The Color of Water (16 page)

“I'm going to the ceremony,” I said
.

“Respect your mother and me,” he said. “Don't break the law of the Bible. Don't go into that gentile church,” he said
.

Well, my mind was made up
.

On graduation day Dee-Dee and I opened up the store, set out the meats, stacked the fresh vegetables, and I worked behind the counter until it was time to go. Of course my parents wouldn't go to that gentile graduation, so I put on my cap and gown and walked the six blocks to Suffolk High School alone and waited for Frances in the parking lot. Frances was late getting there, which gave the other students and their parents something to stare at, to watch me standing there by myself. I was ready to turn around and run home by the time she showed up. I told her, “Frances, I'm not sure I can go into that church.” She said
,
“I understand, Ruth. I'll graduate by myself, then, because I don't want to graduate next to anyone but you.” Well, I felt like I couldn't let that happen, so I said, “I can do it, let's go.” We took a picture in our caps and gowns and got in line, double file, and marched together. The line marched out of Suffolk High's schoolyard and onto Main Street and slowed as it bottled up at the church doorway. As we approached the church I started to shake and sweat, and just before we reached the church doorway, I stepped out of line. I couldn't do it. I just couldn't go inside that church. In my heart I was still a Jew. I had done some wrong things in my life, but I was still my parents' child
.

I turned away, but not before Frances saw my tears. She got out of line herself but I waved her away. “Frances, you go on in,” I said. “Don't miss the ceremony because of me.” She went in. She had to wipe the tears from her own face, but she got back in line and marched through the ceremony alone, and she sat through the graduation ceremony next to my empty seat
.

I walked home sobbing in my cap and gown and caught a Greyhound bus for New York the very next day
.

One Saturday morning in 1973, a few weeks after I got back from Louisville, and just a few months after my stepfather passed away, Mommy woke me up and said, “We're going driving.” She thrust my two-year-old niece Z—that was her name, just plain Z—into my arms and we headed out to Daddy's car.

My stepfather had kept his ‘68 Pontiac Catalina, gold-colored with blue interior, immaculate. Before that he'd had a ‘65 Chevy Impala that he paid good money for. The car, white with red interior, was a bomb. He called it “a cheese-box. I'll never buy another Chevy again,” he fumed as the car, loaded with kids, sat in traffic, its engine steaming and sputtering. It seemed to break down every five minutes.
When it did start, a key wasn't necessary. You simply turned the ignition switch with your hand and it fired, and one evening a guy did just that as Daddy was standing by the kitchen window washing dishes. He watched in silence as the guy drove off in a cloud of blue smoke. “This must be my lucky day,” he said.

Mommy had never driven before as far as I knew. She was afraid to drive. She was a certified dyed-in-the-wool New York City transit passenger who could tell you what subway train went anywhere, which stop to get off at, and how far it was to the next one if you missed your stop and had to walk back. Depending on public transporation meant she was late for everything—for work, for open school nights, for picking us up whenever she had to. Every summer when I returned home from Fresh Air Fund camp, the yellow school buses would drop us off in Manhattan and I'd mournfully watch three hundred hugging, kissing, slobbering happy reunions between campers and parents while the counselors flipped coins to see who would wait with me, at which time Mommy would finally turn the corner at Forty-second Street—I could spot her bowed legs a mile away—and run up breathlessly, hugging me as the counselors looked on with looks that said, “I had no idea!”

But those days were gone. We needed a car. It was time for Mommy to drive. “I hate this,” she said, as we climbed in. “You have to tell me what to do.” I was almost sixteen
then and though I had no license I knew how to drive, having spent a good deal of time driving Daddy's car when Ma wasn't around, not to mention other cars I wasn't supposed to be driving. How she knew I knew how to drive she mercifully chose not to discuss, but by then I had begun to turn around. Deep inside I knew that my old friend Chicken Man back in Louisville was right. I wasn't any smarter, or any wiser, or any bolder than the cats on the Corner, and if I chose that life I would end up on the Corner no matter what my brains or potential. I knew I wasn't raised to drink every day, to work at a gas station, and to get killed fooling around with people like Herman and his gas station knuckleheads. That life wasn't as wild and as carefree as it looked from the outside anyway. It was ragged and cruel and I didn't want to end up that way, stabbed to death after an argument over a bottle of wine, or shot dead by some horny dude who was trying to take my manhood. “You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself,” my sister Jack told me several times. “Put yourself in God's hands and you can't go wrong.” I knew Jack was right, and when I got back to New York in the fall of 1973 for my junior year in high school I resolved to jump back into my studies and rebuild myself. Like my own mother did in times of stress, I turned to God. I lay in bed at night praying to Him to make me strong, to rid me of anger, to make me a man, and He listened, and I began to change.

