Breaking Night

Chapter 4
Unraveling

IF OUR APARTMENT HAD BEEN A WORLD UNTO ITSELF BEFORE, THEN by the time I was nearly twelve years old, the four of us came to live on entirely different continents, separated in our own locked rooms, detached and floating so independently from one another that I worried we might never come together again. I spent the majority of my time out of the house, hanging out with friends or packing bags and pumping gas. Lisa, in her room, blasted music from her radio, her door permanently shut. Daddy had his trips downtown, and his long walks around the neighborhood. And Ma made a new friend to keep her company, a detestable man whose presence in our apartment drove a wedge between us at a fragile time when we were already farther apart than we could afford.
Leonard Mohn was a flamboyant, bone-thin man who resembled Munch’s painting The Scream. He had small tufts of hair on either side of his bald head and his eyes bulged from his sockets as though he were being strangled. He was jittery and impatient, and suffered from a mental illness, not unlike Ma’s, which he treated with all sorts of colorful pills. He and Ma met and became good friends in the bar one night when they discovered they had the same taste in men. Together, Leonard Mohn and Ma took over our kitchen and transformed it into something between a grievance group meeting, a smoking lounge, and what addicts like to call a shooting gallery; a place, usually deserted, where people go to mainline.
Their routine together was consistent with each cycle of government checks: Daddy was the gofer; he ran to cop the drugs, while Ma and Leonard sat in the kitchen moping about life, guzzling large bottles of Budweiser, setting up the works, and waiting for Daddy to return so they could get high. This sequence was repeated for two nearly sleepless weeks (the time it took to run through both Ma’s and Leonard’s checks combined), until dark rings surfaced under their eyes and between them, there wasn’t a single dollar left to spend. Leonard could be expected back when the checks came in again, either his own or Ma’s. He didn’t stick around much for the mid-month grubbing from bars. In his absence, Ma slept for days.
Daddy, Ma, Lisa, and me all made fun of Leonard behind his back. I don’t think any of us liked him, not even Ma really. With his shrill voice, obsessive self-concern, and obvious disgust for children (despite the fact that he was a substitute schoolteacher), he wasn’t exactly likable. But Ma and Daddy did not make decisions based on what they liked or didn’t like, just as they didn’t make decisions based on what was good or bad for our family. Instead, Ma and Daddy made decisions based on drugs, and Leonard was a resource, if nothing else. The more he was around, the greater the check money and the more they could get high. So on the nights when I took long walks with Daddy, tagging along for his drug runs, he’d make me laugh hard by imitating Leonard’s over-the-top effeminate voice and his incessant whining, while simultaneously teaching me how to press the bright beeping letters of a Chase ATM, while we typed in Leonard’s PIN, “WATERS,” to get out cash for their next round of coke. I could always make Daddy laugh when I did my imitation of Leonard, bulging out my eyes big and doing my best version of his voice whining to Ma in our kitchen: “Ooooh, Jeanie! Oh, life’s so hard, oooohhhh.”
Daddy would smack his knee and crack up laughing in the empty ATM carrel, receipts and trash strewn about our feet, as we were totally alone in those predawn hours. Then he’d ask me to do it again and again for our whole walk to the drug spot and home. When we’d get back to our apartment, you could already hear Leonard’s shrieking voice all the way from out in the hallway, before we even put our key in to open the front door.
“If not for the kids, Jeanie, my job would be great. Oh, the little beasts,” he’d say. “I just wish I could give them a good wallop when they get out of hand, the monsters!”
Leonard was as strongly disapproving of the idea of having children as he was pessimistic and dramatic. And he wasn’t at all reserved about saying so. Throughout his visits, I could hear him complain to Ma, using a stage whisper from the very next room with the door open.
“Jean, they’re such little ingrates. I don’t know how you do it.” He always sucked on his cigarettes audibly, making a small kissing noise when he pulled them back. “I can’t even take them at work. God help you with them here in your home.”
“Oh, Leonard, stop it,” she said, weakly.
This was the single response Ma came up with. I’d like to think it was Leonard’s check money that kept Ma quiet, but I’ll never be sure why she sat there complacently, sipping her beer, oblivious to his verbal attacks on us.
If it had been only this nasty attitude of his that I had to deal with, I probably could have tolerated Leonard Mohn. But what escalated him from irritatingly difficult to impossible to deal with was this one recurring conversation he shared with Ma, regarding their shared status as HIV positive. That conversation was too painful to overhear. It made me need to escape him, to escape her.
The subject always came up just as their coke was wearing off, in that stage when the high had lost its thrust and reality came flooding back in a wave of melancholy.
“Jeanie, my heart is racing. Jeanie, hold my hand.” Even if she hadn’t held mine in years, even though the last real hug she gave me was on that night she told me of her diagnosis, she’d sit there and clasp Leonard’s hand, crossing their fingers through each other’s.
“Jeanie, I just don’t want to get sick,” he’d say. “Well, we’re going to get sick, but at least we won’t ever have to be old. No, we’ll never have to have that happen, thank God. Aren’t you grateful for that, Jean?”
Most times when they talked like this, I was no more than ten feet away, lying on the couch, well within earshot. Close enough so I could smell the sour beer, see the fog of cigarette smoke streaming out of the doorway, and hear every distressed word of his, spoken so blatantly, distorted by his tears.
“Oh, Jeanie, in a way it could be a blessing. The good years are all gone before forty anyway.”
“I know, Leonard. That’s one good thing,” she’d agree. “We’ll never be old.”
Any delusion I had that Ma’s and Daddy’s drug habit was somehow harmless vanished with her diagnosis and the intrusion of Leonard. I eventually outgrew my tolerance for being witness to all of this: my parents’ naked arms under our flickering fluorescent light; the very moment a needle punctured their flesh, thin and vulnerable as grape skin; their blood drawn up the syringe in a red cloud, and then shot back in again, causing that electric rush to overtake their faces. Then, blood all over—blood speckling the walls, across their shirts, onto our newest pack of Wonder bread, on the sugar jar. Maybe worst of all was watching them overuse one spot on their bodies, the way it swelled and began to darken, to shine, and even to smell. The way Ma searched desperately for a clean spot on her feet or between her toes. Far more than the gore aspect was their desperation that grew more obvious to me over time. That’s what the whole thing was—an ongoing movie of their desperation playing out in front of me, as though I were seated alone in a dark cinema, watching an eerie slow-motion black-and-white film of their lives crashing and burning. It wore on me, and where I had once tried so hard to be involved, I now grew tired and longed to go anywhere else in order to escape it.
When Ma and Daddy went on their late-night binges, I stopped coming with Daddy and I never explained to him why. Instead, I was compelled by a distinct feeling of resistance that sent me slipping out the front door quietly to take aimless walks along Fordham Road, up and down the deserted shopping strip, by myself. Some nights I searched through plastic trash bags along the sidewalk for defective store clothing, a trick Daddy had taught me. I filled my backpack with damaged or inaccurately stitched clothing while my parents made their runs, occasionally staying out until the sun began to rise. One night while I was foraging for clothing, I actually saw Daddy walking briskly down Fordham Road and I said nothing to him. I did not call out his name but instead just stood in front of the trash bags watching him walk at top speed toward Grand Avenue. Calling out his name would have made me sad for some reason; not calling it out made me sad, too.
Some days, children at school made jokes about my messed-up clothing, the pocket sewn onto the back of a shirt or a short pants leg on my too-large jeans. Most days, I avoided school and walked a different route entirely, arriving early in the morning at Met Food, so I could stand alongside the cashiers to watch the manager unlock and raise his gate for the start of business.
It’s not that I never went to school, but more like I passed through it the way a net passes through water, passively snagging whatever happens to drift inside. Any formal education I received came from the few days I spent in attendance, mixed with knowledge I absorbed from random readings of my or Daddy’s ever-growing supply of unreturned library books. And as long as I still showed up steadily the last few weeks of classes to take the standardized tests, I kept squeaking by from grade to grade.
