The Clancys of Queens (9 page)

The night of the party, English Billy picked me up early, giving my dad some time alone with Jackie to pop the question. When the two of them came through the door, hand in hand, Gregory's erupted in cheers.

A few months later Gregory's Bar and Restaurant took over the entire coach section of a Dublin-bound Aer Lingus 747, en route to the wedding in Ireland. This was back when you could smoke on planes, and, more important, it was back when they gave out unlimited free booze. Everyone was standing up in the aisles, telling jokes and clinking glasses. A little nautical decoration and they might never have left that plane.

The bridal party was an even split of staff and regulars. As the flower girl, I led the lot of them into the church. Jackie, her dress adorned with top-quality lace (a wedding gift from Don Jo), walked slowly down the aisle, past pews full of the entire hungover, ragtag Queens crew, and met Dad at the altar.

After the wedding, Dad and I moved out of our little Broad Channel house and into a two-bedroom railroad apartment in nearby Richmond Hill, Queens, with Jackie, marking a minuscule gain in actual square footage but an exponential one with regard to rooms with doors that closed.

Later that year, 1990, Dad officially retired from the NYPD. He was only forty years old, but he had already put in twenty-two years on the job and was entitled to a full retirement pension, not that he intended on kicking up his heels. He had started going to college at night, six years earlier, after a major off-duty scare:

As an unmarried man with no other children, he had only one true Achilles' heel—me. And once, we ran into someone he had put away. Having served his sentence, the guy was out doing what we were doing at the time, shopping for clothes, a seemingly innocuous thing to do. But when my father saw the man's face across the suit racks, he instantly pulled one of his guns from its holster. Then, without a word, he took my wrist and shoved me behind a nearby cash register. The two men locked eyes, and the guy nodded. “Hi, Clancy.” Hiding the gun in his hand behind a row of suits, my dad said hello back.

“It's gotta be fifteen years. You just out?” my father said.

“Yeah, 'fraid so.”

“You were only supposed to do seven to nine. Must not have been such a good boy in there, huh?”

“Nope. But I'm back with my wife now. She had two more kids while I was in!”

“Immaculate Conceptions, huh?”

They laughed.

The guy didn't seem an immediate threat. But when they parted ways, as the ex-con kept thumbing through the rack, my dad slowly walked off, leaving the clothes behind and grabbing me just before we reached the door.

A week later Dad started taking accounting classes at Queens College.

Six years after that he traded his life as a warrant-squad cop for a desk job at H&R Block—pretty damn likely making him the only person in the world whose career path reads: aspiring priest, bounty hunter, accountant.

And yet, of all the varying titles he held, Dad always made it clear to me, if only in his pick-up-the-guns/three
S
's/red light–running/mustache and aviator glasses–wearing way, that there was one title that forever trumped all the others: Tara's Father.

In 1990, right after my dad married Jackie and moved out of our Broad Channel house, my hard-ass grandmother somehow wound up moving in with her Wall Street daughter and son-in-law and their three kids in the most elite of New York City suburbs, while Mom and I stayed in Queens, in a new house, two blocks away, on 253rd Street. (Grandpa refused to stop working at MetLife in Brooklyn, so Mom bought a bunk bed for my room, and from Monday to Friday I took the top and he took the bottom.) I wasn't there when my grandmother said good-bye to the other Geriatrics of 251st Street, but I'd bet good money that it went something like this:

“My youngest, Lucille, fancy she is now! Connecticut, she wants to live?! What do I know from Connecticut?! But she needs me, for the kids! I'm gonna let a stranger, some
sfacimm
‘nanny' or what they call it, watch my grandkids?! My blood! I'd rather be dead! So that's it,
fahn-gool!
…good-bye.” Then I imagine a rope ladder dropping down from a hovering helicopter, the blasting propeller winds matting down Tina's and Anna's Aqua-Netted helmets of hair, and Grandma hooking an elbow around the lowest rung, lifting into the sky in her threadbare, floral-print, pale orange housedress and dangling terry-cloth slippers, flying up over the clotheslines of eastern Queens, and finally being deposited onto my Aunt Lucille's manicured front lawn in Westport, Connecticut, right in between the gobsmacked landscaper holding on to his leaf blower for dear life and the petrified neighbor with a popped-collar polo and pearls who had just come over to deliver a batch of welcome-to-the-neighborhood scones.

