“Here’s the deaclass="underline" you come with me, then you have to finish up at another school. You have to graduate, then you can do what you want.”
“Fine. You get me in a school, you find somewhere I can still graduate on time, let me stay here, then we can make a deal.”
“A school with black folks in it. Trust me, it’s important. You need to know who you are. Who we are. I’m not going to have a daughter of mine who goes around saying things like ‘the blacks’ all the time. Agreed?”
Tal sighs, rolls her eyes a little, but says, “Fine,” at the end of her performance.
“And no smoking. And you have to keep calling me ‘Dad.’ But in a non-sarcastic manner,” I throw in, feeling momentarily sure of myself.
“I’ll call you ‘Pops,’ ” she says, and that feels okay. “ ‘Cocoa Pops,’ ” she adds, and I get uncomfortable again.
—
Tal unpacks, and I try to make the house more livable. The painting equipment, the strewn tools, I pick them up, put them in the closet behind the stairs. In there, I find three poster-sized pencil sketches of Germantown. One of the long-vacant pool beside the Boys’ Club. One of Chelten Station, from the perspective of the street, looking down to the tracks. The last, a façade of the Whosoever Gospel Mission. They’re mine, or at least I created them.
They’re the ones that didn’t sell, the ones that weren’t purchased out of mercy by Becks’s coworkers at the gallery show she arranged. My father had them framed. He actually spent money on that. With his hammer and nails, I hang them in the living room.
As it gets dark, I wait for the crackheads to show back up. All the doors are checked, all the windows are locked, but crackheads have special piper powers and can probably flatten their skulls like mice and squeeze through the smallest cracks. Perhaps this is how they got their name. I have something to protect now, so I electric tape a steak knife to the paint roller stick.
“If you don’t want people to say racist things, you probably shouldn’t carry a spear,” Tal offers, looking up from her phone to watch me pace around with the stick. Besides that, she doesn’t seem to care much about her decrepit surroundings. After Tal does a little unpacking, she doesn’t ask for a tour, or accept my offer of one. She doesn’t ask why it’s in a state of ruin. She doesn’t ask why there’s hardly any furniture. I try to explain to her too, start to tell her the story, but she walks around the room ignoring me, holding her cell in the air like it’s some kind of ghost detector.
“There’s almost no reception in here. I’m getting, like, one bar. It’s true what they say about the ghetto,” and then she pulls her empty suitcase over to that one corner, sits on it, and goes back to texting.
I have nothing to say to my daughter. I want to say, I can’t believe you’re here and I can’t believe you exist, and I want to know all about your life, but it’s impossible to hold a conversation when the person you want a response from is furiously typing away with just her thumbs. Instead I ask, “What do you want to eat for dinner?” and this gets her to pause, look up even.
“I don’t eat red meat. I don’t eat meat that’s not organic, or at least kosher, and I don’t eat produce that isn’t locally grown. And I’m not eating anything that was frozen. I don’t play ‘reheated.’ ”
I’ve got nothing in the house. My father has a little fridge in the kitchen, sitting about two feet out from the wall, and it’s a museum of beer and condiments. I look for take-out menus in the only full drawer in the pantry.
“The best I can do is halal.” I hold the flier up. It says, Still 2 Getha in Arabic-styled letters.
“Not exactly the same team, but whatever.”
When the food arrives, the bag has napkins and plastic forks, so now we have toilet paper and silverware. Tal takes her chicken cheesesteak hoagie out of the bag, unwraps the foil, which she flattens out beneath the food as a plate. I watch her. The lettuce and tomato she takes off, and then makes a separate pile for each. Then Tal removes the meat from the bread, scooping it out with her plastic fork until it sits in a gray ball. She rips bite-sized pieces from the roll, then lays them down one by one until they form a pyramid. When Tal catches me looking, I turn back to devouring my own serving. I haven’t eaten a cheesesteak in a decade, and many a drunken doner kebab has failed to fill the void. Mine’s gone before she’s even done her preparations. So I watch her.
“I like to keep things organized,” Tal says without looking up. She says it and the words are lifeless and congealed together as if they’ve been recited on many occasions.
“Your mother did that,” I tell her as I remember. It is one of the only things I remember about her mom. I don’t remember her face, but this bit I find within me. The time I went over there, I brought fried rice. I brought fried rice because I must have said I would bring her lunch, because she was sick, and it was the cheapest takeout I could find. And she took it on her plate, then separated the peas, then the carrots, then onions, till the rice was oily and naked. I’d never seen anyone else do that, and haven’t since. Now I’m proud of myself. I have remembered something, something about my time with Cindy, that isn’t horrible. But when I look at Tal, I see her staring back at me, her fork at her side, limp and hanging in her hand like she won’t be using it.
There’s anger there and I know Tal’s going to curse me, for all I’ve done and haven’t done. But she only says, “Irv. He was a nutritionist. Before he retired and became a drunk. It’s not OCD; it’s about portion control. He taught me.” Tal pushes her foil plate away from her on the hardwood floor, sliding it carefully to nearly beyond her reach. Unfolding a napkin, she lays it over top like the sheet on a corpse. “And my mom.”
“Do you remember her? Your mother?” I ask, and I regret it completely because I’ve been asked the same question, and it is one of the stupidest acts of small talk.
“Uh…yeah?”
“She was in her twenties then, right? She was in college?”
“She didn’t go to college. That’s why for Irv, it’s, like, pathological for him. You take the Jewish ‘go to college get a good education’ thing, and then you multiply it times a thousand. It’s like, if I don’t go to college, I’m going to die. Too.”
Tal looks as if she’s about to start crying. And the combined threat of seeing a stranger cry and seeing my daughter cry for the first time is too much. I get up, find the flier for the Umoja Charter School in my jacket pocket, and stick it right under her face before the tears can come. She takes it, sighs, flips it open.
“Everyone in this is black. Why is everyone in this black? You said go to a school with some blacks, not all blacks.”
“You ever looked at a flier that had all white people on it and said, ‘Why is everyone white?’ ”
“Sorry,” Tal says, and starts wrapping up the food that’s remaining. It’s a shutdown move, meaning the conversation is over, but I start cleaning up with her and pretend we are both still united in action.
“It’s a black school,” I tell her as we walk to the kitchen, greasy paper balled in hand. “An Afrocentric-themed school. It’s not like white people can’t go there though. You went to a Jewish school, now you can finish off at a black school. Makes sense. It will help you develop a black identity.”