Kenny was born with enlarged adenoids and tonsils, had difficulty swallowing and digesting food, and projectile-vomited on a regular basis. Until he was four and had surgery to remove his tonsils and adenoids, he would choke on even the mushiest of foods. Long before Dr. Heimlich invented his maneuver, my mother developed hers: She would grab Kenny by the ankles, lift him swiftly upside down, and pound on him until whatever was trapped got knocked free.
I was terrified of his choking and vomiting. I was sure Kenny would stop breathing, or explode, or die. When the gasping started, I would run from the room, hide under the dining room table or my bed, put my fingers in my ears and sing “Jingle Bells” until the danger passed. I didn’t like my baby brother much; I didn’t like how he had disrupted our family life. I didn’t like his smell, or his sticky dark hair, or his noises, his snuffling and choking. I didn’t see much use for him; at best he was boring, at worst, disturbing.
I spent a lot of time hidden in my room with a book. Like my green eyes and small hands, this passion seemed to have sprung from nowhere at all. Other than the supply catalog where he ordered equipment for his contracting business, I never saw my father read anything other than the newspaper. On Sundays I sat on his lap while he read the comics in the Daily News. I loved Brenda Starr, her red hair, the twinkle in her eyes. I loved that she was a reporter, and worked with words. All the men I knew worked with their hands, all the women I knew stayed home and raised a family. But sparkly Brenda Starr wrote things and was glamorous.
My father was too impatient to read to me, so week after week I tried to work out the markings for myself. Slowly, I unlocked the secrets to Little Orphan Annie and Li’l Abner. By the time I went to kindergarten at age four, I could read every word in the comics.
Our house held three books: the heavy Dr. Spock on my mother’s bedside table, a Jewish family cookbook that was stained and oily despite the fact that I’d never seen my mother use it, and a rotating best seller that the women in the circle passed around from house to house like a fire bucket: Jacqueline Susann one week, Harold Robbins the next.
I was never without a book. Other than the kids on the circle, who were my friends by proximity, I was a lonely and unformed child. I played in the circle after school and on weekends, but I rarely went home with a friend; I was never invited to a birthday party. I had almost no sense of myself, no image of who I was, or how others saw me. In third grade I looked around the room and realized that I could label each child with just one or two words. Richard: He was the funniest boy. Susanne was giggly and helpless; the boys liked her. Peter was tough, aggressive. Donald was dumb; he still struggled to read. Clare was the smart one; even in third grade we all knew she would be a doctor someday, like her father. Elizabeth was the most popular girl; she ruled the social scene. Even Eric had an identity: He was strange; white flecks coated the sides of his mouth. He was the one we picked on.
But I was a cipher. I could not choose even one word that defined me. I could not imagine how the other children saw me; I wasn’t sure they saw me at all. To them, and to myself, I was invisible and at the same time, hypervisible, sure that my oddness made me stand out. I felt both acutely self-conscious and completely unreal. Sometimes I would touch my chest, my arms, and my neck, to make sure I was really there.
I started writing stories—vivid, florid tales of princesses and dragons and wild, romantic rescues. As I read and I wrote, my mother yelled up the stairs, “Go outside and play. Get some fresh air.” After a few minutes she’d march to the door of my room and stand there, hands on hips. “This isn’t why we moved from the Bronx, for you to stay in your room all day with a book.”
Once I showed her one of my stories in order to explain myself, and because I was proud of it. She laughed at the language, the flowery childish words. “This is so funny!” she crowed. “Better than Buddy Hackett!”
“It’s not supposed to be funny,” I said, clenching my jaw to hold back tears.
“But it is,” she said. “It’s very funny.”
She called her friend across the street, Mrs. Spyros, and read her a couple of pages out loud. “Can you believe this?” she laughed into the phone. “It’s hilarious.”
After that, I kept my writing to myself.
