by Christina Fulton
Our daughter, Sadie, was biracial. I am eggshell and freckle-faced white. My husband is as “black as the ace of spades,” as he liked to say. I have always burned to a bacon crisp without sunscreen, and my husband liked to write that he was burnt toast on anything that asked him to list his race/ethnicity. We were the original breakfast bunch, and my daughter was a double dose of caramel expresso and was not afraid to express herself.
When she was six, her first grade teacher at a private Catholic school tried to explain to her that she was “mixed.” My daughter took it as an insult, because she knew that was half of “mixed up.” The next day, she came to class purposely wearing mismatched clothing, and when she was asked to write down her race on the construction paper Noah’s Ark class roaster they were making, she took out all her crayons and drew a rainbow and under it, she wrote the word “human.” My daughter was reading with me at the age of four, watching Masterpiece Theater and the evening news with her father at the age of five, and once, she told me at a tea party with her collection of misshapen/mutant stuffed elephants that labels are for stupid people with no imagination. She quoted Albert Einstein, Toni Morrison, and Ron White as she was taken to the principal’s office that day. I have to say that was my favorite school related phone call.
In the sixth grade, she came home and asked her father what “that good hair” meant. He let out one of his Paul Bunyan loud laughs and said, “Why, yours baby doll.”
“No, because my friend, Latisha, said that I don’t have it. She said that hers is that good hair, and it is nice and straight like mom’s.”
“Well, her mom probably let her get her hair relaxed,” he said, with a sigh.
“Can I do that to mine?”
“Sure, but first, you must watch a Chris Rock special on it. And second, you let me do one strand of test hair to see how you feel about it before making a final decision.” I cringed, as I overheard this conversation from my hidden location in my writing studio. I had seen that special, and it made me want to go to all of my black, female creative writing students and scream: You are beautiful and your scalp does not need to be punished for the horrible effects of beauty-based racial stereotypes! That night, while curled up in bed, I registered my concerns with my husband, as he flipped through the instructions that came with the hair product. I always called these our New Millennial Everybody Loves Raymond pre-sex and fade to black moments. It made our marriage feel TV-ready real to me.
“I just don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Relax, my mother is a beautician, and I could do this in my sleep.”
“That’s not what I am worried about! I mean, what are we teaching her? That the hair God gave her is wrong? I don’t want her to hate herself. I don’t want her to bend to the pressure of hundreds of years of unhealthily standards of beauty fabricated to keep black women in mental slavery.”
“I keep forgetting you took African American Studies in Literature,” he laughed.
“Be serious!”
“I am and don’t worry. I got this,” he said, kissing me on the forehead. The next day she watched the special, and she still insisted that we move on to phase two. They both went into the bathroom, while I tried to distract myself by playing a few rounds of Tetris on my phone. A little while later, she came out of the bathroom with tears in her eyes and one strand done. The pain had been too much for her.
“I don’t like this, and I am thinking about going to every salon and leaving them literature on why this is so stupid and wrong,” she bellowed into my chest.
“Now, baby doll, how did you like it when your friend said that there was something wrong with your hair?” my husband asked, leaning down and stroking her remaining curly-fry dreads.
“I see your point,” Sadie sighed. She twirled the straight strand, while giving us her adorable pondering pout.
“Daddy, could you shave it down like, Aunt Felicia?” My sister-in-law had just gone through a few rounds of preventative chemotherapy after a massive brain aneurism. Sadie insisted we visit her every day.
“Why, honey bun?” I asked in shock.
“Because that’s what I choose.” She smiled, with her father’s gapped-tooth grin. She then insisted we donate her “good hair” to kids in need. I worried about what the kids at school would say/do, but I kept forgetting that she was a lot stronger than I was at her age. While I would cry into my journal of sappy poetry every time a group of girls picked on me, she would “get…that…dirt off her shoulder” and outshine them in every subject, sport, and club. She would make friends with every one they made fun of, and sooner or later, she was part of the brand new minority majority. The only people that actually had a problem with her hair cut were the uptight, gender polarizing teachers. When it was brought up at PTA meeting I just laughed and said,
“What? She can’t rock the Barrack?” Considering most of the parents at this magnet middle school were card carrying liberals, they all got real quiet. My husband and I high fived each other under the desks. She wore her hair like that the rest of middle school.
The summer before high school we bought her a cellphone. At first, we thought she had joined the texting hive mind of her generation, but it turned out that she was writing her own blog and creating a photo journal. Whenever her friends would try to text her she would send them a photograph to represent her responses.
“Um, honey, I am going to need you to stop sending your friends pictures of dog butts,” I said to her, during a mandatory parenting pow-wow.
