Leaving Brooklyn

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  The doctor, with his hairless chest, his muscled legs, his large yet fragile-looking hands, his softened and—with the glasses removed—profoundly puzzled eyes, stood up when he was done, walked nakedly to a cabinet, took out a bottle, and poured himself a drink. He offered me some but I refused. That is, I shook my head—I had hardly said a word throughout. “Do you like this?” he had whispered from time to time. “Do you like this?” And I had murmured some wordless sound. This too was altogether new—a situation where words served no purpose. Even the doctor had not used double-edged words to persuade me it was for my own good. It was for his good—I saw that with both eyes.

  With my silence and acquiescence, my knowing look, he had assumed I had done this before. He discovered I had not. No wonder he was puzzled. How could he know why I went along so readily, or that my greed in its fashion was as perverse and rapacious as his own?

  Staring down at me in puzzlement, he said, “Wait just a minute,” which was needless—I was in no hurry to go anywhere, ready for whatever else the scene might bring. He gathered up his clothes and disappeared behind a door. I heard water running, and when he returned he was dressed, with his glasses on and an air of presiding over his office once again. I was embarrassed. I saw that I should have used the interval to get dressed too, resuming my role as patient. Very well, if that was how things were done… I gathered up my clothes and went into the tiny bathroom. When I came out he was sitting on the couch, bent over, head in his hands.

  His shoulders jerked up and he rose to his feet. “Are you all right?”

  I nodded, not sure what he meant, what being not all right would be, at this point.

  “I mean, you understand, I never… I wouldn’t have unless you seemed—I didn’t mean to… I’m going through a very bad time—”

  I wanted to stop hearing those words, which cast him in a ridiculous light. I cleared my throat, I hadn’t spoken in so long. “It’s all right, I’m not going to say anything.”

  That must have been a good answer, for his face eased and he gave a rueful smile, more befitting his role as seducer. It was the first time I had seen him smile, standing up. Standing up, he had a withdrawn manner, nothing resembling a bedside manner. His teeth were quite nice and white. I was glad of that. I hated yellow teeth and would not have liked to think my tongue had touched yellow teeth.

  “These things happen sometimes,” he said. It was what my mother had said when I first asked her about my eye, long ago. He was fussing with some metal instruments on his table, the way she fussed with forks and knives, when I asked her to explain, not only about my eye but about many other things in the world.

  “Mm-hm,” I said, as if I knew. It was just what I didn’t know, how things happen, especially this thing, which apparently happened so easily, all over the place for all I knew, while I had imagined it as momentous—each time like crossing a border with armed guards and showing a passport—and arduous, something the body needed to anticipate and be morally armed to undergo, like major surgery.

  In Brooklyn mythology it could not happen outside of marriage, at least not to girls of fifteen who read books, though maybe to girls visibly out of bounds, the exceptionally flamboyant (dark-eyed Carlotta Kaplowitz, ex-polio victim, had become one of those) or the exceptionally ignorant (Arlene, in my History class, “didn’t know you could say no”). According to Mrs. Carlino in her Pre-Marriage course, such creatures had no “self-respect” and their fall occurred in unspeakable circumstances. On her long-awaited Dating and Courtship sheet, which I had in my book bag at this very moment, was the definitive meaning of Petting: “The prolonged caressing of parts of the body that do not usually come in contact before marriage.”

  And in romantic movies, where after the kissing and panting the scene discreetly changed, I had assumed the heroine firmly drew the line, as we were expected to do on dates. How utterly mistaken.

  The world, as I stood mutely examining the doctor’s flushed face, was disintegrating, to reform in another pattern. My patient bad eye, which had made me his patient, was vindicated. It had known all along how tenuous things were, how very unfreezable. It had suspected the insidious ease with which things unshaped and reshaped, constantly shifting relations so that any configuration was dissolving before the brain had seized it and locked it into a pattern of thought, sluggish brain forever lagging behind volatile world. It had known that things supposed to be hidden were right there, visible to the right eye; it was not shocked by the sight.

  The way the doctor had looked at my breasts. Not like the harrowing gaze of Miss Schechter, who blinked at the raw and perilous thing I exposed. Not like the girls in the locker room after swimming class, who spoke incessantly of breasts as part of an armory of equipment, bemoaning their smallness or largeness or inefficacy of shape, or like the boys who groped for them in dark cars or on living room couches as if they were buried treasure. The eye doctor looked in a way that clarified the world—pleased, even grateful, but unamazed. Of all the ways I had dreamed the world outside Brooklyn to be, I had never conceived of its nonchalance. When he unbuttoned my dress and undid my bra—with ease, not like the boys who built fancy gadgets in shop but fumbled with the hooks of a bra—I had thought I would die of shame to be looked at. But he made it easy, all so very easy.

  And the ease of this act’s happening seemed something even my parents could not know about, though I was aware that they did “it” in the marriage bed—quite a different matter. I was mistaken about many things back then, but maybe not about this: they may not have known or wanted to know how very circumstantial and arbitrary life could be, how unprogrammed, how unsettled.

