LIGHT-SKINNED-ED GIRL by Heidi W. Durrow
“You my lucky piece,” Grandma says when the bus drives up just as we reach the stop.
Grandma has walked me the half block from the hospital lobby to the bus stop, her hand wrapped around mine like a leash.
It is winter in Portland and it is raining. Puddle water has splashed up on my new shoes. My girl-in-a-new-dress feeling has faded. My new-girl feeling has disappeared.
My hand is in hers until she reaches into a black patent leather clutch for change.
“Well, aren’t those the prettiest blue eyes on the prettiest little girl,” the bus driver says as we climb aboard. The new-girl feeling comes back and I smile.
“This my grand-baby. Come to live with me.” Grandma can’t lose Texas.
Her body is a bullet. She is thick and short. Her waist is the same go-around number as her chest. She has Grandma boobies; smother-you-into-her kind of boobies that make her soft and squishy. Her dark hair is pulled back and is covered by a plastic bonnet. She puts the change in for my fare. “Here you go, ma’am.” The bus driver hands her a transfer slip for each of us.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I say. I mind my manners around strangers. Grandma is still a stranger to me.
I know only a few things about Grandma. She’s a gardener; she has soft hands; and she smells like lavender.
For Christmas, Grandma sends Robbie and me a card with a new $10 bill wrapped in aluminum foil. On the back of the envelope where she presses extra hard there’s a small smudge. The card smells like the lavender lotion she uses to keep her hands soft.
I hold her hand again and think of cotton, not knowing what that means, and pillows and clouds. She doesn’t have a single wrinkle on her anywhere. She has dark eggplant-brown skin as smooth as a plate all because of the lotion she sends for special from the South. “They got better roots down there – better dirt for making a root strong.”
“Well, aren’t you lucky to have a special Grandma,” the bus driver says. “Pretty and lucky.”
This is the picture I want to remember: Grandma looks something like pride. Like a whistle about to blow.
She wipes the rain off my face. “We almost home.” When we find our seats, she says something more, but I cannot hear it. She is leaning across me like a seat belt and speaks into my bad ear – it is the only lasting injury I have from the accident. Her hands are on me the whole ride, across my shoulder, on my hand, stroking my hair to smooth it flat again. I am the new girl, partly the new girl but a little off-balance. Grandma seems to be holding me down, as if I might fly away or fall.
The bus ride is seven stops and three lights. Then we are home. Grandma’s home, the new girl’s home in a new dress.
Grandma is the first colored woman to buy a house in this part of Portland. That’s what Grandma says. When she moved in, the German dairy store closed and the Lutheran church became African Methodist. Amen. That part’s Grandma too.
All of Grandma’s neighbors are black. And most came from the South around the same time Grandma did.
This is the same house Pop and Aunt Loretta grew up in.
On the dining room mantle, there are photographs of me and Pop. Of me and Grandma. Of me and Robbie. Of me, but none of Mor, that’s mom in Danish.
“There, see, that smile? That was the time I came to visit you over Christmas. Remember?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“And remember what a good time we had?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“Playing bingo. Going to the garage sales. Oh! And I have a little present for you.”
She slips into her room while I wait, motionless. When she returns to the living room she holds a large wrapped box. I open the box. Make my first deals with myself. I will not be sad. I will not show them I am sad. I will be okay. Those promises become my layers. The middle that no one will touch.
“Thank you,” I say and pull out two black Raggedy Ann dolls, a boy and a girl. I will pretend that I deserve this.
“Aunt Loretta gave you her room. Dressed it all up in pink. Did you know that’s her favorite color?”
I nod.
“And look at this hair. All this pretty long hair looking all wild from outside.”
“We’re gonna wash that tonight,” she continues. “Your Aunt Loretta will help you. Bet she know how to do something better with that mess of hair than what you had done before. You’re gonna go to school Monday and be the prettiest little girl there.”
She doesn’t say better than your mama. She doesn’t say anything about my mother because we both know that the new girl has no mother. The new girl can’t be new and still remember. I am not the new girl. But I will pretend.
