Any Place I Hang My Hat Read Free Page A

girl–style blond hair over her ears. She’d lift her chin, suck in her cheeks, and dilate her already-sizable nostrils. In the photograph, she looks not merely haughty, but also capable of exhaling two grapefruit. In all fairness, however, what look like arrogantly elevated eyebrows could be open to exegesis. Drawn on each day with light brown pencil, they never were in the same place. Their raised position might have indicated disdain or that the bulb on her magnifying mirror had blown.
    Grandma Lil’s blondness? Once every three or four weeks, she’d pocket a bottle of Beauté’s Morning Sun formula. At our bathroom sink, she tried to duplicate the Look that murmured New York socialite. But whether because of ineptitude or some missing secret ingredient, her hair always turned out the brash yellow of egg yolk rather than the pale, high-fat-content French butter blonde of the Ladies.
    Finally, one more Lincoln, Aunt Linda. Breaking stereotype, my father’s sister was a beautiful but dumb brunette. She had married an amiable, handsome fireman who was her intellectual equal. I remember as a kid, whenever they took me somewhere for the day or had me over for a weekend, my jaw would be charley-horsed afterward from smiling. I suppose I was hoping that they’d be so enchanted they’d take me back to Brooklyn to live with them. They didn’t. They never had children, so probably it wasn’t anything personal. In any case, they were only inches from Grandma Lil, in the heart-shaped Lucite frame they’d given me for my twenty-first birthday: Aunt Linda and Uncle Sparky (actually Anthony) Napolitano.
    Oh, my own curriculum vitae: By age fourteen, I sensed a change of scenery might be salutary. Chicky was still in the big house. With each visit, I grew unhappier about the lulls in our conversation. How come we couldn’t kid around anymore? With each visit, I’d get more revolted by the stink of the inmates. Eventually, whenever I climbed onto the bus to go up to Sing Sing, I was already nauseated. With each visit, I’d get more leers, more tongues ostentatiously trailing over lips, more rasping queries—“You bad girl?”—from the prisoners and their visitors, to say nothing of the guards.
    Back home, two of my good friends from school, Alida and Lucy, both smart girls, dropped out to take care of their babies. Another, Jade, left to support her family. She was earning fifty bucks a head performing fellatio on homebound New Jersey commuters who would have otherwise gotten peevish during the usual thirty-minute wait to get into the Holland Tunnel. Some other girl, a couple of years ahead of me, became paranoid from a crack overdose and wound up stabbing her sister to death.
    Around that time, my social worker, Joan Murdoch, mentioned that some of the best New England boarding schools were looking for girls from poor families. “What for?” I demanded, immediately seeing myself on my knees in a scullery maid’s outfit—minus the singing mice and a fairy godmother.
    “They want their students to get to know all different types of people—”
    “Like one of those Rich or poor, black or white, Native American, Asian, we’re all one big American family who accepts each other’s differences videos?”
    “Partly, but—”
    “They always play ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ and show five million faces, but—I swear to God—they use the same Orthodox rabbi in every one.”
    “Don’t interrupt me, Amy. They also know they’re lucky to have such wealth. They think it’s only fair to give some promising girls from low-income families the opportunity to get the same education rich girls get.”
    “What’s the catch?”
    “Well,” she said slowly, “you wouldn’t be living at home during the school year—” Sold!
    My guidance counselor at Intermediate School 495 genuinely believed I could do well anywhere, but she asked: “How about Bronx Science, Amy? I don’t know if you’d be comfortable at a place