{"id":9182,"date":"2015-01-29T12:06:25","date_gmt":"2015-01-29T17:06:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=9182"},"modified":"2015-09-24T14:37:28","modified_gmt":"2015-09-24T18:37:28","slug":"the-skin-were-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=9182","title":{"rendered":"The Skin We\u2019re In"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"homepage-slider-jess-row-image-FINAL\"
Photo by Chester Higgins Jr.\/The New York Times\/Redux<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The writing career of Associate Professor of English Jess Row is on fire, with a critically acclaimed novel and a New Yorker<\/em> short story (\u201cThe Empties\u201d) published in the last six months. Row\u2019s work, which also includes two short story collections, has been called \u201cdaring\u201d by The New York Times<\/em>, \u201csubtle\u2026and fascinating\u201d by Entertainment Weekly<\/em>, and \u201cflat-out brilliant\u201d by the Los Angeles Times<\/em>. In his debut novel, Your Face in Mine<\/em>, Row takes a fresh and unflinching look at race, identity, privilege, and alienation.\u00a0The following is an excerpt from the book. Sit back and enjoy.<\/p>\n

\n

\"jessrow-cover\"It doesn\u2019t seem possible, even now, that it could begin the way it begins, in the blank light of a Sunday afternoon in February, crossing the parking lot at the Mondawmin Mall on the way to Lee\u2019s Asian Grocery, my jacket in my hand, because it\u2019s warm, the sudden, bleary, half-withheld breath of spring one gets in late winter in Baltimore, and a black man comes from the opposite direction, alone, my age or younger, still bundled in a black lambswool coat with the hood up, and as he draws nearer I feel an unmistakable shock of recognition. Even with the hood, that elected shade, that halo of shadow. I don\u2019t know whether to call it a certain place above the bridge of the nose and between the eyes, or perhaps something about the shape of the nose itself, or the way he carries it. Or the exact way his lips meet. Or the mild inquisitive look in his eyes that changes as I come closer to something unreadable, something close to surprise. I am looking into the face of a black man, and I\u2019ll be utterly honest, unsurprisingly honest: I don\u2019t know so many black men well enough that I would feel such a strong pull, such a decisive certainty. I know this guy, I\u2019m thinking, yet I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve never seen this face before. Who goes around looking for ghost eyes, for pleading looks of remembrance, in the faces of strangers? Not me. He\u2019s coming closer, and I\u2019m running through all my past at a furious clip, riffling frantically the index cards of my memory for a forgotten slight, a stray remark, a door slammed in a black man\u2019s face, a braying car horn behind me on 83 South. He has his eyes trained on me with a faint smile, a smile that dips at the left corner, and says,<\/p>\n

Kelly. I\u2019ll bet you\u2019re wondering why I know your name.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry, I say. Do I know you?<\/p>\n

Kelly, he says, pursing his lips, it\u2019s Martin.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re alone, in a field of cracked asphalt, dotted here and there with sprays of tenacious weeds, a mostly abandoned shopping plaza missing its anchor tenant. I would never have come here but for Lee\u2019s being the closest Chinese grocery to my apartment, an emergency stop for days when I unexpectedly run out of tree-ear fungus or Shaoxing wine or shallots or tapioca starch. Yes, we\u2019re in Baltimore; yes, I once lived here, grew up here; but because Baltimore is not just one feeble city but many, and Mondawmin is, to be as honest as I have to be, on the black side of town, in the course of my predictable life, I might as well be on the surface of the moon. As a child I imagined there were hidden places\u2014the tangle of bushes dividing the north\u00a0and south lanes of the freeway, the fenced\u2011in, overgrown side yard on the far side of our elderly neighbor\u2019s house\u2014that held gaps, portholes, in the fabric of the world, and if I crawled into one of them I would become one of the disappeared children whose faces appeared on circulars and milk cartons and Girl Scout cookie boxes, whose cold bodies were orbiting earth as we spoke, and every so often bumped into the Space Shuttle and slid off, unbeknownst to the astronauts inside. How was I supposed to know that I would only have to cross town to find my own gap, my own way into the beyond?<\/p>\n

