“My guess, Dana, is that she said something to him. People say al sorts of things on their deathbeds. At the very end, they just disappear inside themselves, but a couple of days before, they speak from the heart. She must have said something about us.” My mother smiled and touched my shoulder. “Whatever you did, you must have represented us wel .” She wiggled her feet in the basin, soaking the carpet again. “Keep your fingers crossed. Sometimes change is good.”
Ronalda wasn’t worried about col ege applications. She had already made the decision to go to Southern University in Baton Rouge. She had long admired the school’s marching band and hoped to be chosen as a Dancing Dol . I showed her the brochures from Mount Holyoke and the computer-generated letter that urged me to apply.
“Look how nice it is,” I said.
“Are you sure you want to live up there with al those white people?” Ronalda asked.
“It’s a good school,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “But living here, you don’t know anything about white people. Where I’m from, everything is mixed. In Atlanta, at least out here where we stay at, everything is so black that y’al don’t know what it feels like to be black.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“You’l see,” she said. “You get out to Holyoke with those white people and you wil see exactly what I mean.”
“Al I’m worried about,” I told her, “is that Chaurisse wil pop up and say she is going to Mount Holyoke. It wil be the same as Six Flags, but worse.”
“I stil can’t believe that,” Ronalda clucked.
“I can’t believe it either,” I said. “You would think I would be used to his shit.”
But I wasn’t. Six Flags Over Georgia provided the most attractive summer employment for a teenager in Atlanta. Ronalda and I had planned to apply together, but she ended up making better money taking care of her little brother. After three interviews, I was offered the chance to spin cotton candy onto paper cones for a nickel over minimum wage. My first choice would have been patrol ing the park, posing families for photos. Stil , I was happy enough with the cotton-candy position; it would good practice in meeting people, and the money would come in handy, too. To fit in at Mount Holyoke, I would need Ivy League clothes, skirts and blazers. My mother liked the idea of me working, saying, “If you are going to try and get a hardship scholarship, you need some proof that you have held down a job before or else they wil think you are just looking for a handout.”
I hadn’t even reported to HR to get my red-and-blue uniform and pin-on name tag when James arrived at Continental Colony bearing gifts. “I brought you a little something,” he said, and I knew the news wasn’t good.
He explained that Chaurisse, too, had applied for work at Six Flags. She would be strapping guests into a parachute ride cal ed the Great Gasp.
I looked at my mother, who was busy fil ing two glasses with ice. Her face didn’t flicker with anger, she just looked tired. I bit down hard on my lip.
How could I not have anticipated this? Of course Chaurisse wanted to work at Six Flags. Everyone did. And of course she would get the job. She got everything.
“I’m sorry, Dana. I didn’t know until now.” James extended an orange paper sack in my direction, but I didn’t reach for it.
“Take it,” he said, pul ing an album from the bag. Michael Jackson was wearing a white suit and cuddling a pair of tiger cubs. “I got it at Turtles.
Don’t you col ect stamps from there?” James nudged me with the corner of the cardboard album jacket.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t listen to albums. I like cassettes.”
“It’s n-n-new,” he said.
“I got the job first,” I said. “I’ve even been fitted for a uniform.”
“Things happen,” James said. “Things happen. What do you want me to do?”
I knew what I wanted him to do, but I also knew it could never happen.
My mother breezed in from the kitchen and handed James his gin-and-tonic. She handed me a glass of orange juice.
“So how wil Dana spend the summer? I prefer something educational. Maybe you could come up with a smal stipend for her. She was counting on having pocket change this summer.” My mother was calm. This must be how she talks to patients who refuse to take their medicine. She lets them know they don’t have a choice by speaking very quickly and pronouncing al her consonants.
By the time my father left, it was determined that I would be given twenty-five dol ars a week, fifteen of which would go into my savings account and the rest into my pocket. I would also be given a summer membership to a correspondence course to help students score high on the SAT. My mother was satisfied; my father thought he had gotten off cheap; and I was stil furious.
I passed the rest of June and most of July figuring out how to make educated guesses on multiple-choice questions when I had no idea what the answer was. This strategy was different from the one you were supposed to employ when you could at least rule out one of the options. It was not just a guessing game; it felt more like a kind of specialized lying. Raleigh came by on Thursdays to play cards with my mother, and he would quiz me on my vocabulary words. He photographed me memorizing a dictionary page. Years later, he sold that shot to the United Negro Col ege Fund, along with a photo of Ronalda reading
It was not the best summer of my life, but it was manageable, until my mother was attacked at the mailboxes in the front of our apartment complex. The holdup man stole the mail and her handbag. Even worse, he pul ed out a leather-handled knife and helped himself to a hank of her hair. The bald spot, just above her left ear, was about the
