Fall 2007 / Spring 2008

55 Blocks

by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

My elementary school, P.S. 44 in Rockaway Beach, had broken windows, and all the drinking fountains were stuffed with gum and ran yellow water. The cafeteria was in the basement, and lunches were ladled out of what looked like garbage cans.

“Hey, look at the big cat with the pointy nose,” I told Seime, the boy next to me in the cafeteria.

“That's a rat,” he said. “I live in the projects. I know all about rats.”

Later, in the hallways and even in the classroom, I began to notice the small eyes in dark corners and skinny tails whipping by.

When I went home and told my mother how many rats I'd seen that day, she screamed at my father, “Every day I tell you we have to get out of here now, but no, you want to wait until Rochelle gets the plague.”

“There were rats in the forest when my mother, sisters, and I were escaping the pogrom in Russia,” my father said. “Bears too, and who knew what else we heard creeping and crawling in the night? She'll survive.” He pronounced it “sur-wive.”

My two older sisters took buses to the junior and senior highs in middle-class parts of Rockaway, but because I was in elementary school, I had to go to the school within walking distance.

My mother, my father's “American Beauty Rose” from upstate, New York, who sewed clothes from Vogue patterns, wasn't taking rats sitting down. For my father's sake, she called the newspapers anonymously. Even after my father and his family were citizens, they were so afraid that they'd somehow get deported that they never filled out census forms.

A reporter did come down to P.S. 44, took pictures of the rats, and put the picture in the newspaper. Mayor Wagner closed the school for two days to get rid of the rats. When the school reopened, the rats were still there. Big politicians didn't care about us. We were in Queens, a borough of New York City, but we were the farthest from Manhattan and our school was mostly black, except for me and a few other white kids sprinkled throughout the grades.

My mother had bragged that at the turn of the century, Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell used to spend summers in a big Victorian mansion by the sea like the one we lived in. But by the time my parents moved there in the 1940s, when the subways allowed ordinary people access to Rockaway Beach, the mansions had been carved into apartments. Still, my mother loved the gables and spires on the roof of our apartment and the cement lions on either side of the entryway. A frieze of white plaster panthers bordered the lobby walls, and a stained-glass window cast its prism on the tiled floor. Even though my mother was a grocer's wife, she thought she was living like royalty. She had a dread of being considered, what she called “common.”

Then, in the early 50's, the people who used to rent bungalows for the summer stopped coming to Rockaway. They bought homes in the suburbs where they no longer felt desperate for sea air, where they could splash in backyard pools and instead of buying hot dogs on the boardwalk, they had their own barbeques. Unscrupulous landlords rented the unheated bungalows to poor people to live in year-round. Real estate agents knocked on doors. “Negroes are moving in. You'd better sell now before you have to give your house away.” In our neighborhood, hardly anyone had ever lived next to an African-American family, but they were more terrified of it than the A-bomb. “Negroes bring poverty and crime to a neighborhood,” the real estate agents insisted. Right away people sold off their homes.

Then government appraisers gave the area a low rating. “Redlining,” it was called. It meant that black families would have to pay twice as much for business loans, home insurance, and mortgages, and sometimes couldn't get them at all. As a result, many of the businesses were boarded up, so the new residents had less access to employment, and the real estate agents' prophecies came true.

When my two older sisters had gone to P.S. 44 five and eight years before me, the school had been mostly white. They were taught their three Rs, studied geography, Christopher Columbus, John Peter Zenger, and how to make fake volcanoes for science fairs. By the time I got to P.S. 44, most of the teachers had stopped teaching. My first grade teacher, Miss Dougherty, would write a few things on the board for us to copy into our notebooks. Then she'd sit down at her desk and read the newspaper through her goggle-glasses. To pass the time, we kids would make up games. We'd imitate the school alarm, and the kid who fooled the teacher into diving under her desk with her hands over her head in case a bomb dropped was the winner. Once, the boys lined up in the middle of the classroom and unzipped their pants to see who could pee the farthest and hit the radiator.

Every now and then, Miss Dougherty would look up from her newspaper and shout at us, “Animals! You're a bunch of animals! You'll never learn a thing!”

