The Quiet Ones

And like this our lives began, one late November evening in 1985. We were freshly fifteen. We had no immediate plans. We had you. 

You were so winsome, in the way you popped up from the row behind ours. The film had ended; the theater emptied out. You’d been watching us; “so placid and lovely,” we were a “pair of spitting image sisters.” You said that we were like the pair of turtledoves that your father gave to you when you were five. 

“Jackie and Gemma. Twin doves. Always best.” 

You laughed admiringly and held our gaze. You needed no introduction. Everyone knew you as Mike Callahan. To us, you were Michael—born in Ireland—and exotic.

Jackie and I did not admit to marveling over you, as you tooled around Town Center in your Volkswagen Beetle. We did not confess to hiding behind shelves laden with cornmeal and beans, as you and your cousin purchased smokes and whiskey at the counter of our parents’ store. We loved how you hummed portions of “Take on Me” under your breath, how your long fingers trembled each time you lit and dragged on each cigarette! No, we did not admit to longing after you then. Some might have found you disappointing, but we loved that you were twenty-two years old and pale and rail thin—all the better to anchor our hands against your hip bones. You had a shock of white hair at the sideburns and gothic black scruff at the chin. When you smiled, you bared even, square teeth, but your nose was crooked and purple. You’d had a boxing match just two weeks before. That evening, you delighted in telling us how you broke your opponent’s jaw.

“I bested the other guy.” 

You knew, as everyone else did, that Jackie and I were the Davis twins, the only Black girls in N—. Yes, our lives were synchronized in strangeness. As small children, we knew that our true home resided in each other. 

As one and one and two into one, Jackie and I sang to each other. We waltzed in time. I expanded my world by keeping her close. I chewed my meals in concert with her movements. Jackie drank from her glass in the same manner as I did, in adagio. We lived because we steered the same heart. We chose our mise-en-scène. We coached our toys in aquatics and calisthenics. We sewed our stuffed animals into elaborate costumes fashioned out of wrapping tissue and broad ribbons. We admonished our dolls for their surly attitudes. We exhorted them to stand upright and obey, echoing the same frustration that our “muttering” caused all others. 

•

No one parsed our talk. Our Jamaican immigrant parents raised their voices to us as well—“speak clearly!”—because like many of their generation, our mother and father believed children were indolent and needed correction. Understandably, their principles demanded that they discount our “warbling and tears.” Their attention was needed for pertinent matters: the daily clearing of trash littering the steps like magic; the broken eggshells, pebbles and beer bottles strewn in boredom and dislike. Our mother and father remained patient and phlegmatic, while unfolding the crumpled paper bills that their White Anglo Saxon customers dropped again and again on the counter. Customers who left the gap wide to summer’s humid dew and winter’s icy drafts—despite the reminders to “kindly secure the door as you leave.” Our parents dulled their expressions before their “kindly” White Anglo Saxon neighbors, church members who chided them for entertaining “foolhardy” notions. “You’re so far from your own people! Surely, you’d feel more at home there, where you aren’t the only ones of your kind.” When child specialists finally identified our “insensate jabbering” as a speech impediment, Jackie and I did go to therapy. However, elocution lessons did little to correct our fumbling tongues.

Our peers taunted us. In full view of the recess monitors, the girls flounced their fine blonde hair. They chanted whether far or near, “Weirdo Jackie, Creepy Gemmy: the first one’s ugly, the other’s phlegmy!” “Jackie’s wacko; Gemmy’s sicker. Move out of their way; they’re real killers.” Come wintertime, the boys joined in. They threw clods of mud and packed ice down our coats. Jackie and I channeled Bruce Lee. We spun. We kicked. We sliced the air. We flowed like water, but not much changed. We were to remain rock in wall, wall around rock. We were to confirm our freakishness. 

Michael, you could not have known any of this—our penchant for guard and retreat! Nor would you have known the leap in my heart when I volunteered my answer to your unspoken question.

“We’re in high school. We write stories.” 

“Shh,” Jackie said. She squeezed my hand to rein me in. I forced my lips into a variant of amusement and hissed leave me alone, in the language she understood.

“I hope to read what you write, sometime,” you replied, waiting tactfully for me to finish my remark. I wanted to sink into your husky tone, rock inside your singsong lilt. I pressed my lips together because I wanted to evince mystery. I saw opportunity in you and I did not want to waste it. 

