I'm Down: A Memoir (25 page)

“Yeah,” I said, touched. “You came to get me.”

“You know there’s like a ten-foot drop out your front door!”

I nodded still unsure if he was gonna lecture me or hug me. But he just stood there looking like an upside-down triangle. “Well, get your stuff and get in the car! Practice starts in twenty minutes!”

On the way to the pool everyone in the car was quiet. I looked at Dan, who was determined to pretend nothing happened on Friday. He was staring so intently at the road that it was obvious he was avoiding eye contact. Janie, who was what Dad would call “spoiled” or “a punk,” had been kicked off the team several times now. And, even though she was the loudest girl I had ever met besides Nay-Nay, she respected the ride of silence and didn’t say a word.

“I’m sorry,” I said, enjoying being important enough to be picked up. “I’m really gonna do my best from now on.”

“Don’t tell it to me,” Dan said. “Tell it to the pool.”

D
AD HAD ALWAYS
rigged up everything in our house. You needed pliers to turn on the shower or open the bedroom door. There was a trick to opening every drawer in the kitchen, and the phone was a mess of electrical tape and worked only if you sat perfectly still. But Dad’s
Mona Lisa
was the van. This was a cargo van that he transported four children around in. The inside door handles fell off so to get out of the van from the driver’s side you had to use a bent coat hanger, and to get out of the passenger side you used a wrench. The two back doors of the van were held closed with a wire wrapped around them, and the latch on them was broken so the wire was actually the only thing holding the doors closed. And for the kids to sit on, in the cargo area were three plastic milk crates—and your crate wasn’t attached to the floor, so to stay on it while the car was in motion required a deft sense of balance and a working knowledge of physics. The floor of the van also had ridges, so if there was some water in the back that had seeped in through the not-really-closed back doors, we could while away the hours watching it roll back and forth as the van drove up and down slopes. Needless to say, my sister and I always called shotgun the night before.

The summer after my fourteenth birthday I spent with a family in France. The night I returned, my dad picked me up from the airport in the van. I got off my plane and seeing the hooptie-mobile was a subtle reminder that I wasn’t really Continental, and that brake pads aren’t for everyone. Dad helped me with my bags but he didn’t look particularly happy to see me. He looked anxious and stiff. And as we pulled the jalopy away from airport pick up he said. “Your stepmom wants us all to have a talk when you get home.” I was worried it was about money.

The trip to France was something that my French teacher had said would look good on my transcript, and I’d filled out all the paperwork and a scholarship application. My father’s tax forms confirmed what I had already known, that he hadn’t really had a
job
job in years. And that along with my transcripts bought me an almost full scholarship—except for five hundred dollars. I don’t think I had a full grasp of what five hundred dollars was to my family, I just knew it was a lot less than the thirty-five hundred all of the other kids’ parents paid. I actually thought they should be grateful because I saved them three thousand dollars. As I sat down for our “talk” I found out they were not grateful.

“We need you to start earning your keep,” Yvonne said, smoothing a piece of hair by the side of her face into a finger curl. “You got to go to France, and part of that is that you need to get yourself a
J-O-B
.”

“I have a job . . . I do childcare for that Tuesday night group.” Yvonne and Dad drew a blank. “PEPS.”

“What?” Yvonne looked at me blankly.

Dad used his hands to explicate. “She takes care of the kids during they little meeting, I forgot about that.”

“That’s volunteer work,” Yvonne said, grabbing Dad’s hand again.

“No,” I said. “Catholic Ser vice Center pays me. Plus, there’s Saturday mornings at the Jewish Center. I watch the kids during shul.” I was an equal opportunity kid-watcher.

“We mean a real job,” said Yvonne. “The type of job you do every day after school. You got to go to France, now you need to get a job.”

“Your stepmom is right,” Dad said nervously. “You should start contributing to this family.” I didn’t want to contribute to this family. This family needed a lot of work.

“Well, what about my extracurricular activities?” I asked. “My violin, my swimming, my clubs?”

“You’ll have to give some things up,” Yvonne said, causing my stomach to fall and my whole body to shudder.

