Playground, page 7
Rafi Young learned that lesson four times better than anyone.
AFTER THE DESTRUCTION of the orange coat, after Rafi’s fateful lie, after his mother smuggled Rafi and his little sister away into a new life in a new neighborhood while his father was busy fighting the South Side’s fires, the lessons continued. When his mother started up with her new friend and neither Drunk Gramma nor Evil Gramma would take the two kids, they went to their father’s. And that meant two more hours of reading every night, with quizzes every thirty minutes.
He was at his father’s in the winter of second grade when the man came into his bedroom for the nightly exam. “Whatchu readin’, son?”
“The Lion. The Witch. And the Wardrow-bee.”
“It’s wardrobe, Rafi.”
“What’s a wardrobe?”
“Just a clothes closet with a trust fund. What’s the book about?”
Rafi tried to tell his father about the four English children stepping through a hole in the side of reality into another world. His father took the book from his hands.
“Where’d you get this?”
Rafi’s cousin Keesha had traded it away for two Bit-O-Honey bars. The book was beyond Rafi, but his father had told him that if a book was too hard, it just meant he had to read fiercer.
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know where you got something?” Donnie Young chucked the book into the corner. “You a little old for fairy tales, aren’t you? Let’s learn something useful. What do you say?”
Donnie had found a used set of children’s Golden Book Encyclopedias dirt-cheap at Maxwell Street Market, in reasonable shape, missing only two volumes. Rafi didn’t like reading them; each time he turned the pages, he felt the ghostly fingertips of the child who’d abandoned them.
Rafi dragged over to the shelf. “Which one?”
“Which one? What kind of question is that? Any one. Sometimes I don’t get you, Rafi.”
The boy grabbed one of the slender volumes and slunk back to the couch. He sat against the armrest. His father sat next to him, not touching. No false comforts, until the quiz was over. Rafi propped the book up against his raised knees. Volume Five: Daguerreotype to Epiphyte. A coal burned in his stomach, and he tasted the first hints of vomit.
Spooky things spread across the volume’s cover. An ear grew out of the side of a rock. A vacuum tube on the top of the rock looked like a glass-domed colony on the surface of another planet. A sinister secret formula—E = mc2—floated on a scrap of paper. Pinned to the wall under that paper scrap was a picture of an octopus attacking a near-naked white scuba diver. Just to the left, a terrifying white baby doll-clown in a half-blue, half-pink costume hung in the air. It stared out at Rafi with glossy black button eyes.
“What’s wrong with you, boy? Get on with it.”
Rafi pointed to daguerreotype. “What’s this word?”
Ordinarily his father would have blasted him: That’s your job. You tell me. But Rafi knew how to play on his father’s weakness, and pride brought Donald Young down again. He took a stab at it, never wavering. A decade later, in Father Terry’s class at that Jesuit high school that would save and ruin his life, Rafi would reproduce his father’s bungled pronunciation of the word and become the laughingstock of junior-year Modern History.
He pointed to epiphyte. “What about this one?”
His father cuffed him just above the temple. “Quit stalling and get reading.”
The swat hunched Rafi over. He puffed out his lip and pulled at his earlobe. He opened the encyclopedia volume at random. Holding it close enough to see, he read at a good clip, to score points with the judge.
“DUNES. A dune is a hill of sand. Dunes are found along the shores of lakes and oceans and in sandy deserts. Some of the biggest—”
His father smacked him again. “Slow down, hotshot. You even know what you’re reading? Where are dunes found?”
Rafi couldn’t answer. He started again, one word after another, like a long string of boxcars clicking down the track behind his father’s apartment on the south side of Fifteenth. His knee bobbed up and down like the needle on his mama’s sewing machine, and his hand kept whisking at invisible spiders.
“Some of the biggest dunes in the world are on the shores of Lake Michigan.”
