~ ~ ~
Watching her, Viv says to Zan, “In London you’ll need to find a salon for her. Some place where they can do her hair.”
“All right,” Zan says absently, watching the news.
“Are you listening?”
“Yes. Sheba’s hair.” Ever since the girl came to live with them, Viv has been confounded by Sheba’s hair. Once in a shopping mall, a black woman approached Viv and pointed out that the hair was different and couldn’t be neglected and demanded constant attention.
“You never should have started calling her Sheba,” says Viv.
~ ~ ~
After this has sunk in a moment, Zan turns his attention from the television. “What?”
“You shouldn’t have called her Sheba. It sounds like a B-movie,” she protests. “Queen of the Jungle.”
Zan says, “That’s Sheena.” Coming almost two years after the fact, this is an unforeseen point of contention. “What should we call her?”
“Not so loud.” Viv glances the girl’s way. “Her real name, maybe?”
“Do we know that ‘Zema’ is her real name?”
“Well, we know it’s no less real than Sheba,” says Viv.
“We have no idea what it means. ‘Zema.’ It sounds like a power drink.”
“It means ‘hymn’.”
“That’s kind of what it means.”
“It’s close enough.”
“People have been as vague about her name as they have about everything else,” including, he wants to point out but doesn’t, her mother. “It means different things depending on how the stars are aligned that day, or the given meteorology. A fog happens to roll in, and for all we know suddenly it means ‘Death to the Great Satan’ or something.”
“Sheba sounds silly.”
“Won’t it seriously mess with her sense of self if now we go back to calling her something else?”
“Her sense of self is going to be O.K.,” Viv answers firmly.
“Yeah, if we don’t start calling her Death to the Great Satan.”
~ ~ ~
Zan would like to note that Viv has been calling the girl Sheba too but decides it’s best to accept the full brunt of the accusation. “It’s a cool name,” he says. “She can be a rocker with that name.”
“Or a stripper,” Viv retorts. For a while they don’t say anything. Zan gets up and crosses the lobby to the television. On the cable news, a black man argues against the new president’s foreign policy; he looks unhappy, sour, and Zan isn’t sure he would have recognized him — certainly given the political viewpoint he now expresses — if he weren’t identified at the bottom of the screen where it reads RONALD J. FLOWERS and, beneath that, “Los Angeles Director, Civic Organizers Network.” Zan listens for a while and returns to his seat next to Viv. “Ever tell you my Ronnie Jack Flowers story?” he says.
“Yes. It’s why you don’t write novels anymore — I’ve heard it.” She says, “Sorry. That came out crabbier than I intended.”
After a moment Zan says, “You can’t hold yourself responsible for everything.” He means to offer it as, in part, a rapprochement.
“That story’s about you,” she answers, “not me.”
~ ~ ~
The mother, father, son and daughter checker coach, only two of the assigned seats together, which means that Zan and Viv take turns with Sheba while Parker has his own seat across the aisle. On Zan’s shift, scruples waver and soon he has the four-year-old swilling Benadryl; as the plane flies into darkness, Sheba sleeps on her father’s lap with Parker slumped two rows ahead.
Viv says to Zan, “While you’re in London, you need to have the Talk with Parker.” Trying not to look as glum about it as he feels, Zan nods. “He’s twelve,” Viv insists, and Zan says, “All right,” realizing it sounds snappish. “I know he’s twelve.”
“He’s going to start wondering,” says Viv.
“He’s beyond wondering. He’s already figured stuff out.”
“He doesn’t know anything.”
“He knows all of it.”
“Did you? At twelve?”
“I don’t remember how much I knew or exactly what, but I had gotten the gist of it.”
“The gist?”
“Yes, the gist.”
“Shhh,” she says, looking at everyone around them sleeping.
~ ~ ~
He repeats emphatically, “The gist.”
“Did you have the Talk with your father?” says Viv.
“My father was appalled by the whole subject. He gave me a book that I barely looked at. Everything I know about sex I learned from James Bond movies.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yes, that explains a few things.” After a while she falls asleep and Zan turns on his laptop and reads the news on the airplane WiFi that he had to pay for. Soon a woman in the seat next to him strikes up a conversation that Zan immediately realizes is intended to be political.
~ ~ ~
Zan never has picked a political argument with a stranger before. Actually he doesn’t pick political arguments with anyone; he’s so averse to confrontation that when people talk politics, he’s as likely to sink into even greater silences. It’s hard to tell what age the woman is. She could be an older-looking thirty-eight or a younger-looking fifty-one. She looks older than Viv, who looks ten years younger than she is.
The woman is wearing a new ring that she’s shown off to the flight attendants. Zan decides she’s just gotten engaged — maybe, to put it cruelly, in the nick of time. He isn’t sure what leads the woman to draw conclusions about Zan’s political views, which are less predictable than the woman assumes; maybe it’s something she’s seen Zan reading on his laptop. Later he’ll wonder — though this might be unfair — if she saw Zan with his black daughter. In any case she immediately means to straighten him out on some things. After some back and forth that Zan wants no part of, she blurts, “The big difference between us is that I believe in personal responsibility and you don’t.”
He says in disbelief, “I don’t?” He looks back to his wife’s seat to see if she’s catching any of this, but Viv sleeps. Zan doesn’t understand Viv’s sleeping habits, how the slightest thing at home keeps her awake but she can sleep upright on a plane in a seat smaller than a coffin. “No,” the woman says emphatically, and Zan, visions of foreclosure in his head, wonders if she’s right. But she doesn’t know me, he thinks, doesn’t know my life; in fact — and there it is right on the edge of his brain — if she’s just getting engaged then in all likelihood she doesn’t have kids, and he hears himself snarling at her, “Do you even have kids? and if you don’t, then you have no clue what responsibility is.” Finally having gotten some guy to give her a ring, her chance of having children now, at either thirty-eight or fifty-one, is as far from her as the ground below them is now; and she looks stricken, her sense of power suddenly shattered, and bursts into tears. .
Except she doesn’t, “because,” Zan later relates to Viv, “I didn’t say that. It was there on the edge of my brain and there it stayed, because as much as I would have liked to let her have it, with her I’m-all-about-personal-responsibility-and-you-aren’t, as much as she asked for it, as much as she deserved it—”