Spanking Shakespeare (10 page)

MARCH

My mother committed suicide on my twelfth birthday. By that time I had grown accustomed to her bouts of depression and understood that sometimes Mommy was just too sad to get out of bed. On these days, my father would tell us we had to be extra quiet, and then he would go out and not come home until very late. My brother and I would sit in front of the television with the volume turned down low, and when we got hungry I would look for food in the refrigerator or the pantry for us to eat.

When I came home from school that day, I did not even realize at first that anything was wrong. I deposited my brother in front of the television and fixed him a snack. Because it was my birthday and because Mommy had promised me a party when I came home, I knocked on her door and crept in to her room. She looked like she was sleeping, and I remember thinking how sad it was that she was sleeping on my birthday.

I tiptoed to her bed and looked at her. She was lying on top of her covers, wearing the fancy black dress she sometimes wore to church. At least she had remembered to dress up.

“Mom,” I said.

She did not answer.

I shook her gently. “Mom.”

Why wasn’t she moving? I looked around and saw two empty pill bottles on the floor.

“Mom, wake up,” I said, shaking her harder, and still she did not budge.

I started to cry and call her name over and over. My brother, frightened, rushed in and saw me, and the sight of me crying and screaming made him start to cry.

We stood there, holding each other and sobbing. When my father came home several hours later, he found us curled up in bed beside her, tear-emptied and asleep.

My mother’s death is the axis around which the story of my life revolves. Everything that came before prefigured this devastating event; everything that has come since has been an inescapable consequence. All this I understand now, though the understanding provides little comfort. It does not stop my brother from lashing out against the world, or my father from trying to escape it. It does not pay our rent or make it any easier to spend nights in the city’s family shelter. And it does not allow me to live the life of a normal teenage girl or give me the space I need to figure out who I really am.

It feels strange to be telling a story that is far from over. The best I can do is to play my part and hope that fate and time have written me a happier ending than the one they wrote my mother.

“I don’t know what to say,” I say to Charlotte when I give her back her memoir. It is Monday, and we are sitting in the cafeteria at the same table where we exchanged our writing three days earlier. She has already given me back mine with comments written all over the pages.

“You’re not gonna freak out on me, are you?” she asks.

I manage a smile. “I had no idea.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she says.

We sit there, neither of us saying anything. I want to ask to read more of her memoir, but somehow it seems inappropriate. I look up and our eyes meet.

“What?” she says. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing.” I look around the cafeteria, then back at her. She seems like she is waiting for me to say something, but I have no idea what to say. Just reading the first two pages has bonded me to Charlotte in a way I don’t yet understand, but I know that I have been drawn into something that I cannot easily walk away from. “Do you want to go see a movie after school?” I ask her.

The question takes us both by surprise.

“See a movie?” She laughs and shakes her head as if I have proposed something preposterous. “I can’t. I have to pick up my brother.”

“I could come with you if you want. Maybe we could all see a movie together.”

“I don’t think so,” she says slowly. “My brother doesn’t always do so well with new people.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “I just thought you might like the company.”

She looks at me suspiciously. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” I say awkwardly.

“Look,” she says, getting up from the table. “I don’t need you to feel sorry for me.”

I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing, but at the end of the day she finds me at my locker, apologizes for getting upset at lunch, and asks if I still want to come with her to pick up her brother.

“Sure,” I say, tremendously relieved that she is no longer angry with me. “Where does he go?”

Henry White, it turns out, is a sixth grader at my old middle school, and standing outside waiting for him brings back a rush of memories, most of them better off forgotten. Here is the building where girls first began actively avoiding me. Here is where Ms. Mitchell, with whom I was in love, caught me with a pornographic magazine during math class. Will any of my old teachers come out and recognize me? Will they even remember who I am?

“There he is,” Charlotte says.