He stopped, amazed. How did the Golden Book Encyclopedia know where they lived? Earlier that season, he and his father had biked along the lake from the Museum of Science and Industry almost to Navy Pier and back. Rafi struggled; his father sneered at him for stopping so often. They took a break near DuSable Harbor to look at the boats. His father gazed eastward across the endless water. He hid his face from his son. But Rafi saw, and it scared him. The man who used to slap around his mother for failing to raise her children right was crying.
“You gotta understand. . . .”
Rafi didn’t understand.
“I got to teach you where in this city you can go and where you can’t. That’s just how it is. Sooner you get that, the better. There’s Polish and Russian and Mexican and Jews and Irish and Arabs and Chinese, all with their own territories, and you go where you’re not wanted, they’ll kill you. But the lake. . . . this lake. . . .” His hand, helpless, reached out toward the level immensity stretching out of sight. “The water belongs to nobody. It’s no-man’s-land. Anytime you need it, it’s here.”
Rafi finished the article on DUNES and waited for the quiz. It never came, so Rafi went on to the next entry. “DUST,” he read. “Housekeepers spend a great deal of time dusting. Dust settles from the air and may make a gray coating over everything in a house. How surprised many housekeepers would be if they knew that part of the dust they wipe off the floor and furniture each day is alive!”
He reached the end of the article on DUST. See also BACTERIA, DISEASE, GERMS, FERNS, MOLDS, MUSHROOMS, POLLINATION, YEASTS. He waited once again, but his father held still, head tilted, eyes fixed on something distant. At last, the silence snapped him from his trance. He spoke as if far away.
“That’s good, Rafi. You keep it up. Never let the Lilliputians bring you down.”
Rafi had no idea who the Lilliputians were. Probably another Chicago neighborhood he had to avoid.
By way of reward, his father jiggled Rafi’s kneecap, gave his leg a congratulatory slap, and slipped out the door. He did not go to quiz Little Sondy. Rafi’s sister’s reading skills did not concern their father.
The minute his father disappeared, Rafi headed into the room’s corner and went back through the wardrobe, stumbling into the brute particulars of another, more forgiving and beautiful world. A world, like the lake, that was endless, open, and free, belonging to no man.
EVEN EVIL GRAMMA SCORNED the boy’s lack of manliness. For his birthday, she gave him a skateboard. The first time he put a foot on it, he slipped and fell and lacerated himself on the concrete. He tried again, and the board squirted out from under his feet. This time he twisted his wrist breaking his fall.
The skateboard turned the sidewalk alongside South Morgan into the Edens Expressway—nothing but headlong wreckage and flaming bits of death threatening every square. Rafi trickled along, both feet solidly on the board. He tried sitting down, sidesaddle, propelling himself with both scuffling feet.
That Christmas, Evil Gramma gave him a doll. “You don’t like my skateboard? Too scary for you? Here. Play with that. You can’t get hurt by a doll.”
Perhaps his grandmother had never seen a horror film.
THEY MADE HIM SKIP A GRADE. Rafi didn’t want to. He knew how much more misery the jump would bring. Half the school already called him Poindexter, for reading in the lunchroom between bites of grilled cheese. The other half preferred Preach, because of the crazy words he used. Preach speakin’ in tongues. Preach comin’ through, again. Between the second-graders he would abandon and the third-graders whose party he would crash, the daily slaughter of his life was about to ramp up several notches.
His mother insisted. “The school says being bored ain’t good for you. You need challenge.”
Dragging his skinny ass out of bed every morning and parking it in a chair bolted to the schoolroom floor was already more challenge than Rafi Young knew how to manage in this life.
“I’m not bored, Mom. Everything’s hard.”
“Your teacher says you already know it all, and you sit there fidgeting, pretending you don’t.”
His mother had gotten a job driving city buses. He’d heard her tell her friends that if the CTA made her drive the Racine route for one more month she was going to spin out and hurt someone. Rafi knew that that someone might be him. She had given him a coat, he’d lied about it, and now his father was alone fighting fires and his mother was raising two kids by herself and working a job she hated.
“You got special abilities, Rafi. No one can stop you. You can do anything if you just apply yourself. Otherwise, you gonna be trapped in a job too stupid for you. You don’t want that, do you?”
