Between Madison and Palmetto (3 page)

But Maizon had been solemn and reluctant. She had told Margaret she was sick and tired of going from school to school and just wanted to find a place where she belonged.

“You'll belong here,” Margaret promised, pulling Maizon into the seat beside her.

Caroline was sitting in front of them, alone, staring out of the window. Her hair hung down over the back of the seat and reminded Margaret of strawberries, dark and red. But it wasn't really red. It was more blond with strips of brown running faintly through it.

“Hi,” Margaret said.

Caroline turned and Margaret caught the frown racing across Maizon's face and knew Maizon had recognized Caroline from the window on Palmetto Street.

“Hey!” Caroline smiled. Her eyes were just a little darker than her hair and her smile seemed to light them up.
It's a nice face,
Margaret thought.
It's honest.
Margaret remembered the sad-looking girl waving to them from the window. When Caroline smiled, she wasn't that person anymore.

“Hey yourself,” Maizon said.

Those first days at Pace Academy had been great. The teachers seemed to treat every student as though they were the only student. Although Margaret and Maizon only had a few classes together, they had the same lunch period and had spent the early days catching up on everything going on during that time. But as it turned out, Maizon and Caroline had practically every class together and Margaret watched from the sidelines as they grew closer and closer. Soon, all Maizon was talking about at lunch was Caroline. Pace Academy didn't seem so perfect anymore. It was just another school with a bunch of smart kids. And Margaret felt more alone than she ever had before.

“Years pass,” Ms. Dell said again, looking over at Margaret.

Margaret took another sip of chicken soup.

“Years pass,” Li‘l Jay echoed, walking sleepily into the kitchen. “I want soup.”

4

M
aizon made her way slowly up Palmetto Street, past the empty plots where cranes and cement mixers sat silently waiting for Monday when they'd start up again. Cranes and cement mixers working five days a week to change this neighborhood into something it hadn't been before.

“Life,” Ms. Dell had said to Maizon and Margaret the summer before Maizon left for Blue Hill, “moves us through all the time changes. All kinds of changes. And we're made so that we roll and move with it. Sometimes somebody gets stuck in the present and the rolling stops—but the changing doesn't.”

It seemed now everyone was rolling nervously, waiting for the next change to shiver, like a late winter wind, through the neighborhood. Everyone, Ms. Dell and Hattie and Mrs. Tory, waited anxiously. They were afraid of these changes. If the fixing continued and the neighborhood improved, richer people would begin to move in, the way Caroline's family and other families had moved onto Palmetto Street. Ms. Dell and Mrs. Tory rented their apartments. They were afraid the rents would increase because people moving in had more money to pay. If the rent increased, they'd have to move. Maizon had heard Ms. Dell talking to Grandma about it. Grandma owned the house she and Maizon lived in. People had tried to buy it, offering her lots of money, even showing her the cash. But Grandma had held fast. In the end, she had forced the men from her house, daring them to ever come back again.

“They think black people go crazy for money,” Grandma had said sadly, shaking her head. “This house is ours, Maizon. That's the way it will always be.”

But now, as she turned the corner, heading to Caroline‘s, bending her head against the cold rush of wind, Maizon wasn't so sure about “always.” It contradicted Ms. Dell's statement about change. Everything contradicted everything. Even her friendship with Caroline was a contradiction. Bo flashed across her mind.
You get me on a dark street with your Caroline or your Caroline's mom, and if they don't run like Pete to cross the street, my name's not Bo Douglas.
Maybe he was right too.

