I tell this story to the group. I’m the first one to read out loud, too, and I volunteered. I stand up in front of the room and everything. And part of it is that just thinking about that time brought it back for me and I miss my mom. And I know that saying it out loud, sharing it, will amplify the feelings I just remembered. And it does. I can see the oval burns from the curling iron, on my mom’s neck, and the smile that got so big you could see her missing teeth in the back. And I remember the lines of her gaunt face, how they raced down to her sharp cleft chin, how her neck was long and thin and she tried to wear high collars and shoulder pads to obscure that. I remember the smell of that horrible placenta treatment she used to put in her hair, sealed in a glass tube and broken with great care directly onto her roots. I remember the horror of visiting her in the hospital, skinnier every time. I remember that she told me to stop coming, that she didn’t want me to see her like that. I remember, “I can’t get out of this, but you can, so go.” The relief of this reprieve would only be matched by the guilt of accepting it forever after. I tell them all this, telling far more than what I wrote down. There is a petty me in there that wants Sunita Habersham to know that I had been loved once. That I knew how to love once as well. But even that smallness is smothered under the details remembered. When I finish, I’m thinking that I actually like this Mulattopia, this campground of self-indulgence. That it isn’t all bad, being forced to say: This is me, this is me, this is me.
“Okay, that was great. Do you want to continue?” Sunita Habersham asks me. She’s wearing a Nehru collar today, on a knee-length, pale blue cotton shirt that’s proudly wrinkled and wants everyone to know it doesn’t go in for that ironing bullshit.
“That’s all. Thank you. Thanks for listening,” I tell her, and I go to sit down. But there is a hand on my shoulder, so I stop, look back at her.
“No, that’s not all. You have two parents. They were an interracial couple. We are all here, because at some point, there was an interracial couple that conceived us. We all share that legacy. That’s not something to be ashamed of. That’s not even something to be proud of. It’s just our reality, and we can’t run from that and only claim one side. As long as we do, we’ll be haunted by what we’re denying. Your surname is Duffy,” Sun tells me. And I think, Yes, yes it is. When I don’t know what to say, Sun continues, “What about your father’s side of the family?”
“They’re Irish.” I tell her. When this doesn’t seem to satisfy her, I continue. “My dad just passed away. Very recently.” This is a truth that’s also meant to stop the conversation. Yet fails too.
“Where in Ireland are they from?” Sun asks, but it sounds like a demand.
“What?”
“How long have they been in America?”
“I don’t know. When did they run out of potatoes?” I ask, utterly sincere.
“What were their occupations?” She keeps going.
“All I know about them is that they were really pasty,” I tell her. Sun doesn’t laugh. No one does, except One Drop, harder than the joke pushed him. Everyone just stares at him. Me too. He keeps going. I’m smiling, but I want him to stop. This is my family. This is my family, pasty but still mine. When he finally ends with, “Nice one, Holmes!” he holds a hand to slap and I do but I’d rather smack his face.
“Warren, you knew your father, correct? So give us something about him before you sit down. Something as detailed as your mother’s anecdote.”
The first thing I think of is that goddamn house. That rotting mansion. But I don’t really think of that as my father, only as his European legacy, his aspiration for himself and for me if he really did imagine that I’d come back to inhabit it. So then I think about his car, and that’s what I tell them. Craig Duffy drove a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle, black, that he bought in 1972 and never let die. I loved that car. It had such a distinctive lawn mower purr; when he’d pick me up from school I’d know he was coming from a block away. It used to break down all the time, but the thing had such simple mechanics. My dad would get used parts sent straight to the house, fix it out on the street, car radio blasting classical music in the middle of the hood to drown out the sounds of other cars blaring hip-hop as they drove by, which is hilarious now that it’s not actively horrifying me.
I tell Sun that story, I tell the bleached tribe surrounding me, and feel the release. I usually don’t like talking about my white side in public, in front of non-Caucasoids. I’m of the firm belief that, if I never bring up the fact that half my family is white, somehow the fact that I look white will be forgiven. But I look at these people, and among them there is nothing to apologize for. So I remember out loud the way the seats were so old that, where the cushions still remained, they’d oxidized into sand. I feel my dad again, even more than the first night back, and I want to sit down before the emotion it invokes overtakes me. But Sunita Habersham doesn’t allow this. She sighs. Her breasts get bigger when she does but I barely notice it other than to notice it.
“That’s good, but a car is a thing. Why do you think of that particular object in relation to your father, Warren?” Sun asks me. “It’s just a car. What does that mean? To you?”
I know what I can give her about the silly little car, but I don’t want to because I don’t know if I can give it without losing something. But there’s something there I want to lose and I don’t trust myself to pull it out later. So I tell everyone in the room, including myself.
When my mom went into the hospital, I was eleven and they had been broken up for three years by then. My dad unexpectedly picked me up from school one day and that night I went to his house. Visits to my father were strictly every other weekend, so I knew something had changed, but there was no explanation. That night, we went to my mom’s apartment, got more of my clothes and favorite toys. He had keys, somehow. At first, I thought this might be the beginning of a reconciliation, that I had them back together, that my mother would be joining us the next day. I wasn’t actually that freaked out about it; they’d gone on a few dates after the separation, tried to see if they could get things started again, so this just seemed like another attempt. But the next night, she didn’t arrive; my dad finally told me she was in the hospital. He made it sound like she was at a spa retreat. I wasn’t worried; people stayed in the hospital on TV all the time, and usually they were smiling. That Saturday, we drove the Bug to Jefferson Hospital. Two months later, we drove the same little black car to her funeral. We drove that car to a boarding school in New Hampshire a week after the funeral, for me to have an interview and see if I liked it there. I was eleven. My mom had made him promise, with me in the hospital room, that he would make sure I got a good education. That this one thing, this one thing in his life, he couldn’t be cheap on.