Breaking Night

Chapter 3
Tsunami Weather

FOLLOWING HER 1986 BREAKDOWN, MA’S MENTAL ILLNESS PROVED to be more menacing than any of us expected. All together, Ma suffered six schizophrenic bouts in just four years, each requiring her to be institutionalized for no less than one month, no more than three. Initially, I regarded Ma’s attacks as something to dread for the ways they changed her and for the haunting images her episodes replayed before me.
Ma in a conversation with the characters flashing across our TV screen, the uniformed police officers dispatched to our living room to take her away, standing among our furniture, their boots pressed down on our carpet, their crackling walkie-talkies clipped tightly to those tough leather belts. Curled up on our couch, I passed the corner of my pink nightgown through my fingers over and over, watching when they pulled Ma’s wrists together for the handcuffs, as she never went voluntarily.
The beige tiles of the mental ward’s stain-resistant floor; Ma’s life made uncomplicated, in her assigned room with a bed for sleeping, a square cabinet for “personals,” a sink for washing. Ma’s big blank eyes unfocused, wide as two boiled eggs, staring ahead at nothing.
As time passed, Ma’s drug abuse doubled, then tripled in frequency. The addiction became obvious in every part of her, from her diminished ability to string together whole sentences to that overused spot on her forearm that became perpetually infected, as dark and raw as a cracked plum. I began to think differently of her months in the mental hospital. As long as she was able to, Ma would get high; the breakdowns were the only thing that stopped her.
The posters at school called drug abuse a slow form of suicide. At the pace Ma was going, I was beginning to feel that the mental hospital was all that was saving her. And with each hospitalization came the hope, however futile, that she could remain sober.
On each of her returns from North Central Bronx Psychiatric Ward, Ma seemed ready for a healthy, drug-free life: thicker around the thighs and waist, the dark circles gone from underneath her eyes, and her beautiful black hair shimmery and thick again. She’d make regular trips to Narcotics Anonymous, and over those weeks, the glass jewelry box from Daddy quickly filled with optimistic piles of rainbow-colored NA keychains marking her steps toward sobriety in increments of one day, one week, or one month clean. But they always seemed to halt there.
As inevitably as a shift in seasons, Ma would start to show the signs of another oncoming lapse, beginning with her absence from meetings. She’d linger in the living room too long, flipping channels until six p.m. came and went; she’d miss one meeting, then two, then three, and then when her SSI check arrived, she’d go on a weeklong drug binge that ran us broke. Then she’d sleep that off for days as the phone rang and rang with unanswered calls from her NA sponsor. As it turned out, the coke had a way of counteracting the effects of Ma’s psychiatric medication, and enough bingeing would always land her back in the psychiatric ward, leaving Daddy to fill in as a full-time single parent.
Daddy rose to the occasion. Just as Ma had found it easier to manage our finances when Daddy was in prison, so it seemed Daddy was able to stretch the monthly checks in a way I hadn’t realized was possible. I learned with some degree of relief, as well as hurt, that all three of us could go an entire month eating dinner each night, and usually with something to eat during the day as well, on that same check that I’d spent years watching Ma and Daddy deplete in only days following its arrival. Had it been possible to feed us this well all along? Humming tunes from his favorite oldies songs, Daddy spent evenings sweating over the oven, cooking up two-dollar steaks with mashed potatoes or pasta for sides. On the two days a week we visited Ma, Daddy gave Lisa and me four quarters each. I always saved half of it in my Pooh bear piggy bank; not so much for any future purchase, but just to be able to drag my hand through the growing pile and know it was mine. Toward the end of this four-year stretch of Ma’s hospital stays, I realized that I could measure Ma’s time away by counting the quarters. By the middle of the year in 1990, more than once, I had accumulated over twenty dollars in change before Ma found and stole my savings. “Crazy quarters,” I had called them, for Ma’s craziness. Daddy had more money then too, because he used drugs more conservatively, no more than seven or eight times a week, when Ma was away. In her absence, there were no more multiple drug runs either. Daddy seemed almost content to be sober the rest of the time.
And finally, there was the brief period just after Ma came home, before both of them fully let drugs back in, when they were semi-sober together. The four of us saw movies at the Loew’s Paradise Theater, Ma braided my hair, Daddy orchestrated day trips to the library, and the rug got vacuumed.
Though, like a pendulum, I knew Ma and Daddy to be either all to one side—social, approachable—or on their way toward the other—totally removed, inaccessible in almost every way. It was a relentless back and forth, the momentum of their switch determined by the different stages of Ma’s mental illness. That was until they broke the pattern in the summer of 1990, a time that marked an alarming eight months of their most severe drug abuse ever. This overlapped, not coincidentally, with the lowest point in their troubled marriage. Their relationship seemed to worsen as Ma lingered in her longest period of sanity in the last four years. The slump went on for so long that not only did it feel permanent, but it also left me wondering about my love for Ma. I found myself wishing, almost daily, for her to lose her mind and be committed again, so that something, anything would clear away the haze that had settled over us.
That was the summer before I turned ten, when, after a series of daily shouting matches and sometimes violent arguments, mostly instigated by Ma, that lasted for all of June, Ma and Daddy began sleeping separately. Their most recent fights were based primarily on vague suspicions Ma held against Daddy, declaring him “no goddamn good.”
“It’s just him,” she’d say. “He’s conniving.”
Though Ma’s doctors deemed her recovery from each breakdown as “full,” over her last three or so releases, Ma retained an irrational, vague, but consistent image of Daddy’s having something “off” about him.
“It’s just his character, Lizzy. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
Unlike so many of the things Ma’s mind created because of her sickness, part of me wondered whether or not she had reason to mistrust Daddy. When Ma would go on one of her rants about him, I defended him, but part of me would think about all the time he spent out of the apartment with no explanation as to where he’d been. And sometimes, this one fuzzy memory about Daddy would surface.
In the memory I was maybe six years old and Lisa was about eight. Daddy walked with us down a Manhattan block and I could see that we were heading toward a park. As we got closer to the park Daddy let go of my hand and pushed me toward Lisa. I remember that there was something about him that made me anxious.
“Go with Lisa, Lizzy. She’s gonna take you to see Meredith.”
I wondered where we were going and why Daddy wasn’t going to come with us to the park. With my free hand, I reached for him, but Daddy backed away. His hands were shaking.
“Come on, Liz,” Lisa said, pulling on my hand. “Let’s go see Meredith. She’s right there.”
A teenaged girl stood across the street in front of a path leading into the park. She had brown hair and she was waving at us, smiling in a way that implied we were familiar with one another. Years later, Lisa would confirm this memory and tell me that before he met Ma, Daddy had another daughter. We had a sister, named Meredith. Daddy had abandoned her when she was barely two years old.
I don’t recall Daddy ever talking about Meredith at home or in front of Ma. She never came to visit. Sometimes it felt as though I made up the memory of her, but I knew I hadn’t. And every now and then Lisa and I would talk about how we wanted to meet Meredith again, and get to know our big sister. But no one talked about Daddy’s other life before us, or our other sister. And with all the time Daddy liked to spend out of the house, it made me wonder what else I didn’t know about him. The feeling this gave me was one of Daddy being somewhat mysterious.
Whether or not his mysteriousness was the actual cause, Ma was often furious with and suspicious of Daddy, and she expressed herself freely, shouting at him, provoking fights. Daddy was more laid-back, having grown indifferent to Ma’s fits. “You can take it for only so long before you tune out,” he’d tell me, an attitude that only deepened Ma’s mistrust and anger. It was hardly a surprise when they finally stopped functioning as a couple altogether. In a way, Ma’s moving to the couch felt overdue.
The living room took on a bedroom feel with the addition of Ma’s things; cigarettes, matches, keys, and underwear littered the coffee table, among old magazines and crust left behind from food stuck to a fast-growing collection of dishes surrounded by an ever-present swirl of flies. During the day, while she slept and Daddy was downtown, I walked the softest steps past the couch, stopping only to shut the window and keep the draft off Ma, or to cover her naked body with a sheet. Coming in close, I could smell the aroma of sour beer breath circulated by Ma’s snoring. When she was awake, Ma walked circles through the apartment and found everything depressing. She made multiple daily runs to the bodega for forty-ounce bottles of Budweiser, which she drank in heavy gulps, breaking occasionally to burst into tears.
Getting high became one of the last things Ma and Daddy did together. When they weren’t shooting up, Daddy read by his nightstand, sometimes laughing so loudly I’d hear it all the way from the bathroom. Daddy staved off the fighting, shielded by his newly private bedroom and his books. The only real concerns he expressed were over very particular things. As long as everything was together—his aging, faded magazines stacked in some private but vital order, the empty Sunny Delight bottle beside his bed so he could avoid regular trips to the bathroom at night—Daddy could lie there uninterrupted for hours. He’d have no trouble relaxing, he said, if only everyone would just remember to screw the goddamn cap on the Pepsi, tight; or if he could understand why anyone would think two slices of turkey didn’t make a sandwich; and if he knew, for certain, that all the oven’s knobs were switched off.
