I begin to cry. I won’t last a minute in there—I know it!
“Don’t do this to me, Issa!” my mother cries, turning her face sideways to look at me as we rush along. Do it to her? I don’t even recognize her face at that angle; it’s as if a stranger is yelling at me, a pinch-faced witch dragging me along. My tears aren’t enough, obviously. I bend over and vomit on my Stride-Rite shoes, on my cotton stockings.
“You bad girl!” my mother screams.
Well, of course I am bad, this is all happening because I am bad, incurably, permanently bad. The taste of vomit is what I deserve. I deserve to go to the Peter Pan Nursery School, if they would still take me. There is no end to what I deserve.
But school is what I will get. I will get it today, no matter what. I will get it walking along in my own throw-up, because it’s clear my mother will not take me home, not let me creep back into my bed and hide there forever.
She takes me into a little Girl’s Room and washes me roughly with a wet paper towel. “You’ll calm down, you’ll get over this, it can happen.” She averts her face as the smell comes up from my shoes. She drags me down the hall as if she can’t wait to get away from me and my smell. And she turns me over to some lady. The teacher. Who holds me between two fingers by my collar.
Such tiny tables and chairs they have in school! Such tiny sinks and such low toilet seats. What little drinking fountains—not like at the playground where you have to lift yourself up on the rim of the concrete bowl and lean over to drink. The idea that at school you don’t have to grow up into things, but that the things bend down to you, is very strange.
In the wardrobe closet, we each have our own black hook; it has a number. Beneath the hook we have to put our boots on rainy days. There are rules for exactly when to take off coats and how to hang them; rules for how to ask to go to the bathroom and what to do there; rules for what to do when the bell rings, for when the flag salute takes place, for when attendance is taken. I decide rules are what grownups love to force on children; I think of the rules at home, about how I have to touch The Screamer gently and not punch her on the skull, about how certain bad-tasting foods have to be eaten before good-tasting foods can be eaten, how when you wipe yourself you can only use three sheets of toilet paper, how when you wash your hands, you rub them back and forth as high as your wrists before you dry them.
I wonder, if we were left alone, if we wouldn’t all do things very well in spite of rules. If we were left to figure things out, wouldn’t we find the best way? I look around at all the children who are crying and vomiting. So many of us are protesting the rules and the prison for the day, this terror is quite a common thing. Some of us are even wetting our pants. But I have no desire to do that. My shoes and stockings are disgusting enough, getting stiff now.
Louis and William Andanopoulos are twin brothers who are wearing white shirts and ties. Joe Martini has a harmonica in his pocket. Ruthie and Linda and Myra and Myrna are also here! They are without their skates, but as I look at them I can hear the sound in my ears: ZZZSHEE. I try to stand near them, but the four of them hold hands and don’t look at me.
This is a surprise, that they won’t even blink at me. Even when they do look at me, I see they don’t know me. I know them. I know their faces. I know the color of their coats and how their knees bend when they skate. I know how their mothers and fathers and their cars and their houses look. How can it be, if I know them, they don’t know me?
Oh, I am so lonely here. We are getting our desks, we are each getting our special box of crayons, we are getting our silver scissors without pointy tips. At home I use very sharp, very pointy scissors. I use Gilda’s worn out haircutting scissors. I am insulted by blunt scissors. How can I follow a clean line for my cut-outs if I don’t have the sharpest cutting point? They ought to trust me. But how can they? They don’t know me here. They don’t love me here.
No matter what happens at home, they love me. That is the first rule behind all their punishments. But to be in a place where I am locked inside, where they push and pull me around, where I’m not free to think my own thoughts, or do my own deeds, where there is the smell of vomit on my shoes, and no other shoes to put on, this is impossible!
The teacher asks, “Who can tell time? Can anyone here tell time? Raise your hand if you know how.”
No one raises a hand. Miss Fenley is her name, and she has a yellow bun of hair.
