The Office of Historical Corrections(41)

My parents and I were invited over to their house after my first week of school. In the middle of the dessert course, Genie’s father said, “She’s so well spoken, for having been in public school until now,” and my mother grimaced and launched into a defense of public schools, and my father politely waited for her to finish and then said, “When your baby’s really brilliant you don’t need to pay for someone to tell you so. You wait for the opportunities to come to you.” Genie’s father hinted that my scholarship was possible because of funds they’d earmarked for the recruitment of minority students, and my mother said true charity wasn’t boastful, and Genie’s mother noted that the Bible verse my mother was trying to quote was actually about love. That was how joint family dinners went for the following decade, but they continued to happen several times a year.

At the dinner table, Genie was a proper young lady and I was a mouthy child being raised in a home where I’d never been told Children should be seen and not heard, or Stay out of grown folks’ business. Beyond our parents’ watch, Genie had plenty to say. She did not so much actively dislike me as disdain me. Her favorite thing to do was pronounce something I was doing, or wearing, or simply was, to be confusing. “Your hair is confusing me,” Genie said the first day we met, with an air of genuine concern that never entirely went away or became less grating. In both our households there were a series of party pictures of the two of us, one per party each year from childhood to adolescence. I liked myself just fine when looking at myself, but in photos with Genie, a former Gerber baby, belle of the Jack and Jill debutante ball, I looked sulky, ersatz. It was too late for the era when prestigious institutions would acquire one minority and stop, but too soon for there to be enough of us that we had the option of avoiding taking a position on each other. We grew up circling each other, each aware of the ways the other highlighted our deficiencies.

I went to college expecting to be mostly rid of Genie. For the four years we spent at well-regarded universities on opposite coasts, I became accustomed to her absence, but at the party Genie’s parents threw for her graduation, we discovered we were both headed directly to the same PhD program. Ready to believe in the comfort of the familiar, we tried that first year to be real friends, went on study dates and girls’ nights and salon outings, built the trappings of a closeness that never quite took. We were the only two Black women in the department—this counting faculty, grad students, staff, and, for four out of our five years, undergraduate majors—and in our first year I was constantly correcting people who got the two of us confused, our similar hair and coloring enough to override that Genie was five inches taller and three dress sizes smaller than I was. The confusion eventually faded because professors in the program liked me fine, but they loved Genie, and in that way they came to be able to tell the difference between us. Our pretense at true friendship also faded. In my telling, Genie discovered she didn’t need it, and in Genie’s telling, I discovered I didn’t want it. It was true, I admit—away from Genie, I had the peculiar confidence of only children, the boldness that came from being doted on but alone often enough to be oblivious to my own strangeness. In Genie’s presence, I felt revealed by the only nearby witness to my life as a whole.

At the end of our first year in the program, I visited my parents, who were in the suburbs now—they had given up on DC rent and moved to PG county—and told them there wasn’t anyone to date seriously in my small white university town. A week later we drove into DC for Genie’s parents’ annual summer white party, where Genie announced her engagement to James Harmon III, a Black doctor who’d just finished his residency there. Genie got married the summer after our second year, just before her husband started work at the University Hospital. I was invited, but I was teaching a summer class and couldn’t cancel sessions; I sent, via my parents, my apologies and a Vitamix. My research area was protest movements of the twentieth century, and Genie’s was material culture in the seventeenth century, which meant although we were both Americanists, after our first year of school we generally shared only one class a semester, and saw less and less of each other.

By our third year, Genie and her husband had moved into a spectacular town house, at which she volunteered to host the annual grad student end-of-year party. In previous years, the party had consisted of chips and beer in an overheated basement apartment, or supermarket cheese plates in the student union room, but Genie’s party was catered, except for the gingerbread Bundt cake she baked and iced herself, using her grandmother’s recipe. Professional bartenders in black tie were on hand serving cocktails named after schools of historical thought. Genie drank only The Great Man, which was actually a mocktail, and confided in me that she was pregnant. I congratulated her, genuinely, and felt resentful that I could not allow myself even a moment of smug anti-feminist joy to think that motherhood might slow Genie down or at least keep her off the job market when it was my turn. At least I am having a twenties, I thought, though my twenties, which I’d treated with a cast-down-your-bucket-where-you-are approach, had thus far only brought me a string of men who were all very sad about some quality in themselves that they had no intention of making any effort to change. I took a sip of my Marxist, a vodka cocktail made with such high-end alcohol that at first sip I hadn’t recognized it as vodka, having until that party believed that it was the essence of vodka to have an aftertaste like astringent.