4
Here is how my mother met the man I call my father.
Grandma was a sheltered southern belle from Kentucky. The sort of high-yellow woman who believed her fair complexion was the result of an errant Native American gene, but who was, like so many of us, walking proof of American industry, the bolls and ships and casual sexual terrorism that put a little cream in the coffee and made her family loyal to the almighty paper bag.
That is to say, my grandmother was cautious about fraternizing with dark-skinned men. But then she took a typing gig in Queens and met my grandfather, a West Indian cad who was fresh off the boat. He was a gifted pianist with double-jointed fingers, a natural mimic whose classical training was just a dot over the i, a scrawl on a tea-stained island certificate that got him off the boat and government-approved. He saw my grandmother coming out of the Woolworth’s one day and that was that. Against the wishes of her family, she darkened the line and gave him eleven children. My mother was number six, smack-dab in the middle of a transition from tall, blue-black boys to bodacious, kinky-haired girls.
* * *
There were plenty of reasons to be worried about my grandfather. The most pressing of which being the devastating charm of the Classic Trinidadian Man. The lore slants a little differently depending on the island, but the conventional wisdom holds that there is no man more equipped to ruin a woman’s life. By ruin, I mean it both ways, as in, ruin (/roo-in/) noun 1. The total disintegration of your hopes and dreams, fantastic carnage (see Pompeii) or 2. The inability of any man to compare (Ex. Don Omar has ruined me for other men. Ex. Niggas!). Trinidadian men do not just have eyelashes for days, they have something more subliminal that does not make itself known to you until it is nuclear and you are stuck with eleven kids in Jamaica, Queens, while he is tickling ivories for a traveling circus.
* * *
That is to say, Granddad disappeared. My mother had as good a childhood as one can have with ten brothers and sisters, sleeping three to a bunk, ushering a collection of feral alley cats into hidey-holes Grandma could not hope to find, one link in a massive West Indian brood that year by year was proving to take after my grandfather’s side, meaning they were prone to disastrous dalliances with the arts and the things that make the fiscal wasteland of the arts worth the risk—the sex and drugs.
* * *
At sixteen, my uncle Pierre would die in a flophouse in Crown Heights cradling his trombone. At twenty-three, my aunt Claudia would emerge from a small Harlem cult talking about active galactic nuclei and the benefits of Himalayan crystal and tumble onto the tracks of an uptown D. Others would do okay, move to Sweden and Cape Town to sing opera and paint erotic renditions of driftwood, but my mother would take a different tack. She would take her body—this dark, powerful, curvaceous thing—and wield it all about town. After Grandma kicked her out of the house for general promiscuity and insolence, my mother would deal subpar narcotics from Bushwick to Sheepshead Bay, reinforcing the calluses on her large, archless feet with the occasional trek to a supplier in Connecticut, where she had a girlfriend who did not like to get high alone. And per this girlfriend, gradually my mother did less dealing and more using until she was strung out, living on a diet of cream soda and Greek men. Because for all her recklessness, she was not far gone enough to date an island man.
* * *
Until my father. A gruff ex-navy man with relaxed silver hair and gold fillings in his teeth. A man who spotted my mother in a bar and bankrolled a stint in rehab where she found Jesus and got clean. It wasn’t until after they moved upstate and settled at a small Seventh-day Adventist church that my mother noticed his deliberation. The way he would stand before the mirror and practice his smile. The way he was exact and vain, particular about the creases in his trousers and the part in his hair. As he dressed for church, he rehearsed his testimony under his breath. He weighed each word carefully and searched for the most effective places to apply stress. Like a comedian, he came prepared to handle the fickle demands of a room; in church, these rooms were full of women. They leaned toward my father, awed by his grisly accounts of war. They competed fiercely for his favor, and he happily indulged the most vulnerable ones. By then, my mother was already a husk of herself, and I was seven years old, looking how I will always look, which is like I have a single biological parent, like my father has had no part in my creation, which, in a way, is the truth.
* * *
When I get up in the morning, I look in the mirror and I see only my mother’s face. But the fact of our resemblance is such old news that to recognize it anew feels pointed, overly Freudian, a remnant of a dream I am still half inside. When she died, of course I was given to dissecting my face in the bathroom of Friendly’s, or avoiding my face altogether in Macy’s dressing rooms lest trying on jeans become any more demoralizing. But now I am seven years removed and there are some days I don’t even think about her, though on these days a siren will keen from the end of DeKalb and it will be 3:00 a.m. and a cloud outside my window will constrict into the shape of a lung and I will hear her voice.
* * *
This morning I look in the mirror and find a bruise that makes the resemblance more pronounced, and it makes my bowels a little shy. I retreat to my room, where I kill a few roaches, take a few pictures of my face, and do some quick acrylic studies. I have never been able to finish a self-portrait, but in these studies, in the burnt sienna and purple that is meant to be my face, I see the bruises clearly, and it fills me with relief. On the train, I listen to Rebecca’s voicemail over and over again. I arrive at the office with the intonations memorized. My plan for the day is to confirm the pub date for a new title about a vain giraffe and then fall down an internet rabbit hole of Rebecca Walkers who raise the dead.
* * *
My routine is always the same. I dart from the train and immediately wash my hands in the office bathroom. I load up on the free hand lotion the publisher started putting out after it was revealed that the women in the company (a whopping 87 percent of the employee base) are still making less than the men. The hand lotion has slightly increased morale, even though the quality is on par with that diabolical drugstore cocoa butter that leaves you ashier than before. I post a joke about the L train on Twitter, and I delete it when I don’t get any likes. I listen to a newly pregnant publicity assistant retch (lately always between 9:03 and 9:15) in one of the stalls, and I firm up my ponytail. I kill a roach in the kitchen, grab a cup of tepid coffee, and sit at my desk, where, before I start work, I browse through some photos of friends who are doing better than me, then an article on a black teenager who was killed on 115th for holding a weapon later identified as a showerhead, then an article on a black woman who was killed on the Grand Concourse for holding a weapon later identified as a cell phone, then I drown myself in the comments section and do some online shopping, by which I mean I put four dresses in my cart as a strictly theoretical exercise and then let the page expire.
* * *
Then I start work. I look through the Tuesday publications, confirm jacket copy, triage my inbox for panicked emails from production assistants and editors trying to soothe anxious authors with quick TOC and index corrections. Details so minute as to be absurd, an em dash, the romanization of a quotation mark, a last-minute change in the acknowledgments from I would like to thank my wife to I would like to thank my dog, but, and maybe this is surprising, I am good at all of this. Arguably it would be hard to be bad at it, but if a person comes to rote work with the expectation that she will be demeaned, she can bypass the pitfalls of hope and redirect all that energy into being a merciless drone. She can be the ear for the author who calls frequently to chat about the fineries of ichthyology depicted in his series about a bullied flounder, and she can wage war with large corporate vendors whose algorithms sweep book files for errors but have huge blind spots for the speculative lexicon of science fiction, and she can say to them: This is not an error; this is human; this is style.