How’d she get so bright and beaming, anyway?

Was I in elementary school still? Middle school? I don’t know. I want to skew this younger to give myself an excuse, but I truly do not remember how old I was. I couldn’t have been in high school, because it was a singing event.

School auditorium. Concert — “choir” I guess? I was never in any officially designated extra-curricular choir, so it was in whatever grade is young enough where everyone gets up on the risers and sings or pretends to sing, whether they want to or not.

In later years I would be in band, and would take some pride in those concerts, up until 10th grade when I lost motivation and stopped practicing and therefore stopped being the best trumpet player in my grade. But I remember nothing whatsoever about this particular choral extravaganza, except what my stepmother said to me afterwards.

“There was this girl on stage that would make a great girlfriend for you! She had this bright, outgoing smile, she seemed so energetic, shining...”

Really? Who was it? Like what did she look like?

“She was over near the right side, a couple rows down from you, in a magenta dress, a black girl...”

I wish I knew how to write what my stepmom thought when she saw my reaction to that. That would be an interesting POV. All I can say is what I think I must have looked like. Dumbfounded may be too strong a word. Or too dumb a word, or too complex a word. What’s the word for partially realizing that you never thought of something a certain way before, but it never would have occurred to you that your capacity for thinking of the thing was limited, until now, at the same moment as you’re realizing that there’s reasons why you never thought that way, and you sense that there’s something fucked up about those reasons, but you don’t have the perspective or the vocabulary to articulate any of this, so you just kind of sit there with half a dumb smile on your dumb face, before the pause ends and so-called normal life resumes?

It doesn’t matter now, because life does resume, and I know better now. So I guess normal gets redefined by these little ruptures. Is that a form of punctuated equilibrium? Probably not, but I love mangling science analogies.

But do I know better now? Or do I just recover faster?

On a practical level it wouldn’t have mattered either way. What my stepmom was suggesting would have been impossible regardless, because I didn’t have or even pursue “girlfriends” at whatever age I was at the time. And I’m not sure she was even literally suggesting such a relationship. I think it was more of a way for her to say something about someone she was impressed by, while connecting it to me as a way of expressing what she thought of me, too, which in an oblique way was complimentary, and also possibly an irenic bid for inclusion in a certain aspect of my life.

Perhaps it was also a way for her to communicate her own values, or reinforce them in her own mind.

But why the pause and the dumb half smile on my part? Because in 6th grade it never would have occurred to me to have a girlfriend who wasn’t white. My elementary school had maybe three or four non-white kids in it, which was one reason why the switch to 7th grade was such a shock — almost every kid in town, regardless of which neighborhoods and therefore which elementary schools had incubated us, went to one school for 7th grade. It was what we referred to as middle school, and it was the first time some of us privileged little twatters had the occasion to walk the same halls as actual black kids who didn’t talk like us or walk or act like us, and whom (remember this was the very early 80s) some of us (not me) still casually referred to by vulgar slurs, largely without fear of consequences in “polite” society.

Then again, in 6th grade I don’t know that I fully understood what my relationship with the word “girlfriend” could or should or would be, anyhow. I’m picturing a majestic vulture, arcing way overhead, its mythos and legend being misunderstood by my picayune burgeoning literary mind. Words are like that. Days, decades, or centuries old, they swoop into your view as if brand new to you on any given day. For example, today’s the first day I consciously remember coming into contact with the word “irenic,” and now that I’ve seen it I want to take a picture of it, send it in a group chat with my kids, say, look! Look at what I saw perched in a sycamore by the river! How my life is picturesque! How even now, here, in this blasted reality, at my comical age, I can still feel like an explorer!

I can still see the face of the girl in question, can still picture it from the point of view of my stepmother in the audience (gym? auditorium? lunchroom in auditorium mode?). Once my stepmother brought it to my attention, I realized I agreed: that girl’s smile — her brilliance — was remarkable. And that realization brought with it the dissonance: why did acknowledging her radiance feel weird? Why was my provincial sense of “other” more prominent in my perception than the universal sense of “beautiful”?

How’d she get so bright and beaming, anyway? I wonder what her life was like, what her family was like, what her days were like in our conservatively circumscribed town. I was too protected and nervous to wonder about that then. The “go back to school but with all the knowledge you have now” fantasy is OK, but how about “go back to school with the capacity for human curiosity you’re still working on”? That seems more enticing.

Let’s do it. Next time we step out of the house, let’s also step out of our cloying inner tribe, our phalanx of assumptions. Be cool about it if you wish, pretend it’s effortless. Maybe it is for you, I don’t know. But it’s OK if it isn’t. I heard someone say recently, “You don’t have to be superhuman. You don’t have to be subhuman either. You can just be human.” Good reminder. Here’s to the next time someone casually says something that fully discombobulates my comfortable perception about how the world works, who all lives in it, and how I’m allowed to interact with them.

I’ll see you out there!