THE NEXT MORNING, A BOWL of cereal and a glass of OJ were waiting for me on the kitchen table. I gave Mom a peck on the cheek on my way out the door. She stopped me and said that I wasn’t going anywhere until I’d written an apology. I looked up at the clock, then sat down at the table and picked up a pen.
Dear Mister Yamaguchi,
Please accept my sincere apology for cheating in your class. I really enjoy Japanese and you as a teacher. It is a fine language, and you are a really fine good great teacher. One of the best I’ve ever had. I should be so lucky to ever have another teacher as great as you. Anyway, I have had eighteen hours and thirty-four minutes time to think about my mistake and realize now why I should not cheat. How can I get better if I cheat? My mom says that in the long run I’m only cheating myself. I promise you that I will never, ever cheat in your class again. Not in your class or any other.
Yours truly,
Hubert Francis Fairchild, the first.
I folded it in half and slid it into my Japanese–English Character Dictionary, gave Mom another peck on the cheek, and ran out the door. Mom stepped into the hallway and asked where my blazer was. I jumped into the elevator and yelled back that it was at school.
What’s it doing there?
Long story, Mama. Gotta go. Bye!
I hauled ass out the front door past the smell of reefer wafting around the old men sipping cafes con leche out on the front steps. Discarded potato-chip bags stirred in the breeze coming off the East River. The sun reflected off the backboards in the ball court, the chain-link fence on my left, and the chrome bumpers, hubcaps, and door handles on my right. I cleared some broken glass and cut through the long cars parked on either side of a fireplug.
The train felt like a tin can sliding over sand. I squeezed into a seat between some woman in scrubs with a lanyard around her neck and a man in a bow tie with a cane poking up from between his legs. The woman in scrubs had a bag from the dime store Mom had worked at after that job cleaning office buildings. It was a family-owned five-and-dime with a bunch of crazy-looking windup monkeys that play the cymbals in the front window. It was up on East Twenty-Third Street, and even if the old man who owned the joint gave her discounts on all sorts of worthless trinkets and kitsch, he rarely ever paid her on time. After that, it was one of those dime-a-dozen diners up in Columbus Circle, where she was always dropping food and spilling stuff and her boss habitually called her at home with some off-the-charts last-minute shift change that he expected her to be able to accommodate. Then there was the bowling alley out in Brooklyn, which took a whole hour just for her to get to. God, she’d had a lot of jobs our first year here. After that, she took a job in housekeeping at the Days Inn downtown, where the hours were set in stone and they paid her for every single minute that she’d punched in and out for and the commute time wasn’t so bad. After a year of cleaning bathtubs and toilets, her boss came into a guest room while she was tucking in bedsheets and said that he could see that she was too smart to be making beds and that he was going to see what he could do for her. After several months, the promised promotion just kept getting pushed out. Meanwhile, other chamber maids came and went, and Mom’s boss stuck her with having to hire, train, and schedule their replacements. Then he started making her check their work, validate their time cards, and cover for them when they called in sick. Even if Mom was starting to feel that she was getting a raw deal, she hung in there. She was looking forward to the day she got transferred to the front desk, where she could show off her bookkeeping and people skills. Not to mention her smile. But as the months passed, Mister Reinhardt just kept piling on more work, telling her how much he liked her and didn’t want to lose her and for her just to be patient because he was waiting for something special to turn up where someone as good as her could really shine. She was not to worry. He was working on it. Then came the day that Mom walked through the lobby and saw a new girl standing behind the front desk who looked like she’d just graduated from high school, had no front-of-the-house experience whatsoever, and was, well, white.
