by Evan Balkan
“Caroline Panski.”
Caroline knew this must be Granny. She folded her arms across her chest and stared, serious daggers in her eyes. Clearly she was not someone to fool with.
Caroline swallowed. “Is Joseph home?” she ventured.
“And where else do you expect him to be?”
“He wasn’t in school today.”
“He wasn’t in school today because some boys beat him up—could be your brothers by the looks of you. Three boys against one of him.”
“I came to see if he’s okay.”
“He’ll be okay.”
“Will he be back in school?”
There was movement behind Granny and she became distracted.
“Granny, who’s there?”
Caroline recognized Joseph’s voice.
“Get back in there and lay down,” Granny demanded.
“It’s me,” Caroline said.
The door opened, revealing Joseph. There was a bandage across his head, and one eye was black and puffy. He had a cut across his lower lip and one arm in a sling. Granny stepped back, allowing Caroline full view of this pathetic spectacle and then fixed her with a mile long stare, as if this was Caroline’s doing.
“What happened?”
“As if you don’t know.”
“What? I don’t know. What do you mean?”
“It was your friends did this to me.”
“No, Joseph. That’s not true.”
“I don’t want to see you again.”
Joseph looked to Granny for some kind of confirmation, which she gave by way of a firm nod before scooting Joseph back inside. When he was in, she turned to Caroline.
“You heard the boy. Now I suggest you get yourself back to your neighborhood where you belong.”
The door slammed hard, a final exclamation point. Then, just as quickly, the door opened again. “Little lady,” Granny called.
Caroline, full of renewed hope, answered, “Yes?”
“Here.” She tossed Caroline’s scarf and it fell to the ground as the door slammed shut.
She started to walk away when the door opened again. This time, it was Joseph.
“You have to believe me,” Caroline said. “I swear I didn’t know a thing about it. They’re not even my friends. I don’t think I even have friends anymore.”
“I know it wasn’t you,” Joseph said. “I had to say that because of Granny.”
“I missed you today. You’re coming back to school, aren’t you?”
Joseph shook his head.
“But you have to.”
“They don’t want me there.”
“Well, they don’t want me either.”
“But they don’t aim to kill you. I seen how this works. My daddy—”
“My daddy is dead, too, you know. You’re not the only one in the world with a dead daddy.”
“You don’t understand. You don’t know anything about it.”
“I know that you can’t leave.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re all I’ve got left. I gave up my friends for you. My dad is dead. I don’t have hockey. My mom is hardly there anymore. She’s there, but she’s not there. It’s just you, Joseph. You’re all that’s left.”
Joseph stared down the cold street, looking pathetic in his bandages. “I’m sorry, Caroline,” he said. “I’m going to a different school. A Negro school.”
Caroline felt a deep anger burning inside her. She was alone in the world and Joseph was the only one who could understand her. “I thought you were braver than that,” she said.
Joseph shook his head. “I’m plenty brave. Goodbye, Caroline,” he said.
Dejected, she walked away, just as a light snow began to fall. Behind her, Joseph bent and picked up her scarf. He started to call out for her, but her name got caught in his throat. Besides, by this point, she had already turned a corner and was gone.
As Caroline walked toward home, she passed the alley that led to the frozen pond. She heard the shouts of the boys, deep into a game. She turned around and marched straight down the alley and emerged onto the ice.
She stood there a minute, completely numb to the world, numb to everything, unaware of what she was going to do. Until one of the creeps hurled some stupid insult at her. Again. And that was that. Enough was enough.
She marched up to the boy, the kid whose stick she snatched last time around. This time he wisely handed it to her, no questions asked. She grabbed it and stepped out onto the ice. She wore regular shoes, so she was at a severe disadvantage. But she was a player possessed, stealing the puck from one of the boys and racing toward goal. Her teammates called for the puck, banging the ice to alert her to their positions. But she ignored all of them. When a defender approached, she took her stick and cracked him across the kneecaps. He crumpled in a pained heap. She got close to goal and shot. This time the goalie made the save.
