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BERNIE AND ME

Bernie-ism 18.1:

It is a privilege to be able to invent oneself. It is also a burden.

My big brother Bernard took great pains to learn how to talk Black. Street Black. Prophet Black. Angry Black. Which wasn't something you heard a lot of where we grew up. It started when his voice suddenly changed. One day, he spoke in the smooth tenor treble of a choir-boy angel, and the next he possessed the devilish bass of Barry White. Once he was blessed with that depth, Bernie culled some of the diction from our father's brilliant friend, Professor Lester Wright, and pulled the rest from Public Enemy. The result was stunning.

It pissed off our mom. "Talk like yourself, Bernie. Please," she'd say. If he was in a good mood, he'd touch the fingertips of one hand against the fingertips of the other and answer, "Mother Lynn, I am nobody but myself. Do I make you uneasy? Let's examine your fear." Pure Professor Lester. Perfector of charm. If he was in a bad mood, he'd just snarl, "Step off, bitch," and Mom would lean over the kitchen sink and cry into a dishrag. He shaved his head like Michael Jordan. He was a teenager. He had transformed.

When we were little, people remarked on two things about us.

The first thing was how we got along so well. Bernie and I never fought because I adored him too much. He told me once he thought we were the same person in two different bodies and that's why he'd never hurt me. It wasn't that he adored me back. It was that he considered me an extension of himself. I wasn't finished yet when I came. I came too fast and I left some of me behind. That was you. So you came afterwards to finish me up.

The second thing was that we didn't look black, although Bernie came closer: fuller lips, darker skin, flatter nose. Still, most people would guess Bengali or Brazilian when meeting him for the first time. Until his voice changed and they heard him speak. Then he would make more sense to them.

I remain a question mark. When people ask me what I am, which is not an everyday question, but one I get asked every day, I want to tell them about Bernie. I don't, of course. I just tell them what color my parents are, which is to say, my father is black and my mother is white.

People don't usually believe me. You look ______________ (fill in the blank) Puerto Rican, Algerian, Israeli, Italian, Suntanned, or maybe Like you Got Some Indian Blood, but you don't look like you got any Black in you. No way! Your father must be real light-skinned.

In fact, he isn't, but somehow in the pooling pudding of genes, our mom's side won out in the category of hair. And this is really what makes you black in the eyes of others. It's not the bubble of your mouth, the blood in your veins, the blackness of your skin or the Bantu of your butt. It ain't your black-eyed peas and greens. It's not your rhythm or your blues or your rage or your pride. It's your hair. The kink and curl of it, loose or tight, just so long as it resembles an afro. And ours didn't. That is why when Bernie shaved his head, he started to pass for the whole of one half of what he was. Even more than talking the talk, that was the act that did it for him.

My big brother Bernie is a vegetable now. Mom keeps him on a cot in the living room. Him and his wires and tubes and bags of fluid and breathing machines and the shit-and-piss pot. She gives him sponge baths three times a week. When I go down to visit, I wipe the dribble from his chin and I think about him dribbling basketballs. Before. Now he has burnt basketball skin. No hair at all (afro or otherwise). Half a face.

Bernie was tragic long before that, though, because he was too beautiful and because he was Bernard III. He was a legacy. His looks were more of a curse than a blessing, really. People just couldn't stop staring at him. Our mother put our father through grad school at Berkeley by pawning Bernie off as a child model. He had that third world poster-child appeal. That red-brown skin and those soupspoon mud-water eyes.

We still have Bernie, framed in a diaper ad that hangs in the upstairs bathroom. There's baby Bernie before I came along, a little brown buddha staring out at you over your morning crap, one fat fist raised next to his adorable face in a gesture of benediction or defiance, depending on how you look at it. I asked our mom to take it down after the accident because I thought it was tasteless. What with him having to wear diapers at night now as a grown man and all. That just made her sniffle and twist the plastic pearl buttons on her nightgown so I let it go.

But he was beautiful. The way a leopard is. Or twilight.

My father is black and my mother is white and my brother is a vegetable. When we were small the vegetable told me stories. The stories began when we moved from the West Coast to the East Coast. I remember elaborate stories under the blankets or in the back seat of the car on a long night trip, the highway winding before us, unfathomably long.

The highway is winding behind us. I am six and my brother is seven. We are driving cross-country from Oakland where kids like us are a dime a dozen, double dutching on asphalt and break dancing on cardboard dance floors under helicopter skies. Bernie and me in the back seat with the U-haul bumping behind, playing hock-a-loogie flip-the-bird to the cars in the lanes on our sides. Bernie and me and our ashy knees. Dad is zigzagging up and down America for our education instead of going in a straight line because that is what our dad is like. Only PBS and no Barbie dolls.

We stop in Salt Lake City and Bernie steals some salt peanuts for us to share.

