Bridge of Sighs

locker rooms and chlorine from the basement pool, anything could happen, that our strict conventions were about to be suspended. Inside, we were in a new world that resembled the old one, perhaps even paralleled it, but was also thrillingly, dangerously off-kilter. There were secrets to be learned, and it was here that we would learn them.
    The terrible anticipation began on the stairs when, if someone tripped or an adult appeared on the first landing in an attempt to slow the throng surging upward like water through the damaged hull of a ship, the stairway would jam, desire and anxiety and unbearable hope momentarily thwarted, delaying by eternities our emergence into the gym, into Mystery itself, where the music—we could
hear
it there in the stairwell—had already begun to play. Once, stalled in this fashion, I happened to look at the girl next to me, and when our eyes met, I saw that hers were full of tears. Possibly she was simply afraid of being crushed. She’d been separated from her friends, and though we couldn’t move forward, those below continued to press upward, causing everyone in the stairwell, our feet locked in place, to lean forward, our hands pressing for balance into the backs of those on the next-higher step. In a matter of moments we were stacked there like semitoppled dominoes.
    That’s one explanation. But I recognized this girl as a fellow East Ender and think now that her eyes had simply filled with pent-up anticipation. She was imagining her friends already upstairs, dancing without her, getting so far ahead that she’d never catch up. By the time she joined them, the boy she’d been thinking about all week, whose eyes she’d met across the crowded cafeteria, who was too popular—admit it—to be a realistic aspiration, would already be taken. We shared, all of us, a powerful sense that what was at stake on those crowded stairs was nothing less than the rest of our lives, that our every move in that gymnasium had an unimaginable significance, that we were being watched, judged, elected or damned. Slow down, we were being told at home and at school, you’ve got your whole lives ahead of you. But to get stalled in that stairwell was to understand how little time there was, and how fast it was wasting.
             
     
    W HAT I MOST looked forward to about junior high was seeing Bobby Marconi again. Since homerooms were assigned alphabetically, there was a good chance Lynch and Marconi would be together. After the Marconis had moved to the Borough, I’d come to accept how unlikely it was Bobby and I would ever again be best friends. Mr. Marconi had probably made him promise that wouldn’t happen, and my mother had warned me about getting my hopes up, but I did dare to hope that we might share the same lunch period and that I’d be welcome at the cafeteria table where he sat with his new friends. Being both shy and a Catholic school boy, I feared being friendless in a new, hostile environment.
    Even armed with such scaled-down expectations, I was destined to be disappointed. That first day of school, Mr. Melvin, our homeroom teacher, called Bobby’s name and made a notation in his attendance book when no one responded. Was he ill? Would he be here tomorrow? Two West End girls I knew exchanged a look, though I wasn’t able to decipher what it might mean. Maybe it had something to do with Mrs. Marconi. I was pretty sure my mother had kept in touch with her former friend because sometimes at night I heard her name come up through the heat register when I was supposed to be asleep. I was able to piece together that she’d gotten pregnant again, and Bobby had yet another little brother. And right before the baby was born, she’d apparently gone off on another unexpected trip, though it was possible I’d misheard this last part. I was always hearing fragments of my parents’ conversations, but then the heat would come on and I’d have to fill in the blanks in the phrase, the sentence, the story. So it was possible my mother was just recalling Mrs. Marconi’s previous visit to the sister whose very existence my mother had doubted. I distinctly remember hearing “turned up in Canada this time,” but by then my parents may have been talking about somebody else. I’d grilled my mother on the subject of Mrs. Marconi more than once. Had she visited her old friend at her new house in the Borough? No. Did they talk regularly on the phone? No. Was there any news about Bobby? No.