Even I can see that he fits ill among his class. Whether that has to do with his heritage, or his haircut, I truly can't say. He and the other white kids watch the rest of their classmates warily, even when they play or do group activities; but Bernhard watches everyone. His eyes are steel blue and his hair is a thatch like hay that my grandfather would have called well-cured. He is a beautiful boy.
I don't pick him up from school anymore; since he came into third grade I have made him walk home, as the other kids do. I confess that I give him mixed signals.
"Are you home so early?" I say, with an expression of annoyance. "Why don't you play on the block with your friends?"
I know the answer so well, he doesn't tell it to me anymore.
"You won't make any friends if you always come straight home," I admonish him, busying myself with my work so I won't have to look him in the eye, betraying that I am overjoyed that he is home, that he comes back to me in preference to the skateboarders and loiterers on the block.
Occasionally a child from his school will come for him--"Can Bernhard play?" He looks at me, then with the same look as when we are at the doctor, bored and resigned and willing only because it will please me as something good for him. I nod eagerly with a bright smile. They go out as I continue to work; then I hop to the corner window and hover in it, watching him down on the street, terrified and cross and desperate for him to come back and determined that he shall not until five or half past.
But if no one comes for him we walk to the grocery store on Frederick Douglass and 111th, round about 5 in the evening. I let him choose the produce and the dessert. I sometimes think about eating meat again, wondering if he is deficient in iron, but I hate to contaminate him that way and I buy beets instead. He doesn't mind beets so much if I compromise and cook them in a lot of butter.
I remember Germany--I'm going to move there when I'm old enough. I liked Opa's farm but I liked the city, too. I hope I'll inherit the farm--then I'll rent it out and go there for a little while in the summer, and live in Munich the rest of the time. I like the coffee there and the mountains. I mean the mountains in the rest of Germany--there aren't mountains in Munich.
Munich is where my aunt and uncle live with my cousins Gretl and Heinrich and Nathan. Nathan is older but he was at their house once when we visited. They think New York is great but they've never been here. I told them the food is better in Germany and the weather and everything. They said, but you have Disneyland and the Zoo! Disneyland is in California, I said. It's easier for you to get to EuroDisney than me to Disneyland. If they really did come to live here, I don't know what I'd do. I'd trade places. That's what I'd do.
Not being used to meat, he got terribly sick on a bratwurst when we visited my sister in Munich. But he kept wanting another. I compromised by letting him try some coffee and some beer. He didn't like the beer but the coffee was a hit. Fortunately, he hasn't asked me for it since we returned home from our visit.
In the winter, we go to my best friend Maisie's house in Westchester, for Christmas. Maisie and I met during a study abroad trip to London, when we were both in university. She married a British doctor, Cosmo, and they have a lovely home. They have children, not Bernhard's age but it's a lovely family atmosphere all the same. I like Cosmo. He is very good with Bernhard, a very warm man. They always say that they mean to come visit us in Harlem over a weekend. I keep telling Bernhard that, so he will realize how lucky we are and that people want to come here from everywhere.
Germany has woods, real woods, better than Central Park because there aren't any statues or sidewalks or buildings unless it's someones house. The woods there would be scary at night, but not because there are junkies or perverts; because there are animals, and if there were such things as trolls and witches, that's where people believe they are. And plus you would feel more lost there than any other place in the world. I wouldn't go to Central Park at night but it's not because I would get lost, I could find my way out easy even in the dark, and there definitely wouldn't be any trolls or witches living there.
Maisie often asks me whether I'm seeing anyone, and why I don't, and wouldn't it be good for Bernhard if I met someone, isn't that reason enough to try? I say to her, does it look like Bernhard needs a man to get by? He doesn't look like it--but maybe he does need it. Maybe he would start to smile. He only smiles when he wins a game. We play chess together sometimes, for example. He likes to watch the men on the sidewalk with the boards balanced on their knees. He wants to learn dominoes, as well, but I don't know how to play it.
The men in the coffeehouses in Germany play chess, sort of like the men on the sidewalk here, but they only play checkers. Chess is a lot harder, you have to be a lot smarter to play it. I'm pretty good at checkers, and at chess, also. Maybe when I get older I can play with them. But I'm going to live in Germany, not here, so I guess I won't play with them probably ever. I could beat them even now, I bet, if I could play with them now, because I'm pretty good. I always beat Mother. I never let her win. I never give up a game, ever.
It's nearing Christmas time and Cosmo stops by for a drink one evening. His business brings him more and more into the city. Bernhard and he play chess. I make a couple of G and Ts after they play. Bernhard has won, frowning ferociously as he takes his leave.
"Why don't you find him a nice father?" Cosmo teases.
"No one can possibly give Bernhard as much as I do," I say, also feeling a bit ferocious for a moment. Cosmo clinks my glass, to settle me down.