"Here, Em," he says, and we're crunching them and tossing the shells on the ground. My dad says, "Where did you get those?" and Bernie says, "Huh?" My dad says take them back and Bernie says why, we already ate half. Mom says do it anyway because they're not yours and stealing is wrong, and Dad slaps Bernie full in the face and says:

"NO. The reason you don't steal is because that is exactly what they expect you to do."

Everyone in Salt Lake City is looking at us. They're flying kites over the windy lake. One is a dragon. One is a diamond. Bernie takes the peanuts back with five fingers on his face and my mother turns to my dad and she says to him: "I guess they expect to see you hitting your children too." She goes after Bernie and pets him like a puppy dog. She loves him best. I suck on a peanut shell until it turns soft on my tongue.

We stop at Mount Rushmore and Dad tells us about the big heads and Mom says, "Isn't that something?" Bernie says, "No. It would be something if you painted some clown faces on 'em and put a roller coaster in front."

And we all laugh because Bernie always makes us laugh.

We go to the Badlands and there is no one and nothing all around, like we are the last people on the earth. The clouds are like long white hair falling sideways. Dad tells us about Sitting Bull and the Sioux and the Ghost Dances and Bernie tells me he can see their ghosts dancing real slow over by the hill and I ask him do they have bows and arrows. He says, "No. They're crying."

We pass through Wisconsin to see Grammy Livy and Pops snoring through his nose in his armchair with the cigar ashing down his sweater and all Aunt Patty's kids on the walls in their first communion clothes, but not me and Bernie. Pops has a nose like a strawberry. His feet are battleships and his big toes poke through his socks. He wakes up and says, "Who are you, then?" Bernie says we're your grandkids, Pops, and Pops says there's only one way to prove it. "Can you hold your liquor?" "That's not funny," says our mom.

There is a mah-jongg box on the mantelpiece and we want to see inside but it's not for kids to touch. Grammy Livy has a pinchy mouth. She gives us all turkey and Wonderbread with margarine on it and Jell-O for dessert except it's called ambrosia salad because of the coconut snow on top and the baby oranges floating inside. She stares and stares at Bernie. Bernie asks her does he have a booger on his face. Nobody says much. Mom slams the door on the way out so hard the windows rattle.

"Did your dad smoke cigars?" Bernie asks our dad.

"No," says our dad. Our dad's mom and dad are dead.

"Did your Nan make Jell-O?" I ask.

"You'd catch her with her pants down sooner than you'd catch her making Jell-O. She knew how to cook food with flavor." Mom wacks Dad with her pocketbook. "Shut up, Bernard."

"All right, Lynn," he says, "but just because you know I'm right." He pats her on the behind and we all get back in the car. We drive by a metal rainbow in St. Louis. Bernie tells me look at the pot of gold at the bottom. I can't see it. All I see is a paper cup rolling in the wind. I pretend I can see it because I believe Bernie can.

We stop at a Bob's Big Boy in Arkansas and we sit at a table for twenty-five minutes and the waitress still isn't coming. We're hungry. Our mom says we should go but our dad says no, we stay. So we're staying.

Everyone in Bob's Big Boy is staring at us and when I stare back, they look at their hamburgers. Nobody is saying anything. It's like a library, only evil. My dad has a stone face like a Mount Rushmore man. His fists are stones on the table and his knuckles are tight white like ice cubes. My mom isn't saying anything. Bernie is scribble-scrabbling on his paper place mat with Bob's Big Boy crayons. He draws a hangman hanging and gives it to Dad. He wants him to guess who it is. Dad looks at it.

"Guess who it is."

"That's not a very nice picture," Dad says. He crumples it up and pushes it away.

"I'm hungry," Bernie says.

Mom waves to the waitress. The waitress is pretending not to look. She has black hair near her scalp and then it turns yellow like strings of corn.

"Hey, lady! I'm hungry," says Bernie. "My little sister's hungry too!" The waitress pretends she can't hear. She goes into the kitchen. Everyone is looking at us from the corner of their eyes. I don't know why they don't like us. My lip starts to shake. Nobody is moving. I want to go. I feel like crying but my brother is smiling. Everyone is staring at Bernie. Bernie slides off his chair and turns into Michael Jackson. He starts to do the moonwalk on Bob's Big Boy's black-and-white floor. Dad says sit down but Bernie doesn't do it.

Dad's face breaks open. "Quit acting the fool, boy!" he says, and he gets up and storms out and the bells on the door jinglejangle. Everyone starts eating their hamburgers. Bernie rolls his eyes. Mom's staring at the chair where Dad isn't. She's biting her fingernails.

"I'm fucking hungry, Mom," says Bernie.

"I know, honey," she says. "Let's go somewhere else." She puts a dollar on the table even though we didn't eat anything and she forgets to tell Bernie to mind his potty mouth.

We leave and Bernie has his hand full with Bob's Big Boy crayons but nobody makes him take them back. My father is mad and my mother is sad and my brother is bad. I think we will be driving forever.

