Rachel Ebdus had been crying. She and her recluse filmmaker were surely fighting again. The woman had something she wanted to say but Isabel Vendle decided to invoke the petty majesty of the near-dead and prevent her saying it. It’s enough that you’ll inherit my Dean Street, beatnik child. Don’t come here to inter your woes in my dying heart.
Rachel Ebdus was talking but it was as distant to Isabel Vendle as footprints on the moon.
“I might go,” she heard the young woman say.
“Yes,” Isabel said. “That’s best. Go.” If Rachel Ebdus were on television singing this song of woe Isabel would have long since “gonged” her- the Major knew that now he had to plan how to enter an unknown country, one where he was not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson -
Then she was alone, Rachel Ebdus discouraged, Croft scooted back to Indiana. Boerum Hill was what it was-partial, recalcitrant, corrupt-and whatever it would next become it could manage without Isabel Vendle’s help. Let it be carved up, let it be forgotten, let it be forgiven. We must be of the sun, she thought, irritated at herself for continuing to quote, so late in the game, there wasn’t anything here but the sun in the first place, the earth came out of the sun, we came out of the earth -in her last dream Simon Boerum, the old drunk, came to her and rowed her to the shore of Vendle’s Hard, both oars secure in his hand, so whatever we are, we must come from the sun -
Gong!
Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You’d pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit. The ones who couldn’t read still couldn’t, the teachers were teaching the same thing for the fifth time now and refusing to meet your eyes, some kids had been left back twice and were the size of janitors. The place was a cage for growing, nothing else. School lunch turned out to be the five-year plan, the going concern. You couldn’t be left back from fish sticks and sloppy joes. You’d retain at the least two thousand half-pint containers of vitamin D-enriched chocolate milk.
Two black guys from the projects, twins, were actually named Ronald and Donald MacDonald. The twins themselves only shrugged, couldn’t be made to agree it was incredible.
Chinese kids wouldn’t go to the bathroom all day, they lived that much in their own world.
At home, Rachel Ebdus’s telephone was ringing unanswered.
You met zones everywhere. The schoolyard was neighborhoods: black, black girl, Puerto Rican, basketball, handball, left behind. Through the Cyclone fence someone had brushed the word FLAMBOYAN in white paint on the stone wall, along with a square box for a strike zone.
Bruce Lee was famous now that he was dead.
A game of tap-it-in took place above the ground, in moments. Between jumps you weren’t playing. You were inert, copping an attitude.
Black girls had a language of partial words, chants harder to learn than anything in class. There was a general noise at the edges you’d begun to detect, akin to indecipherable ballpoint desktop-gougings. A scribbled voice.
The first few times someone said Hey, white boy it sounded like a mistake. You had to be guided into the new relation by the girls, the boys were actually a little shy about it.
Wrong sneakers, wrong shoes, wrong length of pants. Highwaters.
Where’s the flood?
What you laughin’ at, fool?
Dang. Boy’s laughin’ at his own self.
From I.S. 293 or from nowhere, from the projects, older kids bunched at the school entrances and in corners of the yard. Previous fifth graders had been a layer between. Now you were the layer. Robert Woolfolk was among one of those regular bunches, the precocious paper-bag drinkers. Even standing in one place Robert Woolfolk moved like a sprained knee, like he was forever angling a too-small bike around the corner of Nevins. He flashed a smile like a torn photograph, his voice crept around corners in the air. Dylan Ebdus saw in Robert Woolfolk’s eyes that same scribbled quality.
Red Hook, Fort Greene, Atlantic Terminals.
You built up associations, which would pass for understanding. Nobody was explaining anything. Fifth grade was an abstract art, painted one frame at a time.
Dylan could still hear the telephone ring from the kitchen while he sat on his stoop, waiting, watching, afternoons sliding to twilight, air chilling so the bodega sitters left their milk crates, shaking their heads, pinching their cold noses, leaving Old Ramirez alone. Dylan and Ramirez were paired in their two doorways, keeping watch, ignoring each other. Dylan watched the traffic trickle down Nevins, watched the mothers walking kindergartners home from the YWCA, counted the buses which drifted like humming loaves to the stoplight, waited, drifted on. Henry’s yard was empty, Marilla’s yard was empty, somebody saw a rat in the yard of the abandoned house. Bruce Lee and Isabel Vendle were dead and Nixon was strolling on a beach. Nobody moved, nobody played, strange kids walked the block in groups. It was a season of vanishing, of a silence like raw stupidity, like the unbearable ticking silence of a teacher expecting an answer from a kid everyone knew couldn’t even say his own name right.
Let Abraham answer the phone, if he could even hear it. Let Abraham say she’s not here.
Most days Dylan waited alone until Abraham called him in for dinner. Mingus Rude had other places to go, sixth-grader places, I.S. 293 places-other friends, Dylan guessed, then kept his own guessing hidden from himself. One or two afternoons a week Mingus would lope down the block and raise his hand. His coat was brown corduroy with a sheepskin collar, not the shiny plastic-stuffed bubblecoats every other kid wore. Mingus Rude carried his notebook and textbooks loose under his arm, no bag, and he’d clatter them on the stoop carelessly, expressing something less than utter disdain and more than total mastery.
The comic books Mingus Rude treated as a presence delicately alive, some piece of still-beating flesh he and Dylan might be capable of healing by their absolute fixity of attention, by their reverence. The overlapping storylines were a field of expertise, skully again, all fine print and ritual. Dylan was really horrified to learn he’d let so much time slip past, so much essential cultural history. Forget what you thought you knew. The Silver Surfer, for example, was a situation you couldn’t really understand if you came in too late. Mingus only shook his head. You didn’t want to try to explain something so tragic and mystical.
New comics arrived at newsstands on Tuesdays. Mingus Rude would have an armload, bought or stolen, Dylan didn’t ask. Some were bimonthly, some monthly, you learned by reading the letters page, you built up anticipation for special issues, too, oversized Annuals and one-time special events like the Avengers-Defenders Wars or Origins. In Origins you learned how superheroes got started, the answer generally being: radiation. In the Annuals and Wars you satisfied, at least provisionally, questions of who could take who. Hulk and Iron Man would face-off for a page or two, always vowing to settle it for good another time.
Spider-Man’s girlfriend, Gwen, had been killed by the Goblin, it wasn’t funny in the least. That’s why Spider-Man was so depressed all the time.