Heft (9 page)

My mom has always been too impressed with Pells. When she was better she talked about it quietly, as if it were more important than anyplace else. When I was about eleven
Newsweek
named Pells High one of the ten best public schools in the country. It’s a large school with small classes. Two thousand kids and not a class over twenty. Good sports programs and teachers, labs with new technology, a huge impressive library. The day that article was published my mother came home and called her mother, who was still alive at the time and basically the only person she talked to besides me, and said: Did you hear the news about us?

It made me ill.

When she was still working her boss was Dr. Greene, the vice principal in charge of eleventh grade. To this day Dr. Greene sees me in the hall and asks me in a low concerned voice how my mother is, which makes me want to punch him in his mouth. She worked for him for a really long time. He has never once called her since she left two years ago.

I knew everything about him and his life before I even met him. My mother used to come home and tell me all about the Greenes: Dr. Greene’s wife Marjorie, and their two sons, Brian and Brent, fraternal twins. I know he golfs on the weekends and plays poker on Wednesdays. I know he has a boat at the marina and that the boat probably comes from his family money or his wife’s money because he does not make that much. I know he reads voraciously, my mother’s phrase. For Christmas every year she used to give him something that she carefully picked out, related to one of his four hobbies, and he would give her something generic and edible, a fruit basket or a cheese-of-the-month club membership. I’ve met all the Greenes at one point or another, from being dragged to awards dinners or staff appreciation picnics when I was a kid. I always hated Brian and Brent, who are five years younger than me and truly horrible kids. They used to whine and try to make me play boring games with them like Go Fish. They’re little kids, my mother would say, so be nice.

Dr. Greene drives a red convertible, which is a ridiculous car for a vice principal to have.

This past Christmas my mother made him a card and asked me to give it to him, I’m not kidding, a homemade card. In crayon. I didn’t even read it. I threw it out as soon as I got to school. On my way home that day I stopped at a CVS and bought her a box of chocolates and a card and said they were from Dr. Greene.

I am a senior now and have acquired invaluable knowledge of how to do things over the years. But on my first day of freshman year I had no idea. I showed up wearing red glossy basketball shorts past my knees, a plain white T-shirt that hung off my shoulders, and Nikes.

As soon as we arrived I knew I’d gotten it wrong. I was slumped in my seat while my mother was driving. She kept saying
Are you excited? Are you nervous? Are you excited?
but I wasn’t speaking to her that day. She drove through the student parking lot and the first thing I noticed was that every car in it was nicer than hers. The second thing I noticed was a boy who was standing with his elbows on the roof of his BMW, watching us go by. Holt! Holt! someone yelled, and it was his name, and he whirled around and yelled back. He was dressed differently than I was. His cap was blue and ratty on the brim, a farmboy’s frayed hat with dark shaggy hair beneath. His shirt looked to me like a businessman’s, a blue long-sleeved oxford shirt that I could imagine a banker wearing. His shorts were plaid and fitted him. He was wearing flip-flops. To school. In Yonkers only girls had done that.

What’s wrong, Kelly? my mother said, and I said
Nothing,
God, but everything was wrong. Who I was meant something different here than it did at home. At home I was in charge of all the boys at my school. I am not exaggerating, it was true. I was in charge of them as surely as if I had been elected. I told them things to do and they did them. I was not in charge of the girls but I remember the moment when they became aware of me and several small battles broke out amongst them about me. I was certain that I would be in charge of nobody at Pells and that no one would fight for me. I felt very alone.

My mother left me outside the main entrance.

Can I help you find your homeroom? she asked. I shook my head violently. I had memorized a map of the school the night before, memorized it completely, the first and second and third floors, so I wouldn’t have to take it out in front of anyone in the hallway. I am very good with maps.

Have a great day, said my mother, and then she was gone.

