I removed my bag again, shifted it to the other shoulder. Maybe that’ll suffice as doing the opposite. Suffice for whom? What am I thinking?
I pulled my coat closer to my body. It was the same coat that I always wore on cold days—a heavy, black, men’s wool coat that I bought at the army/navy store when I first moved to New York—and I found comfort in its enormity. It was about four sizes too big, because there is no such thing as a man (especially an army/navy man) who is my size: five-foot-one, one hundred pounds. For some military reason I’m sure, this coat had a hood, which I never wore because it made me look like a Druid. But one block away from Sunny Side Preschool, with Dead Man’s Fingers stuck in my nervous system and the sickening certainty that something horrible was going to happen, I pulled the hood over my head until it obscured the top half of my face.
I need protection, I thought. It seemed to make sense.
My classroom had not been robbed, and I was surprised. Ever since the spine freeze, I’d thought robbery. Of course. What else could it be? You had a premonition just like this before the Chanukah break-in, didn’t you?
By the time I arrived at my classroom, I’d so convinced myself a theft had occurred, I tried pushing the door open without the key.
But the lock was intact.
I flicked on the fluorescent lights and surveyed the classroom. The tiny, multicolored chairs were spaced evenly around the long red table. The large toy box in the corner was shut. The storybooks were neatly stacked on their low shelves, all seven pieces of colored chalk present and accounted for on the blackboard tray. The three locks on the closet door were secure, and when I unbolted them, I saw that the TV and VCR were untouched, as was the collection of educational tapes piled beneath them on the movable stand. The items I’d placed on the closet shelves: the paint jars, the boxes of thick sidewalk chalk for warm-weather months, the felt numbers and letters, the plastic fruits and vegetables and African musical instruments—not to mention the boom box and crate of CDs (which we’d had to replace after the first break-in)—remained inviolate. My classroom was so undisturbed it was satirical.
“Excuse me.”
I recognized the voice of the principal, Terry Mann, even before I looked up and saw his neat little head poking through the open door. Terry had a squeamish way of speaking and winced often, which made it seem like each word had an unpleasant aftertaste. “I wanted to . . . remind you . . . that the . . . police officers . . . are coming today.”
“Cops? Why?”
“Police officers.” He raised his eyebrows as if the word cops was some sort of racial slur. “They’re going to speak to the . . . children. It’s . . . community outreach.”
“Lucky us.”
“It’s an annual event, Samantha.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is.”
“There were no cops here last year. On Valentine’s Day, we made valentines. That’s it. Believe me, I would have remembered uniformed men with firearms hanging from their belts.”
“Yes, well, sometimes we skip a year. The police officers are coming around eleven and will speak to the children about safety.”
“Terry, don’t you think they might scare the kids? I mean, when I was that age I used to cry whenever I heard a siren. Okay, maybe I watched too many Fugitive reruns. But they really are frightening to most young children, with their badges and their boots and their guns and their . . . their hats.”
“I’m sorry you had such a negative developmental experience, Samantha. But it is important for children to learn that policemen are their friends. The officers will be here at eleven.”
Before he closed the door, he gave me a wan smile. “One of them has a puppet.”
I put my head on my desk. Now Terry thought I was anti-safety training as the result of a strong negative influence in my early developmental years brought on by unsupervised violent television viewing, and that wasn’t true at all.
I was all for safety training. I had books, videos—even a board game called Walk Home Safe! that I’d bought from one of the nonprofits with my own money. It was a little complex for the kids, but I’d gotten them to play it more than once.
I’d held meetings with the parents, made sure I’d shaken hands with every relative, housekeeper, nanny or honorary uncle who might ever have reason to pick up one of their children from school. Safety training was important to me. More important than Terry could ever know.
But cops? With puppets?
Two years ago, I went to see a reissue of A Clockwork Orange at a small theater in NoHo. Halfway through the film, I got up to use the bathroom and when I returned, my purse had been stolen.
Reluctantly, I went to the Fifth Precinct house to file a report. “You left your pocketbook on a movie theater seat?” said the platinum-haired cop at the front desk. “That was stupid.”
She went back to her paperwork, as if looking at me wasn’t worth her time.
“Can I file a report?”
“You ask me, anyone who does something that stupid deserves to get their pocketbook stolen.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Ask you.”
After I left the precinct house, I went to the nearest thrift store and bought the most ridiculous-looking shoulder bag I could find. It was a square foot in size and comprised of haphazard brown, orange, antifreeze green and neon-yellow patchwork squares—most of them solid colored, though some sported polka dots, drawn on in black, indelible ink. Embroidered peace sign, happy face and dancing bear patches had been applied in random spots, and a spindly, hot-pink fringe hung off the bottom—embellishments obviously made on the third straight day of an acid trip.
When I’d bought it for one dollar, the clerk had stared at me and said, “Are you sure?”
I figured no one would be caught dead swiping this monstrosity. Even so, I vowed never to let it out of my sight. As strange as I looked carrying it everywhere, it beat visiting another police station.
