in the parking lot of the Boulevard Mall at an Opportunity Village fund-raiser. Emily is done walking, wants none of her stroller, sits perched on Jim’s shoulders. Small grubby fingers cling to his hair, his ear, his nose, as she rocks there. Jim sees the truck, so I buy the ice cream, the simplest one I can find, but still a swirl of blue and yellow dye.
Emily is amazed at this experience. At the truck, at the kids clustered next to it, at the excited chortle of their voices choosing treats. And then the ice cream itself. Cold! Her tongue laps in and out.
“Jim, her eyes are like a lemur’s. She can’t believe she gets to eat that thing.”
She kicks her small feet into his collarbone.
“Whoa there, pardner,” he says.
“Oh, I’m afraid it’s getting in your hair.”
“I can feel it.”
In fact, the ice cream drips along his ear and down his neck, and before she has eaten half of it, Emily has dropped the whole soggy thing on his head. And then she puts her hands in his hair, lays her cheek on the ice cream, and says, as clear and sweet as those ice-cream truck chimes, “Good daddy.”
So what can he do? Except walk around in the heat with a cream-streaked child on his head, blue and yellow stripes dripping down his shirt, and me laughing.
And later, just weeks later, when Emily’s fever hasn’t responded to the Tylenol, when we have raced to the ER, when the nurse has plunged her in a tub of water, when the fever will not abate, when the doctor says it is meningitis, when he says it sometimes comes on fast like this, when thirty-seven hours and twenty-eight minutes and a hundred million infinite seconds pass, when Emily lies there, tiny in the ICU bed, her breathing labored, then faint, then fluttery (like a little bird), then gone, then a single heart-stopping gasp, and then, again, gone. And no gasp. Later, after all of it, I am so glad we bought that ice-cream treat.
“AVIS, I KNOW YOU ARE
upset. I promise I will do right by you. We can figure this out.”
“What about Nate?”
“Nate? I don’t know. We’ll have to tell him. Avis, I don’t know. I haven’t thought about this. I don’t know what we’re doing. What about Nate?”
“There’s something wrong with Nate. He’s different. You know he’s different. Something happened to him. And he’s not getting better. I know you’ve seen this.”
“Avis. We’re not talking about Nate right now.”
“But we are. We are talking about Nate. What you are talking about is everything. Me, you, Nate, Emily, everything. We are talking about everything.”
I had always known that I would never stop loving the man who left that little girl asleep on his head in the sun. But Jim must have held no equivalent debt to me. There was no image that kept him from falling out of love with me, no matter what happened, no matter how many times. No equivalent moment to a soggy ice-cream-stained child glued to his hopelessly knotted hair.
He stood up and moved behind me. I startled, and he breathed in. Jim was still thinking of the gun. He had said it was not loaded, but it bothered him anyway: the gun, and that I was holding it, and that I had not yet turned around. Then he pressed my bathrobe against my shoulders, offering it to me without quite touching me, his cheek very near my hair.
And I folded. I slipped to the ground with the bathrobe around me, and the tears began. I could not stop them. Awkwardly, Jim put his hand on my back, but I shrugged him away. He stood up and went out. Then I cried harder. Because I wanted Jim to hold me. Because how could I want Jim to hold me?
2
* * *
Roberta
I LIKE LAS VEGAS best early in the morning, when the valley stretches out peacefully below a blue sky, when the knife-edged hills that surround are pleated with the shadows of a sideways slicing sun, when a great quiet sits softly over the tiled roofs, the disheveled cottonwood, the miles of empty roads. It’s not often that I drive the valley serenely. Usually I’m jolted to attention by the careening traffic, the cars pouring onto the freeways, the trucks filled with produce or gasoline or maybe chemical waste, the nineteen-year-old on a motorcycle weaving as if he is playing a video game, safe behind a console, the tourists sitting oddly upright in their rented Chevy Cobalts.