Caroline turned around to see Alan skating full speed toward her, a repeat of when she scored and he laid her out. But this time she raised her stick and slammed it right across his mouth. He went sprawling, his mouth sprinkling the ice with blood. One tooth skittered across the ice. Caroline threw down her stick and jumped on top of Alan, walloping his face with her hands, a combination of slaps and punches, fighting against the universe, taking out all of her fury toward an unfair world, until several of the other boys lifted her off and held her back. She struggled for a few moments before wrestling free and taking off back across the ice and through the alley, leaving a dozen stunned boys to watch Alan writhe on the ice.
She walked faster now, impervious to the cold. She skirted the edges of her own neighborhood and walked all the way past Highlandtown, along North Highland Street, past the tall thin brick and Formstone rowhomes. She kept going, picking up Lombard Street and turning south down Haven Street. She walked for an hour, through neighborhoods she didn’t recognize and where she knew no one. Baltimore was funny that way, she thought. You only had to go a few blocks in one direction or another and you were in a new world. The houses were different, the people were different, you could hear different languages.
Then, she thought she started to recognize things. But why? Or how? And then it hit her. If she kept going in the same direction, soon enough she’d run out of land. There, not far ahead, was the place where the big ships docked, where she’d seen her daddy off, not even a year earlier. It felt like a whole other life altogether. And that, suddenly, was where she needed to go. No question about it.
A gargantuan ship sat in port, just like the last time she’d been there. But this time it was discharging soldiers, not taking them on board. There was a crowd, too, whole families, waiting with hardly concealed excitement on the pier, looking and straining, hoping to catch the first glimpse of their loved one coming home. Several young children strained at their mother’s knees, like dogs pulling on leashes, ready to burst forward and run to their daddies.
And there, coming from a single open door, one by one, men in drab green uniforms, each of them carrying a huge duffel across his back, emerged onto a gangway and made his way toward the series of ladders and steps that would take him onto land, take him to his waiting family. Twice, she saw men that looked, from her distance, exactly like her own father. His handsome face. His smooth grin. The dark hair, combed neatly under his drab olive hat. She even saw the faint indentation of the dimple in his chin. But each time this happened, the man who looked initially like her father morphed into some other man, a man with a different family, a man who wrapped his arms around some other woman—not Caroline’s mother—and some other kids—not her and Sam. And arm in arm they walked off. And there Caroline stood alone.
Each man who came off the final ladder shook the hand of a guy with a thin mustache and slicked back hair, dapper in a dark suit, who Caroline eventually recognized as the mayor of Baltimore. And then it was over. The mayor headed toward a long, black waiting car. The happy families dispersed and made their way toward th
e freeways of Baltimore, Maryland, the United States of America, back, presumably, to warm meals and happy homes.
But, in fact, it wasn’t over. After a few moments, Caroline noticed there were easily a dozen or so other families still standing around. They were all Negro. The same kind of excitement swept over them, too, but they had been somehow invisible just minutes earlier. It was only now, as the dark-skinned men started leaving the ship, that these folks, too, ran toward it, leaping and twirling, and grasping onto their returning heroes. Caroline watched these families, too, not even realizing that long steaks of tears flowed down her cheeks.
“A WORLD OF HURT.” That’s what Sam used to call it, though he joked about it. It was some dumb phrase he’d picked up from his friends at school. “Hey, Caroline,” he’d say. “I’m gonna put you in a world of hurt.” He’d say this while holding up his pointer finger and thumb, cocking a make believe gun.
“Shut up, Sam,” she’d say.
But now she kind of knew what he was talking about, or at least was feeling what she imagined a world of hurt actually felt like. A hollowed out feeling, like her belly was nothing but a big deep hole and what bounced around in there was a mess of butterflies all flapping their wings and making her feel perpetually on the edge of being sick.