That night, Mom brought home a dozen of those little bars of soap and mini bottles of shampoo and conditioner. The next morning, she followed up on some job openings she’d come across in a brochure somewhere. She figured what the heck, she had nothing to lose. One night a few weeks later, the phone rang. Mom’s voice went up an octave when she answered it. I was in the living room, watching Don Rickles on TV. She wound the cord around her finger and disappeared behind the doorjamb, into the kitchen. I could tell by the look on her face that it wasn’t anyone from school, so I turned back to Johnny Carson. What a hoot. I was chuckling like an idiot at some gag they were doing. A few minutes later, the phone clicked into its cradle, and Mom called me into the kitchen. I told her to hold on a minute; Johnny Carson and Don Rickles were hilarious together. She came in with the Yellow Pages and opened it to a full-page advertisement, which she spread out over the coffee table. She turned off the TV and asked if I’d heard of Blumenthal, the Mattress Maven. Of course I had. His signs were everywhere—on buses, in telephone booths, on park benches, on subway platforms, in weeklies. I couldn’t go a block without seeing one of his ads. I’d turn around and there it would be, staring at me, telling me how lousy my bed was and that I needed a new one. It claimed in big, bold letters that that was why I felt so grumpy all the time. I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t the bed at all, but it was pointless to shout back at some larger-than-life-sized ad shellacked to the side of a brick building.
Mom was fingering over the ad, admiring it, saying how she’d accepted a position working for him. She wouldn’t be working for one of his store locations or warehouses or anything like that, but the actual family. I had no idea that she was even considering working as someone’s personal nanny and housekeeper and sometimes cook. Turns out, she’d pursued it on a lark. Anyway, the Blumenthals had twin baby boys. As they put it, they could use an extra pair of hands around the house. Who couldn’t? It didn’t matter to Mom that she had no idea what she was in for. She was just happy to finally be able to tell Mister Reinhardt that he could take his job and shove it.
As sweet and adorable as those twins had turned out to be, it didn’t compensate for the fact that the money wasn’t that hot. Which is why Mom had to hold on to her job at the dry cleaners. No matter how much I’d beg just to be able to check out the iguana living inside the Blumenthals’ home, she’d just pull her hair into a bun so tight it stretched out the little wrinkles from her forehead and shake her head and say that there were no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It was strictly verboten. I couldn’t even pick her up there after work. I was starting to wonder if maybe she wasn’t somehow embarrassed of me. I couldn’t figure out if her concern was about the twins seeing her around me or me seeing her around the twins. All I knew was that I had to meet her at the HoJo’s after work. At least Mister Reinhardt would let me come by after school and do my homework in a vacant room.
Mom had been with the Blumenthals for a year before I started at Claremont. Even if she and I rarely ever saw each other after that, what with her away at work and me studying all the time, it wasn’t like it was all gloom and doom. If she’d entrusted my education to Claremont, she’d left everything else to Mister McGovern. He’d become something of a father figure. I was a knobby-kneed pipsqueak who couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag, but Mister McGovern talked to me like I was a grown man. Of course, a kid’s going to love a guy like that. What’s there not to like?
The worst part was that as much as Mom and I missed each other when we were apart, we drove each other crazy when we were together. She complained that I had no idea what her day looked like, and I rebutted that she had no idea what mine looked like. I was always off doing my thing and she was off doing hers, barely home long enough to throw something together for me to eat, check my homework, and tell me to go to bed. She was stretched so thin she wasn’t even able to send me off to school on the mornings she had to leave the house before dawn. It was starting to feel like I hadn’t just lost Dad with our move to New York. I was losing her, too. Which felt wrong. She was all I had left.
I got off at Ninety-Sixth Street and dashed up the stairs to street level. I ran down the block and dug around in the garbage can on the corner, pulling up to-go boxes, Styrofoam cups, candy wrappers, tissues, yesterday’s Daily News, the Village Voice, and empty soda bottles until at last I found my blazer buried toward the bottom. I pulled a banana peel from the sleeve and shook it out. I held it up and tried to figure out what I could claim all the splotches were from, then brushed it off and put it on.
Clyde slapped me five on my way through the service entrance. Past the nurse’s office, up the stairs, around the corner, down the hall. I caught my breath in the doorway and strolled into class. I bowed politely and apologized for being late, then dug out my apology letter and handed it to Mister Yamaguchi with both hands. I asked permission to move up to the front row, where he could see my every move.
Mae no hoo ni suwatte yoroshi desu ka?
Hai.