I'm Down: A Memoir (8 page)

“What’s going on?” I asked. “What are you doing home?”

“Well,” Dad said, licking the mayo knife, “I had to pick Anora up from school. She got in a little trouble today. No big deal.”

“How much trouble could she have gotten in?” I asked. “She’s in kindergarten!”

“S’true,” Dad said, handing Anora her sandwich and NOT giving me information.

“So, what’d she do?” I wondered if she had been sarcastic, too.

Dad readjusted his Kangol and said slowly, “She got caught smoking. But she learned her lesson.”

“I did learn my lesson, Dad!” Anora said, and dug into her sandwich.

“How did Anora get a cigarette?” I asked.

“I got some big girls to give it to me,” she bragged. “They were in the bathroom.”

God, she was already cool.

“Her teacher smelt it on her . . . ,” Dad said, and then looking at Anora added, “ ’Cause-it’s-nasty! And-it-stinks!”

“I know that now, Daddy.”

I couldn’t believe my five-year-old sister could smoke, and I couldn’t have white friends. And from what I could tell, her punishment was a sandwich. When I broached the subject of her punishment Dad said, “Why don’t you keep your eyes on your own self. Or go outside, I think Latifa wants to play with you.”

“I have homework.”

Dad wrinkled his nose. “You know, I’d really like you to go out and play a little. All those kids you go to school with aren’t really that well rounded. You got friends, you gotta pay attention to them.”

I put my school bag on the counter next to my sister, who was happily eating her cheese sandwich and headed outside for some double Dutch.

The next day on the bus I decided that isolating myself at school was unreasonable. Anora was already making older friends and I was sure she had people to eat with. I should, too. I thought,
I’ll just try to be like my family when I’m at home. And when I’m at school I’ll act like school people
. I imagined that’s what integrity
was. I kept thinking about it as I picked at the black pleather bus seat in front of me.
If I could fit in at GSCC, I can fit in anywhere. When I’m around these people, I’ll just pretend to be rich and normal in that white kinda way!
At the time it seemed feasible.

It wasn’t like anyone at school knew where or how I lived, because the school bus didn’t even go to my dingy neighborhood. It went to a good neighborhood that bordered it, and I had to walk a good ten blocks home. So that afternoon when the bus didn’t pull away immediately, rather than let the kids on my bus see me walk toward my neighborhood, I crossed the street and walked into the good neighborhood. That’s when Adam, a blond fourth-grader, who also got off at my stop, asked, “What are you doing?” He pointed to my neighborhood. “You walked from that way this morning . . . and yesterday.”

“I’m going over to my cousin Jane’s house,” I said. A lie. “She has a Nintendo.” Lie upon lie.

The bus pulled away, but Adam flanked me now, so I couldn’t just double back to the ghetto, like I had planned to. I had to commit, and started walking up his street toward my fictional cousin’s house. I watched him silently walking next to me. His perfect Lacoste polo sticking out of a cable knit sweater that matched his cords, hoping he would just mind his own perfect business.

“Where does she live?” he asked.

“Oh,” I said, “Just, you know . . . up the street . . . I take a left up a bit.” He was quiet, so I embellished. “She loves it when I come over, because I’m the only one who really gets her parrot talking.”

Adam looked at me for a moment and after two seconds that felt like two years, he nodded and said, “I love birds.”

“Who doesn’t?” I said.

We walked another half a block until he peeled off to the left. “This is me,” he said, and walked up the steps to the most beautiful two-story colonial I had ever seen. “See you around.”

“Okay, cool,” I said. “See you around the neighborhood.” And I quickened my pace as I continued up the block. I decided then and there to hate him—but also to get invited over. That’s the line I was trying to walk.

As I rounded the corner at the end of Adam’s block I was relieved that lying had panned out for me so well—it actually made me feel a little classier. And on the way back to my neighborhood, I took my time. I walked down the streets of well-tended yards, and fantasized about fathers with tweed jackets, and mothers who stayed home and who had tons of Fruit Roll-Ups in the cupboards. I spent so much time picking out my dream house that I got home an hour late, completely forgetting that Dad and I had made plans. And rather than tell him I was late because I had been designing a new life for myself, I told him it was ’cause I was playing ninja with Tre’s new nunchucks. He looked at me dubiously for a moment and then went back to jury-rigging the toaster.

