The Yoga of Max's Discontent Read Free Page A

of their lives in an airless one-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of thebuilding. The brown bricks hadn’t seen a single coat of paint in the ten years Max had been gone. With its furrows, cracks, and chipped corners, the building looked like a body ravaged by cancer. Screams ripped intermittently through the quiet morning.
    â€œYou best walk away, bitch.”
    â€œMaria, open the fuckin’ door.”
    â€œWhatchu think of yourself?”
    Sophia had hated those screams; the gunshots; the kids that called her names—“white bitch,” “snow bunny,” “nerd”—tore her overcoat and messed up her hair when Max wasn’t around; and just about everything else about the projects. Max had swaggered and strutted, rapping, shooting hoops, shoplifting, getting into petty fights—anything it took to fit in. His mother had been different from both of them. She had developed a steely toughness, an indifference to the world crumbling around them. When the gangs started shooting at one another in the alley behind the building, she would clean their apartment vigorously. While Max and Sophia covered their ears and flattened themselves against the wall, she’d scrub the chipped legs of the ragged brown sofa, wipe the cinder-block walls, mop the floors, and move and rearrange the lone table and three chairs in the living room again and again. She’d stop when the shooting stopped and continue with her cooking or sewing as though nothing had happened.
    Only when she spoke of Max’s and Sophia’s futures would her face liven up. “These two will become something,” she’d tell her friends in the courtyard every evening before the dealers took over the place for the night. Back home, she’d slowly repeat the names of private schools—Horace Mann, Trinity, Dalton—she’d heard of from people she cleaned houses for in the city. She’d construct tantalizing images of them. Instead of the broken windowsand smoky stairwells of PS 65, where they went, these schools had swimming pools and ceramics studios. You didn’t have to lay a thick coat of Vaseline on your face each morning to prevent scratches in fights, nor did you hold your stomach for hours in fear that some kid you had a beef with would slash your face with a razor blade if you went into the dark bathroom. She’d been pulled out of school in fifth grade in Greece, but she’d dreamed her kids would go to the best schools in America. And they had. She just wouldn’t be around to see them make use of it.
    The building stirred to life as the sun rose. Tupac and Nas songs blared from the apartments. A teenager in an ill-fitting jacket and white underwear staggered out the front, an asthma inhaler wedged tightly between his fingers, a dazed look on his face. Was he a crack fiend? Would he also end up dead on the streets as many of Max’s friends from childhood had? So what if he did? Max’s mother had worked two jobs—cleaning houses in the city in the morning, bagging groceries at the bodega down the street late in the evening—and had been so tired every night that she sometimes fell asleep in her bowl of avgolemono soup. All so they could go to good schools and get out of the projects. Hadn’t she realized that illness and death didn’t go away when you crossed over to Manhattan on the 6 train? Everything was so fucking pointless. Max went to the front of the building and touched the scratched, bullet-dented metal front door, then turned around and walked back toward the subway station, glad he’d gotten a chance to say some kind of a good-bye to his mother.

3.
    M ax’s mother died the next day, finally free from the kidney cancer that had spread to her uterus, bladder, liver, bones, and lungs over the past three years. A week later, Max and Sophia held her memorial service at the St. Ann’s Episcopal Church. They briefly considered