in Yonkers all the way through middle school. My mom was better then. She grew up in Yonkers too, back when our neighborhood was OK. When they got married, she and my dad bought the house together and always said they were going to fix it up and never did. Our neighborhood got worse and worse. My mother found a job as a secretary at an elementary school in Yonkers right out of high school. But she wasn’t happy there, so when I was eight, she applied for a job at Pells Landing High School. When they gave it to her, she cried.
I thought I’d go to Yonkers High. It was where my mother and father went. It was where my friends were all going. But I got into some trouble in eighth grade and it was a big deal when it happened. And to make everything worse, my friend Dee Marshall was involved, and Dee is the only son of her only friend Rhonda, so there went that friendship. My mother petitioned the Pells school board to let me go to high school there. It was without me knowing it. She didn’t like my friends in Yonkers, she never did, even though they’re good guys. She wanted to separate me from them, to drive me to school with her every morning, to give me a new start, she said. This was when she was still awake enough to care what I did.
I hated her for it. I had been to Pells enough growing up to know that it was nothing like Yonkers, old friendly ugly Yonkers, with duplexes and projects and run-down libraries and police stations and pubs. Pells Landing is the opposite of Yonkers. It’s twenty miles north but it feels like a different world. The windows are cleaner, the lawns are always green. All the yards and streets are rolling and new. The doors are painted bright colors. There is a sailing club on the Hudson in Pells where rich families go in summer. Where rich kids go together. There is a restaurant at the marina. Trevor’s parents are members and I have been there several times and I have ordered steak there. There is a country club in Pells and it’s so old that I don’t even know anyone whose family belongs. One girl in my high school, her family belongs, and even though we are not friends I know it about her. It’s the thing that is always said next after her name.
My mom has always been too impressed with Pells. When she was better she talked about it quietly, as if it were more important than anyplace else. When I was about eleven Newsweek named Pells High one of the ten best public schools in the country. It’s a large school with small classes. Two thousand kids and not a class over twenty. Good sports programs and teachers, labs with new technology, a huge impressive library. The day that article was published my mother came home and called her mother, who was still alive at the time and basically the only person she talked to besides me, and said: Did you hear the news about us?
It made me ill.
When she was still working her boss was Dr. Greene, the vice principal in charge of eleventh grade. To this day Dr. Greene sees me in the hall and asks me in a low concerned voice how my mother is, which makes me want to punch him in his mouth. She worked for him for a really long time. He has never once called her since she left two years ago.
I knew everything about him and his life before I even met him. My mother used to come home and tell me all about the Greenes: Dr. Greene’s wife Marjorie, and their two sons, Brian and Brent, fraternal twins. I know he golfs on the weekends and plays poker on Wednesdays. I know he has a boat at the marina and that the boat probably comes from his family money or his wife’s money because he does not make that much. I know he reads voraciously, my mother’s phrase. For Christmas every year she used to give him something that she carefully picked out, related to one of his four hobbies, and he would give her something generic and edible, a fruit basket or a cheese-of-the-month club membership. I’ve met all the Greenes at one point or another, from being dragged to awards dinners or staff