Korê in New York

What happens when a kid refuses to leave the past behind? What happens when the past won't go away? Read on and don't worry about the emotional damage.

1. Sparks in Dry Grass

   I got home from school Wednesday evening to find that Dad had all ready given my sister, Nervy Worm, dinner. I felt a bit angry about that. That was my job! Dad said he’d sit with me if I refilled the relish tray and put on water for tea. He asked how lighting crew went. Dad can be extremely sweet sometimes, and I can be…. Well use your imagination.

   I told him we had had our first dress rehearsal and that Loraine, who is in charge of props for An American in Paris, has her head up her you know where. This made dress rehearsal take longer. The upside of this is that Chin, Howard, and I all got turns working the light board, just to give us the feel of it. We even had a blown bulb, which it was my job to fix since I’m not scaird of the battens. A fall either means you  never climb up again or it becomes your area of expertise. Have WD-40 will travel.

   Dad smiled. Then he asked: “What is it about women and the stage?” He seemed to ask this mainly of himself. I shrugged. I’d never really thought about it, but I remembered how badly I  had wanted to perform back in middle school and how I never got anywhere near the stage due to the Fast Crowd, high school girls who wouldn’t even let me paint scenery, but how had it started? “It’s the music,” I said. “Broadway tunes. They’re romantic and they have feeling.”

   “You can dance to them too,” Ivanna butted in from her place in the kitchen door. Ivanna was a terrible nosey parker on her good days. I wondered if the boredom of three weeks of lockdown was getting to her. Besides Ivanna had entered the kitchen on a mission.

   “Do I have to go on a promen-odd or cultural tour this weekend?” she whinged. She had the routine down pat.

   “Do you want to see one of your friends?” Dad did not miss a beat.

   “Isn’t that for my moth-er to decide?” Ivanna’s voice grew icey.

   “She’ll say yes, if I say yes and if you arrange it.”

   Ivanna shrugged. If she wanted a fight, she was not going to get one. “Where are we eating Friday night?” she wasn’t giving up that fast.

   “Could be the Arena or could be Chinese now that there are four of us. We haven’t been to Chinatown in ages. How do dumplings sound?”

   “They’re full of carbs.”

   “OK, then regular Chinese.”

   Ivanna made a face. “Ivanna,” Dad said. “We can find a place that serves vegetable free Chinese chicken  or chicken on skewers. You can RoAnn can have that.”

   Ivanna shook her head. “Are you more comfortable going to the Arena?” Dad asked his stepdaughter.

   Ivanna laughed. Then she folded her arms. “You’re such a fucking hypocrite!” she snarled at my father. I wanted to throw something at my stepsister.

   “What’s your fucking problem?” I asked her instead.

   “You don’t know…” she wanted to laugh.

   “I all ready figured it out. ECBAS gives Dad a lot of work.”

   “Oh so nicely said,” Ivanna laughed.

   “I have an exwife, a current wife, and four children to support,” Dad answered.

   “You’re just in it for the money.”

   “The money and the intellectual challenge.”

   “Bullshit!”

   “Why else would I be in it. I surely don’t agree with their ideology.”

   “What if they throw you out?”

   “I’m not a member.  They can’t even fire me. They’ll just stop giving me work and there will be less money for all of us.”

   Ivanna did not answer. Instead, she slunk into the kitchen. I poured the tea for Dad and me. “Your college is protected by trust funds and there is a second trust set up as a kind of emergency fund in case I have difficulty meating the mortgage on the real estate. We’re always going to have a place to live and you’re always going to have an education.”

   “Of course, school is number one!”

   “You think you can get a job on points?” I asked. Sorry Dr. Marmelstein.

   “Yeah…Look this is not your fucking business,” cried Ivanna.

   “Yes, ECBAS is competitive. Yes, the world is competitive. Houghton was competitive and you lost out big time,” Ivanna sunk a barb back into me.

   “I got out while the getting was good.”

   “You became a fucking nerd. You were all ready a total dork,” Ivanna concluded.  “I’m not ready to give up yet,” Ivanna explained.

   ---

   Thursday night it was Ivanna and RoAnn’s turn to have a fight. I’m not sure why removing the locks had something to do with conflict, but I think that once Ivanna no longer had something to resist and could not think of herself as righteously grounded, she chafed and complained and set off fights like sparks in dry grass.

   I had been busy with yet another dress rehearsal. By the way Ivanna was right. I lost out at Houghton, left, recouped and remade my life, and yes, I did get on the stage. I had partial closure. The part that wasn’t closed was watching Tweets, but Tweets are bullshit when you think about it.

