didn’t touch it at all.
Not a bite.
He wasn’t even holding a fork. He just sat with his head erect looking straight ahead. The large glass of OJ next to his plate was full to the brim. He didn’t take so much as a sip. The only time he moved was when he reached for his woman’s hand. He intertwined his fingers with hers and had her hand in his lap for the remainder of the time we were there. Resting on his knee, their hands caressed each other, twisting and turning on each other, both restless and gentle. It was tender and sweet. I couldn’t take my eyes off them and I didn’t know why. He was certainly strange-looking and weird-acting but the way the two of them were together in the booth made me feel good. Maybe it was because they were obviously so very much in love.
When we got back to our new home I felt much better about the place. I think it was a combination of the gold-tooth waiter’s hospitality and the blond guy holding his girl’s hand so affectionately that calmed me down.
I sat on my brand-new bed. My mother had bought new furniture for the apartment and trashed all of our old stuff except for two end tables that once belonged to my great-grandmother. Legend has it that she brought them from Poland.
I could hear a man shouting in the street: “Back it up!! . . . Keep her coming! . . . Keep her coming!!!”
The shouts didn’t bother me at all. I put my head on the pillow. The elevator was moving less frequently but there was still a lot of noise coming from the street: trucks, cars, buses, sirens, voices . . . None of it disturbed me that night.
All the sounds blended into one big hum of white noise like a steady wind or a patient tide.
I passed out cold till morning.
seven
My new school was supposed to be this very modern and progressive institution of learning. But aside from being much smaller, it’s not all that different than Newtown, the big public high school I went to in Queens. The Hobart School is in an old redbrick building on East 63rd Street in Manhattan. It’s philosophy is to develop intellectual freedom, creativity, and inquisitiveness in its students and to instill a sense of compassion and respect for oneself, one’s peers, and one’s society.
Or something like that.
Their cutting-edge educational strategy was to coordinate the things we were learning in all of our classes and keep the themes consistent across all subjects. I thought the approach to be complete bullshit and the common course threads they prided themselves on had to be stretched real thin in order to appear synchronized and harmonious.
For instance, at the start of our junior year we focused on the Louisiana Purchase in American history; in math we dabbled in a very rudimentary overview of political economics; in English we studied the effects of colonization on language, or was it the effects of language on colonization? And in science we studied the interior waterways of the United States, particularly the Mississippi River. Music class was all about the Delta blues even though that particular form of music came about 120 years after the Purchase.
What invariably happened was that one or two of the classes would exhaust the current topic before the others. This would initiate a chain reaction/domino effect that would undermine the precious syncopation that Hobart held so dear.
So by December it was John Brown and the abolitionists, The Sound and the Fury (okay, I guess), an introduction to trigonometric functions (you’re starting to lose me), and oil extraction in Saudi Arabia (what the fuck??). In music it was West Side Story because we were supposed to be reading Romeo and Juliet in English class—but our study of The Scarlet Letter took longer than expected and cut into the time originally allotted to Faulkner.
Socially, in many ways it was just a smaller version of the same old shit. You could separate all the kids into the same little boxes you’d find anyplace else: jocks, nerds, druggies, brainiacs, and sluts. The boundaries of these personality types were a little blurry at Hobart, though. There was more overlapping between species and more fluidity in the grayzone kids who drifted between categories.
What Hobart did lack were the Cro-Magnons: the psychotically deranged violent types who stalked the halls of Newtown High. For this I was grateful; there was no love lost leaving that lot behind.
The biggest demarcation at Hobart, however, was economic, the Great Divide separating the scholarship kids (who needed to show financial hardship and a modicum of academic merit) from the ones whose parents paid the sticker price (and had to prove even less scholastic ability).
Naturally, this system separated the school into the haves and the have-nots. The favorite sport of the haves was exposing the have-nots and making certain they understood that theirs was a lower place in this tiny galaxy and, by natural extension, society at large.
Some scholarship kids were easier to spot than others. Skin color being the most obvious giveaway (the haves were often bred on prejudice for generations), and clothes a close second. Some of the scholarship kids were dirt poor, lived in the crumbling slums of the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy, and often had to wear the same clothes for two or more consecutive days. The repetition being duly noted by those who wielded the power of popularity and means.
Reconnaissance and intelligence were the other methods used to ferret out and denounce the underprivileged. A few of the haves had parents on the board of the school. Some of these noble altruists were bigger assholes than their kids and they liberally leaked information on who paid and who didn’t.
I was suspected of “being on the tit.” I kid you not, that’s what getting a free ride was called. The endowed beneficiaries being “Tittysuckers” and often just the diminutive “Suckers.” The most prevalent name for Hobart’s poor and indigent was the even more abbreviated “Suck,” as in, “I think the new kid’s a Suck.” This novel transposition of verb into noun a testament to the linguistic proficiency of our ruling class.
I dressed more like a Suck than a rich kid, which I wasn’t, even though we paid. I didn’t like a lot of the new clothes my mother bought me before school and I hadn’t grown much over the summer so I stuck with my Wranglers and T-shirts. I was called a Suck to my face by two athletic seniors who punted a stack of books out of my hands. You see, the white Sucks were more likely to be confronted physically than the black or Puerto Rican Sucks; racist urban paranoia instilled a fear of blades and jailbird siblings into our future titans of industry and stewards (and stewardesses) of culture.
The homecoming theme that autumn was “The Best Days of Our Lives.” But on the glittery blue-and-gold banner they hung over the gym’s big double doors, the word Lives appeared as Live’s.
Nobody bothered to change it.
eight
I noticed her on my very first day of school but it wasn’t until a few weeks had passed that I found the courage to speak to her.
“You dropped your pencil.”
That was it. The sentence fell from my mouth and tumbled into the abyss. The four separate words slurred into one unintelligible sound. At least that’s how I remember it.
By the time this magical pencil had fallen, I had imagined all kinds of scenarios that would crack the glacier that loomed between knowing her and being a mere stranger.
“You dropped your pencil.”
