Black Ice Read online

  The smell of frying bacon and the sound of a stranger’s voice woke me.

  “What kind of juice would you like?” The housekeeper spoke in a thin voice; it emerged from a rib cage no bigger around than a twelve-year-old’s. Three years later, in the same kitchen, this woman would hand me a graduation card permeated by the inky smell of a fresh five-dollar bill. Eight years after that, when I returned to teach, she would stand in the same narrow kitchen, tiny shoulders silhouetted against the same window, and stare into my face to find the plumper, younger face concealed. She would share with me her loneliness after her husband’s death: the stillness of the air inside her house, the pointlessness of unused chairs, days off with nothing to do. Narrowing her eyes to look back, she’d remember my mother, too.

  I heard them talk that December morning while I dressed. “Please, don’t bother with that,” my mother said.

  “No bother.”

  “Now, with a living room this size, they must use Scudder for more than a guesthouse. This room would be perfect for a banquet—a small banquet—or a luncheon.”

  “Yep. We do serve some big meals here.”

  “You don’t mean to tell me they make you do any real cooking in a kitchen this size?”

  “Nope. I don’t cook it.”

  “I was going to say.…”

  “Cafeteria sends the food up. The van comes right to that back door there. I serve it, buffet-style. They serve themselves. I clean up.”

  She stayed in the kitchen while we ate, self-consciously, at the drop-leaf table under Mr. Scudder’s portrait. I assumed he was appalled, and I was pleased to think so.

  Mike Russell appeared to take us for a tour of the grounds and buildings. They were little more to me than a backdrop to our own improbable drama. Russell could have been leading me through the Land of the Sweets, I was so dreamy. He’d be gone by the time I got in, if I got in, I kept reminding myself, trying not to lose control. Like a tourist in a foreign country, I felt that it might be possible to come to this school and be free of my past, free to re-create myself. I smiled at Russell as he guided us into the New Chapel. He did not know that on a bet I’d eaten half a worm in fifth grade, and up here there’d be nobody to tell him or anyone else.

  From the antechapel we looked down a long aisle flanked on either side by three rows of graduated pews for students and high-backed seats carved into the walls for teachers. The floors were laid with brick-colored quarry tile. At the end of the center aisle, the altar rose distant and ornate. Slants of sunbeams were colored by tall stained-glass windows overhead. To our left a bright white marble angel cradled an equally white nude in muscular tribute to the school’s war dead.

  My head filled with the words and melodies of familiar prayers: the doxology, the Lord’s Prayer, snippets of music:

  My soul be on thy guard

  Ten thousand foes arise:

  And hosts of sin are pressing hard

  To drive thee from the skies.

  In the African Methodist Episcopal church, the minister would continue: “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee.” I heard the music, punctuated by the creaking pews, in my head. I heard the floor of Ward A.M.E. groan under its red carpet as the parishioners lined up in the aisle to take their burdens to the Lord. We touched hands and hugged each other as we made our slow progress toward the altar.

  In the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul the heels of our shoes clicked on the stone floors. The aisle was wide enough for a mummers’ procession. My music would not fit here. Neither would my God, He whom I had held onto, just barely, through the music that spoke comfort and retribution, and the community, the perfumed and bosomy women who approved of me, and the old men who nodded at me each Sunday. I could not conjure my God in this place, and it seemed His failure. Surprise, as cold as the electric blanket had been warm, overwhelmed me. We left the chapel. It was time for my interview.

  Inside the Schoolhouse, at the top of a slate staircase, was a waiting room where Russell handed us over to Mr. Price. I smelled coffee brewing, and I heard classroom sounds—discussion, laughter, lecturing, but no shouts or threats, no yardsticks banging for silence, no words of shame or derision. My father, who taught in a public junior high school, looked away from Mr. Price and my mother for a moment and smilingly shook his head.

  Our admissions officer, Mr. Dick, came into the waiting room. After a general greeting, he ushered us into an office and closed the door. This was what we had come for, and it was nothing like I had imagined.

