Obviously Page 5

  But finding that bathroom was a real sanctuary for me. Any time class got to be too much, I’d just go there. No one really knew about this restroom past the library. In fact, one of the stalls was just filled with books and boxes. A couple weeks after the Black History Month scandal, when I had diarrhea and wanted to use a bathroom away from the harsh judgment of my peers, I went to that restroom.

  And that was the day Ms. Murphy took the one shred of dignity I had left. When I came out of the bathroom, she was standing there, towering menacingly, arms crossed, lipstick making its way onto multiple teeth.

  “What are you doing down here?” she asked accusingly.

  “I was using the bathroom,” I said, hoping she hadn’t heard the bubble-guts situation.

  “That’s a notification slip. If you want to play all day, then you can miss the movie.” Heartless and unaware that I’d all but given up.

  “Fine,” I accepted.

  “Fine? Well then, we need to have a parent-teacher conference!”

  My “attitude” annoyed her. What she didn’t know is that I was broken. The fact that I didn’t care anymore was testament to that. She was enraged.

  A few nights later, Ms. Murphy, my mom, and I sat at a table in the classroom. Ms. Murphy just told my mom how terrible I was forever, but I finally stood up for myself.

  “She makes me read the slave narratives. All of them. Out loud. None of the white kids have to,” I said, deciding if she was going to tell on me, I was going to tell on her.

  “Excuse me, what?” my mom said right on cue. I’ve always loved my mother, but I loved her in that moment like I loved watching Mufasa scare away the hyenas on Simba’s behalf.

  Before Ms. Murphy could respond, I continued.

  “She made us watch stuff about Martin Luther King like it was wrestling.” Ooh, bitch, you gon’ get it now. “And when everybody laughed she didn’t even say that he was killed!”

  I saw Ms. Murphy look scared for the first time in my life. My mom gets this primal, rage-filled look on her face when she’s pissed. Her jaw clenches, her eyes squint ever so slightly behind her glasses. She seems to involuntarily shake her head. It was all coming. But then:

  “Akilah was using the bathroom down the hall! I have no control over her,” Ms. Murphy said, maybe admitting exactly what she wanted anyway.

  “Why did you use the bathroom down the hall, Kilah?” my mom asked, totally losing the thread of us taking down Ms. Murphy together.

  “Because I had DIARRHEA!” I said, furious.

  And with that, my mother started laughing. It started out silently, more shoulders bouncing and hand over face than sound. But then it did become laughter, and I started laughing. Ms. Murphy knew better than to join us.

  We stayed like this for a couple minutes, my mom wiping tears under her glasses. With a final “whew,” my mom let her know what was up.

  “We’ve been through a lot this year. My mother passed away last summer.”

  “I’m sorry.” Ms. Murphy tried to get on her good side, but my mom knew better.

  “So anyway, none of this seems to be that big of a deal. I don’t like having to come down to the school for nonsense. Did she hurt anybody?”

  “No.”

  “And she hasn’t acted out?”

  “Well, she went to that bath—”

  “So then what is the problem? What is this really about?” My mom, my hero.

  And that was that.

  * * *

  * * *

  The next school year I had straight As again. We don’t really talk about it much as a society, but the expectation that teachers have for us and our level of comfort in the classroom dictates a lot of our success and “aptitude.” How can anyone be apt to do anything in a place where they feel not only underrepresented, but misrepresented and attacked?

  In later years I learned to stand up for myself to teachers like Ms. Murphy. From kindergarten through twelfth grade I never had a black teacher. Not one. No one in power looked like me, save for a vice principal that I never encountered. It took that experience in fifth grade to learn not to suffer silently when I was being mistreated. It took seeing my mother handle this woman who I thought was untouchable without kid gloves.

  And yes, I’ll be using whatever bathroom I find, thanks.

  Birthdays Are, Too

  Every family has an established dynamic that finds its way after a number of years. Sure, there are the defined roles by birth order and personality traits, but there are also the ways you learn to survive one another’s stronger features.

