The Importance of Being Dangerous Read online

  “In the public schools,” she interrupted.

  “In criminal justice,” he finished.

  “Well, there you go,” she declared with a very certain smile. “That’s just what I’m talkin’ about, my friend.”

  That’s what Griff might be for now, her friend. And that’s where they left it at about eight-fifteen on a street corner two blocks from her apartment. The goodbye had the look of all business. They shook hands, smiling. But they shook lightly at first, as you might a stranger, and that wasn’t good enough. So they rocked on their heels for a few more awkward moments, reminding each other of when the next meeting was and what they were supposed to do in preparation for it. With all the rocking and coming up with last-minute things to say, they forgot to exchange phone numbers. They didn’t even know each other’s full names. By the time they went in for a final handshake, they each did it with both hands, holding more firmly this time, letting each other know how truly good it was to make this acquaintance.

  Her hands were long, delicate, and lovely in his. His hands were strong, large, and honest in hers. And as Sidarra walked alone down the street with Griff’s eyes still on her, she could still feel the distinctive bump of his wedding ring.

  SIDARRA HEARD THE GIGGLES from outside the front door, and the smell of McDonald’s French fries was all over the hallway. Michael and Raquel were inside yukking it up as usual.

  “Well, if it isn’t the two partners in crime,” Sidarra said, staring at the sight they made. They were draped all over the couch, with enough ketchup-stained napkins, several cups of strawberry soda, a few half-eaten cheeseburgers, and more fries on the floor than a small army of water bugs could eat in a week.

  “Hello, Ivana Trump,” Michael laughed from behind his big glasses and bushy mustache.

  “Hi, Mommy!”

  “What you guys been doin’?”

  “Watching videos, baby. Come on in, we saved you some food.”

  Sidarra had to laugh. She gave each of them a kiss. Nobody got up. She just joined them on the other side of Raquel and let them finish the scene. On the TV screen the blurry bootleg showed Eddie Murphy and Dave Chappelle joking about each other’s mother, and Sidarra slid down into the cushions to giggle. It didn’t take long for the fast food to take full effect on Michael and Raquel. By nine o’clock, Raquel was curled up asleep and Michael’s mouth was an open hole of snores.

  Sidarra watched the screen go blank blue and squeezed out from under her sleeping daughter’s legs to turn it off. She stood in the room, a wave of fresh energy washing through her, and decided now would be a good time to clear some work space in the storage room. The investment club research was something she’d have to do at home, at a desk, which she never bothered to set up. Her father had left her his desk, but it was gathering dust in the small back room. Worried about water bugs, she summoned Galore and made her go into the room with her. Things were everywhere stacked in cardboard boxes and covered in a patina of dust. A drooping shoe tree with all manner of shoes sulked beside a wall. Leaning against a corner was a long, thin case made out of stretched leather that held her famous uncle’s billiards cue. Yet the walls looked orderly. Pictures of her parents hung in frames. There was even one or two of Sidarra sitting safely in the middle of her three brothers. Her mother’s mirrors hung on sturdy hooks here and there. Looking at the images all around her, Sidarra saw pictures of who she’d been and who she’d become.

  By one o’clock in the morning, she had surprised herself by completely clearing the old brown desk and dusting down its sides. All the papers from the investment club were stacked in their own cubbyholes. Her pens were on one side, a hole puncher and stapler on the other. Sidarra tried out the seat and sighed. Fatigue finally started to kick in. The excitement of the day was almost over, except that she had met a tall, handsome married man. Her body came alive at the thought of Griff. They’d had the first serious conversation she’d had about those things in many years.

