The hour draws near. For the past ten minutes, the girl and the teacher have been sitting quietly, trying not to look at each other. The teacher begins to straighten up. “Did you find any answers?”
“I think so,” the girl says, though her page is still blank. She takes up her number two pencil and presses the lead deep into the paper, attempting to copy the glamour of Mrs. Greenberg’s cursive:
Dear Colleen,
I’m sorry I pushed you down the stairs today and all the other times. I would not like it if you did it back to me. I hope you don’t do it, because pushing is wrong, and if you do it just because I did it, then we will both be wrong, which will add up to be more like −2 than 0.
She looks over her words, feeling no remorse, yet hoping this is what her teacher wants. She knows that this is not one of those times where the answer will become clear once she grows older, knows some questions are meant to go unanswered. Like why she has so many uncles if her mother is an only child. Like why Uncle cannot live with them. Or at least leave his VCR.
“If you have any last thoughts, you have five minutes to get them down,” the teacher says.
What it really comes down to is the rightness of the push.
When they are going down the stairs and the girl pushes Colleen down the steps or forces her into the railing, the girl feels a part of something larger than herself. She believes, deep down, that Colleen expects it, in fact cannot live without it. On the rare occasions when the girl has not indulged in a minor act of violence, she has caught Colleen sneaking wounded glances at her. Though Mrs. Greenberg can never understand it, the girl knows that Colleen also lives for the skirmish. There were forty-five kids in Mrs. Greenberg’s class. If it were not for the girl’s attentive violence, Colleen would be a nobody. She’d go unnoticed and uncalled on by Mrs. Greenberg, lost in a sea of indistinguishable black kids in a public elementary school with an overcrowding problem. The girl draws a line through her apology and turns to a fresh page.
Dear Colleen,
You don’t have to thank me.
boogiemen
Our mother’s voice—raised in anger—followed by the crash of something sharp, delicate, and expensive shattering against the wall that was ours on one side and our parents’ on the other woke us up. Dressed in a black full-length slip with pink rollers in her hair, our mother stood tough by her side of the bed—tough despite the defeat that sat in her eyes and the tears that rolled down her puffy cheeks—holding up a picture frame, the muscles on her brown arms flexed with the need to throw. The picture was barely recognizable under the layers of dust that had piled up on the cheap frame, but I knew that it was the picture of us taken at Coney Island two summers ago. Our father looked relaxed in it. For once, the wary slant of his mouth had given way to a hesitant smile. Our mother stood on the opposite end, her hair curled in a flip, her face beaming, looking like a taller version of Coretta Scott King. My older brother, Julian, and I stood between the two of them. Julian’s eyes were closed; he’d gotten caught blinking. I had a scowl on my face because I couldn’t have a second candied apple. They took that picture back when we did things as a family, when we went to Coney Island and Mets games during the summer and to the skating rink in Restoration Plaza during the winter. Before my father started spending nights elsewhere, before Julian and I found out that we had a little brother or sister—we never learned which—out in Jamaica, Queens. Before we fell apart.
“Stop it, Anna,” our father said as he turned his back to her and continued to pack.
Our mother ignored him. “You see this?” she asked, shaking the frame. “This is a family. Why don’t you take this with you to remind you of what you’re throwing away?” She made as if to hand it to him. When he reached out to take it, she pulled back. “Or why don’t you just throw it away like you’re doing to us, Walter? Here, I’ll do it for you!” She hurled it against the wall. The dusty glass splintered on impact and the cheap ceramic frame broke off into chunks.
She yelled, “Go on then. Leave! That’s what you do best! How these boys gonna eat? Who they gonna look up to with you gone, Walter? Who gonna teach them to become men. Me?”
