See-Through Girls

Abstract

See-Through Girls Adrienne G. Perry (bio) We were girls you could see through. There was nothing extraordinary about us. Nothing supernatural like in a sci-fi freak show fantasy. We had thighs and torsos. Clavicles we could pinch. Boobs no bigger than a C cup until it came time for our monthlies. Wild: what non-brown, non-down folks might call the hair we teased and waxed into bushy plumes. Beneath that in-yo-face hair, what? Exquisite brains, lustrous as black pearls. Problem was, outside of family, most folks weren't checking for me and Aimee. Least not in that way. Professors? Nope. Classroom compatriots? Was that even a thing? No strangers on the downtown 1 train, no boyfriends or girlfriends. No roommates, no sweethearts. Nobody-knows-the-trouble-I-seen-but-Jesus kind of nobody. Sorry to say, but this state of affairs felt, you know, kind of inflected, kind of, like, racial. And so tired, y'all. One-hundred-fifty years after Emancipation. Forty-six after Loving v. Virginia, and most white Americans were blissfully unaware, isolated in their brains. White America glanced over its shoulder at a freakishly abridged history—say, at the civil rights movement or at the Black president born of a white mamma that it had, mind you, elected and reelected—and that America rolled its eyes. Hard. That America thought, "Get over it," unaware that it had had this thought, or that such thoughts crossed and recrossed its subconscious mind, undetected, on the regular. But let's go back. Get over what, exactly? Get over it how? To keep from crying, Aimee and I used to laugh. Once we caught on for real for real, we'd laugh, strolling down Broadway shouting at the sleepers, "Excuse you! Excuse you!" until our voices were raw as ground round. We were like vague apparitions—ghosts to them as they to us. Earbuds shoved deep, steady working on their widow's humps, noses practically giving head to their phones, these sleepers stared through the two goddesses on their path like we were a mist off the Hudson River. Funny at times, but other times it stung to have a white woman, Upper East Side face melted by plastic surgery, gaze blankly into the negative space above our shoulders, for we were but a smudge on her Dior sunglasses. And can I speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me? Has my maker endowed me with enough love and trust to do that? What do I—we—owe you, and what do we owe ourselves? Alright, I'll say it, because sometimes, y'all, it felt like our people, Black folks, could come just as fucked up. Do I long for acceptance? Of course. Do I sound pitiful? Maybe so, but when sisters breezed by us on those Brooklyn and Harlem streets, craning their necks to avoid our smiles and hellos and solidarity nods, as if Aimee and I were no more than two light-skinned saditty bitches—well, it was like a punch in the ovaries. [End Page 5] I've discovered there is an infinite number of ways to be rendered, if not invisible, insignificant by the very folks from whom you crave and from whom you expect a teaspoon of recognition. The whole mess has been a depressing education. Still, our "close encounters" with white women felt different. They stoked rage. The cure for a brush with such ignorance? Sulk to one of our Barnhart dorm rooms. Wring and beat body-length pillows to Lady Gaga. Pretend those pillows are the brittle necks of those precious, unconscious, snowy-white hens. Typically, our smack downs left me and Aimee feeling a little bit yucky, a little bit guilty, so we would remind ourselves over cheese puffs and mugs of steaming cocoa that these bitches weren't like the white folks, and for sure not the Black folks, in our families. They weren't like our mothers and fathers, uncles, nanas, cousins, and aunties. Were they? When the world is a muddle, you've got to make sense of it for yourself. So, eventually, Aimee and I decided...