Black Ice (9 page)

“Cross-country.”

“Don’t do that, Jimmy.”

“Well, what else am I going to take? Look at me. Look at me! What else am I going to play, football?

“Go ahead, laugh,” he said. “It is laughable. I know it. That’s why I’ma stay the hell away from it. Or soccer? Have you ever seen them play soccer?”

“I’m taking soccer.”

“You go ahead. You’ll do fine. I know it. But I do not want anybody busting me down in some mud after a ball. Crosscountry’ll be fun. Nice little run through the woods …”

“You know what they’ll do to you, don’t you? I heard that they run you into the ground. I heard they run you until you puke in the snow.”

“That’s not cross-country, that’s lacrosse. Besides, there’s no snow yet. I wish they had wall-ball, ’cept I guess that’s not really a sport.”

Fumiko met me on the way to soccer.

“Do you play basketball?” she wanted to know.

“Nah.” I felt rough in her presence, square-fingered, and loud.

“I like basketball. In Japan, I played a
lot
of basketball. Don’t you play at all?”

“A little bit. I don’t shoot so well.”

“I can teach you! It’s easy. I’ll teach you.” She looked at her watch. “Come on. We have time.”

In the gymnasium we heard the commotion below in the locker rooms. Fumiko ran to the wall behind the basket where a few balls lay beside each other. She picked one, dribbled it, and then passed it to me. She ran onto the court, and I passed
it back to her. She shot the ball. It headed toward the basket in a low arc and dropped through. She ran hard to retrieve her own rebound. There could have been four girls after her, as hard as she ran. She snatched the ball out of the air and then leapt to make a lay-up. It hit the backboard softly and fell through the hoop. Then she passed me the ball.

I hesitated and passed it back. She thrust it at me. I caught the pass, chest-high. She threw it as perfectly as a diagram, harder than my old gym teacher, and with no effort I could see.

I did not want to play. I wanted to watch. But she seemed intent on teaching me. Her intelligence and force were as obvious as her athleticism. I had seen none of it before, because I’d been so eager to assume her need for me.

“Hold like this,” Fumiko said. She stood behind me in order to position not just my fingers but my arms as well. She pushed me with her body. I was confused. Her language had been so delicate that I hadn’t expected the shove.

I shot. The ball bounced off the rim.

“Hah!” Fumiko zoomed down the key for the rebound and rocketed another pass to me. I caught it. My palms tingled. This time she told me to dribble to the basket. She followed me close. Her body was so close and new that I dropped the ball. She laughed.

Out of the corner of my eye I watched her as we walked to soccer practice. “You are really good.” I felt ashamed for having thought of her as a geisha girl. I had done to her what I suspected white people did to me. She did not answer me. I did not repeat myself. It would’ve been too much like amazement; after all, the girl had told me that she could play.

Green fields stretched out before us. Two soccer fields lay end to end. A line of white paint on the grass divided them, and
the four goals lined up like giant white wickets. Beyond them were clay tennis courts and a gravel track. Football fields hid behind a stand of trees at the end of the track. Big and small boys ran past us toward the far fields. Fumiko broke into a run, too, and I trotted along. By the time we got there, I was out of breath.

We flung ourselves onto the damp grass to lounge in the sun with the other girls.

“Have you people finished your laps already?” The voice behind us was blunt, the pronunciation lippy and controlled. Miss Breiner, the modern-languages teacher, appeared in pastel-colored shorts and knee socks. She was one of the few women at the school who wore makeup. “Four laps. Four laps, please, so we can get started.”

I could not help but stare at the field. It was as big around as a Philadelphia city block. I knew people who would get in their cars and
drive
that far. The other girls groaned dramatically and started running. I couldn’t do it. I’d die.

“Excuse me, Miss Breiner,” I said. This would look like shirking, I knew. Her powder-blue eyes studied a clipboard.

“Yes,” she said without looking up.

“My parents wrote to the school this summer to tell them that I have asthma.”

“I see,” she said looking at me. “I know a couple other girls here who have asthma. Do you take medication? Do you have pills?”

Behind me I heard the thunder of distant cleats. “No.” I didn’t know there
were
pills for asthma. “But I use an inhaler when I need to.”

