Riggs Park Part 11

Taneka tilted her head back and gave a mirthful bark. "Yeah, he's mine. Mine to babysit," she said. "How do you think I pay to go to school?"

Back in the car, I was thoroughly shaken, and not just by Taneka's tone. There was no question of asking Marilyn to come here with me. She was perfectly capable of getting out of a sickbed to do it, even if it meant a relapse, and I had no intention of being responsible for that. And since Essie was stubborn as concrete, I had no idea how I was going to get her to talk to me without Marilyn coming along.

Nor could I shake the sting of Essie saying I had gained a boyfriend and Penny had lost a tooth, as if the two were of equal significance. It was bad enough that I'd always felt a little guilty about the foolish, selfish Sweet Sixteen Marilyn and I had shared. But for Essie to be rubbing it in after all these years? What could be the point?

Even at the time, Marilyn and I had worried that the party would be awkward. Penny had turned sixteen in October and proclaimed Sweet Sixteens silly, but Marilyn and I wanted one. We both had birthdays in December, an impossible month because of Hanukkah and Christmas Night Dance and vacations. Our nose jobs were coming up at Easter. Terrified of that as we were, it seemed important to celebrate ourselves in some small way while we still could. We scheduled our joint party for January. Penny was our best friend, true enough-but if there was never any telling how she'd react when our sorority sisters were around, was that our problem, or hers?

We decided on a Chinese lunch because no one had done that yet. There had been sleepovers, a tea, an excursion to a downtown show, even a cosmetics makeover at Francine Ades's. But no one had done Chinese. Marilyn's mother would pick up the food, bring it to my house, and help my mother serve. It turned out to be the kind of gray Sat.u.r.day afternoon when everyone was glad to have somewhere to go. Marilyn and I kept telling each other that plenty of the guests besides Penny would be from outside the sorority. Penny wouldn't be ostracized. Penny would be fine.

We hadn't counted on Rhoda Apple. Chair of the sorority's Midwinter Carnival, Rhoda saw the party as a chance to have a committee meeting. After the chicken and snow peas and rice had been eaten off paper plates in my living room, after the fortune-cookie fortunes had been read and pa.s.sed around, while Marilyn and I opened our stack of presents, Rhoda herded her three committee members upstairs to the master bedroom. There, where dozens of coats were stacked on my parents' bed, they had their meeting and used the phone to consult Bertie Eiger, who'd stayed home with the flu.

Lying under some of the coats, half asleep in a fetal position, they found Penny.

"Penny, you all right?"

"Just cramps," Penny said. "I'm all right. The aspirin should kick in in a minute."

"Well, what about lying down somewhere else?" Rhoda asked. "We're having a committee meeting. About Midwinter Carnival."

"Well, go ahead."

"It's a sorority function," Rhoda said. "It's-Well, you're not a member. Sorority business is confidential. I don't think you should stay."

"Oh." Cowed, shaken, Penny retreated to the bathroom. Fearing her red and splotchy face would give her away, fearing the others would a.s.sume her tears were not from anger ("I should have told Rhoda to go to h.e.l.l instead of just thinking about it"), but from the humiliation of being forced to depledge the year before, Penny stayed in the bathroom for nearly an hour. She ignored the other girls, full of c.o.ke and Seven-Up and Chinese tea, who knocked on the door and begged to get in. Downstairs, the presents had all been opened. Although my mother and Marilyn's mother tactfully sent the full-bladdered guests to the half-bath in the bas.e.m.e.nt, word of Penny's standoff spread like wildfire. Marilyn and I feared our curious guests would stay all day.

Then, like a mercy, it snowed.

Most of the girls who'd driven to the party had had their licenses less than a year. None of them knew how to handle a car on slick roads. All were in a sudden panic to get home. Within minutes, the house was cleared, and Marilyn and I were able to coax Penny out of her retreat. The three of us spent the next hour filling trash cans with Chinese take-out cartons, used paper plates, cardboard gift boxes, crumpled wrapping paper and yards of ribbon. By the time we were finished, Penny's good mood had returned.