As weeks went on, fitting in at school proved a little more difficult than I had originally anticipated. For one, my classmates did not appreciate a good cap. One day we were standing on the playground—all lined up to go back inside. And knowing that I had the ear of Zachary, Gavin, and Marylyn, I decided it was the perfect moment to say, “Gavin’s so dumb, he saw a wallet in a store and tried to feed it grass.” A surefire gem in the capping community, but at IPP it was worth nothing—just blank stares. I was amazed.

I explained, “Because wallets are made of leather.” There was silence as Marylyn and Zachary looked at each other.

“Why would you say that?” Gavin said. “I couldn’t possibly be dumb. I have an IQ in the top point-five percent.”

“Oh,” I said. “It’s just like joking.”

I thought about explaining what a joke was, but the look on Marylyn and Zachary’s face let me know what they were thinking—I was too ghetto.

“You’re kind of the dum-dum.” Marylyn said, laughing a little.

“Yeah,” Zachary said. “You didn’t even know what algebra was.”

It was then I really realized that I was actually the dumbest kid in the class. I mean sure I had passed some tests. But the tests I had taken tested logic, not information. And we all knew what time two trains that leave Chicago simultaneously arrive in Detroit. But unlike my classmates, I didn’t know about algebra, or Shakespeare, or lacrosse, or Lacoste. I knew things like if you had fifty cents, and you stole a dollar from the slow kid, you had a dollar fifty. Or that the whipped cream canisters in the corner store across the street get you high. And overcoming these obstacles and making friends was starting to seem impossible.

Then open house came and Mom couldn’t go and asked Dad to instead. I think she was partially hoping that if he saw my classroom and met my teacher, it would get him in the IPP spirit. It certainly got him in the dressing spirit, because the night of the open house Dad got sharp in a cream-colored suit and a shiny rope chain around his neck. And for his feet, there were new shoes. He took them out of a glossy bag labeled “B-A-L-L-Y,” and they were so shiny, I wanted to cheer. When I went to touch them he said, “These are a two-hundred-dollar pair of shoes. I don’t want you or your sister to even go near them.” Dad also had on these socks that were like panty-hose
for men. I had no idea he knew about all this fashion stuff from, but I thought he looked really rich. I thought maybe we had come into some money. But then again I had watched him siphon gas out of someone else’s car the week before, and we hadn’t exactly had dinner, so that seemed unlikely.

We got to my school late, and from the second we walked in the door of the building my dad wouldn’t uncross his arms. I thought he looked so good that he was sure to impress and when we walked into the classroom, everyone looked at us. None of the other parents had dressed up, and as Dad walked through my classroom toward the presentations we had made about ancient Roman life, he said to me, “You know your classmates’ folks could dress a little better.” We walked around the room alone. The kids that were there weren’t kids that I felt like I could just hang out with, and the other parents seemed to be in small discussion groups talking to each other. Dad and I just looked at everything in the room once and headed for the door. “Dad,” I asked, “aren’t you even gonna talk to any of the other parents?” To which my dad’s response was, “About what?”

That was when Mrs. Lewis called, “Mr. Wolff.” And he sighed before turning around. Mrs. Lewis chatted with him and did a quick round of intros to all of the parents and kids in the room. I was glad Latecia and Lanelle, the only black kids in class, were there because I thought it would reassure him about IPP. Then Mrs. Lewis led him to a group of parents talking as incessantly as she did. Dad held my hand tightly and looked at me as if to ask, “Is this lady for real?”

“We were just talking about working with flashcards,” Marylyn’s father said as Dad joined the conversation. “I found them very helpful when I was teaching Marylyn her multiplication tables. What do you think, John?”

“Uh-huh,” my dad said. “I think, good parenting is about dicipline.”

Donald Lin’s mother said, “I used flashcards to get Don ready for the spelling bee last year.”

“Well, it worked!” Marylyn’s father joked, and everyone started laughing. That was when Marylyn’s father actually turned his back to Dad and edged us out of the conversation as he started a story, “You know, believe it or not, Marylyn didn’t always have the highest math scores.”

Dad responded, “I know one thing. You disrespect me like that again, you’re gonna feel it.”

