I stayed quiet while Michelle braided my hair and plotted to destroy my sister. It was only when her plans become more pointed that I began to worry. Not only would she poison Steph, she’d use the rat poison in her basement. She’d dissolve it in Stephanie’s soda. She’d do it next week. After Mass.
We were at odds lately, Steph and I. Despite our years of closeness, my friendship with Michelle and Jimmy’s fawning took their toll.
We began to fight.
Things only got worse when her period started. She told no one, not even my mother, and confided in me only after I swore secrecy. But I was giddy and weak with her news, and when her secret banged its way out of my mouth, she didn’t forgive me.
We fought more.
The stakes got progressively higher: I called her names; she cut the internal wires on my clock radio. I told my mother I saw a purple hickey on the tender skin just below her collarbone; she used permanent marker to put a black dot on my favorite white shirt. It was during one of these escalating fights, with my mother between us, that I blurted out that Michelle Labella was going to sprinkle rat poison into Steph’s drink the following week at church, at which time she would surely die.
My mother was horrified.
Steph was speechless.
And I was punished for three weeks straight for assisting with plans to murder my own sister.
96
So what is it this time?
“What unforgivable thing have you done, my child?”
Bill McCarthy was teasing, of course, when he stood before me, asking with his old-man charm why I was grounded. And I didn’t always tell him. He wouldn’t have understood the rat poison, for instance, or the fake communion, or the complexities of being a middle-school girl.
And he didn’t care why I was punished. Not really.
He just wanted a smile from the one who was always in trouble with the mother who had more trouble than she could bear. So when he called me “Punishment Girl,” it lightened the situation a bit, elevated my punishments (and my punisher) to the realm of normalcy, made them seem funny even.
Bill laughed.
Because he was kind. Because he had studied to be a priest and found bits of God in everything and everybody. Because he was an old man and I was a young girl and that was how he touched me.
I laughed, too.
I let my head fall back, forgot the pain of punishment, and laughed. Because of the way black olives bulged from beneath his brows. Because of his spindly legs and the way they bent and dipped, but kept standing just the same. Because his words gave air to my wounds, and healed them some. Because laughing was so much easier than talking.
97
The Diocese of Rochester wouldn’t hear of kids being denied a Catholic education for lack of money, and so they helped families like mine, chipped in some of the tuition, asked mothers to work Bingo or sell chocolate bars to their neighbors, friends, and relations to raise money.
Nazareth Academy was a fine high school, and all my girlfriends from Corpus Christi chose it over Mercy (or at least pretended to choose, claiming that Mercy’s recruiter, their brochure, and their teachers were dykey, though in reality, Mercy was the finer school, but sat on the edge of a wealthy suburb and cost more to attend, and very few girls from inner-city schools transferred there.)
Trading in plaid jumpers and a walk from my house for navy blue pants, a crisp white blouse, and a bus ride across town, I started high school.
At Nazareth, poor kids helped out.
We were given buckets and rags and shown to desktops and chalkboards directly after school. It was just a bit of work, and no one seemed to mind.
Except me.
The work itself was nothing, but I was an odd mixture of pride and shame those days. Though I still used my mouth to gain attention from time to time, there were whole stretches of time when I wanted nothing more than to disappear. I was overly emotional. Too sensitive, according to my mother.
“You get so worked up over the tiniest things,” she said. “You’ve always been that way.”
I hated being called sensitive. She may as well have called me crazy or stupid. But because I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire, I didn’t tell her how much I disliked cleaning after school. I didn’t tell her that the reason I wasn’t in chorus or soccer was because those groups met after school, while I cleaned. Instead, I said that I hated singing and soccer—that I’d rather do nothing at all than sing or kick around a ball.
Still, my mother began to make a point of my sensitivity over other things. When people so much as looked at me, I turned pink and lowered my eyes.
“I don’t know how you’ll get through life letting every little thing get to you,” she said and she was probably right, because as I dipped my rag into the bucket of chalked-up water and ran it up and down the blackboard in the Latin classroom, my face turned from white to red. My shame flowered like a large bruise, with its eggy yellows and blues—it spread itself out and lived like a shadow just under my skin.
The Latin teacher had black hair and wore fitted skirts. She leaned against the corner of her desk, twirling strands of slippery hair between her fingers, flirting lightly with the only male teacher at school.
Mr. Berke-Collinge taught theology. He was as thoroughly modern and as thoroughly open-minded as his hyphenated name implied. He flipped up his collar, infused discussions of premarital sex into religious instruction, and thought he was accomplishing something by getting ninth-grade girls to giggle about intercourse. He was handsome though, and a good match for her as the two bent into each other and talked topics other than the usual Latin and theology.
I lifted the soaked rag to the top of the board and let it come down over loops and lines of Latin, wiped away lessons from earlier that day.
I was not enrolled in Latin class, was told by a soft-faced Sister of St. Joseph that the class was popular that year and no seats remained. I’d have to take Spanish.
