Summary

Back in the apartment she shares with Gloria and Charlotte, Becky thinks of her parents. Her father, John Darke, was half-Indian and because of his ethnicity, was teased mercilessly as a child. Because he was mixed race, “Skinny white boys in army-green balaclavas had thrown bags of dog shit through his mother’s letterbox” (56). But John did not let the teasing slow him down. Instead, he enrolled as a PhD "with the goal of changing the way we thought about politics in this country” (56). He became a brilliant political scholar and popular community organizer. John met Becky’s mother, Paula, an aspiring photographer, through a man with whom both Paula and John had slept, Marco. Paula and John quickly fell in love because they found “each other’s work inspiring” and enjoy “each other’s strangeness” (65). When Becky was born, however, John...