•

Then Jackie asked politely after your cousin. You answered that he was traveling around “Cork thereabouts.” You flashed an indulgent grin, as if this fact amused you. You matched your good-natured sidestep with ours. You kept chatting and some things that we already knew, we learned again—that your father was a devout Catholic who went to Mass twice a week. You had long denied the Lord as your Savior, because if you looked at it carefully, Jesus kept on with the same cycle of birth, death and resurrection, but even with all that nothing was changed. If we were to wait for Him to die and come again and rinse and repeat, wouldn’t we be waiting a long time? And what did the Kingdom of Heaven have that you couldn’t find on earth? What did the Holy Spirit actually do? You loved your freedom, and we answered that we loved our freedom, too. We just hadn’t embraced it. 

They say it is all about the journey.

“You like men, pet? Or are you still riding with boys?” You whispered in my ear.

“We like men, right, Jackie?” I said.

 Jackie looked at her hands and nodded.

“Ah, that’s lovely to hear. I like how you speak so sweet and plain. Come on, I’ll get you home, but first, let me show you my special place. You can see all of the sky there. It’s like nothing else. Beautiful.”

You punctuated the last statement with a kiss for each of us. I still know the ache of that first touch, the anticipatory pleasure of how you would root down and shine me as your jewel. No, I would not deny you. Or, I would touch this indulgence, and I would not care whether I had or had not slimmed enough over the past year. I would be initiated. Michael, already you were softening my body and seeing me. I was going to surrender and understand my womanhood, at last! Yes that night, I wanted things to change. I would meet my whole self and become your bonafide woman. 

At fifteen, it seemed that we would never become women. My sister and I seemed always to marinate in our luteal phase. We felt too heavy inside; Jackie and I had no choice but to want to grow up. We slathered our ashy skin in shea butter. We masked our musty scent with calendula oil. Because we shared the same bedroom, in the quiet of the night, we did all that we could to enlarge the gaps. In separate beds, our freed fingers insinuated into singular and damp places. We welcomed our new sensations. We were casting aside our playacting, the locked arms and military steps of before. 

Jackie and I were known to bicker, but that year, we wrestled and hit each other all the more fiercely—at the kitchen table, on the stairs, in the living room. We sabotaged each other’s schoolwork. We threw folders and books at each other’s heads. Jackie sharpened pencils and scraped them along my legs. She called me perverted for staring at the nude men in my art books. I told her she was jealous of my long hair. She told me to throw off my horrid wig, and she pulled on it, until chunky strands fell to the floor. She wrote her name as “Jacquet” and I mocked her for her illiteracy. I smoked discarded cigarette butts and took large swigs from the bottle of gin that the younger boys shared with me, behind Mrs. Clay’s farmhouse—it was secluded and the backyard was barren—and Jackie had no choice but to come along. What else would she have done but preen alone? The boys were too young to know what to do with us. They made their clumsy attempts and fell over stoned and we walked away, still warmed and wanting.

• 

What a joy then, Michael, to fly over the road with you that night! I sat in the middle and pressed my head into your shoulder, while Jackie’s cheek licked the passenger window. As you drove, you offered us your flask and the liquor burned my belly and stroked my pubis. Jackie coughed the neat liquid down and hummed and giggled. You hardly touched the steering wheel as you drove, and you kept on with your steady talk. We harmonized to Prince’s “Raspberry Beret.” Jackie and I laughed at your impression of President Reagan. You put your hand on my bare knee, and I was convinced that you were intimate with each prickle of hair, each goosebump. 

Under a brightening moon, you told us, “I’ve always liked the quiet ones.”

You kissed me that first time, and tightened your grip; I melted and then Jackie offered her lips to you.

You showed us Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. 

We admired your Big Dipper.

“Ladies, there’s only so much of me to go around.”

In the moonlight, I thought I could read the lines around your smile, but I would not know the right thing—not then—and so there we were, with no one telling us how to begin, nor how to comply. We weren’t signing a contract. We were just intent on pleasing you and listening for your staccato breath. Soon, you were making that strangled sound that we would come to know so well. That first time, you split us and honored us each and Jackie and I knew that we would never be the same again. It was clearly our time and our beautiful business with you. 

You were unapologetic in how you compared us to one another. “Oh Jackie’s got silky skin, not like yours, but love, you’re like coconut cream.” You undid my coiled crown in awe: “I had no idea Black girls’ hair was so soft.” Jackie pouted in annoyance over my triumphant reports. We claimed you as our own tacit and undivided secret. 

