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. Battle of Wills

   Saturday Dad had me pick out a buttercup squash at the Fairway. It would be one of the last winter squashes of the season. I also bought a big red cabbage. RoAnn came close to rolling her eyes at the contents of the cart. “We’re having squash with dinner tonight,” Dad announced.

   “Who’s the we?” asked a sullen Ivanna who dropped her power bars into the shopping cart and tossed her light brown curls. Having seen Anthony DiFranco, I knew that Ivanna had her father’s hair.

   “Minerva, Kore, and I,” Dad replied. “We all like squash.”

   Ivanna made a face. Then she sauntered off in search of ice cream. “Neophiles,” laughed RoAnn. “Sometimes I feel you’re all ganging up on me.”

   “Who wants a boring diet?” I asked.

   “You have your own language,” RoAnn quipped. “I figure all of this has to be genetic.”

   “Then Ivanna gets her toughness from you,” I thought. I did not say it. Instead, I thought back to the two vandalism attempts on RoAnn’s office in Main Hall and how we held off Rotten Robby the second time and how even in shock, my stepmother had kept her cook the first time. I thought back to the riot before the first break in. I remembered RoAnn mounting the platform to rebut those who wanted to villify her. She did it without a flinch, without a blink. Then I had thought my stepmother’s bravery was a pose. Now I saw it reflected in someone much  younger and a bit less disciplined, someone who must have been exhausted with weeks of resistance.

   Back in the apartment the names of three randomly chosen schools, printed in twenty point font, were taped to the refridgerator door in the kitchen under the fake sunny day and blue sky border. Ivanna had still not chosen three schools and it did not look like she would cave.

   Back in the apartment, I helped take the case of apples to the pantry and fill the plastic fruit bowl that graced our refridgerator. On the kitchen table, the blue, Moranno glass bowl held bosc pears which needed to ripen. “You’ll check these every day,” Dad gave me my marching orders.

   Late Saturday afternoon, I helped cut and seed out the squash. Dad made sure it was cut into small enough pieces that Nervy could handle her share. “They even make butternut squash soup,” Dad told everyone in the kitchen.

   RoAnn shook her head, and Ivanna made a face of disgust. Tonight was study night. Sunday was to be social and family day as Dad explained it. RoAnn planned to take Ivanna to see Kaci from her school and Dad was taking Nervy Worm and me to see the World’s fair grounds, walk around, and eat lunch out.

   “You know,” he told me. “There is going to come a time when we won’t be able to eat out as much as we do now and deli food is expensive.”

   “You really think ECBAS will let you go?” I asked.

   Ivanna snorted.

   “Yes,” Dad replied. “Meanwhile what I earn with them goes to help finance two women who are doing good work against the organization.”

   “We’ll change the code,” Ivanna spoke of her mother’s efforts.

   “And what about Georgia in Albany?” Dad asked my stepsister. He was under no promise not to talk school politics.

   “I thought she was still in Herkimer county,” I spoke of my mother.

   “No, she’s been in Albany. The legislature is close to approving Adirondack Academic Academy.”

   “A-A-A,” Ivanna sing-songed.

   “It’s not every day a school district comes back from being fallen.”

   “Wolf Balls,” Ivanna said under her breath.

   “That’s my mother,” I growled back.

   “Yeah, but you couldn’t live with her,” Ivanna sing-songed.

   “That’s our problem, not yours,” I retorted.

   “Yeah, well look what she did to Nervy.”

   “She’s moving around too much to have kids with her.”

   “And what about Kyril?”

   “Kyril is with a family in Herkimer county. He’s apparently happier there than he has ever been anywhere.”

   “Really?” asked Ivanna.

   “Yes. They take their hockey quite seriously, and the outdoor life agrees with him.”

   “You telling me that Kyril caved.”

   “Kyril makes the best bargain he can,” I answered. I had owed my physical well being through most of middle school to that.

   “Kyril is a stupid wimp,” Ivanna observed. With that, she swaggered out of the kitchen.

   Monday, I saw the news painted on a sign on the boarded up storefront of the Calliope: “CONGRATULATIONS ADIRONDACK ACADEMIC ACADEMY!” I did not have to ask. Late Friday afternoon, the New York State legislature had approved the Academy’s charter, thanks to lobbying, advocacy, and guidance through the beaurocarcy by Georgia Wolfson, Ph.D. To say I was proud of my mother was an understatement. Whatever faults my mother has, she does excellent work.

   Then, almost reflexively, I thought of those last weeks in June of eighth grade. I don’t remember what Nervy did during our fights. I know Kyril laughed at me for not taking the best deal possible, but sometimes the best way to fight is to take no prisoners and I had my plan B, a duffle under my bed for safekeeping that eventually became a full duffle. It took me two weeks to load my duffle, and I checked the train schedules in school to map the subway route uptown.

   I thought of the schools taped to the refridgerator door. Ivanna had still not made a choice. I shivered. “Are you OK?” Eugenia asked me.

   “You wouldn’t understand,” I said.

   “Something bad at home?” she was persistent. There was an attenuated spring track season due to high school sports being in disarray. Next year, Brooklyn Tech, would compete with other Full Academic high schools. The dead wood as we sometimes called it would be gone. That the dead wood was about three quarters of all teenagers was something we did not discuss. That Ivanna would be dead wood was something I tried not to consider. She was my stepsister. She was full of fight. You have to admire fight, even when it is on the wrong side.

   “Very bad,” I told Eugenia. “My stepsister and her mother are not getting along.”

   “What did she do?” Eugenia kept prying.

   “My stepsister or RoAnn?” I asked.

   “I guess the stepsister.”

   “She doesn’t want to go to a Full Academic, public school next year.”

   “She doesn’t have a choice!” Eugenia explained the situation.

   “You’re right,” I could see things my friend’s way, but my friend could not conceive of a fight taken to extremes.

   Drama club hurt. I was up on the battens doing a safety check because we had had too many near misses with the lights. Below the battens, dancers practied a tap number, their Capezioed feet beating out a tattoo on the boards of the stage below. I thought of Ivanna in her Capezios. I thought of the tune One from A Chorus Line. I thought of Ivanna leading aerobics at Friends. I thought of Ivanna watching the Brooklyn Tech dancers in the shadows. This was not her world. I had left her world. She was making a go of that world, but that world was about to end. Parents could rule by fiat, or could they?

   I thought of the bus drivers threatening to whip their own offspring into shape. Brutality only goes so far, I thought, and I prayed: “please don’t let this end brutally.”

   “Hey Bihar, quit fucking day dreaming up there!” snarled Micah.

   “I’m not day dreaming!” I yelled back.

   Ivanna never made a decision about which public, Full Academic, middle school to attend in the fall. On Tuesday, RoAnn submitted the three random choices along with she and Nervy’s three choices for first grade to the school board for the school lotteries that decide thsee things. No one knew where Nervy would live in September or even June. An email from my mother said that she would be on her way to Texas in a few days. She also gave me my brother, Kyril’s address.

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