"There's this kid, Johnny, and his sister, Raisa," Bernie wakes me up to tell me at a Motel 6 while our parents are fast asleep in the next bed.

"This kid Johnny has a hole in his pocket. I don't mean a hole in his pocket like what a quarter falls through, but like a black hole from outer space that's rolled up in a ball and sitting in his pocket sort of like it's a marble only it's a black hole. Understand?"

"Yes," I say even though I don't.

"So when they need to get away, Johnny takes the ball out of his pocket and throws it on the ground and it turns into the hole. Then him and Raisa can jump in and get away. Only one time they jumped in and they ended up on the other side of the world but it's not China. It's this country where it's only giants that live there."

"Good giants or bad giants?"

"Dumb giants."

"Oh."

"And Johnny made a serious mistake. He forgot to put the hole back in his pocket for them to get back. He lost it. So they're stuck there."

"Forever?"

"Yes." Bernie rolls over so his back is to me. "Go back to sleep."

I dream about the giants and I tell Bernie about it when I wake up. He says what were their names and I say Rushmore Fishmore and Bob's Big Boy. Bernie smiles at me and says we had the same dream.

Our dad's mom and dad are dead but he has his grand-aunt, Nan Zanobia, at the bottom of Mississippi and a hundred second cousins and we never met any of them before. When we get there Nan Zan is watering the flowers, and when she sees us she drops the hose and puts her hand over her mouth. Nan Zan is old old.

"Good Lord, Bernard Jr., is that you?" she says and she comes running at us with her arms reaching out and she tells my dad he's a sight for sore eyes it's been too long and are these your pretty babies, lemme get a good look at them.

"You must be Bernard Number Three!" she says, and she makes Bernie turn around in a circle and she laughs and she claps once and says, "Woooo, look out for this one! Girls gonna flock to him like flies to honey! Look at them daddy-longlegs lashes!" "What happened to Bernard Number One?" asks Bernie, but Nan Zan doesn't say anything. She looks at me instead. Her eyes are scary blue. I think maybe she can't hear so good 'cause she's so old. I hope she'll say my eyelashes are like daddy-longlegs even though I know they aren't.

"You must be little Emma. Girl, you came out with some good hair. Let's see your kitchen." I don't know what she's talking about and then she sneaks her fingers in the back of my hair and she says there's no naps in my kitchen. Dad tells her there's no such thing as good hair or bad hair and Nan Zan says, "Hush, Bernard Jr. You ain't a woman so you don't know." Nan Zan lives in a shotgun shack and there's so many cousins I can't remember all their names and she cooks us fried shrimps and okra and rice and black-eyed peas and lemonade to drink and watermelon and pralines with pecans picked right off the pecan tree by the boy cousins.

Bernie goes with the boy cousins and their BB gun and I go with the girl cousins. They can't keep their fingers out of my hair and the one called Sweetie Pop gets out her coconut hair grease and she's slathering it on and they're all pulling and twisting, yank, yank, yank. It hurts and I say stop, please stop, and they call me stuck-up white prissy and won't let me play jacks. The boy cousins come back whooping and hollering with a dead owl in a brown paper bag. It's got a BB in its neck.

We drive and drive. We drive up to the Blue Mountains in Tennessee and the sun is setting low but it's not night yet and the humpty-bumpty mountains really do look blue and the air looks blue and soft and my brother Bernie looks blue in the seat next to me. I think he is asleep but then he opens his eyes halfway and he says Dad, and my dad says yes son. Bernie says did God make the mountains or are we all just guessing. My dad doesn't say anything so Mom says it was God, Bernie, of course it was God made them.

We drive and we drive and we are finally there which is Princeton where our dad is going to be a professor and my mom says wake up! We're here. Every lawn is big and has a garden and in every garden there are tiny sparks of light and my dad says those are fireflies and Bernie squashes one and wipes the glow on my forehead and I scream and my mom and dad laugh.

Our house. It wasn't the biggest house on the block, but it was the biggest house we'd ever seen. In the front were a shaggy craggy blue spruce and a row of smooth slate flagstones leading to the big red door. In the back were a splintering porch, a blossoming dogwood tree, and a garage with a magic door that opened at the push of a button. Downstairs were a bay window with a bench, a busted dumbwaiter and a chandelier. Upstairs were a bathtub with claws and four bedrooms with buckling wallpaper. The walls in my room were freckled with fading forget-me-nots. In California, I used to share a room with my brother. We used to sleep in a bunk bed with me on the bottom and Bernie on top. Now the bunk bed was divided. I poked my fingers in the posts where the screws used to go. "Can't I sleep with you?" I asked him over and over again. He told me don't be a baby. I was supposed to be happy to have my own room.

Our mom filled the house with upscale, slightly damaged yard sale finds. She was a sucker for a bargain. "Can you believe they were selling this rocking chair for only twenty dollars?" she'd marvel. "I talked them down to fifteen. She threw in this exercise bike for free and the only thing wrong with it is the handlebars are a little crooked." Or, "This is an original Tiffany's lamp, with only a hairline crack. She wasn't thinking straight when she sold it to me. They're going through a divorce." She bought our dining room table at a garage sale. It was a gorgeous mahogany oval with leaves that refused to fold down.

