We Are Not Ourselves(70)
That night, when she told the story, she substituted for the young man’s oddly delicate apology a bowdlerized version of the slurs she’d anticipated hearing—which was, in any case, closer to the truth of her lived experience than this inexplicable aberration. “I wouldn’t repeat some of the vile things I heard,” she said, “even if Connell weren’t here.” It was a venial sin, she knew, but she didn’t have to labor to justify it to herself, because it was in everyone’s interest that they move to the suburbs. Ed, though, offered up only a muted version of the chivalric indignation she’d expected to hear, which stoked the fire of her anger at the gang members. Within a few days, she’d begun to consider the possibility that they’d actually said some of the things she’d put in their mouths, and there was a decent chance they had, memory being such a slippery thing.
When she went back to the realty office, she parked in front this time, and Gloria greeted her in a more familiar and less overtly warm way. A bridge had been crossed, a confidence shared. There was perhaps a greater investment on Gloria’s part in finding a house for her.
They began their rounds. On the way to each house, Gloria enumerated the positives in what Eileen was about to see but also addressed certain ineluctable realities, a little confidentially, as if to allow her to encounter these realities in a mood of mutual trust. Then they went inside. If the memory of the previous visits hadn’t been fresh, Eileen might have found the houses appealing; they were, after all, in a neighborhood more desirable than her own. But what a falling off! Where there had been five bedrooms, there were now three; where marble, now linoleum; where wood, some sort of composite, or else actual wood in a state of such severe neglect as to necessitate its wholesale removal and replacement. Expansive atriums became foyers not much larger than the claustral vestibule in her current house. And the magisterial light that pervaded the earlier houses, born of high ceilings and plentiful windows, gave way to a darkness that was all too familiar. Eileen’s expectations sank with the price of the houses.
Gloria saw the shift in mood and tried to bolster her with recitations of hidden advantages, but Eileen would have none of it. She could live down the road from the houses she coveted, she could make friends with their inhabitants, but she could not live in them, not in this life she had with Ed. She had enjoyed years of intellectual partnership, and she’d raised a happy, healthy child, and this was far more than some women ever came close to having. She felt churlish even beginning to wonder what life would’ve been like if she’d married someone else. And yet as she sat outside the latest disappointing house, she couldn’t help thinking that these were the wages of self-respect, sitting in a car outside a house she couldn’t afford anyway, turning her nose up at it.
A baleful air hung in the car. She wanted to reassure Gloria, to express her gratitude for the kindness and patience she’d been shown. “I had unrealistic expectations,” she said. “I can’t get what I want with the money I’m capable of spending.”
“Some of these houses are pretty nice, actually,” Gloria said.
“Some of them remind me of where I live now,” Eileen said. “The neighborhoods are on the border. They could go either way. I’m looking for this next house to be the one I settle down in. I don’t want to have to look over my shoulder. I might as well stay in Jackson Heights if I’m going to do that.”
The houses Gloria had shown her were in areas like Yonkers and Mount Vernon, where poor and comparatively wealthy populations—they happened to be drawn along black and white lines—abutted each other. It wasn’t that she wanted to avoid black faces. She wanted to avoid black anger, black retribution, black vigilante justice. She wanted a buffer from the encroachment of crime. She didn’t want to have to watch a neighborhood go to ruin again and preside over the memory of it like a monk guarding the scrolls of a dwindling people.
“Don’t give up yet,” Gloria said. “Give it some more time.”
“Of course,” Eileen said.
24
On days Connell didn’t have games or practice at Elmjack Little League, he went to Seventy-Eighth Street Park, even though it scared him to go there sometimes. They played softball there—no league, just pickup—and during the games he felt protected. The older white crew came around, guys in their twenties who wore bandanas and sweatpants, blasted classic rock on boom boxes, and played roller hockey when they weren’t playing softball. They drank beer out of bottles in paper bags. Somehow they didn’t have to be at work in the late afternoons. The girls his age swooned over them.
He liked to throw with the high school kids who sometimes came around, because they didn’t complain if he gassed it up. He was playing catch with one of them when Benny Erazo sauntered up in a way that looked like he was carrying bricks in his pockets. Benny had gotten kicked out of St. Joan’s the year before. He went to IS 145 now. Connell had helped Benny through fifth-grade math by letting him copy his homework and look at his tests. Benny’s little brother José was still at St. Joan’s and was sometimes in the group that jumped Connell after school.
“You need to worry about your rep,” Benny said.
“My rep?”
“Your reputation on the street is that you’re soft.” Benny was wearing a Bulls jersey. He had a light mustache and smelled of cologne under several layers of clothes.