by Rita Ciresi
“I don't think we should be here,” I said.
“Nonna would want us to.”
“There might be a ghost.”
“I hope there is,” Lina said. “I want to talk to her.”
“I hear one,” I said. “I hear somebody, Lina!”
The noise came from the stairwell, the sound of one foot on the stairs, then another, coming down slowly, to haunt us, kill us, spirit us away. “Let's go, let's go,” I said, unwilling to leave without Lina. But she stood her ground, forcing me to stay.
The ghost got to the bottom of the stairs and crossed the living room. When she appeared in the door, she was tall and broad-shouldered and dressed in a black jacket, white turtleneck, and black knickers, like a horsewoman in one of those books about girls who want to be jockeys. Her black hair was cropped short, as if someone had shorn the hair to follow the contour of a cereal bowl plopped upon her head. She had eyes only for Lina. “Pasqualina?” she asked, holding out her hands.
Lina stepped back. Resenting not being singled out, I rushed forward and threw myself in her arms. “Auntie Pat,” I said, “it's me, it's me!”
The party went more or less as I had imagined it. Lina and I watched as people filed by to hold Mama's hand. Auntie Pat stood behind Mama, refusing to sit in one of the folding chairs. A beautiful death, the relatives said. She looked lovely.
“They did a wonderful job with her,” Mama agreed. I wondered how she could say that. Lying in the coffin, Nonna had looked like an old, sunken doll with too much red on her cheeks and lips, the sort of woman Mama would have referred to as a made-up hussy had she met her on the street.
“Lovely, my eye,” Auntie Pat said later, as she parked her imposing form between Lina and me on the sofa. Lina moved a good three inches away. “Talking about her as if she were a bride. Putting so much paint on her you could hardly see the true character of her face. It was a travesty.”
Because I had no idea what that word meant, I kept quiet. Lina did too. She looked especially uncomfortable sitting on the couch in the room where she had spent so many hours with Nonna. She kept looking around at the Victrola and the piano and the records, probably thinking about how her refuge from Mama was lost forever.
“So, girls,” Auntie Pat said in her crisp voice, “we have a lot of catching up to do. Tell me about yourselves. What are your favorite subjects at school? What are your hobbies?”
By prodding Lina—she always turned to Lina first—Auntie Pat learned that Lina liked Language and Music best, and that someday she wanted to be a musician.
“You play piano, of course,” Auntie Pat said, looking at the upright. Mama, who was sitting on the piano bench next to one of her cousins, looked back. “And I've heard you like to sing. Where do you take lessons?”
Mama glared at Auntie Pat.
“I don't have lessons,” Lina said.
“Why not?”
“I don't know,” Lina said crossly. “I just don't.”
“You should have a teacher,” Auntie Pat said, “someone to encourage you and give you advice.” She looked at Mama. “Why don't you send her?”
Mama rubbed her forefinger and thumb together, as if she were feeling for a bill that didn't exist. “She takes music at school.”
“But she should have private lessons.”
The word private—like the word money—made Mama scornful. “She already has enough ideas in her head.”
“And what's wrong with ideas?” Auntie Pat asked. “They're very good things to have.”
Mama turned to her cousin and said, “Lina thinks she's going to be a stage actress.”
“I do not,” Lina said hotly.
Mama laughed. “La stella d'oro,” she said. “The golden star!”
Auntie Pat clearly didn't approve of Lina's ambition. You could tell she was struggling to decide whether to side with Mama or Lina. In the end, Lina won out. “And what if she does want to be a star?” Auntie Pat finally said. She turned to Lina. “Let me tell you right now, you can be whatever you want to be.”
Lina sat there with her shoulders hunched, tears clinging to her eyelashes. “No, I can't,” she blurted out. “I'll never be, I'll never be!”
The room went silent. All the relatives turned and stared. Lina stood up, ran across the room, opened the front door, and raced out of the house. Mama clucked her tongue and shook her head. Turning to her cousin, she said, “Il bordo.”
