with her any hope of her approval, so long withheld, but so close that at times we nearly had it. She’d snatched it back into the grave with her like a setting sun pulling the last streaks of light from the sky.

The blue-eyed boy over the bed, talking to the elders at the temple, holding His hands out to the children: Only He would love those unworthy of love. He was the bridegroom, the resurrection, and the light. I wanted so to believe, to make what Tillich called “the leap of faith.” I imagined myself jumping at a brick wall, naked, bruised, leaping at a garden beyond. My head filled with noise and pictures, scraps of music from Hollywood Bible epics, the remembered tastes of the papery African Methodist Episcopal wafer and grape juice, and the comfort of sucking my own fleshy thumb at night.
Take, eat
. God only knows what I actually wrote.

By the time the exams were collected, I arose, stiff and tremulous. I had no idea how I would face studying for the next, or sitting to write it, letting loose in my head so much noise and chaos in the quiet, orderly gym.

But I did. We all did, again and again until it was over.

Just three months after my parents had delivered me to St. Paul’s I was on my way home again. Fumiko came with me. On the bus to the station, I buzzed with exhaustion and anticipation. One student in the back of the bus pulled out a joint; a couple of others passed bottles in brown paper bags.

“Have some?”

As we drove through the Merrimack River valley, I thought of the winos’ street-corner toast:

“No, thanks,” I said. I used an off-handed voice and lit a cigarette to show my cool. My mother would have killed me had I arrived with liquor on my breath. I could smell it even as Fumiko and I dozed.

I thought and then dreamt about the wet necks of bottles everywhere, and about a glamorous adulthood, when I would drink, not out of a bottle, but from thin glasses clinking ice cubes. I loved ice. I thought about a girl at school who made piña coladas, and in a blender, no less, before Seated Meal—the very drink my grandmother and her friends sipped (“Oh, no, my dear, just one for me; these things sneak up on you!”) at their club dinners. I thought about my other grandmother, who drank until cheap Scotch released the rage within her and the insatiable hunger: for more life, more beauty, more men, more food, more love, more money, more luck. I thought of her asleep on the toilet and awake the next morning, the smell of Scotch excreting from the fine pores of her velvety skin, of her toothless shame and the guilty, secretive search for her teeth. I thought of her soprano voice, that was cracked and pitted now by alcohol and tobacco. How could you have a voice like that and destroy it? I wondered. How could you live with yourself?

When I could bear my own homecoming thoughts no longer, I turned to Fumiko. We made excited eyes and talk together. She was an excellent traveling companion and, when we arrived home, a perfect houseguest. Fumiko’s exquisite Japanese manners delighted my family. She brought gifts: pink-and-white-faced dolls with embroidered kimonos and silky black hair. My mother installed them in the china closet where they still reign. After a trans-Pacific phone call, her parents shipped us a five-gallon keg of Japan’s best soy sauce.

Whenever my family seemed in danger of confusing Fumiko and her dolls, I warned them pedantically: they were not to
make geisha-girl cracks; they were not to treat her as if she did not speak English; they were not to pull out their five facts about Japan for her confirmation and agreement.

In fact, my mother recognized without any help from me that Fumiko was a teenager, mischievous, full of hormones, and in need of maternal guidance. When Fumiko announced that she had given our telephone number to a Philly-born boy she’d met at another prep school, my mother set strict visitation rules.

“If that child thinks that I’m letting her waltz out of this house with some Puerto Rican from North Philly, she’d better think again.”

“Oh, Mom, he’s not ‘some Puerto Rican,’ ” I said archly. (More and more often, I found myself mortified by my family’s lack of Third World unity.) “He’s a guy who goes to a prep school … just like we do.”

“
I
don’t know him. I promised that girl’s parents that I would be a mother to her just like I’m a mother to my own children. I tell you what: I would not want anyone to let my child go off in some strange city with some strange man they’d never even met. That is
not
my idea of looking out for a young girl, and despite what you all may think about yourselves and your independence, the fact is that you
are
still children, and I
am
still mother.

