This Side of Providence

by Rachel M. Harper

  “And you didn’t dance with Krystal.”

  He keeps filling the box.

  “Any reason?”

  He shrugs again. “Nope. I just didn’t feel like it.”

  “Did something happen between you two?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “You still like her, don’t you?”

  “She’s all right.”

  “All right? Last month you passed her notes in every class.”

  He picks up a snow globe and examines the miniature world inside. He shakes it before placing it into the box. “I just don’t have the time anymore.”

  “For what?” I ask him. “To pass notes? To dance?”

  He smiles. “You know what I mean, Teacher. To have a girlfriend or whatever.”

  “Cristo, come here for a minute.”

  He walks over and stands next to me, leaning against the desk. “You’re eleven,” I say, squeezing his shoulder. “You have plenty of time for a girlfriend. What you don’t have time for is to carry the weight of the world on your back. Lighten up. Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up.”

  He cocks his head, as if he’s trying to hear me better. I know he’s listening, that he wants to understand, but I also know I should be talking to someone else. To Lucho or his mother, or God, if that would help—but to someone who could actually do something. Not to a child.

  “I’m okay, Teacher. You don’t have to worry about me, all right?”

  “No, it’s not all right. I’m a teacher. I was born to worry, just like a mother.”

  He touches the leaves on a ficus plant almost his height, pulling a few of the dead ones off. “My mother don’t worry.”

  “Doesn’t worry,” I say, stressing the correct grammar.

  He makes a face. “You know what I mean.”

  I make the face back, mocking him. He laughs, crumbling the dead leaves in his hand.

  “How do you know she doesn’t worry?” It’s an obvious question to ask, yet suddenly I’m not sure I want to know the answer.

  He shrugs, and I can see his eyes deciding to move on, to let this, and so many other things, go. “Anyway, school’s over now. You’re not even my teacher anymore.” He smiles as he pulls away from my hand, backing up in those big shoes.

  “Wrong. I’m always going to be your teacher. And your friend. I don’t care what the calendar says.”

  “I know, I know. That’s why I love you.” He looks surprised as the words come out, almost apologetic, and quickly averts his eyes.

  I feel my own eyes welling up so I force myself to look away too. I can’t let myself cry in front of a student, even if he is the only person aside from my parents to ever say those words to me. He stops to sprinkle the crumbled leaves into the garbage, watching the pieces fall like snow into the bottom of the can.

  “See you next year, Teacher.” And then he walks out of the room without looking back.

  “Don’t even think about it, Señor. You’re not going the whole summer without seeing me.” I follow him to the door, calling after him as he walks away. “I’ll take you to the beach one day. Or to a movie, okay?”

  “Okay, Teacher. You know where I live.” He throws up a hand to wave good-bye, but doesn’t turn back around. Seconds later I watch him disappear down the stairwell.

  The hallway is deserted, but I still curse my big mouth. I know better than to say that stuff out loud, especially on school grounds. I shouldn’t cross those boundaries in the first place, let alone advertise that I have.

  Back in my classroom, I finish collecting the rest of my things. When I’ve boxed it all up and emptied my desk, I run across my desk calendar, the final thing that connects me to this class, and to this year of my life. I’ve saved each one since I began teaching; eight years filled with parent/teacher conferences, class projects, and birthday parties meticulously scheduled into half-hour time slots. Every year it’s the last thing I take out of the room. I look down to see that the second half of June is completely empty, as if no life exists once the school year ends; for me, it’s pretty close to the truth. A few words stand out from the neatly scripted entries, a familiar scrawl that cuts across the blank date of June 23rd: “Thanks, Teacher. Ya te echo de menos.” I already miss you.

