The Christmas Kid

Shawn dug out his hand weights from under the bed, a pair of eight-pounders that had once belonged to his father. Now the news was finished in the living room, and he could hear gunshots and horses galloping, as his Uncle Jimmy entered the Wild West. And thought: I have to get us out of here. Leave high school. Get a real job, not just delivering groceries, but real work. And make real money. Get a place on the first floor of some new building. Let Uncle Jimmy sit in a garden, and smell grass or roses, or go walking without help. Gotta do that. Gotta do it soon.

He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, told Jimmy he was going up the roof. Then climbed the stairs two at a time.

Shawn loved the roof in summer. The tenements were on the avenue between 11th and 12th Streets. They had no backyards. No gardens right outside a door. But on the roof, there was always a breeze blowing from the harbor, and he could stand there and see the skyline of New York, off to the right, and remember that night in 1944 when the lights came on again, on D-day, when the armies landed in France to kick Hitler’s ass. All the women of the block seemed to be on the roof, and their kids, and a few old men, and someone began singing “The White Cliffs of Dover” and he heard those words about peace and laughter and love ever after. Something like that. Knowing it was already too late for his father. Knowing that Uncle Jimmy was there in that France and guys from all over the neighborhood were with him. Not one of them was up the roof that night. They were fighting the war. Shawn didn’t know until a few years later how many of them did not come home.

He took off his T-shirt and faced west. The sun was slowly descending into New Jersey, and the sky was full of new colors, blue and purple and red, all mixed together, changing every minute. Beautiful. He did fifty curls with the hand weights. Paused. Did fifty more. Then faced the remains of the abandoned pigeon coop, where the birds once fluttered and murmured behind wire walls and now were gone forever. He did moves he had seen the boxers doing at the gym on 8th Street. Jab, jab, jab, bend, left hook. Jab, right hand, hook. The rooftops of the block’s six tenements were all different. Different kinds of chimneys, some bare, some cowled. Some had clotheslines, some did not. Some were covered with gray pebbles, a few with raised wooden planks, others with tar paper. In the summers, they called those rooftops Tar Beach. People would get home from work, too late to grab the trolley to Coney Island, and try to spend an hour or two in the fading sun. On weekends, some of them would spread blankets and cover themselves with suntan lotion, all the while drinking iced tea or soda or beer. Tar Beach. For Shawn, it was just the roof. All of it.

Now he turned to face north, beginning his bends, touching his left ankle with his weighted right hand, the right ankle with his left. Doing each bend very hard. Grunting. Feeling the sweat on his face and shoulders and back. Feeling muscles tightening in his gut. Turning from north to east to south.

Then he saw a woman on the roof of the last house on the 11th Street end. A woman with long black hair, wearing a pink bathrobe. She was smoking a cigarette.

When she saw him staring, she smiled.

When Shawn first met Marilyn Carter on the roof, he was a virgin. Three weeks later he was not.

She lived in the apartment just below the roof and went down to fetch him a glass of cold water, introduced herself, and just started talking. That day, and on the afternoons that followed. She wasn’t some beautiful kind of movie star. In the real world, who was? She was on the chubby side and her hair was often tangled in a frantic kind of way. But she had a beautiful smile, and good white teeth, and talked very clearly, without an accent. She definitely wasn’t from the neighborhood.

“I grew up in New Jersey, way down, below Atlantic City,” she said one afternoon that first week. “Whatever you do with your life, Shawn, never move to New Jersey.”

He learned that she was a teacher at PS 10, the public school six long blocks away, teaching English. In the mornings now, she taught summer school. One afternoon she asked Shawn the name of the last book he had read, and he told her The Amboy Dukes, by a guy named Shulman.

“Hey, Shawn,” she said with a laugh. “You could do better than that.”

And brought him a copy of The Red Badge of Courage, which he read across three nights on the bottom bunk in his room. A book about a young soldier who was afraid. He wondered if his father had been afraid when he landed at Anzio. He wondered if Uncle Jimmy felt fear, too, but didn’t ask. Uncle Jimmy never talked about his war.

On the evening he returned the book, they talked about the characters and the writing, and what it was like in the Civil War, and then her voice abruptly dropped and her face darkened.