“Well, they send me illogical stuff all the time,” she said, scrolling down her phone and showing me a sea of text talk. As an English professor and a writer, I wanted to fist bump her, but being a parent means sometimes you got to choke that shit back for the sake of the collective parental authority. Plus, I found speaking to other parents to be so incredibly tiresome, and it only served to aggravate my own well developed sense of introversion.
“Be that as it may, send a different pic, or I’ll have to cancel your line,” I said, holding up a magazine of famous female icons of the 1900s. She grabbed it and began looking for inspiration. She began creating her own memes. My favorite was Eartha Kitt dressed as Cat Woman and under it was written You, sir, are a Cat-tastrophe!
High school came with the prospect of dating. I wasn’t as upset about it as my husband. I guess all fathers start to believe they have to play the vagina goalie when their little girls start to up their bra-sizes and make-up quantities. My husband said,
“It’s our job to keep her off the pole.” Then, I would paraphrase Camille Pagila’s famous line about how strippers are sexual conquers, and it is the men who are truly being exploited.
“I forgot you took Feminist Studies in Literature,” he sighed.
“But still, just make me happy and agree to this,” he continued, watching her head to the bus stop on that first day of freshman year.
“Go it, no stripper poles!” I laughed and playfully saluted him. The next day, Sadie and I, went out and bought a tether ball set and set up the pole in the front yard. This would always be our special spot to talk about all the birds and the bees’ related issues. We even sent her father a picture at work of both of us hanging off the pole with a message that read Always be specific! He was not amused. The best part was when we went to buy the thing at Sports Authority. The cashier kept starring at us like we were planning to somehow hide the thing under our skirts and race out of there.
“Um, excuse me, are you adopted?” The cashier finally asked my daughter. Sadie, without even a hesitation, replied,
“Nope, this honkey kidnapped me,” and we both ran giggling out of the store with our shared pole. She even did my Italian woman eye roll, which assured me she was most definitely mine. The first time we practiced with the tether ball set, I gave her the same sex talk my mother gave me.
“Listen, Sadie, I am going to tell you the same thing my mother told me. Do not trust a boy to bring any sort of birth control. You have to handle it.”
“Why? Don’t they have a lot to lose now-a-days too? I mean the slides they showed us last year had an awful lot of sick looking dicks on them.” I muffled a laugh, and tried to keep my game/parenting face on.
“True, but I hate to sound cliché, and I’ll even put a quarter in hackneyed writing jar, but it is better to be safe than sorry.”
“Didn’t the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s raise awareness in men. Plus, there is this recent surge in Syphilis in major urban areas,” Sadie replied, referring to that sign we passed every time we headed into downtown Miami. It sparked her biology paper for the spring semester.
“All valid points, but still, I need you to be smart and be safe. The moment you find yourself in a serious relationship with a boy I need you to come to me, and we will get you birth control pills and a condom multipack.”
“Be smart and be safe? Wow, I think you need to put two dollars in the jar. That was actually the title of a section in that safe sex slide show they made us watch,” she laughed. I hit the ball in her direction and sighed,
“Unfortunately, this subject is hard to talk about without being pedestrian. So, do you have any questions?” She hit it back and asked,
“What if I get involved with a girl?”
“Then, I’ll have to update my safe sex repertoire a bit, but I will have no problem with it.”
“What about dad?”
“I don’t know, and this is the last one I swear, we will cross that bridge when we come to it,” I laughed.
“Wow! That is straight off the cob corny.”
“Yeah, but on serious note, do you have any other questions?” She spiked the ball in my direction again.
“If I get pregnant will you disown me like one of those Looney Tune Lifetime movie moms?”
“No, we will get through it and explore every choice together,” I said, smacking it back.
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Dad’s freaking out isn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that a normal dad thing?” I thought back to my own father, before I answered her. The only time he seemed to be interested in my love life was when he found out I was dating a black man. I remember my mother having to warn me that my father was a racist. I didn’t want to believe it, but then again, I also didn’t want to believe that he cheated on my mother a year later. In addition, to the list of things I didn’t want to believe was the day he sat across from me at a steakhouse and accused me of dating a black man just to get back at him for indulging in the long standing Italian tradition of having a mistress.
“For your information, I was dating him a whole year before I found out you were a pig,” I hissed. Then, he attempted to appeal to my sense of logic, which was humorous because the only way that would have worked is if we were living in the 1950s and my mother hadn’t raised me with a “One Love” Bob Marley mentality.
