Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  I shrugged. “I’ll find my way.”

  “Oh come on,” she said, “all new girls need somebody to get them around this big barn of a place. I’ll speak to Jennifer at lunch and see what went wrong. Until then, I’ll take you from class to class. I won’t forget.”

  I nodded my thanks. Looking into those yellow-green eyes, into that freckled kind face, my insides shook with fury. I hate you, I thought simply, I hate you to eternity.

  American history had a lay teacher, a gray-haired portly woman who was writing on the board when I entered. She heard the door and said without turning, “Well, miss, you are late.”

  Twenty white faces swivelled toward me. I could feel the light of their pale eyes bounce like arrows against my impenetrable armor.

  “I was lost.” My voice was deep and rich, not a girl’s voice at all. I spoke now as I did to the customers at the fashion viewings, slowly, precisely. “I am sorry, but I’m new here. And Jennifer,” I tattled, “forgot to meet me.”

  “Oh really.” The teacher turned, slapped her chalk on the desk. “How can she be so irresponsible. I will speak to her. Sit down, my dear, and we will get back to our work.”

  Now two people were annoyed at Jennifer. Perhaps I could make it three.

  At the end of that class, my friend with the carrot hair was waiting. I smiled at her, a professional model’s smile.

  “Okay, kid,” she said with cheery heartiness. “This time we’ll make sure you’re on time. Did Miss Fowler jump all over you?”

  “No,” I said. “I told her I was new and lost.”

  “She’ll lecture you about promptness sometime soon, I bet. It’s her favorite subject. She hates people to be late and upset the opening of her class. There, that’s where you want to be.” She pointed to a door where a steady stream of navy-and-white uniforms entered. Like a stream of ants, I thought.

  “My name’s Sandra Robinson,” she said with a smile. “I’m in the same dormitory with you, but not in the same wing. They put all you eighth graders together. Who’s your roomie?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  The slightest hint of a pause. Then, “You’re lucky. I still don’t have a private room.”

  At lunch I discovered a change in seating arrangements. I had been moved to a table with Sandra Robinson and six of the older girls, all juniors and seniors. “You’ll eat with us from now on,” Sandra said. “We can do a better job of showing you around. Until you learn, that is.”

  Right then and there I began to be afraid. I recognized the feeling—that chill in my chest, from those long-ago days when my mother and I fled from place to place, moving and hiding and moving again. Pursued by something I did not understand, could not change.

  And the difference was this. In those past days, I knew that my mother would triumph, that we would find our way at last to a shining lovely safe place of our own. Now I was alone. I needed to run, to hide, but I did not know where to go. I did not know this country.

  That evening, I emptied my suitcase. A pleated skirt needed pressing. I took it to the utility room—washer and dryer, iron and ironing board. Two girls leaned on the washer, laughing. They looked up when I entered, did not answer my hello. I pressed the skirt carefully, then went back to my room.

  I unpacked the rest of my clothes, refolding them to fit the new shelves and drawers, reluctantly changing the familiar shape of home, saying goodbye with each piece, fingertips across the cloth.

  (In the months ahead, I would often touch these things, whose needlework was at once a testament and a promise from my mother to me. I drew strength from her strength, and patience from her patience. And I found something else here, something not from my mother, who was too distant, too complete, too indifferent for such emotions. In these bits of lovingly worked cloth I found the twin powers of hatred and anger. My keys to survival.)

  I stood for a long time at the window of my single room. Below was a courtyard—brick walks and a fountain in the middle—with a rose garden, all pink and red. The bushes looked leggy and untended; the ground was covered with bright fallen petals.

  Across the courtyard was the main classroom building. Through uncurtained windows I saw blackboards and neatly lined desks. Cleaning women moved through methodically. Behind them, room after room went dark, as if they packed light into their heavy trash bags and hauled it away forever. As if the last of days were ending and there would not be a sunrise tomorrow.

  Beyond the building, I saw grassy fields stretching to a line of trees in the distance. It seemed a long way off.

