Another Brooklyn Read Free Page B

the streets alone, searching for my mother. Would her hair be gray now? Still in anAfro? Would she be skinnier than I remembered her or had the years added a weight to her like the old Italian and Irish women who had moved away, who had once walked our streets slowly, heavy-breasted and waist-less. Did she still call Clyde’s name in the night, curse my father, walk through the land that used to belong to her, walk down to the water and believe it belonged to her still?
    Come with me, I said to my brother again and again. Let’s go look for her.
    Before Sylvia, Gigi, and Angela were mine, they arrived at our public school each morning, far away from me. They called to each other across the yard. They linked arms and laughed. They curled into each other to whisper when the teacher’s back was turned. Before I knew their names, I knew the tiny bones at the back of their necks, the tender curve of their hairlines. I knew each Peter Pan–collared shirt and turtleneck they owned. I knew Angela’sscowl as she waited in line in the lunchroom. I knew Sylvia’s bronze arm draped around Angela’s waist in the school yard. I knew Gigi’s voice, a waxed-on Spanish or British or German accent as we pledged in the auditorium.
    Every teacher who entered the school yard loved them best, the rest of us sinking into invisibility.
    Before they were mine, I stared at their necks, watched their perfect hands close around jump ropes and handballs, saw their brightly polished nails. As they grabbed each other’s arms and bounce-walked down the hall, I was sure no ghost mothers existed in their pasts. I truly believed they were standing steadily in the world. I watched them, wanting to have what they had—six feet planted. Right here. Right now.
    That year, before we all grew to one height, Sylvia was the tallest. The day we finally became friends,Angela wore a too-small coat, her thin pale arms protruding from the sleeves. My own jacket was also too small, so I met her eyes first, hoping she’d see we came from the same place—a place where we cornrowed our hair and were unprepared for how quickly winter settled over this city.
    The sadness and strangeness I felt was deeper than any feeling I’d ever known. I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone? And now the four of us were standing together for the first time. It must have felt like a beginning, an anchoring.
    I held my nearly flat book bag with both hands.
    Why do you stare at us like that, Sylvia said. What are you looking for?
    Years later I’d remember how shaky her voice was, how I wondered if it was the cold or fear that made it quiver. And in it, there was the slight lilt of Martinique, an island as foreign to me as the Bronx.
    Sylvia came closer to me. Really, I’m asking what are you seeing? When you look at us? I’m not trying to be mean.
    Everything, I said. I see everything.

    You’re the one without a mother, aren’t you? Sylvia touched my cheek, her mouth so close I could smell her wild cherry Life Saver.
    No. That’s not me.
    It was years before the woman with the hijab. Years before the silence and afternoons of watching ivycascade down from a windowsill, a pen stilled in a thin dark hand.
    The sky was overcast. The school bell was ringing. All around us, children were running toward the entrance. Sylvia took my hand. You belong to us now, she said.
    And for so many years, it was true.
    What did you see in me? I’d ask years later. Who did you see standing there?
    You looked lost, Gigi whispered. Lost and beautiful.
    And hungry, Angela added. You looked so hungry.
    And as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home.

    Months later, I would learn that Sylvia had arrived the year