  For one thing, I had not expected my parents to be invited into my interview. Once they were in, I could not keep my eyes off them. They filled the room with their presence. Mr. Dick, I could see, was impressed by them. They were altogether natural, and yet larger than I’d ever seen them. My mother engaging and shiny-eyed, my father, thoughtful and imposing. They wanted St. Paul’s, too—I saw that for the first time—or else they could not have created this portrayal of themselves: the ambitious couple in their thirties, grateful for an opportunity for their daughter, eager to help, reluctant to let her go. Why, St. Paul’s, they said, was a dream come true, and I agreed. I loved to look at them like this. It was almost too good.

  And yet it was true. I knew it. It was as true as the estrangement that had settled between them like chill damp in our basement. It was as true as our weekdays, morning after chaotic morning, when I looked in vain for the correct time on the faces of our several too-fast clocks, as my mother shouted up the stairs at approximately seven-forty-five that it was eight o’clock and we were late. Late! Always late. Always rushing, hobbled, baffled by the confusion that came our way. Whose fault? Whose?

  And it was as true as our barely acknowledged disappointment in the big Yeadon house, which had not made us happier together, as I’d expected it would. Why else had we bought it? Why else the scrimping and saving, the thrift-shop furniture, the careful hand-washing of delicates, the parade of used, rather than new, auto parts?

  I made a freeze-frame of my parents in my mind: big, expansive, generous, unhurried. It was what I had done as a child when I had felt in danger of getting too happy. I’d make a picture in my mind to go back to later and enjoy in bits. My mother was wearing her best lipstick, and my father sat content, wanting to be nowhere else but right there, with us. I made a picture of them like that—I can still see it—and I held my new gorgeous reverence for them way deep inside where it made me warm and giddy like brandy.

  Then, Mr. Dick asked my parents to leave. Their interview was over. They had passed; how could they not? It was my turn, but I felt guilty that they should go. How could I sit alone in the office, discussing my worthiness for an education they’d never had? It was quiet after he’d shown them out. Quiet. It was hard to pull myself back, to stop watching others and start promoting myself. I wanted to watch some more. I wanted to look at Mr. Dick, his mannerisms, his eyes. I wanted to read his files and eavesdrop on his phone calls so I’d know who I was dealing with.

  “Tell me, Lorene, what most attracts you to St. Paul’s School?”

  “I guess what I would look forward to most is being somewhere where all the students want to learn. In my school, if you get a really good report card, you feel like you better hide it on the way home.”

  It was partially true. Afraid of becoming an egghead and of appearing to be one, I smoked in the bathrooms, cursed regularly, and participated in mild pranks. But Yeadon High had plenty of ambitious kids of ambitious parents, and was hardly so tough a place as I insinuated. Mr. Dick did not seem to know that. I wondered what he thought it was like.

  “It’s not considered cool to do well?”

  “Not really.”

  “And do you like school?”

  “Most of the time, yes.” A bald-faced lie. I disliked school, always had—the clanking institutional sounds in cavernous old buildings, the cheap dropped ceilings and multipurpose cafeteria-gymnasium-auditorium rooms in ne
w ones. I hated fights. I was offended by standing in lines (“We’re not moving until everybody is standing ab-so-lute-ly still”); insulted by teachers’ condescension (“If you can’t pronounce Mrs. Rak-our, you just call me Mrs. Rock-over”); I was numbed by busywork (“Copy pages five hundred and fifty-five through five hundred and fifty-eight from your dictionaries, and see if that can keep your traps shut”). I dreaded gym. Mr. Dick could tell that I was lying; he smiled.

  When we got around to books, I was finally set, as our minister would say, on solid ground. I gorged on books. I sneaked them at night. I rubbed their spines and sniffed in the musty smell of them in the library. I sped through my grandfather’s paperbacks that lined the wall of their mint-green sun parlor and read and reread the dirty parts until I was damp. I memorized black poetry—stately sonnets, skittering bebop rhymes, any celebration of black women—and I drank in the fury of my contemporaries. I did not tell Mr. Dick that I’d been reading The Spook Who Sat by the Door, or that I was attracted to the murderous rage of the protagonist, a token black like me.

