Alongside successfully building their design business, they also raised three children. Their youngest son became a radical intellectual artist, who beelined it out of stability and into the hallways of punks, painters, and dope dealers, and eventually the arms of a particular blonde with a penchant for Johnnie Walker and the Ramones. Which is why my now-widowed, septuagenarian grandmother is currently pulling the largest blue Venetian bowl she has from under her sink for her eight-year-old grandchild to use as a puke receptacle after a skateboarding accident.
I don’t know Edie very well. Because my poppa now basically lives in Europe, I only come here when he’s in town, and that’s not very often, so finding myself here is odd. We were within walking distance, though, and my ma was right to assume that the door would be open to us, in any state of need.
The floor where Edie lives is dark and long and exquisitely designed by her. Dim lamps are placed with intention around the classy space, on countertops made of jagged pieces of raw marble, armrests of antique wood, and a low, checkered ivory table.
Edie is small and elegant, with a head of short white curls that look like whipped meringue and a piece of yellow silk tied around her delicate throat. Big glasses dwarf her face, and the sleeves of her thin sweater are rolled up above her tiny wrists. She wears slip-on shoes below her cuffed men’s slacks.
Lying on one of the two beige corduroy couches in the center of her apartment, I lean over and lose my stomach into the bowl. This process makes my head feel like it weighs four hundred pounds, and pain shoots through it until I lie back down. That sucks, and I start to whimper. I’m burning hot and can’t stop spitting. I just want to sleep.
Ma clutches my hand and rubs me down. She is so obviously uncomfortable in this situation. She calls a doctor that Edie recommends. When she describes my pale skin and freezing temperature, he says I most likely have a concussion, and that the best thing is to bring me into an emergency room either now or first thing in the morning.
She tells me she is going to get me some ginger ale and saltines.
For her to volunteer to give me sugar, things must be pretty serious.
Edie sits at the end of the couch and begins to untie my sneakers. Delicate bird-bone fingers place one shoe and then the other on the black stone floor. Moving quietly, she puts a woolen blanket over me and tucks it in around my edges.
If I didn’t have a concussion, maybe I could appreciate the strangeness of this, but my teeth have begun to chatter and I’m just grateful for something warm over me.
Edie stands and rubs her hands up and down her slacks twice, international symbol of distress, before slowly moving into the kitchen. I know she’s holding it together for my sake.
She comes back with a crystal glass filled with water and a wet towel, perching her tiny frame on the couch next to me and putting the cold fabric onto my forehead. I get it now; the water is to clear the bile after I puke in the bowl. I fall asleep to her caressing my face.
Ma wakes me diligently every half hour, all night long. Every time, I groan and wave her away because I’m starved for sleep. Once, I wake up retching and lean off the couch and hurl. Ma is sleeping on the floor, but she bounds up and lifts the bowl to my mouth, moaning in sympathy and patting my head. Edie comes out in her long white nightie, silent and ghostly, her skin soft and thin over her veins. She’s clutching a tissue and dabbing at her sleepy eyes with it.
By five thirty we’re all exhausted, but Ma says it’s time to go. She and Edie have a brief exchange about whether it’s a good idea, but Ma will have none of it. Today is the shoot for the Cartoon Network commercial I’m in, and I’m going to make it no matter what.
“The show must go on,” she says, like a Brooklyn gangster from the twenties, “in sickness and in health!”
Edie knows better than to try to change Ma’s perspective, and retreats to her bedroom in the predawn dark.
Ma bundles me up in borrowed cashmere and we go down to the street. The sun is starting to brighten the sky as we walk toward Central Park. I’m entranced by the vulgarity of the bump on my head.
Although I’m slow moving, and my IQ has taken a hit, by the time we get to Fifth Avenue I have convinced myself that I’m fine. Ma wants to believe it, too, even though I’m not talking a ton and I can’t keep up with her pace.
