Heads of the Colored People(46)
We ordered two hot dogs with mustard and onions from a man who played Turkish or Kurdish or maybe Indian music from an old stereo.
“Let’s sit by the water.” I beckoned my hand toward the shore, which rippled about one hundred yards away from the concrete path.
“You know I can’t wheel over there.”
A family of four looked both ways and crossed over the bike path. They paused at the line demarcating the sand to take off their shoes before sinking their feet in soft heavy steps.
“One day we’ll get you one of those special all-terrain chairs,” I said.
He made a noncommittal sound, not unlike a grunt, and said, “It’s too overcast.”
? ? ?
TODD DIDN’T LOOK at me once during the ride home. “Chelsea told me this wasn’t going to work,” he said quietly, as we approached the elevator to his apartment.
“You’ll feel better tomorrow,” I said.
? ? ?
For the next two weeks, I worked on something to make this Todd get it. Relying on my memory and intuition, I guesstimated the dimensions of his legs, the length and girth. I bought the wood—and with more money I hoped to buy a fancy set of sockets and connectors. I carved and sanded and massaged the wood and plied and buffed and blew off the dust and buffed again. I engraved the soles of the feet with my signature and distinctive paraph.
But the legs were so heavy, far too heavy for Todd to ever use them. I couldn’t sand the insides down smooth enough to keep them from splintering and poking his skin. And it was too hard to line the sockets of the thigh with foam to cushion his bone prominences, so I focused most on the outside of the legs. Since Brian, I had criticized companies that didn’t make tights or foundation to match dark skin and instead copped out by settling on light, dark, and medium, but I understood then. It isn’t just white normativity, which is a concept Brian taught me. I tried so hard to match Todd’s subtle skin tones, scumbled the legs with sepia and umber and chestnut. But even after a decade of studio work, I couldn’t get it right. I can only hope that in a few years I can build a better model with a 3-D printer.
As I carried them up the stairs of Todd’s apartment building—I never used the elevator except when I was with Todd—one leg dropped and thumped and clunked, scuffing itself along the stucco wall the whole way down, but I kept walking so that Todd could at least see part of what I had made. One leg is better than none.
“What are you doing here?” He looked frightened and rolled backward a few paces from his kitchenette set, I suppose because I didn’t call before I used my key, but I knew he would be home.
“I told you things would get better,” I said, presenting my labor, an emblem of my love for him, the symbol of my ability to overlook his shortcomings.
I left before the police arrived, making sure to grab the leg I had dropped. Todd screamed things I won’t repeat; the neighbors came out of their apartments to watch.
? ? ?
A couple of times since then, I’ve tried to sleep with the legs tucked next to me under the covers—I put compression socks on them, I pose them just so.
The last time Chelsea spoke to me, she said, “But why? Doesn’t that highlight how much of the whole person is missing?”
“No,” I said. Chelsea could be dense sometimes. “He was the wrong Todd. I just have to find the right fit.”
A CONVERSATION ABOUT BREAD
Junior was always trying out white folks stuff and bringing it to school for us to try. He wasn’t built for Jackson, Mississippi. There were things black people just weren’t supposed to do, like get caught on the wrong side of County Line Road after dark or use the word “persnickety,” and Junior did both of those things, among others.
When he brought potato bread to school for lunch, we were all like, what’s up with the yellow bread? For it was surely some white folks stuff and the dumbest thing we’d ever heard of until we tasted it. Once that yellow soft hit our mouths, though, it was like Apple Jacks; it didn’t even have to taste like apple, or potato.
Croissants, too, not those pop-can crescent rolls our mamas and the lunch ladies tried to feed us. Junior had real croissants—the kind where you aren’t supposed to pronounce the “r”—from a little bakery at the edge of the Fondren District. We ate the flaky edges of those croissants like they were Pop Rocks, just doing all their work in our mouths.
But most of us drew the line at brioche.
“See, this is why I don’t tell you things.” Brian angled the laptop away from his side of the table, and looking around the library, lowered his voice. A blond woman in a gray sweater—who looked like a librarian but wasn’t one—stared from the adjacent table. “You’re writing this like you’re a white anthropologist.” He mouthed the word “white” so that it made barely any sound, just an outline, like an expletive edited from a song. “We had croissants, the real kind, and we didn’t eat those pop-can desserts, ever. We made things from scratch. And, Eldwin, did you just compare bread to Pop Rocks?”
Eldwin made his mouth a straight line and pulled the laptop away to reread.
“Why do you want to tell this story anyway?” Brian asked.
“Just tell me more about Junior and what you all ate. You know the assignment.”
The brief ethnographical assignment required each student to collect an interesting story from another student in the class and decide which details to recount in order to form a profile of both person and region.