Highbridge Girls

Denise, December 2006

“We are the Highbridge girls, we wear our hair in curls,” we sang. The rest of the song I have forgotten but it was about how tough we were. We were city girls.  There were “gangs” in our neighborhoods, although nothing like the violence that there is today. The rumbles involved chains at worst; there were no guns or knives.   The cool girls wore electric pink baseball jackets and a small scarf tied to the side of their neck. I wanted one of those scarves so bad. But my mother said they were only for “fast girls.” I was not to be one of the fast girls, but then she also bemoaned the fact of my obvious unattractiveness as well.  It’s no wonder I couldn’t figure out the boy-girl thing.

We were hanging out on my stoop, two stone steps framed by two stone slanted benches.  We were waiting for Pat Cooney, the cutest boy in the Bronx, to come by with his pushcart to deliver groceries from the corner store. I was madly in love with Pat Cooney. He was one of five brothers who lived across the avenue. They all had a shuffle to their walk and were the essence of cool. My friend Anne had borrowed the little kid’s chalk and written “Denise loves Pat” on the sidewalk. We were laughing. Just then I caught sight of him turning the corner and heading this way.  If he saw what was on the ground, I would have to just die, just crawl in a hole and die.  I jumped up and began to scrape my feet on the written words to erase them.  I tried spitting on them to wash away the chalk. I realized it was not going to come up in time. I ran into the hallway of the building to hide and watched as he sauntered by with his pushcart. He didn’t seem to notice.