Nella walked them up three flights of stairs to the roof. She carried Ariel, who was only six months old, in her arms. Rachel and her brother, Robbie, followed two steps behind. Nella had taken the kids up to the roof three times that week – each time edging them closer to the side.
The wind clustered around the heart of their neighborhood. On the afternoons they spent on the rooftop, Nella wrapped her arms, like wings, around the kids’ shoulders and breathed onto their necks to keep them warm. Robbie and Rachel fought about who would get to crawl on her lap and wrap themselves half inside her coat.
“Can we go now?” Robbie asked. His face had brightened in the cold air and was as wet from the rain as a well-licked plate.
Nella’s blue eyes had faded into a fuzzy, sunken stare.
Rachel had found many reasons to be disappointed in her mother those last weeks. Robbie needed his pills but had gone without for two days; Ariel’s diaper was wet. Nella’s long blond hair fell in limp strands. And when she spoke, you could see the space for the tooth she had lost in the fight with her boyfriend. Rachel didn’t want to be like her anymore; she didn’t want her pale white skin.
The two rag dolls that Grandma gave me sleep at the bottom of the bed. Grandma and Aunt Loretta come into my dark room. They want to check on the poor baby. That’s me.
I close my eyes and pretend sleep, holding my teddy bear close to my middle. I pretend sleep all the time. “Poor baby, so tired.” Grandma’s hand rakes through my hair.
It’s the kind of hair that gets nappy. She tried to brush it out before bedtime. I held real still, but it still hurt. She said I was tender-headed. The comb got stuck in the bottom in the back.
“She’s got good hair. Leave her be.” Aunt Loretta pulled the comb out, untangled each hair.
“Black girls with a lot of hair like this don’t need to be so tender-headed,” Grandma said. All my middle layers collapsed. And I cried. And cried and cried.
Now my nappy kitchen-head is on the pillow. All wild, like Grandma says. And I’m done crying. I don’t want to be a mess or nappy or be so tender. “I’ll wash it tomorrow, Mama,” Loretta says. Her voice is honey.
I want to be beautiful like Aunt Loretta. She smiles all the time even when she looks at the picture of Uncle Nathan. Her teeth are white like paper and straight. She shows her teeth when she smiles. I have a cover-up-my-teeth smile. It’s a smile, just no teeth. Maybe I started doing it when Pop called me Snaggle-tooth.
Loretta is nut brown and knows she’s beautiful. She was Rose Festival princess and got to meet President John F. Kennedy. Her skin is even prettier than Grandma’s and she doesn’t use that sent-for lotion.
They leave the door open just enough to keep the monsters away. But still I press my back into the bed and open my eyes. No more pretend sleep. Now I will be real awake. Make sure the dreams don’t come. Stay awake. Stay away from dreaming.
Tomorrow is my first day at school. I have a new notebook, and pencils and a pencil holder with a zipper this year. I am going to think about school and learn cursive, and all the big words I can know. I am going to concentrate. Be a good girl.
Up on the roof, Nella told them stories that weren’t really stories, but lists of things she remembered about her childhood self: how she would save the wishbone in the bottom of her jewelry box until she really needed a wish to come true; how she ate her dinner one food at a time. She told them about all the things that mattered to her. Everything that had counted and how it all added up to a childhood she had never remembered being so good before. The wind had blown her hair into her face. It made her look messy now and not free.
“Math was my favorite subject in school,” she said in Danish. She could find herself better in numbers; she liked the way there was always only a single answer.
Nella gave up the study of numbers when she learned that even numbers could fool her. Nella learned the uncertainty of what used to be fixed points – numbers infinitely approaching and never reaching what they were supposed to be.
On the last day that Nella took her children up to the roof, she had calculated the difference between their yearning for what they could not have and her ability to watch them want. The difference between her pain and theirs, she decided, measured nine stories high.
I call this Day 2. Second day at Grandma’s house. Wishing I could go back home. Home to before Chicago. Before there was a boyfriend. To back when there was me and Robbie and Mor and Pop. And everything was okay. Even though there wouldn’t be an Ariel, that would be okay too.