Whenever Ma and Daddy’s fighting became too bitter, Lisa and I locked ourselves in our own rooms at opposite ends of the apartment, her with her music, and me with my books. I sat at my desk, where I could read for hours. I read very slowly through Daddy’s true crime books, his biographies and his books on random trivia. Eventually, I began reading fast enough to get through one of his books in a little over a week. And though my attendance at school remained spotty, this made the year-end exams passable. Even if I hardly showed up for class, I could make sense of most literary material put in front of me. After consistently earning high grades on my exams, I was always promoted to the next grade, whether or not I really learned anything in school.
Still, it wasn’t long before I looked for an outlet outside of school, outside of reading and our apartment. Right after the first grade, I’d begun making daily rounds throughout the neighborhood in search of something to take my mind off my family. In July 1987, this search had led me to Rick and Danny. Brothers born two years apart, they were mistaken for twins everywhere we went. Both had the same caramel skin, toothy smiles, and identical close-cropped haircuts. I was one year younger than Rick and one year older than Danny, a fact that made me feel I could have been their sister, aside from their Puerto Rican heritage.
We first met on a morning when Rick and Danny were playing on a mattress in the trash on University Avenue. The moment I saw them there, I thought that they were different-looking from the kids at school—dirty, almost wild, like myself—which made it easy to reach out to them.
“Can I get on your trampoline?” I asked Rick as he and his brother bounced up and down in front of me. “Yo, be my guest,” he answered, moving aside, smiling. The three of us spent over an hour that day playing together and talking. We were in awe of our similarities. Danny had had the same kindergarten teacher I had at P.S. 261. Kraft macaroni and cheese was their favorite snack, too. Rick also liked hide-and-seek better than freeze tag, and we had the same birthday, even if he was one year older. A few hours later that same day, I found myself in Rick and Danny’s squeaky-clean, three-bedroom apartment surrounded by their family, which consisted of their older brother John, little brother Sean, their stepfather, and their mother, whose name was also Liz. She was a kind woman who smelled of oregano and smiled warmly at me as she scooped generous servings of rice and beans onto my dinner plate. Afterward, in the boys’ room, Rick, Danny, and I competed fiercely in video games late into the night. Someone had draped a blanket over me on the bottom bunk, where I fell asleep with my sneakers still on.
In the three years since, I’d dug my own half footing into Rick and Danny’s crowded family. Through countless sleepovers and Spanish food dinners at their place, family trips headed by Liz to theme parks and to the Bronx Zoo, I’d forged my way into numerous appearances in family photo albums and home videos. It was a quiet pleasure I took, to think that any stranger or new friend of the Hernandezes who might be presented with family memorabilia could see me there, in the pages of their albums, posing naturally beside the boys at communions, or with my arm slung around their grandmother at casual family outings, Rick, Danny, John, and Sean there with me, aging together as the pages progressed. My favorite images were of Rick’s and my mutual birthday parties. Liz always remembered to have the bakery write both our names in scripted frosting along the top of the pineapple Valencia cakes. Dozens of pictures captured the two of us blowing out double the amount of candles, Liz clapping wildly over us, her hands frozen in a streak of motion, vivid and persistent as hummingbirds’ wings.
I cherished Rick and Danny’s family, yet in the time I’d known them, I had never mentioned my own family or given any real details about my home. It’s not that Rick, Danny, or Liz never asked, so much as I was good at guarding my secrets, either immediately changing the subject or touching up aspects of myself that might tip them off. I used rubber bands to make sloppy ponytails from the golf-ball-size knots dangling in my hair. For the embarrassing dirt spots along my neck, the moment I entered their apartment I made sure to use the bathroom, where I scrubbed my neck over the sink until the dirt rolled off in little threads and my skin turned bright pink from the harsh rubbing. And to cover the rank odor that rose from my rotten sneakers when I removed them for sleepovers, I always tried to stick my shoes in some far-off corner in the apartment, in the boys’ closet or behind the garbage can in the kitchen, where Liz might mistake the smell for trash. If I could hide the things that made me feel different, I could relax more and feel like I really belonged. Equally, when I returned to my own apartment, I withheld things from my family, too.
Instinctively, I knew that I should not allow Ma and Daddy a full view of my experiences with Rick and Danny, and especially with Liz. When Ma was plastered to the couch, flies buzzing over her head, cigarette butts floating in her nearby bottle of beer, it just didn’t seem right to tell her that I’d spent my day at a picnic or at the pool, playing in the sun, eating home-cooked meals with Rick and Danny’s family. The same went for Daddy and Lisa. Any joy I managed outside of our home felt, to me, like a form of betrayal. I found that I was always hiding; there wasn’t room for my full self in either my own apartment, or in Rick and Danny’s place, or in school, or anywhere I went. It all had to be kept separate. If I wanted to squeak by unnoticed in class, or be a “good” daughter at home, or a “normal” person to my friends, I needed to tuck away parts of myself.
More and more, the summer I was nine years old, I itched to be outside, to be a part of what went on in the world. The Bronx streets surrounding my building were magnetized, with their moving crowds and winding back alleys, littered from ground to sky with outdoor clotheslines flapping vivid purples, greens, and golds, like new flags. I yearned for movement, for an outlet of some sort, and my friendship with Rick and Danny—when we were not in the company of their parents—fast became a channel for these restless feelings.
The three of us roamed the Bronx, wandering until our feet ached, walking just to see how far we could walk, down the Grand Concourse, along Jerome Avenue, beneath the number 4 train tracks until they curved underground, miles away from University Avenue, near Yankee Stadium. There, the Bronx met upper Manhattan and the street signs read unfamiliar names; the red- or tan-bricked buildings became ragged auto body shops fed by traffic streaming in from the nearby highways. Then we’d turn back and take an entirely different route home, while the sun set on the Bronx and the streets took on a dangerous quality, boom boxes crackling in darkened side streets, brooding strangers clustered under street lamps. Often our play turned to mischief. Together we became troublemakers, street kids, what older people called derelicts. As time passed, our favorite kind of thing to do together became anything outrageous, anything dangerous, and especially anything we were not supposed to be doing.
There was the time that we accidentally burned down the storage shed at the old-age home. It started at Rick and Danny’s apartment, where we’d watched a movie about cave explorers. While the men climbed and maneuvered their way through the dangerous enclosures, Liz served us Kool-Aid with ham-and-cheese sandwiches for lunch. “Here we are,” she said, “for the three musketeers,” something she always called us. Later that day in Aqueduct Park, I had an idea to make exploration tools of our own with a thick tree branch and bundles of paper bags, rubber-banded to the top. I used Rick’s lighter to ignite the “torch.” Our task, I informed the boys, was to “investigate” the tool shed outside the local nursing home, which was dark and mysterious enough to qualify us as real-deal explorers.
While climbing through a hole in back of the shed and carrying our torch, we inadvertently set fire to the shed within seconds, causing the alarm in the main building to go off. I was the first to back away, while Danny stood awe-struck before the bright, spreading ball of flames, half believing his eyes.
“Yo man, it’s on fire!”
I grabbed their shirts, tugging them hard.
“Run!” I shouted, “Now!”
We ran at top speed in silence until we reached a nearby van, large enough to conceal the three of us behind it, where we rested our palms on our knees and gasped for air. From there we watched, petrified, while firemen raced to hose off the tool shed, with a couple dozen elderly people crowding the sidewalk in their robes, stunned out of their bingo session, Rick guessed.
We explored the area beneath the 207th Street Bridge, and walked beside the Metro-North Railroad, where we could place stones along the train tracks so that they would go flying on impact. We ran clear across the Cross Bronx Expressway for the thrill of dodging speeding cars. I navigated our neighborhood rounds, sometimes directing us into supermarkets to stuff our pockets full of candy bars, making sure we exited at separate times to be discreet; I could devour three whole bars of chocolate within five blocks of leaving the store. We threw fist-size rocks clear through warehouse windows, savoring each loud burst followed by the acoustic clank of the falling shards. Laughter bonded us in these moments; courageous pranks were the highlight of our outings.
On a day early in July 1990, we spent hours dipping in and out of apartment buildings along Grand Avenue just to remove every last doormat from every last doorstep and dump each one down the elevator shaft, pausing to listen to their floppy descent. We kept the laughter to a minimum and made it to the ground floor undetected.
Standing in the lobby, eager for another thrill, Danny began popping open someone’s mailbox with a screwdriver that he kept in his back pocket. My eyes caught a metal curtain rod leaning on the wall. I picked it up and passed it to Rick.
“Test this out,” I said. He stared at it and then looked to me for clarification. I motioned to a mysterious, mousetrap-size compartment on the inside frame of the open elevator door.
“Yeah, try that,” Danny said, fanning envelopes high in the air.
