I’d never manage to keep it untangled on my own. It was one of those things white mothers of black children learn the hard way once and then tend to remember. Just before I’d left, she had gotten one of her undergraduates to braid my hair in tight pink-lotioned cornrows, so recent they still itched and pulled at my scalp.
“Mommy can’t do my hair,” I said. “A girl from her school did it for her.”
“I swear, even on a different continent, that woman—When you go upstairs, take them out. You’re a perfectly decent-looking child, and for whatever reason your mother sends you here looking like a little hoodlum.”
“I’m wearing pink,” I said, more in my own defense than in my mother’s. I had dressed myself, and Aunt Claire had driven me to the airport: my parents had left for Rio the day before. My grandmother considered my argument, evaluated my hot-pink shorts as if prepared to object to them as well, but before she could, my cousin Allison came bounding down the stairs to hug me, blond pigtails flying behind her. When she threw her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek, she smelled strongly of sour-apple Jolly Ranchers and women’s perfume that she later confessed she’d stolen from her mother.
“I think you look nice,” whispered Allison. She took me upstairs to the room we were sharing for the summer, and then spent the next half-hour helping me undo each braid, my hair spiraling out into tight, disheveled curls. Allison had been my parent’s ace in the hole, the only thing that kept me from trying to secretly squeeze myself into one of their suitcases so they’d have to take me to Brazil with them. Her parents were spending the summer on a Caribbean cruise, and my uncle had suggested to my mother that since she’d be at my grandmother’s all summer anyway, it might be nice for us to spend some time together. Allison was my playmate at awkward family gatherings, the person I made faces at across the table at Christmas dinner the one year we’d all gathered at her parents’ house in Orlando. (It was the last holiday my mother had agreed to spend with her own mother. I’d heard her on the phone last Christmas a year later, saying almost angrily, No, we’re not coming. Last year she said she was dying, and then she didn’t.)
Allison made those first few weeks at my grandmother’s house bearable, almost pleasant. I’d never had a backyard before, but at my grandmother’s we had an acre of greenery. There was a lawn of impossibly bright grass, landscaped with flowering hydrangea bushes and neatly clipped ornamental shrubbery. Half a mile down the block, the manicured lawns of my grandmother’s neighborhood gave way to almost tropical lushness: hanging crape myrtles with vivid pink flowers and twisted, many-stemmed trunks, tall oaks brushed with Spanish moss. When we followed the gravel path off the main road, we found ourselves at a lake about a mile wide; it took us the better part of a day to circle its swampy edges. We shaded ourselves from the thick summer heat by resting underneath one tree after another. The first time we went to the lake, our grandmother admonished us never to do it again, screamed at us that we had worried her by running off and the lake was a dangerous place for little girls to be alone. It went in one ear and out the other: we were already in love with what we’d found there.
It wasn’t that my grandmother didn’t try. She woke us up one morning with the enthusiastic promise that we’d be going swimming. She had laid out clothes for us, and though usually when we went to the pool at home I climbed into the car wearing nothing but my swim-suit and jellies, I wanted my grandmother to be happy with me, and wore the yellow sundress she’d picked out. Allison’s dress was blue, which matched her eyes, and the bow my grandmother put in her hair after she brushed it. My grandmother tried to brush my hair, too, but between the muggy, humid summer air and the ineptitude of my attempts to control it, it had turned itself into a tangled baby afro, one that Allison’s fine bristled brush did nothing for. That morning my grandmother set out to comb it into pigtails, but after I began to cry from the pain of her yanking on my scalp