Black Ice Page 15

  “Oh, God, don’t cry. It’s all right.”

  Tommy Painchaud had been walking behind me. “Don’t listen to that stuff. Who says everybody’s thinking that? I heard what they said.”

  Painchaud was a townie. He spoke in a nasal New Hampshire accent, and he was friends with several of the black guys. He played ice hockey but in some respects, he, too, was an outsider. He stood beside me with a boy’s awkwardness while I cried.

  “I didn’t put Janie up to it,” I babbled. “I didn’t. She told me she was going to do it, and I asked her not to. I didn’t try to pull anything on anybody. I wouldn’t even have wanted it that way.…”

  “Who the hell cares?” Painchaud breathed in my anger and exhaled into the night. “As long as you know you did right, who the hell cares?”

  “I can’t face them.” I thought of the class officers’ seats in Chapel, two on one side and two on the other side of the aisle, facing the entire school body. How would I sit there next year, day after day?

  “You’ve got to face them. And when you do, it’ll all go away. It will. Listen. People here always got to have something to talk about, and if you do anything different, they’re going to talk about you. Everybody always talks about everybody. That’s one of the things that’s wrong with this place. But in a week, it’ll be something else.”

  I did not know which consoled me more—knowing that Painchaud cared enough to stand on the path and talk to me or realizing suddenly that my supposed perfidy was not uppermost on everyone’s mind, and certainly would not remain so. I remember wanting to touch Painchaud, but being afraid to. I thanked him repeatedly and cried some more. Between the two of us, we found something for me to use to blow my nose.

  “I think you’ll make a great vice-president,” he said, “although I don’t really know what a vice-president does.”

  The next day I arose early on purpose. The spring morning smelled wet and fresh. Midseason bulbs were pushing up through the heavy soil, and evidence of the grounds crew was everywhere. I breathed in moisture and the unhurried time that rested between the chimes for seven-forty-five and three minutes of eight. I saw an entirely different crowd of people that morning. Unlike the students and faculty who rushed to chapel as the warning bells tolled, these people looked well rested. They stopped to chat with each other and with me.

  “Congratulations!” several of them called to me as we passed.

  “I heard the news. That’s great!”

  I had not expected the gentle, tentative surge of gratitude I began to feel—not just for the election, but for St. Paul’s School, the spring, and the early morning. I needed the morning light and the warbling birds. I needed to find a way to live in this place for the moment and get the good of it. I had tried to hold myself apart, and the aloneness proved more terrible than what I had tried to escape.

  Room requests for the following year came due at the end of the spring term. I asked Alma Howard to room with me. Alma laughed easily; she did not hold grudges; and once, when a couple black girls in Middle House had decided to punish me for telling our guys about the good time we girls had had at a dance at a boys’ school to the south, Alma had refused to join in. I remember that I did not know how to tell her how grateful I was. No wonder she was surprised when I asked her to room with me.

  “You’re asking me?” she said with characteristic bluntness. “I don’t know. This is kind of a shock. Don’t take me wrong, now. I just got to think about this a little. Hooking up with a roommate is a big step.” I don’t remember whether she thought for ten minutes or a couple of days, but when she decided to room with me, it was with enthusiasm. “That’ll be great.”

  I was as pleased as if I had arranged my own marriage.

  We decided to live in North Upper, one of the three houses over the dining commons. The three connected Upper houses, which had been the exclusive domain of the older students in the boys’ days, had retained their reputation. Upper was profoundly cool, and North Upper had just been declared a girls’ house.

