Darling Days

by iO Tillett Wright

  She’s sucking her teeth as we climb the stairs to the fourth floor of the dance school. I have a blue rubber handball in the pocket of my shorts and a piece of gum in my mouth. We have already had a screaming match today. She’s been tense since we moved.

  She rushes into the dressing room, shedding her trench coat. On a bench by the front door, I bounce my ball and wait. People are already in the studio, stretching their muscles on the gray linoleum, doing exercises. The teacher claps three times, and a piano begins its staccato twang.

  My mother hustles out of the dressing room and takes up a place at the barre. Her brown hair is pulled into a high ponytail, and her long back is straight. Her eyebrows are peaked at the arches and her lips are pursed. Her bony arm stretches forward and one finger points at the back wall as she rotates her pointed foot to the rhythm.

  I detest this music, this place, the severe looks on all these people’s faces, but right now I’m just happy it’s not me in there. My only job is to sit and wait. I amble over to the door of the classroom and lean my head against the frame.

  The smell of cooked sweat comes in a hot wave, and after a few minutes I’m repulsed. I close the glass door, and when they switch sides, I dart out into the stairwell.

  Four flights down, I push a door open onto Forty-seventh Street. Eighth Avenue is to my left, Broadway is to my right, and tourists are swarming. It’s too early for the theater crowds, so it’s all fanny packs and visors and fingers pointing up from maps. I move toward Broadway, sticking close to the wall. Ma says I’m perfect elbow height. This is a hazard in busy Midtown, and more than once I’ve had a funny bone slammed into my eye socket. She tried to even the scales by telling me to go for the shins, but my strategy is to dodge.

  Busy being stealthy, I don’t see the puppy until he is on top of me. He’s black, with two white splotches, maybe ten pounds, and he leaps straight into my arms, almost knocking me backward. Both paws on my chest, he starts licking my face and I sink to my knees, giggling and swatting his drool away. A few paces behind, his owners approach.

  “He likes you.”

  She’s a petite black girl, no older than twenty, in a tan T-shirt, her hair twisted into tiny little balls all over her head. Her boyfriend is much taller, skinny in his army pants and T-shirt. He doesn’t speak, but she smiles at me. Something about both of them feels yearning and sick.

  “You like him?”

  “Yeah. He’s so cute. What’s his name?”

  “Rocky.”

  Rocky. That’s what I have always said I would name a dog if I was ever allowed to have one. This trips my mind up. A little piece of my heart falls out.

  “You have a dog?”

  “No.”

  “You want one?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can have him.”

  “Have him?”

  “Yeah. You want him?”

  I look into his sweet, playful eyes. I’m sunk, done for. For a moment, my mind flashes to my mother, and what she’ll say. How she won’t like this at all, but that only lasts a few seconds. How could she refuse such a sweet creature? Rocky’s tail is wagging and he’s jumping up onto me again and again, nibbling at my fingers. My smiling cheeks feel like brittle plaster. Rocky’s fur leaves a greasy residue on my fingers.

  “Is he sick?”

  “Nah. There’s nothing wrong with him.”

  “Why don’t you want him?”

  “We can’t take the right care of him, you know? We busy trying to get by, and I want him to be treated right.”

  I notice a length of rope around his neck, the other end in her hand. Rocky deserves a leash. She’s right, I can take better care of him. I can already envision him in my new bathtub, covered in suds. I’ll do everything; I’ll walk him, I’ll feed him, my ma won’t have to do anything, and when I tell her this she won’t be so mad.

  “So you want him?”

  “ . . . Okay.”

  She smiles and hands me the rope. Her boyfriend looks at his pager, unfazed. At the door of the dance studio, the girl bends down and pets Rocky roughly. She says, “Good-bye, my baby,” and turns and walks away. I watch their backs, expecting them to turn around and run up to me and say, “Psych! Are you crazy? You think I’d just give you my puppy?” But they don’t. They turn the corner and disappear.

  Dizzy with excitement, I pull Rocky into the stairwell. Two flights up, crouching on the floor under a window, I pull his scruffy face close to my own.