It didn’t sound all that bad. “The kids are going to hate me, Mom.”
“They’re gonna admire you. They’re gonna wish they were you.”
The plan gave him nightmares. He would wake up screaming, “I’m fine, really! Fine!”
They kicked Rafi Young up into the third grade, and his whole shaky existence took a sharp turn south.
His performance nosedived. His mother confronted him. “You pretending to be stupid so they drop you back down into the second grade? ’Cause I’ll tell you right now, mister: that’s a bad plan!”
“It’s not a plan. It’s . . . my new teacher.”
“Miss Rapp? What’s wrong with her?”
“She writes funny.”
“What do you mean, ‘funny’?”
“Like Chinese. Nothing she puts on the board makes sense.”
The boy failed to tell his mother that skipping a grade had rearranged him. In second grade, he sat up front, near the chalkboard, in the seat he chose. But his new teacher slapped the instant third-grader in the back row of his new classroom, from where the chalkboard lay wrapped in fog. That plunged Rafi into a misery that he figured God had ordained.
Then one day during morning recess he found a pair of glasses on a playground bench near the tetherball pole. As a joke, he tried them on. In an eyeblink, all was light. He kept them on when the class went back inside, and from one hour to the next, he went from floundering to outperforming the older kids. That state of grace continued all the way to lunch, when the owner of the glasses came up to him, took the glasses off his face, and pushed him down.
Rafi stayed down on the linoleum and burst into tears. Not because he’d twisted his wrist while breaking his fall. He’d liked seeing at a distance. He hadn’t realized it was possible. He would never in a million lifetimes have imagined that all the other kids had been seeing at a distance all this time, without telling him. And now he was banished to blurriness again.
“YOUR SON NEEDS GLASSES,” Miss Rapp told his mother.
“What are you talking about? He can see perfectly.”
Miss Rapp tilted her head, and Rafi’s mother caught herself.
“Why didn’t he tell me he couldn’t see?”
“How was he to know? He only has but that one pair of eyes!”
THE CLASSROOM TURNED SAFE AGAIN. From his throne in the back row, Rafi Young took dominion over everything he could now see. Math, geography, science, art, music, history: he excelled in every subject Miss Rapp threw at him. But during reading, he was safest of all. His Oz, his Narnia. Reading left him untouchable on a raft in the middle of an ocean of bright words.
One afternoon they were learning about different branches of the animal kingdom when a commotion outside the classroom window made the kids around him giggle. The boy next to him nudged the back of Rafi’s head. Rafi turned to see his father out on the playground pointing both index fingers at him like revolvers. Then his father began waving like a crazy person. Rafi hid at his desk. His father didn’t belong here. This was school, his safe spot, where if he did well no one could blame him for anything.
His father shouted, inaudible through the glass. He shimmied a little, like a drunk. The kids around Rafi laughed again.
Miss Rapp asked, “Does anyone know who that man is?”
Rafi studied the window as if it were another science lesson. The room filled with a silence softer than death. Then Darnell, from his old neighborhood, ratted him out. “His dad!”
Miss Rapp frowned at Rafi. Criminal again. It didn’t seem to matter how well he did in class.
“Is that your father, Rafi? Well, you better go see what he wants!”
He went outside, perp-walked to execution. Every kid in the third grade and his curious teacher stared out the window at him. He was like some eel in the Shedd Aquarium.
His father jabbed his fingers, pointing at his own eyes. “Your glasses, Rahrah. Your specs. Lookin’ good! Ooo-eee!”
The child braced for punishment.
“I was on my way to the station. Thought I’d stop in and . . . you know. Congratulate you.”
Rafi stared, asking God to make the man vanish.
“Look. Son. I just heard. I didn’t know you needed glasses.”
Rafi pointed back to the building. “I got to go back to class.”
“Listen. Rafi. I’m sorry I used to get angry at you. I thought you were a coward. I didn’t know you couldn’t see the ball.”
Something came over the boy. Someone else’s idea. “I am a coward.”
