Breaking Night

by Liz Murray

  Shen “cut turf” (assigned us designated areas), depending on his assessment of our earning potential. Less skilled canvassers spent their evenings on “dry” blocks, those areas with dilapidated houses and sparse amounts of annual renewals. Those more skilled were given larger houses that looked like castles, whose fat lawns were golf-course green, punctuated by things like fountains and lawn jockey statues. It took no less than five minutes to walk from driveway to doorbell in those places.

  That very first day, I was slated for dry turf, my earning potential apparently assessed as low. They gave me a street that was falling to pieces, with chain-link fences rusting around ratty front yards. The quota was $120 for the day—good luck! But to Shen’s surprise, when the van came back to pick me up at nine p.m., I had collected $240; a neat little row of checks were pinched to the top of my clipboard, their watermark background making a rainbow of pastel along the chrome clip.

  “Is this good enough?” I asked Shen, holding my clipboard up to the orange glow of the van’s brake lights, the summer sky falling dark blue as we stood, canopied under heavy treetops. He read my total once, then twice, and said, “Yeah, it’s great.” After that day, I was assigned to the wealthier houses, where my daily amounts continued to rise, often topping several hundred dollars for the night.

  I was pegged as highly unlikely for this kind of success at NYPIRG, since even the most polished and gregarious types faltered after one too many doors slammed in their faces. No one said the job was easy. Interpretations of my success flew around the office: “Liz is passionate about the environment.” “She had the most training.” “She probably had experience before coming here.”

  None of that was true, nor did my success have much to do with skill. The reason behind my success was simple. I was hungry, and for me, this was no summer vacation. Unlike my coworkers, who looked forward to weekend outings and happy hour, I was stocking up on supplies before the winter, saving every penny, sink or swim, packing for the long haul. I needed this. My intention was to save every dollar so that I could get through the months ahead of me when my school schedule might prohibit me from working. For the first time, I was making my daily life fit into a bigger purpose: climbing out of the place I’d been born into. That was my edge.

  There was also another kind of hunger I felt, one that was harder to put my finger on. It had something to do with the newness of all of this, the rush I got from experiencing these new places. Never before had I seen big houses with cars parked in endless gravel driveways, children looping bikes down tree-lined streets in the sun. The way housewives would open their front doors to me, all put-together looking, their children clinging waist-high, steadying themselves on the sturdiness of their mothers’ hips. I relished the whoosh of air-conditioning seeping from their homes, cooling my cheeks and forearms as I held the clipboard, book bag on my back with all my belongings inside, as I stole glimpses into their lives. It was thrilling, to see how people built a life so different from what I’d known. It filled me with a longing to build the same; it was inspiring to me. There was a sense of adventure in it, an exhilaration in every door opened, every conversation, each new encounter. I went up and down the sidewalks of those suburban neighborhoods captivated, curious to see what could possibly be next.

  But the best days, by far, were the ones when Ken and I had our turf right near each other. I lived for those days. As soon as Shen pulled the van away, Ken and I would secretly catch up with each other to share turf, sometimes hitting doors together as a team. We did not plan who would do the talking; instead, a sense of partnership just flowed. We were good together. Fund-raising, that is. We could knock out a day’s quota, and then some. If we finished early enough, we’d go find someplace just to hang out, to sit in the shade and talk—though I was deeply unsure of what I could possibly talk to Ken about. Would I tell him about Ma? University Avenue? How I left the motel just in time to save myself from Carlos? That I’d slept on the D train that week? All of that didn’t seem to have a place in our conversations. Not when the sun was shining and you could smell fresh soil from the park and hear the cicadas buzzing in the treetops. Not when Ken was smiling like that. If talking about my life would be a downer, then why talk about it? So I let Ken do the talking—about his family, his ex-girlfriend, and lots about Brown University. I soaked it all in, took in his joy and his kindness. We’d do impersonations of Nicole or Shen and crack each other up, laugh at the job, laugh at life—just laugh until we couldn’t laugh anymore.

  It was easy to laugh around Ken. Easy to believe that a life surrounded by these storybook houses, perfect lawns, and sunny days was just as possible as the life I’d already known.