Without hesitation, Rick hooked the end of the thin rod into the box. Instantly, a bright spark flashed and crackled at the point of contact. Rick stumbled backward in a way that appeared totally involuntary. He looked down at his hand and spread his fingers, which were dusted black. Danny laughed first, and then we all did, hard and hysterically. Our voices boomed up the stairs and echoed back down at us. I could smell the faint odor of smoke. Rick shrugged his shoulders.
“At least I did it,” he said, his eyes still wide with shock. There was a pause.
“Yeah, you did,” Danny said, laughing.
Unlike the guys, I had no curfew and I coaxed them to stay out too late, disregarding their mother’s rules. It’s not that I wanted them to get in trouble, so much as I didn’t want them to leave. Sometimes we would stay out until the dark sky grew light again—what we in the Bronx called “breaking night.”
On the evenings when the guys eventually did go home, I was left with nothing to do. Walking back as slowly as possible, I replayed images of our day together. Entering our building, and then 2B, I mapped out plans for the next day. Maybe we would sneak into the movie theater and movie-hop all day, or go to the Bronx Zoo on Wednesday, free admission day.
Compared to the dry summer air outside, our apartment was thick with a humid odor primarily coming from our bathroom; the tub was still clogged and more pungent than ever. Daddy even nicknamed the black substance inside “the Blob.” The house was completely dark, except for the TV, which was barely audible. I knew Lisa was in her room because I heard Debbie Gibson music coming from her cassette player, turned low. Walking to the back of the apartment, I followed the sound of Ma sniffling in the pitch-black bedroom, where all I could make out in the darkness was the orange tip of her cigarette. Her sad records were on again, something she called Cry of the Humpback Whales, which meant she’d already gone through Judy Collins.
“Hey, Ma,” I spoke to her cigarette light. There was a pause, and then I heard her draw in a deep breath, followed by the swish of her beer bottle.
“Hi, Elizabeth.” The screeching of the whales peaked, drowning out the end of her greeting. She used my full name only when she was slipping back into a schizophrenic episode, so hearing it made me nervous.
“Ma, what’s wrong?” I took just two steps into the room, feeling around for the mattress. I sat on the very corner of it, as close to the door as possible. As Ma spoke, I circled my fingers along one of the exposed mattress springs.
“Oh,” she said, half laughing. “I just . . . I don’t know, Elizabeth. I’m lonely.” The tip of her cigarette glowed brighter.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“Who knows,” she replied flatly.
“Did you guys have another fight?” Still charged up from being outside, I swung my feet back and forth.
“Your father is not a caring man. Did you know that, Elizabeth? But I guess I’ll tell you more about that one day, when you’re older,” she said. The tip became a streak of light as she waved her hands in the dark for emphasis.
“I want to know about Daddy now,” I said.
“No, you’d just defend your daddy . . . and you’d think I’m lonely. Well, I just need to be loved . . . you know, people need to be loved,” she snapped, raising her voice and taking another sip from the bottle. The record player continued to spin, filling the room with sounds of a deep, moving ocean, pierced by screeches from enormous, invisible whales.
My heart beat faster. I didn’t like it when she got this way, reclusive with a streak of meanness. All the signs of an oncoming episode were there, the same as in all her previous breakdowns. The last time she’d been completely delusional; she came across the electric bill and mistook it for her SSI check, and herself for Con Edison, the name of the electric company. I made the mistake of addressing her as Ma then. “I’m not your mother, I’m Edison, you little bitch,” she’d said. “And you are not getting any of my money. So back off!” This, while her real check sat uncashed, hopelessly lodged in her pants pocket while the fridge remained empty for weeks. A couple nights later when our stomachs finally ached from hunger, and it became too awkward to knock on 1A and ask for leftovers again, Lisa and I split a tube of toothpaste and a cherry-flavored ChapStick when we got hungry.
Sitting there, I identified her current phase in the cycle. This was the part where she was almost finished speaking to, or even recognizing, us. Soon, I thought, she would revert to near-silence, talking only to herself or to the people she believed to be there with her. We’d have to wait until she was far enough gone before she could be legally taken against her will. Then, Lisa and I would clean the house as best we could, taking down the garbage in big bags, spraying the rooms with air freshener and making sure to shut the bathroom door, tight. Daddy would call the ambulance and the police, and she’d be on her way out again. Based on her behavior now, I guessed she had less than a month.
“Well, I love you very much,” I told her, using my most caring voice.
“No, Elizabeth, I need a man to love me. Okay? Is that okay with everyone? I just need a man’s love.” She began sobbing. “I need a man’s love,” she repeated over and over.
“Daddy loves you,” I said. In the darkness there was no response. “He does love you,” I whispered, more to myself than to Ma.
One Thursday afternoon, when I was tying my sneakers on my way out, there was a sharp knock at the door. Immediately falling into the mode I devised for would-be social workers, I cautiously approached the door, tiptoeing, ready to peer out the peephole. To my horror, Ma—by this time not in her right mind, dressed only in an obviously filthy, extra-long T-shirt—had gotten there first and was already unsnapping locks. Given the extent of the mess spread everywhere—rotten garbage, old clothing, a thousand cigarette burns and butts on the matted carpet—I panicked. The door creaked open and my body went limp when I saw who Ma had let in—a twenty-something-year-old white man in a starched suit, undoubtedly a social worker obligated to report our unfit living conditions.
Unable to fix the larger mess, I ran to clear a kitchen chair for him and was wiping the surface down with a towel so he could at least sit somewhere. Just then, Lisa emerged from her room and shocked me, greeting him by name.
“Matt, right?” she asked casually. Had Lisa called Child Welfare on us?
“You’re Lisa?” he asked, in a voice that sounded surprised.
“Yeah,” she told him. “We can go sit in the living room, the coffee table should be good.”
Baffled, I ran to throw on a long-sleeved shirt so I’d appear a little heavier, a tactic I picked up after one social worker had commented on my low weight and threatened to remove us if I didn’t show improvement. Lisa sat on the couch, on top of Ma’s jeans, tucking her long hair behind her ears. Ma joined her. I sat near the social worker, in a kitchen chair, where I felt I might best supervise the situation. The front door slammed, Daddy returning from the store. My stomach tightened into a knot.
He came whistling into the living room and stopped in his tracks, seeing the stranger who was now searching for a clean spot to set down his briefcase. I prayed he wouldn’t notice the roach crawling near his shoe. “Oh, hi,” Daddy said, his mood noticeably dropping, his tone sharp and deliberately unfriendly.
“Hello, sir, my name is Matt,” the man answered, reaching for Daddy’s hand. His manner was far too polite, nonauthoritative, I thought; something seemed off. By the look on Daddy’s face as they shook hands, I could tell that he noticed, too. I finished moving some plates over to clear room, but the man had already placed the leather case on his lap instead.
Just then, my heart sank into my stomach as I caught a glimpse of Ma, obliviously easing her legs wide open for comfort. Daddy flashed me a warning glance and pulled up a chair opposite me, filling the last remaining space around the coffee table. I realized that it was the first time in a long while that we’d all sat down together. The room was silent. We waited, staring at Matt.
“Well,” he began, his eyes taking a full sweep of the room, over the filthy, partially intact Venetian blinds, the busted garbage bags spilling out over the floor with dozens of roaches darting in and out. He tugged the collar of his shirt and cleared his throat.
“I . . . I’ve been asked to come here today to share with you some exciting opportunities offered—ahem—from Encyclopedia Britannica.”
All the tension in my body loosened, but only for a moment. Before I could draw any relief from realizing this man was no social worker, I caught sight of Daddy and tensed right back up.
“Excuse me,” Daddy said, raising his eyebrows, leaning in way too close to the man. “Where did you say you were from?” Daddy’s arms were folded over his chest, his chin dropped, his eyes suspicious.
A moment from three weeks earlier struck me. It was late at night. Lisa and I had been watching a Honeymooners rerun when a commercial for Encyclopedia Britannica filled the screen. A girl and a boy struggled with their homework and repeatedly turned to their parents, two neatly dressed professional types, for help. “Look it up, dear,” was all the parents would answer to each of their children’s questions. The children did look it up, with the trusty help of Encyclopedia Britannica. And when they received A’s on their papers, the family gathered to celebrate in the living room, beside a crackling fireplace with a coffee table much newer and cleaner than ours.
Lisa’s attention had been fixed on the screen. Then, when the narrator invited us to have a free home presentation, which would include two free volumes—I remembered now with a certain degree of helplessness—Lisa had grabbed a pen and jotted down the number. It never occurred to me that she would actually call.
“These are our brochures,” Matt said, pulling glossy materials from his briefcase. “You can all have a look.”
Every other moment, he ran his finger through his neat, gelled hair and licked his lips before speaking.
“Would you like a glass of water?” I asked. I wanted so badly to communicate that at least I was normal.
“No. No thank you,” he responded right away, without even looking at me. I could feel my cheeks flush hot. “This is for all of you,” he said as he distributed to us, counterclockwise, one pamphlet each. Before it was her turn, Ma snatched Lisa’s copy straight out of his hand. The man jumped, only a little, and quickly continued passing the pamphlets out, reaching a wide space around Ma to get to Lisa. I could feel myself start to sweat.
