They Come in All Colors

by Malcolm Hansen

  **Plus reopening of pool by 8/6.

  ***Reward should be ready with any luck the last week of August.

  It was straight enough. I followed after Dad.

  How ’bout now, Pop?

  Still pink.

  Dad hadn’t even looked. He stood there with one hand in his pocket and the other twirling his key ring as Mister Brines pulled down a dive mask from a shelf behind the window display inside his shop.

  Wanna go in?

  I shook my head no.

  Aw, c’mon. I thought you said that cheap rubber gasket on your dive mask had started to crack. A boy needs a working dive mask—well, don’t he?

  I shrugged. It’s okay.

  Dad rested a heavy hand on my shoulder. Aw, what am I saying? You’re probably just down about your mother and me, aren’t you? It’s no wonder. The trick is to get her off the sofa and back into our bedroom. Then things have a chance of returning to normal. But what on earth will accomplish that, is the question? I’m open to suggestions.

  I dunno. Maybe apologize and ask Toby to come back? Short of that, she probably just needs to get out of the house more.

  Dad sighed. There’s no sugarcoating it, is there? Hell, who am I kidding? You probably miss him, too. It’s not your fault. Known him your whole life. Probably can’t help but feel some affection for the man. After all, he was like a big brother to you.

  No, he wasn’t.

  Well, all I’m saying is that it’s not your fault. So don’t feel bad if you do.

  I don’t.

  Only stands to reason. Hell. I probably would, too—if I were you, I mean. He was always nice to you.

  Never let me ride on the tractor.

  That was because of me.

  I looked up, surprised.

  Nothing for you to hold on to.

  Missus Orbach appeared in front of Ivey’s—which was unexpected. We’d been sitting there, squinting in the sun coming over the buildings across the street, for a good half hour, and I hadn’t seen her go in. She set her shopping bag down and took a moment to straighten her dress and put on her sunglasses. I leaped into the air at the sight of Derrick emerging from the double doors behind her. No sooner did I have the D sound shaped in my mouth than Missus Orbach picked back up her shopping bag and said, Come along, boys. We don’t want to keep Danny waiting. Vincent, you’ve got your shorts? Don’t swing your goggles like that, Cal. You’ll break them.

  Derrick walked off without a word. I was stunned. I wanted to show off my cast. It had been two weeks, and he still hadn’t seen it. I stood there smiling ear to ear, waving my cast overhead, but he just looked straight through me. It was as if he hadn’t recognized me. Half a block down, Missus Orbach and Derrick and Vincent and Calvin all piled into her wagon. I pressed one nostril with my thumb and blew snot from the other, then wandered over to the cool shade of Mister Brines’s awning and wondered if I’d seen right.

  Theodore Krasinski had curly blond locks, plump pink cheeks, and candy-apple red lips that framed a constant smile. He was a dead ringer for those plump, cherub-like renderings of the Christ child you see all over the place. No matter the nonstop ribbing he suffered for being such an insufferable little suck-up, he stoutly remained the happiest, most pleasantly disposed and good-natured kid in town. Everyone loved him. Anyway, Theo appeared behind Mister Brines’s plate-glass door sporting a brand-new dive mask. He hopped down from the front stoop and waved.

  Danny made nationals! He’s gotta head back to campus tomorrow for time trials. We’re all getting one last swim in today! See ya there!

  I’d been nursing that cough drop for the last half hour, and then, just like that, it slipped down my throat. Missus Orbach drove past. I stood still as a statue. I struggled to find it in me to wave. I just couldn’t. Danny was gone? Already? One look at Dad and I knew it was true. Open or not, there was no way that he was going to let me swim in that pool as long as they hadn’t caught the trespassers. I’d only gotten to visit Mister Abrams’s pool three times that summer—so few times it hardly seemed to register as a genuine experience. So few times I could almost trick myself into believing that I’d only imagined it. More than the actual visits to the pool, what stuck out was the depth of my yearning for more. I was a boy of words. Many, many, words. And they all, every last one of them, felt dead in my mouth. It was my last chance to visit Mister Abrams’s pool for another year.

