Darling Days

by iO Tillett Wright

  It’s a good hour of waiting before two uniformed guys come out and gesture for me to follow them. They have young, kind faces and the flat skulls of most men here, but they aren’t weathered and wrinkled yet.

  They lead me to the parking lot and unlock the back door of an ancient squad car. Everything is green, their uniforms, the paint job, the interior. I’m fascinated with the inside of the cop car. Instantly, I feel like a criminal and get into my role. I sit on my hands behind my back, as though they’re cuffed. I contemplate how I’d try to pry the door lock up with my teeth. Maybe I could smash the window open with my head if my hands were restrained.

  There is a stiff-brimmed green sergeant’s hat on the shelf above the backseat, and I gingerly reach for it. The guy in the passenger seat spots me in the mirror and nods that it’s okay to put it on. He smiles at me. I smile back. I pull it over my small head and it flops over half my face. I salute at him. He laughs. I sit up straighter in my seat and stare out the window, saluting and murmuring orders, imagining I was a commander of a fleet of tanks.

  We drive through the gray city, which looks tired and smells of cigarettes and pickled fish. I convince them to turn the siren on for a part of it, just by gesturing and smiling a lot. I make jokes and pretend to be a silent movie comedian, using my actions to make them laugh. They are amused by the little performer they’ve been charged with.

  By the time we pull up, I’m almost sad to have to leave them. I see a big sign with the name of the theater on it, and Yanik and Ma outside. Yanik’s wife, Esther, and Dante come out when they see the cop car. My guys converse with Yanik in Hungarian before they let me out, but my ma is not happy about waiting. She’s furious, I can tell by her face. When they open the door, she snatches the hat off my head and throws it on the ground. The cop doesn’t have time to react to this before Ma pulls me away.

  MA IS PULLING ME by the wrist up a cobblestone street. Generations of deprivation live in the faces we pass. I look up, beyond the crumbling architecture, the leaning structures of damp concrete, toward the gray sky. I can feel a black power swirling amid the clouds. This place makes my spine feel cold.

  We stop in front of a three-story house with planter boxes at each window. Sometimes buildings make me feel sad. It’s a kind of spacial depression, the angle of a roof to the sky, the color of the clouds, whether or not I’ve been there before. What causes it is a mystery, but some invisible quality of a building makes me want to run sometimes. Ma pulls her collar closed over her throat as she takes a set of keys from her pocket. She squints at them in this intense way, where she tilts her head down, as though pointing her horn at them will solve the riddle of what to do with the things. She is too vain for glasses, so she has to improvise a lot. I take the keys from her gently, and put the biggest one in the lock.

  We squeeze up a tiny staircase to the second floor and I open the apartment door. The smell of animal piss wafts out in a thick wave that makes me feel like my stomach is sinking through to my butt bone. The couple who own the place are squeezed into their armchairs in the living room. The woman leaps up and bounds toward us. She is short and stout, with dyed black hair pushed up into spikes that scare me. She starts yelling something in Hungarian, but we just stand there, stunned. Her husband, a skinny man, stays where he is, whittling something out of a piece of balsa wood. She goes on and on. My eyes focus in on their pet bird, a little blue finch, that lives in a planter box on the windowsill. Later, I will find out that the bird is dead, but they keep his carcass around for sentimental reasons. Soiled newspaper dots the floor of the cluttered apartment and two ruglike dogs lope about. Ma pulls my wrist and I follow her into the bedroom we are supposed to share for the coming months.

  There is hardly room to move for all the stuff piled up in here. A threadbare woolen blanket is draped over a twin bed in the corner. The sky rumbles and cracks as it starts to rain outside. The nasty sensation in my stomach worsens when the overhead light pops on and I can see the stains and animal hair on everything.

  Ma is upset, but I’m tuning her out. My mind wanders to the kind policemen. The cold belly feeling was gone when I was with them, distracted, playing, moving, smiling, but now it’s back: the familiar ache that comes with being trapped.

  Chapter 14

  My Third Grade Yearbook Poem

  New York, spring 1994

  What someone said when they

  were spanked on the day before their birthday. . . .

  WHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

  Someday I may run away.

  Someday I may but not today.

  Some night I might

  Slip away in the moonlight.

  Some night I might

  But not tonight.

  Someday I may.

  Some night I might.

  Sometime I might.

  But not today or tonight.

  Chapter 15

  The Move

  Third Street, spring and summer 1994

  THE TWITCHING ITALIAN GUY FROM THE BUILDING MANAGEMENT company was right. The move was inevitable, but we are fighting it. Joey the schizophrenic downstairs started getting death threats. He thinks the management’s books are being cooked, so he laid them out on the sidewalk for everyone to see and he started getting threatening phone calls. He put garbage bags over his windows, asked us to hold his mail, and left to “go to the mountain” for a little while.

  Shit is all fucked up. It went really sideways when they sealed off the basement and locked the roof. It turns out management is steamrolling us with sham votes, putting dead people’s names on the ballot.

  Ma has been staging revolt in every way she knows how, but most of the neighbors don’t want to fight. Henri, whose apartment I was almost born in, capitulated immediately, deciding that whatever the management wanted was best. In response, Ma shredded a bunch of nice men’s shirts he had given her and hung them on his doorknob as a symbol of what she’d like to do to him. She spits when he passes us on the street now.

  Most everyone has accepted the reality of what’s happening and is trying to make the best of it. A woman showed up recently who is in charge of placing us all in our temporary apartments for the renovation. She’s a cutesy-pootsie Rasta chick from Harlem who wears plaid skirts and high socks. She has wired-around front teeth and long dreadlocks and Ma says, “She’s sexy, but she’s a bitch.”

  Rasta Lady takes us around and shows us a few places, but when she takes us to a one-bedroom directly across the street from a Con Edison energy plant Ma goes haywire and storms out, screaming about “How are you gonna propose to put a single mother and her tiny child opposite an electro power plant?! Why are all these people on medications with diseases? Electro brain diseases? Electro power plant. Fuck you!”

  After that Ma stopped cooperating altogether.

  It’s too hot for even the usual cast of vagrants in the neighborhood. There’s been an awful heat wave, and nightfall doesn’t bring any relief. It’s making the poor people crazy. Fans are jammed into multiplugs, four to a socket, and fuses are blowing all over the place. You can hear regular pop noises coming out of open windows, followed by cursing and the clanging around of a sweaty body groping in the darkness for a fuse box.

  Kids are sleeping on the rooftops in their underwear. You can see dirty socks dangling off the sides of fire escapes all the way down the block from where we are standing. Fourth Street is a different world. More Spanish is spoken over here than English, and a lot of the management company employees live here, so it always puts me on edge.

  Ma is leaning on a buzzer and screaming up into the darkness. It becomes a powerful banshee screech. I have my hands over my ears, embarrassed. It’s after midnight. She’s wearing a pair of leggings and tattered flip-flops. The veins in her left arm bulge with the weight of her plastic bags while she stabs the bell with two strong fingers on the other hand.

  “Shaaaannon!”

  Shannon Goldfarb’s daughter goes to my school. We look up at their windows and
the lights are all off. This is mortifying.

  We went back to our apartment to sleep, but the door was bolted shut. We know the construction dudes have been in there, but it’s still our house. All of our stuff is still inside.

  I’m tired. My eyes ache and my jaw stretches out into a big yawn.

  “Shannon! Open the door, you piece of shit turncoat motherfucker!”

  A light pops on in a window on the third floor. The glass slides up and a confused, disheveled head of hair sticks out.

  “What the . . . Jesus Christ, Rhonna.”

  Ma just leans on the buzzer. Shannon’s head pops back out.

  “I have a sleeping child! For God’s sake, lay off the bell!”

  Ma doesn’t stop. It’s another three minutes or so until Shannon appears at the door. She throws it open. Everyone is braced for a fight. Ma leans close into Shannon’s face and says, “They locked us out of our fucking apartment. Our own apartment.”

  She says this like an old Jewish gangster. She sounds like a lockjawed meathead in a detective comic. Somebody who carries a roll of nickels in his jacket pocket.

