Chapter 5
Stuck
BRICK’S ONE-BEDROOM APARTMENT WAS CLUTTERED WITH ENDLESS rebate paraphernalia; proofs of purchase for just about anything you could buy in a supermarket. Marlboro, Newport, and Winston T-shirts were flung in lazy piles all over the place. His bowls were a multicolored, plastic, collector’s set of overturned baseball caps earned from the carefully cut bar codes off the backs of Apple Jacks boxes, which sat untouched in the cabinet. Whole, boxed, bulk orders of Pepsi and Franco-American gravy were opened, stripped of their labels, and stuck in random spots for later use. Mass purchases of Duncan Hines cake mix had afforded Brick free subscriptions to Sports Illustrated and Better Homes and Gardens. Strewn around everything, placed on both sides of the two dirty couches, were countless ashtrays, filled to the brim with rubbed-out butts and struck matches. I knew Daddy would have commented that there wasn’t a single book in sight.
The morning I arrived with Mr. Doumbia, Ma was spreading a generous serving of mayonnaise across Brick’s roast beef sandwich as he sat, waiting to be fed. Smoke from their cigarettes filled the air. Through it, the Platters sang “Only You” from a junk radio on the table. Lisa had opened the door and greeted me with a limp hug. She was wearing dark lipstick and gold hoop earrings that seemed bigger than her face.
“Pumpkin!” Ma cheered when she saw me. “You’re here!” She wrapped her arms tightly around me, still holding the greasy knife in her hand. Hugging her, I immediately felt the weight loss, her delicate body like a child’s in my arms. I was growing taller than her, larger. The difference struck me, made me feel somehow older than she was. “I missed you, Ma,” I said softly into her ear, while I watched Brick behind Ma, signing papers that Mr. Doumbia had fanned out across the kitchen table.
“Feel good to be free?” Brick asked, choking on a laugh through his smoker’s cough. His question made me feel gross and I didn’t answer him, but pulled back to see Ma smiling at me, looking into my eyes. “I’m so glad you’re here, Lizzy.”
“Don’t forget.” Mr. Doumbia removed his sunglasses to speak, a toothpick wagging from his bottom lip. “This is a probationary trial. We’ll see how school goes, then we’ll know if the placement is working or if Ms. Elizabeth cares to return to the system.”
Even though school at St. Anne’s had been no more than a sewing class in a spare room with a woman named Olga, I had technically passed the seventh grade in the system. The day after my arrival at Brick’s, I was scheduled to start the eighth grade at Junior High School 80. Ma had to register me. “Penny Marshall and Ralph Lauren went here, ya know,” Ma told me as we crossed Mosholu Parkway headed for my new school. “Only his name back then was Lipshitz. Imagine, Ralph Lipshitz clothing. Like anyone would buy shit.” I didn’t laugh. “It’s a really good school, Lizzy. I wish I could go back to school. I never finished high school, ya know. I hope you finish,” she added, more to herself than to me. I was unsure if I could finish a straight week of school, but the thought of returning to St. Anne’s made my stomach lurch.
Security directed us to a small office, where we waited to see the guidance counselor about my class placement. Kids were changing classes, swarming in and out of the office. Looking at their backpacks and bright clothing, seeing them laugh and chase one another through the halls, I felt older than all of them. Stepping in the office just then, I suddenly realized that I was embarrassed by my mother.
She spoke in loud shouts over the heads of the passing children, entirely unaware of her language, telling me obscenity-laced stories about her new friends in the neighborhood bar, Madden’s. Since getting off cocaine, she’d been consistent with taking her meds but they gave her a nervous twitch, as though her arms and legs were being jerked upward by invisible strings. The scars on her arms had never been so obvious to me until we sat under the bright lights of the junior high office; punctured and injected thousands of times, they’d healed into light purple marks concentrated mostly over her larger veins. Seated there, I was sure everyone would know they were track marks.
Another student, a boy my age, waited across from me with his mother. The mom was neatly dressed in a feminine business suit and pumps. While Ma spoke, the woman shifted uncomfortably, running her fingers repeatedly over her thin necklace and whispering to her son. Ma had recently cropped her hair into a short mullet, and she had on one of Brick’s rebate T-shirts that read MARLBORO, WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MAN. I shrank in my seat.
When the counselor came out to take the next in line, she called out the boy’s name. Ma rose to cut in front of the boy and his mother, hearing only the word next. “No, Ma, they’re next,” I stammered, but the woman waved us ahead. “No, no, you go ahead.” Ma had already taken a seat in the office, oblivious.
Junior High School 80 segmented its students, like most other schools, into “top” to “bottom” classes. That is, smart to dumb classes, which they coded with names like Star, Excel, and Earth levels.
“You’re here so I can determine what level class is most appropriate for you,” the counselor, an older lady with bookish features, explained.
“Well, she’s smart,” Ma said decidedly. “Put her in your smartest class, that’s where she belongs.” I was hammered with guilt. Here I was trying to figure out how I could disassociate myself from Ma, and there she was, sticking up for me, proud of me for no real reason at all.
The counselor’s laugh was insulting. She explained that finding my placement was a matter of looking over my records from the last school I’d attended. I fumbled nervously with my hair scrunchie, twisted between guilt, nerves, love for my mother, and fear that I would only disappoint her, prove that her faith in me was unfounded.
It took only a moment for the counselor to skim my file before cheerfully announcing, as though to make it sound fun, “I think we have the perfect place for you, dear.” She pulled out the Earth class availability list and began writing my name on some official form, beside the name Eight Earth One, which, she informed me, was a “solid” class.
“They’re at lunch just now, Elizabeth. You can join the Earth program with Mr. Strezou when they return at twelve,” she said, passing me a note for my new teacher. As Ma and I rose to leave, she added, “I hope you go to school from now on; it would be a shame if you didn’t. You’re not getting any younger, dear, and these things have a tendency to go either way.”
Ma and I lunched outside on slices of pizza and watched cars zip by, seated on a metal grate in the grass just outside of the school. Nearby, behind the chain-link fence bordering the schoolyard, children screamed and played. I ate my pizza quickly and watched Ma smoke, her slice barely touched beside her. A woman crossed the street with three small children and a stroller. There wasn’t a piece of graffiti anywhere in sight. Bedford Park was so different, I thought; everything was.
Ma decided to tell me stories of when she was in junior high, about how she and her brother and sister would go to the others’ classes and tell the teacher a sob story about how sick the other was, so they would get excused from class. Then they would all meet out behind the school and go shoplift or sneak into the movies all day. We shared a laugh, but Ma became serious with me quickly.
“But I wish I’d done things differently, Lizzy. I regret not going and I can’t change that now, it’s too late. Don’t do that, Lizzy, you’ll end up with no goddamn options when you get older. You don’t want to end up stuck,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
“Why, are you stuck, Ma? Do you feel stuck living with Brick?”
“We’re lucky to have him” was all she said, and I let it go.