Cutting school, I walked or rode the subway, traveling all over the Bronx and Manhattan just for the feel of sitting among crowds, to hear the sound of conversations, arguments, panhandlers singing, and my favorite sound of all, laughter. I could disappear in the crowds of people—who would notice a short skinny girl in need of a shower, with knotty, filthy hair, if I slung a hood over my head and walked with my eyes downcast, invisible? Even though I worried about getting picked up by truancy officers, it was worth the risk. I just needed to have life around me—the pulse and vibration of people out in the world doing things. I traded school for this. I traded my home for this. Soon, I accumulated two steady absences: one from school and the other from our apartment.
Sometimes, I had company. Rick and Danny abandoned class to ride the number 4 train with me, back and forth on its Lexington Avenue line, for hours. This was a different kind of cutting school; not peaceful like my solitary trips, but marked by adventure. Together on the train, we swung on straps and kicked open empty conductor’s booths to use the PA system, announcing that sandwiches and drinks were being served in the last car. We broke stink bombs—little glass tubes containing the foulest-smelling liquid—onto the floors of crowded cars, delighting in people curling their faces in disgust.
Bowling Green was the only station where we ever deboarded (unless we were being chased by the conductor). Here, we hopped on the Staten Island Ferry; if we rode on the bottom deck, forward bound, the sea breeze drizzled on our cheeks and the ocean split and foamed beneath us. Return trips to Manhattan cost two quarters, a fee easily averted by hiding in the men’s room (I was outvoted by the boys two to one), sneakers jammed against the stalls to support our weight while the ferry staff made their rounds in search of fare beaters.
The ride home always snapped me back to reality. Surrounded by hordes of commuting schoolchildren, dressed in crisp uniforms or the latest fashion, I always felt lonely. I worried the whole hour-long ride home about what might have gone on in school, what I’d missed.
A surprise visit from a caseworker could come on any day, like the day I returned from the ferry to find Ms. Cole in our home. It was her second visit to our apartment that month. Ma had let her in half an hour before I returned. They were in mid-conversation when I walked through the door, clutching my book bag like a prop. Before I passed through the doorway into the living room, I’d already smelled the lilac aroma of Ms. Cole’s perfume, distinct from the musky smell emanating from the rest of the house.
She was the first to speak, establishing her dominance over Ma and me. “Nice to see you, Elizabeth,” she said with a raised chin, her gaze fixed on me. Her legs were crossed, her hands resting flat on her knee. Daddy’s fan had been hauled out from the bedroom. It looked unfamiliar propped in the living room window, aimed at Ms. Cole. It stirred the ends of her feathery weave as she spoke.
“Elizabeth, I’m here today because even though you promised to go to school, I got another call. Mrs. Peebles hasn’t seen you in almost a week. Now I want to hear what you have to say for yourself. Why haven’t you been going to school, Elizabeth?”
Her question struck me in its directness and in its airtight logic. In one way, it made sense for her to ask it, but in another way it made no sense at all, given the chaos we lived in. Because if logic were enough to change things, I suppose she could just as easily turn to Ma and ask, Why are you on drugs, ma’am? Why is the fridge empty? Why did you let yourself contract HIV when you have two daughters and a whole life ahead of you? Ms. Cole could have asked any one of these questions, too. Instead, she chose this one question, out of all the possible question marks we lived in as a family, and she directed it at me.
I looked to Ma, who sat hunched in her chair, eyes half-open. “I can’t do anything, Lizzy. You just need to go to school. You have to.” She addressed the last part of her statement to the wall. Ms. Cole patted the coffee table, clicking her gold ring against the glass.
“Have a seat, Elizabeth,” she said. I hated her for calling me Elizabeth, for coming into our home and bossing us around. Obediently, I sat on the edge of the table. She gave me a look that implied she was getting down to business. If I hadn’t seen the same expression so many times before, I probably would have taken her more seriously.
“You need to get to school, Elizabeth. If you don’t go, I’m going to take you; it’s as simple as that. Your mother told me she sends you to school and you don’t go. Well, that needs to change. And you and your sister need to help your mother out and clean up this mess. Tell Lisa that. I mean it. This house is disgusting, an absolute pigsty.”
I could tell from the way she used the word disgusting, dragging it out, smiling, that it made her feel powerful to say so. Ms. Cole liked her power trips.
“I don’t know how you even live here. You’re old enough now to do something about it.” She raised her voice momentarily, but then said with an unsettling calm, “There are places for girls like you.”
This part of the lecture was hardest to hear. She was just the type of person Rick and I would chuck a water balloon at from the roof, I thought. I imagined her reaction: the shriek she would let loose on impact, how it would flatten her cheap hairdo. I’d do it myself, I thought, and I’d fall down laughing.
“You won’t like the homes I can put you in. And let me tell you, if you won’t clean here, you will clean there. They’ll have you scrubbing toilets. And the girls there are violent.” I saw myself doubled over toilets dirtier than my own at home, blackened along the edges, slimy and slippery. Large, evil-looking girls dressed in rags stood behind me to supervise. “But I’ll take you out of here if that’s what you want. All you gotta do is not attend school and you will go.” Here came her favorite part; you could tell by the half smile on her face, like she worked all day just to be able to deliver this one line. “It’s shape up or ship out, Elizabeth; pick one,” she said.
Her face twisted into something between revulsion and exasperation. “Don’t you want to get your life together, young lady? You ever think about that?” She enjoyed this; I could sense it coming off her, like heat. There wasn’t a trace of good intention in any of it, I knew in my gut. Like so many social workers who disciplined me, Ms. Cole enjoyed being angry; she savored the performance.
Where was the caring that would have made her words effective? “Get your life together.” People said things like that all the time, but who could explain, nuts and bolts, what they meant? Who was trying to show me why I should care about school and keeping an apartment clean? Didn’t adults see the size of those words, the way they were bigger than my understanding, and how the gaps between were wide enough for me to fall deep inside them? What was the connection between what I woke up to every day and the vague goals she expected of me? What was she talking about? If an education and a job were so important, then why didn’t my parents have either? “Get your life together.” What did that even look like? Was I supposed to make sense of that myself? If not, how could I decipher it from Ms. Cole’s lectures? Especially when she explained things to me with such angry self-righteousness.
I was furious, but I did my best to appear calm, especially as Ms. Cole delivered the punch line when I walked her to the front door, briefcase in hand, her long, curly nail wagging at me.
“You know, Elizabeth, if I really wanted to, I could take you today. Actually, I could come in here and take you any day I want to. Remember that. I’m just being nice.”
If this was her being nice, I couldn’t imagine Ms. Cole’s idea of antagonistic.
Back inside, Ma was already lying down, pillow drawn over her head. The clock said it was just before three; Lisa would be home soon. I was shutting my bedroom door when Ma spoke, muddled from under the pillow.
“Lizzy, did you pack groceries today? I mean do you have any cash? I could really use five bucks.”
“No, I’m broke today, Ma.”
She turned over and made a noise, half moan, half grunt. There was a penny stuck to her butt cheek. A tremble ran up my body, then quickly subsided. I didn’t know whether or not I wanted to be upset at her, or if she just made me sad. I went to my room and sprawled across my bed, realizing that I felt only numb. Ma began crying into her pillow, loudly. I stared up at the ceiling and felt absolutely nothing inside.
That night, Leonard Mohn came by with a paycheck. He, Ma, and Daddy binged for hours. In my bedroom, I could hear them make their rounds, beer bottles clanking, footsteps, the front door opening and slamming continuously. At one point, I came out and called Rick and Danny’s house. I cupped my shirt over my nose to filter the cloud of cigarette smoke and made plans with the guys, to hang out until the sun came up. We might sneak into the movies or just walk and see what we could find to do.