  Birthday parties in my house were an ethnographic study into the minds of my family members.

  My sister Lanie is a day short of a year older than me. That means my birthday is the day before hers a year later. It’s the kind of mental math that looks fine on paper, but explaining it publicly was a lot harder than just telling everyone that, yes, we were twins. Because of our close birthdays, we had shared birthday parties throughout our formative years.

  The point of birthday parties has always eluded me. Sure, party hats and cake are fun, but why do I have to give you a gift for successfully evacuating your mother’s body? She and the dedicated doctors at So-And-So Medical Center’s pediatric wing deserve to be showered with gifts for the anniversary of your birth, not you. You probably looked like a sticky alien dough monster that first day anyway, so why’s that anniversary worth celebrating?

  If I had to have a party, though, I wanted it to be big. Not because I thought I deserved it, but because I liked attention. I wanted people to spend a day fawning over me while I put out a fire with my mouth. My favorite Polaroid picture ever is from Linzy Ball’s third birthday party at our preschool. Both our mothers worked at the elementary school, and it was a cost-effective alternative to the standard Discovery Zone pizza-ball-pit-tokens-and-tickets fare. In the photo, I’m sitting at a table filled with smiling little boys and girls with fluffy bangs, arms folded neatly at my chest, sporting a face that has since been perfected by unimpressed Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney.

  “What’s wrong, Kiwi?” Linzy’s grandmother asked as she picked me up onto her lap.

  “I want a party,” I said coldly.

  “You can have a party, sweetie.” She tried and failed to convince me.

  “I already had a birthday this year,” I whined.

  But the idea had been planted, and in a few years I would finally get my in-school birthday party. Little did I know that my obsession with my own birthday would erode each year until I’d eventually dread its arrival.

  On my seventh birthday (Lanie’s eighth), my mom decided to clear out a space in the largest hallway of the school for our extravaganza. There was pizza, cake, and a boom box in lieu of a DJ. All of our friends and all the kids whose parents were super late picking them up from school were prepared to have the kind of memorable, self-exploratory, immersive experience that Burning Man can only attempt to provide to its annual attendees.

  Everything was going as planned, with all of us kids dancing around and playing whatever dumb games eight-year-olds make up, until Ashley Spiders took over.

  Ashley, my (ex) best friend, was a major show-off. Her middle name was literally Star. Her hair was blonde and big, and her blue eyes sparkled. Besides looking like an actual doll, she was the loudest, most confident, most coordinated girl among us. Ashley competed and won pageants and was head cheerleader for the local peewee football team.

  She always had the first party of the year because her birthday was the first week of January, which automatically set the bar high for everyone else’s shindigs. In addition to the usual Chuck E. Cheese affair, her mom often rented two hotel rooms at the Holiday Inn, where we’d swim, scarf pizza, and commandeer the hot tub like a crew of six-year-old pirates.

  Being (ex) best friends with Ashley was a distinct power position.
I was likable enough, but I didn’t possess her celebrity it-factor that dictated the hierarchy on the playground. With Ashley by my side, I always got first dibs on four square.

  The charm that had been my ticket to elementary school popularity, however, completely rained out my seventh birthday party. That year, Quad City DJ’s iconic hit “C’Mon ’N Ride It (The Train)” came out, giving hordes of uncoordinated children the confidence to hold on to one another’s shoulders in the shape of a conga line while the conductor at the engine of the train got the distinct honor of pumping their arms up and down like a maniac whose bus driver just skipped their stop.

  Can anyone tell me why Ashley took it upon herself to conduct the train? On this, my day of birth? Lanie and I swiftly jumped off the train and stood in the corner, seething. The nerve! The disrespect! We never showed up to her parties at Chuck E. Cheese to steal her shine. We’d just participate in the children’s gambling disguised as Skee-Ball—seriously, why do we let kids spend tokens to play games that they can’t win? Doesn’t that seem like a mistake??? Ashley had effectively ruined our party. Still, we couldn’t let our mom know how furious we were.

