Silver Sparrow (8 page)

The McCreadys were a good family. His mother taught music to grade-schoolers and his father was a tax accountant. Marcus Senior handled my father’s books, something I discovered quite by accident, but it gave me a thril to be so close to James’s real life. When Marcus’s parents had renewed their vows at Cal anwolde, my father drove the limousine at a reduced rate. His father cal ed mine “Jim.”

We snuck around a lot, Marcus and me. When I passed him in the corridors at school, he looked away. After a month, I learned to shift my attention first. It wasn’t personal. It was just that Marcus had gotten into trouble the year before when he went to Woodward Academy, so he wasn’t supposed to run around with underclassmen. I slipped easily into my role as unacknowledged girlfriend. When you already had one secret life, what bother was it to have another secret within that secret? I even changed my appearance to exaggerate the effects of my doubly double life. For my everyday self, I gathered up my hair into two Princess Leia buns over my ears and stopped lining my eyes. I asked my mother to buy me black saddle shoes like Olivia Newton-John wore in
Grease,
but they didn’t make them anymore. I made do with penny loafers, wearing them with white socks, marveling at my chaste ankles.

“What is wrong with you?” my mother wanted know. “There is nothing wrong with fixing yourself up. Is this a phase?”

She took me by the shoulders and searched my face for answers. The deal was that we were to tel each other everything. She touched my forehead and then my ears. “Where are your earrings?”

“In my jewelry box,” I told her.

“You never wear them anymore,” she said sadly.

But I did. I wore them when I was with Marcus.

It wouldn’t be right to say that Marcus changed me, that he took a sweet quiet girl who wanted to grow up to be a pediatrician and turned her into the freak of the week. I know that’s what some people said about me behind my back, but that doesn’t make it true. It was more like Marcus showed me new possibilities. I met him, of al places, in Kroger. My mother and I were there to stock up on canned goods — the weatherman had predicted up to four inches of snow and the city was going crazy. Mother had gotten home late and we had rushed to the store to see if there was any food left. She made herself busy snapping up whatever cans of soup remained and I was sent to find deviled ham. The store was packed with panicked shoppers, snapping up anything nonperishable, even oysters packed in brine. The deviled ham was long gone, but I did spy a few dented cans of Vienna sausages way in the back of the shelf.

I was cradling several cans in my arms when I felt a tug on my belt loops. I looked over my shoulder and saw Marcus. I knew who he was — there was no way you could go to Mays and not know Marcus McCready I I.

Stil holding me at the waist, he leaned toward me, resting his newscaster chin on my shoulder. His breath smel ed of orange rind and something spicy like clove. “Hey, pretty girl. If you wasn’t jailbait, I would ask you to give me a chance.” His hand moved up from my belt to my back. I stood stil and let him push his other hand into my hair. “You are some kind of pretty. Fine, too. Thick.” I could envision my heart like the tiny jingling bel on a cat’s col ar.

I locked my knees, even though I knew that locked knees were how girls made themselves faint when they didn’t want to dress out for gym, but stil , I tensed my legs to hold myself upright. This was desire, pure and uncut. I knew the word from reading Judith Krantz, but stil , trashy paperbacks hadn’t prepared me for Marcus’s fingers against my scalp and his potpourri breath. I leaned into his tug of my hair and he said, “You like it.”

Suddenly, he released me, and said in a brighter tone. “Hel o, Mrs. Grant.”

I turned to see a light-skinned lady pushing a cart piled high. “Hel o, Marcus.” I blinked my eyes, as though someone had just turned on a bright light. I looked at my feet, too embarrassed to face the shoppers al around us who had seen God knew what.

“Give me your number,” Marcus said. “I could go to jail, but I don’t care. Damn, girl. You look so good.”

I didn’t have paper, but I did have a pen in my fake Louis Vuitton. Marcus peeled the corner of the label from a can of tuna and I wrote my number in tiny but clear print. He folded the scrap until it looked like a spitbal and tucked it into his pocket. I stood, unmoving, feeling my body expand and contract just under my skin until my mother rol ed her cart down the aisle.

“There you are.”

I gave her the Vienna sausages and unlocked my knees. I smiled like nothing was wrong, as though I was the same girl I was ten minutes ago.