She missed her dad. She’d never see him again. It hurt so much to think about it.
And Joseph was gone now, too, transferred to a different school. The one good thing was that Alan was gone also, sent to a military school or something, the rumor went, as discipline for his role in Joseph’s beating. But she didn’t care about Alan. It was Joseph she missed. It seemed everyone important to her was nothing more than a ghost now, all of them residing in some place she could never hope to get to.
Worse, whenever she caught eyes with Beatrice, her old friend glared at her. Even Genevieve wasn’t acting nice, though it seemed to Caroline that she simply didn’t know where to turn her allegiances and was uncomfortable with the tension between her old friends, so she did what she always did in situations that made her uncomfortable—she clammed up entirely.
It remained unspoken, but just like Joseph’s presence had created and maintained a deep wedge between Caroline and her friends, now his absence did the same.
“Hey, guys . . .” Alma started. But when the only response was a snapped, “What?” all she managed was a chastened, “Forget it” before the group of old friends dispersed leaving Alma alone and, presumably, dreaming of television. She wanted an end to it, clearly, but she did not possess the power of reconciliation between her more forceful friends, and so the girls continued in a silent stalemate over something that none of them was capable of naming and none of them tried to resolve.
The same scene repeated itself each day for the rest of the week. In the lunchroom and outside the building before and after school, Alma was literally and figuratively in the middle, between Caroline on one side and Beatrice and the complicit Genevieve on the other, with backs turned in icy silence and no one interested in a thaw or even in trying to understand what it was really all about.
So Caroline walked home from school alone. Most days, that was just fine. It seemed that for most of the kids, accumulating as many friends as possible was the highest form of validation. But Caroline never could see the fuss in it. A few good friends was more than sufficient. And lately it was clear that even her old friends were tiring of her. So be it. The prospect would have horrified her not long ago, but now she felt a certain comfort in solitude. Still, it was no fun to be alone all the time. But she just couldn’t be around Beatrice and Genevieve anymore. Alma wasn’t bad, but still …
The problem was that Caroline felt like a totally different person now than the person she had been barely six months earlier. It was as if she had aged a whole four or five years. She could get back to her friends when they caught up to her, or when she reverted back to being her old self. Until then, she’d go it alone.
The trolley was a rare treat. True, it cost only five cents, a fare the Panskis could afford from time to time, but there just wasn’t any real need. Virtually everything they could want they could get by walking. But Caroline decided she deserved a treat. She knew what she’d find over at the frozen pond—no doubt those creeps would be back. She wanted to get away from them, away from her own neighborhood for a while, from her life, if that was possible.
So she pulled a dime from her piggy bank, grabbed her skates and stick, and took the Number 29 north toward Roland Park. She knew exactly where she wanted to go.
She couldn’t remember where she and her dad had been heading when they’d left the house that morning. It seemed so long ago now. It had been like any other morning, but Caroline knew it would turn into something special when her dad tapped her knee well before their stop, stood up, and winked at her. “Come on. Let’s get off here.”
They’d exited the trolley across from the grand Cathedral on Charles Street and walked a few blocks toward Loyola College, stopping along the way for two lemon Italian ices. It was a blazing hot summer day. “I want to show you something,” he said, walking briskly up Charles and turning on Cold Spring. Just before them stood a great hill.
“What’s that, Daddy?”
“Come on, I’ll race you up.” He took off up the hill. Caroline chased after, and soon she caught and then passed him.
He got to the top of the hill and bent over, his hands on his knees, breathing in and out as if he’d just run a marathon. “You’re … just … too … fast,” he wheezed. “Whew!”
“Stop it, Daddy,” she said with a laugh, and then turned to see a lake in the shape of a perfect square with a big flock of geese floating on top. “What is this place?”
“The Guilford Reservoir. Can you imagine that? A neighborhood so fancy it’s got its own water supply.”
Caroline scrunched up her nose. “But don’t the geese poop in it?”