   While I was at rehearsal, RoAnn took time off work to take her daughter and Nervy Worm to a School Fair so that Ivanna could have a voice in picking her school for next fall. All of the middle schools that advertised their wears were public. Many were charters. All were full academic and most of them were in Harlem with a few downtown. RoAnn liked the idea of school in Harlem because she and Ivanna could ride to school together. Nervy Worm was not part of this picture. Chances were good she’d be in upstate New York come fall. I did not want to think about that.

   Ivanna returned from the school fair ready to do battle. “Those kids are so…ghetto…I’m not ready for that. They don’t know anything about dancing.”

   I had to laugh. We had tons of kids in Drama Club who were excellent dancers.

   “You’re going to find you’re wrong about that,” RoAnn replied, “and those kids work twice as hard as you. Are you afraid?”

   “Of a bunch of brown noses and nerds, Mom, you have got to be kidding… It’s just, do you know what it’s like to switch schools again?”

   “Not really, but I know it sucks,” RoAnn did not miss a beat.

   “Mom, that’s the understatement of the year. All my friends are at Friends.”

   “You’re not getting an education at Friends so I’m not paying tuition there.”

   “Mom…if I really had a choice.”

   “You need to go back to school for real, not just reading on your own and doing math with a tutor.”

   “Mom…it’s not fair. You can’t do this to me.”

   “Yes I can. You get a say in the choice of school. Isn’t that the contract you signed.”

   “Wow,” I thought, “a contract. I wondered if Kyril signed one of those things when he was in behavioral counseling when I was ten.”

   ---

   I decided the best way to “engage” my stepsister was to duck.

   Friday we had a dismal Chinese dinner. It was dismal because Ivanna was in a sulk and refused to eat. Nervy and I got pepper steak and tried some of Dad’s bran dumplings in a spicey sauce with eggplant and cabbage. “You’re going to get so fat,” complained Ivanna on the subway home.

   “Aren’t you hungry?” this time it was Dad who got ready to blow things open.

   “I don’t care about food,” snarled Ivanna who then asked if she could go out for a smoothie. I thought about Margolin Sidlow for some reason. RoAnn offered to buy some pastries and we got off near a bakery down in SoHo. The bakery had fancy bread sculptures in the window. I remember staring at the breads under golden lights and discussing that they probably had gone quite stale and were probably only for show. I’m not sure why any of this mattered.

   Ivanna stood on the street hungrily eating pastries. “Do we have a promen-odd for groceries tomorrow?” my stepsister whinged.

   “No, we’re taking the truck,” RoAnn cut Dad short.

   No one said much of anything on the subway trip home. Then RoAnn started the real conflict. “Monday is Decision Day,” she told her daughter.

   “Fuck that stupid lottery!” Ivanna snarled.

   “You need to pick a school.”

   “What about Min-erv-a?” Ivanna tried distraction.

   “She’s picked out three schools.”

   “What if we end up in different schools?”

   “It’s possible. I don’t care. You need to have a voice.”

   “My voice says none of the above. The game is stupid. The contract is stupid, and you’re stupid even if you’re book smart. I’m not scaird of you any more, moth-er. The locks didn’t work. I stayed free and strong anyway. I’m not playing the game.”

   “Fine, then we’re going to handle it differently,” RoAnn rose from the day bed in the study/office where the fight had exploded and went to a small closet. She took down a game of Monopoly. She removed two six sided dice, and put the game away. She shook the dice.

   ‘Wouldn’t a random number generator on the computer be better?” Dad asked.

   “You know of one?” asked RoAnn.

   Dad found one on the internet and then RoAnn announced. “There are sixteen middle schools in Manhattan that would be interested in you, Ivanna. I’m going to set them in alphabetical order and randomly generate one, then I’ll generate one in fifteen, and then one in fourteen. That will be your three bids unless you choose to participate.”

   “Fuck that!” my stepsister screamed.

   “Either you participate or you leave it to chance.” RoAnn put her hands on her hips.

   “I can’t believe this. You really think you can get away with this?”

   “You signed a contract,” I reminded the stepsister.

   “I had to sign it,” Ivanna replied. “Making someone do something doesn’t mean they believe in it,” she reminded us all.

   That night in bed, my little sister, Nervy Worm, could not sleep.  “Aunt RoAnn is really mad at Ivanna,” Nervy told me.

   “Very much so,” I answered.

   “What is she going to do?” Nervy asked.

   “You mean RoAnn or Ivanna?” I asked back.

   “RoAnn.”

   “Pick three schools randomly for Ivanna,” I answered.

   “Yeah but there’s more.”

   “What kind of more?”

   “Don’t you know.”

   “You want RoAnn to punish Ivanna?”

   “That’s what mommies do.”

   “RoAnn is not a drama queen like our mom,” I reminded my sister. “Besides you can only punish people enough before it just gets stupid.”

   “Is that why you ran away last summer?” Nervy asked me.

   “Yes,” I replied.

Archive