A skinny boy wearing black jeans, a Sex Pistols T-shirt, and a leather jacket peels away from a group of older boys and walks toward us. His dark brown hair is shaggy and unkempt and falls to his shoulders, and he has the faint outline of a bruise just underneath his left eye. It is all but impossible for an eighty-pound sixth grader to look menacing, but this boy is clearly making an effort.

“Hi, Henry,” Charlotte says.

The boy ignores her and gives me a scornful look. “Who are you?”

“I’m Shakespeare,” I say. “A friend of your sister’s from school.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“A really bad one,” I say. “You know, I used to go to this school.”

“Did it suck as much then as it sucks now?”

“Probably.”

We start to walk off, and I ask Henry about things I remember from my middle school days, which teachers are still teaching, whether they are still teaching the same things, and what he thinks about them. Henry is terse in his responses. Everything about the school sucks, he says, except some of the eighth graders who are pretty cool.

“You coming over?” Henry asks when we get to the bus stop. It is hard to tell from his voice whether this is an invitation or a challenge.

“I don’t know.” I turn to Charlotte. “Where do you live?”

“We just got an apartment in Fairville,” Charlotte says. “You don’t have to come. It’s kind of far.”

It is pretty far, and it’s a bad part of town. Why do they live there? And how did Charlotte and Henry end up in schools over here? Does she want me to come? I wonder. Will it look bad if I just take off? What else am I going to do?

“I’ll come,” I say. “If that’s okay.”

Charlotte looks at Henry, who avoids her stare. “I guess so,” she says.

We have to take the Q bus downtown and transfer to the D. The ride ends up taking almost an hour, and Henry listens to his iPod and takes seats on both buses that are far away from us.

“Is it bad that I’m coming over?” I ask.

Charlotte shrugs. “He needs to learn to deal with other people.”

We fall into talk about school and about how much work we have and about where we think we will be next year. Charlotte is amazed by how many schools I have applied to. She is in a very different situation and is not at all sure what next year will bring. She imagines she will probably end up taking classes at a community college nearby because she will need to be around to help take care of her brother. She says right now she isn’t even sure she will graduate on time.

“How could you not graduate?” I say.

“Ms. Rigby is failing me for missing so much class, and I have incompletes in history and Spanish.”

“That woman is evil.” I tell Charlotte about Ms. Rigby confiscating my poem on the day before Christmas vacation.

Charlotte laughs. “The poem you showed me? Wow, I wish I had been there.”

We get off the bus in front of a large housing project. There is a 24-hour grocery across the street and a take-out Chinese restaurant on the corner. We walk through a small playground to a building in the development set back from the street. The lock on the door is broken, and I follow Henry and Charlotte up two flights of stairs and into an apartment that is small, dark, and sparsely furnished. We enter into a living room with a couch, a table and chairs, a television, and nothing on the walls. To the right is a tiny kitchen, and to the left, a narrow hallway leading to a bathroom and a bedroom with two beds, a dresser, and a closet.

“This is it,” Charlotte says after finishing the tour.

I look around the apartment trying to imagine what it would be like to live here. Does Charlotte share the room with her brother? Does their father sleep on the couch? Where does she do her work? How does anyone have any privacy?

Henry has thrown his jacket and bag on the floor and turned on the television.

“Do you have homework?” Charlotte asks.

Henry ignores her and continues to flip channels.

“Henry,” she says, stepping in front of the TV.

“I did it already,” he says. “Move.”

“When did you do it?”

“Move!” he says, more loudly this time.

“You can’t fail your classes again this quarter, Henry. They’ll hold you back.”

“I don’t care,” he says. He walks to the refrigerator, pulls out a two-liter bottle of soda, and takes a gulp.

“Henry, that’s disgusting,” Charlotte says. “Use a glass.”

Henry ignores her and puts the bottle back to his mouth. When he is finished, he leaves the bottle on the counter, top off, walks into the bedroom, and slams the door.

“Sorry about that,” Charlotte says. “He’s been having a rough time at school. Do you want something to drink?”

“No thanks,” I say, glancing at the soda.

