Heads of the Colored People(14)
The reputation of our school depends on the efforts of involved parents like yourself.
Sincerely,
Principal Lee
? ? ?
NOVEMBER 3, 1991
Lucinda,
Thank you for inviting Fatima to Chrissy’s party. She will be happy to attend.
And thank you for the lovely fruit basket. You are so bad! It’s true—Mrs. Watson looks terrible in that color, and yet Principal Lee finds reasons to look. But I won’t say anything more in writing.
Jordan and I will discuss the Jack and Jill potluck with you when we see you.
XO,
Monica
THE BODY’S DEFENSES AGAINST ITSELF
The back of the woman’s neck is already sweaty. Liquid pools in the dark creases behind her ears and around the collar of her oversize T-shirt. She is wearing loose sweatpants, the cotton kind, and thick white socks to class. She stands at the back of her mat, scratching one ankle with a big toe, turns around suddenly, and smiles. I avert my eyes, annoyed by her expectation of familiarity, and focus on aligning the front edges of my mat with one of the faint slats in the polished hardwood. I watch her face in the mirror. She could be a distant cousin, her nose not unlike mine, but she is fat.
The room always smells damp before class even starts, misty from the deep exhalations, drained lymph nodes, body odor, and steam that the previous students left behind. Bodies fold and unfold, adjusting themselves in quiet discourse in the heated space. The new woman struggles through Eagle Pose, even with one foot tucked around an ankle. Biniam steps behind her, places a hand gently on her back, and says, “You might do better if you remove your socks.” I can’t see her feet in any detail after she balls the socks and sets them down, but I imagine white cotton lint clings to the deep brown of her skin. I lift my foot higher and press my heel into the space where my thigh meets pubic bone. I am wearing short briefs and a sports bra, the typical uniform for the women in this class. If the new black woman is self-conscious about the bagginess of her clothes and body, her face, pleasant, does not let on.
“Relax your face,” Biniam says to me. I try to unclench my jaw, letting the sweat run down my forehead and bare arms. The woman is watching me in the mirror. I close my eyes.
? ? ?
The summer I turned eleven, my body would not stop sweating. Before then, I welcomed the Inland Empire’s dry heat, imagining myself a brown lizard, sunning myself on a flat rock in red sunlight, camouflaging, until my parents called me inside the house with lectures about heat stroke. It’s the kind of heat I still miss in humid, foliaged Nashville. Nashville is more like the Bikram studio I attend there, damp all year round. Upland, California, isn’t really damp, except in the morning when the fog hovers. It can be cold in the winter, but a dry, quiet cold. In the valleys, there’s no elevation to carry the heat, so the cold settles over everything like more dust.
My sixth-grade classmates, noticing my sudden hyperhidrosis, and led by Christinia, called me Sweatima. Fatima Sweatima. I seemed to be the only one who sweated through the cold as much as the heat. I sweated through daisy-print dresses and sunflower Tshirts. I sweated through jackets and coats that I kept on all day to hide the sweat. I sweated through a sweaty cycle that only made me sweatier and more ashamed of the sweat and sweatier still as I tried to hide it.
“It’s anxiety,” a doctor said, but neither my mother nor I would have agreed to a pill to quell my nerves back then. “Is there a history of trauma?”
My mother and I looked at each other and back at him and shook our heads in unison. Maybe it just had to do with being in that specific body, a body so different from everyone else’s at school, one that wouldn’t do the things that other people’s did or that did too much of them. I would try harder to relax, my parents and I concluded.
“?‘Be a thermostat, not a thermometer. Don’t be reactive. Be a thermostat, not a thermometer. Thermostat. Thermostat. And hold on.’?” Mom’s voice merged with Wilson Phillips’s, forming the soundtrack to our daily commute. The perspiration usually started each morning between Fairwood and Rio Road, as we turned the corner and traveled the block toward school. I had double anxiety, anticipating the trials of the day, and the unrelenting moisture that left all my shirts permanently marked with green-and-yellow stains. I would make a mental list of possible retorts, canned answers for the insults that would undoubtedly dart toward me at some point during the school day. The list never helped.
I wasn’t good at coming up with retorts, even if I practiced them beforehand. I had my stock “whatever,” which came with a head turn and an eye roll. And I had, “Hmm, maybe you’re projecting,” something I’d picked up from talk radio. And I had self-righteousness, loads of it: “One day you’re going to be sorry that you didn’t take the high road like I did.” That never worked. The high road is too abstract; kids can’t see it, and really neither could I. I could only hold on for one more day, grasping at the idea of retribution because there was little else I could grasp. The best comebacks always came to me in my bedroom, hours later, when I sat watching reruns of The New Mickey Mouse Club or Kids Incorporated and brooding over the day. And wishing that when I lifted my arms, they were as dry as Stacy Ferguson’s or Rhona Bennett’s.
That year, I’d managed to get through the first months of school without any major incidents. But by the late fall in a seventh-period math class, I experienced the worst trial by far. Christinia had come around to sharpen her pencil, she’d claimed, but she’d bypassed the sharpener attached to the wall and stuck her nose near my coat with a look of self-satisfaction and disgust on her face. It was the kind of coat with fur around the hood and far too warm for me or for that day. My mom had insisted that I wear it because of the chill in the air, and once the sweat started, I kept it on despite the warm classroom.