  “Right now, you’re mine. My ma doesn’t know I have you, that girl is gone, and for right this second, you are mine.”

  I touch his ears. His little black snout has a smattering of white spots above his mouth, and the fur is extra soft right there. He bites at my finger, and I wrap my arms around his neck, hugging him close to me. When I sit on the floor in the stairwell, Rocky is as tall as I am.

  As we climb the last two flights of stairs, I become jittery. What if Ma’s furious? What if she makes me get rid of him? What if there are no dogs allowed in the dance school? How will I explain where I got him? She won’t believe me.

  The matter is clear to me; I am devoted to Rocky, so if he goes, I go, and I plan to tell her as much. Through the glass door, I watch the muscles in her back ripple as she raises both arms into a half circle above her head. She is on tiptoes, moving diagonally across the studio now.

  When she turns to walk back in my direction, her eyes travel to the rope in my hand and the dog attached to it, and her face flies through a quick circus of emotions. Surprise, confusion, irritation, anger. Her gesture is small, but the veins in her arm betray her real feelings. She gestures NO. Maybe a little What the fuck? and then Get rid of it.

  I shake my head. Again, the arm says Get rid of it. NOW. I shake my head and beckon for her to come. Please. Come here. She looks at the class and back to me. PLEASE. Come here! She opens the door, and I rush to it.

  “Ma, this is Rocky! He’s my dog. A girl gave him to me.”

  “What?”

  I repeat myself. She’s panting.

  “Somebody gave you a dog? Nobody gives away dogs. Dogs have fleas, iO. We’re not keeping him.”

  “I’ll do everything, Ma! I’ll feed him and he can sleep with me, and I’ll play with him. Please, Ma, I love him!”

  “He’s dirty! I don’t want a dog in my house. I’m allergic to animals. He’s not coming home with us.”

  “Yes he is! He’s my puppy, Ma. You won’t have to do anything. I’ll give him a bath as soon as we get home.”

  She closes the door, flicking her wrist dismissively, pursing her lips, and jutting her chin out, eyes back on the class. It is never a good thing when her nostrils flare.

  After the class, she stays in the studio, doing the splits on the floor. When she finally emerges, she puts her two clear plastic bags on a bench opposite mine. She leans forward to tie her shoes, bending straight over from the hips. Upside down like this, she unties her ponytail and flips her hair, then she returns upright. She pulls out a bottle of Excedrin and throws a couple into her mouth.

  One hand on Rocky’s neck, I’m staring a hole into her. She turns and looks at me, then at him. She breathes in deeply, picks up her bags, and moves toward the door. I scramble to follow her.

  As we descend, she lays out the rules: Rocky is my responsibility completely. He doesn’t come into the apartment—he has to stay in the hall. I have to walk him twice a day, feed him, and she never wants to touch him, because she is allergic to animals. I’m so excited I don’t even listen. Yes. Yes. Anything. Yes.

  We go to a pet store nearby where she finds the cheapest leash they have and a bottle of flea shampoo. She pays for them with dollar bills pulled from an envelope in one of her plastic bags.

  THE STALE NEW STAIRS fly past two at a time, and before Ma can complain, Rocky is lathered up in the tub. Under normal circumstances, I am forbidden from closing doors, but seeing as there is a wriggling puppy covering the bathroom in bubbles and water, I�
��m allowed an exception. Secretly, I dry him with my own towel, and slip his new collar around his neck.

  My ma is boiling rice when we come out.

  “Take him outside.”

  “Huh?”

  “Take Rocky outside.”

  “But . . .”

  “He’s not supposed to be inside the house.”

  “Let me just take him into my room.”

  “No. Outside.”

  “You mean like onto the street? Someone will steal him!”

  “You can tie him up in the hall.”

  “Someone will steal him out there, too!”

  The argument escalates, but in ten minutes I’m slamming the apartment door and tying Rocky’s leash to the guardrail on the hallway window. I push his butt to the floor, pull his front paws out, and lie down next to him. He doesn’t want to lie down, wagging his tail and looking at me.

  “Come on, boy. We gotta go to sleep now.”

