I'm Down Read online

  Then, I learned the lesson of what happens when you pop a brat at rich school—they tattle like a fucking girl. I wound up in the principal’s office sitting next to Christopher, who was holding his nose like a little bitch, and saying, “I don’t know why she hit me like that for no reason . . . I didn’t even have a chance to defend myself.”

  I begged them to call Dad and let him punish me, because I knew that the punishment in my house for fighting was Dad getting happy and saying, “I guess you let him know.” But they didn’t. They made me write an apology note to Christopher.

  No matter, I thought, I have some well-earned kudos coming my way from the classmates—I fully landed that punch. However, said kudos were not forthcoming. In fact, at the next recess, Donald stayed fifty yards away from me at all times. And rather than invite me to play foursquare with her, Marylyn just looked at me like I was the wild woman in the attic from Jane Eyre.

  I walked over to Gretchen and said, “Why is everyone being so weird?” and she grudgingly threw me a line because I was standing right there.

  “Well . . . ,” Gretchen said. “You kind of lost control.”

  “No,” I said. “I let Christopher know.”

  “You actually let him get you upset,” she said. “Which is what he was trying to do. And I sort of understand it, it’s just a little weird to us here.”

  “Us?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said. “You’re newer than some of us who have been here since first grade.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That us.” I scratched my head and said faintly, “Thanks for talking to me, Gretchen.” And walked away to be alone on my playground structure, where things were simple and strength was rewarded.

  On Presidents’ Day we stayed home from school. Anora spent the day with her school friend Maybelline because she was popular, and I hung out with Dad because I was not, and because Zwena was with her mom. I still would have wanted to hang out with Dad either way, but the fact that our phone was “down” again, and we couldn’t dial out, meant he couldn’t pawn me off on anyone. People called in for Anora.

  Dad and I were about to head out to the basketball court so that he could teach me about dribbling with my left hand and Malcom X, when he got a phone call. Dad got a little giddy as he answered it. Having our phone shut off made contact from the outside extra exciting.

  “Wolff residence,” Dad said. “Oh, hey, Candy . . .” Candy was Maybelline’s mom and I knew instantly there was something up with Anora. Dad listened for a while before snickering and saying, “No . . . I’m not laughing.” I got the feeling he was being yelled at as he listened more attentively and said, “Yes, I know this isn’t funny.” Followed by, “Okay, I’ll be right there.” Dad set down the phone and grabbed his coat. “Stay put, Mishna. I gotta get your sister, I’ll be right back.”

  My heart skipped a beat: I knew Anora had done something wrong.

  Maybe this is it! I thought, as Dad tore off down the street to get Anora. The moment Dad will realize that every time he said, “Anora, I guess you learned your lesson about messing around,” she hadn’t learned her lesson at all. And that I was, in fact, a lesson-learning machine.

  As I waited impatiently for Dad and Anora to return home, I decided I wanted to look extra good when they came back. And I scanned the house for ways to have them catch me in the act of being dutiful. I tried on “Caught in the act—sweeping” where I held the broom and looked up, like, “Hey, you guys are home . . . Oh, this broom? . . . I just got an uncontrollable urge to sweep.”

  Then I tried “Caught in the act—making them tea.” That was where I look up from the teapot and say, “Hey . . . Tough day? . . . Who wants tea?” But in the end I just got really impatient that they were taking so long and put my head on the counter and thought about what I would buy at the corner store if I had a dollar, until I heard them drive up. Then I hurried to the sink to get caught in the act—washing dishes.

  When Anora and Dad walked in I tried to ignore them—much too caught up in my dishes. They ignored me, too, and walked in laughing and carrying on.

  “What happened?” I asked, trying to hide my eagerness.

  “Why you so nosy?” Dad asked. “We just walked in the door.”

  “I was just curious,” I said. “Because you guys are in such a good mood.”

  “Well,” Dad said. “Candy took the girls on her errands today, and they all decided to play themselves a little game.”

  “It was a really stupid idea,” Anora said, giggling.