“Why would you give yourself, and any possible future children for that matter, such an unnecessary hurtle?” He asked, without even flinching. I was aghast and immediately tried to figure out if there was any way my mom may have lied about this man being my father. Unfortunately, I was staring at all my physical traits all wrapped up in a racist red ribbon. I couldn’t even find the words to respond. I just let the obvious be my defense.
“You’re ignorant and apparently living in the wrong time period,” I said, signaling for the check. Sadie never got to meet him. Not because he refused to see his biracial grand-daughter, but because along with being a racist, he was also balancing three different mental disorders that he refused to seek treatment for, and he finally succumbed to them by ending his own life. Sadie was born a year and a day later. I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet with her, so I just replied,
“Let’s just say he is taking it better than most.” She nodded and then suggested we go out for post-game sushi.
High school came with a flash bang period of discovery for Sadie. She figured out that she loved to go to spoken word poetry slams and cosplay like a boss. She loved to draw blood in her self-published action/romance manga and on the Soccer field. She loved high stakes poker and to poke at the establishment by attending every protest rally ever. In school, she got just as many detentions for smoking out the girl’s bathroom as she did A’s. Her rowdy ruff moments began to die down in junior year when her Rastafarian sweet heart, Harley, insisted that they buckle down, so they could both get into either Harvard or Berkeley. They wanted a fifty-fifty shot at a trendy East or West coast twenties lifestyle. I found that many of her generation that sprouted up in South Florida were tired of the touristy vibe and the temperature and wanted out. I, however, couldn’t help but occasionally bring up the scholarships available to them if they stayed every time I brought snacks to their study sessions in our Ernest Hemingway themed den. A shameless maneuver, I know, but the mom juices are always on tap and my secret flavor of the day was orange.
Harley seemed like a beautiful person. They met at a Hugs not Hate peace rally in downtown Ft. Lauderdale. They never met up to that point because Harley’s grandmother homeschooled her. She was afraid of the majority making her have a minority mentality. She only lived three streets over from us in Hollywood. Her mother died in a car accident. The other driver never stopped and neither did her grief afflicted father. He dropped her off at his mother’s house and drove himself into a bottle of Barbancourt and then into an algae covered canal. Harley always told people that her father was part of a larger ecosystem when they brought it up; he was forever expanding and soaking up Jah’s sweet, sweet sunshine.
My husband was a little a shocked when he found out about Harley.
“So our daughter’s a lesbian?” he asked, watching them in the den from the kitchen.
“She never said that,” I said, heating up pizza rolls.
“What did she say?”
“That’s she’s in love,” I said, setting the timer.
“Do you think it’s a phase?”
“Were we?” I said, wrapping my arms around him.
“No, I guess not,” he said, kissing my forehead.
“My mom and the rest of my family are going to throw a royal bitch fit,” he sighed.
“Is this the same woman, and I am quoting you hear, ‘that beat the black off you?’”
“Yeah,” he sighed. His back was a patch work quilt of belt, switch, and extension cord scars.
“Plus, your half-siblings on your father’s side don’t even acknowledge your existence because they blame you for their father leaving their mom. I believe they call you the ‘break up baby,’” I continued.
“Yeah,” he sighed again.
“If it makes you feel any better, my father would have been a total nut bag about it too, if he still had a pulse,” I said, pretending to console him.
“Yeah, but he would have been more pissed off at the fact that Harley’s black,” he laughed.
“True, and he would have thrown a dozen white girls at her hoping one would stick,” I added. He looked at them again. Harley was letting her dark chocolate hands intertwine with Sadie’s as they both hummed along to their favorite song and read their math books. Sadie was smiling to herself like she had just figured out why every X had a Y and how nothing could ever be greater than or equal to this sweet as pie squared moment. I knew that smile.
“Well, that’s it then! I declare that anyone that can make her smile like that is straight up Gucci and a God sent,” he said, checking on the pizza rolls. I had a habit of burning things. I secretly suspected it was my inner 2nd wave feminist subconsciously rebelling against the stereotype that a kitchen is a woman’s place. My husband, being a classically trained chef, just believed that I had no real sense of smell.
“You know we can totally hear you guys, right?” Sadie finally said.
“Yeah, and people your age should probably refrain from overdosing on slang,” Harley giggled. My husband and I both looked at each other like we did when my mother busted in on us getting a little too frisky, while studying our anatomy when we were supposed to be studying history.
“Plus, don’t worry, I plan to take her name. I’m old fashion like that,” Harley snickered.
“I’m going to wear a tux!” Sadie added. After that, both of us retreated to the outside patio with the stark realization that this generation was better at the art of snark than us.
