by Liz Murray
When the bell finally rang, I quickly stuffed the pages into my bag. I always tried to slip out ahead of the rest of the students. They made me nervous. Walking between them as I left class, tension tightened my whole body. At least, I thought, Ma had finally scraped all of the lice off my head, using quell and a comb. Still, I was clearly different from them all. They knew it, and so did I; their stares proved it. My dirty clothing hung heavily off my body. My socks were always weeks old, and I wore my underwear until the crotch dissolved away into nothing. I was aware of the stench I gave off, so I knew they must have been aware, too.
Who cares what people think? Daddy had said. that’s their hang-up. I tried to tell myself their judgment shouldn’t matter. I was, in one way, going through life much faster than all of them—who else cursed freely in front of their parents, went to bed anytime they wanted, knew about sex, and could demonstrate, crudely, how to mainline drugs when they were just six years old? This knowledge did give me some feeling of maturity around them. Still, in ways that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, the other kids seemed far more together than I was, in the sense that they were actual kids. It was intimidating, the way they mingled so easily with one another and made friends, or raised their hands to answer the teacher’s questions, exuding so much confidence. Maybe I was growing up faster, but I worried that I might be skipping too many steps along the way, taking shortcuts that left me feeling scattered, full of holes. Different.
It was the feeling that I was different that gnawed at me in the classroom, pressing me deeper into my exhaustion, racking my stomach with sharp pains. I was always grateful for the end of the day, when I could finally go.
Soon I was outside again, and then after a quick walk, I was home, the school day blessedly far behind me. I was just glad to be somewhere I could rest. And I did, all through the afternoon and into the evening; I slept on the couch so that I could be in the center of the apartment, in the middle of everything.
The following month, December, after weeks of explaining to Ma about the way school made me feel down, she allowed me, against what she called her better judgment, to stay home much of the time. Together, we watched game shows and ate mayonnaise sandwiches on the couch again. Daddy slept until early afternoon and became angry every time he woke to find me home. “Lizzy! You stayed home again?” he’d shout, as though he was somehow surprised at what was becoming a regular occurrence. “You have to go next time, okay?” he’d say, never following up to wake me in the morning. He’d just see me at home, day after day, and shake his head in disapproval.
One Thursday, three weeks into my time off, a morning when Lisa had already lost a fight to get me dressed and left for school, there was a hard knock at the door. I was the only one awake for it. From the hallway, I heard two people talking: a woman and a man. They knocked again, louder this time, making my heart race. I tiptoed over to Ma and Daddy’s bed. In their sleep, neither of them flinched. Then I heard voices in the hall speaking to each other, something about a bad smell. I knew they were talking about our apartment. Over the last six months or so, Ma and Daddy hadn’t cleaned much. Dirt was collecting on everything. A broken window from one night when Ma lost her temper, slicing open her hand as she punched through it, remained broken. To the best of our ability, we staved off rain and snow from falling into the kitchen with the occasional taped-up plastic bag. But it wasn’t effective, and the kitchen was often wet and the apartment freezing. Lisa and I both got the flu that winter. Also the fridge had broken down, and ever since, Daddy had put quarts of milk and packages of cream cheese on the windowsill. But what the people in the hallway must have smelled was the bathtub.
Somehow the drain had gotten clogged. Lisa took a shower in it anyway by using a bucket to scoop out just enough of the old water, and then turning the bucket over so she could stand on top of it to make a little island within the dirty tub. She did this repeatedly, but the water she used was never emptied and over the months it had turned black. There was equally dark slime collecting around the tub’s edges. If you stirred the water, a swampy smell kicked up.
The knocking subsided momentarily, and the voices slid a piece of paper under the door. After a few minutes, I heard them leave.
At my bedroom window, I peeked out onto the street below. A dark man holding a briefcase and a tan woman in a long coat approached a double-parked car. The man looked up and I ducked back, convinced he’d spotted me. But they just drove off.