Our father went over to her, taking deliberately slow steps, and grabbed her by her wrists. He held them both in one of his large hands. “Now you’re gonna stop throwing things! You already broke two frames. This how you want the boys to see you?” he asked. She looked over to where we huddled in the corner by the door, gripping each other’s hands. Our mother turned to us as if she’d never before seen us in her entire life. Like we were ghosts. It took her a few seconds to focus on our faces. Julian squeezed my hand. A shiver passed from him to me. I squeezed back. Then she smiled and waved us off, “Go back to bed, boys. Everything’s all right. Go back to your room and go to sleep.”
We beat it back to our room but left the door open so we could hear.
The fights were nothing new. They had been going on for the last two years, ever since we moved from our brownstone in Bed-Stuy to these projects in East New York. We could always hear them arguing, but our mother’s anger had always been long-suffering, quiet, and plaintive. It seemed to me that not only had the fights become more frequent but that they had reversed so that they were now more dispassionate on our father’s part and more violent on our mother’s.
“Think he leaving, Ju?” I asked my brother.
Julian shrugged and climbed onto the top bunk. “He been leaving for two years and ain’t never left yet.”
We were too caught up in ourselves and our tiny world that summer to be affected by our father’s departure. Our world consisted of a six-block radius. It encompassed the intermediate school with the free lunch program and Miller Park across the street from it, the bodegas on Bradford Avenue, the row on Pitkin Avenue, which included the candy store, take-out Chinese, video rental, discount store, and stores that were fronts for people playing the numbers, and a smaller row on Van Siclen Avenue with the pizza shop, liquor store, and dry cleaners. Across from the three main streets were our three blocks of Fiorello projects, which we called first, second, and third. Our projects were stubby, only going up to the fourth floor. There were four projects per block. We lived on Miller between Pitkin and Glenmore.
We were young that summer that our father left us. Julian was almost twelve and I was nine and a half. The weekend after their last fight, we were in our usual spot, seated directly in front of the TV, watching Saturday morning cartoons when our mother called to us.
She came when we didn’t answer. “Come with me,” she said, standing in front of the TV. She was wearing a cotton dress that hung off her. Our mother had been a good-looking woman, but in less than a week, she became a skeleton of her former self. She seemed slighter, her smooth brown skin now splotchy. Overnight, she seemed to have aged. Lately, the corners of her mouth were always drifting downward.
“Get up!” she said sharply, pulling us up from the floor by the scruffs of our necks as if we were kittens. She took us into her bed-room. With grim determination, she opened Dad’s side of the dresser and the left side of the closet so that we could see that all of his stuff was gone. She lifted the edge of the dust ruffle from where it hung to the floor and forced us to peek under the bed. No brightly polished loafers peered back. Our father was truly gone. All of our father’s toiletries that usually lined the left-hand side of the dresser were gone. Small circles of clean wood where the toiletries had sat stood out among the dusty, watermarked surface.
“I’m not gonna say this but once, boys. Your father is gone,” she said. She released our napes and turned us so that we were face to face.
“Now, I want you to take a good look at each other,” she said, her voice a command. So we did.
Julian looked like a miniature version of our father with his high forehead, wary eyes, serious mouth, and stubborn chin. His peasy hair was uncombed, sleep rimmed the corners of his eyes, and his mouth hung slack. His elbows and knees were white with ash and his bony ar
ms were dwarfed by the huge Spiderman T-shirt he’d slept in. The shirt didn’t cover his knees—like little knobs they poked out and made his bony giraffelike legs more pronounced. I rubbed my eyes and we stared at each other, unable to comprehend our mother’s strange request. Julian looked at me and wriggled his finger near the side of his nostril, pretending to dig in his nose. Grinning, he reached toward me as if to wipe the imaginary booger on my Transformers shirt. I jumped back and our mother grabbed us.
“Stop that!” she said, slapping our arms and clamping down our wrists with a viselike grip. “Be serious now. I want the two of you to understand what I mean. Julian, you take a look at Joseph. Joe, you take a good look at Julian. I mean it!” she snapped.
