by Elle Johnson
I knew she would have. But I also knew this was the last thing my mother wanted to do. She was doing this only for me, but I didn’t want her getting into trouble with my father on my account. I was the only one who could talk her out of it.
“S’okay,” I said to my mother. “We can leave.”
We headed for the door. I looked back and saw Karen surrounded by guests. The girls who had looked me up and down, then snubbed me, were smiling now. Oohing and aahing over Karen’s dress. Her makeup. Her hair. They took the corsage out of the box and slipped the stretchy little silver band over her wrist. She stood in the middle of them, being admired, turned round and round. She reminded me of the ballerina in a music box—surrounded by little mirrors, sparkling from every angle, forever spinning in the same place.
Chapter Three
April 4, 1981
It was a Saturday morning. I was lying in the top bunk of my Ethan Allen bunk bed, above the shafts of sunlight filling my room from the window, running through SAT words in my head. Fatuous. Facetious. Flotsam. Jetsam. “Flotsam” and “jetsam” were giving me a hard time.
The day before, during lunch in the band room, my sophomore friend Ray played an up-tempo blues riff on his guitar and shouted out vocabulary words from a book of practice exams. I shouted back definitions to the beat, between bites of a chicken salad sandwich my mother had packed for me in a green plastic lunchbox. I had figured out how to turn lunch into a “service period,” working for teachers who mostly left me alone in an empty classroom to help them complete menial paperwork. So instead of gossiping in the lunchroom and ogling cute boys, who were never interested in me anyway, I organized sheet music for Mr. Serating and studied with Ray, a cherub-faced, curly-haired musical prodigy generously employing his considerable musical talents to help me boost my SAT scores.
“Fatuous” is silly. “Fat u?” Ray asked, then answered “O, us.” He was being silly, so I remembered that definition, which somehow made it easier for me to remember that “facetious” meant joking, often inappropriately. “Flotsam” and “jetsam” were another story. I had never heard these words before and would have had no reason to use them. Both had something to do with parts of a ship, considered either equipment or wreckage, floating in the water. One deliberately so, the other accidentally. Subtle differences, and I couldn’t remember which was which.
I propped myself up on my elbows in the top bunk. I didn’t want to get out of bed. The SATs were next month. I was taking weekly practice exams in a class on Saturdays. I needed help with everything—vocabulary, math, and reading comprehension. I was a straight-A student with perfect attendance, but school never came easily to me—unlike my sister, who was salutatorian of her class of eight hundred students and on that Saturday in April was a freshman at Harvard. I had a lot to live up to and had hoped life would be easier once she was gone. But her empty room across the hall was like one of my mother’s withering looks—a silent admonishment to do better.
Fatuous. Facetious. Flotsam. Jetsam.
I let those words swim around in my head, satisfied that I had a handle on at least two of the thousands of words that could be on the SAT. I threw off the covers—Does that make them flotsam or jetsam?—and got out of bed.
My mother was up already, buzzing around as persistently as the kitchen fan whirred. The house was full of breakfast smells, buttered toast and greasy bacon. Faint strains of the all-news radio station 1010 WINS drifted up the stairs as I made my bed. I recognized the station’s musical theme—a non-song that was the rhythmic sound of a ticker tape dispensing breaking news—followed by the tagline “1010 WINS: You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world.” In less than an hour I had to pick up Lisa, my classmate and closest friend, and get to the SAT prep class on the other side of Queens.
It was my father’s turn to drive us, but he was still sleeping. Across the hall, my parents’ bedroom door was closed, and I didn’t dare wake him.
He’d come home late the previous night. Again. My mother stayed up setting her hair and writing in her diary. Since my older sister had left for college, things had been strained between them. With my sister away, I thought there’d be more space for me in the home, not less. But my father remained elusive. There was always gardening, storm windows to be put up, things to be fixed down in the basement or out in the garage. I wasn’t good at talking politics, banking, race relations, or foreign affairs like my sister. I wanted to be an actress, which distressed my father enough to warn me that there wasn’t any work for actresses who looked like me. Not brown enough to be cast as Black or light enough to pass for white. People were always asking me, “What are you?” My father told me, “You’ll end up a hooker on Forty-Second Street.” I was used to the sting of his words, but his warning gave me pause.
