the effort to smile, Perla had these deep lines from her nose down to the corners of her lips, the lines of discontent. Whenever I went over to their house … this ranch-style house with aluminum windows, at the border of Willow Glen … she always interrogated me about my academic plans, as a way to needle Nadine. Was I planning on graduating with my class or taking the equivalency exams to graduate early, like Nadine? Was I going to a university or to a community college, like Nadine? Was I going to Junior Prom or was I skipping, like Nadine? She would open the door to Nadine’s bedroom, her boxy, eastern bazaar of a bedroom, to nag Nadine about something, and Nadine would just say:
“Later, Mom, okay? Bye.”
That was alien to me, that refusal to engage your parents. But Perla Hanamoto certainly loomed judgmentally enough around that house, and Nadine’s older sister, Theresa, was their mother’s, like, deputy.
And, Theresa and Nadine. Really, they were the funniest people I had ever met. It’s hard to explain, but when they got going with each other? Like, Theresa would come into Nadine’s bedroom because, whatever, their mother was angry with them about the refrigerator. And Theresa would have a plastic takeout box with her, holding it like clinical evidence. She’d kick herself a path through the Salvation Army sheets that Nadine had hung from her ceiling and whatever random mannequin parts Nadine had lying around her floor, in order to get to Nadine’s bed to confront Nadine with the takeout box.
“Nadi, regarding this specimen from the fridge.” And Nadine would be like:
“I said I’m going to eat it.”
“Right. You said that … last week.”
And I would recognize the box. It would be from a month before … some enchilada from El Cacique, which was Nadine’s favorite taqueria. Theresa would be like:
“Nadi, when I asked you about this specimen of enchilada last week, I figured you knew about … the mold. I told myself, Nadi’s not squeamish, she’ll scrape the mold away. I fi gured, Nadi is tough enough.” And Nadine would say:
“Would you just shut up and put it back in the fridge? Because the longer it stays out, the faster it will go bad.” And Theresa, like, pressing ahead:
“So, Nadi. Last week the mold was only on the left, on top of the rice. Now I observe three kinds of mold, all of which have spread from the moist lower regions where the rice was to this large lump in the middle, which I believe to have once been an enchilada. I am going to attempt to lift the lump.” She’d be, like, prodding the enchilada with the handle of a fork and making a face. “I have successfully lifted the lump. And my question is, Nadi, have you smelled this? Are you … tough enough?” Like, pressing the tray in Nadine’s face. And, Nadine would fi x her face against the odor and say:
“I’m totally going to eat that.”
Which, maybe you had to be there.
And then there was their brother, George. The oldest sibling. Who had been gone for ten years. He had run away to San Francisco when he was fifteen or sixteen, and he was never mentioned. And the day his name finally came up was the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake.
MAYNARD GOGARTY tells the story of what happened on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
Enter the subway conductor.
She is young, black, with one of those tight, heavy MTA uniforms on. She is a buxom conductor, but her uniform has compressed her chest into a flat breastwork of civic authority. And—the redbird trains are designed such that the conductor has to hustle back and forth from one car to another, depending on whether the train has pulled up to an express platform or a local platform. I mention this because apparently we were in the car that the conductor used as her headquarters at express stops, so the fact that the conductor was investigating our car implied that she had already searched one entire half of the train looking for her culprit, the entire down-track half of the train, and had found nothing.
So! Enter the subway conductor. Those doors between subway cars are always hard to get apart, but she just thrusts them wide with one wrist and shouts at the whole carload of us, “Anyone here touch the brake?”
The woman with the beauty spots—looks at me. She wants to verify that I will confess that I did in fact close the cover of the emergency brake. I realize that either I turn myself in or I will be denounced. So as the conductor is hurrying past, I say, “Madam? The cover on that brake there? It was open, and so I shut it.”
The conductor looks at me with—wrath!
“You touched the brake.”
“No. The cover was open. The little metal box, the cover. I shut that.”
“You touched the brake.”
“No. This was after the train had stalled. I shut the cover. Because the alarm was sounding.”
“The alarm was going off,” she said with disgust, “so you decided to touch the brake.”
So then—then! She turns away from me and reopens the box over the brake.
What the EMERGENCY BRAKE has to say for itself (early August 2000):
Meee!
MAYNARD GOGARTY tells the story of what happened on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
The conductor pretends to inspect the brake, but—what is there to inspect? The woman with the beauty spots just sits there, underneath the conductor, eyes shut, wishing for her privacy back, until finally the conductor gives up, turns to me, and asks, “You think maybe the alarm was going off for a reason? Like something is wrong and you shouldn’t be touching the brake?”
She hasn’t properly shut the cover, so the alarm is still bleating at us. But she leaves it bleating and unlocks the closet in our subway car, her little closet for the express stops, and she goes inside, saying, “I am not done with you.”
“But I did nothing wrong.”
“I’m telling you, I am not done with you.”
At first she is tinkering with some of the controls, shouting with the motorman over a telephone. But then—the lights and air conditioning come back to life. She leaves the closet, leaves our car, and then the side doors spring apart and 33rd Street heaves its flames into the subway car.
Over the hoarse public address system comes her voice: “Thirty-third Street. Grand Central next. Stand clear the doors.”
In her voice I can hear, she is not done with me. But as I am awaiting my trial, the two black boys—who knows where the three girls were hiding themselves—the two black boys with the trumpet cases board the subway car. One of them is chubby, the other one is skinny. They sit down not far from me, open up their trumpet cases, and begin admiring each other’s graffiti pens. That is what they were toting in their trumpet cases—vandal-sized permanent markers.
JAMES CLEVELAND talks television (early August 2000):
Brittany and Juney and Shawna flipped off the white guy. I said, “Why you all trying to get us in trouble?”
And Chief said, “You
