Lu doesn’t, not at all. And the number on Della’s pink memo is a California one, 650 something. She remembers that prefix from Gabe’s trips. She will remember that prefix forever. Of course, area codes mean nothing now, just an indication of where you got your first cell phone. She crumples the pink slip into a ball and makes a high, arching shot toward her wastebasket. It hits the rim, but it goes in. Her brother, who deigned to play basketball with her in their driveway on those rare occasions when his friends weren’t around, always told her: It doesn’t have to go in pretty, Lu. It just has to go in.
THE PEOPLE TREE
Columbia turned ten in 1977, the year I turned seven, but its birthday was a much bigger deal than mine, a series of events and concerts and fireworks. My father found what he called the “hoopla” mildly ridiculous, although he was careful not to express this view in public.
“Europe thought our bicentennial was a joke,” he said over dinner. It was spring, the sky was bright well into evening, and I stared longingly at the world beyond our supper table. Most evenings, there were just two of us. AJ, as it happens, was at rehearsal for one of the birthday concerts. “And here we are celebrating the tenth anniversary of an unincorporated town. But it would be impolitic for me not to attend all the festivities.”
“You’re in politics,” I said, confused.
“Exactly.”
I don’t think he minded, really. Much as he disliked celebrations about him, he wanted other people to enjoy themselves. I realized that night that we never had acknowledged my father’s birthday, which fell a week after mine. We never did anything to mark the day-at his insistence. Earlier that week, we had been assigned the task of making “spring tradition” cards-no Easter, no Passover in Columbia schools. I had spent my childhood creating holiday cards and Father’s Day cards, but never a birthday card, not for my father.
“Why don’t you have birthday parties?” I asked.
“It’s a week after yours, and yours is eight days after Christmas. The parties have to stop sometime.”
“But a birthday-everyone deserves a birthday,” I said. “It’s your special day, a day of your own day.” I had a little book that called it just that.
“I don’t think I merit attention for hanging around another year.”
“Are all grown-ups like that?” I was nervous that I might be expected to behave this way one day.
“No, not at all. Your mother loved hers. She turned it into a weeklong celebration sometimes.”
Later that evening, as I reported the conversation back to AJ, he gave me a scornful look. He had been giving me those looks more and more since he turned fifteen. “It’s the day Mom died, Lu. That’s why he doesn’t celebrate it.”
“How did she die, AJ?” I had asked this question before, but I still needed the reassurance that my birth had not killed her.
“Teensy said she just wasn’t made for this world and her heart finally gave out.”
“But not because of me, right? Not because she had a baby? Is that what our grandparents think? Is that why we don’t talk to them?”
“No, not because of you,” AJ said. “I think she got some infection or something in the hospital and it ate away at her heart. Because she was already weak. She was in bed most of the time she was pregnant with you.”
Still, didn’t that make it my fault? I decided to change the subject. “Daddy says it’s silly, having a celebration for a city’s ten-year-old birthday.”
“He can think what he likes,” AJ said. “But I was one of only sixty-six kids chosen to sing in the chorus. I think that’s a pretty big honor.”
The number sixty-six was not arbitrary. Ground for Columbia had been broken in 1966. A year later, the city had dedicated the People Tree, a gleaming metal statue of sixty-six intertwined human figures. Columbia’s official symbol, it had been erected near the shore of Lake Kittamaqundi. So when the celebration was planned, it was decided to have a townwide chorus of sixty-six teenagers. AJ wasn’t the least bit surprised to be one of them. AJ was never surprised to be picked for anything. Noel and Ariel made the cut, too, and Ariel even had a dance later in the program.
AJ assumed he would be given the big vocal solo. But that went to a boy not in their crowd, a tall, very dark-skinned freshman from Oakland Mills.
Davey.
Looking at Davey, one might have expected a baritone voice, a Paul Robeson kind of voice singing “Old Man River.” But perhaps that was just our unacknowledged bigotry, linking tone to color, as if all dark-skinned men were obligated to produce deep, dark notes. As it happened, when Davey showed up at the audition with nothing prepared, the chorus master suggested “Old Man River.” Davey didn’t know it. After a quick conference with the piano player, he decided to sing a Beatles song, “If I Fell.” AJ told me that his voice stunned everyone. He had a glorious tenor, not a baritone, and there was a simplicity to his phrasing that made familiar songs sound new again. He probably could have sung opera if he wanted to. Davey didn’t want to sing opera. He didn’t even want to be in the birthday concert. A teacher had tricked him into going to the audition, claimed the tryout was required for chorus, which he took only because it was an easy “A” for him. Davey played football and needed to keep his grades up, because his parents had said they would take him off the team if he didn’t maintain an A average. His parents’ standards were much higher than the school’s, which required only passing grades from its athletes. So Davey stood next to the piano, a reluctant star, and sang a Beatles song, assuming he wouldn’t be picked.
But if Davey did not understand how magical his voice was, AJ did. So did Noel. They sized him up-a freshman, like them, only a good six inches taller than AJ. Black. Coal black, midnight black. He was obviously going to be the soloist, taking the spot that AJ had assumed would be his. AJ, fiercely proud, probably decided that the only way to prove he couldn’t care less was to befriend Davey.
He brought Davey home that very night. Teensy fell all over herself, offering him things to eat and drink. She asked him to stay for dinner. Our father arrived home and also took an interest in Davey, peppering him with far more questions than he had ever asked of anyone else AJ had brought home-Noel, Bash, Ariel. He was excited, I think, that his son had a black friend. That sounds horrible, but in the context of 1977, it was-well, less so. Howard County was, overall, very white. Less than 15 percent of the population was nonwhite at the time; not quite 12 percent was African American. The numbers were different in Columbia proper, but not that different. People who grew up in Columbia during the 1970s remember it as an idyllic, postracial bubble. I don’t.
“Do you want to sing professionally?” our father asked Davey over dinner, a quiche Lorraine. (“But I can make you something else,” Teensy said, “if you don’t like it.” She never said that to me. Davey said it was all right, his mother made quiche all the time.)
“No, sir,” Davey said. “I like to sing, but I’m hoping that I can use football to get a scholarship to Stanford. I want to be a doctor.”
“How ambitious,” my father said.
“I guess so,” Davey said. “My dad’s a doctor. A surgeon at Hopkins. Oncology.”
My father coughed, gulped some wine. He seemed embarrassed. I wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t the kind of lawyer who sued doctors for malpractice. He gulped more wine, had another coughing fit.
“And you’re at Oakland Mills?”
“Yes, sir. But I’d like to switch to Wilde Lake. Is it true that you can go at your own pace, do courses-I’m not sure what you call it. Independently? I’d like to take extra science and math, and there’s no way to do that at my school. But I’ve got to take calculus in high school and at the rate I’m going, I’ll only make it through trig and analyt because I didn’t take Algebra two in middle school. My family moved to Columbia after I finished seventh grade and they didn’t realize that the math I took in the city was the same as Algebra I. They basically put me back a year in some courses and by the time we figured it out, it was too late to change.”