The Black Kids(7)

“Why are you pulling me over?” my mother asked. Her hair looked a little crazy, and she smoothed it down quickly.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“I live here. Just a few miles up the road.” She recited the address.

“What apartment number?”

“None. It’s a house. Is all this necessary?” she said.

“There’s no plates on your car.”

“That’s because it’s brand-new. I just bought it.”

“License and registration, please.”

She slowly and carefully reached into the glove compartment for the little folder with her new-car paperwork and insurance, announcing everything she was doing as she did it, and then she passed it over to him along with her license. He made a big show of radio-ing everything in, hand resting on his gun, which hung right by my mother’s head. Instead of staring over at her, I kept staring down at my new pink nails, afraid to look up.

When the voice on the other end finally confirmed ownership, he looked disappointed, then quickly discarded us like a Christmas toy come New Year’s.

“Have a good day, ma’am,” he said.

“You too, officer,” my mother said, smiling.

But when she went to turn the key in the ignition, her hands were trembling. She rolled up the windows and pulled the convertible top up so the car grew small and dark and our heads no longer touched the open sky.

“Asshole,” she muttered.



* * *




When Lucia pulls up to Kimberly’s house, I’m already waiting outside. Inside, Kimberly’s mom is yelling at Kimberly, so rather than watch a preview of our own inevitable parental verbal ass whuppings, the rest of us wait on her front steps. I wave to Heather and Courtney before I make the perp walk to the car. I’ve hardly even opened the car door before Lucia starts yelling at me, her pretty mouth an AK-47 shooting Spanish bullets. Her nails and mouth are always red, like a gash or a rose, and she says this reminds her that she’s still a woman, even when covered in somebody else’s dirt. The words keep coming out in a rat-a-tat-tat until finally she pauses and sighs. “I won’t always be around, mija.”

On the radio, a grown man yells at me to go to some for-profit college: “Aren’t you sick of your dead-end life? What you waiting for?”

These are the ads they play on Spanish and Black people stations—bail bonds, cheap auto insurance, ads in which grown men berate your very existence. As we drive, the surfers pack up for the day along the rocks, reedlike and tan, half-naked and black from the waist down in their wet suits, like one of those half-chocolate Pocky snacks Heather brought back from her trip to Japan.

“Change the channel,” Lucia says.

Lucia is my nanny, but I don’t like to call her that ’cause it feels gross. She’s short—shorter than any other adult I know. Like, I was taller than she is by the time I was ten. When she cleans, she can reach only to a little bit above my head, and so sometimes it seems like she spends the day going up and down ladders to reach hidden corners, like some life-size version of the game Chutes and Ladders. Her car is matte gray with missing hubcaps, a Corolla that looks like somebody tore the secrets from its seats.

“I don’t know why you always hanging with those girls when you’re always telling me how terrible they are,” Lucia says.

“I’m not going to tell you anything if all you do is use it against me,” I say. “… And I never said they were terrible.”

“You’re lucky your parents weren’t home,” she says.

She’s right, but also not. Once during sophomore year I ditched with Kimberly and Courtney, and the school called. Unluckily for me, on that particular day my dad just happened to be working from home and answered the phone. When I got home, he sat me down and made me calculate, down to the hour, how much they spent on my schooling to show me how much money I wasted when I didn’t show up for class.

“We’re not your friends’ parents. You don’t have some magic trust fund. This is still a sacrifice for us. We want more for you,” he said.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that nowadays my parents are far too concerned with work and analyzing what went wrong with their wayward daughter, Jo, to care about what I’m up to.

Jo is my troubled older sister. She dropped out of college and didn’t tell them for a whole-ass semester. That’s a lot more money than I’m wasting. Her new husband is a musician who’s really a construction worker, and she’s a musician who’s really a secretary, and they live in a shithole somewhere on Fairfax between the Orthodox Jews and the Ethiopians. I think she’s angry at all the things my parents have done to her, or haven’t.

To be honest, I don’t remember her ever not being at least a little bit angry. When she was in high school, she got suspended for a month because she handcuffed herself to the flagpole up front to fight apartheid.

“We got plenty of people here to handcuff yourself to a pole for,” my mother said.

“Josephine helped the Resistance, and she wasn’t really French,” Jo sassed back.

“She didn’t have to worry about college applications.”

“We got to help our black brothers and sisters abroad,” Jo said.

Jo is named after Josephine Baker, who helped the French Resistance during World War II but also danced around Europe naked except for a costume made of strategically placed bunches of bananas. When we were little, my sister used to tell her friends she was named after Jo March from Little Women; this was back before she got all into being black. Both Jos are pains in the ass, as far as I can tell.