Breaking Night

Chapter 1
University Avenue

THE FIRST TIME DADDY FOUND OUT ABOUT ME, IT WAS FROM BEHIND glass during a routine visit to prison, when Ma lifted her shirt, teary-eyed, exposing her pregnant belly for emphasis. My sister, Lisa, then just over one year old, sat propped against Ma’s hip.
Reflecting on this time in her life, Ma would later explain, “It wasn’t supposed to turn out that way, pumpkin. It wasn’t like me and Daddy planned for this.”
Even though she’d been on her own and in trouble with drugs since age thirteen, Ma insisted, “Daddy and me were gonna turn around. Somewhere down the line, we were gonna be like other people. Daddy was gonna get a real job. I was gonna be a court stenographer. I had dreams.”
Ma used coke, shooting dissolved white dust into her veins; it traveled through her body much like lightning, igniting her, giving the feel, however fleeting, of something forward-moving, day in and day out.
“A lift,” she called it.
She started using as a teenager; her own home had been a place of anger, violence, and abuse.
“Grandma was just nuts, Lizzy. Pop would come home drunk and beat the crap out of us, with anything—extension cords, sticks, whatever. She would just go clean the kitchen, humming, like nothing was happening. Then just act like Mary-friggin-Poppins five minutes later, when we were all busted up.”
The oldest of four children, Ma often spoke of the guilt she harbored for finally leaving the abuse—and her siblings—behind. She went out on the streets when she was just thirteen.
“I couldn’t stay there, not even for Lori or Johnny. At least they had mercy on Jimmy and took him away. Man, you bet your ass I had to get out of there. Being under a bridge was better, and safer, than being there.”
I had to know what it was Ma did under bridges.
“Well, I dunno, pumpkin, me and my friends all hung out and talked . . . about life. About our lousy parents. About how we were better off. We talked . . . and I guess we got high, and after that, it didn’t matter where we were.”
Ma started out small, smoking grass and sniffing glue. During the years of her adolescence, moving between friends’ couches and earning her living through teen prostitution and odd jobs like bike messengering, she moved on to speed and heroin.
“The Village was a wild place, Lizzy. I had these thick, tall leather boots. And I didn’t care if I was skinny as hell; I wore short shorts and a cape down my back. Yeah, that’s right, a cape. I was cool, too. Jivin’, man. That’s how we used to talk. Pumpkin, you should have seen me.”
By the time Ma met Daddy, coke had become a popular seventies trend, alongside hip-huggers, muttonchops, and disco music. Ma described Daddy at the time they first hooked up as “dark, handsome, and smart as hell.”
“He just got things, ya know? When most of the guys I hung around didn’t know their ass from their elbow, your father had something about him. I guess you could say he was sharp.”
Daddy came from a middle-class, Irish Catholic family in the suburbs. His father was a shipping boat captain and a violent alcoholic. His mother was a hardworking and willful woman who refused to put up with what she called “foolishness” from men.
“All you need to know about your grandfather, Lizzy, is that he was a nasty, violent drunk who liked to bully people,” Daddy once told me, “and your grandmother didn’t tolerate it. She didn’t care how unpopular divorce was back then, she got herself one.” Unfortunately for Daddy, when his parents’ marriage ended, his father left him, and he never came back.
“He was a real piece of work, Lizzy. It’s probably better he wasn’t around, things weren’t easy and he only would have made them worse.”
People who knew Daddy when he was growing up describe him as a lonely child and a “hurt soul” who never seemed to get over his father’s abandonment and his resulting status as “latchkey kid.” His mother took on a demanding full-time job to make ends meet and she worked long hours while Daddy was mostly alone, searching for an outlet, someone or something to connect with. Most nights, he spent evenings by himself, or in the homes of friends, where he became a fixture in other people’s families. Back at his house, he and Grandma grew distant, and things were mostly serious and silent between them.
“Your grandmother wasn’t the talkative type,” he told me one day, “which was very Irish Catholic of her. In our family, if you said the words ‘I feel,’ they better be followed with ‘hungry’ or ‘cold.’ Because we didn’t get personal, that’s just how it was.”
But what Grandma lacked in warmth, she made up for in her tireless devotion to securing her son’s future. Determined not to let Daddy suffer from the absence of his father, Grandma set out to give him the best education she could afford. She worked two bookkeeping jobs in order to put her only child through the best Catholic schools on Long Island. At Chaminade, a school with a reputation for being rigorous and elite, Daddy shared classes and a social life with a more well-to-do crowd than he’d ever known existed. Most of his classmates were given new cars as gifts on their sixteenth birthdays, while Daddy took two buses to school, his mother praying that the monthly tuition check wouldn’t clear through the bank before her paycheck did.
The irony was, as much as this upper-class, private school setting was meant to position Daddy for a life of success, instead, it would put my father at odds with himself forever: in this environment he became both well-educated and a drug addict.
Throughout his late teen years, Daddy read the great American classics; vacationed in his classmates’ beachfront summer homes, ignoring his mother’s incessant phone calls; and as a pastime, popped amphetamines beneath the bleachers of the high school football field.
Though he’d always been quick to learn and absorbed much of his rigorous education, the drugs made it hard to concentrate in school, so he slacked on homework and dozed in class. In his last year, Daddy applied and was admitted to a college located right in the heart of New York City. When graduation rolled around, he just barely squeaked by. Manhattan was meant to be his real start in life, college his springboard. But it wasn’t long before his high school setting recast itself around him, except now he was older and not in the suburbs of Baldwin, New York, but in the center of everything. In a few years’ time, Daddy came to apply his aptitude more toward peddling drugs than his college work. Slowly, he rose to the top ranks of a small clique of drug pushers. Being the most educated member of the group, he was nicknamed “the professor,” and was looked to for guidance. He was the one who drew blueprints for the group’s schemes.
Daddy abandoned school when he was two years into a graduate degree in psychology, a time during which he also gained some experience in social work, earning slightly above minimum wage. But the upkeep involved maintaining two very separate lives—a legitimate attempt at the “straight life” versus the “high life”—required too much effort. His lucrative drug earnings had a gravity far too powerful; it simply outweighed what an average life seemed to offer. So he rented an East Village apartment and worked full-time in the drug trade, surrounded by odd, lower-Manhattan types with criminal records and gang affiliations—his “crew.” It so happened that Ma was hitting the same scene, right around this same time, floating in the same offbeat crowd.
Years down the line, they connected at a mutual friend’s loft apartment. Speed and coke were distributed as casually as soft drinks, and people discoed the night away surrounded by soft glowing lava lamps, the air perfumed by incense. They’d met a few times before, when Daddy’d dealt Ma speed or heroin. Coming from the streets, Ma’s first impressions of Daddy were something like an encounter with a movie star.
“You just had to see the way your father worked the room,” she’d tell me. “He called all the shots, commanded respect.” When they hooked up, Ma was twenty-two and Daddy was thirty-four. Ma dressed for the seventies, in flower-child blouses and nearly invisible short-shorts. Daddy described her as radiant and wild-looking with long, wavy black hair and bright, piercing amber eyes. Daddy said he took one look at her and loved her innocence, yet also her toughness and her intensity. “She was unpredictable,” he said. “You couldn’t tell if she was calculating or totally na?ve. It was like she could go either way.”
They connected immediately, and in many ways became like any other new couple, passionate and eager to be with each other. But instead of taking in movies or hitting restaurants, shooting up was their common ground. They used getting high to find intimacy. Slowly, Ma and Daddy abandoned their crowds to be together, taking long walks down Manhattan streets, clasping hands, warming up to each other. They carried small baggies of cocaine and bottles of beer to Central Park, where they perched on hilltops to sprawl out in the moonlight and get high, anchored in each other’s arms.
If my parents’ lives had held different degrees of promise before they met, it didn’t take long for their paths to run entirely parallel. The premature start of our family leveled them, when they began living together in early 1977. Lisa, my older sister, was born in February 1978, when Ma was twenty-three.
In Lisa’s infancy, my parents initiated one of Daddy’s more lucrative drug scams. The plot involved faking the existence of a doctor’s office in order to legitimize the purchase of prescription painkillers that Daddy said were “strong enough to knock out a horse.” Typically reserved for cancer patients on hospice, just one of the tiny pills had a street value of fifteen dollars. On his graduate student clientele alone, Daddy could use phony prescriptions to unload hundreds of these pills per week, earning Ma and Daddy thousands of dollars every month.
Daddy went through great pains to avoid getting caught. Patience and attention to detail would keep them out of jail, he insisted. “It had to be done right,” he said. Meticulously, Daddy used the phone book along with maps of all five boroughs of New York City to carefully create a schedule of pharmacies they would hit systematically, week by week. The riskiest part of the scam, by far, was actually walking into the pharmacy to collect on a prescription, a task made riskier by the pharmacist’s legal obligation to phone doctors and verify all “scripts” for pain pills as strong as these.
