If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (9 page)

“You know that guy?” Voodoo asked. In the dark, you couldn’t tell that his Afro was blond. You couldn’t tell that he was a white boy who wanted to be Jimi Hendrix. In the dark, he looked like one of the junkies who hung out on the playground swings at Central District Elementary.

“Yeah, I know him,” I said.

Voodoo leaned forward and whispered, “Bennie wants to know can you talk to him, maybe get us a discount?”

•   •   •

I
had known Ramone since he was a skinny kid in the fourth grade. He and his cousin, Ophelia, were in my class at Central District Elementary, and my first crystal-clear memory of us all together was when Mrs. Rothman, our teacher, lost patience with Ophelia and slapped her hands because she couldn’t understand English. Ophelia burst into tears, tying her two satiny braids across her face in distress. Ramone had drawn his cousin into a sturdy, protective embrace. Mrs. Rothman’s face was
sweating, like it always did when she was angry. I walked over and took the two of them by their hands and began leading them out of the room.

“Where do you think you are going, Katharine?” Mrs. Rothman cried; she deplored nicknames and always called us by our formal names. But there was no heat to her words and she made no move to stop us. She knew she should never have slapped Ophelia. She would never have hit a white kid. “I have the pass,” I said, holding up the beaten piece of cardboard with the word “Pass” written across it in big, black letters. As the frosted glass door closed behind us, we could hear her droning on about the importance of diagramming sentences.

Once in the hall, I walked in front of them, leading the way to Mrs. Myer’s sixth-grade classroom down the stairs, on the first floor.

“Where are we going?” Ramone asked.

“I’m taking you to your sister,” I said. I honestly felt bad about the way Mrs. Rothman had treated Ophelia, but I had an ulterior motive. I actually couldn’t wait. I couldn’t wait to get to Mrs. Myer’s room and ask permission for Olga to come out in the hall. To say, “It’s a family matter.” I had heard Jody Klein’s older sister say that when she came to get him from our class the day his grandfather died, and I’d thought it impressive. And I had the pass, so Mrs. Myer would think I had permission from my teacher.

The truth was, I was fascinated with the Lopez family, with all the Puerto Ricans in our school. They were always walking together, chattering in Spanish, and they all seemed related somehow. They sat together at one long table in the cafeteria during lunchtime, eating baloney sandwiches, their milk mustaches more pronounced against their dark skin. At recess, they ran over the playground like a flock of colorful birds, their thin legs pumping like pistons. Olga, Ramone’s sister, was the oldest, a sixth grader, and reportedly excellent in math, my worst subject. I’d overheard Mrs. Myer telling Mrs. Rothman, “She’s a whiz at numbers, but so what? She’ll be pregnant and married by the time she’s
fifteen. Better she should learn how to budget her food stamps and care for a family.” I thought if Olga had heard Mrs. Myer say that, she would have kicked her in the shin. She was a tough girl, with a wide mouth and big teeth, and she wore dangling earrings and a beige ski jacket and black flats with no stockings that made her seem wickedly grown-up. She presided over the younger children, scolding them, hugging them, counting them when she rounded everyone up to go home at dismissal time.
“Mira, mami!”
she’d call.
“Ándale!”
Sometimes she’d let out a bloodcurdling whistle. I thought she was beautiful and wished she was my sister. My brother was too young to come to school yet, and though I had friends to eat lunch with and walk home with, I longed to be part of a big, jostling crowd like the Lopezes, standing next to Olga, having her arm around me as she threw back her head and laughed her huge, hearty laugh.

Everything went exactly as planned. We arrived at Olga’s classroom, and I knocked at the door. Mrs. Myer opened it. “Yes, Katie?” she said. I asked to see Olga Lopez, indicating Ramone and Ophelia standing behind me. “It’s a family matter,” I whispered. She pursed her lips and stared at them for several seconds and then closed the door. Olga came out. She was wearing the beige ski jacket over a frilly black-and-white dress that came only to above her knees, which were discolored with faded bruises. She walked right past me to where Ophelia was huddled against the lockers, Ramone beside her. She and Ramone began speaking in rapid Spanish, then Olga asked Ophelia something and Ophelia began crying again. Olga drew Ophelia against her, caressing her braids, whispering soothing words in Spanish. At least they sounded soothing. I stood there, watching.