Miss Breiner was finished regarding me. I could see myself in those blue eyes: a robust black girl talking about asthma and didn’t even have pills. “Do what you can,” she said. “You may find that the exercise will actually help your asthma.”

I fell in. What had started as a pack stretched into a column
nearly a quarter lap long. Ahead of me girls talked to each other as they ran. One sprinted to sneak up behind another and give her ponytail a yank. Ponytails flashed in the sun. Striding legs stretched out before me like a movie. My breath came so fast now that I had to concentrate as if to break through some partition stretched across my lungs. It had to be some failing of mine. I was breathing too fast, that was it. I’d slow it down and let the air go deeper. But then I began to wheeze, and the long, lithe girls in front of me were coming up behind me now, passing me. How had I dropped so far behind? I pumped my legs as hard as I could.

“Do not cut corners. Do not cut corners.” Miss Breiner’s voice caught me out. She’d be watching me now, for sure.

My arms flailed. I’d never run so far in my life. What were those pills? The top of my body swung from side to side, and none of it, the pumping or flailing or desperate prayer, pushed me forward.

When everyone else finished, I slunk into the huffing group. I was gulping at the air. It came into my lungs in teaspoonsful. One girl asked me if I was all right. I nodded. It cost too much air to talk.

Then practice began. We passed and kicked and chased the ball. It changed direction in an instant. It was tyrannical, capricious. At the end of practice we did little sprints. Fumiko won most of them. After practice she grinned at me. Her face was flushed and happy.

“I can’t do this every day, Fumiko,” I said as we walked to Simpson.

In my room I sat on the bed and sucked at my inhaler. The medicine spread through my chest like warmth blown in through tiny copper wires. I thought hard about how to handle this soccer business, and decided to get to practice early in order to do laps before Miss Breiner appeared. After two slow ones, I could quit without being suspected—and still have
time to get my wind back before practice. I rationed my cigarettes (but I didn’t quit), and lobbied for the position of goalie.

About forty minutes was allotted in the community schedule for bathing and dressing before class at 5:15. At first, eighth-period class seemed cruel and redundant. We carried with us the fatigue of the day but also, much as I hated to admit it, the weary refreshment of exercise. Our teachers, tired from their own classes and sports, seemed less critical and demanding. I felt less competitive. I had made it through another day, and dinner was imminent. Night was coming, and the dark pushed us closer together.

When I did not have an eighth-period class I would meander back to my room to inhale my medicine and drift into a short, light sleep. St. Paul’s was not yet integrated into my dreams. At six o’clock I awoke to Pam Hudson’s folk music. It was time to dress for dinner.

Four days a week we sat at assigned tables, one master (and sometimes a spouse) and six or seven students at each one. At six-thirty the head of the dining hall asked the Lord to “Bless this food to our use and us to thy service.” Student waiters piled into the kitchen with their empty trays and emerged carrying the evening meal in serving bowls. The faculty served us, talked to us, and asked questions of us as we ate, so that each table acquired the personality of its master. Seating changed every three weeks. Despite the rudimentary etiquette (we did not eat until everyone at table was served; we tried to ask for seconds rather than grab for them; and we did not ask to be excused until dessert was served), we ate fast. Most of us gobbled our bread and washed it down—someone was always being dispatched for more pitchers of milk and water—to hold us until the waiter arrived. Then, after the master dished up plates, we bolted the main meal while somebody dashed to the
kitchen for seconds. Young boys ate the most and with the least complaint. We older girls were duty-bound to eat least. I tried to pick and fuss like the skinny girls, but I gave up; I was hungry and tired by dinnertime; I was freshly scrubbed and wearing a clean dress and a smear of lip gloss. If I did not eat my fill I’d be ready to cry by bedtime. So I chowed down with the boys. I helped clear our plates (no stacking on the tables), and devoured dessert. By the end of Seated Meal, the heavy food for young boys in a cold climate thudded to the bottom of my belly, and my sense of well-being was restored as simply as a child’s. Then I could observe my new schoolmates.

In the three dining rooms, a few tables crowded round, after the assigned diners had been excused, with students who wanted an audience with particular teachers. Debaters joined intellectuals and a few lonely hearts to assemble around Mr. Katzenbach, a man as corpulent as he was articulate. I heard that he had a law degree, and that he was “brilliant.” Even at his most casual, he was passionate, eclectic, witty. The students around him spoke grammatically and vehemently, and studied his face for approval as they talked.