Daddy devised a way to intercept pharmacists’ calls. The phone company at the time didn’t verify doctors’ credentials, so Daddy frequently ordered and abandoned new phone numbers under names he picked out of thin air, or sometimes he drew ideas from his former professors, Dr. Newman, Dr. Cohen, and Dr. Glasser. The pharmacists did indeed reach a doctor at the other end of their phone calls; a secretary even patched them through. But really it was only Ma and Daddy working together as a team. They worked long days, utilizing rent-by-the-week rooms in flophouses across New York City while friends cared for Lisa, who at that time was only a few months old.
The prescriptions themselves Daddy created with the help of his crew. He gave friends in a printing shop a cut of his profits in exchange for an ongoing supply of illegal, custom-made rubber stamps bearing the names of the phony doctors and a supply of legitimate-looking prescription pads. With the help of his connections, and for the cost of twenty-five dollars per pad, Daddy transformed blank prescriptions into gold, a stamp-by-stamp moneymaking machine. By design, Daddy said, his plan was “airtight” and would have continued to work if not for Ma’s slipup.
Though he did claim responsibility for at least half of the mistake, admitting, “We never should have been using from our own supply, that’s a rookie move. Getting hooked on your own stash fogs your head, makes you desperate.”
But there was no way to tell whether it was Ma’s addiction that made her desperate enough to ignore the obvious red flag, or if it was simply Ma’s typical impatience. Daddy had been careful to warn Ma of the signs that a pharmacist was onto you: surely, if you dropped off a prescription for highly suspicious pain meds at a pharmacy one entire day prior, there could only be one reason for a pharmacist to instruct you to wait twenty additional minutes when you arrived—he was calling the police, and you should get out of there as fast as possible. Daddy had warned Ma of this scenario, made it perfectly clear.
But on the day of her arrest, Ma, who was known for being relentless and never backing down from something she wanted, would later explain, “I just couldn’t not come back, Lizzy. There was a chance he was gonna give me the pills, ya know? I had to try.” She was handcuffed in broad daylight and marched unceremoniously into a nearby police cruiser by an officer who had responded to the call hoping (correctly) that he would catch the criminals responsible for hitting countless pharmacies throughout the five boroughs. Unknowingly, Ma was already pregnant with me.
For over a year, the Feds had been compiling evidence that included a paper trail and a string of security camera footage that undeniably linked Ma and Daddy to nearly every pharmacy hit. If that wasn’t enough, when the Feds kicked in the door to arrest Daddy, they found bags of cocaine and dozens of pills littered across the tabletop of their East Village apartment, along with luxury items like a closetful of mink furs, dozens of leather shoes, leather coats, gold jewelry, thousands of dollars in cash, and even a glass tank holding an enormous Burmese python.
Daddy, who had orchestrated and executed the majority of their illegal activities, was hit with numerous counts of fraud, including impersonating a doctor. On his day in court, for dramatic effect, the prosecution wheeled into the courthouse three shopping carts brimming with prescriptions, all of which bore Daddy’s handwriting and fraudulent stamps. “Anything to say for yourself, Mr. Finnerty?” the judge asked. “No, your honor,” he said. “I think that speaks for itself.”
In all of this, they almost lost custody of Lisa permanently, but Ma maintained strict attendance in a parental reform program in the months between her arrest and her eventual sentencing. This, combined with a very pregnant belly on her day in court, solicited just enough leniency to get her set free.
Daddy wasn’t so lucky. He received a three-year sentence. He was transported from holding to Passaic County Jail in Patterson, New Jersey, the day Ronald Reagan was elected president.
On the day Ma was to be sentenced, she brought with her two cartons of cigarettes and a roll of quarters, certain that she would do time. But in a move that surprised everyone in the courthouse, right down to Ma’s lawyer, the judge looked her over with pity, then merely ordered probation and called the next case.
The bail money, one thousand dollars—the very last of my parents’ earnings from their heyday—was released to her in a check on her way out the door.
Check in hand, Ma saw an opportunity to start over, and she took it. The bail went for cans of fresh paint, thick curtains, and wall-to-wall carpeting for every room in our three-bedroom Bronx apartment on University Avenue, in what would soon become one of the most crime-ridden areas in all of New York City.
I was born on the first day of autumn, at the end of a long heat wave that had the neighborhood kids forcing open the fire hydrants for relief, and had Ma lodging loud, buzzing fans in every window. On the afternoon of September 23, 1980, Daddy—in holding, but awaiting his sentence—received a phone call from Charlotte, my mother’s mother, informing him that his daughter had been born, with drugs in her system but no birth defects. Ma hadn’t been careful during either pregnancy, but both Lisa and I were lucky. I peed all over the nurse and was declared healthy at nine pounds, three ounces.
“She looks like you, Peter. Has your face.”
From his cell later that night, Daddy named me Elizabeth. Because Daddy and Ma were never legally married and he wasn’t there to verify paternity, I got Ma’s last name, Murray.
A new crib in my own freshly decorated nursery awaited me at home. Ma never got over the look on her caseworker’s face when she arrived to check on us. Lisa and I were dressed in brand-new clothing, the apartment was spotless, and the fridge was packed with food. Ma beamed proudly and received a glowing report. She was issued steady income from welfare to take care of us, and we started on our new beginning, as a family.
The next few years were mapped by Ma’s solo visits to Daddy, and her efforts to gain assistance in her role as a newly sober, single parent. Once in a while, through the side door of nearby Tolentine Church, a nun passed Ma free bricks of American cheese and oversized tubs of salt-free peanut butter that came with loaves of uncut bread in long, brown paper bags. With packages filling her arms, Ma would stand still for the sister while she waved the sign of the cross over the three of us. Only then were we allowed to go, Lisa helping to push my stroller along.
These supplies, along with raisin packets and oatmeal, were what we had for breakfasts and snacks. Down at Met Food supermarket, pork hot dogs were only ninety-nine cents for a pack of eight. Dinners were these discount franks cut into thick slices, with warm scoops of boxed macaroni and cheese.
When it came to clothing, although we’d never met her, Daddy’s mother helped us. On holidays she mailed packages from a place called Long Island, where Daddy said the streets were lined with beautiful houses. The boxes were reused from bulk purchases of paper towels or bottled water, but they carried treasure inside. Under layers of newspaper, we found bright clothing, small kitchen supplies, and freshly baked, sweet-smelling walnut brownies in decorative tins, which collected in a clumsy stack next to the “no-frills” cans in our kitchen cabinet. Polite little notes written in careful script—which Ma never bothered to read—came pinned to the opening cardboard flap, sometimes with a crisp five-dollar bill taped neatly inside.
Ma threw away the notes, but kept the money wrapped in a rubber band in a small red box on the dresser. Whenever the wad grew thick enough, she took us to McDonald’s for Happy Meals. For herself, she picked up packs of Winston cigarettes, beer in tall, dark bottles, and Muenster cheese.
When I was three years old, Daddy fanned out his release papers beside me on the king-sized mattress in my parents’ room. I stared up in wonder at the sound of a man’s voice in the apartment; at the way Ma moved gingerly around him in the afternoon sunlight. His movements were quick and impatient, making it hard to focus on the features of his face.
“I’m your fath-er,” he enunciated loudly from under his newsboy cap, as though his sternness should impact my understanding.
Instead, I hid behind my mother’s legs and cried softly in confusion. That night, I spent the evening alone in my own bed, rather than beside Ma. My parents, together for the first time in my life, were muddled voices rising and falling unpredictably through the thick door that separated our rooms.
In the months that followed, Ma grew more laid-back about keeping up with things. Chores were neglected; dirty dishes sat untouched for days in the kitchen sink. She took us to the park less often. I sat at home for hours waiting to be swept up in Ma’s activities, and couldn’t understand why they no longer included me. Feeling pushed out by these changes, I became determined to find my way back to her.
I learned that Ma and Daddy shared strange habits together, the full details of which were hidden from me. Ritualistically, they would spread spoons and other objects along the kitchen table in some kind of urgent preparation. Over the display, they communicated in quick, brief commands to each other. Water was needed—a small amount from the faucet—and so were shoelaces and belts. I was not supposed to bother them, but observing their busy hands from a distance was allowed. From the doorway, I often watched, trying to understand the meaning behind their activity. But each time Ma and Daddy were done setting the strange objects across the table, at the very last minute, one of them would close the kitchen door, blocking my view entirely.
