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. Only One is Innocent

   “We’re going to Fairway,” RoAnn announced.

   “What happened?” I asked.

   “We’re going to Fairway. Hurry up.”

   “I’m sorry. I was at Saturday rehearsals.” Boy did that sound lame.

   “What happened to Ivanna?” I asked again.

   “She went to North Carolina to be with her father. Now come on. We’re going to Fairway.” RoAnn was insistent. She also was probably in shock. Nervy sat huddled next to me in the truck as we rode over to Twelfth Avenue. “I can’t have you girls starving this week,” RoAnn told us. It took me a while to figure out that RoAnn hadn’t offered to play our CDs, and she was not playing any of her own.

   We walked across the lot by the Hudson River in a silent huddle. In the store, RoAnn handed Nervy and me two twenty dollar bills each. “If there’s any change, you can keep it. If you need more, take from eachother, got that. Now don’t dawdle too much.”

   I took a great gulp of supermarket scented air.  Normally, I enjoyed stocking up on provisions, but the last thing I wanted to do or that I could do was pretend everything was normal. Still, I really didn’t have any choice but to go along with it. Nervy clung to me as we wandered into produce and I let her pick half the assortment of apples and pears. She liked starksimon pears for some reason. Maybe it was their attractive red skins. She also liked red d’Anjou pears and said it was both their skins and the apostrophe in their name. I got a nappa cabbage and told Nervy I was making us pepper hash slaw this week with two kinds of peppers from a jar.

   It sounded like a plan and a plan sounded better than…. Silence? I was not sure if it was silence. Part of me expected RoAnn to deliver a long lecture of angry sounding words, an explanation that was half bullshit but all necessary performance. RoAnn did not do this, and I knew it, but now she had lost her only child, blood of her blood and flesh of her flesh to use a cliche. She couldn’t hold it in. She couldn’t hold it in forever without exploding, and Nervy and I could well be targets.

   We deserved to be targets. No, Nervy Worm, my beloved little sister, did not deserve to be a target. Nervy was our martyr and that was no exaggeration. She’d been dumped with a father who was gone half the time and a stepmother and sister she hardly knew and a stepsister who had tried to be kind. I could see Ivanna in the Fairway especially by the deli making both Kyril and Nervy welcome with a game about the grossest food.

   The memory made my throat hurt. “Kore, stop crying,” Nervy told me and I nearly told my sweet little sister, “fuck you.” Nervy you may be innocent but the rest of us aren’t. Mom and Dad both screwed around. Mom dumped you. Dad plays both ends against the middle as far as ECBAS is concerned and is not around enough to parent you. Then we have your older siblings, not to mention your stepmother. First, I ran away from home because I couldn’t make peace with Mom. It was successful and I told other kids they should do it too. Those were the days.

   Then Kyril tried to run away after he’d been dumped with a parent and stepparent he could not stand. Kyril has his own tale of woe when you think about it. Finally, Ivanna got her chance. Of course this was after RoAnn locked her in and… maybe there are just some things such as education, that are “non-negotiable.” Maybe RoAnn could have handled school politics with more finesse. Locking down a child is borderline abuse when it goes on longer than a week or two. Abuse is torture. And of course Ivanna followed my lead and Kyril’s. She was the third one of us to run and the second one to do it successfully.

   As I said, none of us except Nervy is innocent, but now the play is over. There are four children none of them really living with the parent who raised them when they were little kids except maybe me, and even I don’t fit this description because Dad is out of town about half the time. Yes, it was time for RoAnn to explode.

   I, however, was the one who cried instead. I managed to buy three pounds of cold cuts for Nervy and me. Then Nervy insisted we walk up toward the pastries where the coffee bar was. RoAnn sat alone at a table in the coffee bar with a cup of something hot, dark, and probably sweet but maybe not. She sometimes used diet sweetner in her coffee. In my mind’s eye, the thick paper cup of coffee turned into a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass. RoAnn glanced bleerily up at us.

   “I thought you told us not to dawdle,” crowed Nervy.

   “I’m not dawdling. I shop faster than you. I’m giving you time to catch up.”

   “Would you like me to get you some sliced chicken or turkey in the deli and those crusty rolls you like?” I asked.

   RoAnn laughed, a deep throaty laugh.

   “I’ll take care of it, Kore,” she told me. “You and your sister get the rest of your shopping done.”

   “You can’t be brave forever,” I wanted to tell my stepmother. I kept my mouth shut and got the frozen veggies and the canned soups and the soups in packs. “I want mushroom soup,” Nervy told me.

   “I thought you said it had too little stuff in it,” I reminded Nervy.

   “You said we can get mushrooms for it,” Nervy said back. Had I said that? I’d said it in another life time. We backtracked to produce and I got a package of gourmet mushroom assortment and threw it in the cart. I estimated our total and got a few jars of pickles and we had money for both prunes and figlets so I got both of those too.

   We checked out on our own while RoAnn who does shop faster because her food is always the same and she’s one person sat on the poop out bench and glared at us impatiently. I hoped Dad would hurry home soon. This was an emergency. RoAnn needed him. I wondered how to write to Dad and tell him how bad things were.

   I did not write to Dad. Instead, after putting away the groceries including a trip to the pantry in the basement, I made mushroom soup with extra mushrooms for Nervy and my supper. I washed the mushrooms in a collander while a hungry RoAnn with an empty hole no sweets could fill nibbled on a cake.

   “Can I ssee those mushrooms?” she asked.

