MOM WAS SITTING IN FRONT of Mister McGovern, boohooing about all the hours she puts in uptown at the Blumenthals’ just to pay the token amount that Claremont asks of us. Mister McGovern reached across his desk and handed her a box of tissues. I slumped in the seat beside her with the dawning realization that I might not have what it takes to be a Claremont boy, after all.
Mister McGovern got up and went to the window. He gazed out at the orange, red, and yellow canopies lining the street.
We’re proud of our tradition of celebrating our differences here at Claremont, Missus Fairchild. We really are.
I know that, sir.
Is there maybe something going on at home that I should know about?
No, sir.
I wished that I had some hard-knock story that would make sense to Mister McGovern—like how Mom was strung out on bennies and Dad was rotting out on Rikers. You know? Like many of the kids I’d come across out on Randall’s Island. I dunno. I guess that maybe I just felt that no matter what you put in front of some people, that’s all they want to see. What can I say? Maybe I have no excuse. Maybe I should have wiped my face dry and sucked in my gut and salvaged what little self-respect I had left, because maybe it’s true that kids like me have all the benefits of being colored and none of the real costs. The fact is, most of my friends at Claremont assume I’m a wannabe. Not so much because I want to be something that I’m not as because the reality of what I am just doesn’t make any sense to them.
Mister McGovern turned from the window.
It’s a big world out there, Missus Fairchild. And believe me, your boy, Huey, here—he can practically write his own ticket. Go to any damned school he wants. Why, they’re all but begging for kids like him these days. So don’t get me wrong. I’m thankful to have had him.
Mister McGovern nudged his square-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose and sat atop the corner of his desk.
But Ariel didn’t do anything wrong. And here he’s got a collapsed lung to show for his kindness, Missus Fairchild. Because he didn’t have to help Huey with his schoolwork like he did. He didn’t have to do that. But he did it anyway. Did it out of the kindness of his heart. I went to visit him again last night, and the poor kid still can’t even breathe on his own. He was lying there blinking like he had a fruit fly stuck in his eye. His face is swelled up so bad he looks like one of the Muppets. Broke my heart. The doctor told him not to exert himself. Then he told me one more minute and he’d have been brain-dead. Can you believe that? What Huey did to him—it’s disturbing. And I had to explain to Missus Zukowski how something like that could happen at a place like this. My heart goes out to Huey, with whatever problems he has. It really does. But I cannot allow for someone to be present at this school who is a risk to other youngsters. I’m willing to go to bat for him, but only up to a point. There are limits to how far I can go, Missus Fairchild. These families pay good money for me to keep their children safe. Does that make sense to you? I hope it does.
I pitched forward in my seat. Have mercy on me, sir. I’m begging you. You gotta understand! A kid like Zuk being my knight in shining armor only made me feel worse! I won’t last a day in some graffiti-covered public school filled with hooligans, where the latrines don’t work because the kids shit in them. Where kids hardly ever show up, and when they do it’s just to shoot spitballs at the teachers and torment people like me. They’ll make mincemeat of me. I can be the Claremont boy you want me to be, sir. Just give me another chance. I’ll prove it. Let me show that I will rise again, sir! Like a soaring phoenix, I will represent the triumph of the modern colored man over history. I can do it. I know I can. Just give me another chance! Please!
You’re a good kid, Huey. And I like you. I really do. You’re an important part of this school, son. You know that, don’t you? Well, if you don’t, I’m telling you now. We’re going to hate to lose you. We really are. As we say, there are no second-class citizens at Claremont. You know that.
I do, sir. I know that.
Huey, would you mind giving us a moment in private?
Mister McGovern opened the door and called in Missus Zukowski. She stopped me in the doorway and wagged her finger in my face and said that this was all my fault. There was a special place in hell reserved for people like me. Not to mention a world of other kids out there who should be so fortunate. It was only because I was colored that they let me attend Claremont with her son.
• • •
MOM LIT A cigarette, took a long, deep drag, and pulled me in close on our way down the front steps.
He’s a nice man. You’re lucky. He likes you and believes in you. I can tell. God knows why, because you’ve given him such little reason to. Lucky for you he thinks you just lack a father figure. He said he understands about your father—knows how hard that must be, to have an estranged father. But you’re not the only one, Huey. He said several of the other boys here have estranged fathers, too, and struggle with the exact same issues as you.
I looked up. Dad wasn’t estranged. Unreliable, maybe. Negligent, certainly. Absent, temporarily. But not estranged.
Anyway, he recommended that I contact the Big Brothers Association. Apparently they’ve got something set up where they provide father figures to boys like you. They come highly recommended—someone to take you out for an ice cream every now and again. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I said we’re open to giving it a try. And that we’re going to pay a little visit to Ariel tonight.
Tonight?