I looked up at the school. Pells High is built like a castle. It has stone walls and turrets that I think are fake or at least I know no way to get inside them, and I have explored every corner of this school. It’s set up on a hill with a perfect lawn that stretches down to the parking lots below. There are tennis courts and playing fields in front of it and more in back. Two low stone walls run the length of a walkway from the main road to the entrance. A driveway snakes up the side.
PELLS LANDING HIGH SCHOOL
, says a sign by the front door.
HOME OF THE GIANTS
.

Two girls walked by me and didn’t look at me.

It was still early. I sat on one of the stone walls and watched as the slow trickle of students picked up speed. Not one person glanced my way.

Off the wall, please, said an administrator, and I realized suddenly that it was Dr. Greene.

Dr.— I said, and then shut up. I hadn’t been recognized and it was better that way.

I did not want to be too early for homeroom. I lingered outside until I had five minutes to spare and then I walked directly through the green front door, letting the surge of bodies around me swallow me and make me small. The hallways at PLHS are lettered and my homeroom was in D-Hall, which was on the third floor.

No one was sitting down yet when I walked into homeroom. They were standing in clumps like they were at a party. The girls were shrieking with laughter and the boys were slapping each other’s hands sideways in greeting. I didn’t want to be the only one sitting but I felt I had no choice. I chose a desk and sat at it, rifling through my empty bookbag to give myself something to do. I did not recognize myself in anyone. The girls wore cardigans and dangling silver bracelets.

All of my classes surprised me. My classmates spoke perfect drawling lazy English. They spoke like rich adults.

I think, said one, that what Reagan was forgetting was that people
give a damn
about other people.

It was astonishing.

I had signed up for the dumb classes, the level two and three classes. What this means in Pells is classes for very smart and nerdy kids who are so
smart and nerdy that school is uninteresting to them and so they have behavior problems and get bad grades. A boy in my bio class was wearing a cape.

At lunch I did not even try to go into the cafeteria. I found an empty classroom and sat down and put my head on my desk. If anyone asked I was going to say I was feeling sick. I hiked the sleeves of my giant white T-shirt over my shoulders and folded the waistband of my basketball shorts over once and then twice.

That night I went home and begged my mother for new clothes. I begged her not to make me go back to school without good clothes. She was actually happy. She never liked the stuff I wore, the baggy stuff. It was a nice night with her. We went to the mall and I used money I had saved from mowing lawns. I took it out of my wallet and we went to Target, where I bought shorts like the ones I’d seen the other boys wearing. We bought one pair of cheap brown flip-flops (since then I have learned that these are a giveaway, that these are the things that need to be expensive and leather), and a few T-shirts with collars. I let the clothes fit me. I let the shirts be tight across my shoulders and I let the shorts come to just above my knees. On the way out I convinced my mother to stop at J.Crew and I walked to the back, to the sale rack, and spotted two oxfords: one white and one blue. I wanted them very badly but they were so expensive, even on sale, that I almost wouldn’t let her buy them, but she insisted. She loved them. She said they made me look grown-up. The white one was missing a button at the bottom and the blue one had a tiny tear at the back. I didn’t care.

The next day was better. I was not sure if anyone would recognize me from the day before. I had slouched through every class my first day but walking in I stood up straighter. I had grown a lot over the summer and a girl smiled at me on my way in. I was wearing the blue shirt.

In my first-period class, Señorita Klein went around the room asking,
Juegas al deportes?

Sí
, I said.
Yo juego al béisbol, al basquetbol, y al fútbol americano.

The last wasn’t true. I hadn’t played football since I was a little kid doing Pop Warner because my friends did. But the kid next to me looked at me and later in the class, when Señorita Klein was writing on the board, he leaned over to me and said Yo. You play football.

Yeah, I said.

How come you didn’t try out, he said.

I didn’t know when they were, I said, but my heart was sinking. This was something my mother should have told me. I felt like a dud.

Captains’ started middle of August, said the kid.

Chiquitos
, said Señorita Klein.
Por favor
.

