They’d roost, and still do, in the bedroom where all the coats are piled during parties, lounging and talking with impish flair because beer spumes festive around sequins. Because wearing heels indoors on wood floors sounds like the holidays. Because secrets stumble out like small talk when you are beautiful and everyone is listening. Because catching your reflection in a host’s full-length mirror is a rare come-on. And because participating, for these older girls, meant, and maybe still means, reorienting a party’s habitat—means loafing on a bed of coats.
I was, back then, a decade or so away from clocking my brownness, from taking notice of its veiled prominence in my life. I wasn’t so much blind to it, but uninvolved in it. Emotionless about it. I was a brown daughter too inclined by whiteness to appreciate that being a daughter extends beyond the home. That it’s a furtherance. That my parents were handsome, strong, willing. Adaptable. Selfless. Brilliant. Beautiful. I was too busy troubling myself with what I thought was pretty.
So I cloistered my brownness. I wasn’t yet ready to scrutinize my weird, even toxic, relationship to the exclusionary appeal of these older white girls. To their ubiquity. To their immunity. I was coaxed by my stewed and crummy and, invisible to me, feeling of inferiority. In turn, I praised these girls for the faintest reasons. I was convinced they’d never be caught sucking in their stomachs. That even the tiny grooves of their anatomy could transmit persona: a dimple or belly button shaped like a comma. Meaning: She always had more to say.
I held that their overall manner was epitomized by how impossibly cool they looked when doing plain things. Like pulling something, anything—it didn’t matter what—from their back pockets, or casually hoisting their butts onto a kitchen counter midconversation. Their thighs didn’t seem to pancake like mine when I’d sit down; their knees weren’t shapeless either. I call mine potato knees. Inherited from the women on my mother’s side, they’re spud-cut and a little lumpy. Inelegant.
In winter, these older girls carried out the tiring ritual of unscrambling themselves from their layers with remarkable grace. Delivering their long necks from circuits of wool scarf was, as ever, a site to behold. Like when an off-duty ballet dancer steps on the subway and everyone’s head turns, influencing us to readjust our posture and perhaps reconsider our whole lives. Just like that, these older girls preoccupied me.
They were the prospect of fourteen. That summit age I arbitrarily picked, resolving it stood for what I now wonder might be a vacant pursuit: some cooked-up idea of having made it without divining what this unspeakable “it” marks or means. Or more humiliatingly, what it proves. When I turned fourteen, my sixteenth birthday newly assumed fourteen’s folklore. Then eighteen. Followed by twenty-four. And so on, and so on. Recently, I’ve heaped extra faith into thirty-three’s double springs; conceiving in its future roundness the calm of an absorbed, less wobbly world where I’ve developed a better sense of humor and experience with less acuity, the blow of life’s ups and downs. Come thirty-three, I’ll certainly valorize thirty-six. I’ll reason it’ll supply me with securities I have yet to fathom and eccentricities that permit me to slip out of my sensible mind. That I believe some big, whopping sign might one day parachute down and alert me to my arrival, is, I realize, foolish. Yet, here I am at twenty-nine, liberally investing notions of sureness into tomorrow’s birthdays just as I did with those older girls.
Thing is, those older girls were on to something. They collected boyfriends in neighboring schools as if expanding the real estate of their allure. These older girls were wise to the curve and clout of their bodies in ways I’m still not, netting attention early in life when life was still framed by hallways and lockers, authorized by bells and permission slips, and upset by canceled parties or the turnaround caused by a new cut of jeans. They realized the one component critical for eternalizing yourself as myth, no matter what later letdowns or cruelties might come with adulthood: to never smile in photos unless it was the annual class picture. Pouting and appearing generally disentranced to the flash of disposable cameras was standard practice, but come picture day, their smile was athletically sincere. All at once obliging. I still remember most of their names—both first and last. They pleat my memory with singsong. Like the upbeat tempo of a 1-800 number.
It was as if I were standing in some figurative doorway with my head resting against the frame, watching these older girls get ready to go out: considering which earrings to wear, how to part their hair and do their makeup. Because observing any woman smudge shiny powder down her brow bone to her cheekbone, or flutter-blink her lashes between strokes of mascara, or delicately part her lips when lining her eyes—those rapidly precise, tidy-messy and pored-over motions—feels closest to catching a glimpse of her acquiring the world with quiet enormity from that faraway planet: her mirror.
*
It was the neighbor with the skinny-dipping daughters whose maple tree would blanket our pool with giant leaves and clog the filter. A pain in the ass to clean. The filter’s round lid, which leveled with our cement yard, was—as if reminding us of summer’s brief stint—permanently cracked. Backyard things have never appealed to me. Weather-worn white plastic chairs, flimsy-spongy cushions, benches with wrought-iron roses, ivy, and grape clusters that look, however modest, haunted or trapped in time. Cursed, even. Backyards, for me, have either been fiction or totally spooky. There are few things more unnerving than when, in the dead of night, a backyard light motion-detects something but reveals nothing.