All the Greys on Greene Street

by Laura Tucker

  The guy from the deli on Houston and Sixth was whistling as he hosed off the sidewalk outside, and the smell of the cool spray hitting the pavement made it feel like it was already summer. Except that I didn’t want to think about summer just yet. Alex would spend the summer at the beach with his Auntie Em, on a little island with no cars on it. Richard would go his grandparents on his mom’s side, on another little island off North Carolina. My parents are both orphans, and my mom doesn’t really like to go away, so I’d planned on hanging out with my dad and Apollo in the studio like I did last summer, drawing and mixing paints and doing odd jobs for them. But what was going to happen now was another thing I didn’t know.

  I stepped carefully over the trash bags crowding the narrow sidewalk. Before she went to bed, my mom was always moving—sorting, stacking, foraging for her sculptures. She’d give me a boost into a dumpster: “Poke around and see if there’s anything interesting in there.” If I found something I thought she’d like, I’d pass it out so she could take a look, turning it slowly in her strong hands. I’d love that.

  Richard didn’t say anything more until we were a block away from school. Then: “Also, I got up in the middle of the night and ate some ham.”

  As if we’d been talking about dinner at Alex’s house the whole time! That’s just what he’s like.

  Maybe that’s why I told him. Or maybe it was the restless feeling of spring in the air, or the noisy cluster of kids on the corner enjoying their last minutes of freedom before the first bell. All I know is that the words had slipped out of my mouth before I’d decided I wanted to say them.

  “My mom,” I said, and stopped to wait for my voice to get less shaky.

  A turning cab driver honked, and I grabbed at Richard’s elbow to hurry him along, glad Alex had gone ahead. Even though Richard doesn’t like to keep things from his parents, he can if you need him to. Alex likes to think of himself as a tough guy, but he’d crumple like a Coke can if Linda so much as looked at him twice, and I needed this to stay secret.

  I cleared my throat and started again. “She’s not getting up right now.” As soon as the words were out, I wished I could call them back.

  Alex would have made a joke; Richard didn’t. “How long?”

  “A few days,” I said. Not strictly true. According to our third grade teacher Mrs. Prewitt, a few meant three, so I changed my answer: “Several.” Several means four or more, although I couldn’t be sure Richard would remember that.

  The last time my mom had gone to bed, of course, the answer had been many. Many, Mrs. Prewitt said, was an uncountable noun.

  Richard’s eyes widened. Patient for once, I waited as he marched in his mind through everything that meant, hoping he’d see an angle I’d missed. But he only scratched at his forearm, fingernails carving silvery trails into the dark brown of his skin.

  “You’ll bleed,” I warned him, from experience. We’re all allergic to the herbal stress-reduction potion that Linda sprays on her sheets, even Alex. Not to mention that it smells like a tissue you’d find at the bottom of somebody’s grandma’s purse.

  Richard frowned but switched to rubbing his arm with the flat of his fingers. “What if it’s like it was last time?”

  I looked at the lines on his forearm and didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say that wasn’t too terrible to say out loud.

  “Ollie. If she doesn’t get up and your dad isn’t around, then what’s going to happen . . .”

  I cut him off with a fast shake of my head, and he closed his mouth, which was good because I really didn’t want him to finish that sentence.

  We’d caught up with the kids at the corner, their backpacks in a messy pile at the center of the circle. As the first bell rang, I peeled off the blue sweatshirt and tossed it back to Alex, then sped up to walk into the building with my art friend Lady Day.

  “It’s going to be fine,” I called back to Richard over my shoulder. But I didn’t turn all the way around so I wouldn’t have to see the look on his face.

  SMUDGE

  Lady Day Rodriguez is the other really good artist in my class. We always sit together in art; Mrs. Ejiofor usually lets us start working while she gets the boys settled down.

