Black Ice (3 page)

Well, my mother marched me and my armload of buoyant materials right back into school and caught the teacher before she left. The box was the only problem? Just the box? Nothing wrong with the experiment? An excited eight-year-old had forgotten a lousy, stinking box that you get from the supermarket, and for that, she was out of the running? The teacher said I had to learn to follow directions. My mother argued that I had followed directions by doing the experiment by myself, which was more than you could say for third graders who’d brought in dry-cell batteries that lit light bulbs and papier-mâche volcanoes that belched colored lava.

“Don’t you ever put me in a position like that again,” Mama said when we were out of earshot of the classroom. “You never know who is just waiting for an excuse to shut us out.”

We got the box; my experiment went into the fair; I won the prize at school. I won third prize for my age group in the city.

My ears began to burn. I could not help but believe that they would see through this transparent plug, and before I had even laid hands on an application. They’d think we were forward and pushy. I forgot, for the moment, how relieved I’d felt when Mama had stood in front of that teacher defending me with a blinding righteousness, letting the teacher know that I was not as small and black and alone as I seemed, that I came from somewhere, and where I came from, she’d better believe, somebody was home.

The other mothers nodded approvingly. My father gave me a wide, clever-girl smile. Mr. Price and Russell looked at me deadpan. They seemed amused by my embarrassment.

The story was an answer, part rebuke and part condolence, to Mike Russell’s stories, where no parents figured at all. It was a message to Mr. Price about her maternal concerns, and a way to prove that racism was not some vanquished enemy, but a real, live person, up in your face, ready, for no apparent reason,
to mess with your kid. When I was in third grade, and her marriage to my father had looked like forever, when Martin Luther King was alive preaching love, and white flight had not yet sunk the real-estate values in West Philly, Mama could do her maternal duty, and face down a white teacher who would have deprived me of my award. Who at St. Paul’s School would stand up for her child in her stead?

Mr. Price did not answer my mother’s story. Instead he invited a few more questions. The Mama’s boy asked about food and mosquitoes and telephones. He looked appalled to hear that there were no phones in the rooms, only public phone booths outside, and only a handful at that. I doubted that I’d see that child again.

If we wanted to be considered for candidacy, we were to write for an application, our own letters, composed in our own hand, and register to take standardized tests. In addition, Mr. Price said, it would be worth our while to visit the school in person.

Our host, Ralph Starr, who had slipped out of the room during the discussion, had slipped back in. Mr. Price thanked him for the use of his house. Mr. Starr took exception. He was glad to be able to help in the good work that Mr. Price and Mike were doing. In fact he thanked
us
for coming. The adults appeared pleased. They chatted with each other; I talked to Mike, and the session ended.

As we drove away, my mother could not get over how Mrs. Starr had given her barefoot toddler a spoonful of peanut butter to lick before she was spirited upstairs. Mama didn’t feed us peanut butter. It wasn’t proper good food, she said. It was what PWTs—poor white trash—gave their kids. For my lunch, Mom packed baked chicken on toast with lettuce and mayonnaise, ham, tuna, sliced tongue, or cheese.

I was as jolted by the sight as my mother, and not just the peanut butter, but the whole family scene. I had thought that
rich white people would have been quieter, their children more tidy, their mothers less vibrant. I didn’t like it that my mother, too, had been surprised. It made me nervous.

A week later, however, I did not think of the background kid-babble in Chestnut Hill, but of the wide drawing room and the slides. Mr. Price wrote promptly to inform us that he had indeed scheduled the visit we’d said we wanted to make to the school.

“They don’t play, do they?” My parents took turns asking each other and answering back.

“Those people do not play.”

F
rom inside my grandparents’ vestibule, with two fingers hooked loosely over her bottom teeth, Carole watched us drive off for New Hampshire. I saw my grandmother whisper in her ear, and I knew that her voice would be full of indulgent promise.

We headed toward the New Jersey Turnpike, the beginning, for Philadelphians, of every trip north. The turnpike’s smooth black asphalt whirred under our tires. I settled into my seat. Although there was no longer the old intimacy among the three of us, there was the same symmetry—Dad driving; Mama next to him, her hand flung over his headrest and flicking occasionally like the tail of a cat; me, alone, in the back. Suburbs gave way to small farms covered with the frozen stubble of cornstalks and bare fruit trees. It was December. We laughed about how much colder New Hampshire would be. Excitement spread inside me, hot and frightening, like dye injected into a vein.

