“Where you going?” he asked, fingers strumming the radio strapped to his belt.
I didn’t answer. I just kept walking toward the door. I heard him following, could feel him on my heels.
“Hey, girl,” he said, “wait up,” and, when I did not stop, “just who the hell do you think you are?”
His voice became louder. He cursed to himself and began talking into the fuzz of the radio.
“I’m gonna need some assistance by the main doors.”
I walked faster.
I was no real threat, of course, but he couldn’t have someone walking away while he was talking. It was a power thing, and I had no choice but to keep walking.
I pushed through the glass doors and saw Annmarie and her old Volvo waiting for me in the loop.
I ran.
The baby blue of my skirt cupped my behind as I stretched my legs toward my friend, who saw me coming and started the engine.
“Don’t stop,” I said as I slid into the passenger seat. And though another sentry had come from the other set of doors, and two men slapped their hands onto the glass of her windshield, Annmarie put her foot on the pedal and gunned out of the loop.
“What’s going on?” she wanted to know.
“Just go,” I answered, trying to keep my voice level.
I didn’t know what I was doing, but I couldn’t stop.
We drove to the mall, where I filled up on cookies and shoes and tried to forget the scene I’d caused back at school. But once the shopping trip was over and I headed toward my job at the transportation council, I worried about what had happened, and half-expected the police to greet me at my job.
I was so afraid of being caught that I missed school for several weeks. The Girls called. Used to seeing me at least a couple times a week, they were worried. Eventually, my worry about failing overtook my fear of arrest, and I was ready to face school again.
I looked both ways as I stepped through the doors of East High and tried to cloak myself in the crowd of students. The sentry was nowhere in sight.
When I didn’t see him in between the first few classes, I breathed a bit easier, but still hunched over and made myself as small as possible while walking in the hallways. Until lunch, when I heard that the sentry had lost his job a week prior for trying to pimp out high-school girls.
My relief was thorough, if fleeting.
The boundaries continued to blur.
The following week, I mouthed off to the film studies teacher and was kicked out of class.
“You needed that credit,” said my guidance counselor.
Mrs. Wylie had the look of an aging leprechaun. Orange hair leapt from her head and was set off by smiling green eyes. Despite the urgency in her voice, she did not seem overly troubled by my loss of credit. She smiled as though it were just another day, confident that she’d be sipping a gin and tonic by four fifteen, whether someone in her alphabetically-assigned caseload was missing an English credit or not. Still, she tried.
“If you want to graduate,” she continued, “you’ll have to take an English class at night school.”
She leaned in and said this with a wink.
As though we shared a secret. We were partners, it seemed, Mrs. Wylie and I, and as I completed the papers for night school, she softened some, and touched me on the shoulder.
“It’ll be fine,” she said, “just show up.”
117
I was the only kid at night school.
Adults slid behind desks and worked on properly punctuating sentences. When I was handed a ditto to work on, I looked at the Dick and Jane illustrations and turned around to find someone to laugh with. But every other head was bent into the work. My fellow night school students were a serious lot. They came from Laos and Honduras, and when they were not learning to write sentences in English, they kept their eyes on the teacher, moving their bronze faces like sunflowers following a path of light. They wore their pencils into stubs and spoke of a high school diploma with such reverence, I was shamed into working right along with them.
118
You might think that all that time in night school sitting among people who worked ten hours a day, went home to care for children, yet still found time to study sentence structure every evening would have inspired me.
And it did.
You might also think that inspiration led to salvation, as inspiration so often does.
But that’s not exactly the way it happened.
Sitting in that room opened my eyes. I was impressed by the motivation of the students, but their drive also served to highlight my own lack of purpose.
Graduation itself had always been a given.
I was smart, why wouldn’t I graduate?
But as the end of high school loomed, I began to look around and notice plenty of smart people who hadn’t finished high school.
At work, I put my nose to the grindstone.
At home, I spent as much time as I could outside of my house, or hiding under the covers.
And at school, I continued to straddle the line between caring and not caring.
Toward the end of senior year, I walked off the tennis courts during gym class one day with Bernadette Benetti. The sun was shining and we swayed our hips as we crossed East Main Street, taking no pains to hide our AWOL status. We came back a half-hour later, coffee and Danish in hand.
It was a bright day and we felt grown-up as we sipped on coffee from to-go cups.
The PE teacher, Mrs. Rich, had always been attentive, had encouraged me to go out for the tennis team, but I refused. She said I was good at basketball, too, which was a lie, but a kind one. She was a good teacher. She set limits, but left room for affection. Except on the day Bernadette and I dropped our tennis rackets in favor of coffee.
Mrs. Rich fumed. She called me into her office, where I sat looking at piles of unwashed gym uniforms. Dingy cotton one-pieces in pale blue and sage slopped over the top of an industrial-sized hamper.
She said she had no choice but to fail me. I’d missed so many days already, and just walking off the courts like that showed I wasn’t committed to anything.
