The Arrogant Years

by Lucette Lagnado

  And while I never thought of my mother as especially carefree, those moments in the water when she and I together made clumsy attempts at swimming, jumping up and down in the waves, I had a sense she had finally let go of the angst that seemed to perpetually grip her, that her demons had at last relinquished their hold. There in the water, it was as if she had never really grown up—she seemed in many ways a little girl, a waif, a giddy, excited child, not too different from me.

  Afterward, we settled back on the little blue kitchen towels we had brought from home. They were so small, we couldn’t really lie down on them; but that was fine, because we were both too restless—neither Mom nor I were the type to stretch out and bake in the sun. We preferred to sit up and enjoy the amiable scene around us—families devouring large meals of chicken and sandwiches, young girls parading in their skimpy bikinis, lifeguards preening up and down, even as portable transistor radios blasted Cousin Brucie, the relentlessly cheerful DJ who epitomized a Brooklyn summer, and soda vendors with large coolers strapped to their shoulders trudged through the sand pleading to sell us a cold drink.

  We left the beach the way we came, retracing our steps past the children of the Y and the dapper members of the Baths.

  In 1966, Brighton Beach seemed dominated by elderly Jewish women, including many Holocaust survivors. These had moved to the area decades earlier and raised their families a few steps from the El, in humble walk-ups and tenements that had breathtaking ocean views. But now their upwardly mobile children were gone, dispersed to fancier sections of the city or the country, their husbands had passed away, and it had become a neighborhood of widows, or so it seemed as we walked. We’d pass groups of aged women sitting on folded beach chairs, chatting outside their dilapidated buildings. They’d be sunning themselves, uninhibited about sitting on the sidewalk in bathing suits that revealed all their fat and wrinkles.

  How we envied them. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live close to the sea?” Edith would always exclaim. And that was her most fervent dream—that we would move to Brighton Beach and have access to healthful iodine.

  As we turned the corner to Brighton Beach Avenue and its bustling shopping strip, I felt the fun was only starting.

  I shared Edith’s fascination with the discount stores beneath the El, the shops that displayed their wares in vast, inelegant bins. If Mom missed the fine elegant shops of Cairo, she rarely let on; only once in a while did she speak wistfully of Cicurel, the large department store on King Fouad Street that sold only the most exclusive merchandise in Egypt.

  In that sense, she was different from Dad, who couldn’t abide bargain stores and cheap merchandise. Unable to afford the fine clothes he had always loved, my father chose not to shop at all. Only once in a while, in small extravagant gestures reminiscent of his old self, did he come home with an elegant straw Panama from an upscale Manhattan hat store.

  Mom and I felt differently. In our eyes all the promise of America was there in emporiums such as John’s Bargain Store, where for small sums of money, it was possible to decorate an apartment, assemble a wardrobe, purchase gifts. Best of all, we could lose ourselves in those bins. There was such a hopeful feeling that came with rummaging through the boxes and containers filled with items on sale.

  Mom left me to go explore the houseware department—containers overflowing with window curtains, towels, throw rugs, sponges, bedding, saucepans, and gleaming faux-silver flatware that cost as little as ten cents for an individual fork, spoon, or knife. Shopping for a small carpet, or even a spoon, made Edith hopeful.

  She was always quoting a line from Alphonse Daudet, one of her favorite novelists, “Il faut reconstruire le foyer.”

  It meant, “You must rebuild the hearth.”

  Mom was obsessed with the notion of reconstructing what we had left behind on Malaka Nazli Street. She longed to pull our family back together again, to re-create a semblance of the home that we had lost, and it was as if she believed she could do it bit by bit, piece by piece, with pillowcases, towels, and spoons.

  Next stop: the shoe store across the street. Summer began with another tradition that dated back to Egypt—the purchase of white sandals. In settling here, we’d had to eliminate our habit of wearing white—most especially white shoes. Westerners didn’t wear white shoes, and putting them on would have branded us immediately as foreigners or, worse still, immigrants. White shoes in America were for proms or weddings or confirmations, not everyday life. The many pairs we’d brought with us lay fallow in the bottom of our twenty-six suitcases. We were almost afraid to open them, afraid of what we would find from our lost life.