I cross my arms protectively in front of my chest, and say,<\/p>\n

I know you are.<\/p>\n

You do?<\/p>\n

Martin, I say, I need an explanation.<\/p>\n

\n

We cross the parking lot together, Martin, the black man who used to be Martin, ducked slightly behind my right shoulder, flickering in and out of my peripheral vision. Somehow I\u2019m still possessed of enough of my faculties to remember to grab a shopping cart. The sliding door creaks on an unoiled runner, and we breathe in the comforting sting of Asian markets everywhere\u2014dried scallops and mushrooms, wilting choi sum<\/em>, fish guts in a bucket behind the seafood counter. Mr. Lee looks up at me over yesterday\u2019s Apple Daily<\/em>\u2014when did they start getting the Hong Kong papers?\u2014and says, you\u2019re too late, the cha siu bao<\/em> are all sold out.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s okay, I say. I need to lose weight anyway.<\/p>\n

Yeah, says his daughter, stacking napa cabbages on newspaper in a shopping cart. You\u2019re too fat.<\/p>\n

Lee gives her a dour Confucian look. Little number three, he says, that\u2019s enough out of you. And then, turning to me: is the black man with you? He doesn\u2019t speak Chinese, too, does he?<\/p>\n

Martin has halted by the soy milk case, reading the labels intently.<\/p>\n

Yes, I say. Yes, he\u2019s with me. And no, he doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Tell him we don\u2019t have candy bars or potato chips. They always ask.<\/p>\n

I give him a noncommittal nod.<\/p>\n

My wife was Chinese, I say to Martin, making my way down aisle one, filling the cart with black tree fungus and Sichuan chilies and dried beans and tofu skin. I lived there for three years before I got my PhD. She taught me how to cook. My voice sounds bland, conversational, informational: I\u2019ve been stunned, that\u2019s the only way to explain it, stunned back into a certain strained normality. He follows everything I\u2019m saying with lidded eyes and pursed lips, nodding to himself, as if it\u2019s exactly what I would have done, in his mind, as if he could have projected it all, with slight variations.<\/p>\n

Hold on. Your wife was<\/em>? You\u2019re not together?<\/p>\n

No, I say, no, she died. She and my daughter died. In a car accident.<\/p>\n

How long?<\/p>\n

I look at my watch.<\/p>\n

A year, I say, six months, three weeks, and two days.<\/p>\n

Mr. Lee, who has never before seen me speaking English, is pretending not to watch us, stealing interested glances over a full-page picture of Maggie Cheung.<\/p>\n

I was in Shanghai and Hangzhou once, Martin says. Only briefly, on business. Loved it. Loved the energy. Wish I could have stayed longer. He reaches up and pulls the hood away from his forehead. His hair, a black man\u2019s hair, of course, razored close to the scalp, with neat lines at the temples and the nape of the neck. The look of a man who\u2019s close friends with his barber. I can\u2019t help thinking of my own scraggling beard, and the last time I tried to crop it into a new shape, how it looked, as Meimei used to put it, half goat-eaten.<\/em> Fullness of time, I can\u2019t help thinking. The phrase just won\u2019t leave my mind. Fullness of time<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You know, he says. You\u2019re a brave man, Kelly. I think I\u2019d have run away screaming. His voice is different. It is, thoroughly, unmistakably, a black man\u2019s voice, declarative, deep, warm, with a faint twang in the nasal consonants. It\u2019s just a couple of operations, he says. And some skin treatments. In the right hands, no big thing at all. That is to say, it won\u2019t be. When it becomes more common.<\/p>\n

Does it, does it\u2014I\u2019m flailing here\u2014does it have a name? What you\u2019ve done?<\/p>\n

If it had a name, he says, what would that change, exactly? Would it be more acceptable to you? Would it be a thing<\/em> people do? Would it have a category unto itself?<\/p>\n

He laughs.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m just playing with you, he says. You should see the look on your face. Kelly, of course it has a name. What do you think it would be called? Racial reassignment.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve stopped at the end of the dried goods aisle, the aisle of staples, and I\u2019m teetering on the edge of the snacks aisle: lychee gummies, shrimp chips, dried squid, mango slices in foil, and three or four rows of Pocky, that bizarre Japanese name for pretzel sticks dipped in coatings of one or another artificially flavored candy. Pocky comes in cigarette-sized packs with flip-top lids, and there is, in addition to strawberry, raspberry, and vanilla, Men\u2019s Pocky, plain chocolate, in a distinguished pine-green. It\u2019s never been clear to me whether this is an elaborate inside joke on the part of the manufacturer or a sincere message to the consumer. There is Men\u2019s Pocky, but not Women\u2019s Pocky. Am I supposed to be reassured, not having to make a choice?<\/p>\n

