Shut up! I’m sick of this school, anyway.

“Do you talk about race at home a lot?” Gladys asked, peering at me as if I were a lab exhibit.

“We’re very involved with black liberation,” I said. “For a long time,” I added, remembering the Vietnam marches where Ruby, gripping my hand, had chanted along with the crowd, “No Vietcong ever called me nigger!” I didn’t want to tell Gladys about the Black Panthers who’d filled our home for years, toting their guns. I flashed on an image of our old friend Stokely Carmichael, now Kwame Ture, tall and elegant, who practically oozed “death to the white man” from his pores whenever he visited California and crashed on our couch. Or fierce Bobby Seale, who used to bounce Ruby on his knee and now teased her as “my girl.” Or how could Gladys understand who Ralph Featherstone was to us: shortly after Ralph’s last sing-along in our kitchen when Ruby was four, a car bomb in Maryland, probably planted by the Klan, blew him to pieces. We displayed his photo on the living room shelf as a memorial, along with a framed tribute written by his new wife. Yes, Ruby knew his story. We considered Ralph one of our martyrs, one of the several we’d known personally, as a family. I didn’t tell Gladys any of this, or that we were angry all the time. At whites.

“But you’re white.” Gladys squinted, clearly puzzled. “Isn’t Ruby part white?”

“Being African American is a political definition,” I said, trying to still my racing heart while words flowed out automatically. “As all racial categorizations are. She’s seen as black by our culture. Anyone with ‘one drop’ of ‘Negro blood’ is black, according to Southern courts. We want Ruby to have an identity that fits the one the cul­ture puts on her.”

“I don’t know, you have a confused young girl here.” Gladys, usually so poised, so aggressive, looked baffled. As if Ruby were the first biracial child she’d ever encountered.

“Well, the culture is messed up about race!” I grew heated. Per­spiration beaded under my arms. “Biracial identity is an attempt to fade out of blackness. Solomon and I are clear. Ruby is black.”

“But she has lots of strengths,” Gladys said, as if to counter a flaw: Ruby’s unnamable, confusing racial designation. She shook her head and stood, extending her hand. “We wish her luck, and of course we’ll be sending her records on to Martin Luther King Junior High.”

I grasped her hand, gave a numb smile, and fled her office, weaving my way through students until I sank gratefully onto the school’s front steps, dropped my head in my hands, and burst qui­etly into tears. “Ruby’s fine,” I kept whispering. As if the more I said it, the truer it would become.

* * *

“Hey,” I called out later that afternoon, still exhausted from the meeting when the kids straggled home after Ruby’s pickup soccer game, which Che had gone over to referee. They trooped in making a racket. Rosa and Cesar leaped and yelped, as they did whenever anyone appeared at the front door. If it were Ruby or Che, the bark­ing intensified until the kids stroked their shaggy backs. Rosa yipped full volume at Che until she got her rubs; then, once she’d thor­oughly licked his face, cleaning up microscopic lunchtime leftovers, she was his noisy black shadow, her toenails clicking on the floor.

“How was the game?” I peered around the wall separating the living room from the kitchen, wiping both hands on the blue BRIGADISTA SANDINISTA apron tied around my waist, and scruti­nized Ruby, trying to beam that maternal X-ray I’d read about. She looked the same as always.

“My team lost, four to one.” Ruby plopped onto the oak hall bench and reached down to take off her cleats. I saw her glow­ing face, golden apricot under the grime and sweat and the matted curly hair that flew all around her head. How could anyone believe my fairy child has problems?

“But I made the goal.” She lifted her head, the sun through the glass door glinting off her braces, and she rolled her lovely brown eyes up at me so I could see her pleasure. At moments like that, when our eyes locked, our connection was visceral. She smiled, and my heart unclenched. Fight or not, Ruby was fundamentally okay.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“Teaching. Wow, you made a goal.” I stepped closer. “Too bad you lost. Was it fun?”

“Kind of,” she mumbled, head down as she untied her shoelaces. Her legs had grown so long, so fast—at five foot seven she was nearly my height—that every pair of pants she owned were high-water. “Afterward we fooled around . . .”

The rest of her words were lost among long tangles, a curtain hanging over her face. These days she’d turned mercurial: one mo­ment she was beaming at me, the next I had to grill her to get one scrap of information. I was used to that with Che, who’d recently turned a reticent thirteen. But Ruby had ever been the confiding one, eager to press against me on the couch, lean her head on my shoulder, and pour out her heart. We were so close we’d been the envy of all my friends. Until this spring. Day by day, watching Ruby now was like seeing a time-lapsed photo of a flower unfurling: she was that different every time I looked.

“Who were you with?”

“Oh, you know, Jamylle and them . . .” Again she looked up; the brilliant smile captivated me, as it always did.

“How was school?” I held my breath.

“Fine.”

“Anything special?

“Not really,” she said flatly, the sullen stranger closing over her face as if a shade had been drawn.