Olga finally turned toward me. “What you looking at, little white girl?” she asked contemptuously. Her eyes were cold as stone. Ramone looked at me and then began speaking in Spanish. I thought he was telling her how I had led them to safety. She looked back over at me. I
thought her eyes would change, but they didn’t. “You better get back,” she said. “Go on, get back to class.”

“But I have the pass,” I said.

Olga gently disengaged Ophelia’s hands from around her waist. She walked over to me and snatched the pass from my hand, then stood there, her mouth stretched into a cruel smile. “Not anymore,” she said. Ramone looked down at his sneakers. There were tears in my eyes, but I was afraid if I started crying, Olga would only laugh, or yell at me the way the teachers yelled whenever the Spanish kids began crying in class, which was often. The teachers didn’t like them because they were too emotional and couldn’t speak English properly. They became sleepy after lunch and had to be roused from putting their heads in their arms on their desks. They couldn’t understand the simplest directions. Like the time Ava and Marisol Ortiz, beautiful twins in the fifth grade, brought their father’s goat to school for show-and-tell. His name was Gabriel, and he caused quite a commotion. The principal, Mr. Weissman, wanted to call their parents to come take the goat home, but they didn’t have a phone. Gabriel ended up grazing the lonely weeds shooting up between the cracks in the school playground until dismissal time.

The only teacher who was warm to the Spanish kids was Mr. Farnsworth, the gym teacher. He liked them for the same reason he liked the Negro kids, because they were fast and could outrun everybody else, including the track teams at the three other Elephant Beach elementary schools. “It’s in their blood,” we heard him explaining to Mr. Dillard, the art teacher, whose classroom was next door to the gym. It was true; their light, lithe bodies seemed weightless as they ran the inside track, their sneakers barely touching the varnished floor. Ophelia was a somewhat indifferent athlete, but Ramone was gifted, “fleet of foot, a wonder to behold,” Mr. Farnsworth would say, beaming, eyes on his stopwatch. Ramone’s coordination was superior, and it wasn’t just his legs, his
feet; you could see it in his eyes. When he ran, he would lift his face to the sky like a flower to the sun. Sometimes he’d laugh aloud from sheer joy.

•   •   •

O
lga may not have taken to me, but Ramone and Ophelia and I became friends. We played together during recess and in gym class. Ramone and I coached Ophelia in English, so that she gradually began picking up words and phrases, speaking in lyrical bursts. I was overjoyed when she asked me to come over after school; I told her I had to go home first and would be there by four o’clock. At home, my mother’s nose came up sharply when I told her where I was going. She questioned me about “this Ophelia Lopez” and when I told her where Ophelia lived, she put down her crossword puzzle and put on her shoes and said she’d walk me over there. When we arrived in front of Ophelia’s building, a three-story, salmon-colored affair, my mother looked up at the broken windows—the colorful sheets being used instead of blinds or curtains (which I thought wildly gay and inventive), the front door hanging off one hinge—heard the foreign shouts from the narrow hallway, and grabbed my hand and did a rapid about-face.

“You’ll call her from home and ask her to come to your house,” she said, walking quickly.

“But she doesn’t have a phone,” I said. “Why can’t we just get her now and bring her with us?” We were less than a block away.

“You’re not setting foot in that building,” my mother said firmly. She ignored my questions and steered me into Leo’s Luncheonette for a black-and-white ice-cream soda. Then we stopped by her friend Harriet’s, who had a huge color television in her den. I watched
From Here to Eternity
on
The 4:30 Movie
while they had coffee in the kitchen, and when I ran in to ask if I could have a cold drink, Harriet was shaking her head, saying, “They’re everywhere now, they have their own grocery
store for chrissake. How the hell did that get by the council? I mean, where do they think we are, San Juan?”

“What grocery store?” I asked, and my mother, shaking a packet of Sweet’N Low into her coffee, said firmly, “Go inside, sweetie, we’re talking,” and their conversation didn’t resume until I turned the television volume up again.

