Stateway's Garden Page 11

  The bus driver sat us down with only the aisle separating us and re-buckled our belts, and once again went to grab the clipboard. She was looking at our names on the windows and writing so fast I couldn’t follow. I was still crying anyway and my eyes burned badly. She looked disappointed. Made me feel worse than when I got caught stealing G.I. Joes from Woolworth’s on Forty-seventh and they called my mother.

  The bus driver walked back to her seat, picked up a walkie-talkie, radioed something in. Sounded like gibberish to me. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, something about “Roger.” I remember thinking that his name is Sherard and my name is Tracy, what does Roger have to do with it? After she was finished writing, the bus driver switched our seats, boy/girl, girl/boy, us boys against the windows. The remainder of the ride took about ten minutes.

  When we stopped again all the other kids raced to the front to get off, each taking a single, pitying glance at me. It seemed like a release from jail, and Sherard and I were the ones with longer sentences. I made sure to pick up the glasses before they were trampled. Looking for your glasses when you have bad eyesight is an embarrassing thing because you don’t want people to see you searching around. Just adds to the jokes later. Me and Sherard tried to stand last, at the same time, but full extension of our knees was interrupted by seat belts and the sound of the bus driver’s voice.

  “You two boys sit back down,” she said, without turning around to us. “You’re gonna have to go to the principal’s office.” I could see her compassionate brown eyes in the mirror and I panicked.

  “The principal’s office?” I yelled. “Why do we have to go to the principal’s office?”

  Sherard sat there and didn’t say a word. He seemed comfortable, almost used to this kind of thing.

  “Any kind of fighting means you’re going to have to go to the principal’s office,” the bus driver said.

  “Oh please, Ms. Bus Driver.” I tried to stand but the seat belt did its job again. “What’s going to happen if we go to the principal’s office?” She finally turned to look at me and the smile was no longer there.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.

  “They gonna suspend us,” Sherard said. It was the first time we’d made eye contact since the scuffle.

  “Please do not send us to the principal’s office!” I pleaded for mercy, voice clear, British English. “We won’t fight anymore!” I would’ve said anything to get out of that situation. I’d have mopped the muddy bus floor full of peanut shells in its entirety with the smallest dishwashing sponge available, scrubbed it spotless, removing the trash that surrounded its bolts, and for the rest of my life never even watched the Transformers cartoon. Absolutely anything to not be suspended.

  “Honey, there’s nothing I can do,” the bus driver stated. “If I don’t send y’all in, I might get in trouble.”

  I thought she had to be lying to my face. How was she going to get in trouble when we were the ones fighting? We sat there, our seat belts acting as links of chains, something similar to prisoners waiting for transport. In the corner of my eye I could see fabric hanging from my shirt. He’d ripped it! All I’d gone through to wear that shirt, all I dealt with to protect it from even being wrinkled, all for nothing. Right then, my mouth tasted like spoiled milk.

  I glanced out the window, noticing kids running through the playground: mostly whites, many Mexicans, a few blacks, even some others, giggling together. I dreamed of what it would’ve been like to be out there with them. The thought of running around made me smile, playing dodgeball, meeting new girls, anything to not be sitting in chains, anything to have my favorite shirt in one piece again.

  The bus door opened.

  “Are these the two kids that need to go?” A long-legged white man with a mustache crawling into his mouth climbed on the bus. He was so tall that his balding head touched the metal roof.

  “Yes, Mr. Relton,” the bus driver answered.

  “Come on, boys,” he said in a routine voice. “Let’s. Go.” I looked back at the bus driver, eyes shouting for her to save me. The look must’ve been working because she turned her head from me quickly.

  The next thing I knew we were sitting in an office and on the door it read: MR. ALEX RELTON—ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL. There were two wooden chairs sitting right in front of the desk. He pointed to them.

  “You boys sit down. There.”

  I thought I’d have to tell him my name—it was my first day and all—but as soon as I spoke he shut me up.

  “I will do all the talking in here. You just answer questions.” He stared at me.

  “Yes, sir,” me and Sherard replied in unison.

  “Why were you two fighting?” he asked. Neither of us spoke. Maybe we didn’t know the answer. I had to break the silence but my answer was stupid.

  “He tried to take my Transformer!”

  “Oh, he did?” Mr. Relton said, eyebrows lifting. “Let me see it.”

  I reached into the book bag, pulling it out. “See? He broke the arm!”

  “Son, toys are not to be brought to school!” The peninsula of hair on his head shifted. “Your name is Tracy, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Isn’t today your first day of school here?” I nodded my head. “Your mother is not going to be very pleased with the fact you’re going to be suspended on your first day.”

  He lifted the phone, began dialing a number.

  Suspended? I thought.

  “Mr. Relton, please don’t call my mother!” He looked at me, finding my face slowly.

  “You do know we’re doing you a favor by busing you here to this kind of school, young man. You get to mix with other people and see other things. You know that is a privilege, right?”

  “Yes, Mr. Relton. But, please?”

  “Tracy, I don’t know how they do things where you come from, but this is how we do things here.” He pointed to the floor.

