When we were small we used to leap down the stairs, taking the steps two by two. We interrupted, talked over, spoke in singsong or staccato depending on what the situation required— our voices louder than bombs. We wore puffy flight jackets, men’s sweatshirts, baggy jeans and sneakers we found in dollar bins that pinched our feet. Better to be bigger, we thought. Better to take up more surface area before we were accustomed to geometry, before protractors and the definition of circumference. Before we were faulted for all the space we occupied. Before we learned we were worthy of space at all.
What did the situation require?
Who had the wrench for the johnny pump? Who was willing to create an ocean in the street? There’s was always someone who had tools, slim men with cigarettes tucked behind their ear. Boys who sipped 40s from brown paper bags. Women who stomped down the stairs in sandals, tiny arms wedded to their legs; mommy, can I get a… Women who stood over hot stoves adding garlic to the rice, shouting look at the rain on my face while we huddled around the one fan in the house. And then the water blew and sprayed the streets of the muck and the sadness, the cheese doodles and hypodermic needles.
For a moment, we were clean. Shiny gold babies with that cashmere skin before it was used, battled and burned. We were safe until we spoke, until the uncles lifted us onto their laps, sipping their Bacardi, drawling in our ears while The Delfonics crooned Hey! Love. We were safe until someone cranked up the music and the sky darkened to a bruise, all purple, blue and black — the color of a woman’s face before the monthly checks were cashed and there was only a finger left of liquid in the bottle.
Then one of us would smash the empty bottle in the street and we’d stomp on the shards because if you looked at the glass in the water, in the light, it would shimmer like the diamonds we saw draped around the necks of rich people on TV.
The situation required was to close the door and mind your business. Ignore the thumping on the floorboards and the banging on the walls. Ignore it all.
Under the August heat we lit cigarettes — loosies for ten cents a piece — and sprawled out on on the asphalt, feeling the gravel and glass cut into the backs of our thighs. We’d point to one another and talk about how thin we’ve become. And before this was considered praise, before the world would have us know it was verboten to occupy too much space (the degrees of which though no one could define), our withering was an inventory of all the food we wanted but couldn’t eat. It was a photograph of an anemic fridge, a cabinet scrubbed clean except for a tub of salt. It was the few bags of chips we were willing to steal and the half-slices of pizza discarded on counters.
What we wanted was a tiger. Except for the Doberman incident and the cats mewing for milk, we were starved for animals. Polar bears, wolves, and coiled fat snakes. The animals of zoos and countries we couldn’t yet pronounce. Picture us all on the stoop, passing around lime ice and grape juice like spliffs, and there goes a tiger. All murder paws and majestic stripes. We knew there would be a great deal of strutting involved (and behind-the-ear scratching), but what excited us most was the tiger digging into the flesh of all the men who planted us in their laps, all the fathers who unbuckled their belts because we were due for the beats, and all the mothers who told us we were the reason we had to go without.
The situation called for the tiger saving us all.
The summer Judy jumped out of a window my hair turned white. We stood on the street yelling up at her window, calling her name. Where are you? Are you home? Can you hear us through the glass? We know how her mother liked to keep the windows shut, doors locked, lights out. We called out Judy’s name like a sermon, like a song. That’s how we did it back then — we were screamers.
Who had a dime to use a payphone when ten cents was so close to a quarter and a quarter got you a bag of Dipsy Doodles? We liked licking the salt and the grease off our fingers. After ten minutes we shrugged our shoulders and made our plans. Let’s go to the pool. Let’s get the ice that stained our mouths blue and hot pink. Forget her. Our faces were slick with sweat and we were sunburned and hungry and we wondered who had a wrench to get the johnny pump going because the pool was a good fifteen blocks away.
The moment we turned our backs, Judy, opened a window, stepped one foot, then the other, on the fire escape, and jumped. We wouldn’t know until later that her hair got caught in a tree, that it took a few hours for anyone to realize she was gone. More still to find her body.
