Hail Marys

Back when I was in fifth grade, me and Ursula liked to sit on the monkey bars to eat. One time she took me to the bodega on 97^th and Lex and we bought sugar cane and some fruit I never seen before. Ursula always sits at the top of the bars, swinging her legs. I’m too scared to go up that high—but I’m better on the swings than her. I bit into the sour, mushy stuff—“What are these called again?” I asked her.

“Quiñepas—how many times I gotta tell you? Damn.”

I’m supposed to be at Hebrew school but instead I’m in a playground my parents don’t know about in the middle of the projects. I don’t like the kids at Hebrew school. They’re white and go to private school or P.S. 6, which might as well be private school. Plus my Torah teacher makes God sound like an asshole.

So I check out streets my parents never see, try smoking Kools, follow Ursula to church, helping make up stuff she could confess. I make bets with her and her sister Magali on how many Hail Marys they’ll get even though I don’t know what a Hail Mary is. We watch the men play basketball in the neighborhood court, just a slab of concrete with a metal hoop at one end. The drug dealers with long, scraggly hair or afros wider than tall stand around in army jackets, waiting. Moms call their kids from windows way up, holding babies close to the metal bars.

But me and Ursula, we hang on the monkey bars. That’s our place. These kids come up, say, “yo, whassat white girl doing?” I don’t know them. They don’t go to my school.

Ursula, she tells them we just hangin, but they don’t like it. They want me to go. I know Ursula, she’s my girl, so I get up, with my bag of fruit, and I figure she’s coming, too. I wait for her to climb down while the kids call me honky and cracker, and four-eyes. Four-eyes hurt worst of all. But Ursula ain’t moving.

“C’mon, Ursula, let’s go.” I’m looking at her all wide-eyed, jerking my head in the direction of the street.

“Go where? I ain’t gotta go nowhere wit’ you.”

“But you said—“

“Girl, I didn’t say nothin.  You better go.”

I couldn’t believe it. She stayed behind, let me walk out the projects alone. Didn’t feel so safe anymore, now that I didn’t have a Puerto Rican escort.

Next day, Ursula tried to tell me how she did it for me, but I didn’t get it and I wouldn’t hang out with her again for a few months. I don’t know if Ursula said any Hail Marys next time she went to St. Francis—I went back to Hebrew school with the white kids.

These days if I come uptown I sometimes like to take a few minutes to watch the trains come up out of the ground at 97^th Street crawling slowly up the hill and onto Park Avenue. I stand at a dividing line. At my back are the old doorman buildings where we used to think all the rich people lived—not people rich enough to live in a house, but people with lots of rooms, more than one bathroom, and a maid. Down the middle of the avenue are wide medians planted with trees, bushes, ivy—tulips in the spring. A couple kids I knew used to go there at night and cut all the tulip heads off, leaving just stalks and leaves. It always made me sad. And I always wondered what they did with the flowers, because there weren’t ever any petals around after. In front of me I can see clusters of tall red brick buildings on the horizon, the projects, and rows of smaller buildings still black with soot of a bygone era. Here and there steam or smoke rises in a plume, and there are even clothes on a few lines strung between windows, pink shirt or white sheet flapping. Past all this is an open space where the Harlem River must be sneaking through between the boroughs, and after, Upstate and New England. Straight up through this neighborhood the trains run between walls of chain-link fence.

My daughter thinks this view is depressing and that all the people who have a train outside their windows feel sad all the time. It’s so different from the way she lives. I want to believe she’s wrong, but somehow I can’t feel hope when I remember the apartments of the kids I knew when we were coming up.

It’s been a while since I’ve been here. I didn’t notice, mostly, when I was little, the change in this part of Manhattan. I just kinda lived each day—I still do things this way, only now it’s called a lack of forethought. I came up to Park and Madison for Hebrew school, but it didn’t feel like my neighborhood anyway. Now as I look out at the tracks, I am a confused jumble of nostalgia and relief.  I don’t see my middle-class life there on Park and 97th. From my bag I pull out the bit of newspaper I have folded many times over, making it so small I have had to keep it in the little lipstick pocket so I don’t lose it.  I smooth it out and check the address of the funeral home again, just to be sure. 415 Lenox Avenue. I button up my jacket against the fall breeze and start walking uptown.

One day, must have been the year we turned eleven, I was bent over volume 3 of Mah Tov, trying to read the story, in Hebrew, of Jane and Dick and their visit to Tel Aviv, when Ursula appeared over my shoulder. “Girl, what you doin’?” she asked. She put a foot up on the half-wall I was sitting on in the playground.

“Nuthin, jus homework.” I was happy to stop, hating everything about having to do this stuff, going to extra school two nights a week. At the age of twelve I was annoyed by everything. I put the book back in my army bag. Besides, Ursula sometimes made fun of the Jewish thing. Once she started feeling my head, and when I asked her what she was doing, she was like, “Oh, snap—Magali said ‘Rachel has horns.’” That was the first time I had heard that.

“Get the fuck off, stupid.” I smacked her arm away. I squinted up at her, frowning at her and the sun and feeling jus’ tired. She rubbed her arm, but then she bent down to dust her Pumas, like it hadn’t hurt.

Her legs were shiny and smooth in her pantyhose, and her shorts were tight. I wasn’t allowed to dress like that. “Well, come on,” she said, “why don’t we go do somethin? James and Adam and them are at the pizza parlor.”

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