Eventually we find the set. A craft services table is set up just off the very road in the park I took my spill on. Ma wraps grape leaves in napkins and keeps stuffing them into her bag until the producer comes over to explain the concept.
It will be a simple day, but it might take a few hours. They’re shooting people around New York saying, “SPLOING! BOING! BAM! SPLAT!”
The words take on new meaning now that I’ve sploing-boing-splatted my brain against the street. I giggle a little too late at my own joke and Ma and the producer look at me sideways. Ma explains what happened, and the producer is concerned. She asks if I need to go to the hospital, it’s totally okay, but Ma reassures her that I’m fine.
The producer leaves Ma picking fruit off the table, and I amble away to be alone.
I come to a gravel driveway nearby and am beset with the urge to count how many pebbles it is comprised of.
A half hour later, Ma finds me intently bent over the ground.
“What are you doing, kitty?”
“Couhnthing . . .”
“Counting?”
“Mmhh . . .”
She stares at me, then at the ground. She looks up the driveway, contemplating this. My head feels like someone has pumped smoke into it, and I’m shivering.
“Are you cold?”
I grunt.
“You look pale.”
“ . . .”
“Stay right here, okay?”
She comes back a few minutes later with the producer, who says, “Hi, iO, honey. Do you want to come do your shot now, so that we can get you outta here? I bet you’d like to go to bed . . .”
“Mmm-hmm.”
They have been discussing taking me to the hospital. Ma’s silence is heavy. I know she’s worried when she stops talking to me.
The producer leads me toward a playground. They stand me next to a tiny Chinese kid in a polo shirt that’s striped vertically like a Neapolitan ice cream sandwich. A very enthusiastic guy presents himself as the director, and runs through the sploingo, boingo lines.
I am suddenly overcome with a case of the giggles. The director likes it. The other kid starts giggling, too. It’s contagious. The director waves his arms around for the cameras to start rolling. I’m in stitches for no reason, giggling away.
I manage to squeeze out two sets of the lines, and the director calls cut. The words sound like I have taffy in my mouth, but they liked the giggling. A lady with forty different rolls of tape on her belt comes over and takes off a microphone I didn’t remember them putting on me, and says, “You’re good to go now, sweetie. Thank you.”
I hate it when people call me “sweetie.”
The hospital is a blur. A man in a lab coat waves a small flashlight in front of my eyes, but it hurts too much, so I close them.
I get frustrated with the chubby nurse in the pistachio scrubs who is keeping me awake. I want ice chips to bring the heat down.
“Eith . . . .”
“What, honey?”
“Eithhh . . . plthh . . .”
Speaking is incredibly laborious. The nurse leaves and comes back with a paper cup with Donald Duck printed all over it, filled with ice shards, and feeds me one. I let it roll across my tongue and slide out the side of my mouth. This makes Ma groan with fear.
The doctor comes back and examines me again with the flashlight. This pisses me off and I whine breathily. I exhaust myself by waving one hand in front of me, hoping it will scare him off. He asks me some questions that I find irritating;
“What is your name?”
“Ughh . . . aaoowww . . . . .”
“I’m sorry?”
“ . . . aaeeeeuuuhhh . .
.”
“Let’s try one more time.”
“Aiiiooooo.”
I push this last out with great effort. My eyes are rolling back into my lids. He jots something down on his chart.
He looks at my ma and smiles a big cheesy smile, hoping to be encouraging, but she isn’t looking at anything but me, intensely, pursing her eyebrows. He starts writing again, and says, without looking up, “Yeah, iO is gonna be fine. She suffered a mild concussion when she took her spill, so you’re gonna need to watch out for her progress. The nurse will give you a list of symptoms to pay attention to, but she should be just fine in a few days. If anything gets worse, bring her right back here to us and we’ll take care of her. Okay?”
Ma stares at me for a long time, then looks up at him and nods. He extends his right hand, but she sticks out her left, twisting it around to grab his upside down. This throws him.
“Do you live somewhere close by?”
“Yes,” she lies.