Slowly, I tiptoed to the door and lifted the paper up. It ordered the parent(s) or guardian of Elizabeth Murray to hereby phone a Mr. Doumbia regarding her truancy from school. There was a phone number at the bottom, along with a cartoon outline of an adult holding a child’s hand. I didn’t know the exact definition of truancy, but figured it had to do with me never showing up to school.
I double-checked to make sure Ma and Daddy hadn’t heard anything. Then I folded the paper and ripped it, again and again, tucking the small pieces into different parts of the trash, under wet tissues, banana peels, and beer cans, until it was completely invisible.
One night, Ma came home and announced to us that she’d just made a new friend in the neighborhood, a woman named Tara.
“I was just in line at the drug spot to get a nickel bag and I saw this other white lady standing there. That’s rare, ya know? So I started talking to her.” Ma paused, seeming to decide right there in our living room, “I like her.”
They’d hit it off so well that they left and used their coke together, at Tara’s apartment on 233rd Street and Broadway. Soon after, Ma, Lisa, and I were there all the time.
Tara had a limp, blond mullet, and a light facial twitch when she was irritable. With her bulky sweaters and ripped stonewashed jeans, she might have perpetually been on her way to an eighties hair-band rock concert, if not for her age, which had to be in her early forties. Her seven-year-old daughter, Stephanie, was wild, prone to unprovoked tantrums at any random time, which made Lisa and me make fun of her relentlessly, behind her back. With olive skin, small, dark eyes, and relaxed jet-black hair, Stephanie must have looked more like her father, whom Tara didn’t keep in touch with. Ma told me he used to be kind of famous for acting in a seventies sitcom. But for all the money he made, Stephanie, Tara said, got almost nothing.
In Tara’s apartment, Lisa, Stephanie, and I played with toys and watched cartoons while she and Ma got high in her kitchen. The noises they made setting up the drugs in Tara’s place, I noticed, were different from the way Ma and Daddy sounded; Tara kept up conversation the entire time. Before that, I’d assumed there was some technical reason Ma and Daddy were so quiet. Listening to Tara and Ma, I realized this wasn’t so, and it made me wonder whether Ma and Daddy were as close as I assumed they were.
In their time together, Ma and Tara circulated the same three conversation topics: Stephanie’s dad, the quality of their bag, and each other’s chosen method of getting high. Tara sniffed her coke; I found out that this is what most people did with it. Ma and Daddy were different in that way. I’d hear Ma explain herself almost every time Tara had to watch her use the syringe.
“Good God, Jeanie, how do you do that to yourself?”
“Better than letting the powder cut your nose into pieces. You think I wanna be left without cartilage up there by the time I’m fifty?” Ma said.
“Anyway, Jean, he thinks raising a child is as simple as mailing a check whenever you feel like it, which, did I mention, he never does anyway. Well, you know there’s a lot more to it than that.”
I found out that Ma wasn’t a good conversationalist around new people, at least not when she was high.
“I know” was usually all she said back; but that was all Tara needed to keep going.
“Well, his head’s gonna spin when I sue the pants off him. Mr. Big Shot, he ain’t gonna get away with this,” she’d insist, pointing two fingers forward, a cigarette pinched between them.
It turned out that Ma and Tara had a lot in common. They�
�d both grown up with abusive, absentee fathers, and had kids before they were ready, and they both lived off of government assistance. Above other drugs, they both preferred the rush coke provided them. But they differed in one key respect—the methods they resorted to in order to sustain their habits. Tara gasped dramatically, listening to Ma talk about how much she hated waiting for welfare each month, and how it was almost easier to hustle guys in the bar or to stop people on the street for cash.
“At least I know if I’m out there, I don’t have to wait. I hate to wait,” Ma said.
Tara called Ma’s scrounging “panhandling” and said it was beneath them both. But Ma couldn’t care less about her pride when she wanted to get high.
“Oh no, Jean, we’ve got to get you to cut that out. You should meet Ron,” she told Ma. “He takes care of me. He’ll probably help you out, too. No more begging for you. That’s no good,” she insisted.
