“No longer a virgin,” Callie said. “In tree climbing, at least.”
It was Callie who showed her the Village, who introduced her to Dalí, to red wine and Brie cheese. Who taught her how to touch a woman, then how to touch herself. And who, once they graduated, found Lina the job with the SoHo beef steak artist.
In their three years together, Lina never took Callie to Brownsville, but there was one time, toward the end, that they ended up in Bed-Stuy. Callie and her friends wanted reefers from Nostrand Avenue. When the car reached the block and a Black man approached the vehicle, Lina wished she had a blanket to throw over her face. Instead, the man spotted her in the back seat, and his mouth twisted with amusement.
What you doing with these white chicks?said his expression.You back there like they abducted you.
As the girls paid him, Lina nailed her eyes to the back of the seat in front of her.
“Bed-Stuy is a lot more than this. We have the Club Baby Grand,”Lina mumbled as they drove away, though she hated herself for trying. “And there’s Doctors’ Row, Preachers’ Row…”
“Oh, I love Brooklyn,” the friend in the passenger seat said. “My ex took me to the Club Coronet”—and she twisted her head over her shoulder to meet Lina’s eyes, as if she deserved praise.
In the days that followed, Lina was sullen. Callie bit Lina’s neck and stuck a hand under her bra, but Lina pushed her away: she didn’t want sex. And yet she couldn’t figure out how to explain herself or pinpoint exactly where Callie had been at fault. Callie, oblivious, offered Lina the chance to live for six months in the Village; a family friend was going to London and needed someone to watch the cat. “You feed the cat, we fuck,” Callie said. “No more subway rides at two in the morning.”
An apartment all to herself in the Village, just blocks from Kooky’s Cocktail Lounge—it held an allure. But then came the day that changed everything, the day the army chaplain knocked on their apartment door at Van Dyke.
Like the foliage of Brownsville’s ash trees, which crumbled all at once in the first autumnal storm, the family, so optimistic, so admired in the community for their resilience, blew apart at the news of Lou’s death. Their mother stumbled at the Rockaway Avenue station, tripped down a flight of stairs, and broke both her ankles.
Lina took care of her mother during the four-month recovery period. She cooked asopao for her sisters. She went out each night and hunted for Danny. Never tiring, never showing a hint of her own grief—only late at night, sneaking candy button after candy button, cleaning the white strips of paper of their color drops.
After the news about Lou, she saw Callie much less. The time she did attend one of Callie’s artist salons, she drank the red wine, ate the Brie, and watched Callie laugh with a friend about a professor’s ugly affair. If Callie noticed how quiet Lina was, how distant she’d become, Callie played it cool. Lina was not usually conflict-averse, and preferred to handle any tension face-to-face, but she had discoveredthat, bold as Callie might have been with a paintbrush, Callie was a white girl. Lina could not love a person like Callie, and so she decided she would simply disappear.
Yet lying on her back with her hands behind her head on the floor of what had once been Canton Kitchen, Lina feared that she would never find her. Not Callie: theshewho would feel at home in her messy bedsheets on Livonia Avenue.
A few days later, Lina discovered a puddle of water by the radiator pole. The toilet kept clogging. Also, someone had run off with the downstairs doorknob.
She called Mr. Wong again. Then every day for the next three weeks.
He showed up on September 1, at seven thirty in the morning, with a bang on the door. After collecting the rent, he replaced the knob, accused her of flushing her sanitary pads down the toilet, and finally mumbled that he’d send a plumber.
On the first day of school, the United Federation of Teachers called a citywide strike. Brownsville’s parents tied the shoes of hand-me-down loafers and tugged at the malfunctioning zippers of Salvation Army backpacks and wondered how their kids were going to learn anything worthwhile with the majority of the faculty absent.
Early that morning at Canton Kitchen, Lina listened to the radio and shook her head at the news.
“Oh, come on,” she muttered. “On the first day of community control?”
She hadn’t officially joined the UFT yet, and although she usually supported union activism, there was no way she was going out on strike that day. Instead, she pulled on her pantyhose, her best skirt, and a half-sleeve white blouse. Catching a glance of herself in the mirror made her nervous. She had such hairy forearms and ashy elbows that Danny called her Gorilla Girl.
Just a decade earlier, when she’d been a student at J.H.S. 271, therehad been no teachers who reminded the Black students of themselves. She’d had Mrs. Solomon, Miss Neumann, and Mrs. Baron. They’d insisted all theain’ts beisn’ts and assigned chapter books about children you were oh so close to becoming if only you were blond.
Now there was not a single white kid left in the junior high, and it was about to change even further. Over the summer, Lina and others had hauled in crates of books and set up an Afro American and Puerto Rican library. A few of the other community activists had developed a plan to stand on street corners throughout the neighborhood each morning to ensure every child made it to school.
Lina arrived with a few other teachers—some new young hires like herself, some older ones who didn’t care to strike, and a bevy of new parent volunteers. Her schedule would be busy that week. Mr. Devin, the other art teacher, was out on strike, and she would be covering his classes too.
She recognized many of her teachers’ faces in the pictures on the bulletin and wondered what they’d say to her. She knew she had been considered “smart for a Negro,” if “troublesome” like the rest. Once, Mrs. Romano had sent her to detention for saying Christopher Columbus was a murderer. She was now one of the assistant principals.
Lina led her first class upstairs from the auditorium. The ones who recognized her from the Brownsville Recreation Center went berserk.
“Lina!” Walter yelled, trying to squeeze past the others to the front of the line. “Why you in the school?”
“It’s Miss Rodriguez Armstrong to you, Mr. Rodgers.”
“You a teacher?” he exclaimed. “I thought you just a camp counselor.”
Walter had been one of the more rambunctious kids at the BRC; at the age of eight, he’d gotten down on one knee and proposed to Lina. She’d told him she would accept his hand in marriage if he gave her a billion dollars.
She brought the students inside the classroom, where instead of taking their seats, they sprang in all directions like cats chasing balls of yarn, shrieking and knocking over chairs. As Mrs. Jacovitch, Lina’seighth-grade math teacher, passed down the hall, she stuck her head in the room and shot Lina a look of reproach.