Senior year came with matching sea foam prom dresses and full scholarships to Berkeley. I want to tell you that they went on to become established authors and Civil Rights attorneys. I want tell you that I have a flock of grandchildren to awe with my stories of magical dancing possums and wise cracking butterflies. I want tell you that my husband spoils them rotten with enough homemade cookies to send them all into insulin shock, but I can’t do that.
Sadie is my maybe child. A few days after graduation, Harley and Sadie broke up. I found her sobbing over a picture of them at Miami Comic Con. Sadie was a gender bending Joker and Harley was a pin-up version of her comical/homicidal namesake. Sadie rejected her acceptance letter and went to community college to cool off. However, she went too cold and stopped eating regularly, making friends, and just being my Sadie.
“It was just her first love,” everyone kept saying to me.
“She’ll get over it,” my husband said, making all her favorite sushi rolls to sate her. The California, crab, and salmon rolls went untouched and returned back from her room with a note that read,
I’m full of other salty things like broken promises and forgotten class rings. I knew we were in trouble then because she always avoided lyrical/love poetry. She use to call it emotional dumping.
“Do you think we should try therapy?” I asked my husband, after reading him the note.
“What? Over a break up? Please, she just needs time,” he said. My mother and every other woman with a uterus and two rusty cents said the same thing. A few weeks into her second semester, she finally told me what happened with Harley.
“She said, that she didn’t want to go to Berkley in a relationship. She wanted to be free to socialize, free to experiment, and free of everything the reminded her of South Florida and the past,” she whimpered.
“Even you?” She nodded and drew a heart in the air.
“I thought I was her future, mom. What happened?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes love is full of maybes, but there is one definite thing here, Sadie, and it is that you are loved by me and your father and you will love again.”
“Wow, so…cliché,” she said with a spirted laugh. Looking back on it, I think that laugh was more for me than for her. I honestly thought maybe she would be my Sadie again. However, she always was my slippery little prima madonna. She could trot the boards better than most well-seasoned Broadway alumni. She had the whole audience at the community theater believing that she really was Joseph in her technicolored dream coat. Her theater teachers begged her to pursue it in college, but Sadie would always tell them she would just have to forward that heavenly call to voicemail. This is why I didn’t trust her story about Harley. She wasn’t the type of teen to lie, but I knew her and this story hung too well together and sounded like one of her romance/action manga scripts. I went cyber snooping and phone diving, while she was asleep. I found on a friend’s social media website one of her memes. It was Harley texting Sadie, while making out with a preppy-looking white boy. I guess she didn’t know that one of Sadie’s friends was behind her at that particular pep rally. Sadie must have been behind the scenes helping the art club set-up for the parade. Pasted into the shot was a picture of a young Diana Ross with a full-blown afro and the words I Will Survive. I use to sing that to Sadie in the car when she was little. I called it the ultimate break-up hymn. I told my husband and he said that we should wait, until she told us the truth. I knew he was right, and I didn’t want to be “that parent.” You know, the one who played PI and then rubbed it in their offspring’s face.
At the beginning of summer, she told us that her art class was going to Key West on a gallery crawl. My husband and I were elated. Maybe our Sadie was starting to come back into frame and focus, and maybe, make new friends.
“We’ll talk to her about transferring over to a state school when she gets back.” My husband beamed, watching from the window as she loaded up her car. It was a 1970 fully restored purple-people-eater-colored Plymouth Hemi Barracuda. It had a small unicorn horn for a hood ornament and a school of rainbow fish swimming around on the back.
“We should ease into it. Maybe, wait until next year. Two years at a community college will almost guarantee her admission. That’s what many of my creative writing students do down in Miami,” I said, wrapping my hands around his trunk-like waist. He then playfully pulled me into his branchy biceps. I always found his sheer size to be so reassuring. He was so tall and what he liked to call “chef skinny.” Whenever he would hold us, Sadie and I, would always pretend like we were in some ancient hollowed out tree.
“Alright…alright, but we can’t coddle her forever,” he sighed.
“I know, but I feel this is a very delicate time in her life. Harley, meant more to her than just a first love. I mean you were my first, and if anything ever happened to you or we broke up, I think I would have been just as hurt or even worse.”
“I know,” he said, holding me tighter.
“I think we should really consider therapy. Maybe, bring it up with her when she gets back,” I whispered.
“I think you may be right,” he said.
“Right about what?” Sadie said, suddenly entering the room.
“Nothing,” we both said at once.
“You two, always so synced up,” she giggled, running up to us and merging into our hug. After a while, she pulled away.
“Call as soon as you get to the Key Lime Inn. I have the number, so don’t make me stalk you in front of your friends,” I said, kissing her forehead. I couldn’t help but overemphasize the word “friends.”