In the hush of dawn, it’s possible to believe that all is right in the city I call home. I’m one of those rare Vegas locals. I was a teenager here in the early seventies, when the hippies dropped LSD at the Valley of Fire and painted their own hieroglyphics over the ones left so long ago. I went to the public schools, a standout Jewish kid in a small town filled with big dreamers. My dad was a gambler, forced my mom to pick up and move all of us when we were too small to remember, and he said he could run an electric company in Las Vegas just as easily as he could run one in New York. And that was true, because electricity was big in Vegas, and my dad had it all: a gambler’s sense of the moment, a quick smile, an easy banter, good looks.
I loved being one of my dad’s cherished daughters. I loved his hoarse, low-throated laugh, his purple silk shirts, the square gold cuff links, the fur coat and the diamond rings and the emerald necklace he brought home to our mother, the family vacations in hotel suites nearly as big as our home in the Scotch 80’s, the ermine collar on my own seven-year-old’s coat, the curling pool in the backyard where my friends and I would order Cokes from the swim-up bar that my dad had installed long before anyone imagined such a thing on the Strip.
Mine was a particular kind of Las Vegas childhood, neither common nor unique, but of course I remember other children; I remember the way other kids lived. Back then, there wasn’t much space between the best parts of Vegas and the worst. People drifted in from every part of the country, all with their own stories, many without anything to back them up: not money, not education, not family, not wit. And their children tumbled along, left to survive or not as they could. I remember the kids who came to school hungry, the kids who came bruised, the girls whose eyes flickered with something I was too sheltered to understand. I noticed then, I remember now. It is all part of the life I live still.
MAYBE IT’S SURPRISING, BUT MOST
Las Vegas children don’t grow up quickly. They aren’t fast like their coastal counterparts. In Vegas, children pass through their novel environment unconsciously, lacing up their cleats or humming to the radio while a parent maneuvers through the traffic on the Strip; while bare-chested men thrust pornographic magazines at open car windows, while women wearing a few feathers leer seductively from billboards, while millions of neon bulbs flash “Loosest Slots in Town” and “Babes Galore.” And still the children don’t notice. They’ve been taught not to notice, and it’s only the transplanted ones—the children who arrive from Boston when they are nine—who think to tell their friends back home about the naked billboards, the “Live Nude” signs, the doggy-sex flyers.
The families just off the Strip—the ones occupying mile after mile of nearly identical stucco houses—live conservative lives at home. Dad might be a dealer, mixing with high rollers at Caesars five nights a week, Mom might be a waitress, wearing a butt-skimming lamé skirt at forty-seven, but home is for another life. For first graders marching in the nearest high school’s homecoming parade, for neighbors sharing abundant harvests of apricots, for peewee soccer tournaments and springtime fairs and little bags of treats left on door handles all through October. It can be cloying, it can be surprising, but after a while, it simply becomes the way it is. And the good in it, the old-fashioned neighborly niceness of it all, is one of the reasons people stay in Vegas, stay even if they can’t explain quite why, even if they tell their friends they hate it, that the place is a dump, that off the Strip there is nothing to do, even if they worry about the schools and bemoan the lack of art and feel stranded in the stark vastness of the Mojave Desert.
And when the children are old enough, they move into the world their parents occupy. They grow up selling lemonade on t
he corner, and wind up, at seventeen or eighteen years old, parking cars at the Tropicana, or waiting tables in an Italian maid’s costume at the Venetian. They make a lot of money, these insta-adults, and buy fast cars, diamond bracelets, designer clothes, Cristal. Fifty thousand earned in valet tips is a lot of money if you’re young and single; less when you’re middle-aged, when you have kids and a mortgage and an array of nonspecific health complaints: maybe it was the carbon monoxide.
If their parents came from somewhere else, if they were part of the rush of professionals who came to Vegas during the eighties and nineties, then the kids leave when they are old enough to go to college. They go off to Vanderbilt, the University of Michigan, SMU, and the other students call them “Vegas,” and they miss being able to buy nail polish or paper clips or waffles at any time of the day or night, and before too long, their hometown becomes a myth to them as well, something larger and smaller than what it really is. They don’t come back, those children, and when they try, the world they miss is not there; it existed only for their childhoods, and now their friends are strange to them, caught up, as they are, in the world of late-night clubs, baccarat odds, celebrity parties.
