Uncle Janice (29 page)

“What is that?” he said. “Silk?”

“You boys want some coffee?” she asked.

They followed her into the kitchen, where she noticed for the first time all the black ants crawling across the floor. Dozens, maybe a hundred of them. They did not march forward in a single line behind a foreman dancing out orders but instead swarmed like looters for the
sugar she’d apparently done a poor job of vacuuming. Disgust tightened the cords in the fair-skinned cop’s neck. Never mind that the rest of the kitchen was clean, minus all the junk piled on chairs. Never mind that fresh flowers covered the table, albeit in water glasses. She hoped that back when she’d worked patrol, going in and out of project apartments, she’d managed to hide her repugnance a little bit better than he did, but she knew she probably hadn’t. She threw a bloody dishrag over the ants, her face smoldering with embarrassment for both her past and present selves.

“What the hell is all that
noise
?” he asked.

“My alarm clock.”

The cop who liked her robe said, “We’ve had plenty of coffee already, Mrs. Itwaru, but thank you for asking.”

“Miss,” she corrected, because every bit counted.

The other cop rested his hand on the butt of his holstered gun, in a probable attempt to intimidate her. “Miss Itwaru,” he said, “do you have any weapons on the premises?”

She told them she didn’t understand. They told her in response that a criminal complaint had been made against her for assaulting a Mr.—and here the fair-skinned cop had to consult his steno pad—a Mr. Jianheng Hua with a deadly weapon, which was a felony by the way, and what did she have to say about it? The relief vaulted out of her on a single sob. Her ass dropped down into the nearest, paperless chair. She rubbed sleep boogers from her eyes, explaining to the cops her own side of the story: that Hua had trespassed onto her property, into her house, which was a misdemeanor by the way, and so she pointed a gun at him and politely asked him to leave.

“You got a permit for the gun?” the fair-skinned cop asked.

“I’m on the job.”

“You’re a
cop
?” he said, tripped up by her brown skin, vagina, and address, which was in the actual city where she actually worked, meaning she shat where she ate instead of living out on Long Island like a normal PO. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t know why you were here,” she said, which after all was the truth.

“Where you work out of?”

“Queens Narcotics,” she said and watched their eyebrows go up. “I’m an uncle.”

She’d somehow never said it out loud before: I’m an uncle!

“Dang, you out of the bag already?” the tan one said. “How old are you?”

“You can’t ask a girl how old she is,” said the other cop, her defender now. He leaned against the counter, visibly relaxed, because hey, listen, even the cleanest kitchens can get ants sometimes, right? “What’s it like working undercover?” he asked. “Pretty crazy?”

“Pretty crazy,” she said.

Upstairs the alarm clock stopped honking.

“Internal Affairs is probably the worst part of it,” she said, and both cops nodded, eager to agree. “It’s like they got a hard-on for uncles. I’m serious. Since the Sean Bell thing? They just looking to cut us down. Any excuse.” Did she really need to keep going here? Did they really not get it yet? She plucked a droopy petal off a carnation and rolled it between her fingertips. “I’m saying, just you watch,” she told the patrols. “A guy makes some bullshit criminal complaint? Doesn’t matter he comes into
my
house first. IA will just turn it all around and make it seem like—”

“Oh,” the tan cop said. “Come on, no, don’t worry about it.” He looked to his partner for confirmation. “Right?”

“Please,” he said. “This is some paperwork we done already lost.”

After they left, she went to get the vacuum cleaner and found her mother sitting on the staircase. She wore a thin T-shirt and underwear without her robe to go over them. Her knees were pressed together, her feet splayed apart like a pigeon’s, the veins along her hands as thick as licorice. Through the underwear’s sheer fabric, Janice could see the dark sponge of her pubic hair. Nothing made sense. This young woman, who had always seemed even younger, looked suddenly old, as if overnight she’d turned old, old all over her body except for a pair of terrified eyes that would have belonged more rightfully in the face of a child. She
gnawed, as Janice would have gnawed, on her finger’s bandage and gauze.

“Don’t do that,” Janice said.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Vita said savagely. “I heard voices.
Men’s
voices.”

