Black Ice Read online

  My parents and I repeated, as if it were just the right thing to say, that St. Paul’s was a dream come true. During our stay the dream began to take on an aura of inevitability. I cradled my desire gingerly, as if I could keep it secret even from myself, but the visit had given me a feeling of necessity. I had to go to St. Paul’s. I had been raised for it.

  Why else had my mother personally petitioned the principal of Lea School so that I could attend the integrated showcase public grade school at the edge of the University of Pennsylvania’s reach—out of our West Philly district? Why else would she have dragged me across the street on my knees when I balked on the morning before the big I.Q. test, the one that could get me into the top first-grade class, the class on which free instrument and French lessons, advanced Saturday-morning classes, and a special, individualized reading series were bestowed? I remembered the bandages, white and meticulous, covering the suppurating red flesh underneath. Why else had I learned to hold myself to standards that were always just beyond my reach, if not to learn early and indelibly that we’d have to do twice the work to get half the credit? Why the thrift-shop Dickens volumes, stiff and stinking with mildew, the Berlitz records, Weekly Readers, and Spanish flashcards? Why the phone call that night from Mrs. Evans? Hadn’t I been told, hadn’t they said all along, that each of us had work to do? Wasn’t it time for me to play my part in that mammoth enterprise—the integration, the moral transformation, no less, of America?

  I had been waiting for this the way a fairy princess waits for a man. But I’d never suspected that my fate would be revealed so handsomely or so soon.

  By the time we arrived in New Jersey to pick up my sister, the events of my life had rearranged themselves in perfect anticipation of my beckoning academic career. I entered my grandparents’ familiar home yearning to soak it in, as if part of me had already left.

  We crowded into the cool aroma of the vestibule, where Nana kept her fruit in the winter, and then into the house. The cold air we brought in disturbed the quiet pale green rooms; pointed crystals that hung from pink-and-white lusters on the dining-room bureau swayed in the draft. They were antique glass lusters, older than I was, Nana had told me, made from opaque white glass over cranberry glass over crystal, the last of the fine cameo glass to come out of Czechoslovakia before the Communists took over. The lusters did not require candles in their cylindrical crystal centers. They needed only the light from elsewhere in the room, which reflected off their many surfaces. They were elegantly efficient, purely feminine, the most unnecessary objects in my universe. They caught my eye when we walked in. This time I was delighted to wonder how such a rich cranberry color could emanate from such fragile glass. They were as beautiful as anything I’d seen at St. Paul’s, a gratifying thought.

  In fact, something about St. Paul’s reminded me of my grandparents. They belonged to clubs whose members were the old, genteel black Philadelphia, alternately called “dicty” or “blue-vein” years ago. My grandmother had inherited from her father a real-estate business whose profits provided scholarships for black college students. My grandfather had played semipro baseball in the Negro leagues. He worked in a corporate sales job where he earned, he said, not as much as he would have had he been white, but more than he would had he looked black. He was the only person I knew who loved to go to work. That’s how I wanted to feel about school.

  Carole ran down the stairs and hugged me. We had missed each other, and we laughed at her throaty chuckle. I wondered why our family was so seldom happy enough to stand together embracing, and why I could not absorb the encircling sweetness but only anticipate the estrangement to come. I felt certain that my going away to school would pull the family further apart. With unutterable shame I realized that I wanted to go anyway. No matter what, I wanted to go.

  In February I completed my application. I copied my essays onto the elegant red-and-white form in my best Palmer-method handwriting. My hobbies included water colors and “dramatics,” I wrote. (“Hiding behind another personality is a fun carryover from my childhood make-pretend.”) I played violin and cello. The most important thing in my life was my family, who supported my decision. One recent experience that was important to me was going out at midnight on Christmas Eve with my father to select a tree. The vendors had closed early on account of the snow, I wrote, so my father had had to climb the fence and throw trees over to me. One year he heaved a dozen before I found one acceptable. Another year the harvest was so plentiful that we packed the car and made deliveries to family and friends. What I didn’t say was that we purposely went out after midnight to make sure that the tree-sellers had gone home. Still, it was clearly a case of bald-faced stealing. I wrote as prettily as I could and dared them not to like it.

