Black Ice (21 page)

I had no idea what to order when the bartender came to us. “CC and water” came to mind. That’s what Jane had ordered the night when her father had taken us out to dinner at a restaurant in Concord. The waiter had asked for our drinks, and he’d turned to us. “What would you girls like?” I was deciding between ginger ale and Coke when she’d let fly with “CC and water.” Jesus, God, I thought. Bad enough we were happily smoking up a storm right in front of the man’s face, but drinks!

Booker ordered a beer and shot of something and proceeded to tell me about boilermakers. He stoked his boiler. One after another of the neat little combos came, the amber liquid in the thick shotglass, and the big, sweating mug of beer. Booker was showing off for me. He asked about my college boy, and I evaded. He asked about my college, and I described St. Paul’s, concerned at first to omit any telling secondary-school details, and then realizing that there were none that he would recognize. He told me about getting high in Vietnam, and about how a buddy of his, a guy who was blind in one eye and had lied about his blindness to accompany Booker into the service, had carried him a mile and a half to safety. Neither of us knew how far to believe the other. He stoked his boiler some more, and I gulped down the CC and water, trying to pass the stinking liquid over my tastebuds and into my throat, where it was warm and cool at the same time. I told Booker about the black ice on the pond in winter, and he replied that we ought to go roller skating next time.

We caught a cab to my house. It would be a long, expensive ride, but it was clear that there was no other way to get me back to Yeadon by twelve. It was also becoming clear that
Booker’s boiler was boiling over. He had been fine at the bar. He had walked out and hailed a cab. Then, he leaned on me heavily to get in and slumped on the seat. His speech slurred in the middle of a sentence. “Oh, Christ,” he said, “it’s hitting me.”

It was indeed as if he had been hit. One minute he was walking and talking, and the next he was like a fighter who’d been slugged. We’d been told at school about the dangers of ingesting too much alcohol too fast. My friends told stories about students who had died in fraternity drinking bouts, suicidal show-off rounds that left strapping young men stone dead.

“You all right?” the driver asked.

“Fine.” Booker wheezed the word. “I need a smoke,” he told me.

I lit a cigarette and gave it to him. I watched each time he brought it, with excruciating concentration, to his lips to make sure that he did not burn himself or me. He opened the window to get some air and panted at the breeze like a sick dog on his last ride to the veterinarian’s. The taxi sped through the night toward Yeadon. We neared the graveyard where the word F
ERNWOOD
grew in ragged topiary on a green hill. The taxi stopped at the light just before a narrow bridge over Cobbs Creek.

“I’ma be sick,” Booker said.

The light turned green. The taxi began to move.

“Wait! Stop!” I called to the driver. I reached across to help Booker unlatch the door. He leaned over, and I held onto his waist with all my strength. Booker was reed thin, but six feet tall is six feet tall, and gravity was pulling him toward the ground. He vomited onto the street, for what seemed a long time.

“You all right? He all right?” the driver asked.

What could I answer?

“All right,” Booker bawled it out. He flung his upper body upright, back into the taxi, and slammed the door.

“I can’t believe it,” he said to me.

The taxi lurched forward, laboring up the hill past the cemetery. The cicadas sent up waves of racket, their curious dry sound borne along the moist, grass-scented summer air that blew in the windows.

“Call myself taking the girl out for a good time and end up puking on the street like a bum,” Booker said. “Ain’t that a bitch?” Then he dozed.

“You want to take him home first?” the driver asked me.

“No.” Booker revived. “No. We take the lady home first. Said I’d get you home by midnight. I’ma get you home by midnight.”

I directed the driver to my house. Booker, who had seemed himself again, could not move his long legs to let me out. I climbed over him and felt him grabbing at my hands.

“What?” My sympathy for him threatened to evaporate in a moment. If he touched me, I thought, I’d slug him.

“Here. Will you wait a minute? Please! Here.” He was trying to hand me a wad of money. He waved toward the driver. “Pay him.”

I exhaled relief. “How much is the fare?” I asked the driver.

He did not tell me. Instead, he began to shout that he needed to know he was going to get paid for the whole trip, the whole trip. “Where the hell am I going? I got to get paid.”

