Banana Rose Read Online Free PDF Page A

do with her. Please do something. You’re the oldest....
    I’d heard this all before. I picked at the peeling green paint on the table as my mother harangued me long distance. The more she talked, the more I wanted to murder Rita. I was sitting in the staff room at the Red Willow School. I looked at the clock. In five minutes, I had to go back to my class of fifth graders.
    “Mom, don’t keep calling me here. I’m at work,” I said. “Look, I wasn’t put in jail—Rita was. Stop nagging me.”
    “Well, your so-called commune doesn’t have a phone. How am I supposed to talk with you?” my mother demanded.
    “Don’t. Write letters,” I offered brightly.
    “Never mind. A mother needs to be in contact with her daughter. Please, Nell—”
    “I know, I know. Rita! Take care of Rita. Look, I have to go. Sure, I love you, too.” I hung up the phone. It was two days before Thanksgiving. I heaved a long sigh and went to the door of my classroom. Most of the kids I taught had hippie parents. Four of the children in my group of twelve had dropped acid at least once and probably more. Curly-haired Janice had told me her mother gave her acid on her seventh birthday and they tripped together for the whole afternoon, watching the water at the Rio Chiquita.
    My mother and I had had trips, too, I thought: to Macy’s, to Fortunoff’s, to Abraham and Straus, and then always, after the shopping spree, to Micky’s on our corner for ice cream sodas.
    Just yesterday the kids in class had asked me about my childhood, and I told them about playing school with my grandfather in the living room of the apartment we shared with my grandparents in Brooklyn. Some of them weren’t sure what an apartment was—they lived in rambling, run-down adobes surrounded by fields or in communes, and two lived in log cabins up Kit Carson Road. So I described the fire escape off the kitchen, the dark-green-flowered wall-to-wall carpet, the smell of boiling chicken from the apartment across the hall, the sound of locks clicking into place after the slam of the neighboring apartment door, the footsteps of the people in apartment 3C above us, and the silver bugs that scuttled across the linoleum in the kitchen.
    I’d say to my grandfather, “Sam, you got your addition wrong. Now go to the corner,” and he would stand up, take off his spectacles, and walk slowly to the corner of the room, pretending to weep.
    “You were mean,” Ronnie called out.
    “I was a strict teacher. Sam had to learn to add,” I teased.
    “And then what? And then what?” they would ask eagerly whenever I talked of my childhood.
    Once I told them how my cousins and my sister and I sat out on the stoop.
    “What’s a stoop?” Mirabai asked.
    So I explained stoop and curb, getting the picture just right. I set up blocks like they were steps in front of our apartment house and sat on them.
    “When we all were out on this stoop, we’d bend over with stones in our hands and smash caps.” I bent over and pretended to smash at something. I told them about the thin strips of red paper dotted with infinitesimal portions of gunpowder, and how when you hit the dots just right, they would ignite with a sharp sound and emit the smell of smoke. Some of them had played with caps, but they were surprised I had.
    Then I explained to them about the newspaper stands on the corners in the city and how in Brooklyn, when the rain pelted our street, the drops would bounce when they hit concrete. My sister and I would splash in the river that ran in the gutter.
    “And your sister? Did you love her?” Sage asked.
    “Yes, I loved her, but sometimes I was mean to her. I’d hide from her in the alleys, and she would be scared all alone between high buildings.” Emile and Coyote snickered. “But I did love her.”
    The Greyhound bus was late that afternoon. I stood in the slow Taos rain that was trying to be snow and waited for Rita. I breathed in deeply and looked around. I could hardly see