Cobwebs (3 page)

“Dad, you live here now,” she said. “It’ll be here tomorrow.”

“
We
live here now.” He put his finger on her nose,
smiled a little, lay down, and went to sleep pretty fast.

How could Nancy sleep with that empty space waiting for her to fall through it, just beyond the low wall? She slid from her sleeping bag and pushed open the metal door. She padded silently to the edge, grasped the curved railing of the ladder.

You’re going to have to, Nancy,
said the voice in her head. She had been working on a theory, based on an article she’d read in the
Times.
Paralyzed people were learning to walk again by having their legs mechanically put through the motions of walking. Supposedly this electrified some part of their brains, the walking part made dead by paralysis, and brought it back to life. Maybe, Nancy reasoned, if she placed herself in spidery situations, she could electrify some inactive spidery part of her brain.

She stepped onto the ladder.

On a rooftop in Vinegar Hill where he was spending the night, Dion turned over in his sleep, pulled his overcoat up to his chin, and began to have one of his climbing dreams.

The rail curved slippery-slick beneath Nancy’s hands, the metal so cold it felt buttered. Nancy forced
her bare feet to climb the rusty-edged steps. She instructed her toes to hold on tight. At the top of the wall she crouched, scared to stand and raise her center of gravity into the wind.
Make it quick, Nancy; get it over with; don’t think about how you’ll get back up.

With a nauseating twist she forced herself to turn, wrenching her body through dark space. Sweat sprang out in shudders across her neck and between her shoulders. City lights swirled above her. Her toe caught the step and her feet scrambled to save her. Somehow she landed her sorry self on the first landing of the fire escape. She collapsed, her hands cold and gritty with flaked-off rust. She’d made it one whole flight down.

She straightened her soft blue pajamas under her behind, wiped her streaming eyes on her sleeves, and wondered at the image of the boy on the Promenade that appeared suddenly in her mind. What must she herself look like?

She leaned back against the brick. She could breathe now. The breeze blew silver-lined clouds across the moon. The city lights trembled but stayed pretty much in place.

She thought,
I’ll never make it to the bottom alone.

“
I
want a boyfriend!” Annette moaned out over the balcony of her apartment.

I don’t,
Nancy thought. If she were to fall in love with somebody, if she were to want to marry someday, there would be all these
considerations.
It wouldn’t just be a matter of pretty blue eyes. She poked her toes through the balcony railing and studied them. “You just keep doing what you’re doing,” she told Annette. Annette was going to every dance and church thing and strutting the streets lately looking like—well, looking like the other girls in their homeroom, with their curled eyelashes and fingernail polish
and shaved legs. Those legs bothered Nancy. She wasn’t allowed to shave hers. Instead she made her fashion statement with crazy tights and bright shoes that didn’t go against the school dress code of black skirt and white shirt, even if they didn’t exactly go
with
it.

“That’s what Shamiqua says, too,” Annette said. Shamiqua! Nancy peered at the little kids running around the Promenade playground across Pierrepont Place, and tried not to feel bad. Shamiqua was queen of homeroom, and queen of the dances. It was Shamiqua who had told Annette today that some boy named Jimmy might ask her out.

Annette flapped the
Daily News
at Nancy, changing the subject. “Look. He saw him again.”

“Who saw who?”

“Well, nobody
saw
anything. Just the results.”

“Who saw what results?”

“Nestor Paprika, that reporter. ROBBER IMPOUNDED. He says it was the Angel. Do you think it was that ghost boy from the Promenade?”

Nancy’s mouth fell open at the stream of loose connections Annette had just made. She said, “If he were the Angel, he’d be trying to be inconspicuous. Walking on
the railing of the Promenade isn’t very inconspicuous.”

“Spoilsport,” said Annette. “He dropped a hammer on the robber’s head.”

“Ouch. Is he dead?”

“The Angel? I hope not. Shamiqua told me this fantasy she had about him. They were up on the roof and he was fluttering his black wings over his head…”

“Did you read the English yet?” Nancy said, to change the subject again. She had heard enough about Shamiqua. What kind of fantasy? Fluttering black wings on a rooftop. Yes, Shamiqua definitely sounded more interesting than
she
was. Nancy consoled herself: she was still the one Annette asked over after school to keep her company.

Annette made an annoyed sound, but took out the book. “Want me to read it to you?” she asked, as usual. Nancy nodded, as usual. They were reading Hemingway, which bored them, and Walt Whitman, which made them cry, the best thing so far in high school English since Greek myths freshman year.

From the balcony over Pierrepont Place they peeked through the leaves of the Promenade trees at slivers of silver downtown Manhattan. Annette laid the book in her lap, and wailed out to New York, “I want a boyfriend.”

“I know it, Annette,” said Nancy wearily. “Half of Brooklyn surely knows it by now.”

“Surely,” mimicked Annette. “What about you? Don’t
you?
”

Nancy wondered what made her ask now, when she hadn’t ever asked before. She shrugged one shoulder.

“You
do?
” Annette peered into her eyes. “Who?” She knew enough about Nancy to know it wouldn’t be just any generic boyfriend, but someone in particular.

Nancy shrugged her shoulder again, looked away. But
away
was toward the Promenade.

“Oh,
stop,”
Annette said. “That freak?”

“Why is he a freak?” Nancy demanded. “Because he’s got good balance?”

“Most girls wouldn’t have good balance on their list.”

“Since when do you care about most girls?” Nancy couldn’t help herself.

Annette rolled her eyes, moaned. “He’s got no hair, for one. Like a ghost. You like Ghost Boy?”

Nancy shrugged again.

“You don’t know a thing about him,” Annette said dismissively.

“But I do,” said Nancy.

“What?”

“I don’t know. Just—”

“What?”