Her father rubbed his knuckles over Caroline’s head. “That’ll be our little secret, won’t it?” He patted the ground and she sat next to him. Below them they could see the rooftops of Guilford, the toniest enclave in the city. Stone and stucco beauties planted like fairy tale castles along curvy streets studded with sycamores and poplars—a place that seemed a million miles from where they lived, and yet was less than a few miles from home. In a distant, fantastical way, it felt like home—or a place one would aspire to call home someday.
“You think you might like to live down there one day?” her father asked. “You and some drop-dead gorgeous guy?” He poked a finger in her ribs.
“It is beautiful,” she said, squirming away. “But I can’t imagine I’d ever live in a place like this.”
“Sweet Caroline, you can do anything you want to do. Of that I am certain.”
She remembered that conversation now, and it seemed a cruel one. It bit at her, nibbling at her chest and threatening to spill tears down her cheeks, tears that would not stop if she allowed them to start. So she bit them back and sat on the ground at the reservoir’s edge, lacing up her skates. The sky was overcast and gray and a false dawn spread itself all around her in the form of a thick gloom. Tiny plumes of smoke curlicued their way from the chimney tops below her, melding with the atmospheric gray. Single candles lit many of the windows.
This was one of the problems with going to a place like Guilford. Yes, she wanted an escape. But the temporary nature of it was almost too much to bear. Did someone from Caroline’s Highlandtown neighborhood ever wind up in a place like this? Did that migration ever really occur? Or did people like Caroline automatically stay in what she had once heard her neighborhood referred to as “blue collar”? It was just one more thing in a seemingly endless list of things that didn’t make sense. She knew one of her neighbors, six houses down, had painted his front door and the window trims blue, but what did that have to do with “collars”? Who knew?
Anyway, it didn’t much matter; her father was gone now and with him all his dreams for her. Yes, the milita
ry provided some survivors’ pay, but this was only enough to keep the family afloat. Was it realistic to think that she’d end up anywhere besides where she’d come from?
And yet her thoughts of Highlandtown shamed her, too. It wasn’t as if she was embarrassed about where she’d come from. It was a solid place, far better and more secure than neighborhoods like where Joseph lived. Highlandtown had been a major step up for her grandparents, émigrés from Poland and Austria-Hungary who’d settled in Baltimore looking for a new life, free from Old World prejudices, seeking a world where if one simply worked hard enough, rewards awaited. A “meritocracy,” her dad called it. It was the first “adult word” she’d ever learned. Sure, it was plenty good enough for them. It was just that her dad pictured her elsewhere, up here, and not down there.
But that was just it, though, wasn’t it? When she thought about her grandparents now—she’d only ever met two of them and they both died when she was young—she remembered them only as very old and so hopelessly out of style with their modest clothing and penchant for layering themselves, even in summer, in the drabbest, most unflattering garments.
She remembered her grandmother’s chin and the long silver hairs that sprouted there. She’d be ashamed to admit it out loud, but now, after so many years, if she was honest, she’d concede that when her grandmother insisted on a hug, Caroline complied but not without a shudder. And she could remember virtually nothing of her grandfather besides his grotesque nose, bulbous and shaped like a grenade speckled with the blue of burst capillaries.
Yes, they had made sacrifices, and she was glad of it. They had done what they needed to do to make a better life, so what did she owe them now if not to keep moving on up the ladder? Was it fruitless to think she could live in a place like this? Her father thought she could. He thought she could do anything. But could she?
Lacing up her skates, she saw her father in the reflection on the ice. She saw the geese, too, gone now for the season. And she saw Joseph, saw his hopelessness on the ice, the comic way he had of skittering his shoes along the surface as if he was a cartoon character slipping on a strategically placed banana peel. She remembered the feel of his hand—so warm and smooth, the skin on his palm a full two shades lighter than the backside—reaching out to her for help as he struggled to stay on his feet.