We sit at the table, and Charlotte tells me I am the first person who has come over to the apartment.

“Really? How long have you lived here?”

“About a month. It’s not such a good neighborhood, but at least it’s our own place.”

On top of the television there is a framed picture, and I get up and bring it to the table. “Are these your parents?” I ask, knowing of course that they are.

Charlotte nods. “That was right after they got married. It’s the only picture my father kept.”

They are young in the picture, standing on the beach in bathing suits, the woman looking straight ahead and smiling, the man with his arm around her, gazing down at her face as if he can’t believe he is holding something so precious so close. How could these people, so young, so happy, so full of love and life, be the same parents that Charlotte has described?

“My mom loved the beach,” she says. “She liked to stare at the ocean.”

“You look like your dad,” I say.

“That’s what people say. I don’t really see it.” She takes the picture and returns it to the top of the television.

“What does he do, your dad?”

“Now he’s working as a house painter.” She sits back down and looks at me. “He’s had a lot of different jobs.”

There is a lot in this answer that is unspoken, and though I am curious to know more, I can see that her father is a subject she is not entirely comfortable with.

We sit at the table, neither of us speaking, and I wonder why I am here and whether she is wondering the same thing. The strangeness of the situation unnerves me, and I begin to think that I need to do something to justify my decision to have come.

Before I can figure out what this is, Henry flings open the door of the bedroom, comes out, and grabs his leather jacket off the floor.

“Where are you going?” Charlotte asks.

He ignores her and walks out of the apartment.

“I need to go after him,” Charlotte says, getting up.

I grab my jacket and book bag and follow her out. Henry has gotten a bit of a head start, and by the time we get downstairs he has crossed the playground and is turning down the street.

“You should probably just go home,” Charlotte says.

“Are you sure?”

She nods. “Here’s a bus coming right now.”

I hesitate, though inwardly I am relieved.

“Really,” Charlotte says. “It will be better if you go.”

I feel a little guilty, but I can tell that my being here is probably making the whole situation worse. This is obviously a family issue, and I should not get involved. Coming here was a mistake. I board the bus, and as it pulls away, I see Charlotte walking beside Henry with her arm draped over his shoulder, looking down at him in a pose strikingly similar to the one in the photograph.

The next day, Tuesday, Charlotte apologizes to me, and Wednesday she is not in school. She ends up being out for the rest of the week, and when she comes back the following Monday, she looks worn out and defeated. I don’t have a chance to talk to her during math because she is making up a test she missed, and she skips lunch to go to the library to work. I catch her at the end of the day by her locker and ask her if she’s been sick.

She shakes her head. “Henry was suspended from school for fighting, and I had to stay home to watch him.”

“That shouldn’t be your responsibility,” I say.

“My father can’t miss work, or he’ll get fired.”

“Can’t Henry stay home alone? He’s in sixth grade.”

She closes her locker and zips her book bag. “He won’t stay home, and it’s too dangerous for him to be hanging out on the streets where we live.”

“But you can’t keep missing school. You’ll never graduate.”

“What am I supposed to do?” She seems to be on the verge of tears.

It seems crazy that Charlotte is in a situation where she can’t even come to school. There must be some other way. “Isn’t there anyone else who can watch him?” I ask gently.

“Who?” She is clearly agitated. “We don’t have any other family here, and we can’t afford to pay someone.”

“I just feel like this should be your father’s responsibility, not yours.”

“He does the best he can,” she says, looking away.

Listening to her, I realize how easy I have it. I live in a house where the worst thing is having to share a bathroom with my brother; she lives in a tiny apartment in the projects when she’s lucky, and in a homeless shelter when she’s not. My mom is a little bit crazy; her mom is dead. My dad sometimes drinks too much; her dad is most likely an alcoholic who neglects his children and cannot hold on to a job. My brother makes me feel jealous because he is popular and has a girlfriend; her brother is a juvenile delinquent who prevents her from living her own life because she has to devote all of her energy to watching over him.