We sit there, double-parked, while they talk for a while. I tried to interject once and Rafik told me to lie down and do some daydreaming. I didn’t like that, but I did it.
Now I’m staring at the streetlights, thinking about David Bowie, thinking about the cowboy movie, my new tap shoes. I hear a smacking noise and look toward the front seat. Rafik is leaning over and kissing my ma. He has one hand on her chin, holding her face against his. I see a glimpse of his tongue snaking into her mouth, and I am repulsed. I whip my head back to the window above me and roll my body so that my back is to them, covering my ears.
I lie there, staring at the stitching on the seat, thinking about the Boy Scouts and how I can possibly finagle my way into a troop. It’s been a real pain in the ass because everyone wants to see an ID to okay you for insurance stuff, and if they see that, they’ll know I’m a girl and ban me. It occurs to me that my “cousin” Aidan, who lives next door, might have a way in (I refer to him as my cousin because I’ve known him since I was born), and for a second I forget where I am and turn to tell my ma. I spot Rafik’s hand reaching across the abyss above the gear stick, down between her legs, and I snap my head back around. Gross.
If I were in the army, I wouldn’t have to deal with this. If I were in the army I’d be doing basic training right now, doing sit-ups and pull-ups and climbing over walls made out of mesh. My head would be shaved and I’d have a bed to make every morning, and maybe right now I’d be shining my one pair of awesome boots.
This year, I dressed up as Eddie Munster for Halloween. We drew a widow’s peak on my forehead with eyebrow pencil and scored this amazing black velvet suit from a thrift store. Nobody at school knew who Eddie Munster was, but once I told them, they nominated me for best costume in the class.
Last month we went up and spent the night at Ma’s friend Matushka’s house because we were cold. Ma has a little gig cleaning her pad on the Upper East Side, and when she goes out of town she says we can crash. We set up a mountain of pillows and blankets on the floor in the living room and had a slumber party.
Matushka had breast cancer and had a tit removed. She’s made all this art about it so now there are busts of her naked torso all over her house, showing off how she has only one boob and she’s proud of it. I think it’s great.
She has an amazing sound system and I started trying out tapes while Ma was in the kitchen making tea. One of them really lit me up. A winding electric guitar kicks in right away, hammering out a basic riff, then the drums come in, and a dude’s voice sings “doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo,” in a simple, singsong melody. It sent power through me and I started jumping around, dancing. “Rebel rebel,” the guy sang, “you’ve torn your dress. Rebel rebel, your face is a mess!”
I put the tape on repeat, waving my arms and jumping around on all the furniture. My ma came in and started laughing, dancing and clapping along to the rhythm. She started doing the high kicks I love, and swinging her hair around like the drag queens do it, and that made me squeal.
We must have listened to it fifteen thousand times before I realized that he’s saying, “she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.” I found my anthem.
Ma told me the guy’s name is David Bowie, and he likes people who are a little bit of boy and a little bit of girl. She said she listened to him a lot when she was a teenager growing up in Kansas. When she was dealing with the “vacuous loneliness” she says comes with that age, she would listen to him and somebody named Mick Jagger and go out and dance in the discotheques and at tea dances.
Ma and Rafik are making weird slurping noises that pull me out of my Bowie dreaming, and I start singing “Rebel Rebel” out loud. The slurping noises stop and Ma says, “We gotta go, Rafik. Thanks for the ride.”
She smiles and kisses him on the mouth one more time before unfolding her long body out the door. He looks a little wistful, maybe a little uncomfortable, and he adjusts himself in his seat as I climb out past him into the night without saying good-bye.
We will never see Rafik again.
Chapter 19
Cold Cuts
Third Street, Thanksgiving 1995
WINTER IS A TIME OF DARKNESS. THE SUN IS BUSY IN other places, places where people can pay to frolic in it, places where they use words like leisure and luxury.
Darkness here comes before you get your day going, and the night is even colder. You clutch your own bones so tight that they start to ache. Hands stay in pockets, buried deep, balled into fists.
