Black Cake(54)

“Are you going to let someone else’s view of who you are and what you should do hold you back?” He smiled, thinking of what his mother used to say to him when he was still in school.

“Now, I’m not going to get all Pollyanna on you here and say that there aren’t genuine obstacles to confront, including financial barriers and stereotyping. Those of us who are a generation ahead of you are supposed to be working on these things and a lot of us are trying. But do yourselves a favor and think about it first before you don’t think about it, okay?”

Applause.

Byron stepped aside to call attention to what he had written on the chalkboard: RIDE THE WAVE.

“This is what I would like to be able to say to you folks, that in life, you should just catch the wave and ride it. But what if you don’t see any good waves coming your way? You need to go looking. Don’t stop looking, all right? And one of the ways to do that looking is to keep studying. Do not underestimate the value of applying yourselves in school. Because you cannot win…,” Byron said, cupping both ears with his hands.

“…if you don’t play,” the audience responded.

At the end of the Q&A session, some of the kids came up to him to ask about science programs and internships and the like, but he could see that a couple of them were just angling to get a closer look at the surfboard. That was all right, Byron thought, as he posed for selfies with the students. It was a start. But he knew that even if all of these kids were to take his advice, it wouldn’t be enough. That was why he was going to start his own scholarship program someday.

“So you had a good day, son?” his mother was asking him now.

“Yeah, Ma, the usual. How’s your leg?”

“Doing better, Byron. Better every day.”

His mother was still using a cane after her surfing accident. She should have known better than to take on that wave. All of her talk about knowing who you were and where you were at all times hadn’t kept his mother from acting like a daredevil and nearly breaking her neck in the process. Unless, as Cable suggested, his ma had known exactly what she was doing.

More than anyone, even more than his father, Byron’s mother had taught him the value of strategic thinking, of calculated action. He used to think that he was most like his ma but lately, his mother had revealed herself to have a kind of reckless streak that eluded his own logic and left him feeling nervous.

Kind of like Benny.





My Name Is Benny





The year before her mother died, Benedetta Bennett found herself standing at a lectern in a Midtown Manhattan meeting hall saying, “Hello, my name is Benny.” As soon as the words came out, she knew that she had made a colossal mistake. Benny stood there trembling, the electronic fizz of the microphone teasing the pause. A dampness spread across the small of her back. Her waistband itched. She looked up again at her audience, cringing at their open faces.

Thirty pairs of eyes. In those soft, warm seconds of brotherly love, they had no idea, did they? Those eyes would soon will her out of the room as she hurried down the aisle toward the door. They couldn’t know what a state she was in. They couldn’t know that half an hour earlier, she had nearly dropped to the icy sidewalk next to the doggy base of a tree, overwhelmed by despair.

Benny had gotten off the bus from one of her jobs and had been walking, walking, walking. Unable to shake off the leaden feeling inside, she felt her knees willing her to the ground. Just then, a man walked by and she caught the look in his eyes as he headed up a set of stairs to the entrance of a building. His forty-something face, though framed in a movie-star haircut and buffered about the chin by a cashmere scarf, seemed to mirror Benny’s own bruised interior, only with something else, a look that bordered on relief. The man pulled open a huge door, paused, and looked back at Benny. The door was forest green, and forest green was Benny’s favorite color. So she followed the man inside.

Benny passed through a dimly lit foyer smelling of dusty paper and school days and entered a large, warm room with rows of fold-up chairs and a table covered with snacks and flyers. She nodded her thanks when someone handed her a paper cup of coffee and a gluten-free cookie. She basked in the murmured welcomes, the sanctuary of unknown faces, the heat of the cup on her fingers. She was already feeling better. She could have stopped herself right there, but she didn’t. Instead, she took a seat between a young man in a pilly blue sweater and a woman in a scarlet skirt and allowed the tide of goodwill and the need for catharsis to pull her up to the head of the room.

Until then, no one had wanted to know who she was, where she had come from, or why she was there, because, after all, everyone was there for the same basic reason and the why, exactly? of their presence on that particular evening, and the who, exactly? they had been, or hoped to be, would not require elaboration unless and until they took the floor. And now, she was holding on to the edge of the lectern with one hand and clasping a half-eaten cookie with the other.

“My name is Benny and I’m an alcoholic.”

With those few words, Benny had officially crashed a meeting for recovering alcoholics for want of a place where people would say Come in, no matter what. Where they would support her even when she told them that she hadn’t attended her own father’s funeral service. Where they would listen without a trace of shock in their faces when she told them why. Where she could say, to people who might not understand but who would listen to her, anyway, that she was tired of having her authenticity as a person called into question simply because she did not fit the roles that others wanted her to play, or because she wanted to play roles that others seemed to feel were beyond her.