  Each day there were more arrangements to make for the next year. We chose our houses and our courses. We began planning to take advantage of the Sixth-Form academic privilege: independent-study projects. College advisers called a meeting of our form and then scheduled individual appointments with us. Class assignments accelerated. We wrote final papers, took end-of-the-term tests, and rushed to complete research assignments. Everywhere—in the music building, in Mem Hall, in the Chapel—students rehearsed for Anniversary Weekend. Flower beds of big, bright annuals appeared, diminishing the beauty of cardinal flowers that bloomed on knee-high shrubs along the wood paths. Preparations for exams, for the next term, for college, for bright and shining futures seemed endless. Preparation was our life, and it was startling when, on the first Saturday in June, the main gate actually swung open to admit the handsome cars to drive in under the boat-club banners: maroon and white for the Halcyon Club, royal blue and white for Shattuck.

  Once again parents arrived, but this time others came, too—whole families, children, and old people. Young men, recent graduates, appeared and headed for their bivouac in the gymnasium. Students and alumni fund-raisers gave speeches. There were special lunches, teas, cocktail parties. People opened the tailgates of late-model station wagons to reveal neat and not-so-neat hampers of food and drink. Young alumni drank beer conspicuously. Older ones toasted each other with champagne in plastic stemware.

  On Saturday afternoon, long, horse-drawn wagons called barges loaded up the school’s best rowers outside the gymnasium and drove to Turkey for Halcyon-Shattuck races. After the races, athletic prizes were awarded in a ceremony under the flagpole by the pond. Saturday was noisy, crowded, celebratory. Hundreds of people I had never seen behaved as if our School were their second home.

  On Sunday morning the Chapel bells rang out hymns. The bells had never chimed so merrily. Song after song pealed out, and then suddenly, we were walking fast in our dresses, the heels of our pumps sinking into the soft grass, to bleachers set up on the green between the Chapels and the pond. On the hill behind us, the faculty and trustees in their black robes and caps stretched out in two lines, and hidden behind a tall hedge on the facing rise, the Sixth Formers: boys in ties and jackets, girls in white dresses, talking, laughing, adjusting each other, waiting for graduation to begin.

  The Sixth Formers graduated, as St. Paul’s School Sixth Formers do, at two o’clock on the first Sunday afternoon in June. At three-thirty, according to custom, they were to be gone. The grounds were empty without them. We moped around trying to fill up the space. Girls who had gone out with Sixth-Form boys dragged themselves about as if their limp bodies were merely vehicles to carry their tearing eyes. We Fifth Formers strutted self-consciously, telling everyone who’d listen, mostly each other, that we were the Sixth Formers now, and wondering how we’d make it without so many people we already missed. A school of nearly five hundred was suddenly a school of three hundred and ninety. At cafeteria supper we were not enough to fill the tables. After dinner our voices sounded high-pitched and thin in the common room, like a choir whose bass and tenor sections have been kidnapped. Even our houses seemed vacant and grubby. We picked through the untidy piles of Sixth-Form leavings in the halls. We sat on chairs and ottomans and bits of rugs we’d bought from them the weeks before, and instead of feeling important, we felt dull and aggrieved to have yet another week and a half of exams to go.

  I watched Lee Bouton graduate, and I cried to think that she was the first black girl ever to receive a St. Paul’s diploma. I remembered one afternoon when we’d soaked in adjoining perfumed baths and pretended that St. Paul’s did not exist.

  I thought of José Maldonado, who had teased me—and so often hit the mark. “I don’t know why you keep trying to be such a brainiac,” he once told me. “You go out in the middle of the night to look at the stars with all your Embryo Joe buddies. It’s not good for you. No, do not laugh. This is serious. I want you to look at the
dudes you’ve been hanging out with. Have you noticed that they have big heads and little bodies? Do you want to be like that? You want to be a brainiac? Well, hey, just make sure you don’t end up getting more than you bargained for.”

  When the spring term ended, I had not achieved brainiac status. I brought home not one of the awards I had coveted that year, but a home-study packet from the math department instead. I had indeed failed calculus. I convinced myself that when I was home I would somehow be able to do by myself what I had been unable to do with the help of a tutor and my teacher. After all, I had failed the final by only a few points.