This remained a mystery until one summer evening when I parked myself in my stroller (which I would use until it finally gave under my weight) in front of the kitchen. When the door was closed to me again, I didn’t budge from where I sat, but remained and waited. I watched roaches weaving their way in and out of the door crack—a recent addition to the apartment since Ma had stopped cleaning regularly—while each minute dragged by. When Ma finally emerged, her face was tense, her lips pursed together.
Sensing that they had finished, I said something that would be retold to me in story form for years.
I raised my arms into the air, and gave a singsong, “Al-l-l do-ne.”
Taken off guard, Ma paused, leaned in and asked disbelievingly, “What did you say, pumpkin?”
“Al-l-l done,” I repeated, delighted at Ma’s sudden interest.
She yelled for Daddy. “Peter, she knows! Look at her, she understands!”
He laughed a light laugh and went about his business. Ma remained there at my side, stroking my hair. “Pumpkin, what do you know?”
Thrilled to have found my place in their game, I made a habit of seating myself in front of the kitchen each time they retreated inside.
Eventually, they left the door open.
By the time I was almost five years old, we had become a functional, government-dependent family of four. The first of the month, the day Ma’s stipend from welfare was due, held all the ritual and celebration of Christmas morning. Our collective anticipation of the money filled the apartment with a kind of electricity, guaranteeing that Ma and Daddy would be agreeable and upbeat for at least twenty-four hours each month. It was my parents’ one consistency.
The government gave the few hundred dollars monthly to those who, for one reason or another, were unable to work for a living—although I often saw our able-bodied neighbors crowded beside the mailboxes, eagerly watching as they were stuffed with the thin, blue envelopes. Ma, who was legally blind due to a degenerative eye disease she’d had since birth, happened to be one of SSI’s legitimate recipients. I know, because I went with her the day she interviewed to qualify.
The woman behind the desk told her that she was so blind that if she ever drove a car, she would “probably end the life of every living thing in her path.”
Then she shook Ma’s hand and congratulated her both for qualifying and for her ability to successfully cross the street.
“Sign right here. You can expect your checks on the first of every month.”
And we did. In fact, there was nothing our family looked forward to more than Ma’s check. The mailman’s arrival had a domino effect, setting the whole day, and our treasured ritual, in motion. It was my job to lean my head out of my bedroom window, which faced the front, and to call out any sighting of the mailman to Ma and Daddy.
“Lizzy, let me know when you see any sign of him. Remember, look left.”
If Ma could know a few minutes earlier that he was coming, she could grab her welfare ID out of the junk drawer, snatch her check from the mailbox, and be the first in line at the check-cashing store. The role I played in those days became an invaluable part of the routine.
Elbows jutting behind me, I would clutch the rusted window guard and extend my neck as far as possible into the sun, over and over again throughout the morning. The task gave me a sense of importance. When I saw the blue uniform appear over the hill—an urban Santa Claus pushing his matching cart—I could not wait to announce him. In the meantime, I’d listen to the sound of my parents waiting.
Ma in her oversize worry chair, picking out yellow stuffing.
“Damn. Damn. He’s dragging his ass.”
Daddy going over the details of their plans a hundred times, pacing, weaving circles in the air as though to somehow shorten the feel of his wait.
“Okay, Jeanie, we’re going to stop off to buy coke, then we take care of the electric bill with Con Edison. Then we can get a half pound of bologna for the kids. And I need money for tokens.”
The moment I spotted the mailman, I could tell them the very second I knew, or I could wait just a little longer. It was the difference between having their attention and giving it away—relinquishing the one moment when I was as significant as they were, as necessary as the mailman or even the money itself. But I could never hold back; the moment I saw him round the corner, I’d shout, “He’s coming! I see him! He’s coming!” Then we could all move on to the next stage of our day.
Behind the gaudy glass storefront of the check-cashing place, there was something for everyone. Children gravitated to the twenty-five-cent machines, a row of clear boxes on metal poles with toys jumbled inside. They waited impatiently for quarters to free the plastic spider on a ring, the man who expanded to ten times his size in water, or the wash-away tattoos of butterflies, comic book heroes, or pink and red hearts. Tacked up high near the register were lottery tickets for stray men with gambling ailments or hopeful women who allotted just a few of the family’s dollars to the allure of a lucky break. Often these ladies dramatically waved the sign of the cross over themselves before scratching away with a loose dime or penny. But for many, even the smallest item was completely unaffordable until their turn in line.
Women made up that endless line; women clutching the monthly bills, women frowning, women with children. Their men (if present at all) stood off to the side, leaning coolly on the metal walls. Either they came in with the women but stood back, waiting for the check to be cashed, or they arrived beforehand, anticipating the routine, sure to shake down their wives or girlfriends for a portion. The women would fend them off to the best of their ability, giving up what they had to and making the most of what was left. Lisa and I became so used to the chaos that we hardly looked up at the adults clamoring with one another.
Lisa lingered by the quarter machines, captivated by the glittery stickers. I stayed close to our parents, who were different from the other adults in that they functioned as a team, having arrived in pursuit of a shared goal. I was a participant in their giddiness, eager to make their excitement my own.
If I could break the joy of check day down into small segments, then nothing topped the time Ma and I spent together in line. As she waited for her turn at the counter, again I was her helper. In these urgent moments, full of anticipation, Ma relied on me most. It was my moment to shine, and I always rose to the occasion.
“Eight more ahead of us, Ma. Seven. Don’t worry, the cashier’s moving fast.”
Her smile as I delivered the progress report belonged to me. Calling out the numbers in a reassuring tone determined the amount of attention she paid me. I would have traded the rest of check day for ten more people in line ahead of us, because for this guaranteed amount of time, she wasn’t going anywhere. I wouldn’t have to worry about Ma’s habit of leaving us in the middle of things.
Once, the four of us walked over to Loews Paradise Theater on the Grand Concourse to see a discounted showing of Alice in Wonderland. Daddy explained on the walk over that the Concourse used to be an area of luxury, a strip of elaborate architecture that attracted the wealthy. But all I could see as we walked were vast, dirty brick buildings with the occasional tarnished cherubs or gargoyles over doorways, chipped and cracked but still hanging on. We sat down in a nearly empty theater.
Ma didn’t stay until the end. It’s not that she didn’t try; she got up once, twice, three times for a “smoke.” Then she got up for a final time and didn’t come back. When we returned home that evening, the record player was spinning a woman’s sad, throaty singing. Ma was taking a pull off her cigarette and studying her own slender, naked body in the full-length mirror.
“Where were you guys?” she asked naturally, and I wondered if I might have imagined that she’d come with us at all.
But in the check line, she wasn’t going anywhere. As much as she fidgeted, Ma wouldn’t leave without the money. So I took the opportunity to hold her hand and to ask her questions about herself when she was my age.
“I don’t know, Lizzy. I was bad when I was a kid. I stole things and cut school. How many more people in front of us, pumpkin?”
Each time I faced her, Ma motioned toward the cashier, urging me to keep an eye out. Holding her attention was tricky, a balancing act between slipping in questions and showing that I was on top of things. I always assured her that we were almost there; privately, I wished she’d have to wait as long as possible, longer than anyone else.
“I don’t know, Lizzy. You’re a nicer kid, you never cried when you were a baby. You just made this noise like eh, eh. It was the cutest thing, almost polite. Lisa would scream her head off and smash everything, rip up my magazines, but you never cried. I worried you were retarded, but they said you were all right. You were always a good kid. How many more people, pumpkin?”
Even if I was told and retold the same stories, I never tired of asking.
“What was my first word?”
“ ‘Mommy.’ You handed me your bottle and said ‘mommy,’ like you were telling me to fill ’er up. You were a riot.”
“How old was I?”
“Ten months.”
“How long have we lived in our house?”
“Years.”
“How many?”
“Lizzy, move over, my turn’s coming.”
At home, we split off into two rooms: the living room for us kids, and next to it, the kitchen for Ma and Daddy. Unlike most times, on that first day of the month, food was abundant. Lisa and I dined on Happy Meals in front of the black-and-white TV, to the sound of spoons clanking on the nearby table, chairs being pulled in—and those elongated moments of silence when we knew what they were concentrating on. Daddy had to do it for Ma because with her bad eyesight she could never find a vein.
At last, the four of us enjoyed the second-best part of the day. We sat together, all spread around the living room, facing the flickering TV. Outside, the ice cream truck rattled its loop of tinny music and children gathered, scrambled, gathered, and scrambled again in a game of tag.
The four of us together. French-fry grease on my fingertips. Lisa chewing on a cheeseburger. Ma and Daddy, twitching and shifting just behind us, euphoric.
“Between the cushions, Lizzy. Yes, I’m telling you, inside the sofa. Press your ear down hard enough, give it a few minutes, and you will hear the ocean.”
