Wing Jones(2)

Marcus and Aaron run at each other like long-lost lovers, their arms are tight around each other, and Aaron is ripping off Marcus’s helmet and rubbing his knuckles in his hair and their smiles are so bright, I swear they light up the field more than the floodlights.

My mother finally lowers her hands from her eyes and looks up. “It’s done?” she says, her Chinese accent heavier because she’s scared. “He didn’t get hurt?”

“He didn’t get hurt,” I assure her.

“And he won?” Now that she knows he’s OK, she can focus on the important things. Like the final score.

“They won,” I say, consciously changing the pronoun. Although Marcus once said that even though there’s no I in team, there is one in win. Aaron tackled him for that, right off the front porch.

My mom stands. “I knew he would win,” she says, voice confident. “Marcus always wins.”

“Of course he does!” My Granny Dee, my dad’s mom, sniffs. “He’s my grandson, ain’t he?”

LaoLao, my mom’s mom, gives a sniff of her own. “He my grandson!” she proclaims, her Chinese accent even more pronounced than my mother’s. Granny Dee and LaoLao have this argument at every game. As if one of them could have more claim to Marcus than the other. They look over at me at the same time, and I wonder if they notice how even when they bicker, they move like two parts of the same machine.

“Go get me a Coke,” barks Granny Dee.

“For me too!” says LaoLao. “We are celebrating Marcus’s win!”

I sigh but don’t argue. No point in arguing with Granny Dee and LaoLao. “Mom?”

My mom gives me a tired smile and shakes her head. She digs into her purse and pulls out a wrinkled five-dollar bill. “Get something for yourself, sweetie,” she says.

It might not seem like much, but that five dollars could be used for a lot of other things besides buying my grandmothers a couple of overpriced Cokes at a high school football game. I love my grandmothers, but I don’t love how much they love to boss me around. I sigh again, louder this time, more of a huff, and Granny Dee’s walnut face snaps up, her bright eyes narrowing.

“You got somethin’ you wanna complain about? You too busy to go get your Granny Dee a Coke?”

“Me too,” LaoLao adds, scooting her bulk closer to Granny Dee’s thin frame. “Too busy, little Wing? Too busy doing what?”

My grandmothers put their heads together, their old laughter wheezing out of them like air out of punctured tires, a most unlikely united front. Teasing me can always bring them together. It’s like when a cat and a dog forget they’re enemies to come together to chase a duck. I look at them, the women – one from Ghana, one from China – who have been the stalwart forces of my life since before I even took my first breath. Granny Dee, barely five feet, gray and brown all over. So thin she looks like a gust of wind could knock her over, but my money, if I had any, would be that the wind would break before Granny Dee would. And LaoLao, as round as a dumpling full to bursting, her sleek black hair still dark as my mother’s, tied in a tight bun at the back of her head. She looks like she could withstand a hurricane.

“Them Cokes ain’t gonna get themselves,” says Granny Dee as she fans herself with a flyer. “My Lord, it is hot tonight.”

I shake my head at them and go down the stairs to get them their stupid Cokes. As soon as I turn away, they start to bicker about something else. Now that I’m gone, they don’t have any reason to team up. Silly old ladies, I think, affection for them blooming in my chest.

The stands have emptied out, and I’m grateful. I don’t like having to make my way through crowds, pushing myself against them or asking them to move aside, feeling too big and too small at the same time. Watching their eyes go up and down me, trying to figure out what it is about me that is so off. What it is that works so well in Marcus but didn’t quite come out right in me. Same ingredients, different result. Like a cake that came out perfectly one time and a little squashed the next. I know I don’t look like anyone else at this school, or maybe even in all of Atlanta. Hell, maybe in all of Georgia. I know I don’t look like my mom, with her bird bones and silky black hair. I don’t look like LaoLao or Granny Dee either, as Granny Dee will tell you when she tries to do my hair. “Child,” she’ll say, pulling out one of my curls and watching it spring back with a bemused expression. “How can your hair be so fine but so tangly at the same time?” It never stays in braids, wisps of it coming out, but it won’t straighten either. Granny Dee doesn’t know what to do with it. Or with the rest of me. She’ll cluck at my hips and my butt, like I asked to have a big butt, and then she’ll look up at me, because I’m more than just a bit taller than her, and LaoLao and my mother for that matter, like she can’t believe any granddaughter of hers takes up so much space. And even though LaoLao is one of the fattest old ladies I’ve ever seen, even she always has something to say about my size. “You are too big,” she’ll say, all three of her chins wobbling as she shakes her head. “Like a horse. And your skin is so dark!” I don’t know why she sounds so surprised. It’s not like she didn’t know my daddy was black.

Of course, no one ever says Marcus is too big. Marcus couldn’t be too anything. Marcus is perfect.