The Quiet Parts Pt. 6
For two years Leigh has worked at Frida Kahlo Public Charter School. Around the time she was hired, the school scored sufficiently low on state exams for the district to fire half their staff, including the paraprofessionals for their many special needs kids. As Mental Health Counselor, she works the caseload six people used to manage. Her first week on the job, she saw a boy slice another’s throat with a rusty nail. Amazingly, that boy lived, and, more amazing in hindsight, she stayed on the job. The children love Miss Leigh.
Being twenty-nine makes her decades younger than half the staff, yet older enough from the other half that it makes a difference. These Teach for America kids are too anesthetized by media to care about politics, too worried about employment to rock the boat, too boring for Happy Hour, incapable of telling her anything she doesn’t know.
Of the newbies, she gets along best with the third grade teacher, Miss Cabico. That Monday after Brooklyn, they meet in the library during fifth period prep. Miss Cabico is a petite brown woman in khaki capris and a stern polo; her passionless dark eyes remind Leigh of sunglasses.
“Did you hear what Destiny did today?” As usual, Miss Cabico starts off complaining about her students. Leigh considers these vent sessions necessary for their mental health. Likewise therapeutic is the Colombian cocaine Miss Cabico chops in fastidious lines on the back of a Magic Schoolbus book. She snorts off the dust jacket. She grunts, “Fucking Destiny got up and left the classroom while I was dealing with Jaquan’s tantrum.”
Leigh does a line. “Destiny’s cute. I blame her behavior on her mom.”
“Destiny is annoying and illiterate. The kids at my old school weren’t nearly as bad. And why do they all have ghetto names? Jaquan!” she cries in despair.
Admittedly, her racism can be a bit much sometimes.
“Don’t tell anybody,” says Miss Cabico, “but I’m quitting next month. I’m going back to the Philippines. It’s so much better over there. All I want to do is hang out and surf.”
“Jealous.” Leigh does another line. She checks her phone. “I have to get to Stacy’s class.”
“Bring Kevlar.” Then she adds, “You need to stop coddling them. I don’t want to say it’s a white thing ‘cause you know I like you, but that cutesy-wootsy crap doesn’t work. The only thing they respect is force.”
Shortly, as she drags her folding cart down a hall papered in crayon art, Leigh wonders if she would hang out with Miss Cabico if she didn’t bring coke. What a negative cunt.
She visits the combined first and second grade class where rotund Mrs. Stegner-Paslowski—fresh from undergrad and already a hyphenated housewife—observes black and Mexican kids who, sensing summer around the corner, do whatever they like. First on Leigh’s list is Brenden, the boy who spends all day swinging back and forth on the door. She pries him from his beloved knob to take him in the hall, for quiet.
“Sit criss cross applesauce,” she says, and he pretzels his legs like an upset little yogi. She sits opposite from him. “What’s up, little guy?” she asks to no reply. She goes through Empathic Classroom methods: deescalate, validate, divert. Still the silent treatment. She tries Feelings Are Okay playing cards, and, when he refuses to point out which smiley face is him, she asks if he would like to play with clay.
“Don’t tell me what to do, woman!” he shrieks like a startled mouse.
She can take abuse from kids. On this day, for whatever reason, she chooses not to.
“Don’t yell at me,” she yells. “I don’t know what your personal problems are, but you can talk to me like a person.” He holds up a break card and this enflames her. “No, you can’t take a break! I will not reward you for bad behavior!”
“Whatever, woman.”
“You know what? You’re acting like a minstrel show. Do you know what that is?”
“No!”
“It’s when African-Americans put on makeup and act like stereotypes and clowns. That’s you right now. A clown in blackface.”
“You ain’t my mama!”
Furious, she throws the Feelings cards down on the floor, snatches up her bag and storms down the hall, out the iron door to a playground that looks like a prison yard.
Her back to the chain link fence, she fights to catch her breath. Nearby seventh grade boys hoop and shit-talk: “Fuck you, nigga! —I’ma beat yo’ ass! —You’s a bitch!” one of them yells before, glimpsing Leigh, he waves to her like a lovestruck dope. “Hi, Miss Leigh!”
Her throat clenched in loathing, she greets him with a flop of her wrist.
That night when she steps off the 62 a block from her home, aggression thunders in her ears. On top of that dreadful Brenden, she can hear the boys on BART—beat this nigga, kill that nigga. And the girls are worse! In her time at Frida Kahlo, she’s broken up twice as many catfights as dogfights.
Under a warm shower, she remembers the time on BART when a smelly man sat next to her and jerked off. Or the time a gang of five chased down her friend—a black boy like themselves—to beat him bloody on his doorstep. And how could she forget the phantom un-fathers who make the broken boys she tries to help? Where does this sadism come from?
The answer, of course, lies in racism. Black people revisit the violence of America on other black bodies. To invite such predation into her home frightens her. Once she has changed into her blue nylon nightgown and settles under covers, as claustrophobic in her room as Harriett Jacobs must have felt in her garret, she stares at the eggshell ceiling. She will never understand cruelty, and, remorsefully, concludes she has at last reached the limits of her empathy.