Ma’s complete vulnerability occurred to me again. There was something about sitting out there with her, under the open sky, in this unfamiliar neighborhood while we ate lunch paid for with this strange man’s money, that made me see Ma’s small size, her near-blindness, her total lack of capability given the odds against her. She really had no options other than moving in with Brick. If Ma felt she had to leave our home, where else would she have gone? What else could Ma have done for herself, for Lisa and for me? She’d used the word stuck. Maybe I shouldn’t bother her about Brick, I thought. Just for now.
We sat in silence and I drifted for a moment. Someday, I thought, I’ll pass this schoolyard and she won’t be around anymore. The thought had caught me off-guard. I decided to create a mental snapshot of the moment: us sitting by ourselves, eating. Ma’s body, full of life and motion. We loved each other; nothing could change that. “I’ll always be in your life . . . No matter how old you get, you’ll always be my baby,” she’d assured me that awful night on University Avenue when she told me that she had AIDS.
I reached down and plucked two fluffy dandelions from the patchy grass at our feet, then passed her one. She held it in the same hand as her cigarette and studied it curiously. “Thank you, Lizzy,” she finally said.
“Make a wish, Ma,” I laughed, “but don’t tell me what you wished for, or it won’t come true.” I pretended not to notice her embarrassment. We held hands and blew dandelion puffs into a thousand directions; some fluttered and stuck in her dark hair. I thought of wishing to have more options, to do well in school. But I wished for Ma to be well again instead.
I never found out what she wished for.
Eight Earth One was comprised of students who’d been teamed together since the sixth grade. So the twenty-five-plus thirteen-year-olds in my new class were divided into tight cliques, several small groups of best friends. The afternoon I walked in, clutching my note from the office with my red book bag slung over one shoulder, our teacher, Mr. Strezou, was conducting a math lesson. He was in his mid-thirties and wore a dark blue button-down shirt with worn khaki pants and loafers. Skimming my office note, he crinkled his brow into a dozen lines.
“Welcome, welcome . . . Elizabeth.”
I nodded without saying anything back. Disappointing teachers was so much worse than never getting to know them at all. I decided, before I even walked in, to avoid connecting with the teachers at 80.
“You can take a seat wherever you like,” he said, crumpling the office stationery into the wastebasket and returning to the next math problem. “Who can get number four?”
All but one seat was taken in the noisy classroom; keeping my eyes on the ground, I plopped into the seat and hoped to go unnoticed.
Someone had carved the word Phreak into my new desk with a pen, scratching the soft wood with angry little lines. As I ran my fingers over the inscription, someone began taunting me. Giggles, familiar to me from grade school, stirred up one row behind me. Heat flushed my face and a lump surfaced in my throat. Here we go again, I thought. I took in a big breath and hung my head, hoping to stick it out until the bell rang. Somehow, despite my having learned at the group home to shower daily, to change my clothing and underwear, and even though I wore Lisa’s old clothes instead of my defective ones, I’d managed to attract the same kind of negative attention. I ran down a mental checklist of what I could possibly have done, when I realized that the laughter wasn’t directed at me.
I turned around to see a pretty Latina girl and a white boy sitting beside each other shooting spitballs back and forth at close range. Something about their playfulness drew me in; they simply looked so happy. The girl shot another spitball and missed, accidentally sending it across the crowded room, into another girl’s hair. No one seemed to notice. The fugitive sight of it there caused them to laugh so hard together that I couldn’t help but laugh, too. I saw the Latina girl catch me staring. I turned away quickly. My heart started to pound quickly.
As Mr. Strezou tapped out math problems across the blackboard, I could hear the girl telling vulgar jokes to the boy. Something about it reminded me of Ma’s dirty jokes, the ones she came home telling after a night of White Russians. I was sure Mr. Strezou could hear the girl, and I wondered if she was provoking him. I watched, oddly entertained, waiting to see what he might do. Then, out of nowhere, the girl spoke directly to me. I thought she must be addressing someone else, but she leaned forward, swatted her hand on my desk, and came in close.
“You know, next month is my thirteenth birthday. I’m going to celebrate by wearing a trench coat to school.” I wasn’t sure how to interpret her smile; no one really ever talked to me unless I was being set up for a public joke at my expense. I waited to see what she would do next.
“You know what I mean,” she went on. “Only a trench coat. Then I’ll flash all the teachers.” She grabbed the collar of the white boy and laughed into it with him. I laughed, too, this time openly, along with them. Had she really just spoken to me? This is when you should say something back, I told myself; say something.
“Are you really going to do that?” was all I could think of. “That would be so funny,” I added. Mr. Strezou called out, “That’s enough, you guys. Especially you, Bobby, cut it out. Samantha, I need you to get this one, number nine.” He extended the chalk outward.
“A’ight, I got it. Check this out.” She snapped her fingers, rising from her chair and striking a showgirl pose, which included a full sweep of her curvy body and another flash of her bright smile. As she stood, revealing her full profile, I saw that I’d underestimated her beauty. The boy, Bobby, laughed hysterically watching her.
“It’s right here,” she said. Raising the tips of her fingers to a gathered pinch, she exclaimed, “Arrsh!” and sat back down, abruptly.
“Um, I don’t really know it, Mr. Strezou, sorry. Can’t help you out there actually,” she told him, as though the answer were somehow for his benefit. The class was a mixture of silence and laughter, with the exception of a few kids in the first row who sucked their teeth. A dainty girl rose and accepted the task in her place.
When class let out, I followed Samantha through the crowd and started down the stairwell that was parallel to hers, pretending to travel close out of coincidence. I wanted her to notice me again. Together, we began circling the caged, symmetrical staircases, making the rounds until we shared in a laugh, and then the circling became a kind of game, a race helter-skelter to the bottom. When we got there, side by side, heaving for breath, we became friends.
“What’s your name?” she asked, pressing her palms to her thighs. I almost said Elizabeth, but thought again when the name echoed in my head from the mouths of angry social workers, angry group home girls, and, worst of all, Ma’s crazy voice, the voice from her breakdowns.
“Liz, my name is Liz,” I said, testing out the shape and feel of it.
“Well, good to meet ya, Liz. I’m Sam.”
“Cool. Do you want to walk together?” I offered, motioning toward the double doors.
She must have said yes, because we ended up walking together, but all I can remember is that big, bright grin of hers, smiling at me.
The next day, I sat alone at the far end of the cafeteria table, arming myself with a book, avoiding contact with the other kids. A foam lunch tray sat beside me and I was picking at my food when, out of nowhere, someone’s fingers landed—splat—in my applesauce. It was Sam.
“You don’t wanna eat this,” she said. “It’s poison, I think they’re trying to kill us.” I laughed and looked up, smiling ear to ear. I loved how bold Sam was; she could make an ordinary day suddenly thrilling. She flicked the sauce off her fingertips. “Scoot over,” she said, plopping her sketch pad down on the table. Sam was penning a picture of a pouting fairy with a voluptuous body and a set of complicated butterfly wings. She was wearing what looked like her father’s button-down shirt. Undone in the front and draped over her woman’s body, it made her look like one of those girls in movies who look sexy in too-big men’s clothing. The sleeves were rolled up midway, revealing colorful, small, red-and-yellow ink drawings of flames scrawled onto her arms.