  “I promise I won’t bring toys to school again, Mr. Relton! I promise, I promise, I promise, I won’t fight!” Was speaking so fast I almost choked as spit clammed in my mouth. But he continued dialing numbers.

  He called Sherard’s parents first. I knew that was done on purpose. He wanted to give me more time to think about what happened and be more fearful of what I’d have to deal with when I got back to State Street.

  Sherard didn’t budge when his father was on the phone; in fact, after a while, he just folded his arms. He really was a tough kid.

  When Mr. Relton got in contact with my mother, the two talked as if they’d known each other for years. He explained the fight and Optimus Prime and mentioned something I didn’t understand about “integration not going so well.” I could hear her voice exploding on the other end like a grenade. Within a moment, she confessed on the stand how she’d raised me properly, how I’d been told many times fighting was wrong, that I had better training than other project kids. I couldn’t handle myself like Sherard and began crying hysterically. Believe me, I cried harder later and had many reasons to.

  I guess it’s fair to say that my actual first day at the “smart kids’ ” school with the people that weren’t like me and didn’t look like me wasn’t until ten days later. It was the moment my suspension was over. Another thing: In the end, I think I got her attention too, because although I never wore that shirt again, I had an unwilling escort that day: my mother.

  INTERPRETING DOLTON, AT THIRTEEN

  Around the age of thirteen, I was being commanded by my mother to be in bed asleep no later than ten-thirty. I was expected to neither shift nor make a sound, even if I was dreaming, which was often. None of this was easy, especially after we’d settled into the suburbs.

  Our new environment in the suburbs was in sharp contrast to the former: There were never any elderly men yelling for wine throughout the streets; mom-and-pop li
quor stores had no bars on windows; there were no vintage cars (Chevys, Olds Cutlasses, and colored versions of the Pontiac Grand Prix) vibrating our buildings to the third floor with deep bass; and the lights on green poles hadn’t been broken by careless kids with nothing to do. Around the buildings, Mother would have to scream for me to come inside, even in winter, when in Chicago the wind chill can approach negative numbers in November, because my short frame, along with the rest of the black teens from the Stateway buildings, would be hurling rocks like major league pitchers from the White Sox at the orange plastic casings of streetlights. We hoped to clear the white bulb in the center like it was an Oreo.

  But in Dolton, Illinois, it was different. Dolton was located no more than five miles from Chicago’s southern city limit, and kids my age didn’t do things like hurl rocks. Ever. Kids in the suburbs actually attended every single day of school, were even on time most of those days, and at night, when working streetlights began to flash their flares, kids scattered home like fearful roaches. I’d hop from the bed in my room where I was expected to be asleep, just hoping to hear the movement of people, the bark of stray dogs, the bullhorn of a police car. I believe my mother, a woman formerly as emotional as the pages of a science textbook, enjoyed it more in the suburbs. Her demeanor changed when we moved to the city of Dolton. Everything changed.

  She’d started waking me for school at six-thirty in the morning, something she hadn’t done once in our entire eleven years of living in the projects. There would be the smell of hickory bacon in a frying pan, fried eggs laid neatly across a plate, and pancakes or waffles, both smothered in Aunt Jemima’s apron, resting in a perfect stack at the corner of the table. After I came from brushing my teeth was when I would realize how much living away from the projects had changed Mother: She’d be standing in the bedroom where I slept, running her light brown hands along the yellow wallpaper like she lived in a mansion, or maybe a British castle, and staring at each corner of the nearly empty room intently. A few times I saw her mouth my big brother’s name as her tall shadow made the room murky.

  “Jacob. Jacob. Jacob,” she’d say as her hand made circles along the wallpaper pattern. “You should be getting up as well, Jacob. I want you to graduate this year. If you walk the stage you’ll be the first black man from our family that’s a real high-school graduate. The first to graduate the right way, not get a GED.”

  “Mother, who are you talking to?” I’d ask. Her long and healthy body would turn to me with this aggressive yank, as though I cold-watered her from a pleasant dream she’d been having.

  “Why you standing there, Tracy? Shower and eat breakfast.”

  “Can I have three pancakes?”

  “Made them for you, so get as many as you want. You need plenty of energy for school anyway.”

  I knew what happened the moment I walked away. She stood there, looking at the mattress and shuffling her pointed collar for work.

  After leaving the bathroom, I’d put on my clothes, although most times I wouldn’t dry myself from the shower. I’d then race around the corner and head to our large kitchen.

  The kitchen in Dolton was the best. That was where I saw the biggest changes in Mother especially, and in my family’s relationships as a whole. While I ate she’d iron her clothes next to the white sink with small chips of its surface missing. The basin was wider than a bathtub. It extended nearly the same length as the ironing board that mother had positioned directly in front of it. She was standing between the two, back to the sink. Mother had a spray bottle that formerly housed Spritz for hair or some cosmetic she used, doing her entire routine while maneuvering throughout the space with ease. She kept a can of starch at the other end of the ironing board. The board was covered with a dingy tablecloth or a striped sheet, and I’d spend the early part of my morning smelling the lemon scent of the starch she used as I ate.

