She bought diapers to drop off at the Garcias’ and a box of Dippy Canoes for the kids playing stoopball, then strolled back to the new apartment, snacking on a Hershey’s bar as she walked. Hershey’s had been her father’s favorite, and she’d been missing him more than usual—and now her mother wasn’t around to admonish,No hay postre hasta que termina la cena!
Even their mother, when she got all soft and talked about their father and how he’d wooed her, never failed to mention the candies. They’d met on the IRT, when Isabella Rodriguez was new to los Nueva Yorks and prone to getting lost. Paul Armstrong had offered her directions, and then a Fifth Avenue bar, and she’d reciprocated, offering the “big moreno” a square of budín de pan.
Lina loved when her mother told this story. There was an innocence to her parents’ love that seemed impossible to replicate in her own time.
When she finally reached theCHOW MEIN HERE!sign and climbed up the staircase to her apartment, she ran into a young woman with a baby on her hip.
“You just moved in?” the woman said. “Annetta Brown, and this is Deborah.”
“Good to meet you, Miss Brown and Deborah,” said Lina, reaching out to shake the baby’s hand. “I’ve seen y’all around. Y’all used to live at Van Dyke?”
“No, but we go to Presentation. Ain’t your mama that little Spanish lady?”
“You know my mama, huh.”
“2R is small,” Annetta said. “Tight, but that’s all I can afford right now. You got the big space.” She nodded toward Lina’s side of the floor with her lips pursed and her eyebrows raised, an expression that was almost begrudging.
“Yeah,” Lina muttered, scratching her head. “I got to do something with all this.” She smiled at Deborah’s wide-eyed stare. “Maybe something for the kids on the block!”
“Ain’t Mr. Wong tell you no guests?”
“Oh, he said a lot of things. But I’m trained to work with kids. I was just hired to teach art at J.H.S. 271. Right on time for community control—you know about community control?”
“Community control?” Annetta raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?”
“Folks here in Brownsville, we taking over our own schools. It’s going to be education for, by, and about our people—Black people, Puerto Ricans. They’ll teach young people like Deborah how to be strong and proud. You know the board of education office on Livingston Street? We occupied the hall for three days.”
It had been incredible to be there. The activists had declared themselves “the People’s Board,” and held an impromptu hearing on the conditions in slum schools. Dozens of folks from Brownsville, the Lower East Side, Harlem, and the Bronx had shown up to speak their truths. When the police surged the hall and made arrests, Lina had scrambled out—she couldn’t afford to go to jail. But the amazing thing was, in the months that followed, the city had responded to their demands. Mayor Lindsay, with the state legislature’s support, appointed a task force to create an education “decentralization” strategy for the city, starting with a pilot program in Brownsville, Harlem, and the Lower East Side. Each of these neighborhoods would elect a governing board of parents and community leaders and appoint a local superintendent to transform the neighborhood’s schools.
And of course, Brownsville being Brownsville, her people were going to take this opportunity by the reins. Brownsville wasn’t asking for no decentralization, they were asking for the power to overhaultheir broken schools.Stop saying Decentralization, start saying Community Control!That had become Brownsville’s mantra of the summer, and Lina made sure to teach it to Annetta.
“Community control. All right now. But I really got to be going.” Annetta forced a smile and headed for the staircase.
“Right, sorry about—”
“Have a good evening.”
“All right now.”
Lina returned to her apartment. She washed and chopped the cabbage and tried to light the stove, but none of the burners would ignite. She searched the cabinets until she found a match, but even then, she only got one of the burners to spark. She had to cook the cabbage first, the beans second, and the rice third, and she had devoured the whole Hershey bar before the rice finished.
When she called Mr. Wong, he didn’t pick up. “Mr. Wong, I have a question about the stove. Call me back when you can.”
It was nighttime and the windows curtainless and screenless, moths circling the overhead light and mosquitoes eyeing her from the walls. She might as well have been camping. And until Danny got his ass together and brought her mattress over, she would have to make do with piling blankets on the floor.
She hit the light, crawled on top of the blankets, and tried to imagine it. Imagineher—ashewho knew when to be safe and when to take a risk. So far, Lina had only known Callie. She rolled over on the hard floor, restless, wondering if Callie ever thought of her.
They’d been classmates in the art department at City College. Lina had always thought artists were daydreamers, but these ones spent more time striving for inclusion in Manhattan’s sophisticated circles. Lina took a more whimsical approach to her work and seesawed between a desire to laugh at their seriousness and the worry that maybe she didn’t deserve to be there.
But Callie Franklin had been different.
They first spoke in sculpture class. Callie, on her way back from the women’s room, leaned one elbow on the back of Lina’s chair andasked, with glee, if the tubular shape in Lina’s hands was “supposed to be phallic?”
“It’s coqui!” Lina protested, her hands caked with clay. “A frog from Taíno culture!”
Lina was offended, but then she began to notice the way Callie eyed her from across the classroom, hand on chin, as if studying her features for a portrait. Though all her life Lina had stared at other girls, the reality of Callie with her short blond hair, jean jacket, and flared jeans was enough to make Lina want to switch majors. But when Callie invited her to climb trees, she didn’t say no.
Central Park had many trees worth climbing, Callie insisted. Lina had never climbed a tree before, but Callie coaxed her into it, and once they arrived, they pressed their bodies against the rugged trunks, flopped over branches and pulled each other up, found perching positions on various tumors and completed their sketchbook homework ten feet off the ground.
