Mat Johnson - Loving Day

“You’re black identified,” Sunita tells me. She’s barely looked through my test.

“Really? I could have told you that, but it took me thirty minutes to fill the thing out. How did you—”

“The last question. Most white-identified mixed people actually try to list names. You expressed outrage at the question, a typical black-identified response. I already saw a few more answers, I doubt the rest will indicate different. Or you can wait here for the next ten minutes.” I want to wait. I want to wait and talk to her and tell her how silly this test is, this mixed-race posturing. I want to do it in a way that shows her how witty I am. I want her to be able to tell me why I’m wrong. I want her to be right, even though I am. I want to be on the same page in the same space and not feel alone but hinged to someone solid. Someone just like me, so I can know what it feels like to not be different. Someone just like me but happy. And eventually part of me wants that to lead to sex so I can complete the bonding. I step closer to the podium to hide when the erection starts to build. But Sunita doesn’t notice, because she doesn’t even bother looking at me.

“That’s not some kind of sin here, is it? Did I fail or something?”

“No pass or fail. Not a judgment. It just tells us which realignment class to assign you. Almost everyone ends up in one class or the other.” She looks up for a moment, offers a pharmacist’s impersonal grin, then drops her head and expression as she looks down to my test again. “But I knew you were a sunflower when I met you. The male sunflowers always hit on me. Somehow they know they don’t have a chance and need to prove their manhood by defeating reality.”

“We’re leaving,” I tell Tal, and she gets off her phone long enough to stand and gather her things.

“Was my father being a dick? My father can be a dick. Please excuse his dickishness.”

“Jesus, Tal, don’t say ‘dick.’ She didn’t mean ‘dick,’ ” I tell Sunita, who actually winks and nods. Instantly, I feel less offended. Then I realize it’s because she’s agreeing with Tal.

Sunita Habersham’s head bobs and I read that as, You are a dick, a huge dick, isn’t that funny? but her mouth says: “She’ll be in the opposite class. I’ll talk to Roslyn; we can work this out. So come tomorrow, if you can make it. At eight A.M.”

“We’re going,” I tell Tal again, and holding her arm we head to the door.

—

Riding back, I am so angry I say nothing. Tal, for her part, allows me the silence, or at least doesn’t say anything loud enough for me to hear. When we arrive at the mansion, Tal climbs off and says, “Warren? Between the two, you know where I stand. If that Thor-looking goliath at the gate can fit in at Mélange, I got no worries. I just want to get the diploma and go start my life, okay? Just help me. Just help me get the hell out.”

With her helmet under her arm, Tal heads past the gate and up to my father’s house like she owns it. She is beautiful, my big girl, her feet pointing off at ten and two, slapping straight down on the arch as she falls forward. I watch her walk all the way while I struggle to get the motorcycle’s front wheel up the three steps of the walkway rather than try to unlock the rusty vehicle entrance. Tal, I realize, as I speed through seventeen years of parental epiphanies, is of her own making, not just proof that once I was young and reckless. She turns at the door again to add, “Jesus, hurry the fuck up,” after she uses her own house key for the first time.

“She ran away!” Irv Karp yells out of his car window as he pulls up behind me. I recognize the voice more than I recognize him; first it’s just a crazy man in a 1997 Buick LeSabre.

When he climbs out, he’s sweating, his dress shirt’s open, sleeves rolled up. In the outside light, his old flesh looks translucent and fading. “That little weasel ran away, came here. She didn’t tell you that, did she? Did she?”

“I didn’t know,” I find myself yelling back to match his passion. The bike I give up on, lean it against the fence. Irv takes my hand when I hold it out to him, and I know then it’s not me he’s mad at this time.

“See this? This is what I’ve been dealing with. She just goes. I go to dialysis yesterday, I come back, I lay down. I wake up this morning and she’s gone. Who does that? Is that how good people act? Who just leaves?” he asks and I shrug back at him even though the answer could be, Me .

“I would have thought she was running away to the street and who knows what, but she took that little rat pet thing and its cage. That’s when I knew, she’s coming here. To you. Did you know?”

“I didn’t know,” I tell him again.

“Of course you didn’t know! That’s the immaturity! That’s what kids do! But now you know,” he tells me, smiling at the absurdity of it. And then he breathes. He puts his hands on his khakied thighs, catches air some more. I offer to take him in for some water but he waves me off, stands straight again to continue. “How is she; is she good?”

“She’s good. We found a school, someplace she can finish out her year.” Moments earlier I was thinking about GED training instead, nights at a community college somewhere, but here this guy is and he wants a solid answer. I tell him how it’s in Chestnut Hill and he really likes that because it’s ritzy up there. I tell him it’s surrounded by trees and adjoins Valley Green and he looks impressed, so I skip mood-killing details like the fact that it’s actually in the park and composed of gypsy hovels. I hate the awkwardness of talking about race with white people, so skip the whole mulatto-themed bit altogether.

“Come in, let’s talk this through, figure it out,” I tell him, and I start pushing on the motorcycle again just to get it out of the way. There are a few seconds there when he’s waiting behind me patiently as I struggle, but when I finally get it over the hump Irv doesn’t move.

“Nah,” he tells me, head wagging. “Nah, I’m going out to Philly Park, gonna bet on the puppies. Look, I’m leaving. She’s okay, and she’s going to go back to school? Good. She wants to torture her grandfather, just send emails to my niece to tell me she’s okay? Fine. You keep her. You look out for her. I don’t mean like forever or anything, don’t get carried away, but for now, a couple of weeks at least.”

“I can handle her, Irv. I can. We’re bonding.”

“Yeah. Let’s just see. Seven years I’ve been struggling with this one. Let her think she’s won. Let her think she got her own way. I need the rest. I need a day at the track and some good luck for once. I can’t do this forever. You know I got the prostate cancer. I mean, I got it bad.”

Irv just throws that last bit on to the end without pausing. I reply, “Okay,” before I actually hear his last sentence. But it’s not like I have anything else to say. He looks at my discomfort, laughs at it, waves it away with his big spotty hands as if it’s cigarette smoke.

“Look at your face: it’s like I told you that you got it. You don’t even know me. Trust me, I’m no great loss to the universe. Plus, I’m getting the treatments, so who knows? But don’t tell Tal. She doesn’t know. The two of you, you should come to Shabbat at my place, next Friday. You should meet our family, get to know them so—” And Irv starts coughing like something is in him large and wet that wants to come out, but I hope it doesn’t because I don’t want to see it.

MÉLANGE CENTER, 7:55 A.M., cold even though it’s still technically summer. What is a gathering of mulattoes even called? A murder? A motley? A mass? I ask these out loud as Tal and I stand gathered at the gate with the others, waiting for it to open. My daughter says, “A menagerie,” and winks like we’re conspiring.