I can tell time, but why should I tell her that? Is being able to tell time good or bad?
I raise my hand. It goes up like a balloon, without my permission.
“What is your name?” she demands. I tell her.
“From now on Issa will be our time monitor,” Miss Fenley announces. She walks to where I am standing by my desk and holds up my hand. “Take a look at Issa, boys and girls. If you need to know the time, you will ask her and she will tell you. She will look at the clock there in front of the room. Before long you will all know how to tell time. But for now, remember: this is Issa, she has had the good fortune to have a head start in time, and, therefore, in this classroom she is in charge of time.”
CHAPTER 12
I am in charge of time.
To be in charge of anything is something. But time. What could be more important? Time will make me tall and brave and beautiful. Time will get me everything I want. Maybe even roller skates.
I puff out like a peacock, keeping my nose high—as far from my shoes as possible—and I accept the dull scissors, the baby box of crayons (these have only eight Crayolas; at home in my private box I have rainbow tiers of sixty-four; even in my pencil case I have sixteen).
We are assigned desks, inkwells in the right-hand corner with glass jars inside, our own slot in which to slide and hide books and secrets. We must settle down now to hard business, our first lesson. Hands folded. No wiggling, rustling, jiggling or sobbing. We are to learn…colors.
Is it possible? That the twins wearing ties, the four roller-skating girlfriends, the harmonica player, is it possible they don’t know pink, green, red, and blue? Have they never heard of orange, yellow, white, and black?
We all know colors. We have to. We have been alive at least five years, maybe six. Is school going to be a waste of time every day? Gilda told me I will have to be in this school for nine years; after that there are schools beyond: four years in the next one and four years in another and even more perhaps after that.
How can the teachers in these schools know if I already know what they are going to be teaching me? Will they ask me first? If they don’t, it will be pointless, unbearable!
But—I now see that there is a boy who doesn’t know any of his colors! Miss Fenley holds up color card after color card.
“Alvin,” she calls him. “Alvin, what color is this? Don’t you know red, Alvin?”
He shakes his head.
“Red?” she prompts him. “The color of Santa Claus’s suit?”
He refuses to know.
“The color of your Christmas stocking?”
No.
“The stripes on your Christmas candy cane? That color?”
What is all this talk of Christmas? The word strikes terror to my heart. My father hates Christmas and has forbidden me to talk of it. My mother wants us to start having it, Christmas tree and all. The Jewish problem is at the heart of it, though I can’t see why. But I didn’t think we would have to discuss Christmas at school. Will we also have to discuss not using butter in mashed potatoes if we eat meat? Will we have to worry about wearing Jewish stars around our necks?
Also, why do we have to fidget in our chairs while only Alvin learns the color red? I could be telling time. I could be standing up at the front of the room, telling it to everyone, minute by minute. A quarter after nine. Twenty after nine. Twenty-five after nine. If time is what this class wants, time is what I will give them. They could all look at me and get to know my face, as I know the faces of Linda, Ruthie, Myra and Myrna. If they all knew my face, they might smile at m
e and maybe get to care about my fate as people do at home.
But this is the real world, and no one wants to look at my face. Neither does anyone want to learn the color red. The twin brothers are breaking a stick of Black Jack gum between them; another boy has put his head down on his desk and is crying. The Skaters are whispering together, and one girl who looks like a bulldog is actually spilling the ink from her inkwell over her desk.
To think that this will be my home for most of every day, to think that I am glued to this seat with my hands folded for hours each day, to think of it! How did this come to pass? And could I have had any choice in the matter?
Tomato juice and two Ritz crackers is my first course. Now there is a new element to eating: it must be done as fast as possible in order that I get back to school in time. I have to run home all fourteen blocks, with my mother pulling me along. The meal, made by her earlier in the morning, is served in ten-second intervals; tomato juice, tuna fish sandwich, milk, go to the bathroom, put on your coat, run the fourteen blocks back to school.