Aunt Loretta makes pancakes special for me even though she has no business in the kitchen. Two pancakes and not enough syrup is what she gives me. Syrup that makes a stain in the pancake middle, gone so fast like the pancake is thirsty. I eat exactly what they give me. That is what I do from now on.
Aunt Loretta eats only one pancake. And Grandma none because her teeth don’t set right. There is something dangerous about pancakes because Grandma watches us eat. “How you gonna catch a lizard with your backside loading you down?” Grandma fusses at Aunt Loretta. I am smart and know that when she says lizard she means husband. That is called learning the meaning from the context. Because Grandma says it and she touches Aunt Loretta’s face at the same time. That means she’s talking about being pretty and being worth something and making it count. There are other things that make me know this. But I can’t explain.
Aunt Loretta laughs. And so do I. They are happy that I am laughing. It’s the first time as the new girl.
“I don’t need a lizard, mama.”
When she says Mama, I think of saying Mor and the way I don’t get to say it anymore. I am caught in before and after time. Last-time things and firsts. Last-time things make me sad like the last time I called for Mor and used Danish sounds. I feel my middle fill up with sounds that no one else understands. Then they reach my throat. My fingertips pulse. What if these sounds get stuck in me? What if I am filled with sounds that will never get used up? Mor?
Hee-hee-hee-hee. I make those sounds, but the real laugh feels trapped inside too.
School is not a first-time thing. I sit in the front, like I always do. I sit quietly, like I am supposed to do. I raise my hand before speaking and write my name in the top right-hand corner of the paper. And the date. Because this is what good students do.
Mrs. Anderson is homeroom and Language Arts. She is a black woman. I think about this and don’t know why. It is something I’m supposed to know but not think about. Mrs. Anderson is my first black woman teacher.
It makes me go back in my mind: Mrs. Marshall, first-grade, favorite; Mrs. Legos, second-grade, not-so-nice; Mrs. Mamiya, third-grade, beautiful; Mrs. Breedlove, fourth-grade, smart; Mr. Engels, fifth-grade, bald and deep voice. And white. I remember they are all white.
There are 15 black people in the class and 7 white people. And there’s me. There’s another girl who sits in the back. Her name is Carmen LaGuardia and she has hair like me, my same color skin, and she is black. I don’t understand how she counts in the 15, but she seems to know.
I see people two different ways now: people who look like me and people who don’t look like me.
Rachel Morse?
Present.
Where are you from?
I answer: 4215 North Vancouver Avenue, Portland, Oregon, 97217. I hear laughter from behind me.
Day 2 becomes Day 3. And the next day and the next. I stop counting out loud, but do inside-counting.
Grandma thinks I am adjusting well. She says: Look like you adjustin just fine. I want her to put s’s on the ends of her words and not say “fixin to” when she’s about to do something. The kids in school say that and I know they’re not as smart as me.
There is a girl who wants to beat me up. She says, You think you so cute. Her name is Tamika Washington. She says, I’m fixin to beat your ass. Sometimes she pulls my hair. Like in gym class she grabbed my two braids. I said ouch really loud even though I didn’t mean to and Mrs. Karr heard. She said Tamika and blew the whistle real loud. And Tamika said, Miss K. I’m just playin with her. Dang. When Mrs. Karr turned away again that’s when Tamika said it. I’m fixin to kick your ass after school. You think you so cute with that hair.
I am light-skinneded. That’s what the other kids say. And I talk white. I think new things when they say this. Like there are a lot of important things I didn’t know about. I think Mor didn’t know either. They tell me it is bad to have ashy knees. They say stay out of the rain so my hair doesn’t go back. They have a language I don’t know but I understand. I learn that black people don’t have blue eyes. I learn that I am black. I have blue eyes. I try to pull all these new facts into the new girl. Remember.
What are you?
Why are your eyes that color?
You got cat-eyes.
You not really black.
You talk white.
Your mom’s white?