But in truth, I was different now, burning and anointed.

6

THINK ABOUT IT

THROUGH MARCUS, I FOUND myself a best friend. Ronalda Harris. She was often at his house parties, not because she was part of his crew but because Marcus was always looking for more girls to even the numbers out. Ronalda lived right next door to him and, like me, didn’t have a reputation to protect. Sometimes at the parties, Marcus cal ed me his “girlfriend” and even kissed me in front of everyone. I’d sit on his lap and drink from his cup. Other times, he just acknowledged me with secret winks and smiles over the heads of his guests.

When Marcus didn’t have time to talk to me, I’d hang with Ronalda. She was the new girl and so different from everyone else that she could have been an exchange student. She had tried to give herself a relaxer and as a result she was nearly bald-headed so she wore huge earrings and sparkly eye shadow so everyone could tel she was girl. On top of that, she had a curious accent; it wasn’t so much in her pronunciation but the way she grouped words together. For emphasis, she would repeat a word three times. “That test was hard, hard, hard.” She said “make groceries,” like she was from Louisiana. Her face was ordinary as a loaf of bread, but she had a boyfriend who was a grown man. He was in the army and picked her up sometimes in a navy blue Cutlass Supreme. On a few occasions, I rode in the backseat, staring up at the shiny yel ow fabric covering the ceiling, held in place by a dozen feathered roach clips. I thought she was fascinating, but Marcus thought she was weird. “Bama,” he said, and

“ghetto.”

“Ghetto,” Ronalda said she could live with, but she didn’t want anybody to cal her “Bama.” “How can somebody from Georgia cal somebody else a Bama?” She was from Indy, a real city and it was Up North. “North enough that we don’t lose our minds over a couple snow flurries. Marcus and them may be bourgie, but they are the ones that’s Bama. Bourgie Bamas.”

She explained this to me when I went to her house to tutor her in math. Her school in Indy had put people either on the col ege-prep track or the other track. Ronalda got stuck on the other track and this left her without the skil s she was going to need at Mays High. She tried on her own for almost half a year, keeping her head down and paying attention when the teacher talked. The rest of us passed notes or made tentative lists of bridesmaids for weddings scheduled to take place the June after our twenty-first birthdays. The week before midterms, Ronalda even turned in her seat and said “Excuse you” to someone who made too much noise unwrapping a butter mint. But stil , trigonometry was more than a notion when she hadn’t even had Algebra I . Her father had pul ed strings to get her admitted into the math-and-science magnet, and she was terrified that she would fail and get sent back to Indy.

I volunteered to help her not just because I liked her, although I did. New kids at the start of the school year are interesting enough, but new kids that drop in out of nowhere two months into the term — everyone knew there was a story there. And when it comes to having a story, takes one to know one.

Her house, a large ranch, was almost identical to Marcus’s, but the McCreadys had a garage and Ronalda’s family had only a carport. Stil , it was a nice home with four bedrooms and two bathrooms.

“I like to work on the dining-room table,” she said, placing her notebook on a smoky glass oval perched on a black pedestal. “Be careful, though.

My stepmother gets mad, mad, mad if you scratch the finish.”

We worked together about two hours. Ronalda caught on pretty quick, but she was stil behind. We puzzled over sine, cosine, and tangent, but the class was already doing complex proofs. At the end of the session, I did my homework and let her copy it with her nervous handwriting.

“What time do you have to be home?” she asked me.

“No particular time,” I said, “as long as I’m back before my mother gets home at seven.”

“Do you want to see the basement?”

I fol owed her down the stairs into a laundry room, pausing at the luxury. My mother and I had to take our dirty clothes to the Laundromat and sit there for ninety minutes while our clothes spun in the coin-operated machines. James offered to help us buy a stackable set, but our apartment didn’t have an outside vent for a dryer.

The dark-paneled basement was as large as the rest of the house, but it gave a different vibe. The upstairs was clearly Ronalda’s stepmother’s territory, bright with natural light and gleaming with crystal and mirrors. Pale blue china platters were displayed face out beside cobalt glassware.