I loved my books: Nancy Drew, Little Women, Cherry Ames Student Nurse, the Five Little Peppers, the Oz tales. I was happiest when I was in another world. I dragged heavy loads of books home from the library. “Stop carrying all those books. You’re going to get a hernia,” my mother warned. “You’re going to hurt your eyes.”
My mother had a warning about everything. I was not allowed to sleep at friends’ homes, even Linda who lived just across the street and whose mother was my mother’s closest friend. Until the day I left for college, I wasn’t allowed to sleep in the home of someone I was not related to. I begged my mother, I asked her why; but she was as evasive as a Mafia don on the witness stand.
“You can have your friends sleep at our house.”
“You see your friends all day; you don’t need to sleep there, too.”
“We don’t know these people.”
Later I realized that my mother could not give me a reason because she didn’t know what it was herself. Her number-one instinct was for safety at all costs. She was motivated by fear. If I slept in someone else’s home I was beyond her protection. Things could happen—scary, unknown things.
She didn’t even like me eating in other homes. When I went to my friend Susan’s house for dinner, my mother warned me: If you don’t know what it is, don’t eat it. Just move it around on your plate and say you’re not hungry. Or put a few pieces in a napkin and hide it in your pocket until later.
Susan’s family was Italian: They might serve trashy food, cheap food, tinny canned hams, or, worst of all, chopped meat from the supermarket. When I became an adult and found out that lots of people ate ground beef from the supermarket and not the ground beef the kosher butcher made from meat right in front of you, I was shocked. My mother told me that supermarket chopped meat was filled with all the things they couldn’t sell: tails, gristle, cartilage, ears, and feet. It wasn’t a matter of being kosher; we were not kosher. Eating in someone else’s home was simply bad, dangerous, and unsafe.
Sometimes I wondered if my mother would have been less overprotective if I were not adopted. Perhaps being entrusted with this most valuable commodity—a child—turned her natural instinct for safety into a mania. Six years of waiting on a list for a baby, then two long years of weekly inspections: If something happened to me, she would not only have to answer to herself, my father, and her God, but to the agency, the social worker, the judge who finalized the adoption, the court system, the whole watching world. Did she feel she had to justify their approval of her as an adoptive mother by keeping us safe, always safe?
Friends were not safe. She told me over and over: Friends will turn on you; only family is there for you. “Blood is thicker than water,” she said. But what did that mean? My blood and her blood had nothing in common; but somehow they were the same. What was this adoption magic that passed over our lives and made our blood identical?
I read my books, alone in my room, and wrote my stories. But my own story lay untouched, unquestioned. I rarely thought about the nice young couple who did the right thing for their baby. I never wondered about how I came to be reading book after book and writing story after story in a family that did not read, that did not write. I never asked myself or anyone around me: What are you born, and what do you become? How is the difference measured, and how does it matter?
7. BUNNY
WAITING
The Rembrandt light of memory,
finicky and magical and faithful at the same time,
as the cheaper tint of nostalgia never is.
IVAN DOIG
THE WHISTLING SEASON
I had no place to stay. I didn’t want to go to my mother’s; I would have been too helpless. Jake had given me the address of a woman he
’d heard of in the Village, on Bank Street, who liked to take care of people. Maybe she’d let me stay with her until I found a place of my own.
She wanted to help me, she said. But she had put a man upstairs, and some girls in the other rooms, and she was already sharing her bedroom. So she let me stay on her couch, downstairs. When I woke up in the morning, I discovered somebody else had arrived after me, and had also been added to the household.
Years later, I found out that I had slept overnight in Auntie Mame’s living room.
I went from there to our friends, Betty and Rick.
They lived on the Lower East Side, before it was the East Village, or Alphabet City, though they were between Avenues A and B. Betty was a small, elfin young woman with an open, sweet face circled by wisps of curly dark hair. Her body was fairly unbalanced by the enormity of her bosom. Her voice was soft, too, whispery, confiding, understanding. From Betty, sweet Betty, I learned how to use tampons, and I think she also told me about getting a diaphragm from the Margaret Sanger clinic. I had one; I just never used it.
