I don’t remember posing for that Polaroid. It must’ve been taken by Pat, the girl who lived next door. She was a few years older than me. She loved to come over in the evenings with that camera while Mom fixed dinner. But this one was taken during the day. See, I’m holding a beach towel and leaning on the gray tiles of the kitchen bar. I tanned like it was a religion. Oiled and glistening, I became a long stretch of sweaty muscle. I remember being proud of my flat brown stomach. Green beans for dinner — that’s how I did it. Metrecal cookies at lunch — nine of them in a packet of crisp cellophane. For days on end.
Here’s another one of the front yard, from farther away. That other picture window was the dining room where I did homework every night in grade school, until Dad said I had to sit in the kitchen, farther back in the house. The phone calls were bad then. The blacks wanted us out. Threats in a deep bass voice: We gonna burn you out. We coming tonight. Mom didn’t cry, not that I saw. But every meal was ushered in by her urgent questions: Had any For Sale signs appeared on our block? Had I been threatened walking to or from school? What were the next door neighbors doing? Hard-eyed, Dad promised we wouldn’t sell. He promised. I kept quiet at dinner and lingered in other rooms whenever the telephone rang. The one time I heard a man’s voice full of hatred was enough — his voice reverberating inside my bones, permeating the marrow. It was a thick voice, full of intention and spite. I put the phone into its heavy black cradle slowly, so he wouldn’t know I was scared. No point to crying. No one had answers to the questions I could barely think clearly enough to ask, but that always hung in the air: Why do you hate us? What have we done wrong?
That one is out of order. Me, a fat baby. I look like my dad’s father — bald, same shape of head. See how I’m straining toward the edge, off the gray countertop? I knew what I was doing; I wanted to step off. Bright air would hold me — I was sure of it.
In the background of this photo, you can see a large picture window, off-center to the left. My first bedroom to myself. A reward for turning thirteen. It hurt to grow breasts, remember? That embarrassing growth of new hair that felt every breath of breeze, every sashay of fabric across its light-brown fineness.
From the front yard, you can’t see the gardenia bush, tall as a man on the side of our little house, just beyond my screen windows. At night, in early summer, the scent as heavy as a wrestler on my chest. White waxy flowers fragrant enough to eat, whispering all their secrets into humid air. The night’s friendships between creatures of earth and grass, air, and bayous were heard in a long murmur of comforting sounds. I missed that in the new house — the sound of night. A/C shut off everything.
Mother’s mahogany vanity in our little house. The curved front and large round mirror. I’d wait for impenetrable darkness in my still bedroom, decorated in my favorite colors — a splurge after turning thirteen. June bugs crawling on the screens, gardenias outside spreading their white lips. My hands on my breasts and nipples eventually became his hands. I’d raise my baby dolls and throw off the sheets. Dream his lips, recall his blue eyes. Shame, the greatest catalyst; and the forbidden geometry of a grown man, the most irresistible attraction on earth.
That’s Mom’s brand-new Olds in the driveway. My dad only bought Oldsmobiles, and he only bought green ones. I stopped by a hardware store on Telephone Road to get the keys copied. Then I hid them in the piano bench. Every time we ate dinner, I waited for my mom to ask me why I had an extra set of her car keys. After all, she handed me her only set to drive to school when I needed them. I couldn’t figure out a good lie. The only truth I knew was his mouth on the mess of fine hair he loved. A ceaseless tongue.
Yeah, that’s my new school, after we moved. A tedious commute through Houston’s small Downtown, then west, out 59 South. We’d just left our little house. Found a newly built one farther out. Cute freshman beanie, huh? For those days, twenty-three miles each way to high school was long. I did okay at first, but then I started failing. Me, the honor roll kid, failing: algebra I, world history, and British lit. Mandatory tutoring after school — I couldn’t see him on the way home anymore. Mom arranged carpools with older girls, so I could stay late at school. Pecan Waffles winked at me in red neon along Caroline every afternoon as I sailed past in some preoccupied upper classman’s car. I dug fingernails into my palms so I couldn’t feel what I was feeling. His window was always open, one panel of limp curtain hanging out into Downtown’s exhaust fumes. Those seniors were all in love with serious boyfriends they only saw on the weekends — we were an all-girls school. We sang along with the Beach Boys on the radio, and I pretended my ideal boyfriend would be a surfer like them — blond, cute, plenty of freckles, and tiki-god cool.
End-of-year swim party in May. Country club pool. Our two-pieces, so daring. We’re all holding in our breaths trying to look thinner. Guess I liked bright colors — look at the hot pink against neon green and white stripes.
That day, alone, I stopped by his hotel. The damp swimsuit kept me sweating and on edge. The stolen keys were in the left front pocket of a seersucker cover-up. My hair, still wet from the pool’s shallow end.
I’d been planning what to say, what to do, but I hadn’t planned for the old clerk’s drooping shoulders and brutal, hungry eyes. I hadn’t planned for a turning away of all my precious treasure.
He done gone, and be glad of it, girlie.
He had to be upstairs. I was sure of it. How could he not be? It had only been three and a half months. The cracked linoleum on the stairs beckoned. The loud horns of outside traffic scraped at my skin. Flies buzzing against the sunny front windows worked at breaking through their dirty glass prison. But I was impaled by the fierceness of the old man’s voice, the insult of his frank stare at my damp crotch. All this told me what I already knew — my time here was over. No need for the lie already in place, about the softball training camp this weekend. No drive south, my legs sprawled across the front seat and his right hand laced in the hair between my legs.
I walked back to the sea-green Olds parked at the curb. I looked up at the disgusting pink curtains one last time. The keys clinked in my flimsy pocket. Before I cranked the ignition, I sat up straighter. Mom’s words floated through my head: Smile, honey. Don’t scowl. Through thick and thin, keep smiling. I punched the radio buttons and kept the music loud all the way home. Piece of cake, little rake.
This photo he never knew about. His empty hotel room. A room where we stopped time. One wooden chair, painted blue. Smudged panes of glass on western-exposure windows — two of them looking out on tar-papered roofs dusted with pea gravel. Dust motes. Awful pink curtains blowing in the breeze. A mattress covering a box spring that looked like someone had been murdered or given birth on it, with blackened stains dripping down one side and at the foot.
For years, I dreamed of his family’s house — the one I never visited. He’s driving. He parks the car on an oyster-shell road and we cross sunlit weeds toward a small white clapboard. A shaggy farm dog barks, displaying ferocious little teeth, then relents and shows his belly. As we get closer, the sky darkens. He reaches the front door and opens it while grabbing my hand and tugging me forward. I walk inside, and it’s my childhood home — the home we loved more than ourselves. The unadorned walls and hardwood floors. The pale-green net curtains in the sunroom that float in afternoon breezes while I nap. In the backyard will be the rosebushes whose flowers are crushed red velvet, full of scent. The garage will contain the small tan-and-white dog’s bed and Dad’s decoys for duck hunting. Dark green 7-Up bottles — ready for Dad’s nightly bourbon and 7 — will stand in emerald beauty in rows of wooden cases. Dad will be there, whistling as he putters in shirts the same pale colors of his eyes — greens, blues, and grays. At the end of the street will be the weeping willow. Its green-gold leaves trailing the ground, the parchment where we kids write our giddy pleasure, walking home from school each day.