  Chapter Three

  In March, my parents received a letter from the Director of Admissions. St. Paul’s School was “pleased,” he wrote, to offer me a place in the class of 1974. For days the letter lay on the kitchen counter by the telephone. I read it each time I passed to see again “how much the School wants you to come here in September.”

  Once I was accepted, I began to let my schoolmates know that I’d be going to St. Paul’s the next fall. My two closest girlfriends were the first I had to tell and the hardest. I felt like a traitor. Not only was I breaking up the threesome—that didn’t matter so much, I figured, since they still had each other, just as they’d had before they let me into their friendship—but I was leaving behind girls who were intelligent and loving and strong. They were my best friends. How was it that I should have this opportunity and they should not?

  The question plagued me all spring. Why not Tyrone Albert, a smart kid and a football player, as well? He was probably more what St. Paul’s had in mind than I was. They wanted scholar-athletes, and I couldn’t name a sport I was good at. Why not the kids in my old elementary school in West Philly? Or my old neighbors, Billy and Rita, for instance, whose mentally ill mother once came across the street wearing nothing but a bra and a girdle to ask my grandmother for a cigarette.

  Billy and Rita were plenty smart. What’s more, they were good in ways I didn’t even know how to be. Why not them?

  During the school day at Yeadon High, I found myself becoming abruptly sentimental. The classmates I had been so ready to leave began to appear clean-cut, all-American. We played jokes on each other, passed notes, giggled. We sneaked candy and miniature water guns up and down our rows of desks. We waved our hands wildly in the air and jumped like babies at any sign of a distraction: “Ooh, oooh! Mrs. Hendler, please! Aw, me, me! I’ll go to the office for you.”

  Rather than withdraw from the school, I told myself, I should throw myself into it. I sang in the choir. I performed in the school play. In the basement cafeteria Karen and Ruthie and I trained recruits for the majorette squad.

  I visited Ruthie, whose big house was divided like a chambered nautilus to accommodate the flow of nineteen children from cradle to move-out. From there the two of us wandered around the corner to Karen’s house, where we sat in the dark behind her mother’s heavy drapes listening to the Jackson Five and indulging in recreational fault-finding and hair grooming. There were times when we’d sit on the floor saying nothing except whatever wandered into our minds.

  “What I want to know is: is that gum on your night table going to get chewed again?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether either of you have some nice, fresh gum in your pocketbook or whether I have to rely on my already-been-chewed.”

  “But not overnight!”

  “I thought everybody saved theirs.”

  We bet on who’d stay a virgin the longest, and decided that the last one would buy a bottle of champagne for the other two.

  I tried not to think about leaving them, and became numb with the effort. Spring broke out, new green and flowery, and I missed each wave of bloom. I missed the crocuses and daffodils and the delicate weeping cherries. I caught only nature’s n
eon, the azaleas, as if out of the corner of my eye. Each time I noticed, something had just finished and turned brown.

  We corresponded steadily with St. Paul’s School that spring about financial aid, room assignment, activities. They suggested clothing for New Hampshire and “questioned the wisdom” of my signing up for six courses instead of the recommended five. (I relented, resentfully.) They advised that I open a checking account with a local bank.

  “A checking account!” The cry went up in my family.

  “I didn’t have a checking account until I was a married woman with a baby!” my mother said.

  “Well, honey,” said her mother, my grandmother Hamilton, “those children up there start learning about money while we’re still bouncing balls.”

