I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

thin, elderly black lady who had no teeth. She would hold her scarf or hand to her mouth when she spoke, covering itin a very genteel manner. Rose was kind. She would travel by trolley, accompanying me to my new school on 135th Street and Convent Avenue. I had entered a new school in the fourth grade. I was eight. I didn’t know anybody in my class. They were a new breed. Wild. Reckless. I felt very outside.
    I sat in the back of the class at first. The boy next to me leered at me and poked his yellow pencil up and down on the zipper of his pants. I looked away. He kept doing it. After the school day I told the teacher. The next day he was gone.
Hmm,
I thought to myself,
this teacher will like me if I keep telling her what is going on in class.
I didn’t know what a snitch was. I soon found out.
    One afternoon the teacher left the room. Two high-spirited athletic Irish girls started throwing the blackboard eraser to each other. Laughing and scrambling over the desks. Shards of chalk swam in the sunshine.
    The teacher reentered. “Who did this?” she demanded, waving her hand to dispel the chalk and picking up the fallen eraser. “Who did this?” she demanded again.
    I looked around the room and saw that no one was going to tell the teacher the truth but me, the new girl. I raised my hand high.
    “Yes, Lyova?”
    “It was those girls there. That one and that one that threw the erasers.”
    Silence. The girls I pointed out turned toward me, openmouthed, as did the whole fourth-grade class, even the teacher. Obviously, I thought, I impressed everyone with my honesty.
    On the clanging iron stairs down to the courtyard after school, one of the Irish girls hissed in my ear, “I’m gonna get you for that. Just wait till we get outside . . .”
    I can’t believe this is happening. One shaking foot goes from one step to the next. I am becoming very afraid of what is going to happento me. We empty out into the school courtyard, and the whole class forms a ring around me, my school bag, and my De Pinna dress. The two Irish girls are making boxing motions toward me, yelling, tough. The whole class is encouraging them. I am “it.” I’ve never hit anyone. I don’t know the protocol. I realize I am just going to have to take it when Rose, who just arrived to pick me up, breaks through the circle, grabs my arm, and pulls me out. I’m not scared. I’m confused. But the lesson was loud and clear: Don’t Ever, Ever Turn Anyone In. Ever. That lesson was burned in my brain in the fourth grade. Thanks to two tough little Irish girls. The lesson served me well.
    When Rose left, a peculiar little German lady replaced her. We were all scared of her. Sure enough, my mother found small shards of glass in the chicken soup. The German maid was trying to kill the Jews.
    Then Carrie came. Carrie was the real deal. Competent. Smart. Relaxed. Ample. A lap comfortable to sit on, a bosom to rest my head on. She smelled of hot soapy water and fat.
    I was sitting at the dining room table with my mother. She was babbling to me about the sales. De Pinna’s was where she bought my clothes, all French labels or English imports. My winter wardrobe was bought in the summer sales, my summer wardrobe during the winter sales. On each item she’d proudly show us the sale tag: a ten-dollar skirt marked down from four hundred, a thirty-dollar dress down from whatever. And so it was that I was sent to public school in fancy dresses entirely inappropriate to the current fashion for skirt and sweater sets, which I longed for. I would rip the hems of these fussy dresses on the way to school, preferring that the ragged edge be stared at rather than show my pudgy thighs.
    My mother was perusing the newspaper at lunch, talking in her high movie-star voice about the sales. We were eating aspic cubes held together with toothpicks. A toothpick broke and lodged in my throat.I tried pushing it down with water, with bread. I excused myself and headed into the