Tonight. You’re going to bring him some of my chicken soup. And maybe some chocolate and flowers. And you’re going to apologize. I told Missus Zukowski that I’d figure out some way for you to get over to the hospital every night to bring him a home-cooked meal until he bounces back. Told her how much the Blumenthals love my cooking. She said that wasn’t necessary, but I insisted. It’s the least we can do. And on top of that, you’re to write down some thoughts about why you’re so angry all the time. For the judge. Oh, Missus Zukowski agreed to drop the charges, all right, but I said you’d do it anyway. To show your heart’s in the right place.
What about school?
Mandatory two weeks’ academic probation. Regular counseling. And a fifty-page essay exploring the root causes of shame as a source of anger and a lack of personal accountability and a depleted sense of self-worth. If it goes over a little, that’s okay, too.
Fifty pages? Are you crazy? That’s a book!
I walked on ahead, feeling a little light-headed. I stood on the corner at Ninety-Seventh and Madison and closed my eyes. I pretended for a second that I was back home. Funny how something so far away can feel so close, and something so close can feel like a million miles away. All the honking cars zipping past in the rightmost lane, with their door handles zinging past inches away from me, put an end to that. Mom came up from behind and reminded me just how lucky I was. I shrugged. She warned me not to take the second chance I’d been given for granted.
I nodded. I guess. But fifty pages?
Mom’s breaths were visible puffs of vapor. She clapped her hands for warmth and sighed. She knew how hard it had been leaving Dad. Said that had been the hardest thing she’d ever done.
I looked up, surprised. Really?
You think that was easy for me? I loved your father, Huey. I loved him very, very much. You probably don’t know it, but people didn’t even want us living together. We defied them and did it anyway. It wasn’t easy. Our love for each other drove all of that. We’d be married now if they’d have let us. But there was not a courthouse in the state that would recognize us as husband and wife. Seems crazy now, huh? I held out hope for as long as I could, but in the end it was clear that his loyalty was to his parents. I guess I just thought that he would change. Come to find out that all that time, he’d been expecting the same thing of me. Who knows? Maybe it’s good we never married.
Mom paused. She looked down at me. You wanna go back, don’t you?
I shrugged. I dunno. Maybe.
If you do, I will support you in that. Lord knows things haven’t been great here. But you must understand that no matter how difficult life has been for us these last seven years, this is nothing compared to what it would have been like for us had we stayed. She paused. There comes a point in life, Huey, where the question isn’t so much What should you do? but What options do you have?
We crossed Fifth Avenue. It was mostly overcast, but a sliver of sun was peeking through the cloud cover, so low on the horizon it lit the bellies of a flock of pigeons gliding overhead. Mom took my hand and said that when I was a baby, she truly believed the Fairchild family orchard would one day be mine, but that the older she got, she came to realize that had never been in the cards. She shook her head at the dead leaves, stiff and curled, tumbling down the sidewalk. Mom and I entered the park at Ninety-Sixth Street and followed the first shrub-lined path we came to. We strolled through a patch of stinky ginkgos and mixed in with the ten-speeds, and the large-framed Mary Poppins bikes with their long fenders and baskets, and the tourists strolling about snapping pictures. We stopped in front of two jugglers tossing candlepins back and forth. Mom put her spare change in their cap, and we continued on past folksy guitar strummers belting out a protest song. Mom waxed philosophical about how much had changed in the last few years—how I’d gone from being a little boy to someone who would soon be a young man, and how the world around us was changing so much from one day to the next. She slung an arm over my shoulder and cursed Johnson for having lowered the draft age, but told me not to worry. Not in a million years would she let me fight that man’s fight.
I stopped. Jesus Christ. Do I look like some long-haired lotus-eating freak? I wanna go and fight!
Over my dead body! I will not let that man get his hands on you. You hear me? If I wanted you dead I’d kill you myself. Christ, Huey. Don’t be a chump! When are you going to realize that we win just by getting along? And the assholes can’t even do that!
A mime was doing his routine in front of the zoo. He put his fingers to his lips and looked in our direction as we stood there bickering like an old married couple. We exited the park at Fifty-Ninth Street. I stood on the corner, staring at the perky breasts on the statue of some chick holding a fruit basket across the street. Mom tugged my arm and told me to cheer up. She said she knew just the thing to make me feel better and dragged me downstairs into the subway. We took the R train one stop and got off at Lexington Avenue. Mom took off her shawl, and we popped into Bloomingdale’s. On our way up the escalator, she picked at the pilling on my blazer and fussed over a tiny hole at my left elbow and told me that I was in desperate need of a new one. I lifted my arm to demonstrate that it was only noticeable when I raised my hand with a question.
Mom didn’t think that funny. Neither had she appreciated having to have it dry cleaned after I’d fished it out of the garbage can that day. Her boss at the dry cleaners, Mister Sanders, had charged her; he was still upset with her for having reduced her hours on account of Missus Blumenthal demanding more and more of her time. Mom looked down at me and said that even if it annoyed her having to shell out three bucks of her hard-earned money to pay for the dry cleaning, it was still worth it. She started in about how important it was for me to look top notch. Whether I knew it or not, people judged me by how I looked. I shrugged and told her that it wasn’t like I was fooling anyone.