As I pulled my sweater over my head to get ready, something in Ma and Leonard’s conversation caught my attention. They were whispering about something, about someone. Leonard’s neurotic foot-tapping drowned out some words. I stood perfectly still and listened.
They were discussing a man Ma knew from the bar. From what I could tell, someone she had known for a while, and had recently begun to connect with. His name, or the nickname that everyone knew him by, was Brick.
“I don’t know, Leonard. He listens to me, ya know. I like that. I’ve missed being with a man who listens. We have a good time together, ya know?”
It was a man Ma was seeing.
“Oh Jeanie, don’t let go of a man who makes you feel good. I wouldn’t. Men with careers are so much more mature.” Leonard whispered the next part: “Go for it, Jean. You deserve better.”
I could have thrown Leonard out of the house with my hands. There he was, one minute smiling in Daddy’s face and the next, telling Ma to go for another man. He was as two-faced as he was mean. Listening to them continue, it took me a while to fully grasp what had been going on, but I soon understood that Ma had been seeing this man for a while. I eavesdropped, hearing her describe the money he spent on her, their lovemaking, and how much she liked the fact that he didn’t use drugs at all, he just drank to ease his nerves sometimes. The descriptions became more fleshed-out as I stood there, each detail bringing Brick closer to being a real person, all the while threatening Daddy, and the foundation of our family.
Brick made a good living, with benefits, working as a security guard at a fancy art gallery in Manhattan. Ma boasted that he had been in the navy. In a neighborhood much nicer than ours, Brick had his own, large, one-bedroom apartment and was single. And apparently, I was not the only one spending nights far from home. I got the sense this must mean that Daddy knew.
My eyes made a full sweep of the apartment. In my absence, the house had gone from bad to awful. Everywhere, there were signs of deterioration: busted lights, empty beer bottles, and cigarette butts littered the carpet, more so than ever before. Moistness hung in the air. The grime had an airborne weight that you could feel as you breathed. With Leonard there as Ma’s new shoulder to lean on, with his money, my parents were getting high two and a half weeks out of the month, nonstop. Guilt struck me for all of my drifting; I’d abandoned my role in the apartment and in doing so, I’d let things fall apart.
Daddy came in through the front door, whistling. Ma and Leonard got quiet. I opened and shut my own door, coughed, took a step out into the living room. Ma walked through the room and went to remove her worn-out leather belt from a doorknob to use for an arm tie. “Just a second, Petie,” she called over her shoulder. Daddy was counting off change for a twenty to Leonard.
I opened my mouth, intending to say something to her, but shut it quickly when I realized I had no idea what. The beginning credits to The Honeymooners filled the TV screen, the theme music crackling. In no way did Ma’s gestures suggest that she knew I was in the room. I coughed, loudly. She glanced at me, for just a moment. “Petie, I’m getting first,” she said, marching back in with the belt.
Something had stolen away the affection between Ma and me and reduced our interactions to casual, distant ones. Since her diagnosis two years ago, our dynamic hadn’t been the same. I never discussed with anyone what Ma told me that night. Most times I told myself I might have dreamed it; I figured she never told Lisa because otherwise, I was sure she would have said something. It felt as if Ma and I shared a dirty secret, and this seemed to make her afraid of me. The distance she kept told me so. We hardly knew what to say to each other anymore, maybe because so much went unspoken.
Daddy got Ma high first. I could hear her begin to sniffle. Leonard Mohn was next. Daddy took his high to the bathroom, away from them, as he often did. I stood up to go meet Rick just as Leonard began wailing through his high again.
Telling me about her HIV had made me part of the landscape of painful things Ma shot up to escape. I was as certain of this as I was heartbroken by her abandonment. And when I was being honest with myself, despite tremendous efforts not to admit it, the knowledge of her disease made me want to avoid her, too. Being in Ma’s presence was being near the disease, near the knowledge that I was fast losing my mother—information that was just too painful to feel.
I slipped on my backpack, passing the kitchen. Leonard whined from inside, shouting, “Oh, God, Jeanie, my heart is beating so fast. Hold my hand.”
Seeing her clasp his hand sent an ache deep through me. I left quickly, just in time, I was sure, to avoid hearing that same, awful conversation again.
It was a weekday, less than one month later, when I met Brick. Ma let me cut school and brought me down to the art gallery where he worked so that the three of us could eat lunch together, his treat. As we exited the train on Twenty-third street, Ma began fidgeting and appearing obviously uneasy.
“Lizzy, do I look all right? You think this sweater is nice?” She wore a fuzzy pink V-neck sweater and hip-huggers, and she hadn’t had a drink or shot up all day. Her long, curly hair was pinned back neatly. It was the first time in years I’d seen her out of her T-shirts and filthy jeans.
“Yeah, Ma, you look real nice. Don’t worry. Why are you worried whether or not he thinks you’re pretty? Who really cares what he thinks,” I said.
“I do, pumpkin. I like him.”
The words, in their directness, shocked me. It had been a while since Ma and I had been straight with each other; it felt like she was testing it out on me.
“Your ma likes somebody. I haven’t had a crush in years.” She smiled nervously, discarding Daddy altogether.
I knew it was more than Brick making her nervous; it was me, too. After Lisa left for school and Daddy went downtown, it had taken me at least half the morning to convince Ma to let me join her. For the first time in a while, it was just the two of us—even if only for the time until we met up with him and right after, it was just us. I knew she felt awkward because so did I. And though I found myself snapping at Ma, I longed for her to hold my hand, to talk to me, to walk me through this experience. I wanted her to want my opinion, to ask how this whole thing made me feel. But instead, all the way over she’d spoken only about him; of how he was career-oriented, stable, a real family man. I kept quiet and worked out a half plan in my mind: I would check Brick out, and by my disapproving response, Ma would see his flaws, see the flaws in her thinking, too. Our family would be saved.
While we walked, Ma’s descriptions of the gallery seemed full of awe and admiration, as though its professional status were somehow a testament to Brick’s stability. We crossed the street toward a narrow and very tall building, the levels of which were divided floor-to-ceiling by large windows, through which I could already see paintings and sculptures. Ma rushed me in through the side door, an employees’ entrance leading to the gallery’s coat check, where Brick worked, nine to five, alternating between hanging people’s overcoats and standing watch over art.
“Everyone has to get a ticket if they wanna walk around inside the gallery during a show, Lizzy. Normally, you have to pay for ’em, but don’t worry, Brick will get us those for free.” She spoke with pride. I found that the more familiarity she expressed with him, the more of a stranger she felt to me. It made me regret spending so much time being distant. I panicked at the thought that she’d found something more exciting than us. She’d never talked so much about me or Lisa, or expressed pride over how hard I worked. As I watched Ma expertly navigate her way through the employee area and confidently maneuver a path to his post, I was suddenly aware of the numerous private visits she’d been making to the gallery. I felt somehow betrayed.
Brick was a bald, stout chain smoker who said very little, but nodded in agreement to most of what Ma had to say. He wanted her; I could tell by the way he stared openly, shamelessly, at her face, her body. I didn’t trust him. I was suspicious of strange men who bought you things; I assumed they were out for something, like Ron.
We ate together at a nearby diner, down the block. I was allowed to pick whatever I wanted from the selection of soups. With my complimentary gallery ticket stub set on the table in front of me, I ran my spoon in circles through my cream of mushroom soup and watched them flirt. Brick slid his hand over Ma’s at the lunch table, right there, rubbing it while she talked, in front of me. His nails were deep yellow, chewed to the quick. Even his fingers looked a bit gnarled at the tips, as though he chewed those as well.
She stared into his eyes while she spoke, not breaking away for a moment. I hadn’t known Ma was capable of such a long attention span.
“I told Lizzy about how big your apartment is, how you get lonely living there by yourself,” she said.
He gave her a confused smile and said in his five-packs-a-day voice, “Jean, I’m okay.”
