Want

by Lynn Steger Strong

  * * *

  You know, says Sasha, looking at me. I’m fourteen and she’s fifteen. She goes to touch me, then thinks better of it. We’re always close but don’t often embrace. Her family is a touching, hugging unit; when people reach for me, I never know what to do with all my limbs. You might—she’s scrutinizing. I know I’m turning red. She reaches down and touches my ponytail. You might be prettier—she wouldn’t say just “pretty.” It’s important she gives me that, no matter what. It’s a word she’s always had a right to, a world she will always, easily, possess. I mean, you’re pretty, naturally. She smiles. I can’t stand this kind of looking. But if we let your hair down—she takes out the rubber band. My hair is nearly black and thick, and though I always wear it up, when loose, it reaches to the middle of my back. I feel my spine rounding, my shoulders closing in. Do a little something, not too much, but something to accentuate your eyes.

  * * *

  She teaches me things mothers are supposed to teach: how to use a tampon, apply mascara, find a bra that fits. How to talk out loud about ideas I’ve only let form in my head.

  * * *

  Sometimes, after school, we go to her house and hang out with her mom. Her family has less money than my family. The concept of money is sufficiently safe for me at this age, available without acting as a hindrance, that both its presence and its lack feel equally abstract. My mother’s ostentatious car, vacations twice a year, our massive house; the too-big boxes of cereal and jars of peanut butter stored in Sasha’s pantry from the Costco half an hour away, their biggish house passed down and things breaking all the time and nothing getting fixed. My mom works sixty-hour weeks and when we sit down for dinner at nine or ten—because that’s when she’s gotten home, but also, she wants to make my sister and me dinner—she and my father ask us the grades we got on tests, my times on the track. There is always too much food, so much food, made with cheese and milk and butter and my sister and I learn slowly—because we’ve been taught since we were very small that fat is lazy and disgusting—that we have to either only pretend that we are eating or eat only this meal every day. We sit across from each other, our mother and our father at either end of the table. They spend the time leading up to dinner talking about work. My mom cooks and my dad makes the drinks, one and a half shots of gin with tonic for my mother, a whiskey and Diet Coke for my dad. They have these before dinner and then wine and beer with dinner, one and then another. My sister and I linger in our rooms or on the outskirts of the kitchen. We do homework, watch TV. Both our parents change out of their suits. When we sit down, the TV’s on, but we talk over it for the first twenty minutes. How was practice? asks my father. My sister doesn’t run and hates this part. Fine, I say, most of the time. We did speed today, I say. It’s understood I won if we did a speed workout. Sometimes I tell the stories that I know most please them: that I lapped some of the slower girls during intervals, that Coach sent me to run with the boys again. I hate running with the boys and do not talk the whole time and they seem to hate me even more when we have finished. They all need to stay at least a step ahead of me and we run faster than we’re supposed to. None of us is willing to let the other beat them, and it’s hot and humid and we come back sweating, panting; none of them look at me the whole time. We come back angry, our legs and arms and shoulders tight; we suck down water, and the girls are already back and waiting, hardly sweating, and they all talk together and I pour water over my head and walk back to my car or ride alone. How was math? my dad asks, because I’m in an advanced math class, was skipped ahead at their request, and this is something that he likes to ask about. Fine, I say again. I’m not as good at it as they think and I lose focus. I feel too young; everyone else feels so much older, and I sit in back and read a book in my lap as the teacher talks. My sister is a champion debater and I’m grateful when the focus turns to her and what she’s done or won or how she is preparing for her next competition. Her grades are not as good as my grades. She’s in fewer advanced classes, tests less well than I do, and my father often looks less interested when it’s her turn to speak. She eats lunch, I know, alone in the debate room. She’s two years younger than me and I drive her to school once I turn sixteen and get a car, but we seldom talk.

  Sasha’s mom bakes and asks us about boys. She is a guidance counselor at the elementary school and very smart. When Sasha’s sister’s home she sits with us also and often interrupts. They all touch each other. Her sister fixes Sasha’s hair or asks midsentence if she can borrow the earrings that she’s wearing, where she got that sweater, if she thinks the shirt that she’s wearing suits her frame. She gestures often and I flinch when I sit close to her. Their mom looks hard at whichever of us is speaking and when Sasha and her sister fight in their brash, sharp way of fighting, she says, Girls, in this specific, intimate way that both makes them look at each other like she’s being silly, talking to them like they’re children, and also makes them stop, look up at her, say sorry quietly.

  Of her and her sister, Sasha’s the more aberrant. She fights more often with their mother. She is the smarter of the two but also the more reckless, the one who needs more guidance, more taking care. Her sister often scolds her in my presence. I think part of what Sasha likes about me is how rootless I am, feral maybe, that she’s the one in charge.

  Even though my parents are never home, we always go to her house. My house is so clean it makes the few other kids I’ve had over uncomfortable. It’s big and cavernous, with lots of suede and dark wood. My room is upstairs, down a long hall, my sister’s room down an opposite hall on the other side, and my parents sometimes, if they come home from work and we’re in our rooms, have to call the upstairs phone line to see if we are there.

