I'm Down: A Memoir

by Wolff, Mishna

  “Dad, can we go get some food?” I asked. “I’m hungry.”

  “You’re always hungry,” he said, retreating to his bedroom. “Make yourself something out of the fridge.”

  “Maybe you can find yourself some pâté,” Yvonne joked.

  I opened the fridge. Yvonne, Anora, Andre, and Yvette were still watching me like my hunger was entertainment. Milk. Eggs. Rotting scallions. I looked in the cupboard for some Top Ramen. Nothing.

  I looked at my family chowing down on McDonald’s in the next room. At this point, Yvonne started laughing again as I closed the fridge and headed for the pantry, where we kept stuff we got at Costco. Triumphantly, I found a box of Jiffy mix and started to make myself some corn bread. Anora, who had finished her Happy Meal, ran into the kitchen to help me. She grabbed the muffin tin out off the shelf and handed it to me.

  “Make it in this!” she said. My sister liked muffin-shaped things. I had the skillet out to make hot water corn bread, but decided to put it away to make my sister happy.

  “Okay,” I said, “do you want to grease it for me?” She nodded and ran for the drippings jar, but at that moment Yvonne had turned on a Jody Watley cassette in the living room and started shaking her hips along with the babies. While I had played basketball, Anora had replaced me on Yvonne’s beauty team. So Anora took one look at the dance party in the living room and became instantly disenchanted with corn bread. She dropped the pan and ran off to join them.

  “Come on, Mishna,” Yvonne said, jokingly sashaying up to Anora, who was dance-walking into the living room. “Come shake that duck butt.” I was surprised to be invited, but I was still in the middle of my food project, and hungrier than I was lonely.

  “As soon as I get my corn bread in the oven.”

  “You just don’t like black music,” Yvonne snapped. “You’re racist about music.” What she said knocked the wind out of me. There was that word again, racist. It made me immediately defensive.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “You know,” she said, trying to play down the fact she just called me racist again, “you just like that depressing white music.”

  “That’s not true!” I shouted over the music. “Dad took me to see Miles Davis, and I like Miles Davis.” I thought I was making a compelling argument and asked, “Would a racist like Miles Davis?”

  But Yvonne brushed my argument off without breaking step. “No,” she said, “but a really, really white person would.” And returned to the bump with my sister.

  I had had it. I ran to the living room and screamed, “Just because I don’t like Jody Watley does not make me a racist!” Yvonne stopped dancing and the dance party stopped. “She sucks!” I thought standing my ground might put this whole racist thing to bed. Instead, it made Dad poke his head out of the bedroom. He saw Yvonne and me standing across from each other, clearly having some difficulty, and attempted to retreat back to the bedroom when Yvonne screamed, “John! Come here!”

  And as he slinked out of the bedroom into the living room, everything in his walk made me wonder, What happened to my dad?

  Anora turned down the stereo as Yvonne stood with her arms crossed and nostrils flaring. “John, your daughter is disrespecting me and I’m not gonna take it from a kid.”

  “Dad,” I said, tearing up, “she called me a racist!” Surely he had to see how deeply this was affecting me.

  Dad looked at Yvonne before saying. “Well, you know, Mishna, you can be kind of snobby about black folks stuff .” I couldn’t believe he was siding with her.

  “But I’m not a racist!” I desperately cried to Yvonne and Dad. I had to make them see. But they were deeply connected in their judgment of me, and looking at me hysterical in the living room they seemed very close. It made me wonder if they had spent the entire time I was in France talking about the “Mishna problem,” and I could feel their reality slowly replacing my own, until I said, “Am I?”

  I looked at both their faces and neither of them knew what to say. They were neither reassuring nor condemning.

  “What makes me a racist?” I asked, not even sure what the word meant anymore. “Am I a racist because I don’t want to work at McDonald’s?” I asked. “Or because I don’t like Jody Watley?” I was completely confused and started to cry again, in a way that just pissed Yvonne off.