I think that I am getting better at covering up the middle parts. When Michael Wade kicks the back of my chair in class, I focus on the bump bump bump until he stops. I can focus on the bump bump bump and not say anything. I hear the smile on his face as he does this. Is he counting the number of times he can bump bump bump before I tell on him? I don’t tell on him. My new friend, Tracy, says Michael Wade does the bump bump bump thing because he likes me. Tracy is white and doesn’t know anything. And when Antoine who wears new tennis shoes and ironed jeans mocks me in a baby voice when I answer the questions right, I don’t have to cry anymore or be so tender. When something starts to feel like hurt, I put it in this imaginary bottle inside me. It’s blue glass with a cork stopper. My stomach tightens and my eyeballs get hot. I put all of that inside the bottle. If I go through my thoughts quickly, no one notices my blue bottle trick. The blue bottle stays a secret.
The new girl goes to school the next day and the next. She learns cursive and big words like discombobulated because Mrs. Anderson always says that.
You’ve got me all discombobulated, she says when she smacks the yardstick on Michael Wade’s desk and it breaks in half. That makes Michael Wade laugh even harder. He is supposed to stop. We have things to learn. I hate Michael Wade. He always laughs.
The new girl goes to school the next day and the next day. There are some special days in between the ordinary days. And Tamika doesn’t beat me up. I learn more words. I learn to be quiet and stay sweet. I learn that white people don’t use wash rags in the shower, but now I do. I learn to write in complete sentences.
I’m mixed.
My mom’s eyes are this color.
I’m from all over.
My background is mixed.
My family’s from Portland kind of. And Denmark.
Umm, I don’t know. I don’t know.
Aunt Loretta brushes my hair each morning and only sometimes makes pancakes. She’s bought a special brush for me that’s pink with white bristles. She holds my hair in her hands the same way as Mor did. Loretta’s hands get lost in my hair. She has small wrists that make a circle tiny enough for me to touch my fingers all the way around. She has perfect red nails. She uses the nail on her right index finger to make the middle-part. It doesn’t scratch. She parts my hair from the front to the back to make the line. I feel the line she makes on my scalp. Grandma uses a sharp comb and it feels like she’s dividing me in half.
Today is school picture day. Loretta wants to brush my hair special. I sit between her legs on her bedroom floor still in my favorite Pooh pajamas. Aunt Loretta smells like toothpaste and fresh white soap. I smell like a pillow. I bunch my legs against my chest and wrap my arms around my knees. I feel like a boxer getting ready to fight in the ring. Not at all tender, but still taken care of.
“Why do the other kids talk about my eyes?”
Michael Wade calls me cat-eyes. And Tamika says I look scary. She says, I’m scared of that. Except she isn’t really scared since she’s the one who wants to beat me up. She rolls her eyes when she says it and turns her head. Then there’s Mr. Proctor. He calls me Bright Eyes and Mrs. Reynolds who says I look like a doll. And those I know are good things. There are some people who like my eyes and some people who don’t.
“Because they’re such a pretty blue.”
I giggle when Aunt Loretta says this. A giggle can mean thank you or please stop looking at me. This time it means the first thing because it’s school picture day and it’s important to be pretty.
“But other people have blue eyes.”
“Yes, but you got yours special.”
Blue is a prize that even beautiful Aunt Loretta can’t have.
“Yeah, they’re just like Mor’s,” I say and I feel something like happy. I have said Mor out loud and made some of the inside sounds outside. I have said Mor and the glass inside me didn’t shake.
I try the sounds again. “When Mor was little she had two braids in her hair too. Hestetaller. That means horsetails. I saw a picture.” In the picture, Mor is nine, maybe ten years old. She sits at a desk that opens up like a box. I have that picture in my mind when I say this.
But then Aunt Loretta’s “really” with a question mark erases the picture. And all the sounds. Then she says: “Well, today we’re going to do something a little different. Okay?”
I nod, and know that it doesn’t matter. I am a doll.