   I showed her the assortment. It was cheaper to buy a  mixed package than just shitakes or oyster mushrooms, enokis, or tree ears. Portabellas are just overgrown shitakes. “Are you sure you like those things?” RoAnn asked. “Mushrooms are good!” Nervy answered. Nervy’s favorite variety of pizza was mushroom pizza and we bought fancy mixed vegetables that included mushrooms.

   “Yes, but how do you know all those strange mushrooms are good to eat?”

   “They wouldn’t sell poisonous mushrooms,” I replied. “The mushroom company and the store would get sued,” I explained. I realized that if you ask a stupid question, you get stupid answers but RoAnn was back to primal fears. I finished washing the mushrooms and broke them up into the soup.

   We ate together though RoAnn only had coffee. She said it was decaf. We did not talk about anything. After dinner, I refilled the relish tray along with making lunch. This was because I was apt to come home to late to give Nervy dinner due to rehearsals. In some ways, Ivanna had picked the worst week to run away from home. RoAnn told me she’d take up the slack with Nervy. I did not ask  her if she felt up to it. She had no choice or I would have lost my place on lighting crew.

   I’d worked too hard to keep my place on that crew. I’d worked too hard to get into Brooklyn Tech. At thirteen, I’d taken my life into my own hands to escape four more years of torture and studied a subject I hated and for which I thought I had no talent. Even before that, I’d traveled happily across Pennsylvania to see my father, away from my mother and her pain. She had fulminated for weeks after Barry left her. Kyril was beating on my routinely. Mom said she shouldn’t have to make peace between us. I told her to butt out. Kyril took his cue to apologize and become the peace maker.

   Kyril cut his deals. I forgave my father and used my academic ability and study skills to take my life into my own hands. Ivanna was not so different from any of us older kids. I laughed at her rank and points, but she really had given support. She had her mother’s courage and her own brand of fight. Ivanna was one of us.

   I was glad to make it to bed Sunday night without RoAnn exploading. “She is going to get very mad,” Nervy explained to me as we lay in bed. I was glad we roomed together. I needed my Nervy Worm this night. “Mommies always get mad at their kids and they yell at them and they tell them they’ll never amount to anything.”

   “That’s called threatening. Mom is very good at that, but RoAnn is a quiet one.”

   “Yeah, but it’s got to come out…”

   “Maybe it won’t,” I prayed and hoped, but if RoAnn didn’t explode, what would she do. I thought of Nervy alone with her, Nervy who did not deserve to feel my stepmother’s wrath.

   I got home from rehearsals and found Nervy all ready asleep. RoAnn reminded me to refill the relish tray and fix my sister’s lunch. She sat in the kitchen with me while I worked. Apparently she wanted to make sure I held up my end…No, she needed me. I realized this as I cut up blood and tongue loaf to put on wheat bread. Nervy got one sweet pickle and a strip of dill pickle on her sandwich called a “one of each.” Nervy’s little world was as made to order as possible, but she needed it because who knew where she would live this summer. Poor Nervy Worm.

   “I’ll keep you company while you eat,” RoAnn explained.

   “I’m sorry,” I told my stepmother. Someone had to crack this open, and it was going to be me.

   “What  are you sorry for?” asked RoAnn.

   “I started it all by running away after eighth grade,” I confessed. “I was the example.”

   “You’re not,” RoAnn cut me down just like she’d cut down a dumb student in one of her classes.

   “Why  not?”

   “You came here of your own free will. Anthony kidnapped my daughter.”

   “He didn’t kidnap her. She wanted to go.”

   “Fine, but he made it possible. He had the car to take her to the airport and the private jet lined up to take her to North Carolina. She also told him that I had tracked her through the two general aviation airports Sammy uses when the Company flies him abroad. This time they made sure she flew out of New Paltz. This was not her own planning. She’s a pawn even she’s a willing one.”

   “I’m sorry.”

   “You’re not and you shouldn’t be.”

   I let the matter drop even though I really wanted to throw myself on the floor and howl. I stared at the refridgerator. Ivanna and Nervy’s school choices and their successful choice were gone. In their place was a chart showing the various characters of ECBAS war chalking code. It was not hobo code or only loosely based on that code. There were many additional symbols, many of them obscene. A pair of circles with a diamon in the middle with a small dark blotch on it and little dark blobs hanging off of it in case you didn’t get the idea was a  Young Achiever. Yes, it was an asshole. A male organ stood for screwed, as in grounded or seriously deprived by parents. Most of the symbols formed sentences of marching orders for support or news about a kid’s status or about school wide boycotts.

   “They don’t put the illegal stuff in code,” RoAnn explained. “Nice huh?”

   “You can’t be brave forever.”

   “I can be brave for ten days,” RoAnn refuted me.

   “Ten days….”

   “A bit more than a week for good measure. You need to be part of American in Paris. After that you can help out a bit more and it will get easier.”

   “What about Ivanna?” I asked.

   “I go to court to  make sure she gets an education. What else do you expect?”

   “Aren’t  you angry.”

   “Yes, but it’s important to be angry at the right people and the right person is Anthony and those who pay him. This is a political fight.”

   “I guess…”

   “I know you don’t believe you, but I’m not Georgia Wolfson. I don’t thrive on drama. Drama belongs on the stage at Brooklyn Tech, don’t you think.”

   “I’m very worried,” I told my stepmother.

   “Don’t worry about me. You’re being a big help just being here.”

   “Thankyou,” I told my stepmother and then I cried for both of us.

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