  Nana Hamilton lived in a row house across the street from our old house in West Philadelphia. On the corner, between our two houses, big boys and men played basketball late into the night under the streetlight. When my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts went into the kitchen together, and after my sister and young cousin had fallen asleep, I’d often go upstairs to sit in the dark with my great-grandfather. Pap’s skin, crumpled and dry as a paper bag, fit snugly on his skeleton. One gray eye, plagued with glaucoma and cataracts, hung loosely in its sac. He had the bearing of a man who had been bent by age, but not yet neutered or beaten. In his room, I could hear the men’s sneakers on the asphalt. I could hear their voices as they teased and cursed each other with gentle violence.

  Pap would repeat his stories, old, scary stories from Barbados. When he finished, and I lay listening to the men outside, their voices bouncing off the low ceiling of the city sky, I could hardly visualize St. Paul’s. The previous December seemed far away.

  Pap and I prayed together on our knees by the sharp metal legs of the open sofa bed:

  A mother’s knee, O sacred spot,

  As years go by, forget it not.

  Life could unfold no brighter page

  In youth, in manhood, or in age.

  Our father God in faith and love,

  Prepare us for His home above,

  And when we stand before His face

  Let us rejoice, His child of grace.

  Outside the men played. I could hear, by the sound of the dribbling, when different players were in control of the ball. Sometimes it nearly sang.

  In the glow of the streetlight, I could see Pap talk to His God, an old people’s God, One he had turned to, my mother and grandmother joked, after he’d sown his oats but good. Pap’s God and his ghosts swirled around him. Death was close in his room; it felt like warm dark and smelled of liniment. I was sad to think of leaving him for St. Paul’s, and yet I was grateful for an excuse to escape the seductive stillness of his room.

  I was also relieved to escape from my grandmother’s glittering fantasies and the heartbreaking remnant of her coloratura soprano; her excess, from the pounds of cheese and butter that bubbled over in her macaroni to her fury; and the madcap humor drinking released in her. I was relieved to imagine myself free of the silent judgment of my dead great-grandmother.

  “Grammom would have been so proud of you going to that school,” my grandmother said, bestowing on me even greater praise than she could give. “And the wonderful thing is,” she added, “that we don’t even have to tell you to go up there and make her proud. I know you’ll do that already.”

  When summer came, I worked full time at Woolworth’s fountain in Darby. Weeks whizzed by: hot, repetitive, soothing. Each day I wore the same uniform, washed by hand in the sink and hung to dry in the dining room, and the same run-over shoes polished fresh. Each hamburger was cooked the same way; each BLT arranged just so; each soup-to-go poured to the same level in the take-out cup; each basketful of fries allowed to bubble just the same amount of time in their frothy grease. I had it down now. The work felt good.

  From her post behind the cash register in John’s Bargain Store across Main Street, Karen waved at me through the plate-glass window. “Tacky” Darby passed between us: trolley cars forced to wait while Darbyites double-parked outside the ugly state liquor store; the big white woman in the flowered house-dress who never wore panties (and always bent over); shoplifting teens who met on the sidewalks to compare their heists. Veins raised themselves up along the backs of my hands that summer. My handwriting changed several times. I began reading Time magazine.

  Soon after that it was time to go.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  I jumped as my mother came upon me in the dark on our front lawn. On the pretext of walking the dog, I had come outside by myself.

  “Florence Evans told me that you’d go away, and in my heart I’ve always known it. I’m not afraid to let you go. Some people say: How could you let her go at fifteen? But I know that if I haven’t given you what you need by now, another couple years won’t do it. I’ve done my job. I know that.”

  I felt a sadness for us at that moment, and for my mother, for whom being a mother was everything. I was desperate to leave her, a desperation that filled me up with shame. I bloated with it. My fingers itched. She looked at my tears with what I imagined to be satisfaction, grim and tender.

  Then she came to the point. “I think you know how to behave. I haven’t talked to you about how to protect yourself, because you’re smart enough to figure that out. You’ll do better off staying just as you are. Intact, do you hear me? You’re going up there for an education, not for any of that other stuff. Like your cigarettes. I know about girls’ feelings, but I’m not about to condone anything. But girls do make mistakes. I know that. And if you ever make a mistake, don’t you go running to any of those people up there. You don’t know them, and, believe me, they could just be waiting for you to make a mistake. Do you hear me? Don’t you go running to those people. If you make a mistake, you come to me—not Nana Hamilton, not Nana Jackson, not Aunt Evie, not your girlfriends.