Then, it came to be that on alternating winter nights, Jackie and I separated to take our own fullness in you. You’d drive me to an isolated spot behind the forest where the patch of moonlight hit the inside of your car window. Our breath cascaded on dry air. You’d steer Jackie to your bedroom, when your father was out—“We pitch and rumble the bedsprings, Gem!”—and you’d “cozy” me there, too. You would exchange the sodden sheets for dry linen, the mattress sunken from wanton rolling. 

I abandoned myself to your suggestions. I wanted to taste all that I had not before. The first time I shared your coke, I shivered knowing how foreign it was to the way we had been raised, but then fright soon forgotten, I sank into your soft expression—how your crystal tongue caressed mine. Yes, in those early weeks, you showed us your care. You were gentle and knowledgeable. Even now, I know that there is nothing more sweet than how you sang in my ear, how you loosened the ribbons on my blouse, cursing softly at how difficult they were to untie until they weren’t.

Then, into our fourth month of knowing one another, you shared your truth. You hit me and I did not snivel. I was driving you to it and I believed in your rightness. I had no evidence to the contrary. I bit my lips as you slapped me again and again—it was a game to you—and you called me “dumb-bitch-you-do-what-I-say.” You reported that Jackie wrestled you like a foolish tiger and that it was exhausting, “much easier to handle you, pet.” Only later would Jackie and I come to understand the nature of our true abasement, but in those scant months of winter into spring, I learned to erect a wall tower around my heart. I told myself that I was learning to adore you and the sting of your hot hands everywhere. I told myself that I deserved it, although I felt the raging swell of my heart against you, against myself too, as “not-worth-anything-Gemma.” Most importantly, I learned to hold on, and you appreciated my steady and docile nature.

Then in what would have been June, our joyous June, you disappeared. Over scorched and absent weeks, we had to learn to bide the time. Of course, Jackie and I sought explanations for your abrupt departure. Your cousin shrugged and turned away from our frenzied questioning. After six long weeks of no news, we dared approach your father. From the window, the living room was dark, but for the illumination of the television. 

Jackie and I were polite in our timid inquiry, but your father threw up his hands.

“For fuck’s sake, get the hell off my property. I’m tired of you lot, always carrying on and coming around.”

We hadn’t said anything out of turn, but you’d disappeared for good. Your father was tired of your drugging and screwing. He didn’t care that you were “hot-blooded.” He was a God-fearing man and he had already been so patient, so forgiving of your habits. He’d thrown you out and you were to go back to Hell.

“Black sheep indeed!” he sneered. Then, his voice dropped like yours had been known to do. He said: 

“You’re hardly the last, Ladies. Better find yourselves another boy.” He closed the door on us.

We staggered away wondering, had there been other women? Women statuesque and ghost pale; heavy-bosomed and sublime? I remember how Jackie shuddered in my arms, in frustration and relief. I remember how fury squeezed my gut. I couldn’t let you have the freedom that you sought, Michael. You’d held me up only to pull me apart. You were the reason for my self-loathing, in a newly lonesome body. Jackie and I vowed to find you, although we hardly knew how we would shame you.

God came to our side a year later. You were sitting alone in another cinema, a few towns over. Where had you gone? You wouldn’t say. You smiled as if you’d forgotten who we were, but you did remember, because you insisted that we take a ride for “old times.” Jackie and I clasped hands and assented readily to your offer. We squeezed into that damned front seat of yours. We flattened our quickening hearts. You drove and sang and drank. We swigged and sang along with you. We abided with you, because we were still willing under your old pull. You waved your arms about, as if we three were on reunion tour. We parked in the empty lot behind Gray’s Hill and you built a fire and danced and we passed the bottle around. We kneeled down before you because we were not saints and we never will be.

Afterwards, you undid your pants to urinate behind the old elm. You were whistling on your return, but you swayed on your feet. You stumbled in the brown grass and you vomited the contents of your belly onto the ground. You fell onto your back. Jackie and I crept close. She stroked your forehead. I touched your fluttering eyelids. I fingered the mess dribbling down, glittering on your lips like gemstones. I tucked it all back in.  

We waited.

We did not drive you to death; you crumpled. We did not unleash our “cursed African witchcraft” on you as your cousin contends; we placed your body over the front wheel. There you stayed, until the police found you in the days thereafter. No one would learn what we did or did not do to you. No court would come to condemn us for that. 

