Heads of the Colored People(36)
“We can go shopping, but I’m not going to Pilates. Can you leave? I need to call Dom,” she lied.
Carmen left with a small huff, mumbling under her breath about teenage moodiness and ingratitude and what would have happened to her if she had used Raina’s tone of voice with her mother.
Raina scrolled through her new comments, another one from Kevin. There were still forty-five minutes left before Dom was supposed to call, forty-five minutes to compose herself and fix her voice into something pleasant, order the details of her life so that only the prettiest parts showed.
On days like this, Raina sometimes fantasized about running away, saving her money, taking her equipment, and finding a community of people who would really see her, not the family brand, not the extra thirty pounds, not the untouched edges of her hair or her Web tags, but her, whoever she was, her whole head and body fitting into a frame of her own design. But she knew this community didn’t likely exist, and Carmen said that runaways only ended up with human traffickers. She could tolerate Carmen and Dorsey for a few more years until college, couldn’t she? But what then? She wanted to think of college as an opportunity for new freedoms, self-expression, rebellion. She would grow her hair out into naps if she pleased and do what she wanted with her body. But what if college was only thirteenth grade, an escalation of everything in her life now, with older, more taxing versions of the same people, where she’d exchange Carmen and Kevin for new avatars—a controlling sorority sister or an inappropriate professor?
? ? ?
RAINA STARTED OUTLINING a new video. She usually wrote a script and storyboard first and improvised her monologue once she began filming, sometimes taking three days for a single concept. She sat in front of the camera, with her 3-D microphone nearby, but she quickly abandoned her notes. With her whole head in the frame, she spoke in her natural voice, softened so that Carmen would not hear her. “Today, I’m not going to tell you a fairy tale, but something I’ve been thinking about, about myself,” she began. “I struggle with a lot of things,” she said. “Sometimes, I think I’m beautiful and smart, but then one little thing knocks me down, and I don’t know who I am. I can’t be the only one who feels this way.” She paused. She might have been crying; her voice, sharp and cracking, would not modulate. “I’m tired of faking this whispery voice and doing everything for everyone else and worrying about how I look and if anyone’s going to intimidate or abuse me and telling other people’s fantasy stories. I want to stop being afraid to tell the truth. I want to say, ‘Screw everyone who thinks they can just treat me any kind of way, even my mom and boyfriend.’ But would you even hear me?” She persisted until she felt spent, emptied as though after a deep purge. Her exhilaration at the thought of publishing this video made Raina feel slightly breathless. Her cursor hovered over the Upload button.
The laptop rang—Dom calling for a video chat—just as Carmen knocked and barged into the room again. “Raina, what is it? You’ve been crying. I could hear you from my room. Talk to me, honey. What is it?”
Raina didn’t look up at Carmen or pause to decline Dom’s call. With the laptop still ringing and Carmen still talking, she canceled the upload and deleted the footage. She could start over later, returning to her fairy tales. Editing was the easiest part anyway; she worked best in short frames, quiet slivers, fragments. Everyone said so.
NOT TODAY, MARJORIE
Marjorie was already frazzled when she entered the DMV. She had tried to stick to her acronym all morning:
Watch your feelings for a moment
Acknowledge them
Imagine your options
Thoughtfully proceed
Though she had succeeded in avoiding any unseemly confrontations for the past four consecutive days, the ride to the DMV was taxing, the night before tormenting, and she felt her limits approaching. It was one of those afternoons on which, despite her best efforts, she could not see the good, could not practice the options for avoiding conflict that her therapist was making her study, could not replace the word “and” with the word “but,” as she had been instructed to do. On a good day, Marjorie was supposed to say, “I’m angry, and I can still keep my temper in check,” instead of, “I lost my temper, but I couldn’t help it.” Instead of “I hate crowds, but I have to go to the DMV,” on a good day, Marjorie could say, “I hate crowds, and I’m still going to keep my wits about me at the DMV.”
Today, however, was not a good day. Today Marjorie paused at an Ice Cube song on the radio and felt a shiver of longing for her old lifestyle and her ex-boyfriend Charles. Once she stepped out of her car, she immediately regretted her choice of a black long-sleeved shirt—she always wore long-sleeved shirts—the sun burning straight through the fabric onto her arms. Today Marjorie saw the yellow jackets and the wasps but not the fragrant lavender bushes that lined the front entrance of the DMV. She smelled the icky pollen but did not notice the vibrancy of the goldenrods in the planters. One side of her hair wouldn’t lie flat, and though she had spent hours flat-ironing it, the ends of her hair now looked limp, yet the edges looked beady. Today was all buts.
Inside the DMV, grimy children ran around or played with cell phones, families spoke languages Marjorie didn’t recognize, squat pregnant women slouched in chairs, their laundry detergent and deodorant pungent. The air conditioner blasted through the space, quickly replacing the heat outside with its own cold oppression. Marjorie had made up her mind to get in and get out with her attitude intact, but already, so many things portended difficulty. You are already stressed and you are not going to get worked up, she told herself. Not today, Marjorie.