Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

white girls in the pictures that make you touch yourself. It’s like they exist less. It’s like our family exists less than Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver. We’re going across the continental United States of America in this fabulous car, but it’s like no one can see us. It’s too bad that we didn’t bring a movie camera. We could make a television show of ourselves.

S

CENE IV

(Eighth day. Devils Lake, North Dakota. Sunset in a motel parking lot with arid hills beyond. GRACE HARMON stands in front of stacked wooden boxes of empty soda bottles.)

GRACE: These wide spaces scare me. The light is too strong. I don’t know what to do with it. I feel unwelcome, caught like a cockroach out in the open. I like small places inside, places like my shiny kitchen when I have pots on all the burners and everything under control, the smell of greens cooking with ham bones, of chicken roasting, of yeast rolls and tapioca pudding. Or church, when the service has just finished, and we ladies are all standing in our gloves and hats à la Jackie Kennedy, and greeting each other and chatting so close that you can smell everyone’s Arpège perfume and Alberto VO5 hair cream. There is a sense of salvation, and relief, because the Holy Word is still floating around us in the air, and yet we’re all going home to eat soon.

Once when I was still a student at Philadelphia Normal School, I sat next to Eleanor Roosevelt at a tea to benefit the work camps, and she said to me that I must try to see as much as I could of this great country of ours. She was kind, but like an elephant in pearls, and it made me angry that she didn’t stop to think that most of our great country didn’t want to see me.

And I had traveled. The year before that I went with my cousin Minerva down to Palm Beach to work the winter season as a butter-water girl at the Fontainebleau Hotel. That was an experience: the dining room long as a football field, with all those dried-out white faces bent over their food, with Minerva and I and all the other pretty colored girls in our ruffled caps, skimming round tables where never in our lives could we have sat down. The manager’s son, who was our age, used to walk around in jodhpurs and riding boots, not saying anything, just looking us over with hard blue eyes. We felt naked. That’s the way I feel now, standing here under this big sky.

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CENE V

(Glacier National Park, looking over the Canadian border toward Waterton Lakes National Park and Calgary. A curving highway through a swarm of snowcapped peaks, resonance of early afternoon light over heights and distant forests. WALKER HARMON is behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette.)

WALKER: One Winston and they’re on my ass. They haven’t been uncool enough to say anything yet, but Mom is muttering to herself and staring out at the Rockies as if she’d like to bite them off, and Pop looks like I just punched him in the stomach. Well, it had to be done, it’s ridiculous that I’m eighteen and in college and doing half the driving and can’t act like the hell I want. This trip is a mistake. It shows up what’s wrong with this pitiful family. The fight for civil rights is in the South, so we go west on a sightseeing expedition. My roommates at Oberlin, Joel Kagan and Marty Hubbard, are both down in Greenville, Mississippi, registering voters. Joel’s sister from Bryn Mawr is with them, she wears dancers’ leotards and skirts from Mexico, and twists her hair up in a style called the Marienbad. White students are lining up to risk their lives, and what did I do? I came home from college in June like a good son, worked a summer job in the mail room at the Philadelphia Bulletin, and dated my high school flame, Ramona Jenkins, who has tits like dirigibles and allows a lot of heavy action with bra and panties firmly in place and is already talking about how she wants to marry a doctor. Instead of acting like a man and volunteering for SNCC, I came on this trip, with Pop sweating over his AAA guide, and practically shitting in his pants every night when he has to go to ask for a room in one of these little cow-town motels. Terrified that he’s going to hear that word—nigger—that would sweep us right off the map of the USA. Sweep his precious family right off to Oz, like a black tornado.

S

CENE VI

(Seattle World’s Fair. High noon. The whole HARMON FAMILY stands together in the crowd.)

THE FAMILY: We are standing at the foot of the Space Needle, which was our goal. It’s as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and there’s a rotating restaurant up at the top. We won’t go up because there’s a long line, and it costs four dollars a person, and because we’re not the kind of family that does things all the way to the end. This is enough for us. The Space Needle points to the Sputniks, to the stars. It’s like part of a cartoon about the future, something we think we must have wanted for a long time. A prize the president might have promised us as an inalienable right. A giant ultra-modern suburban kitchen appliance out of a dream.

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CENE VII

(Heading back home. The FAMILY MEMBERS speak in turns.)

MAUD: In Oregon the Pacific was tall gray waves that turned my feet numb when I waded. There were dead trees like goblin trees scattered on sand that came from volcanoes. My father and brothers peed against one of the trees, and my mother said: “Don’t look.” It was the end of the country, and I wanted to stay there forever. I kept some sand in a bottle. I’d never seen black sand before.

DR. HARMON: