One day I abandoned my predictable adult conversation with Princess Margaret about her classes and her teachers and her friends to ask her if she didn’t find it difficult to ricochet between a school at which most of the students considered it a tragedy if a cashmere sweater had a moth hole and a neighborhood in which a school shooting was a commonplace. (“You know why this is such a big story?” Tequila had said when the lead in every paper was two boys shooting up a school in Nebraska. “I give you three guesses. White, white, and white.”) Princess Margaret has a fierce and dignified beauty that means boys of her own age will not see it until they mature, and an implacability that borders on torpor and that is surely a response to her mother’s pogo stick of a personality. Flatly she replied, “It’s pretty easy, Miss Fitzmaurice. You’re just two different people. One there, the other here. And you have the whole ride on the train to turn from one into the other.” I knew exactly what she meant, but I suspected even she didn’t understand the full cost of life as a social Janus, one side facing the bright white limestone of Fifth Avenue, the other the grimy bulk of the Tubman projects, in which she lived but would never now be at home.
As housing projects go, Tubs, as the kids call it, is not in the first ranks of the truly terrible, mainly because there is a core group of pissed-off women who give hell to miscreants, at least the miscreants who are young and haven’t yet taken to carrying weapons tucked into the back of their boxer shorts. The elevator that works smells like urine, which is the signature scent of housing project elevators everywhere, although in my years in social work I have never actually seen someone peeing there. Fortunately, the community room smells most of the time like frying chicken and cake because of the elderly woman who lives next door and who salves her loneliness by cooking as though her children are still at home, or at least likely to visit. I love the smells of grease and sugar; if I were to create a signature perfume, it would be called Donut Shop and would smell just like the community room but without the overlay of industrial cleanser. Unfortunately, the community room is also right next door to the laundry room, which means people are always coming in and asking us for quarters when we’re talking.
“Can’t you see we having a meeting here?” Charisse said, as she did every week to some teenage girl who would wander in with a crumpled bill in her hand, desperate to launder her low-rise jeans in advance of a big date.
Charisse had been coming to parenting class for two years, but it didn’t seem to have stuck. Her fourteen-year-old had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, her twelve-year-old was in a youth facility because he’d been caught boosting computers from the charter school, and her eight-year-old had hyperactivity disorder so bad that a cocktail of meds that would have left most kids drooling in a corner barely made a dent. The fact that he adored his older brothers did not bode well for the future.
Yet still Charisse came on Thursday nights and discussed nutrition and boundaries, communication and directed play, just as she had the year before. She’d walked out with me one night on her way to the overpriced and filthy grocery store that served the Tubman projects and told me she was taking other courses, too. Yoga. Computers. Cooking. Somewhere along the line, someone had come up with the bright idea that the residents of the Tubman projects would be enriched by learning to do things that had meaning in the greater world but none whatsoever in their own, exercise classes in lieu of health insurance, job training in lieu of jobs, parenting classes to bring up kids who would soon be dead, pregnant, or in jail.
“Let’s talk about corporal punishment,” I began.
“It’s not good,” said one woman. “Not fair. Only the black men be getting it. None of the white ones, not even that one that killed all those people and put them under the floor. How is that fair? It’s racial.”
“You talking about capital punishment,” said Charisse smoothly. “This is corporal punishment. Corporal punishment mean you be hitting the children to get them to behave.” Charisse gave no hint that she’d made the same corporal/capital mistake the year before. (She was for capital punishment, racial or not. Eye for an eye, baby, it’s in the Bible.) I’d considered changing the nomenclature, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to begin: let’s talk about whether we want to hit these kids or not.
“It depends,” said Maria, the only Latina. “Like with Gabriella, I don’t do nothing but look cross-eyed at her and she behaves. Cries, too, lots of times. But with Tomas, I started giving him a swat when he was real little because otherwise, he do exactly what he want to do.”
“You got to hit the boys,” said a woman who had four sons. “The boys don’t mind otherwise.”
“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” said Charisse, who sang in the choir at the church located in a former synagogue on Mount Ararat Avenue. “You can’t argue with the Book. The Book says it, it must be right.”
“But does it work?” I asked. My handbook says that I’m supposed to use the Socratic method, to use “intellectual investigation to bring participants to a common understanding of the limitations of corporal punishment in molding behavior.” It didn’t say anything about the Book.
“With the boys it works. The girls don’t need it,” said Maria.
“By the time they need it they too old to do it,” said another woman. “They give you this evil look. Hit you back, maybe.”
“Girls are hard,” said a woman who had three daughters and sent them back to live with her mother in South Carolina the moment they began to menstruate. Maybe they don’t have sex down south.
“Boys hard, too,” said the mother of sons.
“But are there better ways to make them mind than to hit them? And are you teaching them that violence is acceptable when you do?”
“See, you misunderstanding, Miz Fitz, because violence is one thing and giving them a tap, that’s a whole ’nother thing,” said Charisse. “We not talking about beating the children. Beating the children’s not ever the thing. You be beating on them, you go to jail, they go to foster care, that’s bad, nobody okay with beating. But swatting is different than beating. Swatting just the flat hand, just saying, listen up there, you in trouble now.”
