by Julie Smith
“What’s a big old girl like you doing in baby nightclothes?” the maid says.
“They’re from Japan,” I say like a white person, and I suddenly don’t feel so bad.
Louise is the one making the calls. They are calling Negro cab companies and sending taxis to Carolyn’s house. “How you doin’?” she says, trying to sound colored. I think she sounds fifteen and stupid, but everyone else thinks it’s hysterical and is laughing into a pillow. “Yeah, I just got off work, you could pick me up?” She rifles through the school directory. This is why she’s flunking math. She can’t even hold Carolyn’s address in her head for two minutes. When she hangs up, they all start screeching with laughter.
“I thought you liked Negroes,” I whisper. Though right now I hate her maid.
Louise looks around to see whether she does or not. She draws blank stares. We all took Civics last year and Mr. Ralph taught us to love President Kennedy, and now all the girls except me have giant hair rollers on their heads so they can look like Mrs. Kennedy in the morning. That is supposed to mean we like Negroes. I explain that to Louise, and she agrees. She has a picture of him in her room. Rena has one in her kitchen, but I’ve never told Louise that. President Kennedy is very good-looking, she says, but why am I asking about Negroes?
Because it’s their cabs.
Oh, says Linda B., they’re out anyway. We’ll make Carolyn crazy. Remember Teal? I remember Teal. They called her all night every night until she was driven to public school in sixth grade.
And I think, I have a feeling you are going to be sitting in public school when Carolyn is up there in Trigonometry at
Newman. I’m having a good time. I’m inside my own head, but I like being in their company.
Linda B. is the one who makes the calls to Carolyn’s house. She thinks she can do a voice deep enough to be a boy our age, and she asks for Carolyn. “Oh God, she used the F word and all kinds of Jewish words,” Linda says, covering the receiver. “What’s a shwotzer?”
“It’s schvartze,” I say, “and it’s a derogatory word for Negroes.” Then I realize they are going to think I’m Jewish the way Carolyn and Shira are, so I have to explain really fast that if they paid attention to the way words are derived they’d notice that there are people at school named Schwartz, and that means “black,” so it’s just a form of a German word. I don’t mention that my father is from Germany, and that he’s been secretly teaching me German since I was three years old. Well, talking to me in German. You don’t teach a child. My mother doesn’t know.
All the girls trip all over themselves telling me how smart I am. I think this is different from my pajamas. This is not something they are going to talk about differently when I leave the room. I am smart, and that fact is unassailably good, and in their presence I am better than they are no matter what subject comes up, as long as it isn’t fashion.
When it seems that Carolyn has been tormented as close to going back to public school as is possible for one night, Linda R. says we need to play Secrets. Louise dims the lights, and we sit in a circle, and we drink Coke. There are eight of us, and we’re going clockwise, and since we started with Meryl, I have three people ahead of me before I have to think up something to tell. I figure I’ll decide on the basis of what they tell. My father likes to have what he calls private jokes with himself. I want to think up a private joke with myself. If I can think of a secret that they think is something they can hold against me, but really is something I can use against them, it’ll be a lot of fun.
Of course, Meryl has a crush on our English teacher and she had a dream last week that she went down to his French Quarter apartment and had sex with him. This is a complete lie. People don’t have night dreams that everyone in the room has daydreams about, especially when nobody really wants to do anything more with that man than kiss him. I pick this apart in my head. It’s a secret about her, and it’s one people can use in the halls. Louise tells that Becca in her fourth period French class came right out in the girls’ bathroom and said that her parents got a divorce because her mother was having an affair, not her father, even though it’s always the father who fucks around. Becca is an atheist, and she doesn’t care if she has any friends, but boys call her up anyway because she has huge breasts. She tells them no and goes out with Tulane boys. I’m not sure what to do with this for the purposes of tonight, but I am sure what to do with it for life in general. I’m going to quit pretending I’m anything but an atheist. My father hasn’t said so, but I know he’s one. He won’t affiliate with a synagogue because he says synagogues in New Orleans are really just churches without crucifixes. I think he’s just figured out that this God thing makes no sense. I know I have.
