Black Ice Read online

  We walked to the playground behind the swim club we never joined. It was called The Nile, and had been built by the black doctors and lawyers and teachers on Yeadon’s west end after they had been barred from the Yeadon Swim Club on the other side of the borough. We listened to the music and smelled the French fries. The water sounded cool, and the children were noisy. I do not remember wanting to go into the swim club; it was yet another social world to figure out and fit into, and did not seem worth the effort.

  Carole and I sat on the swings that once excited her but were now too tame. We climbed into the V in the middle of the old weeping willow tree and talked about when we were smaller and when we’d grow up. She never tired of hearing anecdotes from her own childhood, and she particularly liked to hear how feisty she had been, how she had walked around the backyard naked, how she had run away to Mrs. Evans’s house, how she created her own pantry of stolen cookies and candy in her room and was not discovered until an army of ants marched in a line over the windowsill, across the room, under her bed, and gave her away. She still had that same throaty, infectious laugh, but she seemed to laugh less frequently now.

  Once, when I was baby-sitting for Carole and two of her friends, a sister and a brother who lived two doors away, Carole argued with the little girl and hit her. I scolded Carole while the child cried and the younger boy looked on. When I went into the house to fix their lunch, Carole hit her again. I scooped Carole under my arm and carried her upstairs. She shouted and screamed, and I felt a terrible rage erupting within me. It was hot that day. I never knew what to do when the children fought, and that summer they were fighting all the time. It was much worse with me than with the mothers. I was losing control.

  “I hate you,” she screamed. I slapped her. Knowing full well what I was doing, I slapped her. I knew how hurt she would be, and I did it anyway. She stopped crying immediately and stared at me, disbelieving. I had never done that to her before, and in that moment, our entire relationship was redefined. I had become one of the grown-ups (and with that most immature of actions, a blow). I might play at sibling solidarity, but now she and I knew that I had become capable of grown-up treachery.

  I was one of the women, now, as I had been when I’d stood in front of the mirror in Simpson the night that Ricky had come to St. Paul’s, my eyes wild and hair stuck up like a marmoset’s on the top of my head. It did not come, this womanhood, as I had expected. I had thought it was power that they had been keeping all to themselves, and it was, of a sort: power to make Ricky cry, or to strike shame into a child and wipe away, with the back of my hand, the delicate teardrops of her trust.

  After the moment of shocked silence between us, I grabbed Carole to me and held her. I told her that I was sorry for hitting her, so sorry for hitting her. I asked her to behave with Roslyn, to please, please behave, and she knew and I knew that I was begging her because I no more had the ability to tolerate failing in her than in myself. She went downstairs and outside to friends who were waiting to see what had happened to her. I sat in her room for a moment letting the image of her face burn into me. I can see it even now: that dumbfounded shock, not disputing, but hating, grieving, and so quickly accepting my right to hurt her.

  Later in the summer, my mother’s clan—my Nana Hamilton, my paralyzed Aunt Emily, my octogenarian great-grandfather, and my Aunt Evelyn—moved to a tract house in suburban Wilmington. We went down in a caravan of cars, and I watched as the white neighbors came out to help our disabled kin into the house. I thought of Carole and me then, as I watched them going into the new house, the last of my family to leave the black inner city where I grew up. My great-grandfather said a prayer to bless the house, and I listened as my folks told the new neighbors what family people we were. My grandmother spread her arms and said, as she had said before, that she loved her girls ferociously.

  I had always squirmed under the word and how she belted it out vaudeville-style, rolling the r, and tossing her head. I thought I knew why it had disturbed me, now that I had struck my sister and seen the panicked acceptance in her beautiful coffee-colored eyes. I knew our ferocious love better now: It was feline, deliberate, personal. Nana loved us as a lioness loved her cubs, insisting that her pride stay near and hunt with her, eat with her. Males who could not live with the pride were cast out. I also suspected that like a lioness giving birth, she would lick us, not just to clean us, or to augment her own strength, but also to discover our defects, and, if need be, if one were too weak, to swallow us up.