It’s Thanksgiving Day and everything is wrapped in Christmas lights. It’s so cold my skin burns. The air is crystal gray, sliding into slate as the daylight goes. The sky hovers low, like a cramped ceiling, with dark bubbles of frozen slush.
People are bundled up in their layers of wool and cashmere, slashes of eye peeking out between scarves and hats. They dart across the avenues carrying bags filled with thoughtful gifts for loved ones, pulling open the doors to fancy places they plan to leave money in, blanketing the sidewalks in steaming clouds of central heat.
I imagine these people all have houses like Kevin McCallister in Home Alone, decked to the nines in ornaments and tinsel and tiny reindeer and Santa and Christmas schlock. Tons of presents spilling out from under a lush tree. I imagine that feels good.
We moved into the new apartment a few weeks ago. It’s stark and clean but stuffed with all our junk. I have my own room, which is amazing. I get to put my things where I want to, but I’m not allowed to close the door.
I’ve been sleeping on an old army cot we got on Canal Street. It’s khaki green, the old fold-up kind soldiers would carry around on their backs. It’s missing the two posts, though, that keep the cloth taut, so if I don’t keep myself positioned just so it claps up around me in the night.
I’ve got a pile of airplane blankets we took from all the Europe flights, and I’ve been stuffing sweatshirts into a pillowcase, which works fine as a pillow.
When we first moved in, Ma threw her mattress on the floor, lay down under her Ecuadoran blanket, and went to sleep. She slumbered in the cold, empty room, hibernating like I’ve never seen her do.
The first morning I woke up to Mahalia Jackson wailing on the radio and Ma weeping. Long, tearing heartbroken noises, like an out-of-tune violin getting pulled on in painful, drawn-out strokes.
She stayed like that, prone, for a couple of days. Eventually the tears stopped, but she still hasn’t gotten up. That bugs me out because she never stays down.
I’ve been asking to go sit on the stoop and I’ve been taking longer and longer to come back. I started venturing to Fourth Street, and now I’ve strayed all the way up to the Wiz on Broadway and Waverly. I told her I was playing with Aidan next door, but really I’ve been at the Wiz every day, watching clips of movies they put on the TVs to show what good quality they are. A Schwarzenegger flick, Die Hard—they show good stuff! You just have to be okay with watching the same twenty-minute clips over and over again.
They have a music section that’s awesome, too. They have the top twenty-five albums in the country in players along the wall in a back room. Monica, Brandy, Bone Thugs—they’ve got it all. It’s taking me a week to listen through every album up there.
Ma doesn’t notice.
The window in my room overlooks the light well, so the nasty pigeons settle on my sill and gurgle their gross song. The morning after we moved in, I woke up to a symphony of coos. The radio was on in Ma’s room, but the house was only lit by the few rays of light coming through the windows.
I think that’s why she’s depressed. She fought so hard for us to get a place with daylight and now we’ve got a boxy little joint with two views onto brick walls. You have to turn a light on to see in the morning. The ceilings are low, which makes her sad, and there’s a fluorescent tube in the kitchen, which is a surefire way to get her going nutty.
I lean over her bony shoulders and ask her if we we’re going to the Hungarians’ for Thanksgiving this year like we usually do, but s
he says no and something to the effect of there not being enough space at their house.
This hurts my heart. I feel a wash of shame come over me, wondering what we’ve done wrong that they don’t want us back.
I retreat after that, hanging out in my room and burying myself in Sherlock.
I love Thanksgiving. I love eating so much my belly hurts. I love falling asleep after. I love the sugar high of pecan pie. In fact, I love the mixture of turkey and sugary cranberry sauce so much that the thought stops my reading. I can practically taste the combination as I’ve had it at so many Thanksgivings with the Hungarians, snuck behind my ma’s back.
From where I’m lying, I can see Ma’s bed, and she hasn’t moved. This is a depressing scene. If I want some turkey and cranberry I’m gonna have to make it happen for myself.
IT’S SO COLD that the air almost barks at me when I open the front door. It smells like a mixture of garbage and Christmas.
Halfway to the corner there’s a guy on the nod between two parking meters. At a precarious and impressive ninety-degree angle, he’s got a good lean going. Everything in me wants to give him a tiny push, just to see the epic recovery, but it’s Thanksgiving, and that wouldn’t be kind. So I get real close to his face and shout, “Yo, man!”