  And to top it off, Theodore was twirling his dive mask by its strap on his way down the sidewalk. As that black snorkel skipped off merrily down the street beside his mom’s shifting skirt, tears burst from my eyes, and I hurled my bundle of fliers at Dad. Why on earth do you care who broke into that damned pool so much? No one else does!

  Tell you what—how about after harvest, whaddya say you and me, we take a little drive up to the old reservoir out by the county line. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?

  He was talking about Lake Offal. That was where the colored kids learned to swim. Toby’d bragged once about how when he was my age, he just dove in and swam clear across it his first time out. Which gave me goosebumps just thinking about it. Every September, after weeks of heavy rain, its tributaries rose by more than three feet, and at least one person got sucked into its undertow, never to be seen or heard from again.

  Phooey. Stop with your damned sulking. It’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be. Some swim in pools, others swim in rivers and lakes and inlets and such. What the hell difference does it make? I tell ya, you gotta be open-minded these days, son. Because the world’s a-changing. Every day it’s a-changing. Changing. Changing. Changing. Now, I know what you’re thinking. But I’m telling you, what was not acceptable yesterday may be perfectly reasonable today. That’s the way of the world. Someone’s gotta take the first step. We’ll just take an inner tube along and it oughta be fine.

  A truck skidded past and veered wildly in the middle of the street. Dad jerked me back from the curb as Mister Bradford’s eldest son, Kyle, leaned out of the window and hollered something at me, then raced off down the street. The episode had lasted all of ten seconds, but somehow I’d experienced the wild-eyed look on Kyle’s face in slow motion. Along with the smoke spewing from his tires. And hands covering my ears. The pavement was scarred with black streaks, and a fog of exhaust fumes hung in the air. The crowd gathered across the street was still and quiet. Their collective gaze seemed to be on me. Dad lifted his hands from my ears and the distant grunt of a flathead V8 echoed from a mile away. Dad stepped into the street and checked to make sure that Kyle wasn’t coming back, then stepped back onto the sidewalk and started picking up sheets of yellow construction paper.

  Kyle’s just pissed that he got a 4-F classification. The army won’t even let him stamp envelopes. But that’s not your fault, okay? Kyle’s an asshole. Always has been. I don’t care what he says. Your daddy’s white, which makes you white. You know that, right?

  XIV

  THE NEXT MORNING, A BOWL of cereal and a glass of OJ were waiting for me on the kitchen table. I gave Mom a peck on the cheek on my way out the door. She stopped me and said that I wasn’t going anywhere until I’d written an apology. I looked up at the clock, then sat down at the table and picked up a pen.

  Dear Mister Yamaguchi,

  Please accept my sincere apology for cheating in your class. I really enjoy Japanese and you as a teacher. It is a fine language, and you are a really fine good great teacher. One of the best I’ve ever had. I should be so lucky to ever have another teacher as great as you. Anyway, I have had eighteen hours and thirty-four minutes time to think about my mistake and realize now why I should not cheat. How can I get better if I cheat? My mom says that in the long run I’m only cheating myself. I promise you that I will never, ever cheat in your class again. Not in your class or any other.

  Yours truly,

  Hubert Francis Fairchild, the first.

  I folded it in half and slid it into my Japanese–English Character Dictionary, gave Mom another peck o
n the cheek, and ran out the door. Mom stepped into the hallway and asked where my blazer was. I jumped into the elevator and yelled back that it was at school.

  What’s it doing there?

  Long story, Mama. Gotta go. Bye!

  I hauled ass out the front door past the smell of reefer wafting around the old men sipping cafes con leche out on the front steps. Discarded potato-chip bags stirred in the breeze coming off the East River. The sun reflected off the backboards in the ball court, the chain-link fence on my left, and the chrome bumpers, hubcaps, and door handles on my right. I cleared some broken glass and cut through the long cars parked on either side of a fireplug.

