school there. Or just send me to boarding school. Send me someplace, like, Phillips Exeter. I have the grades. That’s it, Exeter. Send me there. Irv will go for that.”
“Exeter? That’s, that’s a lot of loot. And it’s so
white
,” I catch myself saying.
“But I’m white,” she says, and I look hurt. I must look hurt, because she leans over the table and adds, “I’m as
white
as you look.” Then my new daughter pulls back again, twirling her hot-combed hair with a nail-bitten finger, my own snarl on the adjective mirrored.
4
“I CAN’T BELIEVE you’re here. I didn’t think you’d ever come back,” Tosha tells me from across her kitchen table. She’s got a table, a house, kids, her chosen husband. A whole established life. All new to me, and already old to her. She’s done so well since she rejected me. “And you’re a father, too! To a racist white girl.”
“Not racist. I said ‘casually racist.’ She just…she just doesn’t know better.”
“Because you haven’t been there to teach her. We never even met the wife, besides on Facebook, and now you’re a single dad of a teenager just as fast.”
“Biological. Biological father.” And then I think of Tal’s face and muster up all the nostalgia for yesterday and amend my statement. “Tal has a cleft chin. She got my mom’s cleft chin. All this time there was someone walking around with a chin I loved, and I didn’t even know it. She’s my daughter. I got a girl. An almost grown, pre-woman, girl.” This is the third rotation of this discussion. Apparently, we’re going to keep cycling through this information until both of us firmly accept it. “And she’s a white girl.”
“She’s not a white girl. She’s black. You’ve got a duty. To let her know who she really is, who we are. What blackness means, not the pathology you see on TV. What it is to be an African American woman in this world. That’s deep.” Tosha shakes her head at it, or me.
The fact that I wasted a decade of my life being in love with Tosha doesn’t seem to get in the way of our friendship now. This is largely because it’s also been more than a decade since we’ve actually seen each other, as well as our mutual understanding that I never really had a chance with her anyway. There is a story of our never becoming lovers, a mythology that I have for us that is boring and false, filled with details that I use to try and convince myself otherwise. I met her the same time George did, at the Greek Picnic, the summer of my freshman year. I had seen her on occasion before this, biking around the neighborhood, once on the R8 train, once at the Value Village shopping for jeans; she was too beautiful to approach or forget. But that summer began our friendship, which over the following summers and Christmas breaks grew from casual to intimate, though all the while George’s shadow hovered, as “I have a boyfriend at college” kept our relationship platonic. But because so many beautiful young women in my orbit had some placeholder boyfriend somewhere in the ether, Tosha’s relationship wasn’t something I took too seriously either. It was supposed to run its course, as was the norm.
After graduation, there was no formal announcement of their impending engagement. It was never mentioned to me, despite near daily interaction. It wasn’t said until Tosha nervously invited me to be a groomsman, a role I was unable to fulfill, as I decided soon after the invitation to leave the country instead.
Tosha married George because she loved him more, or despite our connection she loved me only as a friend. It was either or both reasons, or one or the other. That is the story I eventually accepted.
But I have another scenario, still in my head. That scenario says that Tosha went with George because I am a pale fail of a Negro who would never be enough for a “Nubian Princess,” a title which one of Tosha’s T-shirts declared. This is a product of my paranoia and
“Exeter? That’s, that’s a lot of loot. And it’s so
white
,” I catch myself saying.
“But I’m white,” she says, and I look hurt. I must look hurt, because she leans over the table and adds, “I’m as
white
as you look.” Then my new daughter pulls back again, twirling her hot-combed hair with a nail-bitten finger, my own snarl on the adjective mirrored.
4
“I CAN’T BELIEVE you’re here. I didn’t think you’d ever come back,” Tosha tells me from across her kitchen table. She’s got a table, a house, kids, her chosen husband. A whole established life. All new to me, and already old to her. She’s done so well since she rejected me. “And you’re a father, too! To a racist white girl.”
“Not racist. I said ‘casually racist.’ She just…she just doesn’t know better.”
“Because you haven’t been there to teach her. We never even met the wife, besides on Facebook, and now you’re a single dad of a teenager just as fast.”
“Biological. Biological father.” And then I think of Tal’s face and muster up all the nostalgia for yesterday and amend my statement. “Tal has a cleft chin. She got my mom’s cleft chin. All this time there was someone walking around with a chin I loved, and I didn’t even know it. She’s my daughter. I got a girl. An almost grown, pre-woman, girl.” This is the third rotation of this discussion. Apparently, we’re going to keep cycling through this information until both of us firmly accept it. “And she’s a white girl.”
“She’s not a white girl. She’s black. You’ve got a duty. To let her know who she really is, who we are. What blackness means, not the pathology you see on TV. What it is to be an African American woman in this world. That’s deep.” Tosha shakes her head at it, or me.
The fact that I wasted a decade of my life being in love with Tosha doesn’t seem to get in the way of our friendship now. This is largely because it’s also been more than a decade since we’ve actually seen each other, as well as our mutual understanding that I never really had a chance with her anyway. There is a story of our never becoming lovers, a mythology that I have for us that is boring and false, filled with details that I use to try and convince myself otherwise. I met her the same time George did, at the Greek Picnic, the summer of my freshman year. I had seen her on occasion before this, biking around the neighborhood, once on the R8 train, once at the Value Village shopping for jeans; she was too beautiful to approach or forget. But that summer began our friendship, which over the following summers and Christmas breaks grew from casual to intimate, though all the while George’s shadow hovered, as “I have a boyfriend at college” kept our relationship platonic. But because so many beautiful young women in my orbit had some placeholder boyfriend somewhere in the ether, Tosha’s relationship wasn’t something I took too seriously either. It was supposed to run its course, as was the norm.
After graduation, there was no formal announcement of their impending engagement. It was never mentioned to me, despite near daily interaction. It wasn’t said until Tosha nervously invited me to be a groomsman, a role I was unable to fulfill, as I decided soon after the invitation to leave the country instead.
Tosha married George because she loved him more, or despite our connection she loved me only as a friend. It was either or both reasons, or one or the other. That is the story I eventually accepted.
But I have another scenario, still in my head. That scenario says that Tosha went with George because I am a pale fail of a Negro who would never be enough for a “Nubian Princess,” a title which one of Tosha’s T-shirts declared. This is a product of my paranoia and
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