  Tomorrow, I thought, I would find out what was beyond the trees.

  I settled myself on the windowsill, knees bent. This would be my world then, this courtyard, path, building, empty slope, and wood. I would see it every night before I slept.

  Already the September air was chill. Winter would be real here, grass and flowers would die, trees would turn into skeletons. I wondered what snow was like. All I knew of it were the balls sold by street vendors in summer, mounds of shaved ice flavored with syrup. In my father’s India—I had looked it up in the Children’s Encyclopedia—there was deep snow all year long in the mountains. Kings and emperors craved it for their feasts; fast couriers brought it to their summer palaces where clever cooks flavored it with rose water and fruit. In the snowballs from the streets of my childhood, I had tasted the delight of princes.

  That first night at school, after the bell had rung for lights out, I lay in bed and tried to remember my mother’s songs. Eventually the sound of her voice did come to me, but it was thin and fine, delicate and useless.

  The days passed, one after the other. I went to class; I studied after class. Most of the students ignored me, looked through me, as those girls in the utility room had done that very first day. In the dining room I sat with Sandra Robinson and the six upperclassmen. They spoke to me politely, gravely, asking me about my classes, reading my papers, explaining math problems. Once a month, on Saturday, they’d insist I go shopping with them. I had no money to spend, but I sketched the clothes in the windows, and I drew caricatures of the shoppers. The girls found them very funny. They did not seem to recognize themselves, did not seem to know the joke was on them.

  Except perhaps Sandra Robinson. Occasionally in the halls I’d feel her eyes on me. I’d look up, smile graciously, and incline my head.

  Once Sister Paula, the principal, called me to her office. I sat properly, ankles crossed, hands folded in my lap.

  “Your teachers say you are doing well in all subjects.” Sister Paula sounded surprised. Had she then expected me to fail?

  “It takes work to keep up,” I said politely. “But I am sure I can manage.”

  “You are not bored?” Again the note of surprise.

  “No, Sister, I am too busy to be bored.”

  “Your room is comfortable? And our food, does our food agree with you?”

  Did she think I ate beetles and grubs? Why wouldn’t school food agree with me? What difference was there? Except, perhaps, that these servings were larger, and meals arrived with clockwork regularity three times a day. Often, when my mother was busy, we would go without eating for an entire day. Sometimes too (though not lately), there’d be nothing in the house and we would have to wait for her paycheck on Friday afternoon.

  “My room is very comfortable, Sister, and the food is very good.”

  “You’re not lonely?”

  “No, Sister.”

  She did not ask if I were ever afraid. Had she done so, I would have lied, of course.

  After a month or so my classes seemed to become easier. I began to have free time. Sandra Robinson, attentive as ever, noticed the change. “There’s an after-class instrumental-music program that’s pretty good. Do you like that sort of thing?”

  I shrugged. At home there’d been no sound except the hum of a sewing machine and the rustle of tissue-paper patterns and my mother’s own murmured chanting singsong. We had not owned a radio or a TV.


  “Why not try it?”

  I did. The school had only one extra instrument, a violin, so I studied that. It made no difference to me. I soon discovered that I did not like music.

  Why then did I work so hard? I think now that it was a form of aggression, of warfare. I attacked the school, my enemy, to plunder the only valuable thing it possessed: knowledge. Knowledge that I could carry away with me, safely hidden inside my head.

  Thanksgiving week all students went home. Except me. The airfare was too expensive, so I stayed. Me alone, princess in my echoing castle. With the nuns as my retainers.

  I kept busy. I relined my drawers with white tissue paper. I tightened loose buttons and repaired snagged hems. I explored the fields and woods beyond my window and discovered a six-lane interstate on the other side. I watched the passing traffic for hours, my teeth chattering with cold. I got a history of music from the library and studied it carefully, using a dictionary for the unfamiliar words. I practiced my violin exercises, hour after hour, until the new soft calluses on the tips of my fingers bled and stained the gut strings.