  I hurried to bury my bitterness in a flurry of activity. I’d get on with summer. I ached to get a job, make some money, learn to drive, to leave New England boarding school and step back into an ail-American adolescence while I still could.

  Chapter Nine

  I got a job as a waitress at a diner. My father awoke early so that I could learn to drive his old car on my way to work. I ground my way through the gears of the Peugeot he had bought with cash when I was three, and the summer rushed by, measured out, as it had been the summer before, in tips against the money I wanted to have saved by September.

  Waitressing at the Hearthglow DeVille provided an antidote to school life. I worked with white waitresses and black cooks. Nobody talked about “past achievements and future hopes.” My bosses told me that they’d had one other black waitress, and she hadn’t been able to handle the work. They took my stubs off the spindle by the register to double-check my addition. A few customers told me with a leer that they preferred dark meat. I was back to black and white in America as I’d known it before, with none of the confusing church-school rhetoric about community sharing. Everybody figured he had the other side figured out. I wasn’t able to think so with the same certainty any longer.

  Our dishwasher was a punch-drunk old man who had once been a fighter. His face showed the punishment it had taken. His speech was slurred, and he jabbed at the air, like some caricature on the stage, each time the cooks rang the bell for us to pick up our orders. When business was slow, one cook named Booker would hit the bell just to amuse the assembled company. Then he would cover the bell with his hand so that none of us waitresses could hit it again and stop the old man from dancing around, hooking, dodging, punching, in the small square bounded by the dishwasher and conveyor belt.

  “Oh, Booker, stop it,” we’d say.

  Booker would giggle, his eyes red from the marijuana he ducked outside to smoke on his breaks, and when he had had his fill, he’d move his hand from the bell. One of us would hit it and, for the old man, the round was over. He’d resume stacking dishes as if nothing had happened.

  The cooks played other pranks to amuse themselves. They initiated me by switching the foods on my orders. Salisbury steak with mashed and carrots and broiled fish with French fries turned into Salisbury steaks with fries and fish with string beans and mashed. During my first weeks, when I was learning to balance four plates on one arm and learning the rhythm of restaurant service, I would stomp into the kitchen, grab the plates by my checks, and stomp to my tables, only to find the customers calling me back after a few bites.

  “Check your orders,” a woman named Elaine whispered in my ear as I passed her. “Check every goddamned potato. They’re playing with you.”

  It astounded me that black cooks would so bedevil a black waitress, the only black waitress at the white suburban restaurant. I became wary of them and alert. Booker would ring the bell for me, and then click his tongue against his teeth. “Oops. I thought your steak was done. What’d you want it? Medium rare?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry, not quite yet. But it’ll sure be nice to watch you walk out again.”

  I had to learn to ignore the noises when I walked out the swinging doors with a swish; how far to trust the older women, women who were not making extra money to buy books, but were supporting families; how to serve different customers. There were talky ones who’d hold me up while other people squirmed to have their orders taken; four-dollar-a-plate gourmands who asked whether the French fry oil had been changed that day, whether the cucumber salad was fresh (“Ask him what he expects for three ninety-five,” Elaine said. “Tell him to go buy a cucumber and sit in his car and eat it.”); the Friday-night polka crowd with their hoop skirts and cowboy string ties. They arrived in slews of eight or more, each ordering groups of side dishes (“Now, let’s see. I’ll have macaroni and cheese and an order of cole slaw and a small salad with French on the side. And don’t put them on the same plate. I can’t stand to have all that stuff together. I’d like the salad first, and I’ll have tomato juice with lemon with that, and then afterwards, I want apple pie with chocolate ice cream and a cup of coffee. No, make it Sanka or I’ll be up all night.”)—and then left a quarter under each pie plate.

  Hearthglow was washing my head clear of St. Paul’s.

  One night after the dinner rush, just when the teenagers were coming in and before the polka people, one of the cooks, the broiler man, told me that if I wanted more butter, I had better go into the freezer and get it myself. That wasn’t his job. I did not answer him, but went behind the cooking area down the narrow hall where the walk-in freezers were lined up like coolers in a morgue. I didn’t think it was my job, either, but this man was mean-tempered. I was afraid of him, and he knew it.