  A good teacher should never have favorites, so I guess I haven’t been a good teacher. Not since Cristo joined my class. Right or wrong, I favored him from the very beginning. While other kids worry about sitting at the right table at lunch or playing the latest Nintendo game, Cristo wonders who will spend the night in his mother’s bed; while they look forward to their parents getting home from work, Cristo will look forward to the day she gets out of prison. Of course he’s not the only one who has it tough at home (half my class comes to school without eating breakfast), but there was always something different about him; he seemed to need something specifically from me. Or maybe it was just what I needed to give him.

  When the school year started, he interrupted every lesson I tried to teach. He spoke when it was his turn and he spoke when it wasn’t. He refused to read out loud, didn’t turn in any homework, and walked out of the room without a hall pass. He was always late. I responded appropriately, but I never yelled at him or kicked him out of class. I never sent a note home or sent him to the principal’s office. I told him what I expected from him and when he failed to comply, I told him again. I refused to give up or give in.

  And then one day it all changed. He came to school on time; he did his homework; he raised his hand when he wanted to talk. He only fought if he was provoked. And he tried to reprimand the other kids if they broke the rules. On the last day before Christmas vacation he came up to my car and gave me a candy cane and apologized for his behavior all fall. He told me that he didn’t know that teachers could be people you’d like in your real life. And then he stood there until I gave him a hug.

  So that’s how it started, with talks after school and rides home if he missed the bus; with hugs in the hallway when I’d catch him punching lockers in frustration; with a shared lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches, cold tater tots, and chocolate milk drunk straight from the carton. After a while we started making plans to meet outside of school. He brought me a note from his mother (no doubt written by Cristo himself) giving me permission to pick him up at his house, so I took him out for pizza, to the movies, and to the park to go sledding after a snowstorm. I took him to church on Easter, and for his birthday we went to the YMCA to swim in the indoor pool since he’d written a story called “The Saddest Day” about how lost he felt when the public pool in his neighborhood closed down.

  I know I’ve crossed the line. I’m breaking rules that could cost me my job. But who else does he have? Who else do I have? I’m not supposed to care this much about a student, to be this involved, but I don’t know how to stop. Of course he is not my son. But he is not simply my student. He is another species entirely. Every school has a student like Cristo: a kid who lives on the border between civilization and wilderness. Every school has a teacher like me: a bridge between two worlds. If he’s not careful, he’ll spend his whole life split in two. If I’m not careful, I’ll spend mine holding his together.

  Once school ends, I spend all my free time trying to convince myself I’m not pregnant. After two weeks of denial, three days of eating nothing but egg rolls and ice cream, and five episodes of General Hospital I taped during the week, it’s finally time to take a pregnancy test.

  I was pregnant once before, during my junior year of high school. I was sixteen years old. The boy lived in the projects where my Tia Sonia and Tio Ernesto lived. I went to their apartment every day after school so I saw him all the time. He was like a cousin to me. I didn’t have a crush on him, not in the conventional sense, but I did like him. His eyes were a beautiful shade of green and his hair was shiny and black like licorice. He was quiet and kind to old people, and he always had change for the vending machine. He would buy me peanut M&Ms or Goobers almost every day and he didn’t get mad or tease
me when I ate the whole bag. He would simply buy another one.

  His name was Alberto, but we all called him Tito. He wasn’t handsome. He was small and frail like a middle schooler and I remember him getting carded for cigarettes well after he turned eighteen. One night he told me he’d actually started smoking because he wanted to look older, figuring the nicotine couldn’t do anything to stunt his growth that his genes hadn’t already achieved. He had thick glasses he never took off, even during the three times we had sex, and kids used to joke that he showered in those glasses. When they teased him he would bend his head and smile and never refute it. His skin was pocked with acne, even on his back, and I remember running my finger over the bumps when he was on top of me, wondering what they looked like in the light, if they hurt, and if he would bleed onto his sheets when he slept shirtless in the summertime.

