Homegoing(99)

Graham didn’t heed the Do Not Touch signs. He left ghostly fingerprints on fiberglass cases, prints that disappeared almost as soon as he left them.

“America wouldn’t have a space program if it weren’t for the Germans,” Graham said.

“Do you miss Germany?” Marjorie asked. Graham hardly ever talked about the place where he had done most of his growing up. He didn’t wear the country on his sleeve the same way she wore Ghana on hers.

“Sometimes, but military brats get used to moving around.” He shrugged and pressed his fingers against a case that held a space suit. Marjorie pictured his hand pushing through the glass, lifting his body into the case, fitting him into the suit, then losing gravity until his body started to float up, up.

“Marjorie?”

“What?”

“I said, would you ever move back to Ghana?”

She thought for a moment, of her grandmother and the sea, the Castle. She thought of the frantic commotion of cars and bodies on the streets of Cape Coast, the wide-hipped women selling fish out of large silver bowls, and the young girls whose breasts had not yet come in walking down the road’s median, pressing their faces into the windows of the taxis, saying “Ice water,” and “Please, I beg.”



“I don’t think so.”

Graham nodded and started to move forward, on to the next case. Marjorie took his hand just as he was lifting it to press it against the fiberglass. She stopped him, and said, “I mostly just feel like I don’t belong there. As soon as I step off the airplane, people can tell that I’m like them but different too. They can smell it on me.”

“Smell what?”

Marjorie looked up, trying to capture the right word. “Loneliness, maybe. Or aloneness. The way I don’t fit here or there. My grandmother’s the only person who really sees me.”

She looked down. Her hand was shaking, so she let go of Graham’s, but he took it back. And when she looked up again, he was leaning down, pressing his lips to hers.

—

For weeks, Marjorie waited for word about her grandmother. Her parents had hired a new caretaker to watch her every day, which only seemed to infuriate her. She was getting worse. Marjorie didn’t know how she knew, but she knew.

At school, Marjorie was quiet. She didn’t raise her hand in any of her classes, and two of her teachers stopped her to ask if everything was all right. She brushed them off. Instead of eating lunch in the English lounge or reading in the library, she sat in the cafeteria, at the corner of a long rectangular table, daring anyone who passed by to do their worst. Instead, Graham came over and sat across from her.

“You okay?” he asked. “I haven’t really seen you since…”

His voice trailed off, but Marjorie wanted him to say it. Since we kissed. Since we kissed. That day, Graham was wearing the school’s colors—an obnoxious orange, calmed, only slightly, by a soothing gray.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You worried about your poem?” he asked.

Her poem was a collection of fonts on a piece of paper, an experiment in box lettering, cursive, all caps. “No, I’m not worried about that.”

Graham nodded carefully, and held her gaze. She had come to the cafeteria because she wanted to be alone while surrounded by people. It was a feeling she sometimes liked, like stepping off the plane in Accra and being met by a sea of faces that looked like her own. For those first few minutes, she would capture that anonymity, but then the moment would drop. Someone would approach her, ask her if he could carry her bag, if he could drive her somewhere, if she would feed his baby.



While she stared back at Graham, a brunette girl Marjorie recognized from the hallways approached them. “Graham?” she asked. “I don’t normally see you here at lunch. I would remember seeing you.”

Graham nodded, but didn’t say anything. The girl had yet to notice Marjorie, but Graham’s lack of attention pulled her glance away from him, toward the person who had won it.

She looked at Marjorie for only a second, but it was long enough for Marjorie to notice the wrinkle of disgust that had begun to form on her face. “Graham,” she whispered, as though lowering her voice would keep Marjorie from hearing. “You shouldn’t sit here.”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t sit here. People will start to think…” Again, a quick glance. “Well, you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Just come sit with us,” she said. At this point, she was scanning the room, her body language turning anxious.

“I’m fine where I am.”

“Go,” Marjorie said, and Graham turned toward her. It was as if he had forgotten whom he had been arguing for in the first place. As if he’d been fighting simply for the seat, and not the girl who sat across from it. “Go, it’s fine.”

And once she had said it, she stopped breathing. She wanted him to say no, to fight harder, longer, to take her hand across the table and run his reddened thumbs between her fingers.

But he didn’t. He got up, looking almost relieved. By the time Marjorie noticed the brunette girl slipping her hand into his to pull him along, they were already halfway across the room. She had thought Graham was like her, a reader, a loner, but watching him walk away with the girl, she knew he was different. She saw how easy it was for him to slip in unnoticed, as though he had always belonged there.