I got really good at school. For one thing, I liked being there, because no matter how dumb the classes were or how mean some of the kids could be, it felt so much less lonely than my house. But also, I knew that the better I did, the less likely anyone was to interfere with my life. I wasn’t stupid; I knew what sort of shit happened when teachers started to notice that someone was having “trouble at home.” Ace every test and you’re suddenly way down on any potential do-gooder’s list of meddling priorities. So I got good grades, joined a couple of clubs in middle school, like chess club, because it seemed so laughable that you could play a board game for a few hours and get praised for it.
Maybe this all sounds sad, sad, sad to you, but it wasn’t. Life is made of comparisons, after all. In school, from the time you’re small, they teach you about wars and more wars, diseases and famines and still more wars, and I would sit there in the back of my social studies classes, marveling at the boring era I’d been born into and feeling relieved. I think a lot of people have the opposite reaction, and those are the people who start new wars. Not me. I was too busy flying under the radar.
That’s how it was, with me knowingly and expertly avoiding attention for over a decade, while the twin gargoyles of grief and depression sat on my father’s chest, suffocating him.
And then, everything changed. I’m still not sure how, exactly. My father had always gone through periods of feeling better, when his mood would lift and he would hire a cleaning service and ask me what I was doing at school and even call his colleagues at the PR firm that he still technically co-owned. My best guess is that during one of these periods of relative okay-ness he went to a doctor and got some pills, because almost overnight, he became frantically, manically busy. He went back to work and pounded the pavement the way he did when he was a twenty-year-old kid just starting out. He said that all the time, that he felt like a kid again, cigarette in his fingers, leg jiggling, a glazed expression that said that he did not, necessarily, remember that he was speaking to an actual kid, his kid. He started working late, and I was home alone a lot, and even though it shouldn’t have made that much difference, since it was similar to him being asleep in the next room, I admit that this is the part of the story where I started to feel kind of abandoned. And offended, maybe, that after all those years, I hadn’t been the thing to get my father out of bed.
Then he sat me down one day and told me that I was going to go live with my aunt Patrice.
“But I barely know her,” I said. That was true. Auntie Patrice was a name that I mostly recognized from birthday cards, and I wasn’t certain that I could pick her out of the crowd of Mom’s siblings in the old photo albums piled in the hall closet.
“What do you mean?” he asked, fidgeting in his chair. “You lived with Patrice until you were almost two.”
“In Brooklyn?” This was all news to me. “Where were you?”
My father sighed. “This isn’t a life, T. It’s my fault, but still.”
“It’s my life,” I said.
“Patrice will know what to do. She always knows what to do. And things will be fine.” I think I started to protest, to list some pretty valid reasons for not wanting to go live with a virtual stranger, but he got distracted by something and walked out of the room, and left me there, trying to remember something, anything, about Patrice.
So my dad fumbled the opening move a little, but the thing is, he was right: Moving in with Patrice was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. Suddenly, there were Patrice and Marcus and the wonderland of Brooklyn. There were chess tables in the parks and beautiful, worldly girls on every block and big, extended-family parties on holidays. School is even more laughably easy when someone else is making the macaroni and cheese. It was an entirely new point of comparison.
My father works all the time, and sometimes I see the uncles shaking their heads and tsking about that, saying that he’s just a different kind of crazy now, but he sounds okay when I talk to him on the phone or when he comes up to visit every few months, happier than I’ve ever known him to be. It’s like he finally decided to come back from the dead and live a second life, and I’m not mad at him about that. Those words that he said to me haunt me sometimes, though. Is this a life? If it is, can I legitimately call it my own or have I merely been letting the circumstances wash over me? My dad, he’s had two lives already, but have I even started my first?
“Dinner!” Patrice shouts from the kitchen.
Marcus doesn’t show up for dinner, and there’s a little pop of relief in my chest, along with some nervous anticipation. Sometimes it can be awkward when Patrice and I are left alone, like we don’t quite know how to talk to each other. I ask her polite questions about her job at a bank in Manhattan when, really, I’d like to ask her about my mother or what it used to be like when she took care of me as a baby or why she never goes out on dates, even though she’s still pretty, in her no-nonsense, often-frowning way. But it feels like all of these topics are off-limits.
“It’s good spaghetti,” I say, but it comes out almost apologetically.
“Labor Day this weekend,” Patrice says. “That means the block party on Saturday.” Patrice helps to plan the neighborhood block party every year, and I know she puts a lot of time into polishing every detail. But I’ve learned from the past two block parties that it’s one of those things where the whole neighborhood seems to be having more fun than I am and I don’t know what to do with myself.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “I have to work in the morning, but I’ll come straight home afterward. I should be able to catch a lot of it.” I have a job as a summer math tutor at one of the branches of the library. I took it so that I could hang out in Brooklyn for the summer instead of going back to Atlanta like I did last year. I barely know anyone there anymore, and besides, tutoring is not terrible money compared to flipping burgers. Marcus, though, didn’t agree. “You’re worth more than that, fam,” he said. But I couldn’t give up the job and play chess for Marcus all day long; I knew enough about Patrice to know that wouldn’t go over well. “One of my last shifts,” I finish, as a sort of explanation.
