Mislaid (12 page)

Heading to a Chrysler Museum board meeting in Norfolk, Lee stopped off at Doumar’s for ice cream. It was an old-fashioned drive-in with teenage waitresses on roller skates. He was trying to cut down on drinking during the day, especially before board meetings, and ice cream made a nice substitute. Doumar’s reminded him of New York. There were signs on the wall to prove the founder had invented the ice-cream cone. Something about claims of inventing the obvious—pizza by the slice, or reading poetry aloud over a recording of yourself reading poetry aloud—always reminded him of New York.

He pulled his new blue Chevette in to the right of another blue Chevette, and thought,
Quelle
coincidence, a sister ship. As he clambered out to visit the restroom, he had to be careful to avoid colliding with the tray hung on the other Chevette’s passenger-side door. Heaped with heavily salted French fries, it was serving as a feeding trough to a stocky but fine-featured child with blond hair in cornrows. She lowered her mouth to the tip of the topmost French fry, guiding it inside with her tongue and a slurping sound like a robin eating a worm. The driver’s seat was empty.

Husky. Blond. Cornrows. A suspicion burst in on Lee. He stooped down and said, “Karen?”

“Who are you?” the girl asked.

“I might be your daddy,” he said.

“My daddy’s in Leavenworth for fragging his CO,” she replied.

That settled it for Lee. He recognized Peggy’s sense of humor. He jerked the door open, disregarding the greasy fries that tilted onto his clean khakis, and took her by the arm. “Come along,” he said. “We need to clear some things up.”

“Get off of me!” she said. She raised her voice and called out, “Marcella! Marcella!”

A shiny, pyramidal white woman with fine, limp hair—also in cornrows—came around the corner from the ladies’ room and said, “What are you doing? You get away from my granddaughter right now.”

Lee let go and backed away. He had seized the arm of a repulsive child on gut instinct without the least stirring of sensitivity or rationality—the child looked nothing like anyone he knew—feeling momentarily manly for what? For acting out like a drama queen? He didn’t even look around to check that he knew no one there. He simply closed his eyes, placing his right thumb and index finger on his eyelids, thankful it was Doumar’s.

“And you’d best pay for those fries,” the woman added. To the child she said, “Don’t eat food off the ground.”

“I’ll buy her new fries,” he said. He eased her door shut and reached for his wallet. “Watch your arm there. I’m so sorry. I mistook her for someone. Just sort of a confusing couple of years. Would five dollars be all right?” He extended the money toward the grandmother, inadvertently creating a suggestive still life: gold cuff link, gold watch, eel-skin wallet, five-dollar bill. The woman was nearsighted and lacked glasses. Lee’s face was fuzzy to her, but the still life was not. “I’m really very, very sorry,” he added. “I saw her hair and thought she might be my daughter.”

“Well, she might be,” the woman said. “She might well be.”

“I don’t think so,” Lee said.

“She’s a foster child. I just call her my granddaughter because my kids is growed up. You could be her father. What did you say your name was?”

“I got to go,” he said. “I simply must book. I got a meeting. Excuse me.”

“But you should keep in touch. Let me get you my card. I’m a hairdresser.”

As she went for her purse, he lowered himself into the driver’s seat and lurched into reverse. He stayed in reverse, backing all the way out to the main road, thankful he didn’t have a front license plate.

T
here were new families in the county where Meg lived, drawn
by the cheapness of two-acre lots with fishponds at their lowest points and septic tanks and wells going uphill in that order. Their motive for moving to the county had a name: “white flight.” And the more white people moved beyond the city limits, the more wanted to come. They had a snowball effect. Anybody with a little money to invest could make a good living building houses on spec.

You wouldn’t have noticed the newcomers just driving around, especially in summer when the leaves were on the trees. But behind the bushwhacked shoulders of the roads lay new home developments, sometimes as many as ten or twelve families, screened from view by thick buffers of vines and tree snags.

The new families founded a countywide Parent Teacher Association with a political agenda. They hoped to tear down all the public schools and build new ones. The current schools were in towns, convenient to stores where the kids could dash during breaks to grab such necessities as wax lips and fast-burning ten-cent cigarettes. They were overcrowded, because integration had
been achieved by closing two-thirds of them. Most white children still went to private schools (“Christian academies”), although the voucher program that once paid their tuition had been phased out years before.

Thus many a newcomer discovered that his dream home was served by a decrepit public school that was 80 percent black. He was subsidizing it with his tax dollars. Yet he couldn’t get a voucher to pay for private school for his own kids. There was a lot of anger.

But there was also realism. The Supreme Court had invalidated one segregation scheme after another, no matter how well it worked. But that was partly because the movement made strategic errors. It called the voucher system “Massive Resistance to Integration” and school choice “Passive Resistance.” In public relations terms, it was a fiasco. When the Supreme Court went on the warpath, imposing busing that turned white people into refugees, they surrendered. The new way forward was to be subtle enough to fool even themselves.