Lina was on the brink. Not wanting to be the one who pushed her over, I avoided her in the weeks to come. It wasn't hard to do. After the party was over, after Auntie Pat took herself back to New York (where, Mama said scornfully, she would rejoin her lady friend), after the for-sale sign went up in the front yard of Nonna's house and the backyard became a playground for my cousins, Lina grew morose and withdrawn. She went for long walks by herself after school and pretended to be doing her homework for hours every night after supper. She wrote things in a notebook that she referred to as her diary, and every morning she put on gobs of the powder that Nonna had given her, so that even I, who liked the smell, got a headache.
One morning I came downstairs just in time to witness Mama slap Lina's face. “You're a woman now,” Mama said. Lina stood there, her body stiff and rigid as Mama hugged her. She let Lina stay home from school. All day long I puzzled over this, but when I came back home and asked Lina for an explanation, she told me to mind my own business.
By then I was getting used to such remarks, hardened to that sort of treatment. Yet I was sick of being ignored, and even more tired of people trying to get me to take sides with them—Mama,Lina, and Auntie Pat. I wanted to be on my own side, wherever it was, and whatever it might mean.
Summer was coming. I waited for it with high hopes, and when it finally arrived, I cleared out a small square of dirt behind the back hedge and pretended I had my own house. I played until the light began to grow dim and Mama called me in. I got ready for bed to the pulse of the crickets. Sometimes, from Nonna's yard, the loud voices of my boy cousins wafted into the bedroom. I watched them from the window. They were sprawled on the ground, plotting their futures as they stared up at the sky.
Every month Mama made Lina soak her bloodstained underpants in the bathroom. Looking into that water, watching the bubbles glisten and fade, I realized with a sinking feeling what the stars held for me.
EVERY DAY BEFORE we set off for school, Mama warned us: Don't go looking for trouble. Lina and I listened. We steered clear of the boys, and at the start of gym period, we always lingered in the locker room and let the black girls go upstairs first so they couldn't step on the heels of our cheap W. T. Grant sneakers. When Lina and I finally climbed the steep metal staircase to the gym, Miss Bowman was in the middle of taking roll. She glared at us over her clipboard. She always called us the Lupo sisters. Because her chest was flat as a board, Lina and I called her the Carpenter's Dream.
The Dream's short red-and-white kilt swung back and forth, and the pom-poms on the back of her socks briskly bobbed as she moved through the crowd, dividing us into four teams of three black girls and two white girls each. Lina made Team C, but I ended up on Team D, which meant I got stuck wearing a pinny, a faded kelly-green apron that tied around the neck and waist, wet with sweat from the girl who had worn it the class before.
As I fastened my pinny, I stared at the pale face of Carpenter's Dream. The Dream had skin the color of a split baked potato before you put on the butter, and her dirty-blond hair was conspicuous in the halls of Roger Sherman High, which in 1976 was an uneasy mix of two black kids for every Italian. In the morning, all the doors to Roger Sherman were locked except for the front entrance, which was equipped with a metal detector. If the keys on a boy's belt or the beads on a girl's cornrow braids set off the red light, a fat ominous woman, a deaf-mute known only as Matron, made the culprits stand spread-eagled against the wall while she passed a large black wand over every inch of their body. Rumor had it that Matron took the wand home at night and spent hour
s hugging it between her own monstrous thighs. I was Catholic. I believed it.
Lina and I had ended up in public school because our father kept getting laid off from the Dixon Park Soda Company, and he no longer could afford to pay our tuition at Holy Redeemer. At first it had been a shock to go to Roger Sherman High, where plywood boards were the only view from the broken windows, rats fed on bag lunches left in the lockers, and the doors were removed from the bathroom stalls so the girls couldn't shoot up or get raped. But we soon got used to the grungy mud-colored classrooms and the way the students heckled the teachers during assembly and started food fights on Wednesdays—Spaghetti and Meatball Day—in the cafeteria. (No one ever started a food fight on Friday—Pizza Day—although once a major brawl erupted when fish sticks were served.) You never knew what would happen at Roger Sherman High. After the dreary monotony of Holy Redeemer, Lina and I sort of enjoyed the adventure.