“You will get paid,” I said to him. I spoke clearly and precisely, conscious, as the smell of vomit wafted sweet and sour off Booker’s breath through the open window, of the confident speech St. Paul’s had given me. I asked the driver to estimate the fare back to Booker’s address. Then I rounded up his liberal guess and gave him a ten-dollar tip as well.
“Thank you for your patience,” I said as if his job were finished.

“How’m I going to get him out of the car?”

“He’ll get out of the car,” I said as if I knew what I was talking about. I tried to give Booker the rest of his money. I was holding a bunch of wadded-up twenties.

“Keep it. You keep it,” he said. “You deserve it.”

I heard my mother, who was still awake, calling me from the front door. I told Booker good-night and told the taxi driver to roll. Then I walked up the front path, past the yew bushes, to the porch.

“Where’s your date?” My mother asked this as we two watched the taxi cab make his U-turn and speed away. “Don’t young men walk girls to the door anymore?”

“Well, Mama, we saw you at the front door, so we knew I was safe,” I joked, trying to hold in my CC-and-water breath until she turned to go in.

“You’re lucky your father’s not home yet,” she said. “ ‘Cause you are late, and you know he’s not crazy about that boy or old man or whatever he is.”

I tiptoed up the stairs in order not to wake my sister. I went directly to bed with the excuse that I had to work the seven-to-eleven shift the next day.

“Seems like you should have thought of that earlier.” The dog came into my room and settled on the bed with a disgruntled sigh. It took a long time for me to go to sleep.

I awoke late, rushed to wake my father, and drove too fast to the diner. Daddy rapped on the dashboard with his knuckles to tell me to slow down. We knocked our way to work. Booker was there when I arrived.

I poured a cup of coffee and a glass of grapefruit juice as I always did, and went right to work. The day manager raised his eyebrows at me, and the waitress who had covered for me for fifteen minutes made a great show of handing over the
checks on the tables she had served. Later, when I had a minute free, I went behind the steam tables and handed Booker the rest of his money, sixty or seventy dollars. He looked at it with bloodshot eyes. “You know you didn’t have to give this back to me,” he said. “I didn’t even remember.”

“It’s your money,” I said.

He said that I had class, even if I was just a kid, and that the next time he was going to take me out to some class spots, but he never did. We acted as if our schedules wouldn’t jibe, but the truth was that we’d both seen enough. When the summer was gone, we said that we’d missed our chance until Christmas break.

By then I had saved money and taken my driving test in my mother’s old station wagon. My parents trusted me to drive alone with my sister. I took her on outings to fast-food restaurants and playgrounds. I played at being the older sister I had always wanted. Carole rewarded me by copying my movements, my inflections, my idioms. I combed her hair—gently, because she was tenderheaded, as we said. I drew pictures with her and played dress-up with our mother’s party gowns. They smelled of closet dust when we pulled them over our heads.

We walked to the playground behind the swim club we never joined. It was called The Nile, and had been built by the black doctors and lawyers and teachers on Yeadon’s west end after they had been barred from the Yeadon Swim Club on the other side of the borough. We listened to the music and smelled the French fries. The water sounded cool, and the children were noisy. I do not remember wanting to go into the swim club; it was yet another social world to figure out and fit into, and did not seem worth the effort.

Carole and I sat on the swings that once excited her but were
now too tame. We climbed into the V in the middle of the old weeping willow tree and talked about when we were smaller and when we’d grow up. She never tired of hearing anecdotes from her own childhood, and she particularly liked to hear how feisty she had been, how she had walked around the backyard naked, how she had run away to Mrs. Evans’s house, how she created her own pantry of stolen cookies and candy in her room and was not discovered until an army of ants marched in a line over the windowsill, across the room, under her bed, and gave her away. She still had that same throaty, infectious laugh, but she seemed to laugh less frequently now.

Once, when I was baby-sitting for Carole and two of her friends, a sister and a brother who lived two doors away, Carole argued with the little girl and hit her. I scolded Carole while the child cried and the younger boy looked on. When I went into the house to fix their lunch, Carole hit her again. I scooped Carole under my arm and carried her upstairs. She shouted and screamed, and I felt a terrible rage erupting within me. It was hot that day. I never knew what to do when the children fought, and that summer they were fighting all the time. It was much worse with me than with the mothers. I was losing control.