The PTA wanted the school board to solicit money from the federal government to open new, centrally located, fully integrated public schools and bus all the kids to them. Out in the country busing was more a convenience than a burden. It even provided employment for drivers. The new schools would have air-conditioning and no asbestos. They would be large enough to allow children to be taught in separate classes according to their abilities.

No one had thought to criticize the school facilities before. When it came to quality of education, people always talked about class size and teaching. But to the newcomers, property developers, building contractors, and subcontractors of various trades, it was plain that quality education requires modern buildings. There was a good deal of overlap among the four groups, and Meg did
not find their self-interested motives entirely sympathetic. But they made their opponents sound like unregenerate Klansmen.

At the first meeting she attended, all it took was for a speaker to favor modern athletic facilities, and the Pop Warner coach countered that a varsity football program, chronically swamped with aspiring players, would foster un-Christian rivalry for starting positions. A member of the school board opined that children should play sports in familiar surroundings where they speak a common language and learn at their own pace. A third speaker explained that some people’s natural talent would be complemented by other people’s ability to read playbooks, so that the all-county varsity with the deep bench would be victorious in the region and possibly even the state.

Eye contact and whispers raced around the room, and Meg got the feeling she was expected to say something. She was at once a newcomer and black. It was longer than anyone could remember since a black person had voluntarily moved into the county. Quite possibly it had never happened ever before. There were no other black people at the meeting.

She raised her hand and was called on. She said, “I look forward very much to seeing my daughter in a modern middle school with an adequately staffed and funded library, the sooner the better. You know that Andrew Carnegie founded the public libraries so that working people would have the opportunity to better themselves.”

It was a brilliant speech, simultaneously demanding a modern school, praising a robber baron, and exhorting her Negro brothers and sisters to self-reliance and work. After the meeting, the PTA founder made a point of embracing Meg. “An Oreo,” she told her friends later. She remarked that Mrs. Brown was as well-spoken as if she had grown up watching PBS. Her collar was clean (polo shirts and hair relaxers led a difficult coexistence in
those days). She was divorced or a widow, but no one saw her turning tricks or even smiling much. No one had met her boyfriend, but it was always the same van. One saw her buying not steaks with food stamps, but canned goods with cash. And her daughter (Karen spent the meeting reading the book of Bible stories that was chained to the chaise longue in the ladies’ room) was, if not the most popular child among children, the idol of the suburban émigrés. The ghostlike, flaxen-haired black child was almost a matter of civic pride. They hoped she would stay in the county and marry a light-skinned, blue-eyed man to found one of those conversation-piece dynasties.

At subsequent meetings, Meg went on to sing the praises of functional plumbing, heat in the winter, and modern electrical systems that don’t shock the kids every time they touch the filmstrip projector. There wasn’t a trace of separatism about her. She was so delightful and approachable! A natural ambassador of the newly ascendant educated black middle class. The newcomer mothers just loved her.

Two of them had founded a feminist encounter group. They discussed for months whether they might not invite a black woman one time, meaning Meg. Then their curiosity got the better of them, and they invited her.

The group’s founders had never been to any other feminist encounter group, but somewhat belatedly got the idea out of
Ms.
magazine. In between calls to action on the ERA and arousing tales of men who gave head, there appeared mentions of meetings at which women learned to speak openly about their concerns, their wishes and desires, and their bodies.

Once you go black, you’ll never go back, men were wont to say, but why is that? They all knew the joke about their flat noses (that’s where God braced his foot when he was stretching the first black man’s penis) and had heard inexact rumors of the Hottentot
Venus. Such thoughts of racial “difference,” insinuated shyly at several encounter group meetings in a row, troubled the white liberal moms of the PTA but excited them as well. They planned to get answers from Meg if they could.

However, when Meg was ushered in, they happened to be talking about a course in sex magic you could take in Virginia Beach. “I wouldn’t take that course for a million dollars,” a woman said. “When they say life force, they mean sperm. You have to swallow, like he’s doing you this huge favor.”

Meg sat down in a big armchair and said, “I think the fluids might be a yoga thing. Like you’re handmaiden to the Dalai Lama, and you massage his root chakra, and he uses his penis to drink your menstrual blood like coming in reverse? Some guy told me about this one time.”

The women stared at her, captivated. Their knowledge of obscure sexual practices came almost exclusively from magazines (books such as
The Joy of Sex
were short on specifics, enjoining readers to follow their hearts), on very rare occasions from women whose husbands had returned from prison demanding things that demanded explanation, and 0 percent of the time from men. “What else did he say?” her hostess asked, her tone as encouraging as she could make it.

“I’m not sure. We were pretty buzzed. He was one of those people into Wilhelm Reich and
Total Orgasm
. What was it now? I know! I asked him about tantra, and he said the post-structuralist emphasis on
jouissance
is an artifact of a modern construct, sexuality. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Jouissance
means ‘orgasm’ in French.”

“Was he French?” She recalled that the French like black people, or might be black themselves—she wasn’t sure.

