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. On the Boards and On the Pavement

   Sunday night, Nervy and I practiced singing with the boys choir on our practice CD’s. There were no girls in the choir of singing children, but at Lincoln Square both girls and women could sing as part of a co-ed group. I’d heard about the women not being allowed to read the Torah in Orthodox synagogues from Dad. A rabbi in Coney Island confirmed it last fall. It did not matter to me since I don’t know Hebrew. Just following along well would make me happy. I think it would make Nervy happy too. If Dad wanted to fight the battles of the 1970’s then let him. I wasn’t even born then.

   Monday morning I took Nervy down to Houghton and found a huge crowd outside the high school entrance. It was not just kids my age and older, but middle schoolers, lower schoolers, and even the pre-K’s with their day care workers and counselors. Faculty watched from a distance. First I thought someone had gotten sick or died, but I’d hope that in a case like that the adults would have the sense to take the little kids inside.

    I made my way to the edge of the crowd. Nervy Worm’s hand felt sweaty in my own. She wanted to see too. I realized I needed to drop her off at day care and continue on to school. “Come on,” I told my little sibling. “This is not for us.”

   Nervy groaned. She really was curious. “OK, just one small look,” I told her and managed to find a space in the crowd that let me see. On the sidewalk etched in thin charcoal or soft pencil was the beginning of an elaborate pastel drawing. Guarding the drawing was not only go-along-to-get-along Nicole whom I remembered from last year but also the nasty girl with black tips on her blond, baby fine locks, and several other kids whose names came back. The artists worked from what looked like an oil painting.

   I recognized one of them as Eliza. I had sat next to Eliza who in other circumstances might have made a good friend, but the big kids liked her and she was content in her privilege. She was content enough that she constantly gave me advice on how to be “more popular” and “more liked.” None of the advice would have worked anyway, I told myself now. “At least you got what you wanted,” Eliza told me when I told her about my acceptance to Brooklyn Tech last spring.

   Eliza’s head was down. She could not see me as she mixed gold and pink pastels to get the perfect flesh tone. The oil panting she was helping to copy was of a huge human rear end with a soft, realistically squishy, and very brown turd dripping out of its slightly reddened orifice.

   Above the defecating asshole was a circle with a picture of what I recognized as Cornell’s bell tower in Uris Library. Once long ago, Ivanna and I had climbed the hundred plus steps to the top of the bell tower in time to watch a student with long hair play the six o’clock concert on the bells which were attached to a wooden machine sort of like organ pedals. As I thought of it that morning, the bell  player had been the organist at Dad and RoAnn’s wedding. “Nervy you were too young to see all this,” I thought. “You weren’t even born yet.”

   Then I saw another circle with a girl drawn inside it. The wavy hair and shape of the face and ribbon that bound two Capezios together so she could wear them as a fashion accessory when they were not on her feet were enough to tell me who stared at me from the pavement.

   “They’re giving Ivanna support!” Nervy explained as if any explanation was needed.

   “Ivanna is in Ithaca,” I replied.”And RoAnn thinks it’s find if she stays in North Carolina. They weren’t getting along anyway…”

   “Hello Kore,” Nicole sauntered up to me. “What are you doing here?”

   “Dropping off Nervy at day care,” I responded. I felt painful vibes.

   “No one’s inside the day care,” Nicole turned just a little helpful. “The day care kids are over by the door. Here, I’ll take your sister over.”

   “Too bad RoAnn’s trial is not on TV today. It would be great to watch,” said black tips who had once spat at me last winter during the beginning of the push back.

   “My step mother is not on trial,” I replied.

   “Huh?” black tips was really clueless.

   “The legal papers say ‘Matter of DiFranco.’ RoAnn is Dr. Testa.”

   “Doctor Testa,” snorted black tips. “They ought to take away her license!”

   The other girls laughed. I felt like screaming at them that their code was broken, but this wasn’t code, it was art. I found Nervy’s day care counselor and dropped her off. Some of the little  kids looked bored to tears. They had no interest in the politics or conflict behind the pictures. I was glad to get away from Houghton and yes, I crossed the street to avoid flying saliva. You only get a chance to spit at Kore Bihar once.

   After school we had lighting practice. I was rusty with my programming and rusty just using the lighting board. Drama Club was going to present it’s experimental one acts the first week in June and it was time for each member of the lighting crew to get paired up with the cast of their very own one act. The one acts had started blocking. Howard got a boy whose one act was mainly a trumpet solo and a short monologue. I got four acrobatic dancers who performed to a 1970’s tune called Manhattan Skyline. Chin got a group of four who were doing a scene from a play in which married couples squabble and argue. Chin’s actors talked endlessly about costumes and props. Their blocking was actually quite complex.

   The best way to handle blocking to set up a preprogrammed lighting pattern that would only need small, manual adjustments is to mark out actors’ positions on stage with tape. With eight one acts, we needed eight colors of tape. Javonovich snarled and growled over the tape box. “We don’t have enough fucking colors!” he announced to all and sundry.

   Chin nosed over to the box and took count. We have nine colors, but there’s not enough silver. “The silver’s duct tape,” explained Micah. “We need that to fix really bad cables.”

   “So that makes eight colors,” Chin answered.

   “Wow she can fucking add,” groaned Javonovich, “but how do you get eight? I only see seven.”

   “Blue, white, yellow, black, chocolate brown, green, scarlet, and burgundy.”

   “Scarlet and who?” asked Micah.

   “Two shades of red,” replied Chin. “The bright one is scarlet and the dark one is burgundy.”

   “And how are we supposed to keep that fucking straight?” groaned Javonovich.

