Read Riding In Cars With Boys for Free Online

correct them. There’d been a time when I hung out at the project by a chain-link fence, French-inhaling cigarettes and flirting with boys who said pussy and twat. My best friend Donna broke up with me over my attraction to the project. But that was a long time ago, back during the fall when everyone at Dag Hammarskjold Junior High School mistook that plane for the Russians. Since then I’d come to think that most of the people from the project were two things: poor and weird. Like Susan Gerace and her father, Anthony, whose backyard I could see from my bedroom window. Anthony dressed up in his World War II uniform to play his bugle every chance he got—like on Memorial Day, at high school graduations, assemblies after assassinations, and every other evening after dinner. He stood with Susan in their backyard and made her play “Taps,” too. If she got even one note wrong he slapped her on the ear and made her do it over until she got it right. Only then would Anthony answer her with his sad, clear high-pitched horn, putting her playing to shame no matter how perfect her notes. It seems that every night of my life I’d digested dinner to “Taps.” For this I blamed my parents. I looked down on them for landing us in the project, for not owning their own home, for not graduating high school—so they could get good jobs and afford their own home—and for never having enough money for anything, like dancing lessons or enough expensive clothes.
    So I took it as yet another kind of poetic justice, or should I say just punishment, that I ended up leaving school before I graduated and being grateful to my father for pulling some strings and jumping Raymond and me to the top of the public-housing-authority waiting list. We got an apartment in a peeling mint-green duplex house on a dead-end street called Backes Court, which, luckily, was separated from the rest of the project by about a mile. On the first floor we had a kitchen with an emerald-green floor, blue brick contact paper behind the stove, and a living room with a picture window. On the second floor were two small bedrooms, ours and Baby‘s, and a bathroom at the top of the stairs, with a Chiquita banana sticker on the door-knob. In our yard we had one dead bush and no trees.
    On our new road, kids rumbled on Big Wheels all day, dug holes in yards, which they filled with water to make mud balls to throw at each other. The mothers shook blankets from upstairs windows and sat in the sun on front stoops, their hair rolled up and drying. The few remaining fathers drove off in cars and returned once a day, which was what Raymond did, while I plopped around the house like a fat tomato. Most of my time was spent at the window, watching and wishing I’d have the nerve to ask one of those women over for tea and cinnamon sticks or something—when I wasn’t stuck doing schoolwork, that is.
    It had been arranged for me to be tutored so I could graduate high school. That meant I had to invite every teacher I’d formerly sassed into my impoverished teenage home decorated in cast-off furniture that had made a detour to my house on its way to the dump. In other words, I ate crow as my teachers wiped their feet on my welcome mat and sat in my Flintstone furniture—old stuff that belonged to an aunt and had been re-upholstered hard as rock. When I handed them my meticulously done homework assignments, not one of them, not even O‘Rourke, who chain-smoked and smelled vaguely of booze, ever made a crack, which made me feel pitied instead of relieved. I never had to hear I told you so, but I did have to put up with my home economics teacher’s conversation—like when Bobby Kennedy got shot and she objected to there being no day off from work like there’d been for Martin Luther King. She said it was “just because Martin Luther King’s black.” I figured that was a good enough reason, when you considered how many black leaders we had in the country, but I kept my mouth shut