“You’re going to be mighty glad you packed those knee socks,” my mother said with feigned neutrality.

The sock contest had started simply enough. I had been packing when my mother came into my room and saw my stockings folded on the bed next to the suitcase. Those would have to stay home, she said, picking them up and moving them back to the bureau. Knee socks were the thing to wear to this
kind of place, she said; knee socks were “classic.” Then she laid a look on me: indulgent, ready to get mad, amused, annoyed, threatening.

Every mother I knew had that look. It had been the first one I can remember mocking. Later my friends and I all did it together. “Don’t start with me,” we’d tell each other.

“Don’t
you
start.”

“Don’t even
try
it.”

Womanish among ourselves, we were silent before the women themselves. We used a tame version of our bored eyes (which were their eyes as we saw them, bored with us and the childishness of our antics) against them, but we obeyed.

I packed the knee socks, and I packed the stockings, too. They were mine. I’d bought them with my money, the money I made at the five-and-ten where I watched the fountain supervisor trim bitten ends off half-eaten hot dogs, rinse and then plop them into the Coney Island soup. I’d earned those stockings, and I wanted them with me.

Near Elizabeth a clingy stink seeped in through the heating vents. Sulphurous and sweet, filthy and dense, the pollution poured from the landscape: refineries burned oil and coal; a slaughterhouse dumped bloody spoilage doused with formaldehyde; landfills oozed bilge into a river named Kill. When the heating system seemed about to choke us, we had no choice but to open the windows, and let the air, laden with its cold, moist stink, wash over us.

“Money,” my mother said, motioning toward the wasteland around us. “What America will do for a buck.”

We drove through New York City, past the projects of the south Bronx, where people hung their laundry to be dried by the exhaust fumes, and past the north Bronx, with its boxy coops and the clean-block neighborhoods where my cousins lived.

The sun dropped off the edge of the earth just behind us and
to the left. Within moments, it had snatched the last friendly glow from the sky. Around us, headlights of passing cars carved cylindrical plugs out of the darkness, each separate, apart, lighting only enough road to see its own way through.

“This is a
wide
state.” So my parents told each other as we drove through Connecticut. Massachusetts came and went. After nearly eight hours on the road, we crossed the state line into New Hampshire. Well-maintained highways cut through granite cliffs and black woods. Small mountains of bulldozed snow lined the shoulders. Nashua and then Manchester erupted out of the land, little citylets whose worn factories hulked along the Merrimack River. We could not tell which were abandoned, and which, when daylight broke, would be alive with workers.

Concord, New Hampshire, had no such industrial district. Its Main Street swept us into a three- and four-story-tall town center. Pleasant Street took us out again, west, toward the school. To our left we saw a simple white sign with black letters. It said: St. Paul’s School.

Once onto the grounds, our car bucked and lurched across the rutty ice to Scudder House, a white clapboard cottage with brick chimneys and dark green shutters. The front door was unlocked. We opened it and stepped in. A spectacled gentleman with a handlebar mustache regarded us from the far wall.

“Who is he?” asked my mother.

I read the brass nameplate: “Willard Scudder.”

“Well, who else would he be?”

We walked into a light green bedroom with twin beds, where my father deposited their bags, and past the tiny kitchen to a peach-colored bedroom, same beds, where I put mine. A note in the kitchen invited us to help ourselves to soft drinks. More notes in the bedrooms explained how to turn on the electric blankets. I was afraid to sleep underneath live electric wires,
but the guesthouse, charming and well appointed, was cold. I turned the dial. Warmth spread over me. I drifted off into a luxurious, and yet disconcerted, sleep.

The smell of frying bacon and the sound of a stranger’s voice woke me.