I look like a fucking albino, I said. Look at this hair, all white. I’m 12, not 40, not old like you. My aunt laughed; her mouth was a graveyard. You’ll be old and miserable soon enough, she said. The whites of her eyes were jaundiced and everyone said this is what happens when you’re wedded to a needle. But I didn’t care. My aunt was cool when she wasn’t on the nod. We spent a good hour in the drugstore because of the free air conditioning and she picked up a box of Clairol hair dye and said we’ll fix this right quick. At home, under the sink, I felt like I was drowning and my hair was brown for a while until the roots came in, cruel and white.
Where’s your mother, my aunt asked. Double shift. Working. What about you? I asked my aunt. Why don’t you have a job? Oh, I work, she said, drawing an invisible line between us. At night, up and down Ft. Hamilton Parkway — I’m in the hospitality business, she said. I’m in the business of smiles. Later that night my mother rolled her eyes and said, smiles? That sister of mine is a junkie whore. Close your legs. Cover your arms. Don’t end up like her. Back then my mother was a five-alarm fire, warning me about all the things I shouldn’t be doing, all the places I shouldn’t go, and all the ways I could fall prey to the undertow. I spent much of my childhood trying not to drown instead of learning how to swim.
If you’re not careful you could wake up dead. Look at that Judy, falling out of a window. Or worse, you could get pregnant. Judy jumped, I said, but my voice was what I swallowed. My mother was the ticking that was the bomb.
Judy was famous on the stoop for two weeks. She was a glacier. Everyone had their theories and suppositions. The mother who painted the windows shut, frightened of the air getting in. The stepfather who hawked a pretty young girl coming up in the house. Con Edison shutting off the lights. The landlord who taped eviction notices to the door. The mother shoving their clothes into trash bags, preparing to flee into the night. The diary the cops found under Judy’s bed where an eleven-year-old scrawled the same line over and over: it never gets better. That was the year Bellevue ran out of beds; the crazies had to sleep standing up or in straight jackets on the floor.
It never gets better? Who knows this? Who knows the full stretch of life before it’s even lived? We lived in a place where our hearts were shackled. We could lean on nothing lest we fall.
The situation required us to no longer be children.
Back in the day, we didn’t go to the emergency room unless we were bleeding out. No one had time to wait all night before someone took down their name and number. No one had hospital bill money. But a child whose hair continued to grow in white was entirely too much for my mother to bear. She was apoplectic. What if she has cancer? She doesn’t have cancer, the stoop chorus countered. She would be dead by now. Why is your hair white? My mother kept asking. We had burnt blueberry muffins for dinner three days in a row because they were the only leftovers from the luncheonette in which she worked.
The situation called for a shrug instead of: How the fuck should I know?
A few months later, everyone talked about the mother who left her newborn at the bottom of an emptied pool. You can only imagine a mother sliding down sixteen feet and crawling back up, the cries of her child hot on her back. We talked about the echo of the baby crying, the bewildering pain of being abandoned and alone, and how it was a dealer who called the cops from a payphone because a crying baby was bad for business. It was October and cold and leaves fell over the child’s face when the police climbed down and collected her.
Judy had become a distant memory because there was always a new tragedy, there was always a fresh hurt that eclipsed the one that had come before. No one realized the baby’s mother lay a few feet ahead, eyes wide, mouth scabbed, fingers singed. Cracked glass cut into her palm. We hopscotched over the bodies back then because so many people we used to know were dead or on the verge of dying.
The following summer I started to bleed. We moved in packs, screaming at new windows, ringing new bells. My hair grew back in brown and my mother shrugged her shoulders, relieved I didn’t have cancer. She had new worries now. Don’t have sex. Don’t get pregnant. Don’t catch AIDS. A new family moved into the space where Judy had lived.
Even though we liked the new girl and she played the latest records we felt it was somewhat disloyal to yell at her window. That was Judy’s window, we agreed, and we ducked our head around the way.
*A hybrid of memoir and fiction. If you loved this essay, feel free to comment, share, heart, all that jazz. I’ve been on a heater lately and it feels good to get back into the groove.
This is some really strong prose. Heartbreaking yet lovely story, awash with imagery. Great job.
Love this -- it is one of my favorite pieces of yours.