World Made of Glass, page 15
Even the day before, my instinct would have been to smash everything, but I didn’t want to do that anymore. I wanted to open the display cases one by one and gather the hearts. I wanted to collect them all. But they were so delicate, and there were so many. There were too many to hold.
J.R. must have known what I was feeling because he walked slowly around the display case and put his arms around me. I listened to his real heart beating through his shirt as he hugged me. “All these hearts,” he said. “They’re so breakable. This whole world—”
I nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry that everything is so fragile.”
Chapter Nineteen
The whole way home, J.R. slept, curled on his side in the back seat, his gray halo of hair next to my leg. I thought in paperweights. In glass orbs. I wanted to capture every tree, every valley of flowers, every crumbling barn. I wanted to lower a sphere of heavy, spotless glass over the four of us in the car, preserving us like this forever.
I thought of the feeling I’d had in the museum. The calm rage. And I wondered what to do with it. As we neared the city, beneath a darkening sky, an idea came to mind, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t dread the thought of returning to school after the weekend.
On Monday afternoon, when the three o’clock bell rang, Julian, Will, Toby, and I pushed through the double doorway and onto the playground. “Yes!” Julian said, pumping his fist in the air. “I love our plan!”
“Dude, calm down,” Toby responded, sneezing in the sunlight. “Everyone’s going to think you’re a total dork. We have reputations to preserve!” He sneezed again. “Is it cottonwood season?” he asked, looking around at the tufts of white fluff wafting through the air. “I’m so allergic.”
Julian, Will, and I exchanged a look, trying not to laugh.
“Anyway,” Toby went on, “we have a lot of planning to do.”
“Relax,” I told him, unzipping my jacket and tying it around my waist. “It’ll be great.”
“What I don’t understand,” Julian said to Toby and Will as I opened the playground gate, “is how you guys knew that we should go to Stiffio with our proposal. I mean Stiffio? I never would have imagined that she’d be with us on this.”
“Dude,” Will said, pulling a baggie of pretzels out of his jacket pocket and shoving a handful into his mouth, “she’s a science teacher. Get it? Science? Like, facts? Truth?” Crumbs spewed from his mouth as he spoke, and he held out the half-empty bag toward us. “Pretzel, anyone?” he asked, his mouth full.
“No, thanks,” I told him, trying not to laugh at the crumbs stuck to his cheek.
“Dude,” Toby said, sneezing again. “You have pretzels all over your face.”
“Do I?” Will asked, wiping his cheek. He and Toby waved to me and Julian and turned the corner. “Gone now?” I heard him ask as their voices faded into the sounds of Gramercy Park on a sunny afternoon.
Julian and I walked together toward Union Square Park. Instead of going straight home like he usually did, though, he walked me to my building. “So, Central Park after school tomorrow?” I asked him.
He smiled. “Yup.”
“And I’ll call you tonight to compare math problems and to brainstorm for the assembly?”
“Yup,” he said again.
The sun was filtering through the leaves of the trees, and despite everything terrible in the world, I felt better than I had in a while. I thought about capturing the moment in a paperweight—me and Julian standing there together on the sidewalk that was speckled in shadows and light. But it wasn’t exactly the moment I’d want to have captured forever. Without thinking too hard about what I was about to do, I leaned forward and kissed Julian on the cheek. There. That was the moment I’d lower the orb over.
I’ve been hoping for the longest time that you’d do that, I imagined Julian saying. But he just grinned at me, bewildered, not saying a word.
“See you tomorrow, Julian,” I told him, smiling, and went inside.
On the eighth floor, the elevator doors closed behind me and, as quietly as possible, I unlocked the front door. J.R. was where I thought he’d be, on the couch, sleeping beneath the crocheted blanket. I watched it rise and fall, rise and fall, until I was convinced that he was okay. Then, from the kitchen phone, I dialed Bob’s number at work like I’d promised I would, to assure him that J.R. was sleeping peacefully.