“That’s so cool,” I said, lifting my bag to make room for her lunch tray.
“She’s a slut, and her name is Penelope,” Sam answered without looking up. “This girl would do anyone, even Mr. Tanner, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
I laughed instantly, almost too loudly. Mr. Tanner, an older, head school figure with gray hair and rough skin, had entered the cafeteria right on cue. A moment earlier and her comment would have been different. She’s quick, I thought. We watched him stop and cup his hands, forming a bullhorn. Hundreds of kids across the cafeteria all fell into a hush. He spoke, and to my surprise, the cafeteria called out with him, “The outer yard is now op-en.” Sam rolled her eyes, returning her attention to the page; she was coloring the fairy’s wings in emerald. Her attitude was either temperamental or mysterious. “How long have you been drawing?” I asked. Kids began filing out into the schoolyard, holding apples or gulping down the last of their pints of milk. “I mean, your stuff looks good.”
“Eh, it’s all right. What I really want to do is be a writer,” she said. “If I write one book by the time I’m thirty, I can die in peace. In fact, I’ll kill myself.”
Almost everything she said was dramatic in that way. Over the years of our friendship to come, I would see her offend numerous bystanders with foul language, loud belches, and general socially unacceptable behavior. Back then I savored her rebellion; it made me feel accepted, understood somehow. Something about how offbeat she was synched up perfectly with how different, how separate, I felt from everything. Just by watching her be weird and borderline offensive was like testing out my own weirdness on the world, except when I was with Sam, the world’s rejection mattered less because we were with each other. This made her courageous, almost victorious, in my eyes.
“What kind of things do you want to write about?”
A boy sat down near Sam, interrupting us. He was black, dressed in semi-baggy jeans and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt—the typical urban style that boys my age wore, but neater and more put together.
“What radio station would you guess I listen to?” he asked me, an eager look spreading across his face.
It was happening again—another student speaking to me. I searched for his motive, too, and decided that sitting next to Sam made me look cool. It was as if I’d borrowed some of her allure for myself.
“Come on, guess,” he insisted.
“Um, I wouldn’t know, really.” I tried to look laid-back, like someone who casually made friends this way all the time. I said, “You can’t really guess those things, not accurately anyway.” Plus, I was embarrassed by the fact that I never listened to the radio and couldn’t name one radio station if I tried to.
He seemed satisfied. “Didn’t think you’d get it. Z100. The answer is Z100. Most people think because I’m black, I like hip-hop,” he said. Sam looked up from her drawing and pointed a pen right into his face.
“You’re a strange one . . . you go by your last name, Myers, right?” The boy smiled, bowed his head dramatically, and said, “Yes. And I like your drawings, Sam.” It didn’t surprise me that he knew her name, although she wasn’t sure of his. Sam must draw attention from guys all the time, I thought.
Bobby, the white boy who’d been flirting with Sam the day before, slid down to our end of the table, too.
“Whatcha guys doin’?” he asked, smiling at me, and then turning to Sam, who poked her tongue out at him. “Hey,” he yelled. She exploded into laughter, so did he, and then so did I.
Bobby’s hair was a wavy brown puff that sagged over his hazel eyes. He had this perpetual smirk on his face, a sort of half smile, as though he was always about to laugh at something. Any time I looked at him, that little half smile made me always ready to laugh at something, too. Sitting there with him and Sam instantly made me happy.
Another friend was with Bobby, a tall guy in baggy jeans who introduced himself as Fief. “They call him that because of that cartoon mouse in that movie,” Sam told me. “ ’Cuz of his ears, he looks like him.” Fief was Irish, slightly red-faced, with slightly big ears. He resembled someone who might have been in my family, I thought.
“ ’Sup, guys,” he said, sliding over.
For the entire duration of our lunch period, we talked as a group, apart from the hundreds of kids around us. I was one of them, jumping in, making people laugh, suggesting plans outside of school. When the bell rang, we walked upstairs together, parted in the halls, waving back at one another until we passed through our individual classroom doorways, out of sight. For the first time ever, I had no doubt that I would be at school tomorrow.
Brick’s work schedule dictated the routine in his house, and every day was a carbon copy of the last. Each morning, I awoke at 7:15 a.m., to the oldies DJ playing “Happy, Happy Birthday” for the daily birthday movie ticket raffle. As the radio called out listeners’ names, a thick cloud of cigarette smoke from Brick’s Marlboros came floating above Lisa’s head and mine, in the living room where our bunk bed was stashed in the corner. I could hear him shouting for Ma to wake up.
“Jean, Jean,” he’d grumble. “It’s morning; time to go.” She’d prepare the coffee and get us on our feet while he showered. It was the closest I’d ever come to having a responsible routine. Certainly it was unique to Ma, who always had trouble waking up, until Brick yelled moistly into her face and sometimes pulled her off the bed with a rough jerk of the arm in order to make her listen. I knew that what caused her exhaustion was no longer drugs (she finally wasn't using any), but the illness progressing. From overhearing their conversations, I knew Brick knew she was ill. But he didn’t show any awareness or sensitivity in the way he treated her. Watching him in his wrinkled, too-tight boxers standing over her small, resting body revived a growing sense of anger I’d felt since I’d first met Brick. Anger that arose in me each time he’d called Ma away from the phone, interrupting our delicate conversations, back when she’d first left. No one had ever bothered Ma while she slept, especially not Daddy. He never needed anyone to start his day for him, much less feed him. Thinking of his independence sent a wave of worry through me. Was he doing okay on his own? The phone had gotten cut off on University again and we hardly spoke anymore. I both wanted and didn’t want him to see the way Brick was treating Ma. I also wondered whether Daddy’s lack of attention, his life of secrets, had caused Ma to gravitate to Brick in the first place. But this couldn’t have been what she’d expected.
Soon after, Brick and Ma would head out together, him to work, Ma to the bar, where they came to know her so well that she was served before the general customers came knocking, while the glasses were still being wiped clean and last night’s stools had yet to be lowered off the counter. There was no real reason for her to get up in the morning except that Brick said, “This is when people wake up,” and so she did. To kill the time, she went to Madden’s and drank. By noon, she would return home, drunk beyond the capacity for speech.
Lisa beat everyone at getting up in the morning, except that it was not like before, when she made it a point to get me up for school, too. Maybe it’s because we were sharing a space—the living room—for the first time, but Lisa was more aggressive with me than ever. She had developed a hair-trigger temper with me, snapping if I asked her even the most basic questions.
“Lisa, is there any more toilet paper?”
“I don’t know, Liz, you live here now, too, can’t you figure it out?” I couldn’t help but feel as if I had invaded her space.
