“Look at the world around you.” My mother hit her morning newspaper with the back of one hand, a lecture to start my day. “The least you can do is appreciate what you have, and try a little bit in school.” My plan was New York, a spot in a troupe, my own apartment. And only at that point, only after everything was in place, would I break the news to my mother: I wasn’t going to college.
And then, one Saturday near midnight, my ankle turned, and snapped as simply as a frozen branch.
I called the ambulance from the studio pay phone. Then I waited on the floor of the dark cavernous room, one calf propped on the opposite knee as the dispatcher had suggested. Slowly I rocked myself. I recited what I could of every poem I’d ever memorized in school. How was it I recalled so little? The faint light from the hallway phone booth glinted on the mirror and streaked my vision with long twinkling lines. In the silent studio, my mother’s clipped words of that morning came upon me unexpectedly. “I can’t say I understand why you pay so little attention to school, Maya. Maybe you just don’t care what you’re going to do with your life?” I would have stood, run, swept tight turns, anything to escape those words. But when I tried to rise, the pain that shot up my leg brought me, trembling, to the floor. Cautiously I touched my ankle and felt it hot and swollen, overflowing the bottom of my leggings.
I told my mother I’d caught my foot stepping across a gutter outside a friend’s house. After the cast came off, the pain wasn’t bad; it was the weakness of my ankle that brought tears when I navigated the high school stairwells, holding to the railing while the between-class rush clamored past.
Months later, Ms. Stuart sent a message through a classmate. Would I return my studio key, seeing how I wasn’t using it anymore? I imagined she was relieved not to have to talk to me in person. After a call to me that first week, in which she praised me for braving the ambulance and hospital by myself, she hadn’t phoned again. I understood and I wasn’t even angry. My potential gone, I’d become irrelevant. The day scheduled for my Manhattan audition passed without incident. I sat in chemistry class and stared out the window, and returned my exam paper without a single mark.
By that time my mother and I weren’t speaking. Our fight about college was weeks old.
“I’m not interested in a degree”—I’d faced her across the hallway—“because I don’t care about changing the system, and I’m not going to pound on anyone’s door. They can keep their shitty door.”
My mother eyed me, her crossed arms and slim figure imperturbable. I shook with rage.
“At least I’m going to have a life,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you never did anything but work. So Dad had to leave you. Anyone in his right mind would have left, because you aren’t even a real person someone can have a relationship with. You’re the director.” I put all the sneer I could into the word.
“At least I believe in trying to do something in this world.” She tilted her head, evaluating me. “What do you believe in?”
“I don’t believe in you.” I felt the words tear out of me. “I never have.”
For an instant her eyes wavered. I stood tense, my ankle throbbing, confused by her hesitation. It couldn’t be that I’d hurt her. How could I hurt her if she didn’t respect me? “Maybe you’re a redeeming angel at the Center,” I heard myself continue. “But in the rest of the world you’re just some lady who works all the time to hide the fact that she doesn’t even know how to talk to people.”
“Fine,” she said.
“I mean, it’s not like you have any friends.”
“Fine,” she said. And then again, “Fine.”
She disappeared into her bedroom, shutting the door without a sound.
My anger spent, I leaned against the wall, gratified and frightened by my own words.
After that, we didn’t fight. We didn’t talk unless absolutely necessary. She kept longer hours at the Center, I spent my evenings on the telephone. Since the injury, I’d gained the ten pounds and the curves my dancing had staved off, and I had even begun to go out with the guys in the varsity jackets when they called. Although I still skipped meetings with my guidance counselor, I cut fewer classes—I didn’t want to miss the chance to see my friends. The month after I would have auditioned for the dance troupe, I filled out applications to the handful of colleges whose brochures I had received in the mail.
When I told my mother I’d decided on Purchase, she rested her morning coffee on the table. She looked over the top of her newspaper. I could read nothing in her expression. “How much does it cost per semester?” she asked, and I told her. “I can give you a third of that per year,” she said. “The rest is up to you.”
She was glad to be getting rid of me, I knew.
That August, before I went away, I found out she had known all along. She was busy showing the house, making preparations to move to a tiny apartment above the offices of the Center in Brooklyn. I was packing up my room when I realized I’d never retrieved my dance tapes from the studio. At my scribbled request, Ms. Stuart mailed back the cassettes, along with a Post-it note that said only: “All the best of luck—Ms. S.” Enclosed in the envelope were my old audition application forms, as well as a letter, dated the previous year: “Dear Ms. Stuart, It has come to my attention that Maya is spending her time at the dance studio. I understand, of course, that she is in good hands with you. However, should there be any emergency or need to contact me for any reason whatsoever, you may reach me at the above number during work hours and at home after seven in the evening. I thank you. Best, Hope Goodman.”
There was no further note of explanation from Ms. Stuart. I wondered whether she had simply included the letter for thoroughness, hoping through this final mailing to rid herself of all remaining traces of a student who had sorely disappointed.
