Colored Television

Feeling excited about her prospects, Jane convinces Lenny to go look at a house to buy in a neighborhood she calls “Multicultural Mayberry.” It is a beautiful neighborhood often used as a shooting location to depict “Anywhere, USA.” Jane makes Lenny wear a yellow polo shirt so that he looks more “dignified and articulate” when they meet with the real estate agent (69). They stop at a lemonade stand in the neighborhood on the way, and Jane admires the Black lesbian family running the stand. The mothers are talking to a white hippie with a “genderless” child. They arrive at the house, and Lenny chats with the real estate agent. Jane notices his bourgeois upbringing coming out in their easy banter.

As they look around the beautiful Craftsman home, another young couple with a baby arrives. The male partner is from Osaka, Japan, and Lenny speaking to him in Japanese surprises Jane. She knew Lenny had been studying Japanese because he was in the middle of preparing for a solo show there and had dreams of moving permanently to Japan, but she hadn’t realized he could hold a conversation in the language.

Sitting in the child’s bedroom of the home, Jane thinks about how, as a child, she had been bussed from inner-city Boston to a white suburban school.