“How were the students selected?” my mother had asked, knowing how much I’d wanted Latin, knowing my placement scores were high. It was unlike her to speak up, so I knew it must have been important, and waited for an answer.
“She’ll do just fine in Spanish,” replied Sister So-and-So, avoiding the question altogether. She smiled and told my mother that Spanish was an important language, after all, and I could always try to get into Latin next year.
I looked over the column of words before I washed them away:
dies
terra
fides
mater
I wondered what the words meant and wondered who’d be studying them tonight. I liked Spanish, but had learned plenty already, just by sitting with my friends, listening to their mothers sing in the kitchen while stirring rice or grinding platanos. Latin, I’d imagined, would take me places. Transport me to the lands of Athena and Persephone, Isis and Eve, and all those stories I’d stuffed myself with for years.
“Latin is for blancas,” my friends from Corpus Christi said, and they may have been right, except that I was white, and the only time I ever spent in Latin class was after school, with bucket and water.
Streaking sponge-width columns until the entire board glistened, I looked back at the Latin teacher, whose hair was so black it looked blue as she ran it through her fingers. She caught my eye and smiled wide, which caused the theology teacher to turn and throw a charitable smile my way.
I turned back to the board, wishing the teachers would end their after-school chatter and leave the room. I hated being seen. Especially with a rag in my hand. And in my shame, I cultivated that part of me that wondered whether Latin class was ever full for girls whose parents paid 100 percent tuition.
And what if it wasn’t?
“Life’s not fair,” my mother said. It was a statement she’d repeated frequently of late. She said it after I complained about something, while she watched the TV news or stood on the back porch, looking out over nothing. Her hair was short now and gr
aying, and she’d push it in chunks behind her ear.
“Nope, life is certainly not fair.”
She’d punctuate her proclamation with a shake of the head and a pop of a laugh that showed pity for those foolish enough to believe otherwise.
I should have known better. Should have cared less. But instead I cared more, and as I wiped away lines of conjugated verbs, it seemed to me that Latin was only for the best kind of girls.
98
“Hey white girl.”
The Girls were calling. The Rosario girls. Sari and Maritza, maybe even Wanda. They might all be there, sipping on molasses-colored bottles of malta, snapping their gum, sucking down mango juice on their front porch. The large pine in their front yard blocked their porch from view. The Rosario house was emerald green and the color of the giant tree was so similar that it seemed like a needled extension of their home.
“Mira blanca,” they said again, and I smiled and headed over to their place, a soft-shingled two-story a few houses from my own. They might have said “white girl” or “blanca,” “tiza” or just plain “chalk”; it didn’t matter, because they were talking to me.
I was the white girl.
My status had been confirmed long before I met them. I had been a paleface on the reservation, and then a honkie, a cracker, even a saltine, in city schools and city streets where my face stood out like a puff of lint on a gown of midnight silk. Even in Catholic school, as I dipped my head into our recess huddle, pretending to know more than I did about boys and marijuana, I’d chew on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while my friends ate jarred octopus and talked of their quinceañeras—the coming-out parties they’d have in a few years—the line of girls who’d stand up with them, the dresses they’d wear. I’d blink my eyes and take in their lives as though they were publicly funded educational programming. I knew that being white was not such a good thing, and that their approval of me was an exception. When the seventh-grade social studies teacher showed Roots for three days straight, I became only whiter, my skin glowing like the moon as I took in slave ships and tried to avoid the dark eyes of just about every other student.
More than anything else about myself, I knew that I was white. Plain old white. Not even Italian or Polish or Greek—there were no vowels rounding out my last name, no swollen consonants, no grandma’s language on the tip of my tongue. Neither dark enough to qualify as interesting, nor blonde enough to beguile, my long hair did not curl, and except for a thick pair of lips that earned me the unsought evaluation from other kids “you don’t look like a regular white girl”—except for these things, nothing about me stood out.
“Hey blanca,” came their voices.
And though I had wished myself anything but pale, had torn into my mother with questions about our ancestry, mining hard for the slightest bit of spice, in the end, I knew who I was.
“Hurry up, white girl,” they called.
And whether there were two of them or five, they were the Girls. Hardly anyone called them by their names. The fact that they looked so much alike might have accounted for the group name. Hair hung like rope down their backs, they had full mouths, thin bodies, and were narrow as grade-schoolers. Las Flacas, they were called in the neighborhood, the Skinnies.
I was with them every day. Once I’d convinced my mother to let me transfer from Nazareth Academy and start attending East High like other kids on the street, I’d stop by their house on the way to school and home. I’d climb the stairs to the Girls’ room, where we’d listen to music and flip through fashion magazines—castoffs from their older sisters, who had jobs and could afford Vogue and Mademoiselle.
The Girls were fashion hounds. It was all about style with them, and an otherwise suspect person whose hair happened to be en moda or who wore shoes like they did in magazines was all right with them.