We not only never learned a thing, we forgot what we already knew. Before I went to school, my mother read to me and taught me how to write postcards to my grandmother. Once I started school, she thought I was learning in class, so she stopped teaching me at home. Laverne, my best friend, had been able to recite whole passages of the Bible from going to church every Sunday and listening to her mother read from the Bible during the week. But once the neighborhood changed, Laverne's mother had to take three buses to get to work and three buses back and had no time for the Bible anymore. Laverne began sucking her thumb.

With nothing to learn at school and no supervision, fights broke out everywhere in P.S. 44. Even the girls punched. They greased their faces so no one could scratch them and covered their hair with bandanas so no one could pull it. One girl got her cheek cut with a razor. Another was pushed down a long flight of steps. The bathrooms were especially dangerous. There were about a dozen stalls on each side, and the only concession to safety was that the janitors took the doors off the stalls. There were no monitors assigned to the girls' room, no teachers looking in. I saw three girls hold another girl's face down in an unflushed toilet bowl.

Rockaway Park, to the west of Rockaway Beach, still had well-kept, single-family dwellings with manicured lawns. To the east, Far Rockaway was flourishing too. But as our area got poorer, the big old hotels became dilapidated nursing homes or warehouses for the mentally ill or hovels where drug addicts shot up. The streets sparkled with glass, and the sidewalks cracked, and no one repaired them. Fewer and fewer resources were put into the parks, the schools.

Many kids at P.S. 44 had theatrical talent. Daryl had taught himself to tap dance, Marvis could imitate anyone's voice just hearing it once, and Claudine could twang her lips like a mouth harp. But I, the white kid, was the one who got to be The Ice Princess and Mother Spring in our class plays. Even so, the kids liked me. During recess, Laverne and her cousin, Daisy, plaited my hair in little braids that my mother couldn't unknot. They called me Sunshine and taught me to do the fastest Double Dutch, our legs moving like pistons.

Then my mother became pregnant with her fourth child who she swore was a boy?after three girls, it just had to be. She insisted on moving and would not let up until my father gave in.

“All right,” my father finally said. “For a boy, education is important. We'll move to Far Rockaway.”

My parents bought a Cape Cod 55 blocks away, and on my first day of third grade in my new school, I had no reason to believe that I wasn't going to be a star there too.

The new school, P.S. 215, was a happy-looking three-story brick building on a manicured lawn. The playground had monkey bars, swings, and seesaws. My old school was double the size and only had a concrete yard with a handball court for the older kids. The walls of P.S. 44 had been peeling and the floors had no shine. My new classroom was freshly painted in a soft yellow and the walls were hung with gold-star work. In my old school, the only thing that was hung up was a hygiene chart with categories: ears, hair, fingernails, clothing. The teachers would rate us on how clean we were. We had had single desks screwed to the floor with splintery seats. The desktops had years of words carved in them and inkwells without ink. Here there were spotless moveable desks and chairs, two kids to a desk. But most surprising to me was that all the kids were white.

My new teacher, Mrs. Frost, had me stand in front of the class. “Which one of you sitting alone would like Rochelle to sit next to you?” she asked.

No one raised a hand. The kids sitting alone hunkered down, trying to hide.

Mrs. Frost let me sit in the back of the room at a desk by myself. Every few minutes, kids would turn to look at me, then quickly look away and whisper to a friend.

The only way to get the pass to go to the pretty pink bathroom with its child-sized low toilets and doors on the stalls was to sign a book with the time you left and the time you came back. I didn't know how to tell time, so I had to keep my legs tightly crossed until lunch.

Sitting by myself in the sunny lunchroom with its mural of apples and bananas, bottles of milk, cucumbers and corn, and red meat, I listened in on what the other kids were saying. From what I overheard, I found out that not only were most of the kids friends from practically since they were born, but their mothers were good friends too.

“Mom, can't you make friends with the other kids' mothers?” I asked.

She shook her head sadly. “As part of the deal to get us out of the old neighborhood, I promised your father that I'd work in his grocery store so he wouldn't have to spend money on extra help. I have no time for friends anymore.”

She barely had time for me. In the old neighborhood, she used to set my hair with green Jo-cur lotion. Now I had to comb it all by myself with crooked parts and sticking-out places. My fuzzy hair fit in better in the old neighborhood. It amazed me the way, when the girls at this school tossed their heads, their hair swung out, then dropped back on their shoulders like shining curtains.