   “Easy,” Chin explained as if teaching a younger sibling. “Look at Kore’s sweater. It has scarlet and burgundy stripes. You do see three colors there?” Chin looked genuinely concerned.

   “Yeah, but it’s just red and white!” Javonovich shook his head.

   “That’s not white. That’s cream, and then there are two shades of red. Can’t you see that?”

   “Yeah, but it’s…Chin, my brain doesn’t want to remember forty-five hundred fucking colors. It’s not important!”

   “Tell you what,” Micah interrupted. “Why don’t you and Bihar each take one of the red shades since you’re so good at telling them apart. This way the rest of us will just avoid the red. OK?”

   Chin shrugged. I smiled. “Which one do you want?” Chin asked me. I took scarlet since I’m the scarlet type, and I went to work with my group who were mainly dancers.

   The dancers hated blocking. They wanted to move around and practice moves the way Rachielle and her friends practiced gospel songs around the piano. This was not like Houghton where the dancers used their talent to treat the younger kids they didn’t like like dirt. We had no younger kids at Tech unless you counted freshpeople like me, but there was at least one freshwoman among the dancers.

   She sat near the edge of the stage, near the ladder to the lightinng loft doing stretches and impossible splits. She was tall for a dancer, all lean, and all brown. I was in my Global Studies class with her, though we seldom took the same subway home to Manhattan. I was a lot more politicized so want home from Queens half the time and lighting crew made my schedule subtly different from drama club and whatever else the girl did after school.

   “So where’d you go to school last year?” the tall freshperson dancer asked me as she stretched. As a dancer she certainly could walk and chew gum at the same time.

   “Houghton,” I nearly spat it out. I’d never forget it. I tried not to think of the mural on the sidewalk, a mural everyone in the neighborhood would see, a mural that would make the newspapers and possibly the local TV news.

   “Didn’t you go to school with an Eliza Phelps?” dancer asked.

   I reached for my Blackberry instinctively, but then remembered it was wrapped up safely in its towel in the bottom of my backpack.

   “How did you know?” I asked.

   Dancer replied: “I used to take gymnastic dance class with her. She was very good and she was such a sweet, sheltered kid. She used to talk about you and how she was afraid you would get like Dylan and Kliebold, the two kids at Columbine.”

   “How would I make myself into two people?” I felt the heat rush to my face. I don’t have a brave face. I wish I had a brave face.

   “You know what I mean.”

   “Well I took the exam to get in here instead,” I answered. Actually, I took the exam to get into Stuyvesent, but now I was here. So too was Dancer.

   “I took the exam because my parents wanted me to get a ‘real education’ and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be around performing arts types and nothing else. It’s more diverse here.”

   “You can’t ever make peace with the past though,” I added. “We’re all products of it and it keeps influencing the present. You can’t get rid of it.”

   “You’re right…kind of.”

   “I saw them making this incredible mural at Houghton when I dropped my little sister off there.”

   “Houghton’s not really a school any more,” Dancer told me. “The rich brats took it over. You’re political. You ought to  know.”

   “That’s one of the reasons I am political,” I smiled.

   Dancer pulled herself up into a squat. I remembered her name then. It was Kwaata. She did not like nonWestern Studies despite her African name. I was an English and history person because I’d been to a fancy private school and who knows why else.

   “When I go to studio to teach the little kids, I still sometimes see Eliza,” Kwaata told me. “She doesn’t talk much about you any more. We have a rule at studio since Christmas, NO POLITICS. Kids on both sides dance and we’d start fighting if we started that kind of talk. Still, stuff gets out.”

   I was supposed to ask what Eliza said about me, but Eliza and I were down different roads. “Stuff gets distorted,” I wanted to end this conversation, NOW!

   “True,” Kwaata mused. “Eliza was talking about how they were going to put Doctor Testa from Columbia University on trial for child abuse charges in Ithaca, New York. First, Columbia is here in Manhattan. That one was good for a big laugh….Kore are you OK?”

   “RoAnn Testa is my stepmother,” I replied. “She’s in Ithaca for a hearing about her separation agreement from her first husband. They have to edit it because my stepsister went to live with her in North Carolina.”

   “Fuck!” Kwaata shook her head.

   “And your stepsister’s not I-van-a Di-Fran-co, is she?” Kwaata rose to her full five foot eight inch height and blinked.

   “She is,” I said. “I miss her. She’s a good kid at heart though sometimes we fight. It was just normal fighting.”

   “Understood, I do that with my cousins sometimes. School has gone out of fashion.”

   “It’s more than that.”

   “No politics.” Kwaata raised a finger to her lips.

   “It’s too late for that,” I said and then I stopped. “I’m sorry,” I confessed.

   It’s OK. Kwaata rode back to Manhattan with me that night on the subway. I told her about Houghton and not being allowed to even try out for things, and the kids with the mental health exemptions from dress code. I told the whole story which was actually fairly fresh to Kwaata because she had only heard Eliza’s side of it.

   I did not tell about RoAnn, Anthony, and Ivanna. That was family business. Besides, I did not know what had happened at the hearing in Ithaca that day. I had been way too busy to check my email.

   “You had your reasons for being pissed off,” Kwaata summed up my story which was also Eliza’s story and her own.

   I climbed back to street level at 96th street and walked down Central Park West in the beginnings of spring weather. I needed a new in between coat. I needed to check my email. I needed to fix Nervy’s lunch if Dad didn’t do it first. I needed to study. I did not need to forget the past. I told myself that tonight I did not want to watch the news, though news of the giant mural on the sidewalk would find its way to me no matter what I did.

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