It snowed on and off for more than twenty-four hours. Over a foot acc.u.mulated before it stopped on Sunday afternoon. The city was paralyzed. The temperature dropped and stayed below freezing the better part of a week. School was canceled. In the bright, bitter weather, the crust of the snow melted repeatedly in the sunshine, only to freeze again into a slick surface, shiny as icing on a cake and hard enough to walk on.

Snowplows rumbled along New Hampshire Avenue and Eastern Avenue. Occasionally they came across Third Street at the top of our hill and Sixth Street at the bottom. The effect was mainly to pack the frozen surface even more.

With the raw, edgy energy of girls trapped in our houses, Marilyn and Penny and I sledded each morning in the bitter cold, then broke for lunch and came out again. There were never enough sleds for everyone, so when the twelve-year-old boys urged Penny to belly flop on top of them, she did, offering the boys one of the great thrills of their s.e.xual awakening, even though every inch of her body was insulated with layers of cotton and wool. Not seeing the harm, Marilyn and I stretched out atop the younger boys, too, racing with them on sleds so fleet that our world blurred into a collage of black tires at the curb, white snowmen in the yards, scarves and jackets in a pastiche of primary colors. At the alley, we began sc.r.a.ping our feet behind us to slow down and avoid crashing into Sixth Street at the bottom. No car had been by for days, but the snowplows had left frozen ruts and mounds in the cross street, dangerous at full speed.

While the boys pulled the sleds back up the hill, we girls walked unenc.u.mbered, sun glittering off the snow and into our eyes, ice crusting on our lashes until the street lost its shape entirely, became nothing but shooting prisms of light, transformed.

By the third morning, the holiday had turned wild. Children dug through the ice for handfuls of pebbles to pack into their s...o...b..a.l.l.s. The sledders careened recklessly down the hill, racing each other with gleeful abandon. When the ice melted enough to make slick spots on the walk, no one noticed.

When Wish Wishner and Seth Opak and Bernie Waxman appeared at the top of the hill for the first time in three days, they swaggered down a shoveled thread of walk with their usual pack of friends and watched disdainfully as we flew past them atop the twelve-year-olds. As if at a signal, the older boys plunked their own sled onto the street and piled one on the other like tiers of a huge cake. With exaggerated comic gestures, they fell off one by one as far as the alley.

"You're real champs there," Marilyn taunted as we trudged back up the hill.

"Champs at comic relief," I clarified.

"I sense a twinge of doubt at our racing abilities," Wish said.

"More than a twinge," I replied.

"Then you're in for a treat." Elbowing my twelve-year-old partner out of the way, Wish took my sled in his hands and led me to the top of the hill. Bernie did the same with Marilyn, and Seth was climbing the incline with Penny. The displaced younger boys protested noisily.

It was exciting, being shepherded up the hill like that. Wish was in some of my cla.s.ses at school, but otherwise I hadn't seen him much since our one date a year before on Christmas night. He swam on a city-wide team that practiced both morning and afternoon and traveled most weekends. During the summer he was gone, working as one of the junior swim instructors at Camp Chesapeake. It was only now, walking by his side, that I realized how much bigger he'd grown-not taller so much as broader-shouldered and more ma.s.sive, maybe from all that swimming. Situating myself on my sled on top of him, with all the neighborhood watching, for a moment I felt as naked and as awkward as I ever had in my life.

We pushed off and instantly were two lengths in front of Penny and Seth, Marilyn and Bernie. Oh, we were a team! Unable to stop, at the bottom I rolled off into the crusty snow just before Sixth Street, and Wish dove off a split second later, so smoothly our moves might have been synchronized. Walking back up the hill, Wish bowed to his friends on the sidewalk, who whistled and cheered. The attention made me feel important. On subsequent runs, Penny and Seth lagged so far behind us that they were hardly in the compet.i.tion, and Wish and I beat Marilyn and Bernie seven times in a row.