  But I knew he never did. He hid his body as well as I hide mine, in long-sleeved shirts, loose jeans, and puffy ski jackets that doubled his size, making him almost as chubby as me. He used to say he didn’t mind that I was fat. Un poquito gordita, he would say, hugging me from behind. He used to tell me that he couldn’t feel my bones, that I was like a perfect pillow since he could rest on any part of my body and be equally comfortable. We used to spend hours in the playground with the other teenagers, and while they rolled lopsided joints and played Spades on the concrete, we would eat candy bars and talk about the fastest trains in the world or what it would feel like to be stuck on a submarine for two years. Tito laid his head on my soft curves, both of us wishing we had the means to escape from that penned-in playground, by any mode of transportation modern science would allow.

  I stood out for a lot of reasons growing up. I played chess instead of playing with dolls. I never learned how to sew or cook, but I knew the rules of baseball by the time I could read. Other girls sang in church and jumped rope in teams of two or three while I played the violin and walked to the corner store all by myself. Food was my constant companion (my first friend, my oldest friend) and the only thing that has never let me down. By the fifth grade I could read equally well in English and Spanish, something even my parents struggled with, and I was on the honor roll for all of junior high. When I was thirteen my homeroom teacher encouraged me to apply to the same college-prep high school she’d gone to, so I rode the subway from Brooklyn into Manhattan (by myself) and took the entrance exam without even telling my parents. At first they didn’t want me to go, but when I told them that two presidents had gone there they rushed out and bought me the school uniform. New, not used.

  I was comfortable being an outsider, both in my neighborhood and in my own home, but suddenly I wasn’t so different from the other Puerto Rican girls I’d grown up with. Sixteen, pregnant, and unmarried; I finally fit in.

  Tito wanted to keep the baby. He was a sweet kid and he thought he was doing the right thing. He told me we were going to get married at St. Anne’s, that his brother would be his best man, and that we would live in Crown Heights with his grandmother, who had a three-story brownstone and was starting to lose her eyesight. But he never asked me to marry him.

  “Will I wear white?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “My wedding dress. Will it be white?”

  He paused, as if reviewing pictures that had already been filed in a photo album we pulled out on lazy Sunday afternoons when we wanted to reminisce about our youth. His zipped his jacket against the harsh November wind.

  “No, of course not. White is for virgins. You can wear yellow or pink or something like that. My mother could probably lend you one of her dresses. You’re about the same size.”

  I smiled, even though I wanted to cry. He was acting like I should be grateful that he had worked everything out. I shook my head.

  “We’re not getting married, Tito.” The only reason I’d even told him I was pregnant was to say it out loud and somehow make it real.

  “Yes, we are. We have to. I won’t have my son born a bastard.”

  I looked at him for a long time. His milky green eyes, always magnified by his glasses, seemed larger than usual in that moment, and they were glassy, like he was about to cry. I chose my words carefully.

  “This…baby is not your son. He is just a baby. It is just a baby.” I rested my arm on his shoulder. “And after tomorrow, it won’t even be that.”

  “What are you saying, Vanessa?”

  I swallowed the Skittles I was sucking on. “I’m saying that I’m not going to keep this baby. I’m not going to have this baby.”

  He looked down at the bench we were sitting on. The wind kicked up again, so I huddled closer to him. He backed away.

  “An abortion? I don’t understand.”

  “What do you mean you don’t understand? What’s not to understand?”

  He looked around the park, as if wanting to appeal to some other reasonable person. “But I’m the father. I’m going to be a father.”

  “No, Tito. You’re not. Maybe someday, but not right now. Not with me.”

  He stood up. “What, I’m not good enough for you? ’Cause you go to some fancy school Uptown and you play the violin and read Latin? You think you’re better than me.”

  “No, that’s not what I said. You misunderstood.” When I touched his arm again he jerked it away.

  “Oh no, I understood. I understood perfectly clear.”

  He took a few steps away from me. I was about to call his name when he came back, leaning down until his mouth was only a few inches from mine.

  “I wish I’d never slept with you,” he said, his voice filled with a hatred I’d never seen before. “I wish I’d never seen your fat fucking face or touched your fat fucking body. You make me sick.”

