You are
sitting on a back stair, underneath your apartment window, and you
are watching
Darcy, the fifteen-year old across the complex, carry her new baby
to
her
mother’s car. She holds the bundle against her chest
uncertainly; her mother
has to
readjust it twice. You are thirteen, and you sat with her at lunch
several
months back,
before she had begun to show, and when she fretted about a broken
condom, you
had thought her worldly.
But now you
are thinking about socks. They are selling them at school to
raise money
for the basketball team, and everyone is buying them. Your friends
ordered them
weeks ago, and the sale will end in three days, but your father
had
scoffed at
the idea of ten-dollar socks, and you do not have your own cash.
Your father
knows how to go without, and he does his best to teach you.
He
emigrated
from the Soviet Union, a place that no longer appears on the maps
hanging on
your classroom walls, and your mother has told you that before the
move, he was
training to be a doctor. In America, he manages the Dominos
on
Milwaukee
Avenue, and you eat pizza twice a week.
The socks,
designed by the cheerleading squad, are white and purple: school
colors.
Your friends are planning to wear them to the basketball games
this winter,
to kick their
shoes high into the air when the team wins. Yours will be the
only feet
in grey or
black or white.
Darcy stands
by and lets her mother strap the baby into its carrier. Her
hair
is unwashed;
you can tell by the way it slicks down against her forehead. You
rarely
see her at
school now, and never at the parties. She is disappearing, slowly, into
her
new life.
You ran into her three weeks ago at Target – she was with
her mother and
you with your
father, and all four of you passed by the aisles with the lip glosses
and
the nail
polishes and convened, instead, at the Clearance aisle. You had
looked down
at your feet,
somehow embarrassed. You had pictured yourself at forty and
promised
yourself that you when you had children, you would let them buy
their
clothes at
Marshall Fields.
What irks you
the most is that you are not poor – your father is not poor
–
but he
insists on living as if he is, saving his pennies for a rainy day,
withholding the
money for an
ice cream cone because a half-gallon costs less. He had a shock
when
he came to
America, your mother told you once: back home, there were lines
and
frustrations,
but there was food, even without cash in hand. He had never held
a
credit card,
had no understanding for the intricacies of a mortgage. You do
not find
this relevant
to your own situation. You want the socks.
And more: you
want your father’s accent to be like the other fathers’.
You
want your
mother to fry hamburgers and bake apple pie. You do not want to
hear
stories of
harassment, of a society who watches their mouths. You want tales
of
football
heroism; you want your father to have played baseball in the park. It
occurs
to you from
time to time that your father is from a country that does not even
exist,
and this
irritates you somehow, though you cannot put your finger on it
You watch the
car pull out, see Darcy staring out the window, her mother
navigating
the wheel. You had seen her at the mall, a few months back, when
her
stomach was
still so large that she leaned backward when she walked, and your
friend Becky
had smirked behind her hand. You regarded the curve of her belly,
and
what you saw
was not the horror of a wasted youth, an unwanted baby, but rather
the simple
horror of the protrusion itself, its own immediate ugliness. You
had
looked down
at your own stomach and given silent thanks for its flatness.
Your
belly is flat
as a cheerleaders’, though you did not try out for the squad this
year.
You watched
some of their practices outside on the back field after school,
transfixed by
their relative celebrity. Their poms flew through the air, purple
and
white, school
colors.
Like the
socks.
Your father
will be working until 10pm tonight, and he will come home and
stuff pizza
and breadsticks into the refrigerator, and he will look tired.
You are not
talking to
him this week; you are deliberately fuming, staring at him with what
you
hope is a
wounded expression. But you know that he will not change his
mind. You
purse your
lips now, and your eyes tear. And though years later you will
wonder
that you did
not cry for your father’s misery or for the depressing
after-image of a
fifteen-year
old mother, you do not. You cry for the socks that you will go
without.