“Really?”
“Yes, Lizzy. Don’t make me say it twice. You know I don’t like that. Either you want to hear it, or you don’t.”
“But I do!”
“Then put your ear down there, press hard, and listen.”
“Okay.”
Being my older sister, Lisa held an air of mystery; there was a power about her that gripped and awed me as a child. Some of her talents that most impressed me then—just to name a few—ranged from braiding hair to snapping her fingers to whistling the entire Bewitched theme song. She seemed regal in my eyes, holding herself high by professing authority over multiple matters of no particular consistency; declarations that I, in my youth, believed without question. Even if her claims seemed abstract, I figured that she possessed knowledge the way that math teachers command arithmetic: mysteriously and unquestionably so. My blind trust left me at the mercy of more than a few of her practical jokes.
“Okay, now put this other cushion on top of your head.”
“Why?”
“You’re aggravating me. Do you or don’t you want to hear the ocean?”
Why not? I knew that you could hear the ocean inside the lowly seashells we brought home from trips to Orchard Beach with Ma, which were nowhere near the ocean, so why should a couch cushion be any less likely? And how was I to know what Lisa was going to do when she then upped and sat on my head? How could I have guessed she might blow one huge, hot fart all over me?
“Take that! Hear the ocean breeze now, Lizzy!” she shouted while I flailed wildly beneath her, my screams muffled under her weight.
Should that experience have better prepared me for the Halloween when Lisa and her friend from the first grade, Jesenia, “taste-tested” all of my candy “for safety,” leaving behind only pennies and old-lady lozenges in my trick-or-treat bag? During the whole “inspection,” I’d concealed a single stick of gum in my closed palm, truly believing that I was putting one over on her.
But as the younger sibling, I wasn’t always the one shortchanged; once in a while it was the other way around. As second in line, I could approach most of life’s curiosities with a kind of borrowed knowledge, thanks to my older sister. By watching Lisa deal with all kinds of issues in our household, I was able to maneuver similar situations with less difficulty.
This advantage helped me navigate life with our parents. Watching where Lisa made the wrong moves, I understood at least what not to do. I was able to figure out the exact behavior it took to gain my parents’ approval and attention—something that could prove slippery in our home.
Saturday was furniture garbage day for the people who lived in Manhattan, which Daddy said automatically meant that they were “living well.” Manhattan people threw things away that were still perfectly useable; you just needed to look hard to find the good stuff. Daddy had several regular spots where he knew to look. I had a collection going already in my room: three metal army men with only slightly chipped paint, their protruding muskets cracked in different, scarcely visible places; an old set of trick handcuffs I liked to clip on my belt loop with a plastic gun so that I could be just like a real cop; and a set of marbles in a worn, leather pouch stamped GLEASON’S on the side.
Always, along with the gifts, came a triumphant story of the retrieval process; tales all about how Daddy dug through bags while bystanders gawked, turning their noses up at “perfectly good stuff.” In his stories, Daddy was always the hero, underestimated by people who he managed, eventually, to dazzle with his ironic wit.
Once in a while, I’d go downtown with him. Standing there, it was hard to know how to feel when people stared and Daddy just turned his back to them and continued to dig unabashedly. I tried to see through their eyes what this man must look like, dressed in a dirty, buttoned-up flannel shirt tucked neatly into his equally filthy jeans, mumbling to himself, picking through Dumpsters—as though he had stubbornly dressed for some long-lost professional life from years ago. A serious man, dark-haired, with angular facial features that made him both handsome and stern-looking, with a young daughter, standing in the middle of garbage that everyone else walked wide circles around. I can remember feeling nakedly embarrassed, until Daddy stopped me in my tracks.
“What, you embarrassed, Lizzy?” he asked, briefly lifting his face from the rancid pile and removing his newsboy cap. “Who cares what people think?” He stared into my eyes, unblinking, leaning in. “If you know something’s good for you, go right ahead and get it, and let them go blow it out of their asses. That’s their hang-up.”
Staring up at Daddy in all his defiance, I felt proud, like he was sharing a secret with me: how to forget what other people thought of you. I wanted to feel the way he did, but it was something I’d have to work at. When I tried hard enough, for those moments, I could manage it, standing there beside Daddy and sneering back at the people who stared. But only if I used his voice to tell myself, over and over, that it was their hang-up.
Daddy took a certain pride in his treasure hunting. He never stopped telling this one story about how he’d found a brand-new keyboard at the precise moment some guy called him a “garbage-digger.” In the story, the guy had enough nerve to ask, after he saw how good it was, whether or not Daddy was keeping the keyboard for himself. Daddy enjoyed repeating his answer in an indignant tone: “Fat chance, buddy.”
“Their loss, our gain,” he would say when we delighted over our secondhand toys, hardly used, or when he presented Ma with a blouse with a loose stitch simply in need of sewing.
Sitting before us on the couch, he sang the indecipherable lyrics to an oldies song and fumbled with his bag while we waited in anticipation. Daddy had his own calculated way of doing things, such as opening a backpack or unbuttoning an eyeglass case. We weren’t supposed to interrupt him; the exact motions were a routine he didn’t like to break. If he missed a step, he became obviously flustered and had to start over again. Ma called his habits obsessive.
Lisa and I were impatient.
“What did you get, just tell us! I wanna know,” Lisa demanded.
“Yeah, please Daddy,” I said.
“Hold it a minute, guys.”
He was stuck on a zipper. It wasn’t caught, but he had a certain way of undoing it. He hummed and continued.
“Daaa, da dum, darlin’, you’re the one.”
Ma, tired from a nap, looked at us and shrugged her shoulders.
Finally, he produced a pink plastic toy hair dryer for Lisa. The creases where the plastic had been welded together were dirty. Stickers substituted for buttons; the settings were marked by a color-coded HIGH, MEDIUM, and . . . the lowest setting had been ripped off; only a streak of white remained. Lisa dangled the dryer by its end and rolled her eyes.
“Thanks, Daddy,” she said unenthusiastically.
“I thought you might like that,” he commented, rummaging in his bag for what he’d brought me.
“Can we eat now?” Lisa asked.
“Just a minute,” Ma replied with a raised finger.
Next, Daddy lifted up a white-and-blue toy monster truck with reflective windows and thick, grooved tires. Dirt had found its way into every crevice, darkening the white parts to gray, making the truck look truly road-worn.
Before it even left his hands, I knew just the way I would react to Daddy’s gift. Most of my behavior toward my parents was deliberate; I carefully thought out choices about my actions and exact words. This way, I didn’t leave things to chance. Instead, it was a skill I developed, knowing exactly how to get their attention. In this case, Daddy was giving me what he thought to be a “boy’s toy,” and I knew exactly how to respond. Years of listening carefully to Daddy’s comments scorning “girly” things told me so.
Whenever Ma watched TV talk shows discussing women’s issues like “feeling fat” or “standing up to your man,” Daddy drifted through the living room and sent his voice into a high-pitched wail, impersonating the women using an agonized whine.
“Oh, the world is so foul to women. Let’s have a pity party and never get over it. Oh!”
He reacted the same way to Lisa’s habit of looking in the mirror. Lisa liked to sit curled in a corner and examine her reflection, trying out different smiles and facial expressions. She could spend a whole hour looking at herself.
In response to this, Daddy rolled his eyes way back, lifted his chin, and fanned his fingers out behind his head in the rough shape of a crown. He spoke in that same voice that I grew to interpret as the way he viewed anything “female.” “Will you just look at my face? Oh, well, I’ll just look at it then.”
Daddy always followed up his own jokes with a roar of laughter that would make Lisa hide her mirror and fidget.
“Creep,” I’d once heard her say angrily.
Early on, I decided that I would ridicule anything “girly” right along with Daddy, so he would forget I was a girl, too. I made sure never to let my voice sound meek. Dresses were an absolute joke—“girl crap” that I wasn’t interested in anyway. I knew it was working when Daddy began to bring home these boys’ toys for me, which, I noticed, made him smile and watch me far longer than he would Lisa.
I grabbed the toy truck (which I happened to sincerely like) roughly from him and exclaimed, “Wow! Thanks, Daddy!” I ran the wheels along the coffee table and made loud, throaty engine noises for him to hear.
Daddy smiled approval at me, reaching back into his bag.
“I saved the best for last,” he said, turning to Ma, who looked up curiously at him from her seat at the living room table. She’d been adjusting the table fan onto all of us, but in the humidity, it only circulated hot air.
Her gift must be special, I thought as I watched Daddy unwrap it from a careful layering of newspaper sheets.
“Here we go,” Daddy said, tonguing his cheek and holding up a thick glass jewelry box on the ends of his stiffened fingers, like a waiter presenting a delicate platter.
