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Chapter 2
As
he closed the new brown buttons on the shirt his mother now handed him, Clark
thought about the award he was getting—for excellence in journalism for the
school newspaper. Clark wanted to be a writer. He didn’t
know if he had any outstanding talent, but this award renewed his hope that
he might manage to live his dream. And when his mom took his writing from his
hand and read them, she would sigh and say, “You are one amazing piece of
work.” That was her highest compliment. Her smirk made him wonder what she
meant, but when he saw the glimmer in her eyes, he always felt very proud.
Mom was a stereotype, of sorts. She was one of those white girls who saw
herself in another ethnicity. Although she was paler than an albino rat he
had once seen, she insisted on speaking Spanish at home for at least two
hours a day. She said it would keep them from losing the culture.
“What culture,” he would ask. “We’re white people with no roots!” Still, he
went along with her silly game. He also ate the delicious arroz
con pollo which she cooked once a week, enjoyed
the tastes and smells of the other dishes her friend had taught her, and let
her tell him all the stories about their fun times together before Rosanna
and her mother, Sally, returned to Puerto Rico. Secretly, Clark imagined that his mother dreamed
of going to la isla just as Rosanna had
gone. And why not—she had nothing here.
Victoria was a stereotype, but she broke
the stereotype in other ways, too. Mom was a poor single mother who got
pregnant at seventeen—quite an accomplishment in a neighborhood where girls
had babies much younger. She had fallen in love before having sex—an even
greater miracle. Then, she had even married the guy and lived happily with
him—for a while. Within a year, however, the stereotype played out and the
man split, leaving her with a white little baby boy in a dangerous mostly-minority
neighborhood.
Alone and friendless, Victoria had raised her son alone in a teeny apartment
that no one would repossess because the cost of the repairs needed to make it
presentable was greater than the trouble of waiting an extra month for each
payment—at least, that’s what Mama Lucia, the landlady, had told them.
Secretly, they suspected that the crusty old lady had a soft spot for them.
Still, in spite of having taken ten years to pay off a five year mortgage,
they had made it. Now, every month, instead of making a payment, Mom made a
repair.
It was funny that all of the time they had lived in the apartment, Mom had
thought that she was paying Mama Lucia rent—up until a year ago, when Mama
Lucia told her abruptly, “You have paid off the mortgage—the apartment is
yours.” Mom might have fainted if she hadn’t seen my face. At my surprised
look, she burst out laughing, and the moment passed safely.
Apparently, Mama Lucia, said, the apartment had a unique mortgage plan that
would have paid off in five years, but with all of the late payments, it had
taken twice as long. Now, Victoria and her son owned their own little space,
free and clear. However, although Mom had killed all the roaches
years before, there was still the matter of extensive reparations.
Every evening, they tuned into the home improvement channels and learned how
to make a new dresser look “vintage.” Laughing, Victoria would say, “See, son, this time
we’re ahead of the season’s decorations.” Chuckling at the eccentricity of
the rich—which to them meant anyone who could afford to be so silly he would
help her to strip and sand the wood on another solid oak yard sale find,
making the “vintage” furniture into true works of art.
It took quite a while to replace broken doors, redo cabinets, and make the
place look like a home. But it had finally happened, and now Clark was proud to invite anyone over.
After years of work, the little apartment was carpeted and fully furnished,
and Clark was proud when his friends came
over to visit and they called his mother the coolest lady in the
neighborhood.
At the awards banquet this evening, Mom would help serve the food while Clark would stand up and give a
presentation. Afterwards, they would hang around, talking to other students
and their parents, and meeting with a couple of “interested parties,” as his
teacher had called the mystery visitors.
After the ceremony, where Clark’s speech had won him a standing ovation,
Victoria had helped clean up while Clark was encouraged to mingle with his
friends. As he chatted in Spanish with his best friend, Antonio, Clark noticed a tall, handsome black
teen standing beside a stunning Asian girl. They made a neat couple, in spite
of their racial differences. Clark began daydreaming, and he imagined that
their children would be lovely, with brown skin and eyes like hers, though
what he found out later surprised him more than anything he had ever seen.
“We’re brother and sister—really.” At the sight of his round eyes, the pretty
girl laughed. “We love that reaction—it gives us something to tell Mama about
when we get home.” The boy interrupted with, “My name’s James, and this is
Justine—but we call her Jamie. Our mother’s a washed-out blonde with no
outstanding facial features, so when she married my dad—a black man—she ended
up with a little kid who looked exactly like his father.” Nodding, Jamie
added, “Yes, and we still don’t know what she was thinking when a year later,
she ended up with a Japanese man, and gave him a daughter who was his carbon
copy, too.”
Clark agreed. What was the woman
thinking? Yet, obviously, it had worked out. “Now,” James added, “she’s
happily married to, of all things, a washed-out blonde and they have four
beautiful little featureless children—our siblings.” Jamie let out a half-laugh,
half-snort and added, “So whenever we get together for a family portrait, the
whole world stares.” Clark
could imagine that, but he only nodded soberly. It was a neat thing to be of
a serious temperament—he rarely showed alarm, and in the rare cases where he
couldn’t hide it, he was often able to quench it rapidly.
“We were raised by our grandmother—our mother’s mother. She is another little
washed-out blonde, and wherever we went together, people thought we were a
foster family.” Jamie interrupted with, “Well, I guess we sort of were, since
we weren’t being raised by our mother, and we weren’t adopted, either.”
James took up the narrative from here. “But the great thing was that people
would make room in line for this wonderful woman who was caring for this
poor, motherless black boy and orphaned Japanese girl. It seemed we always
got preferential treatment because of my sweet, self-sacrificing Mama.”
Laughing, they threw an arm over each other’s shoulders and offered their
free hands to pull him up from his seat. “It’s time we told you why we are
here.” While they drank punch together, the teens told him that they had seen
him speak excellent Spanish, and upon being told by the teacher that he was
Caucasian, they had immediately become curious.
As it turned out, they were not teenagers at all, but young adults,
professionals in their field, and still unmarried. It had been their goal to
come and find one special child and help pay his way through private school
for a few years. Then, if he eventually won a scholarship to college, they
would feel very gratified for their efforts. Clark was that kid. Smiling, he agreed
to become their project, and their first task, they decided was to give him a
nickname. Clark was happy, since he had never been given one, and so they
began calling him “Sport” immediately.
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