the Rabbi was never home, and I’d seen Mrs. Taborsky in her red ski jacket struggling to walk their yappy terrier, pulling at its rhinestone-studded leash. If she couldn’t handle some dumb dog, how could she restrain her son?
My father concluded our conversation with some advice: “If that monster ever manages to get into our house again, you lock yourself in the bathroom. It’d take a sledgehammer to bring down that door.”
That’s when I understood: Dad was afraid too.
At our special karate practice, Brad blasted Guns ‘n’ Roses while demonstrating how to hit someone’s nose with my open palm. “The nose is vulnerable on anyone. Even if you’re as big as Hulk Hogan, you can’t build any more muscle on your nose.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I taught this to all my girls. Even a girl can throw a grown man to the ground that way. No man’s going to mess with them in some dark alley, I can promise you.” My ears flushed a deep crimson. Was that how he saw me, a girl who’d been messed with?
For an hour, we practiced the same three moves, block, block, and pow, right to the face. I followed Brad’s instructions, feeling the anger surge under my forearms. I imagined what it would be like to make real, powerful contact with someone’s smirking face, soft warm skin masking a hard, solid jawbone.
At the end of class, Brad drew a stripe in black marker on the tip of my white belt. “Keep it up,” he said, “and you’ll get to yellow belt.” As Brad clapped my shoulder, I caught a whiff of his aftershave, a mix of pine needles and car wax.
Both Brad’s and Dad’s eyes grew misty, and then mine did too, just a bit.
FIRST DAY
THAT NIGHT, I CRAWLED OUT OF bed, opened my window, and breathed in the night air, so cool it almost felt wet.
Mark’s bedroom windows were dark. He’d been shipped off to serve his sentence at that Canadian yeshiva. Yes, let the Canadians handle him.
What if he genuinely believed that cover story he’d told the cops, that I wanted it? Maybe I’d been the one who was wrong—for being too weak to resist both Mark’s advances and the police’s pressure to break my promise to Mark to keep my mouth shut. If this was my fault, then I’d have to be punished. Perhaps Mark would recruit a gang of his Detroit friends to rake my windows with bullets. Or they’d be waiting at Dalton to choke me with my new tie and string me up the school flagpole, so I’d dangle in the wind.
Whichever punishment they chose, I wished they’d get it over with. The suspense was too terrible. I already felt that first prickle of skin touching skin, the kiss of knuckle pounding cheek, the tingle of shiny blade sparking blood.
* * *
MY FIRST MORNING AS A DALTON boy, I woke to a thrashing thunderstorm that pelted our lawn and clogged drainpipes with grass trimmings and fallen leaves. Worried about traffic, Mom rushed me through my morning bagel. She’d skipped her usual breakfast, a microwaved frozen egg white omelet. According to her daily morning weigh-in, she’d gained a couple of ounces, and so she was glaring at a mug of raspberry-flavored coffee.
“Mom, please eat something,” I begged her. “Or drink some juice.”
She said, “I don’t believe in juice. I don’t believe in drinking my calories.”
Before leaving, I did a quick spot-check in the hall mirror. No messy hairs to tamp down, no zits to pick. Then I noticed something missing behind me.
“Where’s the de Chirico?” I asked. A few years ago, Mom had bought a tiny sketch of a faceless man strumming a guitar, which had cost more than she liked to admit. The image had always unnerved me, but she proudly pointed it out to guests. When they complimented the de Chirico, she blushed as if they were complimenting her.
Mom’s shoulders fell. “Dalton’s expensive,” she said, then cleared her throat. “Don’t think about it. I don’t. I’ve put the de Chirico right out of my mind.” I gave her a hug, and she said, “What was that for?”
“Sorry for being so expensive,” I said, shrinking into my stiff new blazer.
“Don’t say that. What else is money for?” she said. “Never think about money, okay?”
Even if it was money we didn’t have? “Okay,” I said.
The rain pounded our car on the way to school. Mom played the soundtrack to Les Miz, which she’d seen on her last mental sanity vacation in New York. The singers’ voices sounded cruel and shrill, as if sneering at us for listening.
How would my mother keep up with her New York theater and art galleries now that we had Dalton tuition to pay every year?
When we pulled up to the front entrance, the sight of all those uniforms streaming into school deflated me. Mom put the car in park. “Their grounds always look so neat, so trim.” She gave me a long, sad look. “Enjoy your day, honey.”
Outfitted in my own tight, new uniform, I entered the front doors alone, my feet damp inside slippery dress shoes. No one returned the anxious smile I’d plastered to my face. Where was that boy with the warm brown eyes from my first Dalton visit, the one who’d flashed me the peace sign? Maybe I’d dreamed him up.
Dean Demuth had stationed himself beside a glass trophy case filled with news clippings trumpeting our school’s success on courts, ski slopes and ice rinks. Hoping to make a good start, I greeted him with a hearty, “Good morning, sir!”
“Your tie,” he replied.
I looked down. My polyester tie had slipped a half-inch from the top button of my collar. I yanked it back up, made sure it was choking my neck.
At Lev Stern Hebrew, we used to start the morning with a religious service. Here the day began with our homeroom teacher checking our uniforms, then reading the headmaster’s daily brief, followed by Dalton’s equivalent of school prayer: “Fly, Eagles, Fly!” Then she released us to dash to our lockers, which were lined with wood-veneer and had faux brass handles. We were supposed to call them “cabinets,” but we all called them lockers, and even the faculty occasionally slipped up and called them lockers too.
Between classes, I wandered the halls feeling lost, often getting lost while trying to find the Commons Room, The Quad, The Levee, The Chapel, and the ominous-sounding Dixon House. When I sought out help, I stammered like an idiot.
“Are you an exchange student?” one girl asked me.
Some of the guys I passed in the halls were almost twice my size. I took care to stay out of their sight lines, walking close to walls, peeking around corners. In class I always chose a seat with a view of the door.
At lunchtime, we filed into the cafeteria, a.k.a the “Dining Hall,” and sat at one of several long tables with place settings where all meals were eaten with a fork and knife, even burgers and tacos. I chose the end of a table occupied by African-American girls whose families drove them to school from Detroit.
I’d expected my Dalton classmates to be mostly Aryan, blue eyes, snub noses, with names like Biffy or Tiffy. In fact, our hallways resembled Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition.” There were Christians
