Zora and Nicky: A Novel in Black and White (7 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

ZORA

Dinner at my parents’ house. Oh, joy.

The gang’s not all here. Mama is present in the living room as resident
queen. It’s a weeknight, which means their cook—they actually have a cook,
a
servant
, and she’s black, ironically—doesn’t have to work as hard as she does
on Sundays. Weeknight dinner is a relatively casual affair.

I’m wearing a Spelman sweatshirt, some Levi’s, and my Coach sneaks.
I know Mama wants to kill me for this hookup because dinner isn’t really
casual. It’s never casual. She looks sophisticated as ever in her pink cashmere
sweater, pearl earrings, straight black skirt, and silk hose—she wears silk hose
or none. Her feet are shod with a pair of black leather mules made of butter-
soft calfskin, and
mercy
! I’d smile at her while taking them right off her feet if
she didn’t wear that itty-bitty size five-and-a-half.

Her oval unlined face nearly glows she’s so radiant. Mama’s skin, a
golden color, reminds you of a peach that needs to sit a few more days in
the sun to sweeten, and she’s got a mane of fiery auburn hair she doesn’t
have to chemically straighten to go with that peachy skin. Our family is a
regular rainbow coalition. Daddy and I dark, my chestnut brown-toned twin
brothers in the middle, hale and hearty men, and Mama and my little sister
Zoe, fair-skinned maidens. God doled out the hair texture haphazardly. The
twins got wondrous multi-textured heads that can’t quite decide what they
want to be. Zoe got hair like Daddy, and she never forgave God that trespass.
Let’s just say, I got a flat iron and the best of both. Hair not quite as confused
as the twins’ and not quite as willful as Zoe’s “If only I’d been born in the
seventies” afro.

Daddy sits down on the couch and begins small talk.

Daddy does not love Mama. I think over the years he’s grown used to her.
He may even be fond of her. But he doesn’t look at her like a man should his
woman. She lives the nightmare of being a trophy wife every day of her life,
but I’m not supposed to know. It isn’t hard to see, though. To make up for the
lack of love in her life, she buys everything she needs, wants, doesn’t need, and
doesn’t want. My sister, brothers, and I benefit immensely.

Mama wears a mask of perfection I have seen slip only on few occasions.
Sometimes, when we’re at the table and she asks Daddy a question, he ignores
her. Doesn’t even glance in her direction. Sometimes the mask slips and a
bit of sorrow clouds her hazel eyes. She fitted all of us with our own masks
of perfection. Mine grows heavier every day. And I’m afraid it’s going to fall
right off my face, and soon, if I’m not careful.

I’ve gotta be careful. Careful, Zora.

Daddy wears a white button-down shirt with navy linen slacks. He has
on a silk striped tie, elegant and understated. He’s blessed with the good looks
of a movie star. Or is that a curse? I’ll have to ask my mother about that.
Hershey’s chocolate-bar-brown skin and perfect teeth that startle you they’re
so white against his dark skin. And he doesn’t bleach them either. He’s just
naturally beautiful. Dark and comely. He exudes a manly wildness that on
occasion I see and love in other men.

Nicky?

Don’t start, Zora.

If you didn’t know Daddy well, you’d never know about the
scars. Some of them physical. Some of them soul scars. Daddy’s
back reminds me of the Mississippi slave, Gordon. They show his
pictures in a lot of slave books, whip marks slashing a story on
his broken body.

To make him into a religious man, Granddaddy brutalized him. The
stern apostle did not spare the rod. But Daddy refused to be broken. He lives
his life by
faith
. When he speaks, his words have
power
. Death and life are
in the power of the tongue, and Daddy speaks life. He’s the beloved that the
apostle Paul—not his father, the wanna-be apostle—wished above all things
would prosper and be in good health, even as his soul prospers.

And I can’t blame him. I can’t fault him for wanting life when Granddaddy
held it at arm’s length away from him while giving it liberally to the people
in his congregation.

Can I blame Granddaddy? Maybe he thought the best way to get his
message across to the charmed boy with good looks was to beat it into him. I
don’t know. I only know I feel the same pressure Daddy must have felt, even
though my parents pamper me rather than batter me. I feel bribed instead
of beaten to conform to their image, an image increasingly hard for me to
understand.

Miles joins in on the fun. My boyfriend. My perfect “other” handpicked
by my parents. All year he’d labored with the youth ministry, Faith Afire, in
order to sidle up to Daddy hoping he’d win enough approval to ask me on a
coveted date.

And dates with me certainly are coveted. Daddy has every romantically
inclined male and a few questionable females in church deathly afraid of me.
Nobody, and I mean that, asked me out at church from the time I was old
enough to date, with the exception of the
family
, not the young man, the
family, who approached Mama and Daddy to ask if their son could escort me
to the debutante ball where I was introduced to society. And what a cheeseball
he was. Don’t make me think about him. I gotta eat.

I guess no social life was a mixed blessing. It saved me from the storm of
raging hormones that tore my best friend MacKenzie’s house down. There are
worse things than twenty-two-year-old virgins who’ve never been kissed. Not
that I didn’t get lonely.

Now, Miles is good looking. A Morehouse College man, two years older
than me with good teeth and clean nails. You can tell a lot about a man by
his teeth and nails. He’s great with kids—having put his time in at children’s
church before going on to Faith Afire. He earned an engineering degree and
is already working in his field. He makes good money and, in a few years, just
may be able to afford me without Daddy’s help. He’s got an “I’m hotter than
Denzel Washington” thing going on that the sistahs at LLCC drool over. He’s
a perfect gentleman. Only holds my hand and sometimes kisses me on the
cheek. If he’s got “experience,” he hasn’t shared that with me. I assume just
after his ordination to be one of our associate pastors, Miles Zekora and I will
taste the first of the fruits of sexual love on our wedding night.

And my name will be Zora Zekora.

I don’t know if I can live with that.

He thinks my painting is a nice hobby. Is it any wonder that I don’t care
that he’s never kissed me? I used to care. He used to be the biggest crush I
ever had. He used to make my heart soar, just the thought of him. Tonight I’d
rather be home putting together that newsletter
anybody
with a brain could
assemble.

Don’t think about these things, Z. Eat. Listen. Don’t say much. You don’t
know what’ll come out of your mouth, girl.

W
E’RE GETTING READY
to be seated at the hub of our family, the opulent dining
room table. She may not cook anymore, but Mama knows how to sit down
together as a family. Despite our failings, we’ve always eaten together. The
dining room is beautifully furnished; a handcrafted, endless mahogany table
that seats sixteen is the focal point of the room. Mama has each place set with
bone china and fine linen napkins—with an African flair, of course. The room
has been featured in an issue of
African American Metropolitan
magazine.

My brothers, the twins, James and John, don’t live at home anymore.
They make their living as wildly successful stockbrokers and have taken a
bite out of the Big Apple, lucky dogs. They offered to take me with them and
look after me while I went to art school. I’d been accepted to Parsons.
Parsons!
MacKenzie and I dreamed of Parsons since we were little girls waxing poetic
about color. And now she’s going in just a few days, God bless her, but Daddy
would have none of it for me, for all his big stinkin’ faith. Mama either. It was
Spelman or “you’re on your own.” Many a day I wish I’d have chosen on my
own, but they forbid my brothers to help me. Worse, I couldn’t even study art
at Spelman. It wasn’t practical, they said.