  One day in August, I was taking the A train to fill out some paperwork at Prep and I saw Sam. She was on the C; we spotted each other the very moment the subway doors closed; our cars were directly across the platform that separated us. Like two horses running side by side on a racetrack, the subway cars pulled out and began to run parallel through the dark tunnels, dipping in and out of sync. I planted my open hands flat on the glass window of the door, and Sam did the same. The ridiculousness of the encounter made us both laugh. Sam smiled and stuck her middle finger up at me; her hair was green, tied up in two buns on top of her head, and she was wearing a long skirt and a lacy maroon camisole. She looked well groomed and was a much healthier weight than when I’d last seen her. I motioned with my hands for her to get out at the next stop, but the pillars in the subway tunnels kept blocking our view. We got out at Fourteenth Street and ran to hug each other, tight. She smelled of soap and baby powder. I was shaking.

  “Where you been?” she yelled, smacking my shoulder. Back at the motel, our friendship had been strained by the stress of Carlos. But in the subway on a cool August afternoon months later, our friendship was new again. I loved her like she was my sister.

  “Around,” I told her. “I’m getting myself together, actually, that’s where. I got a job and all. Wanna take a walk with me somewhere?”

  We walked through Chelsea, toting our book bags. I was taken aback when she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and began smoking, but I didn’t say anything about it. With all the time that had passed since I’d seen her, I couldn’t gauge if we were still close enough to give our opinions about anything too personal. We walked and she caught me up on her life. Group home living wasn’t all that bad; the girls had become her family. She was going to marry Oscar for sure. Not that they had official plans just yet, but she could just feel it. Lilah, a group home girl from Staten Island, would be maid of honor, after all they had been through together.

  “Lilah’s my partner in crime. GHFL, that means Group Home for Life,” she said. “I might get it tattooed. All of us might.”

  I kicked a small stone around in front of us while we walked, my eyes downcast.

  “Sounds great,” I told her. Had I imagined our closeness? Did she miss me at all? I missed her. “You wanna check out this school thing I’m going to?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said casually, shrugging her shoulders as though, since she had free time on that particular afternoon, she might as well enroll in high school. Sam came with me and filled out an application to Prep. April told her she would get a call at her listed number soon. Perry wasn’t around to meet Sam, so we slipped out the side door and walked back to the train, where we went in separate directions. Sam wrote her group home phone number on my hand in blue, curly script. Her hug good-bye was big, and the gesture felt deeply loving. There she is, I thought. We made promises to see each other soon and she would let me know, for sure, when Prep got back to her. Or, if she and Oscar picked a date before then, she’d definitely call me for that, too.

  It was raining when Ken’s mother pulled up in the family minivan. She turned out to be blond like her son, with a haircut just as short as his, except hers was darker and had flecks of gray that offset her tiny pearl earrings. She drove all five of us, Ken’s coworkers, from the A train to their beachsi
de home in Far Rockaway, through a light drizzle that made the nighttime asphalt shimmer under the streetlights of the quiet Queens suburb. Her arms were muscular and tanned in a way that suggested exercise and healthy diet. Her clothes—cargo shorts and an impossibly white V-neck T-shirt—were so clean they might have been fresh off a wooden hanger at Banana Republic. She kept up a cheerful conversation, inquiring about our schools and what we did for fun. I stayed as quiet as possible, afraid I might draw attention to myself and have to give up my cover: a normal high school senior readying myself for college applications.

  At a traffic stop, I saw her reach over and stroke Ken’s forehead and hair, smiling at him, their matching faces made pink under the red traffic light. I could tell she was a kind woman. You could see it in the way she reached for her son and in the way he softened to her. Watching them, I felt like I did when watching a movie I’d snuck into at Loews Paradise; like at any moment I might get caught and asked to leave, my presence discovered as fraudulent.

  The basement in the family’s home was set up like an apartment. It had been Ken’s until he left for Brown; since then, his little sister Erica (who I was mortified to find out was exactly my age) had taken it over as her own, mixing Ken’s old philosophy books with her posters of environmental causes like “Save the Whales,” “Save the Trees,” and “Save the Children.” Erica and her mom had prepared refreshments and set them on a small table: a foot-long sandwich cut diagonally into slices and a selection of juice boxes.