  “What was the idea?” I asked, trying to be cool.

  “They stole something at every joint they went to,” Dad said.

  “Wow,” I said “That’s . . . wow.”

  Anora is the one in the middle, with child.

  “Maybelline blamed Anora,” Dad said, “and Anora blamed Maybelline.” And apparently hilarity ensued, because Dad was acting like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. I didn’t get why it was so amusing that my sister was becoming a delinquent. And I wasn’t letting it go.

  “So . . . ,” I said, looking at Anora and trying to seem sympathetic. “I guess you’re punished, huh?” Then I turned to Dad. “She’s punished, right, Dad?” My sister glared at me, noting that it was a dick move.

  “Nah. I think she learned her lesson. We just have to return all this stuff.” I looked at the stuff—a pack of gum, a nail file and three stickers—and I knew none of it was going anywhere, except in her mouth. I had learned my lesson.

  Four

  DOMINIQUE AND MORE LIES

  “MISHNA, WHAT ARE you doing?” Mrs. Lewis interrupted her lesson, and everyone in class silently turned to face me. Based on the temperature of my cheeks, I was sure I was blushing.

  “Nothing,” I replied nonchalantly.

  “Are you eating the paste?” she asked.

  I was actually squirting paste out of my missing-tooth hole for two boys in my row. So I said, “Not really, I . . .”

  “Bring me the paste now, Mishna.”

  I walked to the front of the classroom and handed her the round pot of Elmer’s. Dave DeLuca and Andrew Tanaka, who had watched me with rapt attention only a few minutes earlier, looked down and away like they didn’t know me.

  “Why do you eat the paste?” she asked.

  Everyone was looking at me, so I tried to look like I didn’t care by licking any residual paste off my lips and smiling like it was delicious.

  “Does that mean you don’t know?”

  I shrugged. But I knew exactly why I did it. I needed the attention.

  After six months at rich school, it was obvious to everyone I wasn’t going to fit in—so I fit out. I started doing the stuff other kids were afraid to do in exchange for an audience, like hemorrhoid talk. I harassed Mrs. Lewis with endless questions about hemorrhoids. I could work the word hemorrhoids into a question about any subject. For example, you may or may not know that the first president of the United States was George Hemorrhoid, or that four times twelve is hemorrhoid. For creative writing, I read aloud to the class my epic thriller “The Hemorrhoid That Lives in My Basement.” And Mrs. Lewis stopped smiling as much as she used to . . . hemorrhoids?

  And I took any dare. Besides paste, I ate glue, paint, and a rubber band. I was Fear Factor for third-graders. It didn’t make me popular but at least I could get a crowd to spend five minutes watching me destroy my esophagus.

  Mrs. Lewis continued to stare at me in front of the classroom, paste in hand for, like, a year.

  “Can I go back to my seat?” I asked.

  Mrs. Lewis disregarded the question. “I think you are purposely disrupting my classroom for attention.”

  Like, duh.

  But rather than admit that—yes, sheer neediness drove me to eat the Elmer’s, I faced the class and circled my ear with my finger—the universal sign for “Hey, is this lady is crazy, or what?”

  “Do you act this way at home?”

  “No,” I said. The one time Dad caug
ht me showing my sister how I could swallow a marble, he punished me for wasting a marble. And for the most part when I was at home I acted how Mrs. Lewis wanted me to, which was causing problems with with my friends at home. I had recently been left out of a very important game of Slam Charades (like charades, but meaner, and with words). And when I asked Jason about being dissed, he leveled with me. “Yo, you act kinda weird sometimes.” When I asked him what he meant, he said, “You just say shit, and nobody understands what you’re talking about.”

  I also knew I didn’t have real friends at school. I could tell the difference between being liked and being a paste-eating sideshow.

