Chapter 30 Lina & Sadie #2
He turned around and waved at a young woman standing by the entrance. “Katrina, meet Sadie, the reporter who launched the investigation into the history of the lot. Sadie, meet my girlfriend.”
The woman approached. Katrina wore a lilac wrap dress and from her sun hat gushed a bevy of braids with blue extensions. She was as tall as Tyrell and, Sadie thought, absolutely gorgeous.
“Katrina is a licensed nurse, and the founder of Brownsville Health Counsels,” Tyrell added.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” said Katrina, reaching out her hand, a mothering note in her voice.
“It’s great to meet you.” Sadie tried to maintain her composure as she shook Katrina’s hand. “So how long have you two been together?”
“Hmm, how long, babe?” Tyrell mused, smiling at Katrina. “Like a year, right?”
“Two years,” Katrina answered.
“Off and on,” Tyrell added. “This lady was always dumping my ass.”
“Oh, shut up.” Katrina knocked Tyrell’s shoulder, and he laughed. “Ms. Sadie, you know how it is,” she continued, talking girl-to-girl now. “I didn’t know if this boy was serious.”
“I’m always serious. When am I not serious?” Tyrell protested.
“You know what I mean.”
“No I don’t, I’m the most serious brother in Brownsville! Nah, but being serious”—he winked at Sadie—“I’m going back to school. Brooklyn College. Majoring in political science. Maybe one day I’ll run for city council. You’ll get me some good press, right?”
“If you deserve it.” Sadie managed a smile.
There was something so lovely about the two of them that, intermixed with her heartbreak, Sadie felt relief. The fantasy would come to an end. Maybe Tyrell could see her turmoil, and this was his way of telling her to let go.
Sadie continued biking to Brownsville every day, and she watched the new lot transform from wasteland to urban farm.
On the hottest day of the year, a bunch of gardeners announced they were heading to the Betsy Head Park pool.
Sadie hadn’t brought a bathing suit, but they insisted she purchase one on Pitkin Avenue and meet them in the water.
As directed, she bought a suit, then followed a few shirtless boys all the way to Betsy Head Park.
They passed handball courts, a lady selling ices, and a truck in front of which three Orthodox Jewish guys were bantering in Yiddish.
For a moment, Sadie felt as if all the decades of the neighborhood’s history were sliding into each other, as if she might turn around and see a Jewish deli owner gossiping with a Bangladeshi bodega man, a Jewish mobster bumping fists with a Bloods member, or Ms. Lina’s block cat pawing her father’s pet turtle.
Perhaps when she reached the pool, she’d find her grandfather challenging the other children to a swimming race.
When they got to the bathhouse, she split from the boys and entered the women’s changing room, slipping shyly out of her clothes and into the newly purchased one-piece.
She trailed a group of laughing young girls to the bathroom, where all the visitors were required to rinse themselves beneath the continuously blasting showerheads.
Wet and shivering, Sadie followed the girls down the hall and in the direction of the laughter, the splashing, and the sunlight.
The concrete beneath her feet crackled with heat, and the pool was the too-blue of rock candy, a mirror to the sky above.
The pool was gigantic and packed with people—not just young children, but also high schoolers whirling up enormous splashes, couples cuddling, and men and women with infants strapped to their chests.
For a moment, she sat alone on the pool’s edge with her feet in the water, and she watched the people.
At the center of the pool, a group of teenagers played Monkey in the Middle with an empty milk gallon.
A bunch of others attached themselves to a hand-to-shoulder human chain and waddled in a circle.
Still others engaged in something like Marco Polo, a single “Yo!” substituting for “Polo.” It was hard to tell where one game ended and another began, and her ears filled up with a smoothie of voices, reprimands, giggles, and shrieks.
The lifeguards blew their whistles at regular intervals, and once every few minutes, a train hurtled across the elevated tracks behind the pool.
And then there was a Chinese boy.
He was very round-faced, small, and unselfconscious.
He bounced on the balls of his feet and laughed with his mouth wide open, channels of mucus flowing from each nostril.
He played Monkey in the Middle with the others, shouting “Over here!” when the milk carton soared, flopping his roly-poly body in the water.
But when an adult voice, a woman’s voice, on the side of the pool called out his name—“Tin Tin!”—he grabbed his nose dramatically and dropped beneath the surface of the pool. Sadie followed him under.
The water swallowed the cacophony. A blurry forest of legs surrounded her, all of them twisting, kicking, hopping—reveling in the seeming absence of gravity.
Shattered sunlight warbled on the blue tile floor, and she saw bodies blurry and softly bobbing, and bubbles solid as glass beads.
In this soundless, viscous place, it was like she had returned to the womb, become unborn, the hums and shouts of the present world so many years away.
Then she saw him: weaving through the forest of legs like a fish through seaweed. In the unborn world, his little arms churned the water with determination. He was harsh with his peers’ legs; he jabbed the other children with his fingers, and some of them kicked and squirmed as he touched them.
Eventually he ran out of breath, and in a panic, returned to the surface.
Sadie rose for air and heard the boy’s mother barking at him in the Fujianese dialect.
She watched as he whined, as his face soured, and then as he surrendered, flapping his arms against the water to express his disappointment.
He slunk over to the ramp and climbed the pool stairs, his head drooping like a heavy flower bulb.
The young mother waited at the top step, ready to engulf him in a towel.
Watching them, Sadie felt she knew the boy.
Trying so hard to break away, battling forces even stronger than gravity.
Willing and able to scratch others in that desperate quest to escape.
Sadie blinked, took a deep breath, and again plunged below the surface.
She could see clearer below, in this folding across time, across space.
She again expected others from the past to emerge—Jewish girls with pigtails chasing Black girls with box braids, her great-grandfather meditating with the rabbis on the pool floor.
Some sort of alternate universe, where the land belonged to all of them, or to no one at all.
Sadie ran out of breath and returned to the surface of the pool, gasping.