“Are you?” she asked.
I looked at the dirty laundry and said nothing.
We both understood that this was it. I wouldn’t graduate high school without that PE credit.
Mrs. Rich leaned in.
“Well, say something.”
I liked the teacher, feared and respected her, but could find no words. When I failed to speak, she scratched a spot behind her ear and said she had no choice but to send me to the dean for suspension.
When I failed to respond even to that, she asked what I did care about anyway. The question had force to it, but even as it hit me, I could find no answer.
119
I went cold as I considered it.
I’d had close calls before. Failing grades. Night school. Missed exams.
Looking back, I wondered when it was I’d stopped trying.
I thought of the bad teachers I’d had. Mr. Burm, who started each English class with a piece of chalk between his fingers. He’d step to the board, scratch out an assignment, then return to his newspaper while we did what we wanted at our desks. I kept waiting for something to happen, long after other students had realized that his class would be just another study hall. What a letdown after the nuns who’d shown such fire while reading poetry.
But there were good teachers, too.
Mrs. Farnham, my eleventh-grade English teacher, for instance. She had Parkinson’s or some other ailment that caused her to shake, wore her hair in a quivering pile on top of her head, and made no mystery of the fact that she had only one breast. She loved the books she assigned, and when I actually attended, I found myself touched by Rosasharon’s sharing of her milk, could relate to the seasickness of the Joads’ westward migration. And who could not visualize Lady Macbeth with those impossible stains on her hands in Mrs. Farnham’s telling? Still, I had a job I preferred to school by then.
When I received a report card that showed me failing the class, I went to her in a panic. It was a Friday in June, a few days before the end of the school year, but suddenly, I cared. I wanted to pass.
I found Mrs. Farnham in her room, head shaking behind a pile of typed papers. She looked up briefly, then back to her work.
I walked in and stood before her desk.
“I’ve read some books on my own this year,” I said, my voice wet. She’d liked my writing earlier in the year, and I was hoping to impress her with my literary prowess.
“Like what?” she asked without looking up.
I thought hard. I had been reading lots, but didn’t think Harlequin romances would impress her. I wanted to show I’d been serious in my choices. I thought of one an English teacher would like: “Well, Catcher in the Rye, for starts.”
“Outdated piece of shit,” she said.
Surprised by the frankness of her opinion, I was unsure whether to try another title or walk away.
Walk away, I decided.
As I started to leave, Mrs. Farnham finally raised her head and asked if I liked feminist science fiction.
Normally I might have laughed, but I was scared and serious for once, so I said I wasn’t sure.
She sent me home with a stack of books, told me to have them read by Monday, at which time she kept me after school and asked me to explain the plot, literary approach, and roles of women in each novel.
She was cautious as I began, but showed some satisfaction as I continued. “The female characters are surprisingly strong,” I said, “each takes a risk in the novel, and by the end, only one of them seems to regret it.”
“Which? And when?” She asked, and leaned in as I answered.
Still, she did not smile.
“I like you,” she finally said, “but make no mistake, I am doing you no favor—I would have failed you if you hadn’t read every last one of those books.”
I thought of Mrs. Farnham and other close calls as I told my mother it looked like I would not graduate from high school. She was in her room, the door closed. I talked through the door and waited for her response as I told her about failing gym class.
She said nothing.
I kept talking.
I said something might happen to save me, but eventually silence hung on both sides of the closed door, and neither of us really believed.
120
“I don’t care what the school says, you don’t deserve to graduate.”
My mother shouted this through an upstairs bedroom window. I was outside, calling the good news up from the street: I would, in the end, be able to graduate.
I was floating, had just come from the Girls’ house, where Maritza had shared our news. She’d passed the math exam that had plagued her for years, and Mrs. Wylie had called me down after testing to say that Mrs. Rich, the PE teacher, had made an exception.
“She’s letting you pass,” the impish counselor reported, looking relieved to have one less student to sign up for summer school.
“Why?” I asked.
She shrugged, said I must have made a good case for myself, but I knew I hadn’t. I had apologized to Mrs. Rich for walking out of gym class and ruining her trust, but I had not asked her to change my grade, had spared us both the indignity of my begging.
But she’d changed the grade anyway, my counselor reported and suddenly everyone was happy, hugging me, saying they knew I could do it.
I stood under my mother’s window, waiting for her to say something else. It was hot, the sun beating down on me as I waited on the street.
“How’d you trick them into this?” was all she said, her voice sluggish, but clearly angry and disappointed that the school had been duped by the likes of me.
I just stood there, staring up at the window, unable to see her through the sun’s glare. I was amazed, almost flattered, by the power my mother thought I had over the school. It was true that I had messed up most of the year, but I had also worked—had walked to and from each and every night-school class.
But I had given up that year, and perhaps in doing so, I’d encouraged my mother to give up right along with me. Still her silence burned more than the late June sun.
