“What does Oliver’s flirting have to do with you?” Kenya asked.
“I just hate seeing that big dork make such a fool of himself. It offends my sensibilities,” Commodore said.
After getting off the phone Kenya sometimes stayed up late dozing over her homework. The morning after one of these marathons, Kenya slept through her alarm and woke up to Zaineb, who usually drove her to school, outside honking her horn and Teddy knocking on her bedroom door.
Though Kenya had vowed never to cause Teddy to come near her room, this particular conversation had been worth it.
“How do you meet guys?” Commodore had asked suddenly. “You know, going to that school?”
“I don’t meet too many,” said Kenya. Up until that moment, she hadn’t known how she would handle this question. Should she demur and make herself seem normal? Or should she tell the truth, which was that nothing—not a kiss, not a date, and certainly not sex—had ever happened to her.
Commodore had two ways of talking, even on the phone. Sometimes he was clearly distracted. Now his focus sucked the air out of the space between them. “Do you, ah, date outside the race?” he asked, and Kenya could feel him waiting for her answer.
“Not really,” she said.
“Hmph. So you don’t approve of that sort of thing?”
“Do you?” asked Kenya.
“Well, you know I love black women,” said Commodore. “I
love
my black women. But I keep my options open, you know?”
“Is that how you put it?” said Kenya.
Commodore gasped in a dramatic fashion. “You would judge me? After I opened up to you? I can’t believe this.”
“Settle down, Miss Scarlett. So you date white girls?”
“I didn’t say that!”
But during the next conversation, she learned about Hannah (two dates), Scout (sophomore dance), and Tessa (they just kicked it sometimes). They’d all been special in their own way, and all white, apparently. But none of them mattered, he said, because thoughts of other girls had gone away when he met Pippa.
“That jawn almost broke my heart. Bruised it, at least. At least!”
“You really want to call a white girl a
jawn
? Just doesn’t seem right,” Kenya said, trying to smooth the edge out of her voice.
“So mean! I almost lost my mojo over that one. I’m over it now, though.”
It was hard for Kenya to put together either a picture or a personality for Pippa through Commodore’s description. Mostly “there was just something about her.” Listening to Commodore, she pictured a faceless white female presence. Several months later, when she finally saw Pippa at one of Reggie’s parties, Kenya noted her long, thick blond hair and her large, globe-like breasts.
“I mean, it seemed like we were getting close for a while, you know. I would walk her to her classes and put these sweet notes in her locker. I know it sounds corny. But then she just, like, started dodging me. She switched lockers without saying anything. I can’t believe I’m telling you this stuff. I must really feel comfortable with you…” Commodore said, trailing off. Kenya made listening noises, not knowing how else to respond. Later, she kept thinking about it, how she should have acted. Because after that conversation, Commodore didn’t call for several days.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” asked Teddy Jaffrey.
Where’s yours?
thought Kenya.
“Don’t tease her,” said Sheila.
Barrett had let out for the summer and Kenya had a week off before going full-time at Dr. Walton’s office. Commodore would still be in school several more weeks. It had been five days since she’d spoken to him. She told herself that after a conversation like the one they’d had about his love for every other girl in America, she should wait for him to call.
But she didn’t.
An angry male voice answered the phone: Alfred. Though he hadn’t talked much in the old days, a wave of nostalgia nearly knocked the phone from Kenya’s hand. Then Commodore was on the phone, sounding as if he had a cold.
“I have to call you back,” he said. As he hung up Kenya heard angry voices in the background.
Kenya wanted desperately to know what was going on. She had scribbled Ned’s number down somewhere once. She thought of calling him to get the story. But soon enough the phone rang.
“Wait till you hear this bullshit,” Commodore said. “I have to be quick. I’m not even supposed to be on the phone, but they went out to get something to eat and left me here.”
“What happened?” exhaled Kenya.
“What happened is that you can’t trust
white
bitches.”
That afternoon Commodore had been called into the principal’s office—incidentally, another white bitch. Pippa had been there, “looking like someone had strangled her dog.” Her tight-lipped mother and Alfred were there also. Also there: a large folder of the notes Commodore had slipped into Pippa’s locker. Words like
harassment
were used by the principal, particularly in reference to the notes, which quoted both Henry Miller and Amiri Baraka extensively, and which had been found by Pippa’s mother, who kept lamenting that something had to be done, since she couldn’t
afford
to transfer Pippa to private school.
