At-Risk (10 page)

The teacher's pantyhose are the old-fashioned kind, the kind with the little lines down the back of them, the kind the white women in those old black-and-white movies wear with the skirt suits whose hems fall way past their knees. The seams at the back of the teacher's pantyhose do not follow down her leg in a straight line. They curve around her calves, twisting all the way to the front. Mrs. Greenberg is bowlegged. Perhaps, the girl thinks, this is why her stockings are always crooked.

The stockings make her think of the movies Uncle always brings over. Every time he comes over, he brings a big black garbage bag stuffed full of dirty newspaper, and inside the bag there is always a
VCR
. He takes out the
VCR
and hooks it up to the big floor model television in the living room, where everyone can watch. He brings popcorn for the stove and puts in tapes of old movies, of films he said were made when he was little. The girl is a sucker for these movies. She likes Rosalind Russell. Maureen O'Hara. Doris Day. She will watch old movies until her eyes are dry. They sit on the plastic-covered couch, he and the girl and the sister and the mother, watching women telling men to put their lips together and blow, having a good time, until the mother crosses her arms and says, “Thought I was the one you came to see.”

Mrs. Greenberg speaks over her shoulder. “How are you making out?” she asks.

“I don't know what to write,” the girl says.

Mrs. Greenberg turns from the chalkboard, which is half-filled
with tomorrow's lessons. “All right,” she says. “Try this. How would you feel if the roles were reversed? What if it were you that was always being pushed or shoved or picked on? What if you were always Colleen's target? How would you like it then? What do you get out of torturing an innocent girl? Think about answering at least one of those questions and see if you come up with something to say.”

The teacher raises her eyebrows, implying profundity. The girl remains unimpressed. It could never be the other way around. Colleen is not a leading lady. The girl likens her to the brunettes in the old movies, the ones who never get the guy. The girl is thinking of Ruth Hussey in
The Philadelphia Story
and Janice Rule in
Bell, Book, and Candle
. There is always a Katharine Hepburn or a Kim Novak to tempt the Jimmy Stewarts of the world. Colleen is the kind to get attention only by default.

Though she can hardly remember how it all began, the girl's first push truly was accidental. Mrs. Greenberg assembled the class in two rows by the coat closet, boys on the left and girls on the right. Colleen was in front of the girl, Abdul to her left. As they filed out of the classroom and down the hall to the far stairwell, the girl began to lag behind. She had spotted a small reddish stain in the center of Colleen's skirt. It bloomed brightly as if someone had cut her, as if she'd sat on a tube of paint. Entranced by the blooming, spreading stain—it had no edges, it looked like an inkblot, like something the girl's sister had shown her from an old college psychology textbook before she'd dropped out to make money—the girl lifted her feet mechanically, walking with legs made of wood, knowing Colleen knew things that the girl had yet to learn, wondering if she should follow Colleen more closely so that no one else might see (for surely the girl hadn't noticed the stain when they'd first lined up), when, closing the space between them, the girl stepped too close, right on the back of Colleen's
LA
Gear sneakers, making Colleen stumble
and collide with the girl in front of her. The girl imagined them as a line of dominoes toppling from the one accidental push, but it did not happen like that. Colleen righted herself quickly, but not quick enough to fool Mrs. Greenberg, who walked alongside the class, keeping close to the middle, a vantage point that allowed her to survey the entire line. She cut her eyes at the girl, saying nothing, chalking it up to clumsiness, to an accident. An accident it had been that first time. After that, it simply felt too good to stop. First, there was the closeness of Colleen's body when the girl pushed her, stepping close enough to smell the grease against Colleen's scalp. Second, there was the Jean Naté that wafted from Colleen's collar. When the girl stepped against Colleen, she saw Colleen begging her mother for a splash of cologne from the yellow bottle in the hopes that wearing it would make someone finally notice her. Stepping against the back of Colleen's sneakers was stepping into her life, a life the girl guesses to be less complicated than her own. Colleen, the girl thinks, has a father and no unrelated uncles. When she goes home, someone is always waiting.

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
.

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 arms 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.