  Glancing up at the fluorescent bulb that will be burning above him all night, I feel a bubble of worry in my esophagus at the thought of the neighbors stealing him. Wrapping my arms around his neck, I pull him to the floor. He succumbs, and we lie there on the vomit-colored tiles, listening to the pigeons in the light well outside the frosted window.

  It is deep dark outside and Ma is naked under her bathrobe when she comes out of the apartment and pulls me inside by the arm. I cry, I kick, I scream, but she just puts a toothbrush in my mouth.

  WE HAVE THREE DAYS of walks, trips around the neighborhood, taking Rocky to run, taking Rocky to the Chinese restaurant on Fourth Street, introducing Rocky to the local meatheads, talking to Rocky like he can understand me, hugging Rocky’s neck and inhaling the sharp chemical smell of his flea shampoo. I’ve accustomed myself to fearing he will disappear, and I’ve started to save up for a tag engraved with our phone number.

  Finally, it’s Saturday and Rocky is allowed to accompany us. We walk from Third back to Forty-seventh Street. Like a looped tape, my ma is late for class and I’m on my bench. Five minutes in, Rocky and I take to the stairs. We head toward Broadway, and there she is, Rocky’s old owner—same boyfriend, same block, different T-shirt. She squeals at the sight of him.

  “My baby! Hi, my baby!”

  She puts one knee on the sidewalk, pets his head, and smiles. His tail wags, and he licks her. I am proud of his cleanliness and his leash. I feel like she must be able to tell that I’ve been buying him two cans of Alpo a day with my pay phone money. I smile back.

  “You’re so clean, baby! He been behaving himself?”

  “Yeah. I love him.”

  “Yeah? That’s nice.”

  She grabs him by the jaw and looks into his face.

  “You mind if I take him for a walk around the block real quick? For old time’s sake. I’ll bring him right back here.”

  I look at her petting him and think to myself, who wouldn’t miss him?

  “Sure. Of course. I’ll wait right there by the door.”

  “Okay. We’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  Rocky looks up at me and I put my right hand on his head. He licks it. Saying it out loud would be too sappy, so I’m trying to tell him I love him with my eyes. I hand her the leash and she smiles in my direction as the three of them walk toward Eighth Avenue. Again I watch her back disappear around the corner, followed by Rocky’s excited trot. I sit on a sprinkler valve jutting out of the wall and settle in to wait.

  A woman in a visor asks me which way Broadway is, and for the first time in a long time I tell her the truth. It’s a little victory my ma and I have over the onslaught of tourists to answer obvious questions incorrectly. Later, I will wonder if what happened had something to do with karma.

  I don’t have a watch, but I know when it’s been more than ten minutes. Maybe she took him around a few blocks. The sprinkler is cutting into my butt, so I walk to the street, balancing my weight on the edge of the curb, looking up and down. I wish I had my ball, or something to kill time with.

  After half an hour, my stomach starts to feel like I’ve drunk too much water, and I go back upstairs. Not wanting to miss them, I race to the window in the lounge and stick my body halfway out, scouring the street below. I wait.

  Sixty minutes in, I am skint on excuses for her. No matter how far she could have walked, she would be back in an hour. My ma gets out of class and it’s hard to squeeze the words out to tell her what happened. She doesn’t bother getting angry at me for going out alone again, because she can see the crushing feeling happening inside my chest, I’m sure of it, so I stick it back out the window.

  Three and a half hours later, my ma is pacing the lounge area, cursing the girl. The woman at the desk gave me a Blow Pop when her shift ended, and she looked like she wanted to cry for me. My stomach aches with disbelief. How could I have been so stupid? Why did I trust this chick? My ma, allergic to animals or not, puts her hand on my head and pets me in her stiff way, never separating her fingers, making a little cooing noise as though my pain is passing through to her, too.

  I think about his leash.

  I think about the bath.

  I think about how cold and hard the tiles in our hallway are.

  I think about the sterile flood of fluorescent light.

  I think about his neck.

  As reluctant as she may be to welcome this dog back into our home, my ma understands that this is my story. She paces the foyer, leans out the window, swears at the girl, drinks water from tiny paper cups shaped like cones, bites her nails, and rearranges the contents of one of her purses, but she doesn’t rush me.