  A box in the corner suddenly called to her. Inside was a chaotic mixture of odds and ends—a radio, some old scarves, her mother’s best shoes, and a few pieces of jewelry her grandmother wore. She plugged in the radio and was surprised when it worked. The channel was still set to her father’s old jazz, as if you might hear old jazz on the radio now. But there it was, full of sweet horns and a gentle rhythm. Sidarra pulled out a lavender hat with a wide brim that was partly folded under other things. She put it on and found a silk scarf to match. Next she found a long strand of faux pearls and placed it over the hat and around her neck. She tried on three pairs of good shoes before finding the ones that lifted her with a little magic. And there she was in the mirror, fifteen years younger, beautiful and ready to sing like she used to. In her house as a child, everyone knew what Sidarra would become: a singer, a lounge singer, with a rich, mysterious voice like Nancy Wilson, Diana Ross, or Lena Horne. She would wear long, glittering dresses that hugged her strong figure like a mermaid’s scales. She would cast shadows on adoring men who stood no chance of having her, but she would give them all her heart through her songs. And that night in the mirror, all alone with the past, she thought she glimpsed hope.

  3

  SIDARRA WAS ONE of those people who believed that almost everyone gets up in the morning and tries to do the right thing that day. She figured that if you believed differently about people, you’d go crazy waiting on evil—especially living in New York City. Lately, only the Board of Miseducation made Sidarra question her belief in the goodness of folk, and at the Board of Miseducation building in downtown Brooklyn, there was one person in particular who seemed to set evil in motion: Desiree Kronitz.

  Desiree’s problem might have been that she was a young white woman with a black woman’s first name. Apparently she felt she had a lot of compensating to do for that at work in Clayborne Reed’s Special Programs division, where all the other women were black or Latina, but most of the men were white. Desiree had to rise quickly, speaking up constantly in staff meetings, adding her own agenda items, or being the first to report on the progress of a project. She thought nothing of interrupting coworkers fifteen or twenty years older than herself. Only men seemed to like her—a trait Sidarra shared—but the origin of their affection for Desiree was ambivalent: they dreaded the sound of her voice but looked forward to the sight of her butt. She was as well known for the inappropriate comment as she was for the thong line visible atop the back of her waist. Either way, men didn’t mind being around her. Particularly Clayborne Reed, the head of the unit, whose managerial responsibilities included standing behind Desiree when she happened to bend over and pick something up two or three times a day.

  But what made Desiree more than a pain in the ass was the fact that she was an Eagleton type. Jack Eagleton was the not-so-new schools chancellor appointed to cut bureaucratic waste and improve standardized test scores. Eagleton came in with a plan to run the schools like a corporation and make them “profitable” again. He immediately directed his new programmers to create a simple computer designation for unproductive but belligerent staff—“Control-86 Transfer Command”—which with a few keystrokes would remove them from the books at central administration without the usual termination hearing required by the collective bargaining agreement. For the employee, it meant job oblivion, practically without a trace, and months of costly searching to retrieve lost files of your employment history in the event you wanted back pay, benefits, or reinstatement. For Eagleton, it was legal subterfuge, a secret high-tech hammer held over the heads of longtime Board employees who dared to resist his changes. Under this schools chancellor, schoolchildren were now referred to as “educable units,” teachers became “learning associates,” a curriculum was really a “paradigm,” and success meant “investment returns.” Eagleton was known around the office simply as “that bastard.” Desiree was the new breed of hatchet man, the kind who speaks wistfully about “makeovers” and “reorganizations.”

  The first thing reorganization
meant was no more offices for certain staff, like Sidarra, just cubicles. Desiree made a beeline for Sidarra’s cubicle one morning in late May. When she got to the half wall, she planted her silk-bloused elbows on the edge and peered down as if she were looking into a cage. That morning, Sidarra was stuck answering random calls to the central office when a frantic assistant principal called to report an emergency at a Bronx school. Desiree, gesturing wildly, interrupted the phone call.

  “Good news, sweetie!” She giggled like they were close friends.

  Sidarra looked at her in disbelief, shook her head, and returned to the phone. “I’m gonna have to call you back,” she said into the mouthpiece. “That’s very disturbing. We’ll get you a school safety investigator by tomorrow. Make sure to keep somebody with the families. Try not to worry. Kids are tough.” Sidarra hung up the call and looked up at Desiree. “What?”