She readied herself at around six A.M., staring into a large mirror on the side of Brick’s living room wall. But instead of searching her image or experimenting with facial expressions, Lisa approached her reflection the way an artist would her canvas. The process was graceful, and each time the transformation surprised me. She began with a dainty zippered bag from which she pulled all types of soft pencils and wands. First she lined her lips, then filled them in with a bright creamy red. Sometimes, if she was going out with her new boyfriend, she drew symmetrical upturned tails at the edges of her dark eyes, like Cleopatra’s. Lisa’s vision had worsened but then stabilized over the last few years, causing her to lean in, allowing just enough room between herself and the mirror for whatever tool she was using. She left in a brilliant flash of glistening gold hoop earrings and tightly gelled hairstyles, going either to school or—in the evenings—to a life she’d carved out for herself elsewhere.
Many nights she’d return with a faded version of the vivid artistry she’d left with, dark pigment rimming her lids, dull pink smudged around her lips like runny watercolors. I didn’t dare ask about the dense maroon blotches, like bruises, spotted around her neck, but quietly willed her to sit on my bottom bunk and confide in me about her boyfriend, and what being seventeen was all about.
“Do you have MTV?” Sam asked the first time she visited Brick’s house. On television, O. J. Simpson was crossing and uncrossing his legs in an LA courtroom. A camera zeroed in on his facial expressions as some new evidence was being revealed. We were cutting school for the day. I’d managed to be in semi-regular attendance for almost two months, so I didn’t think it would be too big a deal to miss a day or two at this point. Lisa wasn’t home yet, and Ma had already returned from the bar and passed out on Brick’s bed, bordered by an impossible amount of loose laundry, crates of cans, and stacks of old magazines. We sat on the couch in the living room, Sam painting her toenails a glossy black.
“I think we might have it, but you have to check. I’ve never had cable before.”
“Anything but this,” she said, hitting some buttons on the remote. A jumble of guitar strings shot out from the TV speakers. Sam curled her foot to her chest and puffed out her cheeks, blowing on her toes.
“This is a cool place,” she said. “Your mom’s boyfriend is almost never here, for real? And your mom sleeps all day?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Sounds great.” Even though it didn’t feel great to live under a stranger’s roof and to have Ma drained of all her vitality, I knew from my one visit to Sam’s house why she thought so. I wasn’t delegated responsibility over a younger sibling. I didn’t have to deal with the intimidating father she described, around whom everyone at her house walked on eggshells. I hardly had to deal with adults at all, apart from my caseworker’s checkups.
Leaning on the arm of the couch, Sam reached to the back of her head. With one jerk of a single brass pin, her light brown hair, phone-cord curly, soft as silk, dropped from a tightly wrapped bun down to her waist. Colorful rubber bands were worked into a single, thin braid within the larger mass. Together, the range of color in the braid made a complete rainbow.
“Oh my God,” I marveled. “Damn, look at your hair. I had no idea it was so long. It’s really nice.”
“It’s a bitch to comb, I’ll tell you that much. My dad is the one who’s in love with it. If he likes it so much, he should grow his own,” she said, unraveling the bottom of the braid with her fingers. The smell of peach conditioner carried up to my nose.
A Nirvana video came on; Kurt Cobain filled the screen. “Oh, he is so hot,” Sam said, perking up. “Oh my God, I would so do him.”
The comment had taken me off guard.
“Yeah . . . I guess he’s cute,” I said. I didn’t know how to join in here; boys hadn’t occurred to me yet. They might as well have been bigger versions of females. The only difference to me so far was that every so often I found myself staring a little longer at one, or feeling slightly more curious or impressed by things they did. But I couldn’t say I’d ever really been attracted to any boy. I watched Kurt’s face, covered in blond stubble, as he strummed his guitar in wide circles for the camera. Studying his features, I imagined what it might feel like to cup his cheek, to hold his hand. Suddenly, his face became Bobby’s face, smirking his half smile at me.
“Yeah, I guess I would say he’s definitely hot,” I told Sam. I didn’t know why what I’d said embarrassed me so much. But from her face, there was no sign that she noticed.
“God,” she said, biting her fist. “Damn right.” She turned the volume way up.
“Pass me that,” I said, reaching for her nail polish. Holding the jar, I worried that Daddy would somehow see me all the way from University Avenue and think I was being girly. I shook it back and forth in motions that matched the grating noise of the guitars, then twisted the top open and shouted over the music. “Yeah, I would so do him, too.”
Sam and I spent every day together. Ours was a hasty, overnight bond that we both swore would last until we grew into old ladies, pushing ourselves around some resort in Florida with walkers. In the meantime, we planned the next fifty years of our lives together. Right after high school, we would hitchhike to LA, where we’d become successful screenwriters, then eventually move to San Francisco when Hollywood became lackluster, after making more money and visiting more countries than we ever knew existed. Our neighboring houses would be on that winding hill in San Fran that I’d seen in Daddy’s postcards, and in Rice-A-Roni commercials. After our children (three each) grew up and moved away, we would buy big, old-lady sunglasses to wear throughout our sixties, and we’d tan on beach chairs in our connected backyards until our skin turned into living leather. New York would have to do for now.
In a way, though, what we hardly realized was that we’d begun our shared lives already.
Little by little, Sam began filling up drawers at Brick’s apartment, packing her sketch pad, tapes, shoes, and clothing into sloppy piles that mingled our things completely over time. Together, we wandered Bedford Park at all hours of the night. I always suggested she take us by Bobby’s, where we threw pebbles at his window. My heart would thump, waiting for him to appear. TV light flickering from his darkened room, he’d lean out to whisper to us, throw down bags of chips, and talk about wrestling or his latest video game endeavor.
Sometimes he’d have Myers and Fief over, and they’d sneak out to join us in the parkway, where we’d make fun of teachers and take turns telling stories. I told them about my adventures with Rick and Danny, about the fire at the old folks’ home and how Rick got electrocuted.
“I just told him ‘test this out,’ and he did it. His fingers were burned like toast!”
Sam’s favorites were the stories of the serial killers Daddy told me about. She liked hearing what psychologists believed motivated them to commit their crimes. It thrilled me to see my new friends get as scared as I was when I first heard Daddy’s stories, or to see them crack up in hysterical laughter at the very mention of Rick’s name.
But mostly, Sam and I were alone. We made rounds to the all-night diner on Bedford and Jerome, where we befriended the Mexican night manager, a stout, often drunk man named Tony. There, we fended off the cold and shared bits and pieces of our lives over plates of French fries smothered in mozzarella cheese and gravy, the diner’s ancient speakers crackling Mexican boleros through the air.
On those nights we spent together wandering around outside, Sam confided in me some very difficult things that were happening in her home. The exact details of these events she shared with me are private; however, I will say that she needed to be away from home, for her own good reasons. And the things she shared inspired me to want to take care of her, out of my growing love for our friendship, for the sisterhood we were building together. If she felt she could not go back home, I told her, she could always stay with me.