  By the end of August, after my summer holiday in the real world, I was more than ready to go back to school.

  Chapter Ten

  On the first day of my Sixth-Form year, I greeted new parents and studied at the Rectory. I called across the green to old friends. I told tired-looking parents how to get to their children’s new houses. I helped new girls carry boxes up the stairs. I stood outside the Old Chapel to watch the new students go in for their First-Night Service. I saw their nervousness and arrogance, and I remembered my own.

  The rituals this year were familiar. They included and sustained me and helped me to know where I was, to know the season, and to ease the pain of leaving the parents and family whom I looked at with new, different, critical, nostalgic eyes. I knew as precisely as a soldier where I belonged in this community, and I had the privileges and responsibilities to show me.

  I also had a history here. I had been thrown off the boat docks into the icy pond. I had lived in a house, studied in the library, run on the fields, rowed on the pond, eaten in the dining rooms, prayed and sung in the Chapel. I knew the rhythm of the year, the first days of orientation and welcome, the beginning of term, term-time proper, and then the Cricket Holiday break, Parents’ Day, and on and on. I had experienced failure and success.

  I stopped on the paths to talk with new students, particularly new black and Hispanic students, just as Mike Russell and Lee and Maldonado and Wally had stopped to welcome me. I saw their skepticism, and I saw reflected in their eyes the poise and confidence they saw in me. After a brief talk, I’d mount my bicycle—another Sixth-Form privilege—and ride away.

  Alma and I explored North Upper and settled into our new room. Like the rest of the Upper, the room was trimmed in old wood. It had two large windows that looked southwest onto long-needle pine trees. Instead of a closet, an armoire was provided for each of us, as well as the standard bed, desk, and bureau. Instead of linoleum floors like Simpson and concrete-block walls like Middle, we had pine floors and plaster walls.

  In addition, our hallway was a dead end, separated from the rest of the house by a fire door. Although the door was customarily propped open, in contravention of city fire codes, we did have the option of closing it if the noise wafted up to the second floor from the stairwell (and, as Sixth Formers, we had the clout to keep it closed). We were not troubled by passersby, and we were just across the hall from the toilets and showers. Also, positioned as we were over the kitchen, we were on the main steam line. Our radiators, we learned on the first cold night, clanged and banged as if Marley’s ghost were trapped inside, but they worked. They sizzled and hissed and spat drops of boiling water on our beds, and gave more heat than I’d ever dared hoped for in Simpson. So, too, did the radiators in our bathroom.

  Alma liked to keep the room much warmer than I did. It was a running joke between us, but I looked forward to coming into our toasty room, where the color of the several mix-and-match woods glowed in the afternoon sun. Not only did Alma like the room warm, she liked to sit half dressed at night as we braided our hair together and talked about the day. My side of the room bristled with order. Hers was less insistently tidy.

  “How come you got to start making the bed the minute your feet hit the floor? You need to lighten up, girl. Live a little!” Then she’d laugh, delighted with herself and at my inability to be angry with her.

  I found her lightheartedness incredible. I kept waiting, without knowing it, for some event to shake her. She accepted rather
than fought against her limitations, and she enjoyed her strengths. When we choreographed dances together for dance class, we learned to respect each other’s bodies, and we marveled, with the sharp, quick joy of adolescent insight, that our dispositions were reflected in our movements. She was short, fast, and playfully athletic; I was bigger, tense, controlled. We jumped and cavorted on the dusty green carpet in our hallway, and the old wooden floorboards underneath groaned with our efforts.

  Underneath this new, surprising friendship ran the less-than-lovely fact, as Alma told me years later, that I had “made a project” of her. Just as I had corrected her pitch in choir rehearsals the year before (we’d sat next to each other in the soprano section), I now fixed her collars, coached her on a proper point in dance, instructed her on how not to stack our albums without first putting them back into the sleeves and album covers.

