The Black Kids(15)
“Not her,” my mother says. “The other one.”
She recounts the evening’s events, but in her version we ate pig slop for dinner and Harrison was raised by wolves who let him nearly die of lockjaw, and poor sad wayward Jo is his prey. Then Jo stomped right on her own mother’s foot and slammed the door in our faces before we could even say goodbye. And as we were going back to the car, we witnessed a police beating, because that’s the kind of neighborhood his daughter wishes to live in these days. All of which, I suppose, isn’t entirely untrue, but it’s also not entirely true. We all sew a few sequins on our stories to make them shine brighter.
“I thought the slop was pretty good,” I offer.
“Be quiet, Ashley,” my mother says as my father pours her a glass of wine. Being the only black person in the brochure at the office is stressful. Sometimes my parents get mistaken for their own assistants, or people think they’ve stumbled into the wrong meetings, or their assistants think they know better than my parents do and it becomes a whole thing, even though both of them are amazing at what they do, or they wouldn’t have gotten where they are to begin with. Like Grandma Opal said, “You have to be better.” That’s why they drink, Jo says.
“Did you do anything?” my father asks.
“About what?”
“The police and the kids.”
“What should we have done?”
“You said they were little kids?”
“I don’t know what they did or didn’t do. And I wasn’t going to jeopardize our safety to find out. We’re still black. Besides, that’s not the point. What if Jo and that man have kids in that neighborhood? I mean, they’re probably not gonna be moving anywhere better anytime soon. And even if they move somewhere else, things are changing, but people are still ignorant. If people say or do nasty things to them or to their kids, what’s he gonna do about it? Jo’s a smart girl—too smart for this shit. She needs to get her ass back in school. What if people think she’s her own kids’ nanny?”
Lucia looks up at this and makes a face but doesn’t say anything. Then she looks over at me. I’ve already started to nibble on the chicken going into the enchiladas. She slaps my hand out of it.
My father scratches above his eyebrow and opens his mouth as if to say something that never comes out.
“You should have been there,” my mother finally says.
“I couldn’t get out in time, Val. Things were too busy,” my dad says.
“They always are.”
My mother leaves the room, clutching her wineglass, my father at her heels. They’re off to argue about Jo, which is a lot of what they do these days. Although before it was Jo, it was other stuff. Jo says they’re so busy trying to be perfect for everybody else that all they have left for each other is the messy. Lucia turns to me and passes me a knife.
“You eat, you help.”
* * *
They say one day when the Big One hits, all of this will just cave into the ocean, all the beauty and the rocks and the grass and the homes and the people. Our house is made of glass and wood so that you’re inside and outside all at once. It’s loosely modeled after a Case Study House by a very famous architect that my mother loves. Once, she took Jo and me for a Saturday drive to tour all the Case Study Houses, which are famous historical houses designed by famous architects all around the city. I think she wanted us to love those gleaming corners as much as she did, to understand how the right beam could make you feel closer to the very universe itself, but mostly Jo and I complained about how hot it was, and I had attitude all day because I was missing a birthday party for this girl I didn’t even particularly like. “I don’t understand why we’re spending the whole day paying to look at other people’s houses. It’s so dumb,” Jo whined. Still, we spent the day wandering through great modernist boxes, light and dark, with their big open glass windows and plywood and steel and concrete, the stuff of the houses themselves kinda like the three of us together, our parts both knowable and unknowable to one another. Eventually, Jo and I stopped sulking and started to marvel at the way all that glass in those fancy houses refracted the light in colors across our skin; and instead of being little assholes, together we chased rainbows. Anyway, if there’s a Big One, we’re definitely goners. On days like these, even the gusts against the glass feel as though, if they keep on hard enough, the entire house will collapse on all of us fragile in it. The roof feels like the safest place to be sometimes. Jo and I used to stand on the edge and dare each other to jump.
Courtney calls, and I climb out onto the roof for some privacy. Sometimes I see my parents as shadows at my door, listening. The roof is safer for secrets.
“Are you in a wind tunnel? Good Lord.”
“Eye of a hurricane, actually.”
“Are you in trouble?” she says.
“Lucia didn’t tell them.”
“God, I wish I had a Lucia,” Courtney says. “I’m grounded, but not until after prom.”
“That’s not too bad, right?”
“I can’t go to any of the after-parties, though.”
“That totally sucks.”
“Yeah, but, like, I went to them last year… so I guess it could be worse.”
“Totally.”