I began to sneak her in for sleepovers, without Brick knowing it. He had firmly warned me not to have any guests past ten o’clock, but given that he went to sleep precisely at nine thirty, the rule was easy to break. We took a bed sheet and strung it along the side of Lisa’s and my L-shaped bunk bed. Then, with an old paisley quilt from Brick’s hall closet, I cushioned the ground for Sam’s resting spot. All we had to do was open and then slam the front door in the evening, to give the impression she’d gone home, then tiptoe back through the room and conceal her. With Sam’s legs tucked beneath the top of the bottom bunk and her torso sticking out beside my head, I would pass her half my TV dinners, whole glasses of Pepsi, Oreos, or any of Brick’s endless rebate supplies.
I found that as wild as Sam could be, there was also something puppy dog-like about her, as though threaded through her tough, eccentric outbursts were subtle indications that she needed caring for. It was in the way she could walk into an elevator and never press a button, but just wait there for me to do something; or how when we crossed streets, she never navigated, but walked blindly by my side, in total trust. If I made one bad move, I thought, a truck would flatten us both; it was all in my hands. She was fine with that, and that was fine with me.
At night, under my bed, sometimes I could hear her crying softly. But whenever I asked her what was wrong, she’d brush it off, say it was just her allergies or that I was hearing things. But I knew better. Sometimes, when she snored in her sleep—a cute little whistle—I’d reach down and touch a piece of her hair, run it through my fingers, stare at how, in the darkness of our room, the moonlight turned it glossy as polished onyx. I will keep her safe, I told myself.
One evening, while I poured myself soda in the kitchen, muffled shouts came from Brick’s bedroom. No one responded to him, yet the muffled noises continued and sounded like half of a conversation. As I walked over to investigate, bits and pieces became decipherable.
“In my own goddamn house, I can’t even find a clean fork . . . didn’t ask for this . . . if you or those lazy girls of yours . . . group home . . .”
Was he yelling about unwashed dishes? All around me, dirt was ground into the floor; newspapers, yellowed with age, were scattered across the room; empty boxes of doughnuts and potato chips trailed from his bedroom as I walked an obstacle course around his crates of supplies. Brick complaining about a mess seemed insane.
Besides, my mother hardly ever dirtied a fork. The closest Ma came to eating food were the cocktails and sedatives she took randomly throughout the day—she never had an appetite anymore. Even if I put hot bowls of New England clam chowder on the nightstand (her favorite) or cut the crust from her tuna-fish sandwiches, the bowls were returned chilly and full, the tuna untouched. Sometimes I did leave piles of dishes, and I knew that was my fault. But could he really be screaming at Ma about it?
Through the cracked door, I peered in and saw that he was waving around a roll of paper towels, screaming, frantically sweeping it over Ma’s depleted body as she lay motionless, one arm protectively drawn over her head. He was in his underwear, a white T-shirt straining to cover his large, hairy stomach. A pile of dirty forks, which he must have collected himself, was clumped on the nightstand. He raised the paper towels over his head and grumbled, “You hear me, Jean? Do you?” thunking the roll on Ma’s head and face. I darted inside.
“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled. “She’s sick. Don’t touch—”
Before I could fully step into the room, Brick grabbed the door. “Good-bye,” he interrupted, slamming it with a force that broke against my foot, scraping the skin on my toes so hard that the cuticles peeled back in chunks. A surge of pure heat seared through me as I hobbled on one leg, holding my damaged foot in my hand. I almost screamed in pain, but held it in for Ma’s sake. Black nail polish had chipped off on three of my toes; red blotches were rapidly forming under the nails in its place. At the sight of it, I tried, unsuccessfully, not to tear up.
Shoes would have been too painful. I tore open the hall closet and found a pair of oversized slippers, put them on, and stormed out, hysterical. Outside, the sky was transitioning from sunset to night. I started down the street, only half sure of where I was headed. When I passed strangers, I turned my face away, blocking my tears from their sight. Thoughts broke loose, swarming in my mind like a jumble of angry bees.
Ma was in a living hell and as much as I wanted to, I could not protect her. He was impatient with her at a time when she needed gentleness, when she needed someone to take care of her. And he didn’t need or want us there either; we were a burden. That much was obvious. It didn’t matter anyway because all I had to do was miss enough school and I’d be sent back to the home and Brick could be done with me. Mr. Doumbia was waiting if I messed up.
“You’ll end up just like your father, a no-good junkie drop-out,” Brick had taunted me once. This one day I couldn’t find the toilet paper, only I was sure we hadn’t run out because there’d been an enormous economy pack. Later, Brick screamed at me about flushing the toilet after we went, then he revealed the pack on the top shelf of his closet. He had hidden the toilet paper because someone had forgotten to flush. Not that I didn’t know already that something was off about him, but I realized then that he was as crazy as Grandma. Now he was putting Ma through a small hell over a pile of forks when she couldn’t possibly be weaker. The man was controlling and unstable, and Ma was powerless against him. I had to be away from it, from him, from Ma’s disease. It was too much.
A light sheet of rain drizzled down as I crossed Bainbridge Avenue, the wind whipping against my jacket, chilling me but seeming to strike fire along my foot. Across the sidewalk, people toted briefcases or clutched umbrellas on their return from work. I stumbled past them with my head held down, hiding my tears.
It hit me then: I couldn’t remember the last time Ma and I had had a conversation. All we’d been saying to each other was “Hi” and “Bye.” Our last real talk may have been five months ago, when she signed me up for Junior High School 80.
The thought sent more tears streaming down my face; I couldn’t control it. Up until that moment, I told myself that I was handling her illness better than this; I prided myself on it. But avoidance allows you to believe that you’re making all kinds of strides when you’re not. I thought I had dealt with my feelings of pain over my mother’s AIDS, but the image of her lying helpless under Brick’s rage brought it all back. Like an exposed nerve, I felt the reality of her sickness jabbing at me. AIDS just wasn’t ever talked about in my family. Ma and Daddy didn’t talk about it, not even Dr. Morales brought it up, and certainly Brick didn’t talk about it. He watched Ma take her medication, could see her getting weaker, but he still made demands on her. Judging by the condom wrappers I found lying around, I am sure that for as long as Ma could manage it, they were even having sex.
No one was talking about her AIDS, even as it was eating away at her in front of us. Yet it was as tangible and present as the shaky foundation we stood on with Brick. Ma’s rapid deterioration and her sickness, like the sickness of our collective denial, was real.
Two weeks before, I’d been sitting in the kitchen alone when Ma burst in, crying, trembling. She went straight for the top of the fridge without noticing me, reaching for her fat brown paper bag of medication. The eruptive entrance and her raw, obvious pain had frozen me still. I watched her struggle with a childproof top. I didn’t dare speak for fear of embarrassing her. When the bottle finally popped open, the pills spilled out over the table, landing with dozens of little clicks against the wood. With great difficulty, Ma plucked up two, placed them on her tongue, and with one deep inhale, she paused her crying just long enough to swallow. In doing so, she caught sight of me.
“Ma” was all I said, one perfectly useless syllable, and nothing more.
“You’re too young for this,” she told me, raising her hand even as it shook. “I’m sorry. You’re too young.”