He was sweating, too, obviously so. I could tell from how he cleared his throat between almost every word that he was also choking on the rancid smell from the bathtub. Lisa got out her glasses to look over the brochure. If she felt awkward, I couldn’t tell at all.
“The benefits to owning your very, ahem, a-hem, very own set of Encyclopedia Britannica are, a-hem truly beyond measure. Education-wise—”
Daddy clenched his pamphlet tight in his fist, his knuckles whitening, and interrupted, “Yeah, okay, okay, yeah,” every second or so, as though to speed him up.
As the man spoke, a couple of flies from the garbage buzzed past his face. He pretended to open a pamphlet, swatting at the flies with its pages. I thought I would die right there when Ma spoke.
“You think you can just come here and get away with that?” she said, sneering at him.
“Ex-excuse me, ma’am?” he stammered.
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Nothing, please finish. I mean, go ahead, please.”
Ma’s eyes were too wide open to look sane, and she was nodding her head at something unapparent to anyone but herself.
“Ma!” Lisa said, looking up from her reading. “I told Matt to come, that’s why he’s here.” Ma continued to stare at him without flinching.
Regardless of Ma’s state of mind, Lisa always addressed her as though things were perfectly normal. Then, when Ma’s actions conflicted with whatever logical outcome Lisa expected, she became livid. I found the pattern just as frustrating as it was irrational. Not only was Ma obviously insane, but it seemed as if Lisa was detached from reality as well. So much so that her behavior could, at times, make me feel like I didn’t have an older, but instead a younger sister.
“How much is everything?” Lisa continued, looking up at the man, who was shifting uncomfortably under Ma’s unrelenting glare.
“Well, luckily, Britannica offers a variety of payment options—”
Daddy crossed his arms again and smiled smugly, interrupting.
“So tell me, sir, would this be the exact same set available in the public library, down the block?” Daddy had a way of engaging people as though they were attempting to take advantage of him, but he wasn’t going to let them get away with it.
“Well, uh, really the luxury of owning your own set cannot be, ahem, underestimated. To answer your question, ma’am,” he addressed Lisa, “there are several payment plans, ahem, packages that make it possible for nearly anyone . . .”
Forgetting Matt, Ma absentmindedly dug her pointer finger up her nose. He pretended not to notice, but gave himself away with a frown when she wiped it across the arm of the couch. I might have been the only other one to notice. I wished then that I could somehow explain to him—I knew what this must look like; I got it. I kept offering the man my gaze, so that he could see that I understood, but he would only glance my way for brief moments before looking away again.
“Well, what if we want only certain volumes?” Lisa asked. “Like your special editions on the presidents, or the wars?”
What was my sister thinking? What apartment had she woken up in every morning? If we went days without a solid meal, why would it matter if we wanted to look up the Peloponnesian War, or what year Abe Lincoln was born? Watching her nod at the man’s proposals of payment plans that I knew we could never afford, just as he was probably aware we would never accept, while Ma ate her boogers and Daddy shifted every five seconds, I needed for Lisa to realize the extent of this foolishness, to see it clearly, the way I did.
I’m not sure who was more relieved when the whole ordeal finally ended, Matt or me. During the following three and a half months Ma spent in her next hospital stay, whenever a Britannica commercial came on, Daddy folded his arms, privately indicating Lisa to me with his eyes. Each time, I relived the humiliation of our first-ever house guest all over again.
To Lisa’s great disappointment, our two free volumes never came.
Five days after Ma was again committed, the next month’s check had yet to arrive. I searched our cabinets to find them totally barren, not a scrap to eat. I was starving. When my stomachache turned to something more like stomach-fire, and I felt shaky all over, I decided to head out to see what I could do about my situation. I had in mind an acquaintance of Rick and Danny’s, a boy named Kevin, who, even though he was not much older than me, always had money in his pocket and talked endlessly about some job that he had.
Because it was already ten in the morning, and Kevin was never seen hanging around the block during the daytime, the guys and I rushed over to Fordham Road and University Avenue, where we might be able to catch him on his way out to work. We found Kevin at the number 12 bus stop, in front of a part of Aqueduct Park that everyone called Dead Cat Alley. Guys from Grand Avenue used that area to set their pit bulls loose on rounded-up stray cats, whose bloody and disfigured corpses could be found scattered across the cement most Sunday mornings. I went near the alley only when I had to; the sight of one limp cat body, a patch of blood wetting its fur, gave me nightmares.
When we crossed from University Avenue onto Fordham, Kevin had just exited from the front of a bus and the driver had yelled something I couldn’t hear before pulling the doors shut and driving away. Kevin ignored the driver, and when he saw us coming, he did not seem at all surprised. From the casual look on his face as we approached—drooping eyelids and a bored, steady face—you’d think he’d been expecting us. I let Rick do the introduction.
“Yo, uh, Kevin, man . . . this is my friend Elizabeth. Yo, uh, bust it, we wanted to find out about that job you got.”
“You guys wanna make some money?” he asked, a smile spreading across his face. Rick and Danny half shrugged, half nodded.
“Yeah,” I responded immediately, stepping forward. “I do. Will you show me where?” I felt as if acid were eating away at my stomach. “I’ll work anywhere,” I told him. “Can we go now?”
Kevin taught us how to hop the bus. We waited, standing off to the side, a few feet away from the back door, so as not to get the driver suspicious. Then we rushed in the back door as exiting passengers clustered, blocking us from sight. Our destination, Kevin informed us, was the self-service gas station just beside the Bronx Zoo, where Fordham Road split into the highway. There, we could run up on customers and offer to pump their gas, hoping for a tip.
Kevin prepped us the whole bus ride there. I nodded and listened quietly, hoping to mask my hesitation. When I realized that Kevin’s “job” was more hustle than legitimate work, the hunger in my gut made room for anxiety. But I kept a straight face, sucked up my worry, and listened to Kevin’s advice while the bus chugged down Fordham Road.
“Just stand there and look at ’em like you’re dumb, like you don’t get that they’d even think about not tipping. Make ’em feel cheap. They’ll give ya somethin’, especially a white girl. You guys’ll get somethin’, too, we all will. Just grab the pump and don’t let them tell you no.”
It actually worked. In the beginning, it took me a while to get the hang of hooking the nozzle into the tank’s opening without spilling gas all over the ground. But in a few hours, I was a pro. By dark, I’d made more than thirty dollars, more money than I’d ever had at one time in my life. It wasn’t easy at first; the station’s legitimate workers occasionally took a break from their post behind Plexiglas to chase us away. They said we were trespassing, and they were going to call the police. But the four of us were too quick for the two of them; to our advantage, only one was allowed to leave the booth at a time. And with our system of serving as lookout for one another and our agreement to scramble in separate directions in order to cause confusion, they couldn’t catch us. It was never more than five minutes before we returned to our spots. Kevin, I noticed, gave them the finger the moment he caught their glares from the booth again.
The drivers’ initial reactions to me were off-putting, and my confidence suffered with each rejection. My voice became a shy quiver and I had to repeat my request a couple times before they understood it. “You want to what?” they’d say. “What about my gas?” Or, worse, they just silently looked confused until I got up the nerve to say, loud and clear, “Can I pump your gas for you?” I’d been turned down more than a few times during those hesitations. Eventually, I realized that I had to act confident, and this made courage easier to summon. Before long, I was reaching for the pump and, with a polite smile, saying, “Let me get that for you.” This worked almost every time.
Enlivened by the rush of earning my own money, I stayed behind far into the afternoon, long after Kevin, Rick, and Danny left for home, allowing myself only one break to buy a Happy Meal from the neighboring McDonald’s. I’d almost drooled on myself waiting in line for that cheeseburger; I ate it in a few bites on my way back to the pump, licking my fingers clean. It was one of the most delicious meals I’d ever had. My stomach pains eventually subsided and I went back to work, staying at the station for hours longer, until the sky turned sapphire and the night breeze ran goose bumps down my arms and legs. Finally, I walked back to the bus and headed home. During the whole free ride back, my mind raced, replaying the day and thinking about all the new possibilities I’d just discovered by making my own money. The experience was exhilarating.
It occurred to me that Kevin might have brought us along to solve the only obstacle he could not overcome alone—the issue of the gas attendants chasing after him. Since he’d had us to look out, Kevin was able to spend the day making all the money he could, with hardly any interruption. We worked with Kevin for that one day, and after that, I never spoke to him again. But something about my brief encounter with him gave me a sense that I could do something to change my situation. Though he wasn’t my friend, I admired how Kevin had found a way to do things on his own, how he looked at not having money—a situation that most people would see as fixed—as something he could overcome. What else wasn’t set in stone? I wondered what other opportunities were out there for me.