His eyes snap open and droop down to half closed immediately. He rights himself and I carry on to the deli.
I grab a can of jellied cranberry sauce and get the dude at the counter to give me a quarter pound of turkey cold cuts for a dollar. Abdullah tells me to take a quart of water for myself and puts everything in a brown paper bag, which I roll up and carry back to my stoop.
There, on the top step, I unpack and lay out my bounty.
Yuppies are coming and going, and our neighbor the Purple Woman passes by, making me wonder if they celebrate Thanksgiving where she’s from. Probably not.
I had Abdullah open the can, and I got a plastic fork. It makes the perfect bite when you wrap a slice of turkey around a hunk of cranberry jelly and pop it into your mouth. I’ve never missed the holiday and I’m not about to start now.
Chapter 20
Camouflage
Manhattan, December 1995
SOMEONE AT SCHOOL WAS TALKING ABOUT WHAT KIND OF cereal they like yesterday and how they go shopping with their mom. I realized that I don’t think I’ve ever been in a conventional supermarket. There’s one close to our house but we literally have never set foot inside.
Our eating habits go more like this:
There’s a health food store two blocks from the dance studio. We’ll have a half hour between classes, or maybe fifteen minutes on the way to an audition, and we’ll jet over there. Ma will head to the juice counter and order a large carrot (once I had a shot of wheatgrass and I puked in a trash can on the street). I’ll dip to the back and dig through the freezer to unearth one of the Kamikazes I buried in there the day before. Kamikazes are rice shakes that I think are much better frozen (they’re really called amazakes, but “Kamikaze” makes more sense).
Twice a month we hit Panna, a closet-width Indian restaurant on Sixth Street, where I always get exactly the same thing: cheese poori (basically an Indian grilled cheese) and raita, which is a yogurt condiment with cucumber in it. On very rare occasions I can get lamb curry, but that’s only when we’re flush. Ma gets a gross spinach dish that takes longer and by the time it comes, I am comatose on the table. I don’t know what they put in the food, but I’m almost sure they’re drugging me. As soon as we finish eating my eyelids become cement shutters, and I pass out, drooling on the glass tabletop.
Other nights I’ll scrape a buck fifty and hit the Spanish deli on Second Avenue for a coffee cup of rice and beans, or, if I’ve got a little more cash, a pint of chicken lo mein from the takeout Chinese joint. Ma hates that because she says it’s rigged with MSG to trick my senses and poison my body, but it’s so damn good.
If Ma’s not around and I’ve got three bucks, I’ll hit any deli I pass and order the same exact thing: salami on a roll, lettuce, tomato, mayo. Mostly I don’t have enough for a sandwich, though; mostly I subsist on toasted bagels with butter, sometimes cream cheese.
It’s been kinda gnarly with food lately. The electricity went out in the new apartment because Con Ed shut it off. Ma says the bill doubled since we’re in a place with more rooms, so we’re running a cable out the window to the Purple Woman’s place upstairs. That gives us some light in the front room and the radio, but it means the fridge doesn’t work.
Ma says I don’t need keys to the house because if the sun is out I should be out in it, so mostly I wait around the dance studio trying to figure out how I can score enough money to sneak away and grab a Happy Meal.
We walked the runway a few weeks ago for a hat designer. There was an Italian model who had a bunch of cash in his jeans in the dressing room. I don’t know what I planned to do with a roll of European money, but there was a sweet silver clip so I snagged it. I’m dumb, though, because I was the only one who could have done it, and my ma just about lost her mind when she realized it was me.
The next day, on the way to school, she dragged me into a church and asked the priest if he could give me an exorcism. She told me about how every time she’s ever stolen something, anything, no matter what size, something precious to her goes missing. She says she doesn’t know how it works, and she doesn’t believe in mystical shit, but that’s just the balance of things.
So now I don’t steal from people anymore. I just sit around staring at people’s food, wondering where the hole in the sky is that money and hamburgers are gonna drop out of.