When it’s my turn, something makes me tell that I speak German. It will be a private joke with myself. Linda B. says I have to say something, and I say, “Du bist böse und hässlich,” which means, You are mean and ugly, but I tell them it means, You are smart and beautiful. Linda says it sounds like the way Carolyn’s mother talks, and everyone else chimes in, agreeing. Carolyn’s mother throws in maybe one word that sounds sort of German, I tell them, and they mull that over for a while, ask me to say something else. I take it on as a parlor trick: They ask for Boys think I’m sexy, and I give them back, “Männer denken dass Ich rieche wie Pferdescheisse,” which means, Boys think I smell like horse shit. Linda wants to know how I know how to speak German when I’ve been sitting in Newman all these years with all of them, and Newman hasn’t taught it to me. My father’s from Germany, I tell them. No, he’s not, they say. Nazis are from Germany. They start looking at me hard. My last name is Cooper. That’s not a Jewish name. It’s not a German name. It was Kuper until my father got to Ellis Island. I shouldn’t have to explain this.
“I’m Jewish, for Chrissakes,” I say, which I think is a pretty good joke, but they don’t get it.
“How do we know you’re not a Nazi?” Linda says.
“Because my grandmother was killed by the Nazis,” I say. I want to go home.
They all get quiet for a moment. They all have grandmothers who are just like their mothers.
Finally, Louise, who is in my European History class and getting a B without cheating, says, “If the Nazis killed her, how can she be your grandmother when she was dead before you were born? I mean, the war ended in, what, 1945?”
“Because my father had a mother, and that’s how you have a grandmother, no matter what,” I say. I’m feeling better. Newman is a remarkable school. All of these girls will go on to college. Though some are going to take a detour through public school.
“Prove it,” Louise says.
And I tell them, “There’s a bundle of letters in my parents’ bottom desk drawer.” I can read every one. In German. Right up to the very end.
Mrs. Prescott has done the math for the mothers, and this six weeks is going to require As from all four of those girls just to get Ds. She’s not sure any of them is what she calls Newman material. Meryl says that Newman material also has a lot to do with donations to the school, and her father is going to give five thousand dollars, and there’s probably a secret formula that mixes grades with parents’ contributions, so she’s not worried. But she must have some kind of dignity problem, because she’s not willing to come out of tenth grade with an F in Geometry, and that means I’m still going to have four friends at least until June. Meryl says we should have a slumber party at my house.
If people are going to come to my party, I want to have it, and I want to have it just the way they would. My mother won’t have Rena spend the night, and when I think about it, I’m relieved but angry anyway. She also won’t buy me shortie pajamas. So I cut the legs and sleeves off my silk pajamas and make very good hems in them, and there’s not a thing my mother can do. There’s also not a thing the other girls can say because the truth is that my pajamas are really better than theirs. At least I hope they are. My mother lets me have Coke. She doesn’t know that Coke and Oreos are right while Pepsi
and Hydrox are wrong. Daddy knows, and he’s not telling. He doesn’t think I should have to squirm through life. But there’s no way to tell that to my mother because she likes to see me squirm. At least that’s the way it looks to me.
When my very cute house is quiet, and we’re all sitting around in my very cute living room, Linda R. looks at my parents’ desk and says, “So, is that their desk?” As if it is a peculiar kind of furniture found only in some obscure foreign country. Which to most of them it might be. I haven’t seen desks in most of their houses. Or bookshelves. I tell her yes. “So is that where you found the letters from the lady that got killed by the Nazis?”
I tell her yes.
