Danzy Senna

Cole claimed to remember the good times between my parents. But I didn’t. Seemed like they were always breaking up to make up. After their big fights, they usually got back together with a little ritual: Al Green, a bottle of red wine, and a carton of Chinese noodles. Sometimes they would read aloud to each other from one of their favorite writers, Camus or Richard Wright. Other times they would just stand in the living room, lights off, swaying to the soul music, kissing, and whispering to each other secrets Cole and I would never know.

I turned and tore up the stairs to the old brownstone, looking for solace, or answers, I suppose, in the arms of my mother. I found her in the bedroom. She was curled fetal on the floor by her bed, and the whole room was suffused in a stench of musk oil. Her dress was twisted around her legs, and she was sobbing dryly, under the golden veil of her own hair. I went toward her, tiptoeing, as if approaching a bear caught in a trap. I thought she was alone, but then I glimpsed a shadow in the corner, and a woman stepped into the light. It was Linda, the Puerto Rican revolutionary. Cole and I had never liked her because she ignored us when she came over, acting as if we were a distraction from something far more important. She held a sponge in her hand and appeared to be cleaning up spilled oil. She held shards of a broken bottle in her hand. She smiled at me brightly, as if everything were fine, and said, “Your mami’s a little upset, Birdie. Why don’t you go watch television. Eh? ‘Sesame Street’ ?”

I wondered what my father would think of us if he could see us now—me as a Jewish girl, my mother pantomiming the life of some ordinary white woman. When we had first chosen Jesse Goldman that day in the Maine diner, I had thought of it as a kind of game. For those first few months on the lam I believed my father would see our situation as innocent and practical, just as my mother liked to see it, as the only way for us to remain free while we waited for him to fetch us. I had even convinced myself that my passing for this white girl, this Jewish girl, this Jesse Goldman, would support my father’s research.