Rick was an Antioch dropout, like Jake. He’d been drafted, too, but was a conscientious objector, a Quaker, and was working off his term of duty at Payne Whitney Hospital in Manhattan. He shared Betty with the world, but he worried about it. Now they both worried about me, on their couch, looking for a job, an apartment, a life. Staying in their apartment was like being in a warren, dark and quiet, the light barely penetrating through the endless rows of identical buildings, crowded and filthy.
Dinner at Betty and Rick’s was an anachronism. Betty came home from work and made dishes like trout almondine. I set the table (the coffee table across from my couch), and we talked about Woody Guthrie, because he lived nearby, and photography and friends from Antioch and the awful new cars with huge fender fins, and poetry. At night, on the couch, I listened to their bedsprings creak and wanted to move.
Within a week, I found a day job, a night job, an apartment, a roommate, and a therapist, Alfred Ennis. He had been recommended by my psychology professor at Antioch. (In fact, a lot of Antiochians had an interlude with Ennis.) He wasn’t much to look at: pallid, and tall and thin, shaped like an inverted numeral three, with rounded shoulders, and a stomach protruding slackly, triangularly, toward his toes.
After the first few visits, he explained his philosophy: “I once had a patient who was afraid of subways. I told her there was only one real solution, only one way to overcome her fear. She had to get used to subways. She had to take the subway.
“She tried it. It was difficult at first. We spent much time here talking about it. And she kept trying: uptown and downtown; the Seventh Avenue, the Independent, the BMT, and the Lexington. She kept trying.
“And when she got through, she wasn’t afraid of subways.”
I tried to look impressed, but I was mystified.
“But what should I do? I’m not afraid of subways. And I’m not afraid of Jake, either.”
“No,” he agreed. “But there is a problem here, isn’t there?”
“I’m not happy,” I said. “Jake is the problem. Why hasn’t he written to me? How can I fix that?”
“Do you want him to write?”
“Of course I do.”
“I wonder why you married Jake,” he asked.
“Because we love each other.” That seemed the obvious answer, still.
“Are you sure? Do you really love him?”
I had to think. “I’m not sure. But I’ve never felt that way about anybody else. Was that love? I don’t know. I thought he was marvelous—I appreciated him.”
“Maybe you married him because he asked you. Maybe you thought no one else would ever ask you?”
“I’m only nineteen, for heaven’s sake.”
“Ah! That’s it exactly,” he smiled. “I think you need more experience.”
“But if Jake doesn’t write me, how will I get it?”
“Screw around for a while.”
It occurred to me that now we were getting to the subway idea.
“But I’m married.” He waited. “And everybody I know knows that I’m married.”
“Find someone new. Pick someone up.”
I stopped thinking; I just listened.
“Go places where you can meet men—nice men, of course. Museums, galleries, libraries, coffee shops in the Village—places you like to be, wherever you think might be best. Pick out an interesting-looking man, look at him, and this is important: Make eye contact. Follow him if you have to. Be sure he notices you. Talk to him if you can. Ask for a match, or the time. Or say something about the weather, or whatever he’s looking at. He’ll take it from there. If he doesn’t, try again with someone else.
“You need more confidence in yourself,” he concluded. “Our time is up for today. We’ll explore this further next time.”
About two weeks after Jake left, I’d received a package from him, a large envelope containing daily newspapers from the transport ship he was on. They were legal-sized paper, folded in half, all about the voyage, and news gathered from the ship’s radio: the weather, the speed of the ship. There was nothing personal, nothing from Jake.
My roommate, Sally, another friend from Antioch, was as puzzled by the package as I had been. We’d been friends from the very first day at Antioch, when she and Mary and I had taken a blanket out to the front lawn, in front of the campus’s main building, and stayed up all night to watch the sun rise.
