The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (6 page)

When I was ten years old, my mother’s facial hair fetish gave way to an athletic addiction. By that, I mean, she only dated runners. And by runners, I mean competitive speed walkers. I don’t mean to pass judgment or anything, but approximately half of the speed walkers my mother took home sported a mustache across their upper lips, so she can claim she got over the ’stache fetish, but she didn’t. Not really.

I’ll never forget walking home from school one day and seeing my mother and a mustachioed speed walker sashaying up to the front door after a whopping three-mile jaunt, their hips shifting from left to right, their arms staggered in pendulous rhythm, and their feet tenderly touching the ground from heel to toe, heel to toe, like developmentally challenged salsa dancers. I was with Andy Hoskins, the most popular boy in school, and Persephone Riga, the most popular girl in school. My mother’s feet picked up movement along with her boyfriend’s, all the while as she placed the key in the door’s keyhole, and then within moments, their rotating hips almost swayed in syncopation, his mixed with hers, like vodka and cranberry juice, like rum with coke. Right there in public. On our front door. For the entire neighborhood and Andy Hoskins and Persephone Riga to observe.

Despite this nefarious production, Persephone later became my closest friend, my constant companion, and my confidante, until the middle of seventh grade, when her parents moved the family away from the school district to a neighborhood where having a tennis court in your backyard was not considered excessive or affluent. It was just considered normal, like having an indoor bathroom and doggie door was considered normal in my neighborhood.

At first, I didn’t see a lot of Persephone after she moved, but after about a month or so, she started to invite me over to her house and teach me how to serve and volley on the backyard tennis court, or smash down a lob so that nobody could possibly return it. After only two or three weeks, it was as if she had never left.

I still remember the first time I visited her small palace on the other side of town. Her parents were pleased that she was still comingling with her former classmates, as she was having a rather clumsy time acclimating to her new school. They invited me in, gracefully, almost as if they were the servants to a new manor, and served me lemonade in a crystal wine glass and Girl Scout cookies on a crystal cheese platter.

“Thin Mints, Noa?”

I nodded, eloquently, the way I thought someone in her home would reply. “Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Riga. Thank you very much, Mrs. Riga.”

“Freshly squeezed lemonade or pulpless, Noa?”

“No pulp, Mrs. Riga. Thank you so much, Mrs. Riga.”

Persephone laughed when she heard me talking to her mother as if she were royalty.

“Come!” she cheered, “I want to show you something.”

She grabbed my hand and pulled me over to her parents’ dining room, where dozens of porcelain dishes were displayed behind glass so thick you’d think it was protecting the Mona Lisa from itinerant fingerprints and bullets.

“Check it out,” she told me. “My mom says they’re worth like twenty thousand dollars.”

The china had fleurs-de-lis hand-painted on each bowl and dessert dish. How did I know they were hand-painted? Persephone told me.

“They’re hand-painted,” she said proudly. “My mom told me they’re hand-painted. That’s what makes them worth so much. We got them with the house after my grandpa died. Isn’t it cool?”

I wasn’t sure which part of it was cool, but I was pretty sure that I didn’t fit in with people who spoke about china patterns and fleurs-de-lis, and even less so with people who had tennis courts in their backyards. I understand now that Persephone and the Rigas didn’t fit in with them, either. Susan and Georg Riga didn’t paint those fleurs-de-lis by hand. They didn’t build that tennis court by choice. They were merely inhabiting new imperial robes, almost like I have with the color cocoa brown.

For months, Persephone proceeded to invite me over after school on days when she didn’t have a tennis lesson or a French lesson or dance practice, to show me some extravagant new relic of inheritance that her mother or father deemed too priceless to display. The Rigas were always placing their beloved items behind glass or behind a closet or behind a wooden cabinet or in a safe. It was as if they never felt comfortable in their new station, like they never unpacked from their old life. Clothing that Persephone and I had purchased together when we were neighbors lay dormant in old suitcases, never opened. Mrs. Riga started picking up extra lines around her eyes and lips every time someone called, because she didn’t quite know how to answer the phone. And sticky plastic skins cloaked all their furniture, as if they were too nervous to soil it with their old routine. They woke up one day with someone handing them a new life without their choosing, and they were unsure of how to conform, like someone who has recently been relegated to a wheelchair.

It took me over twenty years, but I finally could relate.

My mother told me years later that if someone hands you a new life that has been watermarked as enviable and emerald, you take it—regardless the cost. I thought of Persephone’s transformation away from me for years, never quite grasping her need to step into that new life, until it was time for me to do the same.

When I was seventeen years old, I was salutatorian of my high school class. I was chosen to give the oration at graduation. I had earned a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and was sharing postcoital cigarettes with the cutest boy in school (yes, Andy Hoskins) on a triweekly basis. To top it off, I had no father to tell me I was doing it all wrong.

Andy Hoskins ran track for our school and was going to Cal State Bakersfield on a full athletic scholarship in the fall. The night before graduation, he slept in my bed along with a box of cigarettes, a matchbook, and an empty notepad. He kept urging me to work on the speech, finish the speech, practice the speech, trying to frighten me with such comments like: “Do you know how many people are
going to be watching you tomorrow?” “These words will be your epitaph!” “This is the most important thing you’ve done up until now.” And so forth. Perhaps he knew how prophetic those comments would be, fast-forward a few years into the future. Perhaps not. It’s not my job to dwell on these things.