This kid was Trevor Cohen who is now my best friend, along with Kurt Aspenwall. Trevor got me on the football team. In the winter I played basketball. In the spring I tried out for baseball and made varsity and I was the first freshman to do this in five years. That spring we won state, which we also did last year. Baseball is the best and most important thing to me. Sports in general are the one thing I have ever been very good at, excellent at, even, which I don’t feel shy about saying because I am good at nothing else. But I can boast about this without much fear of comeuppance. I can throw and catch balls. I can run faster than most people. I can swing bats and launch my body like a missile toward the bodies of other players and I can knock them down. I can jump. I can tense my muscles and swallow the blows that come in my direction from elbows and shoulders and hips. I can puke and keep going. This is my talent. It glows inside me like a secret jewel.

My mother began going downhill when I was a sophomore which was also around the time that I started to really love school.

She had had her ups and downs. Always. It was what we called them, together. Outside the house she was normal. She cared what people thought of her and she saved all her madness for me. I would come home and find her flat on her back with sadness, or up and acting like a maniac. Happier than happy. She would have cleaned the house and she would have baked. She would say Have some! Or she would clutch me in her arms—this was when I was very little, too little to know that nobody else’s mother was doing this—and hold me so long that my joints got stiff. She would rest her chin on my head and sometimes she would cry. I was afraid to move or breathe.

When I was little she would date sometimes. Never anything that lasted. Always boys she grew up with in Yonkers who turned into men that had never left. I tried to imagine what they were like when they were my age and I came up with the worst boys I knew. The boys I hated when I was younger, the boys I brawled with. When her dates came by the house I would never even look at them.

Besides these men and her work she had few connections to the outside world. She had few friends and now she has none. She liked some of the checkout clerks at the grocery store and would make conversation with them when she saw them, asking after their families. She liked Frank at the corner store. And for years, for as long as I can remember, she has had a pen pal named
Arthur Opp,
which was a name that I loved and would say to myself in a singsongy way, and whenever a letter from Arthur Opp would arrive I would tease her about it and she would snatch the letter from my hands and go into her bedroom to read it. Who is it? I would say, and she would say it was her secret admirer. Or a prince, or a king. The king of England, she said once. He even sent her little gifts once or twice, candy, chocolate. He sent her flowers when my grandparents died. When I pressed her for the truth she would say he was an old friend, but she never let me read what he had sent.

She didn’t drink the way she does now until a few years ago. The drinking came very slowly and a little at a time until one day I realized that she never never stops drinking. She drinks from the time she wakes up until the time she passes out. Most days. Most of every day.

I stopped liking her.

When she worked at Pells—when she was still OK enough to work—my Pells friends knew that she was my mother but we never acknowledged it, never once. She was a secretary at the school and they saw her and said hello to her but there was never any talk about it, never once. I spent more and more time with them. On weekends I was rarely home. I slept in their warm comfortable houses and on weeknights I stayed out late at practice and then took the train home, feeling very adult, taking the train from Pells Landing to Yonkers and then the bus to my home.

One day I went into her office to tell her that my practice had been canceled and she wasn’t there. I went into Dr. Greene’s office instead.

Have you seen my mom? I asked.

He was shuffling his papers around and he paused.

She went home sick, he said. He took a breath.

I waited.

Kel, he said.

Yes, I said.

—Has she been—OK?

I was leaning in the doorway. Yeah, I said. Why?

—She’s seemed different recently.

She’s great, I said.

The truth, of course, was that she was nothing close to great and the drinking was getting worse. She was also complaining more about her health. She was diagnosed with lupus when I was a little kid but it had never ever affected her, not once. She was one of the lucky ones, she used to tell me. A mild case. But when I was a sophomore she began inventing symptoms. She began telling me that different parts of her body hurt and that she was tired all the time. She’d be asleep at five. She’d tell me she was running a fever and ask me to put a hand on her forehead but she never felt hot to me.