He was out the door, headed to teach his history course at the community college, before Marjorie could protest. She had always hated it when her father called her Dove. It was her special name, the nickname born with her because of her Asante name, but it had always made Marjorie feel small somehow, young and fragile. She was not small. She was not young, either. She was old, so old her breasts had grown to the size of her mother’s, so large she sometimes had to carry them in her hands when walking naked through her bedroom to keep them from slapping against her chest.
“Who do you like?” Marjorie’s mother asked, coming into the room with fresh laundry in her hands. Though her parents had lived in America for nearly fifteen years, Esther still would not use a washing machine. She washed all the family’s undergarments by hand in the kitchen sink.
“No one,” Marjorie said.
“Has someone come to ask you to prom?” Esther asked, grinning widely. Marjorie sighed. Five years ago she had watched a 20/20 special on proms across America with her mother, and her mother had been delighted by it. She said that she had never seen anything like the girls in their long dresses and the boys in their suits. The thought that her daughter could be one of those special girls was a hope that flickered like light in Esther’s eye, just as it stung like dust in Marjorie’s. Marjorie was one of thirty black people at her school. None of them had been asked to prom the year before.
“No, Mama, God!”
“I am not God, and I have never been,” her mother said, pulling a lacy black bra from the depths of the sink water. “If a boy likes you, you have to make it known that you like him too. Otherwise, he will never do anything. I lived in your father’s house for many, many years before he asked me to marry him. I was a foolish girl, hoping he would see that I wanted the same thing he did, without ever making it known. Were it not for Old Lady’s intervention, who knows if he would have ever done anything. That woman has strong powers of will.”
That night, Marjorie tucked Graham’s poem under her pillow, hoping she had inherited her grandmother’s willpower, that the words he’d written would float up into her ear as she slept, blossom into a dream.
—
Mrs. Pinkston was putting on a black cultural event for the school, and she asked Marjorie if she would read a poem. The event, called The Waters We Wade In, was unlike anything the school had ever done before, and it was to take place at the beginning of May, well after Black History Month had passed.
“All you have to do is tell your story,” Mrs. Pinkston said. “Talk about what being African American means to you.”
“But I’m not African American,” Marjorie said.
Though she couldn’t exactly read the look on Mrs. Pinkston’s face, Marjorie knew instantly that she had said the wrong thing. She wanted to explain it to Mrs. Pinkston, but she didn’t know how. She wanted to tell Mrs. Pinkston that at home, they had a different word for African Americans. Akata. That akata people were different from Ghanaians, too long gone from the mother continent to continue calling it the mother continent. She wanted to tell Mrs. Pinkston that she could feel herself being pulled away too, almost akata, too long gone from Ghana to be Ghanaian. But the look on Mrs. Pinkston’s face stopped her from explaining herself at all.
“Listen, Marjorie, I’m going to tell you something that maybe nobody’s told you yet. Here, in this country, it doesn’t matter where you came from first to the white people running things. You’re here now, and here black is black is black.” She got up from her seat and poured them each a cup of coffee. Marjorie didn’t really even like coffee. It was too bitter; the taste clung to the back of her throat, like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to enter her body or be breathed out of her mouth. Mrs. Pinkston drank the coffee, but Marjorie just looked at hers. Briefly, for only a second, she thought she could see her face reflected in it.
That night Marjorie went to see a movie with Graham. When he came to pick her up, she asked him if he would park his car one street over. She wasn’t ready to tell her parents yet.
“Good idea,” Graham said, and Marjorie wondered if his father knew where he was.
When the movie ended, Graham drove her into a clearing in the woods. It was one of those places that other kids supposedly went to make out, but Marjorie had been through it a couple of times, and it was always empty.
It was empty this night. Graham had a bottle of whiskey in his backseat, and though she detested the taste of alcohol, Marjorie sipped from it slowly. While she drank, Graham pulled out a cigarette. After he lit it, he kept playing with the lighter, making the fire appear, then disappear again.
“Would you stop that, please?” Marjorie asked once he started waving the lighter around.
“What?” Graham asked.
“The lighter. Would you put it away, please?”
Graham gave her a strange look, but he didn’t say anything, and so she didn’t have to explain. Ever since she had heard the story of how her father and grandmother got their scars, she had been terrified of fire. When she was just a little girl, the firewoman of her grandmother’s dreams had haunted Marjorie’s own waking hours. She had only heard about her from her grandmother’s stories on those days when they walked to the water so that her grandmother could tell her what she knew of their ancestors, and yet Marjorie thought she could see the firewoman in the blue and orange glow of the stove, in hot coals, in lighters. She feared that the nightmares would come for her too, that she too would be chosen by the ancestors to hear their family’s stories, but the nightmares never came, and so, with time, her fear of fire had waned. But every so often she could still feel her heart catch when she saw fire, as though the firewoman’s shadow still lurked.
“What’d you think of the movie?” Graham asked, putting the lighter away.
Marjorie shrugged. It was the only response she could manage because she hadn’t been thinking at all about the movie. Instead, she’d thought about the location of Graham’s hands in relationship to the popcorn or the armrest they shared. She’d thought about his laugh when he’d found something funny, about whether or not the tilt of his head toward the left, toward her, was an invitation for her to tilt her own head toward him or to rest it on his shoulders. In the weeks they had spent getting to know each other, Marjorie had become more and more enamored with the blue of his eyes. She wrote poems about them. The blue like ocean water, like clear sky, like sapphire—she couldn’t capture it. At the movies, she had thought about how the only real friends she had were characters in novels, not real at all. And then Graham had appeared and swallowed up a bit of her loneliness with his blue whale eyes. The next day she wouldn’t for the life of her be able to remember what the movie was called.
“Yeah, I felt the same way,” Graham said. He took a long drag from the whiskey bottle.
Marjorie wondered if she was in love. How could she know? How did anyone know? In middle school she had been into Victorian literature, the sweeping romance of it. Every character in those books was hopelessly in love. All the men were wooing, all the women being wooed. It was easier to see what love looked like then, the embarrassingly grand, unabashed emotion of it. Now, did it look like sitting in a Camry, sipping whiskey?
“You still haven’t let me read any of your writing,” Graham said. He stifled a burp, passing the bottle back to Marjorie.
“I have to write a poem for Mrs. Pinkston’s assembly next month. Maybe you can read that one.”
“That’s a few weeks after prom, right?”
Her mouth went dry at the mention of the dance. She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t, and so she just nodded.
“I’d love to read it. I mean, if you want me to.” The bottle was back in his hands, and though it was dark, Marjorie could make out the deeply wrinkled lines of his knuckles, turning red from clutching.
—