Sunday You Learn How to Box

by Bil Wright

  I managed to pass everything, even if it was borderline. Dr. Shapiro and the principal met with Mom again and said even though I hadn’t flunked, they strongly recommended that I go to this place downtown called the Burgess Treatment Center, which Mom said was really an insane asylum.

  “I hope you’re satisfied,” she told me. “You couldn’t make me look any worse than this.”

  Burgess was actually a day treatment center, Dr. Shapiro explained to me, which still might be an insane asylum I thought, but at least they wouldn’t keep me there sharing a room with some grizzled old guy wearing a dirty straitjacket and weeping. It was state-owned so Mom wouldn’t have to pay anything. Dr. Shapiro thought it was a great deal. He told me to think of it as a scholarship and laughed, which made me think maybe he was a little nuts too.

  I only had to go for a few hours every day, for group therapy and for a private session with him. He wanted me to start in August so I’d get used to it, then continue in the fall while I was going to school. He’d work with the principal to arrange my schedule so I wouldn’t miss anything too important while I was at Burgess in the morning.

  All July I spent sitting on the stoop reading library books or taking care of Lorelle while Mom ironed. I hardly ever saw Ray Anthony and when I did, we’d kind of nod at each other, but by the time I got up the nerve to say anything, either he was already gone or I got called inside. I’d take over the ironing if Mom needed a break or got nauseous, which she sometimes did, standing over the steam inhaling spray starch and people’s stinking underwear. By August I was glad I’d have someplace to go in the mornings, even if it was “the asylum” as Mom insisted on calling it.

  14

  One side of our bungalow faced the courtyard, the center of the projects. Our back door faced the street. Across the street were houses like the ones Mom wanted so desperately to live in, all sizes, all colors, with awninged porches and neatly trimmed hedges.

  Directly across from us, the Sabatinos, an Italian couple, owned a pale blue, two-family house with a front lawn framed by alternating red and white zinnias. There were zinnias on either side of the driveway leading to their front porch and zinnias in window boxes on both floors of the house. Mom decided she wanted zinnias planted in the patch of dirt outside the front of our bungalow.

  “It will keep us from thinking we’re in a prison,” she said, “and remind us that this is only a temporary condition.” She would ignore, of course, the regulation that forbade tenants to plant anything on projects property.

  She went across the street one day when Mr. Sabatino was on his knees planting along the driveway and asked him if zinnias were difficult to grow. She was willing to buy soil, if it was necessary. She wanted to do whatever was necessary, she flattered him, to have her home look as attractive as the home it faced across the street.

  Sal Sabatino was about fifty years old and five feet tall. He didn’t speak English very well and asked after almost every sentence, “Yeah, Mrs. Stamps?” to which Mom would answer, “I follow you.” He assured Mom that he would be more than happy to bring some of his special planting soil across the street and plant a couple of rows of zinnias himself, if that’s what she wanted. “Are you sure this isn’t nothing against the law? I never seen no other flowers over there.”

  “If there’s a problem, it won’t be yours, Mr. Sabatino. I’ll do what I want with where I live.”

  “That’s right?” He laughed. “Call me Sal. You tell me when to bring the flowers over, Mrs. Stamps, and I’ll plant them myself. Not a problem.” And the next Saturday morning, about an hour after Ben left for work, Mr. Sabatino was on his knees in front of our bungalow, planting zinnias.

  Kids from the projects called to each other to “come look at the white man planting flowers outside Miz Stamps’s apartment.” Mom stood on the stoop and supervised Mr. Sabatino. “Not too close to each other, Mr. Sabatino. And not too close to the street.”

  After he’d finished planting, I could see neighbor women watching from their windows as Mom served Mr. Sabatino iced tea on the front stoop. The two of them sat there sipping as Mom pretended not to notice she had an audience.

  That night, Mom asked Ben what he thought of the zinnias.

  “Something else for you to fight with these people about?” Ben asked her. “They’re not all that fond of you as it is. Why do you push it? Why do you always have to call attention to yourself?”

