Heads of the Colored People(22)
“No, public school.”
“Ah,” Rolf said, in a tone that Fatima interpreted as neutral.
“She’s my girl.” She stopped herself from saying “Ace boon coon.” “We hang out a lot on the weekends, actually.”
“How come you never mentioned her before?”
“I don’t know.” Fatima felt her mouth lying again, moving somehow separately from her real voice. “She’s kind of shy. She got teased a lot.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Rolf said.
“They called her Patti Mayonnaise,” Fatima said, and she didn’t know why it was she who was now prattling on.
“Don’t tell anybody this, but I always thought Patty was cute on Doug,” Rolf said, and shifted to talking about all his favorite cartoons. Fatima exhaled.
? ? ?
Over time they grew to joke, a little awkwardly, about Fatima’s position at school, as one of two black girls. She asked Rolf if this was a thing for him or if she was his first black girlfriend, because by now they called each other boyfriend and girlfriend.
“I don’t see color,” he said. “I just saw you. Like, one day there you were.”
Violet would have said that color-blind people were the same ones who followed you in the store and that Rolf’s game was hella corny.
“Anyway, it’s not like you’re black black,” Rolf said.
Fatima remembered the lifelessness, before Violet, of feeling like a colorless gas and tried, in spite of a dull ache and the numbness of her brown lip, to take Rolf’s words as a compliment.
? ? ?
The conventions of such a transformation dictate that a snaggletooth or broken heel threatens to return the heroine to her former life. That snaggletooth, for Fatima, was either Rolf or Violet, depending on how you looked at things, and Fatima wasn’t sure how she did.
When she saw Violet, on April 4—after hiding her relationship with Rolf for three months—approaching from across the lobby of Edwards Cinema with Mike’s arm around her waist, Fatima’s first instinct was to grab Rolf’s hand and steer him toward the exit. But Violet was already calling her name.
This wasn’t the natural order of things, for these separate lives to converge. Other factors aside, the code went hos before bros, school life before social life, family before anyone else. But Rolf was both school and social, and Violet both social and nearly family, and Fatima’s math skills couldn’t balance this equation.
“I knew I saw you,” Violet said to Fatima once she got close. “Who is this?”
“Rolf, Violet. Violet, Rolf,” Fatima said, “and Mike.”
Mike smiled, and Rolf smiled, and they shook hands, but neither young woman saw the guys, their eyes deadlocked on each other.
“Ha, so this is Violet,” Rolf said, ignoring or misreading Fatima’s firm grip on his arm. “Even your black friends are white, too.” Rolf laughed.
“I was gonna tell you—” Fatima started to say to Violet.
“Wait, Patti Mayonnaise, I get it now,” Rolf said aloud, then, “Oops, I—” and both women scowled at him.
Fatima made a noise that could be interpreted as either a guffaw or a deep moan.
When she turned back to Violet, though she opened and closed her mouth several times, no sounds emerged. She didn’t mean to hurt her; some things had just come out, and other things she hadn’t told Violet because she wasn’t sure which lip she was supposed to use. Before she knew it, her voice was over there and then over there, and she was ventriloquizing what she’d learned all at once, but from too many places and all at the wrong time.
Violet didn’t curse or buck up as though she might hit Fatima—though perhaps one of those options might have been better; she just grabbed Mike’s arm and walked away.
And like that, Fatima was a vapor again, but something darker, like a funnel cloud, or black smoke that mocked what was already singed.
THE SUBJECT OF CONSUMPTION
No one had come right out and said it, but Mike intuited that he might never advance past this stage in his career. The rule was that you couldn’t go backward. Whatever baseline he established with the first show could curve only upward, never down. If he’d started with, say, some original series about dating with disabilities and sold it as straight realism, he could do what he wanted now. But since he started with filth, he could get only grittier. The people were always hungry, the viewers and the “talent,” as they called the fame whores; they were downright gluttonous. Mike wanted to shift toward ironic documentaries with a sharp lens, but who would respect the artistry of the man who brought the world such jewels as Pet Psychics of Rhode Island and My Big Fat Gay Dads? So, here he was, at the house, heaping muck upon muck in order to form a more perfect dross pile.
The neighborhood’s landscape belied the inner contents of the house. Oak and spruce trees stretched over Tudor roofs and lawns so smooth they looked vacuumed; women in gardening hats bent over patches of flowers gradated by height; lawn tools filled truck beds. Mike had pitched his first two series for the network—one on a set of twin sisters married to the same man and one on a pair of married white pastors raising ten adopted black children—with similar “behind these walls” premises. Mike’s use of cutaways from outside to inside—from the family looking suburban in the front yard, to the real workings of the house—attracted indignant viewers who couldn’t believe anyone lived this way. One of the sister-wife twins had stumbled across the blog of Lisbeth Hoag and tipped Mike off to this family he was preparing to shoot.