  “I can’t study anymore. Don’t you understand? My brain is tired, and yours is, too, ’cept for you’re too crazy to know it,” she’d say at night while I prepared to begin a midnight study session.

  “Hey, did I ask you whether you were going to study?” I asked disingenuously. “No. All I asked was if it was OK for me to keep the lights on or if I should go somewhere else.”

  “Where else are you going to go?”

  “I could get late sign-out to the Schoolhouse.”

  “Aw, come on. It’s raining too hard, and you know it. I just guess I’ll read some more of this old French. Now’re you happy? I’ll be looking as baggy-eyed as you tomorrow. But I guess that’s the price of rooming with the vice-president of the school. You gotta uphold the standards.”

  Most of my friends joked about my position on Student Council, but accepted it, as Alma did. A few, I found, were not comfortable with it, or with me as I took on the mantle.

  One fall evening—when the leaves had turned red and gold, and frosts came at night to knock out the mosquitoes but retreated in the daylight—I happened upon Janie and some of her friends, a circle of them sitting cross-legged on the ground. They invited me to join them and showed me a bottle of rosé that someone had secured. I was looking down on their white legs shining in the twilight. We seniors felt relaxed for the first part of the term, knowing we’d soon be grinding like maniacs, filling out college applications, writing essays, taking the standardized tests for the last time. I wanted to bask with them in the early days of Sixth-Form year. (We were already referring to ourselves with premature nostalgia.)

  But I was scheduled to sit on a Disciplinary Committee meeting soon. I’d received notification in my mailbox. More and more frequently that fall, I received official notes in my box. They listed several names across the top, faculty members first, then two or three students. My name would be circled. I knew that the Rector’s secretary typed these notes and photocopied them, and that each person named would receive one. I was notified of meetings, dinners for visitors, planning sessions for school functions. I attended meetings in the Schoolhouse, in Vice-Rectors’ offices, and in the welcoming living room of the Student-Council adviser, a gracious French teacher named Mr. Archer. I ate lunches and dinners at Scudder, where I met again with the diminutive housekeeper who had made breakfast for my parents and me when I’d come for my interview nearly two years before. I carried plates out to her. I talked to her in order to escape for a while the repetitive discussions about school life.

  Mostly, however, I took part. I learned with what care the faculty scheduled our lives, and to what degree they considered the good of the students. The Lower School was being phased out; what could we do to keep the younger boys from feeling left out of activities geared toward older teenagers? The trustees were coming. How could we arrange for more students to interact with them—not just the straight-arrows hand-picked by the administrators? Older students were allowed to take long weekends away from school, but only the wealthy or those who lived nearby could make use of the privilege. How could we give scholarship kids and students from far away a chance for a break, too? (Answer: a Student Council initiative called Long Weekend on Campus, which excused a student from Saturday classes.)

  The Disciplinary Committee had not yet met that year, but we were due to convene soon. Peter Starr and I, and a group of faculty members, would hear the case of a student who had been caught breaking an “expectation” (they weren’t called rules) of the school. We would deliberate and suggest a response to the Rector.

  I looked around at the cross-legged kids on the grass. What I had been doing was different from what they had been doing that fall. It had not seemed so different at first, but my thinking had changed. I tried to tell Janie that I couldn’t drink this year. “It just wouldn’t be right,” I said. “I’d like to, but I shouldn’t.”

  “I can’t believe that you’ve let this vice-president crap go to your head.”

  The others were quiet. They were watching. This was between Janie and me. It was the sort of dispute that rarely took place in company. They watched with avid interest.

  “It’s not going to my head,” I said. “It’s just that I can’t sit in judgment on somebody tomorrow night knowing that I’ve done exactly the same thing the night before. I can’t do that.”

  “Next thing you’ll be turning us in.”

  According to the Honor Code, that’s what I was supposed to do. I did not think it would help my case to point out that at the present moment, I was being lenient.

  “I really didn’t think you’d take it this way,” said Janie.

