Tizita

Tizita means memory tinged with regret

Abraham Verghese

Tizita 1

My Bronx neighborhood

halfway between the elevated train on Jerome Avenue and the Grand Concourse, home to blue-collar and white-collar first generation children of immigrants

included a Junior High School, Minnie's Grocery, a meat market, a Chinese laundry, a drugstore, and Mo's Candy Store.

An orphanage —just beyond my immediate roaming ground —sent age appropriate girls to an elementary school on the other side of the Grand Concourse. When I was in the fifth grade my mother was ill and I lived with my Aunt Dottie, Uncle Murray and Cousin Bobby for several months. I attended that elementary school.

Mary, with her institutional bowl haircut and ill-fitting clothes, joined our class in November. Prior to her entrance the teacher said, "One of the children from the orphanage will join the class."

Yvonne ruled a clique of girls in the class.

Maybe the idea of being an orphan frightened us—
Maybe the haircut and the too often washed clothes, maybe the way Mary held back, maybe the way she spoke —hesitant and flat—made her Yvonne’s target.

One afternoon Yvonne and her clique surrounded Mary with their presence and questions.

"Why are you in the orphanage? Doesn't anyone care about you? "

I didn't belong to the clique but I and several others wandered over to see what was happening. We heard Mary say that her mother's favorite sister was coming in a few weeks to pick her up. Yvonne, with a carefully balanced attack worthy of a nascent Machiavelli, dove into that comment with the agility of a fencer.

She aided Mary in spinning a tale of an aunt who lived in a country estate, of promises of horseback lessons and her own piano. As the story spun out of control Yvonne bided her time until she said, "Why do you tell so many lies?"

By that time the toothpick edifice of stories tumbled and Mary began crying.

By the time I went over to Mary the clique had dispersed. "I'm sorry," I said.

The sorry, too late and too tepid, didn't do much.

Tizita 2

Getting a job at a summer camp as a Junior counselor teaching arts and crafts meant money, getting out of the city for eight weeks and a vacation. I taught crafts to girls whose parents could afford the steep cost of a private camp

I played scrabble with three other counselors and became friendly with Doris. When her parents came to visit, her father drove down the dirt road in a battered car complete with rust holes.

Camp ended and Doris invited me to her house. I took the subway and then walked to her building on Park Avenue in Manhattan. A carpeted elevator took me up to the tenth floor — a maid opened the door to the family apartment.

"Don't just stand there, come in."

I walked into a large room—the marbled entranceway. I thought that our Bronx apartment, with a few adjustments, fit into that room.

Doris and I didn't have a lot to talk about. She told me about her private school and the planned class trip to Greece. I told her of my art classes.

The cook prepared a lunch—served on China with sterling silver flatware and glasses that rang when clinked.

I never did invite Doris to the Bronx— I felt that she wouldn't be comfortable in a three-room apartment with layers of paint on the walls.

Tizita 3

The memories not written down, the ones we all carry with us, layered like strips of paper mache...

The memories we regret, the ones we want to alter refuse to allow that possibility...

Some memories have crevasses where people drown or people seek forgiveness.

Some memories are simply shadows