  When I turn sixteen I get a brand-new black convertible, just exactly what I asked for—I don’t know until years later to be embarrassed by it—and Sasha and I drive out by the water on the weekends, top down, sun splotched on our faces, hair a mess. I skip school by myself; her mom has friends who work at the high school and they would tell her. When the school calls to say I wasn’t there, I just delete the message before anybody sees. I drive out to the beach and run, then walk, for hours and no one notices at dinner that there’s sand still on my feet and in my hair. I drive around and cry. My face is swollen in addition to being sunburned and I look straight at my mother as she asks me about my calc grade and she nods when I tell her it’s an A.

  Our senior year, Sasha has a boyfriend much older than us all. He is at the community college and in plays. I think he’s awful and then worry I’m just jealous: of him or her, I’m not quite sure. He’s dramatic, gesturing and talking, saying nothing, but she says she loves him. We talk about him on the phone for hours. He gets us stoned on weekends at the beach and convinces us to break in to old hotel pools at night and sit naked in the hot tub, four or five girls and his one or two friends that always tag along—they don’t ever touch me—and he tells us stories about places he says he’s been. We play Truth or Dare and we are told to kiss. She grabs the back of my head and burrows her lips in my face and I breathe through my nose and my hands make small, tight fists.

  IT’S FIVE DEGREES so I wear two pairs of tights and two shirts and a jacket that my mother bought me for Christmas that smells because I wear it almost every day. I wear a headband and gloves. There’s a hole in the index finger of my right glove and though every other part of me is covered up and warm my finger is raw and splotched and I have no feeling in my hand when I get home.

  * * *

  My husband slips in the shower as I stand underneath the spray, cold skin prickling with each drop of heat, my legs and arms bright red. I make a fist and then unfist it over and over, trying to get the feeling back. My husband pulls back the curtain and I have to step out from underneath the warmth to let him in. I put my hand along his back and he gasps and snaps at me and we both shampoo and condition and scrub our arms and legs and faces without speaking, without touching, until we’re out and dry and
dressed.

  * * *

  At work, a woman whom I’ve always liked but don’t really speak to is putting on lipstick in the employee bathroom. How are you? I say, and her eyes angle toward her lipstick and she says, I’m hoping this will pick me up.

  Will you teach me? I say, unable, it seems, just to smile. I blame my mother, I think, for my inability to not always try in some way to make conversation out of quiet. I point to her bag. Those bags remain one of the great mysteries of my life, I say.

  She laughs.

  You don’t need it, she says. She is younger than me, just like every other person who works here, and she is also trying to be nice.

  I smile at her and shake my head. My poor daughters, I say.

  * * *

  I leave after the last class I teach with the twenty-four-year-old, in which he gives a fifteen-minute speech about Brita filters as a metaphor for making edits on one’s papers. Clarity, he says, and purity. The kids’ eyes glaze over and I catch a girl in the back playing pool on her phone but I pretend that I don’t see her and as soon as class is over I grab my bag and coat and take the escalator steps two at a time.

  * * *

  I keep checking my phone as I walk down Broadway, thinking Sasha might call or text me back. I don’t want her to call me. I use the magic credit card to get more gummy candy from the CVS and one of those tubes of goop meant to put underneath one’s eyes and walk over the Brooklyn Bridge—though I usually reserve the bridge for running—and the last three miles to our apartment as it gets dark and my ears are very cold.

  2

  IT SNOWED, THEN rained, and now ice has frozen on the sidewalks. I sit up in bed, scrolling through my phone and thinking myself through the pros and cons of going running. I won’t be able to breathe at work if I don’t go running. If I fall and break something, I won’t be able to breathe for months. I put on two pairs of tights and two shirts—one fleece and one thin insulate, both long-sleeved—and the padded jacket my mom got me that still smells. I put the band around my head and I put on my gloves, still with the single hole, and I pull a fleece tube around my neck so I can yank it up to just below my eyes in the moment when I start to lose feeling in my nose and lips. I run in the middle of the road so I won’t slip, as the sidewalks are still slick with ice and piles of snow, and cars drive slowly past the few times they drive past. I see one other person running, a woman, older than me, slowly climbing through the snow piled on the sidewalk, taking off.

  * * *

  At lunch, at work, my co–homeroom teacher shows me a YouTube video of a black woman prepping a wig and placing it, firmly, on her head. She cuts the hair and shapes it as it sits on a mannequin in front of her. She colors the scalp to match her skin tone with what looks like chalk but my co–homeroom teacher says is not. Her hair is held against her head in small tight braids and she slips the wig overtop and shifts it back, then right, then left until it sits perfectly on her head.

  You do that every day? I say, setting down her phone, as she eats the mozzarella sticks that come with French fries that they serve on Tuesdays, neither of which I can quite bring myself to eat.

  My friend laughs at me. I stay mostly quiet because I do not want her to stop telling me things like she did this morning: out of nowhere, holding my arm and whispering to me, as the kids filed into the classroom and we sipped our third cups of coffee, You know my hair’s a wig.

  I did not, I said.