She slapped his shoulder playfully. “Oh, I know you get lonely, Brick. He tells me he does, Lizzy,” she said, looking back at me for a moment. “You get lonely, Brick, you told me so.” Her laugh was nervous.
When we initially entered the gallery, headed for coat check, I had mistaken a younger man for Brick, a mildly handsome, dark-haired man standing beside him, until Ma approached Brick and threw her arms around his thick neck. He’d been stuffing a tip in his pocket when we arrived. Over Ma’s shoulder, as they hugged, he’d given me a small “Shhh,” with a wink and a smile that revealed a damaged set of yellowish teeth, as he pointed above to a tiny, silver sign that read: NO TIPPING, PLEASE. Ma couldn’t stop smiling and holding on to him, while I’d stood there, waiting, shifting my weight from foot to foot.
Before we could go to lunch, I was instructed, because of my sharp vision, to be lookout while Brick snuck us to a deserted area and pulled a large bottle of beer out from under a trash bag in a black wastebasket, quietly, secretly. While he went to the men’s room to drink it down in a locked stall, Ma assured me, “He just has a few every now and then to calm his nerves. You know, working a full-time job has got to be real stressful.”
Watching them at the diner table, it was difficult to stomach their physical contact. Seeing Ma slide her hand playfully over Brick’s thick, uniformed thigh, I realized that in my whole life I’d seen my parents kiss only twice, a brief peck both times. Now her roaming hands over Brick’s thick body seemed not only a violation to Daddy, but of who Ma was. The difference made me lonely. I almost reeled in my seat when she continued discussing Brick’s extra living space. I couldn’t help interrupting. “Can we go now, Ma? Please?”
When the full hour was up, we walked Brick back to the gallery, where Ma kissed him affectionately. Then she and I circled the floors together for a long time after. I refused to look at her, but kept my eyes trained on the walls as we walked. She kept trying to talk to me, but I pretended not to hear. When we made it to a section that a nearby employee called “contemporary art,” which was only splashes of paint or solitary shapes on stark white canvases, Ma was up to the part about how wonderful Brick was, if I’d only get to know him, for the third time.
I continued to pretend not to listen as we moved along from the first floor to the second, until finally, when we entered an area dedicated to an artist’s re-creation of historical Egyptian artifacts, I cut her short.
“Ma, I’m sorry, but I don’t really want to get to know him. I’m fine with not knowing him.” I kept my back to her and let my eyes trace the details carved onto a contemporary version of a mummy. “I know he’s your friend, but maybe you shouldn’t spend so much time with him. Okay?” She took to silence, a moment passed, and she asked a stranger for the time. We walked into a clay rendering of a small tomb, the ceiling and four walls covered in pink hieroglyphics turned orange by track lighting.
“He gets off work soon, maybe we can all take the train together,” she suggested, standing so that she blocked the entrance of the tiny enclosure.
“This is nice, right, Ma?” I asked, scanning hieroglyphics inscribed in clay for several rows in front of me. “We had a worksheet translating some of these in school once. Maybe I can remember a few. You know, some of them are spells to scare off grave robbers. Creepy, huh?”
“Look, Lizzy, I’ve been thinking about getting off of drugs . . . I am, I’m going to get off drugs.”
“I know Ma . . . ,” I said gently, hoping not to discount her. “Any way I can help, you know I would.”
“You mean that, pumpkin? Because this time it could be for real. I just need to be somewhere where there are no drugs. Ya know?” she asked, crouching down to the floor where I sat crossed-legged, pretending not to know what she was getting at. Her face was clean and her eyes were wide and aware. It occurred to me then that she actually hadn’t shot up in almost a week, even if she had been at the bar several nights consecutively, drinking White Russians, her new favorite. I wondered if maybe she was serious this time.
“If you don’t want drugs around you, then don’t bring them into the house,” I said, turning my head away from her again. “It’s simple, if you really want that.”
“But your father will bring ’em into the house, Lizzy. He’ll keep using, and then I won’t be able to keep from using too. I can’t see that stuff in front of me and not do it, no way. Not a chance.” No response came to mind, whatsoever. I knew she was right, and I couldn’t remember ever hearing Daddy say a thing about stopping. I began feeling claustrophobic within the small space. Speechless, I ran my hand over the Plexiglas that protected the delicate art, tracing my fingertip to a stiffly drawn, armored soldier who looked out bravely into nothing in particular.
“I don’t want to move, Ma. I don’t want to leave Daddy,” was all I could think to say.
“I’m not just going to go, Lizzy. I’ll give your father a chance. Maybe he’ll stop using too, and then we won’t have to go anywhere.”
Her hand appeared on my shoulder. “You know, Lizzy, I’m not always going to be here. I’m not well, baby, you know that. I need to stop living like this. I want to be around to watch my girls grow up. So . . . some things have gotta change.”
Tears gathered in my eyes, fell from my cheeks. I finally turned to face her. Ma let herself fall on her butt with a thump. Sitting on the floor across from me, she took my hands in hers and squeezed them tightly; her touch was warm and reassuring. The rare thrill of Ma being totally present to my needs was something I wanted badly to last.
“Yeah Ma, maybe Daddy will stop using,” I said.
“He just might, Lizzy.”
We sat in silence for a moment, both knowing full well that neither of us believed he would.
I didn’t expect to graduate sixth grade and go on to junior high school, given all of my absences, but somehow I did. Apparently some of my classmates shared my surprise, because the day that they saw me receiving a diploma alongside them, comments flew. “They passed you, Elizabeth?” Christina Mercado had commented, turning to her friends. “Damn, wonder why we even bothered to show up if they were just givin’ these things away. Know what I mean, girls?” For years, each time I sat down near Christina or any of her friends, they collectively fanned papers in front of themselves and coughed excessively, to draw attention to my dirty clothing and obvious need for a shower. Or they’d hiss at me in the halls and sketch pictures in which bugs infested my hair and waves of bad smells rose from my body. As I sat in the auditorium, sweating in my shiny graduation gown, and the principal called each student’s name, they laughed at one of the last comments Christina would ever make at my expense. I was glad Ma, Daddy, and Lisa weren’t there to witness it.
While I accepted my diploma, Ma lay flat on her back in bed, recovering from a night of White Russians. Daddy was off on one of his private excursions downtown, one of his infamous outings that used to irritate Ma, back when she cared what he did. After the service ended and parents were snapping pictures of their children with their teachers and friends, I left quietly through the side door. In the hallway of my building, I removed my cap and gown before entering my apartment so that Ma wouldn’t feel bad for missing the ceremony. When Ma woke up later that evening, apologizing for not showing up, I assured her, “It was so boring, Ma, you would have hated it. I was glad to get out of there. I wish I could have stayed in and slept, but I didn’t want to make my teachers feel bad, ya know?”
It seemed like no time at all between my graduation and the day that Ma stood over my bed wearing a form-fitting T-shirt, her hair combed back neatly, asking again and again for me to come with her to Brick’s apartment.
“Pumpkin, I gave it my best shot,” she said. “Please, baby, come with me.”
But I clutched my pillow and did not budge from my bed. “I’m not going, and you shouldn’t either! We’re a family, Ma. You can’t leave!” I shouted. “Please, Ma, stay here,” I begged her, crying. “Stay home, stay here with me, please.” I didn’t stop pleading; I even shouted at her from my bedroom window until she and Lisa got into the cab. I couldn’t remember ever being so honest about something I wanted before, and still it had no effect on her. It seemed Lisa had been as ready to go as Ma was, because she placed two pillowcases full of clothing in the trunk, stuffed so full that they told me she had no intention of coming back. Before pulling away, Ma rolled down the taxi window.
“I’ll be waiting for you, pumpkin!” she shouted. “Whenever you want to come, you can.” And with that, the cab drove off, and they were gone.
