Rion Scott - Insurrections

Sitting through dinner, my left elbow nearly touching my father’s, I said nothing of the interim reports and neither did he. My gut quivered during the silences, waiting for the lecture on taking my work seriously. The exasperated screams. Accusations of wanting to be a ne’er-do-well. But none of that happened. I wondered if I should preempt my father, apologize for the poor showing and promise to do better, but I shot that down. I knew my father well enough to know it would be taken as a sign of weakness.

After dinner I retired to my room, nominally to do my homework, but really I sat at my desk, threw my head back, and imagined what I’d say to Alana come Sunday. Perhaps there was a song that encapsulated everything I felt and I could quote it to her. After all, hadn’t everything that ever needed to be said about love been said in an R&B song? From the first time, Alana, that I saw your brown eyes …

Three hard knocks on my door startled me. No one ever knocked. Knocking is nonsense when you own the house, my father said once.

Come in, I called.

There stood my father in the doorway. I breathed deeply. I had practiced what I’d say about the interims all day since I had seen them waiting for my father on his dresser. The mental rehearsal was limited, though, interspersed with thoughts of Sunday’s wooing of Alana. I fumbled with my words in my mind.

Bobby, he said. I opened my mouth to offer a blubbery explanation, but he cut me off. Tomorrow, I’m gonna come home early so we can go down to the mall and get you a suit for Sunday. You can’t be looking like just anybody during your confirmation.

I thought of Alana so much on Thursday that my head pounded by the time school let out. When my father came home to take me suit shopping, I was lying on the living room couch, hoping my closed eyelids would make the throbbing in my head dissipate.

Boy, you not ready? my father called. Didn’t I tell you to be ready when I got home?

The boom of his voice vibrated against the ache on the right side of my head. I moved slowly through the motions of changing into my going-out clothes, fearing that sharp, quick movements would rupture my brain or, at least, cause a sudden pulsing.

My father stood by my door grumbling and complaining as I changed. But when we finally went out to the car and the radio got to cranking, he put on a big grin, singing along with Teddy Pendergrass. The key to everything, son, is to calm down, he said. Don’t let too much move you. So much depends on a million things that are out of your control. Took me a long time, too long, to figure that out.

I said nothing, distracted by the streaks of sun that beamed down from space to stab themselves into my eyes and stir my headache. I screwed up my brow and must have looked angry or confused. To tell the truth, I was a bit confused, as my father, quick to anger and judgment for most of my life, was always being moved by petty annoyances. I often wondered if and when the old monster I loved and feared would return.

Why you frowning? he said. You still upset that your old dad wanted you to move with purpose?

Naw, Dad. I’m fine.

The sun now caused the pain in my head to slowly throb.

Something’s wrong, my father said. People don’t just frown for no reason at all.

Dad, could you let it drop?

We exchanged not two more words all the way to the store. My father didn’t even bother to sing when Al Green came across the radio, and I felt I had ruined his good mood. But once we got into the store, it only took the sight of a few fine suits to rekindle it. He pulled a gray one with thin brown lines from the rack and danced like James Brown with it against his chest.

I’m gonna have you looking sharp, he said. I don’t care how much it costs me. A man got to have one of these. Two when you really become a man. But one is good now. You like this?

I shrugged, not from indifference, but rather from the fact that the suits all had a sameness to me. I was becoming a man, but my sense of fashion was far from refined. Sure, I could tell that the three-piece number in yellow and black plaid was a clown suit, and I could also marvel at the $500 Italians, but everything else had a uniform quality. I lacked the visual vocabulary, the key to the code that all men were reliably expected to crack.

My father pulled suit after suit from the rack. Try this one!

I gazed at myself in the mirror wearing a black striped suit that came with a vest. It made me look like a banker or a gangster from the 1920s. I stood on a raised part of the floor and for once I was higher than my father and everyone around me. I looked sharp. There’s no way I could deny that. Or at least I would look sharp once the tailor went to work.

Two figures passed behind me; I could see them clearly in the mirror. The twins from confirmation class. They were with a tall oaken-skinned man. He had Alana’s cheeks and nose, so I assumed he was her father and that she must also be around. Here I was standing in a baggy whale of a suit that swallowed me whole, accentuating every outward thing that was still childlike in my appearance. I wanted to become small. Not small in the way that I was, but a tiny thing so I could spy on Alana when she happened by.

Maurice spotted me and chuckled, pointing. Tomás grunted but otherwise ignored me, even when I waved. Maurice turned from me and glanced through the suits. When Alana walked up behind her cousins, my hand was still in the air. I shouted a Hey! that sounded to me like the flat bark of a seal. She responded with a pursed-lipped smile before turning to help Maurice choose a suit. The tailor returned to tug at the ends of my pants. My hand hung in the air, a frozen wave. I realized I had been holding it above my head as if I were now some kind of black Statue of Liberty. My father arrived with two more suits. Son, he said, the one you got on looks good, but you’ll look like my little superstar in one of these. Maurice and Tomás pointed and snorted once more. I thought I saw Alana smirk, but whatever passed across her lips was too brief for me to place. I pretended not to see Alana and her cousins walking about below me as I glanced at them out of the corners of my eyes. Soon they disappeared into a dark-hued maze of haberdashery. I took solace, standing there in the mirror, in the fact that my voice hadn’t cracked, but on my way home I realized that what actually did transpire was no better or worse than my voice momentarily dancing off into a higher register. In fact, that could be explained away as the uncontrollable whims of my malfunctioning hormones. What excuse could I ever make for such a bizarre display?

The Friday before confirmation Sunday I spent much of the day wondering about the strange mechanism of the mind that made seconds slow in anticipation of major events. It’s still a mysterious thing to me, especially since it no longer happens much now that I’m older. Nowadays a minute is a minute and a day is a day and the ones leading up to something exciting feel no longer than any other minute or day. Perhaps I had experienced so few days and minutes as a young man that my sense of wonder could stretch time until it felt misshapen. Perhaps when I’m old, all of life will feel like little more than an instant, and maybe that’s why God’s day is a thousand years. What’s a minute to the man who has all the time?

At home, I did no homework but instead slept, watched music videos, and masturbated to make time move faster. In class I slept, and it was perhaps to Ms. Baker’s delight, because it gave her another opportunity to call my parents, which she took advantage of Friday night.

My mind was so cloudy and loopy, floating through a haze somewhere far from earth, that I neglected to properly monitor the early evening phone calls. What kind of person has nothing better to do on a Friday night than call parents, anyway? I picked up and didn’t recognize Ms. Baker’s voice until after I had screamed through the house, alerting my mother that she had a phone call.