  “That’s because everyone is vacating, Rhonna.”

  Ma gets close to Shannon’s face, clenching her strong jaw and breathing through her tensely flared nostrils like a bull.

  “That is our home.”

  Shannon isn’t responsible for what’s going on. She’s just another tenant like us, but she embraced the change of guard, and, unfortunately for her, can pull strings to get keys to locks late at night.

  She looks into Ma’s burning tension and the fight deflates out of her. Maybe she thinks about her daughter, sleeping upstairs. Maybe she decides to be the bigger person so that this woman’s anger doesn’t seep into her own life. Maybe she’s afraid for her safety if she doesn’t give Ma what she wants.

  Shannon’s eyes catch mine for a brief second and she looks like she pities me, which makes my spine crawl with shame. Aware of the futility of logic, she says, “Rhonna . . . everyone in your building is vacating. You guys have to move into your new place. The gas went off today, and they’re gonna start knocking down your walls in the next few days. You guys have to move or they are gonna move you.”

  We already know all these things. Ma has stubbornly refused to accept what we have seen every time we’ve gone home. Kevin is long gone. The Purple Woman, who has always been kind to us, sucked her teeth when she last passed us in the hall, annoyed that my ma is being such a pain in the ass. There are only construction lights in the stairwells now, and the buzzer system doesn’t work, which means it’s only a matter of time until the shelter boys start looting the place of everything that isn’t tied down. Susan and her cats are on Fifth Street; even Joey is installed somewhere else. Every day there are crashing, shredding noises, the sound of walls being busted through and toilets being ripped out. Mexican music blares in the hallways, and the guys ogle my ma. The only other person left in the building is crazy Fritz on the first floor, because the management doesn’t know what to do about all of his pianos.

  Ma was holding out for a nicer place, to be relocated to an upgrade. The only joint that fit her criteria was a long, skinny one, on the fifth floor of the building closest to the corner of Fourth Street and the Bowery. We were supposed to have moved in two months ago, but Ma hates it. The whole building has a creepy, dark vibe about it, and the people are awful, so we’ve been sleeping in our beloved old place on Third Street, until now.

  Tonight we came home to find a giant padlock screwed onto our door, something that Joey would have installed in a different era, but it was brand new, which means it was put in by the management company. Ma went ballistic. She tried everything to rip and pry it off before giving up and stomping around the corner.

  Shannon tucks a stringy curl of salt-and-pepper hair behind her right ear and sighs. She looks at the ground and rubs her eyelids. She’s tired. We’ve been here so many times, and they have had the same discussion, over and over. Ma blames her for being a part of the evil system, Shannon blames Ma for obstructing what everyone else wants and creating a problem. It’s a deadlock. Shannon doesn’t have the energy to get bitchy anymore, and Ma’s rage would stampede her in an instant if she decided to fight, so Shannon, beleaguered, says, “Rhonna, there is nothing I can do this time. I don’t have the keys to the padlocks. They told me they were gonna bolt it, and I tried to warn you you had to get out, but there was nothing I could do. For iO’s sake, you should just—”

  “DON’T YOU TELL ME HOW TO BE A MOTHER!”

  Shannon sees immediately that she has made a mistake bringing Ma’s parenting into this.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not. Okay. There is nothing I can do for you right now, Rhonna.”

  “Get me the fucking keys, Shannon!”

  Ma sticks her foot between the door and the frame.

  “I don’t have it, Rhonna. I swear to fucking God, I don’t have the fucking key to the padlock. I’d give it to you if I did, just so you don’t wake my kid up, but I don’t have the fucking key. Okay? I don’t have it.”

  There is something believable in the finality of her tone.

  Ma sizes Shannon up, her right hand balled into a fist, shoulders hunched forward, staring into her from under her tensed, angry brows. I think she can tell Shannon is telling the truth because she doesn’t say anything.

  “Okay? Rhonna? I don’t have it. I’m going to go to bed now. Please stop ringing my bell. Please.”