It didn’t matter to Mom that Vernonblood, Lichenberger, and Bilmore all knew where I lived or that Zukowski was the only one who didn’t seem to care. She looked at me in the prudish way she does when she’s annoyed and reminded me that it was still worth spending a little extra to get the very best. What bugs me is that Mom humps away day in and day out just to buy me the stuff rich kids have, never realizing that they’re dyed-in-the-wool blue-blooded boys and not just some measly peanut farmer’s son, which she still manages to talk about like it’s a big deal. She doesn’t care if me having at least some of the stuff kids with nannies, au pairs, and chauffeurs have comes at the cost of us spending more time together, because the second I mentioned Dad and peanuts in the same breath, she started rambling on about how she had a mind to petition for back pay for all the work she’d done for him, because she should have known all along that she’d never get one red cent out of him for all her trouble keeping his books, never mind get to be a Fairchild, and when were people going to start calling her by her correct family name, anyway? She needed to start correcting people, because she was a different person than she had been back when she let it slide because it didn’t seem to be worth the trouble. She was sick and tired of all the people from my school calling her Missus Fairchild all the time, when she was not a Fairchild and never would be a Fairchild because that had probably never been in the cards either. She knew that now. She only wished she’d known it then.
I snapped my fingers in her face and told her to get a grip. What the heck are you talking about?
You wouldn’t understand if I told you.
Well, you lost me on our way past the third floor. Enough with the ranting, Mama!
Oh, hush.
There’s no point arguing with her when she gets like that. Besides, it was too late. She’d already received a two-week advance from Missus Blumenthal to help with the cost of some unexpected lawyer’s fees and the special psychiatric evaluations. We got off on the fourth floor and headed for the men’s department. I took a seat in the wingback chair they keep in the back by the tailor’s station and started to swing my feet back and forth while pretending that I was wearing a smoking jacket and puffing on a pipe like Alistair Cooke. I love that show.
Mom had been up late, taking care of the twins for half the night. She was standing in front of a three-way mirror, trying to rub out the dark circles under her eyes, going on about how the truth was that Dad always had been a hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil kind of guy. And in a way, maybe she had been, too. But she was a much different person from who she was back then. And no, maybe New York hadn’t turned out like all the fancy stories she’d been told, but we’d make something of it still. We just needed to give it more time. Where there were second chances, there was hope. And New York seemed to be giving us a second chance. Mom flashed me a smile—the kind that can light up a ballroom, which to my mind, was just another New York City abstraction that I had never been to. Right up there with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and the Apollo Theater. Anyway, even if you can kind of tell that life has been a little rough on her, she’s still the most beautiful woman in the world. Honestly, I don’t know how she does it.
An older gentleman in a double-breasted suit and comb-over strolled over and asked if he could be of service. Mom asked after a Mister Castiglioni. The man raised an eyebrow, nodded his head slightly, and said, Speaking, madam.
Mom informed Mister Castiglioni that he came highly recommended from Carol Blumenthal. Which seemed to make an impression. Mister Castiglioni checked his watch and then escorted us into a fitting room. Mom handed him the blazer she’d pulled from a rack. Mister Castiglioni recognized the crest on my lapel, complimented me on my academic accomplishment, and instructed me to kindly change into the one he was presently holding open for me.
I slipped my right arm in quickly. The infection where the bone had poked through the skin had left an ugly scar, but the worst part was how crooked it had healed. I’ll never forget the look on Mom’s face when the doctor at the New York Hospital cut off the cast and saw my bow-shaped forearm. She was as shocked as he was. There she was, planning to celebrate the occasion with Chinese takeout, and she turned irate with those two big bags of food in her hands. I could tell that she wanted to throw them, but of course she couldn’t waste food. She’d joked on our way up the elevator to the pediatric orthopedics floor, telling me how it’d be a quick in and out and that of course the Chinese food would still be hot by the time we got home. She had no idea that my arm was going to end up looking like a corkscrew—that’s what she’d called it. Dad had never told her that he’d foregone the procedure that would have corrected that issue without having consulted her.
Dr. Cohen, who had no idea about any of that, asked if it had happened while we were on vacation in Mexico; he’d attended a conference in the Yucatán once and could sympathize. The Mayan ruins in Chichén Itzá were amazing, but you didn’t want to end up in a hospital there. When Mom grunted and said, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It happened right here. In the United States, Dr. Cohen looked both ways and said under his breath that he didn’t necessarily advise it, but judging by what he saw, she could probably sue for malpractice. This is egregious, ma’am. There isn’t a judge out there who wouldn’t be sympathetic to this.
