“That’s here in DC, right?” I asked, more to make conversation than anything else.
“Yes.”
“So, tell us about Atlanta,” Jasmine said to Maggie.
“There’s not much to tell. Spelman’s okay. Classes are okay.” Maggie smiled at me. I wondered how Maggie’s answers were influenced by my presence. I imagined them asking about the guys at Morehouse and Maggie telling them how many cute ones there were or weren’t.
But before the conversation could fail to get going, the doorbell chimed. Maggie knew, Maggie’s friends knew, and I knew that, according to the rules of bad drama, according to my evening’s apparent and particular adherence to a steady and predictable awkwardness, Robert was at the door. Brotherlike Robert, five eleven, trim and fit, handsome and appropriately shaded stepped into the room. I could picture the insane mothers of these insane women sneezing out dating advice between sessions on the stair machine and the treadmill, “Light not white, girl, light not white.”
Robert shook my hand and seemed friendly enough as he gave me the once-over. I suppose I was doing the same. He paused at my name.
“Then what is your name?” he asked.
“My name is Not Sidney,” I said.
“Not is a part of Not Sidney’s name,” Maggie said.
“Knot, with a k?” he asked.
“Not with a k,” I said.
“That’s what I said,” he said.
“N-O-T,” Maggie said.
“Sidney?”
“Not my name is not Sidney. My name is Not Sidney. Call me Not Sidney.” Though he was the one being dense, I was the one in the middle, feeling stupid, trying to explain the unexplainable. And for no good reason.
We sat and the children’s song ran through my mind, “Fly’s in the buttermilk, shoo, fly, shoo.”
They talked and laughed about old times. I learned that Robert was a business major, a member of some fraternity, and already had a summer internship lined up with Stanley Morgan or Morgan Stanley. Then Lydia brought up the old days in Jack and Jill and they all laughed.
“What’s Jack and Jill?” I asked.
“It’s a club, an organization,” Jasmine said. It was a rather uninformative and mysterious answer.
“It’s a club for children,” Maggie told me.
“What kind of club?” I asked.
“A social club,” Robert said. “For cultural and social enrichment. It was started in nineteen thirty-five in Boston.”
“Nineteen thirty-eight in Philadelphia,” Maggie said.
“I stand corrected.”
“Who gets to be in it?” I asked.
They looked at each other. “You have to be sponsored by someone who is in it or who has children in it or was in it,” Sophie said.
“And then you have to meet other criteria,” Robert said.
“What criteria?” I asked. “Is it for black children?”
“Yes,” Jasmine said. But it could have been any one of them speaking, as they had all blurred together for me, even Maggie.
“What criteria?” I asked, again.
“There’s a whole selection process,” Maggie said.
I could see I was getting nowhere, so I shut up.
“So, do you play any sports?” Robert asked me.
“No,” I said.
“Robert’s on the lacrosse team and the swim team at Dartmouth,” Lydia said and watched me closely.
“I’m not a very good swimmer,” I said.
“Do you play golf?” Robert asked.
“Never have.”
The room was fairly quiet, but not in an interesting way. Sophie finally said something to Jasmine who said something to all of them and then they were chatting again and, this time, with no pretense that I was to be kindly included. Instead, I was kindly excluded and I felt somewhat happy about that. I had a sneaking realization, however incapable I was at articulating it, that my presence was essential to them, not in some singular, specific way, but in a broad and pervasive and insidious way that none of them would or could understand or acknowledge.
On the way home as Maggie drove the luxury coffin of silence, I watched the streetlights reflect off her fair skin. She was lovely and monstrous, but also sad as I knew she had invited me home as a wedge to use between herself and her parents. However, she had no mallet to give the wedge even a light tap, and so it (I) lay there on its (my) broad side. We managed our way into the house and into our separate rooms without so much as a grunt or hiss, though the hiss was implied. In my quarters, I showered, trying to rinse off whatever had been dumped on me. I felt, remarkably, okay and somewhat better for the steam. I was drying off with a stiff towel when, startled by a woman sitting on my bed, I covered myself.
“I’m Agnes,” she said.
“Not Sidney.”
“So I hear.”
“I’m naked.”
“So I see.”
“Why are you in here?”
“I hate my sister,” she said.
“She’s not in here,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to have sex with you.”
I understood everything she was saying and yet still I said, “I don’t understand.” My jeans were lying uselessly on the bed beside her. I pulled the towel tighter. “She’s your baby sister, you’re supposed to look out for her.”
“I suppose one of us should,” she said.
“I honestly don’t believe she’ll be terribly upset.” I was recalling the events of the evening.
“Oh, she’ll be upset.” Agnes stood and stepped toward me. She wore a powder blue flannel gown that looked comfortable, if not alluring. She was slightly shorter than Maggie and in a strange way prettier, perhaps because of an oddness in her features, a too-high forehead and a hawkish nose. More than Maggie, her face seemed to have a story, or at least wanted a story.
She brushed against me, laid her head against my chest, and then quickly pulled away the towel. She and I were impressed as we looked down at my erection. It was one of my penis’s better efforts.
“Well, well,” she said.
I was in no position to deny my arousal, however confusing it might have been to me.
Agnes latched on with a fist, then lowered herself, finding me with her mouth. It was agreeable, the sensation. In fact, I am ashamed to say, I was surprised to feel that either Agnes was quite good at it or I was as invested in upsetting Maggie as she was. I caught a glimpse of us in the standing mirror, and the image was a bit of Gothic porn. I looked so much like Sidney Poitier that I was momentarily distracted, until I remembered that Sidney Poitier would never have appeared in a scene like this one. I closed my eyes, stood there, and had a remarkably relaxed and floatingly nice time, during which I dreamed.
I dreamed it was 1950 and that I was a young doctor with a Bahamian accent and that no one believed I was a doctor and yet I was given a patient, a white man who called me nigger and tried to spit in my face. He had been shot and the bullet was near his heart and he went into cardiac arrest and the other doctors, all white and believed to be doctors by everyone else, stood around and told me it was my call. I attended to the heart attack, asking for adrenaline, compressed the chest, but the chest wound was severe and the man died.
My elderly white mentor patted me on the back and said, “What could you do? Nothing, that’s what.”
Into the scene walked a man with a skeletal face who said he was the brother of the dead man and wanted to know why he had died. All the white doctors and nurses and my elderly mentor turned and pointed to me and said, in unison, “The nigger killed him. That nigger killed him.”
“That nigger?”
“Yes, that nigger.”