Authors: Anna Quindlen
And then there was Princess Margaret, her only daughter. When Tequila had first gotten her out of foster care, she had despaired; the kid would leave for fourth grade in the morning and not come home until 7:00
P.M.,
her eyes red, her hair disheveled. She refused to talk about what she’d done or where she’d gone, and Tequila, using the skills she’d acquired in parenting classes, reluctantly decided not to beat it out of her. Then one Saturday when Tequila made the kids accompany her to the nail parlor, where she indulged in her only vice, the painting of flowers on her talonlike acrylic tips, they had run into the wife of the pastor at the Living Rock Church of the Merciful Jesus, which Tequila attended. “I have never seen a child read in my life the way that child reads,” said the pastor’s wife, who also worked part-time at the branch of the library on Mount Morris Avenue, on a block Tequila had told the children was dangerous. And that’s how Tequila found out, first that Princess Margaret was a crazed reader, then that she was a genius. First, Tequila got her into a program for gifted kids in upper Manhattan, then a program that sent poor kids out of their neighborhoods and into the most exclusive private schools in Manhattan.
The idea of it gave me a feeling of falling off the high dive backward, but Tequila insisted that Princess Margaret was perfectly happy at the Carlisle Benedict School for Girls on East Eighty-eighth Street. This may have been because Princess Margaret was never forced to attend the social events that would have made the differences between her and her classmates so clear. Tequila almost never let her out of the house except for school. “The warden,” Princess Margaret called her mother. “Ms. Fitzmaurice, tell her that a junior in high school needs some freedom. What’s your nephew’s curfew?”
“No nephew gonna get pregnant, mess up his life for once and for all.”
“For the millionth time, I am not going to get pregnant. I just want to go out on Saturday night.”
“You go out on Saturday night when you go to college,” Tequila said. The college counselor had told Tequila that the Ivy League was Princess Margaret’s best option. At the moment, Tequila was leaning toward Princeton.
From Tequila’s apartment window, the Bronx looks every bit as magical at night as Manhattan does from atop Fifth Avenue. While most of the people I meet prefer to focus on the differences between where I work and where I live, I’m often struck by the essential similarities. Most days as I walk from the subway station to our buildings, I’m lulled by the ordinariness of life. Partly it’s because it’s morning, and most of the worst things take place under the soft, mottled cover of big city darkness, in the pockets of black between the streetlights and around the footings of the projects. Partly it’s because the Bronx is just like anyplace else, only poorer. Sometimes I’m walking behind a gaggle of girls from Maria Goretti High School, their legs long and shimmery beneath the plaid uniform skirts that they have rolled up and will roll down when the school door is in sight. And I remember how we rolled our skirts at the Harper School, how Miss Means would stand in the doorway to shake our hands and say, one eyebrow cocked into an accent grave, “Have you forgotten something, Miss Fitzmaurice?” until I tugged my skirt down and moved on. And there are two little boys on our shelter’s block who go to school together, their mother watching from the window with a baby in her arms, the two of them hand in hand. They are a little closer in age than Meghan and I were, but still the older boy, who can’t be more than eight, has that proprietary sense and a rich quiver of demands: Come ooo-nnn. You’re slooo-ooow. We’re laaa-te. The old woman in the community garden rises stiffly and watches them as they go past. There’s nothing for her to do in March except walk the perimeter of the lot and dream of May: tomatoes here, peppers next to them, marigolds to keep the bugs away. Bugs feast on vegetable gardens in the Bronx the way they do in Connecticut or Iowa or anywhere else, and boys walk to school, and girls show their legs. It’s just ordinary life.