So we stopped fidgeting and looked again. I looked Julian dead in the eyes and he looked right back at me. It was as if we were playing chicken with our eyes. Neither of us dared to be the first to look away. Looking this time, I didn’t see the imaginary booger or the Spiderman T-shirt. I saw the boy who gave me first pick of books at the public library when we went on Fridays to get our books for summer reading. He was my partner for watching the late late shows and all the horror flicks. In my eyes, he was the someone who always had an extra quarter so that I could buy a bag of barbecue potato chips after I had spent all my money on cheap fireworks and water guns that leaked. I saw my brother.
“Now,” Ma said. “What do you see?”
Julian looked at me like I was one of those jigsaw puzzles he and our father could spend hours on, slapping me away anytime I tried to point to where a certain piece should go. My face tingled under his inspection.
“I see Joseph. I see my brother,” he said solemnly. Then he began to chew on his lower lip. My mother nodded and waited for me.
“I see my brother, Julian,” I said and shrugged.
“That’s right,” she said. “You’re the two men of the house now that your dad is gone. You’re brothers—blood—and you’re all each of you has in this world.”
She squeezed tightly on both of our arms and said, “Don’t ever forget that.” There was an urgency in her voice and her grip that we couldn’t understand. It seemed so important to her that we answered and said the right thing. I couldn’t know that she was preparing us for the hard times to come, that she was trying to both protect us and make us immune to the things beyond our apartment that would strive to pull us apart.
They began to whisper things about my brother right before school let out that summer. It suddenly became a big deal that Julian had never had a girlfriend when Sasha, a girl in Julian’s grade, spread the word that he didn’t like girls. Older boys picked on us whenever they saw us around, calling my brother Julie and calling me Josephine. Boys my age that I had previously run around with suddenly wanted to know if I had cooties and if I had caught them from my older brother. No one would let me tag them or borrow their skelly caps and no one would ride the handlebars of my bike. By the end of the summer, I knew that the whispers were fears and confirmations that Julian was what the boys at school called “funny,” what my mother called “nasty” and what the adults referred to as “that way.”
I was too young to understand the various modes of defense we all set up to safeguard ourselves from looking too closely at my brother. I knew only that the kids were shunning him and that their disdain for Julian was trickling down to me. So I turned my back on him, too. That was the summer I began to venture out past our streets and projects, trying to see what was up in the areas close to us. I was an inner-city anthropologist checking out the locals. That summer, I became fascinated with the kids who lived near Livonia Avenue by the three train and with the boys that played in King Park. I was looking for people who didn’t know me, who didn’t know that Julian was my brother. I looked for ways to avoid him without appearing to do so. Before, I had enjoyed our late-night horror show marathons, but now I threw tantrums on the evenings our mother would go out to midweek service and leave Julian to watch over me. I didn’t know what it meant to be that way, but I knew that boys who had once eaten paste with me now brushed themselves off and crossed their fingers if they came into contact with me. I didn’t know if what Julian had would rub off on me. And I didn’t know if it was temporary like the ringworm I had caught once or permanent like our mother’s diabetes.
We were in the candy store on Pitkin and Van Siclen, a block from our house, getting Italian ices when a crew of boys from the first projects came in and saw us. None of them had their shirts on. Their nappy heads were beady with water, their scrawny chests slick with it, and their swim trunks were wet all the way through from spending the afternoon running through the fire hydrant on Bradford Avenue. Their swim trunks had no pockets, which meant that they had no money and no reason for being in the candy store. Except for us. I was hoping they weren’t there for us.
They were.
Will’s face broke into a grin. “Hey, look what we got here,” he said. “A couple of girls buying ices. Hey Julie. Hey Josephine.”
We kept our backs to him and waited to be served. I could feel the boys moving behind us, forming a semicircle and fanning around us in a crescent moon of brown bodies. I made sure not to step back into their arc.
Derek called out behind us, “Hey Muhammad give me one, too. Put it on my tab. I ain’t got no money.”