Again it dawns on me that this is real, that it has to happen every day. That it’s not a joke or an experiment or a temporary trip. That it doesn’t end, that it is perpetual and unavoidable.
I tell Gilda privately what I feel. She looks at me with pity. It simply has to be done. We stare at each other in the understanding of something hard and unmovable. I never knew there were going to be things in my life like this, and now I know. Nothing can stop it, and nothing can save me. There is a whirlwind beyond me that spins through its patterns. I can observe it, I can consider all the possibilities, but I cannot change it.
No! I won’t have it! This is not what I want! Even as I think this, I am making plans as to how to endure it. Bring Black Jack gum and make friends with the twins. At home, go outside when The Skaters are skating by and offer them chocolate cupcakes that I’ve saved up in a secret place after the bakery truck’s visits. Force some children at school to look at my face. Make them know me! If I mean something to them, they’ll offer me advantages. They’ll invite me in. No one keeps an eye on me just because I’m there, lost in the army of children. I have to be valuable to someone first.
How complicated!
“Ride! Ride! Ride!”
We are reading a book. The whole book has only this one word in it. Ride. On every page there is a picture of a different kind of ride: a car ride, a pony ride, a train ride, a wagon ride, a bus ride, a trolley ride, a sleigh ride, a bicycle ride.
Miss Fenley is going around the room, having us each read a page of the book. “Ride! Ride! Ride!” When she comes to me, I will know what to say. In the meantime, all I can do for entertainment is to look out the window. The classroom has tall windows that can be opened from the top by a long pole with a hook on the end. Outside, the day is dark and snowy, the sky black, heavy with cold. Soon it will be lunchtime and I will have to start pulling on my boots, which exhausts me. My mother will be there at the gate at a quarter to twelve; then we will race home, our breath coming out in puffs of smoke, so I can eat my balanced meal. Snow will get down my neck. Snow will get in the top of my boots. My mother always whimpers a little as we run, almost as if she is crying. Together we will slosh in the slush and slide on the icy curbs.
Why don’t the other children go home for lunch? My classmates bring a paper bag lunch, or they eat in the hot lunch room. Why am I the only one required to have a balanced lunch at home? Because of this rule, my mother has to come and get me since the crossing at Ocean Parkway is too dangerous for me by myself. One rule leads to another. She must leave The Screamer with my grandmother every day at noontime because Gilda is busy with her customers; my grandmother, who might have a heart attack and drop my sister, is almost as dangerous as my crossing Ocean Parkway. My mother’s constant fear is that something terrible can happen anywhere at any moment.
Here in my classroom, lit by yellow lights, with the black sky outside, I can almost forget The Screamer, forget home with the nine windows in my bedroom, forget liver broiling, forget my whole life. It’s rather nice, sometimes, to beam my eyes like a flashlight across the room and light up new faces, not the old ones from home. I wonder if a person can get tired of faces at home and one day decide never to see them again.
Joe Martini closes his reader with a slapping sound. Doesn’t he want to take his turn reading “Ride! Ride! Ride!”? He gets up from his desk and wanders to the window. Ruby, the girl with the bulldog face, pulls up her plaid skirt to let her garter belt show. Miss Fenley doesn’t see any of this, she’s so busy trying to get Louis Andanopoulos to read the words in the reading book. Even after she explains to him how to read the first “ride,” he can’t read the second “ride.”
The sky gets darker and darker. A wind roars through the schoolyard. Tree branches rattle and shake across the playground.
“Oh, goodness, this is a real blizzard,” Miss Fenley says. Just then the lights flicker and go out. We can’t read anymore. We can hardly see the teacher. Because it isn’t really night, there’s enough dim light in the room to see the outline of everyone’s heads, but not their faces.