So my mother had known all along. Not even the gold-lit studio was mine. I couldn’t fool her, I couldn’t claim a corner of the world free from her judgment. And I couldn’t even make sense of her behavior. If she knew I was dancing all that time, why didn’t she try to stop me? Why write to my teacher as if she accepted my choice—as if she didn’t think I should be studying or marching, anything but dancing away every free hour?
All I understood was that my world had been deflated once more. There was nowhere I could hide from her, not while I lived at home. I counted the days until I could leave.
College was all I had hoped it would be. Other than brief telephone calls and the occasional mailed news clipping, my mother stayed in her world and left me to mine. I moved almost everything I owned to Purchase; my mother’s new apartment had little room for storage. And I went to visit her for only a handful of vacations. I used schoolwork as my excuse—a lie I knew my mother wouldn’t challenge. I found summer jobs in Purchase, and went home with local friends for long weekends. My mother never complained. “Your choices are your own,” she said.
Between classes and dormitory life and the dance troupe, I had more friends than ever before. Chief among them was Ina, who shared my crushes on three different guys, and who knew to leave me alone after rehearsal when I cursed as I fumbled with the bottle of pain reliever and barked at her rather than allow the tears into my voice. “Okay, so you’re just a recreational dancer now,” she would say to me later. “No shame there.”
Each fall my mother arrived for Parents’ Day, sat through the obligatory programs, and shook hands with my friends and their families. As the morning wore on I answered her questions more tersely than I intended, and when I responded to her curiosity about my classes with open irritation she didn’t persist. By the time it occurred to me to ask, as a peace offering, about the Center, she had already glanced at her watch. She never stayed past lunch.
Thanksgiving Day of my junior year, I arrived in New York City early in the afternoon. The first cabdriver I hailed at Grand Central refused to go to the part of Brooklyn where my mother lived. The second noted the address with
a grim expression, then punched his fare button and sped from the curb without a word.
I was prepared for the sharp shifts between neighborhoods, but they happened even more decisively than I had recalled. As soon as we turned a corner a few minutes past the bridge, the white people were gone. Signs in English and Spanish advertised lottery tickets and Caribbean groceries. A few markets that hadn’t yet closed for the holiday spilled elderly women onto the streets and absorbed a few others; every customer was black or Latina.
Then suddenly, as we turned another corner, all the people were gone. Block after block of burnt-out or simply abandoned buildings lined glass-littered streets. We wove along pavement gouged with potholes, intruded on by gutted cars and corroded dumpsters. The driver checked the deserted street through his rearview mirror and drove faster. A few figures huddled in a park; a darkened sign advertised a check-cashing center. The driver shut the windows, sealing us inside the cab with the dull static of the radio news. Then barbed-wire-topped walls and heavy metal grates indicated that we’d reached populated buildings again. We passed church after church, low brick buildings hemmed in by high fences and identifiable only by signs announcing their heavenly mission. We passed the school most of the children at the Center’s programs attended, one wall of its basketball court spray-painted with the street names of dead children. “That’s the local roll call,” my mother once told me. “The wall gets more crowded every year.” I knew from years of overhearing her telephone conversations that many of them died not from gunshots, as outsiders so often assumed, nor from AIDS or even asthma, but in fires or accidents. The buildings we drove past were traps loaded with lead paint, unsafe elevators, unbarred windows, trash heaps, and always, rats.
Slowing in front of my mother’s building, the cabdriver glared at me in the rearview mirror. “This entire neighborhood ought to be condemned,” he said.
“It has been.” Without meaning to, I’d parroted my mother’s favorite comeback. I paid him without another word. He weighed my tip unappreciatively in his palm, then drove off.
The green letters on the sign above me read “Center for Community Renewal, est. 1972. Together We Rise.” I rang the buzzer and glanced up and down the littered street. When the door unlocked I pushed against it; it hit the inside wall of the entryway hard. The sound echoed in the darkened honeycomb of rooms.
The guests crowding in the narrow kitchen of my mother’s second- floor apartment were mostly strangers to me. Other than my mother’s assistant Faye and her husband, there were a young black couple, an older woman with a Jamaican accent, and a red-haired white woman near my age. Faye’s two children played on the floor with a boy I didn’t recognize.
My mother kissed me on the cheek, murmured a greeting, and turned away so fast I hardly had time to answer. Then Faye, whom I’d met only twice before, greeted me with an unexpected hug. When she released me, my mother was already sitting at the table and indicating that I should take the empty seat beside the couple—as far away from her, I noticed, as possible.
I sat and took small helpings, cursing silently when my knee hit a leg of the table and the jolt rattled dishes. As usual in my mother’s presence, my body felt as clumsy as if I’d tripped in the middle of a dance and fallen to the floor. I didn’t speak.
At the table, the usual conversation.
“But if we push the community initiatives first, the jobs program may suffer.” Faye was shaking her head at my mother, and soon they were embroiled in a debate about strategy and timing. The couple chimed in now and then, as did Faye’s husband; the Jamaican woman, who stared moodily at the barred window, and the red-haired woman, who looked stunned to be at this gathering, were both silent. The red-haired woman was sharp-jawed and pretty, and her slow gaze, which landed on me several times, didn’t seem to be taking anything in. I guessed that she was a newcomer to the Center, one who had ended up in the battered women’s shelter at last and was being enrolled in a job training or educational program. I stopped meeting her vacant eyes; we would both be more comfortable.