  “What was that about?”

  “District 11. Two children had seizures during the morning test session and no one was prepared to help them. They’re still testing out there, but a few of the kids went to the hospital in ambulances.”

  “That’s not school safety, Sidarra! You oughta know that,” she said in that thick Long Island accent that always makes you want to chew a piece of gum. “That’s Communicable Disease Suppression and, oh my God, Legal. Those parents could sue us.”

  “Thanks for your input, Desiree. What’s the good news?”

  “The chancellor issued an early draft of his reorganization report to some of us. Guess what?” Her face brightened as if she sincerely meant it. “You’re not getting the early retirement ax after all!”

  “What? How did you—?” Sidarra looked around and tried to blink some sense into a moment that had caught her totally off guard. “What’s happening to our division?”

  Desiree gleefully ticked off the names of a few coworkers, men and women who had been at the Board for decades. They were getting a “package.” One or two would be transferred. A new person, a specialist, was being hired from Chicago. “And you’ll be reporting to me! Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “But, Desiree, I’m senior to you.”

  “Apparently not anymore. But don’t get stank with me until you talk with Reed, because it was his recommendation, sistergirl.” She thought that talk was funny in a black way. “C’mon, Sidarra. Don’t be upset. This will be good for the management flow. You and I will have to get along eventually.”

  And she was gone. Everything in Sidarra’s head went numb. She stared blankly across her desk, past the mounds of files, the computer she rarely used, to a picture of Raquel as a toddler smiling sweetly. How could this be? she thought. What would this mean? Then the old, Whatever happened to our union? Sidarra nearly blacked out from the shock. Slowly she rose from the seat, but she was too distracted to avoid the sides. As she stood up, her thigh caught on the jagged edge of the old swivel chair and the metal tore her pantyhose, her dress, and drew a thin line of blood. Sidarra balled up her fists. “Cheesy fucking dress!”

  Ripped clothes and all, she marched away from the cubicle and straight to Clayborne Reed’s office. He was on the phone when she walked in and closed the door behind her.

  He put the phone down. “Do we have an appointment?” he asked, grinning sheepishly.

  “I think so,” she said. “Desiree just gave me some ‘good news.’ Is she on crack or something?”

  He shook his large round head and chuckled to himself. “No, Sidarra. I’m afraid not. You know your dress is ripped.”

  “I’ll survive.”

  “Why don’t you have a seat. You were going to find out Friday anyway.” Sidarra sat down and Reed began to explain that there was nothing he could do about the latest changes the new chancellor wanted. They’d brought in management consultants from Wisconsin, conducted efficiency studies, and reviewed each member of the division’s staff. “You’re lucky you still have a job. Most of us are lucky to be around. Desiree is even going to train you to enter the Control-86 Transfer Command. Can’t fall through a trapdoor if you know one’s there.”

  That wasn’t good enough for her. “But why was no one here consulted? Lots of us have good ideas. I have a whole folder of proposals I’ve wanted to make to improve things. Don’t I deserve that after ten years here? And how, Clayborne, how in the world…” Her voice trailed off as she tried to collect herself.

  “Seniority will only get you so far in this man’s world,” he said. “Desiree’s skills are fresh. She knows the database systems they use. She’s familiar with the whole test regimen we’ll be implementing. This is not a knock on you, Sidarra.”

  “Did you go to bat for me, Clay? Did you at least fight for me?”

  He wouldn’t look at her. He just pressed his fingers together and redistributed his girth in the chair. “I did what I could,” he nearly whispered, still not meeting her eyes. “The demotion in title could have been worse. The pay cut coulda been a lot worse.”

  “The what?!” she screamed.

  It was no use. Before long she was out the door and on the way back to her cubicle, leaving a fresh bloodstain on his chair.