“You don’t understand! I need those to get a scholarship for college!”
So I can get the fuck out of here.

“No,
you
don’t understand!” Yvonne said. “You are too old to be not contributing to this household. And since you don’t have enough time to work, I say you quit swimming.” At this point I was swimming five hours a day.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Dad said. “She doesn’t have to give up swimming, does she?”

Yvonne shot Dad a look so neutering, he actually left his body for a second.

“I’m fourteen. Who’s gonna hire me?” I asked.

“McDonald’s, for one,” Yvonne said

McDonalds, does she know who the fuck I am?
“I’m pretty sure you have to be sixteen.”

“To work at McDonald’s?” Yvonne said incredulously.

“Pretty sure,” I said.

Yvonne was flustered and got dismissive. “Well, that’s not the point! Besides,” she said, “no one is gonna check your age.” Wrong again, but I didn’t say anything. I just sat there wishing that I hadn’t gone to France, and more, that she hadn’t said the
word
McDonald’s
. I wouldn’t have taken the summer in France if I had known it might end in McDonald’s.

Since I was old enough to know it was a shitty job, McDonald’s was where I was worried I’d end up. Every time someone joked about McDonald’s being my future My friend Violet said that McDonald’s was where we’d work if we didn’t finish our history presentation. When I missed a geometry problem, and my math teacher said I should practice saying, “Would you like some fries with that order?” I just froze. They thought it was funny because it was so far-fetched, but for me McDonald’s wasn’t all that far-fetched. I had been fighting it all these years, but I knew if I stopped fighting, my genes would catch up to me like a tailwind no matter where I’d gone to school, and I’d spend the rest of my life on fries.

“Jesus!” I said. “You don’t understand.” I tried not to get upset. Yvonne fed on upset-ness. “We get like four hours of homework a night.”

“That sounds like an excuse,” Yvonne said. “I had a job when I was your age, and had time to get pretty good grades. And I’ll tell you, I had a lot more family responsibilities than you do. I understood my priority was to my family.”

“I’m not having some great time!” I was getting upset anyway so I decided to lay it on thick, “I have a four-point-oh, and I play in two orchestras, I’m in swimming, and I work with underprivileged youth, because I think it will pay off down the road . . . for all of us.” The last part made no sense to Yvonne.

“You’re underprivileged youth!” Yvonne said. “Or did you not know that?” Why was she killing my American dream?

“Besides,” Dad said, “I see you find plenty of time to monkey around here and watch that TV.”

“Yeah,” Yvonne said. “You could easily spend the same hour flippin’ burgers and have made five dollars.”

“Do you want a McDonald’s employee or an All-American?” This was meant to grab my dad’s attention. He may not have related to swimming that well, but he liked the way those words rolled off the tongue:
All-American
.

“Can’t you do both?” Dad asked.

“She’s manipulating.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, panicked. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but I have a plan.”

“You have a plan?” Yvonne laughed. “A plan for what? You’re fourteen.”

“To go to the same schools my classmates are going to.”

“Oh, this again,” Dad said. “You think you’re better than this family.”

Yvonne nodded in agreement before declaring, “You’re just being racist.”
Racist?
I was shocked and recoiled. It was like we were all just having a conversation and she pulled out a hand grenade. “That’s right. You got a problem with black people.” I could keep talking, but the argument was over, so I started to cry. I had worked too hard at trying to be down to be called a racist.

“I’m not racist.”

“Mishna,” Dad said. “Get a job.”

“You guys are being really shortsighted!” I screamed and stomped off . What I really wanted to say was “ghetto”—“You guys are being really ghetto!” So maybe I was racist.

I raced down the stairs to my room, wondering why I couldn’t have my friend Violet’s parents.
They don’t even talk to her most of the night. She sits in her room and does whatever she wants and nobody makes her clean anything or do anyone’s hair or get a job. Her only job is her schoolwork and she doesn’t even do that well in history. Or my friend Marni—her parents even take her to Europe every summer and she doesn’t have to pay them back. In fact, she gets a HUGE allowance and all she has to do is stomp around and act all
depressed. I wished someone would pay me to be depressed—I would do such a good job.

