Black Ice (7 page)

The room seemed crowded with all of us about. I found myself chattering on, very gaily, about where I would put my things. What with the windows at one end, the narrow bed against one wall, the bureau, the desk, the radiator, the closet, the door leading into the next room, the door leading in, and the economy of my possessions, there were few options, realistically, for interior design.

Still, I could not stop buzzing. So long as we stood crowded together in the room, my sister jumping on the naked mattress, my mother wondering about smoking a cigarette, my father by the open window clenching his jaw and rubbing the back of his neck, and me burbling and babbling as if words were British soldiers marching in pointless columns, bright and gay, with flags and bright brass buttons on crimson-colored breasts, on and on and on into battle; so long as we had nothing to do except to wait for the next thing to do; so long as the intolerable closeness remained and the intolerable separation loomed to be made, so long would this adrenaline rush through me, anarchic, atavistic, compelling.

Outside the move-in continued. Convinced that I was missing yet another ritual of initiation, I ran down the hall to check the bulletin board. As I stood reading, an Asian boy propelled himself into the vestibule. He introduced himself without smiling and asked me my name. Then, addressing me by the name I gave, he asked whether or not I lived in Simpson House.

“Listen,” he said. “There’s a girl upstairs. She’s just moved in. Her name is Fumiko, and she’s from Japan. She can hardly speak any English at all. She understands a lot, but she really needs someone to go and make her feel welcome.”

“Do you speak Japanese?”

“Of course not.” (He was Chinese-American.) He appeared to be reevaluating me. “Look, is anyone else around?”

“I don’t know. I’ve just arrived myself.”

“Well, welcome! Look, we’ve been helping her, but she needs a girl in her own house, and guys can’t come in. Maybe you can tell some of the other girls. Really, she’s only just come to the country.”

Reluctantly, I agreed. I went to the room on the second floor that the boy had described, and found her. I introduced myself. We tried hard to pronounce each other’s names, and we laughed at our mistakes. Fumiko was taller than I. She kept suppressing bows. We agreed to meet again later.

I returned to my family much calmer than I’d left, and I told them about my new friend. Now my mother seemed agitated. Just before we left for dinner, she began to tell me what items of clothing should go into which drawer.

“You always put underwear in the top. See, it’s the shallowest one. Big, bulky things like sweaters and jeans go down at the bottom. But, now, please don’t just jam your things in. I don’t want you walking around here with stuff that’s all jerked up.”

“I know where things go.”

“Listen. Skirts, your good pants, all that stuff needs to be
hung up. Let’s see how this is packed.” My mother unzipped one of the suitcases on the bed. “You know, maybe you might want us to take this big one home. I can’t see where you have room to store it.”

I watched my mother lift layers of underwear delicately from their berths. Her hands, precise, familiar, called up in me a frenzy of possession. “I’ve got all night to unpack,” I said. “Please don’t. I should do that.”

“I’ll just help you get started. Lord, I hope you don’t start putting together any of those crazy outfits you concoct at home. I know you think that stuff looks cute, but it doesn’t. You didn’t pack any of those fishnet stockings, I hope.” Mama selected a drawer for panties and one for bras and slips. I’d brought a girdle—hers, of course—that was hidden in the next layer.

“I
really
want to do that myself.”

“I’m not taking anything away from you.” Her voice rose with maternal indignation.

“Let the child do it herself,” my father said.

I knew that they were going to fight. It would be a silent fight, because we were, even in this room, in public, so long as we were on school grounds. I did not see how we would avoid it. We’d been cooped up together, as my parents called it, all day.

Then my mother laughed. “All right, all right. I was just getting you started,” she said. “You’d think I was doing something wrong.”

We left for dinner, and I closed my door.

“No locks,” my father commented. “I wonder if they ever have any problems.”

Outside old students lounged in groups, throwing Frisbees and tossing balls with lacrosse sticks. They halloed one another across the green and complimented new haircuts and tans.