When we lined up in the schoolyard to go back to class, Marylee Floria, in line in front of me, began swishing her long ponytail in my face.

I made a fist. “You do that one more time and I'll punch you in the nose,” I said. I had been a pretty good fighter in my old neighborhood.

She did it again and I punched her in the nose. It began to bleed like a fountain, and she started howling. Nobody cried in my old neighborhood.

Mrs. Frost dashed over. “What happened here?” she demanded.

“Rochelle punched me in the nose,” Marylee gasped.

Nobody in the old neighborhood ever told on each other either.

Mrs. Frost sent me to the principal's office.

Mr. Waldbaum looked at me kindly. “You didn't do it on purpose, did you?” he asked softly.

“Yes, I did,” I said. It never occurred to me that you could punch somebody in the nose by accident.

It was like the report of a bullet. “She did it on purpose!” Mr. Waldbaum's voice echoed through the office. Then he told the secretary to call my mother.

“My mother isn't home,” I said with satisfaction. I thought that would be the end of that, but he said, “You'll give your mother a letter from me telling her to come to school with you in the morning.” He told the secretary to type it up. “And you,” he said to me, “you'll stay in the office until three.”

There was a big clock on the wall, but, of course, I couldn't read it.

The next morning, my mother cried as she drove me to school. “I fought for you to get out of that terrible school, but you brought P.S. 44 with you. This is a disgrace on you and our family. The principal will think we're common.”

In Mr. Waldbaum's office, my mother blurted out, “I don't want you to think we're common. My husband has his own business. My older daughter is in high school and might even go to college.” She went on and on about how her father had had his own tailoring shop in Syracuse and her mother had owned half the block of houses on East Raynor Avenue until she had lost them during the Depression.

I saw Mr. Waldbaum's eyes begin to glaze over, and I felt myself blush to the roots of my hair. He wanted my mother to shut up. I wanted my mother to shut up.

“I promise I'll never punch anyone again,” I said, and meant it too. I'd face anything rather than my mother coming to school again.

As the weeks passed, schoolwork became harder than ever. Mrs. Frost was doing pyramid division on the blackboard with estimations and little x's under the numbers that were to be carried over, while I had to count on my fingers just to add.

Then, just as I thought things couldn't get worse, Mrs. Frost announced that there was going to be a city-wide I.Q. test. I had no idea what an I.Q. test was.

The girl in front of me bragged, “My mother used to be a teacher, and she spent the whole summer tutoring me on how to do well on this test.”

“So what?” the boy next to her said. “My aunt's a teacher right now, and she's showing me what to do.”

“Why do you have to get tutored?” another girl chimed in. “We've taken I.Q. tests every year since first grade.”

Every day I worried more and more about the test that I knew nothing about.

The day of the I.Q. test, Mrs. Frost made everyone who shared a desk sit as far apart as possible. Then she handed out pencils and booklets.

“Don't open your booklet until I say ‘Start,’” she announced. Mrs. Frost looked at her watch, tapping her index finger against its face.

Sweat rolled down my forehead into my eyes.

“Start!” she called out and all the kids opened their booklets.

I stared at the first question. It was a picture of three faucets, one dripping, the others not. Slowly, I sounded out the directions. “Wh-ich one is dif-fer-ent?”

The middle faucet wasn't dripping, but I figured that the answer couldn't be that easy. Maybe I'd read the directions wrong. I sounded out the directions again and again. No, that was what it said, but maybe it meant something else. I thought about everything I'd ever heard about dripping faucets: The Chinese water torture that got prisoners to talk, the U-valve that the plumber changed, my mother turning on the faucet to make me pee before I went to bed. Even though I checked and rechecked, I couldn't find any place where I could write any of my answers in. Everybody else was writing, turning pages, while I was still stuck on the faucets. The small hand of the clock was slowly reaching the next number. I had to answer something, but I still couldn't decide what or how.

“Stop!” Mrs. Frost called out, and everyone closed his booklet and put down his pencil. I held on to my pencil so tightly that Mrs. Frost had to pry it from my fingers when she came around to collect the pencils and booklets.