  Mrs. Lewis heard the titters from the kids who had seen my “crazy” gesture and her face went from bad to worse. And standing in the front of the class, while Mrs. Lewis scolded me, I started to think about a Sunday school class where we talked about limbo—and how much I connected with the idea. Except to me heaven was a crappy street where all the kids did after school was try to invent new ways to call me white, and hell was a room full of kids in French polos. It seemed that both heaven and hell sucked the same amount, but differently. But I’d have given up my teeth, my hair, my feet, and my education to be truly popular in either one. And I wondered if I would have friends after I died.

  Mrs. Lewis was angry and ordered me to clean out my desk and move to the empty one in the back of the class.

  “Next to Zachary?” He always had his fingers in his mouth.

  “Yes,” she said. “The empty desk next to Zachary Stein.” Then added, “Facing the wall.”

  Over the course of the year I had been moved farther and farther back in the classroom, which from a feminist standpoint might have been something to be proud of. I was the only girl in “behavioral problem” row. But I took no pride in it. To me it was just proof that I was defective. It oddly never occurred to me to stop eating paste.

  It was Friday, and Mrs. Lewis gave me a note for my parents to sign. I had the weekend with Mom, but I didn’t want to give it to her, afraid she would freak out or be hurt or both. So I put it in my schoolbag to give to Dad to sign on Sunday night. On Sunday morning when I came down to eat, which I did a lot of at Mom’s house, Mom was at the breakfast table holding the note.

  “What’s going on at school?” she asked.

  “Dang,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “It is,” she said. “Why are you misbehaving in class? Are they not challenging you?”

  “No,” I said. “Trust me, I’m plenty challenged.”

  “Well, you’re not exactly making teacher’s pet.”

  “Well, then, they’ll just have to kick me out and send me back to normal school.”

  “It’s not like that,” Mom said. “They won’t kick you out. They’ll just ask how they can make it more productive for you.”

  “I’m just not that academic.”

  “Academic is a very academic word,” she said.

  “Well then, could I just live with you?” I asked for the first time.

  “It’s not the arrangement,” she said. “You know your uncle is a lawyer, and has offered your dad limitless legal help.” She was scared of him. “And your father really loves being a dad.” I buried myself in my cereal.

  “How are you feeling?” She searched my face, imploring me to open up to her. But I wasn’t gonna open up to her on my three days a week. No matter what I was feeling, she was still gonna go to work on Monday, and I was still gonna go back to Dad’s.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “‘Fine’ is not a feeling.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I promise, I will try much, much harder.”

  “Really?” Mom said.

  “Yes.”

  ______

  A few days later, after my sister and I got home from school, Dad called us into the bathroom where he was shaving, wearing a pair of jeans, work boots, and no shirt. I liked watching him shave because it was exciting. You never really knew what was gonna happen next. Every stroke could go exactly according to plan . . . or not. Those were the type of risks men took. He took a stroke up his chin that was a little too long, and the result was a tiny, bursting red blossom. I winced, but Dad didn’t. He was a man. He just patted some Drakkar Noir on his face and took a last look in the mirror. His hair was cut short now but it still had enough length that he could feather it on the sides, and the top was so fluffy, it made him look even taller. He grabbed his chin and smiled like he was in an aftershave commercial. Then he slowly turned to face my sister and me—still in the commercial.

  “You girls.” This was important, so he kneeled down in order to be at eye level with us. Full eye contact—maximum impact. “I have met a real nice lady named Dominique.”

  “Like a girlfriend?” I asked.

  “I don’t wanna put labels on things,” Dad said. “But she’s gonna make dinner for us on Wednesday night ’cause you all gotta meet. I told her how important family is to me . . .” He turned to face me. “So, if you embarrass me . . .” He banged the bathroom counter, making a loud noise.

  I didn’t know why he was looking at me, but I nodded furiously. My sister threw her arms around Dad’s neck and started laughing. “I’m so happy, Daddy!”

  “Wait, how would I embarrass you?” I asked.

  “Well, for one,” Dad said. “You don’t need to know everything about every little thing.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean you don’t know everything, and you don’t need to know about what you don’t know.”

  “I think I understand,” I said.

  “Good,” Dad said, returning to the mirror and making his most handsome face. “Good . . . Oh by the way,” he added, “your mom and I talked and you gonna see her on weekdays, too, sometimes. When she’s not working doubles.”