  “She’s your friend! Do something!” Lanie whined.

  “The song is almost over. Maybe we can cool it on the dancing?” And a plan was born. Like many of our childhood shenanigans, I was deployed to plant an idea in my mom’s head and have her think it was her own idea. This had worked at the library every time we wanted to rent the “Caldifoohnia Waisins” VHS tape even though we had just returned it. It worked when trying to lessen Lanie’s time-out sentences for my own personal Barbie-playing gain. It would work again.

  “Mommy. Can we play a game without music? I wanna play jump ropes,” I whined so well that I even convinced myself that I wanted nothing more.

  “Cut the music! We’re gonna sing ‘Happy Birthday’!” my mom announced to whoever was standing close to the stereo. Our happiness was now their distinct responsibility.

  The music didn’t return after the cake situation. Partially because my mom did not cheap out and bought way too much cake and we all ate too much cake. Too full to dance. But not too full to play Uno and Go Fish for another hour.

  * * *

  * * *

  But honestly, none of this compares to the third-grade sleepover fiasco that was both legendary and the last time our mom ever let us do anything with friends at our house.

  My mom had recently bought a new car, and Lanie and I stood in the doorway of our laundry room that led to the garage patiently awaiting her return. Once the five kids were there, it was a pretty regular birthday party; there was a ton of pizza. (Pizza in Kentucky sucks, but I wouldn’t really find that out until I moved to NYC and tried real pizza for the first time. It turns out the secret ingredient is diversity.) Little white girls gave us a variety of black Barbie dolls. Well, two attendees gave us the same “Workin’ Out Barbie” complete with lime-green spandex and a cassette tape with inspirational cardio music, but who’s counting?

  We choreographed a dance and ate too much and played games that centered on being in a sleeping bag and falling asleep first. No one fell asleep. We told jokes until Kaitlin peed her pants and had to change. We tried to tell ghost stories, but we didn’t really know how to be scary yet, so we all gave up about halfway through the plot. We were definitely the popular girls at our party that year, Lanie and me. I think we brushed our teeth at least five times that night because each girl wanted to individually brush with us.

  All was harmonious in our house until about three a.m., when my mom snapped.

  “If y’all don’t shut up and go to bed, I swear to God I’m taking your little asses home. I am not playin’!” she shouted down from her bedroom to the living room. Apparently the repeated screeches of our never-ending laughter were unsettling.

  Lanie and I immediately understood the weight of this situation. Once Marilynn was mad it was only a few minutes before she would launch into her hour-long script about how we didn’t appreciate her and we had to go to our rooms because how many times did she tell us to stop?

  Unfortunately, our friend group had different kinds of parents at their own houses—probably vampires okay with being kept up in the middle of the night on a day of the week designed for sleeping in.

  Try as we might, we just couldn’t keep the other girls quiet. Much to Lanie’s and my chagrin, the laughter continued, and an hour later another threat descended the stairs.

  “Okay. Y’all wanna go home? No. NO! I told y’all to be quiet. Go. To. Bed. If I hear one more peep, I’m driving you all home and your moms are going to be so pissed when I wake them up. Keep it up!” she dared us.

  I eventually fell asleep, so I don’t know if the standoff between giggles and my exhausted mom was continuing. I just know that at eight a.m. I was awoken by the sound of my mom pulling out of the driveway fast. I rolled over and shook Lanie awake. Our friends were gone. We were screwed.

  I immediately suggested we clean up before Mom got back. After all, I was the peacekeeper in the home. My strategy was simply to anticipate what might make her mad after a sleepless night. I took stock of the litany of things that could be out of place. We put our pajamas in the hamper so she wouldn’t have to see them. We cleaned the toilet and sinks. We vacuumed the snack crumbs and took all the pizza boxes to the trash.

  Lanie and I waited patiently in the laundry room near the garage for her return this time. We were prepared to get yelled at for misbehaving for a whopping twelve hours straight. I came to terms with it, but Lanie was a nervous wreck.

