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Girlbomb
By Janice Erlbaum Random House
Janice Erlbaum
All right reserved. ISBN: 1400064228
Chapter One
1
Intake November 18, 1984
Where do you think you're going?
Forty-seventh Street and Tenth Avenue--that's what the lady on the phone told me. "The building has a big sign with a cross on it," she said kindly. "We'll be looking out for you."
I hung up the pay phone and hoisted my book bag. I was fifteen years old, it was ten-thirty on a windy November night, and I was somewhere in Hell's Kitchen. I'd been marching uptown since Washington Square Park, not knowing where I was going, my hands swollen and tingly from swinging furiously at my sides, my book bag denting my hip with each step.
"Yo, where you goin', miss? I could walk with you?"
No, papi. I was walking alone tonight. I was going to a shelter, which was on Forty-seventh and Tenth, and I wasn't stopping for anybody--not the hustlers hawking nickel bags, not the Italian homeboys in their tricked-out IROC catcalling me. Not even a break in stride for the two boys passing me, shoving each other and laughing, then yelling, "Hey, miss, you dropped something!"
"Hey, miss!"
You miss me yet, Mom? The way you missed Dave so much you just had to take him back? It's only been a few hours, maybe you think I'm walking around the neighborhood, burning off some steam, I'll be coming back any minute. Or maybe I went to one of my friends' houses--what were those girls' names again?
"Pssssst. Over here, girl."
I was on a bad block, a gauntlet of drunks, hookers, and bums, leading nowhere. I'd been walking quickly, but now I started really hoofing it, still trying not to out and out run, red-eyed men hissing at me from every shadow. I was almost at the address the lady gave me, but I didn't see the building with the cross. Don't panic, I thought, panicking, faint tears blurring my sight. Maybe it's across the street.
Across the street was a rotting industrial plant. Catty-corner was a diner and a church. But right here was a building covered in scaffolding, and a man approaching me from a driveway, asking, "Are you looking for someplace?"
"No," I said quickly, moving away. "I'm fine."
"You sure? Because this is a shelter here."
I stopped, took in the man's blue windbreaker and badge. His face was impassive, but his hand was outstretched.
"You need to come on in here tonight?"
I sat in a plastic chair and waited. The place looked like places look, I guessed. Linoleum. Windows that probably didn't open. A lot of taped-up construction paper on the walls, memos on bulletin boards. no hats or do-rags inside thank you. prayer group 7:30 chapel. Prayer group, I thought--Oh Christ, not Jesus.
An older woman with short gray hair and a black smock came out of her office and nodded at me. A nun. I didn't know any nuns. I thought nuns were spooky. This one appeared human. She looked like a middle-aged gym teacher in a smock.
"Come in," she suggested. I rose and followed her.
The entire inside of the nun's office was papered with missing posters, ghostly kids smiling down in smudgy, high-contrast black and white. Shameeka Wells, age 16, missing from Brooklyn since September. Ebony Johnson, age 15, missing from the Bronx since July. Ebony's fax had curled and yellowed, but her eyes burned bright from the center of a black splotch. Her picture looked like it had been drawn by a seismograph. Ebony was not smiling.
The nun sat at her desk, engulfed in this cage of missing kids. She looked concerned, and busy.
"How are you tonight?" she asked.
I was . . . How was I? Disoriented. In shock. Just two hours ago, I was heating up some lentil soup at my mom's in Brooklyn, thinking I'd eat it and maybe read some Edith Wharton before bed. Now here I was at a runaway shelter, staring at a nun's mustache and wondering where I was going to spend the rest of my adolescence.
"I'm okay," I said.
She nodded and tried to meet my eyes. "Is there a reason you came here tonight?"
I didn't want to cry, so I kept my eyes averted. "I can't live at home anymore."
She nodded again, like she agreed. "Can you tell me about it?"
"I . . ."
Where to start? I was born, and . . .
"My stepfather . . . he's crazy. He's . . . abusive to my mother. And he's creepy. And they have a baby, and he shakes the baby." I winced, thinking about Dave handling baby Jake, panged with guilt over leaving my brother behind.
