by Liz Murray
This was the environment in which I finally came to my education, the environment in which I knew I could no longer lie in bed and give up. How could I pull the blanket back over my head when I knew my teachers were waiting for me? When they were willing to work so hard, how could I not do the same?
With the Prep staff, my negative feelings about school began to dissolve, replaced by an actual love for learning, and with it, at last, a tangible hope for my life.
My feelings about the teachers were my feelings about the school. If they were wonderful, school was wonderful. It had always been that way for me. And if the teachers believed in me, that was at least the first step in a long journey of believing in myself. This was especially true during my more vulnerable moments, back when I was labeled “truant” and “discipline problem.” I was always seeing myself through the eyes of adults, my parents, caseworkers, psychiatrists, and teachers. If I saw a failure in their eyes, then I was one. And if I saw someone capable, then I was capable. Professional adults had credibility and were my standard for deciding what was legitimate or not, including myself. Previously, when teachers like Ms. Nedgrin saw me as a victim—despite her good intentions—that’s what I believed about myself, too. Now I had teachers at Prep who held me to a higher standard, and that helped me rise to the occasion. If I kept at it, slowly, I could do this. The deeply personal relationships with my teachers in this intimate school setting made me believe it.
I learned a lot in the years I spent at Prep. I was engrossed in Shakespeare (I played Hamlet and Macbeth in school plays); I participated in student government, and traveled with student groups on buses north of the city to represent Prep in regional conferences. I began wearing colorful clothing, taking my hair out of my face and, slowly, looking people in the eyes. I learned that my voice mattered. But I think that it was the teachers themselves who were my biggest lesson at Prep. My teachers, my role models, became my compass in an otherwise dark and confusing world.
Eva and I became friends in our after-school peer education science class, which met every Monday and Wednesday. Enrolled in the class were fifteen students, fourteen girls and one boy, Jonathan, who assured us all that he was very much “one of the girls.” The class was an add-on to my already full schedule and it counted for one solid credit, one more toward the forty I needed to meet my goal of graduating in two years.
Our group sat in guidance counselor Jessie Klein’s rectangular office, some of us curling up on a futon and the rest of us on metal chairs we’d dragged in from a nearby classroom for the occasion. A woman named Kate Barnhart sat before us. She was plump with large, circular glasses and long, Halloween-wig-frizzy red hair. Her jacket was a patchwork quilt of mix-matched colors, like an old rug that someone had stitched sleeves into. She smiled often, revealing her small, perfectly white teeth; she seemed happy to see us, happy to teach us. Kate came from a program named CASES, which trained kids in the court system to be peer educators in the subject of HIV/AIDS. Jessie gave her the floor.
Kate introduced the topic by asking, “Ever had a guy try to tell you he’s too big to wear a condom?” The room erupted into nervous giggles.
Jonathan called out, “Yes!”
“Thank you, Jonathan,” Kate said, “because that’s how this is gonna work, we are gonna get real in here. Now, who else? Please raise your hand.” Several girls obliged.
“Great,” Kate said. “We’re just getting started. Now raise your hand if a guy ever caught an attitude with you about putting on a condom.”
The majority of hands went up, including my own. I had sometimes had to argue with Carlos to put one on, but I assumed it was a problem specific to him.
“Thanks, hands down ladies, and Jonathan.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, in a Southern woman’s voice, snapping his fingers. The girls laughed and someone high-fived him.
“Great. Now I want you to watch this,” Kate said. She produced a red condom from a bag, ripped it open, and began stretching it out with all the expertise of a pizza maker maneuvering warm dough. As she stretched out the latex, she spoke.
“What you’re going to do in this course is empower yourself to teach your peers all about HIV/AIDS and STD prevention.” Tug, pull, tug, stretch. “But first, you have to learn all about HIV/AIDS and STD prevention, and to do that, we are going to get a little outrageous.”