  The one exception was summer, where it was appropriate at least for children to wear white.

  Off we’d go to Miles, the cool, darkened shoe store near the beach. Inside, quiet and order reigned, and the children’s sandals were expensive; there were no markdowns, no sales, no bins—these would come only at the end of the summer, the salesman told us, when prices would be slashed by half or more. But by then, of course, we wouldn’t want them.

  Mom had decreed I could have one new pair of sandals, des sandalettes, as she called them. They had to last me through July and August and daily walks on the boardwalk and in the sand and they had to be white and they had to be made of leather. I’d try on as many pairs as the salesman would allow and choose carefully.

  Changing into the new sandals seemed to have a transformative effect. As the obliging salesman strapped them on and I tossed away my dark wintry school shoes, I felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted. I could run, skip, jump, almost float in my white sandals. I could revert to an earlier incarnation of my childhood, when I was a little girl in Egypt and I didn’t shop in bargain stores and white was all I ever wore.

  Light and carefree in my sandalettes, I headed with Edith to the kosher butcher shop with the intriguing neon Self-Service sign on the window that heralded a different kind of establishment than any we’d ever known. Modern, antiseptic—it wasn’t at all like the old-style butcher shops we patronized in Bensonhurst (or for that matter in Cairo) where men in bloody aprons chopped and prepared whatever meat we ordered on the spot. The shop consisted entirely of freezer sections where you could find impeccably wrapped packages of ground beef, steaks, lamb chops, and hamburger patties at the exact weight and price you wanted. The butchers themselves were nowhere to be seen.

  Back home we collapsed from exhaustion over the iodine and the shopping expeditions. We’d sit together and have a simple meal Mom prepared, typically scrambled eggs with tomatoes and green peppers.

  It was over one such after-beach dinner that my mother unveiled her grand plan for my future.

  I wasn’t going to go back to “cette affreuse école public”—that awful public school—she declared. She was prepared to yank me out of PS 205, and beg and implore the lycée’s formidable president, Monsieur Galy, to admit me. If that failed, she had another ace up her sleeve. She would reach out to Edouard Morot-Sir, the influential cultural attaché at the French Embassy in New York.

  Surely, if anyone could get me into the lycée, it would be the diplomat with the aristocratic hyphenated last name.

  She wasn’t being entirely fanciful—my family had, against all odds, forged a relationship with Morot-Sir. Edith had begun corresponding with him shortly after we’d arrived in America, when my brother and sister needed to have their studies in Egypt accredited to be able to attend college here. To her surprise, the eminent diplomat—whose name she always pronounced in a reverential way—responded amicably. Indeed, Suzette received two years of college credit as a result of his help.

  The illustrious Edouard Morot-Sir would be a formidable weapon in Mom’s arsenal. He would be her way, and mine, into the elusive lycée. She reiterated her disappointment with PS 205. Even now that I was trying to put the year behind me, she was still brooding and obsessing over it and figuring out how to implement her game plan.

  Edith became so absorbed with her letter-writing
campaign to the Lycée Français, that the daily outings to the beach decreased and she left me on my own, expecting me to find ways to keep myself busy.

  I must have seemed disconsolate. One Saturday my mother turned to Madame Marie, her closest friend in the women’s section. She was like us—she couldn’t afford to go away. The two agreed both Celia and I were in need of a respite. There we were, rows of empty chairs all around us, and no other children in sight.

  Their solution?

  We would go on a cruise—a cruise to Staten Island.

  When Madame Marie suggested a boat trip to Staten Island, Mom readily agreed, though neither of us had the foggiest notion where or what Staten Island was. Since we had arrived in America I had rarely wandered beyond the confines of Sixty-Sixth Street, though I was hungry for adventure.

