Eraser Tattoo

“The scrape and screech of bus brakes every fifteen minutes.”

This sentence is part of a longer description of the sights and sounds of everyday life in Brooklyn, which helps create a believable setting. This sentence in particular also employs cadence and alliteration, which strengthens the effect of the pleasant and familiar description of setting.

“Shay pushed her finger into her own sternum, like pushing a button to turn her heart on. Or off.”

As Shay points to her chest, she is telling Dante that “love is a strong word” (4). She’s talking about her father, but the narration about turning her heart on or off makes it clear that she also thinks love might be too strong a word to use for the relationship between her and Dante. The implication is that she will easily move on from the relationship after she moves.

“Before then, he’d just tuck in the laces until they worked their way up the sides, slowly crawling out like worms from wet soil, which would almost always lead to Dante tripping over them, scraping his knees, floor or ground burning holes in his denim.”

The simile comparing laces to worms is another illustration of one of the story’s main ideas—the image of worms being forced out of wet soil is an analogy for people being forced out of their homes due to gentrification. Dante “burning” holes in his jeans also parallels the burning he feels on his arm while receiving the tattoo. In both scenarios, as kids and in the present, Shay blows on his wounds to relieve the burn.

“Shay always needed to see it, white where brown used to be, a blood-speckled boo-boo waiting to be blown. Kissed.”

When they were five, Shay would always blow on Dante’s wounds to relieve the pain. Now, she does the same thing after she gives Dante the tattoo. The irony is that now, she is the one causing the pain as well as taking it away. For Dante, love is both the root and the reprieve of anguish.

“She was concentrating on the top of the S, a curved back-and-forth motion—a frown.”

Shay is rubbing her initial into Dante’s skin with the pencil eraser while they talk about their future after Shay moves. Comparing the “S” to a frown shows Shay’s disappointment—she is unhappy to be leaving, but she is also disappointed by Dante’s inability to understand what she wants, and his impractical insistence on continuing their relationship after she leaves.

“Shay glanced up at him with sadness, a dim shooting star in her eyes. She blinked it away.”

Dante continues to express his elaborate plans for his future with Shay, but it saddens Shay because she knows these plans are not realistic. The fact that she cries and Dante doesn’t points to the fact that she has accepted the end of their relationship, while Dante still believes they will stay together.

“It hurt like hell. Like someone was trying to strike a match on his flesh.”

The eraser breaks through Dante’s skin at the exact same moment that Shay suggests the possibility that they might break up after she leaves. Dante’s physical pain mirrors the emotional pain he experiences by refusing to accept that his relationship is not permanent.

“He and Shay stepped down so the couple could step up. ‘I just don’t know why they couldn’t say excuse me,’ Dante grumbled, loud enough for the couple to hear. But they didn’t respond. Didn’t even flinch.”

After being pushed farther to the edge of the stoop every time the tenants passed, Dante and Shay finally get off. It’s significant that the new tenants are a couple, like Dante and Shay. The tenants aren’t aware of it, but they are partially responsible for causing Dante and Shay to separate. This adds to the injustice of the entire situation—Dante and Shay are forced to give up their relationship so that a young, affluent, white couple can move in together.

“As Shay and Dante watched the man and woman struggle up the steps inside, they also watched Shay’s mother struggle down the steps, eventually bumbling through the front door.”

This scene illustrates the handoff of Shay’s house to the new tenants. The tenants have a rude and selfish attitude as they literally, physically force Shay, Dante, and Shay’s mom off the property before they’re ready to leave.

“She flashed a sad grin. One of loss and love. One of understanding.”

Shay’s mother, in tears herself, sees Dante and Shay sharing an emotional goodbye. Dante and Shay’s relationship and separation is made more difficult by the fact that they are young and emotionally immature. Shay’s mother seems to know exactly what they are going through, as the unique pain of young love and heartbreak is a universal experience.

“Her mother moved slowly, as if giving each foot a moment to mourn each step, and Shay threw her arms around Dante, kissing him on the cheek.”

Shay’s mother’s slow movement down the steps shows how begrudgingly the family is leaving. Using the word “mourn” likens the situation to the grief of a death. Indeed, each of the main characters undergoes a crushing sense of loss as a result of the move.

“She blew on it, her breath cooling the burn for just a moment.”

Just before Shay gets in the car to leave, she looks at Dante’s tattoo and blows on it to ease the pain, just like she did when they were kids. She is only capable of offering a momentary relief from the pain that, this time, she herself has caused.

“Dante forced a smile, closed the door, and told Shay to call him when she got there. To Wilmington. A place he’d never heard of, where buses probably didn’t go.”

This is the second time in the story Dante has thought that buses probably don’t go to Wilmington since he’s never heard of it. The fact that this only occurs to Dante minutes before Shay’s departure suggests that he has been avoiding any serious consideration of the logistics of continuing their relationship, perhaps because the idea of breaking up was too painful to bear.