We all met Ron, together, the very next Sunday. He was an older man, mid-sixties, very thin, with pale skin and large brown eyes. His jacket was sparrow-brown, with patches covering the elbows. He used a separate voice for speaking to children.
“Well, hello there, you pretty little ladies. And how are we all doing today?” he said as we sat in a row on Tara’s couch, the early-afternoon sun streaking through Tara’s sheer curtains.
Stephanie got up to hug his leg. Lisa and I were a little shyer, so we hung back. He tried to win us over with candy. I snatched three butterscotches from his hand and began unwrapping one, fast. He smiled and rubbed my head.
“That’s a good girl,” he said.
Lisa remained quiet and held her candy in her hand until Ron went back into the kitchen. He winked at her on his way out. She turned to me.
“Don’t eat that crap,” she said, smacking it out of my hand.
“Why?” I whined.
“We don’t know him, that’s why.”
“You ruin everything!” I screamed.
Right from the start, Lisa didn’t like Ron. “He’s a stranger,” she always reminded me. “We don’t know him. Treat him like a stranger.”
But was he a stranger if he was Tara’s friend? And would a stranger take us out to eat? Would he buy us candy and take us for a long ride in his big, red car? And especially, would Ma warm up to a stranger so quickly?
Ron bought Tara most of her drugs, and she assumed, correctly, that he would do the same for Ma.
While Lisa, Stephanie, and I lay on our stomachs on Tara’s plush carpet in front of the TV watching cartoons, Tara introduced Ma to Ron in her kitchen. Soon after, the three of them slipped into Tara’s bedroom, shut the door, and didn’t come out for a long while. Occasionally, we heard a giggle or a thud, but it was impossible to tell what they were doing. Ron was the first to return to the living room.
“Now, which one of my girls is hungry?” he asked, rubbing his hands together.
Ron took us all to eat at International House of Pancakes, not too far from Tara’s apartment, on Broadway. He surprised us by saying we could get anything we wanted—something neither Lisa nor I had ever done before. The notion of limitless food seemed unreal. I ordered a whole stack of pancakes that the two of us could have never finished. So did Lisa. I enjoyed pouring almost the entire syrup bottle onto my unused portion. No one noticed. Stephanie’s habit of ordering eggs grossed out both Lisa and me; we’d had enough eggs to last us a lifetime. Between bites, Stephanie drummed her fork on the table and kicked her legs all around.
Ma, Tara, and Ron spoke in whispers over lunch. Ron did most of the talking, leaning in close so he could speak privately to them while resting his hand on their thighs, something that I saw made Ma fidget.
Our next stop was in a desolate area of the Bronx, near abandoned, burned-down buildings, where men wearing flashy jewelry stood on street corners, dancing beside enormous radios. Ron passed Tara and Ma some cash from his breast pocket, and Ma ordered Lisa and me to stay put in Ron’s car. She walked over with Tara to give the money to the men and I knew they were buying drugs. Ron turned around and talked to us while we all waited.
“How did you girls get so pretty?” he asked. “You look like a car full of supermodels.”
Stephanie squealed with laughter. I concentrated on Ma.
Something about the men she and Tara spoke to made me nervous. I shut my eyes tight and didn’t open them until I could hear Ma entering the car. When we were driving again, Tara told Ron they each got a D-I-M-E B-A-G.
No matter how much Ma told Tara that Lisa and I knew all about drugs, she still tried to be discreet around us, and around Stephanie.
“Dime bag,” Lisa said. “Tara, I know how to spell.”
“Oh, be quiet, Lisa,” she snapped.
Back at Tara’s, with Ron keeping them company, she and Ma got high for hours.
Ron started coming around in his dusty red car every Sunday to pick us up at Tara’s apartment. Our outings became the thing I looked forward to all week long. No matter what else was happening, I’d think of Sunday and count the days. But, taking my cue from Ma, I hid my excitement and never talked about the time we spent with Ron when Daddy was around. More from instinct than thought, I knew that our trips were something Ma didn’t want Daddy to know too much about. As far as he knew, we were just passing time with Ma’s friends.