  The train felt like a tin can sliding over sand. I squeezed into a seat between some woman in scrubs with a lanyard around her neck and a man in a bow tie with a cane poking up from between his legs. The woman in scrubs had a bag from the dime store Mom had worked at after that job cleaning office buildings. It was a family-owned five-and-dime with a bunch of crazy-looking windup monkeys that play the cymbals in the front window. It was up on East Twenty-Third Street, and even if the old man who owned the joint gave her discounts on all sorts of worthless trinkets and kitsch, he rarely ever paid her on time. After that, it was one of those dime-a-dozen diners up in Columbus Circle, where she was always dropping food and spilling stuff and her boss habitually called her at home with some off-the-charts last-minute shift change that he expected her to be able to accommodate. Then there was the bowling alley out in Brooklyn, which took a whole hour just for her to get to. God, she’d had a lot of jobs our first year here. After that, she took a job in housekeeping at the Days Inn downtown, where the hours were set in stone and they paid her for every single minute that she’d punched in and out for and the commute time wasn’t so bad. After a year of cleaning bathtubs and toilets, her boss came into a guest room while she was tucking in bedsheets and said that he could see that she was too smart to be making beds and that he was going to see what he could do for her. After several months, the promised promotion just kept getting pushed out. Meanwhile, other chamber maids came and went, and Mom’s boss stuck her with having to hire, train, and schedule their replacements. Then he started making her check their work, validate their time cards, and cover for them when they called in sick. Even if Mom was starting to feel that she was getting a raw deal, she hung in there. She was looking forward to the day she got transferred to the front desk, where she could show off her bookkeeping and people skills. Not to mention her smile. But as the months passed, Mister Reinhardt just kept piling on more work, telling her how much he liked her and didn’t want to lose her and for her just to be patient because he was waiting for something special to turn up where someone as good as her could really shine. She was not to worry. He was working on it. Then came the day that Mom walked through the lobby and saw a new girl standing behind the front desk who looked like she’d just graduated from high school, had no front-of-the-house experience whatsoever, and was, well, white.

  That night, Mom brought home a dozen of those little bars of soap and mini bottles of shampoo and conditioner. The next morning, she followed up on some job openings she’d come across in a brochure somewhere. She figured what the heck, she had nothing to lose. One night a few weeks later, the phone rang. Mom’s voice went up an octave when she answered it. I was in the living room, watching Don Rickles on TV. She wound the cord around her finger and disappeared behind the doorjamb, into the kitchen. I could tell by the look on her face that it wasn’t anyone from school, so I turned back to Johnny Carson. What a hoot. I was chuckling like an idiot at some gag they were doing. A few minutes later, the phone clicked into its cradle, and Mom called me into the kitchen. I told her to hold on a minute; Johnny Carson and Don Rickles were hilarious together. She came in with the Yellow Pages and opened it to a full-page advertisement, which she spread out over the coffee table. She turned off the TV and asked if I’d heard of Blumenthal, the Mattress Maven. Of course I had. His signs were everywhere—on buses, in telephone booths, on park benches, on subway platforms, in weeklies. I couldn’t go a block without seeing one of his ads. I’d turn around and there it would be, staring at me, telling me how lousy my bed was and that I needed a new one. It claimed in big, bold letters that that was why I felt so grumpy all the time. I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t the bed at all, but it was pointless to shout back at some larger-than-life-sized ad shellacked to the side of a brick building.

  Mom was fingering over the ad, admiring it, saying how she’d accepted a position working for him. She wouldn’t be working for one of his store locations or warehouses or anything like that, but the actual family. I had no idea that she was even considering working as someone’s personal nanny and housekeeper and sometimes cook. Turns out, she’d pursued it on a lark. Anyway, the Blumenthals had twin baby boys. As they put it, they could use an extra pair of hands around the house. Who couldn’t? It didn’t matter to Mom that she had no idea what she was in for. She was just happy to finally be able to tell Mister Reinhardt that he could take his job and shove it.

  As sweet and adorable as those twins had turned out to be, it didn’t compensate for the fact that the money wasn’t that hot. Which is why Mom had to hold on to her job at the dry cleaners. No matter how much I’d beg just to be able to check out the iguana living inside the Blumenthals’ home, she’d just pull her hair into a bun so tight it stretched out the little wrinkles from her forehead and shake her head and say that there were no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It was strictly verboten. I couldn’t even pick her up there after work. I was starting to wonder if maybe she wasn’t somehow embarrassed of me. I couldn’t figure out if her concern was about the twins seeing her around me or me seeing her around the twins. All I knew was that I had to meet her at the HoJo’s after work. At least Mister Reinhardt would let me come by after school and do my homework in a vacant room.