“Ay que linda,” they’d gather around and say in unison about certain pocketbooks, earrings, or hats. “Cute!” Certainly they were more inspired by something on the cutting edge of style than by anything they ever heard at church or school.
The Girls didn’t have much money either, but their mother was a gifted seamstress who fashioned clothes based on things they’d eyed on MTV. She’d lay newspaper on the floor and snip out patterns for Gautier knockoffs.
“Mas corta?” Shorter? she’d asked as they circled and made demands for the latest miniskirt or palazzo pants.
Even back before we were friends, when we still cautiously eyed each other, fashion was a part of our relationship.
When our family first moved to Lamont Place, I recognized the sour-faced Puerto Rican girl who did not return my smiles, but wore the same striped sweater as me to School no. 33. Long belted sweaters were in style then, and ours were nearly to the knee and belted around the waist. It seemed to me that having the same sweater and being from the same street should have bonded us, and the fact that it didn’t could only be viewed as failure.
One time, my mother came home with a plastic container of spiced-up vegetables and a green garbage bag full of used clothes.
“Where’d you get this stuff?” we asked, as she bit into red peppers and corn.
“Oh, from Marta Rosario,” she answered, as if we should know who Marta was, as if Marta were a member of the family or, at least, a frequent visitor.
“She thought we might be able to use these clothes.”
They were still strangers then, but I’d seen the Girls and knew they were well dressed, and though dignity should have prevented it, I practically jumped into the bag. Hardly anything was usable. It was all too small, even the platform sandals I’d have killed to clog around in were half the size of my own feet.
My mother visited the Girls’ mother regularly, but that was her way; cup of coffee in hand, she’d wander into other women’s kitchens, and talk her way through the better part of an hour, wearing down their ears on the virtues of the White Mountains, the taste of fresh berries, the feel of snow in May. No one was ever a stranger to my mother for long, not the Pakistani family that had just moved in, the quiet old ladies across the street, nor Marta, whose limited English was no barrier to my mother, and may only have served to entice her. While Harun and Bada taught her about cooking with curry and Pakistani history, Marta taught her how to recite the rosary in Spanish. My mother loved these connections, in the same way that she loved watching birds.
Always, my mother seemed most energized by things just out of reach.
99
It took years before I befriended the Girls.
It was in middle school, while walking down the street after school.
I’d peel off my uniform as soon as I got home and though there were no old Vogues lying around my house, I liked to make up my own styles. On that day, I must have felt a little adventurous, because I cut off some old khakis below the knee and cuffed them into pedal pushers, which I paired with an oversized men’s blue dress shirt and flat white sneakers for my walk to the corner store. And as I passed their house, the outfit drew their attention, like string dangled in front of cats. Everything quieted on their porch as I walked by; their voices stopped chirping. The Girls were reduced to nothing but eyes.
Walking back down the street a few minutes later, a small brown bag crinkling in my grip, I felt their attention once again. I began to wonder whether my attempt had been too risqué. They must be appalled, I thought, but forced myself to keep walking. They shifted on the porch as I passed, their faces following my return home.
“That’s a cute outfit,” one of the older girls finally called out, once I was well past their house and nearly in my own yard.
“Mmm-hmmm,” echoed another.
“Sure is,” came another voice.
“Que chula—come over here, let’s see what you’re wearing.”
I walked over as calmly as I could, and let them inspect me. They were pleased, and the next thing you know I was there day and night, watching Sabado Gigante, eating bacalao, learning to dance stiff-hipped merengue
s.
Their place was different. Except for the refrigerator-sized arcade game Steph had found in the Swap Sheet and traded for her Texas Instruments computer, having it delivered to our dining room while my mother was at work—except for that game and the eight-by-ten glossy of Jesus with the pink-thorned heart taped to our wall, everything in our house was some shade of brown.
The Rosario house had color. There were plants everywhere, green leaves and slender stems twined round black and white photographs of dead relatives, circled the waists of mantilla-clad dolls. A six-foot rosary carved from tropical wood hung along the living room wall like garland, doors were covered with lacy favors from years of baptisms and weddings, a ceramic fruit bowl sat atop the dining room table, a suffering Jesus graced the walls, and old-time Spanish music scratched out from a kitchen that smelled of sofrito and onions.
Occasionally, I’d go home for dinner, but more often, I’d eat rice and beans with them. On holidays, I was there, in the dining room, table pushed aside for dancing. And all of us, young and old, let our bodies fall into fast, loose salsas, laughing and sipping down rum and cokes and piña coladas until no one could stand from the fun of it all.
100
No one told me the thing I most needed to know.
No one prepared me for it.
Not the way they prepared me for every little bit of my body changing—the way they told in advance about all the tubes and canals of my inner chambers, warned me for years about parts I’d never see, talked on and on about my period coming, what it would look like, what it would feel like, what it would mean.
Ghostbread Page 14