Chapter 12
Zack
Public School 3, West Village, September 1993
THIRD GRADE IS GONNA RULE. I KNOW ALL MY CLASSMATES, and we had Karen last year so I know how to stay under her radar. It’s rare that you get the same teacher twice in a row, but through an elementary school version of litigating the adminstrative office, a bunch of us pulled it off.
I am pretty clear on where my place is in the social ecosystem. I’m a weirdo loner kid who everyone is pretty confident is a boy, but they aren’t sure. I’m not one of the cool kids by any means, but as long as I don’t push my luck I’m chill with everyone. The nerds don’t mind me, and so far I’ve escaped any real brutality by generally being nice.
There is something about being an enigma that earns you a certain holiness. It’s easier to leave me alone than to tease me and have to dissect what the hell is actually going on in my underwear.
Ma is gripping my hand, trying to pull me along because we’re late, but I am intent on leapfrogging every fire hydrant we pass. At quarter to eight it’s a long trek from the Bowery to Hudson Street, basically from one side of sleepy Manhattan to the other, and it gets boring. From our place to Sixth Avenue it’s a long stretch of nada. At Sixth, the homeless people start to appear, and occasional drag queens still tottering around from last night. They’re entertaining to look at.
Just south of Third Street is a bus stop, and I make sure to always pass between the stop and the lamppost directly in front of it. It’s an essential ritual that will dictate the course of the whole day. If I don’t pass between them, it won’t go well.
We turn up Bleecker from Carmine Street. Then it’s a row of Italian bakeries, bread shops, and a record store. My stomach gurgles at the smell of fresh bread, and every day I pull my mom into Geno’s for a hot loaf of semolina. I like how it’s sweet, and I can scrounge my own thirty-five cents to buy it.
A bar sits on the corner of Bleecker and Seventh Avenue that has a giant plastic yellow cab outside of it and a massive margarita glass hanging over the door. I use this as a landmark. When we pass the cocktail, we are in the home stretch, five minutes to school.
Two blocks up we make a left on Christopher. I like this street because it’s quaint and beautiful, overhung with branches and lined with brownstones. It serves as a reminder of all the lives we don’t live—quiet, calm, sweet, stable—words I didn’t even know were supposed to be associated with how you live your life. There are no bars here, no junkies, no cars blaring bachata, only prim gay men taking their dogs for an early-morning walk, who smile and wave. These guys pick up their dogs’ shit with manicured fingers in sandwich bags.
Public School 3 hulks on the corner. The building takes up the better part of a city block. At eleven thirty shrieking and laughter explodes from within, evidence of several hundred children unleashing pent-up fervor, but right now the block is quiet. Everyone is still too sleepy to make a ruckus.
Ma walks me to the top of a stairwell. She checks me in with the security guard and I shoo away through the gym on my own. I pull off a corner of the semolina loaf and cram it in my mouth as I slowly climb the stairs. I don’t care about being late. We’re late for everything. A sense of urgency has not been instilled in me about lateness; I don’t even register it as a problem. My world operates on my time, because that’s the only time that exists in my head. It’s the third day of the new year and I might as well not set up any false expectations.
One strap of my backpack dangles down over my elbow as I amble up the steps, leaning against the wall as I go. I’m so sleepy. Last night was a late one. The play I’m in had a performance and we went out with the cast afterward. My ma had a wine and got angry. It took us forty-five minutes to walk home from Gramercy at midnight.
When she tried to wake me up this morning, I took a swing at her face. She held me off, but I swung again. At first she was mad but then she started laughing at my tenacity. She sat on the edge of the bed holding my little fist, laughing and laughing and petting my head in that weird way she always does where she doesn’t part her fingers and folds her hand, like a ballerina who only bends at the waist. I finally cracked and started to giggle, too. I took another swing at her shoulder out of embarrassment, but she pushed my hand away and kept laughing.