Linda R. crawls right over to the desk and opens the bottom drawer. It’s the drawer where we keep all our memorabilia. Very neatly. My baby book, my mother’s baby book. A scrapbook of photos and an envelope of more photos. My mother’s diploma and my father’s honorable discharge from the U.S. Army, which he got four years and two months after he left Germany. And the packet of letters, which always lies nestled in the lower right-hand corner at the front. It’s impossible to miss, and Linda doesn’t miss it. She plucks it without the tenderness a person should afford these pages and pages of aerogramme paper, thin as onionskin. “Be careful with that,” is all I can think to say.
She undoes the ribbon, and they cascade to the floor. I leap to take them before they can fall out of order. I have read them, but I’ve read them like a detective who doesn’t want even fingerprints left behind. Linda pulls back, offended, as if I’ve called her a slob. “Hey, I just want you to read us one. Read it in German.”
Of course, the one on the top of the stack is the last one, the most frantic one. My grandmother has seen the light now that it is too late. She is writing to my father in New York, sorry she didn’t listen to him when he said they had to leave. My father has enlisted in the military to survive. I think you know people on Park Avenue, she says. People on Park Avenue have money. I understand you can still buy a way to America. Please ask your friends for help. I don’t know why I don’t hear from you. I read it in German. I translate without playing around.
“God, she didn’t get it, did she?” Meryl says.
“Did your dad really know a lot of rich people?” Louise asks.
I don’t say anything.
“Well, how come your father didn’t just go over and get her?” Louise says. “I mean, just get on a plane or something? That’s what I’d’ve done.”
I tell her it was 1943. That ought to connote more than the fact that commercial air travel didn’t exist, but it probably doesn’t.
Louise says, “So what happened next?” She is far too excited.
“She fucking died in a concentration camp,” I say. I fold the letter back and put it in its envelope and reassemble the packet of letters so it’s impossible to tell they’ve been touched. I put them back in the drawer. I go to sleep hours before they have their fill of Coke and meanness.
Mrs. Prescott comes to take me out of Geometry class, and Mrs. Walter makes her wait until the end of the period; such is her power. I’m not bothered until she tells me she’s taking me home. This is not something Mrs. Prescott would do; it’s too generous. People who work at Newman are not generous because they would be destroyed by the children. She protects herself, saying nothing in the car, and when we approach my house and I see my grandparents’ car and a police car, she doesn’t do anything except say that someone will get me my homework. I have to walk in alone.
This morning, an hour before Geometry class, my father killed himself in his office.
He found a bag made of plastic in the store, put it tight over his head, and waited to die. The policeman has a manila envelope with some evidence in it that he wants me to look at. Everyone in the room is wide-eyed and dry-eyed, and
I’m supposed to be that way too, but I bawl like a baby, and I can’t look at stupid evidence, and I don’t know who they think I am. I see Rena standing by the wall, and her eyes are wet and red. She loves my father. He always jokes with her, tries to use a Southern accent and says he’s from the south of Germany. I go over and hug her because among Mrs. Prescott and my mother and Rena, she’s the only hugging type I’ve seen today, even though she’s tall and skinny. The policeman wants a sample of my handwriting. My mother tries to sound protective. “She doesn’t need to give it to you,” she says. “We’ve got a million samples all over the house.”
Rena whispers to me that they have checked her handwriting too. Rena has very girlish writing. In fact, she writes like a fifth-grade girl. Which, if I think about it, is probably what she was when she quit school. I tell them I’ll write anything they want if they will tell me what this is all about.
In the manila envelope is one of my father’s mother’s letters. It’s the one I read at my party, but that doesn’t mean anything because it was the one on top. Scotch-taped to it is a note. The note says, Hitler didn’t kill your mother. You killed your mother.
I go over to the bottom drawer of the desk. Everyone follows me. I can’t believe no one has looked. My mother knows about the letters. I pull the drawer open. Slowly, while my mother explains rapid-fire that this is where the letter came from, that it was in a packet, that she should have thought of this before. The packet of letters is gone. Well, the letters are gone, but the ribbon is lying on the bottom of the drawer, swirled around. And under it is a scrap of paper. I recognize it. It’s torn from the pad we keep by the telephone in the kitchen. In the same handwriting as on the note attached to the letter, it says, You’re not so smart.