With her ten fingers protruding out in a cat’s cradle, Kate stretched the bottom of the condom to a cartoonishly broad width. To the classes’ collective shock, she began to pull it over her head, Halloween hair and all. She spared the glasses, which sat on her lap. Tugging and stretching, to the sound of our laughter, Kate pulled until the latex condom hugged her face firmly and cupped her nose. With her nostrils, she blew air into the condom. It filled like one of those clowns whose mouths you shoot water into at a street fair, until the balloon pops and you get a prize. When the thing had inflated to a reasonable size over her head, she reached up with a hairpin—like she’d done it a million times before—and pierced it with a small pop. Then she yanked the broken pieces away one by one.
It felt right to clap; we all did. “So, who’s too big for a condom?” she said defiantly, refluffing her hair and reapplying her saucer-shaped glasses. “The first step to taking control of your health is to know you are worthwhile. You are important, and you get to ask for things you need. Your rights and needs, safety and comfort, are important. And you can steer the ship with your guy. Remember, you have something he wants. You have more power than you realize.” From her desk, Jessie smiled at all of us.
I looked at Jessie, then back at Kate, and I was flooded with a sense of pride. I loved the feel of these two grown women pulling us aside for what felt like girl talk. It made me feel special, as if they were sharing secrets.
“Your well-being has a direct relationship with your self-esteem, mentally, physically, spiritually. Your body is a temple, and you have to protect yourself from abuse and misuse of your temple. You must be your own guardian! You get to say what happens to you,” Kate said.
Her enthusiasm became my enthusiasm. I could feel a glimmer of what Kate was talking about . . . like maybe there could be something beautiful about me. I wondered why I’d let Carlos treat me the way he had; how I came so close to letting him break me. I didn’t stand up to Carlos, and it wasn’t me who got us out of the bathtub with Ron that day—it was Lisa. “You must be your own guardian. You get to say what happens to you.”
We spent the rest of the session with Kate going over a list of what she called Didjaknows, which were a series of facts introduced by the question, “Didjaknow?”
“Didjaknow Cool Whip can trigger yeast infections? And so can anything else heavy in sugar, when applied to your labia majora. Do we all know what a labia majora is?”
“It can trigger what?” asked a concerned voice across the room. The owner of the voice was a thick, pretty white girl with big green eyes wearing a sparkling stud of a nose ring and tall leather boots. Her name was Eva; I’d seen her in two of my classes. Her style was hip-hop with a club girl twist. Her pink lipstick was outlined in deep red lip liner, and her long brown hair was highlighted blond and pulled into a sleek ponytail.
“Does it always cause an infection, really?” she asked. Everyone laughed.
“Whatchoo been up to?” Jonathan quipped, laughing and taking more high fives.
Kate smiled. “Not always, dear, it’s just something to watch out for.”
“Oh,” Eva said, still showing obvious concern but slowly beginning to smile. “Well . . . I’m just asking,” she said, her hands raised in mock defense. “ ’Cause it doesn’t say all that on the label, and a girl needs to know,” and then she laughed, too; we all did.
Eva lived on Twenty-eighth Street and Eighth Avenue, close to Prep. Other than a visit to one of Daddy’s friend’s apartments growing up, I’d never been inside a home in Manhattan before. I expected it to be “rich” like Daddy said, but instead Eva and her
father, Yurick, a Holocaust survivor, lived in Chelsea’s version of the projects, in one of a cluster of tall redbrick buildings that primarily housed elderly and low-income families. Yurick was a painter. His mother, Eva’s grandmother, had smuggled him out of the Warsaw ghetto when he was an infant, saving his life. There were abstract paintings of the Holocaust all over the walls of their large, sun-filled, two-bedroom apartment.
“They make me feel guilty for having food,” Eva half joked, gesturing over the microwave, toward a painting of a gaunt and horrified cluster of people lost in the woods.
“You’re hilarious,” I told her as she served us a late dinner, two plates of creamy bowtie pasta with peas and carrots. Eva was always making me laugh, and she was deeply insightful, easy to talk to. The moment I met her in Jessie’s class, I decided I liked her instantly.
