I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir Read Online Free

painter, a great singer, then actor, and if all else failed, I would marry a rich boy, then divorce him, get alimony, then marry another rich boy. Oh, Colette! Oh, Gigi!
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    I started public school in third grade, at the age of seven, at PS 145 on 145th Street and Broadway. Up till then, my mother and Fremo had taught me at home.
    Mrs. Cherry was my teacher. Straight-backed, red-haired, hard. My first week in school we had a spelling test for the entire school. Blackboard walls were slid away and all the different classes wererevealed—one large auditorium holding first through eighth grades. Our class was in the middle of the last row. The teacher of another class sat at her desk behind me, facing her own class.
    My mother had taught me to call pee
number one
.
    In the middle of the spelling test I tiptoed up to Mrs. Cherry at her desk.
    “I have to do number one.”
    “Get back to your seat, we’re in the middle of a test,” she hissed.
    I hurried back to my little desk and tried to concentrate on spelling. Trying to hold everything in. I couldn’t concentrate. I tiptoed up to Mrs. Cherry again.
    “Mrs. Cherry, I really have to go,” I pleaded.
    “Back to your seat.” She rose and pointed.
    “Please?”
    She pointed to my desk again.
    I was wearing a short cotton dress with puffed sleeves. As I sat down again, the dam burst. My long wooden seat filled with warm, yellow liquid that spread and spread until my little bench filled. It spilled over the sides onto the floor. The boy at the next desk watched in disbelief. Looking at me, then at the seat, then at the floor.
    The teacher at the desk behind me must have turned at the sound of liquid splashing. She grabbed my arm and guided me up the long rows of classes and out of the auditorium. She was young and kind. She took me to the bathroom, but I had no more use for it. My underpants were soaked, and the back of my dress and legs. I found the door to 145th Street and ran all the way home. My mother was furious with me. She changed my clothes and sent me back to school. I thought I would die of shame, but no one seemed to know what had happened. Not Mrs. Cherry, not even the boy.
    The lasting memory I have of third grade is Mrs. Cherry and Foster. Foster was black. He was neatly dressed in a shirt and tie and wasthe tallest boy in class. He did something Mrs. Cherry didn’t like. She punished him by having him walk from her desk, where she stood with a ruler, around the back of the class, back to her, then hold out his hands, which she hit hard with the ruler. At least ten times. The braver Foster was, the more I hated Mrs. Cherry; the harder she hit, the blanker his expression, the more I admired him.
    One afternoon, I came home with a new friend from school. I remember how excited we were to find each other, running down 148th Street laughing. When I look at the face of my granddaughter Rachel, I see the face of that friend, so open, so dear, so beautiful, also black. After we played together in my room, and my new best girlfriend picked up her book bag to go, my mother swept into the dining room with a laundry bag of my old clothes, which she pushed on my friend with laughing generosity. “Take them, take them. Lyova can’t wear them anymore!”
    My new friend looked at me. I looked away. “She doesn’t want them,” I muttered. “She doesn’t need them.”
    “Take them, take them,” my mother insisted, pushing the full laundry bag into the little girl’s arms.
    I avoided her eyes. There was no arguing with my mother.
    “All right,” she said.
    I was too ashamed to see her to the door. I was swallowing shame. “You ruin everything!” I cried, and ran to my room and wept. I knew, even then, how insulting an act of charity could be to a child, how demeaning, how “put in her place” my friend was. I never asked her home again.
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    O ur new maid (housekeepers were called maids in those days), Rose, was a tall,