She wanted to convert the basement den into a game room. She stocked it with jigsaw puzzles and board games: Clue, Yahtzee, Battleship, Monopoly, Scrabble, Parcheesi, and Life, but these were not popular with our dad (because he always won), nor with Bernie (because he always lost). She taught me the rules to canasta, crazy eights, and cribbage with kitchen matchsticks. I played with her from time to time, at a lopsided vintage card table, but it wasn't long before the den turned into the TV room. Later, it was the room where Bernie lifted weights.

The house was a perpetual mess. The stairs were cluttered, the counters were sticky, the attic was overrun with squirrels. Our mother wasn't a disciplined housekeeper. She tried inventing systems to involve Bernie and me in cleaning: color-coded pie charts and graphs designating which kid needed to do what chore on which day, but she wasn't consistent with these methods and usually wound up doing everything herself. Our dad did not help her.

This was our house. A place of fine, broken things. A place where games were aborted. A place of uncontrolled mess. It was an old house, with plenty of hiding places. The walls talked at night. My brother was no longer the ceiling to my sleep. Without him above me, I had nightmares of the house blowing down.

Our dad won a Guggenheim and a Fulbright. When I was in the third grade he went to Ghana and the Ivory Coast to research West African marriage ceremonies. He was gone for a long time. He returned with a goatskin drum for Bernie and a tiny giraffe carved out of wood for me, and for Mom a bolt of kente cloth that she spread over the dining room table. I got scared when he walked in the door. He'd shaved his beard while he was away and I didn't recognize his face. He looked like a stranger.

His book, When I Left My Father's House: Slave Weddings of the African Diaspora, won the National Historical Society Book Award. He spent more and more time in libraries or holed up in his office at home, listening to scratchy slave narrative recordings, over and over again. Sometimes he didn't come home at night. Once when he needed to do some research in the photo archives at the Schomburg he had to bring us with him because our mom had the flu.

I think that was our first time in New York. It was definitely our first time in Harlem. It was cold, January or February maybe, but there were lots of men outside on their brownstone stoops drinking out of paper bags without gloves or scarves, just their collars turned up against the wind.

They get quiet when we walk by and look at us with their rheumy eyes. My dad nods at them but they don't nod back. I'm worried they will take my gold Christmas charm bracelet so I make sure it's hidden underneath my coat sleeve. "How's the hot chocolate?" Bernie asks one of them. The man grins and lifts his paper bag like he is toasting my brother.

Inside the Schomburg there is a poem on the marble floor. I read it to myself while our dad checks our coats and I don't know why but it makes me feel like crying. Bernie asks me to read it to him. I've known rivers: / I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow / of human blood in human veins. Bernie walks along the words as I speak them slowly. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. When I get to the part about the Mississippi's muddy bosom going all golden in the sunset I have to stop because I am crying. Our dad comes and asks me what's wrong. Bernie knows I don't want to say anything.

"Sometimes we just feel sad," he says.

When we leave the Schomburg later that afternoon there is a dead dog taking up a parking space by the curb and a lady honking at him because she wants to park there. One of the dog's eyeballs has popped out of its socket and is strung a few inches from the face by a thin pink string of ligament. The eye is as big as a Ping-Pong ball. It is gazing at the sky. Down the street is a dreadlocked bum wrapped in a wet sleeping bag. He is rocking himself and chanting Diiiiiime-nickel-penny. Please help! Diiiiime-nickel-penny! Please help! Bernie tries to give the man his winter hat so he can keep warm but the man doesn't take it.

Diiiiime-nickel penny. Please help!

On the train home I think about the poem and the dog and the man and I start crying again. Bernie tells our dad that if he really wants to know, I am crying because I am wondering about our grandfather. That isn't true. I don't really know why I am crying. It's Bernie who's always asking about Bernard Number One. Mom says it's not a story to pass on to children. Our dad looks out the train window. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't even give me his handkerchief.

Bernie-ism 11.8 (eleven years, eight months):

I'm so dyslexic, I'm dyxlecis. Dog is God and Em is Me.

My brother couldn't read until he was eleven. I was ten and Bernie was eleven and he was reading comic books and I was reading Wuthering Heights. But he had friends and I didn't have any except for Hadas who lived around the corner and had a wandering eye. Our first Halloween in Princeton we went trick-or-treating with some kids from the neighborhood. I was Sojourner Truth and nobody knew who that was so I hated my costume and wanted to go home whereas Bernie was making himself adored by breaking raw eggs into every mailbox up and down the block. It was no better the next year when I dressed up like Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. "What are you supposed to be?" they asked.

The question had begun.

"What does it feel like to have a black father?" one of the Williams twins asked me on the school bus during a class trip to Thomas Edison's laboratory in West Orange.