Mom didn’t care about the money. She wanted my arm to be straight—which Dr. Cohen explained was resolutely impossible. Took Mom three weeks before she was able to climb down from the angry tree. I learned that term from my court-appointed social worker, Tabetha, who urged me to visualize myself climbing out of a tree next time I got irate. Said it helped to trigger something calming in the brain. I asked if it could be any kind of tree I wanted, and she said sure, why not? I settled on a palm tree. They seemed pretty damn near impossible to get out of. Long story short, Dr. Cohen said there was a fifty-fifty chance that I would regain sensation in my pinky. It’s been seven years now, and it still just kind of hangs there, useless.
All this is to say that my bent-to-shit forearm got a raised eyebrow from Mister Castiglioni. Thankfully, he didn’t feel the need to comment. Instead, he blithely snapped at the blazer’s hem with his fingers and, with pins in his mouth, said,
Whose kid?
My eyes fell to the floor.
The Fairchilds’.
I don’t know that family. What business are they in?
Peanuts.
Mister Castiglioni raised an eyebrow, impressed. Peanuts? I once had a customer who was in peanuts. Now, this was a great many years ago, of course. I think his son went into politics. Or maybe it was his nephew. Anyway, he used to come in all the time, trying on some double-breasted number, and would always talk about his boy. I think he was doing some type of missionary work for the UN, if I’m not mistaken. Who knows? Might be a congressman now, for all I know. Any relation?
I waited for Mom to correct him, but she just said that she wouldn’t know and otherwise let him believe whatever he wanted. After all her talk. I was starting to sense that maybe everything had changed and nothing had changed. Mister Castiglioni finished with the chalk marks and poking me with pins and informed Mom that it would be ready at four thirty, then bid us to kindly give his regards to the dear Missus Blumenthal.
Mom pulled me in close, and on our way out of the heavy glass doors, I closed my eyes and wished the day to last forever. With all the time we had together when we lived back in Akersburg, I’d never once gone for a stroll with her down Main Street. What made strolling down Lexington arm in arm with Mom magical for me was that no one bumping into us knew or cared whether or not my folks were married, or why they’d split, or what color they were or how much money they made. We strolled down Lexington like two kindred spirits and would have done it together every day if it wasn’t for the fact that she practically lived at the Blumenthals’.
I didn’t care if all the men in business suits shoving their elbows and knocking their briefcases into me as they passed assumed she was my nanny. And honestly, I don’t think Mom did, either. It was still nice. As we walked down the busy street, weaving through the hustle and bustle of midtown pedestrian traffic on a drab weekday afternoon, I thought that maybe the pickle I’d gotten myself into had something to do with the realization I’d had that it was better to be some run-of-the-mill, just-off-the-boat foreigner from Krakow, or wherever the hell Zukowski’s folks were from. They actually thought they were better than me. It didn’t matter to them that they hadn’t been off the boat fifteen years and were from some godforsaken far-flung place that I couldn’t even pronounce, or that they still spoke Polish around a dinner table packed with aunts and uncles and cousins while Missus Zukowski peeled potatoes barefoot in the kitchen of their split-level, stand-alone duplex out in Canarsie. None of that mattered. I mean, really? Does that kind of bullshit happen in other countries? Even the one they left?
Even if it were true that I’d only gotten to go to Claremont because I was colored, I didn’t exactly appreciate having my face rubbed in it. The worst part for me was that even if Zukowski knew better, the rest of his family hadn’t been here long enough to and didn’t understand about our delicate history of human bondage, and frankly, they could not have cared less. Missus Zukowski was too busy celebrating her son’s recent accomplishments in the land of opportunity to be bothered to give a shit about that. As far as her merry band of scorekeepers were concerned, the point totals spoke for themselves.
Zukowski’s family hadn’t been here for much longer than I’d been alive and had already achieved what had taken Mom ten generations. Trust me, none of that was lost on me. And none of that would have mattered, not one lousy bit, except for the fact that Zukowski’s enlightened worldview wasn’t enough to keep him from cashing in on the advantage unfairly conferred unto him when it mattered most. He had no problem using the color of his skin to curry favor with Suzie Hartwell when she came to both realize and resent that I’d misled her about mine. And yes, that pissed me off. I knew that what I’d done was wrong, but so was he. I was being mocked and maligned on a daily basis for having the gall to use the color of my skin to gain advantage where it concerned getting into Claremont, and here people like Zuk pulled shit like that all the time and weren’t even aware of it, much less feeling pangs of guilt about it.
Listen, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I was having a hard time, socially, those first few years at Claremont. I know that what grown-ups want to hear me say is that it’s a great time in our country’s history to have brown skin, what with a kid like me in school here and the nation on the mend now that we’ve got all that happened back in Akersburg behind us. But I was pissed. Tabetha has assured me that it’s okay if I come clean about the racism I’ve experienced at Claremont, that I can only bottle things up for so long before they just explode. Even if I’d gotten pretty good at ignoring it, when nigger was murmured anonymously under someone’s breath, it still hurt. I dunno. Maybe it was just that I no longer had an Evan around to absorb that particular shock.
