Virgin Soul (16 page)

I
nterim Housing, the tough-shit place for students who had no place or no money, was boot camp—showers with no curtains or walls. When I finished showering the second night, I was relieved to see no one but the other black woman on my floor. I didn't have to parry funny looks. I had noticed her long straight hair the day before. It looked like somebody had chopped it all off. Her face was round and sweet, almost defenseless looking.

“What happened to your hair?” I asked.

“I cut it off.” She stepped closer, as if to give me a good look.

“What style did you want?” I asked. “A Mia Farrow?”

“I was tired of it.” She was reet petite, with serious black eyes like watchtowers.

“Why didn't you go to a beautician?” She bent her head for me to see, then motioned for me to touch it.

“Believe it or not, I want a natural.”

“Do you have a perm, or is your hair straight like this?” I touched her warm scalp.

“Lustrasilk, but it's pretty straight anyway.” Ola had used Lustrasilk for years.

I pulled her hair lightly at angles from the roots. “You can get a natural. It would just take time for your hair to go back.”

You could forget you had nappy hair if you Lustrasilked continuously.

“I stopped treatments about a year ago, when I came here,” she said.

“You're a sophomore?”

“Second semester junior. Nursing. My name is Xavi.”

“Zayvee, like Jay Vee?” She nodded. “I'm Geniece. Psych.”

“Xavi is short for Xavier. I was supposed to be a boy.”

“What's so special about boys?” I was trying for funny and got there. She cracked up. “Do you really want a natural?”

“I must if I cut off all my hair.”

“You could put Tide on it. That would strip it.”

“You must be kidding. Tide? I can't shampoo my hair with laundry detergent.”

“You'd get your natural quick.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

X
avi's Tide-treated hair took a week to revert to a soft limp natural, with straight strands sticking out. We decided to try to room together off campus and began checking the listings at the housing office. The lady behind the desk gave us a hard time.

“How do you girls know there's even an apartment available?”

Xavi was polite. “If one's not posted, we want it before it gets posted.”

“Any unoccupied apartments are posted on the bulletin board,” she said, barely looking at us. I'd had it with barrack green. I couldn't sleep surrounded by ugliness.

“If we were white, would an apartment be available?” I asked.

“I don't know what you're implying.”

“C'mon,” I said to Xavi. “She'll never give us a break.”

The lady's face turned bright pink. “I don't make the rules.”

As we walked out, Xavi turned around, grabbed the room reservation list, and threw it on the desk. “This is what I think of your rules.”

Outside the office, Xavi was shaking; when she opened her mouth her lips moved, but no sound came out. The woman called Xavi back in and gave her a housing referral and me a dirty look.

X
avi became my first off-campus friend in the city. She got a studio on Parnassus near UCSF for $105 a month. I wasn't jealous, because I figured Xavi deserved it. She stood up to the housing office lady. I was beginning to see that defiance got results, made the rules bend at State. But Xavi and I didn't have the same political understanding. Xavi didn't see anything wrong with Ronald Reagan being governor. The idea of it made me ill.

“He's an actor. He's used to having a director for a brain. Remember
Death Valley Days
?”

“We're not old enough to vote anyway.”

“I don't care. It's like having Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse running things.”

“My parents voted for Pat Brown. Did yours?”

Mine. Did mine? I didn't have parents. “I don't have parents.” My throat got so dry I got a crick in it. She didn't say anything. We were sitting on her bed trying on sample tubes of lipstick. I tissued off the Orange Jujube and dabbed on Carnaby Coral.

“They all are too bright for me. When are they ever going to make lipsticks for dark lips?”

We kept trying them on anyway—Pink Paisley, Naughty Iridescent Violette, Nectaringo, Great Granny Red—and wiping them off.

“We look like the low-rent Supremes,” Xavi said. “You're Diana.”

“Because I'm the gorgeous and talented one?”

“No, just the smile. I'm Flo.”

Xavi dug into her jewelry hatbox and pulled out crepe paper fans in a rainbow of color. “The Supremes don't use fans,” I said.

“These aren't fans, Geniece. They're froo-froos,” she said.

She began manipulating the crepe paper, folding and unfolding it like origami, until it fanned out into geometric shapes.

“Froo-froo paper earrings—you never saw them?”

“On models, not real people.”

