The Children’s Magical Garden
Your heart doesn’t have to be safe to go in here. Climb the fence. I’m at the corner of Norfolk and Stanton on the Lower East Side, staring at the green and verdant garbage. A full-size boy rides around on a midget bicycle. The playhouse is half-built, some sticks in the yard. It’s the same apologetic pink as my playhouse was, the same white trash off-white on the rims. I know I shouldn’t say white trash.
I’m sitting on a skateboard somebody left. They can’t arrest you. Anyways the kids who come here are sad and listless and wouldn’t beat a butterfly up. A girl comes out of the tree, she’s Mexican or something. She has a trembling little potbelly. Instantly I love her to death. I don’t know about the boy. He’s cycling around in the dirt, but he looks like he’s perfectly aware that there are other things to do besides cycling around in the dirt, only they’re not worth his time. He must be a little shrewd, though. It actually is a giant chain-link fence so it takes some effort to cross.
Are you homeless? the boy asks me.
Are you homeless? I ask back.
He looks at me like bitch, please and cycles over a flat hula hoop. The girl is writing her name in the dirt with a stick. I want to tell her about diseases but what do I know? I’ll give you a hint: nothing. The bricks look like ninety-year-old men. Stained, tired.
At night a policeman comes by and looks for us, but we hide. It’s the last locked-up green space in New York where anybody can hide, because, come on. This is a poor family’s displaced, junked backyard. From, like, Staten Island. Flew away and ended up here.
I shouldn’t say poor.
We dig holes to pee, we eat from the trash. What kind of questions are those? Really we go to Tompkins Square Park or Starbucks to do what we need to do, and then we come back home. You can get in and out. It’s a myth that you can’t, just like it’s a myth that vampires live in the subways.
One day we felt benevolent, so we invited some rich kids over to play. We had sort of a swing set, and a few tires. No mulch, though. Without mulch we didn’t have much credibility as a playground. When the rich kids came in their adorable little outfits, some of them jumped up and down. The other ones stared.
Climb, we motioned them. Cycle boy latched onto the fence like Spiderman to demonstrate how it was done. The little ones touched the rungs. The short-haired moms, with their sunglasses and scarves, looked like aviators. What a fun place to play! they said. Isn’t there a door?
The Mexican girl pressed her little cheeks into the octagons in the fence. You can do it, she said. Climb. A Star Wars Velcro sneaker landed on a rung and slipped off. No traction in those shoes.
We don’t have all day, the moms said.
We really don’t either, I said. So I lifted the loose end of the fence from the ground. It twisted up pretty easily, like lousy plastic. The rich kids wormed through, excited by the dirt, pulling up the grass. When they got in, they just stood around. Then they played the way kids do. Swordfights and rubber balls. Hand-clapping games. Jumping on the tire. They kept it up till the sky changed colors. It’s five, said the moms. We have a yoga lesson. Come on out.
Not yet, said the rich kids.
Now, said the moms.
Please let us stay, said the kids. Please. Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.
The moms reached their hands through the fence, their big eyes teary. One of them started to rattle the fence. Don’t do that, I told her. It’ll give you tetanus. The kids were singing, not really a song, kind of a lazy cheer. Here we are, all of us, here we are and here we are and here we are again. Turn around and turn around and where will we be then? It didn’t make any sense. Plus the kids’ hair was wrinkled all over their collars. They had grass-stains and mud clumps on their little wool coats.
We’ll call the police, said the moms. They drew their cell phones like swords from their pockets.
The cops don’t come here, I said. The moms wailed. It was dark and the kids hugged each other, the little girls linked arms. Some girl had found a jump rope and they swung it back and forth. The kids waved at the trees, the trees waved at the kids, everyone waving like we were at some sort of rock concert holding up our lighters.
Amy Bergen lives in New York. She studied fiction at NYU and now lives the life of a freelancer and a roustabout. Originally, she comes from Columbus, Ohio. |
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