Which is why I had no choice but to explain myself to Mom. I told her how devastating it felt when I saw Suzie Hartwell and Zukowski walk up the stands in the gymnasium and then sit together, arm in arm, at a pep rally. How I calmly made my way through the crowd and walked over to him and tapped him politely on the shoulder, and when he turned, I socked him one. Right in the teeth. I don’t know. Seeing the two of them together like that—it just triggered something ugly in me. I just sort of blew my top. I guess I just realized that having nothing in common but a lack of belonging is not enough to base a friendship on. I deserved better. My only regret was that I’d let Hamilton and Bilmore egg me on, which had me feeling like I was their chump. Of course I knew that guys like them just want to see a fight. I dunno. I guess I’d just finally reached a point where I didn’t care anymore. Didn’t matter that it took five years—they’d finally succeeded in getting me to behave the way they’d predicted I would all along. As they said, That’s just what niggers do. I looked up at Hamilton and Bilmore and said, Happy? and walked off with blood on my hands.
Mom stopped me in my tracks.
Oh my Lord. You didn’t. Please tell me you didn’t. Oh, no. You did? You did that? How did I not find out about that? Mister McGovern was wrong. It’s not a father figure you lack. It’s the father figure. You lack Jesus Christ in your life, son. I’m sorry, but it’s true. You do. I sense a black hole somewhere deep inside you—a very, very dark place. Absolutely, positively Godless, I’m afraid. Starting tomorrow, you’re going to start reading the Bible again. We’re going to start with Leviticus. I think that’ll be good for you. Every day. And cartoons be damned—you’re going to make time for church on Sundays. And not just on Christmas and Easter, either. Every week. You hear me? For crying out loud! Does his mother know about that?
The only answer that I could offer was a shrug. The truth was, I didn’t know. On our way across the street, the late-afternoon sun was shining a lustrous amber light between the tall buildings. Mom rubbed her hands together for warmth and cursed the cold and said how eight years sure was a long time to have cloudy judgment, and how Dad hadn’t given her one red cent for child support all these years, and how she was sick and tired of being nickel-and-dimed to death, and how people down there probably still don’t want people like them living together and now she hadn’t got a legal claim to any of it. Nothing. Imagine! Rights, my A-S-S. She wasn’t allowed to protect herself financially and here she was taking care of me all on her own and Dad never sent one red cent in any of those letters, and now he probably had some other woman doing his books for him. Mom gave a manic laugh, then stopped and snapped me around in the crosswalk right in the middle of Lexington Avenue.
You don’t think I heard her? What she said to you in the doorway of Mister McGovern’s office? I’ve been working around people like that for seven years, mister. And you don’t think I’ve heard that talk before? Don’t you believe it. Or seen the look of judgment on her face when she said it? Listen here. You have every bit as much right to be at Claremont as Ariel. Every single bit and then some. It’s like one man steals a house from another man, and we say, fine. The authorities find the man guilty and send him to jail, and we say justice is served. But his son gets to keep the house. Okay? In short order, the son has a child and decides that he wants a second house. Except now, the man who’s had his house stolen finds himself competing for a home loan with guess who—the thief’s son. Only the thief’s son has a house to offer up as collateral against a second mortgage, and the man with whom he’s competing for the loan does not. Now, the banker doesn’t care one way or the other about that first home. He only cares about getting his money back. And after all, the son didn’t steal the house that he lives in. His father did. So why should he be penalized unfairly? We all know that you can’t punish the son for the sins of the father. Which is why he gets to live in that first house. But I’ll be damned if he gets to use it to bootstrap his second home when there is still a man out there who has been robbed of his fair chance at his first! And I don’t care if Zukowski has nothing to do with the provenance of that first home, either. Because it was stolen, and they strolled into it like they’ve got the Midas touch, when all they’ve done is stumble upon a damned fire sale. Nothing more!
An emotional bottle, having inadvertently come uncorked, was spilling over, and Mom was desperate to catch every drop. I wasn’t following half of what she said, but it didn’t seem to matter. Lexington Avenue may as well have belonged to her.
I’m going to tell you this once, sweetheart, and then I’m never going to tell it to you again. So listen well. Any person you know who has not had a family member enslaved is at a two-hundred-fifty-year advantage over you. Okay? Not the other way around. You must understand that one simple fact. You have ancestors—blood relatives, real people, connected to you by blood and history—who were enslaved, who had their families, language, labor, freedom, possessions, and identity taken from them by force and used to the advantage of everyone you see around you right here, right now. That is, everyone but us. So do not ever let anyone talk to you like you’re some goddamned drain on society. Ever! That would be like scorning the man who has built your house for not owning one himself. That’s just wrong. The only thing you oughta be worried about asking any of them is what the hell they have to show for the last two hundred fifty years of their advantage. And I don’t care if for those two hundred fifty years their ancestors were in Europe or Asia or Russia or on Mars or wherever, because I can guarantee you that they were not in chains. Your Grampa Hicks once reminded me of that fact. And now I’m reminding you. I probably should have reminded you a long time ago, but I was too busy trying to be someone I’m not.