“They're for pierced or unpierced,” she said, handing me a pair. She put a flap of purple and pink on one ear and a white carnation on the other. She gave me a set of blue cubes with Egyptian eyes. We turned her transistor radio on and started dancing to the mirror and the Isley Brothers' “Twist and Shout,” a solid hour. Xavi could Mashed Potatoes up a breeze; I showed her how to Watusi. When the deejay got mushy, we were ready to tune him out. But he put on Ruby and the Romantics' “Our Day Will Come,” so we did cha-cha-cha and then tuned him out.

“Open the window, Xavi. It's funky in here.”

We squeezed our heads into the window frame and hung out, our faces suspended. The night breezes were heavenly.

“What happened to them?” Xavi said. “Did they die?”

She meant my parents. I sighed.

“My mother died when I was three. And my father left. I mean, he left Oakland.”

“He's still alive, though?”

“I don't know.”

“He went out for a pack of cigarettes and left?”

“No, he prepared. He just didn't tell anybody where he was headed. The family took over.” My voice got quivery. “It's not like who am I. I know stuff. I have family. But it is like, am I a nobody?”

“Because you have to ask?”

“Yeah, it's not a given.” My jumble, my puzzle, was registering with her.

“Do you keep it a secret?”

I couldn't answer right away. “Everyone assumes I have parents.”

“Who do you tell that you don't?”

“No one, I guess. Those who know don't ask. Those who don't know don't ask.”

“Geniece, a secret is something you keep hidden on purpose. You never told anyone?”

“I told my boyfriend.”

“Anybody else?”

I scrounged around in my head. Julie. “Somebody I used to work with.”

“Why tell me?”

Because you have a face like a wishing well. I didn't say that. “My cheeks are as cold as Popsicles, Xavi. Are yours?”

“Why me?”

“I trust you, I guess. You're nice.”

“I know.”

“Let's hang our faces until they freeze,” I said. “Then come in, and the air in the room will feel like needles hitting our skin.”

“Have you ever heard of sadomasochism? We are bringing our chocolate faces in now.” I liked that about her, that she only went so far. We felt prickles anyway. We lay on her bed, side by side, and rubbed our faces.

“Now my body's getting cold,” I said.

“The cold has to go somewhere.” She threw her leg across mine and I bumped it off and she bumped it back and we rubbed the outside of our calves, my left one, her right one, together.

“I feel your stubble,” I said.

“And you don't have any. Your legs are so smooth.”

“I'm the hairless wonder.”

“You never grow hair on your legs?”

“Never. Look at my arms.”

She ran her hand up and down my arm, then over my fingers.

“You're hairless. That's unusual for somebody with so much hair on the head.”

We were silent for a while. I felt the hairs on her leg brush my leg each time she inhaled. “This is like sex.”

“I know. But it's not.”

“I know. But it's like it. I'm feeling the tingles.”

“I think we're close enough for me to tell you my secret.”

I held my breath.

“It's shameful,” Xavi whispered.

I couldn't believe it. I was lying in bed with a lesbian. A colored lesbian. I blurted, “You're a lesbian?”

Like the corpse in a Hollywood movie that lies in the coffin one moment and pops up wide-eyed the next, Xavi sprung to sitting position.

“No. Not on your life.”

What could be more secret than that?
I thought.

She turned to me with this ultraserious look. “It's kind of shocking.”

“You don't have to tell a secret to match mine,” I said. “I consider my stuff a fact of life anyway, not a big dark secret.”

But I wondered what hers was. It had to do with sex.
What else involved shame, secrecy, and shock?

“I had a baby two summers ago.”

“You're a mother?” I was shocked shitless. Xavi kept on like she was purging.

“I wasn't showing during the semester. I had it at a home for unwed mothers, but everybody found out anyway. I felt like an outcast.”

The way she said
it
made me shiver. “How did people find out if you gave birth during summer?”

“They found out when I was pledging. I was the laughingstock of the whole school. And my mother had me go through pledging knowing everybody had found it out. The big sisters treated me like poop, on top of the pledging crap.”

“But how did they find out?” Xavi was talking to her mother, not me.

“My mother said, ‘You're not the first pledge with a baby off somewhere. . . . There's no record of this, no birth certificate, no proof.' I was going to be a soror if she had to shake up the Supreme Court. The social worker at the home told my mother I needed counseling at school, because I gave it away.”

“Oh, that's sad. You had to give your baby away?” She nodded.

“I couldn't keep it and I couldn't give it up. It was a struggle.”

“So what happened?”