His father’s face collapsed. Euphoria flooded through Rafi, as never before.
“I don’t like baseball. I don’t like getting stronger or learning how to fight. I just like reading.”
The feeling was fantastic. Like beating the man at checkers. Like whupping him at his own invented game.
EVIL GRAMMA SMACKED HIM when he mispronounced words. “Get it right, child. You’re the only one of us who has a chance of making it, in this world.”
Drunk Gramma didn’t believe Rafi’s glasses did a thing. “You just wearing those to get attention. Trying to be somebody special!”
His mother dropped Rafi and Little Sondy off for babysitting on Saturdays, while she drove the Racine route in both directions until her brain bled. Once in charge, Drunk Gramma took off Rafi’s glasses and put them on top of the refrigerator. Then she’d send the kids out into the alley to play ring toss or hide-and-seek for hours. With her experiment concluded to her satisfaction, Drunk Gramma would give him back his glasses just before Sondra Young returned to pick up her children.
One Saturday night at bath time, his mother stopped to examine his naked body under the fluorescent sink light. “How’d you get all these bruises?”
“Running into things. Falling down.”
“Why you getting so clumsy, Rafi?”
“I only run into things at Gramma’s.”
His mother pressed him until he told her why. His father’s mother never babysat him again.
HE MADE A PERISCOPE from two makeup mirrors and a paper towel tube. Lying on the floor behind the upstairs banister, Rafi spied on his mother and Mrs. Jones in the room below. He had somehow done something wrong yet again, and the principal of his school was recommending punishment to his mother.
“You have to get your boy out of there.”
“Why? He’s doing so well!”
“That’s my point, Sondra. He’s got the goods. He can go all the way. But not from here. If he stays at Medill, he’ll be buried like the rest of them.”
From his hidden outpost at the top of the stairs, Rafi imagined his school under a mudslide. He’d read of a grade school in Wales being buried by an avalanche, and it sometimes haunted his dreams.
“Is it really that bad?”
“Honey, you have no idea. The city cheats us out of money. They cheat us on teachers. The smart ones want to work anywhere but here. Nothing against our poor kids, and pardon my French, but this place is a zoo.”
“What can I do?”
“I’ve got favors to call in with the Board of Education. There’s a magnet school called Green Classical, up in Park Ridge. Western and Touhy.”
“Park Ridge? That’s not—”
“You won’t have to pay a dime. A smart black boy who can read like Rafi will be gold to them.”
A magnet school. Rafi lowered his periscope. An immense Classical magnet had grabbed him and was pulling him up to the North Side, deep into the neighborhoods where his father had taught him that blacks should never go.
FOURTH GRADE PITCHED HIM headlong into someone else’s life. While his former classmates accused him of uppity betrayal, Rafi Young boarded a yellow bus with stiff red upright seats that took him for an hour-and-a-half ride into enemy territory way on the other side of Chicago’s great checkerboard, to serve time as the only black kid in Green Classical.
At Green he met his first Jews, people who, until then, had been as mythical as Babylonians. And the Near North Side kids met their first African American. They asked to touch his hair. They imitated the way he pronounced simple words like get and sure. They wondered about the strange sandwiches he brought from home and patiently told him how his shoes were wrong. But soon enough he was everybody’s fetish. He could read rings around all of them. They quizzed him about their favorites—Charlotte and Wilbur, the Boxcar Children, the Chocolate Factory. To the amazement of the magnet schoolers, the newcomer had read them all.
Biology, geometry, geography, history, French, social science: Rafi Young did well in every subject. Not so well that the North Siders hated him. Just well enough that they left him in peace. He didn’t grasp much about Green Classical. But he soon learned that the smart kids survived and the slow learners vanished.
On weekends he continued to play in the old neighborhood, as if he still belonged on South Morgan with his old friends. With his glasses, Poindexter could throw like Vida Blue or catch a pass like Lynn Swann. But in the unraveling game of childhood, every week pushed Rafi Young further into enemy territory. His life as a permanent infiltrator had begun.
