Other, Please Specify: Notes from an Off-white American

By Paul Hawkins

With tact, enthusiasm and humor, Paul Hawkins invites you into his intimate revolution—a romance, an unexpected pregnancy, the beginning of a family—a multiracial family. We follow the storyteller’s easy tone and clear voice as he wades through the cultural quagmire of nth generation white America to expand his identity and embrace his new roles of partner, father and other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312395107

Paul Hawkins

American author. I am happy to be a child of the space age and I still set my sights on great things. I put humor in everything I write because that is my disposition. If I chronicle the 20th century it is only because I have not given up on the 21st.

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Other, Please Specify:

notes from an off-white American

Copyright © 2014 Paul Hawkins

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

Paul Hawkins

PO Box 150230

Brooklyn, NY 11215

Published by Paul Hawkins

Brooklyn, NY

ISBN 978-1-312-39510-7

for

Ella Grace

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

—John Steinbeck

Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.

—Ernesto Che Guevara

Other, Please Specify

Was I supposed to study for this? It was another form to fill out, another list of check boxes. Just a few pages—a customs declaration and an airline survey dropped on my tray table during the last few minutes of flight, and though the questions seemed simple enough, I would have rather been taking the SAT.

I never had a hard time with forms. Name, date of birth, eye color, weight… you could have asked me anything. I breezed right through to the big X on the bottom, scribbled my signature and went about my day. I knew all the answers.

I filled out my passport application in less than three minutes, and that included deliberation for item 13—hair color. I considered graying or balding before writing brown. It was a passport application—two photographs included—the State Department could figure it out.

The application was a gift from a recent girlfriend. It came in the mail with a card and a CD of music she liked to play in her apartment. One of the songs came pre-packaged with emotion. It played over an awkward, unrequited moment in the movie Love Actually.

It was a farewell package—reflections on our short romance ending with the line, I send you this extra passport application, in case you decide to leave Brooklyn some day.

The point of the note was to bid me adieu, but I couldn’t help seeing that one line and the passport application as an invitation.

The letter arrived on a Tuesday. I promised myself I would listen to the CD until Saturday when I would eject it, snap it in two, and throw it away. I wasn’t going to get lost in this breakup. I was going to breathe deeply, put one foot in front of the other and move on.

Saturday night at 7:30, as the CD played for the last time, the phone rang.

I’d like to see you, she said, and suggested a café where we could meet.

OK, I said. I can be there in an hour.

- - -

Varsha and I had met at a New Year’s Eve party.

I’m supposed to leave in a little bit, she said, picking at the buffet. I’m going into Manhattan for a guided meditation. I want to welcome the New Year with peace of mind.

I’ll walk you out, I said. I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. I’m going to meet some friends at Coney Island to swim with the Polar Bears.

I said goodnight. Varsha and her friend walked off to the subway. I turned my collar up and headed to my apartment. By the time I got home I had scrapped the Polar Bear idea and was in a more meditative state. I breathed in. I breathed out. I whispered a mantra—a word to repeat and focus on to clear my head of distractions. The word was Varsha.

Varsha… what kind of name is that? Varsha… what could it mean?  Varsha… who is this woman? Breathe in… where did she come from? Breathe out… why haven’t I met anyone like her before?  She had long, straight black hair, big, dark eyes and full lips. And her skin, how would I describe it?

Here is where the needle screeches off the record. I cannot describe her skin.

I am uncomfortable talking about skin color. I owe part of my discomfort to a limited experience with racial diversity. The neighborhood I grew up in consisted of three distinct ethnic groups—the pale, the sunburned and the freckled. But the true source of my difficulty comes from a childhood belief that the way I see colors is broken.

In elementary school, I was the boy with horn-rimmed glasses and the patch taped over his eye. I was at least half blind, and I had no depth perception. It didn’t take much to convince me that I registered color differently than everyone else too.

I wasn’t completely outcast as the neighborhood freak, but the games other children played—chasing games, or hit-the-ball, catch-the-ball games—made me fall down more than I liked. I chose closer activities where I could squint my unpatched eye and make sense of the world in smaller portions. A simple set of art supplies—paper, pencils, a coloring book and the deluxe set of 64 Crayola crayons—kept me occupied from Kindergarten through the second grade.

I would kneel at the family room coffee table, my face hovering four inches above the page, rendering my impressions of childhood. I drew the normal scenes. The grass was green and the skies were blue, my hair was yellow and my skin was…

What color am I? I called out as children do to whoever is in earshot.

My mother, no doubt distracted by her more active children, playing bicycle tag or poking forks at electrical sockets, simply called back, White. You’re white. Compared to other questions children ask, that one was a breeze.

I fished through the old steel can recycled from Christmas butter cookies to find a white crayon. While most of the crayons were broken or worn into smaller pieces, the white crayon was pretty much intact, only slightly rounded at the tip.