  At some point I just know it’s over. My throat feels like someone slipped a rubber band around it, and I’m too ashamed to look up into anyone’s eyes. I just want to leave. I know I’m not allowed to go home becasue the sun’s still up, but I’ll take a park bench or a bus ride over this.

  Trying to walk toward Times Square to the subway, my knees feel weak. It’s as though the entire world is in on a secret that I’m not a part of. Here I am, right back where I started. Rocky’s Alpo fund is arcade money once more, and I wonder if the girl will ever come back to Forty-seventh Street.

  Something in my heart tells me I won’t ever see the three of them again. It feels as though real kids live on the other side of some invisible glass, in a place where puppies aren’t gifts from teenage junkies and you get to hug them all night.

  My ma says we should go lie in the grass in Tompkins Square Park, and I’m too preoccupied to care. I just want out of Midtown.

  Chapter 23

  Orange Juice

  Everywhere, forever and always

  FEELINGS ARE LIKE ORANGE JUICE. WHEN SOMETHING PAINFUL happens to you, it’s like you’re drinking a big, tall, full glass of orange juice. It’s pungent and full of flavor and you get all the little bits of pulp in your teeth. It’s the fullest experience of the flavor of orange juice.

  When you try to tell somebody about what you felt, you’re handing them the glass of orange juice, but somewhere in between you and them, the glass gets half diluted with water. So what they get is sort of like orange juice, but a heavily watered-down version. They have to inject the flavor with sympathy and comparisons to things that have happened in their own lives for it to taste like juice to them. That’s why people are always saying things like “Oh my gosh, yes, when that happened to me . . .” even though it never did, because this thing happened to you.

  My solution is just to hand them two glasses of orange juice. If it’s gonna get cut in half, compensate. Hand them a notion of double the pain, and by the time it gets diluted by the space between brains, it’ll reach them at just about the pitch of what it actually felt like to you.

  That’s why I fake all these injuries at school when there’s no electricity in the house. That’s why sometimes, after a real bad fight, I tell people that my ma hit me, even though she didn’t. Even though she never would. But then they get it. They sputter and ooze with sympathy for my hurtin
g bones and I use it as salve for my bleeding heart.

  Chapter 24

  Climbing In

  Third Street, September 1997

  IT’S A TENSION THAT STARTS AT THE BASE OF MY SPINE. EVERY muscle in my butt is clenched. The stakes are high as I turn the corner. The noon light is crisp, sun straight overhead, cold air cutting into my face. I pretend it’s a video game—maintenance guys in blue suits are the bad guys who must never see me. A twelve-year-old wandering around at lunchtime by himself is one of the less strange sights in this neighborhood, but still, if one of them casually mentions it to my ma, it will be explosive.

  I’ve worked my way down the block from Second Avenue, and unease ripples through my body as I pass my own stoop. Huddled into the entrance of the building next to ours, I ring apartment 3B. Nothing. I wait. Then I ring again. Still nothing. Lazy motherfucker.

  I step out and look up at the windows. One of them is covered by a black trash bag, the other is open. I don’t want to do this, but I have no choice.

  “Aidan!”

  It takes a couple of minutes, but the glass rises and my “cousin” Aidan sticks his head out. Gap toothed, handsome, Puerto Rican.

  “Yo! Hold up.”

  Aidan’s apartment is pitch black. I can’t see what my feet are stepping on, but I’ve been here so many times I know the way. A long hall stretches from the door, past the bathroom, into a living room cluttered with a plastic-covered couch, a round dining table, and a gigantic television. The smell of grease saturates the air. I bet you could ignite the room if you lit a match. A ripped WWF video game fighter Aidan customized to have blue skin is frozen on the screen, grimacing, holding a chair above his head.

  Aidan, shirtless and muscular, short ponytail pulled back, plops back onto the couch. He’s grumpy, which means he just woke up. Normally, he’s one of the blue suits on the street, working maintenance for management, but he’s the only one I don’t have to dodge. If shit ever really hit the fan it would be Aidan who I would call to defend me. His place is also typically the only place I can score a meal during the day.