  Mom had been with the Blumenthals for a year before I started at Claremont. Even if she and I rarely ever saw each other after that, what with her away at work and me studying all the time, it wasn’t like it was all gloom and doom. If she’d entrusted my education to Claremont, she’d left everything else to Mister McGovern. He’d become something of a father figure. I was a knobby-kneed pipsqueak who couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag, but Mister McGovern talked to me like I was a grown man. Of course, a kid’s going to love a guy like that. What’s there not to like?

  The worst part was that as much as Mom and I missed each other when we were apart, we drove each other crazy when we were together. She complained that I had no idea what her day looked like, and I rebutted that she had no idea what mine looked like. I was always off doing my thing and she was off doing hers, barely home long enough to throw something together for me to eat, check my homework, and tell me to go to bed. She was stretched so thin she wasn’t even able to send me off to school on the mornings she had to leave the house before dawn. It was starting to feel like I hadn’t just lost Dad with our move to New York. I was losing her, too. Which felt wrong. She was all I had left.

  I got off at Ninety-Sixth Street and dashed up the stairs to street level. I ran down the block and dug around in the garbage can on the corner, pulling up to-go boxes, Styrofoam cups, candy wrappers, tissues, yesterday’s Daily News, the Village Voice, and empty soda bottles until at last I found my blazer buried toward the bottom. I pulled a banana peel from the sleeve and shook it out. I held it up and tried to figure out what I could claim all the splotches were from, then brushed it off and put it on.

  Clyde slapped me five on my way through the service entrance. Past the nurse’s office, up the stairs, around the corner, down the hall. I caught my breath in the doorway and strolled into class. I bowed politely and apologized for being late, then dug out my apology letter and handed it to Mister Yamaguchi with both hands. I asked permission to move up to the front row, where he could see my every move.

  Mae no hoo ni suwatte yoroshi desu ka?

  Hai.
/>   XV

  THE ORBACHS, KRASINSKIS, AND SCHAEFERS shared Miss Della. She might have worked for others, but those were the three I knew about. Later that week, I was on my way out to clean the henhouse when she came running up the road, waving her hands like it was about to rain and our laundry was still up. She called out for me to get Mom. I tossed a handful of dirt and feathers into a garbage can and told her that she was inside. Mom poked her head around the front door. Miss Della labored up the stoop. Next thing I knew, Mom disappeared inside Miss Della’s arms.

  Are you sure you heard right?

  I’m sure, baby doll. I’m sure.

  I went about my business of scrubbing the slimy black-and-white chicken shit from the walls, frustrated with how long it was taking with just one arm. The henhouse was dimly lit, and there was crap everywhere: on the side of the water jug, in their food, even on their eggs. Loose feathers shifted at the slightest movement so that I practically had to corner each one.

  When I stepped out for air, the two of them were still standing in the sliver of shade beneath the rusty metal awning, rocking back and forth. Miss Della was holding Mom still, and tears were streaming down Mom’s face. I had never seen her cry like that. Miss Della let go and rushed past me and hollered out from the road, saying how she wished she could stay, but she couldn’t afford to be late. And to turn on the news—that was the main thing. She kept repeating herself on her way up the road, urging Mom to check the news. Telling her that it was on TV and everything.

  Mom called me inside. As curious as I was, I also kinda didn’t really want to know what was going on. I hollered out that I was busy and demanded to know how I was ever gonna finish up, what with her calling me in every other minute. Mom stormed down the steps and snatched the scrubber and hose out of my hand, tossed them aside, and marched me inside.

  She disappeared into the next room. She and Dad huddled in front of the TV and clicked through the channels. They settled on one and just stood there. No sooner had I shoved past them than Mom turned the TV off and left the room. Dad followed after her. I went up to it and was standing with the power knob in my fingertips when Mom reentered the den. I was covered in loose feathers, cobwebs, and chicken shit. She sat me down in Dad’s easy chair and knelt down in front of me. She told me that there had been a tragic accident in the peach grove adjacent to the Camelot.