I rubbed the crayon over the face of my portrait, but nothing happened. The page didn’t take on the color of my skin. Instead, my drawing looked somewhat ruined—smudged, like it had been dabbed with cupcake frosting.

Is this what other people see? I wondered. I see things differently.

I didn’t dare tell anyone, for fear they’d hang some other contraption on my face to color-correct my vision. I reached back into the can, pulling out crayons, scribbling on paper and inspecting the marks through a squinty eye. When I found the colors I saw when I looked in the mirror, I placed them to the side. Collecting the handful of crayons, I took them to my sister, asking her to read the names off the crayons’ paper wrappers.

I am apricot. I am peach. After working those crayons to unusable nubs, I could also be melon or maize, but I wasn’t white.

Had I known Varsha as a child, I would have drawn her next to me on the page—an apricot boy holding hands with a raw sienna girl.

- - -

I bumped into Varsha the next day and asked her to dinner.

I don’t just meet people at parties and start dating them, she said.

It doesn’t have to be a date, I said.

No, she said. It’s a date.

About an hour and a half in, Varsha told me she was leaving me.

I want to make big changes—travel through Asia for a couple of years.

She was going to work for a school teaching English in foreign countries. She wanted to go to Nepal, South Korea, or Thailand and visit neighboring countries from there. Her application awaited approval.

What kind of fool was love trying to make of me? Didn’t it know that I was on to it, that I had watched the game tapes, that I knew its moves? Hadn’t I explored the intricacies of love and insanity in my third unfinished novel?

Love without pause. Care without caution. The heart will endure every madness. Love and lunacy are poured from the same pot.

Heartbreak offers special deals for return customers. It never asks if you are ready. It never asks if you are able. It only asks you to be willing. Any fool could see what stood before me. Only a fool would agree to inevitable heartbreak—cue the sucker-punch music from Love Actually.

I walked Varsha to her door. I tilted my head to the side, moving my nose out of the way for a kiss. Varsha didn’t respond. I pretended I had a crick in my neck. I rubbed my hand on the side of my neck and squeezed the base of my skull in my palm. When the conversation slowed down a second time, I tilted my head and leaned in slowly.

You don’t think we’re going to kiss, do you? she asked.

I thought we might.

No, she said. This is a first date. There will be no kissing.

How do we say goodnight? A handshake? A hug? A punch in the arm?

We just say goodnight.

We took long walks on mild winter evenings. We went to a play and sat to hear a little jazz ensemble set Shaker hymns to the sounds of a Moog synthesizer. We ordered egg creams and Jell-O at Junior’s diner at odd hours when Varsha returned home late from work. We talked on the phone late into the night. We strolled about like sweethearts from another age, Varsha wrapped her arms around my bent elbow as we sauntered down the street.

Something was there. The type of something that shouldn’t be rushed, but there was a schedule to be kept and Varsha was keeping it.

I would arrive at her apartment to pick her up and see a Seoul travel guide on her kitchen counter or a passport application on her ottoman.

I picked up a few extra applications, she called from the bathroom. You can take one.

Thanks, I called back. I’m staying put for a while.

We had been together five weeks. Surely there was no need to change plans, or to consider changing our lives. She was still new to me. I’d play a game with myself when I’d ring her doorbell and she’d buzz me through the two front doors. I’d try to picture her in my head in great detail—her hair, her eyes, her physical presence. Did I know her yet? Was I remembering her correctly, or was she partly my imagination? Was this romance real or something I was inventing?

Varsha opened the door to her apartment and greeted me. She wasn’t as tall as I remembered, her shoulders more delicate than I‘d thought. Through the few times I played this game, my memory failed to accurately recall the color of her skin. There was something substantial about her color that left me feeling insufficient, as if she were written in permanent marker and I was a smudge left by a dirty eraser. A thrilling, existential uneasiness came over me. As I moved toward her, I became harder to see—translucent, transparent, invisible.

- - -

You’re Catholic, right? she asked me on the phone one night. Have you ever thought of becoming a Hindu?

I don’t know much about it, I admitted, but if you dress me in a long white shirt and give me one of those gorgeous Indian names that goes on forever, I’ll think about it.

I’ll see about the shirt, she said. But for now, let’s call you Maharajah Rajkumar.

I loved my new name. I looked it up on the Internet and found that it repeatedly referred to royalty—the royal prince. I practiced saying it and use it when I left Varsha phone messages. It was a private joke that we enjoyed. Most of what we shared was private. There didn’t seem to be any reason to get friends and family involved, but somehow it happened.

On Valentine’s Day I unwrapped a gift from Varsha—a long white shirt and matching pants.

It’s called a kurta, Varsha said. And you wouldn’t believe what I had to go through to get it.

I ran into the bedroom to try on my new clothes. I’m listening, I yelled into the living room as I pulled off my tee shirt.

My parents have never met anyone I’ve ever dated, except my Prom date, she explained. I didn’t know where to get a kurta. Didn’t know how they were sized. I really didn’t even know what they were called. So, I asked my mother. She said she didn’t know how the sizes ran either and I’d have to ask my father.