I didn't change right away. For one thing, I was still strung out on herb. I'd watch newscasters Roger Grimsby and a young Geraldo Rivera do grim-faced reports on Channel 7
Eyewitness News
about the dangers of being “hooked” on marijuana and I'd laugh. “You can't get hooked on reefer,” I told my friends. “I can stop anytime I want.” But deep inside, I knew I was hooked, and I was secretly jealous of those from my drug circle who got themselves together and pulled out. Day after day I found myself in some dude's house getting blasted on weed and alcohol while he stuffed towels under the door to keep the smell in. I was also suffering occasional flashbacks from taking LSD, which I had done a lot the previous year. The flashbacks came out of nowhere: a joint or cigarette would set them off, or nothing at all—I'd be walking down the street and suddenly find myself blasted, tripping, that acid clairvoyancy high where people seem to be made of glass and the back of your hand becomes a purple star. I'd wander around the neighborhood paranoid, avoiding everyone I knew until the high wore off. Thank God crack wasn't available then, because I would've certainly become a crack addict. As it was, every single day—on the way to school, during school, and on the way home—I felt I had to get high. If I ran out of pot I drank wine, and when I couldn't get that my buddy Marvin and I drank NyQuil, which got you high and sleepy and slightly sick. I'd come home every night blasted, smelling like a pot house,
promising myself as I put my key in the door that I wouldn't get high the next day, only to open it and find Mommy standing behind it, screaming at me, “What's the matter with you! Your eyes are all red and you smell funny!” I wanted to give up weed, but I couldn't. Weed was my friend, weed kept me running from the truth. And the truth was my mother was falling apart.

Looking back, I see it took about ten years for Mommy to recover from my stepfather's death. It wasn't just that her husband was suddenly gone, it was the accumulation of a lifetime of silent suffering, some of which my siblings and I never knew about. Her past had always been a secret to us, and remained so even after my stepfather died, but what she had left behind was so big, so complete that she could never entirely leave it: the dissipation of her own Jewish family, the guilt over abandoning her mother, the separation from her sister, the sudden, tragic death of her first husband, whom she adored. While she never seemed on the verge of losing her mind, there were moments when she teetered close to the edge, lost in space. Even in my own self-absorbed funk, I was worried about her, because as my siblings and I slowly got to our emotional feet, Mommy staggered about in an emotional stupor for nearly a year. But while she wee-bled and wobbled and leaned, she did not fall. She responded with speed and motion. She would not stop moving. She rode her bicycle. She walked. She took long bus rides to
faraway department stores and supermarkets where she'd window-shop for hours and spend fifty cents. She could not grasp exactly what to do next, but she kept moving as if her life depended on it, which in some ways it did. She ran, as she had done most of her life, but this time she was running for her own sanity.

