Legacy

My brother says, it’s probably easier for people who are the same race to date each other, and baby, I was this close to telling him how right he was, and this close to telling him to shut his face.

It’s been worrying me though, you and me.  I been dreaming about the Klan, lately.  I grew up knowing to wrap crosses in carpet, to douse that in gasoline so it burns brighter, longer.  How will I love you knowing that?  I once found a loose noose of nylon rope in my Sunday school classroom; a study in knot tying, only big enough to hang a doll.  How will I hold you, remembering that?

I dream about them coming for you.  I dream about them coming for you because of me.  I don’t dare take you to my parent’s home, only miles to the Grand Wizard’s.  I think I am the danger sleeping in your bed, charring cheese omelets at the stove, bouncing through the door with a bag of pilfered persimmons in the afternoon.

I wake up in the morning so glad you’re alive.  When you’re snoring away with a ring of dried snot around one nostril, I love you babe.  Wake up and tell me what you’re dreaming of, wake up and tell me you’re fine.

 The Secret Under the Big Tree

She’s the reason you look forward to recess every day, the reason you quickly finish your lunch even though you’d rather savor that peanut butter and jelly sandwich, pack of animal crackers, and Hi-C juice your mom packed at 6 a.m. this morning. Instead of thinking about the sandwich or the juice, you look forward to recess: you like her brown hair, especially when she lets it out of her pony tail. Even though she’s missing her left big tooth, you don’t care. You secretly wish you could hold her hand. You imagine the two of you walking around, fingers locked, smiling at each other. She causes fireworks in your chest like at the end of the parade on the Fourth of July and it feels new and exciting.

 Everyone takes turns at the monkey bars, on the slides, piloting the wheel of the “ship”. Then the group moves to the hill, rolling like barrels of giggling skin and bones against the grass, trudging back up only to race down again, your legs ecstatic slaves to gravity and momentum, your chests exploding with laughter at the bottom.

            After these daily rituals, the two of you are sometimes alone. She usually likes to read a book under the big tree in the corner by the fence. Thinking yourself clever, you bring a book to read by the big tree too. Sometimes, she says nothing, and the only sounds you share are those of pages sliding against pages, or the breeze whispering through the blades of grass around your ankles. Every once in a while, you sneak a look up at her; every day, she’s reading a new Magic Tree House book.

            On a day when you’re actually engrossed in the latest Hardy Boys novel from the library, she asks you if you know a word she can’t figure out. She’s reading The Magic Tree House #23: Twister on Tuesday, and the word is “engulf”. You try to explain that it means being surrounded or taken over or something like that, but then she’s distracted:

What’s that book you got? She asks.

It’s the Hardy Boys, you say, holding it up proudly.

Like Nancy Drew? She asks, tilting her head to the side inquisitively.

And you say who’s Nancy Drew? Then the two of you spend the next half hour talking about all the different books you’ve read. In the end, it’s really her talking and you listening, since she’s read so many more than you. When the bell rings and it’s time to go back inside, you say goodbye and start can’t waiting for tomorrow.

            Every day now the two of you sit and read for a bit before you start talking. At first the conversations consist of what math homework you’ve got (she’s doing times tables but you’re still on addition and subtraction), then they morph into gossip about the kids and the teachers (I heard Mrs. Moss is 100 years old! No way! I heard her hair is just a wig.) but after days and days she tells you a secret.

            My parents are getting a divorce, she says, slapping her finger to her lips so you don’t tell. It’s because my mommy cheated on my daddy, but I’m not supposed to know that. I woke up late one night to go pee and heard them yelling about it.

            You can’t believe she would trust you with something like that, so you think hard about something super secret of yours to share with her so she knows you appreciate the trust.

            I still wet my bed a couple times a week, you say to her, after weighing several shameful options in your head. Please don’t tell, you plead.

            Of course not, she smiles.

            The next day while everyone is taking turns on the monkey bars, a kid with a gap-toothed grin asks, do you wear diapers at night?