My mother stood at the bottom of the stairs and yelled, “Ricky, get up! You have to take Elle to SAT class.”
“You take her!” my father yelled back, then almost immediately added, “Can you take her, Mel?” Softening my mother’s name to a nickname he reserved for apologies and outrageous requests. That didn’t stop my mother from storming up the stairs and throwing open the bedroom door. A heated negotiation ensued. I didn’t want to be the cause of another fight. I stepped deeper into my closet and focused on finding something to wear.
The SAT class was full of cute boys from other schools and lots of pretty girls who came dressed to impress them. Lisa was as nerdy as I, with her glasses and braces, but her petite frame and curly permed brown hair made her a crowd-pleaser who drew double takes then soft smiles that rendered me invisible even when I was standing right next to her. I was desperate to be noticed by the opposite sex, but clueless as to how. I was tall—five feet ten by eighth grade—awkward, and out of proportion. I had a flat chest, broad shoulders, and arms that were too long for any shirt with sleeves to fit properly. Long legs with thick thighs meant most jeans never made it past my knees, and any pants that did manage to make it all the way up were high-waters.
I breathed in the thready smell of clean cottons and wools mixed with the dry old cedar walls surrounding my wardrobe. My closet was small, only two rows for clothes, and the back half was full of my mother’s out-of-season outfits. I’d spent most of my life—kindergarten through eighth grade—neatly tucked into a gray-and-maroon plaid Lutheran parochial school uniform. All the other clothes my sister and I wore were ill-fitted hand-me-downs from my mother’s friends’ daughters or dressy outfits bought new for special occasions like Easter Sunday or my sister’s high school graduation. I wanted my own clothes but buckled under the pressure of having to decide what I liked. I missed the simplicity of wearing the same thing every day in elementary school and the safety of not having to express myself through an outfit.
Finding clothing that fit my body was difficult.
Finding clothing to fit my personality was impossible.
At my high school you had to pledge allegiance to either the land of disco or the country of rock. I watched Soul Train, Deney Terrio’s Dance Fever, and Andy Gibb on Solid Gold, but I also had a subscription to the Columbia Record Club, where I bought albums for a penny by Aerosmith, Jethro Tull, and Kansas. I didn’t look good in the velour tops, headbands, or leg warmers favored by my disco contemporaries, or the ripped jeans, concert T-shirts, and denim jackets with band album covers painted on the back worn by the rock ’n’ roll boys and girls who both sported long, feathered hair. I wore button-down shirts with handmade trousers sewn by a tailor using the leftover fabric from my father’s bespoke suits and lugged around an unattractive brown leatherette bag that sagged under the weight of my textbooks. I would have been another faceless nerd in honors classes had it not been for my scene-stealing turn as a crazy ax murderess in the school play. Bug-eyed, standing on a chair and gesticulating wildly, unconcerned for once with what my classmates thought, because that’s what the part required. That’s what I loved about acting: a chance to be free of myself.
E
veryone knew who I was, but no one knew me. Including me.
I heard the phone ringing and dressed quickly. I assumed it was Lisa’s mother asking where we were. I didn’t answer it. Neither did my mother, who popped her head into my room. “Okay, good, you’re dressed. Now you go downstairs and grab breakfast. I’ll put my shoes on and be right there. I’m driving you.” As I headed downstairs 1010 WINS blared from the clock radio in my parents’ bedroom. The mattress springs creaked, my father lumbered out of bed but only to hit the snooze button. The radio went silent.
“Ten more minutes,” he said before crawling back under the covers.
The phone stopped ringing.