Everyone flouted the dress code at Roger Sherman, which mandated no leather pants or skirts, no platform shoes or gold chains, and no bald heads on girls. Gym suits—baggy green and white affairs with an unflattering elastic around the waist—were required for Phys Ed, but after the first week Lina and I abandoned them. We had gotten our fill of uniforms at Holy Redeemer and were relieved to find that the only standard outfit appearing on the Roger Sherman courts consisted of thin ribbed tank tops—often worn without a bra underneath—and tight, faded cutoffs that covered the butt only—no thigh.
After getting Teams A and B started on the other court, Carpenter's Dream came over and supervised our tip-off. The girls exploded into action as fast and as loud as the M-80 firecrackers that blew off in the boys’ bathroom from time to time. As usual, I lagged behind. Roger Sherman girls played for blood, and any girl who wasn't willing to scratch or kick her way to the basket had better hang back. I loped up and down the court, a useless addition to the pinny team, only touching the ball once, when it got slammed out of someone's hand and rolled back to me. I stood there for a moment, stunned to feel the orange leather beneath my palms. Then I turned and ran down the court, a solo flight that culminated in a call for traveling and a missed basket.
All the other pinnies groaned at me, and when Carpenter's Dream turned to focus on the other court, the black girls on my team began elbowing and shin-kicking me out of the way, running behind me, shouting taunts that ended with the phrase white girl, which sounded like why girl, why girl. Sweat flew off my face as I ran back and forth, trying to avoid their jabs, until I realized I should hang back in the center and not even follow them. I stood near the sidelines until Carpenter's Dream's shrill whistle declared that Lina had been fouled. Lina stepped out of the court to throw the ball back in. But instead of throwing it to someone on her team, she deliberately slammed the ball toward me, socking me right in the stomach.
I stood there, then threw the ball to another Italian girl—Mary Annetta Giunta on the non-pinny team, who threw it to Maria Feminelli, one of the pinnies. The rules of the game suddenly had changed. It took a moment for Carpenter's Dream to figure it out, but as we charged up and down the court, four white girls to six black, the Dream futilely ran up and down the sidelines, yelling, “Black girls! Black girls! White girls! Keep to teams! Pinnies with pinnies! Pinnies must play with pinnies!”
As her whistle shrieked, a crowd of girls fell in a heap under the basket, and a string of multicolored beads around someone's neck broke and burst in a hundred directions on the floor. Charlene Stewart went skidding into the wooden bleachers. When she sat up and put her hand to the back of her head, her fingers came away sticky and red. She fainted.
Charlene was taken to the nurse and the rest of us were sent to the main office, where after an hour and a half of stubborn silence on the part of us all, two black girls (Felicia Green and Terry Moore) and two whites (Lina and me) were sent to the new assistant principal's office for punishment.
Mr. Tyrone Oliver had played with the Green Bay Packers in the sixties, supposedly kneeling on the goal line and saying a prayer every time he made a touchdown. I had seen Mr. Oliver floating down the hall, head and shoulders above even the tallest of boys. He always wore pale yellow shirts and jeweled cuff links, a uniform that seemed to prove he was the coolest thing ever to grace the halls of Roger Sherman. But as Mr. Oliver leaned against his office desk, scornfully looking over our too-tight tank tops, painted fingernails, and hairy muscled legs, he suddenly seemed huge and frightening. All four of us girls looked set to crap our cutoffs until he opened his mouth, and we discovered with great glee that he had a southern accent.
He called us guls. He said we guls were a discredit to Ra-jah Sher-man. He said we were a discredit to New Haven. He pointed at Felicia. “You fixin’ to scrub floors for the rest of yuh life?”
“No, suh,” Felicia said. “I'm a-fixin’ to sing backup for Diana Ross.”
“You gul.” He pointed at Lina. “How yuh mama gonna feel if you end up cleaning toilets?”
Lina shrugged, knowing that Mama valued a clean toilet bowl above everything except a good bingo game.
Mr. Oliver did not bother to interrogate me or Terry. He said something that I couldn't figure out about Abraham Lincoln and
George Washington Carver, and he gave us some jazz about Booker T. Washington sleeping for seven nights in a street gutter because Booker T. knew the value of a good ed-u-ca-shun even if we guls didn't.
Then Mr. Oliver said he was going to teach all us guls an old-fashioned lesson. We could just move on down to the locker room and clean the sinks and toilets until we had gotten a good taste of what our lives would be like if we didn't straighten up and hit the books. He would have Matron open the janitor's closet. “Now get out of my office,” he said. “I don't want to see yuh ugly faces here again. And yank up yuh bra strap,” he told Felicia. “It's showing.”