She operated on automatic mode, rising each morning and chasing us off to school as if things were as they always were, but she could make no decisions. Even the simplest choice, like whether to have a Touch-Tone telephone or a rotary one, required enormous, painstaking deliberation. If the furnace broke down it stayed broken, not just because she didn't have the money to fix it, but because…well…just because. She had always been incredibly disorganized, but now her disorganization reached new heights. I went to gym class, opened a paper bag from home in which I had stored my gym gear, and found her underwear inside. She'd disappear from the house for hours and come back with no explanation as to where she'd been. About a year after my stepfather died, her best friend, a wonderful black woman named Irene Johnson, passed away and Mommy teetered at the edge again, standing over the kitchen sink washing the same pot for hours, sniffling back her tears, and snapping, “Get away from me!” when we approached her. “You only have one or two good friends in life,” she used to preach at us, and for her, Irene was one of those. She and Irene went
back to Harlem in the forties when Ma first came to New York. Irene understood how far she had come. Irene had helped her raise her older children and had been like a sister to her. Yet she refused to go to Irene's memorial service. “I'm done with funerals,” she announced, yet you could see the pain on her face as she picked up the phone to dial Irene's sister to ask her about the final details of her best friend's life. “Please stay in touch,” Ma said, and Irene's sister did, for years. Ma was utterly confused about all but one thing: Jesus. The young Jewish girl who at one time could not allow herself to walk into a gentile church now couldn't do without it; her Orthodox Jewish ways had long since translated themselves into full-blown Christianity. Jesus gave Mommy hope. Jesus was Mommy's salvation. Jesus pressed her forward. Each and every Sunday, no matter how tired, depressed, or broke, she got up early, dressed in her best, and headed for church. When we kids grew too old and big for her to force us to go, she went alone, riding the F train from Queens to Brooklyn to New Brown Memorial, the church she started with my father. Church revived her, filled her up, and each Sunday she returned a little more renewed, until that Saturday afternoon she announced she was going to drive my stepfather's car.

She sat behind the wheel, tapping it nervously and muttering while I settled in the front seat and held Z in my arms. We didn't bother with seat belts. She stuck the key in
the ignition. The engine roared to life. “What do you do now?” she asked.

“Put it in gear,” I said.

“Oh, I know that,” she said. She slammed the car into drive and pulled off in a cloud of burning rubber and smoke, swerving down the street, screaming hysterically—“Wooooooooo!”

“Slow down, Ma!” I said.

She ignored me. “I don't have a license!” she shrieked as the car veered from side to side. “If I get stopped I'm going to jail!” She went about four blocks, ran a stop sign without pausing, then at the next intersection whipped a wide, arcing left turn, stabbing the accelerator pedal and sending the big sedan reeling down the wrong side of the street as oncoming traffic swerved to avoid us.

“Watch it! What are you doing, Ma! Stop the car!” I hollered.

“I need to go to the A&P! I need to go to the A&P!” she shrieked. “This is what I'm driving for, right?” We jerked along for a few blocks, no cops anywhere, and miraculously arrived at the A&P. Since she didn't know how to parallel-park next to the curb, she pulled up next to a parked car, slammed on the brakes, put the car in park, smashed the parking brake with her foot, and got out, leaving the engine running. “Wait here,” she said. I held Z in my arms while Mommy ran inside. When she came back out she released
the parking brake, threw the car into drive, and pulled away without looking over her shoulder. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason—she might have gotten the accelerator and the brake pedal mixed up—she stood on the brake pedal with all her might. The power brakes locked and I was thrown toward the windshield with little Z in my arms. The baby's tiny head flew at the dashboard with a great whipping motion, missing it by a millimeter. Had she hit it, the force would have severely injured her. The car sat there, the motor humming softly, while Mommy gasped for breath. “That's it,” she said. “I quit.” She drove home slowly, parked the car, and walked away from it like she had never seen it in her life. She never got inside it again. It sat there for months, leaves gathering around its tires again, snow accumulating on its hood, till she finally sold it. “I'll never learn to drive,” she said.

The irony was that Mommy knew how to drive before she was eighteen. She drove her father's 1936 Ford back in Suffolk, Virginia. Not only did she drive it, she drove it well enough to pull a trailer behind it full of wholesale supplies for her family's grocery store. She drove the car and trailer on paved and dirt roads between Norfolk, Suffolk, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, and North Carolina. She could back the trailer up with the goods in it, unload it at the store, back the car into the yard, unhook the trailer, and park the car in the garage, backing in. But she had left her past so
far behind that she literally did not know how to drive. Rachel Deborah Shilsky could drive a car and pull a trailer behind it, but Ruth McBride Jordan had never touched a steering wheel before that day in 1973, and you can make book on it.