Throughout those first few months that Daddy and I spent alone in the apartment, I busied myself with upkeep. Using ripped-up old T-shirts and scalding hot water, I wiped down the tabletops of the living room and kitchen. I cleaned the dishes and took out the trash. Each night, when our favorite shows aired, I went over to our black-and-white television and snapped it on, turning the volume up. Whenever it got dark outside, I flipped on the lights in every room of our three-bedroom apartment, and I turned on Lisa’s abandoned radio (too large for her to take with her) so that it spun pop music into her empty room. The noise and light imitated a full household in my mother’s and sister’s absence.
Daddy never said he was sad that they left. He never complained. Though he was quieter than usual those days, even for him. When he wasn’t getting high, Daddy slept throughout the day with the curtains drawn and the lights off in his room. Most of the time when he was awake, he wore his loneliness on him like an old jacket. I could see it in the hunch of his shoulders, and in the way he avoided any mention of their names.
Sometimes when Daddy left for downtown, the moment he vanished over the bend of University Avenue, I opened a drawer that held a few pieces of Ma’s old clothing and selected an item to wear around the apartment. Mostly, I enjoyed sitting in Ma’s rose-colored robe—which dragged on the ground wherever I walked—and eating bowls of cornflakes while watching The Price Is Right. I was sure she’d return any day to join me, sorry for her absence, ready with assurances that she would never leave us again. Wearing her clothing was my way of summoning her, just for the meantime.
By the time I started Junior High School 141, our phone was back on for a short while and Ma had called at least four times to describe how clean Brick’s apartment was. “Bedford Park is a much better neighborhood, Lizzy. Lisa thinks so, too.” She always placed her calls when she was at the stove. Living with Brick, Ma had taken to cooking. “I haven’t used coke in months. Do you realize that, Lizzy? I feel great. I told you, I only needed to get away from it to stop,” she said, deflating my argument before I could even get the words out of my mouth.
In the background, I heard Brick prodding her, “Jean. Jean, the pork chops. Jean!” The grease crackled loudly and she returned her attention to me. “I have to go now, Lizzy. We’re about to eat. I love you, pumpkin!” My heart dropped. “I love you too, Ma.” And then instantly, a click, and the hum of a dial tone.
Junior high was a whole new system to adjust to, one I hoped to manage the way I had managed grade school—squeaking by with my performance on the annual standardized tests. That fall, I began taking half-hour bus rides, packed with wild twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, for the whole first month that I actually attended.
Though, as with grade school, I eventually found myself absent more than I was present. The only difference here was that with the long distance to travel and the jarring experience of now having several teachers to deal with, I was actually absent all the time. My truancy got worse than ever. On the rare occasions that they did see me, some of my teachers didn’t even know my name, and I did not know theirs.
In those first few weeks of the semester, whenever I would return to school after a few days of absence, I’d find several handwritten notes stuffed into my student mailbox, summoning me to meet with the school guidance counselor to discuss my truancy. While the notes made me nervous, I just ignored them. I carried the thick office stationery as I walked to the bus stop and I shredded it into a thousand tiny pieces that I released behind me.
I was good at that, tuning out official notices from school and child welfare—just as I had grown accustomed to tuning out the barrage of “official” people who always seemed to be pushing themselves onto our family: social workers, Ma’s caseworker at welfare, disappointed teachers, and guidance counselors. They had never really felt like separate people. Instead, to me, they felt like one disapproving entity, one voice repeating the same threats to take me into “placement,” shaking their heads at my mistakes, telling my family how to run our lives. I responded to them uniformly, disposing of the mail they sent and barricading myself in my home.
Daddy made regular day trips downtown to see his friends, and I spent my days content to lie on the couch and watch television. Sometimes, I’d scour Ma’s dresser drawers in search of things to remind me of her. Other times, I was content just to sleep, wearing Ma’s robe like a big warm blanket.
One day, while Daddy had gone downtown for something, I spent the afternoon sifting through the contents of his and Ma’s closet. I discovered a huge stash of Ma and Daddy’s seventies things packed deep inside. Behind crates of dusty records and eight-tracks, there was a plastic bag stamped FARMERS’ MARKET, with a picture of an old guy wearing overalls and plowing a field of hay on the side. I dumped the contents out across Ma’s and Daddy’s bed: a set of matching turquoise pipes for smoking, a teardrop-shaped pendant of amber, a museum ticket stub, and a thick stack of old photographs, the corners of which had begun to curl with age. There were three dinky silver rings, the smallest of which had a peace sign carved into it, and which fit right on my finger. Scattered between the pictures were grains from their pipes, which gave off the acrid scents of tobacco and weed. Most of the people in their pictures were unrecognizable to me—twenty-somethings wearing headbands and tie-dyed shirts, posing in city parks or beside old Volkswagens. Proof that Ma had had a life before me, and an uneasy reminder that Ma could build a life after me.
I found one faded shot of Ma and Daddy together, taken in a newer version of our kitchen. Daddy had dark, wide sideburns that connected to a fuller head of hair. Ma wore an Afro and a paisley blouse; neither one of them looked up for the picture, but lowered their eyes and heads as though they’d received bad news.
“You look miserable,” I said to them. “You are miserable.”
But I thumbed through the rest of the stack only to discover a cluster of pictures that proved there had actually been much happier times—such as one photo of them standing together in a living room that I did not recognize. In the picture, they were both smiling brightly with their eyes shielded behind large, red-tinted sunglasses. Ma and Daddy had on matching his-and-hers leather coats and were holding hands, something I had never seen them do. Another picture showed Ma in a fit of laughter. She was sitting cross-legged on a thick, orange rug, wearing a white T-shirt and tiny pair of jean shorts. Her head was thrown back in a moment of joy. Curled around her shoulders and propped up by her petite hands was a long, muscular snake of some kind. In yet another photo, Ma was blowing out candles on a birthday cake. There were several people surrounding her that I did not recognize, their clapping hands frozen in streaks of motion. Daddy was standing beside Ma, his arm over her shoulder; he was leaning in to kiss her on the cheek.
That one gesture captured in that photograph was the single greatest act of affection I had ever witnessed between my parents. I felt like I was looking at strangers.
But my favorite picture, by far, was a black-and-white headshot of Ma that had been taken when she was high school age. With a brooding look on her beautiful face, she could have been a model, I thought. The photograph drew me in and I stared down at it for what felt like forever, at this single moment of Ma’s life before she went and accidentally made children, before mental illness, welfare, and even before HIV. I wondered if this was where she was always running back to: her old life, happier times that had nothing to do with children, a truant daughter interrupting her, driving her crazy, holding her back, making her sick. When I finally packed everything into the plastic bag again, I took that single headshot and slipped it into the back pocket of the jeans I wore under Ma’s robe.
Placing the bag back onto the shelf turned out to be trickier than pulling it down, so I grabbed a chair from the kitchen and stood on it to see high over the crates of records. As I did, my eyes caught sight of something I had missed before, an old, dust-covered wooden box situated on the very back of the high shelf in my parents’ closet. I returned the Farmers’ Market bag to its place and lifted the wooden box out from behind the crates of records; it was much heavier than I had expected, given its small size. I climbed down from the chair and sat on my parents’ bed, where I placed the box on my lap.
Inside, there was a scrapbook held together by rubber bands so old that they snapped when I pulled on them; a few pictures slipped to the floor. “SAN FRANCISCO” was scribbled across the tops of the remaining pages of the scrapbook, in my father’s bold handwriting. On each page, there was picture after picture of Daddy looking even younger than he did in the photographs with Ma, his head nearly full of hair. There were shots of him pointing to the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, relaxing on a beach, cooking hamburgers with friends at a barbecue, and laughing at parties.
In one photo, Daddy was standing in front of a place called City Lights Bookstore, in a row of four well-dressed men who were playfully serious for the camera, their chins bucked up, eyes squinting in the sun.
There were also two black-and-white pictures of Daddy, and on the back of them, unfamiliar handwriting stating three words, “AT CITY LIGHTS.” In one, Daddy is reading by himself, seemingly unaware that he is being photographed. In the other, he is part of a group of serious-looking people all seated audience-style before a bearded man, whose arms are raised in a gesture that implied storytelling.