The man behind the counter said, “You never have money and you never get tab here.” All the boys laughed.
Malcolm said to Derek, “That’s all right. You don’t want him to serve you after he just finished with them homos.”
“True that,” several boys said. Their voices blended into one large chorus so that I could no longer pick out the individual cadences of their voices and think of them singly.
“Hey Muhammad, you might wanna think about that before you do it,” one of the voices called out behind us to the Arab man at the counter as he started to scoop cherry ice from a gallon canister.
“Don’t do it, man!” said another.
Someone said, “You could be making the biggest mistake of your life.”
“Hey Muhammad, don’t be giving that homo no ice cream, man,” said one of the voices behind us. It sounded like a boy I knew from the third projects named Kyle, but I hadn’t seen him come in with the group. I wondered when he had come in. I no longer knew just how many of them there were behind us and I was too scared to look and see.
Another voice said, “Hey Muhammad, you better be careful who you sell to.”
And another, “Yeah, you might get a reputation for selling ice cream to homos.”
The man behind the counter looked up, unsure of what they were talking about. He was used to all our bullshit, the way we called him Muhammad without bothering to learn his name, the way we asked how many wives he had, and the way we always asked him if there was pork in the ice cream. But something in their voices triggered him off to the underlying seriousness beneath the joke and warning. The joking had stretched to include him. He straightened and relaxed his hold on the metal ice cream scooper. “What are you all talking about? I don’t want trouble here. None of you boys’ bullshit now!” he said in his thick accent, suggestive of caravans and savannas.
One of the boys shouted, “No, no man! No bullshit.”
This time I recognized Will’s voice: “Nah. For real. Didn’t you know you got two homos in your store?”
“Homos?” the man behind the counter asked, his accent distorting the word until it sounded like hummus.
“Homos,” Will said, distinctly, perfectly. “Don’t get upset, man. That word probably wasn’t in your English-Arab dictionary. Homos. Homos,” he said. He stepped out to the side of the semicircle. I could see him from the corner of my eye. He pushed his rear end out and pointed to it. He made a circle with his right hand and pushed his left index finger back and forth through it at the same time. He made a face, closing his eyes in ecstasy. The boys behind him joined in with a chorus of, “Ooh! Ooh baby!”
“Homos,” Will said. “
And I don’t wanna eat in no establishment that caters to homos.”
One boy threw out, “Yeah, unless you gonna give him a double dip!”
Laughter broke out behind us, the guilty forced laughter that erupts in groups where each person has something to hide. They had to laugh. Whoever didn’t would be next. The man behind the counter had resumed fixing our ices. Yet when the thread of laughter spooled toward him with its implied threat, his left hand—the one that held the scooper—slowed its scraping motion across the top of the hard-packed gelati. He stiffened, lowering his hand until the scooper fell from it.
The man behind the counter’s face turned red. His eyes swung to us. “You boys are brothers, no? You buy ices? You have money? You give it to me now!” he said. He had never before demanded payment first.
“Look man, we got your money,” Julian said toughly. “Just like we always do. Now you give us our ices and then you get your money.”
“Let me see the money. I don’t want no games,” he said, his eyes sliding back and forth between us and the boys who circled us.
Maybe Julian realized the futility of fighting. The longer it took for him to give us our ices, the more boys passing by saw the commotion and crowded in behind us. There were already too many of them to count now.
Julian turned to me. “Give him the money, Joe.”
“Yeah Josephine, let’s see the money,” someone said.
“Give him the money, Joe,” Julian urged.
“It better not be no Monopoly money,” said another.
“Just show it to him! Give him the damn money,” Julian said, teeth clenched.
Will shouted, “Show him the money!”
Then they all picked it up. “Show him the money! Show him the money! Show him the money!” they chanted behind us as they jostled each other.
“Show him the money! Show him the money! Show him the money!” The chant became louder and louder as they closed in the half-circle behind us and got closer and closer.
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