Our neighborhood was full of kids; on the way we passed some of the boys from Helene’s grade, who were shooting craps between two parked cars, the game obscured from the view of any parent that might look out their window.
At Chickie’s house, his two youngest nieces were playing jacks on the front walk while Pam and another girl lounged on the front steps. Helene and Rhonda passed through Chickie’s gate and I continued to the store.
Mrs. Menoni farmed a small plot in the yard at the front of her property, which may sound odd considering I grew up in Queens, but she’d lived in the neighborhood for so long that I’m sure she could remember when it was all farmland. And when it had all been Italian too; by the time I was growing up, the only ones left were too old or too broke to have joined in on the white flight. Helene’s friend Matt Testaverde’s family fell in the latter category; his father beat him with a belt every time he caught Matt hanging out with the rest of us, but that didn’t stop him.
Inside Mrs. Menoni’s dim, old-fashioned shop, she was sitting on a tall stool behind the counter, swaying gently to the classical music pouring out of the radio on the shelf behind her. She was in her eighties and, as always, was wearing a black dress and shawl. I liked her even though Matt Testaverde said she was a witch. He’d once told me that she could look at any pregnant belly and know the baby’s sex, and that she could put the evil eye on people too.
She smiled when she saw me. “Maria. Come va?”
“Non c’è male. E Lei?” I replied. Not bad. And you?
She laughed as she always did when I spoke in the minimal Italian she’d taught me, and answered, “I’m good.”
I picked out a loaf of bread, a carton of eggs, and onions, and put them on the counter beside a box of wrapped penny candies and a jarful of the Spaldeens we used to play stoopball with. After I’d paid, she pressed a piece of candy into my palm.
“Grazie,” I said, pronouncing all the letters as she’d taught me—graht-zee-a—then walked out of the store, the bread and onions in a paper bag. I heard a bloodthirsty chorus of kids’ voices shouting and jeering, and ran across the street to join the group clumped in Chickie’s front yard.
Helene had Rhonda pinned down on the patchy lawn and was punching her. I called for her to stop, but it was like she was in a fugue state, unaware of anything but the mechanical beating she was giving her friend. No one intervened. Then Helene landed one last punch and stood abruptly, like some kind of internal timer had dinged. By then all of the spectators had fallen quiet. I’d witnessed a lot of fights growing up, even a few where someone was hurt worse than Rhonda, but none had ever struck me as being so strange, or quite so brutal.
“Damn, Helene,” Matt Testaverde said.
She came over to me. She asked, “Did you remember to check the eggs?”
I held out the carton. She opened it, moved each of the eggs around to make sure none were cracked, then gave it back. Her expression was as calm as still water, her face was streaked with dirt and blue chalk dust from the skelly board one of Chickie’s charges had drawn on their front walk.
Rhonda was still curled on the lawn, crying. As we started back toward our house, it was only once we were almost out of earshot that Rhonda got to her feet and weakly threatened to have my sister jumped.
“Your nose is bleeding,” I said to Helene in French. Her lip was split too. She touched the tip of it lightly and sniffed hard at the blood creeping out.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine.”
“What happened? What did she do?”
She shrugged. “Nothing.”
“What?”
“Nothing recently. She tried to drown you though.”
I started to ask what she was talking about before I remembered. “But I thought you all were friends.”
She was amused. “Really?”
Confounded, I turned to her. She put her arm around me as we crossed the street toward our house.
“No, I was practicing something. Spies have to be able to get close to people, then turn on them. Just ’cause I’m not gonna be a spy myself doesn’t mean I shouldn’t know how to do it. You should never ask someone to do something you can’t.”
Helene opened our side door—it led into the kitchen, which was avocado green and had a large, generically African mask hanging on the wood-paneled wall. I followed her through the house, going first to the living room, where she grabbed Rhonda’s bag and blanket and tossed them out onto the front steps, then to the bathroom where she washed her face. I followed her to the kitchen where she announced she was going to start dinner. I couldn’t get over how calm she was. Holding up one of the onions I’d bought, she said in French, “Cut this for me, please? And set the table. After that go get your book. You can read it down here.”
Helene was at the range when our father came home. He was wearing his uniform. “Smells great!” he said cheerfully.
His good mood deflated the second he noticed her split lip. He lifted her chin and held it firmly in place. “What happened here?”
“Nothing,” she said as she tried to push his hand away.
“I told you already I’m tired of this.” He let her go and she turned back to the stove.
“You don’t have nothing to say for yourself?” He watched her back as she silently spooned rice onto a plate.
His voice was full of malice when he said, “No, of course you don’t. Just like your damn mother.”
He turned to me. “Marie take your food upstairs. I need to talk to your sister.”
I left the kitchen and hid on the staircase to eavesdrop on him shouting at her. Pop was furious. Her behavior reflected badly on him, he said, and he was going to do something about it. She didn’t say a word, but at one point in his tirade I heard her shriek—it sounded involuntary and made me think he’d hit her. Scared, I ran up to my room and read at my desk until I heard Helene on the stairs.