I’d never trusted cops. In my early childhood, they were the sneering giants who’d throw my dad through the door most Sunday mornings, stinking of beer and sometimes bruised. When I was a teenager, they were the assholes who tailed my boyfriend Brian and me all the way across Coldwater Canyon and into the Valley before inexplicably pulling us over, searching the car and asking us questions so rude I can’t even repeat them. (My mother didn’t mind that I was dating a black guy; these cops, for some reason, did.) And, in New York, they were that bitch from the Fifth Precinct.
I was thinking about how annoying I found Terry and his callow respect for “police officers” when one of my preschoolers, Daniel Klein, showed up. It was only seven-thirty, but Daniel was always early. His father was a stockbroker and dropped him off on his way to work. If I were Daniel, I would’ve resented all the forced “alone time” with my teacher. But he didn’t seem to mind. Daniel was an unusually dignified four-year-old. His parents dressed him in Brooks Brothers casuals and gave him a tiny briefcase to carry and still he looked so comfortable that none of the other kids teased him about it.
“I got a new fish,” he said.
“Really, Dan?” I said, opening the shoulder bag, removing some of the paper hearts and placing them along the red table. “A goldfish?”
“No. It’s orange, akshully.”
“Yeah, they are orange. But they call them goldfish for some reason.”
“Who is they?”
“The International Society of Fish Namers.”
Daniel giggled. He had a surprisingly throaty and infectious laugh for a kid with such a grave face, and it lifted my spirits. I wanted to make him laugh some more, but I couldn’t think of anything funny to say (except for a terrible joke about the word goldfish being a fishnomer, which wasn’t the right material for anyone, let alone a preschooler.)
“Is he your first pet?”
“Yes. Mommy says if I take care of him, I can have a dog when I get bigger.”
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“What’s his name?”
“Squad Watery.”
“Squad Watery?”
“Yes. I didn’t make it up. He told me his name.”
“That’s a great name.”
“His food looks like little, tiny Corn Flakes, but akshully it does not taste like them.”
“Daniel, you shouldn’t be eating fish food.”
“Someone’s at the door.”
I turned around, saw the dark outline of a head in the smoky pane of glass. The person rapped on it lightly.
I cracked open the door, and there stood Terry, his face flushed and shiny. I was about to ask what was wrong when I saw the younger, taller man behind him. The man was casually dressed—jeans, black T-shirt, plaid flannel overshirt, leather jacket—and his expression was much calmer than Terry’s.
“Samantha, I . . . oh, is Daniel here already?” There was a tremor in Terry’s voice—a tinge of anxiety that hadn’t been there earlier and seemed to increase as his eyes went from my face to that of the younger man and back again.
As I stepped through the door and closed it behind me, I thought of bad premonitions, holidays with massacres named after them.
“Who are you?” I said to the stranger.
He reached into his leather jacket, inched it aside like a backstage curtain, and I saw the dull glint of steel. A gun.
I screamed. The sound bounced off the sides of the enclosed courtyard that held the small playground, echoed back at me and hurt my ears—a horror-movie scream, the scream of someone soon to be murdered.
Our janitor, Anthony Ciriglio, a sweet-but-addled sixties drug casualty, appeared at the far end of the courtyard, his mop raised like a machete. The other teacher, Veronica Bliss, flew out of her classroom and stared at me with her thick jaw hanging open.
“What is the matter with you, Samantha?” Terry said. For the first time since I had known him, I detected anger in his voice.
“What’s the matter with me?”
The man removed his hand from his jacket and produced a police ID card. “John Krull,” he said with the nervous nonchalance that people reserve for the insane. “I’m a detective with the Sixth Precinct. Um . . . I’ll be speaking with your kids today at eleven? I thought I’d stop by on my way to work, but uh . . . this is obviously a bad time for you so . . .”
“God, I’m sorry.”
“She had a . . . a difficult morning,” said Terry.
“You need a Valium, Sam?” said Anthony.
“Are you okay, Detective Krull?” said Veronica, who’d never particularly liked me.
My throat and mouth suddenly felt like they were made of rusted metal. “I . . . I don’t need a Valium. It’s just . . .” I closed my eyes, swallowed hard. “I saw your gun.”
Terry stared at me as if I’d just exploded into a fine powder. “I told you officers would be—”
“You said at eleven. It’s not eleven, Terry. It’s not even close.”
Veronica rolled her eyes and retreated into her classroom.
Anthony said, “How about half a Valium?”
Krull smiled—a nice, uncoplike smile that made me think he might not throw me into the back of his patrol car, turn on the siren and head straight for Ward’s Island. “You’ve got quite a voice.”
“I guess I do,” I said. “Who knew?”
“It’s good to know how to scream. You’d be surprised how many people don’t.”
For a moment, he seemed miles away. Then he smiled again and it was as if he’d never left. “See you at eleven.”
It took me ten minutes to get Daniel to stop crying and another fifteen to coax him out from under my desk.
By the time the rest of the kids arrived, everything was back to normal. Daniel and I were sitting at the long table. We’d removed all the art supplies from my bag, and we were making a valentine for Squad Watery.
2
Strangers Are Danger
To my relief, Detective John Krull was not the one with the puppet. I’d have hated to think that this actual decent cop was, in reality, a Borscht Belt reject with a talking doll on his lap.