Finally, she spoke again.
“It doesn’t matter what they say,” she said, “you don’t deserve to graduate, and I won’t have any part of it.”
By then, Stephanie was living a few towns away in a tiny apartment with Jimmy Sulli. The older kids were away, and the two younger girls didn’t understand what graduation meant, or how close I’d come to not making it.
There was no one to talk to.
My mother slammed the window, and I went in through the front door and let my boxed cap and gown fall to the floor. No tears came. I just lay in the darkened room and nurtured the part of me that believed my mother was right—that I didn’t deserve to graduate.
Except for the sound of children playing on the street, the house was quiet. Their laughter drifted in through open windows. My mother and I were rooms away from each other, doors closed, in separate cells, but somehow I had become a replica of her, lying in bed, flattened by the weight of the world.
121
I got up.
The Girls called, said I had to attend the ceremony I’d earned.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“There’s no way you’re missing graduation, white girl.” They prodded, and when I complained I had no one to go with, they said I’d go with them.
I stayed in bed.
The Girls called.
Again and again.
“Come on, blanca,” they said, “it will be fun,” and “we’re stopping to see our mother,” then finally, that they’d be leaving in forty-five minutes.
I looked at the cardboard box holding the cap and gown, and felt the full drama of the moment.
And finally, I cried.
Over every pain I’d ever felt. Over the imprecise hovering of the future, the nostalgic thorn of the past. Over my mother, my sisters, the father I never knew. Over the places we’d lived, the things we’d lost, and how wilted everything looked just then. Over Ruben and Danny, the doctor’s phone call, and the mistakes I’d made.
I sobbed.
And sobbed.
And when my face was as wet as it could get and I was completely cried out, I thought of my mother, huddled a few walls away, and began to feel anger.
She just doesn’t want to get out of bed, I realized.
Not for me, or anyone else. She said she wanted the best for us, and a part of her did, but another part just wanted company. She’d never spent a night alone, I remembered her saying. She’d been surrounded by her family, then her husband, and finally us. My mother had had her own collection of pain, and she didn’t want to be left alone with it.
I thought of this, and let my anger push me into action. I threw myself into whatever clothes I could find, grabbed the white satin gown and purple tassel, and headed to the Girls’ house, bobby pins pressed between my teeth.
The Girls’ mother was also in bed—at Park Ridge Hospital, at the end stages of ovarian cancer—but, as promised, we stopped by her room on the way to the school, and I let her kiss of congratulations settle on my skin.
“Soy tan orgullosa,” she said, I am so proud.
122
I chattered with Maritza as we made our way into the auditorium at East High School. “How’s my hair?” I asked, while she begged me to straighten her cap and we stood in line listening to the rules for crossing the stage.
I stuck my head outside and checked the auditorium for someone from my family.
I knew they wouldn’t be there, but still I checked.
No one.
“When your name is called, walk to the center of the stage, wait for your graduation partner, then head to the front.”
We were to walk out in pairs. Boy and girl.
As names began to be called, I watched as boys in purple gowns and girls in white met at center stage,
faced each other briefly, then turned and walked into the limelight. The audience responded with whoops and hollers, hearty clapping, or a polite dribble of applause.
I watched and waited as names were called, and began to fear that no one would clap for me. My friends were there, I knew, but would they make noise?
I considered slinking away.
“Paula Gerace and Tyrone Germaine.”
Boys and girls walked onto the stage in smiling pairs, until finally the principal reached the Ls.
“Nilsa Lista and Olivier Lightfoot.”
I peeked out again and saw only strange faces.
I knew my name would be next, and steeled myself for the silence I was certain would follow.
“Sonja Livingston and Jonathan Livon.”
I walked onto the stage facing Jonny. He was tall and good-looking, a top-notch scholar and stellar athlete. I remembered him from some of my classes, but he’d never looked so golden before. As I approached center stage, I felt a pang of regret that I had not taken my classes seriously.
I moved in what seemed like slow motion to the center of the stage, where light spilled from the ceiling and Jonny flashed a wide smile as we turned to face the audience.
The crowd erupted in whoops and hollers.
People stood and clapped and cheered.
All that light and noise, it felt as though the earth was breaking open.
It took me a second to realize that the thunder wasn’t for me—they were cheering for Jonny: star student, golden boy, multiple scholarship winner. They were shouting for him, but I let their light and cheer carry me to the front of the stage just the same.
The crowd continued to crack itself open with applause as I accepted the diploma that had only recently begun to mean something.
Looking out into the packed auditorium, I saw people standing and stomping and shouting for Jonny, but noticed some clapping for me. The Girls. My teachers. Friends. I blinked back the bright lights and felt warm as I exited the stage. I headed toward the stairs, and for a few seconds, let myself enjoy the splendor of the moment, no matter its source. I smiled as I stepped off the stage and felt some of that light making its way into me, and I believed, just then, that I would somehow find a way.
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