Once on the way down, caught in the eye by a drop of water and forced to push my head into the collar of Wish's coat, I was certain I felt the warmth of his neck underneath. When we reached the bottom and he pulled me up, his hands, too, seemed warm under his gloves. I could not imagine, as we stood there in that snow, what it felt like to be cold.

On our next trip down the hill, I saw the car. Saw it dreamily at first, through a film of snow in my eyes. Creeping into the intersection where no car had been for three days, it labored its way along Sixth Street, directly in our path. I had neither the time nor the presence of mind to think. I catapulted off the sled and hit the street hard. Behind me, Wish landed on his right shoulder, then instinctively jerked the rope toward him so the sled would not go under the car.

The driver saw us and jammed on his brakes.

Marilyn and Bernie were right behind us, and Penny and Seth a few yards back.

"Watch out!" I yelled. "Car!"

The car's wheels locked, but the ice carried it forward. It skidded in slow-motion over the snowplow ruts.

Marilyn and Bernie lunged off, rolled over and over, a tangle of arms and legs and coats. Seth and Penny did the same.

Shocked and dumb, all six of us sat up where we had landed on the snow. We watched as the skidding car finally came to a halt on the rutted street.

The driver got out, dazed. His eyes slid over me and Wish, Bernie and Marilyn, and settled on Penny. At the sight of her, he muttered, "Oh, my G.o.d. Oh, my G.o.d." We all turned to look. She must have landed with her mouth open, hit her upper teeth on the ground. Her gashed gum was dripping blood onto the sunshine-white street, and her upper left front tooth hung crazily by a thread.

She hadn't yet been aware of it. Seeing the man's alarm, she removed one of her gloves and lifted a hand to her face to touch the injury. Even before her fingers found the tooth, she noticed her own blood on the snow and started to scream.

Except for Marilyn, who coddled a bruised knee, the rest of us had no idea if we were hurt. There is a moment when you suffer a traumatic injury, when you are numb and still free of pain, a moment of grace. Bernie and I were fine, but we did not know yet-even Wish did not know-that he had broken his shoulder. We did not know that when it healed it would never again be right enough for swimming, which had been half his life. Or if he knew, he understood only in some visceral, unconscious way. Later that was how it seemed: that Wish knew, and that I knew, that in the instant we had flown together off the sled, he had ceased being Wish the swimmer and become Wish who loved Barbara Cohen. And I had become the girl who loved him back.

Then the street was full of people, all noise and color. Penny's mother, Helen Weinberg, coatless, came running down the block like the devoted parent she'd never been. Trudi dragged my mother down from our house. Pauline Wishner appeared, a frilly ap.r.o.n tied around her waist and a jacket flung over her shoulders, hands clawing at her face in disbelief.

Seeing his mother so distraught, Wish finally caught his breath and stood, and in the same motion I stood with him. "I'm all right," he told Pauline. It was to me he whispered, "I think there's something wrong with my shoulder."

Implicit in that confidence made against the dazzle of brilliant snow and drying blood was that we had found each other and formed the sort of complete and unyielding bond that offers itself only once in a lifetime, an awesome and permanent thing. Yet we must have known we were too young for it, too; must have felt its strength and feared its power to tear us from our youthful moorings, leave us clutching at air. We were always together after that, yet not together at all. Wish's father wanted him to be a doctor. My sister Trudi was in college, and my parents expected me to follow. That day in the snow, Wish and I had moved apart, knowing we had to wait, be patient, until that moment of consummation, still several years off, that would turn out to be every bit as grand as we had imagined there in that raw January light.

Driving away from Essie's, I wanted desperately to talk to Jon again, hear his voice. We'd spoken last on Sunday, and now it was Tuesday. It seemed forever. His absence was almost like physical pain. If he called again, at least he would help me decide what to tell Marilyn until I could get Essie to talk. We'd be together, even if only on the phone.

With a mounting sense of dread, I dug out Marilyn's cell phone and called Bernie to make sure she'd been released from the hospital. "No complications, for once. We're home. She's taking a nap." That meant she'd soon be awake, waiting for my news. Why had I been stupid enough to let her know I'd found Essie and was going to see her? Why couldn't I have waited?