  THE CITY’S PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS seemed to be in a perpetual state of test taking. The chancellor had doubled the number of standardized tests given to city schoolchildren each semester during the spring testing dates, but school staff were struggling to handle the logistics. Four girls in the eighth grade at P.S. 76 in the Morrisania section of the Bronx found themselves four students too many for the classroom’s legal maximum. D’Amaya, Kimara, LeJazz, and Jennifer were friends skilled in coordinating class disruptions. Because of overcrowding, the only sensible place to move them was to a large maintenance closet where some chairs and a round table were squeezed in. A proctor could monitor them through a window in the door. Everything worked well enough during the first part of the day of testing, but late in the afternoon an old dumbwaiter shaft that connected to the room through a vent began emitting a weak gassy smell. The girls complained about having to take a test in such a nasty place that stank so bad, but both the supervising teacher and the custodian detected nothing more than the astringent aroma of floor cleaners. The girls went home for the day. But the next morning, the emissions from the little vent became visible as a thin film in the air, which made the girls dizzy and nauseous. When two of them complained again, the young proctor thought they were trying to get out of finishing the test. Then the gas really started to fill the tiny room. When one child lost consciousness, the proctor finally decided to open the door and call for emergency help. Because the school was on testing lockdown, the commotion didn’t set off the normal relay, and it was several minutes before the four girls were actually removed from the closet and sent to the hospital, violently coughing and vomiting in loud, raw spasms that horrified the students who had to hear them pass. The story ran on all the local TV news channels that evening. The girls had not suffered from “communicable disease,” as Desiree had thought. It was the toxic union of too much gas, asbestos residue, and asthma.

  MICHAEL WAS GOOD about one thing. He agreed to relieve Mrs. Thomas of babysitting duty whenever Sidarra was at her weekly investment club meeting, and he was always on time with videos and cheeseburgers for Raquel. Michael was right about another thing: that Sidarra might lack the patient temperament of a successful stock market investor. A couple of weeks into her first attempts to invest some of the savings her parents had left for Raquel’s college fund, Sidarra began to wonder if she was a stupid fool, or just a damn fool. Mr. Harrison advised her to wait a bit longer before she actually bought any stock. He thought she might want to keep evaluating the best portfolio for her. But he also said that she seemed like a very quick study. That last part was all she heard. Sidarra felt a little too desperate to be patient.

  After that particularly bad day at work, she arrived early and waited alone for the investment club meeting to start in the dank, poorly lit conference room in the Theresa Hotel. She had an acute need for pow
er. It wasn’t just the surprise demotion by the chancellor that made her feel vulnerable. It was what happened to the four little girls in the Bronx, too. She realized that, in a way, it could have been she who was forced to take that test in a dangerous little room, in which case, had she survived, she would be forever disabled and her life would assume the involuntary mission of undoing the Board of Miseducation’s carelessness. Or, more likely, it could have been her own daughter trapped in that room, in which case Sidarra would suddenly have had to take on the lifelong quest of the pitiful parents you see on the evening news, looking small and sweet and pathetic in their tired search for justice, accountability, and, failing all that, a little peace. The unexpected chain of events starting from the Bronx school accident had suddenly set fear off inside her—the phone call from the frantic school administrator that she happened to answer, the Board’s self-protective response by Desiree, the slow-breaking news about the girls’ condition in the hospital, the sight of their anguished parents on television, the insipid prevalence of danger to girls. It all struck home for Sidarra. She could see herself under the bright reflection of a helicopter spotlight, scanning for storm victims amid twisted wreckage and instead finding her, huddled and shaking. Sidarra didn’t want to be caught out there. So once Charles Harrison began the meeting, she asked as many questions as came to mind; she answered questions she wasn’t responsible for researching. And when the goofy-looking guy who wore the colorful warm-up suits tried to redirect the day’s topic into tech stocks, she checked him politely, but firmly.

  “But I know a little something about this,” the man said. “I’m a computer tech. I mean, I do programming.”