I didn't understand. It hadn't occurred to me that I should feel different than she did. "It feels fine," I answered, but inside the Black Mariah, I began to wonder.

"This is the first motion picture studio," the tour guide explained, then showed us a reel from The Great Train Robbery. We learned that when people first saw that movie, eighty years before, they believed the train was real and hid beneath their seats. The other kids laughed but I was worried. When the train came toward us, I held my hand up at arm's length, as if to stop it. My hand was caught in the dusty projection light, magnified in monstrous black distortion on the screen.

For my eighth birthday, my mother invited all of the girls in my class to the Kendall Park roller rink. "Why'd you invite her?" Lindsey Mallard asked me, pointing at Brigitte on her wobbly skates. "Don't you know she's black?"

"I know," I said, turning red beneath the disco lights.

"Is she your friend?" she sneered.

"No," I protested. I was telling the truth. None of them were my friends.

That winter was the season of the Stork Baby. My mother, being somewhat frantic and behind in her Christmas shopping, brought me with her to the Toys "" Us to pick out a Stork Baby doll, but the shelves were bare. We stood on the customer service line for over an hour. "It's a two-week wait for a Stork Baby," the clerk reported.

My mom was astonished. "Two weeks?"

"That's right, lady. Unless you want a black doll. We got them in storage. You can get a black doll today."

"Do you want a black doll, Emma?" my mom asked.

"I'm not sure," I said. It didn't seem like they were as good.

"We'll take one of each," my mother decided. She signed our name to the white-baby waitlist. We walked out with the black baby that day.

I had two dolls, but I hated them both. They were pug-faced and ugly. I cut off their yarn hair, and spoiled their faces with purple marker. I was disturbed. For nearly a month I pretended to swallow my daily vitamins and when no one was looking I hid them behind the couch in a neat little row. Nobody suspected a thing. Not even when the vitamins became coated with dust and stuck to the floor. Everyone was too busy watching Bernie tap-dance down the driveway with bottle caps stuck in the soles of his sneakers. I escaped into books where I could become anybody, but eventually I had to come back out again. It didn't matter that I was reading Don Quixote. I was invisible next to Bernie.

Our mom started writing down the "Bernie-isms" in a big black journal around the time Bernie started going to special ed because he wasn't reading yet. Bernie-ism 9.9 is my favorite. I remember when he said it, we were eating gingersnaps in the kitchen and we were warm and it was cold outside and I almost almost knew what he meant. Like how when you love something so much you think it's inside you, growing in there.

Bernie-ism 9.9:

When I close my eyes, I can see sound.

Of course, I could never actually see sound when I closed my eyes. Apparently he could. Bernie was always saying things like that that made you wonder about the inner workings of his mind.

Our dad didn't quite know what to make of the fact that his son was learning disabled. He got him tutors and specialists and all that, but it was Professor Lester with the gold-toothed grin who introduced my brother to Coltrane. The tenor sax became Bernie's shadow. He was good from the moment he took it up. He became amazing. He could make it sound like our mother's laugh. I remember him at fifteen, practicing in the wee hours out on the garage roof so we wouldn't wake up. I remember watching him out there one 2:00 am from my bedroom window, perched like an owl, wailing on that thing like he thought the sound might lift him up over the trees, like the sound might resurrect the dead. Butterscotch, the neighbor's cocker spaniel, was sitting still in our vegetable patch, looking up at him with her head cocked gently to the side. We watched him, she and I. We watched my brother seeing sound.

Professor Lester took a special interest in Bernie. He was younger than our dad, and cooler and didn't have kids of his own. He drove a Cadillac, had a perfect afro, and always, even in the dead heat of August, wore three-piece suits. He made several TV talk show appearances a year as one of a handful of recognized spokesmen for Black America. He was sexy. During puberty I wrote dozens of Lester love haikus, folded them into paper cranes and stuffed them under my mattress.

Black Man where you walk
The mountains move in terror
Me I tremble too

Lester was constantly being pulled over on the NJ turnpike because, he said, police make the automatic assumption that a black man with a slick ride is a pusher or a pimp. Our dad claimed Lester sped on purpose just to feel self-satisfied when he got to flash his Princeton University ID in front of a cop.

Lester was impressed by Bernie-ism 15.2:
That mess about judging people by the content of
their character and not the color of their skin
-that's some bullshit. Nobody has the right to judge
anybody else. Period. If you ain't been in my skin,
you ain't never gonna understand my character.

and loosely based a lecture series upon it. He came over sometimes just to pick Bernie's brain. He said Bernie reminded him of how he was when he was a kid growing up in the South Bronx and that school wasn't the right thing to feed Bernie's mind. They started hanging out a lot, listening to Coltrane records, going to museums, protest marches, concerts. They called each other "Nigger," which our father couldn't stand. The weird thing was that it wasn't always like Professor Lester was Bernie's mentor. It sometimes sort of seemed the other way around. Our mom was jealous. I was jealous.