I stared back blankly and just watched her go, the white pills still scattered across the dark tabletop.
I’d never been too young for anything—not for the drugs, or for Ma’s graphic stories of teen prostitution—but I was too young for this, for AIDS. I absolutely hated myself for proving her right, for doing so little to soothe my mother when she needed me most. I was there for everything else, but when Ma was fighting AIDS, I had put a distance between us. Or, had she taken a distance from me? Something happened to us, because after she left University Avenue, after the group home, and now as she was getting sicker, we just weren’t close anymore. And now I had Sam, and my days were enlivened with cutting school, dreaming about the future with my friends, and a new vitality I’d never known before. What it boiled down to was, the more joy I experienced with my friends, the harder it was to come home to Ma and an apartment filled with her sickness. The harder it was to be near her dying. It was so much easier to not come home at all, to be with my group.
“Selfish,” I said out loud to myself, harshly wiping tears from my face. On 202nd Street, I looked up at Bobby’s living room window, at the warm light glowing from it. I thought of his smile, the way it lit his large eyes, made them so inviting. I headed upstairs.
Paula, his mother, served us pork chops and rice in front of his bedroom TV. It was tuned to wrestling, which made Bobby throw his arms up and cheer every few minutes, in a way that kept revealing his bare stomach and the trail of thin black hair running up to his belly button (I was careful about looking). Back in the hallway, I had wiped my cheeks clean and taken a few deep breaths before knocking, to make sure he didn’t have a clue.
“I like your room, Bobby,” I said cheerfully. But then I remembered, even as the words escaped my mouth, that I’d told him that already when I’d first walked in.
“Thanks,” he said, being gentle with the slipup, gracious as he had been when I’d surprised him at his door. “That’s Mankind,” he told me, pointing at the screen to a giant, leather-masked guy whose thick flesh glistened with sweat. The guy grunted into the camera, flew off the ropes, and landed squatting on his opponent’s back, sending a roar up from the crowd and into the room as Bobby flung his arms in the air again. I had no idea how to participate in the topic; Sam usually kept up the wrestling conversations.
“Yeah? That’s cool. . . . Is he, has he been fighting for a long time?”
“Mankind is nuts,” he answered, stopping for a moment to look into the next room. “Hold on. Close my door, Chrissy!” he yelled.
A young girl with softer versions of Bobby’s facial features appeared and leaned in to grab his doorknob. Before closing it, she looked me over, spotting the T-shirt Bobby had given me to wear while mine dried off from the rain.
“Shut it and get out,” he commanded. She rolled her eyes and slammed it, hard. “Brat,” he said. “Yeah, so this guy’s completely insane.”
“Oh, like that’s his gimmick?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, just . . . Um, so he’s crazy?”
“Yeah. And then there’s Bret Hart, who’s known for his precision. See, Liz, they all have something different about them . . .”
Well into the night, I listened to Bobby talk, playing audience as he thumbed through his wrestling magazines. Leaning back on a pile of his soft pillows, with my legs curled under his blanket, we shared his bed and I drifted into sleep, hypnotized by the distant hum from his mother’s blow dryer and the sound of Bobby’s deep voice.
“Hello, this is Mr. Doumbia from Child Welfare. I am calling regarding Elizabeth Murray, who has been placed in your custody. According to JHS 80, Ms. Murray is not in regular attendance at school and we are concerned about her future in your custody. Please call me at . . .”
I was lucky to catch and erase the answering machine message from Mr. Doumbia before Brick had a chance to hear it. I hadn’t been to school in weeks, and I already knew what the message was going to say: I kept up my truancy, I was headed back to St. Anne’s. But I didn’t want to hear it, so I kept deleting the messages whenever I found them, hoping the problem would just go away.
WARNING!
Apartment 2B is being cleaned and fumigated!
Please take proper precautions for health & safety!
—Management
The bold black-and-white flyers had been strewn about our lobby on University Avenue in surplus, tacked above the rusted mailboxes and slipped under each tenant’s door. Daddy hadn’t called to tell me that he was losing the apartment; I found out on my own. Sam and I had been discussing keepsakes and family pictures in the diner when I’d realized that almost everything I owned was still at the other apartment.
“I’d at least like to have my pictures with me, and maybe a couple of my books too,” I told Sam as we followed the elevated train tracks to University Avenue. Following the 4 train’s route was the only way I knew how to get back to the neighborhood. Every so often a train would rattle by, sparking and screeching overhead. We kicked a can back and forth between us through the weeds growing up out of the sidewalk on Jerome Avenue.
“I have books on sharks and dinosaurs,” I told her, raising my voice to be heard over the train. “Do you know who Jacques Cousteau is?” I asked eagerly. She shook her head. “My dad has these books . . . you have to check out his underwater photos. You’d never think some of these things existed.”
As we drew closer, I got to what I really wanted to say. “You’ve never seen a house like this before, Sam, really. When I say it’s bad, I mean it, like a hundred times worse than Brick’s,” I said, hoping to make her realize just how bad the apartment was, so that when she saw for herself she would know that I also realized how bad it was. That way, she wouldn’t look at it and think differently of me.
“Liz, shut up,” she answered. “You know I love your white ass, don’t even sweat it.”
Months of sharing with Sam had made me eager to bring her to the apartment on University Avenue, something I’d never done with a friend before, not even Rick and Danny. I’d been too afraid. But after sitting in the diner and talking so much and so often about Daddy and about University, I realized I wanted to show Sam where I came from. More than anyone I knew, I trusted she would understand.
During the ten months since the court removed me, I’d visited Daddy only once, right in the beginning when they let me out. I thought it would feel good to come home again, but it turned out that being a visitor at Daddy’s was entirely different from living with him. As a visitor, we had to sit down and face each other, make conversation. We had to fill the time with words. This proved harder than I thought it would be. What were we going to talk about? The group home? Ma’s AIDS? His latest high? My new life that didn’t include him? Walter O’Brien? So we ended up watching TV together. Daddy fell asleep on the couch while I sat on one of the living room chairs, flipping channels, sitting beneath the fly tape that was still—after all these years—stuck to the ceiling. Garbage bags were open on the floor, and the stench that once seemed tolerable was so rank that I could hardly breathe. The house had become eerie in our absence. My room had been filled with storage boxes and garbage bags Daddy hadn’t taken out yet. It was obvious just by looking in my room that he had given up on my ever coming back. So I wrote him a note that said what a great time I’d had, and I slipped out while he was asleep.
I might have gone back to visit Daddy again, except seeing him and our home in that state made me sad in a way that was hard to deal with. Plus, I started having nightmares after that. In them, our family was united and then divided over and over again. Always, we were on the brink of separation in my dreams, the difference hinging on a decision of mine. Always, at the last minute before waking up, I made the wrong call that divided us one more time. The pain was fresh each time it happened. So I stopped coming around altogether.
