“Change the channel,” Lucia says.
Lucia is my nanny, but I don’t like to call her that ’cause it feels gross. She’s short—shorter than any other adult I know. Like, I was taller than she is by the time I was ten. When she cleans, she can reach only to a little bit above my head, and so sometimes it seems like she spends the day going up and down ladders to reach hidden corners, like some life-size version of the game Chutes and Ladders. Her car is matte gray with missing hubcaps, a Corolla that looks like somebody tore the secrets from its seats.
“I don’t know why you always hanging with those girls when you’re always telling me how terrible they are,” Lucia says.
“I’m not going to tell you anything if all you do is use it against me,” I say. “… And I never said they were terrible.”
“You’re lucky your parents weren’t home,” she says.
She’s right, but also not. Once during sophomore year I ditched with Kimberly and Courtney, and the school called. Unluckily for me, on that particular day my dad just happened to be working from home and answered the phone. When I got home, he sat me down and made me calculate, down to the hour, how much they spent on my schooling to show me how much money I wasted when I didn’t show up for class.
“We’re not your friends’ parents. You don’t have some magic trust fund. This is still a sacrifice for us. We want more for you,” he said.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that nowadays my parents are far too concerned with work and analyzing what went wrong with their wayward daughter, Jo, to care about what I’m up to.
Jo is my troubled older sister. She dropped out of college and didn’t tell them for a whole-ass semester. That’s a lot more money than I’m wasting. Her new husband is a musician who’s really a construction worker, and she’s a musician who’s really a secretary, and they live in a shithole somewhere on Fairfax between the Orthodox Jews and the Ethiopians. I think she’s angry at all the things my parents have done to her, or haven’t.
To be honest, I don’t remember her ever not being at least a little bit angry. When she was in high school, she got suspended for a month because she handcuffed herself to the flagpole up front to fight apartheid.
“We got plenty of people here to handcuff yourself to a pole for,” my mother said.
“Josephine helped the Resistance, and she wasn’t really French,” Jo sassed back.
“She didn’t have to worry about college applications.”
“We got to help our black brothers and sisters abroad,” Jo said.
Jo is named after Josephine Baker, who helped the French Resistance during World War II but also danced around Europe naked except for a costume made of strategically placed bunches of bananas. When we were little, my sister used to tell her friends she was named after Jo March from Little Women; this was back before she got all into being black. Both Jos are pains in the ass, as far as I can tell.
Two weeks after Jo’s twenty-first birthday, she and the construction worker wed in the Beverly Hills Courthouse and didn’t even invite any of us. My mother cried for weeks that her firstborn got married in “our own backyard and didn’t say a thing! Not even to her mother!”
Tonight’s dinner is to be the beginning of a truce.
My mother thinks my sister is on drugs, that her husband is forcing her to be some other her. I don’t think that’s it, though. Some girls are given away, but some girls run.
I think Jo ran away from my parents and away from me and away from the ocean because she was afraid of drowning. When she first started teaching me to drive, she drove me up the coast to Santa Barbara and back. The car charged forth in fits and starts, German engineering under teenage toes.
I was terrified of driving both of us off a cliff, of careening out of control, but Jo just said, “Steady. Steady.”
It was a quiet ride. I started to tell Jo about school, about how Heather and Kimberly were fighting that month, about how my history teacher sometimes called the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression, about how I was thinking of getting bangs but, like, half the school had bangs, so I didn’t know. Jo said I needed to concentrate, not talk, so I shut up. When I started to get exhausted from all the concentrating, we pulled off the freeway and parked and walked through the rocks and down to the sand. Two girls in wet suits sat in the back of a station wagon and waxed their surfboards. Fishermen balanced on the rocks and pulled in fish that gleamed. Then they gutted them, and out the red poured.
“Poor fish,” Jo said.
“You eat fish,” I said.
“Yeah, but I don’t kill them for fun.”
We watched as the men placed them in big plastic coolers.
“See, they’re going to eat them.”
Jo started to build a sand castle between us. She poured water from her water bottle into the sand and started moving the earth in scoops toward the sky. When she was done, there was a moat and a bridge and two hills that were a home.
“Sometimes it feels like a piece of my brain is far off in the distance,” she said, “and no matter how hard I swim, I can’t quite get to it. And I’m getting so tired of swimming.”
She waited for me to respond. I think I was supposed to say something, but I didn’t know what.
A leathery man in neon shorts jogged by and smiled at us. We’re pretty girls together, the kind that white folks assume are mixed with something else because we don’t look like mammy dolls. We have heart-shaped faces and mouths and almond eyes and unassuming ancestral curves. Jo had these beautiful thick curls that cascaded down her back, but she cut it off above her ears, and my mother cried for, like, an hour over how she could do such a thing. My hair doesn’t curl—it kinks—but it doesn’t matter because it’s relaxed anyway. I don’t think my mother would cry if I cut it.
“I dropped out of school. Just for the semester,” she said.
“Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know. I… I’m going back. When I’m doing better. My counselor was the one who suggested it.”
“Do Mom and Dad know?”
“They wouldn’t get it. And don’t tell them.”
I got mad at her then, even though I knew I shouldn’t.
Last year, New England was hit by Hurricane Bob, which is a pretty funny name for a hurricane. Like a sunburned white man with a beer gut and dad sneakers. Hurricane Jo is the black girl in ripped tights and Doc Martens drenching the rest of us in her feelings, and it’s like we either need to batten down the hatches or be swept away.
“What do you even do all day, then?”
“Wander around campus, sleep, listen to music; I don’t know,” she said. She bit her lip like she does to keep from crying, and I froze. Then, just like that, the moment passed.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Several weeks later, she met Harrison while wandering through campus. He wasn’t a student, just one of the construction guys working on the new dorms. Also, Harrison is white, but so are most of our neighbors and friends.
She took me out to drive one more time after that. As we twisted along the coast, she gushed, “He’s got the most beautiful eyelashes you’ve ever seen, Ash. He makes me happy. So happy.”