The next day at school I told Ophelia I had developed a nosebleed when I got home, and had to spend two hours sitting up with small ice packs up my nose to stop the bleeding. I didn’t consider it a total lie because this had actually happened when I was seven and had the measles. Ophelia exclaimed in Spanish, then stroked my arm in commiseration. I felt guilty that I’d been so distracted by ice cream and TV, and felt worse at recess when Ramone handed me the yellow tulip he’d picked from someone’s garden across the street from our school. He presented the tulip, then bowed, so that his too-big shirt billowed out and touched the ground. I curtsied and we giggled, and then the three of us began climbing to the top of the jungle gym.

But that wasn’t my best memory of Ramone. That came later, after Olga had graduated and we were sixth graders ourselves. That was the year we were competing for the John F. Kennedy Memorial Trophy against the three other Elephant Beach elementary schools. The trophy was brought to each school so that we could all see what was at stake. It was huge, with two streams of gold plating down the sides, and Mr. Farnsworth told us that the winning team would have their names engraved on the sides of the trophy. Then he bowed his head and nodded three times, which he always did when he had something important to say. “President John F. Kennedy came from a family of athletes. Who knew what healthy competition was. Who knew what it meant to win. President Kennedy was a winner, all right. He was the first Irish American to be elected president of these United States. He opened the door. The door is now open for anyone to be president. For anyone to win.”

We all nodded solemnly. President Kennedy had died two years
earlier. We’d had a moment of silence and then they let us out of school early. We felt a personal connection to the president because during his campaign, he’d come to Elephant Beach, which was one of the few Democratic towns on Long Island. My father had taken me to see him, had lifted me up high so that I could see him through the crowds. He was riding down Buoy Boulevard, standing in the back of a convertible in his shirtsleeves, smiling and waving at everyone. His teeth were very white. Against the sunlight, he looked more like a god than a regular man. Among us, we agreed it would be an honor to win the trophy named after the president. It would be like having a little piece of him for ourselves forever.

The trophy was all anyone talked about for days, even kids who weren’t on the track team. Those of us who were reached an exalted status that surpassed making the Principal’s Honor Roll or being a hall monitor and wearing a silver badge, both of which I’d achieved, but neither of which had been this exciting. I had been running track since fourth grade because I was tall and had long legs and was fast, and it brought me closer to the Lopezes. I used to leave the house to walk to school while it was still dark out, eager to get to Stein’s candy store and split a Yoo-hoo and cheese Danish with Ophelia and Ramone and whoever else showed up early, mostly the Negro kids who lived near the railroad tracks, who would sometimes bring their little brothers and sisters with them while their mothers went to work. Sometimes Kenny the janitor would let us into the gymnasium before homeroom, where we’d practice running relays, using an old ruler from one of the classrooms to pass off to one another. Sometimes we’d just run wildly through the school yard, watching our breath come out in white puffs as the sun rose higher over the bay. But now we had a goal and a purpose, and the whole school was cheering for us, especially for Ramone. His nickname was Rocket. “Hey, Rocket,” white kids who never talked to the Spanish kids would hail him in the hallways. Even the teachers smiled at Ramone now, responding to his inner light. None of them yelled at him or made
sarcastic remarks when he didn’t know an answer to a question in class. Everyone loved his rhythm, the way his feet skimmed the earth.

The day of the meet, I was up at dawn. The meet was scheduled for ten o’clock and the bus was picking the team up at nine twenty in front of Central District Elementary. My father wouldn’t let me leave until it was light out and offered to drive me, but then discovered the car had a flat tire from a bent nail. My mother insisted I eat something before leaving the house, but then my younger brother threw up all over the kitchen table from a virus nobody knew he had and the house was in an uproar and I couldn’t get into the bathroom on time. I ended up running the three long blocks to school with tears streaming down my face because I was using up valuable energy that should have been saved for the race. I didn’t want to let the team down. By the time I got there, the bus had already departed and now I was crying in earnest. I heard somebody shout my name and looked up to see Ramone, Ophelia and their cousin Julio coming toward me, all wearing black shorts, white tee shirts, and high, white ribbed socks with black piping around the top, the kind you could buy at Irv’s Bargain Center, three for a dollar fifty. They, too, had missed the bus. “Eddie was supposed to drive us, but he never showed up,” Ramone explained, panting. Ophelia’s eyes filled with tears. Julio shook his head; he was short and stocky with slicked-back hair and a low forehead. “Girls always making things worse,” he said disgustedly. “Fuck it, it’s not like they giving us money or nothing.” He rolled saliva in his mouth and spat it out on the sidewalk.