The honking grew loud enough to break through Mom’s ranting. She pulled me out of the way of traffic, onto the sidewalk.
You want fair? I’ll give you fair. If I were to go down to Akersburg now and demand my fair share of all the work I put in for your father, some magistrate would laugh in my face, and they’d look at me like some two-bit hustler trying to game them. I’m nothing but a hussy to any of them. No different than someone who was his one-night stand. You hear me? A fly-by-night. An easy come, easy go. Me? Oh, what am I saying. You probably don’t even know what that is.
Yes, I do.
I was too proud to ask for help early on, but let me tell you, I’m not too proud to ask for it now. Only now it’s too late. If I were to do that now, people would talk like it never even happened. They’d probably have something cute to say like, “Oh no. You must be mistaken, Miss. We never let any of our coloreds cohabitate with Caucasians in Akersburg back then. That sort of thing simply didn’t happen.” Or like, “Well, why didn’t you get yourself a marriage license, darling, if you loved him so much?” As if people like us never lived together. As if it never happened. Please! Because if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that life in this country is like living on a dollar-store inflatable you’re constantly having to blow up unless you want to sink. There’s not a day of rest. It’s a perpetual assault on my basic humanity. And it’s exhausting. All just to keep this damn floaty above water, when it seems like other people are hell-bent on tearing into it with a knife only because if they can’t have it all to themselves, then they don’t want anyone to have it.
Listen. You never got to know your Grampa Hicks. But you know me. And I’m telling you, you get to be whatever the hell you want. You’ve earned that much. It’s not for me or anyone else to say. All I want to see you do is take back what’s rightfully yours. That’s all. Lay claim to it like others before you have not been able to do. And if anyone tries to stop you, make them get out of your way. You owe that much to your Grampa Hicks. They’ve rearranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission. Don’t ask for theirs. You don’t owe them anything. And it’s high time some of that comes back around for us.
Mom snapped me back around and dragged me down the sidewalk and reeled off a list of stuff she wanted to pick up while we were out. She should have written it down, if you ask me, what with the box of tampons, eyeliner pencils, two wide-ruled notebooks—make that two dozen flowers for Zuk—special hairspray, two blush markers, and an eraser for me. Which she said we should get two of, since I was bound to make a lot of mistakes when I got around to writing my essay. I told her that maybe I should type it. She said to get them anyway. Called them the bare essentials. I could tell that she was more desperate for my eventual return to Claremont than I was.
Which is only a half truth. Listen, even if I feel resentful and a little conflicted about Claremont it’s just because I’d had somebody whisper nigger to me under their breath in a crowded room one too many times. Even though its painstakingly cultivated sense of exclusivity exacts a toll on people like me because we know we will never share in its aristocratic heritage, I’m still thankful that I have the experience of going there. I guess that maybe at the end of the day, I love Claremont much in the same way that I loved Mister Abrams’s pool. I see it as a keyhole through which I get to peek into a life bursting with possibilities that would otherwise never be known to a kid like me. I’m thankful for it because even though it was never truly mine, it has, in a perverse way, become a sort of home away from home.
Even if I know that elitism is wrong, the floor-to-ceiling burnished wood paneling, ivy-covered wrought iron and redbrick out front, and portraits of stately men wearing powdered wigs and dinner coats puffing on meerschaum pipes are still kind of cool. I guess I’ve come to dig them. Stalwart slave-owning criminals and crooks though Mom claims many of them to be, they’ve all become a part of who I am, and they have as much a claim on me as anything else. Which is why they mean every bit as much to me as they do to Vernonblood and Lichenberger, and have, with time, become every bit as much a part of me as them.
We stopped at the corner of East Fifty-Seventh Street and waited for the signal. Across the street a marquee was lit up like a blast furnace, so bright Buzz Aldrin could probably see it from outer space. The Wild Bunch was showing. Mom reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her coin pouch. She unrolled each of the five curled-up singles stuffed inside, all the while telling me how she’d once found herself at the Blumenthals’ building uptown without subway fare home and swore she’d never make that mistake again. I remember how exhausted she was by the time she got home. I had to fend for myself that night. She was out like a light on the sofa, with her overcoat still on and spit-up baby food staining her dress and her pumps brushing up against the box of cereal I’d balanced on the sofa arm amid the soft flicker and glow of Dick Cavett announcing his first guest of the evening.
Mom tucked her coin purse away and proclaimed how sad it was that all the western stars she’d grown up with were over the hill. With John Wayne contemplating retirement and Jimmy Stewart right there behind him and Gene Autry out of the picture, who would save the day? They don’t make them like they used to, Huey.