            What do you mean? You ask him, but the seed of fear blossoming in your gut knows what he means.

            When you pee your bed every night, he says, laughing. The other kids laugh too. You feel your face flush red.

            I don’t pee my bed every night, you attempt, but your voice is small under the truth.

            Is it because you like the smell? Someone else asks.

            Did your mom and dad teach you to use the bathroom?

            Do you still wear diapers?

            Are you wearing diapers right now?

            As the voices continue to question, you see her down by the tree reading a book alone. You wonder what would happen if you tell the others that her parents are getting a divorce, that her mom cheated on her dad, but the thoughts are drowned out by the overwhelming question: why? You don’t understand how an exchange of trust can be so easily shattered.

            After the questions subsist, you race down to the tree, lacking a book, and ask her why she told, who she told, how she told?

            I’m so sorry, she said, but it just slipped out. I won’t say anything else to anyone ever again, cross my heart and hope to die. She crosses her heart and hopes to die. See? She asks. See? I mean it.

            Okay, you say, and walk away, looking for the latest Hardy Boys volume from the library.

Shocking

In an unexplained fit of hopefulness I’d decided to get “Always walk tall” tattooed on my leg.  A reminder to myself to keep obeying my skin no matter what.  Make it Latin to be even more official, as if proffered from the Vatican or some other ancient institution of truth.

Then I plugged in the axiom to an online and undoubtedly incorrect translator and found out what it was: “Semper ambulantes sublimem.”  I could never have that; everyone would be thinking, “Ambulance?  You kidding?”  I looked at it in all other kinds of classical languages—French, where trying to translate “walk” is an approximation of the most desparate kind, German didn’t fit the sentiment, and Russian and Arabic looked good as artistic imagery but I didn’t want to look like a criminal tattooed in jail, having pledged my body to some illicit outfit.  So, discouraged, I put it off for a year or so.

Everyone I knew, everyone my age, was getting tattooed.  Trashy stars or inspirational quotes, barbed wire, the usual suspects; and then true art, what seemed so real, a part of them and not an artificial stamp.  Maybe it was the cool thing to do, maybe it was a rite of passage into independence.  And here I was, too afraid to go back home to picket-fence parents and gossiping aunts, to stand the seething disapproval.  Either them or Leviticus, one would stop me.  Twenty-one years old and still a chickenshit dependent too scared to finally step out on my own, in my own direction.  To mark myself as I saw myself, marked like a counterfeit bill or a defective playing card.  I knew I could, I knew I wouldn’t take charge of my body, claim myself for myself.

It had to be plain English.  Of all the words I learned in England, “shocking” is my favorite.  It means “terrible” or “awful,” and can be used as an understatement or at face value, a real exclamation.  Forget Latin and stars, flowers and symbols; shocking was my lowest common denominator, something I knew was permanent, something that would always be true of me.  Worthless.

It’s on the inside of my upper thigh, so when you see it, it’s already too late.  I scraped together enough courage to walk into the parlor, using that adolescent shaming that kicked my thick head into going.  I could use a little torture, I’d be thankful afterwards.  Even a teenage girl could sit through an hour or so, to get her butterfly or whatever it was.

I tried to make that standard, I really did.  Plain English, no fancy script or font, just stark, thin, simple letters.  Spare like that endless winter, flurries falling, cars hissing by the building, dry and cold.  The girl who did me tried to be patient and reassuring, but her kind smile grew tired when I got in the way of business.  I bled, I cried, I asked for breathers until finally she said no.  It would be easier to get it over with.  Exceedingly simple and quick, and yet when she finished with the “K” I just aborted it.  I told her to stop, I was done, I couldn’t make it through any more.

To anyone who’d see it, it would make no sense.  SHOCK.  For me, forever, a constant reminder, yet again, of cowardice, inadequacy, reminded of my inability to even finish my snide insult to myself, of a failed accomplishment.  More shocking than shocking.

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