“I remember when I was a little girl. I’d have to sit by the stove to get my hair all pressed out. If I didn’t smell the hair burning I knew it would be no good.”
I have heard these stories before. I think they’re embarrassing but don’t know why.
She puts her nails in my hair and makes one part then another. She uses the big curling iron that goes in her hair even though my hair has curls. I smell hair burning.
She sprays hairspray on curls she makes with the curling iron. I do see a girl in the mirror when she is done and she is not me. There are so many pieces to my hair. Nothing lays flat. There are stiff curls that don’t wrap around my finger.
“You look just like your grandmother spit you out herself.”
I don’t want to be spit.
I am the letter M and somewhere in the middle for class pictures. When I sit down, my feet don’t reach the ground. My middle is all jumbled. I do my best cover-up-my-teeth smile, but the corners of my mouth barely move.
“Such a pretty little black girl. Why won’t you smile?”
Grandma’s house is two blocks away from the Wonder Bread factory which means that my house is two blocks away from it too. What’s hers is mine, she says. Simple math. Mr. Kimble, my math teacher, says that’s what’s called a transitive property.
Only I don’t like what’s hers: an oily pomade she wears that smears my cheek when she kisses me; a green velvet couch with deep brown swirls that no one can sit on unless special company comes by; a porcelain music box decorated with people who look like kings and queens and a servant with a broken arm; a dresser full of fabric she’s saving for the day I learn how to sew. Hers is the sent-for lotion; the rocking chair on the porch; and the pictures on the mantel; and the powder that looks like corn starch that she puts in my underwear drawer. She has a lot more things but these are the main ones.
Grandma’s things are mine and I am not allowed to touch them. Only sometimes I do. Because how can you have something without holding it? Like my denim-covered diary and my teddy bear and my new favorite pencil case with a zipper.
I know I’m mean to Grandma sometimes when I don’t want to be. I’m smarter than her. I don’t let the new girl think those things.
On Tuesdays we go to the Wonder Bread factory store and buy old bread even though it doesn’t make any sense that the bread would be old because it comes from just next door. But things work differently here in civilian life. That’s what Pop would call it. Civilian life. Civilians live in the same house or apartment and know the same people their whole lives. “Why would you want to live in the same place your whole life?” I ask my new friend Tracy. She looks at me like I’m crazy. “You have to live where your parents live. That’s just how it is,” she says and I make her not my friend anymore.
“I live with my Grandma and my Aunt Loretta.”
“So, that’s different.”
“I lived all over the world.”
“No you haven’t.”
I can say anything now because Tracy is not my friend. “Yes, I have. You’re stupid.”
Even though it’s her face that is crunching up and the heat is in her eyes, I open the blue bottle. Mad goes in there too.
You can buy bread at the Wonder Bread factory store on a good deal. Grandma likes good deals. On Tuesday afternoon there’s an extra discount and sometimes a few crumbled up cupcakes near the counter. They do not have franskbrod, or rugbrod, or wienerbrod. They do not have bread like Mor made. I stand by the check-out counter waiting for Grandma. It’s Tuesday but all the crumbles at the counter are gone.
“This Roger’s baby?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” Grandma says to a tall woman wearing an African scarf on her head.
“No mistakin you in the same family. Roger got some strong genes makin these babies. Except for those eyes.”
The new girl smiles a no-teeth smile when the African scarf woman takes her face in her hands. The new girl looks something like happy and stuck there. She’s the trophy on Aunt Loretta’s mantel with the perfect tennis swing. Smiling. Frozen. She is still. She is me.
Grandma grabs my face now and wipes away imaginary crumbs from my mouth. I know they are imaginary. Grandma’s just polishing me up.
“You know Roger’s granddad had blue eyes. Something just about like this.” Grandma turns my head toward her when she says this. I am scared that the sounds will spill out.
“They say that’s the only way it can happen. That’s the scientists. They know all that. We are a mixed-up people alright,” the African scarf woman says.
“Mmm-hmmm.”
If the sounds spill they will say: I am Mor’s daughter. I have her eyes.