With exaggerated motion, Felicia lifted the shoulder of her tank top and deliberately snapped the elastic of her black bra strap into place. Then we all left the office. Dangling from our fingers the blue paper passes that permitted us to walk the hall between classes, we sauntered down to the locker room, which was empty because fifth period already had started. We stood in the hall waiting for Matron, looking uneasily at one another. Like a model on the end of the runway, Lina threw her black hair over her shoulder, stuck out her hip, and pouted her lower lip. Terry looked down and twirled the rawhide braid around her wrist. Felicia inspected her purple fingernails, then took her hand and rubbed the skin below her neck, looking over the clots of dirt on her fingers before she brushed them away. Then she pulled back her shoulders and did a very accurate imitation of Mr. Oliver strutting down the hall. “He don't like my bra strap?” she grumbled. “Oughta be glad I got on a bra at all.” She looked at Terry. “And what he talking about, us giving New Haven a bad name. Already got it one.”
“Worse than Bridgeport,” Terry said. “Don't even got jai-alai.”
“Got the shitty old Coliseum, gonna fall down before the year 2000,” Felicia said.
Lina finally ventured to join the conversation. “Got Yale,” she said.
“Where that at?” Felicia asked, and we all laughed.
“Rich-boy school,” Lina said.
“Smart-boy school,” Terry said.
“Foreign country,” I said.
After Matron opened the closet with a ring of keys that would outdo any jailer's, she handed us sponges, a can of Bon Ami, a broom, and two toilet brushes in plastic pails. Then she locked the closet and disappeared down the hall, her wand swinging against her hip like a cop's nightstick.
We went back into the locker-room bathroom. It stunk of mold and mice and almost enough cigarette smoke to cover up the odor of a backed-up toilet. We put all the supplies on the bench next to the first row of lockers.
Lina crinkled up her nose with disgust. “What're we supposed to do now?”
“I ain't emptying no cunt rags,” Terry said.
“Only one thing certain,” Felicia told Lin
a. “You started it, so you clean the most toilets.”
Lina gave Felicia an icy look, then grabbed one of the toilet brushes. Felicia grabbed the other, and for a moment I thought they might start dueling. But then Felicia took her brush and went into one of the stalls along the left wall, followed by Terry. I trailed Lina into a stall on the right. Lina crinkled her nose again as she gingerly lifted the toilet seat and lowered the brush in, halfheartedly swishing around some of the water. None of us bothered with the Bon Ami.
Lina and I had gone through the motions of cleaning three toilets on the right when it started, as we all knew it would—the real standoff between us and them, not with shoves and punches and pushes, but with words.
From across the room I heard Felicia say, “Guinea girls think they too good to wash toilets.”
“Dream on,” Lina said beneath her breath.
“Don't pay any attention to them,” I whispered. But it was hard not to.
“Guinea girls wear too much perfume,” Terry called out loudly.
“Guinea girls go to hell, eat hamburger on Friday,” Felicia said.
“Guinea girls got the mustaches,” Terry said.
Felicia laughed. “Guinea girls put out big-time for black boys.”
Terry whooped.
“My brother, he make it with a white girl,” Felicia shouted. “Said it felt like fucking a frozen turkey.” She laughed. “Then he do it with a guinea girl. She wearing so much gold he say he feel like he fucking King Tut.”
“More like he fucking Big Butt,” Terry said. “Guinea girls got them big butts.”
Lina shoved past me and walked out of the stall. “So what?” she said. “Nigger girls got ‘em too, and bigger. And they stink up the halls with their hair straightener.”
Felicia and Terry dropped the brush into the toilet and came out of their stall. I peeked out at Lina, standing in the middle of the bathroom with her hands on her hips, and then I reluctantly came out and stood there too. Behind us were the toilets, and over to the side stood the sink, a huge bathtublike contraption that sprayed water like a sprinkler if you pushed the button. But we all knew the sink didn't work and that nobody intended to fix it. Nobody ever washed their hands after going to the bathroom at Roger Sherman.