I looked up from the book. Her eyes were red and her face was puffy. I asked, “What happened?”
“He said if I’m gonna act so much like Maman I might as well go live with her.” She went to her door. “He’s sending me to Martinique.”
Before I could respond, her door closed and locked. I couldn’t believe it. How could Pop separate us so abruptly? I went over and knocked on her door, but she didn’t respond.
“When are you going?” I called.
She put on some music. Turned it up loud. The wall was thin—she did that sometimes when she didn’t want me to hear her cry.
* * *
—
I MISSED HELENE MORE than I ever had Agathe. Or maybe the way I missed my sister was simply less bearable—the difference between the sharp pain that takes you to the hospital and the dull ache you can ignore because you’ve always had it. I’d felt like I needed to be insulated against my mother—in the five years since she’d left, I’d spoken to her only occasionally, far less than my sister did.
But I wrote Helene once a week and spoke to her as much as I could, even though an overseas call was an expensive rigmarole back then (you had to book it through the operator and get rung back when the call was ready). That was when I first learned that Agathe owned a cattle farm with one of our uncles—a farm! I couldn’t picture it.
I felt guilty about Helene’s banishment—she’d gotten in that fight with Rhonda because of me. And I was lonely without her; she was without question my best friend. But I resented her too. She’d been rewarded for her bad behavior with an extended Caribbean vacation, and I thought Helene was the only one of us who was welcome at our mother’s, which triggered that old jealousy.
When Pop picked her up from the airport and returned her to our house in Queens six months later, she had a golden suntan and was ostensibly reformed. She walked through the door and said, “Jesus, neither of you know how to use a broom?
”
It was true that the household had fallen into shambles while she was gone. I hugged her hard as Pop came through the door behind her. She handed us both small parcels wrapped in newspaper—always a practical gift giver, instead of souvenir tchotchkes, she’d brought Pop back a Swiss Army knife that he still has, and gave me a little red address book that I kept for years.
And later that night, when I was in bed, I asked her in French how it had been down there. We could hear each other through the wall, and sometimes it was easier to be honest when we couldn’t see each other.
“It was fine. Good.”
“That’s it?”
“What else do you want me to say?”
“What was it like being with her?”
“Nice. She took care of me. Made pancakes sometimes. And she took me to the beach. Not all the time though, don’t be jealous. There’s a lot of work to do on a farm.”
“A farm. With animals and everything?”
“Of course. Cows and chickens.”
“I can’t picture it. I can only see her here, you know? In the city. In the kitchen. Or in Ohrbach’s that time when she bought me that nice coat with the toggles. Or the three of us in the button store on Delancey.”
She started to laugh, and I knew why. I said, “You thinking about that thing I did with the sample button?”
“Uh-huh.”
Every wall in that button store had been lined with shelves, and stacked on each were thousands of two-inch-tall cardboard boxes. Glued to each box was a sample of the button inside. They were organized by color; the effect was surreally beautiful. The samples were as appealing to me as candy, so once when no one was looking I’d ripped a round button off a box, and not knowing what to do with it once I had it, shoved it up my nose. I was six. It had seemed reasonable.
I remember a young clerk in a yarmulke holding my face and trying to claw it out of my nose, while a second one, fat, suspendered, his face red, had shouted, No! Get her to blow. Put a finger over her nostril and get her to blow it out! My sister hysterical with laughter, my mother frozen with mortification.
“You never did stuff like that,” she said, still giggling. “Maman got so mad at me for laughing, but I couldn’t help it.”
“Helly, are you glad to be back in Queens?”
It took her a few long moments to answer. “Yeah. I’m glad I’m here.”
It seemed obvious she was lying, which upset me. If she’d wanted to stay in Martinique, then she should’ve stayed. Sometimes I still worry that she came back out of obligation to me—out of guilt—and feel awful for taking her away from a place that made her happy.
Staying in Queens was contingent on her behavior, so Helene committed to being good. At least that’s how it looked to everyone else. She did better in school, just well enough to stay out of trouble. She joined the cheerleading squad and started dating a basketball player my father strongly approved of. She never got into another fight that I heard about. But I suspected she wasn’t really reformed. I could sense that her new personality was manufactured, and who she’d always been was still present just beneath it. I couldn’t prove it though—how do you expose a dormant sleeper?
1971
In our tiny corner of Queens, the shift in culture had been abrupt—suddenly everyone was wearing shades in school, military apparel, Afros. Bullets around their necks and lions’ teeth; red, black, and green flag buttons on their jackets. But I continued to look good. I kept pressing my hair, and when I applied makeup, it was with a light touch. I kept wearing the cream-colored blouses and wool pencil skirts that pleased my father. My mother had been gone for years, but I still had good home training. I spoke and dressed well, did well in school, accepted that I had to be twice as upright for white folks to think I was half as virtuous.
