—

ON FRIDAY, MY day off, I have an appointment at the nail salon with Adisa. We sit side by side, our hands under the UV drying vents. Adisa looks at the bottle of my chosen OPI nail color and shakes her head. “I can’t believe you picked a polish called Juice Bar Hopping,” she says. “That’s got to be the whitest color ever.”

“It’s orange,” I point out.

“I meant the name, Ruth, the name. You ever see a brotha in a juice bar? No. Because nobody goes to a bar to drink juice. Just like nobody asks for a sippy cup full of tequila.”

I roll my eyes. “Really? I just told you all about getting barred from a patient’s care and you want to talk about what color I’m putting on my nails?”

“I’m talking about what color you chose to live your life, girl,” Adisa says. “What happened to you happens to the rest of us every day. Every hour. You’re just so used to playing by their rules you forgot you got skin in the game.” She smirks. “Well. Lighter skin, but still.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She shrugs. “When was the last time you told someone Mama still works as a domestic?”

“She hardly works now. You know that. She’s basically a charity Mina contributes to.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

I scowl. “I don’t know when I mentioned it last. Is that the first thing you bring up in conversation? Plus, it doesn’t matter what color I am. I’m good at my job. I didn’t deserve to be taken off that case.”

“And I don’t deserve to be living in Church Street South, but it’s going to take more than me to change two hundred years of history.”

My sister likes to play the victim. We’ve had some pretty heated exchanges about that before. If you don’t want to be seen as a stereotype, then the way I see it, don’t be one. But to my sister, that means playing a white man’s game, and being who they want her to be, instead of being unapologetically herself. Adisa says the word assimilation with so much venom that you’d think anyone who chooses it—like I did—is swallowing poison.

It’s also very like my sister to take a problem I have and turn it into her own rant.

“None of what happened at the hospital is your fault,” my sister says, surprising me. I figured she’d say I had this coming to me, because I’ve been pretending to be someone I’m not and somewhere along the pretending, I forgot the truth. “It’s their world, Ruth. We just live in it. It’s like if you up and moved to Japan. You could choose to ignore the customs and never learn the language, but you’re going to get along a lot easier if you do, right? Same thing here. Every time you turn on the TV or the radio you see and hear about white people going to high school and college, eating dinner, getting engaged, drinking their pinot noir. You learn how they live their lives, and you speak their language well enough to blend in with them. But how many white people you know who go out of their way to see Tyler Perry movies so they can learn how to act around Black people?”

“That’s not the point—”

“No, the point is you can do as the Romans do all you want, but it don’t mean the Emperor will let you into his palace.”

“White people do not run the world, Adisa,” I argue. “There are plenty of successful people of color.” I name the first three that pop into my head. “Colin Powell, Cory Booker, Beyoncé—”

“—and ain’t none of them dark, like me,” Adisa counters. “You know what they say: the deeper you go into the projects, the darker the skin.”

“Clarence Thomas,” I pronounce. “He’s darker than you and he’s on the Supreme Court.”

My sister laughs. “Ruth, he’s so conservative he probably bleeds white.”

My phone dings, and I carefully extract it from my purse so I don’t mess up my nails.

“Edison?” Adisa asks immediately. Say what you will about her, but she loves my son as much as I do.

“No. It’s Lucille from work.” Just seeing her name pop up on my phone makes my mouth go dry; she was the nurse during the delivery of Davis Bauer. But this isn’t about that family at all. Lucille’s got a stomach bug; she needs someone to fill in for her tonight. She’s willing to trade me, so that instead of working all day Saturday, I can leave at eleven. It means pulling a double shift, but I’m already thinking of what I could do with that time on Saturday. Edison needs a new winter coat this year—I swear he’s grown four inches over the summer. I could treat him to lunch, after shopping. Maybe there’s even a movie coming out that Edison and I could go see. It’s been hitting me hard lately—the realization that getting my son to a point where he’s accepted to college also means that I will be left alone. “They want me to come in to work tonight.”

“Who’s they? The Nazis?”

“No, another nurse who’s sick.”

“Another white nurse,” Adisa clarifies.

I don’t even respond.