Along Fordham Road, stores glowed against the night. Through the bus window, I saw shoppers streaming in and out of them, clutching bags filled with newly bought merchandise. I considered how often I’d gone by that gas station on the bus with Ma, never thinking there was a chance for me to do something about my hunger. Now, as I rode past these businesses, I wondered what else I hadn’t seen. Surely there must be managers inside of each store who were able to employ whomever they chose. Though I knew that at nine, I was not old enough to be officially employed, maybe with a little convincing, some bosses wouldn’t mind having me sweep their floors or clean in back for tips. Maybe we didn’t need to be out of food all the time, even when the check ran out. Of all the businesses, I thought there must be at least one place for me, somewhere.
Riding up Fordham Road, I rested heavily against the bus seat, soothed by my exhaustion. Change weighted my pockets, rolling over my thighs in my shorts—more than enough to buy Chinese food for Lisa, Daddy, and me. I began to work out the next day in my mind. Leaning my head against the window, I drifted into a light, easy nap made sweet by the new idea that I could have some say in what happened to us, after all.
The next morning, with twenty dollars’ worth of leftover earnings tucked away in my room, I walked up and down Fordham in search of work. With station attendants chasing me at the gas station, it could never be a real job; I wanted something I could count on, something consistent. I entered each store and requested a conversation with an employee, trying to look as serious and responsible as I could. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get one person to take me seriously.
“You want a job? You asking for someone else, or you want a job?” Though I made every effort to be clear—yes, I was hoping you might have something; doesn’t have to be a real job or anything, maybe you need someone to sweep up here—the responses at Alexander’s, Tony’s Pizza, and Woolworth were the same. No one seemed to want to bother with me. Some even laughed outright.
“You have to be at least fourteen, kid. How old are you—ten?” One woman leaned over the counter to pat my head and smile, a thick gold chain resting between her coffee-colored breasts. Laughter from the entire cashier’s section followed. I stomped away, embarrassed, deeply frustrated. I was sure of my ability to work, if they would just allow me to; though the more I was rejected, the more self-conscious I became. I began noticing my tangled hair, my dirty, cracked sneakers, and the dirt caked under my fingernails. Yesterday’s exhilaration was beginning to seem foolish.
I walked so far down Fordham—from rejection to rejection—that I ended up at the end of the shopping area, well on my way back to the gas station. I hadn’t originally intended on going to the station, given the problem of dodging the workers. Rick and Danny had let me know yesterday that one day’s work had been more than enough for them. At least, I thought as I walked toward the pumps, I probably wouldn’t have to come home empty-handed if I took a shot at it.
I decided to work into the early afternoon, pumping gas until just after lunchtime. Then I would make my way back uphill until I reached the Grand Concourse, where there was a whole strip of stores I could try my luck at.
Apart from constantly looking over my shoulder to check for the station attendants, the first two hours of pumping gas went by smoothly. I learned that early-morning traffic from the Bronx Zoo brought a rush of families to the station. I jumped from van to car to station wagon, each packed with its own family. There were babies screaming, adults counting money, children my age fighting in backseats who looked at me with curiosity, the smell of ripe diapers and fast food rising toward me from their open windows.
Change from my tips crashed against my thighs as I ran, weaving between gas pumps to rush up to people. Missing a customer meant missing profit, so I wasted no time. Soon I delighted at how I could afford anything from the McDonald’s. I thought, as I saw a bus pass, that I could even go far away, if I felt like it. As long as I was able to work, I was beginning to feel as if I didn’t have to be stuck anywhere. I had options. Yesterday’s excitement returned to me, and I raced back and forth from one customer to the next, fattening my pockets, oblivious to the passing hours and the station workers.
By one o’clock, I had made almost as much money as it had taken me the whole day before to gather, but I’d been chased out of the station three times. The final time I had decided not to come back, when a station worker grabbed the back of my T-shirt, screaming at me, threatening to have me arrested. He tried to drag me back into the booth with him, but I thrashed around, shook loose from his grip, and escaped, pumping my skinny legs as fast as I could, letting his insults fade as I gathered distance.
I rested to catch my breath on a bench at the foot of the hill, where I counted twenty-six dollars in tips. My skin had turned dark pink and sensitive from hours of standing in the sun. Stuffing the money back into my pockets, I resumed my search along the Grand Concourse, pushing my way through crowds of people whose elbows and heavy shopping bags brushed painfully against my sunburned arms. Warm sweat spots dampened my T-shirt beneath my armpits and the top of my back, then turned freezing cold each time I entered another air-conditioned store to ask the same question over and over again.
As the afternoon wound down, my luck at finding a job on the Concourse turned out to be no better. I couldn’t locate one person to take me seriously. Finally, I started on my way home. As I walked, I tried to come up with another possible location to search for work, maybe on nearby Kingsbridge Avenue, or over the bridge on Dyckman, but doubt began sinking in.
I entered through the automatic doors of Met Food supermarket four blocks away from my building, into air-conditioning. Stealing was something I knew I could do. I would take a package of steak and a stick of butter. I could afford the food with my tips, but until I was sure I could earn money consistently, I did not want to spend any of what I had. In the meantime, I would settle for taking things; after doing it so many times with Rick and Danny, I was sure I could manage without getting caught.
The supermarket was packed with evening shoppers, which made me all the more confident that I could slip in and out without being noticed. Customers stood in long, winding lines and stock boys in white coats stained with cow blood weaved their way through, carrying crates high up on their shoulders. I searched for the manager and the assistant manager, the only two people I knew to be on the lookout for shoplifters. Instead, I caught sight of something else—kids only a few years older than me standing at the end of the cash register counters, dressed not in workers’ uniforms but in their regular clothes, packing grocery bags for tips.
I counted four baggers, and saw that all four had a few things in common. They were all boys, either Latino or black, and all had a container where customers dropped change before exiting. My impulse was to take one of the two empty counters, but instead I stood beside the bread rack up front and watched to learn how the job was done. Single bags were used for eggs and bread, which were packaged alone. Heavy items were spread out with items of medium weight. Smiles and polite conversation prompted tipping. I took in one deep breath. With a mixture of excitement and fear, I approached a register.
The cashiers were a string of young Spanish girls in tight clothing and baby blue aprons, all wearing similar gelled hairstyles. At the counter where I took my place, the girl smiled sweetly. We exchanged no words, but her gesture told me I was welcome. I peeled a plastic bag from the bag rack and before I could think or do anything, she reached over and began sending items rolling down the counter toward me. A cake box and cold cuts slid over; cans of soup and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol followed. A stout, middle-aged man watched his purchases ring up on the register through thick, bottle-capped glasses. I was glad he didn’t seem to notice me touching his things.
Boxes have sharp edges; they need double bagging. Cold cuts fit on top and don’t weigh the box down, so it all gets packed in together. Only two cans, they go together . . .
Somehow, I was able to finish before he was done paying, and this made me feel proud. But when I passed the neatly packed bags to the man, now staring right into his eyes, he took his receipt from the cashier and headed for the door without so much as glancing down at me. I continued to follow him with my eyes, half expecting he’d realize his mistake and turn back. But he kept on going. Frustrated, I remembered that each bagger had his own change-packed plastic dish.
Leaning over the partition of his booth, a manager shouted, “Attention shoppers, we will be closing in ten minutes. Thank you for shopping here. Good night!” Under the metal counter I found a half-pint container. I fished in my pocket for some change and quickly dropped it inside.
A large woman in a floral muumuu and her children pushed three carts full of groceries to the counter. Scanning the enormity of their purchase, it seemed they’d spent the entire day inside the supermarket, gathering food. I panicked, seeing the large mass of items rolling swiftly toward me. The children unloaded the carts so much faster than I could pack the items. Their mother waved a stack of coupons in the air, rippling the loose skin on her arms.
“I got coupons, so don’t let me catch you overchargin’, miss.”
The girl hardly looked up from punching in the numbers.
“Thass right,” the lady emphasized. “I got my eye on you.”
One of her three children began an argument with another. The woman spun around and whacked the boy in the back of his head, putting an abrupt end to the argument. “Unpack the goddamn food and behave yo’self!” I could feel my insides tighten; I wasn’t sure a tip from her would be worth the trouble.
The woman returned her glare to the register. Chips, dip, pudding, various slabs of meat, and two-liter bottles of Pepsi rolled to my end of the counter and clunked against the partition. I worked fast, avoiding eye contact in spite of my hopes to be tipped.
Meat with meat, cereal fits with bread. Gallons of milk get individual bags.
I finished the job as the cashier sorted through the woman’s coupons. Looking down over the packed bags, I felt another small jolt of pride. Each one was neatly arranged, the weight distributed evenly, the items sorted in the correct clusters. I stood still, waiting.
That’s when I spotted a yellow Lunchable package protruding from the grocery bag closest to me.
Pink bologna meat, a row of crackers, and a small block of cheese sat behind the plastic. I could imagine the texture of the meat, the bland taste of the cheese.
