Scott Spencer - A Ship Made of Paper

“And he just stood there,”Iris is saying.“He heard Nellie screaming.I was in bed, I was sick, and I was calling out to him.He started down the stairs, but when he was halfway down he stopped, turned around, went back to the bathroom, and got his robe.His kid was screaming and he went back for his robe.”

Daniel doesn’t know what he can possibly say.She is comparing Hampton unfavorably to him, she is offering herselfto him, she is saying she is unhappy.

“It just seems to me,”Iris says,“that with your kid screaming the first thing you do is get to the kid, not run in the opposite direction.I got out ofbed—”

“With your robe on?”

“Are you trying to annoy me?”

“No, amuse.”

“It really appalled me.I felt something…”She is going to say either

“close”or“die,”but she says neither.Instead, she asks Daniel,“You wouldn’t have done that, would you? Stopped for your robe with Ruby crying out in the yard.”

He shakes his head No.Then, smiling,“But I’m sort ofan exhibitionist.”

She usually laughs when Daniel jokes, now it seems as ifhe is scrambling to put some distance between them, backing out ofthe whole thing. Chicken, she thinks.She only wants to go forward.And ifhe takes another step back, then she will have to take another step forward.

“You’d think Hampton would be an exhibitionist, too.He’s so proud of who he is.Family and all that terrible stuff.”

“I’m not really an exhibitionist,”Daniel says.

”I know.”

“And I don’t have much ofa family.Two parents who were too old for the job and sort ofgave up on it, no brothers or sisters.”

“Well, to Hampton, family’s everything.His family, that is.You got a taste ofthat, didn’t you?”

“It wasn’t so bad.”

“It wears on you.Those people, maybe you have to be black to really be angry with them.But it’s that bunch ofNeee-groes who look down on everyone else in the community.”She points to herself.

“You?”

“First ofall,”she explains,“too dark.Second, bad hair.”

“You have wonderful hair,”Daniel says.

”You don’t know anything about my hair,”she says, laughing.“I can’t stand when people talk about my hair, especially…Anyhow, myfam-ily wasn’t part oftheir crowd.Hampton’s people are really amazingly provincial.They’re all intertwined with each other, mixed up in each other’s business.My folks had enough money, that wasn’t really a prob-lem.I mean I wasn’t from the projects or anything.My father’s a hospi-tal administrator, my mother taught kindergarten, before arthritis hit her.But I didn’t belong to any ofthe right clubs.I was not a Girl Friend or a Jack and Jill.I didn’t know shit about Oak Bluffs or Sag Harbor.I think one ofthe things Hamp liked about me was I wasn’t perfect in the eyes ofhis family.I was his little rebellion.A dark-skinned girl, with rude politics.But…youknow.The rebellion runs its little course and slowly but surely he turns into all those people who he swore he’d never be like.He really and truly wishes I was lighter, and I think he feels the same way about Nelson.And the really strange part ofit is Hampton is obsessed with being black, he’s black twenty-four hours a day, it’s all he thinks about.He sort ofdislikes white people, but at the same time he’s like most ofus:He really wants white people to like him .And that, by the way, is the dirty little secret oftheAfricans inAmerica.We really want y’all to like us.”

The electricity cuts out for about the time ofa long blink, the world disappears, then shakes itselfback into existence.When the lights come back, the digital clock on the stove flashes12:00over and over.Daniel and Iris sit across from each other, silent, waiting to see what will hap-pen next.And then a few moments later, the lights go out, and this time they don’t come back on.This time it’s for good, they both can feel it.

The children cry out upstairs, with more delight than alarm.

“I love you,”Daniel says in the darkness.

Suddenly, in the distance was a pop, and then a plume of iridescent smoke rose above the trees, a vivid tear in the dark silken sky.

“ Someone’s got her,”Daniel said.“I just saw a flare.”

Hampton looked up.Only a small circle of sky was visible through the

trees.“What was a damn blind girl doing out here? Even with eyes you can’t make your way.”

“ She was raised here,”Daniel said.“Her father was the caretaker.She came

back to look after him when he got sick.Smiley.”

“ Smiley?What do you mean?”

“ That’s what everyone called him.I used to see him in town whenIwas

akid.”

Hampton shook his head.“These people, they’re living in another cen-

tury.They got their old family retainers, their fox-hunting clubs, their ice boats, they play tennis with these tiny little wooden racquets, and NewYear’s Eve they put on the rusty tuxedos their grandfathers used to wear.”

“ Just a small percentage,”Daniel said.“They can be pretty absurd, but it’s

okay, if you have a sense of humor about it.”

“ That was the first thing Iris ever said about you, how you have this ter-

rific sense of humor.”

“ Class clown,”said Daniel.“In my case, middle class.”

In the city, Hampton comes home to what used to be his and Iris’s apartment and which is now his alone.It’s four rooms in a high-rise down on Jane Street, in theVillage.On a block ofpicturesque town houses, most ofthem over150years old, the building is a twenty-five-story eyesore, but the saving grace is that once Hampton is inside he doesn’t have to see it, all he looks out on are tree-lined streets, and pastel blue, pink, gray, and cream brick Federal town houses, with their tiny backyards and steep tiled roofs and the crooked old chimneys right out of Mary Poppins.

He’s taken the subway home, the most efficient way uptown after work.A taxi fromWall Street to Jane Street would take an hour, whereas the subway gets him there in ten minutes.And the cost is a token, not the fourteen to twenty dollars a crawling, ticking taxi would cost.Hampton is becoming more and more careful about spending money.This creeping fiscal conservatism has nothing to do with how much he’s making, be-cause he’s making more money than ever before, and it has nothing to do with rising expenses, because his expenses are stable.It just seems that the older he gets, the more watchful he becomes about his expenditures.

He is still a long way from the miserly habits ofhis grandfather—who, ac-cording to family lore, held on to a dollar until the eagle grinned—and he will always disapprove ofhow his haughty, judging, acid-tongued mother would say things like“That Negro spends money like a nigger.”But lately it seems to Hampton a breach oftaste to squander money.When shop-ping, he counts his change carefully, increasingly certain he is about to be cheated.On the train up to Leyden he looks with contempt at the pas-sengers who have paid nearly double to ride in that dopeyAmtrak Busi-ness Class.For what?A bottle ofSaratoga water and the mandarin delight ofsitting in a seat that is exactly like every other seat on the train, except that the upholstery is blue rather than red.Yet even carefully monitoring his own expenditures leaves Hampton unsoothed and insecure.He wor-ries over his investments, suffers the manic fluctuations ofthe NASDAQ, the slow attrition ofsome poorly chosen mutual funds.But even more than he worries about the stock market, Hampton worries about Iris’s management oftheir household accounts.In his view, she remains a child with money, without impulse control, with no sense ofsobriety, or plan-ning, or self-denial.Sometimes in the middle ofthe day, like one ofthose mothers you read about who are suddenly certain that their son has just fallen on some battlefield halfway around the world, Hampton will look up from his work and practically feel Iris making some ill-advised pur-chase, an antique rug, a digital camera that will never be used, a halfgal-lon oforganic milk at twice the price ofregular milk, a full tank of premium gasoline, even though he has told her over and over that a friend who covers petrochemicals has assured him that the so-called high-grade gas doesn’t extend the life ofyour car’s engine by so much as an hour, nor does it protect the environment.