  “I have some money. That’s just for you to know. It is only for emergencies, but there’s enough there if you need it. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

  I nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “Now, don’t stay out here too long.”

  Getting pregnant, I practically snorted to myself, was out of the question. Not that I couldn’t make mistakes. Not that I was judging girls who did. But not me. Not when I had so much to lose.

  I thought about being pregnant. I thought about how you got that way, and my body tingled. It did that not only when I expected it, when a boy held me during a slow dance or kissed me good-night, but at other times too—completely against my will. It did it when Gregory, our paper boy, sang to us girls with exaggerated enjoyment:

  I’m a girl watcher, I’m a girl watcher,

  Watchin’ girls go by. My, my, my.

  I’m a girl watcher, I’m a girl watcher,

  Here comes one now.

  It could jangle despite danger, too. I’d learned that in junior high when two older boys, one black and one white, called out to me after school. They hung out together. That was all I knew about them. They stared at pieces of us girls, at our breasts, our thighs, our buttocks. Once, they asked me to go somewhere with them, and they walked behind me until I’d found a friend to latch onto and accompany home. The clamorous, bulging body under my skin set to jangling with fear, and I spoke about them to my mother.

  “Next time they come near you,” she said, “I want you to turn around and shout, ‘Just what is wrong with you? What is your basic maladjustment?’ ”

  I couldn’t say that, of course, so I determined to avoid them. Eventually, they lost interest in teasing me.

  Months later, they were arrested, tried, and found guilty of raping and killing a girl in her own basement. She was discovered, as the newspapers said, as my mother often repeated, and as I visualized at odd moments during the school day, in a pool of her own blood.

  I remember little else about them or about the incident. It blended into, rather than stood out from, the daily rhythm
of my life. It was just like that, adolescence was: jerky, disorderly, the most important times condensed by fear.

  I went inside to bed then, because for the first time since I had applied to St. Paul’s School, I realized that I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

  The next morning we left early. St. Paul’s fall term began later than public schools, so my father had to take a day off from teaching.

  Late-model station wagons, weighted down like our Citroën sedan, drove north with us. We watched them. We counted them. We took an inventory of their cargo. Suitcases, boxes, blankets, potted plants, reading lamps; pillows smashed up against the windows; rocking chairs, easy chairs, rolled up Orientals, and bean bags in various colors lashed to the rooftops or straddling open back doors. We decided that these folks were off to college or to boarding schools less stringent than St. Paul’s regarding matters of personal possessions. (The Vice-Rector had sent us a letter, which my parents approved of, stating that students were not allowed to own or have access to automobiles and were strongly discouraged from bringing expensive objects to school, such as fancy jewelry or stereo systems.)

  I missed my baton. For the first time in three years, I would not have it close to hand where I could twirl it absently in my room, to comfort myself with the simple competence of my fingers and the smooth, cool weight of the metal. I would twirl at night after my mother had told me to turn off the lights and stop reading. Even in the morning glare of the Garden State Parkway I could remember the whirl of silver splinters of light the baton gave off, and the funnel of air around my head and legs and behind my back.

  St. Paul’s did not have majorettes with epaulets and white, half-calf boots with tassels; it had no cheerleaders, drum majors, or flag squads; no prom or prom queen; no caps and gowns at graduation; no class rings such as the big gold one Wash once gave me and I tried solemnly to give back. I had the ring, packed up and hidden, but the baton would have given me away, so I’d left it home with the rest of the folderol of a public-school education and my gospel choir robes from church. No sooner were we on the road, however, amid the station wagons and their cool-eyed passengers, than I missed each and every public-school artifact.