“His eyes,” said Nancy. “That’s enough.”

“You might never see him again!”

“Something might bring us together. It did once. I’m keeping my eyes open, that’s all.”

“Good plan,” said Annette.

Nancy shrugged again. Annette picked up the book and started reading.

At school, in homeroom, the girls sat and complained:

“My mother? That witch! You know what she did/said/wants now?”

It made Nancy curl within herself. And, curling, she bent an ear forward to listen.

“If I don’t clean my room/get home soon/change my tune, she’s gonna—”

Nancy’s mother made no demands. She showed Nancy weaving and told her information about the best yarn to use to warp a loom with, the sort of tea to brew depending on the weather, or the best kohl to put around your eyes. She didn’t mind if Nancy slept at Dad’s when it was his night. She didn’t make Nancy call either one
home.
She made Nancy’s bed when she wasn’t there, rolled her comforter, tucked in the sheets, put away the trundle, kept her pillow fluffed on the dresser top, handy.

Nobody else’s mother made their bed; Nancy had listened enough to gather that fact. It was a downright bone of contention, the idea that anyone had to make a bed at all.

“I’ve gotta/I hafta/I’d betta or I’ll get pounded/punished/grounded.”

Grounded? Nancy’s father would never do such a thing. “That’s no place for me,” he’d say, “so how could I do it to you? What terrible things are you plotting, anyway, that you’re considering consequences like grounding?”

Nancy just smiled, wanting him to think she was as brave a roof dweller as he was. And listened to what was going on in homeroom.

R
achel and Nancy’s door stood behind a cobweb iron gate set under Granny and Grandpa’s stoop. This afternoon Rachel was sound asleep when Nancy turned her key in the lock and stepped in. The apartment was dark and the air felt soft like down. The drawn shades let streams of dusty sunshine into the tiny underground kitchen. Like Thumbelina’s house, Nancy had always thought. Her mama was the mole.

Nancy stood in the doorway that led from the kitchen up cement steps to the yard. She listened to Rachel snoring. Later in the day her mama would
emerge, like someone with a star-shaped nose, to cook beautiful soup and bake bread or brownies to contribute to the big dinner Granny was making upstairs. She’d be happy, ready to nourish and nurture Nancy. Nancy knew this because from here she could see into Mama’s greenhouse studio; she could see that Mama’s loom was warped. New smooth shining threads like a river flowing over a dam waited there practically vibrating, so ready were they. Ready for what? For weft threads to swim through them, crisscrossing into a pattern that was visible now only to Mama, who was probably seeing it in her mind as she slept.

But here Mama came now, shuffling into the kitchen toward the kettle, saying guilty things, making a plea.

“You poor little caterpillar, Nancy, you ought to have a better mother. I can’t even go for groceries without the screaming heebie-jeebies! And now we’re out of tea.”

“Mama, the tulips are blooming in Prospect Park,” Nancy said.

“I know,” Rachel said tersely. “I’ve seen them before. Why do I need to see them again?” She gripped Nancy’s arm suddenly. “What’s that?”

“It’s just a car alarm, Ma. Out on the street.”

Rachel could never get used to that. “Oh,” she said.

How had Ned ever found Rachel? Grandpa had brought him home. Grandpa Joke had met Grandma Aso long ago, before she’d gone back to Jamaica. Her son Ned was an inside carpenter then, just getting started out of high school. Grandpa needed bookshelves, so when he heard about Ned, he asked Grandma Aso to send him over to look at the job.

Rachel was living at home, doing giant weavings hung on the wall. She and Ned fell in love. They rented the basement apartment. They fixed the greenhouse together. And Ned built the floor loom.

He thought it was all temporary, that he would soon make enough as a carpenter, and she’d sell enough weaving, for them to find a place of their own, someplace where they (and soon, Nancy) could be closer to the sky. He was a typical guy, Rachel said, who thought she’d just go with him wherever he went.

But she didn’t want to. “I want my feet on solid ground,” she said. She didn’t need the whole world. Her loom—her web—was large enough.

Now, every spring, Rachel cried. “He thinks I don’t want to be with him,” she had sobbed to Nancy this March. “I
can’t
be with him up there on that roof.”

And he couldn’t be with her, down on the ground. Now Nancy told her mama all about the new apartment, up high like the one in Mama’s favorite TV version of
La Bohème,
the Australian Opera one, where everyone was young and beautiful and there was a big neon sign saying
L’amour
outside their apartment on the roof. She knew how Mama would feel, and now she’d made her cry, telling her about it.

“I wish I was different,” Mama said.

“You’re yourself,” Nancy told her, grasping for soothing words. “My Greene Mamba.” It was a favorite nickname, usually guaranteed to bring a smile.

“She thinks I don’t love her,” Ned had said. “She says if I loved her I wouldn’t live on some empty roof.”

“She’s afraid of everything,” Nancy had said sadly.

Nancy crawled under the loom, looked out at the nose-level grass and dreamed herself back at Dad’s apartment. Open those glass doors and breathe, listen to the city breathing. The whole world was up there. She loved it, or she wanted to love it, but her body
seemed to rebel against it, breaking out in shivers and shakes every time she approached the edge.

“I’m still afraid of heights,” Nancy confessed to Rachel. It needed facing, this fear of hers that was so natural for a human, so unnatural for the kind of spider she wished she were.

“Needn’t be,” said Rachel. She laughed, and threw the shuttle that carried the weft thread through the shed of the loom. The shuttle sailed over Nancy’s head, letting out rose yarn behind it like exhaust smoke.

“Well, I am,” Nancy said, her voice heavy. She watched the weaving from her favorite angle, lying on her back, nestled at her mother’s feet. She had her own yarn with her, and was knitting, the yarn unrolling from its ball inside her school backpack.