Ma let out a long, pleased sigh as she cupped the gift in her hands. Before, she’d seemed only mildly interested, but from her reaction, I could tell that she truly liked the box—although I couldn’t help thinking that she had no jewelry to put inside it. While Ma stared at the box, Daddy narrated.
“You should have seen this woman look at me like I was nuts, going through her neighbors’ bags. You know what I have to say to that.”
He raised his middle finger into the air and made a sour face. “Screw you, that’s what. Nosy.”
The jewelry box was a shallow, rounded work of carved glass. A thick, silver lid sat on the top, covered with intricate designs. The lid held a single silver rose in the corner, which bowed gracefully forward. When you twisted it, the softest music played while the rose moved in slow circles, as though dancing a sad ballet. It was beautiful. Instantly, I wanted it for myself.
“Daddy! Can I have it?” Lisa yelled, speaking my mind. Daddy ignored her.
“This is so nice, who could throw it away?” Ma asked.
“I don’t know, but too bad for them. Picked it up on Astor Place, under those big loft buildings,” Daddy said as he unlaced his sneakers with rough, quick jerks. He had a habit of double-, sometimes triple-knotting his laces.
“All right, can we eat now?” Lisa asked.
I was relieved that she brought it up; my stomach had begun to burn, but I was reluctant to interrupt. We hadn’t eaten since that morning, when Lisa and I had rolled-up mayonnaise sandwiches. Most days, that’s all we ever ate, eggs and mayonnaise sandwiches. Lisa and I hated them equally, but they got us through a lot of days when my empty stomach cramped and burned, and all we would have had otherwise was water. It was five days after check day by now, so the money was completely gone and the food in the fridge mostly eaten. I’d been looking forward to some dinner.
“Just a minute,” Daddy answered. “Just wait a minute, let me get settled.”
While Lisa sat watching TV, Ma and Daddy busied themselves in their bedroom. Off to the side, I watched them from the edge of the doorway that provided the only separation between my room and theirs.
Ma sifted through their stack of records in the closet. Since she was with Daddy, she wasn’t going to play Judy Collins; she was in a good mood, so it would be something light. Together they worked a two-man assembly line with some mysterious purpose. Daddy sat on the edge of the bed, sorting through something that looked like dirt, which he pinched between his fingertips and, carefully, spread on a New Yorker magazine taken from the squeaky nightstand drawer that was on his lap. Ma then rolled the gathered bits into an onionskin paper and licked the ends before twisting them tight. Ma raised her lighter, sparking it several times before it fired up, her eyes directed at the cigarette. She took three labored pulls and passed it to Daddy. I’d never seen Daddy smoke a cigarette before.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked, unable to help myself. I questioned them about everything from “Why are you making cigarettes if Ma has some ready-made ones right on her dresser,” to “How come they don’t smell like cigarettes?”
Their nervous laughter told me I was being lied to.
“Liz, enough,” Daddy managed, through his giggling with Ma. I got the feeling that I had said something na?ve, and the thought embarrassed me. I could feel myself begin to blush.
“Enough for now,” he said.
Strange smoke filled the air and I tugged my shirt collar over my nose to avoid inhaling the foreign smell. They were in their own world, and not one of my attempts could penetrate it. I stood, seeking Ma’s eyes in the hope that she’d let me in on their secret, but she didn’t look at me. On the bed, the New Yorker sat open to a typed page sprinkled with their cigarette filler.
“Are we ever going to eat anything?” Lisa bellowed when the credits from her show began to roll across our small television screen.
“Sure, honey,” Ma replied smoothly. Unsteadily, she rose to enter the kitchen, moving her legs in large strides, like an astronaut venturing onto the moon’s surface. The awkwardness of her movements went unnoticed by anyone but me.
Soon Lisa and I sat at the living room table to a dinner of scrambled eggs and ice water. The fight began as soon as Ma set down our plates in front of us.
“Why do we have to eat eggs again?” Lisa complained. “I want chicken.”
“We don’t have chicken,” Ma answered flatly before walking back over to Daddy to take another puff.
“Well, I want real food. I don’t want any more eggs; we eat eggs every single day, eggs and franks. I want chicken.”
Daddy could hardly get over his laughter to speak. “Think of it as a small chicken,” he said.
“Screw you!” Lisa snapped.
“It tastes good,” I said, hoping to make things better.
Lisa whispered across the table, “Liar. You hate this crap as much as I do.”
Lisa detested my urge to be agreeable, regarding it as the threat to her ongoing campaign of demanding better from our parents.
I stuck my tongue out at her and dumped globs of ketchup on my eggs to drown out the bad taste. Lisa was right; I did hate eggs. On television, a picture of Donald Trump shaking hands with a city official flickered and crackled into static. I ate hurriedly, hoping to get rid of the hot mush by forcing down large mouthfuls. I ran my truck around and around my plate, making sound effects that shot wet bits of egg onto the table and onto Lisa.
Back and forth, I watched her argue a losing battle. If there was nothing but eggs, then we had to eat them. It seemed simple to me. At least if Lisa was quiet, we could all get along. But I was also grateful that she was demanding, because it gave me a chance to be agreeable. I would be the easy-going daughter. I didn’t need to look into mirrors; I wasn’t vain or girly. I liked trucks, and I ate my eggs.
Lisa went on until she’d worked herself up into tears. When she was sure of the dead end before her, she screamed, “I hate you!” at both of them. But, from the smoke-filled bedroom, which was heavy now with slow guitar music and a man’s singing, neither of them responded.
Lisa always seemed to be pulling her standards from some higher place, apparent only to herself. If I had to guess now where her resistance to being shortchanged came from, I’d say it had something to do with the year before I was born.
When she was pregnant with me, Ma had what she called a nervous breakdown. With Daddy in prison, Ma had trouble managing her mental health while caring for Lisa at the same time, and Lisa was placed with a foster family for nearly eight months.
The couple who cared for Lisa were wealthy and could not conceive children of their own, so they treated Lisa as a permanent fixture in their family. They lavished so much attention and care on her that when Ma got well and came to get Lisa, she protested by locking herself in the closet and refusing to leave. Ma had to pry Lisa out of the house and drag her back to University Avenue, both of them in tears—which, it seemed, Lisa never got over. From then on, Ma said Lisa was tough to please. It appeared she had developed a sharp sense of what was owed to her, and she was quick to put her foot down whenever she was presented with less—which was nearly all the time.
Lisa screamed a final “I hate you” from the table, folding her arms over her chest, staring back at the TV. “And, I’m not poor—my daddy’s Donald Trump!” she shouted.
“Well then, go ask Daddy Trump for some chicken, why don’t you?” Daddy said. Ma buried her laughter as Daddy howled at his own joke openly, clapping his palm over his knee.
Abruptly, Lisa clanked her plate into mine, which tipped, scooting my eggs into a pile. She stomped off and slammed her door, hard. The noise faded into the blare of pop music from her distorted speakers. Ma and Daddy had taken over the living room, two tired bodies sprawled over the cushions, limp as cooked noodles.
“I ate all my eggs,” I said, but no one was listening.
Grandma, my mother’s mother, lived in Riverdale, across the street from Van Cortlandt Park, in a sixties-style old-age home where she smoked, prayed, and made pay-phone calls to our apartment daily. Apart from us four, she was the only family we really connected with. Daddy’s mom sometimes sent gifts from Long Island, but by falling into drugs, he’d become the black sheep of his middle-class family. My whole life, they never once visited; they never came to see how we lived in the Bronx. Although Ma had run away from home at the age of thirteen, she and her mother reconciled later in life. By the time Lisa and I were born, Grandma would visit once a week, on Saturdays, when she boarded the number 9 bus using her senior citizens’ half-fare card to travel to University Avenue.
Before her visits, Ma sped across the apartment tucking sheets into the corners of beds and gathering plates into the sink and running hot water over them. She swept dust into a pile under the couch and sprayed air freshener over our heads minutes before Grandma was due to arrive.
From the couch, Lisa shooed Ma away each time the vacuuming blocked her view of Video Music Box, a show that appeared in snowy grains on our TV only if Lisa turned the UHF dial around and around.
On one hot summer afternoon, Grandma was expected to arrive at twelve sharp, but Ma—as always—waited until the last minute to do anything. The mist from the aerosol spray was settling over me in cold drizzles when Grandma arrived, dressed too warmly for the weather. She was wheezing heavily from her brief walk up the two flights of stairs, and the strong reek of cigarettes kicked up from her sweater when we hugged. Her hair was a tight bun of gray and silver. Her eyes were crisp and green, and her skin was wrinkled and tough-looking, with faded brown blotches of age. Lisa didn’t look up from the TV. For her, Grandma had to lean in to get a hug. I threw my arms around Grandma’s waist and asked how her bus ride—a pivotal part of her week—had gone. Her answers were always brief and delivered with a complacent smile.