  I changed into my sleep clothes in the upstairs bathroom while the group began a game of cards. My plan was to accidentally end up sitting as close to Ken as possible during the game. We would brush up against each other ever so slightly, by mistake, several times during the evening. I would pretend to be oblivious. When I could identify where he was sleeping, I would coincidentally fall asleep near his spot, prompting him to act upon the “vibe” we’d built all night. His lips would be soft as the inside of my cheek, silky. Looking in the mirror, I rubbed vanilla-scented shampoo into my dry hands and carefully spread bits of it throughout my hair with my fingertips: preparation for when we’d spoon together later.

  My reflection looked back at me: my brown/purple hair was waist length and wavy. I hoped Ken liked it. I wore no makeup, and I hated the way my face gave away how little I’d been sleeping—a few hours here and there on friends’ couches and in hallways. Four small silver hoop earrings ran up each of my ears, and my eyebrows were thicker than I wanted them to be. My sleep pants were jogger’s sweats decorated by a cartoon skull embroidered on the thigh. Underneath, I had on a pair of Carlos’s old boxers. Ken’s mother had loaned me a T-shirt of Ken’s for the night, three sizes too big.

  The night played out in front of me like a first evening in some foreign country whose language I could not understand. We sat on sleeping bags along the basement floor, in a circle made for storytelling. Kat, Anna, Steven, Jeremy, and Ken talked about things totally unfamiliar to me. “Rich people,” Daddy would have called them. I didn’t know if they were rich, but it quickly became clear that they were different from me. After all, in the ghetto, by no means do we talk about things like different types of cheese.

  No, sir, we do not go on about the distinctions between Brie, Havarti, and Gorgonzola. In the ghetto, we buy one kind of cheese, and that is American. We get it when we ask the bodega man for “a dollar ham and a dollar cheese” wrapped in thick waxed paper and handed to us on the day the government check is cashed. And in the ghetto, we do not talk about backpacking through Europe (wherever Europe is).

  However, in the ghetto, we do talk about the block that we live on and the blocks surrounding the block we live on: “Did you hear about the shootout on Grand Avenue? They got Milkshake! He dead!” “Yo, on Andrews Avenue Mrs. Olga’s selling piraguas out of 1C again? They a dollar cheaper than Mrs. Lulu’s! She got coconut!” Other countries and cultures were never discussed at home. In fact, anything farther than our own block, and the blocks surrounding it, was just a vague concept. So when Ken shared with us that he had managed to find a way to travel to Cuba last summer with a youth group, I asked, “Why, is it hard to get to Cuba?”

  “Well, given the embargo and all . . . yes,” he said. I nodded stupidly, as though I’d somehow misheard him. My heart jackhammered. Embargo? This was probably something they teach you about in high school. I hated feeling like I should know something that I didn’t. Sometimes it was easier just to be quiet.

  And then there was the topic of college. All of them compared campuses, dorms, professors, and plans for graduate school, using words like fellowship, thesis, and registrar. What was graduate school, exactly? Was that different from college? Because if I graduate from high school, then I can go to college, so maybe college was graduate school? But that couldn’t be it, because they were already in college. I made the most casual face I could make, a face that said: “I know what you’re talking about, why wouldn’t I?” And while I didn’t get it at all, this idea of college did begin to interest me.

  Their excitement was part of it, but above all, it was their belonging with one another that really got me interested. It was the way that college seemed to make you fit in with people whom you had never even met before, gave you things to talk about. And then the question struck me: Could I go to college? Even if I didn’t know where Europe was, or the difference between Brie and Havarti, could I have what they had? Ma left school after the eighth grade, and Daddy dropped out too. But could I go to college?

  “Anything else to drink?” Ken asked me, touching my forearm unnecessarily. My heart raced again, my cheeks flushed hot. “No thanks, I’m good.”

  “Okay then,” he said, smiling.