“Oh my God,” said Kenya, who felt the shame of being alive on Commodore’s behalf. “Did you know any of this was going to happen?”
Commodore laughed bitterly. “What kind of question is that? I guess I should have known when she started acting funny. But, I mean, if she didn’t want me, fine. I don’t know why she had to get school administration involved. That’s the white girl part of it.”
“I thought you were over her. That’s what you said last time.”
“Well, if I wasn’t then, I sure as fuck am now! So I’m grounded, but when I get off punishment, can I see you? Like, just us? I haven’t really felt like hanging out with Ned and them since this went down. Those cats are cool, but they don’t
really
know what’s up.”
“What about Peter?”
“Peter is black and everything, but he grew up in the Northeast and he basically discovered he was black in sophomore year. He’s not like us,” he said.
“Not like us,” Kenya repeated.
“He’s new to this,” said Commodore. “We’re true to this.”
* * *
After his two-week punishment ended, Commodore suggested they meet at the art museum, where Kenya had not been in years. It was an unnaturally warm Sunday, the day before Memorial Day. She tried to dress alluringly without revealing that she’d tried. She wore old jean shorts with a new silky peach-colored blouse about which Sheila had been especially enthusiastic. Walking from the train station that afternoon, she realized it was a poor choice for a hot day. She beat Commodore to the museum, so she ran to the bathroom and did her best to towel away the visible wet spots under her arms. When she emerged into the grand entrance hall, she saw him and smiled, her arms locked tight to her sides.
“Hey, you look good,” he said. “Stop trying to make me look like poor relations.”
“What’s wrong with what you’re wearing? It’s Bohemian.” His red polo shirt and loose jeans were both perfectly nice, if paint stained, and he smelled good. Kenya wondered if he was wearing some kind of man perfume, but the smell was gone almost as soon as she detected it. She thought maybe it was just her fevered imagination.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but that’s a blouse you’re wearing. You’re wearing a blouse.”
“Please stop saying
blouse
. It sounds like
slacks
.” Kenya shuddered.
The museum was cool and empty. They made it through a couple of floors, pausing to look at paintings that especially interested Commodore. He particularly liked ones with a hint of a horror story. He and Kenya stood forever in front of a huge canvas on which a bunch of white men in dark clothes, whose old-time look registered as “slaveowner” to Kenya, performed a bloody operation. It did not look as if they were helping the patient. The painting was aptly titled, Kenya thought:
The Gross Clinic
.
“I don’t think she’s going to make it,” said Kenya.
“I think that’s a dude they’re operating on,” said Commodore.
Kenya wasn’t so sure. “What am I supposed to think is good about this?”
“It’s like there’s so much going on. Look at the mother there, and that guy in the back. And it’s just so fucking
real
.”
Nearby, an older white couple with unkempt curling gray hair and matching sandals stood smiling at them.
“Let’s get out of here before they try to adopt us,” Commodore murmured.
“Or sponsor us,” Kenya said.
“I could use a sponsor,” said Commodore. “A patron.”
For lunch they bought hot dogs off of the cart out front, agreeing that even though these were beef—not pork—meat from a cart violated an unofficial Seven Days–type dietary restriction. They sat eating at the top of the steps, where people took snapshots of each other posing like Rocky.
“Maybe your art will be in there one day,” said Kenya.
“What are you, my grandmother?”
“Okay, maybe you’ll die broke and unknown. How’s that?”
“What are you, my parents?”
“Is that really the kind of stuff they say to you?”
“Not in those words, but they’re pretty pissed about next year.”
“But you have a full ride to a good school!” protested Kenya. Commodore, who had not gone to private school, and consequently had not been held back a year like Kenya, had gotten a scholarship to Tyler, Temple University’s art school. “And it’s not far away, so they can’t complain about that.”