  “We’re never going to have another sleepover!” she said, thinking the worst.

  “Well, we never had one before now, so maybe we should be grateful for the memories . . .”

  “I tried to tell them to be quiet! It was more your friends than my friends!” She bounced between all of the stages of grief.

  “We have the same friends! Don’t put this on me. This is not the same as Discovery Zone ’95. This is more like that time you ate the block of cheese Mom was gonna use for mac and cheese last Thanksgiving.”

  The garage door opened slowly and we took a deep breath in unison. By this point in our young lives we had learned that it’s better to take the yelling early in the day and get it over with.

  Before Mom closed her car door she reached across to the front passenger seat to lift a box of doughnuts.

  SCORE! Mom didn’t even bring up the night before. I was her fourth and youngest child; she knew that kids would be kids and sometimes that is in direct conflict with adult ideas of control and relaxation. She let it go. Lanie was shocked, but I have always been a little better at going with the flow. And sometimes the flow led to doughnuts.

  I Don’t Love Animals

  Like every other thing in my life, our family pets weren’t normal. Couldn’t we just be like the Tanners from Full House and have a golden retriever? Nope. Mom was allergic to dogs and cats. Could we do a light quirky thing with a bird? Absolutely not. There was “too much noise” in the house already. Instead we had a house of horrors: a bizarre motley crew of mammals, crustaceans, and whatever classification fish are. Again, not normal.

  In the year 2000, my Christmas list wasn’t too extensive. I mostly just wanted a turtle, because I’d read in school that they’re self-sufficient and far more entertaining than the fish I’d amassed and somehow not killed in four years. Yes, my fish survived the rise and fall of the Spice Girls. In second grade my class had two pet turtles, and aside from smelling a tad rank as we approached summer, they required very little attention. Plus, we had a backyard so we could just put their tank out there when the funk got too real. This was a pet experience my family could get behind.

  On Christmas Eve, my mother inexplicably came home with a rabbit in a cage.

  “Turtles have salmonella, Kilah. I’m not tryna die in here,” she said. I was at once delighted a
nd horrified. I wasn’t ready to take off my pet-ownership training wheels, and a rabbit required a level of physical contact that I wasn’t prepared to explore. Petting? What the hell is that? I “liked” animals; I just didn’t want them touching me. Still, the bunny was cute and tiny, and I was ten so basically all I cared about were cute and tiny things.

  Lanie loved animals and rushed to take our new black-and-white dwarf bunny out of its cage to hold carefully in her lap. I was the Cruella de Vil to her Jack Hanna, only comfortable around animals when eating or wearing them. While she softly caressed our new fuzzy son, we tried to come up with a really good name for him.

  “Eve?” Lanie posited, listing the date of arrival as the obvious reason such a name would be fitting.

  “No,” Mom said. “Y’all aren’t going to annoy me screaming ‘Eve’ all the time in the house.”

  Lanie’s next attempt: “Juno?” With no improv training, the frozen tundra that Kentucky had transformed into during the recent snowfall meant that the capital of Alaska was her best word association. In hindsight, had we preempted the hit Ellen Page movie and actually named the bunny Juno, we would have so much Brooklyn/Portland cred now. *sigh*

  “Hmm . . . nope,” Mom replied.

  “Bunbun?” I added mindlessly. I was hardly paying attention to anything but the rabbit’s constantly wiggling nose and long eyelashes. What was he thinking about? Was he missing the pet store? Did he understand that this was a permanent change? Was he gonna bite Lanie? He seemed benign enough, but I still wasn’t ready to investigate closer.

  “YES!” Mom and Lanie said in unison. We’d done it. Bunbun was an official member of the family. It was a Christmas miracle.

  Instinctively I grabbed the tube of rabbit chow and poured some into the bowl as Lanie lowered Bunbun back into his cage. Insanely diminutive, Bunbun hopped into the bowl to feast. After about ten minutes of nonstop chewing, we realized that history could and would repeat itself* if we didn’t intervene and remove the food from Bunbun’s cage.