  That day, we were finishing our self-portraits in charcoal. I hate charcoal. You’d think I’d like it because there’s no color involved, but I hate the horrible scratching sound it makes against the paper and the smudgy mess of it. Every time Mrs. Ejiofor gives us an assignment to use it, I tell myself that I’m going to keep my filthy fingers away from the white spaces on my paper, that I’m going to use one hand for blending while keeping the other one clean, that I will neatly shade and hatch and highlight instead of making a furious little Pigpen cloud.

  Every time, though, I end up with a blob of grey on dirty paper, and I walk out of the classroom looking like one of the kids in the book of Dust Bowl photographs my dad used to suggest I look through when I was complaining about something. Give me a properly sharpened Blackwing any day.

  “I have a good fact for you,” Lady Day said. Her grandma sent her a book of cat facts for her birthday. “Okay. What’s the biggest difference between dogs and cats?”

  I knew the answer to that one. “If you die in your apartment, your dog won’t eat you. Your cat will.”

  Apollo told me that. He also told me that the difference between a cat person and a dog person is that a cat person generally doesn’t mind the idea of being eaten.

  Lady Day looked a little deflated, but also impressed. She has a calico named Sammie who steals the celery out of the Kung Pao chicken when Lady Day’s dad brings home Chinese. I wouldn’t care because I never eat the celery anyway, but Lady Day’s dad lets her do it because he thinks it’s funny. (Sammie is a girl. Calico cats almost always are, according to the book.)

  Anyway, Sammie doesn’t eat the celery, either. She licks it.

  “I was going to say that a cat will explore a new room or situation without looking back for her owner,” Lady Day said, adding a few scattered freckles to the bridge of her self-portrait’s nose. “Dogs need more support. Cats are more independent.”

  That seemed right. You didn’t see cats looking tragic outside of the Eagle coffee shop on Broadway, sure that they’d been heartlessly abandoned even though they could see their owners through the window, reading the Post and eating scrambled eggs on toast like they did every morning.

  Maybe cat people were like cats and dog people were like dogs. Lady Day was definitely a cat person, curious and independent.

  “You think Sammie would eat you if you died?” I asked Lady Day, accidentally making my self-portrait more accurate by smearing a black thumb across my cheek.

  “I’m pretty sure she would.” Lady Day wiped her long, graceful fingers methodically on a damp paper towel, then dabbed them dry on another.

  “Harsh,” I said, experimentally blowing on the surface of my drawing like Mrs. Ejiofor had showed us, to clear some of the dust and expose the white surface below. Nothing happened, except maybe the paper looked a little damp.

  Lady Day blew expertly at hers. An obedient puff of dust rose, exposing pristine white detail beneath. “What do I care, if I’m dead? Why should she go hungry when I’m lying there like a big stupid roast beef?” She picked up her charcoal again. “Something’s going to eat me eventually. It might as well be Sammie.”

  Apollo had been right.

  I hoped Lady Day would tell me another cat fact, but her long, lean body was bent nearly double over her drawing, and the tip of her tongue stuck out one corner of her mouth, meaning she was done with talking. Charcoal, it turned out, was the perfect medium to capture the spun texture of her hair when it’s brushed out and pulled up into two clouds on top of her head.

  I smudged halfheartedly at my own self-portrait a little while longer, but it was hopeless. I spent the rest of the period at the big
sink, scrubbing at my hands and face with the waxy grey paper towels from the metal dispenser and thinking about what a mess everything was.

  I hadn’t been keeping the thing with my mom a secret—or maybe I had been, a little. But having it out in the open had changed it, the way an apple turns brown after it’s cut. I didn’t like the way I felt now that Richard knew the truth. Anything could happen, and I couldn’t stop it.

  There was something else, too: I felt ashamed.

  All the stinky pink soap in the world wouldn’t get rid of the black half-moons the charcoal had left under my nails, but I clawed at my palms anyway; it was better than thinking.

  Even if I could find my dad, what if he didn’t want to come back? What if he couldn’t?