I sat in the front seat of my mother’s Toyota Camry, eating pieces of crispy bacon from a balled-up paper towel. She was wearing a housedress. Her hair was wrapped in a silk scarf. She turned the radio on, rolled down her window, then lit a cigarette. Clouds of smoke rolled out of her mouth as she talked about “your father.”
“If he thinks he’s going to keep getting away with this shit, he has another thing coming.” I half-listened as we drove away from Hollis, under the Long Island Rail Road overpass to the other side of the tracks. I looked out the window at the palatial homes of Jamaica Estates made of red brick and stone. We passed Saint John’s University, where my mother had completed her master’s in bilingual education, where my sister had conducted research and won a prestigious Westinghouse science scholarship, and where the previous semester I’d made out in a locked entryway with the third boy ever to ask me out on a date.
My sister had wanted to go to Saint John’s, to live at home, to not leave my parents until they convinced her to accept the offer from Harvard. Now she was happy.
I was worried about taking the SAT, about getting stuck in Queens, about never leaving my parents’ home.
We crossed the avenue toward Lisa’s. The houses were smaller, closer together. My mother slid the scarf off her head, fluffed up her bangs. She announced what would happen next: She would wait in the car. I would get out and ring the bell but not visit. We were already late.
That’s when the news came on the radio.
“Last night a sixteen-year-old girl was shot to death in a robbery at a Burger King on White Plains Road in the Bronx. The victim, Karen Marsh, was the daughter of a homicide detective with the NYPD. A search for the suspects is currently underway.”
My mother gasped, we both looked at the radio, and she said, “What?” She ran a red light, slammed on the brakes too late, and skidded into the intersection. Horns blared. I pressed my palms against my chest to still my pounding heart. Mouth agape, stunned into silence, I looked at my mother.
“Oh dear God,” my mother said. Her eyes darted wildly up and down the intersection. “Let me get out of here.” She put both hands on the steering wheel and joined the tide of traffic. We sailed down streets, careening toward Lisa’s house. “We’ll tell Lisa you can’t go to class, then we’re going home. Okay? Okay?”
I couldn’t answer.
My mother grabbed my hand and shook it. “Are you all right?”
I gulped at air like I was drowning.
“Answer me, are you okay?”
I nodded but did not speak. “Flotsam” and “jetsam” swirled into my head. Jetsam was a ship’s parts deliberately put out to sea, jettisoned to lighten the load of the vessel. Flotsam was not. Flotsam was parts dislodged violently, cast into the ocean by accident or distress. All at once I understood—flotsam dislodged, distressed, floating wreckage.
My mother double-parked; I ran up the steep brick stoop to Lisa’s house and rang the bell. Lisa’s mother answered the door wearing a polite but thin smile. I could tell she was annoyed, until she looked at my heavy, downcast eyes and gently lifted my chin with the crook of her index finger. Her face went slack.
I stumbled, trying to explain, “My Karen, my cousin . . . she’s—” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word “dead.” “She was shot. Killed. It’s on the radio. I can’t go to class today. Tell Lisa I’m sorry.”
She squeezed my shoulder. “Oh, honey,” she said.
I nodded, acknowledging the awfulness of the news, and then for some reason I smiled. To make her feel better, even though I was the one in pain. I had learned not to burden others with my emotions. Ashamed and embarrassed, I turned away and headed back to the car. Lisa came to the door.
“Slime?” she called, using one of the nicknames we had for each other.
I heard the confusion in her voice, the concern, but kept moving. I wanted to go home.
When my mother and I got back to our house, I ran in the back door and heard the phone ringing again. My father didn’t answer it. I sped up the stairs, expecting to find him busy, putting on his shoes or shaving. But he was still in bed, eyes closed, breathing deeply, covered up to his neck in a blue wool blanket and a white cotton sheet. My mother pushed past me, put a hand on his covered shoulder, and shook him once, firmly, out of sleep.
“Ricky,” my mother said. “Wake up.”
My father opened one eye and barely lifted his head off the pillow. “You’re back? What’s the matter?”