“Well, I don’t think they would have minded me moving to Jupiter, actually. And they wanted me to go to a black college. They’re not big fans of the company I keep, especially these days, with the shit happening at school. But mainly, they’re just scared. It’s like they made up this whole way to be, them and their crew. And they raised us with it, but since they made it up, they don’t really know where it goes next. Like, they don’t want me to be some kind of blue-collar grunt, or city bureaucrat like them. But they know I’m never going to study law, and since I barely passed ninth-grade science, med school is out. Of course they would never fix their lips to say ‘Corporate America.’ It’s too late for that.”
“My mom would fix her lips to say that.”
“Yeah, your mom went another way,” Commodore said, smiling. “I think mine is a little jealous, tell you the truth.”
“Yeah, well, my baba went another way, too. Is she jealous of that?”
“Well, see, that’s another reason they’re scared. He was their Fearless Leader.”
“And he was a nut.”
Commodore looked thoughtful in the pause.
“I think about him sometimes,” he said.
“My father?” Kenya squeaked.
“Yeah, he was kind of like an artist. I mean, he was an activist, or whatever they all thought they were, but he had a kind of thing to him like an artist.”
Kenya thought about The Key and rolled her eyes. “He didn’t make any art.”
“No, but he was trying to do more than just make things better for black people.”
“Wait, is it a bad thing to ‘just make things better’?”
“No, not at all.” Commodore laughed. “That’s not what I meant. Making things better for black people is the only reason a chickenshit like me can even, like, exist. If it was the fifties, I would have just opened my eyes and died right there after being born.”
Kenya laughed. “I think I would have made it home from the hospital maybe…”
“But your dad—excuse me, your baba—he had what they call a vision. He had a vision of another world. That’s why he was always fighting with them.”
“How do you know that? I don’t remember you being there when they got into fights.”
“I would hear about it later, though, mainly from my dad. He was not the biggest Johnbrown Curtis fan.”
“Alfred talks?”
Commodore laughed again. Then he looked at her as if they’d just met.
“You feel like hanging out some more?” he asked.
Despite what Commodore had said about not wanting to see his school friends, they wound up at Ned’s in the late afternoon. Ned answered the door in what looked like pajamas.
“Ned?” Kenya asked. “Do you actually have parents?”
“Unfortunately,” he said. “Make yourselves at home. I think Dawn might be over later. Or not. I’ll go shower,” he said, yawning.
“And brush your teeth,” said Commodore. “Please!”
“Please,” Ned mimicked in a high voice. Then he said, “Commie, why don’t you make yourself useful and roll us up something? Shit is in that drawer,” he said, pointing to a heavy wooden chest. “And don’t be makin’ it all baggy like you usually do. Respect the herb like
you
paid for it.” With that, he peeled off his shirt and padded into the bathroom. Kenya observed that his chest and back were muscular.
“What are you looking at?” asked Commodore with exaggerated petulance after the bathroom door had closed.
“A
lot
of freckles.” Kenya imagined saying something to make him jealous, but it would have been absurd. Ned had nothing on Commodore, who, she’d decided, was beautiful in his lanky way, and also probably her soul mate.
When Ned emerged from the shower, he made grilled cheese sandwiches, and then they half watched
Xena: Warrior Princess
while Commodore and Ned smoked a joint. Kenya wanted to smoke with them, but she was terrified that she would find herself drooling all over Commodore. She was also terrified that maybe he would not even notice. In fact, he became quite absorbed in a monologue about how he had to “get back to my art. Like, really start taking it seriously again.”
“When did you not take it seriously?” Ned asked. “It’s embarrassing how much Mr. Yoder falls all over your shit in class. And you got a scholarship to Tyler; probably fucking affirmative action, but still.”
Commodore ignored the dig. He said, “I mean I think I just let this Pippa shit distract me. But me and Kenya went to the museum today, and I was looking at some of that shit and thinking about, like, twenty years from now…”
“Dude, if anybody could do it, you could,” said Ned before Commodore could finish the thought. It struck Kenya that Commodore had never said anything about Ned’s art. Though she’d heard people at parties talking about his great paintings, he hadn’t gotten into Tyler or any art school, and he was going to a school called Reed all the way in Oregon. Ned’s face darkened as Commodore talked on and on, blithely vowing “to work till my fingers bleed” at school next year.