“When you have kids, you’ll see,” said Maria.
Most of the women in the class had no idea that I was the age at which women in the Tubman projects were usually grandmothers two or three times over, often grandmothers who were raising their grandkids while the generation sandwiched between worked two jobs, Ping-Ponged between rehab and addiction, or put in a deuce at Attica or Dannemora. All of them behaved as though everything else in life was the waiting room, and having kids meant actually getting in to see the doctor. And that despite the fact that some of them were attending parenting classes in the first place because a judge somewhere had decided they’d failed miserably at parenting, had given birth to babies who had cocaine in their blood or brought kids to the ER with cigarette burns or broken bones. Charisse was raising her sister’s two girls, and while I was nattering on about healthy substitutes for soft drinks, she was worrying about whether her oldest son was having sex with his cousin. I’d met the girl, and I’d vote yes. It was also a cinch that Charisse would wind up raising her grandbaby, so maybe it made sense that she was back for a second helping of the class.
“Oh, that’ll be a pretty baby,” said one of the women, looking me up and down.
“Big baby. Look at how tall she is for a lady. That’ll be a big nice-looking child.”
“You got to see who the daddy is. Sometimes the babies take so much after the daddy, it’s like the mama was just one of those things in the hospital to keep them warm—”
“Incubator,” said Charisse.
“Could we get back to corporal punishment?”
“You got no children?” asked a pretty young woman there for the first time.
“No,” I said. When I’d just begun at Women On Women, I would have said, “No, I’m not married.” Now I knew that that would be a rebuke to virtually everyone in the class.
I don’t even have a dog. I tell people I’m allergic so they won’t think less of me. Instead I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility. The closest I’d come to having a kid was Leo, who was my godson as well as my nephew. I’d held him at St. Stephen’s Church, and when he cried as the priest poured water over his bald head, I had begun to sway from side to side in the gentle unconscious rhythm that later I’d learned to recognize in supermarket lines, waiting outside preschools. The unconscious slow dance of motherhood. I’d taken him to the carousel in Central Park, to eat ice cream at Serendipity, to solemnly observe the bears in the Bronx Zoo. Nannies would look from him to me and shake their heads. “You can tell who his mother is,” they would say, and I halfheartedly corrected them in the beginning and then I just stopped. But I knew who I was. I was the maiden aunt, that staple of fiction and movies and real life, the one who is attentive and adoring and just a little odd, who takes the kid the places and has the conversations the parents can’t or won’t. On me Meghan’s auburn hair is carroty, her muscled torso softened and elongated. She’s the color picture; I’m the sepia version. Close enough. Leo called me Bridey because he hadn’t been able to manage the back-to-back consonants of Bridget when he was small. He called me Bridey still.
“I like that kid,” Irving had said once when Leo stopped over after school, before he went away to board at Crenshaw Academy. The two of them had watched a Yankees game on the couch together, talking in that impersonal, strangely intimate way that guys talk about sports. Leo had a mashed Fluffernutter sandwich in his backpack for which he’d traded someone at lunch—Meghan would have flipped at the thought; with all her running and swimming, she was very particular about what she referred to as the fuel that fed her family, even if she couldn’t scramble an egg—and the two guys had split it companionably. “I never had one of these,” Irving had said. “They are fantastic.”
“God, you are so Jewish,” I said.
“I don’t think you should say that,” Leo replied.
“Nah, it’s okay, kid,” Irving said. “Your family gets to make cracks like that. But if a stranger does it”—he smacked his fist into his palm—“to the moon, Alice.”
“The Honeymooners,” Leo said.
“I’m impressed. Went off the air long, long before you were born. Before your aunt was born.”
“I watch a lot of old TV. Gilligan. Hogan’s Heroes. Beverly Hillbillies.”
“Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed,” Irving began to sing in his bass voice, and Leo joined in. Then they sang The Flintstones theme, and Mister Ed. I felt that sensation of physical well-being that bears a passing resemblance to lying on the beach at 3:00 P.M.
“I’m not a big fan of your sister’s, but she must be a helluva mother,” Irving said later.
Meghan is a very good mother. When Leo was a baby, she was living part-time in a garden apartment in D.C. while covering the Justice Department, and by the time he entered school she was doing weekend newsbreaks and a feature called “Real America,” about the lives of ordinary people, that took her all over the country. But she would fly for hours to get back in time for a teacher conference, and he would fax his school papers to hotel rooms so she could read them over. And Evan was a wonderful father, good at roughhousing and reading bedtime stories. There was the nice Scottish nanny who stayed until Leo started school, and the great Filipino housekeeper who’d be around forever, whose name was Mercedes. And of course there was always me. We did look enough alike to be mother and son.