When Professor Lester kidnapped Bernie to bring him to the Million Man March down in Washington, our dad had a fit. It was way past midnight when Lester's burgundy Cadillac finally rolled up the driveway that night. Our mom was upstairs pretending to be asleep because she was mad at our dad about something. My dad and I were waiting. I had trouble sleeping when Bernie wasn't home.

They came slinking up to the house. My dad was taking up the whole doorway so it was hard to see. Lester was smoking one of his Kools. Bernie had his so-what look on his face.

"You missed a great day, Brother Bernard," said Lester.

"I will teach my son how to be a black man," said our dad.

"Who's stopping you?" asked Lester.

"Get off my porch."

"All right, man"-he leaned in real close to our dad-"but just so you know, it ain't all in the books." He winked at me over our dad's shoulder before turning to go.

Dad told Bernie to get his ass to bed; it was too late to talk about it now. To me it seemed more like he just hadn't figured out what to say. The lecture on how the saxophone would never pay Bernie's bills didn't fit this situation. I followed Bernie up to his room. He looked faraway. He set his limited first edition "Coltrane: Ascension Live from Stalingrad" that Lester gave him for his sixteenth birthday low on the flip side and stretched out on his half of our old bunk bed with his hands behind his head. I sat cross-legged on his floor and fingered the frets of his saxophone. The music spilled around us.

"He's pretty mad," I said.

"Him? He's just scared of what he doesn't understand or hasn't already heard."

"So, were there a million men?" I asked him.

"Had to be. At least."

"What did it feel like?"

Bernie didn't say anything for a minute. I thought he was lost riding with Coltrane. I wanted to go lie next to him and close my eyes. Then he started telling me how the march felt like ten million. Each man times ten. Like each man had all the weight of all the men that came before him and behind him only it wasn't heavy like a burden. My brother's voice was so deep I could feel it the way you can feel the amplified vibrations of a bass guitar all the way down in your bones.

"We were light," he told me, "like we weighed nothing, and we were lifting up. I could feel Bernard One there and he was carrying me and his father was carrying him."

Bernie was my we. I didn't like to hear him talk about other people like he belonged to them. If the Bernards were carrying each other all the way back to the slave ship and past the ocean and beyond the grave, I didn't know where that left me. I didn't know who was carrying me. I felt like crying when he told me about the ten million, but I didn't.

I asked him if there were any women there.

"Some." He looked at me. He looked at me for a long time like he could see behind my face.

"What?" I said.

"You gotta cut that shit out," he told me.

"What shit?"

"You think I don't know what's going on?"

"What?"

"You know what I'm talking about. You better cut that five-finger shit out before you get caught. You're too smart for that mess. Harvard don't take folks with criminal records." Bernie rolled over so his back was to me. "Wipe your fingerprints off my saxophone and go to sleep. It's late."

I'd been shoplifting, little things mostly, that fit in the palm of my hand. ChapStick, tweezers, spools of thread. The first thing I took was a green Rub Kleen eraser. I walked straight out of Woolworth's with it closed in my fist, then tossed it in a trash can two blocks away. I was euphoric. Nobody had seen me. Nobody could see me. I started shoplifting every day. I took tortoise shell barrettes and leather money clips. Batteries. Bubblegum. Whatever. I was very good.

I kept my booty in a lacquered ballerina jewelry box under my bed. I didn't stop after Bernie talked to me, either. I secretly devised schemes for stealing him the sterling silver saxophone that hung in the window of Farrington's like the letter Z but I only had the guts to steal little things. Not just petty things though-I stole several watches, loads of jewelry, and once I even lifted a $400 pair of platinum Cartier cuff links from Hamilton Jewelers while the saleslady was fitting a couple for their wedding bands. I felt bad about taking those, not because they were expensive but because they were beautiful and I knew I would never use them or be able to explain how I got them if I gave them away. I decided to bring them back and leave them on the store's doorstep early one morning while everyone else was still asleep. I put on my gym clothes so that if my mom asked me what I was doing out so early I could tell her I'd been jogging. But when I got back she hadn't even noticed I was gone. She was trying too hard to wake Bernie up for school, promising him she'd make banana pancakes because banana pancakes were Bernie's favorite.

When people ask me what I am, I want to tell them about Bernie because I grew up in his skin. We were a breed of our own. And now I'm alone. My brother belongs to the vegetable race. He has become the simplest of machines. Food goes in. It comes out changed.

Because I have been in my brother's skin, I can judge him. I wipe the dribble from his third-degree chin and I hate his guts. I hate his fucking guts for being a selfish, self-serving son-of-a-bitch stupid motherfucking bastard. I hate Professor Lester for treating him like a prophet and our mom for treating him like goddamned God his whole life. This is not heroic, Bernie. There is nothing romantic about being a vegetable. You look like a monster, Bernie. You are so repulsive I want to vomit when I look at you, so fuck you for leaving me.