  “I’ll see you in two weeks, then?” the doctor said. I nodded. He gave me some instructions about cleaning the lens. I had forgotten all about the lens. Only when he snapped open the lock and I put my hand on the doorknob did I feel something was missing, and I stood in confusion.

  “What’s the matter?” He looked alarmed, as if I might suddenly make the scene he had stopped fearing.

  “The lens.”

  “The lens?” Bafflement, then he slapped his hand to his forehead and broke out in a laugh. We had both forgotten that the lens was not in my eye or in its case in my purse but in the little saucer on his work table. He handed it to me on a tissue. I wished I could laugh at this oversight too, in a comradely way. But to display my laugh, to join it to his, would have been too intimate, too real. I accepted the lens stiffly and walked out into the waiting room. The cheerful receptionist had gone for the day and two patients were left, a young man with a bandage over one eye and an older woman wearing a black pillbox hat with a veil. I strolled past them with my head high, trying to appear - blasé, a movie heroine with a shady past.

  “Mrs. Daniels? You can come in now,” I heard him say as he had said it to me less than an hour ago. I strolled along Park Avenue with the same casual air, as though the thing had not happened. For this, I had been schooled well.

  The days proceeded in their routine way. All my waking hours I moved within the scene in the doctor’s office, living over and feeling each detail and each surprise as if it were an unfathomable dream I had dreamed. And so it was with the next visit. And the next. His undressing me—after a brief check of the lens—and making love to me on the couch where my mother had perched that first day, nervously entrusting her child to the hands of the big man, were continuing chapters of the dream, remote from the world of Brooklyn which enfolded me, though when I got home and changed my clothes I could see, I could smell the reality. I brought his smell back to Brooklyn, I thought as I stood in the shower, staring down at myself; I brought home the spouting overflow of his body and sent it down the drain.

  October came and went. As the fall settled in I cultivated a new kind of double vision. My eyes were veering apart like those of the wall-eyed people in the big men’s waiting rooms of my childhood, the banal left eye trained on Brooklyn, and the bad eye on the doctor’s couch in Manhattan, the doctor�
�s body weighing on mine, a scene with its skin removed, the particles barely holding together.

  IN MID-NOVEMBER THE sorority interviews were held at the apartment of one of the members. The custom was to dress up, so I wore a suit and stockings and high-heeled pumps like an aspiring corporation executive, though no such ambition could then have lodged in the heart of any girl in Brooklyn. I sat gingerly on a plastic-covered sofa in a living room carpeted in sky blue, and, with the other pledges, drank tea served with the tea bag, its little paper label on a string dangling over the rim of the cup. I didn’t know what to do with the tea bag, so I rested it on the edge of my saucer, where it dribbled an amber pool and slid into the center of this pool every time I lifted the cup. We were pretending to be ladies, to be our mothers, and a few sorority sisters were on hand, scrutinizing the way we managed our tea and cookies. Maybe the tea bags were left in on purpose, as a test. Most of the members were down the hall in the bedroom, where one by one the pledges would be summoned for interviews. After a while they emerged, limp, and slunk silently away.

  My name was called. A girl led me to the bedroom door and before I knew what was happening, tied a scarf around my eyes. I heard jabbering on the other side of the door, but when I was led in it subsided to an absolute stillness, as our voices in the school auditorium were stilled by a warning chord on the piano. Sightless, I was guided to a hard straight chair. I must have been in the center of the room; I felt space at my back. I wanted to reach out to find a wall, place myself in relation to something firm, but I reined in the impulse.

  “We understand, Audrey, that you want to be a member of Chi Delta Epsilon. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much do you want it?”

  “Well, I really do want to … I’m not sure what you mean by how much.”

  “We mean, how far would you be willing to go for it?”

  Each question came from a different voice, as if these were lines read from a script, and the voices were disguised—I couldn’t identify them. I kept turning my head in the direction of each voice; one was definitely behind me. Where could placid, reliable Susan be? Could she really be a part of this?

  “Well, it depends …”

  “Maybe if we ask you some questions… For instance, if the sorority asked you to dye your hair green, would you do it?”

  “Dye my hair green? I don’t… If everyone else did, maybe… just for a while …”

  “Do you mean to say you’re that much of a conformist?”

  These were not the kinds of questions I had expected (hobbies, ambitions, favorite movie stars) or knew what to do with. There must be better answers, correct answers, if only I could figure them out.

  “I didn’t say that. It would depend what for…”

  “If a sister cheated on an exam, would you report her?”

  “It would depend… Well, I guess not. I’d probably mind my own business.”

  “Do you mean to say you don’t believe in honesty? That you approve of cheating?”

  It continued in this vein for an eternity. I grasped that it would have no natural parabola but would continue until they decided to stop. The image I had lived with for so long had come to life. Not a bucket but a blindfold, not evil communists but schoolgirls. Why should I be shocked? I myself had given it life by harboring and nurturing it so long, and then stupidly surrendering to it. My insides churned. I had succumbed to Brooklyn and look where it led… And it was all so unnecessary: a year from now I would be gone, far from Brooklyn. The Sorbonne …

  “Have you ever been on a bed with a boy?”