I knew any more questions were hopeless. Well, I consoled my­self, we’ll talk about it later. Once Solomon and I had a chance to catch up, after dinner, we’d talk to her together.

While I turned away, Che slid back out the front door. I heard the steady plunk of his soccer ball, thump, thump, hitting the stoop. “Che!” I called, stepping outside with Cesar rubbing my leg until I bent to scratch him. Rosa, limping from a deep cut in the pad of her right front foot, hobbled out, whining for her turn.

“Mama?” Che smiled at me then, the same golden red tone as his sister’s lighting his face, as if a special incandescence shone, like Ruby’s, from under his skin. He sidled up the three steps, brushing lightly against my shoulder, hand automatically out to pat Rosa. “We had a snake in biology,” he said, his deep voice cracking while his brow wrinkled. “We dissected it.” His face curled closed so his lashes fluttered against his cheek. “It was dead already. Jabari brought it in. But when we cut it the guts came out.” He squealed with horrified delight, until my serious teenager suddenly sounded like a ten-year-old. “They oozed out all over.” He tried to gauge my reaction. “It was gross!”

Lulled by his lapse into childhood, I reached out to try for a squeeze, but he wriggled free and expertly hurled the ball against the step, bouncing it on the black and red target Solomon had painted. I heard the plunk, steady and slow, just like he was. “After you hit the target . . .” I calculated “. . . two hundred times, come set the table.”

Inside, Ruby’s footsteps thumped and I followed the sound to her room at the back of the house. “Help me with dinner, okay?”

“All right, as soon as I call Imani. I have to tell her one thing. It’s important. What are we having?”

“Pizza—or do you want upside-down night, with scrambled eggs and toast? I have that seeded bread you like. The one that’s real thin-sliced.”

“Pizza!”

How many thousands of times had this been our dinner? Rotat­ing between four or five meals, somehow pizza seemed to come up more often than any of the others. Over the stove I’d hung a color­ful BLACK POWER! UNGAWA! poster, with a raised fist, next to a pic­ture of a massive Chinese woman in red, her huge forearm wielding a giant hammer. Underneath these two Solomon had tacked an An­golan SWAPO poster; its stenciled guns loomed over the steaming vats of food I cooked, usually fresh green beans to go with pizza, or cheap spaghetti or chicken backs and wings, for the Black Pan­thers and hordes of neighbors who constantly filled our kitchen. Now, when the steam billowed, I strode to Ruby’s room. Through her closed door I could hear her muffled voice on the phone and wondered if she was talking with Imani about the fight at school. “Ruby! Come on. Now! I need you.”

She padded up the hall, skillfully chopped beans and tossed them into my bubbling pot. “Quick, put the lid on,” I told her. I sprinkled hamburger onto a frozen pizza crust, said, “Here, sweetie, spread out the meat with this spoon, I’ve almost got the tomato sauce done”—and was tossing a salad with olive oil, oregano, and chives from Berkeley Bowl when I felt a sweet hand massage my left shoulder. After a moment, she seized my arm and began to pull me into a dance. Ruby’s eyes sparkled; in their flash I saw my familiar child. How tall she was getting, I marveled, as we swayed to the jazz beat blaring from the stereo.

“Daddy,” Ruby called out hopefully when the front door clicked open. But it was Che clomping through the dining area. “Can I cook, too?” His voice cracked.

“Shoes off,” I reminded. Kicking his sneakers into the corner, he ambled into the kitchen.

“Watch out, sweetie. Careful of the stove and the hot food.” Soon the three of us, with Cesar wagging his tail, were creating an improvisational dance to Coltrane’s Live at Birdland, an album I never tired of. When Elvin Jones crashed the cymbals, we clapped in unison, Cesar and Rosa brushing our legs. At the rat-a-tat of the steady drumbeat we jerked our hips, a whirling threesome of giggles crowding into the kitchen, until the boiling pot of beans overflowed, squelching the flame. Catching my breath I relit the stove and handed Ruby a stained quilted blue mitt, a wedding pres­ent from Solomon’s sister, Cookie. “Here. Use this while you stir.”

The aroma of bubbling tomato sauce filled the kitchen. Yes, I thought, stealing glances at her, Ruby looks fine. I knew why she’d grabbed that girl’s hair—Jenny had knocked her down—and as for calling her a white bitch, my heart thumped, but before I had a chance to go further with the question I heard the front door click open, and out of the corner of my eye I saw my husband lope through the living room into the kitchen, sniffing the food. Yes, he’s still gorgeous, I let myself notice. Stands so erect, those fine shoulders.

Home for once before nightfall, Solomon’s still-lean body hung over me like a question mark, but I didn’t say a word. Uncorking a bottle of Chianti, I felt my shoulders stiffen and my legs tighten while I silently handed him a glass. And refilled my own. Deliber­ately, I turned my back into a fortress and busied myself with the sauce scalding on the burner.

“Sorry I missed the meeting,” he mumbled. “I tried—”