I hate the smell of fried chicken. In the mornings when we walk to school I can smell it coming out of the Wonder Chicken & Pizza, which is across the street from us, on Malcolm X Boulevard--or Lenox Avenue, like Mother calls it--whatever, the sign says both. I hate that smell. When it's cold out, Mother takes a deep breath and says, "Mm, I'd never want to eat it but doesn't it smell good?" The people sitting outside with greasy boxes, gobbling out of their fingers, stare at her when she takes those deep breaths through her nose, with her eyes closed. I hate it. I walk faster, so she has to catch up with me. I hate that smell. Schnitzel is way better and you get it with yellow pasta, not a big white cotton-ball biscuit. I sat on a biscuit once by accident, at lunch. It got a grease stain on my butt, big and round. I'd rather have sat on a bench with wet paint. I'd rather get swirlied than have to eat any of the crap they sell at Wonder Chicken in those white square boxes. If anyone tried to make me eat it I'd throw up, all over him.
There is nowhere like Harlem. You feel it as soon as you come down 110th from Amsterdam and turn the corner onto Frederick Douglass. A wave of heat will hit you, or the smell of fried chicken and biscuits, or a man who looks just like one of the great jazz giants. It's something you just know, even without those things. The world at that corner has changed, grown smaller, but it glistens with storied magic. And to walk northward on these long boulevards, thinking of all that passed there and will continue to pass ,the stories of hope and human emotion, the arts, the social unrest, what more could you ask for the soul to enlarge? Harlem is a place for the soul.
Of course I wish there were more amenities--there is only one organic market and a very few good restaurants. There is nowhere to have a drink, no shopping or salons. Not the kind I would go to, at any rate. You still pass a lot of loafers referring to each other with horrible, degrading epithets. I was alone--Bernhard was not with me--one day, when I heard it. I stopped and turned around, and I said to the tall young man--he looked fairly young but it is so hard to tell--"How dare you use such words to refer to your own people? Those are words of guilt and hatred, and they will never cease to haunt you if you keep them alive. Each time you use that word is a curse on your own children." He stared at me as I were on the television. But you must say things to such people. Ignorance is the only sin and being oblivious is the greatest crime.
Sometimes I wonder if Bernhard actually hates it here. His face sometimes frightens me; I wonder whether he hates me for living here with him. What will this place be in another five years' time? What renaissances may occur, one after another, before our eyes? I look round us and see possibility. I don't know what Bernhard sees. I am just as glad that Maisie doesn't bring her children down for a visit. Harlem is a place for lone spirits, solitary souls. Maisie's life is too controlled, even her children are too controlled. She would not appreciate it here at all. I want Bernhard to be his own soul. When I was younger, in university, I loved a man who introduced me to jazz, and black American poetry, and he showed me that freedom of spirit that I craved, the transcendence of the crucible that the music and the poetry express, and I decided that I must go there someday. When I found I was going to have a baby, I knew that I must raise my child, together with myself, in that very place.
Once there was another man watching the old men playing checkers. He was tall and he had kind of a big face--I mean like normal but just bigger than lots of other men, his eyes looked like they got lost in his face. I don't know, anyway, he was wearing a green coat and a hat and his hair was kind of long and curly and he had a big messenger bag. He was watching, like me, only I was watching him. I was watching him because he seemed like he might be German. I don't know how I knew it. He looked like he knew how to play checkers. He was watching their hands move. And his head would go to one side and his eyebrows came down and then he'd smile like he made the move himself. And then he saw me watching him and he smiled, again, only really embarrassed sort of, like he had said something embarrassing by accident. He ducked his head at me, and then he walked away.
I bet we could play each other if I lived in Germany.
I wish Mother would get married again so I could run away and everyone would blame it on the evil stepfather. But she doesn't go on dates, and since she works at home, the only man she ever sees is Cosmo. He comes over a lot now--he started right before Christmas. Most of the time I don't even talk to him, I just leave them alone. They like that better anyway, it seems like. Mother used to make me play chess with him but she doesn't anymore, thank God. I just stay in my room and I think about stuff--like that guy, who I'm really sure was German.
I actually followed him one time. A different time, after the time I saw him watching the checker-players. I saw him walking down the street. I recognized his hair sticking out around his shoulders under his cap. he had sort of long woolly hair, like a girl's. I followed him to 114th Street. He went in a restaurant and then came out to sit at a table outside. He asked for coffee, I guess, because that's what the waitress brought him, in a little pot. And he looked embarrassed at her, and happy, and he just drank his coffee slowly and stirred and and kept looking over his shoulder . It was dead quiet on the street--not many people even walking around; it was a cloudy day. I got really mad. I wanted to hit him. He didn't belong in Harlem, but he kept staying in the neighborhood. It wasn't the right place, and he looked like he couldn't even speak the same language. I thought, what are you doing
here? Go back where you really belong.
http://nyc.everyblock.com/restaurant-inspections/by-date/2007/12/3/632644/
watching scary movies, the girls shrilled and the guys cracked wise; everyone drank white russians and microbrews. one girl asked for a martini, in a coy whisper—she got it, courtesy of the host's chivalry. the puppy gnawed on people's fingers; it also ate the back of one girl's earring—the same girl who needed a martini in a kitchen stocked with kahlua and leffe.