The nun bobbed her head seriously, like Yes, you're right, that sounds bad. I was heartened to continue.
"So . . . my mom and him fight all the time, and he gets crazy and violent, and she throws him out--like, ten times in the past two years. And every time, it's the same. She calls the cops on him, and then she changes the locks, and we go to court to get an order of protection . . ."
The nun's nod knew what was coming next. It knew before I knew. I still couldn't believe it.
"And then she takes him back."
She was taking him back. She swore she wasn't going to do it this time, and here she was, doing it again. I told her, after the last time, "That's it. If you take him back this time, I'm leaving." She swore to me, "Jan, I'm not taking him back."
Until tonight. There I was, heating up some soup, and my mother came into the kitchen, and she said we had to talk. And I knew what that meant, so I turned off the soup, went into my room, and got my bag.
And I left.
"So here you are," said the nun, like something was settled.
I shook my head yes. I looked her in the eye. Then my eyes welled up again, and I looked at my lap.
I didn't know what else to say. The nun wasn't questioning me, she wasn't jotting down notes. I didn't have to go on with my story, didn't have to back it up with dates and details the way I did in depositions with my mother's endless divorce lawyers. She wasn't asking me for proof that I wasn't lying, or exaggerating--Yes, we know your stepfather threatened to hit you, but did he ever actually strike you? She just believed me.
"What about your father? Do you have a relationship with him?"
Ugh. Another case history, in twenty words or less: "Not really. He's abusive. He hit me when I was a kid. We don't talk anymore. I can't live with him."
Case closed. "Any other family you'd like us to contact?"
"No." No grandparents, no aunts. No godparents, no friends' fami-lies. No friends. Nobody.
Nod. She closed her eyes for a moment and drew in a breath. I got the crazy idea she was saying a prayer for me.
She opened her eyes and said, "We're glad you came to us tonight."
The fifth-floor lounge was crowded. Twenty or thirty girls were sitting or lying on thin foam mattresses on the floor of the large rectangular room, some curled up with their jackets over their heads like they were trying to sleep, which clearly wasn't going to happen with the ruckus under way. Two girls argued loudly over the custody of a Walkman; another hollered at her neighbor to move the fuck over before I wreck you, ho. Several animated conversations dropped to whispers as the nun escorted me to the supply closet and pulled out a pallet for me. I distinctly heard the word white more than once, and I knew, from a quick scan of the room, that it had to be directed at me.
"We just did head count," said the nun. "It's almost lights out. Here're toiletries for you. We'll take you over to the minors' wing after breakfast. It's in a separate building. It's a little quieter over there." She handed me a Baggie with a toothbrush, a small tube of paste, and a hotel-sized soap. I put it in my book bag, which I clamped to my side. "Have a good night."
The nun walked away, and I was left to my foam mattress. I was in the furthermost corner by the closet, right up against the wall. The girl to my right was sleeping with her coat over her head and her sneakers on; either she or somebody else had tied the laces together. How could she sleep in here? People were cursing one another out, shrieking with laughter, stomping around the room looking for the bitch who took my fucking comb. The girl on my other side gabbed in Creole to her neighbor.
I was too wired to sleep anyway. I leaned back against the wall and looked around the room. Several people looked back at me, some frowned. I lowered my gaze, dipped my head, and gently closed my eyes as though I was exhausted.
My mind raced, as it had been racing all night, since I stepped out my mother's door, What now what now what now what now. I didn't know. So far I'd been running on instinct and adrenaline, following my feet. They took me out of the apartment, down Flatbush Avenue to the D train, through cold, empty Washington Square Park, to a pay phone in Hell's Kitchen. Now we were here. What now? What now? What now?
I heard someone say, "What that white girl doin' here?"
Quiet.
Then, "Same as you, bitch, she ain't got noplace else to go."
Laughs.