“I hate you,” she screamed. I slapped her. Knowing full well what I was doing, I slapped her. I knew how hurt she would be, and I did it anyway. She stopped crying immediately and stared at me, disbelieving. I had never done that to her before, and in that moment, our entire relationship was redefined. I had become one of the grown-ups (and with that most immature of actions, a blow). I might play at sibling solidarity, but now she and I knew that I had become capable of grown-up treachery.

I was one of the women, now, as I had been when I’d stood in front of the mirror in Simpson the night that Ricky had come to St. Paul’s, my eyes wild and hair stuck up like a marmoset’s
on the top of my head. It did not come, this womanhood, as I had expected. I had thought it was power that they had been keeping all to themselves, and it was, of a sort: power to make Ricky cry, or to strike shame into a child and wipe away, with the back of my hand, the delicate teardrops of her trust.

After the moment of shocked silence between us, I grabbed Carole to me and held her. I told her that I was sorry for hitting her, so sorry for hitting her. I asked her to behave with Roslyn, to please, please behave, and she knew and I knew that I was begging her because I no more had the ability to tolerate failing in her than in myself. She went downstairs and outside to friends who were waiting to see what had happened to her. I sat in her room for a moment letting the image of her face burn into me. I can see it even now: that dumbfounded shock, not disputing, but hating, grieving, and so quickly accepting my right to hurt her.

Later in the summer, my mother’s clan—my Nana Hamilton, my paralyzed Aunt Emily, my octogenarian great-grandfather, and my Aunt Evelyn—moved to a tract house in suburban Wilmington. We went down in a caravan of cars, and I watched as the white neighbors came out to help our disabled kin into the house. I thought of Carole and me then, as I watched them going into the new house, the last of my family to leave the black inner city where I grew up. My great-grandfather said a prayer to bless the house, and I listened as my folks told the new neighbors what family people we were. My grandmother spread her arms and said, as she had said before, that she loved her girls ferociously.

I had always squirmed under the word and how she belted it out vaudeville-style, rolling the r, and tossing her head. I thought I knew why it had disturbed me, now that I had struck my sister and seen the panicked acceptance in her beautiful coffee-colored eyes. I knew our ferocious love better now: It
was feline, deliberate, personal. Nana loved us as a lioness loved her cubs, insisting that her pride stay near and hunt with her, eat with her. Males who could not live with the pride were cast out. I also suspected that like a lioness giving birth, she would lick us, not just to clean us, or to augment her own strength, but also to discover our defects, and, if need be, if one were too weak, to swallow us up.

By the end of August, after my summer holiday in the real world, I was more than ready to go back to school.

O
n the first day of my Sixth-Form year, I greeted new parents and studied at the Rectory. I called across the green to old friends. I told tired-looking parents how to get to their children’s new houses. I helped new girls carry boxes up the stairs. I stood outside the Old Chapel to watch the new students go in for their First-Night Service. I saw their nervousness and arrogance, and I remembered my own.

The rituals this year were familiar. They included and sustained me and helped me to know where I was, to know the season, and to ease the pain of leaving the parents and family whom I looked at with new, different, critical, nostalgic eyes. I knew as precisely as a soldier where I belonged in this community, and I had the privileges and responsibilities to show me.

I also had a history here. I had been thrown off the boat docks into the icy pond. I had lived in a house, studied in the library, run on the fields, rowed on the pond, eaten in the dining rooms, prayed and sung in the Chapel. I knew the rhythm of the year, the first days of orientation and welcome, the beginning of term, term-time proper, and then the Cricket Holiday break, Parents’ Day, and on and on. I had experienced failure and success.

I stopped on the paths to talk with new students, particularly new black and Hispanic students, just as Mike Russell and Lee
and Maldonado and Wally had stopped to welcome me. I saw their skepticism, and I saw reflected in their eyes the poise and confidence they saw in me. After a brief talk, I’d mount my bicycle—another Sixth-Form privilege—and ride away.