“Everything was simply wonderful, dear. I’m just glad to have been given another day from our Lord to come see my beautiful girls.”
Grandma was deeply religious. In her tan pleather purse—which she held in the crook of her right arm wherever she went, even to the bathroom (a habit she attributed to “those filthy crooks at the home”)—Grandma carried a Bible—the King James edition—hair clips, Lipton tea bags, and two packs of Pall Mall cigarettes, her “smokes.”
Usually, no one cared to have a conversation with Grandma but me. Ma said she was so lonely living in the home that she would talk anyone’s ear off who’d listen, her sole focus being religious education. Ma also insisted that I would eventually lose interest, just like everyone else had, when I realized Grandma “wasn’t all there.”
“She’s not working with a full deck,” Ma would say. “I figure she couldn’t help the things she put me through. You’ll understand what I mean one day, Lizzy.”
But I couldn’t imagine. Grandma was unlike other adults. She would indulge my every question, no matter how many I asked. My curiosities ranged from how rainbows were made to who looked more like Ma when she was little, Lisa or me. And Grandma came ready to offer answers to absolutely everything, drawing all reasoning from her pious know-how, assuring me that all mysteries of the world were God’s doing. From the doorway, Ma watched, commenting that we were a match made in heaven.
Grandma set up station in our kitchen, offering tea and scripture to any takers. I liked the sweet taste of the tea after Grandma stirred in two sugars and some milk, which ribboned through the smoke curling from one of Ma’s cigarettes. I sat, my knees drawn to my chest, nightgown pulled over my legs, sipping the warm drink, and listened to her describe how sins kept the wicked from heaven.
“Don’t curse, Lizzy. God doesn’t favor a foul mouth. Clean the house for your poor mother once in a while. God sees and hears all, and he never forgets. He knows when you don’t do right by others. Trust me, missy, there will be plenty of sinners who never enter the pearly gates of heaven into God’s love. Be careful, God is our Lord, and He is all-powerful.”
The only other thing Grandma made conversation about, unrelated to religion, was what I wanted to be when I grew up.
“A comedian. I want to tell jokes onstage,” I declared, recalling the nights I’d watched men on TV, wearing suit jackets, delivering nervous anecdotes to invisible audiences, their confidence mounting with each explosion of laughter. I figured Grandma would be as impressed as I was at the idea. Instead, she looked at me with concern and set her glass down to raise her finger to the sky.
“Oh dear God, no, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Lizzy, no one will laugh. Sweetie, be a live-in maid. I became a live-in maid when I was sixteen years old. You’ll love it. You go to stay with a nice family and if you take good care of their kids, you can eat for free and make a good, honest living that God would be proud of. Doesn’t that sound nice? Be a live-in maid, Lizzy. Besides, it’s good practice for when you have a husband, you’ll see.”
At my age, it was hard to understand what Grandma meant. I envisioned a wife and husband seated at a square table, in a large, square, white house. Their toddler, chubby and wailing, was waiting for me to serve him, along with the couple, whose faces were blank blurs. Grandma smiled reassuringly. I smiled back. Her vision of my future disheartened me so much that I decided that while I would outwardly agree to anything she said, secretly, I’d keep my true wishes private. I nodded and smiled, pretending to be as pleased with her advice as she was. Then I gave her an excuse about needing something from the living room and joined Lisa on the couch.
But Grandma didn’t need me—or anyone, for that matter—to keep up a good conversation. If she was left alone in the kitchen for too long, she was just as happy to kneel on the floor and carry on a private dialogue with God Himself. Lisa lowered the volume on the television so we could eavesdrop from the next room on Grandma’s passionate repetitions of “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” She went on, over and over, clicking her rosary and murmuring until her speech was more rhythm than words. This meant that she’d made direct contact.
Lisa snapped the TV off completely when Grandma’s praying got louder, her voice raised and deepened in a way I found frightening as she called out for guidance from above—her own sort of CB radio calling to the Lord. Grandma could lose hours in this trance, never moving, never opening her eyes while the sun set and darkened the room around her, the tea cooling in glass mugs on the table. The kitchen remained off-limits to the rest of us when Grandma was speaking to God.
“Lisa, shhh, I wanna hear.” I believed she might truly be reaching heaven and strained to listen, through Grandma’s responses, to what God’s direct advice might sound like. Lisa twisted her lips into a smirk.
“You’re so dumb,” she chided. “Grandma’s just crazy. Ma says she hears voices. She’s not talking to God—she’s nuts.”
Many times, while Ma was busily cleaning in preparation for Grandma’s arrival, she told us stories about how her childhood was ruined by her mother’s mental illness. As a girl, Ma was forced to return home every day only minutes after school let out, many long blocks away from home. Grandma would synchronize Ma’s watch to their living room clock, and if Ma was late, even by minutes, she received a fierce beating. Grandma used anything from extension cords to spiked heels; all blows were delivered to Ma’s tender inner thighs until black-and-blue bruises colored her flesh from crotch to knee. In the middle of the night, Ma, her sister, Lori, and her brother Johnny were often shaken out of bed, pots and spoons thrust into their hands. They were instructed to bang hard, to make as much noise as possible, and to scream a phrase of Grandma’s devising: “Its-a-bits-of-para-kitus, Its-a-bits-of-para-kitus” over and over, until the voices that tormented Grandma were drowned out by the clatter.
This is partly why, Ma said, she’d left home to live on the streets when she was very young and why she cried, listening to sad records in her darkened bedroom, remembering all the trouble she’d run into since.
“A childhood like that can really mess with you,” Ma would say. “What’d she expect me to be after all that, Miss America?”
A firm regimen of medication and talking to God kept Grandma tame later in life. Without that, Ma swore, the devil in her was easily provoked.
“But you should know, it’s not her fault,” Ma once explained in a gentle voice that told me she loved Grandma. “It’s hereditary. Her mother had it, and her mother’s mother had it. And once in a while, pumpkin, I got a spell of it, but I was nothing like Grandma. With treatment, mine went away, one hundred percent. She’s always half in la-la land. She can’t help it.”
The “treatment” Ma spoke about was two- or three-month stints in the psychiatric ward of North Central Bronx Hospital, after Daddy found her hallucinating and hearing voices. Before I was born, they tried a few types of medication before Ma was given Prolixin and Cogentin to keep her balanced. Daddy explained that more attacks were unlikely because this had happened years ago, and Ma had been all right since. Either way, I was convinced that Ma could never be anything less than one hundred percent herself, partly because the very thought of her being any different frightened me.
Inside the kitchen, Grandma laughed knowingly to herself, in some private joke.
“There she goes,” Lisa said, rolling her eyes at me and spinning her finger in small circles beside her head. Until Lisa and Ma pointed it out, I’d never once connected Grandma’s solo conversations with her insanity. I blushed at my gullibility.
“I know she isn’t talking to God. What do you think, I’m retarded?” I snapped back.
In the summertime, Ma bridged some of the gaps in our income by feeding us through other government programs, like the free lunch offered throughout local public schools. Lisa and I often had to coax her out of bed to dress us and ready herself, so we were almost never on time. Having waited until the last minute, Ma would rush around the apartment frantically, feverishly scrambling to make the cut-off time.
“Just—sit—still! If you move around, it’ll only be worse.”
My head jerked and swayed with the tug of Ma’s fine-toothed comb, which ripped fire like nails along my skull. “Owww, Ma!”
“We have only fifteen minutes, Lizzy. We need to go. I’m being as gentle as I can. If you sit still, it won’t hurt,” she insisted, tugging my hair to prove her point. I knew from experience that this was a complete lie. From the doorway, Lisa poked her tongue out at me; her hair was manageable. My cheeks burned with anger. As I went to return the gesture, the teeth of the comb snagged an enormous knot. Without hesitation, Ma dug furiously, snapping the stubborn pieces like dry grass. I winced my eyes shut and grabbed the corner of the mattress beneath me to wrestle with the pain.
“See. If you sit still, it’s not so bad.”
I would rub my throbbing scalp for the rest of the morning.
We were in danger of being given cold servings for the third time that week—or worse, there might be no food left at all. This was especially difficult when we were between SSI checks, and the free lunch was often our only full meal of the day.
July’s intense sun broke the Bronx open, split it down the center, and exposed its contents. High temperatures drove our neighborhood’s occupants out from their muggy, un-air-conditioned apartments to crowd the cracked sidewalks.
I waved hello to the old ladies who spent all day sharing gossip on lawn chairs, each claiming one full square of cement for themselves and their battery-operated radios.