“The police,” Janice said. “About last night. Mr. Hua. It’s nothing, I took care of it.” As she spoke, the spirit of her mother’s panic shot through her like a chill. She gripped her own elbows to keep herself from trembling. “You hungry? You want me to make you something to eat?”

“What happened to my finger?” Vita wailed.

“Oh, Mom,” Janice said and went up the stairs to hold on to her.

For young Mikey Sharpe, a natural taxonomist and lover of lists, there was only one sport: handball, and of that one sport there were only two subsets worth considering: Chinese handball and American handball, in that order, from best to not-quite-as-best. His classification system did not include the so-called team handball nonsense played at the Olympics indoors with goalies and referees. Or the beach version, which Mikey couldn’t even wrap his head around. Or any of the other naked emperors cluttering handball’s Wikipedia page. Handball, real handball, was played outside, without goalies, away from sand, against a wall with an actual—and this should be obvious but apparently wasn’t—handball, of which again there were only two preferred types: the light blue Sky Bounce and the heavier pink Spaldeen. They both smelled like summer and kicked up nicely, but the Sky Bounces were a little easier for him to find. A stationery store on Roosevelt Avenue sold them for a dollar apiece.

Between American handball and Chinese handball, American was by far the more popular, especially down at the Seventy-Eighth and Ninety-Fifth Street parks, where the older boys wore fingerless gloves over their palms. With American you had to smash the ball into the wall. With Chinese, the ball got bounced into the wall. Rule-wise it was the only difference, but that one difference led to five distinct yet interrelated
advantages, in ascending order of importance: Chinese handball did not require gloves, which were more expensive than he could afford on his allowance; it privileged touch over force and angles over aggression; with longer points, more people could play at a time; with more people playing, there was a whole lot less running; and, as in baseball, its slower pace led to a super-hilario insider language of killers, Hindus, egg rolls, babying, watermelons, wormburners, and cobble smashers.

Mikey’s specialty was the killer, a soft-touch shot that kissed the base of the wall before dribbling back, unreturnable. Unbeatable, he dominated the I.S. 145 handball court from the beginning of recess to the loud-ass bell calling every eighth-grader inside. Actually? Technically? He dominated
one
of the I.S. 145 handball courts. The playground had a single, freestanding wall: on one side, the side grafittied with a fire-spitting dragon, kids played American style, which Mikey thought unfair because dragons were Chinese; the other side of the wall, his side of the wall, was a pop-art mural of rainbow figures dancing and hugging. Totally lame. He recognized the style from a Keith Haring exhibit, one of the many so-called cultural events his mother dragged him to in an attempt to discourage him from sports and/or turn him gay. Some, though, were not entirely terrible and his top five from best to fifth best were: an exhibit of Richard Avedon photographs, an exhibit of Calder mobiles, the musical
Ragtime
, the musical
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
, and a swing-dance class they took together outside Lincoln Center but had to stop after only ten minutes because he ran out of breath.

Next September he’ll enter the ninth grade at Newtown High, where his older brother, Chris, was the star athlete. And where the PE department had an actual handball team with an opportunity to win actual trophies like the ones with plastic baseball and basketball players on Chris’s side of their shared bedroom. There was a problem, though, and it was a sucky one. Newton’s PE department, and the Public Schools Athletic League as a whole, played handball American-style only.

In their bedroom, getting dressed before dinner one night, Chris told him he just needed to build up his lung capacity, that’s all. Mikey
asked him what a pothead knew about lung capacity. Their mother was frying sausage and peppers in the kitchen, too far away to have possibly overheard, but Chris still punched him so hard in the arm that Mikey’s fingertips deadened. Mikey couldn’t believe it. Unique among older brothers, Chris had never really hit him before. Afterward, while Mikey cried like a loser, Chris put his arms around him, apologizing into the swirled hair atop Mikey’s head, telling him that he could do anything he put his mind to. Seriously, anything. Mikey just needed to take things one step at a time, to not get ahead of himself. For instance? When Chris was scared of the baseball, he started fielding grounders on his knees after batting practice. See, one thing at a time. Fast-forward a year and he was Newtown’s starting shortstop. He used to have a mad-weak crossover, so he began playing pickup games left-handed, which was probably what he was doing right now over at the Seventy-Eighth Street courts, fighting against the dark on this mega-cold Saturday.