Looking at the package, I realized how hungry I was. I stared at the food and suddenly felt a deep craving for it. My mouth watered. All around me, the supermarket was finally closing. A couple of cashiers were counting out their registers for the day. Someone pulled the gate down over the window outside, and I realized I would not have time to pick up my own food, as I had hoped.
I leaned down and pretended to tie my sneaker. No one was looking; the cashier made conversation with a stock boy while the woman organized her food stamps. I let go of my laces and very quickly slipped the Lunchable out of sight, underneath the metal counter where I’d found my change dish a few minutes before. I rose, smiling stupidly for everyone who wasn’t watching, my heart pounding.
“Let’s go, kids,” the woman shouted, clutching her receipt. “And we ain’t stopping at the quarter machine. So don’t ask!”
I passed the heavy grocery bags into her hands in groups of two. She handed them over to her kids. I thought I might die when I realized she was speaking to me.
“Look at that smile,” she said, looking down at me with affection.
My guilt made it hard for me to look into her face. “Here you go darling, this is for you.”
Leaning over, she placed a moist, limp dollar bill in my hand. I forced another smile, and said, “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Such a pretty smile,” she repeated. “Now let’s go kids!”
She charged out the automatic doors, children teetering and straining under the weight of the bags as they followed behind her, the smallest one wobbling like a penguin.
I tucked the dollar away and waited a moment to make sure they were gone before sliding the Lunchable into a new plastic bag. The other baggers had already gone for the day; only the cashiers sifting through their day’s count remained.
In the clear, I grabbed the bag and exited. I walked home much faster than I needed to, looking over my shoulder until I reached University Avenue. Two blocks from home, I tore open the package and shoved crackers, bologna, and cold, delicious cheese into my mouth; filled with guilt and giddiness, I consumed the food in just a few quick bites.
The rec-room phone in North Central Bronx Hospital’s psychiatric ward rang until the ringing dissolved into a distant hum. At home on my side of the line, the receiver grew hot against my ear. There was a calm I found in dialing and redialing the same seven numbers on our rotary phone, just to hear the connecting click and the rolling noise of the ringing go on and on. Nearby, Daddy was watching a game of Jeopardy!, slapping his knee with all of his correct answers. Resting my head on the table, I let the ringing lull me into a light sleep.
In my dream, Ma, miniature and far away, was screaming for my attention from someplace remote. “Lizzy,” she called over and over again in a tinny voice, “Lizzy, is that you?” I snapped out of sleep, realizing she was actually talking to me from the phone, which had rolled halfway across the table. I grabbed it.
“Ma?”
“Lizzy, I thought that was you, pumpkin. We were in friggin’ arts and crafts again. I made you something. A cup. It’s not as good as I wanted, but I couldn’t see the board.”
“Pottery? You can make cups?” The idea impressed me; it made her seem unusually capable. “Are you feeling better, Ma?”
“Sure. I guess. Well, actually I’m havin’ a hard time. . . . I just need a little bag. It’s been a while, ya know? They’re like the goddamn gestapo over here, these nurses. I can’t even get a cigarette from anyone. I just don’t feel that great right now, I guess.”
Ma complained that the staff was always placing her on smoking restriction for “bad behavior,” like cursing or showing up late to group.
“I feel like a goddamn inmate,” she said. “They don’t know what it’s like to need a smoke and not get one. They never had to go without, ya know?”
“I know, Ma.”
The shift down in rank Ma suffered as a resident of the psychiatric ward was a tricky issue to manage. North Central Bronx staff came to know Lisa and me by name; they inquired about school, commented on missing baby teeth, and remembered birthdays. But I resisted their kindness. Something about their interest, alongside the authority they exerted over Ma, made me feel like a traitor. So I pretended not to notice when they charted “behavior points” for Ma on the bulletin board, or spoke to her in a voice most people used to discipline their children. I turned away rather than watch how she was made to stand ten feet behind them, tapping her foot, dressed in hospital booties and faded sweaters from the lost and found, watching while they locked and unlocked ward doors to permit her access to places. There was just no way to acknowledge the people who contained Ma without acknowledging her confinement; no clear way of addressing them, I worried, without belittling her. So I always stood off to the side, looked to the ground, and only whispered my answers to staff during visits.
One thing that helped to make the tension easier was watching other patients: the sweaty Chinese man who stuffed all the checkers into his pants in slow motion, or the old woman with pursed lips who paraded the “runway” through the ward’s halls, or the man who faced the wall and let a continuous strand of drool spill out of his mouth. Whatever planet these people were on, I knew Ma would be doing ten times better in just a month or so, with medication. Her illness came in bouts, not like these people. Watching the other residents, I counted on the difference I could trace between them and Ma; it assured me that things could be worse, that Ma would come back from this.
“Ma, listen, when you come home, we’re going to McDonald’s.” I’d been searching for a place in the conversation to tell her about my new job.
“Yeah, Lizzy. No problem.”
“No, Ma, I wasn’t asking. I was saying; we can get McDonald’s when you get home. It’ll be my treat. I got a job.”
“What, pumpkin? Really? You know, I used to work on a farm when I was a kid, for only a little while though. It was part of one of my foster care placements for like six months.”
She was sane again, safe. I could hear it in her voice.
“We milked cows, it was dis-gus-ting. But everything tasted fresher than when you buy it at the store, ya know? You have no idea how old canned string beans really are.”
“So you’re coming home soon, right? You’re well enough to come home, I can tell. You sound good.”
“Soon, Lizzy. Tuesday, the doctor said. Tuesday.”
“Really? Promise?”
“Sure, pumpkin.”
“Okay. So that means you’re coming home this week no matter what, right?”
“Yeah, Lizzy. Hey, I love you pumpkin, put Daddy on the phone now, okay?”
“All right, Ma. I love you, too.”
Daddy took the phone and released a heavy sigh into it, keeping his eyes on the TV. “Hi, Jean,” he said. “Don’t worry. Yeah. Yup. Yeah.”
While they spoke, I skipped over to Lisa’s room and pushed my way inside, calling out her name.
Seated on her bed, Lisa quickly clutched a blanket, covering up her chest. She was shirtless. I immediately stepped back out the door.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Could you watch it, Lizzy, I’m getting dressed,” she snapped.
A crinkled plastic bag lay on the bed near her; the center of the bag read YOUNG WORLD in rainbow letters.
“Sorry. It’s just, Ma’s on the phone. She’s getting out.”
“Give me a minute,” she said, avoiding my eyes, “and close my door.”
“Okay,” I told her, backing away.
The door shut and bounced open just a crack, so that it bled light into the dim hallway and still provided a view into Lisa’s room. From down the hall, I could still hear Daddy “uh-huhing” into the phone every minute or so. I pretended to take a few steps away from Lisa’s door but remained close, watching. After a moment, she lowered the blanket, revealing a pale pink, lacy bra half drawn across her chest. The sight of it shocked me. She’d never mentioned anything about a bra before. Though the other day, I remembered her fishing for coins between the couch cushions and counting out some singles she’d saved. Ma owned only one dirty bra herself. Up until just then, I hadn’t given much thought to the idea that we would both need to buy them one day, too.
Lisa pulled either side together and pinched her fingers on a small, plastic bow in the bra’s center, fumbling to close it. Her thick hair was held in the teeth of a hairclip, high up on the back of her head. The bra popped out of her grip twice, and she started over again, until finally it clicked into place. Seeing her topless, I almost backed away. Nudity had become strange around the time we stopped taking baths together, when I was three and she was five. But the bra was too mysterious; her relationship with it too intriguing not to watch. She was becoming a woman, I thought, like Ma. I felt betrayed, like the first time I’d spotted a box of tampons on her nightstand. Maybe if we were closer, if we spoke to each other more than a handful of times each month, then maybe she’d trust me with her secrets.
By my behavior, my wearing shorts and T-shirts, and especially my body, I thought, I might as well be a boy. Climbing trees or getting filthy with the guys, I was often called “tomboy” by other kids. It was a term that made my face hot and my heart beat fast. Just because I was active and enjoyed being physical, I didn’t see why this got me compared to a boy. Yet I felt nothing like the girls who wore frilly dresses that left them sitting motionless, legs folded, gossiping on chairs and other clean surfaces all day long. Still, I didn’t feel male, either. I was neither one, I thought—an outsider. A girl-boy. Watching Lisa made me feel even more displaced.
Lisa took off the bra and pulled a T-shirt over her head. Then she took a wire hanger out of her closet and hung the bra up with care. Her walls were covered with posters from teenybopper magazines, airbrushed boy pop stars and feathery-haired female teen idols. Lisa took a small, broken piece of mirror and walked back to her bed, puckered her lips at the glass, and batted her eyes.
I leaned against the wall and looked down at my own chest, which was as flat as Rick’s or Danny’s. I was wearing a Ninja Turtles T-shirt and black, high-top sneakers. My hair was tangled in several large knots. Inside, Lisa began applying lipstick. It was a bright pink, which she lightened by pressing her mouth over a napkin. She plucked at her bangs and smiled wide for the mirror.