To say that the simultaneous loss of my hero grandmother, Tommy O'Reilly, and the rest of my Broad Channel pals, along with the two homes I had grown up in, would make me come untethered would imply that I had ever been tethered in the first place. By then, age ten, I was already a tried-and-true child chameleon, a real-life little Zelig who knew how to go from being barfly at a Queens local hangout to a summertime Bridgehamptonite to an honorary septuagenarian at the drop of a dime. Despite all that (or maybe because of it), there was one role I didn't always like to play: kid. More specifically, rule-abiding kid.

According to my parents, from kindergarten right on up, they never went more than a month without getting a call from my school's principal. I would leave class “to go to the bathroom” and not come back for an hour—I'd hit the office to shoot the breeze with the school secretary, then move on to the school nurse, and then the security guard. If they were new, I'd pull my trademark, “So, you got any kids?” And if I knew them already, I'd ask how little Kevin was doing these days or what they thought about them Mets, as if I were Dad making the rounds at Gregory's. (It typically took a few minutes before whomever I was talking to copped on that I was not supposed to be there chitchatting and would shoo me back off to class—not that I went.)

I had a particular infatuation with the “secret” fourth floor of PS 133, and I'd sneak up there, climb under the yellow caution tape, and have a nice long snoop around (it was quarantined due to asbestos contamination for my entire six years of elementary school). After that tour I'd pop my head into the gym, and if the coast was clear, I'd slip past the door and start running loops around the perimeter as fast as I could to practice for my recess races against the boys, or I'd take the California Raisins figurines our gym teacher, Ms. Lobasco, would give us as rewards for doing the President's Challenge Fitness Test's recommended number of sit-ups for our age and gender, line them up at half-court, and then bowl them over with a basketball (imaginary giant snowball), screaming, “AVALANCHE!!” And whether I was caught and taken back to class by the hand, or on the rare occasion when I went of my own volition, I was placed in a special desk right next to the teacher's so that he or she could keep me from telling jokes to my neighbor, or yank me back down to my seat when I stood up on my chair and did the hula to get a rise out of my classmates.

It's impossible to say whether my refusal to sit still or listen to the rules was more the product of nature or nurture, but I would guess that at least some part of it stemmed from the fact that I spent so much of my time outside of school adapting to multiple, very different adult worlds. Once I was in school, I must have decided that everyone could just adapt to me. Which is likely why, for nearly the whole first half of elementary school, I didn't have many close friends. It would go something like this:
“Hey, Tara, want to help us build a house with the blocks?”
“Nah. You wanna cut class, sneak onto the cordoned-off fourth floor, and breathe in a little asbestos?! No? Well, to hell with ya.”

But then, along came Esther…

Despite her having a name that suggests she was an eighty-five-year-old Jewish grandmother, Esther Hilsenrad and I first met as fellow third-graders. We sat at least three rows away from each other—or however many bodies it took to get alphabetically from Clancy to Hilsenrad in a packed Queens public-school classroom—but for at least the first half of the school year, I'm sure she wished we were even farther apart.

Esther and I were not just of a different species; we were of a different genus. I was Catholic. She was Jewish. I was the shortest kid in the class. She was the tallest. I didn't shut up. She barely said a word. I kept dog-eared notebooks full of chicken-scratch handwriting and had a permanent seat in the principal's office. She had pristine notebooks and was petrified of getting into trouble. I had the confidence-bordering-on-arrogance typical of only children, while she had the frenetic look in her eye typical of anyone who had good-natured torturers for brothers (and she had three, all older). On the whole, in the menagerie that was Ms. Rockower's third-grade class, I was the raucous howler monkey; Esther, a solitary, paranoid heron. Or, in other words, for a good while she couldn't stand me.

I, however, was infatuated by Esther straightaway. Every so often I would catch myself staring across the room at her—she'd avert her eyes from her work just long enough to shoot me a split-second look that nonetheless ran the emotional gamut:
Who, me?…Stop that!…Oh, God, I hope your bad behavior isn't an airborne contagion!!
And then she'd bury her head right back in the assignment. Even so, I was hell-bent on getting to know her, if for no other reason than I suspected, despite all our differences, that there was one thing we had in common: weirdness.

