Every Sunday in the summer the white people opened up their pool to the neighborhood Negroes in a spasm of royal charity. The charge led by a came-over-on the-Mayflower family headed by a white matriarch with hypnotically gleaming dental work. So proud, marinating in her benevolence, smug in her social daring in a block dotted with tenured Kennedy liberals bloviating about the start of the Vietnam War at backyard barbecues. On torrid days when the heat, funk and clamor of whiny little kids cooped up indoors became unbearable, black folk who lived less than a mile away came by car in cautious watchful groups. The white people’s pool titillated year round, beckoning from behind a blond wooden fence with no peepholes. Out of all the girls Hy and Taryn had the dingiest one piece bathing suits, Gospel Army hand-me-downs, baggy at the ass, drooping with funereal flowers. They stayed in the sun, lapping it up, while most of the other dark-skinned girls flitted along the margins of the yard, coveting the cool, the dollops of broken shade like manna from hell. Boys of all shades glided by undaunted, un-chastened by the withering, policing looks of adults fanning themselves on the sides of the pool or rigid upright in the lawn chairs the white people had arrayed around the grass in a tidy circle of containment. At first their uncle sneered at the community invite. Raging at how the prettified peckerwoods calculated down to the penny to make them look like good Christian humanitarians when they were all lynchers crouching behind soft masks of benevolence. But first the heat of their small house broke him, driving him out like a tic on fire. Then, the opportunity to carouse and gossip with the other jobless men, to trot out his vocabulary and college degree when a woman his dick popped up for came into his orbit. Then, it was the magic of the spare keys; throwing them down at the pool’s bottom for Hy’s trained seal’s act of retrieval, dangling ice cream at the corner store for a pinch, a copped feel, murmuring how beautiful Taryn was in comparison to the other black “nappy-headed” ones without the common sense to cloister themselves like God intended.
He was the first one to turn her away from God. The concept dead, burnt to a raw crisp in her head after she'd gotten home early from a track meet and seen him staggering out of their room goggle-eyed, startled to see her, his belt buckle slapping against the starched slacks he wore to the fake interviews at important business establishments crammed with passing Negroes paralyzed in fear of detection. Taryn reeked of him; the foul dime store cologne that he simmered in post-rape, saturating the bathroom as he sat on the toilet reading Reader’s Digest melodramas after a long hard day of idleness, the eloquent freeloader who wore their grandmother down to a penniless nub with each new loan for his brilliant inventions. The whole family mesmerized by his boy genius while their mother went to work every day mopping floors and emptying trash cans at Water and Power.
