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It was as if instead of entering a house she was entering the idea of a house, some archetype brought to life here before her. Something she’d only heard about but never seen.
“Being allowed to do something and knowing how to do it are not the same thing.”
She had learned that when people were bent on doing something they believed was a good deed, it was usually impossible to dissuade them.
In the first week of school, after reading T. S. Eliot, she had tacked up signs on all the bulletin boards: I HAVE MEASURED OUT MY LIFE WITH COFFEE SPOONS and DO I DARE TO EAT A PEACH? and DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE?
Izzy pored over the reproductions of her photographs: her favorite was a shot of a housewife and her daughter on a swing, the child kicking her legs so hard the chains bent in an arc, defying gravity, the woman’s arms outstretched as if to push her child away or desperate to pull her back. The photos stirred feelings she couldn’t quite frame in words, and this, she decided, must mean they were true works of art.
“Journalists,” she explained in a civics speech about dream careers, “chronicle our everyday lives. They reveal truths and information that the public deserves to know, and they provide a record for posterity, so that future generations can learn from our mistakes and improve upon our achievements.”
“Change doesn’t just happen,” her mother had always said, echoing the Shaker motto. “It has to be planned.”
She had learned, with Izzy’s birth, how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course.
ANGER IS FEAR’S BODYGUARD,
To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.
Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,
It was so easy, she thought with some disdain, to find out about people. It was all out there, everything about them. You just had to look. You could figure out anything about a person if you just tried hard enough.
“And what about all those black babies going to white homes?” she had said. “You think that breaks the cycle of poverty?” She dropped a pot into the sink with a clatter and turned on the water. Steam rose up in a hissing cloud. “If they want to help the black community, why don’t they make some changes to the system first instead?”
It was the kind of place where—as one resident discovered—if you lost your thousand-dollar diamond wedding ring shoveling the driveway, the service department would remove the entire snowbank, carry it to the city garage, and melt it under heat lamps in order to retrieve your treasure.
And Elena would remember that look on her mother’s face, that longing to bring the world closer to perfection—like turning the peg of a violin and bringing the string into tune. Her conviction that it was possible if you only tried hard enough, that no work could be too messy.
All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never—could never—set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled. Domesticated. Happy in captivity. The key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.
Pagers were strictly forbidden at the high school, which meant that all the cool kids now had them.
The young are the same, always and everywhere,
Getting information out of interviewees, she had learned over the years, was sometimes like walking a large, reluctant cow: you had to turn the cow onto the right path while letting the cow believe it was doing the steering.
They were middle-class people, had lived all their married lives in a butter-colored middle-class ranch house in a stolid, middle-class town. To them, work was fixing something or making something useful; if it didn’t have a use, they couldn’t quite make out why you’d do it. “Art” was something that people with too much time and money on their hands did.
In the kitchen, when the manager wasn’t looking, she ate the leftover wedges of toast and cold forkfuls of scrambled eggs from the plates instead of scraping them into the garbage. This was her breakfast.
She ate the last bites of their burgers and their forgotten fries and the stubs of their pickles for dinner and folded all the cash into her jeans pocket.
“Nothing is an accident,” Pauline would say, again and again.
The Rabbit started up with a throaty growl. “A Porsche purrs,” Warren had told her once, “a VW kind of putts.”
Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less.
Now, as a teenager, Pearl’s caresses had become rare—a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug—and all the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it,
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“Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.”
“Honestly, I think this is a tremendous thing for Mirabelle. She’ll be raised in a home that truly doesn’t see race. That doesn’t care, not one infinitesimal bit, what she looks like. What could be better than that? Sometimes I think,” she said fiercely, “that we’d all be better off that way. Maybe at birth everyone should be given to a family of another race to be raised. Maybe that would solve racism once and for all.”
But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on.
He felt as if he’d dived into a deep, clear lake and discovered it was a shallow, knee-deep pond. What did you do? Well, you stood up. You rinsed your mud-caked knees and pulled your feet out of the muck. And you were more cautious after that. You knew, from then on, that the world was a smaller place than you’d expected.
Sometimes, just when you think everything’s gone, you find a way.” Mia racked her mind for an explanation. “Like after a prairie fire. I saw one, years ago, when we were in Nebraska. It seems like the end of the world. The earth is all scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow.” She held Izzy at arm’s length, wiped her cheek with a fingertip, smoothed her hair one last time. “People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way.”
Sex changed things, she realized—not just between you and the other person, but between you and everyone.
She had told Pearl the outline of everything, though they both knew all the details would be a long time in coming. They would trickle out in dribs and drabs, memories surfacing suddenly, prompted by the merest thread, the way memories often do.
Every time she did this, she was comforted by how Pearl smelled exactly the same. She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she’d carried alongside her.
“Some pictures,” Mia said, “belong to the person who took them. And some belong to the person inside them.
Where do we follow the rules, and where do we justify breaking them? Do our pasts determine what we deserve in the future? And is it ever possible to leave your past behind?
ignoring race means ignoring longstanding problems and history, as well as ignoring important aspects of a person’s identity.