“Watch your speed limit,” my husband suddenly interjected, trying to camouflage my over parenting blunder.
“Oh, dad, I’m not little miss lead foot, like mom,” she laughed.
“Hey, respect your elders,” I said, flicking her on the nose.
“Well, I’m off,” she said, heading for the door.
“We love you,” my husband and I both said.
“Later days!” she said, walking into the light.
“Later days?” My husband repeated, turning to me.
“It’s from an anime she likes called Robotic; Notes,” I laughed.
“How did I get such a dorky family,” he chuckled.
“You know you love it,” I said with a wink. The day went on, and we got a phone call from her when she reached The Conch Republic. I even made her put the professor on the phone to confirm everything was all aces and no spades.
“You know you’re paranoid, right?” My husband laughed from the kitchen. He was making a Key Lime Pie in honor of Sadie’s departure.
“I can’t help it! There is a reason parenting and paranoia both start with P.” I said, flipping through the channels and landing on the anime channel. Sadie’s reference made me want to binge. I did find it odd that she was quoting one of the more tragic characters. The mysterious older sister who was almost responsible for the end of the world and an intergenerational giant robot smack down.
The weekend went by fast and she would send me the occasional text and corky picture of her and some wild art. I did notice that some of her classmates were in the background, but none of them ever posed with her. My husband said that it was because they were still in that awkward early friendship stage, and I was being paranoid, again. However, I remembered how easy it was for her to make friends when she was younger. This had to be on purpose.
I dialed her number Sunday morning fully prepared to confront her on the topic. It went directly to voicemail. She never came home that night. The next morning, we called her professor and she told us that she left with all the other students.
“How did she seem?” I asked.
“She seemed well enough. Although, I did notice that she was always by herself this weekend. I actually caught her on the phone having what seemed to be a very heated conversation with someone out in the hall at the hotel. Who’s Harley?” With that, I hung up the phone and immediately called the police. They said she would have to be gone for more than three days before anything could be done. They were also quick to remind me that Sadie was an adult now. However, no mother wants to believe that an umbilical cord is just a physical thing. I convinced my husband that this was more than my usual hysterics, and we went searching for her on The Overseas Highway.
After the third day, the police finally had to admit that I was more than just an “empty nester” talking crazy. Their search began and my husband and I, who had been doing nothing but aimlessly driving around from key to key, crashed out at a small hotel in Big Pine Key.
“When we got married, you said you didn’t want kids. Why?” my husband asked, cradling me in the dark. I didn’t answer. I just laid there thinking about cats, cradles, and the toxic silver lining of my own faulty genetic spoon.
Around 8:00 am the next day, we received a phone call from the police that her car had been spotted and possibly involved in a wreck outside of No Name Key. My husband and I both looked at each other with a haunting realization.
“Torpedo Juice,” we both shouted, grabbing the keys and heading for the door. Harley had gotten Sadie into Tim Dorsey novels. Their shared favorite was Torpedo Juice. It took place in No Name Key. The main character, Serge, was a sporadic serial killer/amateur Florida historian who takes up residence in this particular locale, which just so happens to be home to equally colorful and crazy natives. The girls had always talked about getting matching tattoos of the book cover on their shoulders. I could see her wanting to visit the No Name Pub she had written a poem about. Harley and Sadie also loved to act out scenes between Serge and his equally complicated/crazy new wife, Molly.
We arrived at a broken guard rail near the bridge connecting the highway to the anonymous and quite infamous key. Pieces of purple car debris were scattered in the shallow marsh below.
“Where is she?”
“We are looking. The tide has washed away a lot of things. For now, try to stay behind the barricades,” a female officer shouted. They never found her, but what they did find was a painting she had done in Key West gently placed at the side of the rode across from where they said the car went over. It was her from the back. There was a torpedo with a shark grin on her shoulder and a nuclear orange bandana in her hair blowing in a frozen frenzy upward into the sky.
My Sadie wasn’t gone, she wasn’t dead, and she wasn’t missing. My Sadie lives in the transcendent maybes that all art forms and babies promise.
Christina Fulton graduated from Florida Atlantic University with her MFA in fiction. She is currently teaching at Miami Dade College. Her book Dead Ends is available on Amazon. Her short story “Key Weird” was in a recent issue of Toad Suck, and her piece “RiverMonsters” was in The Chaffin Journal. Two of her poems were in the fall 2015 edition of Open Minds Quarterly. Her creative nonfiction pieces “Spiderman and The Old Man,” “Manahawkin Vice,” and “Do You Remember?” have been in The Scarlet Leaf Review, The Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and The Route Seven Review.