The one with the puppet was named Officer Ricky Genovese Community Relations. (That’s how he introduced himself, only with no spaces between the words.) A thin, impeccably groomed, uniformed cop, he sat in front of my class on a collapsible stool that he’d brought himself and opened his stainless-steel ventriloquist’s case.
His black hair was short and extremely glossy; it looked as if someone had recently poured ink over the top of his head. Too bad Yale wasn’t here; Yale actually liked guys whose clothes you could bounce quarters off of.
The puppet was a smiling Dalmatian—also meticulously turned out, in a police uniform identical to that of his master. From the back of the room, I watched Officer Ricky Genovese Community Relations set the dapper little dog on the creased thigh of his blue slacks and thought about how long it must take both of them to get ready in the morning.
To be honest, Krull was more interesting to look at than Community Relations or his dog. He had changed clothes and facial expressions since this morning, and both looked extremely uncomfortable. He wore an exhausted-looking blue blazer, rumpled white shirt, a patternless navy blue tie made out of some sort of polyester/cellophane blend and gray corduroy pants that looked as if they’d barely survived the eighties. I wondered if he always changed into a coat and tie for work, or just when he talked to kids, which, judging from the confused look on his face, was not very often.
The kids—who sat in three rows on the floor in front of Community Relations—were unfazed by the police uniform and riveted by the dog puppet, which made me think maybe I didn’t know them as well as I’d thought. As soon as it came out of the stainless-steel box, they broke into spontaneous applause.
“Hello, everybody!” Community Relations said cheerfully.
“Hello!” they responded in unison.
“I’m Officer Ricky! The man behind me is Detective John Krull. He works at the police station right near here, and he can answer all your safety questions later!”
Krull waved clumsily.
“I have a safety question!” yelled Kendrick Sullivan, the most skillful four-year-old heckler I’d ever encountered.
“How about you hold off until later, sport?”
“It’s a good question!”
“You don’t have a safety question, Kendrick, and you know it,” I said. “Now let Officer Ricky continue with his presentation.”
“Does that doggie go poop?” Kendrick said, sending his nearest fellow audience members into peals of appreciative laughter.
“What’s your dog’s name?” asked Nancy Yu.
“I have a new fish!” said Daniel.
“I’m Buster the Safety Dog!” the Dalmatian said in a slobbery, animated voice. Officer Ricky was impressive; his lips never moved. He lifted Buster into a standing position, spun the puppet in a pirouette and flopped it back down onto his knee in one fluid motion. “I’m going to show you how to spot danger! Get it?”
“Yay!” the class screamed.
“Now, I know a word that rhymes with danger. Do you?”
“Ranger!”
“Danger!”
“Poopoo brain-ger!”
“Kendrick.”
“The word is stranger! Can anybody tell me what a stranger is?”
“I have a new fish!”
“I’ll tell you what a stranger is!” the puppet shouted. “A stranger is anybody you and your parents don’t know! If a stranger talks to you, what do you do?”
“Yell loud and run away!” said Nancy.
“That’s right, young lady!” said Buster. “If a stranger gives you a candy bar, what do you do?”
“Don’t take it and run away and yell loud!” said Serena Martin.
“That’s right! If a stranger gives you a Nintendo game, what do you do?”
“Say, ‘Thank you!’ ” Daniel said.
“Wrong-o-roonie! Sorry,
young man. Saying thank you is polite, but you’re not supposed to be polite to strangers. You know why?”
Silence.
“Because . . . strangers are danger! Say it with me!”
“Strangers are danger!”
“You got that right, Buster,” I said, thinking of every fairy tale I knew in which the overly trusting princess was nearly killed by the witch or the troll. And my gaze slowly drifted up, until I was looking at the tiny, evenly spaced soundproofing holes in the ceiling tiles.
“Hello there, princess,” he says, through the open window of his dirty red Pinto. No one has ever called me a princess before and so I smile and watch him smile back with his long, thin teeth. He says he has something for me in the car, and I think, Maybe it’s a jeweled crown, like on the Imperial Margarine commercials . . .
I shut my eyes tight and forced the memory out of my head, wondering what could have possibly brought it back. I’d obviously thought about strangers before. I’d thought about the ones who broke into my classroom, the one who stole my purse at the movies, the ones whom Yale would meet at clubs or gyms or news-stands, the ones who passed me on the street as I walked home from the box office alone. New York was a city filled with strangers and danger. But I still hadn’t thought about the man in the red Pinto. Not for twenty years.
It’s good to know how to scream, Krull had said. You’d be surprised how many people don’t. I caught his eye, and he nodded at me.
Buster the Safety Dog was chanting, “If a stranger calls on the phone, and he asks if you’re alone, what do you say?”
“No!” the class shouted.
“If a stranger says, ‘Come with me! I’ve got something for you to see!’ what do you say?”
“No!”
“I can’t heeeeeear you!”
“No!”
“Now, let’s all say it together, as loud as we can . . .”
“No! No! No!”
After the presentation, the kids mobbed Officer Ricky as if he were a rock star. I walked up to Krull and said, “Looks like he was a hit.”
Hide Your Eyes Page 2