When I’m in trouble, my punishment is that I’m not allowed to close my door. This makes me feel like I’m soaking wet without a towel. My mother and I are nothing alike. She says we have the same heart-shaped face. The same thin lips. I have her face but my father’s nose. My father’s hazel eyes. My father’s legs. My mother’s torso. My father’s fair skin. My mother’s thick, dark untamable hair. My mother’s moods. My mother’s sensitivity to the almondy aura of bad things coming.
“Where did you get that shirt? I didn’t buy that for you.” In her nightgown and slippers—ink-black, blow-dried bob, immaculate—she stands in the doorway of my room.
“It’s Bianca’s.”
Kilt rolled at the waist, hair in a bun, frizz at my temples, homework half done and shoved in my book bag, I’m ready to go. I need to go. I can feel it.
“I hope you didn’t trade that for something I bought you,” she says.
“No, Mom, she knows I’m not allowed to lend my clothing.”
“Isn’t that shirt a little tight for school?” She hooks her finger in the V of the neck, it snaps back against my chest. She touches me with such entitlement, as if my body were her own.
“It’s Lycra. That’s what shirts are made of,” I say, pulling away.
“Well, at least put a sweater on over it. And don’t you need to wear a collar?”
She is a tornado this morning, vibrating with instant coffee, to-do lists, and unsettling premonitions.
“Is everything where it should be?” she asks, opening my cabinet, searching for a specific reason to feel as uneasy as she does this morning.
“Where is that royal blue sweater from Banana Republic?”
I sink. I thunk my bag back on the floor so she can hear how heavy she makes me feel.
We are nothing alike. I am incapable of holding on to my property and my mother is incapable of letting anything go. It’s as much a product of her upbringing as it is a product of mine. There are times we try to reason with each other through insults.
“You’re spoiled,” she says.
“You’re materialistic,” I say.
No time for all of that today. “Mom, I’m late.”
“Fine, but when you get home, I want to see that sweater.”
She softens. “Give me a kiss.”
I do.
We walk down the hallway to the front door, the dog following us, hoping we’ll dangle her leash. Her tags chime and jangle, always the sound of my mother’s moving shadow.
As the elevator door closes between us, my mother continues to talk, her voice rising to counteract the downward movement of the elevator. “Don’t you need some break—”
By the time I reach the lobby, one of the doormen, a young blue-eyed man with a goatee, who is too pretty and close to my age to look directly in the eyes, hands me the house phone.
“It’s your mother.”
“You forgot breakfast,” she says.
She says she’s sending Billy down with toast. I wait in the lobby, inspecting the marble floor so I don’t have to look at the pretty young man. Billy operates the back elevator, an old-fashioned hand-cranked affair, with nothing more than a fan to cool him off. He is the kind of man who pats his brow with a handkerchief. Watching him walk toward me, all three hundred pounds of him, a man who in another circumstance I would be calling Mr. followed by his surname, which I don’t even know, hands me a square of tinfoil-wrapped rye toast.
“Sorry,” I offer, and head for the bus across the street. The homeless man with the baritone voice is there. He sings low and quiet, shakes a cup, nods at me. I feel around in my knapsack for change and instead produce a little blue pill stamped with a V. It goes in my mouth. The last one I’ll ever take from the bottle, I promised myself before I stole it.
The M86 stops at every avenue all the way to York, which is three blocks from the mayor’s house in one direction, three blocks from school in the other, and one block from the river where Manhattan ends and the absence of anything concrete begins.
By the time I get to school, the Valium kicks in. I look around homeroom at my whole grade, sitting on red, knotty carpeting and in metal desk chairs waiting for class to start. Look at all the ponytails and topknots, the silver rings and jangling necklaces and bracelets. Sniff that fresh deodorant smell, hear the binders snap, feel the space between the back of the blue metal seat and the faux wood desktop where my body slips in. Look how it all bleeds together like a fresh painting doused in buckets of water.
Today is like every other day, except that it is different. There is no fear, no crossed fingers folded into fists hoping for a magically good grade, no looking over at the paper next to mine, no looking at Bianca’s red tongue curling on her upper lip as she copies notes from a chalkboard. Just a blurry relaxation, a comfort within these walls, a familiar protection, a herd feeling, a oneness.
We are in the ninth grade. We are reading a poem. We are highlighting every word the teacher tells us is important and writing symbolism in the margins.
We are preparing for when we will dissect a frog by looking at a diagram of a frog on a piece of paper. We are conjugating Latin in the pluperfect. We are walking our trays into a steamy silver room. It is taco day. We ask for one shell, no meat, and we ladle the soupy salsa into a paper cup; we tong lettuce onto our plates. We break off little pieces of shell and dip them in the red sauce sparingly. We talk about the history test, the boy who got stabbed, when he’s going back to school, how lucky he is. And then we place our trays on the tray cart and walk downstairs to the student lounge, where we buy Diet Cokes from the vending machine and sink into the worn-out plaid couch—the most comfortable couch we’ve ever sat on because it’s ours.
We change for gym class in the locker room, we see skin, nipple yolks balancing on egg whites, their gelatinous jiggle. We run ten laps around the gymnasium. We are called “GIRLS!” We ball our fists together and pump a volleyball into the air, passing it back and forth, diving, calling out “Got it!” slamming it with an open hand over the net.
We make our math teacher cry because we won’t stop asking her personal questions: “How old is your daughter? What kind of work does your husband do?” We make her a card out of spiral notebook paper that reads We Love You.
And then the bell rings again and we walk through the science corridor, the walls lined with the seventh-grade drug project. There’s cocaine in red block letters and a Ziploc bag of baking soda stapled in the center of the poster. There’s LSD and PCP and so many glued on pebbles of Advil and Tylenol.
Now we’ve entered the middle school wing. There is carpeting on the floor and the whole hallway smells of art-teacher perfume—a mixture of sandalwood and clay. We want, when we enter this wing, to go back to the way things were, but instead we keep walking down another carpeted hallway past the arts-and-crafts room, where the kiln is baking fresh ashtrays, and into the room at the very end of the hall where our French teacher is waiting for us.
“Bonjour.”
“Bonjour, madame.”
“Comment allez-vous, aujourd’hui?”
“Bien, merci.”
There is a TV/VCR setup, and we are grateful. We watch The Rules of the Game, and pass a game of Hangman back and forth, along with some Saltines from the soup section of the cafeteria. This is a room filled with light. Windows form the back wall and face the front of East End Avenue. Four floors below, chauffeured cars are already starting to pull up outside the school. Nannies gather in front of the main entrance.
The sun hangs low. Three of its rays are in our French class, pointing at the mass of bodies lying on one another on the floor. We are reading subtitles; we have forgotten this movie is even in French.
“I want to disappear down a hole,” says one character in the movie to another.
“Why’s that?”
“So I no longer have to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong.”