Racial reassignment surgery<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Yeah, of course, surgery. But it\u2019s more than that. It\u2019s a long process.<\/p>\n

Meaning, I have to say\u2014I strain to form the words\u2014meaning you were always black. Like a sex change. Inside you always felt black.<\/p>\n

Damn, he says. You get right to the point, don\u2019t you? I don\u2019t remember you being this direct, Kelly.<\/p>\n

Martin, I say, without quite being able to look at him\u2014I cast my eyes up to the stained ceiling tile, the fluorescent panel lamps dotted with dead flies\u2014we\u2019re not going to see each other again, are we? Isn\u2019t that the point? You wanted a new life. I\u2019m certainly not going to intrude.<\/p>\n

Anyone can get a new life, he says. It\u2019s easy to fall off the map. I don\u2019t recall you ever trying to track me down. And all of you guys left, anyway. Am I just repeating the obvious here? I never thought I\u2019d see you back in Baltimore. You get hired by Hopkins?<\/p>\n

No, I say. I\u2019m not an academic. Not anymore. I work in public radio. No kidding? You mean, what is it, 91.1? The Hopkins station?<\/p>\n

No, the other one. WBCC. 107.3.<\/p>\n

Oh, yeah. Right. Way up at the top of the dial. I always wondered why there were two.<\/p>\n

Are you a listener?<\/p>\n

Heck no, he says. I listen to XM. No offense, I like the news sometimes, but not all that turtleneck-sweater, mandolin, Lake Wobegon stuff. Not my thing.<\/p>\n

Yeah. I understand.<\/p>\n

You do? You understand?<\/p>\n

I read the surveys<\/em>, runs through my mind, that\u2019s my job, I know the demographics. I could break down our audience into the single percentiles<\/em>. Look, I say, I mean, it\u2019s not a secret. It\u2019s a problem<\/em>. We think about it every day. We want to be a station for the whole city, you know, Baltimore<\/em>, and we\u2019re just not. It\u2019s an issue. I\u2019m trying, believe me.<\/p>\n

He whistles through his teeth. Maybe you\u2019re the man for me, he says. I need somebody to help me with this project. This idea I have. A communicator. He takes a slim billfold from his front pocket\u2014the long, old-fashioned kind, meant to fit in a blazer\u2014and takes out a glossy orange business card. Martin Wilkinson, Orchid Imports LLC.<\/em><\/p>\n

You changed your name.<\/p>\n

You know many brothers named Martin Lipkin?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just one in a long list of inconceivable things I\u2019ve had to conceive of in the last fifteen minutes, so I nod nonchalantly.<\/p>\n

And what, you sell orchids?<\/p>\n

No, no. Electronics. My wife came up with the name.<\/p>\n

Okay, I say, nodding again, a yes-man.<\/p>\n

So you\u2019ll email me? Can I buy you lunch?<\/p>\n

Is that really a good idea? I ask him. I mean, I know you. Aren\u2019t I kind of a liability? A piece of personal history?<\/p>\n

I trust you, he says, staring at me, boxing me in, so that I\u2019m forced to look straight at his coffee-colored pupils\u2014just the same as before, at least as far as I remember. Listen, he says, we can act like this never happened. If that\u2019s what you want. Either way, you\u2019ll respect my privacy. I know that much. So I\u2019m just asking: you want to come with me a little further down this road, Kelly? You curious? You want the whole story?<\/p>\n

Keeping my head straight, our eyes level, in this Vulcan-mind-meld game he seems to want to play, I conduct the briefest possible mental inventory of my life: an empty apartment; an enormous, shockingly expensive storage unit out in Towson, filled with boxes I\u2019ll never open; a job, if you can call it a job; a few friends, widely spaced; a 500-page manuscript on two dead poets, gathering dust in its library binding up in Cambridge; a wall of books in five languages I never want to read again.<\/p>\n

Yes, I say, yes, I\u2019ll have lunch with you, Martin.<\/p>\n

See you then. He pulls his hood back up, hunches his shoulders, and disappears through the door, back into the tepid weather, the diffident sunshine, the blank, anonymous world that seems almost to have created him.<\/p>\n

\n

Reprinted from Your Face in Mine<\/em> by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. Copyright \u00a9 2014 by Jess Row.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The writing career of Associate Professor of English Jess Row is on fire, with a critically acclaimed novel and a New Yorker short story (\u201cThe Empties\u201d) published in the last six months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":9187,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-winter-2015"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}