  I opened the big lever to the middle freezer and stepped in. Plastic packages of meat were stored on shelves. On the floor were boxes, as big as moving boxes, filled with little containers of half-and-half, butter, French fries, and vegetables. I browsed the freezer quickly, as if it were a dictionary that I had opened to look up a word, only to find a delicious storehouse of other words waiting to be read. Then the door closed behind me.

  I did not turn around until I convinced myself that there must be a lever on the inside. Surely, freezers were made that way. They had to be. Doors bumped closed by accident all the time, I thought, and the freezer companies couldn’t pay the damages that would be filed by families of suffocated workers. I breathed deeply of the frosty, food-laden air. It smelled of meat and frozen blood. When I turned, the cook was standing behind me.

  “I was wondering when you’d look around,” he said.

  “Open the door.”

  “You got your butter yet? Don’t look like you got what you came here for.”

  I reached into the box and picked up a few pounds of butter.

  “That’s not going to be enough,” he said.

  I knew it was not enough, but I wanted to have one hand free.

  “I’ll get more later.”

  “I didn’t get what I came for, either,” he said. He moved the toothpick in his mouth from one side to another, and then took it out. “You scared?”

  “Just let me out. I got tables waiting. I got money to make.”

  “You ain’t making no money here. This here is chump change. You could make some money if you put your mind to it.” He grinned.

  “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to walk past you, and then I’m going to open that lever, and I’m going to act like this has all been some kind of joke. So far, it’s a joke.”

  “Don’t threaten me.”

  “I’m going to scream now.”

  He laughed. “Go ahead.”

  It was obvious that no one would be able to hear me.

  “They’re going to be missing us.”

  “Ain’t nobody missing nobody. All they’re doing is running around simple like they always do.”

  He reached out and grabbed my arm. I watched his face. I watched where the sweat had stopped dripping and had cooled on his head, nearly bald, but covered with a fine growth of slick, black hair. He was much taller than I, and he liked to roll up the short sleeves of his white T-shirt to reveal his knotted biceps. I watched his face, because I knew that I could keep the panic out of my eyes. I waited for him to move again, gambling that I’d be faster than he, that I could throw
myself against the lever and shout over the kitchen din.

  He held my arm so hard that I dared not move it and expose my comparative weakness. He put his other hand on my face and swept it down my body. I wanted to hurt him. I would wait, and I would hurt him somehow.

  “Let me go.”

  “You too good?”

  “Get your motherfuckin’ hands off of me.”

  “Don’t talk like that.” He gave my torso another squeeze and opened the door. “You got a nasty mouth sometimes,” he said, holding the door ajar. “You’d better just make sure to keep it closed.”

  I couldn’t talk when I got out of the freezer. All I could do was put the butter out, pick up my plates, and serve my customers. I couldn’t even talk to the other waitresses.

  When my shift finished, my father came to get me. I drove the car badly. I stalled three times trying to get into first gear and crest a hill at a stoplight. My father told me about his experience stalling out once when a police car was behind him. I listened to the story he had told me before, and I soaked up the safety of being in the car with him.

  The next day I arrived at work early and spoke to the manager. He was a sloppy older man with a belly that oozed like lemon curd over his belt. He tasted each dish every morning. By noon, the corners of his mouth and his nubby short-sleeve shirts were stained with the day’s specials. He looked worried as I told him about the cook who had trapped me in the freezer, and I knew he was worried about having to do or say anything that might upset the cook. He, too, was afraid of the man, and I knew from experience that he hated to hire new people. He told me to watch myself, and to make sure that I did not provoke the cooks. There had been only one other black waitress at the Hearthglow Diner, he said, and she hadn’t worked out, but “you’re doing good,” he said. “We like you.”