I reached out and almost knocked on her door, but stopped when I realized I had no idea what I would say. Instead, I just stood for another moment or so, staring at my big sister.
I was jolted out of sleep on the couch by our front door slamming. I looked up to see Ma storm through the apartment, teary-eyed, distraught. She tossed Lisa’s winter coat onto a chair near me and plopped onto her bed. I got up to shut the TV off and went to see what was wrong.
As I stood in the doorway, Ma shut off the light in her room and began crying. She did not acknowledge my presence.
“What’s wrong, Ma?”
“Lizzy?” she asked, in a tone that implied she was surprised to find me in our apartment.
“Hey, Ma . . . what’s wrong? You okay?”
“Nothing baby . . . I’m having a bad night,” Ma said, kicking off her shoes in the dark. “This guy . . . I thought I could trade him . . . I was going to use Lisa’s coat, but they wouldn’t. I walked all that way there and I didn’t even get a bag.” She burst into tears, wailing in pain on her bed. Hearing it broke my heart. I hated that there was nothing I could do to make her better when she was this way.
“This guy” that she was talking about was one of the local drug dealers, and the “trade” Ma was referring to was Lisa’s coat for a small bag of cocaine, a type of bartering that was typical for Ma. On a regular basis, when Ma had no cash, she scoured the apartment for all manner of semi-valuable objects to present to local drug dealers for bartering consideration. Gun-wielding, illegal-drug-trade-working, criminal-record-having drug dealers around our block became so used to Ma showing up and badgering them to trade her drugs in exchange for everything from old shoes to alarm clocks that they gave her a nickname—Diabla, Spanish for She-devil—to capture her relentlessness.
As though she had no idea the dealers were dangerous at all, Ma waited in line behind paying drug customers, and when it was her turn, rather than set down cash on the dealer’s table for her purchase, Ma fearlessly placed down whatever item she had managed to dig up: VCR, video games, toys, groceries. And she began making her case, unwilling to leave, even as the drug dealers threatened her. I have no idea why they didn’t harm her, or if they did and she just didn’t tell me. But I do know that a dealer familiar with my parents had once asked Daddy to make sure to come get the drugs for the two of them, and leave “Diabla” at home, she was bad for business. Sometimes, the guy told Daddy, they gave Ma just a small hit to make her go away.
On this particular night, when Ma attempted to sell Lisa’s winter coat, the drug dealer had refused, not based on the value of the coat, but on principle.
“Yeah, everybody’s got a high horse apparently,” Ma said. “He gave me this crap,” she said, handing me a strange coin in her frustration, “and he preached at me . . . Like he’s so good.”
Seeing that the coat was the size of a child’s, the drug dealer handed it back to Ma along with the single large coin, and he told her to go home to her kids, which made Ma livid. Ma would later explain to me that it was one of those coins people got in Narcotics Anonymous for reaching a given number of days in their sobriety, as a symbol of their progress so far and for struggles yet to come. In no way did Ma seem to appreciate the irony of being given the coin by a drug dealer. Collapsed on her bed, shaking from withdrawal, she was just consumed with pain, hurting from the need to use.
I stayed with Ma until she fell asleep, then I went into my bedroom and got under the blankets, where I turned my attention to the coin as I lay in bed. Later on, I would keep the coin tucked away in my dresser drawer for years. From time to time, I’d take it out just to run my thumb over the engraving and to marvel at its mystery, the “Serenity Prayer” on back:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
While I didn’t exactly get the meaning, I recognized the music of this prayer as familiar to me from Ma’s countless NA meetings. There was a structure to the meetings: Addicts always recited the serenity prayer in unison, clasping hands together in the basements of urban churches while their children, Lisa and me included, rummaged through the free donuts and too-sweet lemonade. Once at the beginning of the meeting, and then once more at the end, God grant me the serenity . . . It was a staple of all NA meetings, along with the testimonies from those who had forsaken addiction, those who had “worked the steps” and “beat drugs,” the testimonies of those who had “made it.” Standing in front of the room, each recovering addict’s story took on a familiar shape: there was a lifestyle that wreaked havoc on self, family, and loved ones; the redemption that brought them successfully through NA; and in between, a dark and frightening low—one moment of demarcation between old life and new, characterized by the person’s absolute bottom.
These former addicts who “had recovery” would sometimes make their way over to Ma after meetings. They wanted to help her, and I could feel them using me and Lisa as a way to reach Ma. One man stands out in my memory, a white guy with green eyes, impossibly tall. He crouched down to look me in the eyes and asked if I liked cookies. With several in my hand and one stuffed in my mouth at that very moment, I couldn’t discern if he was being playful, or if I felt accused. I stared back stupidly. He smiled and stood to talk to Ma about sobriety. She chain-smoked and eluded eye contact while he spoke, shifting back and forth (a side effect from her schizophrenia meds), as he tried futilely to connect. Ma was fresh off another release from North Central Bronx psychiatric ward at the time, and her sobriety was hitting its predictable threshold. We would end up accompanying her to the drug spot right after the meeting that night. But for a few moments this man’s message was as clear and powerful as it could be to someone who was unwilling to listen.
“You know how you know for sure when you hit bottom, miss?” he asked. “You know you hit bottom when you stop digging! That’s what my sponsor told me.” His attempt at eye contact was earnest, but his words just couldn’t get to her.
Later that night, Ma sold the toaster and my bike for a hit.
After years of experience, I knew that there were a few existing versions of Ma, roughly five personalities in total. There was crazy Ma, drugged-and-drunken Ma, sober-and-nice Ma, check-day-happy Ma, and pleasant, fresh-out-of-the-hospital Ma. This last one was maybe the most appealing version, though she had a lifespan of roughly two weeks.
Back home, at the outset of this alter ego, she would entertain us with hilarious stories about other people on the psychiatric ward, each anecdote making her laugh in a breathless way, the edges of her mouth turned down, her fist slamming the countertop as she doubled over at her own jokes. She still carried the smell of that hospital-assigned soap on her skin and hair, something I loved to smell when she hugged me so frequently, having just come home to us. This Ma smoked less; she fussed over the symmetry of the living room curtains. She might pass through the apartment humming, and then pause at the couch to kiss me on the forehead on her way down the hall, just because. Simply being home was enough to make this version of Ma happy.
But this time was different. This time, the hospital sent us back a stranger in Ma’s place, one that did not seem to fit any of the previous versions. They dressed her in the same clothes, delivered her to the right address, familiarized her with our names and her surroundings—only they forgot part of her personality. The first thing I noticed was her absolute stillness, the way her limbs carried her too steadily through the front door, like a model balancing a stack of books on her head. None of her usual fidgeting; the jumpy quality was totally removed from her mannerisms.
Ma went through all the motions, extending limp hugs to us one at a time. She managed a smile, though most of her face wouldn’t cooperate. “Are you taking a different drug?” I asked as she unpacked in the most awkward silence.
“I don’t know, Lizzy. I might be.”
Lisa was more aggressive; she came with question after question. Ma said little, and walked away from Lisa mid-sentence, her eyes searching the wall, the ceiling, the floorboards, anywhere but Lisa’s eyes. Daddy was obliging, or else Ma was; they shared a bed for almost a week. Then Ma returned to the couch, or she took a seat by the window, where she could sit for hours, wide-eyed, hair pulled back, her body steady, frozen in her rose-colored robe, like one of the mannequins in a Macy’s window, a picturesque display of sadness. Outside, the weather seemed to match her mood.
It rained that entire first week she was home, overflowing potholes and washing old beer cans and cigarette butts clear from the gutters. It rained so much that the weathermen diligently provided updates on commercial break. The sky was so gray it seemed to be evening all day long. On the third straight night of the rain, Ma commented that it was “tsunami weather,” exaggerating its significance.
“Wherever tsunamis hit, this is probably what the weather looks like,” Ma said, while we sat together one evening to watch the rain pimple the asphalt in the alley.
“What’s a tsunami?” I asked, more in an attempt to gauge her mood than in sincere curiosity.
She picked at tiny pieces of ancient paint, chipping it off the windowsill, the scent of rain riding in with each cool burst of wind. “A tsunami is a really big wave that kills people and destroys houses and villages, Lizzy. It’s huge, the size of a mountain.”
Sometimes, the randomness of what Ma offered in conversation made her seem like a stranger. I both did and didn’t like learning things about her this way. It was like bobbing for pieces of Ma in the dark space that was her past. It was all too indistinct, with no rhythm to what she shared. I could learn something important about Ma as easily as I could not learn it. The thought of how much I didn’t know about her bothered me; it made us feel separate, and I hated that.
“How does it destroy stuff if it’s only a wave? Waves are in the ocean, and villages and people are on the ground.”
“Yeah, but this wave is different, Lizzy. It’s not like at the beach, ya know. It’s a lot bigger.” Lightning flashed through our window, illuminating old water stains like a stencil on the glass. It was followed by a deep crack of thunder that set off car alarms outside.