  “Anora,” Dad said. “Take the babies downstairs.” Anora grabbed Andre’s and Yvette’s hands and headed downstairs. Dad turned to me. “You seem to have some different values than the rest of us. . . .”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “That makes me racist?”

  “Not so much racist,” Dad said. “Just selfish and judgemental.” I couldn’t believe that was Dad’s idea of softening it.

  “I’m just different.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Yvonne said. “Mishna’s judging me, John. And I seriously don’t need it from her. I got enough on my plate, I don’t need her prissy attitude.”

  “Mishna,” Dad said, “you make any headway on getting that job yet?”

  “Since yesterday?” I asked. “No.”

  “Why don’t you get on that for your stepmom and stop causing trouble.”

  “Okay,” I said, wiping my face, “but I don’t think I’m a racist.”

  The next day after school and before swim practice, I went to McDonald’s to try to get a job. I was willing to give up swimming or violin if it would just make the house bearable again. Even if everyone I went to school with knew, and I wound up working there the rest of my goddamn life, and my grades and swimming slipped, and I couldn’t even get a scholarship to community college, I decided it would be so worth it if I could just not be the problem for a while. I walked past the McDonald’s playground, where I had spent so many hours as a child seesawing next to plastic Hamburglar or climbing into the Big Mac tower, and into the restaurant. I scanned the employees. They were all black, older than me, and remarkably intimidating at that moment. I wondered if they would even want to hire a white person, and whether just thinking that made me racist. Were racists just people that noticed color? Or was it expecting that they wouldn’t like me that made me a racist?

  I held my breath and walked up to a teenage girl who was the most friendly-looking of the bunch. She had two pair of earrings on, a big pair and a small pair, and she looked me up and down before she said an anemic, “Welcome to McDonald’s, can I take your order?”

  “Are there any openings?” I mumbled, cripplingly scared all of a sudden that she would laugh at me.

  “Pardon?” she said in a way that made one of the world’s most polite words sound rude.

  I said as loud as I could, which was a whisper: “An application . . . for a job?” She broke the tension with a big reassuring smile.

  “Oh yeah, you can fill out an application. Let me get my manager.” She said it nicely, like we were in the same club.

  “Um . . . before you do,” I said, “I thought I’d ask . . . How old do you have to be to work here?”

  “Fifteen,” she said. “But you need a note from your school.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said, trying to sound disappointed. “I’m too young.”

  “Shoot,” she said. “You look seventeen!”

  “Thank you . . . You, too,” I mumbled, but she had already moved on to the woman behind me and was talking over me saying, “Welcome to McDonald’s . . .” before I finished. I guess I wasn’t in the club anymore.

  I headed out the door, relieved and righteous. I knew I was too young for McDonald’s. None of my friends at school had those types of jobs. And the girl behind the counter kind of liked me, so I probably wasn’t obviously racist to people.

  I returned home that night trying my best to look really disappointed as I walked in the door. I let out a little sigh as I set my things down and Yvonne said, “What’s wrong with you now, Duck-Butt?”

  “Well,” I said, letting out another disappointed sigh. “I tried to get a job at McDonald’s . . . b
ut I’m too young to work there.”

  “I don’t believe you!” Yvonne said. “I bet if you talked to the manager, you could have worked something out.”

  “It didn’t sound like that kind of a deal,” I said. “They said I could work there when I’m fifteen if I get a note from my school.”

  “Oh,” Yvonne said. “Don’t act like you’re not thrilled.”

  “I’m not!” I said, lying through my teeth. “I’m sorry,” I pleaded even though I wasn’t.

  But Yvonne had turned on the silent treatment and wouldn’t look at me. It was a maneuver that made me desperate to please her. After three minutes of ignoring me and looking displeased, I was cooked. I tried to make eye contact with her, which she rejected. And finally I said, “I’m gonna try to earn as much money as I can this year babysitting. And next year, I’ll get a job-job, and quit swimming.” I knew I was over-promising, but Yvonne could be gone in a year and none of this would matter. For this moment, I needed things to be okay with her.

