As a girl I made lists. A student of high fashion and only if’s-- how to mimic pouty lips and a tousled fresh-from-bed head guaranteed to put you back in with a man
according to Cosmo mavens. My mom slipped Ebony under my bedroom door, where I mixed hot wax tricks for instant bare limbs. I wanted to be thin and beyond
recognition. To blend in with apple-blushed cheeks and hair-twirling fingertips. The white girls got the Science and P.E. teachers’ looks, “Isn’t she something." I wanted to cry
my way out of speeding tickets and into boys’ arms. Why wouldn’t mom make potatoes and sloppy joes instead of catfish and chitlins? I resolved to be like them. Number one: shave
armpits, number two: relax hair straight, curl and hitch the cascades in place with Still Life Spray. Mom said it’s a sin to get rid of what God gives.
You’re gorgeous!
The shocker was turning hip, the teenage goal to be unusual-- the girls called me unique. I was the other piece of the puzzle, the hottentot, my life
an exotic garden to walk through. I was so not like the other girls they knew, a complimentary ticket to get close, then I received invites for putt-putt and sleepovers. We were the only black family
on the block; when we moved in the neighbors brought bundt cakes and removed their shoes before entering. We were immigrants to a neighborhood of community associations and cul-de-sacs. Yes, we’d have to have them
over for dinner, then mom shut the door before asking me if they’d like her special: oxtail stew over grits. Only if, only if-- My mantra for a curse and a wish.
Chanda Wakefield is an MFA candidate (in poetry) at Cornell University. She was the recipient of a 2002 Walker Foundation scholarship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and was named a finalist for the 2002 Constance Saltonstall Artist Grant. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Hubbub, Sou'Wester, and Spoon River Poetry Review. She is currently an Associate Editor at Epoch Magazine and a Consulting Editor for Glimmer Train.
