“Any black people there?”
“Zingha, why you have to make everything about black and white?”
“Maybe because people are starting all-white pools in my neighborhood.”
She sighed. “There was a black guy there.”
“Janitor?”
“I think he was the security guard.”
I snorted.
We watched a black Range Rover crawl down the block. The windows were tinted, and LL Cool J’s “The Boomin’ System” erupted from the speakers.
“Wow,” I said, in mock awe. “That’s boomin’ from his boomin’ system.”
“So ghetto,” said Aja.
“Um, because this is the ghetto,” I said, though my mother forbade me to use the word.
“He spoke to me,” Aja said suddenly. “The pool security guard. He wasn’t that much older than us.”
“Was he cute?” I asked without much interest.
“Tell you the truth, he’s a little creepy. Like maybe he was on that line between crazy and, um, retarded.”
I laughed and then she did too.
“So you been hanging out with Jess a lot this summer?” Jess, a gangly brunette with an upturned nose, was Aja’s entry into the clique to which she aspired. But Jess sometimes ignored Aja for weeks at a time, and had repeatedly tried to date guys who Aja liked.
“Well, not a lot. She was at tennis camp earlier,” Aja said, glancing away from my face. She could never fully commit to a lie. I imagined my older brother Dahani a couple of nights ago, spinning a casual yarn for my mom about how he’d been at the library after his shift at the video store. He said he was researching colleges that would accept his transfer credits. Dahani had been home for a year, following a spectacular freshman-year flameout at Oberlin. That memory led me to a memory from seventh grade when Dahani said he’d teach me how to lie to my mother so I could go to some unsupervised sleepover back when I cared about those things. I practiced saying, “There will be parental supervision,” over and over. Dahani laughed because I bit the inside of my cheek when I said my line.
“You mean the pool at the Y?” my mom asked me later that night. We had just finished eating the spaghetti with sausage that she had cooked especially for my brother. She had cracked open her nightly can of Miller Lite.
“Not that sewer,” I said.
“Poor Zingha, you hate your fancy school and you hate your community too. Hard being you, isn’t it?”
“Sorry,” I muttered, rather than hearing again about how I used to be a sweet girl who loved to hug people and cried along with TV characters.
Dahani, who used to have a volatile relationship with our mother, was now silent more often than not. But he said, “I know what you’re talking about, Zingha. Up on 47th Street.” Then he immediately looked like he wanted to take it back.
“You been there?” I asked.
“Just heard about it,” my brother said, tapping out a complicated rhythm on the kitchen table. When he was younger it meant he was about to go to his room. Now it meant he was trying to get out of the house. I wasn’t even sure why he insisted on coming home for dinner most nights. Though of course free hot food was probably a factor.
“So what are you up to tonight?” my mother asked him brightly.
“I was gonna catch the new Spike Lee with Jason,” he said.
My mother’s face dimmed. She always hoped that he’d say, Staying right here. But she rallied. “You liked that one, didn’t you, Zingha?”
I looked at Dahani. “Sure, watch Wesley Snipes do it with a white woman and stick me with the dishes.”
“Oh, I’ll take care of the dishes,” my mother snapped, managing to make me feel petty. Turning to Dahani she asked, “How is Jason?”
“Just fine,” Dahani said, in a tight voice. I followed his eyes to the clock above the refrigerator. “Movie starts at seven.”
My brother kissed my mom and left, just like he did every night since he’d come home in disgrace. I went upstairs so I wouldn’t have to listen to the pitiful sound of her cleaning up the kitchen. After that she would doze in front of the TV for a couple of hours, half waiting for Dahani to come home. She always wound up in bed before that.
I went up into my brother’s room. I didn’t find my things, but I helped myself to a couple of cigarettes I knew I’d never smoke, and an unsoiled Hustler magazine.
It happened after I had done the deed with a couple of contorting blondes who must have made their parents proud. I had washed up for bed and was about to put on my new headphones, which would lull me to sleep.
I realized that my Walkman was gone.
Understand this. I did not care about the mother-of-pearl earrings from my aunt that even my mother admitted were cheap. I did not care about the gold charm bracelet that my mother gave me when I turned sixteen-the other girls in my class had been collecting tennis racket and Star of David charms since they were eight. And of course the future value of nonfunctioning Swatches was just a theory. But Dahani, who had once harangued my mother into buying him seventy-five-dollar stereo headphones, understood what my Walkman meant to me.
Every summer since eighth grade, the nonprofit where my mom worked got me an office job with one of their corporate “partners.” I spent July and part of August in freezing cubicles wearing a garish smile, playing the part of Industrious Urban Youth. This summer it had been a downtown bank, where the ignoramus VPs and their ignoramus secretaries crowed over my ability to staple page one to two and guide a fax through the machine. If you think I was lucky I didn’t have to handle French fries or the public, you try staying awake for six hours at a desk with nothing to do except arrange rubber bands into a neat pile. It was death.
Most of the money I made every summer went for new school uniforms and class trips. The only thing I bought that I cared about was the most expensive top-of-the-line Walkman. I had one for each summer I’d worked, and all three were gone. I turned on my lamp, folded my arms, and decided that I could wait up even if my mother couldn’t.
The next day I hovered around the living room window waiting for Aja to appear on my block and also hoping that she wouldn’t. I needed to tell someone about my brother. But on the other hand, Aja had the potential to be not so understanding. She had two parents: a teacher and an accountant who never drank beer from cans. They went to church and had a Standard Poodle called Subwoofer. It was true that sometimes we were so lonely that we told each other things. I had told her that I liked my brother’s dirty magazines and she told me that she didn’t like black guys because once her cousin pushed her in a closet and pulled out his dick. But whenever we made confessions like these, the next time we met up it was like those mouthwash commercials where couples wake up next to each other embarrassed by their breath. Besides, I didn’t want her to pronounce my crack-smoking brother “ghetto,” not even with her eyes.
He lied, he lied, he lied. Dahani, who used to make up raps with me and record them, who comforted me the one time we met our father, who seemed bored and annoyed, and once, back when we were both in public school, beat up a little boy for calling me an African bootyscratcher. That brother, said calmly, “I didn’t take any of your stuff, Nzingha. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking: what the hell is going on? I’m thinking: where are my Walkmans? I’m thinking: where are you all the time?”
“I’m out. You should go there sometimes.” He laughed his high-pitched laugh, the one that said how absurd the world is.
“Okay, so you supposedly went to the movies tonight, right? What happens to Gator at the end of Jungle Fever?” I asked.