  I ran a paper towel around the edge of the wide, trough-style sink to pick up the grey droplets I’d scattered, then dried the stainless taps to a shine.

  I was a cat person, too. At least, I thought I was. But I couldn’t help wondering if it was possible for an independent, curious cat person to be having a please-love-me, don’t-leave-me, desperate, doggy kind of day.

  PURR

  Richard had piano practice after school, and Alex had to pick his little sister Maggie up and take her to his mom’s office. So after a quick stop at Mr. G’s, I went home by myself and got back into bed with my mom.

  I almost told her about the math test, but that wasn’t the kind of thing she cared about even before she went to bed. “Bobby Sands is dead,” I said instead. I’d seen the headline at Mr. G’s.

  My mom put her arms around me.

  “He believed in something more than his own life,” she whispered, and I couldn’t tell if I thought that was the craziest thing I’d ever heard, or the bravest.

  We lay there quiet together for a while and then my mom said, “I’m sorry about all this, baby girl.” Her voice sounded weak, watered-down.

  I don’t want you to feel bad. I want you to get up.

  Instead I said, “It’s not your fault.” Then I added, “It’s Dad’s fault. And Vouley Voo’s.”

  She shook her head. “No, babe. This isn’t him; it’s me,” she said. “The work I’m making—it’s not right.” She paused. “And yes, him leaving, a little. But mostly me.”

  That would have been the right time to tell her about the note, but my dad had asked me not to tell anyone. And I knew it would worry her, especially the part about not everyone agreeing that what he was doing was the right thing.

  I did ask her if she’d talked to him, though. Even with my head on her chest, I could feel her slowly shake her head. “Can you?” Another shake, and I believed her. If my mom knew how to get in touch with my dad, she would have told me then.

  We were quiet for a minute, and I could feel her going away again, so I asked her to tell me a story I’d heard a thousand times. “Tell me the story of how you started making your sculptures?”

  She shifted next to me. “Olympia, please—you know this story.”

  I did, but I’d never gotten tired of hearing it.

  My mom used to make gigantic paintings. When I was born, she stopped. Then she started to make sculptures out of little things she found lying around our house. She uses garbage, mostly—except that things stop being garbage when my mom puts them into one of her sculptures.

  For a long time, she didn’t show anyone what she was making, until last year when she got picked up by an important gallery uptown. They’d given her space in a big show coming up in the fall, but she only had part of one new piece. This was another reason that she really needed to get out of bed.

  “Please?”

  She bunched the pillow under her head and left her arm there. I felt her chest rise as she took one deep breath and then another.

  “Before you were born, I made paintings, like the one in the living room.” The canvas in the living room covered an entire wall between the windows, all soft blues and greens and yellows melting into one another. Looking at it made you want to hold your breath and go quietly, as if you were deep in a forest and trying not to disturb any of the creatures living there. Alex said it made him think of swimming underwater.

  “It was hard for me to paint after you were born. Your dad would take care of you so I could work, but I’d just stand in front of the canvas. I didn’t have the same things to say anymore.

  “Then, when you were a toddler, Apollo gave you a set of blocks, made of beautifully sanded and polished wood. There were columns and triangles and long planks, graceful arches, chunky half-moons. And there were a lot of them.”

  My mom and I had always agreed that was one of the best things about those blocks: there were enough of them to really make something.

  “You played with the blocks. I wasn’t allowed to touch them.” Even though the room was dark, I could hear a smile creep into my mom’s voice.

  “But I wasn’t allowed to get up, either; I had to stay and watch while you squatted there like a bossy little sumo wrestler with your ‘Pollo blocks,’ your brow furrowed with the concentration it took to pinch and stack.” Her voice turned dreamy and sad then. “We have to work hard to learn the things we know.”

  The tone in her voice ran chills down my spine, and I was relieved when she started talking again.

