“If the man’s sperm and the woman’s egg come together, they make a baby. And then you don’t have the splash while the baby is growing inside your belly,” she said, pointing to me.
“Wait—I have to grow the baby?” I asked, incredulous. “In here?” I said, pointing to my belly button.
“Yes.”
“No way, José. I’m not doing that.”
“Everyone does it, Dani.”
“Not Cory! Cory doesn’t do it.” The burgeoning coals of what would become my feminist fire were sparking to life as I pointed at my brother, innocently sitting next to me. “How do they get that baby out of there?”
“It comes out through your vagina.”
It was impossible for either of us to know it at the time, but those six words changed my life. At seven years old, I had barely become acquainted with my vagina before I knew I had to protect it at all costs.
I relayed this information to Grandma as we approached the school.
“Babies come out through your stomach and vagina,” I said emphatically. “I am not doing that.”
Exhausted from laughing, Grandma finally gave in. “Okay, child, whatever you want. Have a good day at school,” she said, kissing my forehead before I ran inside.
5.
The fact that I don’t believe in God certainly didn’t stop me from lying to his employees for a few years.
We’re not a religious family in the traditional sense. I’ve only seen my family genuflect when boxes of Entenmann’s pastries are on sale two-for-one at the Grand Union, and 60 percent of us were born so far out of wedlock our birth certificates list “who cares” in the space where you indicate the father’s name. Christmas was a time best spent ripping pages out of the three-hundred-pound Sears catalog and begging for thousands of toys that would never make their way under the tree; Easter was the season for eating tie-dyed egg salad for a week straight to help revive you from the self-administered, candy-induced diabetic shock of your overflowing Easter baskets. Who rose from the what? Pass the M&M’s.
I was baptized in the Catholic Church a few months after I was born and didn’t step foot in a church again for seven years. They were big on protecting the soul, but there wasn’t much God in my life following my baptism, aside from the casual way every adult in my family took the Lord’s name in vain every ten seconds. Like all Black families raised in the jive-talking seventies and politically oppressive eighties, “goddamn” was the most widely used descriptor of all things animal, vegetable, or mineral. Though sometimes used aggressively, it was primarily a gentle way to indicate the world-weariness and overall exhaustion cultivated deep in the bones of all middle-aged Black folks. It filled a space, and your job was to figure out how to read between the lines of what each “goddamn” actually meant. “I said pass the goddamn salt” meant you were tired after a long day, certainly too tired to repeat yourself. “Do you know where my goddamn gloves are?” was code for “Which one of you moved my stuff after I expressly told you not to move my stuff?” The rapid-fire, multiple wielding of “goddamn” was a threat-level-red situation, a clear sign that you had just pushed someone to the limits of their sanity. It wasn’t unusual for my grandma to condemn me straight to hell for not letting her goddamn play the goddamn Nintendo she goddamn bought for these little goddamn motherfuckers. It was her expletive-laden form of praying that someone, anyone, would give her the strength to keep from murdering me for trying to level up on The Legend of Zelda when it was clearly her turn. When she dies, I will make sure her tombstone simply reads:
goddammit, i told you kids to leave me alone
We were a baptized bunch, but regular church attendance was never on the menu. My grandmother spent her Sunday afternoons chain-smoking foot-long Carlton 120’s and yelling at the Jets, Giants, Mets, or Knicks to throw, kick, punt, or pass whichever ball was in play. My grandfather open-mouth snored loudly in the armchair next to her, shifting slightly every time she yelled, “Shut up, Jack,” his snoring apparently more irritating than her exasperated wails. He usually went back to sleep quickly, patiently waiting for her to calm down or just give up so he could change the channel to WPIX and watch one of the Westerns that aired all day. If Sunday was the Lord’s day, we were only taught to pray to the gods of the split-finger fastball and John Wayne.
Thinking I’d miraculously skipped out on all manner of religious instruction, you can imagine my surprise when out of the blue my mother informed me that I had to attend church school in preparation for my communion. “Don’t forget to go with Erin and Mrs. Garrett after school on Tuesday,” she said nonchalantly one day as she mixed a jug of powdered milk at the kitchen counter. “You’re going to church school.”
There was little to protest since I had no idea what she was talking about, but I gathered up all of my seven-year-old might to rail against the idea of extra instruction. “Why do I have to go to school after I go to school?!” I complained, tiny pigtail braids slapping against my ears. I was a decent student, but my afternoons were already filled with chasing Tommy Garrett around the swings and punching him in the solar plexus for calling me a tomboy.
“You’re going to church school.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“Why?”
“Because I need a goddamn break,” she said, dropping the wooden spoon in the container, “and your goddamn grandmother is making me do it, so I’m making you goddamn do it.”
Having heard the multiple Henderson “goddamn”s, I knew it was useless to fight her.
It was a short walk to the squat, stone church that housed the answers to life, the universe, and why my family thought I needed to be indoctrinated in a dominant religion that had wreaked globally destructive havoc on brown people who looked just like me for centuries. Mrs. Garrett walked a group of us to the church the first week, but after that we were expected to get there on our own, even though six-year-old Adam Walsh had been kidnapped and murdered three years earlier and concerns about child abduction were on the rise.