Now Sally was doing what my mother had wanted me to do: waiting. She was formally engaged to Leo, a soldier, drafted, like Jake—and now stationed in Georgia. She saw a rabbi several evenings a week, in the process of converting before the wedding, for Leo’s mother.
Sally radiated patience and goodness and acceptance, all underlined by an ineffable aura of unhappiness, unease. She had the kind of face that belonged to a different time: She would have been a beautiful flapper. We shared a furnished studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights, beautiful Brooklyn Heights, where Long Island meets Manhattan, just below the Brooklyn Bridge. The Promenade, a long walk above the river, had one of the city’s best views. Sally and I walked and gazed wistfully at the ships being loaded, getting ready to cross the ocean for South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe: the continents.
We were both saving money: Sally, for her wedding; me for the unknown future, and to pay Dr. Ennis. At home we ate hot dogs and sauerkraut for dinner. After dinner, we cooked hard-boiled eggs for breakfast in the morning, and we made sandwiches (sliced Spam and pickles, the cheapest thing we could think of) to take to work for lunch.
After we peeled the eggs, we’d lean against our windows and talk. Less than a year out of college, school was a very distant memory. We were caught between what we remembered, and what we were planning, the past and the future. Both of us lacked a present tense: Sally was waiting for Leo to come home for the wedding, and I was waiting for a letter from Jake. The simple fact of our friendship helped us both. Every so often, Leo appeared, and I disappeared. Our days were comfortable, and indistinguishable.
I spent my days working at Cinerama. Cinerama was a wide-screen multidimensional film effect with stereophonic sound, which supposedly brought the viewer into the action. A film using these new techniques was showing at a theater on Broadway. I remember a long sequence of roller-coaster rides, the viewer in the first car, careening up and down the rails, the sound track full of shrieks.
I sat all day in a narrow room, like a large horizontal closet, off the back of the auditorium, near the entrance. There were two or three telephones on a narrow table. On the wall behind the phones were lightbulbs that lit up when the phones rang. The chair in front of the table barely missed touching the door.
There I sat: “Yes, there are tickets for tomorrow’s matinee.” Or: “The evening showing begins at 8:30.” I was the recorded announcement.
At night, I worked at Tavern on the Green as a cigarette girl, in a white blouse and a black skirt, with the cigarette and candy tray
hung from a cord around my neck. “Cigarettes? Cigars? Candy?” We weren’t supposed to accept tips, but each new girl was quickly initiated: You sewed or pinned a sock to the inside of your skirt’s waistband, and dropped the tips into it as you went. By the end of the evening, on a good night you had a sock full of quarters, half-dollars, and even dollars, thudding against you as you walked.
I was saving money in the hope that I would go to Germany as soon as Jake wrote. Unfortunately, he didn’t.
I tried following Dr. Ennis’s therapeutic suggestions, but I was too timid. I called some young men I had known before; one took me to lunch at the Astor, where I was shocked to discover that the price of one cup of coffee would have kept Sally and me in sauerkraut for weeks. Another, now interning at Long Island Hospital, was more like me: We walked, sat on the Promenade and talked, and then had coffee with Sally in our room. Nothing came of any of this. Ennis never asked me how my adventures had gone and I never brought up the subject.
I continued to write to Jake via an APO address: short letters filled with dissertations about how the city renewed itself forever, discarding old, infirm buildings and reclaiming their tiny pieces of land for new roots; summer heat in New York bringing the city to its knees, humbling everybody, but thickening their ties to each other as they suffered together. I look back on those letters as filled with a nineteen-year-old’s wonder, giving shiny significance to the world. This kind of seriousness must be as much a measure of youth as it is of unhappiness.
My mother worried about Jake’s silence, but she said little about it other than asking me the occasional question: “Have you heard yet?”
Jessica Lost Page 4