  I snapped back to attention, to my school attitude. There had to be a right answer, just figure out what they want. “Yes” could mean I was daring and independent, or else a slut. “No” could mean I was respectable or comically inexperienced. I didn’t know these girls well enough to be sure—it might turn on their whim of the moment. There was also the matter of truth itself. Had I? Strictly speaking, no. I had endured the usual ventures at parties when the lights were turned down, but surely they weren’t what my questioners had in mind.

  Literal truth was what my mother seemed to value. Wasn’t that what she meant by “To thine own self be true”? And wasn’t she, with her sensible brown eyes, the incarnation of standard vision, the supremely reliable index of what the world at large wished of me?

  Not for a moment had I forgotten the eye doctor or what happened in his office; all of that was sealed behind the bad eye, which took it in. But the eye doctor was not only in a different world, in the stellar reaches of Park Avenue—he was not a boy and it was not a bed we lay on but a brown leather couch, on which, after the first time, he spread a sheet because the leather was uncomfortable on bare skin, especially slick with sweat.

  I confessed that, no, I had never been on a bed with a boy.

  No giggles, no further questions. Just an inscrutable midnight silence lasting so long that every muscle in my body went rigid. I was blinded, encircled: they could do anything they pleased, stone me or set on me like savages, pulling my hair and tearing at my clothes.

  Someone stepped up from behind and touched my shoulder. I jumped. She led me across the room and out the door, closing it behind us. In the hall, she removed the blindfold and light smacked my eyes. It was the same girl who had taken me in, a Carol. Colored spots surrounded her face like a halo. I blinked. My right eye probably wandered a bit, seeking solace after its imprisonment. As my vision cleared so did the sober pink face of Carol, who told me to leave without speaking to any of the other girls. I would be notified of the decision early in the week.

  The next day, a Monday, I went up to see the eye doctor. I was used to him by now, as I was used to the lens, which I could keep in for hours at a stretch. I had learned to enjoy what he did to me, too, but when I first cried out he had touched my open mouth with his fingers and said, “Shh, they’ll hear you.” Not harshly. In the tone of an experienced person cautioning a younger one, precisely the case, and precisely my mother’s tone. And so along with learning pleasure I learned not to be too loud about it, even in the wide absorbent spaces of Manhattan.

  This Monday, as every other, he dressed in the bathroom. When he came out his face had a subdued version of the look that accompanied his orgasms—unsettled, distraught, bordering on panic. I knew it well. I watched. Through half-closed lids I watched him.

  I was still lying on the couch. I was always bemused afterwards; each time there was something slightly different, something I could not have imagined, for I didn’t have a lascivious imagination—I was a more bookish sort of dreamer. Not that I still believed everything I read in books. In all my afternoon hours with the eye doctor, the dread words in the old wine-colored book had never been uttered, and we had gone far beyond the boundaries of its instructions. Nothing we had done, except in the most general sense, even resembled its instructions. (Nothing I ever did since, either.) I sat on his hips and his chest and his shoulders, but never on his lap. Neither of us could have managed that. That was a forbidden border.

  Today, while we lay on the couch, he had nudged me over onto my stomach and climbed on top of me. I was confused. I remembered the day we celebrated the end of the war, and how the black dog alongside the country road, also celebrating, balanced on his hind legs as he did it to the indifferent gray ter - rier. And class trips to the zoo, where the purple-bottomed apes clambered over each other as I purpled with embarrassment myself, not so much for what they were doing as for that savage color they exposed.

  He urged me to lift myself up and fitted himself inside me. I was pierced with shame. I might not be the delicate bride of the manual, yet I was part of her species: it was inconceivable for her to be balancing on her knees, with her shoulders low and her breasts hanging down like udders, presenting her secret parts to the light like those purple apes. I did it, though. In his office I did the inconceivable. And as it went along I let myself sink, pressed down into the strangeness of it, till I saw an
d felt what was beneath still another surface. Interesting; everything about this subterranean rite, the great human secret, was powerfully interesting, except this way I couldn’t watch his face.

  Lying there musing while he dressed, I almost drifted off to sleep.

  “I’m sorry to keep sending the bills.” His voice roused me. “I don’t like to, you know, but your parents would wonder…”

  I said nothing. What were bills to me? Only the papers on my father ’s little desk, to be processed and torn across and thrown in the wastebasket. My parents didn’t discuss money in front of me, though I knew we were not rich, not even “comfortable” : they would never have consulted a Park Avenue doctor for anything but the most urgent of remedies. For all I knew they might be making sacrifices so that I could visit the eye doctor twice a month.

  “Do you understand?” he said.

  “I understand.” I didn’t fully understand, but I felt something shaping vaguely in my mind, a blur set in motion by his mentioning my parents. It was an amorphous image of this situation as it might be viewed from the world outside his office. It had never had a shape before; it was fluid, unreeling like a tide of silk from a hidden spool, in this closed room, for me alone. Now it was struggling to form itself into a pattern like other sequential events in the world, a story with a plot that need not take a random path but might be designed. An opportunity, a dim byway in the plot, seemed to be opening. But I couldn’t conjure up the pattern all on my own. He had to say something more first.