And then there are the children who don’t go to college and don’t land on the Strip: the ones who go to war. In Las Vegas, armed forces recruiting centers dot the landscape like Starbucks shops, across from every high school, near every major intersection. Everyone knows someone in the military. Thousands of people live on the base at Nellis; many thousands more owe their livelihoods to it. Schoolchildren thrill to the roar of Thunderbird air shows, commuters estimate their chances of making it to work on time when they see the four jets return to base in formation each morning.
We send our children off, knowing they will grow up, thinking the military will give them security, hoping they won’t be hurt, praying they won’t die, believing that ours is a patriotic choice. And our children come back with that war deep within them: a war fought with powerful weapons and homemade ones, a war fought by trained fighters and twelve-year-old boys, a war fought to preserve democracy, to extract revenge, to safeguard oil, to establish dominance, to change the world, to keep the world exactly the same. Yes, Vegas children fight America’s wars. These most American, least American of children, these children of the nation’s brightest hidden city: the city that is an embarrassing tic, a secret shame, a giddy relief, a knowing wink.
But, then, fighting a war, going to college, working at Caesars Palace, these are choices for children who grow up. In my line of work, I worry most about the ones who might not.
3
* * *
Bashkim
EVERY DAY I WALK to school early and cross the street with Mr. Ernie. Mr. Ernie wears a vest and his fishing hat, and sometimes he puts his stop sign over his head like an umbrella. He does this to make us laugh, because it almost never rains when I am going to school. The rule is that nobody can step off the curb until Mr. Ernie is in the middle of the road and has called for us to come. Any kid that steps off before he calls us gets in trouble, even if Mr. Ernie doesn’t like to get kids in trouble, because that is an important rule.
Another important rule is that kids have to stop reading their books when they cross the street. Even if they wait until the crossing guard says they can step off the curb, and even if they walk perfectly carefully, they can’t be reading a book while they do it. I know that because last year I had library at the end of the day on Tuesday, and sometimes I would try to read my book while I was walking home the short way, but Mr. Hal would make me stop. And he would say, “Stop reading that book!” in a really loud voice, which made me almost drop the book the first time, but the second time, when I forgot about the rule, he said that if I didn’t stop reading in the crosswalk, he would have to report me to the principal.
I can’t be reported to the principal.
If you get reported to the principal, you get an RPC, which is a required parent conference, and you can’t go to class until your parent comes in, and I don’t think my baba would come in, and my baba might not let my nene come in, so I don’t know what would happen then. Also, if my baba did come in, he might say, “Budalla Bashkim, I don’t want to hear from the school!” Or he might say, “Bashkim, I have had enough of you reading books.” Or he might flip the backs of his fingers against my nene, and say, “Arjeta, this is your fault. You are raising my boy to embarrass me.” But in any case, whatever he did at school, he would definitely do something worse at home. That’s why I go the long way and don’t cross with Mr. Hal, because what if my foot just accidentally fell off the curb before he called to us, and what if he remembered about me reading the book twice last year? Then he might think I was the sort of kid who needed an RPC.
So I cross with Mr. Ernie, who doesn’t have two strikes against me. Also, it’s kind of nice to cross with Mr. Ernie, or even to hang around on his side of the street awhile and then cross, because Mr. Ernie has a lot of friends at my school, and he has a lot of people to talk to every morning. I like to listen.
Mr. Ernie has a high voice that sounds funny, which is probably because he is Italian. Mr. Ernie loves Italia and he loves soccer, and he always is saying things like “Did you see that story in the paper about Italia, Mrs. Bell?” or “How you feeling, big guy? You going to play in a game this Saturday?” Any kid who wears a soccer shirt hears from Ernie. “Hey, you play soccer? Are you a striker? Make any goals? What’s the name of your team?” He likes it when the girls play soccer. He says girls don’t play soccer in Italia, but in America, maybe the girls could beat the boys. “Whatcha think, Michael? You think Marissa could beat you? You better work hard, or she could beat you.”