One day I abandoned my predictable adult conversation with Princess Margaret about her classes and her teachers and her friends to ask her if she didn’t find it difficult to ricochet between a school at which most of the students considered it a tragedy if a cashmere sweater had a moth hole and a neighborhood in which a school shooting was a commonplace. (“You know why this is such a big story?” Tequila had said when the lead in every paper was two boys shooting up a school in Nebraska. “I give you three guesses. White, white, and white.”) Princess Margaret has a fierce and dignified beauty that means boys of her own age will not see it until they mature, and an implacability that borders on torpor and that is surely a response to her mother’s pogo stick of a personality. Flatly she replied, “It’s pretty easy, Miss Fitzmaurice. You’re just two different people. One there, the other here. And you have the whole ride on the train to turn from one into the other.” I knew exactly what she meant, but I suspected even she didn’t understand the full cost of life as a social Janus, one side facing the bright white limestone of Fifth Avenue, the other the grimy bulk of the Tubman projects, in which she lived but would never now be at home.
As housing projects go, Tubs, as the kids call it, is not in the first ranks of the truly terrible, mainly because there is a core group of pissed-off women who give hell to miscreants, at least the miscreants who are young and haven’t yet taken to carrying weapons tucked into the back of their boxer shorts. The elevator that works smells like urine, which is the signature scent of housing project elevators everywhere, although in my years in social work I have never actually seen someone peeing there. Fortunately, the community room smells most of the time like frying chicken and cake because of the elderly woman who lives next door and who salves her loneliness by cooking as though her children are still at home, or at least likely to visit. I love the smells of grease and sugar; if I were to create a signature perfume, it would be called Donut Shop and would smell just like the community room but without the overlay of industrial cleanser. Unfortunately, the community room is also right next door to the laundry room, which means people are always coming in and asking us for quarters when we’re talking.
“Can’t you see we having a meeting here?” Charisse said, as she did every week to some teenage girl who would wander in with a crumpled bill in her hand, desperate to launder her low-rise jeans in advance of a big date.
Charisse had been coming to parenting class for two years, but it didn’t seem to have stuck. Her fourteen-year-old had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, her twelve-year-old was in a youth facility because he’d been caught boosting computers from the charter school, and her eight-year-old had hyperactivity disorder so bad that a cocktail of meds that would have left most kids drooling in a corner barely made a dent. The fact that he adored his older brothers did not bode well for the future.
Yet still Charisse came on Thursday nights and discussed nutrition and boundaries, communication and directed play, just as she had the year before. She’d walked out with me one night on her way to the overpriced and filthy grocery store that served the Tubman projects and told me she was taking other courses, too. Yoga. Computers. Cooking. Somewhere along the line, someone had come up with the bright idea that the residents of the Tubman projects would be enriched by learning to do things that had meaning in the greater world but none whatsoever in their own, exercise classes in lieu of health insurance, job training in lieu of jobs, parenting classes to bring up kids who would soon be dead, pregnant, or in jail.
“Let’s talk about corporal punishment,” I began.
“It’s not good,” said one woman. “Not fair. Only the black men be getting it. None of the white ones, not even that one that killed all those people and put them under the floor. How is that fair? It’s racial.”
“You talking about capital punishment,” said Charisse smoothly. “This is corporal punishment. Corporal punishment mean you be hitting the children to get them to behave.” Charisse gave no hint that she’d made the same corporal/capital mistake the year before. (She was for capital punishment, racial or not. Eye for an eye, baby, it’s in the Bible.) I’d considered changing the nomenclature, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to begin: let’s talk about whether we want to hit these kids or not.
“It depends,” said Maria, the only Latina. “Like with Gabriella, I don’t do nothing but look cross-eyed at her and she behaves. Cries, too, lots of times. But with Tomas, I started giving him a swat when he was real little because otherwise, he do exactly what he want to do.”
“You got to hit the boys,” said a woman who had four sons. “The boys don’t mind otherwise.”
“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” said Charisse, who sang in the choir at the church located in a former synagogue on Mount Ararat Avenue. “You can’t argue with the Book. The Book says it, it must be right.”
“But does it work?” I asked. My handbook says that I’m supposed to use the Socratic method, to use “intellectual investigation to bring participants to a common understanding of the limitations of corporal punishment in molding behavior.” It didn’t say anything about the Book.
“With the boys it works. The girls don’t need it,” said Maria.
“By the time they need it they too old to do it,” said another woman. “They give you this evil look. Hit you back, maybe.”