Eva became my first real friend at Prep. Our short talks after class had grown into lunches on the stoops of Chelsea brownstones, which grew into visits to her apartment, and eventually into sleepovers. We were quickly becoming close. I told Eva an edited version of my situation, withholding the full extent for when I felt more trusting. Without ever really stating explicitly that she wanted to help me, she did. We had dozens of sleepovers and hangouts on Twenty-eighth Street. Eva would always cook something, loan me clothing, let me take hot showers upstairs. Often, she split her extra snacks with me during lunchtime at Prep, and she never once showed a sign of being inconvenienced.
“Does your dad remember much about the war?” I asked, dressed in my pajamas in her kitchen, ready for bed. I always felt it was easier keeping the conversation about other people. And after taking “Facing History and Ourselves” with Caleb, I’d learned all about genocide and the Holocaust. It felt good to be able to engage Eva in conversation with some confidence.
“Parts. He was really little, but his dad was the head of an important Jewish organization, so mostly his memories are of after the war, when my grandfather counseled survivors in their living room. My dad overheard all of it, which had to be tough for a small kid,” she said.
Eva loved psychology, and she had a way of seeing deeply into people, always listening to someone’s sharing from the angle of discovering their motivations, struggles, and needs. “I think his paintings are cathartic for him,” she said. “After you experience trauma that deep, you need to do something to heal. Something to make meaning out of all the loss.”
I ate everything Eva gave me, and then a second plate, too.
“There’re clean sheets on the couch for you, Liz. For whenever you get tired and are ready to sleep.”
With Eva, I felt totally understood and cared for. She was safe, loving, and funny. I looked forward to seeing her every day, and I wanted her to be a part of my life always.
Sometimes, another new friend from Prep joined us at Eva’s house. His name was James, and he took history class with us. James was over six feet tall, half-black and half-white, with beautiful caramel skin, a toned, muscular build, and a very messy and very large Afro. He loved all things Japanese, and often wore T-shirts with Japanese characters across the chest, or old martial arts shirts from his kung fu class. His clothes were always disheveled, and he had an innocence about him that made me want to be his friend. We connected one day when our teacher unknowingly repeated a nervous tic throughout his lecture, saying the word mmkay dozens of times in a single class session. It was so frequent and so funny that I looked for witnesses and saw James beside me, holding back laughter. I slid him a note marked, “Matt says mmkay,” with tallies underneath, tallied to well over a hundred. He erupted into laughter in the tiny classroom and we were asked to move seats, both of us still smirking and sharing the joke silently, making eye contact from across the room. Later at lunch, I saw him eating alone, and I used a memory of Sam to summon the courage to approach him. I promptly walked over and stuck my fingers, splat, into his mashed potatoes.
“This lunch sucks,” I said. “You wanna come eat with me at the deli, my treat?”
With a disbelieving smile on his face, he looked up at me, then back down at my fingers in his food, then back up at me, and said, “Sure.”
We split a sandwich in a park off the West Side Highway, facing the crashing waves of the Hudson. I devoured a bag of chips and watched James rollerblade in lazy circles around the pier in the brisk afternoon air. We started having lunch together every day after that, and soon the three of us, Eva, James, and me, began hanging out all the time. Some nights I slept over at Eva’s, other nights I crashed at James’s. James lived with his mother in a one-bedroom in Washington Heights, uptown near the Bronx. At first I slept on the top bunk of his bunk bed. We’d sit up talking into all hours of the night, posters of Mount Fuji across the walls and a beautiful oak tree outside his window. Eventually, I started lying down next to James to talk. Some nights, we’d fall asleep telling each other stories, wrapped together like pretzels. Other times, things would go further. James was gentle and protective. Our sex was affectionate and it happened naturally, like our friendship.
I slept so well on those nights with James, knowing that I was completely safe.
I had lost my family, but I was building another one. Between Eva, Bobby, Sam, Fief, Danny, Josh, James, and Jamie, I had a collection of people in my life bound together by love. These were the people I leaned on to get through.