“Boys and girls,” Miss Fenley says. “Boys and girls…,” but she can’t think of what to say next. We sit in the semi-dark and look around for comfort. Joe Martini comes back up the aisle, not to his seat, but to mine. He bends down right next to me and says, “I hate to read ride ride ride, don’t you?” I’m astonished. I stare at his face, and he stares at mine.
“I hope the whole school blows down,” he whispers to me. Then he is gone. But my heart is bursting with joy. He looked at my face. Now someone at school knows me.
A messenger comes to the door of the room with a note. By now Miss Fenley has found a flashlight and is shining it on the alphabet letters above the blackboard. The same children who didn’t know their colors also don’t know their letters. It’s not so bad when it’s my turn, but with so many children it’s almost never my turn. Also, my turn goes by very fast. I read ride ride ride, or I read one letter of the alphabet, and then I have to wait forever for my turn to come again. I begin to make rhymes in my head. Ride, slide, bride, glide, hide, tide. My mother would be proud of me.
“Issa,” says Miss Fenley. “Your mother has called the school. All the lights in Brooklyn are out. Even the traffic lights. She cannot come to take you home for lunch. You will eat in the hot lunch room today.”
“But where is it?” I ask.
“Who will volunteer to take Issa to the hot lunch room at lunchtime?”
Joe Martini will. This is the luckiest day of my life.
Never mind that the smell in the hot lunch room is of vomit and tomato soup. Or that the sandwich is peanut butter on whole wheat bread and we have to eat in the semi-dark. I can get this food down. I can swallow anything as long as I don’t have to run fourteen blocks each way and be watched as I eat and drink and even as I go to the bathroom. I could manage crusts here, liver here, soft-boiled egg if I had to. Joe Martini and I sit at a long wooden table and each get our bowl of soup and our half-sandwich. We get our milk. Some children look sad, but I can’t imagine why. Would they rather be racing home in a blizzard? Home is fine for some things, like having a cold, or getting an enema, you wouldn’t want to be in school for those things, but for eating anywhere else is better than home.
School may not be as bad as I thought. It’s terrible for learning things, but it has its advantage for eating food and for sitting with Joe Martini. At school you can forget home if you want to. At school you have a kind of privacy in your mind that no one can enter. Miss Fenley might think I am reading “Ride ride ride” every time someone reads it, but she can’t really know what I’m thinking. No one knows what is going through my mind as I stare out the window at the trees blowing in the wind, or even as my eyes follow Miss Fenley’s pointer going along the row of alphabet letters. I am learning things, but not the things Miss Fenley is teaching me. I give myself special lessons that light up my mind like flas
hes of lightning. I walk through a blizzard of my own thoughts and cross my own dangerous streets.
CHAPTER 13
On the radio, Christmas is as big as the war, even bigger. Songs come on—”Silent Night,” “The First Noel,”—that my father switches off and my mother switches back on. A little green plastic Christmas tree appears in the kitchen and then disappears. At school, decorations go all around our classroom. Tinsel (which I never saw before) and stars and elves and Santas and candy canes and camels and donkeys and reindeer and Jesus The Baby and Jesus The Lord and Jesus The Savior and Jesus The Father. Joe Martini knows all about Jesus and can’t believe I never heard of him.
“I’m Jewish,” I tell him, hoping that will explain everything, but wondering why even Jews don’t know news this big about Jesus.
“Jesus was a Jew,” Joe Martini tells me. “So you should know.” This is definitely something I will have to ask my father about since he is the expert on Jews in our family. But I know he won’t want to talk about Jesus. He won’t talk about Christmas either, except in fights with my mother. The word Christmas is between the two of them like the word liver is between my mother and me.
“Issa is in school now,” she informs him, which seems to make it plain why she should have the Christmas tree she wants in our house. Not just the little plastic one, but a big one, a real one, a forest tree with green piney leaves, with mirrored balls on it, with tinsel. With presents for me under it! She doesn’t want to deprive me, she says. Or Blossom, my sister. “This is a Christmas world,” she tells my father.
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