“And besides,” she continued, taking another tack, no doubt because of some scrap of resistance in my face, “let me tell you one thing. Some of the weirdest people I know are educated people. Why? I don’t know. But the fact that he’s a preppie doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. I am not impressed by education. He could be even crazier than he would have been had he stayed home in North Philly!”

So Fumiko’s admirer came to visit on a weekday afternoon (not evening). The trip took an hour and a half on public transportation. (“I am
not
using up my gas and my day to
chauffeur some boy. If he can’t find his way, with that education he’s getting, well, shame on him.”) When he arrived, my mother made a face to indicate that he was bigger than she’d expected. He had a bigger bush, and a hat that he made the mistake of leaving on in our house. Something else was wrong, too.

My mother and I went into the kitchen to leave them alone together. We closed the door. “I’m sorry,” my mother said after a minute. “I can’t take this any longer.”

“Oh, Mama, please,” I whispered. “It’s just for a little while. My Lord, you’ve only given them an hour or two. How much could a little funk hurt in one hour?”

“A little funk? Is that what they’re teaching you? You don’t smell like that. Not yet at least. God knows that child doesn’t smell at all.”

“Japanese don’t smell.”

“That’s the goofiest thing you’ve said yet. I know
he
smells, though, and I can’t have it. I just cannot have it.”

“What are you going to do?”

My mother looked at me scornfully and mounted the staircase. I was aware that I was placing the tender feelings of this big, funky dude ahead of my mother’s sovereignty in her own house. I spent a few idle moments wishing that they had gone to the movies as they’d wanted. I had promised to chaperone. Then I spent a few more moments cursing my mother’s need to lord it over us that this was her house. Her house. I had thought St. Paul’s would have freed me of all that, but instead, I was back here getting double doses, just so I wouldn’t forget under the subversive tutelage of those people, people who obviously had no control over their own children. Mom had several complaints about what those people were doing to me: they had me eating too fast, dumping pepper on my food as if she hadn’t already seasoned it just right, neglecting to wash my hands frequently enough, forgetting to mind my tongue. By the
time I had done thinking and sighing, my mother returned from upstairs.

She stood on the landing. “Now I want to do a little something,” she announced to the pair on the brown brocade couch, worn shiny in patches.

“What is it?” Fumiko asked, prettily biting her consonants.

“Close your eyes, everybody!” Mama’s voice was falsely bright.

I knew that tone. I watched her with suspicious dread from the kitchen. Then I saw them close their eyes, and my mother pulled from behind her back an aerosol can of deodorant.

“Keep them closed!” she sang.

She sprayed all around them, making sure to get some mist on the big, odoriferous interloper. Then she opened the window behind them a crack to let in the winter air.

“Just a funny little family custom,” she said to Fumiko as she floated back into the kitchen. “There,” she said to me. “All done! Just like a needle at the doctor’s.”

I visited Karen and Ruthie. They asked how St. Paul’s was, and whether or not I liked it. I wanted to answer them honestly. I wanted them to know how my life had changed so that we could sit down in the dim light of Karen’s living room and talk about it. But I did not have enough words or time to make them see it and feel it with me, and besides, nobody, not even my best friends, cared as much about St. Paul’s as its students. Nobody else lived there. They lived, as we Paulies joked, in the real world.

Fumiko told them in her halting English that St. Paul’s was “very hard.” I agreed, and once they laughed, I broke into the monologue that I repeated, with variations according to the audience, for years: “First of all, you’ve got to understand that the teachers are all a little screwy. You’ve got to be to stay in
a place like that for twenty years. These are the people who decided to opt out of real life at some point, and they are set loose on us twenty-four hours a day.

“OK? You got the picture? There is no escape from these people. They are out to
improve
you: how you read, how you write, how you run, how you look, what you say at the dinner table, how you
think
. You see what I mean by no escape? Meanwhile, back at the dorm, the white kids are blasting the hardest hard rock you’ve ever heard.…”

Later, I figured, when I understood the school better, then I could talk to them seriously about it. For now, I wanted to make them laugh. I wanted to entertain. I didn’t dare risk being boring or snobbish or cry-babyish about my new school. I didn’t want to lose them.