My mother hesitated, and I was glad she had pushed past me, that I wasn’t the one giving my father the news. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. I looked at my mother, curious as to how she would tell my father that Karen was dead. And not just dead, but shot. Murdered.
My mother’s face twisted in pain. She said, “Karen was killed last night.”
My father bolted upright in bed, then burst into tears. In an instant his face was wet as a washcloth. His hands grabbed the sheets. He dug the heels of his clenched fists into his thighs and wailed, long and low, as if he were some great wounded, four-legged beast. Then the word slipped out across his lips in a guttural moan.
“No,” he said. Only once, but his voice wavered, so it sounded as if he was saying it over and over and over again: “No, no, no.” As if saying the word would stop the pain or change the outcome of events.
“I thought it was a dream,” he said. “I heard it on the radio but I thought I was dreaming.”
My mother took a seat on the edge of the bed and turned away from my father with her chin resting in her right palm. Her left hand held my father’s ankle. She closed her eyes as if she couldn’t bear to see my father railing against life, or in this case, death.
I saw every detail of my father’s face. The veins in his neck, the creases around his eyes. I smelled my parents’ bedroom, the dry heat from the morning sun lifting dust off the worn wooden slats of the imperfectly closed venetian blinds; the slept-in cotton sheets, musty with sweat and my parents’ commingling. I heard the faint buzz of the minute hand sweeping around the face of the electric clock radio and knew at any moment the alarm was set to blare out the news of Karen’s murder again.
I was afraid.
I had never seen my father cry before. Not like this. I had seen him cry from laughing too hard. His shoulders would shake, racked by big air-gulping spasms. His eyes would shut tightly. His lids would soak with tears that he wiped away slowly and easily with a finger. But I had never seen him cry out in pain, either physical or emotional. This, it seemed to me, was both. The tears were so plentiful they seeped out of his closed eyes and ran down his cheeks in rivulets onto his lap. I watched the drops change the navy silk sheets to a darker, deeper shade of blue. I stepped back into the hallway, because being close might make the pain splash onto me.
Also, I wanted a better view.
I wanted to see it all and not be told to leave by my parents. But a part of me had already left. An emotional separation had occurred. My father was vulnerable, and I was stronger than I thought. I distanced myself from my father’s pain and somehow knew everything was about to change.
Chapter Four
April 4, 1981
I was watching my parents from the hallway when the phone rang. The shrill bell pierced the still air, now weighed down with sorrow like a sopping-wet tow
el. My mother’s body tensed the way it did when a neighbor or one of her girlfriends stopped by unexpectedly. My parents didn’t like intrusions at home. We were forbidden to ask classmates over to visit, to do homework, or to have dinner. Company was for holidays and “occasions” deemed special by my parents. So when the phone rang, my sister or I was dispatched to run interference with several ready-made excuses. “He’s outside working in the yard.” “She’s taking a nap.”
My mother pulled herself up from sitting on the edge of the bed and answered the call. She said hello in a clipped, irritated voice. Her body softened, so I knew it was Aunt Barbara on the other side. Aunt Barbara had been calling our house all morning, trying to tell us about Karen’s murder before we heard it on the radio. My father rushed downstairs to listen in on the extension. I watched my mother. She steadied herself against the tall bureau, propped up on her elbows, with the beige Princess phone pressed to her ear. She closed her eyes and shook her head slowly back and forth in disbelief and despair.
“Oh, Barbara. Oh dear God, dear God,” my mother said. “What happened?”
Karen and a skeleton crew of kids had been working the graveyard shift on Friday night at the Burger King near White Plains Road. It was almost time to lock the double glass front doors when two boys entered and headed straight for the counter. One of the boys held a sawed-off shotgun. They demanded all the money from the register. Karen was standing at the till. She slid the drawer open and handed over all the cash—$241. The boy holding the sawed-off pulled the trigger. He shot Karen at point-blank range. The fiery blast blew her face off. Her body was lifeless before it even hit the ground.