  She softened a little as she named her terms. “I want you to pay for all your clothes and school stuff from now on.”

  I was shocked; it was as though she had her terms ready.

  “And your swim stuff ,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said like a robot.

  “And next year you can pay us back for France.”

  I grimaced a little at that one. I couldn’t imagine how long that would take.

  “That’s a lot of money for a fourteen-year-old.”

  “You’ll be fifteen,” she said. “And it’s beaucoup bucks to me, too!”

  “Okay. I’ll try to pay you back,” I relented, knowing divorce was real and so was the possibility of either one of us stepping in front of a bus this year. But in the meantime, I couldn’t take the silent treatment, and I couldn’t take her calling me racist one more time. I just wanted us all to be happy.

  For the next week I relished my time in a new way. The fact that I wasn’t working made my schedule seem really luxurious. But things were different. Now I knew that no one cared if I did well at school, or violin, or swimming, or anything and I was having a hard time seeing the point. Negative ruminations would creep into my head while I was in the middle of homework or swim practice and exhaust me. And I would have to talk myself into focusing on the small picture, because the big picture sucked.

  A week later I was riding in the van with Dad, my sister, Andre, and Yvette. We had just picked the babies up from school, and were headed to the store to get some stuff to make dinner. Riding in the van when it was more than just one kid was always tricky because of the whole milk-crate situation. My sister was in the front, meaning I was stuck in the back with the babies, watching about a half cup of water roll back and forth. Dad was cursing at traffic, which Andre scolded and Yvette imitated.

  Someone would cut Dad off in traffic and he’d say, “Motherfucker.”

  And Andre would say, “Ooooh! You said a bad word.”

  And Yvette would say, “Mutterfucka.”

  My sister and I laughed a little every time Yvette cursed—but Dad had no idea what was going on since he was so absorbed by “how shitty everyone was driving.”

  Then, Dad ran over something. A rock or a pothole, nothing Dad even noticed, but whatever it was caused Andre’s crate to fall over. Then, both him and the crate slid down the inside of the van and out the back doors, which had only been kept together with the wire.

  “Andre!” Yvette screamed as he tumbled out the back of the van and hit the street, the back doors swinging freely. But Dad, oblivious, continued driving and showed no sign that he would be slowing the van any time soon. Andreus hit the street in the middle of traffic, and promptly picked himself up and made the choice to abandon his crate and chase the van.

  Cars behind us slowed to leave room for a six-year-old boy chasing a cargo van in two lanes of traffic, screaming, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”

  Anora, being in the front seat, took it upon herself to get Dad’s attention and tapped his shoulder and told our dad that the baby had fallen out of the back. But he didn’t hear her, and she had to tap him, “Dad . . . the baby fell out the back!”

  “What?” Dad said, looking up from the road confused. Anora’s eyes motioned to the back of the van, where, out the back two swinging doors, you could see Andre was struggling to keep pace with the truck. My father immediately hit the brakes, and Andreus caught up to us. There was a scrape on his head that was bleeding, but it was unbelievably minor considering. The whole incident took only about thirty seconds, but Andreus was horrified as he poked his head into the back of the van, “You guys were gonna leave me!”

  I reassured my very jarred brother as I pulled him into the van. “It’s okay. Dad was gonna stop the van—”

  But Dad interrupted me. “Mishna!” he screamed. “What the hell were you doing while you were supposed to be watching your brother?”

  I was baffled by how it could be my fault that his van was so jacked up, but as we drove home, I tried to get used to the idea.

  By the time we got home, I was in big trouble. I still didn’t quite know why, but I knew I was. My dad sent my sister and me to my room saying, “I got some stuff I need to deal with.” I wondered if Dad was going to use the time before Yvonne got home to try to get Andre to keep the van incident a secret. But it did seem like the scrape on his head would raise a lot of questions.