And Mikey on this mega-cold Saturday? He was playing American handball by himself against the apartment building’s brick exterior. And Mikey’s inhaler? Upstairs on his bedroom dresser. One thing at a time. To keep his lungs fresh, he stopped all his rallies after six shots. Yesterday he’d gone up to five; tomorrow he hoped to do seven. Here we go: with some gangster topspin he sliced the ball for an ill killer, bringing a touch of the Chinese style to this American game.

The Sky Bounce squirted away from him.

A few feet away it ended up trapped under the high-heeled boot of a woman who must’ve been watching him this whole time. He’d seen her before, he thought. Earlier in the week maybe, with two dudes on an afternoon much warmer than this one. She looked a little grimier than he remembered. She wore baggy jeans, an orange thug cap, and a gray sweatshirt too small for her, but was still totally pervable. His top-five girls were black girls, obviously, followed by Indians because they all seemed to have nice skin and big ta-tas, then Latinas, Russian girls, and finally Asians, mostly because of Tiffany Chen’s bouncing ponytail, which he sometimes followed half a block behind on the way to school. This lady right here appeared part black, part Indian, a perfect
combo. She reminded him of a favorite porno video with brown boobies smushed up against a shower-stall door, an image that came easily to mind during his own afternoon bathroom sessions. He looked away from the woman, embarrassed, as if she somehow knew all the things he’d been thinking about, all the guilty things he’d ever done.

“You practicing your killers?” she asked him.

He couldn’t believe it. “You play?”

She bounced the ball to him, but because he was Mikey Sharpe, loser extraordinaire, he fumbled it and had to go chasing after it. There were whole games, like Suicide and Asses-Up, where now he’d have to face the wall so she could peg him.

“How old are you?” she said.

“Sixteen,” he lied.

“Sixteen,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I’ve seen you around, right? You’re the neighborhood Romeo? The Heartbreak Kid around here?”

He tried to think of how his brother might answer that. The neighborhood Romeo? A million years ago Cindy Friedman apparently had a crush on Mikey, but she moved to New Jersey before he could do anything about it. At a birthday party last February he went into a closet with Tiffany Chen for seven minutes of quick pecks—well, more like two minutes of quick pecks—without any tongue even, and she hadn’t spoken to him since and he had no idea why. Him? The Heartbreak Kid?

“Not really,” he said.

“Exactly what a player would say,” she told him. “How many girlfriends you got?”

He shrugged.

“Too many to count?” she asked.

He didn’t know what to tell her. He didn’t think his brother would even know what to tell her. She terrified Mikey, and he didn’t want her to leave, both at the same time. He threw the ball up high in the air and caught it one-handed, to show her his earlier fumbling had been a fluke.

“You live around here?” he asked her for lack of anything better to say.

“Next thing you’re gonna hit me up for my number,” she said, smiling, pulling out her cell phone like maybe this whole thing might really happen. But nope. She must’ve just been checking the time, or seeing if she’d gotten a text, because the phone went right back into her pocket. “You know I’ve been out here all day?” she asked him. “Up and down all these streets. For
hours
. I even had a pigeon shit on my shoulder, you believe that?”

Sure, he believed it. The five worst New York City animals: roaches, pigeons, squirrels, subway rats, and silverfish. He couldn’t see it, though, this shit on her shoulder, but then again it was getting late, getting dark out. With the sun setting, his Sky Bounce was beginning to look more indigo than baby blue.

“You’re really sixteen?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said, unable to keep himself from shrugging again.

“Let me ask you a question. You got your ear to the ground, right? Outside all day? Practicing your killers, hollering at the pretty girls. Where I gotta go to cop some weed around here, huh? Not a lot. Just enough to get a little joint going, you know what I’m talking about? A little party like. I been hitting up people all day, Romeo, and you’re pretty much my last hope.”

A tiny camera kept him under surveillance as he rode up in his elevator. Padded blankets hung on the walls, protection from possible scuff marks and dings. All week he’d taken the stairs, pausing at every landing to re-up his breath, but he didn’t have time for that now. He worried the lady would leave if he didn’t get in and out of his apartment fast enough. Part of him, the loser part of him, hoped she was already gone.