You really didn’t have to go that far, I said, peeking my head through the door.

The word was out, Varsha said. I couldn’t stop now.

So, all I said to my father was, ‘I want to buy a kurta for a man and I need your help to figure out the right size.’

OK, I said.

So, he turns to me and says, ‘Will it be a Hindu wedding?’

Well, I was dressed for it.

It was a little early to prepare guest lists or to pick colors for table linens, but it was time to introduce Varsha to my family. When I mentioned to my mother that I had been seeing a woman since New Years, she invited us for Easter dinner.

Did you tell your mother that the girlfriend you are bringing to dinner is a woman of color?

Would you like me to? I asked. I don’t think it makes any difference.

Yeah, it makes a difference, Varsha said. I doubt you’ve ever brought home a dark skinned woman before.

To tell you the truth, I said. I don’t know if one has ever been in the house.

What exactly was I supposed to say? Having never provided my mother with ethnic information about women I’ve dated before, I didn’t know how to frame it. I didn’t know how to put it into a context that would fall normally into conversation.

Guess who’s coming to dinner.

I thought you said you were bringing your girlfriend.

But what if I told you she was Sidney Poitier?

We didn’t go to my mother’s house. We got into an argument a few days before. I had said something cheeky in mixed company that made Varsha angry. It was the type of argument that couples have in the first few months of getting to know each other—a disagreement usually resolved without much trouble, but I had looked at the calendar. It was already April and Varsha planned to leave in July. I was in too deep. The options were clear: break up with her now or continue to get closer to her and set myself up for total annihilation.

- - -

Two weeks later, I walked up the block, looking for the café she mentioned on the phone.

Varsha sat at a table in the open store front. I stepped in and took the seat across from her.

You look great, I said. I’m glad you called.

She raised her eyebrows and smiled.

Thank you for your card, I said. I already sent in the passport application. I knew all of the answers.

Varsha took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She looked me straight in the eye. I’m pregnant, she said.

That was the last time I knew all of the answers.

- - -

A week later I stared across a small room on the twenty-seventh floor of a downtown Brooklyn office building. I had a hard time finding the words to begin. That was it. There were just no words for it.

I… me… my girlfriend and I… my ex-girlfriend, that is… she’s pregnant. I’m the father and we are deciding what we should do.

How do you feel about that? the therapist asked.

I feel OK, I said. "I’m excited by the possibility. I’m anxious that in the end the decision isn’t mine to make. I think what bothers me the most is how difficult it is to talk about. It is the most natural thing in the world—a woman, a man, a pregnancy, but the language is lacking. That’s what makes it confusing. That’s what makes it feel like I’m hiding something.

It’s strange—one of the big ideas of western culture is the gift of an unexpected child. ‘And a host of heavenly angels sings hallelujah.’ But when it happens, I can’t find a word to describe the relationship between me and the woman I’m experiencing it with. Girlfriend isn’t right. She’s not my wife…

Partner is acceptable, he suggested.

Maybe for a cowboy, I griped. Partner is vague and it’s been co-opted by the gay community. I want to speak clearly, succinctly, not raise more questions.

The therapist looked at his watch. Something I want to leave you with to consider is that women’s feet change a lot during pregnancy. You might want to buy your partner a new pair of shoes.

I considered the shoes and other articles of clothing. We considered our living situations, our cultures and our bank accounts. We considered our histories and our dreams. Then we would go back to the beginning and consider everything over and over again. Sometimes it was fun and playful. We would talk about Christmas and Santa Claus. Sometimes it was rough and fears would spill out on the table between us. Once in a while it was spiritual. She prayed a novena to Saint Jude. She framed a picture of Sri Ganesh. One night when we couldn’t sleep I whispered that if anyone knew what it was like to be unexpectedly pregnant, it was the Blessed Mother and that she would listen. We didn’t have all the time in the world, but if we used the time well, we had time enough to make a good decision. There was no reason to rush. At least I didn’t think so.

I told my mother, Varsha said.

What do you mean? I asked. I thought we were going to wait.

I know, she said. But I told her.

Her parents were willing to marry her off at the mere mention of a boyfriend. Now they knew she was pregnant.

How did she handle it? I asked.

Not well, Varsha said. ‘Bring this man to me,’ my father said. ‘I want to see him.’

And your mother?

My mother asked, ‘What kind of white is he?’

What kind of white am I?

Imperial white. That’s what I told her, that you are good-old-fashioned Colonial slave trader white.

Wow, what an introduction.

That’s nothing, Varsha said. We’re having dinner with them on Saturday.

We were having a baby. And that baby would need a family. And it was time to let the family know.

Have you spoken to Mom yet? my brother asked.

No, I haven’t, I cringed.

I don’t know how she’s going to take it, he said.

I know, I whispered.

I had to break the news gently to my mother. Not about the pregnancy—my mother knew where babies came from. My brother’s comment was about skin color and we