“Excuse me? I’m sorry. I don’t think I understand what you mean. If I have managed to offend you . . .”

“You heard me,” Dad said, staring him down for a moment before grabbing my hand and turning to Mrs. Lewis. “Thank you for your little show. I wish everyone here had some manners.” Then he dragged me out. And as we walked out of the building he tugged at his tie and warned me about yuppies adding as we pulled up to the house that they were a, “Waste of good clothes.”

A few days later, after coming the long way home past Cousin Jane’s house, I walked in the house to find Anora sitting in front of the TV with a bowl of ice cream, looking dazed. Her head was completely bandaged in white gauze, and she seemed to be drooling into her ice cream.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“I’m not supposed to fall asleep,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. “What’s up with your head?”

“I was playing,” she said, and went back to
Care Bears
.

I knew Dad must be home and I screamed, “What happened to Anora’s head?”

Dad entered from the bathroom with a newspaper under his arm. But rather than answer my question he looked alarmed
as he saw Anora’s ice cream dripping on the antelope-skin, African-drum coffee table.

“Shit, Mishna, get a rag!” Dad yelled as he hurried to set the newspaper under her bowl.

I hurried to the kitchen and wet a rag. And as I was wringing it out, I hollered, “Can I have some ice cream, too?”

“Is your head in a bandage?” Dad snapped back. I decided to skip the smart-aleck remark about how easy it would be for me to make that happen.

I brought the rag dutifully and asked again, “So, what happened to Anora’s head?”

“Oh,” Dad said, wiping the antelope skin with the grain, “she was playing a game with some girls and the bathroom doors.”

“Tug-of-war,” my sister said.

“Yeah,” Dad said, looking at Anora. “With the bathroom door!”

Anora was dizzy, but still had the energy to brag, “With third-graders!”

To which Dad responded, “I guess you learned your lesson about messing around . . .” Then Dad got sucked into
Care Bears
and trailed off, “Her head went into the door . . . stitches. But she’s a’ight.”

“How many stitches?” I asked, awed that she was making friends with third-graders.

“Four,” my sister said proudly, because four was a respectable amount of stitches. It wasn’t anywhere near my record of nine stitches, but it was decent. My sister reached for her bandage to show me, when Dad pulled himself out of
Care Bears
and said, “What’s wrong with you, Mishna? Anora, leave your bandage alone.” I took a seat next to Dad and quietly started watching TV, even though I thought
Care Bears
was lame.

Dad suddenly shifted his attention to me. “Mishna,” he said. “About your school.” There was a pause during which I wondered how I had suddenly become the focus.

“It’s been a few months, and I been wondering . . . How you getting along with the sisters?” This was a trick question. There were only two black girls in my whole class, Dad knew this from the open house. And I wasn’t really “friends” with anyone. But rather than concede I said, “Well . . . I’m kinda friends with Latecia and Lanelle.”

To which Dad replied, “Yeah, well . . . They’re not
really
black.”

I quietly crossed them off my list of people to beg for friendship.

I was increasingly desperate to make friends at school. And soon I lied again. I was standing on the playground butting in on a group of kids who were talking because they had no idea what to do with a recess. Gretchen, the tallest girl in our class, was talking about her weekend. “I rode at the Kirkland stable all day Saturday.” She said, “I don’t have my own horse yet, but my parents think we might get one in Germany next year.”

“I have my own horse,” said Catrina Calder, a girl with trendy glasses and an even trendier haircut. “But it’s not German, it’s just for riding.”
As opposed to plowing?
Then she said in baby talk, “But, I love my Mastro. He’s my handsome guy.”

“I want to get a Hanoverian,” said Gretchen.

That was when I said from out of nowhere, “I have a horse!” I was aware that it was a risky whopper, but everyone else was talking about their stupid horses.

“What kind of horse?” Gretchen asked.

“Coco,” I said.

“That’s the breed?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I mean Coco is her name. She’s a dapple.” I
had heard the word
dapple
when my mom sang the lullaby “All the Pretty Little Horses.”

“Dapple is a color,” Gretchen said. “What’s the breed?”

That’s when Catrina blurted out, “You do not have a horse . . . I mean, I thought your dad was a contractor?”