Our transition from diametrically opposed exotic little-girl animals to diametrically opposed exotic little-girl animals who were friends was predicated on one fateful confrontation during recess surrounding her pronunciation of my first name. For reasons neither of us can remember, Esther had had to call out my name during one of our class exercises. (Maybe we were doing a unit of math, and Ms. Rockower asked, “Who is the fourth person in the second row?” and Esther raised her hand and said, “Tara.” Or maybe it was grammar: “Whose name has two syllables?”
Tara.
Or health: “Who thought it was very funny to stick pencils into her ears and wiggle them around, yelling, ‘Look at my alien antennas!,' which caused both pink eraser tops to break off and get embedded deep inside her ears for months, then didn't tell her parents about it, even when they were completely panicked that she was going deaf, so they took her to the doctor's office, where said erasers had to be surgically removed?”
Tara
.)

No matter the exact circumstances, when Esther said my name in class that day, she did not pronounce it
Tara
(like
Sarah
), with the New York accent that I and everyone else around us had but, rather,
Tey-ra.
So the very first words I ever spoke to her were, “Eh! Why do you say my name funny!?” To which she nervously shot right back, “Um, maybe because during the summer, I went to Montana, where they talk different?” I spent the entire rest of recess walking a slow loop around the fenced-in giant square of bare asphalt that was the PS 133 recess yard, side by side with Esther.

“Montana!? What for?”

“My mom is in a…a group.”

“What kinda group?”

“We just call it The Group.”

“THE Group. Never heard of it.”

“I don't know if it's really called THE Group. But that's what we call it.”

“Oh…so, is it like camp?”

“No.”

“Well, are there sports!?”

“No, it's not like that. I don't know…it's just a group.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Well, do you promise not to say anything?”

“Promise!”

“My brother told me, just this last time, that maybe, it's a…cult.”

“Wow. I never met anybody in a cult before!”

“But I don't think we are going to go anymore now, though.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It's okay. So, what about you? Do you go anywhere, different, like, in the summer?”

“Wanna make another loop?”

And so it was that the tiniest demographic was then added to the PS 133 diaspora. There was the vast majority—multigenerational native New Yorkers of Italian or Irish heritage; the next-largest clique of recently immigrated Indian kids; tiny pockets of Asians, African Americans, and Latino kids; three Maltese sisters (this was Queens, after all); and, finally, Esther and I, the “my native New Yorker mom got herself into some seriously unique situation that has ping-ponged me back and forth from this small slice of working-class Queens to worlds unknown” kids.

By the end of fourth grade, Esther and I had made an Indy 500's worth of loops around the recess yard. The whole of my story was now clear to her, and she had revealed the whole of hers to me. Esther's mom grew up in an apartment above their family's delicatessen in New Jersey, worked the counter starting at age ten, saved her money, and put herself through Rutgers, earning a teaching degree. She then moved to California, where she met and married a man involved in a questionable, cultlike religious group that held yearly summertime retreats in rural Montana. They had four kids together and moved from California to Pennsylvania, but things soon deteriorated, so her mother came back to New York, this time to Bellerose, Queens, divorced, and was raising her children alone on a public school teacher's salary.

The particulars of our stories were as different as our personalities, but having “a story” was enough to bring us together, and by the start of Mrs. Miller's fifth-grade class, Esther and I were inseparable.

The effects of the skittish, goody-two-shoes, neat-as-a-pin girl becoming best friends with the scatterbrained, disheveled imp, were instantly apparent. I became a “morning monitor,” a job that entailed tidying up the classroom before the start of the day, which I never would have been caught dead doing before, only because Esther was one, too. But a few days in I strong-armed her into using the teachers-only electric eraser-cleaning machine mounted to the wall of its own tiny hall closet, an offense she wouldn't have dreamed of before, and then accidentally let the door close behind us just as she turned it on. The cleaner screeched like an incoming subway train, and we screamed for what felt like ten minutes, trapped in the dark and hitting all sorts of buttons to try to shut it off, before some teacher yanked the door open and found us covered in chalk dust like two little powdered donuts. (Apparently one of those buttons we hit released the trash compartment.) It was Esther's first-ever trip to the principal's office.

Lunchtime had always been a hotbed of trouble for me, but having Esther by my side helped curb my troublemaking, most times. There were too many kids to all fit in the cafeteria at PS 133, so those of us who brought bagged lunch ate in the tiny auditorium on rows of metal folding chairs, leaving an empty one in between each kid to serve as a table split with your neighbor. It was a tight squeeze in a hot room, with a pungent swirl of bologna and curry. All of that would have been tolerable if it wasn't for Mrs. Golden.