Heads of the Colored People(26)
“Well, what’s it for, then, sweetie?”
“To sleep in.”
The woman hesitated for a second, looked back at Ryan, holding a definite glare, and said, “Hmm,” before turning around in line.
In truth, Inedia slept in one of the twin beds, with a matching bamboo sheet set and comforter, but Lisbeth wanted to strip the beds bare to corroborate her claims about the family’s nomadic Romani-style living—though Ryan didn’t think the Romani even lived that way. And, she speculated, “The more skeletal the house looks, the more likely they are to do a crossover episode with one of the network’s home makeover shows. We could get a whole new interior for free.”
They could get a whole new interior for free by paying to make their current interior look worse, reverse house-staging—it didn’t make sense to Ryan. Inedia’s bed, according to Lisbeth, needed the sleeping bag, an old one, to pull the look together.
The woman glanced at Inedia and Ryan again before paying for her groceries. Ryan knew some black women judged him for choosing Lisbeth. He had heard his mother’s and sisters’ and college friends’ appraisals of black men who dated white and could even understand the accusations that some black men chose “any old white woman,” as his first college girlfriend, Jessie, had put it. “I mean, she could be toothless, big as a house, and speaking the fakest-sounding Ebonics you could imagine, and they’ll jump over four highly educated black women to hold the door for a bowser, just to have little light-skinned babies with her.”
Lisbeth wasn’t a bowser, originally. She had been beautiful once—an eight—with a kind of hard-line assertiveness that still felt soft. They met at UC Berkeley under a tree to which several students had chained themselves. They both skated up on their respective boards, Lisbeth’s a longboard and Ryan’s a skateboard, and paused to see the commotion. Protests were a daily occurrence, and neither could remember what this protest was about, only that their eyes met and that they both laughed at the hippies in the tree. Lisbeth wore little Capri Sun straws in her earlobes, which, she explained, she was stretching. Her top, simple and black, paired with jean shorts, accentuated her breasts, uncontained by a bra. She complimented Ryan’s short dreads. Their relationship developed quickly, the sex intense, and Ryan could almost drown out the judgment and Jessie’s theory that Lisbeth was just trying to make her parents mad. When Lisbeth was assaulted near campus their senior year, Ryan became her sole source of support, which initially had a damaging effect. They broke up briefly, Lisbeth claiming, “I don’t like how dependent I feel when I’m with you.” But they reunited, spent happy years traveling, making plans, eventually settling, with some recognition of the irony, into their own hippie comforts, the stability of Ryan’s income, and the softness of each other.
He loved her, but increasingly Lisbeth scared Ryan. He had watched his father, a businessman, take care of his schizophrenic mother, who on lucid days made artwork that hung in galleries from Riverside to Cape Cod. On bad days, she went missing for weeks at a time, leaving no food in the fridge. Ryan’s dad would return home, comfort the kids with expensive toys and fast food, and go back to work. His mother was institutionalized four times during his childhood before her suicide when Ryan was sixteen.
Lisbeth never went missing, but her shrinking frame and increasing delusions were a kind of disappearing, too, a propulsion toward death. Ryan couldn’t pinpoint when the days began to slow down, when Lisbeth became an embarrassment, the flint of her shrinking body a bone against his own.
? ? ?
The introduction on the blog’s welcome page featured a picture of Lisbeth with fuller cheeks and a peachy glow on her skin, unlike the sallow, patchy face in front of Mike and the camera. She stood next to a tree, wearing a blue tank top, holding a durian, and smiling.
The note on the webpage read in part:
Detachment parenting works from the premise that early peoples had it right and babies and children were essentially adults in miniature. If left to perform tasks on their own, they will develop useful skills and become self-sufficient.
Lisbeth told the cameras, “I don’t believe in all that smothering my parents did to me, stuffing me into puffy dresses and making me their world. It’s so suffocating. We were wrong to name our daughter Inedia. At first—I think I had postpartum because I didn’t encapsulate my placenta—I was all into the idea that she’d be our sole source of prana, our air, that we could draw everything from her. But the more I read about the benefits of the lifestyle, and the more I got in touch with the food, the more I realized that we should have named her something empowering for her and for us.”
Mike nodded, hoping the condescension didn’t show.
“We’re thinking of changing her name to Busela or something more independent.”
“You’d change a child’s name at seven?”
Lisbeth was doing that thing with her hair again. “We waited ten days before her Namakarma Sanskar ceremony as it was; we believe in the traditional way, that a name should reflect the character.”
“And this is the kind of stuff you put on the website?” Mike moved his hand to suggest she should elaborate.
Links to previous installments of the blog appeared in the sidebar, listed in chronological order. Lisbeth named them and told anecdotes about each:
October 19: Breastfeeding: A Lot like Cannibalism, No?