Even the parents knew each other. Mothers in A-line skirts
bent their heads together, and the pastel-colored sleeves of the cardigans they’d thrown over their shoulders flattened against one another like clothes on a rack. Fathers shook hands and laughed in loud voices. At first, they all looked the same to me. People whom we had passed a couple times nodded at us like old acquaintances, and we nodded back with well-prepared poise, although I had no idea whether or not I had spoken to or even seen them before.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the landscape, I noticed different varieties of families. There were fancy white people in big foreign sedans, the women emitting, as I passed near them, a complex cosmetic aroma; there were plain, sturdy people whose hair and nails alike were cut in blunt, straight lines and whose feet were shod in brown leather sandals. Less exotic families emerged from chrome-and-wood station wagons; they wore baggy beige shorts. Almost no one was fat. I could only make out these few gradations, and it unhinged me to know that just a few hours before I had not noticed a one. We ascended the brick pathway to the Upper School building, where meals were served, and we remembered how perilous the walk had been in winter. “Get ready,” my parents teased.

After dinner chapel bells announced the First Night Service. Everywhere around us parents were climbing into empty cars and driving away. The air had grown cool. I did not know how to say good-bye to my family. I wanted the leave-taking to be over and my part done right. I wished them gone and was ashamed at the thought. “Please stay,” I begged. “Just until chapel’s over.”

The First Night Service took place, according to tradition, on the first day of each term since the nineteenth century, in the Old Chapel. The Old Chapel was built in the shape of a cross, with smooth rows of wooden pews in the three lower segments and high-backed seats along the walls. The pulpit stood where Christ’s head would have hung if he in his gaunt
passion had been nailed to this most charming symbol of suffering. Unlike the grand New Chapel this church was small and homey. It did not dwarf or intimidate us.

In the Old Chapel my mind flipped through its familiar images of pious devotion: the Jesus, blond and bland, wispy beard and wistful eyes, who had smiled at me from over my great-grandparents’ bed, from the Sunday-school room at Ward A.M.E., from the illuminated cross over the pulpit, and from cardboard fans and free calendars produced by black funeral parlors; the brunet Jesus who stretched his arms out toward his disciples at the Last Supper in my laminated reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s oil.
Take, eat
.

The Rector appeared in the pulpit, shorter than he had seemed in the Rectory, and businesslike. I heard him, despite the close intimacy of the chapel, as if he were speaking from far away. Yet even from such a distance, his words—the content of them, if only I could take them out of that solid, white voice, but I could not quite—had everything to do with me right then. He talked to us of our fears and our dreams, of our new career, of the challenges of our life together.

Then he spoke of tradition. Boys had come and gone before us, sitting in these same pews, thinking and feeling these same thoughts and feelings. They had grown into men and gone out into the world prepared, by a St. Paul’s education, to do something worthwhile.

My own voices were talking back to him, and so long as he spoke, I could not control the dialogue. Part of the tradition, my eye. I was there in spite, despite,
to
spite it. I was there because of sit-ins and marches and riots. I was there—and this I felt with extraordinary and bitter certainty—as a sort of liberal-minded experiment. And, hey, I did not intend to fail. I remember yawning and yawning, sucking in air with my mouth closed and my face taut.

Finally, I gave up the effort to pull in his faraway voice. I
let myself drift into silence. I watched the old dust settle in the red- and yellow- and blue-tinted sunlight. Above and around the stained-glass windows thick curls of paint peeled away from the walls. Below the windows gold lettering of memorial plaques shone dimly through the dust. A faded semicircle of ornate print above one window reminded us of boys who played in the streets of Jerusalem. In this close, cool chapel, I could not imagine Jerusalem, its noise or its sun. I could not imagine anything. I knew now what they wanted: “No boy shall leave here unimproved.”

When the doors opened, I pressed through them into a wash of cool orange twilight. I took off my shoes and was surprised by the wet grass and the freedom to run through it. I ran across grass, asphalt, and brick, past the round post office, the art building, over the bridge. It had been selfish of me to ask them to stay. Daddy would have to drive eight hours tonight. Mom would be tired. Carole had had it. I felt a stitch in my side.