  “Cool,” I said, even though it felt like there was too much stuff coming at me at once.

  After chores and homework I walked over to Lyman’s. Zwena had gotten a scholarship to private school that year. So now she was the only girl in the neighborhood who wore a uniform. I liked seeing her after school because she looked so rich in her white shirt with the navy plaid skirt. And when I told Zwena that Dad had a girlfriend the first thing she asked was, “White or black?”

  “White,” I said, unsure. “I think.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “I go to school with all these white kids and their moms are like servants.”

  “My school, too!” I said. “Don’t you get jealous?”

  “I used to,” Zwena said. “But I’m the only kid at my school that knows how to cook.”

  “I’d rather have a servant.”

  On Wednesday night Anora and I got ready for dinner at Dominique’s house and Dad put us in our gold chains that we were allowed to wear only to church. We had started going to an all-black Baptist church after the divorce and Dad usually let our gold out of his desk only on Sunday because he said, “If you wear gold every day, it loses its class.”

  Then we drove to Dominiques’s four-unit apartment building on a busy street, not far from GSCC. We rang the bell, and a voice said, “Hello.”

  “It’s us,” Dad said into a metal box. “Buzz us up.” And Dominique “buzzed us up”—which was the closest I’d ever had to a Star Trek moment.

  It was the first time I had been in the apartment of a woman with no kids and upon entering I almost gasped at how neat her place was. It was full of bamboo and cream-colored furniture. In the corner sat a glass coffee table and the most real-looking fake palm tree you ever saw. And the whole place was covered in light cream carpet—which I tiptoed onto like it was hot lava. I knew that cream was for careful people, and no matter how Dad was acting, that wasn’t us. We were the kind of people who needed dirt-colored things. In fact, our living room was home to a brown rug and a brown pleather sofa that was always just a little sticky.

  Dominique heard us enter and ran into the living room with an ecstatic, high-pitched, �
��Hi!!!” And Dominique was black. I don’t know why it surprised me, but I somehow assumed that if Dad had been into Mom, then he was only into white women. I assumed this because I was starting to have crushes at school, and I knew for sure I was only into Asian guys—and I was sure I would be till the day I died. But I guessed that wasn’t true for Dad, which explained why all the women at church Dad made us stand around and talk to just happened to be pretty. And why we were always the last to leave church.

  Dominique was also very pretty. Not Christie-Brinkley-in-a-Billy-Joel-video pretty, but definitely up there. She was wearing a huge smile—and perfect makeup that matched a perfect blue dress that showed off her perfect figure. She was also about the farthest from my mom’s style that you could get. She ran up to Anora.

  “You must be Anora!” she said, touching her shoulder.

  “Is this your house?” Anora asked. “It’s so pretty.”

  Dominique looked at Dad and put her hand to her mouth like a lady getting proposed to. And turning back to Anora, gushed, “Well, aren’t you cute!” Dominique then turned her attention to me. In fact, she looked me over for a while, like she was redecorating. “And you must be Mishna. Your dad tells me you’re very smart.”

  “Really?” I asked excitedly. I looked at Dad, who had a stern look on his face. I turned back to Dominique, “I mean . . . it’s a pleasure to meet you . . .” I didn’t know what to call her so I said, “ma’am.” And Dad gave me the old Vulcan neck pinch—just as a reminder.

  After Dominique made us remove our shoes we sat down for dinner. The first thing we learned about Dominique was that she couldn’t cook; some awful pasta creation with meat that tasted the way yak smells. But this didn’t seem to bother Dad, who over dinner announced, “Dominique is a good woman, and I want you girls to listen to her. You should be so lucky as to grow up into a woman like Dominique!” He said it like it was important. But I didn’t know what that meant—a “good” woman. I’d think he’d want to find a great woman if he could. I figured, based on church and forty-five minutes with Dominique, that being a good woman must have something to do with God and cleaning—because it sure didn’t have anything to do with cooking.