The basement, on the other hand, was a manly space, equipped with a Ping-Pong table, wet bar, and cable TV. The atmosphere was cool and damp like earthworms and smel ed vaguely of strawberry incense.

Ronalda clicked on the heater that dominated the far wal , near the component set. It was painted green and was shaped to resemble a fireplace.

It hummed on, and fake logs glowed orange. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” Ronalda said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Let me empty out the dehumidifier. That’s one of my chores.” She went to what looked like a smal metal cabinet and pul ed out a pan of water, which she emptied into the washing machine.

“My dad comes down here a lot,” she said.

The whole place was decorated to show the world how much Mr. Harris enjoyed being a black man. On the wal s were line drawings of men whose images I saw at school during Black History Week — Malcolm X, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other faces. I wasn’t completely sure, but I thought one of them invented the stoplight. Among these pictures was a just-born portrait of Ronalda’s little brother, Nkrumah. On another wal was a poster of Hank Aaron hitting his 735th homerun. The one woman in this portrait gal ery was half-naked. I kept staring at the poster, trying to decide if she was pretty or not. Her dark-skinned body shone with oil. Between her pointed breasts was a bul et-studded strap. Her thick afro was decorated with bul ets and from her hips hung even more bul ets, hiding her privates.

The image confused me. The very fact that she was splayed out naked meant that she was supposed to be sexy, but I had never seen a pinup this dark or this nappy. I imagined myself halfway between this woman and Marcus’s favorite, Jayne Kennedy. Like Jayne, I had the hair, but like Ronalda’s father’s fantasy, I was dark as burnt brass. At the bottom of the poster, just under her knee-high leather boots, was a caption: THINK ABOUT

IT.

I pointed to the picture. “I don’t get it. Think about what?”

“Al men like to look at pictures of naked women,” Ronalda said. “My boyfriend, Jerome, you should see al the pictures he got.”

I nodded as though I understood this, but the picture made me feel a sort of roaming sadness in my stomach. I wondered how James decorated his private spaces. He wasn’t a back-to-Africa man, so I knew he wouldn’t look at naked women with nappy hair. Maybe his fantasy women would sprawl on the hoods of limousines. Maybe they’d be inside the cars, resting their breasts on the steering wheel, wearing nothing but chauffeur’s caps with yards of glossy hair tumbling out from underneath. I thought about it.

“You want to look around?”

I nodded again.

“This is my father’s study.” She opened a door and led me into a smal room crammed with books and more il ustrations of black men looking serious. She pointed to a dark-skinned man with a high forehead. “That’s Kwame Nkrumah, who my little brother is named after.”

“Who is he?”

“An African president. My daddy is real y into Africa. Presidents especial y.” She sat in a leather desk chair and swiveled around. “Africa, Africa, Africa.”

“What about your mother? I mean your real mother. Is she like that, too?”

Ronalda’s mouth turned up at the corner and she mashed her lips together before she spoke. “My mother is dead. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, even though Ronalda didn’t sound exactly sad. It was more like she was angry with me for mentioning it.

“Can you show me around some more?” I asked.

She opened another room, the same size as her father’s study, but it was nearly empty. There were bookcases instal ed, but only one shelf held any books. There was a desk, but it wasn’t cluttered with papers. In the corner stood an electric belt exerciser. My mother had one of those, too. You turned it on and it would jiggle the fat off of you.

“This is my stepmother’s office,” Ronalda said. “We can hang out in here.”

“What do you cal her?”

“My stepmother?”

“Yeah.”

“Jocelyn. She never comes down here.”

Ronalda opened one of the desk drawers, revealing eight strawberry wine coolers. “My secret stash. You want one?”

She gave me a bottle; I screwed off the top and handed it back to her. She handed me another. We each drank two coolers as quickly as the effervescence would al ow. The taste was sweet and medicinal at the same time. We opened our third and proceeded with ladylike sips.

“That was good,” Ronalda said.

“Ditto.”

We were both seated on the wooden desk, as there wasn’t even a chair in the office. The smel of our perfumes competed with the smel of the booze and the odor of our bodies. I thril ed at the confinement of it.

Ronalda said, “Can I touch your hair?”

I nodded and she reached out and gently stroked the hair covering my shoulder blades. Her touch was light, as though she worried she would hurt it.