“Girls are hard,” said a woman who had three daughters and sent them back to live with her mother in South Carolina the moment they began to menstruate. Maybe they don’t have sex down south.
“Boys hard, too,” said the mother of sons.
“But are there better ways to make them mind than to hit them? And are you teaching them that violence is acceptable when you do?”
“See, you misunderstanding, Miz Fitz, because violence is one thing and giving them a tap, that’s a whole ’nother thing,” said Charisse. “We not talking about beating the children. Beating the children’s not ever the thing. You be beating on them, you go to jail, they go to foster care, that’s bad, nobody okay with beating. But swatting is different than beating. Swatting just the flat hand, just saying, listen up there, you in trouble now.”
“When you have kids, you’ll see,” said Maria.
Most of the women in the class had no idea that I was the age at which women in the Tubman projects were usually grandmothers two or three times over, often grandmothers who were raising their grandkids while the generation sandwiched between worked two jobs, Ping-Ponged between rehab and addiction, or put in a deuce at Attica or Dannemora. All of them behaved as though everything else in life was the waiting room, and having kids meant actually getting in to see the doctor. And that despite the fact that some of them were attending parenting classes in the first place because a judge somewhere had decided they’d failed miserably at parenting, had given birth to babies who had cocaine in their blood or brought kids to the ER with cigarette burns or broken bones. Charisse was raising her sister’s two girls, and while I was nattering on about healthy substitutes for soft drinks, she was worrying about whether her oldest son was having sex with his cousin. I’d met the girl, and I’d vote yes. It was also a cinch that Charisse would wind up raising her grandbaby, so maybe it made sense that she was back for a second helping of the class.
“Oh, that’ll be a pretty baby,” said one of the women, looking me up and down.
“Big baby. Look at how tall she is for a lady. That’ll be a big nice-looking child.”
“You got to see who the daddy is. Sometimes the babies take so much after the daddy, it’s like the mama was just one of those things in the hospital to keep them warm—”
“Incubator,” said Charisse.
“Could we get back to corporal punishment?”
“You got no children?” asked a pretty young woman there for the first time.
“No,” I said. When I’d just begun at Women On Women, I would have said, “No, I’m not married.” Now I knew that that would be a rebuke to virtually everyone in the class.
I don’t even have a dog. I tell people I’m allergic so they won’t think less of me. Instead I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility. The closest I’d come to having a kid was Leo, who was my godson as well as my nephew. I’d held him at St. Stephen’s Church, and when he cried as the priest poured water over his bald head, I had begun to sway from side to side in the gentle unconscious rhythm that later I’d learned to recognize in supermarket lines, waiting outside preschools. The unconscious slow dance of motherhood. I’d taken him to the carousel in Central Park, to eat ice cream at Serendipity, to solemnly observe the bears in the Bronx Zoo. Nannies would look from him to me and shake their heads. “You can tell who his mother is,” they would say, and I halfheartedly corrected them in the beginning and then I just stopped. But I knew who I was. I was the maiden aunt, that staple of fiction and movies and real life, the one who is attentive and adoring and just a little odd, who takes the kid the places and has the conversations the parents can’t or won’t. On me Meghan’s auburn hair is carroty, her muscled torso softened and elongated. She’s the color picture; I’m the sepia version. Close enough. Leo called me Bridey because he hadn’t been able to manage the back-to-back consonants of
Bridget
when he was small. He called me Bridey still.
“I like that kid,” Irving had said once when Leo stopped over after school, before he went away to board at Crenshaw Academy. The two of them had watched a Yankees game on the couch together, talking in that impersonal, strangely intimate way that guys talk about sports. Leo had a mashed Fluffernutter sandwich in his backpack for which he’d traded someone at lunch—Meghan would have flipped at the thought; with all her running and swimming, she was very particular about what she referred to as the fuel that fed her family, even if she couldn’t scramble an egg—and the two guys had split it companionably. “I never had one of these,” Irving had said. “They are fantastic.”
“God, you are so Jewish,” I said.