“They’re
all
French,” Meg said. “It’s like people used to just get it on, but modern science started sorting us into categories.
So you get assigned this identity, like ‘straight woman,’ meaning woman who likes men. Except ninety-nine guys out of a hundred, if they touched you, you’d scream. And the hippies and the male chauvinists say the same thing, that sex is a form of play and you should relax. But what makes sex great is that it’s exciting. Sex isn’t relaxing! Relax and free your mind is what you have to do when somebody’s raping you! But that’s all men ever think about, getting you to relax so they can rape you and go to sleep.”

She surveyed the room to see how her audience was reacting. They were aghast.

Unable to backpedal, she decided to sum up. “So, the theory is basically that they had to define sexuality as a one-way street to orgasm so they could market it as a therapy that’s not predicated on attraction to a certain individual.” She concluded with a “Whew!” to show she was done. There was silence. Meg put her hand on her purse and glanced at the door, thinking it was time to leave.

“I think I know what you mean,” a woman ventured. “You’re in love with the wrong person, so you tell yourself you have needs and your husband can satisfy you.”

“It’s more like what society tells you,” Meg answered her. “It’s a way of labeling you. You fall in love with one man, so they tell you you’re into men, which is a joke. Nobody likes
men
. I mean, come on. Most of them are disgusting.”

An especially cute woman leaned forward and said quietly, “My husband makes me play that I’m a whore who’d do it with anybody or anything. I think he’s in love with my niece. My marriage is a joke, and his idea of a solution is to role-play that he’s a motorcycle cop. In the garage. He makes me keep my seat belt on. God, I hate that fucker. I fucking hate him.”

“That’s exactly it!” Meg said, inexpressibly delighted, yet worried, because everyone was taking her seriously and she had said way too much. “The idea is that the concept of sexuality was invented to stop us from stepping out of line and wanting people we’re not supposed to want.”

“What’s the guy’s name? Does he have a book out?”

“I don’t remember. Besides, I don’t know that he’s right.” She rose to their disappointment by adding, “I mean, he’s right about women, because women fall in love with individuals. But won’t guys fuck anything that doesn’t fuck them first?”

“My husband says he fell in love with me at first sight,” the cute woman said. “If that’s not proof, I don’t know what is.”

“Same with mine,” Meg agreed. “Love at first sight.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s deceased. He was much older.” Meg shook her head and made a sad face, feeling ecstatic. Her first act on leaving the encounter group would be to find the cute woman’s motorcycle-cop husband and punch him in the nose. “He was an entomologist,” she added, feeling that an intellectual in the family might make her butchering of Foucault seem less out of place. “I’m finishing up his manuscript about the butterflies of southeastern Virginia. That’s why I live down here.”

When the feminist encounter group wound down, Meg rescued Karen from the group of kids out in the yard playing doctor and headed for the car, vaguely worried that she had blown her cover. She went over every moment in her mind. Somebody must have noticed something. Mustn’t they? It was so obvious that she could not possibly be anything she said she was—black, straight, an entomologist’s grieving widow. But no. No one had noticed a thing.

As she was preparing to drive away, a not-very-cute woman appeared at her window, introducing herself as Diane. Her husband
was an electrical contractor, but she was nominally the owner of their business and not a housewife at all. There were government contracts for minority-owned businesses, and women were a recognized minority.

That made Meg laugh. “The majority of people are women!” she objected.

Diane replied, “Not in construction. It’s a great line of work. We’re cleaning up. I don’t want to say how good, but we’re doing all right. It’s a shame I never learned a trade.” She looked searchingly at Meg, eyes lingering on her V-neck, and Meg thought, Dyke.

Now, you’d think two dykes might be on the same team. But sexual deviance doesn’t trump anything. It just makes a person more paranoid. The weak are always the first to turn on each other in a clinch, like Peter denying Jesus three times before the cock crowed. If ever two deviants were on the same team, it was Jesus and the rock on which he would build his church.

To Meg, an unattractive lesbian was a clear and present danger: someone whose feelings she might hurt. There weren’t many of those in the county—people vulnerable to her—and maybe just one (Karen). Also, Diane was white, meaning she couldn’t be trusted. There was proof: a roadhouse named Ye Olde Coon Hunting Club with a big sign. Any well-intentioned white person would do something about the Coon Hunting Club before he or she started building schools.

Diane told Meg to stop by for coffee if she was in the neighborhood, and Meg lied that she would.

Two days later, Meg heard the slurping sound of tires in the mud and peered around the window shade to see Diane emerging cautiously from her car. She went out to meet her.

Diane sought a political favor. She wanted Meg’s support at a public hearing. “We want the board of supervisors to apply for a
grant to build public housing,” she explained. “Some people in this county live in conditions I just can’t believe. Especially black people, no offense. It’s not sanitary.”

“My people, the black race,” Meg said, offended. “We got one thing in common. And that’s that we’re exactly like the white race. The white people around here don’t live in a housing project. Why should we live in a housing project? We never did before. We have our own driveways now. We just need better houses.”