Killing time, I stopped at McDonald's. The first bite of greasily satisfying cheese-coated beef calmed me. The second brought inspiration. Given the desperation of my circ.u.mstances and the likelihood of Marilyn grilling me for information I didn't have, I had no choice. I had to appeal for help from the one person most likely to melt Essie's heart and loosen her tongue: Marcellus Johnson himself. I reached into my purse, extracted the phone once more, and dialed before I lost my nerve.

CHAPTER 12.

Truck Ride Marcellus answered on the first ring. I didn't expect it, thinking he'd probably be at work and I'd get an answering machine. But there he was, bright and lively on the other end, sounding amused to hear from me and not at all surprised. When I told him I'd like to meet with him, he gave me his address in Adelphi. "I got two jobs to check on this afternoon. You got the time, you can come along."

"Fine." Now I'd have to spend hours trapped in a moving vehicle with the man. Nothing I knew about Marcellus made that seem appealing-not the story of how he'd met Essie when he was a teenager and had later moved in with her, even though his own mother lived on the next block, not Essie's proud a.s.sertion to former Riggs Park neighbors that as an adult, Marcellus had "gone into business for himself." I'd always a.s.sumed "business" in Marcellus's case meant bookmaking and drug deals, the kind of entrepreneurship his young years had promised. I only hoped Essie had browbeaten him long enough to a.s.sure that his current "business" was something legal.

As I followed the directions Marcellus had given me, I wasn't sure if I was actually afraid of him or just curious. All I knew about him were oft-told stories, and I had no idea which of them, if any, were true.

By 1965, the old Riggs Park homeowners had fled into the suburbs in such numbers that what had been a Jewish, working-cla.s.s neighborhood was almost entirely black. Essie was one of the few who claimed she'd stayed on because she could see no reason not to.

Marilyn's mother, Shirley, probably the most faithful among the women Essie had played canasta with for so many years, was genuinely worried. She called Essie from the Ginsburg's new home in Maryland at least once a month, to warn Essie that the city was no place for a woman alone anymore. Affordable, but certainly not safe.

"Why should I change now just because you did?" Essie snorted. If the white youngsters who'd occupied her time were grown and gone, she claimed, eventually black ones would replace them.

But no such thing happened. When Essie's new neighbors ventured onto their porches, they nodded and exchanged a few words with her, but never really tried to be friends. The woman next door, who chatted with Essie almost daily, invited her in once for coffee and then never again. The children, with whom Essie had always had such rapport, averted their eyes when Essie greeted them and giggled after she turned away. One night in the middle of the summer of 1965, Essie went to bed and dreamed about her husband and son, which she hadn't done for twenty years. She woke up so shaken that she put on a dress and high heels and took the K-4 bus downtown and applied for a job at every store on F Street. By the end of the week, she was clerking in Woodie's men's department, selling shirts and trousers, regular daylight hours except on Thursday, when she stayed until nine.

One Thursday night, the air was so hot and sticky that it seemed to coat the city like a shroud. Essie got off the bus at the District Line and started walking home at a good clip, feeling more unsettled than tired. She never heard the footsteps approach from behind, only felt someone grab the strap of her purse. Instinctively, Essie hung on. She rocked back and forth, having a tug of war with her attacker. Finally she slung her whole weight at him and, to her surprise, knocked him flat. On the dark sidewalk, she couldn't see him well, so she lugged him to his feet.

"Hey...let go of me!" he yelled in a voice newly deep and frightened.

"Not on your life. You're coming with me." She reeled him in and pulled him toward her house.

"What the h.e.l.l, lady..."

"Watch your language," she scolded. To his credit, the boy shut up. Five minutes later, she had him inside her living room. She shoved him onto her sofa.

Her first good look at him stunned her. A pretty kid, but so young. "Good lord," she said. "You can't be more than twelve."

"Fourteen," he told her, growing surly.

"What's your name?"

"What's it to you?"

"Look-you want me to call the cops?"