  I was reading a book for school while Anora tried on a one-dollar hat she had bought at Value Village, when we heard Yvonne come in. We looked at each other apprehensively, and went back to what we were doing. Then there was yelling for about five minutes. And finally Dad came down and said, “Mishna, can you come upstairs for a minute? Me and your stepmom want to talk to you.” I knew this wouldn’t end well.

  I walked into the kitchen, where Yvonne was looking the scariest I had ever seen her. She stared at the floor and she was so angry, I half expected that when she looked up her eyes would glow red. They didn’t. Instead she looked at me with brown eyes—brown eyes that said, “You hurt me, bitch.”

  Dad said, “Yvonne and I was talking. And we’re both pretty pissed off about what happened in the van today.” Yvonne, nostrils flaring, looked away—it made me want to beg again.

  “What did I do?” I asked. Yvonne shot me a quick look, registering her disgust at my attempt to play innocent, then looked away again.

  “You should have been on your J-O-B,” Dad said. What the hell had he told her had happened? Yvonne finally looked over at me to say, “You’re so selfish!” She spat it out it so venomously and so calculated that it bore into my head like a hollow-point bullet and shattered me from the inside. I’d thought I had really been making her happy lately, and now she was more pissed at me than ever.

  “I’m sorry!” I said, once again not sure what I was sorry for, but sure that apologizing was the way to find out.

  “You aren’t sorry,” Yvonne said, knowing I would have said anything to get myself off the hook. “You don’t care about this family. You are too busy thinking about going to France and your fancy school, and what you are gonna be and yourself to give a shit about what I’m dealing with.”

  Huh? “What?” I asked. “What did I do?”

  “You let your brother fall out of the van,” Dad said, cementing his version of the story. I laughed, either because I thought he was joking, or out of discomfort. Whichever it was, it made me look guilty.

  “That’s funny to you,” Yvonne said. “Your dad can’t be looking out for every little old thing.”

  “I couldn’t have stopped him!” I cried. “He’s too heavy.”

  “Please,” Dad said.

  Then Yvonne said, “Just admit it. You weren’t paying attention.” Defeated, I just nodded in agreement.

  “You’re right,” I said, crying hard now. I cried for forgiveness. I cried like it was my job. I cried because I didn’t know what was true, but I knew I needed them.

  “You
spoiled her, John!” Yvonne said. “She’s used to crying to you to get what she wants.” Yvonne shook her head. “She’s a princess.”

  “Well,” Dad said. “She’s not a princess at sports—”

  “John!” Yvonne said. “This is half your fault!” I was glad to hear that I wasn’t the only one at fault. She continued and turned her frustration at Dad for a second. “If you had a job, and didn’t need me supporting this whole goddamn family, your van wouldn’t be so janky that my kids are falling out.”

  Whoa. Supporting this whole family? I mean, I knew Dad didn’t have a lot of W-2 income, but I thought there were cash construction jobs or something. I looked at Yvonne standing there upset, and she looked like she was about to collapse. No wonder she was so pissed off at me all the time.

  This took me a moment to digest, her supporting us; it meant a lot of things. It meant that Dad was only pretending to still be the head of the house hold. It meant that I really did have to contribute, and it meant that I had probably been judging the hand that fed me. The least I could do to earn my keep was to adore her, like everyone else in the house. I wasn’t even doing that right. I was wholly ungrateful.

  Yvonne shook her head and looked sad and frustrated, like she was gonna cry. “Goddamn it!” she said. “Andreus could have gotten killed.”

  I looked at Dad cowering beside Yvonne, the big twenty-five-year-old provider and thought, So, Dad needs to not like me anymore, and think I’m a racist. It’s kind of his J-O-B. And at that moment I was so angry at him, I couldn’t see straight. Not because he couldn’t get it together to provide for us, but for keeping me in the dark about what was really going on.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, still crying but not with the same commitment. “It’s all my fault. I wasn’t paying enough attention to my brother. I was thinking about myself.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Yvonne said. “You better get with the program here, or step off. You really need to make a decision, Mishna.” She looked me right in the eye. “Are you a part of this family or not?” She was talking to my soul.