Throughout the eighties, kidnapping was deployed as an empty threat by overworked, exhausted parents who wanted to keep us close enough to elude Child Protective Services but far enough away to not ever have to see, hear, or smell anything we were playing with. “Oh, you want to run off and play on Elm Street without telling me where you’re going? That’s the fast-track to getting kidnapped!” my mom said, looking very refreshed after the three-hour nap my absence afforded her. These days, children are embedded with GPS systems in utero, but in the 1980s, we had a low-rent solution to potential child snatching: the secret password. Every parent in my neighborhood used this method, teaching us to ask strangers for the secret password before they tried to take us anywhere. The built-in trick was that the potential kidnapper wouldn’t know the password, so you could then scream or run away. It’s an oddly polite reaction to a serious attempted crime, and, to my knowledge, it never worked once. Can you imagine?
“Get in the van.”
“Pardon me, sir, but do you happen to know my secret password?”
“Uhhhh . . . pizza.”
“’Twas peanut butter and jelly, my good man! Now unhand me and I’ll be on my merry way.”
The secret password gave some parents enough ammunition to appear capable and concerned while still forcing us to stay out of their way as much as possible. And, in a brilliant stroke of the prescient victim-blaming mentality that would become de rigueur thirty years later, it also made any potential kidnappings entirely our own fault.
“Didn’t you used to have three children?”
“Well, Suzanne didn’t use the secret password when a stranger tried to force her into their car, so she had to get snatched. Dem’s da breaks! Let’s strap on some shoulder pads, stick some Lee Press-On talons on our fingernails, and get a shrimp cocktail.”
We toddled off to church school, with
only God and a few snack-based phrases to protect us.
* * *
—
Holy Rosary was a small stone church on Windermere Avenue. It reminded me of the type of house you would see in a fairy tale, an unassuming place where the townspeople lived. The neighborhood was quiet; if you kept walking down the street, you would hit the top of the lake.
The schoolroom was just a room in the basement, filled with small plastic chairs lined up in rows. The teacher, a dowdy woman who was likely a volunteer, made us all sit down. We instinctively knew to be quiet, since “school” was in the title, but, as a kid who never went to church, I had no idea what else was about to happen.
After the teacher handed out the pink catechism books, we were invited to go to the wooden booth to confess to the priest. I sat in the dark box and was startled when the small rectangular screen slid open next to my elbow. “Hello, my child.” The priest asked me to call him Father, a word that sounded unfamiliar in my mouth, and confess my sins. As a book-obsessed seven-year-old I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, so I did the thing that came naturally: I lied my ass off.
“Um, I broke my mom’s favorite mug,” I said confidently.
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Uhhh . . . bad?”
“Say ten Our Fathers and three Hail Marys.”
Well, that was easy.
Like serial killers and three of the worst men I ever dated, I never really had a grasp on what I was supposed to feel sorry about. Week after week, I filled the confessional with lies. I yelled at my teacher. I stole my best friend’s favorite toy. I kicked a dog. I punched my brother in the nuts. No one ever caught on, verified my story, or gave me more of a punishment than walking to a pew to chant a few quick Our Fathers on a plastic rosary. It slowly dawned on me: if I could lie and be quickly forgiven, there was nothing to stop me from actually doing some of the stuff I was making up. Catholicism flipped a switch and turned me on to a life of crime.
First, I stole a pack of purple jelly bracelets from Hanley’s Lotto, which doubled as a five-and-dime. Purple was my favorite color, and the bracelets were the most prominent status symbol of the first-grade set. Instead of buying them one at a time, I took the whole package and stacked them halfway up my arm. Within three weeks, I had a rainbow of stolen goods that I cleverly looped into a jump rope. I said a few Hail Marys and slept soundly.
My neighbor Kurt always teased me for being tall; after I learned that I could be forgiven for anything in confession, I started beating him up with gusto.
My days of lying and thieving lasted until my first communion. I had a loose grasp on what I needed to do in order to be communed aside from an agonizing day spent in Sears buying a miniature wedding dress replete with a tiny child-bride veil, but the fact that my whole family was coming seemed like a big deal. My great-grandmother, Sweetie Pie, came up from New York City wearing her finest daytime turban, her light skin offset by a pair of giant dark sunglasses. She had a deep, croaking voice and spoke in a slow, quiet way that made her seem like the most glamorous woman I’d ever meet. It’s hard to imagine her sitting on a graffiti-filled subway and enduring a nauseating two-hour-long bus ride to get there when she clearly should have arrived in a crystal carriage powered by unicorns. Sweetie Pie and Grandma talked on the phone almost every day, but she only came to see us a few times a year. She always carried a camera with her, the kind with the long flash cube attached to the top, and would read books with me for as long as I wanted. When the rest of the city family visited once a year, she drove up with them but hung out with us. While the other adults were in the kitchen cooking, playing cards, and drinking beer, Sweetie Pie was outside, listening intently to our instructions about which rock was a base for the game we just made up. She took pictures of us while we ran around; without her there to document it, the happier part of my childhood would be an unattainable memory.