“How big are they?” I asked, draping a sheet over my shoulders for protection.
“Huge. So tall. As tall as our building, like six stories, or sometimes even higher.” Ma extended her arm above her head. Her faced tensed with emphasis. “I’m telling you, Lizzy, like this. They’re huge. They darken the whole sky before they drop down.”
“Wow. Have you ever seen one?” I fished to link the information to Ma’s life.
“Oh no, hell no, they happen only in places far from here. But I used to have nightmares about them all the time. After I saw this news report on tsunamis when I was a kid, I always dreamed I was swimming as fast as I could, with this huge one right on my back. And I never made it out; the wave took me every goddamn time.”
“Do you dream of them now?”
“Every now and then. Last night. I guess the rain has me thinking about them.”
“Why don’t people just leave before it comes?” I asked. Ma stared again out into the alley.
“They would if they knew when to expect it, but they can’t. It takes them by surprise, and then it’s too late to get away. I’m going to get some sleep now, pumpkin. I’m tired.”
“But Ma, no matter how fast they run?”
“No matter how fast they run, Lizzy. Once they see it coming, it’s already too late to escape.”
Ma and Daddy plowed through Ma’s saved-up welfare check in just a matter of days. For Lisa and me, they’d purchased thirty dollars’ worth of groceries, but just under a week later, money was scarce, and we had to be careful about our portion sizes again. Each day that I tried to work in Met Food, every slot was full. So Lisa and I divided what was left of the food. That night, I made myself peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of my supply, while I worked on a diorama assignment for Ms. Benning’s class. The rain was still coming down in noisy sheets, blowing bursts of cool air onto my legs and arms from the open living room window.
In fifth grade that October, we’d read Charlotte’s Web for the fall reading fair. I was using construction paper from the art lounge to cut and paste careful sketches of Charlotte, Wilbur, and Templeton into a shoebox for a depiction of the scene where Charlotte weaves the word humble into a web. The three best models from each class were going to be displayed in the school lobby for the month of December, where everyone would see them. Tomorrow morning, first thing, Ms. Pinders, the school librarian, was going to pick the winners. If I made the characters vivid enough, I was sure that my diorama had a chance.
I spent all night on the finishing touches: Elmer’s glue joined Popsicle sticks to form the barn’s low fence. Pencil shavings sat in for tufts of hay. Every so often, I stepped back to take in my progress, pleased with how well it was coming along. As I worked at the living room table, Ma and Daddy stormed in and out of the apartment behind me, headed to bars or to cop drugs. It was clear from their aggressive but indistinguishable conversation that something was up. Just what it was remained unclear. More than once, Ma staggered out of the apartment in tears, headed for the bar. From my window, I’d watched her dissolve into rain so thick, it concealed University Avenue.
Finally, around four o’clock, my arms grew tired and my eyelids heavy. Though neither Ma nor Daddy was home, I went to bed. Once the finished diorama sat safely on my dresser top, I made my way through my darkened room, under the covers, my head sinking into the pillow. Outside, cars whizzed by, casting fast-moving shadows on my empty walls. A gate rattled in the wind, barely audible over the pouring rain. The repetitive clink carried me into sleep until a closer, more urgent sound brought me back, waking me—Ma’s beer bottle tipping and sloshing with the tapping of her foot.
“Hey, pumpkin.” Weighing down the corner of my bed, Ma sat with her legs crossed, the remainder of the mostly consumed beer in her hand.
“Hi, Ma.” Rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I became instantly ready to console her, to listen well to whatever was wrong.
“You want to talk? Are you okay?” I asked.
Tears streaked down Ma’s face, shimmering in the moonlight. She rubbed them away harshly with the back of her hand. She said nothing, only taking in deep breaths and letting more tears fall. I always knew what to do when Ma spoke, but this silence thing was new. It made me tense, clumsy.
“Ma, talk to me. . . . You know, I love you. Ma? I love you. Whatever it is, you should talk to me. Did someone say something mean to you at the bar? You know I want to hear it. . . .”
“I love you, pumpkin. Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re not my baby. You got that? No matter how old you get, you are always my baby.”
“Ma, please, what’s wrong?” Watching her face contort in some private pain, I wished for one of our better nights, when Ma let her thick, curly hair dangle down to brush my cheeks while I lay in bed. She’d tickle me until I burst with laughter. But sometimes she just didn’t have it in her. I knew those nights did not come easily to her. And she needed my help through the harder ones, like this, when memories of her past caught up with her. This was when I needed to listen, to soothe her, when she needed me most.
“Ma, I love you. You shouldn’t cry. We’re all here, we all love you. Whatever it is, it’ll be okay.”
I searched her eyes for recognition, but she was somewhere far away. I could tell that this was going to be one of our long nights, when we talked until the sky lightened and the birds were the only noise outside. The thought alone exhausted me. I thought of Ms. Pinders and the fall reading competition in the morning, and I wished for some way to make Ma as tired as I was. Maybe then she’d just fall asleep.
“Okay, Ma, talk to me.” I grabbed her hand; it was wet with her tears.
“Lizzy, listen. I’ll always be in your life. Always. When you get big—” She suddenly sobbed, letting out a heavy moan that scared me. “When you get big and have your own kids, I’ll babysit them. I’ll watch you graduate from school. You will always be my baby. You know that? No matter how big you get, you’ll always be my baby.”
“Let me hug you.” I began shaking, but tried hard to conceal my fear. “I know you’ll always be here. I’ll always be here for you, too. Don’t worry so much, Ma.”
“Lizzy, pumpkin, I’m sick. . . . I’m sick, I have AIDS. They diagnosed me at the hospital. Daddy thought it would be better not to say anything until I got sick. . . . They gave me a blood test. I have AIDS, Lizzy.”
Television images of pale men spread out on stretchers came to mind; people on cots, limp with sickness. I remembered someone saying that all AIDS patients eventually died. It took me only a moment to connect the images and the word death with Ma. Was Ma going to die? A hot quiver shot up from my stomach, and I burst into tears.
“Ma, are you going to die? Are you going to die, Ma?”
I was fully awake. I watched the rain fall behind Ma as she continued to cry, illuminated by the streetlight. It made a silhouette of my mother, like a stark, vacant painting. Only a few minutes ago, the rain fell just as steadily and Ma wasn’t dying. Somehow, my bed and my furniture all stayed in place, the shadows of my window guards remained stationary along the wall, but Ma had changed.
Ma gathered me into her arms, digging her beer bottle into my back. Hugging each other, we shook with quiet sobs on my bed for long, disbelieving moments. My mother and this thing, both seated beside me, both in my arms. Holding her, I held it, and shared her, took what I could get away from the alcohol and from the disease.
“Ma . . . you can’t go.”
“Not right now, pumpkin. I’ll be here for a while. At least a few years.”
“What? No, Ma!”
Now it was me who was sobbing uncontrollably, choking on my own tears.
“I mean, I’ll be here for a long, long time. Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. I love you, pumpkin. I’m not going to die. Mommy’s not going to die for a long time. I might not even have AIDS, who knows. Never mind what I said.”
But it was too late. I knew Ma too well, with her inability to keep secrets. I was sure it was true. She couldn’t just take it back. I wished so badly that this was a delusion, a sign of another oncoming episode, but I knew this was real.
“But you just said . . . Ma, don’t lie to me. Are you going to die?” I coughed and choked on my tears; I was hysterical.
Abruptly, Ma stood up and reached for my doorknob.
“Forget it, Lizzy,” she said. “You get some sleep now. Never mind what I told you. Who knows what I have. These days, no one knows anything. Don’t worry, I was just kidding. It’s fine. I’m fine,” she said, taking another drink from her bottle. “We’ll be just fine,” she added, before stepping out and shutting the door.
“Wait,” I screamed. “Wait! Ma! . . . Maaaa!” I knew she’d left because I failed to give the right response. That must be why she’d left. I hated myself for whining, for being so needy. Whenever I needed too much, it always pushed Ma and Daddy away. i should have known better. I called out to her one final time, “Maaa!”
But as loud as I yelled, and as much as I cried, she did not come back. I couldn’t find it in me to chase after her, either. Something about climbing out of bed would make the moment more real.
I drew deep breaths and tried to quiet down; I gripped the sheets to ease my trembling. The silence made the room feel emptier than it had before. Only ten minutes ago, I was asleep and Ma didn’t have AIDS.
As much as I wanted to hold things together, I was always letting them fall apart. I tried to help Ma, to give her what she needed, but maybe I only made things worse. Knowing what she needed the money for, there were countless times I still gave Ma my tips from packing bags or the dollars taped inside my birthday cards sent from Long Island. It hit me then, like a hammer to my chest, that maybe I’d driven her crazy and paid for the needle that infected her with AIDS, too.
“Idiot,” I said out loud. “Moron.”
I hurled a pillow across the room, smashing the pieces of my diorama. The Popsicle stick fence, still glued together, clacked onto the floor, snapping in half.