“When he’s up, remind him to take five of the orange pills,” Bob reminded me.
“I know,” I whispered, not wanting to wake J.R.
“Maybe you’ll be a doctor someday, Belly-ris,” Bob told me.
“Nah, I’m a poet, not a scientist.”
“Maybe you’re both,” he said.
I thought about that after hanging up the phone, and I thought of Ms. Staffio and how we’d all misjudged her. On the kitchen table was a green apple, the jar of peanut butter, and a sprig of mint leaves from the plant upstairs. I didn’t think that J.R. had gone up to get it. He was too weak for that. Maybe he’d sent Mom to do it. Beneath the apple was a piece of notebook paper. I unfolded it. The handwriting was kind of faint, but it was still clear.
Bloom Like an Iris
A limerick by J.R. Holmes
April 20, 1987
There once was a young girl named Iris
Who came face-to-face with a virus
She allied herself
And her heart grew in wealth
And from anger, she bloomed like an iris.
I smiled. It wasn’t bad for a limerick. I cut the apple and tapped my pencil against the tablecloth as I thought.
Calm Rage
A limerick by Iris Cohen
April 20, 1987
Where do I send this calm rage?
Trained lion, released from her cage.
Pacing the streets,
She’ll never retreat.
Good thing she doesn’t have mange.
The beginning of it was decent. The last line was definitely what Dad would have called lazy, but I didn’t have much practice with limericks yet. Besides, rhyming was stupid, and I had things to do. I folded the poem and placed it quietly on the coffee table next to J.R.’s medicine and glass of water. Then I took out my math book and sat down in the chair across from him. I wanted to keep an eye on him. To watch the blanket move gently as he breathed. And I wanted to finish my homework so that when I was done, I’d have an excuse to call Julian.
Chapter Twenty
After school on Tuesday, Julian and I took the subway to Central Park. It was a perfect spring day, and the paths were swimming with people—joggers, couples holding hands, parents with children. They were living their lives, most of them likely unaware that all around them, people were dying of AIDS. It made me so sad to know that many of them would probably help, if they only knew how terrible this all was.
I sneaked a glance at Julian and imagined J.R. walking next to us instead of sleeping at home in the living room on the hospital bed that Bob had rolled in that morning. He would nudge me. What are you waiting for, kid? he’d ask, grinning. Julian’s a good guy. Talk to him.
I smiled at the thought. “Julian?” I asked.
“Yeah?” he answered quickly, as if he’d been waiting for me to say something.
“Last time we were here, I had all these thoughts in my mind, and I didn’t share any of them with you.” I felt lighter. Sparkly.
“Really?” Julian asked. He looked at me eagerly as if he wanted to know more. Behind him, pigeons pecked at the pavement and a squirrel ran across a tree branch. A little girl walking with her mom dropped an ice-cream cone and started to cry.
“Yeah.” I pictured J.R. again. In my image of him, his face was smooth and healthy, not hollow and pale. His gray curls swayed in the breeze. And? the image of him prodded, winking at me. “And I want you to know that I’m not strong like you think I am. I’m scared of what everyone thinks of me. I’m scared of what you think of me. I’m scared that if I tell you certain things, you’ll think I’m weird and you won’t like me anymore.”
I want you to tell me everything, I pictured Julian saying. I could never not like you. I waited as he looked at his shoes, his cheeks pink. The image of J.R. waited, too. Come on, I imagined J.R. mouthing in Julian’s direction, gesturing wildly with his hands.
Finally, Julian looked at me confidently, as if he’d been emboldened by my openness. “I want you to tell me everything,” he said. “I could never not like you.”
J.R. jumped up and pumped his fist.
“Okay,” I said eagerly, pointing to the entrance of the zoo. “I’m going to tell you the truth about why I didn’t want to go to the zoo and why I’m never going there again.”
“All right,” Julian said, smiling.