  Sunday morning, we found Madame Marie, her husband, Celia, and younger brother Moshe ready and waiting for us in their cramped apartment on Sixty-Ninth Street, and together we set out on our journey. A magical cook whose dishes were redolent with the spices of her native Morocco, Celia’s mom had prepared a big picnic for us.

  Once at the ancient South Ferry station, we clambered aboard the boat, giddy at the prospect of a great sea voyage. We had no idea how far Staten Island was—it could have been hundreds of miles away for all we knew. Perhaps we were going on one of those grandes vacances after all.

  Once the boat docked, the question arose—where to now? I saw Mom glance at her friend with alarm.

  We were strangers in a strange land. We may as well have been standing on the dock of a foreign port. Edith took charge, bravely asking a passerby if there were a nice park nearby, “to take the children.” The man directed us to a bus and we hopped in feeling terribly adventurous.

  There was a dreamlike aspect to the ride; we looked out the window at a landscape that was startlingly different from the rows of two-family homes and brick tenement buildings we knew in Brooklyn. Here, we passed vast open spaces, the occasional neat private house with a lawn, and water all around.

  We finally arrived at a lush green wooded expanse. “Clove Lake,” the driver barked amiably. We walked around in a daze to a park that bore no resemblance to any we knew in the city. It looked and felt like an enchanted forest, with thick trees giving way to an occasional clearing.

  We settled onto a grassy patch and prepared to dine. Madame Marie had outdone herself. Instead of a picnic basket, which neither of our families owned, she had brought several shopping bags filled with her specialties. None of us wanted to leave—I felt as if I could have stayed forever on this strange idyllic island. As we boarded the bus back to the ferry, we agreed that Staten Island was full of mystery and we had to find a way to come back.

  · 9 ·

  The Errant Sister

  Although Mom and Suzette clashed on every possible subject, they were usually in agreement about me. When it came to dissecting the American school system, they were kindred souls—public schools were atrocious, my sister remarked when Mom briefed her on her plan to take me out of PS 205. My mother found in Suzette the perfect ally—someone who shared her sweeping ideals as well as her grand illusions. Suzette firmly concurred that I should be given a shot at a decent private education—the one so cruelly interrupted when we left Cairo and I had to abandon the Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk. Only the Lycée Français in New York would do.

  Yet even with a subject they could discuss harmoniously, Mom couldn’t resist needling Suzette. Her rage at my sister and the fact she insisted on living away from home manifested itself in nearly all their dealings. While Edith was more progressive than my father and had always cut my sister some slack, it was now two years since Suzette had moved out. There was no sign she was coming back, yet Mom could never stop pleading with her to return. And though my sister only lived in Queens and stayed in constant touch through phone calls and letters, her departure haunted the family, overshadowing each of our lives. It was the great calamity of our move to America: We had lost Suzette.

  Every phone call to my sister, however peaceable, seemed to end with Edith delivering a tirade.

  This time it was about how Suzette was neglecting me, “cette pauvre petite enfant”—this poor little child. Mom told her I was struggling in this difficult New York summer, and she was finding it hard to keep me busy, and what was the point of having an older sister anyway? Suzette slammed the phone, and my mother began to cry. What had been a cordial conversation about the horrors of the American educational system in general and the advantages of the lycée had turned into another bruising battle.

  Mom’s words must have penetrated. Within days of this latest clash, my sister materialized, ready to take me to the beach.

  Even back in Egypt, Suzette never liked going to the beach with us. Sporting Beach, located in a middle-class section of Alexandria, was a favorite destination of many of our friends and neighbors from the Jewish community. My sister couldn’t stand it. Instead, she wangled invitations from her tony friends to Sidi Bishr or San Stefano, the far more exclusive enclaves farther up the coast, where the crème de la crème of Egyptian and European society gathered.