  That week it snowed, the first I had ever seen. I opened my window and stuck my bloody fingertips into the soft accumulation on the sill. (It was not so cold as the vendor’s flavored snowballs.) Then came a hard freeze. The marks of my fingers, like bruises, stayed on the sill.

  I did not go home for Christmas either. Again I was alone with the nuns, and for a longer time. One day as I was passing the music room—in the empty quiet building—I heard Sister Lucy singing, tentatively, striking a few piano chords. I went in.

  “Child, I’d forgotten you were here.” She still wore the traditional habit, and inside its coif and wimple her small face was red and wrinkled as an old apple.

  “I should like to learn to sing,” I said.

  She blinked at my directness.

  “I want to join the choir.”

  “It would be a good way for you to make friends,” she said thoughtfully. (I neither need nor want them, I answered her silently.) “Come, let’s see what sort of ear you have.”

  Twice a day she worked with me. I grew confident and my voice grew steady and true. I could follow the piano scale. I could read simple scores, turning the silent marks into sound. I practiced dutifully, triumph filling my veins like brandy.

  Soon I was singing in the choir. (How happy the director was to see me—there were only three contraltos.) I stood in the midst of the group and sang with them, me like a speck of dirt in all that whiteness.

  At the reception after our recital on Easter Sunday Sister Lucy sought me out, and found me where I usually was, standing against a wall, in a corner, alone, watching.

  “My dear,” she said and her small brown eyes beamed from their wrinkled hollows, “I am so proud of you.” I nodded, eyes properly, demurely, downcast.

  O little old lady, smiling at me, you don’t know that I have stolen a part of you. When you appear in heaven, that heaven you believe in, the Recording Angel will say, O Sister Dear, your soul looks as if it has been nibbled by mice. There is a piece missing. Your wisdom is depleted, your value reduced. Who was this thief? The black daughter of a black prostitute? Or the daughter of an Indian king?

  Often during that first year, I thought of myself as a secret presence. (After all, did not the students already look through me as if I were invisible?) I was the mouse in the pantry, the moth in the woolens, the worm in the ground, moving silently through the heart and halls of the school.

  I imagined one scene over and over: at high school graduation, I emerge from my concealment. Draped in honors and ribbons, I step into brilliant sunlight, to a curving path like the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz. I float along, strewing flowers from my long slender fingers. Behind me this cluster of buildings, school and church and gymnasium, crumbles. Walls collapse, even the bricks crumble into dust like termite-riddled pieces of wood.…I have, like a spider, sucked the vital juices from this place. I have amassed its knowledge; I have learned its prayers; I have absorbed its attitudes, its good and its bad. I have transformed them all into me, leaving nothing behind. This citadel of whiteness has been looted by a single black thief, whom they declared invisible. Their magic has become mine, and I will now carry it away to my mother in her secret fastness far to the south.…

  So I dreamed for the future.

  For the present I smiled politely at Sister Lucy and imagined her turning to dust, her habit, black wool and white linen, sinking slowly to the floor, into a heap of old unwanted clothes.

  Because the school required it, I wrote to my mother each week. Not letters, which I knew she would not bother to read. But sketches: of dresses and coats, skirts and blouses, handbags and jewelry. My own designs, my dreams.

  My mother did not write; I telephoned home. There was a pay phone in the dormitory hall; we signed up to use it at ten-minute intervals. Sunday was the most popular time, but I chose Wednesday, every second Wednesday, at nine-thirty. David Clark always answered. He told me his news—the weather (rainy weeks were busy and profitable for a cab-driver), a horse he had won fifty dollars on, the sandwich shop he had opened in a downtown office building. Then it was my mother’s turn. She described her latest ideas in careful detail, telling me exactly how she had integrated my designs into them. Business was good, she said, she had hired two women to do piecework for her. She told me who they were and what sort of families they had. Even so, she said, she had to work until midnight to keep up. She was thinking of leaving her job at Lambert Brothers Department Store, but they’d just given her a raise and she liked the regular paycheck every week. She wanted to move her shop to a nicer location; she was looking but she hadn’t yet found a place she could afford.