Paper-clipped onto the back cover of the scrapbook was an old, faded letter, the return address of which I recognized as my grandmother’s, on Long Island. I unfolded a brief, handwritten note in which she informed Daddy of her surprise the day she had received his tuition check, returned by his school in the mail, uncashed. In the short note, she explained that Daddy’s former roommate had given her his forwarding address in California, and she asked when he intended to continue his studies and how long he would be “vacationing” out west. She signed it With love, your mother, just as she had signed every birthday card she had ever mailed to him at our apartment.
Clipped to Grandma’s letter were two more letters; these were unopened and not addressed to Daddy, but rather were from Daddy, to a Mr. Walter O’Brien, in San Francisco. They each were stamped RETURN TO SENDER. In my entire life I had not seen Daddy write a letter to anyone, and I wondered what they could possibly say, but I knew I was already snooping and that I couldn’t get away with opening them. So I thumbed through the postcards. One featured a photograph taken at the bottom of a very curvy hill, and it read LOMBARD STREET; it was sent to Daddy at a New York City address from a woman whose name I no longer remember, telling my father that she missed him and his “bad taste” in poetry. She also wanted him to know that their friend Walter missed him too, and that she hoped he would return to San Francisco. Daddy liked poetry? I couldn’t imagine it. With his true crime and trivia books, all he ever seemed interested in were facts, and usually dark ones, or those absent of deep meaning. Poetry didn’t fit.
I gathered up pictures that had fallen out of the scrapbook. There was one photo of a baby girl wearing a pink dress. At first, I thought it was a photograph of me, only I’d never seen it before and the picture was badly faded. Then I flipped it over to find that the writing on the back read, Meredith.
My chest tightened. I stared at the photo for a long while, comparing Meredith’s face to the foggy memory I had of her that day in the park when Daddy had directed Lisa and me to walk toward our big sister. I stared at Meredith’s face as a baby and compared it to Daddy’s. Taking in her complete vulnerability as an infant, I wondered where she was now, and how Daddy could have left her behind, and why we never talked about her. It filled me with a deeply unsettling feeling to wonder what else he was capable of doing.
In the last few photos, I found one that read “Peter and Walter, July 4.” I flipped it over and saw a picture of Daddy smiling. In it, his eyes were so bright, it was as if they were smiling too. The other man in the photo, Walter, was handsome, slim, and even younger-looking than Daddy. He was fair-skinned, with red hair and freckles. He was also smiling, and he had his arm around Daddy’s shoulder. In the background, I saw people carrying American flags in a park that did not appear to be in New York City, but rather someplace I had never seen before. It looked as though everyone was having a picnic.
Finally, I reached the last photo—a Polaroid at the very bottom of the stack, underneath the pictures. At first, the image confused me. I stared at it for some time because my mind simply could not make sense of what I saw. Slowly, though, the reality of it seeped in. First, I understood that I was looking at a picture of two men kissing. I then processed that the red-haired man in the picture was Walter. My father’s friend Walter. The Walter mentioned in the postcard. The Walter of the returned letters. Walter was kissing another man, and that man was Daddy.
Without thinking, I sprung to my feet in a sudden panic and stuffed the letters, postcards, and pictures back into the scrapbook and slammed it shut. I jammed the scrapbook into the wooden box, fast, as though if I moved quickly enough, I could pack my discovery back in there with it. I returned the whole thing to the very back of the closet, put Ma’s robe back in its place, and ran to my room.
On the bed, my head buried in my pillow, Ma’s warnings about Daddy came roaring back to me. I remembered all the times she accused him of being secretive and not loving her. I thought it was her illness making her paranoid. I had defended him and felt sorry for his having to put up with her irrational meanness. Did I really just see that? Was that real? Did Ma know?
I cried hard into my pillow. I cried out all my hurt over missing Ma and Lisa. I cried out deeply unsettling feelings. I cried because, buried in the back of the closet in the bedroom Ma and Daddy had once shared, was evidence that I didn’t really know my father. Was he still seeing this Walter? Was he seeing some other man? Had he ever loved Ma? Could Daddy have given Ma AIDS?
Those next few months, I began spending a lot of time in my room with my door shut. Each night when Daddy returned from his drug runs or his time spent downtown, I’d step out briefly to receive the take-out food that had become our routine dinner, fried rice or a slice of pizza. We’d make brief conversation, and then when Daddy was ready to get high in the kitchen, I’d retreat into my room, where I could eat in privacy. When he brought home a second, smaller TV set from the trash one day, he let me keep it in my room. I explained that the couch wasn’t comfortable anymore. Sometimes at night, before Daddy went to bed, he’d tap lightly on my closed door to say, “Good night, Lizzy, I love you.” From the other side, I made him wait just a few moments before I’d finally answer “. . . I love you too, Daddy.”
A few months later, when I was thirteen years old, child welfare finally took me into custody. When they came for me, I didn’t put up a fight. In someplace deep inside of me that is hard to think about even now, I do believe that my heart broke when Daddy didn’t put up a fight either.
In response to numerous calls regarding my truancy from Junior High School 141, two unsmiling male caseworkers wearing starched suits appeared at our door to escort me by car to “placement.” One introduced himself as Mr. Doumbia, and the other was nameless. While Daddy signed the papers handing over legal custody of me to the state, I had ten minutes to pack whatever I could into a book bag. In a tearful panic, I’d taken some clothing, Ma’s bronze-colored NA coin and that one black-and-white picture of her, and that was it. Daddy’s hug was stiff and nervous at the door. “Sorry, Lizzy,” was all he said, his hands shaking with tremors. I hid my face from him because I didn’t want Daddy to see me cry. If I just had gone to school, this never would have happened.
In the backseat of the car, I sat with a bag in my lap. No one spoke a word to me. I tried to figure out what was going to happen next by listening to their conversation. But I couldn’t make out much through their guttural accents, which were drowned out by the roar of the car engine. My eyes were darting everywhere, up and down the Bronx streets that we drove through and which I did not recognize. They took me to a massive, anonymous-looking office building made of tarnished bricks, with no sign above the entrance, I noticed as we walked in.
I was brought to a small office that resembled a doctor’s examination room, but without the examination table. “Sit here,” a tall woman said, pointing to a chair, before walking away and leaving the door wide open. The walls were bare. The window was barred with a thick, rusted gate, and the sun illuminated a small, trash-filled back alley behind the building. From my chair I could see another girl seated alone in the hallway, hair in cornrows, wearing sweatpants. Her eyes were lazy; she looked the way people in Ma’s psychiatric ward looked when they were doped up on medication. More than a half hour went by, and no one returned. I got up and dared myself to walk over and speak to the girl.
“Hi,” I said. “What are you here for?”
“They think I stabbed my cousin. I’m sick of this shit,” she muttered, not looking up at me.
“Oh . . . sorry,” was all I said, and after a moment I went back to my seat. I don’t know how long it was before the tall woman came back, but when she did, she shut the office door and it was just the two of us alone. She opened a file under her desk lamp, read something, and then she turned, looking at me from over the top of her glasses. It was the first time anyone had looked at or spoken to me since I had gotten in the car.
“I need you to undress,” she said, followed by nothing but silence.
“Get naked?” I asked.
“Yes, I need to examine you. Please undress.”
The last thing I wanted to do was take off my clothes, but what else could I do? What wouldn’t I have done if she told me to? So I did. She flipped through a couple of pages from the folder while I stacked my clothing on the extra office chair. I stood slightly hunched over in the chilly office, rubbing my arms to smooth away the goose bumps, and I waited for my next instruction.
“Your underwear, too. Everything.”
“Why?” I asked, pulling my underwear down. “What’s this for?” If someone had just talked to me like a human being and walked me through what was happening, that would have helped so much, made it so much less frightening. But instead, she talked to me with a stiff office voice that told me I was not a person, but a job, to her.