  • • •

  When Mom found an ad in the newspapers for a house just outside of town, she asked Ben if he’d drive over to see it. “Please, Ben. We could all go. Just to see. At least, let’s go look at it, for god’s sake.” Ben said, “I’ve already told you. I don’t have any money for a house. If you have the money for one, you go see it.”

  Mom didn’t have the money, but she was determined to see the house. I was shocked when she announced two days later, “Louis, I want you to take care of Lorelle. Mr. Sabatino is taking me to see the house from the ad in the paper.”

  She came back breathless with enthusiasm. “We can’t afford that one, Louis. But I got Mr. Sabatino to take me to see a few others. That’s the only way we’re going to do it. We have to shop. We’ll never get one sitting here.”

  The next day at Sunday dinner, she told Ben she’d gone to see the house, in spite of him. When he asked her how she got there, she said simply, “The man across the street drove me.”

  Ben took a swallow of water and slowly put the glass back on the table. “You got that old man driving you around to see houses now?”

  As he leaned toward Mom, his voice got even softer. “You’re really something, aren’t you? You’d do anything to get your precious house. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Watch your mouth, Ben. You watch your damn mouth. I don’t care what you say in private, but you watch your mouth in front of my children.”

  “I should watch my mouth?” He pushed away from the table and started to stand. “You know what you are?” He flipped his full plate onto the floor. “You’re garbage.”

  He’d barely gotten the word out of his mouth. I lunged at him before he could stand. I aimed at his head, his stomach. I punched, spat, kicked, as hard and as fast as I could, slipping and skidding in mashed potatoes and corn.

  For the first time, Ben ducked and dodged to protect himself. It was only for an instant, but I recognized it when it happened. In the next moment, though, he punched me in the stomach with enough force to go through me to the other side. I doubled over, then fell back. My shoulder smashed against the cinderblock wall and I slumped to the floor in pain.

  Ben was winded. I’d never done that before. In all the Sundays of boxing, I’d never even managed to land a punch. He didn’t come after me. He stared at me like he was trying to keep himself from coming over and killing me. Mom stood between us in front of him begging, “Please. Ben. No.”

  “I don’t care what he does,” I gasped. “I hate him.”

  “And you know what, you little bastard? I hate you too.” With that, he was gone. We didn’t see him again until Monday evening.

  It was the last of the Sunday boxing matches. Till the Sunday he died.

  15

  I was supposed to take the bus every day to Burgess alone, but that first morning Mom and Lorelle went with me in a cab. Mom wanted to see for herself what it looked like and she thought it would look better for her to be seen driving up in a taxi instead of walking from the bus stop.

  Burgess was a big, brown two-story house with a wraparound porch and a driveway. This surprised me because for a whole month I’d imagined a redbrick building with bars on the windows hidden from the street by mile-high hedges.

  No one was on the porch, but there was a face at one of the windows watching us. Mom told the cab to wait. A woman with a pink velvet bow in her hair and lipstick covering her teeth met us at the door and asked us to step into the hallway. I thought she might be one of the friendlier patients but she said, “I’m Vera Stein, the receptionist. Dr. Shapi
ro told me Louis was coming.” She was blocking the doorway on purpose so Mom couldn’t get any farther into the building.

  “Hello, Louis.”

  As nervous as I was, I was dying to tell her to run her tongue over her teeth and clean up some of that lipstick. Mom stopped trying to see around Vera Stein and said to me, “You call me if there’s any problem.” As mean as she’d been about me going to this place, I could hear she was scared to leave me there. Lorelle asked, “Mom, can’t I stay with Louis?” but Mom pulled her back. “Shhh. Louis will be home later.” The moment they turned away, I heard Dr. Shapiro’s voice at the top of the stairs behind Vera Stein.

  “Come on in, Louis. Welcome.”

  I didn’t understand why he’d told me to get there at nine since group therapy wasn’t until ten. I had to sit, waiting in what they called the community room, watching the other patients drink juice and drop doughnut crumbs over everything. From the conversations around me, I found out that day treatment meant most of them had been in a hospital before coming to Burgess. Now they were living on their own, but spending a good part of the day at the center.

