Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (26 page)

He is rich. It is his wife’s money, inherited from her parents. Her picture appears in the newspaper for donating one
million dollars to charity. Members of her family give one another furniture and paintings for their birthdays. The Father’s good fortune in having married money is not mere luck. It is entitlement. He works. He worked ideas day and night for forty years. He has worked all of his life at social propriety. In retirement, he works at predicting snowstorms in his children’s home cities, and at sending packages to them with optimal efficiency. When the packages do not arrive on schedule, he works at tracing them, telephoning dispatchers to verify times and routes of delivery. He works at letting his two sons know that they do not know the meaning of work. He works at reminding his daughter that although she works hard, having established her own horse training and breeding farm, she does not work intelligently. She wants to work and write her poems, which have won numerous awards, and ride her horse in the woods, and have time to ask herself questions. The Father knows: she indulges fantasy. She does not know what is valuable. She has recently been published in a prestigious anthology, which lies, unnoticed, on the counter during dinner.

As we sit surrounding a hillock of rare prime rib, the telephone rings. The daughter winces. The Father sits up straight. He asks who will answer it. No one will answer it, replies the daughter. We work all day on this farm, she says; dinner is sacrosanct. He snorts over his plate. What if a horse has been struck by a car? What if a client has an emergency? The Father believes in answering telephones. Phones carry information. Information is vital to, work. If information is lost or delayed, work does not get done. The sorts of people who ignore telephones to savor good food or good conversation do not value work. They are, ultimately, lazy. They shirk duty and are not entitled to wealth. They work from nine to five, following orders from people who know the importance of answering telephones. They have trouble paying their bills. Such people, including most blacks, like me, are his inferiors. Or else, like his daughter, they are women.

The telephone continues to ring. The Father stares at his daughter. She does not move. I chime in to support her. The farm telephone has voice mail, I tell him. Anything gained by the small chance of catching an emergency within those thirty minutes, I say, is more than offset by the added stress of being ruled by the telephone. The Father interrupts me. That sounds very pretty, he says, talking over my voice as if I am radio music, but it does not change the facts. A person must answer the telephone. The phone rings again, then stops, leaving a silence.

Conversation resumes, shifting to what the Father and the Mother will do tomorrow, on the second day of their visit. They could tour the farm, meet horses and clients. They could go for a pleasant drive in the country. They could take their grandchildren to the mall. The Mother speaks up. She hates malls. Malls are hell. It is promptly decided. Tomorrow afternoon, they will let the kids drag them through hell. I put down my fork. I tell the Father and his wife that they should do what they like. This is their vacation. The children will survive. Why don’t the two of them simply enjoy themselves? He aims his bald bulkhead at me. You, my friend, have a lot to learn, he says impatiently; life is not simple. I return the Father’s gaze and suggest that perhaps things are simpler than he thinks. But I have forgotten: there are no thoughts. Only knowledge. Around me, silverware clinks loudly enough to shatter china. The Father’s would-be son-in-law, alert to the dangers of flying glass, makes a joke. The Father turns to him and laughs, slaps the table. He likes what he sees of himself in his daughter’s suitor: a young man who knows how to work, a man who comes straight from the barns to dinner, a man who would have leaped from the table to answer the telephone had the daughter not stopped him.

The daughter announces dessert. But, the Father protests, there is a task at hand: a dozen boxes of heirloom china, and a rack of the Mother’s old clothes, must be brought into the
house from their car. The family agrees. We will wait for dessert. The son-in-law suggests a plan. We will drape the dresses and coats over an upstairs banister, then place the boxes of china in front of the cabinet where they are to be stored. The Father slaps the table, grins at the son-in-law, and declares loudly that logic always prevails.