  Shannon gingerly turns and starts to walk back into her building. In that moment she reminds me of a tired old bird: frazzled and confused, half asleep, protective of her little one. I understand her position. I silently wish her a good night’s sleep as her back turns and disappears up the stairs.

  Ma stands there, foot in the door, seething, watching her go. I am beginning to fear what we will do next. I have no idea where we’ll go. We have the keys to the new place, but we don’t even have a bed in there. Ma’s face is half lit by the brightness of the hallway. Her eyes burn blue as she stares intently at the empty corridor, thinking.

  “Ma.”

  She can’t hear me through the jungle of her fury.

  “Ma. I’m tired.”

  She turns her face and looks at me, but it is almost as though she is looking through me, past me, at the fire hydrant behind me. Her face softens when her eyes meet mine, but instantly she is enraged again when she thinks that we have nowhere to sleep because of these assholes.

  Abruptly, she pulls her foot from the door and pushes her entire body weight against Shannon’s bell again. The noise clangs out into the sticky night.

  “Ma! Stop! Let them sleep! She doesn’t have the key . . .”

  She leans on it some more.

  “MA!! Ma! Stop!”

  Only when I start to cry does she snap out of it.

  “Shit, kitty. Okay. Okay. My little marsupial. It’s okay. Let’s go.”

  She pulls me into a hug, tight against her strong chest, before taking my hand and standing up. We start walking, but I have no idea where to. Tears roll down my face slowly for half a block. I’m scared.

  At the corner, Ma stops at a pay phone. She rummages through one of her plastic bags and comes up with a quarter. She lifts the receiver and dials a number. She waits as it rings. She hangs up before the answering machine comes on, retrieves her quarter, and tries again. This time someone picks up.

  “Hello? It’s Rhonna.”

  WE SLUMBER-PARTY on A friend’s floor, and when we get back to our building in the morning, they have begun to drain the boiler of its oil. It has spread lazily across the sidewalk in thick black slicks, and the whole building smells like fuel. Construction workers are crawling all over the place, hauling bags of plaster out to a big green Dumpster and pulling the old metal footplates off the stairwell. Ma loved those footplates.

  As we come up the stairs to our floor, several men pass, coming down the hallway from the direction of our apartment. Looking past them, we see tha
t the only open door is ours. They were coming out of our house! Three smug, smiling Mexican guys, carrying things.

  “Hey!” Ma yells, as she realizes what is going on, but they are already down the stairs and gone.

  My heart falling through my stomach, we step into our beloved steamboat palace. It looks ransacked, all of our things strewn around. My favorite table, shaped like the inside of a grapefruit, stands awkwardly in the center of the kitchen, and a pile of Sheetrock covers our bed. Then I see it: there, on the floor of the living room, in the corner under the window leading to the fire escape, is my piggy bank, smashed. I have been saving every lucky penny I picked up on the street, every forgotten quarter I scored in pay phones I check every time I pass one, every nickel from the floor of Joey’s car. I was saving to buy supplies for the tree house I’ve been dreaming of, and I must have had a fortune in there. Now there are only a few pennies left, strewn among the shattered chunks of pink plaster. The pig’s eyes are intact, severed from its ears, and something about its sad face, broken on the ground like that, sends a sharp pain through me. It’s the feeling of having been violated. I don’t have anything, why would someone take that from me?

  When Ma spots the piggy bank, she goes scarlet. I know what that look in her eye means. Someone is going to pay. Her nostrils go wide, and her eyebrows come down.

  Then she sees the box.

  Of all holy things in our lives, the ultimate, most sacred possession we have is Ma’s box of photos of Billy and their time together. I join her in anointing this my most important possession, too, because it seems to carry the essence of her soul in it, and I love her soul.

  It is an old box, filled to the brim with Polaroids and Minox prints, of Billy alone, on roller skates with kneepads and no shirt on, in nothing but a bathrobe and socks, in their old apartment, of them together, her towering over him in heels and a blond bouffant, him in a zoot suit and her in sequins. Some are of her alone, posing next to a Christmas tree or diving into crystalline Jamaican waters.