I was on the subway recently and the smell of chocolate floated down the car, rich, milky, and sweet. A little boy was holding it awkwardly between his middle finger and his thumb, smacking his lips from his last bite, watching it melt in the heat of his hands. My tongue sprouted a layer of dew. I wanted to snatch that kid’s chocolate so badly.
When you’re hungry your mouth waters. Your stomach produces some kind of acids or something and it’s like your tongue starts to sweat. There is the vaguest flavor. You can trick your body out of hunger if you replace this flavor.
I have zero shame about going up to the guys at the newsstands in the subway and asking them what I can get for two dimes. Usually a Blow Pop is a safe bet. I go for cherry or sour green apple because it has the most pungent flavor. And Blow Pops last, too. So that’s a long time my mouth is telling my stomach I’m not hungry. And then there’s gum inside to prolong it further.
Never drink water when you feel like that; it only makes you realize how hungry you are. You want to chew it and eat it, but there’s nothing fuckin’ there. It’s just water filling, or not filling, your little belly.
My strategy to avoid constantly ruminating on my hunger is to steal as much as I can from stores (not people), and to distract myself with elaborate getups. I got some costume glue and stuck clippings from my ma’s hair all over my face a few weeks ago and told people I was a werewolf lost from the forest and did they want to donate to my fund to return home to my habitat.
We’ve been spending our evenings in the public libraries, when we’re not at school, dance class, or auditions. I got a scholarship to a prestigious ballet school in Harlem, but on the first day the headmaster pulled my ma and me into the girls’ bathroom and told her that I couldn’t wear my black tights and white T-shirt, I’d have to wear the pink getup required of girls. I ran into a stall and puked. Ma didn’t make me go back, but it’s destroyed my opinion of ballet. I hate hate hate going to class now. Ma doesn’t want to hear it. She said I could do more tap and jazz, and I’ve started hip-hop, but she says ballet is the backbone of dance, so I have to still take it. At least she took me out of that crazy strict leotard place and lets me go where I can wear my boys’ uniform.
I’ve been taking advanced tap class in the evenings, and two older ladies asked me if I’d give them private lessons. They don’t mind that I’m only ten, maybe they think it’s cute.
For Christmas my grandma Edie got me a pair of Chucks and my ma put taps on them! I’ve been way up in the front of class right next to the teacher, walking around on my toes, and the ladies have been paying me a little bit to teach them the basics. Needless to say, I’ve been snagging secret Happy Meals when I can.
But mostly there’s no food. Ma is generally in a bad mood and doesn’t seem to get hungry much. She hates the apartment and never wants us in there, so she’s taking more ballet than ever and she’s looking real skinny. I have to remind her about Panna lately, which is weird, and she never cooks, even though we have a stove now. We only go to the apartment late at night and we leave first thing in the morning. If we’re home for a longer stretch, I’ll light some candles in my room and read while she blasts old songs in the big room and belts along.
Anyway, supermarkets: we have this Kamikaze ritual, which has me stabbing a plastic knife down into the bottle furiously while Ma waits for her juice. I wander the aisles as I do this, dodging butts and occasionally miscalculating. Today I’m in full camouflage—pants, shirt, jacket, hat, and greasy face paint. I love camouflage. I love all things army, so this is my dream suit.
We’re in a health food store on West Houston Street, and Ma is looking at some Chinese teas, talking to me about body health, but I’m not listening. I’m concentrating on my Kamikaze and getting it smashed up enough to drip in my mouth when a familiar voice calls our names. It’s my godmother, Nan!
She glides up the aisle and sweeps me into a huge, warm hug. Chewing on my tongue, I continue slamming my knife into the Kamikaze while she asks my ma all kinds of questions about how we are. She compliments my outfit and asks what the occasion is.
I shrug. “It’s Tuesday . . . ?”
She laughs deep and hearty and long, squeezing my shoulder. Something about her just feels cozy, like she sleeps in rabbit furs or bathes in milk. She smells like expensive flowers and first-class plane tickets. I want to tell her I’m fucking hungry, but I’m way too embarrassed to say that to my godmother. I don’t want her to think Ma can’t provide.
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