These are the sweet moments. The times when I recognize what I see in other kids with their parents when they’re buying chocolate lollipops or driving past us after school. These are the darling days when everything is all good and the beast is calm.
The door to the second floor is heavy. My head is the height of an adult forearm, so I have to lean my entire body backward to swing it open. The hallway is quiet the way that it is only first thing in the morning. I put little nibbles of bread in my mouth as I meander down toward Karen’s classroom.
Our class door is covered in colorful index cards with each of our names elaborately scrawled on them. When I push it open, everyone is sitting on the rug, thirty-six shining little faces from every corner of the city. Karen is sitting on a tiny footstool under the blackboard, her big body folded over her knees, talking about what’s going to happen today.
Karen is about fifty, with a brush of graying hair, rectangular wire glasses, and a no-bullshit kind of face. She wears oversize T-shirts and jeans with Birkenstock sandals, which combine to make her appear even more imposing.
I like Karen so much. I don’t know why. She scares the shit out of me, and getting her to smile is a hard-won victory, but I enjoy the challenge.
That is not happening right now. She greets me with a hard glare over the top of her glasses. For a second I think she’s going to say something, but her way of expressing annoyance is to ignore your existence, so she angles her body away and carries on talking.
“So what you’re going to do is go into the hallway and line up double file. Find a buddy, and stay on line until I tell you to . . . hey! Andy! Excuse me, Andy.”
Andy is a special-needs kid. I don’t know why he’s in our class and not in special ed, but this is his second year in a row with Karen. Dainty and hyperactive, he walks on his toes in a bouncy way that suits his aloofness. He has eyes like holes punched through paper with a pencil. They dart all over the place like he has fifteen thousand thoughts happening at once. He couldn’t tell you what eight plus two was if you gave him a half hour to get back to you. He wears T-shirts tucked into his jeans and brags about how his family is Puerto Rican. He has a mullet and a rattail. Andy is prone to screaming freak-outs, and sometimes violence, but he’s easy to fend off. He is the kind of kid you can hold off by the forehead and he’ll keep swinging until he’s so infuriated he starts to cry. He can’t focus for very long, so Andy’s name being yelled across the classroom is the basic soundtrack to the day.
Right now he’s doing something on the carpet that he shouldn’t, with someone I don’t know. As I hang my backpack on a bright yellow hook I look at the new kid.
“Zack! Don’t distract Andy, don’t do anything while I’m talking but list
en to me. Got it?”
I guess his name is Zack. He’s wearing a salmon-colored T-shirt and shorts. His hair is sandy blond, also with a mullet, and—Jesus Christ—a rattail, but he takes it one step further because it is wrapped in multicolored thread. He’s muscular for an eight-year-old and his eyes are bright, smart, but not particularly warm. He strikes me as angry.
“Got it, kid?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
Before he’s gotten the words out of his mouth, his look turns to me, and he stares. Why is he looking at me? I’m trying to ignore it but he is relentless. When I glance back he’s glaring. I turn my face back toward Karen. What the hell? But she glares at Zack.
“When we line up, you’re walking at the front with me.”
Karen considers this a punishment, but last year I kind of liked it when she made me walk with her. I like talking to her better than anyone else anyway. Zack doesn’t share the sentiment. He rolls his eyes and flops his chin down onto his chest.
The two lines of children snake from the stairwell halfway down the hall. It’s nearly nine now and everyone is starting to wake up. Thirty-six kids makes for a lot of chatter, jokes, and patty-cake games, and a din that perpetually hovers near shrieking splits the hall.
I forgot we were going on a field trip today. It’s a big one—we’re going to the Brooklyn Aquarium. This kind of thing is usually reserved for the end-of-term summer trip, but we got rained out last year, and part of the joy of having Karen again is that she’s making it up.
The whole line is pushed up against the right wall of the hallway. I’m at the back, quietly holding hands with Magda—a tall, bug-eyed dork who favors interpretive dance and snap bracelets. I’m ambivalent about the aquarium, but I’m into the idea of leaving the building.
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