SCARED RABBIT
BY TIM MCLOUGHLIN
Irish Channel
Okay, okay, so the mayor is looking to start a new antiterrorist task force and he only wants the cream of the crop from law enforcement.”
Tommy Mulligan had settled into his joke-telling stance, his back to the bar, elbows resting on the hammered copper surface. He faced his audience, seven or eight other cops and a few nurses, standing in a loose semicircle at the back of the crowded room. Thursday was nurses’ night at the Swamp Room, and the place was packed. Nurses’ night at a cop bar was always busy. Nurses’ night at a cop bar in the Irish Channel was very busy. Nurses’ night at the Swamp Room was a zoo.
“Which mayor?” someone asked.
“What?” Tommy said.
“Which mayor?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Not this bald prick.”
“Better than Barthelemy,” another said.
“So’s bin Laden.”
“Could it be Morial?” a nurse from Touro suggested.
“Screw him too. All the money in heaven for Comstat, but splits hairs about the goddamn raises.”
“It don’t matter which mayor,” Tommy said, sensing he was losing his audience. “It’s a joke. Let me tell the fuckin’ joke.”
Tommy had been hitting it heavy for the last hour, and his face was already flushed and sweaty. He’d reached that point in the evening where he thought he was the wittiest son of a bitch on God’s green earth, and that was usually Lew Haman’s cue to leave. But Lew wasn’t going anywhere quite yet tonight. He sat silently next to Tommy, his back to the others, facing the bar in the rear, its rows of bottles decorated with casually tossed toy stethoscopes and white garters.
The Swamp Room had been a real bucket of blood when Lew was a kid, with a large scratched and smoke-yellowed Plexiglas panel in the floor. Beneath it two alligators were kept in a tank that, as he thought about it now as an adult for the first time, had to have been woefully small for them. His father would let him come in to watch them be fed, and more than the feeding itself he remembered the horrendous stench when the panel was lifted.
The space where the Plexiglas had been was covered with stone tile now, and sometimes used as an impromptu tiny dance floor. The whole bar had been rehabbed about twenty years ago, just long enough that it was beginning to look shabby again.
“So he calls in
two state troopers,” Tommy continued, “two FBI agents, and two New Orleans detectives.”
It was the awful end to an awful night, and Haman was not in the mood to indulge his partner’s humor. He drained his Jameson on the rocks and signaled the bartender silently to bring another. Seventeen years, he thought. Three to go. For the thousandth time lately he lamented joining the force so late in life. He’d come on an old man of thirty, and now he felt like a dinosaur at forty-seven, old even for a detective; and fuck that television Law and Order bullshit with fifty-five-year-olds running down gang-bangers in an alley. Everybody knew that if you hadn’t secured a desk job, you were an asshole to stay on past your early-, or at most mid-forties. You were an asshole or you were Lew Haman, with three years to go. Same thing, he decided.
“So the mayor takes all six guys, and he drives them upstate, somewhere in the woods, middle of fuckin’ nowhere. He tells them ‘Here’s your first test. Go into the woods and find a rabbit. Bring it back out here.’”
They had been only fifteen minutes from going off-duty when they got the call. Lew had planned to go straight home after work, to skip the Swamp Room, the nurses, the drinking. He made such plans often, and rarely adhered to them, but you never knew. It might have happened tonight. Then the call came in.
Two uniforms had been driving along Magazine Street toward Jackson when a short, heavyset Hispanic woman stepped off the curb into traffic and waved them down. She told them that two kids had just robbed her on Constance Street. One held her face tightly scrunched in his hand while the other cut the shoulder strap on her bag with a large knife. The one holding her face pushed her backwards unexpectedly, and she fell. Then they ran off, laughing.