Sr. Fuster attracted a loose, motley group. Some Spanish Club business took place, but mostly, they kept company. He held the boys by the backs of their necks and patted the girls’ hands with his manicured fingers. They called him Fu-Fu.

Other groups hung on in the dining rooms around other teachers: athletes with favorite coaches, girls with women, clubs and societies with their advisers. Eventually, though, many crowded into discernible cliques in the smoke-filled common room. (The Rector would later astound us with the information that only a few dozen students had actually secured from their parents the letter granting them permission to smoke. The common room in those days teemed with unauthorized smokers who, like me, felt safe in the crowd. In 1988 smoking was
banned altogether, as it had been until 1971.) Each group pulled around itself a membrane to shield itself from the others. Some of the membranes were more permeable than others.

One group that attracted my attention was the artsy sophisticates. The girls wore low-cut black dresses, bosoms white and plump as the Renaissance. The boys, too, were pale, languid, bored. They appeared the most self-possessed, but studied, of the groups.

A Greenwich, Connecticut, crowd, held together by nothing more than short hair and a fondness for corduroy, as far as I could see, was just as cohesive. There was a tiny super-rich, European-traveling set and their entertaining hangers-on; a pimply, giggly group of hairless boys who played computer games and wore their pants too short; a small group of freaks, whose hair hung longer, whose pants were slung lower over their protruding hipbones, and whose cynicism, though less articulate, ran deeper than others’. Conspicuously absent were the lower formers, seventh- and eighth-grade boys who were due back in their dormitories for prescribed study times, and who were, in any event, too young and scared to make after-dinner small talk. They traveled back to their houses in chest-high clumps and slept in wards where their beds were separated only by curtains. In the far corner were the black and Hispanic kids, whose base was a blue couch and battered coffee table.

Our corner admitted others, white scholarship kids from Concord who came to see that they had at least as much in common with us as with anyone else, social radicals, foreign students who had not yet found a clique. (Fumiko told me later that she fell in with us because at first ours were the only faces that she could readily distinguish one from another.) And from our blue couch, we allowed each other to roam to other groups: José Maldonado could choose to huddle with his hulking football
and lacrosse pals; Steve Isaac with his ice hockey chums; Anthony Wade with the science buffs. (A couple of black kids never came to the blue couch, never spoke to us at all, because they clearly wanted to assimilate. We shunned them back. They appeared not to notice.)

I wanted to know to what extent the group dictated its members’ movement, to what extent it presumed to dictate mine. St. Paul’s School, which I had imagined would liberate me from the tyranny of home life, had me confined in a rigid regimen of chapel, classes, sports, mealtimes, activities, meetings, homework. Nobody here would say, “When I say jump, you supposed to ask, how high?” But that was surely how it felt. I could not buck the school, but I was damned if I was going to let my own black peers boss me around, too. The first Third World Coalition meeting did nothing to assuage my defiance.

We held the meeting in the common room of the squash courts under photos of the first high school squash teams—St. Paul’s own—in the country. The officers sat at a round table in the front of the room. The rest of us lounged on sturdy captain’s chairs and love seats the color of a cloudy day. Originally, the group had been named the Afro-Am. It had commanded its own room for meetings, recreation, and dances. That had been under the reign of Bernard Cash, the president who had graduated the previous spring.

It was Cash who had led the group to power, I learned, Cash who had defied the administration, Cash who had spurred the group to press for black books in the curriculum and respect for the black presence in the school, Cash who’d helped lead the coat-and-tie rebellion before coeducation. The boys who were now our leaders seemed to assume that those days were over, that we here were living in a lesser time.

I felt no loyalty to Cash. I had seen him once, at my interview. I had seen his photos in our pamphlets. I knew the attitude, the cocked head, the gold-rimmed shades, the hat, or, when he chose to go bare-headed, the Afro with the off-center part that looked as if it had been made with a hatchet. He had been bigger and meaner than I could ever be, as big and as black as I supposed white people expected, or hoped; and the line of succession that descended from him was as male as the apostles. I bristled at the mention of his name, and yet, I wanted to know more.