Eye to Eye (6 page)

“Really?”
Doris asks, and I can see her wrinkled nose and squinting eyes that say, “
You've really gone round the bend now.”
“You don't get scared, not of skinny blondes, anyway.”

“I know. I know. Maybe it's just the stress of moving back home, and money, dealing with that horrifying child, being worried that Earl's okay—”

“Huh,” Doris says. I hear her take another sip of wine, and then she let's me have it. “YOU HAVE GOT TO SNAP THE HELL OUT OF IT.”

“But—”

“HELL TO THE NO,” Doris yells, mimicking Whitney Houston's now-infamous catchphrase during her reality TV meltdown. That shit was hilarious—in hindsight—now that Whitney's drug free and clear of Bobby Brown.

I'm laughing, but still trying to make my point. “Doris, seriously—”

“You cannot, and I repeat
cannot
start any of this horse shite,” she insists. “All that time when you were playing hard to get in Langsdale, I was seeing how hard Earl was working to get you. He's not going to toss you aside after moving
across the country,
for some halfwit, barely legal, dime-a-dozen L.A. floozy. Do you hear me?”

“Yeah. Really damn loud
and
clear.”

“Okay, then,” Doris says, and then I hear the tinny sound of her call-waiting beeping. “It's Zach, speaking of people who are hard to get.”

“Get it!” I holler. “Don't be mean, either.”

“Don't worry. I will.” She hangs up on me.

Doris's phone call was perfect timing and I think it's a sign that it happened when I was about to go on a walk. We used to always walk around the trail at the Y in Langsdale, and one of us was usually knocking some sense into the head of the other while we walked and complained about stuff. Doris was the one who gave Earl my number. I gave her shit for that, but she knew I would never call Earl. I would have kept running and running.

In Langsdale, I worked in a car parts factory to make money during the summer. The whole time, I was working with Earl's cousin and didn't even know it. Unfortunately, the cousin, Ray, thought I was a snotty university student slumming it, which I was, I realized by the time I was done. Ray gave Earl an earful about me, Earl told me later, but he still wanted to be with me. He saw something of me, in him, Earl said, which sounded crazy at the time. But then soon after we started dating, something happened, all because of James Baldwin.

It was my fourth time on Earl's hog, and he'd take me all over town. He'd picked me up from the library, where I was doing some research, and when we got to Griffey Lake, Langsdale's most beautiful spot—turning leaves in the fall, woodpeckers and ducks and every other creature I usually want to avoid—we hiked up to a clearing to talk. We lay on our backs and looked up at the sky. One of my books was poking out of my backpack so Earl asked me what I was reading. I pulled out
The Fire Next Time
and passed it over to him.

“Read something,” he said, passing it back to me.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I don't know James Baldwin.” Seriously? I felt that passing notion of our difference.
He doesn't know James Baldwin.
But I started reading anyway. Written in 1963, during the times when the racial shit was truly hitting the fan in America, any reader could see that Mr. Baldwin was pissed off—as were most black folks in America. In essence, Baldwin argues that all of us, black, white,
whatever,
really had best get it together or we were all going to go down in flames together. Sure, he was talking about the times in 1963, but for my money, it's still very relevant today. As I read, Earl's brows were scrunched together. “What?” I asked.

Earl sat up. “I don't know.” He ran his fingers through his hair. He looked of in the distance. A woodpecker concentrated on a tree nearby. “I feel mad or something.” He wouldn't look at me.

“Mad at what Baldwin is saying?” Good. I got mad every time, too.

“Yeah,” Earl went on, “I don't think…He's not…Well, hell, Ronnie, I feel like he's blaming me personally or something, whenever he says white people this and white people that. I ain't like what he's saying.”

Oh
no.
Here we go, I thought. I sat up, too, and stared at Earl hard. All of a sudden I wasn't sure what I was looking at. “Not you, personally, maybe, but white people of that time, and white people of this time still have a lot of privilege. Black people or other people of color keep struggling to be treated as equals.”

Earl nodded slowly. “But I ain't privileged,” he said.

He had a point, but I was becoming disappointed. I couldn't do this. If he was saying that racism didn't exist, that Baldwin was insignificant, Earl and I could never, ever, see eye to eye. “I want to go,” I said. I stood up, shoved Baldwin in my backpack, and started walking away from Earl.

“Hey,” he called out. “Wait a minute!” He caught up to me and grabbed my arm. I jerked away from him. “Don't do that,” he said. “Don't just cut me off, Ronnie.” He stood with his fingers in his belt loops and looked down at his boots. “Tell me something. Talk to me. I want to understand what you mean.”

“You want to quit bartending and go to law school. You want to help people who get treated badly. When Jimmy D. got fired at the factory, you were pissed off about that.”

“Well, yeah,” Earl said. His voice was getting loud. He was frustrated and trying to calm me down at the same time.

Jimmy D. wanted to see about a union at the car parts factory. He was out of there faster than you could say Norma Rae. Not even Ray, Earl's cousin who was the foreman, could do anything about it. I could tell he wanted to toss me out on my ass before he'd see Jimmy D. go, but I was only a temp. I let my backpack fall to the ground and crossed my arms. “So why is this so hard for you to understand? People don't like to get treated like crap. That's all.” I stared at Earl whose face was a deep red. He looked miserable.

“Ronnie,” he said. “Veronica.” He took my hand in his and his voice got soft. “I didn't mean to upset you the way I did. I just thought I could tell you what was on my mind. I want to be able to tell folks who I care about what's on my mind. Talk to me. Let's talk about all of this. Make me see what you're saying.” He put his hand on my cheek and stared at me. I was looking into blue eyes that were trying to get me to see him and give him credit for trying, and for being the person that he was.