Not that Lisa and Daddy weren’t my family, but after Ma passed, we’d drifted from one another. Lisa stayed with Brick, and Daddy was in the shelter system. I think a lot of hurt went unspoken between us. I felt that Lisa blamed me for leaving her alone with Ma at the worst possible time. And Daddy and I hadn’t been the same since I was taken into St. Anne’s. Something essential had broken between us, and it felt as though with time, he was just getting further and further away. I felt as if I had failed him by not going to school and by getting taken into a group home. However irrational, I felt that I’d left him. And then, when he’d lost the apartment on University and hadn’t even told me, it was so painful for me because I knew it was proof that we weren’t close anymore. I wasn’t his little tomboy who played with trucks and helped him sneak past Lisa late at night. I was lost to him.
Without a shared living situation to connect us, Daddy, Lisa, and I spun out of one another’s orbits and made independent lives of our own that barely even touched. By the time I finished my first year of high school, the truth was, we barely knew one another.
Painfully, we made the most awkward attempts to be together. We sat through holidays and forced birthday celebrations at a favorite dessert place of Daddy’s in the Village. I worked at NYPIRG a second summer, and with my savings, I paid for the cake. These celebrations would always play out the same way. Daddy and I would arrive early, Lisa shortly after. Daddy and I would chitchat, but provide no real details about what was going on in our lives. When Lisa arrived, we would be seated. Being seated was the worst part because there is no such thing as a table for three. There would always be one empty seat at our table, as if to announce clearly Ma’s absence. And because it was often one of our birthdays, a waitress would carry out a cake glowing with candles and the three of us, who no longer really knew one another, would sing in celebration of each other’s lives.
Lisa’s birthdays were the hardest, for the way I could see Daddy’s nervousness peak then. He was always so anxious with her, even more so than he was with me. The only other time I could recall seeing him that anxious was in my faded memories of our brief encounters with our older sister Meredith. He seemed fraught with guilt and eager for escape. I couldn’t take my eyes off Daddy then, clasping and unclasping his hands, fidgeting through birthday songs with his forced smile, and the absurdity of his reluctant singing. It knotted my stomach to watch. I hoped Lisa didn’t see it. And I was grateful she didn’t know that I had to call Daddy to orchestrate the whole event to begin with. How he would send me to the drugstore to pick out a card for Lisa, from him. “I’m bad at that stuff, Lizzy, and kinda lo
w on cash right now. Pick out something nice, okay,” he’d ask. “Thanks, Lizzy, you’re the best.”
But it was no easy task to pick out a birthday card from Daddy to Lisa. What could I possibly pick? They were all designed for men who had lived up to their responsibilities as father, cards decorated with shimmering monikers of Dad, Daddy, sayings like, “This card is from your loving Father.” “Through all the years watching you grow, it’s been my joy to raise you.” But he hadn’t, not really. “To my Daughter on her birthday, the light of my life.” I didn’t want to insult Lisa, or to embarrass him. So I came up with my own solution. Neither of them knew it, but more than once I found the perfect card from Daddy to Lisa in the sympathy section of the card store: “Been Thinking About You,” or “On This Day and Always, I Remain by Your Side,” cards that expressed love but left room for the implication of tragedy and distance. These were the only greeting cards that captured Daddy’s role as a father. My role, as Daddy engaged me and as I accepted, was to minimize the awkwardness of these moments, to facilitate the experience of a holiday gone smoothly for all of us.
For the same reason, when Lisa would look away or go to the bathroom, I always slipped Daddy the money to pay for our “celebrations.” The waitress would come with the check and Daddy would reach up to grab the black leather fold, inserting cash. “I got it,” he’d say. “Happy birthday, Lisa.”
It’s not that we didn’t love one another—we did. I just think we didn’t know how to be with one another anymore. No one had prepared us for this, for what to do when tragedy breaks up your family. We had no idea what to do when disease took hold, mental illness struck, when Ma died. And we weren’t prepared for what happens when proximity no longer brings you together, and instead connecting became a matter of making an effort toward one another. We were doing the best we could with what we had.