Now, as Sam and I approached the building, I saw that planks had been nailed over my parents’ bedroom window and mine. My first impulse was curiosity, but that was quickly overrun by fear. “Sam, I think there was a fire,” I said as we approached the building, our necks craned upward at the boards with black X’s spray-painted across them. I played out the worst scenario in my mind as we climbed the stairs. Was my father alive? Had it all burned? I’d gotten in the habit of expecting the worst. We ran up the stairs and reached the apartment door; there was a stainless-steel padlock blocking our entry. An odd sense of relief filled me, accompanied by confusion. It took me moments to make sense of what I saw. Sam’s voice drew me back; she was reading something about a marshal and seventy-two hours’ notice.
Outside on the fire escape, we pulled futilely at the large boards. For all our tugging, the only effect we could produce was a small wobble in the oversized plank, which wafted out the apartment’s musky odor. Soon we slumped onto our butts.
“I just don’t understand. I don’t know why he wouldn’t tell us or where he would even go. I don’t know if our stuff’s still in there, either. Sam, I’m sorry I brought you all the way here, I didn’t—”
“Liz,” she said, “come here.” I quieted down as we hugged, leaning back on the brick building. Up on the fire escape, placing my head on her shoulder, I breathed in the soft smell of peaches. In that moment I could feel that Sam cared about me as much as I did for her.
“Oh well,” was all I said after that.
Sam agreed. “Oh well, Liz. Screw it. What else can you do?”
There was nothing to do, so neither of us said a thing. Not then, and not when I learned that Daddy had fallen behind on the rent and gone to live in a men’s shelter. And certainly not when I found out that the entire contents of our apartment had been taken away in dumpsters, way before I ever got there. There was just nothing to say or do, but accept it. So I did, like I had everything else so far.
That spring, I squeaked by, graduating Junior High School 80 with exactly enough attendance to avoid being taken back into the system. After the June ceremony, Ma stood outside on the curb, smoking her Winstons, waiting for me to appear while unknowingly standing right beside a chatting cluster of perfumed, well-dressed parents that happened to include Myers’s and Bobby’s mothers. The guys stood separately, chucking their caps at one another like Frisbees. Bobby’s gown flapped open in the breeze. In his sharp, black suit, he looked like a grown man. His mother looked like the perfect mom; her hair, as brown and thick as her son’s, was pinned up in a shiny French twist.
Ma had unearthed a short-sleeved floral, thrift-store dress for the occasion. Her arms bore scars that transformed her skin into something like pale hamburger meat. She’d cut her mullet for the occasion, and the white sandals she wore, with no stockings, emphasized the hair on her legs and provided a blatant view of her yellowed toenails, which curled ever so slightly over the edges of her shoes.
I decided to wait it out in the bushes. As long as I could hide, crouching there, I would avoid the humiliation, preserving any normalcy I enjoyed in my friends’ mothers’ homes. I was done with being the odd one out; I had reinvented myself. I was normal, generally upbeat, even interesting, and I wasn’t giving that back—not now, when I could so easily wait this moment out and avoid the whole ordeal.
Then something happened that I was unprepared for. Mr. Strezou, the man who must have been insane to pass me on to high school, stopped in front of Ma to make conversation. In his suit and tie, with a nonchalant look on his face, Mr. Strezou reached over and clasped Ma’s hand and shook it, smiling earnestly at her. His eyes were kind. Though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I saw that Ma had completely come alive with his attention. She was smiling, fidgeting from her medication. I realized I hadn’t seen her smile in a long time. And she was keeping him there, asking questions. About me? She shook his hand and held on to his arm with her other hand. I saw her say the words thank you. Then, when Mr. Strezou walked away, Ma looked all around for me again. Slowly, her face seemed to fall.
I forced myself to step forward, over the wood chips and out of the bushes. I walked across the sidewalk, straight up to Ma, and hugged her tightly, openly. I loved her so much, and right in the center of my chest I could feel her love for me. I hugged her for the longest time.
“Pumpkin,” she said, “I’m so proud of you.” I pulled back, still holding on to her arms; there were tears in her eyes. “When they called your name, I clapped so hard, honey. Did you hear me?” I’d received no special distinctions—I’d barely even graduated, but that didn’t seem to matter to Ma. I knew that she supported me, trusted my decisions. Maybe too much. I put my arm around her waist and escorted her forward. I was surprised to feel the sharp corner of her hipbone.
“Come here, Ma, I want you to meet some people.”
Walking a few feet over, I parted an opening in the circle of women big enough for Ma and me. I clapped my hands together, my heart racing. “Hey, everyone,” I said. “I want you all to meet my mother, Jean Murray.”
Daddy called one night, a couple weeks after I started high school, as Brick’s ceaseless television noise, cigarette fog, and Ma’s illness filled the apartment. She’d spent the day vomiting into the toilet and onto the bathroom tiles; even though I’d gone through an entire roll of paper towels, the smell could still be detected, thick and sour. Sam and I passed the time between Ma’s bouts by phoning in to radio contests hoping for concert tickets, and by marking up a map of the United States with all the places we would go on our hitchhike cross-country. Although she would never get too close to Ma (I think because the sickness scared her), Sam helped me forget the rough job of cleaning her up by planning our lives on the road together. That evening Lisa had fallen asleep on her homework after a long day at school, a place I hadn’t been for days. I marveled at her diligence, wondering how she focused enough to spend hours perfecting essays and lab reports up on the top bunk.
When I lifted the receiver, I didn’t initially recognize my father’s voice—it was too small and far-away sounding, as though the call had been placed internationally.
“Liz—Liz,” he said, “I’m doing okay. Not bad, really. They treat me well here. And I’m eating three squares a day. I’ve even been getting a stomach, believe it or not.” His laugh was tense. I woke Lisa and mouthed the word Daddy, but she waved me away, closing her eyes again. He continued, “They always play Jeopardy! for me, too; everyone stands there and bets on how many I’ll get right.”
A scene returned to me of my father fixed on our couch, my child’s body curled on the far end, nightgown drawn over my knees as I watched him coach Alex Trebek on the answers. When he paused for a moment to recall a piece of vital information, he’d shut his eyes and rub small circles on his bald head as though to summon it. The living room flickered with the blue light from our old television, and correct answers to each trivia question came in waves of three; first from Daddy, then from the contestant, and lastly from Mr. Trebek. Moments later, Daddy went into the kitchen to shoot up.
“Yeah, you were always good at that,” I said.
“It’s pretty neat, Lizzy, you should see it.”
The trouble was, I could see him now, occupying a thin cot in a loft of aging, broken men with wispy beards. Was he actually one of them? How had I gone all those years on University Avenue without noticing that there was something broken about my father? He’d once seemed so free, and we had felt so close. I must have been wrong about that. If he lived behind fenced windows, under adult curfew; if he hid an entire life from me; if he didn’t even bother to call when we were losing our home and our belongings, then maybe I’d never known Daddy at all.