Six weeks into my first semester at Yale, my mom called me in hysterics.

"Did your father call yet?"

"No."

"Oh God."

"What is it?"

"It's Bernie. It's Bernie. Oh my God."

"Mom?"

"Oh my God, I don't think I can do this. I can't do this."

"Mom, what happened?"

I missed Bernie so bad on the first day of college I felt unreal. I felt like the ghost limb of an amputee. Everything felt wrong. Bernie had dropped me off with my stuff, helped me unpack, then walked away smiling.

"Was that your boyfriend?" my new roommate asked, staring after him. Her name was Fran and her family owned an olive ranch in California. She'd hung pictures of Georgia O'Keefe vagina flowers on three of the four walls and taken the good bed by the window.

"My brother."

"Oh." She looked at me perplexed. "He's gorgeous."

"Yeah." My eyelid was twitching and I couldn't swallow.

She was looking at me funny. "So what are you anyway?"

On the third day of college, a guy came knocking at our door. "Hi, I'm Karim," he said. His eyes were kind of like Bernie's, but not as wide. "I'm looking for Emma."

"Yeah," I smiled. I noticed that he had dimples and a kind round face.

"Is she your roommate or something?"

"No-I'm she. I'm Emma."

Karim looked confused. "Oh. There must be some kind of mistake or something. I'm supposed to be Emma's culture counselor. Through the Af-Am Center?"

"Well, that's me," I said. "I mean, I'm Emma."

He stared at me for a moment. "All right, then. So, I'll see you around." We shook hands and he never spoke to me again. We were in the same James Baldwin seminar and also African-American History: Reconstruction to the Present, where we were assigned Professor Lester's fourth book, the one that was dedicated to Bernie. I wanted to tell Karim that the last chapter "The New New Negro" on biracialism was inspired by my brother, especially the paragraph about the liminal space between black and white America where

there can be no life on the hyphen. The "mulatto" cannot be

both black and white just as he cannot be neither black nor white.

These terms are mutually exclusive and mutually imperative. In the hyphenated psyche, an internal choice must be made to privilege one of two warring selves. Black-White. Pick one! Or this choice will be made hard and fast by the external world. (p. 272)

which is all pretty much a drawn-out, sloppy, convoluted paraphrase of Bernie-ism 16.9. I tried wearing make-up and I practiced saying witty things to Karim in case I ran into him on cross-campus. I even spent two hours one morning putting my hair in the tiniest braids but it was like he couldn't see me.

I started writing Bernie letters instead of taking notes in my classes and I wrote cryptic haikus in black felt-tip marker on the back of my closet door.

I am Raisa

Wandering among giants

Stuck in a strange land

I avoided all social interaction. I stole boxes of cereal from the dining hall so I could eat in my room. I heard Fran on the telephone telling someone that I was a snob. I took several naps a day. I liked to imagine that Bernie was missing me back. I was sleeping when my mom called that day.

"Oh God, I can't do this."

"What happened?"

"Your brother's been in an accident."

"What happened?"

"Emma, you have to come home now. I can't do this by myself."

At around four am that morning, Bernie had climbed to the top of the resting shuttle train down at the Princeton train stop with a bottle of malt liquor and his saxophone. He had gotten drunk and stupid and urinated off the roof of the shuttle train right onto the third rail. A current of electricity had run up his golden stream of piss, burning him from the inside out, ruining his epidermis and dermis, shorting the circuits of his brain, knocking him clear off the train and landing him twenty feet away on the concrete platform. He must have looked like a shooting star.

When I arrive at the hospital, they have him on life support. My father is in the corner standing strange like a scarecrow, standing like he might fall down. They are telling my mother that skin grafts will not help him. That they are going to have to amputate his penis and one of his hands and probably both of his legs. She is lowing like a cow. She has tucked his saxophone next to him under the white sheets as if it is his teddy bear. It is dented in the middle from the impact of flying with him off the train. The mouthpiece is chipped. His hair is gone, his eyebrows and lashes. His lips are gone. His fingers on one hand are twisted like the spokes of a broken umbrella. His skin is raw meat and later it will be leather. He is a monster.

A doctor with a mustache like a broom tells us we have to consider whether or not it is worth it. He does not say what IT is.

"What are you asking me?" says my mother. Her voice is a screaming tenor saxophone. "What the hell are you asking me?" Dad tells her she needs to calm the hell down and I want to slap them both. Instead I tell them to leave. The doctor, my mother, my father. "Leave," I say. At first they don't want to. They want to pat my hair and rub my back or they want me to pat their backs and squeeze their hands. I tell them again. "Leave. Get out. All of you get out," and after a while they do. I sit with Bernie. I poke his arm. He is breathing through a machine. I am scared to touch his face.