I remember looking into his blue eyes that night, wanting to throw away the pencils and the pens and the yellow lined legal pads and just stay in bed. I didn’t care about my speech. I was sure that my impediment, asleep as it may have been, would come out in public, despite the years of therapy. All I wanted at that point was Andy. He was all I could think about. I can remember, even now, the windmill of air-conditioning cooling my moist back on that night in May. I still smell his olive-hued skin next to mine as I urged him to spend graduation in bed together. It would have been the first time we’d go to sleep together and wake up together. I didn’t want robes or mortarboards anymore; I didn’t want clapping parents and grandparents. I just wanted us.

My legs crawled around him. “We can skip the ceremony. It’s not that important,” I told him, closing my legs about his chest. Back then, my legs were smooth and sculpted, and my calves swung out as little tennis balls each time I flexed.

His jaw dropped at my proposition. “People like you aren’t supposed to speak that way.” Andy’s heart was pounding, probably without him even knowing it. “You don’t even realize what an opportunity you have,” he said, standing up from the bed.

Instinctively I rose and stood next to him. Our eyes met. I was just as tall as he, just as fit, just as tan. He probably never got over that, the equality between us. Then again, I suppose since I was salutatorian and I was going to Penn and he was about to be an ex-jock going to a state school, then we weren’t exactly equal, per se, now were we.

“Look, I barely study,” I finally said. “This stuff—school—just comes easy to me. Why does it even bother you?”

He sat back from me. “I can’t be with someone who doesn’t take herself seriously.”

“I take myself plenty seriously.”

He locked eyes with me. “No, you don’t.”

Then he found his shorts and slid them on one leg at a time. His calves, his thighs, his forearms were all so tan; and the hairs on that bronze skin were bleached nearly blond from the hours he spent running outside, jumping over hurdles, slipping on the rust-colored track. “I gotta go,” he mumbled. “I have to actually prepare for tomorrow.”

He grabbed his shirt and started draping it over his top just like they do in movies: all those fuming men who can’t remember where they put their pants, even though they know the room well, and rush outside half-naked, teeming with an anger that can’t be contained inside four walls. That’s pretty much how Andy looked when he walked out on me the night after we slept together for the second to last time.

I watched him storm away from the upstairs window of my mom’s bedroom. I wanted to scream, “What the hell do you have to prepare? You walk across the stage, pick up a piece of paper, shake some old freak’s hand, and move on. Real tough, Andy!” But I didn’t say it. I let him have the last word, and for that, he forgave me the night before I moved to Philadelphia.

At graduation, my salutatorian speech failed to impress. I stole a load of Shakespeare quotes and sandwiched them with Bobby Frost to create the most clichéd “Go Forth and Prosper” homily my high school ever heard. No doubt, had Persephone not transferred, she would have been salutatorian and postulated more eloquently in front of all those people than I did.

Andy collected his diploma with subdued panache. I heard he went on to train for the Olympics in track and field but couldn’t compete due to an Achilles tendon injury. Now he’s married to a dental hygienist, is a commercial real estate agent, and lives somewhere in the San Fernando Valley with his litter of five-point-whatever kids.

Three days after my high school graduation, I received a letter in the mail from my father. Not one of the baker’s dozen of men rotating
through my mom’s bed in the ’80s. Nor Paramedic One (or was it Two?). No, I’m talking about the sperm donor, the one she’d always called a one-night stand, the ex. My Real Father.

It was a postcard from somewhere just outside Philadelphia. The front of it was a large picture of the cracked Liberty Bell with a little red heart painted on top of it. “The City of Brotherly Love,” it said in white cursive bubble letters. When I turned the postcard over, it said, “Congradulations! Love from, Caleb.” There was absolutely nothing else on the postcard but the word
congratulations
, spelled with a
d
, and his name and address.

“How do you know this is from my father?” I asked my mom.

She sifted through the mail, picking up a hefty envelope from Publishers Clearing House and tearing it in half, then in fourths, and eighths, and so on until a confetti mug shot of Ed McMahon sprinkled the table. She did not, however, dignify my query with a response of any sort—visual or audible.

“Mom?”

“What?” she asked, without looking my way. She was sweeping the confetti into her palm.

“How do you know this is my father? Is this his name? I thought you didn’t remember who he was?”

When she didn’t respond, I understood everything. I grabbed the postcard, stuck it in my purse, and took it as an open invitation for contact. My mother disagreed.

“If he wanted to be a father, he would have been a father,” she later said.

And that was the end of the discussion.

E
VERYONE IS SO FASCINATED WITH THE ACCURSED
“
WHY
”
OF MY
crime. They are obsessed with the organic origin of my hate as if it were born in some petri dish, fused together by the toxic roots of my genetic tree.

If I were to offer an explanation of why I did what I did, half of the public wouldn’t believe it, and the other half wouldn’t think it changed a thing. The only people who would be transformed by a revelation are related to Sarah, and this so-called revelation isn’t going to bring her back. So why does anyone really need to know?

Back when my trial began, I thought about doling out various “whys” to the press. A new story per printing.

One: I was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder after having spent that night in the hospital all those years earlier. The Psychologist-Approved Theory.

Two: I was drugged at a New Year’s Eve party and didn’t know what I was doing. The Victim Theory. (The public eats this one up, expecting me to ultimately own up to actually knowing what I did.)

Three: I hated Sarah and didn’t want her to be happy. The Cain and Abel Theory.

Four: If I couldn’t have what I wanted, then nobody could. The Cain and Abel Theory, part deux.

Five: She was rich and I was poor. The Marxist Theory.

Six: She wanted me to do it. She wanted the easy way out. Only not necessarily the way I did it. The Jack Kevorkian Theory.

Seven: I had daddy issues that bled into every part of my motivation. This one is neither logical nor boring, most certainly never gets old, and doesn’t even merit a label.