The Other Black Girl(53)
I stopped my wig adjusting long enough to meet his eye and grinned. “Who?” I asked, wrapping my voice up in as much gold glitter and cashmere as I could. “Diana Ross?”
Elroy laughed that honey-coated laugh that had made me fall in love with him back in Newark, back when he’d followed me, Kenny, and Mani around school trying to sing and dance like a Temptation; and again almost ten years later, when we were home for the holidays and freshly graduated from our respective universities. But even as the usual four crinkles bracketed his eyes, I could see something sharper than mere playfulness lay beneath. Reproach, maybe.
I didn’t like it. Not even as he stood up from the toilet seat, came over, and kissed me on the cheek, contorting his body so he could get around the tall back of the wooden chair I’d dragged into the bathroom from the bedroom.
“No,” he said, twirling one of my new locks of hair with his finger. “Not Diana.”
“Who’s more diva than Diana?”
“Your mom,” he said. “And all those fancy Jack and Jill ladies she used to bring around the house. The ones we always made fun of back in the day, with the long white gloves.”
Elroy must not have seen me wince, because he continued on. “What was that one lady’s name? The one who had a different pastel outfit for every day of the week? Beverly Carter?”
“Uh-huh. No—Rebekah Carter,” I said, moving the brush and the toothpaste out of the way so I could reach for the curling iron. “Wife of Herbert Carter the Fourth.”
It was Elroy’s turn to wince, bracing himself with my chair. “Right. Rebekah with a ‘k’ Carter. Always so uppity.”
“?‘It’s Re-beh-kah. Not Re-beh-kuh,’?” I recalled, busting into a fit of giggles so convulsive that I almost burned my forehead. “Remember that time you called her Rebek-can’t to her face?”
“I was such a terrible kid,” Elroy admitted. “I’m surprised your mom still let me come by for dinner all those times.”
“She didn’t. Well—not really. Remember those nights I told you that you couldn’t come over because I was studying Swahili at Sidney’s house?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember ever hearing me speak one word of Swahili?”
Elroy laughed. “Makes sense. We couldn’t have little ole El from around the way messing up a Gordon dinner.”
“Tracking brown mud up and down all of Mom’s white carpets.”
“Updating everybody on the latest bad news. Getting to second base on the front porch… with all the lights off.” Elroy wiggled his eyebrows.
“Don’t forget feeding Bubbles to the raccoons. And that time we almost fed Jonathan to them, too.”
“Hey, hey, that was all you,” he said, smiling. “Jonathan and I were always cool. He was the only Gordon who could stand to have me around. Your dad? Maybe a little bit. But your ma, though… lord have mercy, the daggers that woman shot me whenever I came around, all because my dad was a doorman.”
I eyed Elroy again. Something had shifted beneath his ready-to-go exterior. An unsettling memory mixed with a rush of repulsion. Just like that, our reminiscing was over. His hands were still on the back of my chair, but his eyes were shut, and I could tell he was drifting somewhere else entirely. It almost always happened this way: a swift shift from perfectly okay to painfully wrong.
I returned to my reflection, feeling less confident about what I saw than I had moments before. For the first time, my blue eye shadow looked garish; my liner like a child had taken a crayon to my eyelids. My skin was too pale, much closer to the color of dry sand, much closer to the appearance of a sick person.
This was who was getting up onstage in front of three hundred people? My stomach lurched. I was going to look so washed out beneath those bright lights compared to Kenny, who would be all beautiful and brown and Harvard-polished.
I pinched my cheeks once, willing some color to come through, until I remembered that was something that really only worked for white women. Then I put my head in my hands and did the one thing you’re not supposed to do before a public appearance: I started to cry.
Elroy placed his hands on my shoulders, and I knew he was back. “I just… this satin shirt, your being late to your own event—it all feels kind of over-the-top, you know? I just don’t want you to become one of those…”
I blinked at him. He blinked back.
“The Rebekah Carter comparison might have been an exaggeration,” he continued carefully, “but you know what I mean. You know how much of a self-important devil she could be.”
He had a point. A “well-to-do” Black woman with café au lait skin and a heel for every occasion, Rebekah had been a fixture in my house nearly every summer morning from 1959 until 1967. Supposedly, she was lonely; supposedly, her husband’s line of work sent him all over the country. All I knew was that whenever I woke up and went downstairs to have breakfast, she was almost always chatting with my mother at our claw-footed kitchen table about politics or music or the latest Jack and Jill gossip. Sometimes, she’d comment on my shape or how dehydrated I looked, as though I were supposed to roll out of bed looking like I was ready to go find a husband. But usually—mercifully—she ignored me, too tied up with proffering this or that Black person to fulfill whatever latest need my mother had: a new grass-cutter, a new hairstylist, a new dentist.