Or maybe, if he was calling to reach out to me, that meant he hadn’t drifted too far away, and maybe his life had only slipped into a temporary rough patch. As he tap-danced his side of the conversation, my mind drew up a checklist of all the things I could do to help him out: work to support him, call the shelter to check in on him more often, find him an apartment somehow, get clothing to him. The ideas spanned the size of my unused hours in the day.
“How’s high school?” he asked lightly.
“It’s good, real good.”
If he was tap-dancing his end of the conversation, so would I. Why tell him I was absent all the time from school? Why confront him? If he couldn’t do anything about our problems, then what would be the point in venting at Daddy? It would only stress him more, and I didn’t want to do that to him. It felt mean. So I decided to censor my life from my father, and to have him think everything was just great.
“Well, glad to hear it, Lizzy. I was wondering about you. Good to know, good to know.” I was doing the right thing; there was no way to tell him that I was afraid of how far I’d fallen behind, that I wasn’t sure I could ever find my way back.
“Actually, I should get back to my homework now, Daddy, before it gets too late. I’m sorry. I’m glad you called though.” And I was. It had been too long without a phone call to help me paint a picture of what he was doing, knowing whether or not he was safe. We said good night and hung up. Sam looked at me with concern. “What’d he say?” she asked.
“Nothing, he just called to say hi, I guess. He’s living in a shelter. I don’t know, who knows.” Spread across the table, the bright blue map caught my eyes. Sam was hunched over it. In pen, she’d drawn a dotted line to represent the ideal route to travel cross-country. At the base of the line, she’d sketched two stick figure versions of us wearing big brimmed beach hats, our old-lady shades, and purses slung over our forearms. Her character was different only in that it had a Mohawk. Before she could ask more about Daddy, I slipped my finger quickly along the line and stopped, tapping on the West Coast, and asked, “Hey Sam, how long do you think it’ll take for us to get there?” I pointed to LA.
“Not long,” she answered. Then Sam grabbed the map and folded it in half, holding it so that New York directly touched California. “We’re practically there already,” she said.
We both laughed, more than the joke was worth.
High school was a place where Sam and I were registered, but showed up only to receive free train passes. We hung out at Fief’s or Bobby’s place or on Brick’s oversize couch, where I ignored the phone to avoid social services as we watched television throughout the working day. I “accidentally” broke Brick’s answering machine, and I learned to remain completely quiet for five minutes whenever the doorbell rang, in case of social worker visits. I was in the clear; I had become a pro at avoiding school, at avoiding Mr. Doumbia, at avoiding everything.
“You can’t procrastinate forever,” Lisa had scolded me one morning, zipping up her jacket before slamming the front door on her way out to school. By my behavior, you might have guessed that I was trying to prove her wrong.
I felt I’d given school one valid shot, being in strict attendance for two straight weeks before I gave in. But high school was just a different world altogether, one big crowded maze of responsibility that I had no idea how to navigate or care about. And it’s not like we intended to mess up so badly; the first cut day was only supposed to be a single Monday. Just one day.
Sam and I took the train downtown, to Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, a place that was vaguely familiar to me from childhood, when Daddy used to bring me with him to dig through the garbage. From those trips and from Ma’s stories, I knew the Village to be where all the interesting people were, identified by their multicolored hair and vintage clothing. We gathered $2.75 in change from all around Brick’s house, just enough to buy and split a hot dog and soda while we watched street performers in Washington Square Park. All around us, people were cool. By association, so were we.
We really were only going to cut school that Monday. But then, if I was going to take two days off, it was best to take them back to back. After all, my reason for being out a second day would be more credible if it came right after the first. I mean, who gets sick for just one day, right? And then maybe the third day wasn’t so bad if I missed the first two. After all, the reason must have to do with whatever ailment kept me home the first two days. But then if I missed Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then Thursday and Friday were hardly worth salvaging. There was always next week. Besides, we didn’t plan on doing this again. That is, until we overslept the following Monday, and the cycle started once more. Eventually, we’d missed so many days that it was hard to keep up in class. Oh well, there was always next semester.
In the meantime, there were other places to focus our energies. For our group of friends, Fief’s house was the hub of our neighborhood. With his dad at work all day, and his mom living there only part-time, that’s where everyone cut school. It was there I found that when I was willing to sit around and do a whole lot of nothing, lots of other people my age were willing to do the same. We made a routine of it, a carefree weekly schedule of simply being together. I had never been happier.
During these days we leaned on one another heavily, a little family free of judgments or clearly defined roles. Sam’s unconventional, indignant style was the focal point. And between Myers’s offbeat conversation topics, Bobby’s humor, Fief’s hospitality, and my affection and adoration for them all, we came together. Bobby, Sam, and I were really the heart of it. The circle expanded outward from there to include a list of names that came and went: Myers, Fief, Jamie, Josh, Diane, Ian, Ray, Felice, and many others. “The group” is what we called ourselves. Collectively, we let one day roll into the next, more or less uneventfully. We sat around barefoot in Fief’s graffiti-ridden apartment, taking turns sleeping and talking, but most of all laughing hysterically, together.
Because we were afraid of getting our friends in trouble, it was rare for anyone to do drugs inside the apartments we skipped school in. At most, someone would smoke weed in a back room, or in the hallway. As for myself, I was repulsed by drugs and alcohol and didn’t go near either of them. Even the smell of beer on someone’s breath made me sick to my stomach. Part of this had to do with everything I saw Ma and Daddy suffer through, but the other part was due to specific things Ma said directly to me. Several times in my childhood when I was with Ma as her high was coming down, she’d turned her attention to me with a grave look in her eyes that was haunting. She cried and pleaded with me, “Lizzy, don’t ever get high, baby. It ruined my life. You’d break my heart if you ever got high. Don’t ever get high, never, okay, baby?” With dried blood spattered on her arm, her eyes manic with concern, and her voice filled with love, it was probably the most compelling anti-drug message anyone could have given me. So I never got high, not once. And apart from some harmless teasing from my friends that I was the “straight edge,” no one pressured me to. Besides, we had other things to keep us entertained.
While other kids developed critical writing skills and picked up arithmetic and science, we conducted experiments of our own. Such as, a spoonful of water, when poured onto a scorching-hot stove burner, breaks into little, audibly bouncing beads. And when you place a lightbulb in the microwave—for the five seconds it’s safe to do so—it performs a strobe light show of neon pink, green, and orange. Random experimental mixtures from Fief’s cabinet could sometimes yield something edible. Water balloons, when chucked at high speeds from open windows, caused a few minutes of uncontrollable laugher. Every day together was another layer of insulation from the bustling world around us, my experience made richer by my love for Bobby and Sam.
Still, at some point in each day, Ma’s illness called me back to reality, back to the stale, inert feeling of Brick’s apartment. I could push it away for only a matter of hours before images from previous days came roaring back in. I knew that without my returning to help, Ma could be slumped over in her bedroom doorway, stuck; unable to lift her own weight off the toilet; or crying helplessly for water from her room. So I made regular rounds to check in on her, parting from my friends, to visit what I knew to be her deathbed. I found it hard to admit to myself that it was a trip that I was becoming more and more reluctant to make.