She didn’t answer my question directly, but looked up from the page again and began to recite what felt to me like a practiced script.
“Elizabeth, we will be examining you today and I will need to ask you some questions. All you have to do is answer honestly. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” I said, standing there completely naked, repulsed by the feeling of her eyes on my skinny body.
Looking up from her notes, with the tip of her pen she pointed to a bruise on my shin and asked, “Where did you get that, Elizabeth?”
There were lots of bruises on my body. I was naturally pale and always bruised easily. Every time I came back from playing outside, I had a bruise somewhere, so how was I supposed to know where one particular one came from?
“Um . . . playing outside?”
She wrote something down. “And that one, and this one,” she asked, pointing to two more on the same leg, in approximately the same area.
What was the right answer? What would happen if I said I didn’t know? Would they think Daddy beat me? If so, could I never go home again? What was at stake? The whole thing was so unclear, and the less clear it was, the more she was in complete control of me, and the less I trusted her. Why wouldn’t someone just talk me through this?
“Um . . . my bike, from getting on my bike and hitting my leg.”
This went on for a while. I was asked to turn around, raise my arms up, and extend my legs. Finally, I could put my clothing back on and sit down. She walked out, and a Latino man entered to bring in some food. He didn’t say anything to me either. He just nodded and placed on the table a mound of something wrapped in cellophane; inside it was one thick slice of ham and one thick slice of cheese encased in a tough-to-chew roll. He gave me a juice box and left as noiselessly as he’d come. Eventually, Mr. Doumbia appeared in the doorway, and it was time to go. Back in the car, I curled my arms to my chest and stared out the window in a passive daze, at nothing in particular.
Saint Anne’s Residence was a plain but stern-looking brick building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It looked like a cross between a public school and a home for the aged. I would find out later from other girls in the home that St. Anne’s was a “diagnostic residential center”—a place where girls with histories of behavior problems like truancy, mental illness, juvenile delinquency, and other issues were sent to be “evaluated” before being sent to a more permanent placement. This evaluation process was supposed to involve sessions with all kinds of mental-health professionals, and there was a rumor that it took at least three months to complete.
My time in that group home—nearly a whole season—comes back to me now only in flashes of smells, images, and sounds. I was, for that period of time, a witness more than a participant in my life. And even if I try hard, I can only remember certain pieces.
I can see the day I was sent there, those two looming male caseworkers walking me in, sandwiching me between them. The way they pressed their picture IDs to the receptionist’s window to get us buzzed in. The automated unlock-then-lock click of the doors, like the sound I’d heard in Ma’s psychiatric ward. The heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach when I wondered, did these people think I was crazy? If I was sent to a place like this and no one would talk to me like a human being, did that mean that something was wrong with me? There must be something wrong with me.
A thick, bald troll of a woman nodded acknowledgment at my escorts, and they turned back to the door. When it clicked open, a gush of city sounds filled the otherwise noiseless entryway, sounds made by people who enjoyed freedom. In that moment, I could feel the shift in rank; I was no longer one of them.
This wasn’t okay. I shouldn’t be here, and Daddy was too fragile to be alone. I was sure I knew the subway system well enough to find my way back to him, if only I could get away from these people. But when I looked, I saw that attempts to escape were anticipated, and precautions had been taken accordingly. Each window was covered by gates the shape of fly-screens, and they were rock-hard. Everything was so sterile and bare that hiding was impossible.
“Call me ‘Auntie,’ ” the woman said. “I’m in charge. You gonna stay on the third flo’. Stay outta trouble and you’ll be a’ight. . . . Do you hear me, girl?” Tears caught in my throat. I nodded.
Upstairs, melancholy girls walked while being supervised through corridors lined with rooms, two or three beds in each. “This’ll be your room, with Reina and Sasha. We don’t tolerate no disrespect! Lights out at nine, breakfast at seven, and no missin’ class. No fuss. Anything else, ask them.” She indicated the girls with her nose.
Reina was dry and dark, with a narrow face and lanky body, and her head was topped with fuzzy braids. She spent all her time talking about girls who “run they mouth and get what’s comin’ to them . . . know what I’m sayin’?” She often paused for confirmation.
“Yup” is all I ever said back to her incessant talking.
Sasha, my second roommate, was extremely quiet, especially around Reina, and she had every reason to be. Whenever Sasha left for the bathroom, Reina immediately started in on her, going on about how “ugly” or “full-o-herse’f” she was. “Now me, I was a model befo’ this place, and my clothes was bangin’, before the home messed ’em up, but you ain’t see me akin’ like I am betta’ then all-yall! Let her keep it up, I will smack that bitch.”
It was true that style was not an option in St. Anne’s, because everything valuable was inevitably stolen, and all clothing was washed together in scorching, color-draining water. But Reina was no model, and Sasha’s silence was more strategic than egotistical.
Reina looked at me like she was trying to decide what to do with me. “I like you, white girl, we could be tight, watch each other’s backs, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Sure,” I told her.
The first night, as I sat at the dinner table, quietly delighting in a single moment’s pleasure of eating a warm meal, a sudden liquid heat erupted in my lap, scorching my abdomen. It burned like fire and I screamed in pain. Reddish soup had soaked through, leaving only a few carrots and rice grains clinging to my shirt and jeans. A group of girls gave themselves away, departing backs hunched over with laughter. But they were not alone; one of the girls at my table muttered, “white bitch,” under her breath.
The end of the day was marked by standing in a long line, waiting to join a row of girls brushing their teeth before white, sterile sinks that sat under hanging fluorescent lights in the bathroom. The windows were guarded in there, too. I could already tell which girls were dominant by the way they took slightly longer washing up, exaggerating their movements, leisurely fixing their hair while we all waited for our turn. Everyone else quickly splashed water over their faces, grazing their toothbrushes over their teeth in mechanical motions.
The smells of toothpaste, shampoo, and Tone soap were strongest; the butter-colored bars were distributed to us in the shower line. One by one, we waited, barefoot on the tiles, holding our towels, for the night watch to call out our names off the clipboard and count on their stopwatches the minutes we were to shower. The distinct cocoa-butter scent of Tone filled the space between all the stalls, emanating from behind the plastic curtains that separated us, thickening the foggy steam.
No one loitered because Auntie’s omniscience made it seem as if she was right behind you, ready to speed you up with a threat at any time. So the main hallway remained totally empty, pyramids of light shining out of each open bedroom door.
“Raguìa-Lauryn-Elizabeth, this ain’t yo’ personal bathroom. Now hurry up befo’ Auntie lose her temper! You ain’t no snails.” It was the first time my hygiene and bedtime were ever enforced; it felt strange to know that people showered every day, and to be one of them. But I loved the feeling of being clean and the brush of laundered clothing on my skin. Auntie made sure everyone’s lights were off promptly at nine; as a backup, a staff member sat in the hallway for a night shift.
One of the hardest things to deal with, it turned out, besides the confinement, the half hour a week of phone time, and the minute-by-minute routine, was the thunderous call of Auntie’s voice from morning till night, accompanied by the jingle of keys that clicked on the waist of her one, permanent house dress. Each morning all twelve of us woke no later than six thirty, or else, to the sound of our doors flying open, the flicker of fluorescent lights over us, and, of course, Auntie screaming.
“Besta get up now, girls! Get up, get up, get uuup!”
Occasionally came the sounds of a girl (usually new) who refused to leave her bed and was consequentially dragged, kicking and screaming, out of it.
“Don’t test Auntie, ’cause Auntie don’t play. You try this on Auntie, you see what Auntie going to do.”
“Why don’t you start by telling me how you feel about being here.”
“Stuck,” I replied, ignoring the disappointment on her face as moments dragged on and I stayed silent. The long hand on the Prozac clock ticked patiently; instead of the 12, there was a picture of a bright green-and-white pill.
