was always surprised when people confused them for each other. The second girl, Debra, had processed hair, and sticking from it like an ax handle was the grip of an oversize wide-toothed comb. She’d sit at her desk with her book unopened, and when the teacher asked her to turn to page thirty-six, she’d mutter she wasn’t opening nothing to no damn page thirty-six or two hundred neither.
“Did you say something, Debra?”
“No, ma’am,” she’d answer, followed by a closemouthed, almost inaudible, “Hell, yeah, I said something. Take your ugly head outcha ass and maybe you can hear it.”
“I’m sorry, but is there a problem?”
“No.” Then, “Yeah, bitch, you my problem.”
Delicia, by contrast, was timid and sweet, with short Afroed hair and a soft, almost childlike voice. I thought that because she was shy she’d be a good student, but those two things didn’t always go together. She was polite, certainly, and seemed to try as hard as she could. It just wasn’t good enough for the north side. The two of us were in the same English class, and though I told myself that we were friends, her reticence made it hard to hold any kind of real conversation. Like all the new kids, she used the word “stay” in place of “live,” as in “I stay on South Saunders Street,” or “I stay in Chavis Heights.” Delicia stayed with her aunt, which she pronounced to rhyme with “taunt.”
That was all I knew about her personal life. Everything else was my own invention. I decided for a start that she was virtuous and eager to change, that our association was, in some substantial way, improving her. It’s not how a person would think of an actual friend, much less a potential girlfriend. This was the status I upgraded her to a few weeks into the school year. At fourteen, I figured it was about time I took the plunge. Everyone kept asking if I was going steady, or at least everyone creepy kept asking, particularly the men from the Greek Orthodox church, who’d refer even to newborn babies as “lady-killers” and wonder how many hearts they had broken. Like it wasn’t enough to be dating at the age of three weeks, you also had to be two-timing someone.
To the other boys in my Sunday school class, it was “Who’s the lucky lady?” To me it was just “Find anyone yet?” And though at that age I never could have admitted it, I was as physically attracted to Delicia as I’d have been to any female. Her body was no less appealing to me than that of our head cheerleader, so why not have the two-hundred-fifty-pound girlfriend from the wrong side of town?
The idea coincided with my Greek grandmother’s moving from our house into a new senior citizens’ apartment complex called Capital Towers. She was cruelly out of place there, the only resident who wasn’t born in the United States and who didn’t try, in that resolutely American way, to be gay and youthful. Where Yiayiá was from, old age was not something to be disguised or outrun. Rather, you embraced it, and gratefully, for decrepitude, in Greece, was not without its benefits. There, you lived in a compound with your extended family, and everyone younger than you became your pawn. In America, being old got you nothing but a spare bedroom that was painted purple and had bumper stickers on the door. Then one day your daughter-in-law decides she’s had enough, and out you go, not just to an apartment but to a studio apartment, which basically means a bedroom with a kitchen in it.
Capital Towers was trying to get an activities program going. A social was to be held on a Sunday afternoon in early October, and that, I decided, was just the place to take Delicia on our first date.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” my mother said.
“No,” I told her. “I think it would be interesting for her to meet Yiayiá.”
“Interesting?” My mother allowed her tone of voice to do the heavy lifting, as unless you were making a documentary about gloom, there was nothing interesting about my grandmother. Or at least not to us at the time. If I could go back to 1972, and if I were able to understand Greek, she might have told me all sorts of fascinating things: what it was like to endure a loveless arranged marriage, to be traded away by your family and forced to sail to another country.