There were days when we sat in front of the television watching Clark Kent fall in love with Lois Lane and understood what it meant to hold secrets close. When Angela cried but wouldn’t tell us why, we promised her our loyalty, reminded her that she was beautiful, said Knock, Knock, Angela. Let us in, let us in. We stroked the sharp knots of her cheekbones, moved our fingers gently over her lips, lifted her shirt, and kissed her breasts. We said, You’re so beautiful. We said, Don’t be afraid. We said, Don’t cry.
When she danced, her dance told stories none of us were old enough to hear, the deep arch of her back, the long neck impossibly turned, the hands begging air into her chest.
What are you saying, we begged. Tell us what it is you need.
But Angela was silent.
On the Fourth of July, my father took all of us to the East River, where thousands of people crowded to watch fireworks explode above the water. Pressed against each other, Angela whispered into my ear, I’m gonna leave this place one day.
I promised her we’d go with her.
But Angela shook her head, her straightened hair hot curled into a mushroom low over her brow and ears. She stared straight ahead at the fireworks.
Nah, she said. Ya’ll won’t.
That night, as New York and the rest of the country celebrated its independence, everywhere we looked, the world was red, white, and blue. We had shared a joint in the smoky bathroom of a crowded McDonald’s and felt wild and giddy and free. On the subway home, someone’s boom box played “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” and we all laughed, singing along.
Hop on the bus, Gus. You don’t need to discuss much.
Angela nodding, saying, You know that’s right!
On a different planet, we could have been Lois Lane or Tarzan’s Jane or Mary Tyler Moore or Marlo Thomas. We could have thrown our hats up, twirled and smiled. We could have made it after all. We watched the shows. We knew the songs. We sang along when Mary was big-eyed and awed by Minneapolis. We dreamed with Marlo of someday hitting the big time. We took off with the Flying Nun.
But we were young. And we were on earth, heading home to Brooklyn.
12
I looked for Jennie’s children in the faces of strangers. The terrified girl with her hand closed tight around pieces of bologna, the boy with his too-small shoes. The night the woman came to take them, they had cried late into the day. My brother and I went down to get them, but the door was locked. Open the door, we said again and again. But even though we could hear them crying, they wouldn’t open it. So we went back upstairs and turned the radio on.
They were on this side of the Biafran war, filling their mouths with whatever we offered, their stomachs never seeming full. Same dark skin. Same fearful eyes. Where had they been taken to this time?
Open the door, we said. It’s us. We have food upstairs. We can play hide-and-seek. Please open the door, we said. We can take you someplace better.
We were not poor but we lived on the edge of poverty.
Alana moved in across the street. She wore men’s suits and did the hustle with her green-eyed girlfriend inside the front gate, her perfect dome of an Afro bouncing. When she smiled, one side of her mouth went up followed by the other, and the four of us sat on the curb watching her, fascinated.
At night, when the DJs plugged extension cords into the streetlights, the four of us followed the line of brown and white cords to the music in the park. We watched neighborhood boys break-dance on flattened cardboard boxes and we screamed when the DJ threw Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” onto the turntable, and Jerome pulled me away from my girls. In the darkness, with Stevie singing, They can feel it all over. . I let Jerome kneel down in front of me, pull my shorts to my knees, and put his mouth on me until my body, from neck to knees, exploded. I pressed my back into the cement wall of the handball court, trembling. The DJ had cut a slow song I didn’t know into Sir Duke and I felt tearful suddenly. This was the temple I had promised Sister Loretta I’d protect, and now, cold suddenly, my shorts still down below my knees, I held Jerome’s head a moment, his face soft and wet against my belly, then pushed him down again.
Temperatures broke the hundred-degree mark and we sweated through the days to get to nights in the park. Angela found a boy named John who had delicate fingers and spoke with a lisp. Sylvia’s boyfriend was Jerome’s age, pulling Sylvia away from us into the darkness behind the handball courts. Gigi said she was falling in love with Oswaldo, whose older brother had been killed in a gang fight with the Devil’s Rebel’s the summer before. We were afraid of the gangs and the fires that turned the wood-framed houses in our neighborhood to ash. But we had our guys and we had each other.
We knew the stories. Down on Knickerbocker a girl ran out of her house, her robe on fire. By the time she was safe, she was naked. On Halsey Street, a fireman carried two small children down the fire escape. For a long time, he couldn’t pry their frightened arms from around his neck. I searched for the children’s names in the paper, wondering if they had been Jennie’s children.
At the end of the night, we pressed against our boyfriends, fingers locked together, slow swaying as the DJ announced, We about to shut this party down, y’all. Still, we held on to them, their skinny bodies as uncertain as our own of what we were moving toward. Please, they begged. And for a long time, we whispered back, Not that. Not yet.
Charlsetta had been sent away. She was sixteen, captain of the Thomas Jefferson cheerleaders. She had a straightened ponytail and bangs oiled and spiraling over her forehead. For weeks, we asked her younger brother where she’d gone. The whole block had heard the yelling. We had watched her mother leaving the house for work in the morning, stern-faced and stiff-backed. Charlsetta got her behind beat last night, we said to each other. Her mother tore her up.
And we laughed until the beating became legendary, a warning to all of us that this kind of public humiliation was only one belt-whipping away. There was some Charlsetta buried in each of us.
She got a baby inside her, her brother finally admitted. She got sent back Down South.
We pulled our boyfriends’ fingers from inside of us, pushed them away, buttoned our blouses. We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. The threat of a place we could end back up in to be raised by a crusted-over single auntie or strict grandmother.
Down South was full of teenagers like Charlsetta, their bellies out in front of them, cartwheeling in barren front yards as chickens pecked around them. We shivered thinking of Charlsetta’s belly and imagined her and her boyfriend together while her mother was at work. How many times had they done it? How did it feel? When did she know?
We sat on stoops looking toward Charlsetta’s house. We thought she’d come home with a pink-blanketed baby in her arms. We imagined her taking up her spot again on the squad, her blue and gold pom-poms in the air—Come on team, fight-fight with all your might-might, get on the floor and let’s score some more. Go boy! — her ponytail bouncing, her bangs low over her eyes. When time passed and she didn’t come home, we imagined she’d come home baby-less, the crusty auntie or pinch-faced grandmother raising the child as her own, sending Charlsetta back to her life in Brooklyn.