My mom curled her hair into a Farrah Fawcett bouffant, covered her entire eyelids up to the brows in turquoise eye shadow, and wore a maroon, tapered jumpsuit under a short white blazer; she looked like a Rainbow Brite doll about to turn tricks. My grandmother was busy being choked by a shirt with so many ruffles I thought her skin would be permanently marked with undulating waves, but her Jheri curl was spritzed to high heaven, shining brighter than the safety reflectors on my bike wheels. My grandfather wore the same thing he always wore—a thin plaid shirt with the top two buttons undone and a pair of jeans—but he deigned to put on a pair of shiny black shoes. My brother was also part of this communion and wore a tiny black suit with a white shirt and tie. There’s a picture of all of us standing in front of the church; without context, it looks like a hooker, her parents, and their madame are happier than ever to marry their youngest children to each other before they hand them over to the pope.
The ceremony was long and forgettable; legions of children marched up to the podium one by one and listened to the priest mumble something in Latin before he shoved a dry Styrofoam disc in our mouths and made the sign of the cross over his elaborate robe. The body of Christ tasted like construction paper and felt like a giant, doughy penny as it dissolved on my tongue.
When it was over, I asked my grandmother excitedly what was next. I was already planning my next attack on Kurt and wanted to know when I could come back to church to be forgiven for it.
“What do you mean, ‘what’s next’?” my grandmother said.
“When do I come back to confession?” I said.
My grandmother looked down at me, her mouth terse and one eyebrow raised. “Child, we’re not coming back here! We don’t have time to get your ass to church every week.” She walked away briskly, barking at everyone to pile into the cab so we could go home in time for her to catch the next game.
My communion marked the beginning of my soul’s salvation and the end of stealing. It was a relief—I had a hard time believing in God, and I was running out of stuff to make up in confession.
* * *
—
Even though I didn’t have to go back to church anymore, I was still learning how to keep on the right side of good versus bad. One day, while grocery shopping with Mom in Grand Union, I looked down and saw a roll of bills on the ground held together with a thin rubber band around the middle. I picked it up; it was heavy in my hand and the size of a roll of toilet paper. The outside bill was a twenty; even if the rest of the roll was singles, it was the most money I’d ever held in my life. I ran over to Mom.
“Look what I found!” I was excited. Like any seven-year-old, I was well aware of the Finders Keepers rule—anything you found that didn’t directly belong to you was now yours. It was a biased and rather Republican approach to material goods, but now that the law was working in my favor, it felt just.
“Give me that!” Mom snatched the roll out of my hand. “Where did you get this?”
I pointed to the ground. “There. It was on the ground!” I was already calculating how many video game quarters this would yield and how much I could rub it in Tommy’s face that I was now at the top of the Pole Position scoreboard.
“Come on,” Mom said, abandoning our cart.
We walked to the front corner of the store. The manager sat on a raised, dais-like platform in an office-size box. His gray vest strained at his midsection, the buttons threatening to pop at such velocity they would surely take out someone’s eye. He peeked out at us through the window at the counter. “May I help you?”
“My daughter found this in an aisle,” Mom said, handing up my roll of bills through the window.
When the betrayal of the situation hit me, I yelled, “That’s mine! I found it!” I stomped my foot and screwed my face up, pointing an accusatory finger at Mom. “Finders keepers!” Mom was twenty-eight, so it’s possible she had forgotten the rules all children lived by, but I was happy to remind her.
Mom grabbed my wrist,
pushed my arm down to my side, and pointed her finger in my face as she bent down to meet my gaze. “It is not yours. Someone dropped this, and we don’t keep things that don’t belong to us. That’s stealing. We don’t steal.” Her big brown eyes were wide with anger.
“If you could maybe put it in an envelope or something? I’m sure someone will come looking for it,” Mom said to the manager. He took off the rubber band and flattened out the bills; they were all twenties. “Sure,” he said, reaching for an envelope and stuffing the money inside. “Thank you, Robin.”
I stomped and pouted while we finished our shopping. Mom paid with food stamps, smiling and chatting up the person at the register. “She’s getting tall,” the woman said, motioning to me.
Mom rolled her eyes. “Can you believe it? In a few years she’ll be taller than me!” They laughed. “Dani, say hi,” Mom directed. She was always making sure that we used good manners around adults.
“Hi,” I said, through gritted teeth.
“Ooooh, this one has a little attitude today!” the clerk said.
Mom looked down at me. “She’ll get over it.” Mom didn’t seem to care that she had just given away more money than my piggy bank could ever hold, which just made me angrier.
“Here,” she said, handing me a grocery bag. “Carry this.”
As we walked home, I thought about the difference between Finders Keepers and stealing, and why the rules always seemed to mean that I ended up with nothing. Mom was right, of course—stealing was wrong. But this didn’t feel like stealing; it wasn’t like I reached in someone’s pocketbook and took the money.
I didn’t once consider how much character it took for a single mom on welfare with two kids to fork over a few hundred dollars to a man who surely kept the untraceable roll of bills to himself.
The larger lesson I learned was that the key to stealing was not telling anyone about it.
The Ugly Cry Page 6