Welcome to the asylum, to the first night of the rest of your life. I stayed with my eyes closed and my back to the wall until the lights went out. Then I curled up with my jacket over my head and my sneakers on, put my thumb in my mouth, and stared at the darkness for hours, until I finally fell something like asleep.
2
Outtake It was all Dave's fault.
Okay, maybe life wasn't perfect before Dave came along, but it was definitely way better. It's true that my mom had picked some crappy husbands before, including my own father, an abusive tyrant she left when I was five. My father used to scream and hit and break the furniture, and he was still better than Dave, who did all of that, plus picked racist arguments in movie lines and threatened to burn down the dry cleaner's. I mean, at least my father kept his temper tantrums in the family.
Dave Malley was crazy. He smelled crazy. He smelled like bad soup and aluminum foil, and his unfiltered Camels left murky stains on his fingers and teeth. I was introduced to Dave when I was twelve years old, and I wrote down that he was itchy. He was tall and wiry, and he pointed stagily with his cigarette as he spoke--"Very valuable skills to have, computer programming skills, very lucrative field." He smirked at me, as though I should be impressed with him, which I wasn't. My mother was. God only knew why. My mother could have done a million times better than Dave Malley.
My mother, Barb Rosen, was thirty-five years old, with a twelve-year-old daughter, but she looked like she was twenty-three. She was about five foot six, and model thin, with glossy auburn hair, green-gold eyes, bisque skin, and a wide smile, next to which lived a perfect little mole. Sometimes I sat and watched her, dressed for the office in her cowl-necked sweaters and high-heeled boots, and I could not believe how gorgeous she was. Meanwhile, I had a puffy, freckled face with a schnoz like my dad's. It hardly seemed fair.
I had, I guess, sort of a crush on my mom, in that I thought about her a lot, I wanted to spend time with her, and I wanted her to like me. Any time she was paying attention to me, I was elated. I wanted more than anything to live just the two of us, just me and my mom. I'd been waiting for this blessed arrangement since I was five years old, when we left my father in the middle of the night and drove to my grandma's in the Bronx, and my mom told me gravely, "It's just us now, Jan."
But it wasn't just us, it was never just us. As soon as we left Grandma's for our own Manhattan apartment, my mother met Joe, a droopy-eyed guy who stayed over in her room a lot. I had no use for Joe, and he had none for me. Then after Joe came Barry, the leisure-suited salesguy from New Jersey. Barry had curly hair, a gold Star of David around his neck, and three daughters, all older than me, all of whom despised me on sight. Within weeks of their first date, my mother moved us to the suburbs and married Barry, making him Crummy Husband Number Two, though he was probably the best of the lot. He was a "putz," according to my mother--"I don't know why I put up with him," she'd confide to me, age eight, any time we were alone in the car. "He lets his ex-wife bleed him dry, and those girls of his are little nightmares."
I agreed with everything my mother said. Even if I didn't know what it meant. I developed a repertoire of sympathetic responses: "No. Really? Wow. Uh-huh?" The important thing was to keep her talking to me, feeding me information, making me indispensable.
"So I said, 'Barry, you're paying your ex-wife child support and you're stuck raising them? Send them to their mother's if she loves them so much!' " She punched the dashboard lighter, impatient.
I bobbed my head. "Yep. Mm-hmm. You're right."
I prayed every day for this marriage to end, wishing on every dandelion puff, fallen lash, face-up penny, and airplane masquerading as a shooting star. Maybe Barry wasn't as scary as my own father, but he was kind of slimy, with his exposed chest hair and his incessant mom-fondling, and my stepsisters were like evil characters from a fairy tale, who delighted in pulling my index finger backward until it met my wrist. It took Mom and Barry almost three years to break up, by which point I was ten years old and didn't really believe in wishing anymore; still, I was as gratified by their divorce as if I'd arranged it myself.
My mother and I moved back to Manhattan--"Just the two of us, Jan, won't that be a relief?"--but then she immediately started dating again.
Continues...
Excerpted from Girlbomb by Janice Erlbaum Excerpted by permission.
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