“I let them take the baby. My mother wrote the dean of girls a letter and sent me a copy. It was all strictly confidential. But it got out. The big sisters found out.”

“Secretaries read mail. I read confidential stuff in Admissions every day.”

“I know. That's what I told my mother. She said the dean called and said it wouldn't go on my record.” Xavi went to the bathroom but didn't shut the door.

“So now you're an AKA, and you're not a mother, and it's all cool?”

“I never went to another sorority function. And I pray for my baby girl every night.”

A girl. Xavi came back in the room drying her hands. “She looked like me. A replica.”

“Babies change, you know?”

“All I know is those first two weeks.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

A
few days later we caught a bus to the old opera house in Bayview Hunters Point. Sisters on campus had organized a community black-is-beautiful program. When we walked in, I saw what the deal was right away: an African emporium. Money changing hands. Business. An African boutique owner had display tables full of material, African cloth for your body and head, baskets overflowing with fabulous amber beads, shell necklaces, cowrie shells, African wood carvings, drums, stools, tin masks, delicate earrings and bracelets from horsehair. People were buying left and right. Xavi bought a pair of earrings that looked like elongated drums and went to put them on in the bathroom. The sister who seemed in charge came over and asked me my name. After we got acquainted—her name was Li-an—she asked if I wanted to be in the show that night.

“Um, what do I have to do?” I thought I'd have to buy something.

“Just show up,” she said.

“When?”

“Tonight. Seven. Show starts at eight. We have to rehearse, mainly the order we come in.”

“Rehearse what?”

“You pick an African wrap from the sellers and a record you dance to.”

“Dance?”

“Yeah, each sister comes in like this.” She handed me her clipboard and then twirled around, popping her fingers and dancing. When she turned she cocked her head, more friendly than conceited. She walked to a table and put on a record. Bo Diddley's nasal voice and guitar-twanging backbeat filled the room. Xavi was buying material for an African gele head wrap, the earrings swinging already from her lobes, her hair, in spite of the Tide, more beatnik than anything else.

I tried my turn, knowing I wasn't brave until the dance floor was full and I got ideas. I was better at running my mouth, but the backbeat, twanging to the rafters, made me try.

“You're all right,” Li-an said. “Come on, all we need is one more person.”

“Okay, but what about my friend?” I motioned to Xavi to come over.

Li-an added my name to the bottom of a list, telling me I was the last one. Her complexion was ruby brown, different from all the other shades of brown I had become expert at categorizing. Each of us was a wholly different shade of brown, and a different style of natural hair.

When I told Xavi about the show, as I expected, she said, “I want to do it, too.”

Li-an went to change the music.

“You can take my place. I'm not that good a dancer.”

“Be for real,” Xavi said.

“I don't want to be in front of an audience. Somebody else can floorshow while I check out the spotlight. Take my place, please.”

“Only if you're sure,” Xavi said, beaming.

We walked over to the turntable and I asked the person who was holding the clipboard list with my name to substitute Xavi's.

She shook her head. “She can't be in it. She has straight hair.”

“What's the deal?” I popped back. Xavi looked like she had been shunned. “Are you for real?”

“This is for sisters,” she said, finished with the matter, and walked off.

My natural glare yanked at its leash. “This is not happening,” I said, looking around for Li-an.

“It's all right. I don't want to bogart,” Xavi said.

“Oh, I'll be queen bogart,” I said. “This don't sound very African. More like bringing out the nigger in me.”

I spotted Li-an, who was coming toward us with the sister clutching the clipboard in her hand.

“What's your name?” Li-an said to Xavi.

Xavi spelled her full name, then said, “It comes from Xavier.”

“Are you a student at State?”

Xavi nodded, her eyes working like wheels.

“What's with this she's-not-a-sister stuff?” I asked.

“I'm sorry, that keeps coming up,” Li-an said. “This started out as a natural show, so everybody could see all the ways sisters are getting the natural hairdo. And then, you know, it just grew.”

My leash started to slacken. Li-an kept on. “Initially somebody thought only sisters with naturals should be in it. No sisters who wear their hair straight.”

“This is her natural, as natural as she can get it. We even tried Tide,” I said.

“Really?” the sister with the clipboard said, looking at Xavi's hair the way I did the first time I saw it cut.

At the show, Li-an put Xavi, the African wraps, and “Hey Bo Diddley”
together. While Xavi strutted, Li-an whispered, “I need a roomie to split my rent. Half of $125. Know anyone?”