I don’t play soccer. I don’t play anything. Unless it is in PE. But I like to think about playing something. And having a uniform. I might do that some day.
Sometimes Mr. Ernie talks to me, even though I don’t play soccer or anything. He says, “What you say, little man?” and “Did you get a good breakfast today? Why don’t you hurry up and get some breakfast at the school?” He says that because I am skinny, but I don’t eat breakfast at the school, because it costs a dollar, or you have to fill out papers. My baba doesn’t fill out any papers except the ones that get me into school, and I can eat at home—good Albanian buke and djath—which is true, except sometimes there isn’t that much to eat, and sometimes I know it would be better just to leave what is there so we can eat it at night.
My baba doesn’t know, but sometimes my nene lets me eats the ice-cream cones in our truck. She doesn’t let me eat the ice cream, because she says ice cream will make me sleepy in school, but an ice-cream cone is okay, and it just fills me up a little in the morning.
MY TEACHER IS MRS. MONAGHAN.
There are five third-grades in my school, and none of my second-grade friends got put in Mrs. Monaghan’s class with me. Alyssa Button did, which is sort of surprising, because Mrs. Monaghan is brand-new, and Alyssa Button always gets the teacher that everybody wants. Alyssa Button’s mom helps at the school. She puts all the decorations on the bulletin board, and on Wednesday she reads in the hall with some kids who don’t read fast. I don’t read in the hall with Mrs. Button, because I am really quick at reading.
For a new teacher that nobody wanted, Mrs. Monaghan is pretty good. She has curly hair, and she waves her hands when she talks, and some days she wears red shoes. She is almost the nicest teacher in the school. She lets us do whatever we want during Earned Party Time, but she gets mad if we are loud other times. That’s not too hard for me, because I am used to being quiet, but Levi Van Wyck can’t be quiet. He has already gone to detention, and it is still the first month of school.
I really like red shoes. When I grow up, I am going to get red shoes for Tirana and my nene. Along with lots of other things. That’s why I work hard at school. So I can take care of Nene, and Tirana too, if she doesn’t have a husband or something. I have a list of things my
nene wants, but red shoes aren’t on it, because she probably doesn’t even know how pretty red shoes are.
Mrs. Monaghan is from Australia, and she says things in an Australia way. I like the way Mr. Ernie talks, and I like the way Mrs. Monaghan talks, but I think it’s funny how grown-ups speak with their accents at school. At home I speak Albanian, or sometimes American that sounds Albanian, but at school I just speak regular American. That’s how all the kids do it. On the playground, Felicia and Santiago speak in Spanish, and with Mrs. Lopez, they speak American that sounds Spanish, but in class, they speak regular American. So I don’t know why Mr. Ernie and Mrs. Monaghan always use their home voices. Mrs. Monaghan and Mr. Ernie have been here a long time, and in Australia, it is not even a different language.
AT MY SCHOOL, WE HAVE
specials. A special is a class that you have just once a week. All of our specials are right before lunch. Mrs. Monaghan’s class has art on Monday, music on Tuesday, PE on Wednesday, science on Thursday, and library on Friday. At 10:49, Mrs. Monaghan claps one time, and we all stand up and get in a single file line, real quiet. We have to have our lunches, and our notebooks, but we can’t go until everyone is still and quiet. Sometimes even I get mad at Levi Van Wyck, because it is hard for him to be quiet, and when he finally does get quiet, he usually has forgotten his pencil, or he drops his notebook, or his shoelace is untied, and then we might be late for special. But it doesn’t help to get mad at him or make any sound like Alyssa Button does, because then he just drops something else. Being late is a problem, because we have to walk down the hall at the right time, or the principal comes out and asks, “Mrs. Monaghan’s class? Shouldn’t you already be in your special by now?” The principal makes me really nervous, because I don’t want an RPC, and I just look at the floor when she is there.
We Are Called to Rise Page 2