The Black Kids(25)
“Dude. What the hell, Ash?”
The phone clicks, and then my sister’s gone.
DURING
CHAPTER 6
LAST NIGHT, A Guatemalan immigrant was attacked by the crowd. They launched a car stereo at his head, stripped off his clothes, and spray-painted his whole body black, including his privates. Then they doused him in gas. A black preacher threw his body over the man and raised a Bible at the crowd like he was performing a group exorcism and yelled, “Kill him, and you have to kill me, too.” In many of the worst-hit areas, the police are nowhere to be found.
My mother shakes her head in disbelief. She stands, lips slightly parted, her tongue waiting for words that won’t come. The heart of the violence is around Normandie and Florence. Without the police, there’s nobody’s around to stanch the bleeding. Even so, all throughout the body of the city there is trauma, all of us slowly going into shock.
“Josephine needs to bring her stubborn ass here,” my mother mutters. My mother calls my sister by her full name only when she’s pissed or scared, or both.
When the news finally cuts to commercial, my mother takes a VHS tape and shoves it into the machine’s mouth. The sun isn’t even up yet and we’re going to exercise damn near a full hour before it’s time to get ready for school, which she used to do with Jo every morning for as long as I can remember. Then Jo went off to college, and my mother started aggressively waking me up to join her, whether I wanted to or not.
When my mother turns to look at me, I think she’s gonna say something about the riots, or, like, maybe that I should stay home from school today. According to the news, lots of schools in the hardest-hit parts of LA have shut down as a result of the riots.
Instead, my mother says, “Don’t you think it’s time to throw that shirt away?”
I’m wearing the same thing I wore to bed, an extra-long, bleach-stained “Where’s the Beef” T-shirt, courtesy of Jo’s emptied closet, and sleep shorts with dancing penguins. My mother is in a leotard that’s tighter than I’m comfortable with. It’s lavender, cut high up her hips, and she wears a pair of teal bicycle shorts under it that match her faded terry cloth headband. I can’t be bothered to wear exercise clothes when the sun itself isn’t even up, much less color-coordinate in my own home. Besides, I just got my heart broken by a university. I feel the weight of my failure with every beat. I stayed up all night thinking about what I did wrong, whether my personal statement wasn’t personal enough, whether I should’ve done extra extracurriculars, about that one B I got in PE freshman year, all because I suck at stupid badminton. Who the hell plays badminton in real life? I don’t think I even got three consecutive hours of sleep. I’ve read that people actually die of broken hearts. I really shouldn’t be exercising under these conditions.
I decide that I’m definitely gonna ask my mom if I can stay home from school today when we’re done and she’s got that post-exercise high when, even though you’re dripping in sweat and sore, you got the endorphins swirling around you and making you feel like just because you moved for a few minutes you can do anything. Like give your child twenty dollars.
We fast-forward through the weird courtroom sketch about piracy and throw ourselves right into the diner dance floor 1950s nostalgia rendered in flashes of neon. Richard Simmons is perfect. His voice is high, his ’fro slightly receding, his shorts receded. His tan thighs are smooth as silk and his sneakers bright as bleach. He’s flanked by a lady in deep purple who looks a little like a California Raisin and a brunette in pants that are trying to eat her whole.
My mother and I begin to dip and writhe sensually with Richard to “Fever.”
It definitely feels inappropriate to writhe sensually with one’s mother.
“You got that fever!” Richard purrs.
“You got that fever, Ashley?” My mother laughs and squeezes her butt cheeks along with everyone onscreen.
“I got something,” I huff.
“You’re being ridiculous,” my father yells from the kitchen.
“Let me see you sizzle,” Richard says.
My father is on the phone arguing with my uncle Ronnie while we exercise. Uncle Ronnie is my father’s balding older brother who likes to give him shit about where we live and how we talk and most other things about us. I think he’s afraid my dad thinks he’s better than him, or maybe he’s afraid that he actually is. Ronnie refuses to give up his hair because it used to be his pride and joy—long, inky spirals that he wore in two braids throughout the 1960s and ’70s, until the early ’80s hit. When the economy got fucked, so did Uncle Ronnie’s hair. Now his hairline’s receded so his forehead looks like low tide. It does seem a bit unfair that one brother should have so much and the other not even so much as his hair, but I guess that’s just the way it is. They’re arguing over my grandmother’s store, which is in the hood, which is on fire. Not the store itself, though; not yet.
My grandmother is long dead and the business should be too, but Uncle Ronnie has kept it alive by the skin of his teeth, as my dad says. Repairing vacuums isn’t as lucrative as it once was, not that my grandma Shirley ever made all that much to begin with. Now when things break, sometimes it’s easier to just buy another one. Still, Shirley’s Vacuum Repair Spot stays. Uncle Ronnie sells vacuum accessories, repairs broken vacuums, and refurbishes discarded vacuums to be sold. Also, inside the store a woman named Guadalupe sells homemade tamales for a dollar each. The tamales do better than the vacuum stuff, even if technically Uncle Ronnie doesn’t have a food permit.