My work here is done, J.R. said proudly. I’m going home. He took a couple of steps, fading into the scenery around us, then stopped. Hey, kid, remember: I’m not dead yet. I smiled and then turned back to Julian to tell him the story.
By the time that Julian and I had made our way to the Waldo Hutchins bench, I was exhausted from so much talking. I’d told him everything, from how I’d become friends with Mallory, Will, and Toby to the shock I’d felt when Dad had died, despite Mom’s attempts to prepare me. I’d told him how every place I’d taken him last time we’d been in the park had been one of Dad’s and my favorite spots.
We sat down on the bench in front of the Latin engraving. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this last time we were here?” Julian asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. An image of the sun-filled gallery at the Corning Museum of Glass parted the curtains of my mind and stepped into my consciousness. I remembered the sunshine, the glass windows, the glass display cases, and the dots of vibrant color surrounding me and J.R.
J.R.
I understood why Dad had loved him, and I remembered the way that my anger had transformed to sadness when he’d forced me to see what had been in front of me for so long: He was sick. He was dying. “I guess it was just too sad,” I told Julian.
He nodded, and for a while, neither of us said anything.
“Do you ever think about how weird it is that two opposite things can exist at the exact same time?” he finally asked. “You can be totally nervous, but also calm. You can be really excited, but also scared.”
“Yeah,” I answered quickly. “Like, how can I be so sad and so happy at the same time?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “It’s really weird that we don’t just, like, implode because of it.”
I laughed, imagining that—imagining everyone around us who was feeling too many things all at once bursting into tiny fires and then transforming into piles of ash on the ground. Contemplating all that sadness and all that joy made me think of the ACT UP meeting and demos, and how all those feelings coexisted in the same place. And thinking about that brought to mind the assembly that the Philanthropy Club had planned with Ms. Staffio.
“We better get going,” I told Julian. “We have those posters to make.”
“Yeah, good point,” he said.
“And I told my mom I’d be back by six. I’m watching over J.R. while she and Bob go on, like, a date or something.”
Julian looked at me. “Are you okay with that?”
“Yeah,” I answered quickly. I’d had a lot of time to adjust to Mom and Dad not loving each other in that way. “She seems happy when she’s with Bob. He makes her seem like her old self.”
Julian giggled. “Something just came to me,” he said. “Let’s say that they got married someday.…” The thought was weird, but I supposed that it wasn’t too terrible. “And they had a baby.…” Now, that was weird. “And they named it Butt-ris.”
I laughed. He was such a dork. “Meet our children,” I added. “Eye-ris and Butt-ris.”
Julian laughed, too.
“You know,” I said. “When I first met you and you came to Philanthropy Club, I thought that you might be too cool for us.”
“Nah,” Julian replied quickly. “I’m a total nerd.” He got up and unflinchingly reached for my hand. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go.”
Back home, J.R. was awake in the hospital bed in the living room, propped up on pillows. Bob sat next to him, taking his pulse. I stayed quiet until he finished.
“Hi,” I said from the doorway when Bob gently released his wrist. I searched J.R.’s face, trying to tell if he looked better or worse than he had when I’d left for school that morning.
“Hey, Head-ris,” Bob said.
“Stop doing that, Iris,” J.R. said in a raspy voice.
“Stop doing what?”
“Looking at me like you’re trying to figure out how many days I have left.”
“I wasn’t,” I lied, trying to smile. I knew he was kidding around, and I tried hard to hold on to both feelings at once—the sadness and the happiness. It was hard to do.
Mom came into the living room, her hair wet from the shower. “Hi, honey,” she said, hugging me. “Did Bob give you instructions about the medication yet?”
“I’m just writing it down now,” he said, getting up and handing me the notepad he’d been scribbling on.
I read his notes.
Instructions for Nurse Armpit-ris:
7 p.m.: 5.5 orange pills
9 p.m.: 1 white pill
Beneath the instructions were the name and phone number of the restaurant they’d be at—a new Mediterranean place near my school that they’d told me they’d been wanting to try.