  I listened but said nothing at all. They seemed to want it that way. The call never lasted the allowed ten minutes.

  In the new term, at midyear, another black face appeared in the dormitories: Adele Abbott, a junior. She was short and square, with a wide face, a flat nose, and kinky hair she straightened and held in place with a thick gel. She lived nearby and went home every weekend. Her father was an accountant, her mother taught school, she told me, and home was a steel town. She herself had worked in the mill last summer, right at the furnaces, where the heat was so intense she wore long underwear for extra protection under the regular protective gear. “You’ve seen that big Rockport plant, you know what I’m talking about.” When I said I hadn’t seen it, nor even known of its existence, she looked surprised and then annoyed. “Where have you been? In a cornfield?” She played the piano very well and knew endless songs by heart. Her favorite seemed to be “Star Dust,” and its old-fashioned sounds floated through the halls in the free period just before bedtime, mixing with the rock from a dozen different radios (light rock, of course, the only kind permitted).

  She lived in the junior-senior dormitory, a separate wing, but we were often together. She sat at my table in the dining hall, us two little black peas close together in our pod. She wrote a piano-violin version of “Danny Boy,” simplifying it for me. We practiced it carefully and played it everywhere, for school assemblies, visiting parents, school benefactors. We even provided background music for an alumnae fund-raising luncheon. (Adele did most of the work, of course. The only song I played well was “Danny Boy.”) Once, passing me in the hall, a girl said, “That sounded nice. I guess you people are born musical.”

  I stopped, open-mouthed and startled, not by the words, which didn’t even anger me, but by the fact that someone had actually spoken to me.

  Adele had a steady boyfriend, his name was Stephen; he was twenty-four, had played basketball in college, and now worked in his father’s insurance business. His photo was hidden under the sweaters in her drawer.

  In April, the night of her birthday, Adele broke the one single inviolable law of the school: she slipped out of the dormitory. Using a bit of wire, she disconnected the burglar alarm on a window in the science classroom. She climbed out, dropped the few
feet to the ground. On such chilly nights the watchman never left the warmth of his guardhouse. Nothing moved, not even a bird, as she crossed the playing fields and climbed the low rail fence at the Lexington Road. Stephen was waiting in his car.

  She had trouble climbing back; the window was higher than she’d thought; she got brush burns and scratches on her knees and elbows. In the morning she went to the infirmary, saying she’d fallen on some concrete steps. The nurse shrugged with disbelief but picked out the largest pieces of grit, scrubbed the wounds clean, and said nothing at all.

  Next evening Adele came to my room and closed the door after her. “I want to show you something.” She was almost shivering with excitement. “Can you keep a secret? Swear you can.”

  “Of course I can.”

  “Look.” She unbuttoned her blouse, unhooked a safety pin from her bra. “Stephen gave me this last night. For my birthday.” An engagement ring, a round diamond set in gold. She slipped it on her finger and turned her hand back and forth in the light.

  She didn’t notice my silence. “I have to wear it under my bra during the day, but I sleep with it on every night.” She held her hand under my desk light. “Just look at it.”

  In the small room, windows shut tight against the spring night chill, I was overwhelmed by a dislike of her, a physical dislike. Her short square body, her stiff shiny black hair, the rasping sound of her excited breath, her perfume…

  “Aren’t you worried about the nuns finding out?”

  She shook her head, not taking her eyes off the ring.

  “You’re not even supposed to be wearing perfume.”

  Her eyes glittered in the desk light, black eyes with points of sparkle in their depths, and she smiled a happy wide smile. “I only wear perfume when I go to bed. By morning it’s worn off.” Her smile brightened. “Once, though, Sister Bernice, you know her—in the food service department—once she asked me if I was wearing perfume, and I said, ‘Oh no, Sister, that’s against the rules. You must be smelling the vetiver sachets I put in my drawers to keep away the moths and the roaches.’ She was so stupid she believed it.”