We are lying in the wet grass staring at the moon. We are surrounded by gigantic cast-iron bells. I am sixteen and my brother is seventeen. Our dad is the dean and we live in a castle on a hill under a tall bell tower. It is summer and there is a golf course spread out like the train of a bridal gown down at the bottom of the hill. There are old people down there, dancing between the sand traps under paper lanterns. It is their reunion and they have an orchestra and the orchestra is playing a waltz and the violins trill out strings of sound that fly like kites up to us on the hill. The old people are waltzing in their world far away down there between the sand traps.

It is summer and today an enormous crane like a bony arm came to pluck the bells from the bell tower. They are ten-feet, twelve-feet, twenty-feet tall and each of them makes a different sound. They are going to clean them here on the ground because they are old and rusting. Their silhouettes curve like hips in the nighttime. Like skulls. It is summer and I am supposed to be thinking about applying to colleges. I am supposed to be thinking about where I will go.

My brother looks like an Arabian prince. His saxophone is dismembered. The pieces are shining laid out in a circle around us. Bernie is pulling on a joint and holding the smoke in his lungs so long I worry he's not breathing. I am staring at the side of his face. The iron bells are silent and old like black mountains in a dream. Like slumbering giants. The bells are not breathing. My brother is not breathing. The saxophone is in pieces. The moon is watching us. I touch his face and he lets go the smoke and it rolls away slowly.

"I found out what happened to Bernard Number One," he tells me. Our dad's dad is a secret.

"Did Dad tell you?"

"No."

Bernie and my dad don't talk anymore. They made our dad the first black dean and he moved us to this castle overlooking a golf course and he looked around and said what the hell am I doing here, my life is halfway over and look where I am. He told us, "I may be gone for one month, I may be gone for two months, I may be gone forever." Then he ran off with a pretty graduate student and left us in the castle where we don't belong with our mom who turns on the bathwater just so we can't hear her sobbing and begs Bernie to sleep in her room at night.

Bernie-ism 12.6:

Women will do anything not to be alone.

The pretty graduate student is black so our father's leaving makes sense to everybody but Bernie and me, but we're smart enough to know it's forever he'll be gone.

This betrayal has made my brother more beautiful. More beautiful even than anger and rage. I want to touch his face again and see if he is crying. I want to put my hand on his chest so I can feel his voice.

He tells me, "They burned him in a baseball diamond and hung him from a tree."

"What?"

"He was too good at baseball. He was better than all them motherfuckers so they burned him for it and they hung his black ass from a tree." Bernie draws again from his joint. "For everyone to see."

My chest hurts and I am getting heavier and I think I am sinking into the ground. The wind is choking the violins. "Did Dad tell you this?" I whisper.

"Motherfucking violin motherfuckers."

"How did you find out?"

"You think it's a coincidence I'm named for him? There's three of us. That's a triangle. I'm the third point. Understand?" "No." My brother is so stoned.

"I got put here to finish something. They got Bernard Number One before he could do it. Bernard Number Two has failed in every respect to get it 'cause he's blind. I'm Number Three. Number One came back in me. In us."

"Who told you about our grandfather?"

"I remembered it. I remember. We got put here to do this thing."

"What's that?"

"You think it's a coincidence we chose to descend through the same womb into the world? I wasn't finished yet when I came. I came too fast and I left some of me behind. That was you. So you came afterwards to finish me. I'm the he of you and you're the she of me. Understand?"

"Yes," I say, even though I don't.

"Then don't forget." Bernie sits up and starts fitting together his saxophone. "We were baptized by fire to come back stronger."

We can hear the old people laughing down there in the sand traps. They do not see us up here hiding among the bells. My brother wets the reed and brings the horn to his mouth.

I've learned that when people ask me what I am, which is not an everyday question, but one I get asked every day, the easiest thing to do is to tell them what color my parents are-just the black and white of it. I want to tell them about Bernie. As if he is an answer and not a question himself. As if he made sense to me. As if I knew what I was put here to do any more than anyone else.

When I go down to visit, I tell my mom to take a rest. She is suddenly old. There are liver spots on her hands. She has taken to drinking juice glasses full of sherry and playing solitaire. When Dad comes she goes out to the driveway and sits in her car, staring out the windshield at nothing. I make her tea. I draw her a hot bath. She doesn't want anything from me, except maybe a fourth Bernard. She is not smart enough to know he is in me and not in that bed.

The oxygen tank stands like an atom bomb. Bernie himself is the fallout. There's a tube in his nose, a tube in his throat, a tube in his arm, and, under the thermal blanket, there are more tubes. He has forgotten how to breathe. I think, how would it be if I just flipped off that switch? How would it be if the up down up down just came to a rest and the chest became still? It could be my act. Like shaving a head. Changing a voice. Climbing through a hole.

I don't do it, though.

I just sit there in the living room for hours watching that raceless, faceless thing in that bed, hoping it'll die already so I can start. I do a crossword. I brush my hair. I wait.

Excerpted from The Professor's Daughter © Copyright 2005 by Emily Raboteau. Reprinted with permission by Henry Holt. All rights reserved.

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