  When my interview ended, Mr. Dick opened the door for me. He held it while I stepped through. “I hope you’re ready for homework,” he said. “Because there’s plenty of it here.”

  Was he assuming that a black girl from public school might not be up to it? I wondered. Or was I too sensitive? I’d been told that before, and I knew it was true, but I couldn’t always tell when. Sometimes “sensitive” was what kids called each other when they wanted license for cruelty, or what white people said when they did not want to bother to change.

  “Really,” he said as we walked toward the waiting room. “If you would not look forward to three hours—and sometimes more—of homework a day, then St. Paul’s is the wrong school.”

  “I do my homework,” I said. It was too quick and too sharp. I smiled to soften the defiance I’d let slip.

  Mr. Dick reunited me with my parents. Once again we stood in a group chatting. We had been chatting all weekend. Chat. Chat. Chat. I could not think of one more thing to say. Not one. I smiled. My temples were sore.

  A buzzer sounded the change of period. Doors banged open, and students swarmed the halls. A few girls walked by, but for the most part the Schoolhouse teemed with boys. They were tall and short, wiry, stocky, fat, skinny, loud, groomed, unkempt, babyish, manly—and they were white.

  Then a group of black boys passed by. They stopped on the second-floor landing. A couple of boys smiled. A couple looked elsewhere. A couple looked me over. One boy, who was wearing a black leather jacket and cap, stepped forward.

  “Well, hello there,” he said. “Are you here to apply to St. Paul’s?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Oh, wow! That’s great. Where’re you from?”

  “Philadelphia.”

  “How about that? What’s your name?”

  “Aw, come on, Wood.” The boys had been amused to watch their buddy in action for a while. Now they wanted to move on.

  “You’ll be gone next year, anyway.”

  “You’ll have to excuse him,” one of the boys said to me.

  They laughed together and bounced in a group down the steps. I was annoyed. I smiled again at the adults. My temples were rigid with exertion.

  Mr. Price appeared to take us to lunch. On the way we stopped at his dorm. His modern apartment had tall windows and bright white walls. He told my parents that the school paid for faculty members to do graduate work in the summers and, after a few years’ teaching, to go to Europe. He showed us a red-and-white china bowl depicting scenes from the grounds that he was given after five years’ service. My mother said that my father should think about teaching at St. Paul’s. I was appalled to hear it.

  “It doesn’t look like your daughter thinks that’s a good idea,” Mr. Price said. He enjoyed the joke and kept it going.

  “We could use you,” he said to my father, looking to me for a reaction. “I’m sure we could arrange to have you put in his class. Would you like that?”

  I was relieved when, on the way to lunch, Mr. Price found another student to tease. “Alma Jean! Alma Jean!” Mr. Price mimicked a Southern accent and laughed at a girl at the top of the path. “Alma, come meet a visiting family.”

  The path sloped steeply. Underneath the sawdust, a thick crust of ice gave off the dull gray sheen of moonstone. Students going to and from lunch stepped around us. They slipped off the shoulder of the icy path and made giant steps into the surrounding snow. Two or three of them fell. They laughed at each other and slid away. I felt my toes curl under in my boots, even though I knew that nothing short of grappling hooks could save me if I began to fall. And, of course, my mother was holding onto my arm, smiling a blaze of new lipstick. Her fingers dug into my sleeve. God forbid one of us should slip. We’d both go down, brown behinds right up in the air for Mr. Price and all these white people to see, my father grabbing for both of us with some wild, involuntary cry from ancient Japan, my mother screaming, and everybody rushing to help us, their solicitude, the shrieks of hysterical laughter once they were out of earshot.

  Alma Jean reached us alive. The door she’d come out of at the top of the path might as well have been cradled in the clouds. I’d never make it.

