Touissant’s invitation. His family’s refined voices scared her more than any thug: listening to his mother and father and twin sisters speak with all the smooth and intellectual grace of the world, she knew that she wasn’t close to ready for college. It was too much of a leap, too much of a change. Her body didn’t bend quite right when she danced, her words didn’t sound sophisticated when she spoke.
“Do you like the campus?” the first sister asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you consider any private universities?” the second sister wanted to know.
Erycha noted the USC sweatshirts that both twins sported. Their enviable chests made each letter stand out as if embossed upon the fabric. They had both highlighted their hair Trojan red, which more than hinted at their preference in the private vs. public question. She had seen both these girls before, locally, though she couldn’t fix a time and place to the twins. She figured they were dancers like herself, probably better dancers than herself. Maybe she had seen them dance, maybe wished she could hold a position the way they held themselves and wished she could move as they moved.
“I was always wantin to be here,” she answered, neglecting to mention that Riverside was the only university that pledged to pay her way for four full years. “Ever since I was lil,” she added. “Little.”
“Where are you from?” The mother asked, light and sharp at the same time.
Erycha answered that she was from Highland and thought she noticed the woman’s expression brighten a little.
“We live over by the new church. Where’s your parents’ house?” the lady asked.
“Round there,” Erycha lied. “We live nearby,” she said more properly. “East Highland’s so small, right?”
The lady laughed and nodded.
Erycha stole a quick glance at Touissant. He looked stunned, or hurt, as if it mattered that she had lied to his momma. She knew that lying went contrary to every book of rules from the Bible to the Student Catalog handed out during orientation and was obviously wrong before God, but doubted that it mattered before Mrs. Freeman. Better to just tell the lady what she wanted to hear. That she had two caring parents, that her life was good and getting better.
She kept on lying to Mrs. Freeman and her husband all lunch long: yes, she’d always loved all forms of dance, especially ballet. She had never lost faith in her talent, had always been supported by her folks, had always made a way out of no-way, like black folk know how to do, she quipped. She played her black card in just the way she knew boojie black people like their black cards to be played, displaying it in order to describe her pride, determination and success, but never her poverty, anger or loneliness in a world full of black folk who never gave a damn about her unless she was braiding their hair or spreading her legs. She even loved writing about dance, she told the Freemans. She was so committed to it, she might get a PhD in the field one day.
Mr. and Mrs. Freeman seemed to like all this. The twin sisters smiled at Erycha with twin precious approving gazes. Touissant just seemed bewildered by everything he was hearing; his fork stayed in his mouth the whole meal.
Erycha started to realize just how good a liar she could be. So good she didn’t have to think about the lies before she said them. All she had to do, in fact, was say anything that she wasn’t actually thinking. Her true thoughts were a little too strange for public disclosure. All lunch long, she stayed thinking about Josephine Baker. Queen Josephine, the baddest lil black girl dead or alive. What would Josephine do if she were ever tricked into lunch with a bunch of boojie black folk? Would she figure a way to gloriously devastate the ceremony and expose the class struggle beneath the bed of lies being told? Would she manipulate the young man who was trying so hard for her? Or would she be the nice girl, smile, do right, say right, and save the real talk for another time? Josephine might do just about anything. After all, Erycha had read where the woman once walked her cheetah along the Champs-Elysées. A black girl controlling a big dangerous cat. Everybody staring her way. Erycha knew that it would take some doing before she could bend nature and folks to her will like that.
She kept on with the pretty lies about a different world.
When lunch was done, the twins went one way and the parents and Touissant another.
Erycha followed after the parents and Touissant, so as not to end up at an expensive private school. She got in the backseat next to Touissant. As the engine revved, she felt him lean into her the way she had leaned into him at orientation. “Were you lying to me or to them?” He whispered very quietly, almost too faint to hear.
Erycha was surprised by the question but took it in her stride. She was still impressed by just how easy it was to lie. She dug in her purse, found a pen and a large business card for a hair salon. The card had nothing written on the back.
to them
She handed over the card and looked at him, straight at his dishonest eyes.
He took the pen along with the card. Why?
they wanted the lie you wanted the lie
He looked into the blood spider explosions that were her eyes. That makes no sense.
yes it does
How?
you wouldnt understand.
Is your name even Erica?
erycha evans are you really a dancer?
Touissant knew she already knew the answer to that question. If she hadn’t figured him out at orientation, she surely had at lunch, when his parents went on and on about his goals in the fields of political science and later law school and local and state government. None of what he had going for him had anything to do with dance. And he had planned to tell her the truth anyway, sometime before the dancing started. Really, Touissant just didn’t understand why his not being a dancer would make her want to retaliate in kind. He had lied, but for a good cause. He was just trying to get closer to her.
No.
Erycha kept thinking about Josephine and her cat and that incredible walk she took. She imagined herself in that beautiful body. She was walking down that Paris street buck naked, the cheetah by her side. She had no leash for it, just her will. She was Josephine and Touissant and every other fronting, foolish brother she had ever known was the cheetah. She stopped and knelt and said something in French that made the cat stop, and she placed a diamond collar round its neck. All around her female-acting Frenchmen and their jealous wives watched her. She could hear each and every murmur. The Champs-Elysées was her campus and the people watching were an audience before which to perform. Everything in Erycha’s dream was the opposite of the real world, where she sat in a far corner of the banquet hall next to a boy who had straight-up lied to her about himself and to whom she had been lying ever since just for the hell of it. Nobody was watching them. Nobody knew they were at the campus. Their only connection was the false one that they had created in their conversations that day. In the fantasy, she strolled slow and naked down the street, her walk a dance, her nakedness a basic beautiful truth. In the fantasy, she didn’t have to worry about lies or class segregation or whether her grammar was completely proper. She spoke exquisite French in her dream.
The difference between dreams and lies dwindled as the night wore on.