“Hi, Mary.” I smiled at the woman who gave me nickels to buy peanut chews whenever I saw her downstairs.
“Good morning, girls. Good morning, Jeanie.” She waved back.
Old Puerto Rican men played dominoes in front of the corner store on planks of rotted wood suspended over cinder blocks. Ma always called them dirty old men and said that I should stay far away, because they think dirty thoughts and would do dirty things to little girls if given the chance. As we approached the men, I tried to keep my eyes on my shoes to show Ma that I was obedient. They called things out to her that I never understood. “Mami, venga aquí, blanquita.” And they made whistling and sucking noises with their wet, beer-shiny lips.
We passed a few of Ma’s friends sitting nearby, perched on stoops, eyes trained on their children, clutching overloaded keychains decorated with plastic Puerto Rican flags and smiling coqui frogs in straw hats. The plastic jumble of trinkets clinked with each disciplinary raise of the mothers’ hands. Children circled sprinklers and teenagers claimed street corners.
The block thumped salsa as we crossed University onto 188th, Lisa and I tugging on Ma’s arms, helping guide her through traffic while she squinted.
“Four more blocks, Ma, all right?”
Ma smiled absentmindedly. “Yep, okay pumpkin.”
The cafeteria was filled with the distinct smell of fish. I sucked up disappointment, grabbed a yellow Styrofoam tray partitioned into four sections, and got in line. I hesitated over the pyramid of fish cakes glistening with grease.
“You got something better to eat at home?” the milk lady asked over the cafeteria chatter.
“No,” I answered, hanging my head as I accepted the limp fish.
“Then come on, keep it movin’.” I grabbed a pint of milk, the container slippery between my fingers, and tried not to let my Tater Tots roll off the tray as I went to sit on a bench connected to a long, crowded table.
Lisa stabbed holes into her fish cake, drawing the bright yellow cheese filling from its center. I was staring at a faded poster of children raising their sporks—a cheap plastic spoon combined with a fork—to demonstrate the importance of proper nutrition, when a lady with a clipboard began talking to Ma.
“So, how old are your children, ma’am?” she asked.
“Seven, and the smaller one is almost five.” Ma squinted and smiled vaguely, but I could tell that the woman’s face was too distant for Ma’s bad eyes to see clearly. The woman wrote something down, humming a quick, “Mmm-hmm, really,” as though Ma had said something interesting.
They talked for a while, the woman asking Ma a lot of personal questions about our family income from welfare, Ma’s level of education, and whether or not she lived with our father. “Where is he? Does he work?” and so on. I pushed the Tater Tots around in my mouth, breaking them into bits with my one front tooth. Still cold in the center, they tasted like cardboard moistened by freezer ice.
“I see. So when do you plan on starting this one in school?” She pointed her finger at me. I slid closer to Ma. The clipboard woman spoke to her with the same voice adults used when they leaned down to tell me how big I was getting.
“This fall, down the block at P.S. 261,” Ma replied.
“Mmm-hmm, really? Thank you, ma’am. Enjoy your lunch, children,” she instructed us as she went on to the next parent.
“My baby’s growing up,” Ma said, ignoring the woman’s intrusion and briefly hugging me to her side. “You start school in just two months.”
I thought of the words growing up—grown up, I mouthed to myself. I looked at the adults in the cafeteria, searching for what grown up looked like, hoping to find some signs of what to expect for myself.
I watched the way the clipboard woman interviewed the new lady, making her nervous as she leaned in to take her information. I didn’t like it when Ma smiled for her questions, just like when she was nice to the cold women who sat like royalty behind big wooden desks at welfare—the way Ma sounded like she was begging. I didn’t like being afraid of Ma’s caseworker and racing around the apartment to help clean for the in-home checkups, or having to be overly grateful to the moody cafeteria workers. It scared me that strangers had the power to give or take so much of what we depended on.
The cafeteria rules stated that food was for kids only, but at Ma’s request, Lisa snuck her a piece of fish. Careful not to let the lunch ladies see, Ma stuffed it into her mouth and had me scan the room to ensure that she had not been seen. Watching her and Lisa, I thought of Ma’s words, about the fact that I was growing up.
I stared over at doorways leading up to stairwells that held so much mystery for me in the summers I’d attended P.S. 33’s free lunch program. I cherished the last few years when Lisa always went off to school in the morning, while I got to spend time alone with Ma. We’d wake up when we felt like it, and Ma would sit me down on the couch and if we had enough food, I’d get the rare treat of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We would watch the morning game shows; Ma would light up for Bob Barker and The Price Is Right. Ma said he was “one of the last real gentlemen around,” and she always sat extra close to the TV, squinting when his face filled our screen, his white hair perfectly neat, his suit freshly pressed. Together, we would bet on the “showcase showdown,” taking turns pretending to be contestants, winning boats, new living room sets, and glamorous trips around the world. I’d stand and clap extra loud for the contestants who won big. Ma sometimes vacuumed, humming smoothly while I was parked in front of the TV for hours, our apartment bright with the morning sun. It was a brief time when I felt that Ma belonged only to me.
And then some days Daddy brought me to the library, where he helped me pick out books that were mostly pictures. For himself, he’d choose thick ones with photographs of contemplative men in suit jackets on the back, which he stacked around the house and never returned. He was always applying for a library card in a new name. Some nights, I liked to take one of his books and bring it to my room, where I would try to read it the same way Daddy did—held directly under the light of my bedside lamp, searching for any words that might be familiar to me from nights when Ma read to me at my bedside. But the words were too big and they made me tired. So I’d just fall asleep beside the book, smelling the yellowed pages, relaxed by the feeling that I shared something special with my father.
It worried me to think that I would be away in the mornings now, missing out on this. I got the feeling that something was slipping through my fingers, and that I was the only one who saw the loss of our special time as a bad thing.
I wondered what starting school would be like, and how it was supposed to help me become grown up. I wondered what grown up could mean, when there were different types of adults all around me. Though I wanted to, I didn’t dare ask Ma to help me figure things out, because I knew it would only make her feel bad about herself and the scrounging we had to do to get by. Some things I was just going to have to figure out on my own.
Later that week, the evening newscaster—a white man in a suit who wore a triangle hat with colorful streamers dangling from the top—called the day, July Fourth, a time to celebrate our independence. Then he and the poofy-haired woman beside him waved good-bye under the rolling credits and blew simultaneously into kazoos. The noise honked in our living room, becoming the second-loudest thing next to our window fan whirring behind me. I sat alone on the couch, motionless. Ma had promised me earlier, when it was still light outside, that she would take us downtown by the water so we could watch fireworks along with everyone else. I had run to get dressed and chosen my blue shorts and tie-dyed shirt to match the festivities. But I had stayed in my room too long. By the time I came out, Ma had left for the Aqueduct Bar without telling anyone—a new place she’d recently discovered and been running off to more and more lately.
Her trips there started on St. Patrick’s Day, that past March. Ma and Daddy had taken us down to the parade spontaneously, after we’d seen it announced on TV.
Under a light sheet of rain, we watched from Eighty-sixth Street, just off the park, as men in kilts played eerie notes on bagpipes and beat drums so powerful I could feel them in my chest and legs. Lisa and I had our cheeks painted with four-leaf clovers, for luck, and Daddy let me fall asleep on his lap for the whole train ride home.
Ma didn’t make it back to the apartment with us. Just as we were about to come off Fordham Road, she ran into an old friend who was headed into a bar, and she decided to catch up with us later. After all, what was St. Patty’s Day without a drink, he’d insisted. Without bothering to wash the paint off my face, I’d set my blanket down on my windowsill to watch for Ma’s return. I waited for hours, dozing off against the window, until she finally came home around three in the morning, smelling of liquor and walking in zigzags. Ma slept then like she did after her longer coke binges, without waking up once for the entire next day. After that, the bar became a regular thing. We could be in mid-conversation, or sitting down to dinner, it didn’t matter; she would leave at any time.
Hours later that night of the fourth, still dressed in my tie-dyed shirt and blue shorts, I sat on the couch, turning the TV dial, flipping through the different televised celebrations. I decided then and there that Ma had snuck away because of me. It was because I’d developed this habit of asking her over and over if she really had to go to the Aqueduct, and what time exactly I could expect her back. Sometimes it was hard to help myself, and I even followed Ma to the door, holding her hand for as long as I possibly could. I made it so that our fingers touched down to the very tip before she exited. “See you soon, Ma, come back soon, okay? Okay?” I called down repeatedly, until I heard the hallway door click shut. I supposed that this had become too much for her to deal with. That must be why she’d felt a need to slip out secretly tonight. If only I’d been less difficult.
A couple more hours passed and the replay of the news ended. I stood up, readying myself for bed, walking out of the living room. Just as I did, Ma came through the door.
