I dropped the box on the kitchen counter and started to open it, but the box cutter slipped from my sweaty fingers. I grabbed a paper towel and wiped my hands, then my forehead, my neck, front and back, and between my breasts. That was when I realized that while I was good at picking up heavy things, I didn’t always know what to do with them. I had forgotten that I couldn’t put the dishes in the cupboards until I did something about the roaches that had swarmed across the floor when I turned on the light last night. I pushed the box to the side and started to make a shopping list. To keep the roaches at bay, some repellent spray. To sprinkle along the baseboards, some borax. To wash out the cupboards, a strong disinfectant soap. The heat was unbearable. We needed a fan. The hot, steamy air was scrambling my mind.
In the bathroom I added more items to the list. Shower curtain. Toilet bowl cleaner. Clorox. More sponges. There was a miniature mushroom growing between the shower wall tiles, but instead of digging it out, which is what I would normally do, I decided to leave it alone, see how big it would get. I wondered if it might be edible.
In the living room, two tall windows covered by heavy metal security bars opened to a fire escape. An array of dingy underwear, worn jeans, and T-shirts hung on a clothesline operated by a pulley system stretching between two buildings. I added laundry detergent to the list and told myself I would not be hanging our clothes on that line for everyone to see. Little did I know, there would be a lot of things I would do in my time in the Bronx that I couldn’t have imagined myself doing.
Playing the role of a good—meaning dutiful—preacher’s wife was one thing I knew I couldn’t do. I went into the bedroom, where Frank’s Bible on the bed stand provided more evidence to me of how impossible it was for me to see things the way he saw them. I didn’t pray. I didn’t read the Bible. I slept during church services, and I hated the songs in the hymnal because they didn’t have a gospel beat. I thought that requiring seminarians to learn the Greek language was the height of absurdity.
I didn’t know who or what God was, and I never had. I was too young and had too much of my life ahead of me to worry about whether there was a heaven or a hell, and as far as I was concerned, we should be worrying about the hell on earth that too many people were already being forced to live instead of worrying over an afterlife.
Maybe it was our religious differences that made me irritated with Frank so much of the time. It had been so different when we first met, as freshmen in college. I had been awed by his intelligence and his certainty about his place in the world. I liked the way he noticed things about me—the food I ate, the smell of the lavender soap I used in the bath, even when the split ends on my blond hair needed trimming. He noticed me like no one had before, and it was intoxicating. So when this superior being chose me, I married him, never stopping to think about whether or not I loved him.
I couldn’t pinpoint when it happened—I guess it was gradual—but at some point he stopped noticing me, and the things I had admired about him became an irritation. His inquiring mind started to feel like criticism, and in the face of his superior intellect and certainty, my own insecurity was magnified.
My reflections were cut short by the sounds of screaming children out in the street. I walked over to the window. Someone had opened the fire hydrant in front of the church full blast, and scores of kids, of all ages and in all kinds of dress and undress, were having the time of their lives running through the spray.
Frank and I would not be having any children. I’d thought it was my fault. So had Frank. He encouraged me to see a doctor, which resulted in both of us being tested, and it turned out it was his fault, not mine. I had thought I wanted kids, but now that I knew we couldn’t, I wasn’t sure anymore. Frank, on the other hand, didn’t take it well, and we stopped talking about it.
As I watched the kids outside now, I told myself it was all water under the bridge. Then I grabbed my keys, locked all the locks behind me, and went out to join in the fun, pinching my nose against the warring cooking smells in the hall. On the second-floor landing, I bumped against a hunched-over man who, in his heroin-induced nonexistence, didn’t notice. The first-floor foyer reeked of pine-scented disinfectant and stale urine. I held my breath and raced out onto a sidewalk layered with grime and broken glass and spray paint.
The building super sat to the right of the door in front of his street-level apartment. He seemed to be a permanent fixture, his stomach bulging under a graying T-shirt, his wrinkled skin exposed between his shirt and pants, and hanging over the edge of his rusted folding chair.
“Good morning,” I said. “Quite the scorcher today, isn’t it? How long do these heat waves last?” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, made a few more attempts at conversation, and then said, “Well, nice talking to you.”
“Yup, you too,” he mumbled as I turned to walk away. I smiled. I would try again tomorrow.
The throng of children running through the water from the hydrant grew larger, their squeals louder as they pushed each other and floated pieces of paper and sticks in the flooded street. For a few seconds I almost forgot that the deck of life was stacked against them, almost believed that their playfulness might be powerful enough to outwit society’s best efforts to extinguish it. I ran across the street, plunged into the spray with my mouth open, and swallowed a mouthful of water. The escape from the scorching heat was heavenly.
All of a sudden, the children stopped playing, and I realized they were all staring at me like they knew who I was better than I did: a white do-gooder residing temporarily among people living on the margins. Any idealistic notion I’d had that their squealing was the sound of resilience vanished. There was nothing romantic about children having to play in a flooded piece of street with foul garbage floating around their bare feet and ankles. They should have a real swimming pool, with chlorine in it, and a lifeguard to keep them safe.
I left and went back into the building, having learned my first lesson: that there was nothing romantic about poverty, and nothing honorable about living in its midst when you had a choice.
~
After passing the New York City teachers’ exam and signing a loyalty oath, which I was uncomfortable about but signed anyway, I was assigned to teach third grade at P.S. 457, which was an easy ten- to fifteen-minute walk from our apartment. At the teachers’ orientation meeting, I learned that I would teach my class during the morning shift, from seven to noon. Another third-grade class would use the classroom from noon to five. The two classes would have to share books, bulletin boards, supplies... everything. How were we supposed to do that? The principal said it was an unfortunate situation but she knew everyone would make the best of it like they always did. Everyone but me seemed to consider it normal.
Once the orientation session was over, I spent a couple of hours working in my assigned classroom with my teacher-mate, a woman in her midsixties who was more interested in what she was going to do when she retired at the end of the year than she was in children. After leaving the school, I went directly to the parsonage for dinner with Pastor Paul, his wife, Linnea, and their two handsome sons.
Pastor Paul was Frank’s internship supervisor, but he preferred to think of himself as Frank’s spiritual guide and on occasion treated him like a third son. When I arrived, everyone was sitting at the round picnic table on the patio in the back, a slab of concrete between the church and the house. My neon-pink dress with huge lime-green dots was shockingly short and as out of place here as it had been in the school auditorium. I’d heard someone whisper “Since when did we start letting sixteen-year-olds teach” when I walked in. Everyone but me must have gotten the dress code memo, because all the other teachers wore suits. I spent most of the meeting tugging at the hem of my dress and running my fingers along the edge of my hair where