She said, “I don’t believe in juice. I don’t believe in drinking my calories.”
Before leaving, I did a quick spot-check in the hall mirror. No messy hairs to tamp down, no zits to pick. Then I noticed something missing behind me.
“Where’s the de Chirico?” I asked. A few years ago, Mom had bought a tiny sketch of a faceless man strumming a guitar, which had cost more than she liked to admit. The image had always unnerved me, but she proudly pointed it out to guests. When they complimented the de Chirico, she blushed as if they were complimenting her.
Mom’s shoulders fell. “Dalton’s expensive,” she said, then cleared her throat. “Don’t think about it. I don’t. I’ve put the de Chirico right out of my mind.” I gave her a hug, and she said, “What was that for?”
“Sorry for being so expensive,” I said, shrinking into my stiff new blazer.
“Don’t say that. What else is money for?” she said. “Never think about money, okay?”
Even if it was money we didn’t have? “Okay,” I said.
The rain pounded our car on the way to school. Mom played the soundtrack to Les Miz, which she’d seen on her last mental sanity vacation in New York. The singers’ voices sounded cruel and shrill, as if sneering at us for listening.
How would my mother keep up with her New York theater and art galleries now that we had Dalton tuition to pay every year?
When we pulled up to the front entrance, the sight of all those uniforms streaming into school deflated me. Mom put the car in park. “Their grounds always look so neat, so trim.” She gave me a long, sad look. “Enjoy your day, honey.”
Outfitted in my own tight, new uniform, I entered the front doors alone, my feet damp inside slippery dress shoes. No one returned the anxious smile I’d plastered to my face. Where was that boy with the warm brown eyes from my first Dalton visit, the one who’d flashed me the peace sign? Maybe I’d dreamed him up.
Dean Demuth had stationed himself beside a glass trophy case filled with news clippings trumpeting our school’s success on courts, ski slopes and ice rinks. Hoping to make a good start, I greeted him with a hearty, “Good morning, sir!”
“Your tie,” he replied.
I looked down. My polyester tie had slipped a half-inch from the top button of my collar. I yanked it back up, made sure it was choking my neck.
At Lev Stern Hebrew, we used to start the morning with a religious service. Here the day began with our homeroom teacher checking our uniforms, then reading the headmaster’s daily brief, followed by Dalton’s equivalent of school prayer: “Fly, Eagles, Fly!” Then she released us to dash to our lockers, which were lined with wood-veneer and had faux brass handles. We were supposed to call them “cabinets,” but we all called them lockers, and even the faculty occasionally slipped up and called them lockers too.
Between classes, I wandered the halls feeling lost, often getting lost while trying to find the Commons Room, The Quad, The Levee, The Chapel, and the ominous-sounding Dixon House. When I sought out help, I stammered like an idiot.
“Are you an exchange student?” one girl asked me.
Some of the guys I passed in the halls were almost twice my size. I took care to stay out of their sight lines, walking close to walls, peeking around corners. In class I always chose a seat with a view of the door.
At lunchtime, we filed into the cafeteria, a.k.a the “Dining Hall,” and sat at one of several long tables with place settings where all meals were eaten with a fork and knife, even burgers and tacos. I chose the end of a table occupied by African-American girls whose families drove them to school from Detroit.
I’d expected my Dalton classmates to be mostly Aryan, blue eyes, snub noses, with names like Biffy or Tiffy. In fact, our hallways resembled Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition.” There were Christians of all stripes (I didn’t know there were different stripes of Christians before), as well as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, even a Zoroastrian. Native tongues included Spanish, Arabic, Thai, Korean, and working class slang.
Today for lunch, we were served decidedly non-kosher cheeseburgers.
I’d never tasted a cheeseburger, though I’d always been curious about them. For a second, I considered peeling the melted cheese off my meat. Finally, I just bit into it. It was delicious, the gooey cheese melting over the seared brown patty, and the juices running into the bun. I finished the whole thing in a minute.
Why would God make something so wonderful and then forbid us to eat it?
OUT OF PROPORTION
IN ART CLASS, WE COULD TAKE off our jackets and cover our shirts and ties with pale blue smocks. After outfitting myself in a smock, I opened the metal supply cabinets, filled with an impressive array of pens, brushes, paint tubes, and expensive paper. I thought of asking Mom if she wanted me to steal some for her.
I chose a piece of good paper and sat at one of the tables. The other kids dirtied their hands with ink or paint, or snacked on granola bars in plain view of our teacher, Ms. Hunter. One kid fed an Ice-T tape into Ms. Hunter’s old stereo, which she’d brought from home to inspire us, and another guy said, “Hey, faggot, turn off that rap crap.”
“Who you calling faggot, faggot?”
“You, faggot.”
I fixed my eyes on my drawing. My pen had torn a small hole in the paper.
“Hey, hey, hey . . .” Ms. Hunter came scooting over, stopped the stereo. “Watch the language, guys. And no more stereo privileges for today.”
“Aw, come on, please . . .” both boys begged, almost in chorus.
“Alright, but don’t let me catch you talking that way again.”
Ms. Hunter, the only female teacher in school who wore pants, didn’t give much in the way of instruction beyond how to work the projector, so we could trace images directly onto paper or canvas. “No one draws freehand anymore,” she said, winding her long hair into a bun that inevitably came loose. “You think Andy Warhol drew freehand?”
Despite Andy Warhol, I stuck to the old-fashioned way, drawing a multi-panel cartoon of Dean Demuth choking several students lining up for uniform check. “Cool beans,” said Ms. Hunter, peering over my shoulder.
Cool beans? I thought. Was that something people said?
“Your faces are good,” she added. “But the bodies are out of proportion. You might want to spend a little time looking at yourself naked.”
HOW ARE YOU LIKING IT?
“SO, HOW ARE YOU LIKING IT?” Dad wanted to know when he picked me up for karate class, at the end of my first week at Dalton.
I’d practiced my answer to this question. “Oh, you know.” I unbuttoned my collar and loosened my tie. “Fine.” Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to stare at here.
In school, I kept my Dalton tie neatly knotted, my shoes and socks regulation black, and my hair cut several inches above the collar of my starched white dress shirt. I ate cheeseburgers and ham sandwiches without thinking twice. I pledged my undying support for the Dalton Eagles at pep rallies and attempted to live by the guiding principles in the Headmaster’s Message of the Day. I learned how to move between the library, the “new” gym, and the Dining Hall without passing the Commons Room, where the burliest, angriest football players rammed into each other for fun, or the photo lab, where burnouts and bohemian types played with X-Acto knives and toxic chemicals.
Before driving out of the Dalton parking lot, Dad looked at me for a few seconds, then patted my seat belt. “All strapped in?”
Mark’s father used to pick him up from Stern every afternoon, kissing him noisily