“Guess who’s here,” she sang. I heard two sparks from a lighter and thought she was lighting a cigarette. Then I heard a fluttering noise, like a small swarm of bees.
“Ma!”
“Look what I brought you, pumpkin. Go get your sister.”
Ma stared at a sparkler that she held like a magic wand. The brightest light in the living room, it shot glowing, silvery threads all over her pinched fingers, around her bare arm. Flecks of light danced in her eyes.
“Ta-da!” she sang, raising the sparkler. Just then, I noticed the large plastic bag filled with fireworks hanging from her other arm.
We never made it downtown by the water that night, but we did sit on the stoop out front, surrounded by people from our building. We set off every last firework Ma had brought home. With the neighborhood kids, we made Jumping Jacks dance and spin. Firecrackers popped, ringing in our ears. Daddy was the safety supervisor for Lisa and me. With a glass bottle from the trash, which he cleaned off with newspaper, Daddy taught me how to send a bottle rocket soaring into space without hurting my fingers. Ma sat on the stoop and talked to Louisa from apartment 1A, whose daughters played with their own fireworks beside us.
“Here, Lizzy,” Daddy said to me, his deep voice reassuring. “You’ve got to prop the stick into the bottle first. You don’t want to get burned.”
I crouched into a ball down by the cement to help Daddy light the fuse. Daddy wrapped himself over me, engulfing my small body, protecting me. I smelled his scent, the musk and sweat mixed with our freshly struck matches. His hands were enormous, cupping mine as he showed me how to position the small explosive. Together we backed off to watch it fly, screaming through the air, flashing radiant pink beams in the black night sky. With Lisa and I taking turns shooting bottle rockets, we finished the whole bag in under a half hour. I sent each one flashing into the dark with a round of applause, looking over my shoulder at Ma, who hooked her arm through Daddy’s and was leaning on his shoulder, smiling.
That was the summer of 1985, just before school, and the last time I can remember the four of us being close, and happy. Before then, whatever went on in our household, I simply had nothing to compare to. I had no idea how different we could be from other people. All I knew was Ma was a real mother then, and my parents, together, tended to our needs. Or whatever they didn’t tend to didn’t matter because I had no clue that I needed anything more.
The fade of that summer withdrew not just its own warmth, but with it, the only family unity I’d ever known, and as a result my very last clear memory of stability, too. I guess you could say we’d lived in some kind of bubble before that, a little world made up of just the four of us. But in my eyes, we were just one of the many families living and struggling to make it on University Avenue. Things were sometimes tough, but we had each other, and in having that, we had it all.
That August, I made a habit of standing on one of the kitchen chairs to count the passing days off the free Met Food supermarket calendar tacked high up next to the fridge—something I’d learned watching my big sister. For two Augusts, I’d seen Lisa repeatedly squint at the dates framed neatly beside coupons for bargain poultry and ninety-nine-cent frozen burritos while she muttered complaints and groaned extravagantly over the start of school. Tomorrow would be my first day to join her.
“You’re in for it now,” she said, digging through her extra school supplies to split with me. “No more bumming around here, that’s for sure. You’re going to have to work now, just like the rest of us.”
I thought of all the times Lisa returned home and headed straight for her room to labor over homework, emerging hours later, droopy-eyed and exhausted, only to find that I’d been sitting on Ma’s lap, watching TV most of the evening. Routinely, she’d strike up some petty fight with me shortly thereafter, demanding control over the TV or the couch, since she’d been working hard and I’d just been sitting around on my butt. Her helping me prepare for school felt, to me, like some form of revenge.
Lisa peeled open a pack of very old lined paper that she’d dug up from her closet and divided it in half.
“You’ll need this,” she said, passing one stack to me. “Don’t put it in upside down or people will make fun of you. Kids tease about a lot of things, you’ll see.” My small hands worked to hook the whole stack at once into my three-ring binder, just the way I had seen Lisa do many times before. Ma circled the room frantically.
“Tomorrow, Lizzy. I can’t believe it. It wasn’t too long ago that you were in diapers. In diapers!” Ma’s voice was panicked. I couldn’t tell whether she realized that she was shouting.
Ma had just spent time in the kitchen with Daddy, getting high. Now, with her jaw tight, her lips pursed, and her eyes wild, I knew she would go on like this for a while, circling and ranting. I’d been pressing Ma the whole week to get me ready for school, but she wouldn’t get out of bed. Luckily, check day had just come. And now that she’d shot up, Ma absolutely came to life. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled with her attention.
“Now look at you, starting school. I can’t believe it, pumpkin.” She lit a cigarette and sucked so hard that the tip glowed bright.
“You’re going to love it, Lizzy. You’ll do so well.”
Her excitement became my excitement. I would love it.
“Wait, do you have a notebook?” she asked with sudden, manic concern.
It was eleven thirty at night. I’d found the used binder under Lisa’s bed a few hours before. The paper she’d provided, which we’d rescued from the trash room downstairs last spring, was yellow with age.
“Yeah, Ma. It’s right here.” With great effort I held the thick notebook high for her to see, but she didn’t look.
“Good, but did I give you a haircut?”
“A haircut? No. Do I need one?”
“Yes, pumpkin, the day before school everyone gets new things, they get their hair cut, they brush their teeth. Go sit on the floor by the coffee table, I’ll get some scissors and take care of you right now. You probably don’t need your whole head, just your bangs. That’s all people really look at anyway.”
She went to search the junk drawer. Her movements were impatient, unfinished, like her sentences, which usually stopped before any point was made.
“Lizzy, you just . . . It’ll be good. Wait until you see . . .” Her energy felt frantic.
I could hear the contents of the junk drawer clanking from the kitchen as she stirred through them. Lisa had gone to bed, saying she needed sleep to get up early and warning that if I knew what was good for me, I would do the same.
Something about the way Ma moved made me nervous. Did she even know how to cut hair? And what about her eyesight? I didn’t want my hair to look anything like hers, which was long and wavy, but also kinky and unkempt. The thought filled me with worry.
“Here we go!” she yelled, holding up a pair of rusted scissors. Daddy was still in the kitchen; I could hear him fidgeting and making small mumbling noises. There was nothing to do but go with it, so I did.
I had to stay perfectly still, with my chin held in place by Ma’s fingertips while she made each cut, or I would interfere with her concentration. Ma made me close my eyes to avoid getting any hair in them. I held a piece of loose-leaf paper below my chin to catch what fell. I’d never had bangs before, but Ma didn’t seem to realize this. She just took clumps of my longer hair and made the necessary cuts. The real panic didn’t set in until I could feel the cool metal of the scissors slide along my forehead, over an inch above my eyebrows.
“Ma, are you sure that’s not too short?” I asked.
“Pumpkin, it’s okay, I just need to make it even. I almost had it before; I just need to try again. We’re almost there. Just . . . sit . . . still.”
On the ground beside me, my hair had fallen in scattered chunks. Ma tapped her foot impatiently. Every so often she’d hiss a curse.
“Shit!”
My heart raced and I tried not to ruin her concentration by flinching.
In small bits, Ma chopped away my bangs, until they were so short, only a cropped border remained, so stubbly that pieces of it stuck straight out from my head. When she rested the scissors on the coffee table, I touched my forehead, rubbing it frantically in search of hair, pinching the short stubble in disbelief. Tears welled up in my eyes.
“Ma-aaa,” I whimpered. “You made it really short, Ma. Isn’t this too short?”
She was already putting on her shoes to head out to the bar. From the way her face had dropped, I could tell her high had worn off. The alcohol was what she needed now, to calm her. She was out of my reach again.
“I know honey, it’ll grow back. I just had to make it even. Those damn scissors are no good for cutting hair. I had to keep going back to fix it.”
Lisa said that kids teased about a lot of things. Imagining what the kids in school would think when they saw me, I began to cry softly. Ma took me by the hand and walked me down the hall to the bathroom, which was just beside the front door. She stood behind me, both of us facing the mirror together. Her jacket was already on. Suddenly, her chin was down on my shoulder, her fingers stroked my forehead.
“It’s just hair, pumpkin, it’ll grow back. When I was little, my sister, Lori, cut my favorite doll’s hair off. I was so angry. She told me it would grow back and I believed her. Can you imagine?”
I wiped tears from my cheeks and studied us together in the mirror. Ma’s eyes couldn’t stay in one place, and her hands on my shoulders had blood spots on them. Tiny pieces of hair were stuck to her fingers.
“At least yours grows back, Lizzy. It’s really fine. School will be so much fun, you’ll see.”
With that, I watched her reflection plant a single kiss on my head, and she slipped out the front door. I could hear her stomping quickly down the battered marble steps. Then she was gone.