“Maybe you can help with the activities for the children when you get home,” Patrice says. “There’s a new family up the block, and the lady wants to do some kind of arts-and-crafts thing.” Patrice shrugs and rolls her eyes, so I know she’s talking about the white family who moved in a few weeks ago. They renovated one of the oldest houses on the block, and now that corner, without the overgrown yard and rotting porch, looks completely different. “Buddhist sand sculpture or something. I don’t know.”
“That sounds… interesting,” I say cautiously. It’s way different up here, the whole race thing, than it was in Atlanta. Personally, I like the way everybody’s so blasé about it here, the way people try their best to get along because there’s not enough room not to.
Patrice makes a noncommittal hmming noise. She’s been living in this neighborhood since she was younger than I am now, and she can definitely be a little territorial when it comes to our block. She’s seen a lot of changes, and any newcomers get put through a long probationary period while she decides if she likes them or not. This is especially true if they look like they might not fit in. If they make Buddhist sand sculptures, for instance, and wear flamboyantly tie-dyed scarves, like I’ve seen this woman wear.
“Well, I’m glad you think it sounds interesting,” Patrice says. “You can help her, then.”
If Marcus were here, he’d make some joke about crazy white people and their crazy schemes and make her laugh. He can be a harsh judge of people when he wants to be, but maybe that’s just another form of being territorial.
I get uncomfortable making jokes like that, though, so I act terrifically interested in my spaghetti and nod. I compose my face into a blank that says: You know me, I love Buddhist sand sculptures.
“Good,” she says. “It’s settled, then.”
THE QUEEN
I’D SPENT MOST OF M
Y TIME THAT SPRING AND SUMMER dwelling on the possibility that my parents might be idiots. I was tired of their relentless optimism and their matching sandals and their boring, overeducated friends and their pretending that musical history stopped with The White Album and their community co-op bulgur wheat and their organic but ineffective toothpaste. The sixties were half a century in the past, but somehow, they hadn’t gotten the message. Hell, they had barely even been alive during the sixties, but that didn’t stop them. Living with people like this would have been irritating under the best of circumstances, but it was particularly infuriating when they decided that the Lower East Side, where my twin brother, Hull, and I had spent our entire young lives, didn’t have enough soul anymore, and we needed to uproot our comfortable existence and move to Brooklyn at the end of our sophomore year of high school. You should have seen the shade of purple that my brother turned when they dropped that piece of news during the family dinner at Shah Jalal, their favorite Indian restaurant. Is it easier to imagine if I tell you that he was yelling “Fuck this stupid family” at the same time?
They say that round parents have square children, and you couldn’t find a more apt illustration of that axiom than the Steinbach clan. We were five when Hull created his first Excel spreadsheet. (Its purpose was to keep an inventory of his stuffed animals, which he was certain that someone was pilfering. I was.) Starting in fifth grade, he insisted on wearing collared shirts, even on the weekends, and got his hair trimmed every three weeks in a style that my mother called “the Mitt Romney” with an exasperated sigh. He ran for student council every year under the slogan “Hull Steinbach, the Responsible Choice.” And it was unusual enough at our small, experimental school that he always won, too. Hull could be hard to take, a little prickly. People thought he was arrogant, but the truth was that he really was smart and special, and he wasn’t into pretending that he didn’t know it. I loved him dearly, in spite of and because of all of this.
As for me, I was as distinct from my kooky parents as Hull, but in different ways. I spent most of my childhood curing my family of imaginary diseases. My dad, a professor of Renaissance drama at NYU, couldn’t keep anything that had “Dr. Steinbach” printed on it because I would spirit it away to add to my doctor kit. “Why do you have them anyway when you’re not a real doctor?” I would ask him, a question his friends always found precocious and extremely funny when it was related at dinner parties. When my mother made me go to stupid weekend classes with her, pottery-making or painting or interpretive dance, I would sullenly pore over Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body for the entire subway ride. She was a jeweler who made large, elaborate pieces that only eccentric wealthy people could afford, and she simply couldn’t believe that she’d birthed a daughter with so little artistic aptitude. Believe it, I’d think as I was half-heartedly pretending to be a tree in dance class. Believe it. When I broke the news, at age nine, that I had my sights set on med school, my parents tried to take the news bravely.
“Well, William Carlos Williams was a doctor,” my dad said hopefully, “and so was Chekhov!” And then my mother said, a little too brightly, “That’s great, honey!” and lit some sandalwood incense, which is what she does when she’s stressed.
But I’m already getting distracted from the point, which is that my parents’ big announcement that we were moving to Brooklyn and that we would be enrolling in a public school there didn’t go over so well.
“It will be amazing,” my mother trilled. “The house we found is a gem. Haven’t you guys always wanted a real backyard? And Brooklyn is where all the really interesting stuff is happening these days. We’ll be in the middle of it!”
