building super sat to the right of the door in front of his street-level apartment. He seemed to be a permanent fixture, his stomach bulging under a graying T-shirt, his wrinkled skin exposed between his shirt and pants, and hanging over the edge of his rusted folding chair.
“Good morning,” I said. “Quite the scorcher today, isn’t it? How long do these heat waves last?” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, made a few more attempts at conversation, and then said, “Well, nice talking to you.”
“Yup, you too,” he mumbled as I turned to walk away. I smiled. I would try again tomorrow.
The throng of children running through the water from the hydrant grew larger, their squeals louder as they pushed each other and floated pieces of paper and sticks in the flooded street. For a few seconds I almost forgot that the deck of life was stacked against them, almost believed that their playfulness might be powerful enough to outwit society’s best efforts to extinguish it. I ran across the street, plunged into the spray with my mouth open, and swallowed a mouthful of water. The escape from the scorching heat was heavenly.
All of a sudden, the children stopped playing, and I realized they were all staring at me like they knew who I was better than I did: a white do-gooder residing temporarily among people living on the margins. Any idealistic notion I’d had that their squealing was the sound of resilience vanished. There was nothing romantic about children having to play in a flooded piece of street with foul garbage floating around their bare feet and ankles. They should have a real swimming pool, with chlorine in it, and a lifeguard to keep them safe.
I left and went back into the building, having learned my first lesson: that there was nothing romantic about poverty, and nothing honorable about living in its midst when you had a choice.
~
After passing the New York City teachers’ exam and signing a loyalty oath, which I was uncomfortable about but signed anyway, I was assigned to teach third grade at P.S. 457, which was an easy ten- to fifteen-minute walk from our apartment. At the teachers’ orientation meeting, I learned that I would teach my class during the morning shift, from seven to noon. Another third-grade class would use the classroom from noon to five. The two classes would have to share books, bulletin boards, supplies... everything. How were we supposed to do that? The principal said it was an unfortunate situation but she knew everyone would make the best of it like they always did. Everyone but me seemed to consider it normal.
Once the orientation session was over, I spent a couple of hours working in my assigned classroom with my teacher-mate, a woman in her midsixties who was more interested in what she was going to do when she retired at the end of the year than she was in children. After leaving the school, I went directly to the parsonage for dinner with Pastor Paul, his wife, Linnea, and their two handsome sons.
Pastor Paul was Frank’s internship supervisor, but he preferred to think of himself as Frank’s spiritual guide and on occasion treated him like a third son. When I arrived, everyone was sitting at the round picnic table on the patio in the back, a slab of concrete between the church and the house. My neon-pink dress with huge lime-green dots was shockingly short and as out of place here as it had been in the school auditorium. I’d heard someone whisper “Since when did we start letting sixteen-year-olds teach” when I walked in. Everyone but me must have gotten the dress code memo, because all the other teachers wore suits. I spent most of the meeting tugging at the hem of my dress and running my fingers along the edge of my hair where it was trimmed above my ears and trying not to feel like a fish out of water.
“Hur står det till?” Pastor Paul’s warm smile and soft voice belied his massive six-foot-three presence. “So how was it today?”
“Worse than I expected,” I said.
“God works in mysterious ways,” Pastor Paul said. “Maybe P.S. 457 is your calling like this ministry in the Bronx is mine.”
I winced at his religious assumption and tried to hide my discomfort by reaching for a slice of watermelon and dropping it on the plate in front of me. I poked it with my fork, cut off a piece, and brought it up to my mouth.
Linnea Winston gave her husband an indulgent smile and an affectionate pat on his arm. “Paul likes to believe we’re here because of divine intervention,” she said. “He doesn’t want to admit that no other church in the denomination was willing to hire a black pastor, much less one with a white wife.” She ran her fingers through her wavy blond hair.
“And two black sons who might want to date their daughters.” Jake, who was a month shy of turning seventeen, laughed like he thought what he’d said was hilarious.
Fourteen-year-old Ronnie joined in. “What do you mean? We’re half Swedish, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, and we’re probably both gay, too,” Jake countered. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jean shorts and leaned back in his chair, laughing.
Everyone cracked up. Frank and I had been told, before deciding to come to the Bronx, that Pastor Paul had been asked to leave his last church, in Connecticut, after he invited a gay couple to join the congregation. I’d liked this family even before meeting them, and now I liked them even more.
“Hey,” Jake said, still laughing. “Be glad the Supreme Court finally declared our parents’ marriage legal.”
“To us!” Ronnie lifted his glass of lemonade. “Thanks to Loving v. Virginia, we are bastard children no longer.” The two brothers toasted each other with a clink of their glasses.
I couldn’t help but wonder what it must be like for them to navigate a world of prejudice, and if their joking was a way to disguise hurt and anger. But there was no hint of rancor in their humor. It even seemed pure in a way. I glanced at Frank, who was laughing as hard as anyone, knowing that if I told him what I was thinking, he’d accuse me of being too serious.
“Enough,” Linnea said with a giggle. “Time to eat.”
The laughter subsided as plates and bowls were passed around the table—hamburgers with pickles and onions on the side, potato chips, coleslaw, potato salad, and brownies.
I took a bite of my hamburger. “Mmmmm, this is delicious. I don’t know how you do it.” I wiped the juice from my chin with the red and white checked napkin that matched the tablecloth.
“Well, first you fire up the grill,” Jake said, laughing again.
“No, I mean, how did you take this drab little patch of cracked concrete and make it into such a beautiful little sanctuary? And the parsonage,” I pointed toward the back door, “it’s so... so... normal.”
“Nobody’s ever accused us of being normal before,” fourteen-year-old Ronnie cracked.
“Tack så mycket to Linnea here.” Pastor Paul winked at his wife.
“See what I mean?” Ronnie said. “You know any other black man who speaks Swedish?”
Everyone laughed, me included. “I don’t mean normal, normal,” I said. “More like ordinary. No, I guess what I mean is that your home is such a contrast to everything else around here.”
“We want you to think of it as yours while you’re here, right, Linnea?” Pastor Paul said.
“A shelter from the storm,” she added with a smile.
“So