At the corner, Maizon stopped. Woodbine Street. She looked up at the black-and-white street sign. Woodbine used to be between Madison and Palmetto. A long time ago there had been a whole block of houses where there was nothing now.
A whole block just disappearing,
Maizon thought to herself.
A whole neighborhood.
Years ago, Ms. Dell had told them, Woodbine had fallen victim to fire after fire. Soon there were only a few houses, scattered up and down the block. Now even those were gone and the big, empty lot that once had been the homes of families, escaped the notice of a lot of people. Maizon couldn't remember the last time she had thought about the block that used to be between Madison and Palmetto.
Where there once was, there isn't now.
The line was from a poem someone had written at Blue Hill. Maizon couldn't remember the girl's name. They hadn't been friends. The title of the poem was “Disappearance.” The class had taken the poem apart line by line while the author sat silently, occasionally nodding but not offering up any of her own reasons for writing it. Only now, standing on the corner, could Maizon add this to her ideas of what the girl had been trying to say.

Maybe Bo had been right when he'd said, “We'll all see.” Maybe everyone in the neighborhood was on the edge of riding aloft a memory of the old Madison. In the years to come, Maizon wondered, would Madison Street drop off the face of the earth the way Woodbine had?

She rang Caroline's buzzer and waited. The high-rise apartment building always smelled so new and clean. No smell of chicken frying in an apartment on the first floor. No peas and onions bubbling in a pot on the second. There was something almost too sterile about this new building. As she made her way up the marble staircase to Caroline's third-floor apartment, Maizon wondered if this building would always smell so new.

On the day of Margaret's father's funeral, she and Margaret had gone outside, away from the Torys' crowded apartment.

“Ms. Dell says rich people are going to move into those new buildings,” Maizon had said. They had worn identical black dresses that day. In the July heat the dresses clung to their skin.

They had always dressed alike back then. Now—Maizon sighed—they hardly ever wore the same clothes anymore. And rich people had moved into this building. Caroline's father was a college professor. Her mother wrote for magazines.

Maizon had been so deep in thought, she had forgotten why she was coming over until Caroline opened the door and stared at her. “Check this out!” Maizon said, opening her coat and running her hands over her new outfit. The look Caroline gave her reminded her of the time she had gone to Margaret's house dressed exactly like a fashion model she had seen in a magazine.
“Your grandmother's going to skin you alive when she finds out you left the house looking like that,”
Margaret had said when Maizon walked into her house wearing big gold hooped earrings and eyeliner. Margaret had been right, Maizon realized days later. The outfit had been a little bit ridiculous. But this one—now, this one was hot!

Caroline leaned against the door and smiled, dimples cutting deep into the sides of her face. Seeing her standing there, smiling, Maizon was sorry for how mean she had been the first time she saw Caroline: “Who's she?” Maizon had asked Margaret, glaring at the pale girl with her face pressed against the window, staring down at them. Maizon had just returned from Blue Hill. “I don't know,” Margaret had answered. “She just moved in. I can see her staring all the time from my window.” Margaret had waved, and Caroline waved back.

When they first met, last January, Maizon had not even said hello to Caroline on the school bus.

“Old Sunshine Face,” she had nicknamed Caroline. “Always so bright and cheery.”

“I think she's nice,” Margaret had said.

But somehow it had been Maizon who became tight with Caroline. Margaret seemed happier spending time with Ms. Dell and Hattie and, more and more, by herself. When Maizon had asked her what she did when she was alone, Margaret had grown defensive. “Things!” she said, angrily. “Mostly I sleep.” Maizon had stopped asking after that. When she called and Margaret said she'd rather be alone, Maizon left her alone. She missed her, though.

Things turn around and around,
Maizon thought as she smiled back at Caroline.

“Cool, huh?” she said, coming into the living room and peeling off the heavy coat her grandmother had made her wear on top of the new outfit. “I don't think a thirteen-year-old should dress in black no matter how in-style it is,” Grandma had complained, even as she stitched the Lycra material into an outfit.

Caroline whistled. “That's really nice, Maizon. You look like Catwoman.”

“It's called a cat suit. My grandma made it ... reluctantly.”

“She spoils you.” Caroline laughed, hanging Maizon's coat in the huge closet at the end of the living room.