  He slapped me across the face and walked out of the park. The sting from his hand stayed with me for the rest of the afternoon, but the real injury came from his words. That was a blow I am still recovering from.

  I saw him a few more times, but we never talked again. He would glare at me from across the playground, those big green eyes bearing into me like lasers, and when I couldn’t take it anymore, when I would turn to face him, he would either look away or look right through me like I didn’t exist. I missed him, I missed my friend, but I never tried to approach him again. I knew I was dead to him, just like our baby, and I tried to feel the same way. But I couldn’t. Neither one was dead to me. Even now I think about him every day.

  I went to the clinic by myself. The weather was cold and clear, but the sun was warm; I remember how hot it felt, shining on the back of my head. I kept my face down as I walked between the buildings on Atlantic Avenue, feeling miles away from my home (though I didn’t even have to leave the neighborhood). The procedure was fast. Less than an hour and I was free. The burden of carrying Tito’s child, my child, was gone. I felt empty. I did not think of a baby, or even a toddler, when I thought of what I had done. Instead, I pictured an older boy, six or seven, with short brown hair and green eyes, a non-stop talker who liked books and baseball and ice cream sundaes, and when I cried for weeks afterward, that is the child I imagined I’d lost.

  I lost my appetite. Barely interested in solid food, I began to shrink. My mother was so proud of the weight I lost. She told me I was beautiful now, that I looked just like her mother, and she let me try on her wedding dress, which she kept boxed in the closet for me to wear one day. She took pictures of me with my father’s Polaroid camera, which was usually reserved for shots of our dog, Lucky, and she displayed them proudly on the refrigerator door, held in place with Yankees magnets, until they eventually moved back to Puerto Rico when I graduated from college. I didn’t like all the attention—the stares from men on the subway, the whistles from packs of teenaged boys—so I started eating again when the bleeding stopped. I’ve been eating ever since.

  I never told anyone other than Tito that I was pregnant. I’ve kept the secret for the last fifteen years. I am still keeping it. My son would be fourteen years old today. Almost as old
as I was when I got pregnant. Almost a man.

  If I’m pregnant now, I will still be a young mother. Not as young as I would’ve been (and not as young as my own mother), but young enough. Maybe too young. The father, if I am pregnant, lives in Atlanta and works for the CDC. Right after we had sex he told me he had a girlfriend he thought he would marry. We ran into each other at our ten-year college reunion, and after a few glasses of Asti Spumante he invited me to his hotel room. I hadn’t seen or talked to him since graduation, and just like Tito, we never actually dated. We were friends with benefits.

  I drive to a pharmacy in Cumberland to buy the home pregnancy test. I can’t buy one in Providence because being a teacher is like being a politician—someone’s always watching. On the drive home I try to imagine calling my parents and telling them I’m pregnant, that it was an accident, and that the baby’s father is black. I can’t decide which will disappoint them the most. Probably the fact that he’s black, even though I have relatives in Puerto Rico who are darker than he is, starting with my mother’s own father. But I know how they are about color, how they prayed for me to be pale, with soft wavy hair and green eyes like my father. How happy they were when I came out light and didn’t disappoint them.

  But this could change everything. Having a baby when I’m not married, not in love or even dating, will permanently alter our relationship. I feel their shame rise up in me: what will I say to my grandmother; to the other teachers (who will notice I no longer drink coffee, sip cheap wine at happy hour, or sneak drags off bummed cigarettes in the teacher’s lounge); to the students who ask about my expanding belly and the lack of a ring on my finger? I’m disappointed in myself, so how could I expect my parents to feel any differently?

  But sometimes I argue the other side. I have a job, an apartment, and a car. I have a savings account and a retirement fund. Why am I scared of being a mother? I don’t need the government to support me, I don’t need a man, and I don’t need my family. I can do this. If I can handle twenty-five kids a year in the classroom by myself, surely I can handle my own little baby.