Three weeks later, Mrs. Frost asked Marylee Floria to stand up. She rose, ponytail swishing.

“The test results are in,” Mrs. Frost said, “and our own Marylee Floria got the highest score in the grade.”

And then Mrs. Frost asked me to stand.

“On the other hand, Rochelle Shapiro has the third lowest I.Q. in the whole school.”

Everyone turned to stare at me.

Since I hadn't filled in any answers at all, I wondered how anyone could have scored lower than me.

At recess, kids called me Dummy and I couldn't even punch them or else my mother would be back at school. I was so depressed that I couldn't eat. I sat there with my head in my hands, my elbows on the table. The cuffs of my blouse slipped down from my wrists. The kids noticed that I had only washed my hands, not my forearms which were grimy. I had been so worried about the test that I hadn't bathed in five days, and my mother had never noticed. Then I was known as “Dirty Dummy.”

The name stung my ears and my heart.

I remembered my father telling me, “When Mama and my sisters and I escaped Russia, we fled to Germany. We had rags on our feet, rags on our bodies. It was bitter cold, too hard to wash outdoors, so we probably didn't smell any too good. From door to door we went, Mama, in Yiddish, begging for some food, a place to stay, a job. But the Germans, even the Jewish ones, spit at us, called us Schweine, pigs.”

By moving only 55 blocks, I had become a refugee like my father, unwelcome, despised. In class I continued to struggle with each word, sounding it out laboriously. Math was still a process of counting on my fingers.

There was no one at home to help me. My father came home so tired from his seven-day work week that he fell asleep at the dinner table. My mother, heavily pregnant then, began cutting back her hours at his store. But when she got home, she had to lie in bed with her swollen ankles elevated and a cool cloth on her head. My big sisters were already dating and always running out the door.

In May, a tall boy, way taller than Mrs. Frost, stood in the front of the classroom, his hands jammed in his pockets. He kept touching one shoe to the toe of the other, like he wanted to be anywhere else. He had dark hair and big dark eyes, and his skin was dark too.

“Class, this is Pedro Morales,” Mrs. Frost announced. “He's just moved here from Puerto Rico.” She had a forced smile. “Let's welcome him to our class.”

Nobody said anything. The boy next to Marylee whispered, “He must have gotten left back a million times.”

“Pedro doesn't speak much English yet,” Mrs. Frost said. “Would one of you volunteer to be his buddy and help him learn to speak our language?”

I didn't know how to tell time, I didn't know how to do pyramid division, and I had the third lowest I.Q. in the whole school, but I could speak English. My hand shot up.

“Mrs. Frost, Pedro can sit next to me,” I said. “I'll help him.”

When Pedro sat down next to me, he was so tall that his knees lifted his side of the desk in the air. I remembered a boy from Panama in my old school who spoke Spanish.

Hola, I said to Pedro, and he smiled. I couldn't wait until he learned enough English so I could tell him that even though I hadn't filled in one answer on the IQ test, there were still two kids dumber than me in the grade.

* * *

I was 11 before I could read well enough to get through a whole book. My first was Lad, A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune. Near the end of sixth grade, my teacher caught me reading the steamy Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan during Social Studies. My mother had to come up to school again.

“At least Rochelle didn't punch anybody this time,” my mother told Mr. Waldbaum.

With hard work, I managed to graduate high school with good enough grades to get into college and even go on to graduate school. But each step of the way, I thought of Laverne and my other buddies from P.S. 44, and my heart would sink. There was no way of finding out what had happened to them. P.S. 44 had been closed long ago. The blocks of bungalows had been torn down. The big summer mansion with its gabled and spired roof, cement lions, and stained-glass window where I used to live had been demolished. Looking down from the elevated train, the whole area looked as if it had been bombed.

I felt the way my father must have. “Your father feels guilty for living,” my mother once told me. And I knew it was true. Nights, in his sleep, he'd shout out the names of his dead brothers who had been killed in the pogrom. Even when he was awake, his eyes would get a faraway look, and he'd mutter, “God, what was done to them!”

And that is what I think whenever I remember Laverne and Seime and Daisy and all the other kids at P.S. 44. I had managed to escape, but because they hadn't had the opportunity to learn to read and write, they were stuck there, in some way, forever.

THE END