And then when Leo was seven, Meghan became the morning show newsperson. There were family dinners every night at six. Eighteen months in and she was given the big job, for what at the time seemed an astronomical sum and now was slightly in excess of her clothing allowance. Her first day on the air I watched with Leo and Evan, the three of us eating oatmeal. And when Meghan said, “This is Meghan Fitzmaurice. Rise and shine!” I burst into tears. It sounded just as it had sounded when we were children, when the eight-year-old Meghan would slide from her twin bed to wake her four-year-old sister with exactly that greeting. It sounded so promising, as if this would be the day: the day to ride a bike without training wheels, to make it through the afternoon without a stained blouse and a scolding, to persuade the girl next door to like me. To meet a man. To make a mint. To prosper. To love. To live fearlessly.
But Leo had been truculent, and his freckled brow had dropped low over his eyes, as though he was wearing a visor. “She said that on television,” he muttered. “That’s what she says to me, not what she says on television.” It was as though Meghan had blurred a line that Leo had expected she would maintain, a line between work and home. Evan and I had looked quizzically at each other over his head. Finally Evan had said, “I guess it will take some getting used to.”
FOR MANY YEARS my date book had contained the overlay of someone else’s family: M to Phila for convention, E in Tokyo all week, and everywhere L. L—soccer. L—exams. L—field trip. It was not that I made them all, but I was the backup parent. “This is Bridey,” Leo said to his English teacher, his coach. The friends’ mothers all knew me, the friends liked me. There was a common perception that I was less likely to narc them out, in their words, than a parent would be. This perception was wrong, but they’d tested it only once, when I was house-sitting for Meghan and Evan and found two guys in the steam shower with a beer bong. I turned the shower on and threw them both out onto the street dripping wet. Luckily, the other guys thought it was hilarious, and whenever they saw me they all started to chortle. “What is it with those guys and you?” Meghan said once, almost as though she was jealous.
“L to JFK,” it said in my date book when I turned to the following week, and in this new atmosphere of domestic anarchy, I was stymied. Meghan had left for the Caribbean, Evan was somewhere in a hotel, and I was not prepared to be the one to tell their son that his father had moved out and his mother had become a national symbol for the degeneration of American society.
That last was not exactly accurate. First came the news stories, then the features, then the opinion columns, and not all the columns were bad. There were the pursed-lipped discussions of standards and the columns that called for Meghan to resign and those that said she should stay on but she made too much money and didn’t pay attention to Kansas and Arkansas and what one pundit called “the great swelling midsection of the country.”
But there had been plenty of columns that said that Meghan’s temper was understandable, that you couldn’t lionize people because they were hard-hitting and irreverent and then turn on them when they stepped over the line, that Ben Greenstreet would have tried the patience of St. Edward R. Murrow himself. “I stood up and cheered,” wrote the only woman columnist at The New York Times. The flip side was the antifeminist who wrote always as though the fifties had been the most halcyon time in American life (although of course she would not have been able to write a column then) and who suggested that if Ben Greenstreet’s wife had not been so busy with her own job, none of this would have happened. Meghan had read me that one over the phone. “So let me get this straight,” she’d said at the end. “He’s a jerk because she works?”
She had gotten claustrophobic in Harriet’s apartment, much as she professed to love it, and gotten angry at her forced hiatus from the show, although she had been scheduled to take a week off anyway. “I’m leaving this afternoon,” she said when she called the morning after our lunch, at least a half hour short of dawn.
“Oh, God,” I said. “I wanted you to stay in touch, but not necessarily at five A.M.”
“It’s my body clock. Along with everything else, this show has totally screwed up my body clock.” Then she gave me a list of clothes to get from the apartment for her trip. “Aren’t you worried they’ll take pictures of you at the airport?” I said. “I’m chartering,” Meghan said. Ah, the chartered jet, the black car of the air.
I couldn’t bear t
o watch the show with only the two men, both guys who seemed to think that banter was a small country in Africa. It would have reminded me of looking past the night table at Meghan’s bed after she had left for college. Pillows stacked, comforter uncreased. A couple of times I’d jumped on it just so it looked as though someone had once slept there. I’d seen my sister almost every morning for the last ten years, mostly when both of us were in New York, but sometimes when I was in Washington and she was in London, I in Philadelphia and she in Baghdad. Most of the time I was drinking my coffee and she was drinking hers, although probably people think it is water in that big mug on the desk. And every morning she greeted me with the words she used to wake me in the morning when we were kids.
She somehow made it mournful in the first few days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, and then changed it to defiant after week two, so that one columnist said she had thrown down a gauntlet for those who thought the United States was out for the count. She embellished it from time to time, said “Rise and shine, Mr. President” the morning after the inauguration and “Rise and shine, Hoosiers” the morning after the NCAA finals. If the ratings are any indication, you probably saw her every morning, too.
“Who cares?” she had said the last time the numbers came out. “The morning shows are a joke. Thank God I got that ‘no cooking segments’ clause in my contract.”
“You make ten million dollars a year,” I’d said.
“You always bring that up. You and the tabs.”
“It does mitigate.”
“I know, but who really cares about the crap we do? Diet doctors, stonewalling administration officials, shrinks. Who watches that stuff?”