  Lucille, the woman whose face I’d seen at the window, was a patient. Anytime she thought she heard a noise outside, she ran over and peeked from behind the curtain. Then, depending on what she saw, she’d call out to whoever was around, “It’s alright! It’s only the mailman!” Or, “There’s somebody walking by, but they’re not gonna come in!” I don’t think it mattered to her whether anyone heard her or not, it was something she had to do for herself. She was the only one of the patients who spoke to me the first day. She had a very loud conversation in the front hallway during which she asked Vera what my name was. Vera said, “Why don’t you go over and introduce yourself, Lucille?” To which Lucille answered, “Because I already know his name is Louis.” I was sitting just a few feet away from them in the community room. Sure enough, Lucille came right in and practically shouted at me, “Is your name Louis? Your name is Louis, right? I heard them call you Louis.”

  Lucille was white, I was pretty sure of it, but her skin was more of a beige color. It wasn’t a black person’s or Puerto Rican beige. It was a beige that looked like she could use some vitamins or maybe a lot more vegetables in her diet. Lucille had dark, curly uncombed-looking hair that had egg or cereal or something in it, the same thing she had around the corners of her mouth. She was wearing a red sweater even though it had to be about eighty-five degrees outside and a plaid skirt that reached almost to her ankles. It was hard to tell for sure, but I guessed she was around twenty-five. Thirty, at the most.

  I told her, “Yes, that’s right. My name is Louis.”

  At about twenty minutes to ten, Vera came into the community room to tell me that everyone was expected to help clean the kitchen area in the morning after juice and doughnuts, whether they ate or not. Anxious not to get off on the wrong foot, I ran in, grabbed a sponge and started washing the other patients’ glasses. Lucille picked up a towel and dried them as I gave them to her. I asked her to wait until I’d had a chance to rinse them all. Even though she said, “Yes, Louis,” in that same loud voice, she took the very next soapy glass from the drain and I wasn’t about to ask her again. Besides, by then I’d seen about a dozen other people wandering around who’d used those glasses and none of them had volunteered to help either one of us. I saw Vera ask one huge man with some pretty nasty stains on the back of his pants if he’d wipe off the table where the doughnuts had been served. He swept the crumbs into the palm of his hand and then threw them on the floor. A black woman sat in the corner of the kitchen mumbling about how no dirty-assed white woman was gonna make her do no damn housework if she didn’t want to, hell, she’d had enough of that to last her a whole damn lifetime. Given who else was around, who cared whether Lucille waited for me to rinse the glasses?

  “Group,” as Dr. Shapiro called it, had only about half the people I’d seen during juice and doughnut time and Lucille was one of them. Dr. Shapiro and a young, blond woman named Sarah were supposed to be the group leaders except Sarah never said anything after she introduced herself to me. She sat next to Dr. Shapiro in the circle and took notes. When she wasn’t taking notes, she was twirling her ponytail with her pencil and flicking it back over her shoulder. It was the kind of habit someone should’ve told her was definitely too irritating to keep doing in front of mental patients.

  In Group, when I had to introduce myself, Lucille said, “Now we have a kid in here,” and I thought, I am. I’m the only kid. Everyone’s older than I am and they’re crazier too. When Dr. Shapiro asked me in front of everyone if I had any thoughts about what Lucille said, I just muttered, “No. I don’t have any thoughts about it. I guess it’s true. I guess I am the youngest.” I wanted to sound calm. All of the others were fidgeting and smoking and getting up to walk around the room. I measured the distance from where I sitting to the door, thinking if anyone did anything dangerous, it wasn’t that far to run.

  When it was her turn, Lucille talked about her new apartment, how she liked the colors of the walls and the floor and the only chair she had, which she let her dog Trisket sit in. Group was almost over before I figured out that Trisket was a stuffed animal. I was thinking about how interesting it all was and what a good psychologist Dr. Shapiro seemed to be when I remembered that I was nutso too or I wouldn’t have been there.