They were waiting at the car. My mother looked at me with dramatic maternity. We were back to baby names, to the familiar fury of the separation I had dreamt of. I heard my sister wail, but I could not see her past my mother. I hugged my mother and my father in the moist air. My cheeks were wet from their kisses. I hugged my sister and felt the panic in her small, perfect body. The soles of my feet throbbed from the bricks.

“Don’t stay here in this place,” Carole cried. “Aren’t you going to come home? You can’t stay here!”

My parents got her into the car, and in those days before seat belts, she flailed around in the back seat as I walked my mother to the passenger side. I was sick with my betrayal of Carole and ashamed that I begrudged my parents the thin shreds of devotion I dredged up and flung their way.

I did what I needed to do. I said the things they needed to
hear. I told them that I loved them. I told them that I would miss them. It was true, and it was enough, after all.

They drove away slowly. My mother looked back and waved. My sister cried and cried. I watched her face and waved to it, until it was no more than a speck, until they turned the corner and were gone.

S
till barefoot, I ran into my house to cry. Even when I closed the door to my room, however, I could hear girls. They were talking and laughing. Who could cry? I washed my face and wandered upstairs to Fumiko’s room. It was empty. I took the long route back to my room by making a circle down past the common room and peeked in. Two black students, a boy and a girl, smiled back at me.

Jimmy Hill, one of the skinniest boys I had ever seen, had arrived that morning from Brooklyn. He had extravagant brown eyes. His black satin jacket, emblazoned on the back with a red-and-yellow dragon, hung open to reveal a fishnet T-shirt that cast tiny shadows on his chest.

Annette Frazier was a ninth grader (or “Third Former,” as I was learning to say) whose theatrical mannerisms made her seem older than she was. She had an appealing face, rounded, with regular features that she used to great effect. When we met, she pantomimed our wariness with a quick movement of her eyes. She caught precisely our exposure and our collusion.

We shouted with laughter and touched hands. Had anyone told me two hours before that I would be engaging in such high-decibel, bare-naked black bonding, I would have rolled my eyes with scorn. We sat in our small circle until Annette decided that it was time for her to get back to unpacking her things. I wondered if she was as organized and as self-assured
as she looked. Neither Jimmy nor I could face our rooms, so we left together in search of a place to smoke.

We found one next to the squash courts. It was marked by a sand-filled stone urn and a few butts. We liked the place, because we could smoke there, and because we had a solid wall to lean on and buildings with which to swaddle ourselves against the open sky.

I was not afraid to go to St. Paul’s School, although it was becoming clear to me from the solicitous white faces that people thought I was—or ought to be. I had no idea that wealth and privilege could confer real advantages beyond the obvious ones sprawled before us. Instead, I believed that rich white people were like poodles: overbred, inbred, degenerate. All the coddling and permissiveness would have a bad effect, I figured, now that they were up against those of us who’d lived a real life in the real world.

I knew that from a black perspective Yeadon had been plenty cushy, but after all, I had been a transplant. West Philly had spawned me, and I was loyal to it. Jimmy felt just as unafraid, just as certain as Darwin that we would overcome. Jimmy had grown up in the projects, the son of a steadfast father and a mother who was a doer, a mover who led tenant-action and community groups. Together, his parents had raised a boy who had a job to do.

“Listen to me, darling,” he said. “We are going to turn this motherfucker out!”

And why not? I, too, had been raised for it. My mother and her mother, who had worked in a factory, and her mother, who had cleaned apartments in Manhattan, had been studying these people all their lives in preparation for this moment. And I had studied them. I had studied my mother as she turned out elementary schools and department stores.

I always saw it coming. Some white department-store manager would look at my mother and see no more than a modestly dressed young black woman making a tiresome complaint. He’d use that tone of voice they used when they had
important
work elsewhere. Uh-oh. Then he’d dismiss her with his eyes. I’d feel her body stiffen next to me, and I’d know that he’d set her off.

“Excuse me,” she’d say. “I don’t think you understand what I’m trying to say to you …”