Dessert is served on small, gold-leafed square plates freshly unpacked by the Father. While apple and cherry pies and ice cream make a circuit around the table, the Father stands, unpacking more china. He stacks gold-edged cups and saucers, twenty or more, atop the avocado-green antique cabinet. He places plates, bowls, platters, enough for an officers’ banquet, upon the thick wooden shelves. Ice cream melts on his rectangular dessert plate. I cannot stop looking at the hard angles of his body: the abutment of his alabaster forehead, the steam shovel of his jaw, the stooped hinging of his back and long legs. I see his wild-eyed worship of work, his deafening grinding of gears, furiously clearing hillsides of forests and tearing trenches through mountains. I see the squirming gray workings, the clever worms, turning in his great oblong skull, calculating the yield of prairies and rivers. I see him at the first Thanksgiving, accepting gifts of fur and pumpkin and corn, an ill-clad, starving settler who would soon forget how his own science had failed him. I see him making soundly considered decisions: bison are limitless, wolves are an enemy, beef is a core nutrient, straight lines are natural. I see my wizened black great-grandparents shaking their heads on their porches about the way that white people think, the way that white people act, the things that white people believe.

And then I see more. I see a man with dark skin father a son. I see this Father work three jobs at a time, admonish all others as soft and lazy, build an all-consuming business that his
son will learn to hate. I see this dark Father take quiet walks in the woods and then return to his family with a chain saw. I see him pile women and children like timber, carve a home by the whim of his measure. I see him plant a large foot in his eight-year-old son’s ass because the boy could not mop a basement floor fast enough. I see this Father running for messages, running for deals, running for City Council, running for some kind of glint of respect in the gray eyes of white Fathers, running for rabbits named Sparky on a quarter-mile oval track, running to outpace the squeezed rush of his own metered blood until science gives way and the brain bleeds on itself, the movie monster collapsing on a city skyline in a cloudburst of red. I see this Father’s son wander amid sirens and fire hoses and splashing pink water, proof in the flesh of a life’s work well done.

I sit at my friend’s table, chew slice after slice of sweet apple pie while I watch the Father stack china. I watch him work his long limbs over small boxes as ice cream pools on his plate, and the fine shells of china strike one another like bells. I bend over my plate with a ringing in my ears, a high, thin pulse in my skull, and I ask myself, why doesn’t somebody answer that phone, and why does my fork have the weight of ten men?

BEENA KAMLANI

Preeti rounded the corner jauntily, her Walkman earphones on full blast. She was wearing white jeans and an oversized pink T-shirt. Her hair was drawn back in a ponytail, and she had her sneakers and bright-green scrunch socks on. She felt good, for the first time in weeks. The guidance counselor at school had been really helpful. “It’s unlikely that you could be pregnant if you’ve only done it once. You’ve probably not had your period because of tension at home. But get it checked to make sure.” She had smiled reassuringly. Preeti thought of the home pregnancy test kit in her knapsack. She’d check as soon as she got home. Please let Mom be out, she prayed.

But as she drew closer to home, she felt a sense of panic fill her. What if she
was
pregnant? What would she do? Where could she go? What luck that Papa was away in California for a physicians’ conference. Things would be bad enough just having Mom to deal with. She glanced quickly at Chuck’s house. His beat-up car was outside the garage. God, he was home. She didn’t want to see him, didn’t want him to see her. She sidled around the bushes in the backyard. She’d go in through the kitchen door.

Once inside the house, she rushed upstairs, dropping her things on the stairs as she headed toward the bathroom. Mom had been cleaning, she saw. The bathroom was pristine, sparkling. She reread the instructions that came with the package, then went through each step over again, her heart thumping loudly. Easy, easy, she said to herself. It might turn out wrong if I’m so worked up.

When the liquid showed up a dark pink, she thought she was going to faint. It can’t be, it can’t be. I must have done something wrong. She read through the instructions wildly, looking for her mistake. But she had done everything exactly as the instructions had said. She looked out of the bathroom window. Chuck was lying on the grass, his dog, chewing something, beside him. Preeti wanted to call out to him, but the words got stuck in her throat. Something about his attitude, sprawled carelessly across the grass like that, with no sense of the world around him, told her that she had been foolish. He wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her now. But a little voice inside said. You don’t know for sure. He’s the father. He might want to help. He owes you that.

“Chuck,” she called down. “Please come here.”

“Preeti! What are you doing back so early? What’s wrong? Look, I’m expecting a call. I’ll be up a little later, okay?”