  “If you’d let me build with you, I probably never would have made anything.” That part wasn’t true. The thing about people like Lady Day and my mother and Apollo is that they have to make things. “Sitting there on the floor with you, I’d sweep the floor with my hand. A house like ours, one that used to be an industrial space? You could sweep every day for a thousand years, and it never gets clean, not really. I started to see things in the garbage I was sweeping up, things I’d never seen before. You taught me to notice, Olympia.”

  That was usually where the story ended. As if on cue, a heavy truck backed up against one of the loading docks downstairs, and two men shouted at each other in Spanish.

  This time, though, my mom kept going.

  “The tenants before us here made blouses. I spent hours on my hands and knees when I was pregnant, pulling straight pins out of the spaces between the boards.”

  I’d never heard this part before.

  “Apollo saved the day by renting an industrial magnet. It looked like a lawnmower, but I was so frightened I had to leave—those spiteful pins flying through the air, thousands of them, the terrifying noise they made when they hit. Even after the magnet, though, even after I’d swept the floor hundreds of times, a twisted corkscrew of metal worked its way up through the floorboards and bit into my palm one morning as I was sitting with you, taking a pass with my hand over the planks.”

  She raised her hand, and even in the half-light, I could see it: a white half-moon at the base of her thumb. I rubbed it under my fingertip, felt the slight ridge of scar tissue under her skin. I’d seen that scar a million times, but I’d never thought to ask how she’d gotten it.

  “We found out later that they made ship propellers here, before it was a textile factory. For massive ships, like the Lusitania.” The hardness in her voice made me twist around to look at her. “The cut was a message. That nasty little piece of metal had missed its grand voyage to drive home what everyone had told us: that this was no place to raise a child.”

  My mouth opened to protest, but when I saw the look on her face, I closed it again. It didn’t seem like she was talking to me anymore.

  “That was the day I made my first sculpture. Sitting there on the floor with you, I found the stuff of a thousand nightmares. Vicious little wire twist ties; deadly, candy-colored pushpins; an aspirin, escaped. I used my own pincer grip to sweep a penny into the pocket of my jeans. A penny can kill a baby—so fast, so easily. The menace in these everyday objects overwhelmed me. Why couldn’t everyone see the wicked, fanged mouth at the center of the plastic chip that held the bread bag closed?”

  I kn
ew the sculpture she was talking about. It had sat on her table in the big room before it sold for a lot of money. There was a picture of it in a book about women’s art that had come out in the fall. It had always scared me a little, but she’d never told me the story behind it.

  I waited, but she didn’t say anything more, so I lay there and listened to her breathe. Eventually, I closed my eyes, too—just for a minute. But when I woke up, it was dark.

  My mom was still curled up next to me, motionless, and suddenly I could see how you could stay in bed forever, if that was where your mom was.

  I lay next to her, breathing in the warmth of her, and remembered another one of Lady Day’s cat facts. We had been doing string art that day in Art Club, winding colored embroidery floss in patterns around nails we’d driven into painted plywood.

  “People think a cat’s purr means ‘I’m happy,’ but it doesn’t always,” Lady Day had said, tying off a piece of fuchsia thread with a neat, close knot. She’d picked up a fat skein of turquoise then, pulling at the loose end to free it.

  “A sick cat will purr, and a scared one, too,” she told me. “Purring just means ‘Don’t leave.’”

  My arm was asleep. I tried to wiggle my fingers without waking my mom, but she stirred, so I carefully inched myself out from underneath her and got up.

  I crossed the room silently, holding my pins-and-needles arm in front of me like it was broken. But when I turned to shut the door behind me, I saw that my mom wasn’t asleep after all. Her eyes were open, looking blankly at the indentation in the covers where my body had been. There was no expression on her face at all.

  My numb hand sat, alien and slick, on the cut glass doorknob.

  “Mom,” I said. “Are you going to get up soon?”

  She didn’t do or say anything for so long I worried she hadn’t heard. When I was about to ask again, though, she shook her head and closed her eyes.