You can say that again.
The light turned, and we crossed with the herd. Mom said it wasn’t every day that you got to see the end of an era. She linked her arm with mine, and we headed for the theater.
I pulled at her coat. Can’t people like me be a new generation of cowboys?
Mom laughed. That was a good one. All the same, she agreed that I could be her cowboy any day. Which, frankly, offended me. It was something in the way she said it—like it required too much imagination. Then what the hell was she sending me to Claremont for?
You’ve got it all wrong. Cowboys are only as good as the challenges they face and swear to overcome, come hell or high water. It’s the big heart and unyielding courage in the face of insurmountable odds that matter. That’s what’s made this country great. Don’t you know anything? I can be a cowboy. Anybody can be a cowboy. That’s the point.
Mom was still chuckling. A little too long, if you ask me. She thought I was being cute. She said she just wanted me to be more realistic, was all. Said I had my head in the clouds too much. If there had been a can there, I would have kicked it. Mom led me across the street, and we popped into Woolworth’s. She grabbed some flowers for Zuk and a protractor and erasers for me and some tampons for herself.
Mom was tapping her feet to the music emanating from overhead while we were waiting in line. She said she’d like to try her hand at something different—maybe go back to school and study to become a certified public accountant. She could work on contract for small businesses. Handle all their back office needs—kind of like she did for Dad, only now she’d get paid good money for it.
That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?
I opened a bag of chips and stuffed some in my mouth. Great.
I just love sitting down in front of a clutter of receipts, invoices, bank statements, and payroll reports—tapping away on an adding machine—figuring out where all the money is going.
I unwrapped a stick of gum and shoved it into my mouth. If you say so.
What—you don’t think I can do it? Or you think I can but that it’s beneath me? I can’t tell which.
It’s not that. You’re a modern woman, I see that. Anyone can see that. You can do anything that you set your sights on. And have the right to. So it’s not that. It’s just that—well. I paused. It’s not that I think you should be home, cooking and cleaning, or anything like that. It’s just that I wonder—well . . . I mean . . . what about me?
What about you?
How can we both be in school at the same time? Where’s the money going to come from? And when are we going to have time to hang out? Besides, whatever happened to doing people’s hair? Didn’t you like that? Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for you leaving the Blumenthals. But. Well. I just thought that, if you do leave the Blumenthals, well—I dunno. I guess I just thought that somehow you’d find your way back to doing people’s hair. Why would you just give something like that up, when it used to be such a big part of your life?
Mom sighed.
First of all, I hated the work. Second of all, I checked into it, and I’d have to rent out a chair somewhere and I’m not doing that. Third of all, I need a change. And I’d like to try something that I actually enjoy for once. Of course I’ll need to ease into it, silly. I was just thinking long term. This kind of a move would take a while to materialize. It wouldn’t happen overnight.
I shrugged. It was as much of a blessing as she was going to get from me. We stepped to the check-out counter. Mom unloaded our stuff from the basket and asked if I’d mind waiting for her outside. She was going to ask to speak with the manager about the HELP WANTED sign leaning in the window. It said to “See Cashier.” The matinee didn’t start for another half hour, and she’d been talking about changing jobs for the last year. Who knew? Maybe they had some sort of training program that would jump-start her new career.
The woman behind the counter was ringing up our items. I looked up at her as I stuffed my pockets with the gum, chips, Milk Duds, and Mike and Ikes I’d gotten for the movie.
Are you sure this is right? You’re able-bodied and capable and you want equal pay for equal work. Trust me, I get it. What’s there not to get? You want a job where you get the respect you deserve. I guess I just thought that—well. I mean, I just think of you as being more of a people person. And besides, how can you be sure that you’re not doing it for the fancy business cards? Or the novelty of having “CPA” tacked on at the end of your name? Or the allure of maybe even having your own LLC one day? Or for the promise of maybe flying high with the corporate jet set one day? That’s where it all leads, right? All just so that you have a fancy story of your own to tell someday? I mean, if you’re doing it for me—you don’t have to. Please. God, don’t do it for me. I just thought you liked doing people’s hair, is all. Because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing people’s hair. And it just seems so much more manageable. Because you can do it from home. I could even help find you customers. And that way—well—we could have a lot more time together. I dunno. I guess I was just hoping to eventually get my mom back someday. You know? Have more time together. To talk and stuff. Kinda like we’re doing right now. Jesus. You’re all I’ve got.
The cashier was taking her time, doing a price check on the flowers. Mom was digging money out of her purse. She looked up and sighed.