  After Group, while I was waiting to see Dr. Shapiro for what he called “our private,” there was snacktime. I was too nervous to have an appetite and even if I had, watching the other patients eat would have ruined it. They weren’t any better with saltines than they’d been with doughnuts. Most of them either ate like it would be their last meal, gulping and shoveling the crackers in, or they mashed them them into their pockets to save for later. Lucille came up and offered me some of hers, which she’d crumbled into small pieces.

  “Aren’t you going to have snacktime, Louis?”

  I was afraid to upset her. As gently as I could, I told her I wasn’t hungry. She looked disappointed and shuffled off to eat her saltine crumbs alone, staring out the front window. When Vera came in and announced snacktime was over, though, Lucille came back and shouted, “Let’s clean up, Louis,” and once again, we went to the sink together and washed and dried everyone else’s glasses.

  During “our private,” I told Dr. Shapiro about both the thinking and the remembering I’d done during Group. He smiled and said that was good and that he had a feeling I’d be doing both. I asked him if it was necessary for me to come every day. What I really wanted to know was if he thought I was as much of a lunatic as everybody else there. I couldn’t tell if he understood what I was really asking. But he answered, “Yes.”

  Mom asked when I got home, “You tell those people all our business?”

  “No,” I told her. “I didn’t say hardly anything at all.”

  “Don’t con me, Louis,” she said. “I’ve had enough conning to last me a lifetime. That’s what makes me crazy. Con artists and liars.”

  • • •

  Going to Burgess every day didn’t stop me from feeling exhausted all the time. Actually, I thought it might be getting worse. When I got home, I’d sneak a nap. Mom asked me, “What good does it do for you to spend half the day at that asylum if you still come back here and lie around like a junkie?”

  The junkie thing must have been on her mind for a while. I didn’t actually get what she was talking about until one night when I’d fallen asleep in my clothes and left the light on. It was a little after one in the morning when she opened the door to my room and woke me up. She just stared at me questioningly and left. I got up and started to get undressed when she came back with Ben. They took the lampshade off my night table light and made me hold out my arms.

  Mom was the one who’d told me what a junkie was when she told me about Billie Holiday. I pretended I was Billie and she and Ben were cops when she was holding my arm up to the light. I’d never thought about me being a junkie befor
e. When had Mom started to think about it?

  I went to sleep remembering how Miss Odessa told Mom once the reason Ray Anthony Robinson wore dark glasses at night was because he was a junkie. “You better believe it,” she’d said, as though Mom’s believing it would make it the truth.

  In my dream, Ray Anthony and I were on the train to New York, wearing hats with little brims like the one Ray Anthony’d worn to Delilah Buggman’s party. We also had on dark glasses, very dark with square black frames.

  Sitting very close to each other, almost touching, but not quite, both of us were singing, softly. Miss Odessa and Mom were in the seat behind us. Miss Odessa told her it was a shame what I’d become, hanging around with Ray Anthony.

  “Hush,” Mom hissed between her teeth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Up ahead of them, I laughed, pushing my dark glasses back farther up on my nose and pulling the brim of my hat lower to meet them. Ray Anthony and I were singing “I Get a Kick Out of You.” Both of us sounded exactly like Billie Holiday.

  • • •

  There were days when it didn’t feel like it was really me going to Burgess. It was more like me taking my body there, watching it walk around, then bringing it home again. Every day, Lucille would wait for me at the window and by the end of the second week, she’d be out on the porch when I came up the driveway. Even when she was having a bad day, we washed the dishes together. There were quite a few bad days, though, and by the end of the month a lot of Burgess’s glasses had to be replaced.

  I still never said much in Group. I figured eventually Dr. Shapiro would realize that it wasn’t making me any better to sit there and watch the rest of the patients fidget and mumble and tear up tissues. Even Lucille got upset and whined to Dr. Shapiro in front of everybody, “Why does Louis have to come to Group? He never says anything. He just stares at me like I’m insane or something.”