I jumped into my top bunk and wedged myself into the corner against the cement wall and imagined I was in a Soviet prison. Dad was supposed to have finished dry walling it seven years ago, and now the pebbles in the cement just elevated my self-pity as I pressed my face into cold rock like a Dostoyevsky character. And as the tears poured down my cheeks I realized I was mostly upset about Dad. He had totally let Yvonne call me a racist, and I wondered if there was any way he could really think I was.

That night I had a dream. I saw myself running down a street in the middle of the night. The street was desolate—just abandoned ware houses lining a cobblestone street. It must have been inspired by Michael Jackson videos—maybe “Smooth Criminal” or “The Way You Make Me Feel.” I was running fast to get away from something, but I could feel its breath on my neck. I sprinted, trying to resist, but this giant hand reached out to grab my shoulder and pull me back. I finally fell into the fog and became a part of it. But in the fog there was a warm, familiar peace. I woke up thinking about McDonald’s.

The next day when I came home from swim practice, Yvonne was sitting in the kitchen with Anora, Andreus, and Yvette. All of them had a Happy Meal.

“Did you get me one?” I asked.

“No,” Yvonne joked. “I thought you didn’t like McDonald’s.”

“I like McDonald’s food!” I said, feeling hungry and dejected.

“Well, you should get yourself some money.” She laughed. I pulled a five out of my pocket and handed it to her.

“Ask your dad to take you.”

“Dad, can we go get some food?” I asked. “I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry,” he said, retreating to his bedroom. “Make yourself something out of the fridge.”

“Maybe you can find yourself some pâté,” Yvonne joked.

I opened the fridge. Yvonne, Anora, Andre, and Yvette were still watching me like my hunger was entertainment. Milk. Eggs. Rotting scallions. I looked in the cupboard for some Top Ramen. Nothing.

I looked at my family chowing down on McDonald’s in the next room. At this point, Yvonne started laughing again as I closed the fridge and headed for the pantry, where we kept stuff we got at Costco. Triumphantly, I found a box of Jiffy mix and started to make myself some corn bread. Anora, who had finished her Happy Meal, ran into the kitchen to help me. She grabbed the muffin tin out off the shelf and handed it to me.

“Make it in this!” she said. My sister liked muffin-shaped things. I had the skillet out to make hot water corn bread, but decided to put it away to make my sister happy.

“Okay,” I said, “do you want to grease it for me?” She nodded and ran for the drippings jar, but at that moment Yvonne had turned on a Jody Watley cassette in the living room and started shaking her hips along with the babies. While I had played basketball, Anora had replaced me on Yvonne’s beauty team. So Anora took one look at the dance party in the living room and became instantly disenchanted with corn bread. She dropped the pan and ran off to join them.

“Come on, Mishna,” Yvonne said, jokingly sashaying up to Anora, who was dance-walking into the living room. “Come shake that duck butt.” I was surprised to be invited, but I was still in the middle of my food project, and hungrier than I was lonely.

“As soon as I get my corn bread in the oven.”

“You just don’t like black music,” Yvonne snapped. “You’re racist about music.” What she said knocked the wind out of me. There was that word again,
racist
. It made me immediately defensive.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“You know,” she said, trying to play down the fact she just called me racist again, “you just like that depressing white music.”

“That’s not true!” I shouted over the music. “Dad took me to see Miles Davis, and I like Miles Davis.” I thought I was making a compelling argument and asked, “Would a racist like Miles Davis?”

But Yvonne brushed my argument off without breaking step. “No,” she said, “but a really, really white person would.” And returned to the bump with my sister.

I had had it. I ran to the living room and screamed, “Just because I don’t like Jody Watley does not make me a racist!” Yvonne stopped dancing and the dance party stopped. “She sucks!” I thought standing my ground might put this whole racist thing to bed. Instead, it made Dad poke his head out of the bedroom. He saw Yvonne and me standing across from each other, clearly having some difficulty, and attempted to retreat back to the bedroom when Yvonne screamed, “John! Come here!”

And as he slinked out of the bedroom into the living room, everything in his walk made me wonder,
What happened to my dad?