"You will anyway."

"Not necessarily."

"Boozer," he spat.

"Ten years from now maybe you'll be a Boozer. Let's hope not. What's your real name?"

"Marcellus."

"Marcellus what?"

"Johnson."

"Nothing wrong with the name Marcellus." She still couldn't believe he was fourteen. "A Marcellus could grow up to be somebody. A Boozer can only case the place." Which of course he was, now that she'd let him off the hook about the police: eyeing the stereo and the console TV.

"You bring me here for a lecture, lady?"

"Where do you live, Marcellus?"

He inched up from the sofa, edged toward the door, didn't answer. She grabbed his arm, dug in her fingers.

"I'm talking to you, Marcellus."

"What's wrong with you, anyway?" he asked, trying to shrug her off.

On the second try, she let him go. "Where do you live, Marcellus?" she asked again.

"Quackenbos Street," he whispered.

"I didn't know people were so poor over there that they had to rob little old ladies of their purses."

"You ain't that little," he said.

"A sharp observation, Marcellus." She allowed him to contemplate her size in case he was thinking of escape. He sank back onto the couch and endured her.

"You're at Paul Junior High, right? Eighth grade?" His lip curled and she knew better. "No, seventh. They kept you back and you're still in seventh."

"You don't know nothing about it," he said.

"What don't I know anything about? Hard times? Failing math? I'll get my violin out and play you a little tune."

The boy shifted uncomfortably, looked at the carpet. "What you bring me here for?" he mumbled.

"To get a look at you. You tried to take my purse."

Marcellus took a deep breath, sank deeper into the couch. "Listen, you gonna call the cops or what?"

"Maybe," Essie said.

He stood up again. She pushed him down and all at once knew what his problem was. Too small for his age. Compelled to play tough. She'd seen it before. Morty Landau. Lenny Kirsch. She began working herself up the way she'd done with the white teenagers when circ.u.mstances demanded. "Listen," she said, bringing her face close to his. "You plan to s.n.a.t.c.h purses and smack people around until they catch you, then spend your life serving time?" she shouted. When they were small for their age, they thought being in trouble made them bigger. "I had a kid myself once that got killed, and I never stole anybody's purse to get back. You think I'm sorry I didn't?"

Marcellus looked up, shocked into attention. "You had a kid get killed? What happened?"

"He got chewed up by a coyote," she said.

"Yeah, sure."

"He did." The words rolled off her tongue. Later she told Shirley Ginsburg it was the first time the scene had come back clear to her in twenty years: Her young self with hair black as Marcellus's, pacing the frayed carpet of her living room near San Diego, colicky baby in tow, hot Santa Ana wind blowing in, sweat rolling down her chest. The baby fussed until she carried him outdoors, set him on his blanket under the eucalyptus tree in the yard-a tiny backyard with brown hills behind it, rising dull-edged and dry from the California dust. She dangled a rattle at him and his crying stopped. He liked it out there and couldn't get far, only seven months old. She left him and went inside to clean as she often did, watching through the sliding door. She turned on the vacuum, a big loud Hoover. When she turned off the machine, she looked to the yard to check on her son, but saw the coyote first. It was tearing away at something, a dead thing; she did not see what-did not understand what-for the first moment. Later, she went screaming into the brown-and-blood-colored yard, facing down the beast that had come from the hills because it had nothing left to hunt. It heard her and fled-eyes angry, deprived of its meal, but too frightened to stay. She turned to what a moment before had been her son, screaming. But he wasn't a baby anymore, only a dead thing, pieces missing, smeared.

Essie said all this, in a straightforward way, to the boy.

"Christ," he said. His eyes had grown wide, not defiant.

She'd looked at the body for a long time. The skin white against darkening blood. The face set, grotesque. She'd understood at once: that she was responsible for her son's death, a murderess. That simple. And months later, when she'd stopped screaming and her husband had given her enough money to go East and live the rest of her life, if she would just stay away from him forever, she'd understood she was responsible for all sons.

"Christ, lady," Marcellus said again.