“What kind of juice would you like?” The housekeeper spoke in a thin voice; it emerged from a rib cage no bigger around than a twelve-year-old’s. Three years later, in the same kitchen, this woman would hand me a graduation card permeated by the inky smell of a fresh five-dollar bill. Eight years after that, when I returned to teach, she would stand in the same narrow kitchen, tiny shoulders silhouetted against the same window, and stare into my face to find the plumper, younger face concealed. She would share with me her loneliness after her husband’s death: the stillness of the air inside her house, the pointlessness of unused chairs, days off with nothing to do. Narrowing her eyes to look back, she’d remember my mother, too.

I heard them talk that December morning while I dressed. “Please, don’t bother with that,” my mother said.

“No bother.”

“Now, with a living room this size, they must use Scudder for more than a guesthouse. This room would be perfect for a banquet—a small banquet—or a luncheon.”

“Yep. We do serve some big meals here.”

“You don’t mean to tell me they make you do any real
cooking
in a kitchen this size?”

“Nope. I don’t cook it.”

“I was going to say.…”

“Cafeteria sends the food up. The van comes right to that back door there. I serve it, buffet-style. They serve themselves. I clean up.”

She stayed in the kitchen while we ate, self-consciously, at
the drop-leaf table under Mr. Scudder’s portrait. I assumed he was appalled, and I was pleased to think so.

Mike Russell appeared to take us for a tour of the grounds and buildings. They were little more to me than a backdrop to our own improbable drama. Russell could have been leading me through the Land of the Sweets, I was so dreamy. He’d be gone by the time I got in,
if
I got in, I kept reminding myself, trying not to lose control. Like a tourist in a foreign country, I felt that it might be possible to come to this school and be free of my past, free to re-create myself. I smiled at Russell as he guided us into the New Chapel. He did not know that on a bet I’d eaten half a worm in fifth grade, and up here there’d be nobody to tell him or anyone else.

From the antechapel we looked down a long aisle flanked on either side by three rows of graduated pews for students and high-backed seats carved into the walls for teachers. The floors were laid with brick-colored quarry tile. At the end of the center aisle, the altar rose distant and ornate. Slants of sunbeams were colored by tall stained-glass windows overhead. To our left a bright white marble angel cradled an equally white nude in muscular tribute to the school’s war dead.

My head filled with the words and melodies of familiar prayers: the doxology, the Lord’s Prayer, snippets of music:

In the African Methodist Episcopal church, the minister would continue: “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee.” I
heard the music, punctuated by the creaking pews, in my head. I heard the floor of Ward A.M.E. groan under its red carpet as the parishioners lined up in the aisle to take their burdens to the Lord. We touched hands and hugged each other as we made our slow progress toward the altar.

In the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul the heels of our shoes clicked on the stone floors. The aisle was wide enough for a mummers’ procession. My music would not fit here. Neither would my God, He whom I had held onto, just barely, through the music that spoke comfort and retribution, and the community, the perfumed and bosomy women who approved of me, and the old men who nodded at me each Sunday. I could not conjure my God in this place, and it seemed His failure. Surprise, as cold as the electric blanket had been warm, overwhelmed me. We left the chapel. It was time for my interview.

Inside the Schoolhouse, at the top of a slate staircase, was a waiting room where Russell handed us over to Mr. Price. I smelled coffee brewing, and I heard classroom sounds—discussion, laughter, lecturing, but no shouts or threats, no yardsticks banging for silence, no words of shame or derision. My father, who taught in a public junior high school, looked away from Mr. Price and my mother for a moment and smilingly shook his head.

Our admissions officer, Mr. Dick, came into the waiting room. After a general greeting, he ushered us into an office and closed the door. This was what we had come for, and it was nothing like I had imagined.

For one thing, I had not expected my parents to be invited into my interview. Once they were in, I could not keep my eyes off them. They filled the room with their presence. Mr. Dick, I could see, was impressed by them. They were altogether natural, and yet larger than I’d ever seen them. My mother
engaging and shiny-eyed, my father, thoughtful and imposing. They wanted St. Paul’s, too—I saw that for the first time—or else they could not have created this portrayal of themselves: the ambitious couple in their thirties, grateful for an opportunity for their daughter, eager to help, reluctant to let her go. Why, St. Paul’s, they said, was a dream come true, and I agreed. I loved to look at them like this. It was almost too good.