  Now she shows me this clip and then another, a different woman, a different type of wig. She explains to me the names and types of textures: 4A, 4B, 4C. She shows me another video of different types of braids.

  My hair is short and, while we watch the video, I keep reaching up to touch it, embarrassed, maybe, by the ease of it. How I only ran my fingers through it, still wet from my shower after my run, as I left the house this day.

  Kids walk past us and my co–homeroom teacher whispers to me. Her hair is natural, she says, nodding toward one girl and then another, her hair’s a weave, a wig; worst of all, she tells me, her face close to mine and her whisper getting quieter, nodding toward a girl carrying a tray of double mozzarella sticks, this girl, against any thinking person’s working knowledge of the fact that this is basically giving in to white supremacy, has somehow been allowed to get her hair relaxed.

  My co–homeroom teachers, more and more, share things like this with me, but also, they have a text chain with the three other black teachers at school, of which I am not—I know better than to ever ask to be—a part. I’m quiet more than I’m used to. I let them talk and try very hard to stay still and to listen and, every time they tell me things, I feel like I’ve lived a whole life without knowing anything and I’m so grateful that they trust me at least enough for this.

  I keep separate from them also. They don’t know about my leaving. They don’t know about my night class. They don’t know that we pay extra rent to live in a neighborhood we can’t afford so that our kids can go to a school that’s said to be better than the one my co–homeroom teacher’s kid will go to when he turns four next year.

  * * *

  I stay through the end of the day and help students with the paper I’ve assigned, which all of them are not quite comprehending. I’ve asked them to use one character in Hamlet to explore the gradations either of sanity or of culpability throughout. They’re too set on the desire to state one thing or the other—Ophelia’s absolutely insane, they want to argue; Hamlet’s absolutely just defending his father’s honor, they tell me. But what about, I say, pointing to a different moment, and they keep getting tripped up. They’ve never written anything longer than two pages, never been taught to cite sources. Their syntax twists and slips in this strange performance of an idea of academic prose that has been delivered to them by their teachers before. It obfuscates whatever it is they might be trying to say, and I sit with them and ask, one by one, But what do you want to say? and they tell me, and I say, So why don’t you write that?

  I can’t parse what of this is them being kids and what is having not been taught. In grad school, I taught comp, and there was plenty that my students couldn’t think or do. But there is something fundamental at this school that I can’t make sense of. What’s taken for granted about these kids is different than what was taken for granted about us when I was at my cloistered, white, and wealthy public school. Too many of the teachers, nearly all of the administrators, think our kids can’t think or do things that at my school we were told we had no choice but to think and do. Discipline stands in the place of any opportunity for exploration. Teachers try sometimes to teach the way we’re told they want us to be teaching, progressive, emphasizing inquiry and exploration, but then no one seems to trust the kids can learn if information isn’t delivered to them in small, concisely bullet-pointed worksheets and PowerPoints, so teachers summarize and truncate the information, covering themselves, too afraid of all the ways our performances are judged wholly on the scores kids get on tests.

  The kids have learned to expect that this is the only way to learn. When I ask questions but don’t give answers in advance, I see not only how scared they are, because no one here has taught them how to trust their ability to think, I see how desperate for it they are, how exciting and surprising and specific their brains are.

  When we sit together after school I keep a store of Doritos and Kit Kats and Reese’s cups from the teacher workroom on my desk, and as their theses start to clear up and their sentences begin to build more seamlessly together, we take breaks to eat and they make fun of my cardigans and my dress pants; they look at me long, head tilting toward one side, eyebrows cocked, and ask if I’ve ever thought of growing out my hair.

  * * *

  I skip my run the next morning because my back and legs and neck are sore, and I try to do a yoga video in the small room off our kitchen but I get bored. The woman talks as if I am her child and she just wants me to feel better. I mute her and lie back on the mat with my eyes closed until the children b
oth wake up and come out and crawl overtop of me and the two-year-old reaches her hand up my shirt and asks to nurse.

  * * *

  I’m at a work meeting. We are discussing whether the new policy barring head wraps is professional or racist and what type of orthopedic shoes should be allowed with doctor’s notes. The few times I’ve spoken up in meetings like this I’ve later been asked quietly by my boss not to any longer, so I sit in back and read the news on my phone.

  I text with a friend from college, Leah, who is finally pregnant after three rounds of IVF and has just found out she’s having twins.

  I get an email that says a Chilean writer, name linked to her Wikipedia page in parentheses, would like to sit in on my Thursday night class at the university. The Chilean writer read your syllabus and responded intensely to it, says the email. I’m sitting in the back with my two co–homeroom teachers and they both look at me as our boss talks. I send the Chilean writer the title and the author of the book we’re reading, as I’m requested to do, and turn my phone back over on my desk.

  * * *

  I teach one more class after our meeting and we have a debate about whether the ghost in Hamlet is real. I offer lunch on me as extra incentive for whoever wins. I give them ten minutes to plan their opening arguments. After that they craft rebuttals. After rebuttals come the cross-examinations and I egg both sides on, pointing out the holes in their opponents’ theses, pointing out how their opponents’ examples might be twisted to serve their arguments as well. We all get loud.