Only later, would the police seize our father’s gun, one that he never used but kept in his possession, just in case. Following the recovery of your corpse, your cousin appeared at our front door. He dragged me out of the house. He bared rodent teeth and slapped me, demanding to know why we were riding in your car that night. Behind me, Jackie fired the gun; your cousin did not bleed. He limped away; he was not maimed at all. He tore the road down in his car. The day we entered this place for the mentally ill, he boarded a plane for Ireland. He is likely married now, with children, and we remain here to be “rehabilitated for as long as necessary.” What does that mean? 

It means that thirteen years have passed to the day, since your death. It means that we are thirty years old, that we keep our own counsel. It means that we are not leaving the hospital anytime soon. The doctors keep us separated from one another, so Jackie and I send our letters back and forth. I decode penitence in her jagged script; her regret cements a new truce. Jackie believes that we will one day leave this home, have “new times to live,” but we are here. We are subject to wayward hands and the bland warnings from our doctors to “speak the truth”—but what use is an avowal now, sliding as we are from one pill to the next? We endure in our protective silence, because we are deemed “unreliable,” because we are the sole witnesses to our destruction. As before, no one knows how to decipher us, nor does it matter that they do. Better to mark us as “disturbed” and “emotionally delayed.” Better that doctors mold their medical imaginations to construe one diagnosis after another. They are certain, for example, it is “schizoaffective.” If we do need a cure, it is none that they will give. It may seem that I revisit the bad that we were then, and the bad that we had no choice to be, but to be quite frank, I do not recognize who or what we were. 

Back then, Jackie and I were composing our new selves, and ones that eased away from each other and took on a new allure on paper. In our adolescent writings, Jackie and I searched for glory. We put on our armor. We strapped on our guns and fought wars with zombies. We solved acid rain, the ozone layer and the certain planetary destruction. We wrote our stories so that we could live as sages, queens. We rode our horses barebacked, our arms raised to the stars. Jackie and I whisked down the Los Angeles freeways in our El Camino. We roared our tilted songs. But I do not need a chorus to sing now. 

I remember how you clipped our wings, Michael. I remember your firebrand hands; the bruising weight of your embrace. Did you know that the Ancient Greek root for “apology,” apologia means to “speak back”? Much like Socrates, I am speaking back to you. 

But in my dreams, you insist on sharing your words with me. You assure me that I was your favorite. I was a sweet dream to you, your “peony and pussycat.” We parted because “time had drained the poetry from our union,” just as time had revealed how contemptible your father would continue to be. Your father who pummeled you as a child, for the fun of the blame and the bleeding; for the blessings of our Lord Jesus and Sweet Mary. Your father, the hypocrite, he patted his genitals in one hand while handling the rosary in the other. “You can take the man out of the Church, but you cannot take the Church out of the man,” you sneer. You round out your speech to me, saying that I was “the ready one.” You chant the last over and over, until I awake, my forehead still wet and anointed by your crystal tongue. You want me to mire in remorse. I refuse.

I do not regret your quieted heart under my hand. I live in this new and porous body and my spirit knows that you were my true north, the truest first moment. All other moments pale in comparison: the police’s first appearance at our parents’ door; the search of our bedroom; the retrieval of the gun and your hidden stash of cocaine; our arrest and our defense lawyer’s pleas for a lesser sentence; our first offense for drug and gun possession; the judge’s agreement to try us as juveniles and place us in a home. Yes, even the first rounds of tranquilizers. None of these count the same as you.   

Even so, you will not claim me as yours, Michael—certainly not now on this eve of the new millennium. On our last evening of 1999, there will be those who insist on dancing with their Prince; those who herald the world’s shuttering and the Rapture. Still others convince themselves that they can zero out the past and find reconciliation. I do not know what any of that has to do with Jackie and me. 

How to walk this zero-pebbled path? How to keep ourselves as we do, pocketing our mutual patience and devotion? Is this life? Is this all there is? There must be something else out there for us—out in the distance ready to speak a truer message!  Freedom lives above in the birds and the sun; the wind and the sea. The sea—that tell-tale drift—I know the churn too well already, those waters layering cobalt and navy over azure and sea green. Maybe this time, the waves will take heed of us. Maybe this time, the roiling will ripple our tale. Maybe, I will find the merciful and good news of renewal and softness there as memory or wisdom can allow.