Robbie Young, according to my father, was the single corrupting element in my life. Pop hated Robbie; having known him for as long as my family had lived in Queens and being able to remember him as a goofy, happy little boy did nothing to strengthen my father’s affection for him.
Still, when Robbie was sent to jail at sixteen—to Spofford, a notoriously violent juvenile facility in the Bronx—my father pulled some strings to get him transferred to a reform school upstate. Pop was the type who would never hesitate to put his personal feelings aside in order to do right by a young black man.
While Robbie was at Warwick he’d mailed a package to our house. In it were two items. The first was for me—it was a picture of him posing solemnly in a flannel shirt, pointing at the camera with a hatchet. The second was for my father: Robbie had lopped the paw off a badger, preserved it, and wrapped it up in a bit of newspaper as a gift.
I think his intention was to make a lucky trinket, like a rabbit’s foot. Now I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t ghoulish, but Pop’s reaction surprised me: He took it as a threat. He must’ve believed that Robbie was rotten right down to his center, and everything he did was an expression of that rot. He told me that when Robbie got back I was forbidden to see him. I didn’t argue, but when Robbie was released, I gleefully ignored the ban. People thought I was the good sister, but really I was only good at being sneaky.
I saw him every day for a few weeks until one evening when Helene, with feigned casualness, broke the news that Robbie was back in the city. She’d picked her moment: Mr. Ali was also in the kitchen, having just dropped Pop off after work. He shared my father’s opinion on my boyfriend, which I knew because he’d lecture me on it. Even though, strictly speaking, it was none of his damn business.
“I hope you’re not planning to see him,” Pop said.
“Why would I? You already told me I couldn’t.”
“Hm.”
Mr. Ali put his nose in the air and took a deep sniff. “That boy. You can smell the recidivism coming off him from here.”
I smiled to hide my annoyance. He’d been right, of course. I knew Robbie well enough to know he thought he was smarter than everyone else, and by extension, that the rules shouldn’t apply to him. But what teenager wanted to hear their boyfriend condemned by a man who wasn’t even their father?
After Helene ratted me out, I didn’t see Robbie again for about a month. In that time he moved out of Chickie’s house and started sleeping on the futon in a foul little East Village one-bedroom, he and his roommate paying something like ninety dollars a month and “liberating” their electricity by patching into the building next door. This was the summer before I started college. I was sixteen; I’d been advanced in school a second time, so I was in the same graduating class as Helene. I took an inconsequential job because it was near Robbie’s apartment, and felt free to see him whenever I wanted because my father’s house was so far away.
One afternoon, the phone rang while I was at his place. He picked it up, then held out the receiver and told me it was Helene. She said she was at a pay phone nearby and that she needed to tell me something in person. She asked if I’d meet her in Tompkins Square Park.
Robbie insisted on coming with me. On the way there, we stopped at a pizza place and ate quickly at one of the Formica counters. We were having a good time until, as I was throwing out our paper plates, I looked over and saw him glance at the cashier, whose back was turned. Then he reached over the glass counter, opened the register, removed the stack of twenties, and reclosed it so smoothly it didn’t even ring.
“You dummy,” I said when we were out on the sidewalk. The insult was a part of our patter, but I was also annoyed. He tried to put his arm around me, but I shrugged him off. “I don’t care what you do when you’re alone, but don’t get me in trouble. If he’d called the cops they would’ve arrested us both.”
“You got to read Steal This Book. Then you’d understand.”
“Don’t give me that.”
“It’s true.”
I sighed, resigned. “I’m already rea
ding Soul on Ice like you told me.”
“Read it next,” he said, and added with a sarcastic smile: “Off the pigs. And welcome to the revolution, baby.”
I loved Robbie, which meant he could truly make me furious. In too much of what he said, I heard overconfidence about his limited life experience and in his aggressively average intelligence. He was the type of guy that, had he been born white, especially if he’d grown up with a little money, would probably have wound up at an excellent business school.
We walked into the park. Helene wasn’t there yet, so we took a free bench beside the monument where she’d told me to meet her. Tompkins Square was teeming with people: other teenagers, men playing chess, the homeless. Lively salsa music floated down from a nearby apartment building and mingled with the guitar that a cross-legged hippie in overalls played under a nearby tree.
Helene appeared with a backpack on. She’d gotten really beautiful. We both looked like Agathe, but Helene was also built like our mother’s family: tall and with an athletic body. I was much curvier, like the women on Pop’s side.
“Hey, Helene,” Robbie said as I hugged her.
She ignored him. “I thought we’d be able to talk alone, Marie.”
“What’s going on?”
“Well. I enlisted.”
Anger at the news flashed up in me, but I hid it as best I could. Robbie on the other hand couldn’t contain himself. “What’s the matter with you? They still fighting! You want them to send you to Vietnam?”
She gave him a withering look. He was wearing green fatigues, dark glasses, and a goatee, having started styling himself after the Panthers. “I don’t want to go over to Vietnam. I want to be in the army.”
“What’s the difference?”
American Spy Page 7