  “Welcome to St. Paul’s,” Alma said. She was a short Southern girl with acne on her round cheeks, glasses, and a big, fluffy Afro the color of old honey. “I hope you had a good trip.” She’d already taken in the knee socks, I could see that, and was now processing my “classic” getup in all its devoutly-wished-for understatement.

  “This is Alma’s first year,” said Mr. Price. “She came here from Memphis, Tennessee, and she’s in the Fourth Form.” He looked down at her.

  “Oh, you must miss home,” my mother said.

  “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

  “And it’s a lot colder than you must be used to,” Mama said. “Is that all you wear?”

  Like the other students, Alma sported a jacket. We, of course, were swaddled in everything but buffalo hide.

  “Yes, ma’am. They told me it was going to be cold up here, but nobody told me it would be this cold!”

  I could see that Alma was a little feisty for my mother’s taste in teenagers, but Mama couldn’t help but go for that “ma’am” stuff. Mr. Price tried to steer Alma back to a proper discussion. “Now, Alma, aside from climate considerations, are you enjoying your first year here? Your classes, sports, activities?”

  Alma giggled and rolled her eyes. Nope, she did not dig this place. She’d signified it, OK, and now I waited to hear the words that would disavow her look.

  “Well, naw, not really, Mr. Price.” She burst into quick laughter, but she stuck to her story. “I mean, this is an excellent education. The best. But ‘like it’? I don’t know if those would be my exact words.”

  I watched her leave, jealous of the cool disdain with which she looked up at Mr. Price and the way she bounded over the ice when she left, careless and confident as a cat.

  We waved gingerly in Alma’s direction. Then we turned, arms still locked, to begin our ascent. By the time we made it safely into the building, I had begun to sweat into my layers of wool.

  We walked through a cold, bright cloister. On black iron hooks along the windows, jackets were hung to chill while their owners ate. We folded our coats—these were our good coats we were wearing—and laid them on benches by a wall that was covered with oak panels carved, like the panels in the Schoolhouse, with the names of graduates. Heaps of textbooks and paperbacks lay scattered on benches and the floor. Like toppling cairns they led us to the dining room.

  The lunch line snaked through the Upper Common Room, past the formal dining hall with its dark, high-backed chairs and forbidding portraits, and into the kitchen. We collected trays and battered silver-plate utensils. In our turn we stepped up to be served. Behind a long steam table stood the poorest-looking white people I’d ever seen. These were residents of a state training school for the mentally retarded, Mr.
Price explained. During the school terms they worked with the food-service staff and boarded in rooms above the kitchen. Students, for some reason, referred to them as wombats.

  “But aside from that rather predictable teenage cruelty,” said Mr. Price, “the kids, on the whole, treat the staff with at least a modicum of respect.”

  “Nice hot soup,” said one of the women. Her teeth were rotten, and she showed them when she smiled.

  It seemed wrong for these people to stand there, separated from us by chrome and glass and crusted-over sheet pans. It seemed wrong for them to remain stunted in the presence of growing, budding, blooming talent, able only to feed the young aristocrats who would go away and forget them. I took the bowl from the woman with the medieval mouth. There seemed nothing else I could do. Soup, thick with cornstarch, sloshed onto my thumb, and the woman apologized fast, like a child who has been beaten.

  “Lost your appetite, eh?” Lee Bouton sat across from me at the lunch table. She was a year or two older than I, long and lean and unhurried. Her beige face was framed with nearly black hair, thick and wiry, pulled back into a big, Africanized bun. I would never have guessed—almost no one did—that Lee’s mother was white, as were her older brother and her stepfather, a college professor. Years later Bouton called her urban black image a literary creation, one she’d absorbed from her peers and fashioned from books her stepfather had recommended.

  A few other students sat with us. They were friendly, welcoming, quirky. I wondered if I’d displayed enough character in my interview. Perhaps the Yeadon High booklist I bragged that I’d read was as tacky as those fishnet stockings I had wanted to wear and insisted on packing. There was no solid ground up here for me, but neither was there any going back.