“What kind of interesting stuff?” Hull asked. He was angrily ripping his naan into bits and compressing them into round pellets, an arsenal of doughy BBs rolling around his plate. “Artisanal pickles and ironic facial hair?”
While Hull and my mother went mano a mano on wide-ranging social issues, I chewed a forkful of biryani and considered. Here are the things that occurred to me, in the order in which they did: 1) I didn’t want to leave my friends and teachers at Hope Springs Day School. Some of my friends, like Alma and Philip, had been in my class since kindergarten. 2) HSDS didn’t have the strongest science program, and there was a chance the new school would have AP Biology. 3) Hull was not going to stop freaking out about this, not for a long time. Hull had spent years laying the political groundwork to be both junior and senior class president, and he was enraged. He actually pounded his fist on the table, knocking over a little bowl of mint chutney.
“Don’t I have some kind of legal recourse?” Hull shouted, which made my father laugh, which is what made Hull drop the f-bomb, which is when the diners at nearby tables started to give us the side-eye.
“I think that in just a few months, you’re going to love it there,” my mother said, and then burst into tears. Dinner was over.
The house my parents bought was old, very old, and it used to be a farmhouse when Brooklyn was full of rolling, grassy fields and stately vacation homes, though now it was squashed improbably onto the end of a row of brownstones. I wouldn’t call it a gem; I would call it more of a fixer-upper. But it did have a wide porch and a big living room and a pretty curved staircase that led up to an entire second story, the sort of comforts that most Manhattanites teach themselves to live without. And my parents, to their credit, are good at fixing things up, so they hired Nicolas, a soft-spoken contractor, to do the more serious repairs while they sanded floors and stripped wallpaper and painted and landscaped and varnished their little hearts out. This was in the late spring, as school was letting out for summer break, and sometimes they managed to drag me along to help, but Hull was steadfast. He didn’t even want to set eyes on the place.
Eventually, he had to, of course. The co-op that my parents had owned for almost two decades sold quickly to a young investment banker and his aspiring actress girlfriend, and moving day was set for early July. “It’s not that bad,” I tried to tell him a week or two before. “There’s a lot more space.” He looked at me sadly, as if even this simple statement of fact was a deep betrayal, and shook his head.
Hull and my mom and I piled into our aging Volvo and drove to the new place behind my dad in the moving truck. Over the river and through the woods, I thought, as we crossed the Manhattan Bridge into our new borough. When we got there, Hull slid out of the back seat with a duffel bag and a box of his stuff, and disappeared inside to lock himself in his empty new room, completely shirking any other moving responsibilities. “I think he’s grieving,” my mother said to my father and me as we dripped sweat onto box after box. “We should respect his emotional journey.”
“I think your son doesn’t like Brooklyn so much,” Nicolas said solemnly as he helped her maneuver a dining table through the front door. “Maybe it is not the place for him.” Nicolas almost never said anything that was superfluous and, consequently, anything he did say seemed like a grave and irreversible proclamation. My mother dropped her end of the table and knocked it against the doorframe, causing a gouge on one of the legs that could never be repaired.
We were all so focused on Hull and his wrath that I think we may have overlooked some of the other difficulties of the move until we were in the thick of them. The house was in a section of Bed-Stuy that was pretty cool, but a little rougher around the edges than our neighborhood in Manhattan. One night, some people who were drunk (or angry) trashed a bunch of the landscaping my parents had put in, and they had to do it all over again. The empty lot at the other end of the block always smelled like urine, and used condoms appeared there overnight like fungi. My mother made me start to carry a tiny can of mace in my backpack. She looked sheepish when she gave it to me. “Not that anyone will bother you,” she said. “But it’s good to be safe.”
I was a New York City kid, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know plenty of black and Latino and Asian people. What I wasn’t used to was being so obviously, attention-grabbing-ly white in a ne
ighborhood where most people weren’t. What’s more, it was a summer full of problems that I’d thought were solved decades before I was born; the newspapers carried grim stories of black people shot by white police officers, and the headlines flashed through my head every time a police cruiser glided past. Most of the neighbors, Nicolas had informed us, were longtime residents of the block and most were Caribbean, immigrants from decades before or their first-generation children, and I could feel them giving me the once-over whenever I walked by. Slightly farther from home, on the way to the hardware store or the grocery store, I got called Snowflake once or twice, and another time I had to pretend not to hear a very drunk homeless guy yelling down the block, telling me what all white girls liked to suck. But mostly I got along just fine.
The situation was far worse when I was with my parents. My mom wanted to engage with everyone she saw, trying to make new friends, but it was painfully awkward. “My family is from Ireland,” she would say whenever we met someone new, running a hand through her curly red hair, “though I was born in Illinois.” When I asked her why she kept saying something so stupid, she told me, “I’m sharing something of my background so they can feel comfortable sharing theirs with me. That’s how people learn about each other, Izzy.” Honestly, it was mortifying.
Izzy + Tristan Page 2