  “How does everything taste, son?”

  “Good.”

  “Isn’t living here nice?”

  “Yep.”

  “Mom did well, didn’t she?”

  “Yep.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she’d then say.

  When I lifted my head to stare at my mother as she ironed, I always noticed the anxious and focused manner with which she pressed the steel against a shirt. Looked like she was attempting to grind it into the ironing board.

  “You know, your head is shaped just like your brother’s,” she said after taking a break. “You two look so much alike.”

  Although I continued eating those eggs, perfectly fried with salt, lemon pepper, and just a tad of yolk visible, I knew what she was saying to be impossible. Even though we both had our grandfather’s last name of Landon, Jacob and I had different fathers. Very different fathers from what I overheard Mother saying during phone convos with her friends. Jacob’s father was this extremely good-looking black man. When she’d describe him it made me wish he was my father as well. His nose and eyes and the other features of his face blended like pound-cake mix. Mother said once, after she had been at a nightclub and arrived home drunk, maybe from whiskey or the gin she adored, that he was the love of her life. Said he was generous and affectionate and spontaneous and exciting but that he eventually left her for a thinner woman from Ohio. I didn’t know where specifically in the state they had gone, whether it was Middletown or Mansfield, but usually I assumed it to be some truly frozen place where all people were evil and snooty and stole fathers from homes. The only thing she said about my father was that he was dangerous and she couldn’t stick with him.

  “Did you make your bed, Tracy?” she’d ask as I ate.

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Didn’t I tell you not to talk with your mouth full? You need better manners. No man will want to be head of this big house seeing you talk with a mouth full of pancakes.”

  I shook my head.

  “I would like for you to answer me when I ask you a question.” She looked at me intently and continued ironing her shirt, standing to my side in nothing but a bra too small for her breasts. “How does this look?” she asked. She then held the shirt up like it was on a hanger. “Your mother has to be presentable if she’s going to be a secretary.”

  “It looks good,” I replied. “You should wear those black pants you bought the other week, Mother.” I put the fork down and swallowed before continuing, nearly choking myself. “You look good in those.”

  After she was fully dressed—shoes, classy black Swatch with the white face, earrings, blue underwear, shirt, fitted pants, and all—she came and sat in the seat to the right of me at the table. She looked determined, like a racehorse that always finished second. Mother never noticed I’d be pacing myself the entire time I was eating, waiting for her to dress so we could finish our meal together.

  “How was school yesterday?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “I know I didn’t get home until late.”

  “It’s fine, Mother.”

  She would then make herself a full plate of food and it appeared in tall and sectioned stacks, something comparable to that of an overtime-worked man, only to nibble at toast or a pancake, or shuffle the corner of an egg, and take modest, speedy hits of juice. Probably should have drank it from a flask.

  “Have you been attending your classes?”

  “Yep.”

  “What about math?”

  “Yep.”

  “Geometry?”

  “Yep.”

  “All of them?”

  At that moment I’d shove another huge helping of fluffy eggs into my mouth before speaking. “Yes, Mother. All.”

  “Good. ’Cause you know we’re not in them projects anymore. They actually will flunk you in junior high school.” When she chewed, her mouth looked refined, especially if she’d already put lipstick on. It was shiny, like imagining the silver coating of
a purse opening and closing. She may have looked a bit older than she was, but she was pretty, and I consistently wondered why Mother had never been married. “How were your eggs, son? Made them just the way you like.”

  “They’re really good.” I continued chewing as we talked. “You never made food like this before we moved.”

  “I know.”

  “Is it because Jacob is gone?”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “But everything changed with me and you when we moved here.”

  “More things are going to change.” Her voice was steady when she said that. We’d just sit there awhile, together, eating slowly and taking short giggling glances at each other. Felt like a date. “Speaking of which, have you seen or talked to your brother?”

  It was a question my mother would eventually ask at least three or four times throughout breakfast. She persistently straightened her collar in that nervous motion she perfected before work, and snapped the purse fasteners of her mouth. I had to lie to her each time she asked.

  Jacob turned seventeen or eighteen the year we moved from the projects, but his age wasn’t as significant as it should have been because he was always ahead of schedule: He left home when he was just older than me, maybe fourteen and a half, walked out in a similar way a man does when he and his wife argue over bills, or who is the messiest, or whose farts smell the worst, or who cheated on who first; he simply stormed out of the door with whatever clothing he had on that day, slamming it with such might that small pieces of concrete fell from our project apartment’s ceiling. Those kinds of arguments all look the same from a distance. Surely you believe the other person is merely going for air. They’ll be back. Jacob was gone for such a long period of time that I didn’t remember what he was wearing nor what his and Mother’s fight was even about.

  I do recall how red his creamy skin became as the two of them yelled. He was nearly six feet tall at the time and a few weeks before had cut his hair in the military crew style. He previously had a head full of hair, which made him look Mexican, or at the very least Puerto Rican. Told me over a beer that he was tired of being made fun of for looking different than others and wanted to resemble something closer to the “normal” black kids of the projects.