  Ken tossed a pillow onto a particular sleeping bag and leaned back. Anna declared that “her song” was playing and raised the radio volume, flipping her ginger-colored hair. Four Non Blondes’ “What’s Up” blared through the basement. “Wicked!” she yelled. Anna and Kat became a chorus, singing along. Ken laughed and looked around. Had he just looked at me, or did I imagine it? I was pretty sure that he gave me a look. I found his eyes and smiled back.

  Using a bathroom break as an excuse to get up, I returned a few minutes later and ever-so-casually changed my seat to the sleeping bag beside Ken’s, rejoining our circle. Two hours later, chips and bits of sandwich were strewn about the floor and tabletops throughout the darkened basement. Everyone was falling asleep on their sleeping bags across the wide floor. Ken was closest to me, just like I’d planned. Our communication in the dark, silent room would now take place in code.

  In the silence, a cough would signal: I’m still awake, Ken; in case you’re worried I fell asleep. Getting up for water was like saying, Go ahead and move nearer to my spot while I’m gone. “Accidentally” brushing my foot against Ken’s foot was erotic. I waited out the silence for his advance. Nothing. The basement was filled with dry heat from the hissing steam pipes. Moonlight streamed in from the tiny windows and illuminated his little sister’s pictures: two teenage girls holding up a turtle on the sunny beach of some faraway place, matching friendship bracelets on their wrists. I waited. Nothing. Then suddenly, something!

  A noise, a signal, some kind of movement! . . . Ken’s snoring sounded over the hissing pipes. He was completely, without a doubt, 100 percent asleep.

  The next morning, Ken’s mother set the breakfast table with knives and forks wrapped in napkins, like they did at Tony’s diner. His father came in from a jog, sweat under the armpits of his Martha’s Vineyard T-shirt. “Hey, kiddo!” he said, ruffling Erica’s blond hair as she sat curled up on the large living room sofa in her cotton pajamas. Jeremy, Steven, and Kat grabbed seats at the table. I sat in the chair farthest from everyone and pretended to be busy toasting my bread, avoiding eye contact all around. The front door opened, and Ken and Anna came bounding in dressed in sweats, laughing.

  “So,” Anna’s voice boomed like an announcement, “told ya we . . . could do another lap,”
she said, playfully poking Ken in the ribs, her blue eyes bright, her breathing labored from running. Ken was bent down with his palms on his knees, catching his breath. Anna rested her hand on Ken’s back with an ease I hadn’t realized existed in their friendship. How could I have ever thought this guy was interested in me? All along he was being friendly, and here I was thinking something else entirely. I felt like an idiot.

  Ken’s mom lowered a huge wicker basket brimming with pastries onto the breakfast table: muffins with sugar drizzled over their golden tops, mouth-watering Danishes, bagels studded with raisins and poppy seeds. It was commercial-perfect, and the sight of it stunned me. I stared disbelievingly; I’d never had access to an entire basket of pastries before. On the stove behind us, Ken’s dad cracked an egg on the edge of the frying pan. A full pitcher of orange juice sat untouched on the table. Steven and Kat began to spread cream cheese on bagels. Ken reached over and set down a plate.

  “You, here,” he said, gesturing to Anna. “I believe I lost that bet and I owe you breakfast.” She beamed at him, took a seat, and played with her hair while he poured her juice from the heavy glass pitcher. This was a Saturday Night Live skit, and the theme of the comedy was “How perfect this guy and his wonderful family that you will never have, Liz.” Suddenly, it struck me as over-the-top funny.

  Before I could stop myself, I blurted out a laugh. Heads turned my way; there was nothing obviously funny happening. I knew it was weird of me, but I caught the giggles then and cupped my hand over my mouth, quaking with laughter that I could not control. It was the ridiculousness of it all: the conversations about cheese, the beautiful home, Ken’s too-good-to-be-true looks and kindness, Ken and Anna as a pair, his parents . . . but it was that damn bread basket that put me over the top. Sam would have laughed with me if she were there, at that wonderful, inaccessible life of theirs, like a gorgeous Christmas display in the windows at Macy’s, enticing to the eyes, glorious in every detail, and locked behind glass. You let the sparkle dazzle you from the sidewalk, and you kept things moving.