  “Neither did I.” I had not expected that anything would change. I could lose my outrageous friend. I did not want to lose her irreverence and swagger and fun, her loyalty or brassy sexuality. I felt important with Janie, as if we knew more than others, saw more, felt more, perceived some quality through a sixth sense of headiness that others did not possess. I didn’t want her to think I’d joined the establishment, but the truth was that, in a way, I had.

  I went back to my hot little den to lick my wounds and convince myself, in the glow of Alma’s company, that I’d found something better. And I did indeed begin to receive other, subtle rewards of my new (relatively) law-abiding status. Although I did not realize it at the time, my relations with my teachers were changing. I had little to hide from them, a state which I understood only in terms of their treatment of me: they’d stopped watching me so hard. My St. Paul’s career suddenly seemed shorter. Like a fifty-year-old manager, I saw that I’d gone as far as I could go in the company, and I felt released, just a little, from the tyranny of competition.

  Anthony Wade, who had teased me relentlessly the year before, noticed the change in me, and felt it incumbent upon him to tell me about it. He made me laugh. I was astonished by this new friendship, which was clearly headed toward romance. I wondered if I could date Anthony and still remain myself. He did not seem to demand that I affect a girlie witlessness. He accepted me, committee meetings and all, and he showed compassion toward my difficulty in math and my more successful struggles in science.

  “Anybody who could get an HH out of Buxton’s class can memorize the Periodic Table,” he’d say as we walked together from the science building. “The only problem with chemistry is you can’t wing it. You can’t go in, read the first and last line and come out with, ‘Mr. Hawley, this chemical reaction really acts as a metaphor for human relations with God as expressed in the Trinity.… ”

  I’d make some retort, but I took his point. There was a difference in the disciplines. I’d learned that in last year’s desperate battle with calculus and the more successful campaign I’d mounted in Spanish under Sr. Fuster’s loving tutelage. In the fall term I was taking dance, Modern Novels, Spanish, Biology II, and chemistry. I knew that I could not afford to skitter over the basics in science. I did not know them. I would not be able to pick them up later.

  These simple facts were easier to accept as I spent more time with Anthony. We studied together, met between classes, sat together at lunch. I could see up close that he, too, di
d the groundwork for his sciences. I could see the repetition and exercise, and I learned to believe in it.

  Parents’ Day turned out to be an unsettling time. My parents and my grandparents Jackson were scheduled to come to school, but at the last minute, my mother, on the recommendation of her doctor, decided to stay home. She was ill.

  I was deeply disturbed by her absence. I was one of four students chosen to speak at the Parents’ Day Symposium. She was not there to hear me. She had been in every audience for every skit I had performed since second grade. I was only half of the performance. She was the other.

  Mr. Oates introduced me as “the first girl to be elected an officer of the School.” The audience registered a suitably quiet Episcopalian appreciation. Mom would have drunk it in, but she missed it. Then Mr. Oates said that I was on the editorial board of the Horae, the school literary magazine. I gulped. That was wrong! I had submitted several celebration-of-blackness poems, but the Horae honchos had rejected them all. He said more, and I held my breath through the applause.

  I stepped to the lectern and adjusted the microphone. My grandfather turned around to the people behind him. No doubt he was identifying me as his granddaughter. It made me smile, and I used the smile to slide into my speech. The moment I heard my own voice bounce back at me through the speakers, I saw someone else. It was Ethel Kennedy. I knew that her son was at St. Paul’s, but a smart-mouthed Fourth Former was not the same as a famous mother. Not three sentences into the speech about diversity in the morning chapel services, my bladder leaked.

  I could feel the warm betrayal like a five-year-old awakening from a dream. Pop-Pop was smiling broadly, my grandmother more discreetly; my father looked proud. I could not stand in front of these white people and wet myself! I crossed my legs behind the lectern and pulled all of myself up into my voice. I heard it deepen in the speakers. It was calm and poised. My voice finished its speech, and the rest of me sat down.