  To Suzette, we had once been hopelessly middle class. Now, we were miserably working class. It had been relatively easy in Egypt for a young woman with charm and appeal (and my sister had plenty of both) to climb up the ranks and be embraced everywhere, from the elite private clubs of Cairo in the winter to the elegant seaside playgrounds of Alexandria in the summer. But here in America, ostensibly the land of upward mobility, life seemed more rigid and castelike. Stuck in a low-level clerical position at the First National City Bank in Manhattan, my sister’s future, instead of opening up to limitless possibilities, seemed more limited than ever.

  Eighteen-year-old Suzette on her French travel documents, Paris.

  She was twenty years old.

  Yet her friends from Cairo, after a similar turbulent exile and relocation, were beginning to settle down. Her closest companions from the lycée, the Wahba sisters, had moved from Cairo to Paris, and finally to Israel. Pretty and charismatic, they were getting married and one by one, having children. They felt an optimism about the future that my sister, and for that matter, the rest of my family, lacked.

  My mother was always citing the Wahba girls as shining role models. When was Suzette going to come to her senses? When was she going to resume her education? When was she going to get married? When was she going to come home?

  My sister would always get so distressed, and the arguments would begin again.

  When Suzette showed up Sunday, she was determined to offer me, as Edith had urged, quelques distractions, a little bit of fun. Yet her snobbish tastes and condescending attitudes were on full display. We weren’t taking the Sea Beach Express, she announced. We were going to Manhattan Beach.

  Manhattan Beach, contrary to its name, was also in Brooklyn. But it was far away, and getting there by public transportation was complicated. We boarded a tangle of buses that took more than an hour to get to the only beach in New York that met Suzette’s standards.

  Once we reached the sand and prepared to settle in, I took out the faded little blue towel Mom had packed for me. My sister looked at it with contempt. She immediately marched me to one of the vendors hawking their wares by the entrance and bought me my first beach towel—massive, soft, big enough to fit two people side by side. We stopped at another stand where I picked out some toys—a blue-and-white inflatable ring and a beach ball. She also grabbed a bottle of Tropicana suntan oil—another luxury my frugal mom would never have considered buying.

  At last, we were ready to proceed to the ocean.

  Manhattan Beach was exceptionally crowded. Its topography seemed different to me from Brighton Beach, and I felt disoriented. But Suzette was determined to make me feel at home there—offering me suntan lotion and applying it on herself, like the models on the TV commercials. My sister looked especially glamorous in her yellow bathing suit, which set off her dark
hair, and she stood out even among the bikini-clad teenage girls. She had brought a novel to read and encouraged me to take my little inflated ring and enjoy myself “dans cette belle plage,” on this lovely beach. Then, she settled into her book and her suntan.

  I ventured out rather nervously. The water seemed to get deeper much faster than I expected.

  I tried to practice my swimming using the ring. I was so absorbed floating on my back in my little ring that I didn’t notice the group of boys who had formed a circle around me. They were laughing, and one grabbed the blue-and-white ring and began pulling me deeper and deeper out to sea. I tried to scream, but because of the waves and the sun and the crowds of people around me nobody could hear me. The more I cried, the more the boys laughed.

  Where was my sister?

  When they finally scattered and left, I was far out into the water. There was no one around me, and I was sure I was going to drown.

  At last I spotted Suzette swimming toward me. I was crying hysterically when she reached me. She seemed mostly bemused, asking what had happened. She pulled me back to shore and together we walked back to our encampment and my new beach towel. For the rest of the day, I hovered close to her on the sand.

  I didn’t tell Edith about what happened. Back home when Mom asked “Comment était la nouvelle plage?”—How was the new beach?—I said only that it didn’t seem nearly as nice as ours. The sea didn’t even have that much iodine out in Manhattan Beach.

  My mother looked at me strangely, but she didn’t press me. I couldn’t tell her the truth. She would simply have added it to the ever-growing list of sins my sister had committed against God and the family and me. She would have condemned Suzette as selfish and hopelessly self-absorbed. She would have reminded her that since she’d left home, my brother was supporting the five of us on his slender salary from Continental Grain. She would have demanded to know how she could have possibly let pauvre Loulou out of her sight at a strange and faraway beach.