Mom smoothed the thinning wisps of hair on Bob’s head, and as she did, I envisioned her paperweight heart brightening in her chest. What had been peach-colored for so long became vibrant sunset orange with brushstrokes of fuchsia. “Mom?” I asked suddenly. “You know the paperweights that Dad kept on his desk at work? Where’d they go?”
“They’re in my bedroom,” she said. “In my top drawer.”
I nodded, stunned.
“Why?” she asked, noticing the shocked expression on my face.
“I just… I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t know where they went.” It dawned on me that it was odd that I’d never asked her about them. “Can I get them?”
“Of course,” she said.
“If anything seems amiss, don’t hesitate to call us at the restaurant,” Bob said as Mom handed him his jacket.
“Not dead yet!” J.R. rasped, and despite everything terrible, I smiled. I was so lucky and so unlucky.
“We won’t be home much after nine,” Mom added, kissing my cheek.
Once the door closed, I went to Mom’s room, opened her top dresser drawer, and took out the paperweights. J.R. had dozed off, and I put them onto the coffee table as I listened to him breathe. I felt so sad looking at them. All of those trapped colors. They were so beautiful and so breakable. Like Dad.
Then I pulled out the paper and markers that Ms. Staffio had sent me home with and got to work.
Chapter Twenty-One
On Wednesday, we finished up our posters and, with Ms. Staffio’s permission, ran off copies at the Xerox machine in the teachers’ lounge. By Thursday afternoon, I was jittery and anxious. Was this how the ACT UP organizers felt before the Wall Street demo? I imagined the energy that had hovered above me when I’d been at the center three weeks before. I tried to summon some of it to reappear over the school building.
At two fifteen, just as science ended, the intercom clicked on, and Principal Marshall’s voice sputtered into the classrooms to call the students down to the gym, starting with the sixth graders. Ms. Staffio gave me, Julian, Will, and Toby a nod, and we rushed down ahead of the rest of our grade to get situated.
As Principal Marshall had promised when Julian, Will, Toby, and I had gone to him and Ms. Staffio with our proposal, the folding chairs faced the stage, where the projector screen was set up. In the center aisle, the film projector was ready to go. The room was empty aside from us, and I could hear the sixth graders approaching the doorways. The intercom clicked on again, and Mr. Marshall invited the seventh and eighth graders to the gym. I turned to my friends. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to thank them for being allies along with me, but it seemed cheesy to say that aloud.
“Hey,” Will said, almost as if he was reading my mind, “we’re here for you, but we’re also here because we want to be.”
“This is true,” Toby declared.
I smiled at them. They were the biggest dorks, and they were my best friends. Then my eyes and Julian’s connected. He nodded as if to agree with Will and Toby, but also to encourage me. You’re fine, his eyes told me, and he seemed so sure about it that I decided to believe him.
“You ready to go?” Principal Marshall asked, walking into the gym alongside Ms. Staffio.
“I think so,” I replied. Julian, Will, and Toby took their places in the front row, Toby holding the paper bag full of flyers with all kinds of slogans we’d come up with, like HIV and AIDS: Know the Facts and Knowledge over Fear.
“Let’s get you set up on stage, then,” Principal Marshall said. He was kind of a quiet guy, and I’d never thought much about him one way or another. But as he and I walked toward the stage, in a voice just above a whisper he said to me, “I quite respect you, Ms. Cohen. You know, my brother is gay. He lives in Boston. AIDS is taking out his community. What you’re doing is good. The education piece, it’s been missing. This is going to help.”
I nodded at him, surprised.
A few days before, when I’d finally told Mom about Mr. Inglash and the splinter, she’d been shocked. “Mr. Marshall seemed so understanding when I talked to him about Dad back in March,” she’d told me, exasperated. “I left the meeting feeling sure that I’d done the right thing for you. I’m so sorry, Iris.”