“Chuck, please come up here now,” Preeti said urgently.

He looked up at her, then shrugged and walked toward the house. Preeti went into her bedroom and sat down in a chair. She could hear Chuck’s heavy footsteps on the landing stairs. Help, help, help, she cried soundlessly. I can’t go through with this.

“Okay, baby, what’s up?” Chuck came in and lay down on her bed, propping his head against the pillows. “You’ve been missing me, is that it? Why are you sitting so far away? Come here, you sexy thing.” He stretched himself out comfortably, patting the space next to him. “Come on. You know, you kids at school are hotter than most of the girls I date at college. You don’t have as many hang-ups. You want to experience it all.” Preeti watched him as he undid the top button of his jeans. So that’s what he thought she wanted. More sex. He was humming the tune to “Layla.” “Layla, you got me on my knees, Layla …,” he sang softly.

Preeti took a deep breath. “Chuck, I didn’t call you up here because I wanted to do it.” She watched her words register, saw him look a little less secure. “I called you here because I’m pregnant.”

She saw the blood drain from his face, his eyes begin to look shifty, evasive. “The old, old trick, huh? Preeti, are you gonna tell me that I’m the father?”

“You are,” Preeti said quietly. “There’s been nobody else.”

“You’re crazy. I can’t be the father. I had a condom on.”

“That’s what you said then. I’m not sure—like, you said you did but I don’t know.”

“And anyway, we only did it once. Virgins can’t get pregnant the first time they do it. Everyone knows that. And it’s only been six weeks or so. How can you be so damn sure?”

“I am sure,” Preeti said, pulling him off the bed with her hands. “Look, see for yourself.” She pulled him into the bathroom, where the pink blot still showed bleakly on the test kit.

“Look, Preeti, I’m really sorry for you. It’s rough for a fifteen-year-old to be pregnant. But I can’t be the one who got you pregnant. Shit, for all I know, with a face and a body like yours, you’ve got all the guys in your class dating you. Specially now that you know what it’s all about.”

“Chuck, I haven’t been with anyone else. I’ve only done it once, like with you. I don’t know how this happened, but I know you’re the father of this baby growing inside me. And I really don’t know what to do. My folks will kill me, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah, that’s for sure.” Chuck was beginning to look worried. “Of course, you’ll get an abortion.”

“I guess,” Preeti said. “But I’ll need their permission and then they’ll find out.”

“Look, they’re going to find out anyway. There’s morning sickness and stuff like that. Dead giveaways.”

“You know quite a lot about all this stuff,” Preeti said.

“Well, yeah, my cousin got pregnant when she was in high school.”

“What did she do?”

“She got an abortion. There’s nothing else you can do. You’re still a kid, Preeti. You don’t want a baby messing things up.”

“It’s easy for you to say. You just fuck people and say to hell with what happens after that. I wish I hadn’t believed you when you said you had a condom on.”

“Hey, baby, you would have done it anyway. Remember that rainy afternoon? You were so hot.”

Yes, she remembered. She remembered going over to Chuck’s to listen to some music one afternoon when her last-period teacher was sick and the class had been sent home. At first, they had simply drunk a couple of beers and laughed a lot in the backyard. Then it had started raining and he had taken her up to his room. “You’re so special, baby,” he kept saying as he kissed her, his hands already underneath her clothes, exploring, setting off fires, strange new sensations. She had loved the feel of him, what his hands were doing to her body. So this is what it’s like, she thought. But the feeling grew, intensified, and then, only when he was in her, exclaiming “My God, it’s true, you really are,” that she realized guiltily what was happening, too late to change her mind. And she didn’t want to change it. How could something that felt so neat be wrong?

Now, of course, it seemed different. Threatening. His hot breath all over her body, his hands rough on her skin, bruising all the tender places. She remembered not knowing what to think. Was it really fun?

“Anyway, what are you going to do?”

“You mean, what are
we
going to do?” Preeti asked, thinking: To hell with it, he made the moves. He took me up to his bedroom, he undressed me, he showed me how. It’s my fault
for letting him, but he’s as much to blame for what’s happened to me as I am.