You wanna know something, Huey? Math was my favorite subject in school. I liked reading. But I loved math. Did you know that? You wanna know what I loved about it? I loved how everything starts out messy but ends up nice and neat. Other kids would make fun of me. Especially the boys. I don’t know why. I think it was because I was so much better at it than any of them. I didn’t mean to be, but I guess it just made them feel insecure. So I wasn’t too popular with many of them. So I backed off that stuff, because I didn’t like being made fun of any more than anyone else, and the unfortunate result was that I never did much with it in school. I just sort of played it down and let it fall by the wayside. The only time I used it since was to help your father. And every time I’d sit down at the kitchen table with the ledger, I got a rush of excitement. Because I knew it was important, and because I just loved how I could see the story that all those numbers were telling me. It was never difficult for me. Because none of them ever lied. And ever since we’ve been up here, I’ve felt this longing. I used to think that it was for your father. But now I realize it’s not—it’s for that darn ledger. Can you believe it? Does that sound strange to you? Well, it’s true. When we first arrived here, we simply couldn’t afford to go without a paycheck. We had no place to live yet, no food, nothing. But now it’s different. It’s taken me a long time, but I finally know what I want in life. That’s what I want, Huey—I want my life to be like a math problem that starts out messy but ends up nice and neat. At some point in this lifetime of mine, I’m going to have to do something for me. Nothing splashy. Nothing fancy. Not some get-rich-quick scheme, not some pill that you take that solves all your problems. Just a small step in the right direction. You asked how I know it’s the right decision for me. Well, that’s how I know.
I turned for the door. Mom waved me back and handed me her umbrella and told me to take it, in case.
She blew me a kiss at the door and told me to wish her luck. I leaned into the spatula-style door handle and looked up at the sky—gray as it was, at least it wasn’t raining. It was something that Mom would say. I wasn’t even sure how I felt about her eternal and unbending optimism, but it seemed to be rubbing off on me. So there I was, on the corner of Fifty-Seventh Street and Lexington, standing on the sidewalk outside Woolworth’s in the bitter cold, holding a white paper bag with one hand and a bouquet of lilies, carnations, and buttercups up to my nose with the other. I buttoned up amid the honking cabbies jamming the three-laned avenue in front of me, and the hectic flow of pedestrian foot traffic and grumpy sidewalk vendors wobbling past with their steaming hot dog carts. The clipped strides of women in heels hauling large shopping bags. I’d just about gotten the last of the potato chips out from between my teeth and was feeling pretty good about that, and sort of got to thinking about what I’d write in this essay of mine, which was already starting to weigh on me a little and, as you now know, turned out a little longer than it was supposed to. You see, I knew more or less that I wanted to say something about the summer seven years back, but I wasn’t sure what exactly to say or how to say it. I just knew that it was still weighing heavily on me. I guess that in a way, you could say that writing this damned thing has helped me figure out that what was so humiliating about that whole summer wasn’t the bone-aching inevitability of it all, or the fact that school was segregated, or even having been the last person in town to discover the truth about who I am. It was the way I’d been forced onto a bus and shipped willy-nilly out of town on the overnight express, under the cover of the darkness—jettisoned without a say like a dead leaf kicked up in the autumn wind. I hated the fact that it denied me the wiggle room I’d need to make up an excuse to save face. You know, like, a dear old relative of Mom’s had fallen ill in a neighboring town and so I had to go assist in her convalescence and liked it so much I decided to stay. Better yet, Dad could have said that it might be a long while before I returned. Even if Theo and Darla and Derrick would hardly have cared, that didn’t matter. What mattered was that it look like the actual leaving had been my choice. I figured I was owed that much. Of all the lies I’ve ever told myself over the years, that was the most important—the one I carried with me from day to day. You know, the only one that ever really hurt to give up. I may live on the twenty-third floor of a housing project in the East Village, but Akersburg is still my home, and deep down I know that’s where I belong.
I could have just kicked myself when it started to drizzle. Damn it all. I knew I should have brought my galoshes. I fumbled with Mom’s umbrella, all the while asking myself why oh why I had believed in that asshole right up until the bitter end, and now no letter had come since the one I’d sent him back in April. I was getting a little worried because it was starting to seem like maybe life had moved on for him, and here I was spinning my wheels, getting in all sorts of trouble. When I asked Mom if four unanswered letters was a lot, she said not for him. I was starting to think that maybe I should just suck it up and write Dad a fifth letter, just to be on the safe side. Because it’s entirely possible that he just figured that I was doing fine without him. Except that it’s been over a year since he’s so much as called, and like a complete douchebag I’m still waiting, as if that’s ever going to happen. Which is why I think I’ve got no choice but to bury the hatchet, let bygones be bygones, and start accepting that I’m never going back.
What a flimsy fucking umbrella. It took me five minutes to get the goddamned latch free, and then it just sort of reluctantly flopped open. A man carrying a cardboard box filled with all sorts of useful things for people walking around Midtown in the rain popped up in front of me and held out a new umbrella. He offered to sell it to me. I told him that I had too many cheap umbrellas. Sure, I was irritable. Just look at my thirty-dollar shoes.