Ron must have looked forward to Sundays the way I did, because he was never late to Tara’s place. He’d show up at exactly eleven a.m., honking the car horn three times. We’d drive aimlessly, for hours. Tara played the radio loudly from the front seat, so we could all sing along together.
At IHOP again, we feasted on pancakes, sausages, and orange juice, while Ron whispered more mysterious stories close to Tara’s and Ma’s ears, stories that made them laugh with their heads thrown back.
“That’s when you have to up and out if you want to save your own A-S-S,” Tara added to something he’d said, slamming her fist on the table, jingling our forks and knives.
“Tara, you’re a riot. Only you, man,” Ma responded. Always hyper, Stephanie kicked her seat repeatedly. Whenever they weren’t looking, Ron’s eyes skimmed up and down Ma’s and Tara’s T-shirts.
One day, when Tara was busy doing something else, we met up with Ron without her or Stephanie. He suggested that Ma, Lisa, and I go to his house, out in Queens.
“Come on, Jean.” He’d coaxed Ma out in front of our building, tugging on her wrist. “We can pick up a bag. You’ll like my place, it’s real nice.”
The drive there was long; it was the first time I can clearly remember being on a highway. The cars zipping past made the trip seem adventurous to me, but Lisa fell asleep.
Without Tara around, Ma and Ron didn’t seem to know what to say to each other. Ron turned his tape player up, a country-music singer’s whiny voice filling the car. Ma fidgeted in her seat the whole, silent trip there. Once, I thought I saw him reach across and rest his hand on her thigh, but Ma shifted too quickly for me to get a clear view.
Ron’s place was a real house, two stories high, with a front yard and a garage. A thick, glass wall divided into squares separated the living room from the dining room, and viney plants hung from hooks above a large, black piano. Everything was made of gleaming blond wood. Ron and Ma headed straight for the kitchen. Lisa turned on the TV and we watched cartoons from his huge, black leather couch.
Hours later, I woke up to Ron’s rough hand on my shoulder.
“Girls, wake up.”
“Where’s Ma?” Lisa asked.
“She went to the store for a beer. She’ll be back in a little while.”
I’d never seen Ron dressed in shorts before. Why had Ma left us behind?
“The store is far from here, so it will be a bit. She asked me to look after you both; she said you needed a bath,” he told us, clasping his hands together and lowering his chin with a seriousness that seemed insincere.
Given that it wasn’t uncommon for me to go a month or two without washing or brushin
g my teeth, this struck me as strange. One time, while I was helping to hang up test sheets in class, my teacher noticed a patch of dirt on my neck and told me that when I showered that night, I should make sure to scrub extra-hard there. Though our clogged tub prevented me from showering, I was embarrassed enough to take a washcloth and scrub my neck when I got home. Bits of dirt had rolled off into my hands.
Considering the uselessness of our tub at home, I thought maybe Ma wanted us to take the opportunity to bathe here.
Ron watched us from the toilet, while Lisa and I sat together in the soapy water. Not only had I never seen Ron in shorts, I’d also never seen him without his tweed jacket before. In the steamy bathroom, I saw that underneath it, he was even thinner, in an almost feminine way, with large nipples that showed right through his shirt. I wished he would put his jacket back on and go. The white tiles were shiny clean and the bathroom lemon-scented. As we washed, he kept his eyes just below our necks. Something about that look made me cover myself. I curled into a ball, pulling my knees to my chest. Lisa had a look on her face that bordered somewhere between worry and anger.
“Your mother wants me to make sure that you girls wash every part now,” he said. “I want to see every part get squeaky clean. Let’s see those feet,” he said. “And those legs. Above the water, or else it’s not really clean.”
Under his instruction, Lisa and I lifted our feet, ankles, calves, and thighs above the water to scrub clean.
“Now, one of the hardest parts to wash is your privates, so we need you girls to stick that way up high in the air and clean every crevice. Come on, I want to see them clean.”