“I don't want to explain. I want you to already know.” The wind was picking up then, and something flew in my eye. “Dammit,” I said.

“Let me see.” Earl held my face in his hands and blew in my eye softly until it watered. I blinked a few times, and then whatever it was, was gone. He wiped my cheek and then tugged on a braid. “Some things I cain't know until you tell me,” he said. “I'm going to do whatever it takes to understand what you need me to understand.” He was still holding my face, and so I leaned into him and felt his big arms wrap around me. We stayed at the lake and talked until it got almost too dark for us to get out of there, and Earl and I came to an understanding. We didn't know how all of this would end up, but we would always talk to each other, talk things through. Doris is right, I have to snap out of whatever this is I'm feeling. Earl is the real deal, Katie or no Katie. When the phone rings, I think it's Doris and I'm happy to tell her I've come to my senses. But when I look at the caller ID, I don't recognize the number or name. My hello is met with a Southern accent. Hmm.

“Hi. May I please speak with Ms. Veronica Williams?”

This voice sounds
exceptionally
Southern. Could be a bill collector—I am one of their favorite people—but they usually didn't sound this nice. I
could
say, “She's not home right now, may I take a message?” Classic. That's old-school bill avoidance right there. Not for amateurs. But I gamble, take a Vegas chance. “This is she.”

“How wonderful!” The accent thickens. “My name is Arianna Covington and I'm calling from Burning Spear Press.”

Burning Spear Press…Burning Spear Press…I'm hoping to remind myself, and then I realize that I don't care. I got traffic to look forward to. “I'm sorry, I can't afford any subscriptions or anything. Thanks for calling.”

The woman on the other end clears her throat. “Oh no, honey. You misunderstand. I'm calling about your manuscript, your novel,
F: The Academy?
You sent it to a friend of mine at Smith Alloy, who passed, but she sent it to me. I liked it a whole lot and would like to publish it.”

All at once I'm trying to figure out everything she's telling me. The manuscript I sent out after graduating Langsdale, sent out on a whim because Professor Lind, my Shakespeare professor, told me to, the manuscript that had exactly sixty polite, two-line rejection letters to show for itself, the manuscript that I had just thrown in a drawer and accepted as every writer's first novel that never gets published—until you're dead—was wanted by some publisher called Burning Spear Press. “Are you
serious?
This better not be somebody screwing around with me.”

“No,” Arianna Covington says, coughing slightly, “I'm not, uh,
screwing
with you. We'd very much like to publish
F: The Academy.
We think it's exactly the thing for our press. We're a new house, but we're big, and we're looking to publish promising up-and-coming writers.”

And then I flip out on old Arianna. I scream. I carry on.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I barely hear what else she tells me, only that my book which, by sixty other editors has been called many things, from a boring meditation on class, to a humorless meditation on class, to a pointless meditation on class further marred by a tedious discussion about race, is something that Burning Spear Press is very happy to be publishing. Other boring stuff about contracts and money—surprise, not very much—is also mentioned. Then Arianna, in her charming accent, congratulates me once again and I can't wait to tell everybody: Bita, Doris, Earl, my family. Yet there's a lingering silence on the other end of the line that makes me uneasy. Damn. There's a catch. There's always a catch.

Arianna starts out nice and sweet. “If you are familiar with our books…though, I've forgotten, you're not…” She stammers all over the place.

“Yes?” Uh. Oh.

“Well, Burning Spear has a very particular demographic. It's a press that publishes exclusively African-American books by African-American women for African-American women.”

“Uh-huh.” It was starting to sound awfully claustrophobic, but I stayed quiet so she could keep talking.

“So, let me just be as frank as I can be, Veronica. We're wondering if you'd be willing to make Dottie's character black.”

Dottie was based on Doris, but I was confused about the rest. “You mean dark? Like a villain?”

Arianna pauses. “No. I mean black, like African-American.”

I like old Arianna. She's a crack up. “That's funny,” I say. “I'm going to like working with you. You're hilarious.”

Silence.

“You're joking, right?”

“No, Veronica. We talked about the book in meetings—we love it—but think it would read more smoothly, be more attractive to our readers, if Dottie was African-American.”

Hmm. Was I getting punk'd or something?

“Are you there, Veronica?”

“Kind of,”
I reply.

“What are you thinking?” Arianna asks, after a moment.

“I'm thinking it's the craziest thing I ever heard.”

“Listen,” Arianna says, in a gently urging voice. “Dottie can stay the same person—more or less. You just identify her as black and keep the book basically the same.”

“I don't know. It's a weird change. I mean, part of the point was that Dottie's white.”

“Imagine that she's exactly the same, but just a different color. That's all.”

That's
all?
It's a lot to think about. Honestly, I don't believe that Doris would be the
exact
same if she were black. Environment and culture, etc.

“So will you take the book if I don't make the change?”

Arianna sighs. “I'm not trying to make this sound like an ultimatum, but there are other books that better fit what Burning Spear does.”

Oh, well, at least I got to feel good about being a published author for about five minutes. On the other hand, the more I think about it,
parts
of Dottie would be the same except a different color, right?

“Can I think about this for a day or two?”

“Of course,” Arianna says. “Please call as soon as you decide.”

After I hang up, I think about what an asshole ingrate I must have sounded like on the phone.
Let me think about it.
What a jerk. But there's something still exciting about this and I'm amped, amped with a caveat.