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‘Breasts,’ my mother said. ‘They’re called breasts.’
‘You’re supposed to put the tip in their cleavage at Ralph’s.’ Jody pursed her lips and made her voice go cutesy and high like Tammy’s. ‘That’s it, put it in there, right in there ... ’
‘Her boobs did look weird,’ I said. ‘Like seals’ heads.’
‘Gross,’ said Jeff.
My mother looked at my father. My father shrugged.
Jody got into bed with me that night and Jeff got into the cot in the middle. I was eating a bag of potato chips, licking my fingers after each one. We were watching a comedy on one of those channels that we didn’t get at home. Bette Midler and Shelley Long were pretending to be Russian sisters who didn’t speak English trying to get on a plane. They had kerchiefs around their heads and the most pathetic, dramatic-y, sad-mask expressions. No one thought they were Russian but they kept pretending to be, and they knew that the attendant at the counter didn’t believe them but they couldn’t stop talking and acting that way, in gibberish Russian, looking fake sad, trying to get pity from the woman at the counter by saying that their father had died and they had to get home. I started laughing so hard at that scene for some reason. The sounds coming out of my mouth became wheezes. They were ridiculous as sisters, too close and never stopping the gibberish talk even though they were in on the same dying joke. They were milking it hard, they kept milking it so hard. Tears rolled down my cheeks. My family started laughing at me mostly because I just couldn’t stop.
GAYL: She laughs at the foreigners.
LEE: She’s not laughing at them because they’re foreigners. They’re pretending to be foreigners.
GAYL: Foreigners are comedy.
LEE: That sounds kind of racist, you know. I thought you said trauma was comedy.
GAYL: You know what I’m talking about.
§
We made one excursion all together on our vacation. The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum was only about eight blocks from our motel. My mother announced that they were having a special exhibition there about two slave ships that had landed in Key West in 1860, which was the very end of slave trade in the U.S.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Sounds happy. Let’s go.’
Jeff whined and Jody brought a book. My dad was the sulkiest, trailing behind.
In the first room of the museum, before the slave-ship exhibition, there were these pieces of wood set up like a sculpture. It was a broken raft, I read, that thirty Cubans had used trying to get across the ocean from Cuba all the way to Key West. This had happened seventeen years ago. All of them died. They’d even found some kid’s T-shirt attached to the raft’s pole like a sail. Those were the actual pieces of wood that people died on that were displayed. There was a rope around the raft but two kids were climbing on it, their parents totally oblivious. Jeff and Jody hadn’t even stopped to see this thing. I think Jody went to go use the phone. Jeff was probably going to go through the entire museum as fast as he could. I was the only one who stopped to look at the raft. Kids our age had died on it. It was a fucking memorial!
‘You better get off that,’ I said to the kids.
They both had sand on their feet and dirty flip-flops. They ran to their mother and whispered in her ear. The mother glared at me. Fucking fuck you, I thought. Your kids are playing on a grave.
My mom poked her head out from the other room. ‘You have to come see this,’ she said.
It wasn’t right that that raft was out there for everyone to touch, for kids to climb on with their dirty little feet. People should take the time to think about what that rotting thing was. It was a death boat for thirty people. I didn’t even have time to deal with what I was thinking. My mother kept calling me out of myself. She wanted to show me a picture, the first picture from the slave-ship exhibition. ‘This is unbelievable,’ she said. ‘Myra, you have to see this, this is unbelievable.’ I cringed at how fast she was talking. Why unbelievable? This all actually happened! Why is this all so hard to believe?
The Last of the Slave Ships was stencilled on a white wall. There was a detailed, life-size drawing of a really sad-looking African man with a chain around his ankle that looked like it had been photocopied onto the wall. You couldn’t really see his eyes, they were almost slit shut. It was grotesque. Why’d that have to be life-size?
‘Myra! Come here.’ My mother called me from around the corner, where she stood in front of a tiny ink print.
The picture, you had to really look at it close up, showed a boatload of smashed-together people with cuffs and chains around their ankles. They were all black, bony, made out of criss-crosses.
‘Unbelievable,’ my mom said again.
I wanted to take this precious grainy little picture off the wall and stomp on the glass and knee-break its frame. Who the fuck was the artist who could draw so realistically, actually set up an easel and draw people’s bones and chains for hours, draw for hours each little criss-cross on people who were crying beside buckets of slop? Who the fuck was the artist who worked on that to get it all so realistic? And why was my mom saying it was unbelievable?
People are like this. This happened, I wanted to scream at her. This is not unbelievable at all.
I looked that picture in the eyes. I wanted to see that dreadlocked guy again. I wanted to be with him, stay with him, let him do whatever he wanted to me in that room.
My mother had moved on. ‘Oh my god,’ I heard her whisper at the next picture. My mother started to cry. I hated this museum. Who thought that this exhibition was a good idea? It was exploitative. I wanted to stencil that on the walls: Slavery Is Fucking Exploitation!
My father, pathetic, hadn’t come inside the museum at all. He’d yelled at the woman at the front desk because at our motel it said there was a family price for the museum on weekdays but when we got there that woman said they weren’t taking any coupons. My father said something like, ‘What kind of business are you running?’ And my mom said to the woman, ‘It’s fine, it’s okay.’ Then my father snapped at her, ‘Irene, don’t undermine me!’ It was totally embarrassing that they were having a fight in public over five fucking dollars. The woman at the front desk stared at us like we were the worst kind of tourists, the kind who shouldn’t even be at a serious museum. My mother ended up giving her the extra money so we could just go. My dad had wanted to rent mopeds and drive to Key Largo, saying that I’d go on the back of his bike, Jeff could go on my mom’s and Jody could ride her own because she was pretty much nineteen. My mom thought that mopeds were dangerous and she wasn’t riding one and neither were we.
My mother had moved to the second-last picture of the exhibition, blowing her nose. I noticed that ther
