heard of anyone getting a strike in kickball,” Billy Danniman, standing on deck, sneered. In algebra, he wound up in the seat behind Diane Jernigan, who gloated to him about how psyched she was that she and Victoria had so many classes together, while he seethed with envy: Diane Jernigan, that bitch, last year she got a whole bunch of girls to gang up on me because I said I hated Kiss. At lunch, he took his place at a table with a kid from his neighborhood named Gerald and Gerald’s friends, who passed the hour talking about an upcoming Star Trek convention they were all really stoked about. He spent most of the period surveilling the cafeteria for someone else to sit with tomorrow; there was his lab partner from science, George Lincoln, but George was black, and the black kids all sat together at three tables on the far end of the cafeteria.
The one class he was looking forward to was art—he’d been told that freshmen learn how to develop film and print photographs, which he’s always wanted to do. There was no mention of this, however, from Miss Blasio, who used up the class drilling them on which solvents counteract which kinds of paint. Miss Blasio was six feet tall, with brown hair halfway down her back and long, red-painted fingernails. Robin became mesmerized by the way she regularly let a thick ribbon of hair fall in front of one shoulder, then, with a purposeful toss of her head and the back of her hand, flipped it behind her again. It was hypnotic—hair sliding around the left shoulder, then flip; then around the right shoulder, flip. He timed it—one flip about every four minutes. Every ten minutes or so she gathered the whole mop of it in the back, made a ponytail in her fists, and then let go. Whoosh. Next to Miss Blasio’s name in his notebook he wrote “a.k.a. Cher.”
Already group guidance is an improvement on the day. The chairs are in a circle, and Cortez has instructed them to sit anywhere they want while they rap about expectations versus reality:
“School sucks.”
“I hate it when people make fun of me for liking school.”
“I’m sick of all these uptight teachers telling me what to do.”
“I’m a Christian, and I find it very hard to feel comfortable because kids act like that’s not cool.”
Cortez writes, “Expectation: We’re all in this together. Reality: Conflicting values.”
Robin gets the nerve up to raise his hand. “I was told that we’d be doing photography, you know, in art, but she didn’t even mention it.”
Cortez nods. “We can check into that. Who’s your teacher?”
“Miss Blasio,” he says, then rolls his eyes and adds, “Cher.”
A few big laughs from around the circle. His face turns red—embarrassed, until the satisfaction of having told a successful joke settles in. He even dares an imitation of Miss Blasio’s hair toss—flip, flip—which grabs a few more approving chuckles from his classmates. Cortez himself breaks into a wide grin, though some sense of propriety prevents him from actually laughing at a teacher’s expense.
Robin remembers his list of Chances: one of them was to tell jokes in class. This is the first victory of his high school life. For a few hours, it erases all of the day’s defeats.
A well-placed sarcastic comment, out of earshot of his teachers but loud enough for those in the desks around him to hear, becomes Robin’s sole release—the one chance he successfully takes again and again, until it isn’t chancy at all, until it is one of the few times that he doesn’t shrink from the sound of his own voice. Mornings are gloomier since Victoria’s proclaimed that she is no longer accepting rides to school from her brother—“I’m not gonna sit around and wait for him to get busted for drugs,” she announces to Robin—thereby effectively cutting off Robin’s access to Todd. Most days, he gets home from school and for no reason he can articulate is so lethargic and exhausted that all he can do is collapse in front of the TV. He disappears into the heated storylines of General Hospital and The Edge of Night until his mother gets home from her part-time job at the Greenlawn Public Library. Fatigue takes root in his joints—from his knees to his jaw, as if he’s been holding himself stiff for hours. When his mother asks him how the day went, he scavenges for something he can tell her, something she would appreciate. He doesn’t tell her Billy Danniman called him a fag in gym class after he dropped a fly ball; she would only urge him not to dwell on it. He leaves out the disappointment of yet another awkward, on-the-fly conversation with Victoria—the only kind of interaction they seem to have anymore; his mother would simply remind him that his future is far away from Greenlawn and that adolescent friendships are never the important ones in life. He certainly doesn’t tell her when the best thing that happened all day was Todd sending a halfhearted “Yo” his way as they passed in the hall (leading to a kind of hopeful reverie on Robin’s part that yes, in fact, he and Todd might actually hang out sometime). So instead he tells her what he’s reading in English because this delights her most of all. Dorothy rereads for herself whatever he’s been assigned so that they can talk in detail about the story. Books—stories—are what his mother appreciates above all else.
One day toward the end of September, Dorothy lets Robin miss school. He’s been waiting for this: their City Day, one of the days every few months when they disappear from Greenlawn together. They’ve been doing this for years, dressing up in their most stylish clothes and traveling by bus through New Jersey towns that bleed together unremarkably, onto the Turnpike, where the first views of the New York skyline are revealed, and into the eerie glow of the Lincoln Tunnel. They hurry through the crowds at the Port Authority Bus Terminal into one of the Checker Cabs that line Eighth Avenue like chariots for visiting royalty.
Robin gives instructions to the cab driver—“Take us to the Museum of Modern Art, on 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas”—and Dorothy tips generously, her bracelets jangling as she pulls bills from her purse. She is most animated on these days, an enthusiastic tour guide, telling Robin about her adventures in the city in the early ’60s, when she graduated from Smith College and found work as a secretary at a publishing company. She tells him about the well-dressed crowds strolling Times Square at 2 A.M., about drunken authors at book parties, about the handsome men who courted her over coffee at the Automat. She shows him the apartment on West Twenty-Third Street where she and Clark first lived after they were married, where Robin spent the first four years of his life. She tells him things on these trips that he never hears her telling anyone else—punctuating the details with dramatic exhalations from her Pall Malls—which leaves him feeling uncommon, a coconspirator, the keeper of secret myths.
And her stories change: today she mentions a surprise appearance by Miles Davis at the Five Spot in 1963; the last time she told this story it was Sonny Rollins in 1962. Robin used to correct her, but Dorothy only laughed off the inconsistencies. Now he has come to welcome the way her stories shift; it is the excitement of them, and not the facts, that he values. She encourages him to make up stories of his own. A woman in sunglasses and a fur coat hurries past the park bench in Washington Square where they are sipping coffee. “Who is she,” Dorothy asks, “and what is she up to?”
Robin takes a moment to think, and a tale tumbles forth: she is a jet-setting fashion model who dances all night at Studio 54, but deep down she’s miserable, she’s spent all her money on champagne and caviar and cocaine; now she’s broke, all she has left is that fur coat, and she’ll be trading that in at the Ritz Thrift Shop any day now. It feels like ESP when he does this, but instead of reading someone else’s mind, he’s tuning in to transmissions from some alien part of his own, where ideas are always buzzing, where static can be translated into stories.
The tragedy of the City Day is always the aftermath, when he sits across from Ruby at the dinner table and absorbs her jealousy at having been left behind, or argues with Jackson about why a symphony at Lincoln Center is more interesting, more relevant, than a playoff game at Yankee Stadium. Even his mother loses her sheen in the days that follow, as she returns to shopping at the A&P and telling his father to remove his feet from the coffee table and correcting Robin’s language whenever, God help him, he slips into slang like some common New Jersey teenager.
A Sunday night at the beginning of October: Clark is dragging Dorothy to a World Series party with Uncle Stan and Aunt Corinne.