I rearranged the food on my plate and passed dishes on whenever they came to me. I focused on my diet; in a few weeks I would have to dance in the winter show, in a skintight costume.
As the conversation continued, it seemed to me that my mother’s interest was waning. Her braid had come undone, and as she listened she raked her fingers distractedly through her fine brown hair. Then she re-braided it down the back of her neck, and clipped it with a sky-colored barrette. The navy dress she was wearing hung loose on her shoulders.
“You look great, Mom,” I offered across the table, after a long pause in the conversation. “You’ve lost weight, haven’t you?” I meant it as a compliment. On the train from Purchase I had promised myself: This time I would try to get along with her.
No one spoke. And then my mother laughed so brightly that, sitting at this table full of strangers, children giggling on the floor behind me, I felt something turn into place. It was a window, or a door, swinging firmly shut, closing out the light for good with the breath-catching length of that laugh, its high, unaccustomed pitch.
I waited through dessert and coffee, through the couple’s repeated refusals of second helpings of pie, the Jamaican woman’s refusal to indulge in a first, the red-haired woman’s silent acceptance of whatever was put in front of her. The children were summoned to the table and my mother gave a long speech about how glad we all were to welcome Yvette to the Center; the red-haired woman blushed.
At one point, the Jamaican woman looked up at me, and I thought I saw something pass across her face. An instant later, her expression was once again blank. But for some reason I felt sure that she also saw what was happening. My mother, not usually one for pleasantries, was delaying her guests; she was hoping I’d tire and excuse myself before the two of us were left alone.
After the guests were gone, my mother denied it for more than an hour. The apartment was quiet, the dishes stood drying in the drain. Still I persisted. At last she said that she hadn’t wanted me to know the cancer had come back. “You’re happy at school,” she informed me, and I understood that the grim smile that twisted her face was meant to let me off the hook. I thought of the time, after my first semester of college, when she said she was impressed that I had made decent grades and hadn’t dropped any classes. She didn’t have to say anything more—the compliment said quite enough. I knew I had finally stopped being a disappointment to her, because she no longer expected anything from me.
Now her smile accused me of more than any words could. What would have been the point in letting me know the cancer was back? I’d hardly proven myself the type who could be leaned on.
Our fight that night felt preordained, each question and retort inevitable, as though we were playing out scripted parts.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked for the dozenth time.
“It seems to me, Maya, that a person needs to figure out how to take care of herself before she takes care of anyone else. And you’ve got plenty to sort out in your own life.”
I threw my hands up in anger, which prompted her into another prim lecture. “This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. Immaturity. You’ve always wasted your energy on distractions—”
“Distractions?”
“You’ve got enough to worry about with your schoolwork and choosing a direction for yourself. When you get your life in order, then you can worry about other people’s troubles.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Trust you to do what? What could you do? Personally administer chemotherapy?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I can help.”
“I don’t heed help. I’m going to be fine.”
In the end she was too tired to continue, and I trailed her to her bedroom. There, some magic possessed me. Without pause for thought, I approached her, and she, caught off guard, allowed it.
She; cried as I loosened the laces of her shoes and slipped them off her feet. “
I’m perfectly all right,” she said. “I’m just upset.” Her dark eyes were ringed with fatigue. “You tire me out.”
Kneeling before her, I rolled the knee-high stockings off her calves and held one of her feet in my hands. The rough skin was cool against my palms. Her eyes followed my motions. In my outstretched hands her foot looked like a child’s, narrow and helpless. I stared at the contrast between the pallor of my skin, the olive cast of hers. With her dark hair and my pale coloring, my mother and I had never looked anything alike. When, as a child, I became separated from her in a crowded place, I would be shocked, then injured, by strangers’ inability to recognize us as mother and daughter. Walking down the street with her afterward, I would imagine a narrow golden thread connecting us; I wondered whether, if I turned my head fast enough, I might one day catch a glimpse of it.
“I’m not an invalid.” She kicked my hands away. “Leave me alone.”
“I’m not going to leave you alone.” I wagged my head angrily to mask my own confusion. “I’m going to help you into bed so you can rest.” But the spell was broken. As I locked eyes with her, I was struck only by the differences between us. On this night, in my mother’s small bedroom, we might as well have been strangers.
“Since when do you care about my life?” she asked, and there was no bitterness in her voice, only a matter-of-fact exhaustion that made my hands tremble as I turned off the lamp beside her bed.
From the street one story below my mother’s window came the sound of a bottle smashing.
“Go to sleep,” she said.
The spare room where I stayed that night was full of unfamiliar sounds. The sheets whispered with my every motion, the bed frame creaked when I knelt to look down on the glittering pavement. I watched long angular shadows loom and sway on the street well before their owners appeared and passed along the block. From several blocks away sirens wailed, and fell silent. Twice there were loud bangs that could have been doors slamming, and once someone shouted a woman’s name and there was laughter. At each noise I started, then sat alert with the covers drawn to my chest.
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