Dr. Eva Morales drank her coffee from a Cornell University mug, which never traveled anywhere in her small, windowless office except to her mouth and back onto her coaster, a doily the same exact shade as her bright pink lipstick. Our sessions, like every other girl’s sessions, ran for forty minutes, three times each week, for the entire time I remained at St. Anne’s Residence.
“Consistency brings progress and progress is marked by consistency,” Dr. Morales would chirp, nodding her head to each syllable on an angle determined by the seriousness of our current topic—which was usually my “discipline problem.” However, sometimes she took the opportunity to explore other things: “Doesn’t that hair in your face bother your mother?” And, “If you stay this shy, you’ll never make any friends.”
Her expression had only two variations: the sympathetic frown (one hand cupping her cheek) and the pensive look (biting her lip and steepling her hands). I wished for anything other than the pensive one, for an irritating affirmation never failed to follow it: “Life is about taking charge, and being responsible for oneself.”
As though I hadn’t been responsible for myself almost my whole life.
She was so disconnected from anything she was saying that I sometimes felt the entire session might just be for Dr. Morales, a forum for her to practice phrases she learned in her training. As a result, I spent half my time in her office appeasing her, nodding unwavering agreement and faking my own connection to her insights.
“I want to help you, but everyone knows, you can’t help someone who won’t help you help them.” Her eyebrows perked up; she was trying to draw me out of a long silence.
“I understand,” I constantly told her.
I practiced my best attentive face so that I wouldn’t have to suffer through her repeating herself. That’s what Dr. Morales and I did for our forty minutes—“understand” each other for the sake of progress. I understood her because if I did, I’d be closer to getting home. If she was my ticket back to my family, then I would show her that I didn’t deserve to be at St. Anne’s Residence another minute.
So I burned our time together making responsive faces and nodding endlessly, as though I was moved and enlightened by her affirmations. Yes, I did think that it was time to start caring about my future. Yes, now that you mention it, I did want to be an educated young lady and to take advantage of my potential. Yes, you are effective at your job and I am changing because of you, Dr. Morales.
One afternoon later that week I found out what Reina had meant by having me “watch her back,” when Auntie slammed open our door fuming, dragging Sasha behind her, soaking wet and sobbing, her eyes bloodshot.
“Don’t neither of you girls try playing no tricks on Auntie!” Her beady eyes darted from me to Reina. With that bald head and pushed-up nose, she looked like a bulldog with its ears clipped. “Which one of you put bleach in Sasha’s shampoo bottle? Don’t make Auntie guess!” Reina insisted that it wasn’t her, in a way that was so convincing, for a moment I doubted myself.
“Elizabeth did it! I told her we don’t ak like that here, but Auntie, she just don’t listen.” With an exasperated shake of her head, she added, “She told me to leave her alone if I didn’t want no trouble fo’ myself, but I’ll be damned if I am going to take blame! Auntie, cross my heart and swear to die, I didn’t do it.” At that, Auntie was convinced.
“I would nev—” I began.
“I don’t care where you came from, but ain’t no way that mess goes down here—you ain’t gettin’ away with none a dat on Auntie’s watch. You come with me!” I followed her shiny bald head out of the room, past Reina’s smug smile.
I ended up in the “quiet room,” a six-by-ten space with bad light and itchy carpeting, where girls were dragged and locked in when they misbehaved.
There was one small window, barred like the rest, through which an eerie light came in. It faced the brick siding of the neighboring building, and only if I strained could I see a slice of sky. The room smelled of dried sweat and urine, and I rationed my breathing as I sat, furious, crying in the miserable room. “I hate this place,” I said aloud to myself. “I hate it.”
After Reina’s bleach prank, I was moved away from her and Sasha, to a room with only one girl. Her name was Talesha; she was fifteen, two years older than me. She had small, down-turned eyes, coffee-colored skin, and a six-month-old son. Because of her age, Auntie figured I “wouldn’t try none a dat sass” on her.
As I brought a garbage bag of my stuff to the new room, Talesha held the door open, smiling. Long, slender braids cascaded behind her shoulders. She had full hips and inch-long metallic purple nails.
The minute the door shut behind us, she bounced onto her bed and exclaimed, “Reina’s got issues out da ass! Girl, I know you ain’t do that bleach trick . . . especially being the only white girl here, you’d have to be crazy to pull somethin’ like that. You don’t look crazy.” Her eyes were soft.
“I didn’t do that to Sasha,” I said.
“So why are you here?” she asked. “Where’s your family?”
I didn’t know how I wanted to answer her, and I didn’t want to tell her about Daddy or even to think of him alone on University Avenue, because of me. So I just shrugged my shoulders and unpacked my things.
Talesha had been in foster care for over a year now. This was her second time back at St. Anne’s, and she knew everything about everyone. Living with her, I was privy to the former lives of many of the girls, and even Auntie. It turned out Reina’s mother was a crackhead, who showed up broke at her dealer’s apartment and traded Reina for some rocks.
“Her mother was like, ‘Reina can clean your house for you.’ Yo, they was like, a’ight, let her fix up the house, that’s worth something. But girl, Reina’s mother never came back, she just bounced with the rocks and thass it!”
Listening to Reina’s story, I felt lucky to have Ma. She would never do something like that.
Talesha went on, “And another thing! Did you know that Auntie useta have thick, long dreadlocks, but then she got sick and they fell out. She put them in a big plastic bag, and till this day keeps them behind the couch in her office!”
“No! Serious?” I said.
This I refused to believe, until a few months later when I actually saw Auntie proudly showing them to other staff. She pulled the long, raggedy things out of that plastic bag, like toy snakes popped out of a fake can, and she declared, “There’s Indian in my family. My father’s Cherokee, so I can grow ’em back whenever. They looked good on me, too!”
But more than anything, Talesha talked about her baby son, Malik. Often we would lie awake hours after lights-out as I eagerly listened to what it was like to have a boyfriend and become pregnant. “It’s nice. When you start showing, people get up out they seat on the bus and treat you real respectable. And there’s always someone to love you when you have a baby, and always somebody you could love, too.”
Many nights, I’d lie awake and listen to Talesha cry softly, telling me how much she missed her son. And about how she hated her mother for forcing her into the home and keeping the baby herself. Sometimes we’d stay awake and she’d tell me about how good life was going to be when she got out and got Malik back. They’d get a house somewhere upstate, near Peekskill, where Malik could play in a beautiful yard. Sometimes, long after Talesha had gone to sleep, in the total silence of the pitch black room, I cried, thinking of my family. Daddy alone in that big apartment, Lisa drifting so far away from me, and the AIDS virus making its way through Ma’s body minute by minute, with nothing I could do to stop it.
I was discharged from St. Anne’s just as spring arrived and cherry blossoms were budding on the trees along the Lower East Side. I don’t know if it was Auntie, Dr. Morales, or Mr. Doumbia who made the final decision on my release into Brick’s custody, but I was more than happy to get out of there. Other than leaving Talesha behind, there was absolutely no sadness I felt about going.
“Good luck, girl. I’m gonna miss you,” she said, giving me the warmest hug I’d had in a long time. I thanked her for everything, wished her luck, picked up my garbage bag of clothes, and went downstairs to meet Mr. Doumbia.
It didn’t hit me until I was on the street outside of St. Anne’s, standing on the sidewalk surrounded by all the noise of a busy Manhattan day, that I had no idea what my life was about to look like. Even though I was “going home” to Ma and Lisa, I was not returning to anything I knew. On each of our weekly phone calls, Ma had promised that living with Brick was the best thing for me—for us. But now, her “us” no longer included Daddy.
I settled into the backseat of the taxi next to Mr. Doumbia. As I listened to him give the driver my new address on Bedford Park Boulevard, I was aware of a very familiar feeling spreading through my chest. I was afraid—to the point of certainty—that far from “going home,” I was just being shuttled to another place I didn’t want to be.