In the silence she thinks of her sister April, a child in a twenty-five-year-old body. Mom always said, It’s our job to help her. To which Leigh would say, No one can help her! April with her mongoloid eyes and slobbery speech. April who pissed herself. In high school, Leigh started claiming she was an only child and still does. Incredible to think her parents denied her a real sister in favor of that burden . . .
Her hand is a fist. Staring in triumph upon the clenched bones of hatred, she knows she has found commonality with every black American boy. Thoughts of April make her angry.
Angry enough to kill.
FIFTH STORY
On Tuesday Jason tells her, “We gotta screen these bums,” and Leigh says brightly, “For sure. And I’ll get Andre to vet them.”
Wednesday evening, shortly after dinner, Jason comes knocking on her door, saying meet him downstairs to pick a hall for her “experiment,” as he calls it. Vexed at his disregard for her sleep schedule, her dinner undigested, she dresses in a T-shirt and sweatpants to join him in the kitchen. Cramped and bloated, she sits at the table for a time, as the aural assault of his words, dialing up her nausea, has her ready to vomit tofu and peanut sauce over the linoleum. Neither of them wish to step foot in Over-the-Rhine, which leaves them seven options.
Starting in Jamaica Plain, she follows him under the fizzling green lightbulbs, one hand on the earthen wall to relieve the tension in her belly that has her farting the whole way. Over the year since their last visit, seemingly the hall has summoned its own junk. When the space narrows to the point they must walk abreast, she trips on antique children’s toys, obstacles hidden in shadows created from the ensconced torches whose flames stay lit in sorcerous perpetuity. Between the walls and pervasive fungal reek, the corridor gives her an uneasy subterranean feel. Soon Jason, starting to fidget himself, demands they halt their exploration.
Both conclude Jamaica Plain looks promising. They go to bed.
Their survey mission continues over the week. Center City contains dusty heaps of 1980s women’s clothing, which force the companions to proceed with bandanas over their noses. Linear, damp-smelling, constantly inclining and declining Echo Park is torture on her knees. Midway she gasps to find an old-fashioned-Superman-changes-here telephone booth. Curious, she picks up the receiver and dials zero. A woman answers in Mandarin. She hangs up.
Leading the way through East Austin, Jason gripes, “This whole hall looks janky.” And Leigh says, “Dude! We’re in a literal magic corridor,” and he says, “Yeah. A janky one.” She finds the hall promising: wide enough for three humans to sleep on the floor and high enough for lofts. Motor oil smells linger over the floor, fixable with a couple of air fresheners, she supposes.
Walled in bronze sheet metal, the hall keeps curving to the right in what she can only picture as a spiral. A normal hall of that shape should have intersected with Echo Park at several points. Either the halls occupy a pocket dimension, or they distort reality itself. It is the not knowing that causes Leigh’s heartbeat to thunder in her throat. Unconsciously he reaches into her pocket to touch the sharp, rusted metal of the key. A reminder she controls the wild portal.
The temperature drops, and Leigh, assuming them close to the end, quickens the pace until she has outdistanced Jason. The floor angles sharply until she finds herself climbing wooden planks lain in mud. Insecure Jason doubles his stride to be first out the slender double doors embedded in the ceiling. Immediately he is drenched in rain.
Leigh joins him after zipping her leather jacket tight. They stand in the rathskeller of a converted bungalow painted pink. The sign above the door reads STAY WOK ASIAN FUSION CAFE in bubble letters. A miserable night in East Austin. She turns back the way they came.
Wicker Park has endless disorienting turns and a no-shit Indiana Jones spike pit two-thirds of the way through. To its advantage is the shower, a semicircular ring set in the wall and hung with a clear plastic curtain. On inspection the shower head works, dispensing hot and cold water that empties down a grate in the concrete floor. Jason nixes the hall. “What’ll Chen think when he’s getting a water bill from here? They can use a washtub.”
Garfield, the shortest hall, will require little maintenance, or so she assumes until she gets a blast of green mold in her eye as a result of peeling a corner on the newspaper flooring. Jason, however, declares this the one. He embraces the renovation project with enthusiasm rarely seen from him. He buys lumber and rents power tools. Day by day, Leigh’s anticipation builds to witness him bleach the hall and construct a brick wall to cut the space in half.
Two weeks later, Jason, looking handy and kind of sexy in paint-splattered overalls, invites her to view the finished product.
A cozy space, she thinks. Three loft beds stand close to the ceiling on legs made of cedar, the air fragrant with fresh-cut wood. Three mattresses lay on the floor. Regarding ablutions, Jason has dug two latrine holes and provided each a baby gate for privacy. The washing machine runs on bicycle power.
“What would you do without me?” he remarks in genuine self-approval. “I built the lofts and the washer and got out the mold. And, and, and. So many ands.”
Elated, she throws her arms around his shoulders to nestle her cheek in his odorous cleavage. It’s a shame, she thinks, that his apathy for his fellow man keeps him from helping in the homeless camps, where they could use a fix-it guy. Perhaps she will search the camps for their first tenant. How hard must it be for black men to know every day could be the day a racist takes their life. To know the full power of America is mobilized for their death. Here, within these walls, she will build a sanctuary.
“Ashe,” she says in satisfaction.
Naturally she takes selfies. Uploads them to Facebook. What pleases her most are the likes from friends who recognize the room for what it is.
Yaaaas Kweeeeen! Jo writes on her wall.