The Six Times of Alan Alejandro Varela (bio) All the other children were white. I considered leaving, using the tantrum-proof promise of ice cream as an exit strategy. Instead, I held my breath for 10 seconds, exhaled with intention—just as Alan always tells me to—and allowed Jules to wander off and play. In this regard, I’m unlike my husband, who thinks children should be left to interact with the world on their own terms and spends most of his playground-parenting lost in his phone, occasionally glancing at the exits. I’m too busy invoking ancestors and casting protective spells. But it’s been a couple of years now of parenting, and very few people on the playground have proven to be anything worse than casually horrid or vaguely racist. Which is probably why I let my guard down. This all took place three Fridays ago, at a small park in Manhattan—specifically, where Bank, Hudson, and Bleecker meet. The pristine tangle of primary colors was encircled by a ring of car traffic, chic boutiques, and restaurants that opened only for dinner. The neighborhood had become more upscale and less appealing in the 20 years since I’d known it primarily as a nighttime cruising ground: besotted kisses and furtive, moonlit hand jobs, most of which took place on the Bleecker side of the playground. Last month, however, there was none of that. What I remember was Jules wheeling around a rusty toy stroller that had been discarded. I recall, too, another stroller-pushing child of similar size and shape, but blonde and white. I remember feeling that everything was going smoothly enough for me to get lost in my email. I fear I’m being redundant, but this is as propitious a time as any to explain that my skin color, like that of Jules, sits on the spectrum of brown. I occupy a lighter nodule, a decidedly Central and South American mestizaje of the Indigenous-European variety. Jules, too, is a mix of identities, the most identifiable of which is Black—the ethno-racial-political category, not the absence of light. I bother to mention this at all because I’ve noticed on several occasions that this sort of phenotypic asymmetry within a family sows confusion, especially for the other guardians at the playground, who look around curiously, and sometimes with blatant alarm, whenever they don’t see a corresponding Black adult for Jules. Not in an Are you okay, honey? fashion, but more of a Who is guarding this unknown variable? fluster. [End Page 145] It doesn’t matter if I’m interacting with my baby in an unambiguous parent–child fashion, the other guardians stare (me, Jules, my face, Jules’s face, then mine again), searching for commonalities, desperate to understand or to prove. There’s no two ways about it: racial discordance unsettles people. And it often casts me as an unwitting eavesdropper. “This kid. . . .” blared a man in a sweater vest and dirty blond eyebrows a few feet away, before he caught himself and began again, but now in a hopeless, stakes-raising whisper. “This black kid just tried to jump Taylor and steal her stroller, but she wadn’t havin’ dat. Nuh-uh,” he said proudly and patois-y to his wife, a similarly handsome woman sitting beside him and breastfeeding their younger child beneath a white sheet decorated in cartoon rainbows. Then he dragged his hand through the air in a lazy, sass-less semicircle that ended with soft finger snaps. Whether the throwback pantomime was his misguided homage to Black women, gay men, or the resurgent era of drag queens is unknowable. What was clear was the way little Taylor’s father had manipulated the register of his voice to talk about Jules. It changed me. I detest physical violence—I caught a glimpse of a ufc match at the barber last week and I got woozy—but in that moment, I contemplated digging a grave in the sandpit for the whispering racist. In fact, it took every breathing and mindfulness exercise Alan had ever taught me to keep me on that park bench. It bears...