“I deserve it,” Maizon said, surprised again by the way the material shimmered, as though it had been sprinkled with gold dust. She pranced back and forth in front of Caroline, stopping to admire herself in the mirrored wall opposite Caroline's living-room window. But Grandma was right, Maizon realized. The cat suit emphasized the fact that she didn't have a single curve. Although she was nearly as tall as Hattie now, close to five eight, she didn't have anything to show for it. And now that her hair had grown out, hanging almost to her shoulders, it looked like a wild bush unbraided. Maizon tugged at it. Grandma had been right ... again. Her hair did look ridiculous just sticking out all over her head.

“What're you doing?” Caroline asked, coming to stand beside Maizon at the mirror.

“I'm braiding this mess up. Look at me. I'm a wreck!”

Maizon watched Caroline watching her. They looked so different standing next to each other: where Caroline was pale and blond and came only up to Maizon's shoulder, Maizon was tall, the color of coffee beans, with hair dark and thick as steel wool.

“I like it loose,” Caroline said, shrugging.

“Looks dumb,” Maizon said. “I look like a wild child.”

“Wish I had hair like that,” Caroline said.

“You'd really look like a wild child, Caroline. Imagine you with my hair.”

Caroline tilted her head sideways, as though she were really imagining it. Then they both burst out laughing.

“Is Margaret coming?” Caroline asked.

Maizon finished French braiding her hair.

“She's probably hanging with Ms. Dell and Hattie, the people who live downstairs from her,” Maizon said. She had walked right past Margaret's building on her way to Caroline's. Even though things had changed between them, she still felt guilty about it. She looked back at the mirror. “Maybe if I put tissue in my—”

“Forget it, Maizon.” Caroline laughed. “You can't show up at school flat chested one day and completely developed the next.”

“When I was at Blue Hill, some of the girls used to walk around the bathroom with hardly anything on. I hated that. It seemed like they were showing off or something!”

Maizon looked away from the mirror. She had been back over a year, and still there were things missing. It reminded her of Woodbine—that wide gap of space, sitting there, filling itself in with air.

“Isn't Margaret supposed to be directing us?” Caroline said now, cutting into Maizon's thoughts.

“Yes....” Maizon said slowly.

“Well, we only have two months before production!” Caroline was fanning herself with her script now. Maizon had written the monologue Caroline was doing. It was about a girl who gets lost on her way home from school even though she is walking the same route she has walked a thousand times. A
Metaphor,
she called the piece, and decided she couldn't write it and act in it too—that would not only be unprofessional, it would be downright greedy. Pace Academy put on student productions every year and asked students to submit plays. Margaret had also submitted a play but it hadn't been picked. Maizon couldn't help feeling a tinge of satisfaction at this. She still hadn't gotten over the jealousy she'd felt when Margaret's poem won an all-city poetry contest.

“I'm going to give her a call,” Caroline said, heading for the phone.

“No,” Maizon said quickly. Caroline put the phone down and turned back toward Maizon. “I'll go get her.” She slipped her coat over the outfit and headed back toward the three flights of stairs.

5

M
argaret sick,“ Li‘l Jay said, looking up at Maizon from a pile of trucks in the center of the living-room floor.

“Shut up, Li‘l Jay.” Margaret emerged from the bathroom. “Hey, Maizon.”

“Hey,” Maizon said. “What's wrong? You don't look so well.”

Margaret pressed her hand against her stomach. “Hattie's soup.”

“She was crying,” Li‘l Jay said, dragging a truck across Maizon's feet.

“You okay?” Maizon felt her friend's head.

“I just threw up a little. I hate that feeling. But, yeah, I'm okay now. What's up?”

“Saturday rehearsal at Caroline‘s,” Maizon said.

“Jeez! I forgot. I was so busy hanging with Hattie and Ms. Dell, it completely slipped my mind. I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing.”

“I'm not sick,” Li‘l Jay said. “Just Margaret. I ate soup too.”

Margaret eyed Li‘l Jay. A long time ago she couldn't wait for him to start talking. Now she just wished he'd shut up.