“Just makes you wonder what that boy would look like now,” says the woman with the African scarf on her head.
“Mmmm-hmmm,” Grandma says. “Mmmm-hmmm.”
Loretta knocks on the door. My door is locked.
“Do you need some help, baby?”
“No, ma’am,” I say because I want to be polite.
She wants to brush my hair. Today I am brushing my hair.
I have tried to make the part straight three times already. It keeps going jagged in the back. I know because I run out of hair on one side and can’t make the braids even. Now I am not looking in the mirror. I am sitting on the bed. When I sit on the bed like this, my heels can bang against the sideboard. Bump bump bump. Michael Warren pulled my hair yesterday and I didn’t say anything. I try to make the part one more time and let my hair loose from the uneven braids.
The dolls Grandma gave me are at the end of the bed. I can grab them like I am grabbing them now. The girl doll has matted yarn hair. The boy doll’s hair has come loose. I rock the two dolls in my arms. Hush little baby don’t you cry, Momma’s gonna sing you a lullaby. They stare back. The thread of the girl doll’s smile is a little loose and I pick at the loose threads. If that rocking horse don’t go, Momma’s gonna buy you . . . The loose thread slowly unravels and the girl doll’s smile disappears. I pick at each loose thread on her face. If that mockingbird won’t sing, Momma’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. Only a few threads are left after I finish tugging at each loose one. Her face is nearly empty. There are only small needle holes where her eyes, her smile, and her nose were. I tear off the boy doll’s face too.
Then I rip off their clothes and hide the gingham suits beneath the covers at the bottom of my bed. I want to tear out their stuffing. I pour my glass of milk on the girl doll’s naked cloth body. The milk sinks in fast. It stains her like a birthmark.
I rustle my hands through the right side of my hair then the left. I look in the mirror again and see a monster. I make a monster face. And then a monster noise. I grab the dolls again and they fight each other. They are monsters too. I bounce on the bed with wild-nappy-kitchen hair. Bump bump bump.
No fence or divider separated the roof from the sky because no one was allowed to walk up there. Someone had broken the chain lock on the door. The door opened freely and they stepped out onto the rooftop, the neighborhood’s highest arch.
That day the wet air swallowed them. Nella’s silent misty breath seemed to fill the space between where they stood and the stretch of air before them. They walked closer and closer to the edge. Rachel remembers the rest of the morning now in those small steps toward the sky.
When Nella pushed Robbie off the roof, he didn’t make a sound – just looked at Rachel and reached out his hand. Rachel imagined that he had said her name: the vowels of her name, Rachel, just hollow sounds now that fill out her dreams. She did not see him fall – just saw him step off the edge and surrender to the air.
Nella came toward Rachel next and Rachel screamed. Nella looked at Rachel. Then she saw through her, took her hand from her daughter’s shoulder and turned toward the air. She stepped over the edge with Ariel in her arms and danced into the sky. They waltzed with a cloud. And, for just a moment, again, you could see her smile.
Rachel jumped after Robbie then. Every bit of her already shattered; she could hurl herself over the edge and fall faster than Robbie – land before him, grab his hand, help him not be afraid.
She does not remember the ground. She danced with that cloud too. She saw above her and around, beyond the day’s fog. She felt her cells expanding into space and she felt larger and heavier and stronger than she ever had. And then she met the ground.
Heaped on top of Robbie, next to Nella and Ariel’s crushed head, she lay waiting for an ambulance for forty minutes too. But she lived.
The dolls are on the floor now. They have no faces and no clothes.
“Almost time for school,” I hear Loretta say through the door.
“Okay, ma’am.”
I pick the dolls up and stuff them into the back of the closet, into the corner, their heads crushed.
She is her mother’s daughter.
I am still hers.
Heidi W. Durrow is a 2004 fellow in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a recipient of a Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Writers 2004, a Jentel Foundation Residency 2004, and a Ragdale Foundation Residency, and the winner of the Chapter One Fiction Contest sponsored by the Bronx Writers’ Council. This is Durrow’s first fiction publication in a national literary journal.