An Enlarged Heart (5 page)

Curtains

F
or almost a decade I lived in an apartment the size of shoe box on West End Avenue which had three windows which fronted on a brick wall. These windows were bare because I was unable to reproduce in my apartment the curtains that in a life spent gazing out windows had made the greatest impression on me. The first two sets had hung, respectively and almost identically, in the music room of my glamorous piano teacher on Long Island and in the Elysian apartment of my great-aunt on Eighty-Eighth Street. These curtains were pale green Scalamandré silk, with tiebacks. They were cool, remote, elegant, while I was heated, untidy, adolescent; and both housed, when I was a girl, daughters who I wished I could be. The first was a huge, three-story stucco house on a sloping tree-lined street, with an green-tiled roof and concrete steps that led up from the sidewalk to a small veranda that served as a porch. I knew those steps quite as well, as I knew the big oak door with the doorbell, which, unusual for those days, even, was an actual bell on a pull chain, because my piano teacher's house was the first place I was allowed to walk to by myself. This was such a novelty that I felt more unsure, on the way there, than I was. Although there was no house on the street that resembled it in any particular, I memorized each crack in the steps and the flagstones, and my fingers remembered the slightly convex ivory bell push, which did not work: one had to remember to pull the bell rope. I was so enamored of being by myself that often I would lean my head against the door and smell the paint's odor of oily tobacco. I knew that my mother thought the house was a disgrace. In the summer, joe-pye weed grew up through the cracks. It was a testament to her forbearance that I was allowed to go. Once I'd idly plucked some. It was in my hand when she came to open the door, and she told me it was also called Queen of the Meadow.

She was the first and last person I knew for many years who had my initials, and she often exclaimed over the coincidence. We were in a club, she implied, with our rhyming letters, which sounded when she said them like a spoon hitting a triangle: sharp and clear. Twins! she would exclaim, and I'd shake my head. I was twelve, dark, moody. She was then perhaps forty. She wore her red hair in a snood; her clothes, as far as I remember, consisted of Rosalind Russell suits in violet and gray bouclé wool. On the landing I could see from the living room, where I sat week after week at the piano, enrobed in the smell of wax and Shalimar (I knew it was Shalimar because my mother wore it too, but only in the evenings, when she went out), there was a huge white wicker chair with a heart-shaped back; in each half of the heart was a wicker peacock, seen from the side. For her, I played Clementi and Haydn and Bach, badly. On the piano was a photograph of my piano teacher's husband, in an army uniform: I knew no one who had been in the army. In all the years I came to the house I saw him only once, handsome, sinewy, with the air some family men used to have of competence: he was lying on the ground under a car in the driveway. They had five children, which was unusual, in the neighborhood. Later, I was friends with one of her sons who was a few years ahead of me in school: playing on a zip line in a neighbor's yard, he fell and broke his jaw.

B
ut by his sister Vivian, I was transfixed. Once in a while, she would come and stay when my parents went out—even then I knew that for my mother, Vivian was a last resort. She was fifteen, wore her lank hair over one eye and an old green suede jacket, and she smelled of cigarettes. I was to call her Vi. The last time she came, she told me that I was old enough to watch over my brother and sister upstairs if I didn't fall asleep. She crept out of the house promising to return, and I watched her go, through the living room's heavy curtains, a hunched figure in the dark street. She came back an hour later. Her hair was wilder and another smell clung to her, one that would take me years to identify, muskier, unaired. We went into the kitchen, where all the lights were on, and she skittered between the stove and the table, talking fast. She was in love. It didn't matter who he was; he lived a mile away, she had walked—it was rainy, did I know it was raining—she found some pebbles from the driveway to throw up at his window, yes, she knew which one it was—she would have died if he hadn't come down. As she ricocheted between the stove and the table she picked up one thing and then another; by the end of her account she was holding a fork, which she drove into her hand, just hard enough to break the skin. I knew even then, as she held her hand under the kitchen tap, that Vivian had hurt herself because she was afraid of being hurt by this boy, whoever he was, I knew that he could not be anyone I could or would know, even though he lived one mile away. I was twelve. I was wearing a nightgown printed with little baskets filled with apples. I felt exhausted by what lay ahead. I went to sleep shortly afterward, to the quick sound of Vivian's voice on the telephone and then the scraping noise of my parents' key in the lock, and the sound of the curtains being drawn along the long rod in the living room, closing up the place where I had stood.

The pale green curtains at Vivian's mother's house—how odd, that she should be at once Vivian's mother and my piano teacher—looked out onto an patio furnished with elaborate white iron painted furniture. Now that I have an untidy garden of my own, I know how difficult it is to keep up such furniture, with its curved menacing arms and mincing feet. The identical curtains hung in my great-aunt's apartment on East Eighty-Eighth Street, a few houses off Fifth Avenue, by the huge white snail of the Guggenheim Museum. These curtains flanked two long windows that looked across through the plane trees to a facing building across the street. They were the color of the underside of a leaf, muted, almost shiny, the silk webbed with tiny spun fibers. By the time I was old enough to remember other people's lives, the apartment was inhabited by my great-aunt and -uncle; my aunt, who was dark, quick, and elegant as a dragonfly, was the youngest sister of my paternal grandfather: there were almost twenty years between them. In one photo that hung in the apartment she is dressed in a pinafore with big round buttons. She is three, and has a pony on a lead. My great-uncle was the only other army man I knew. In the war, he'd been a marine. The family was given to large lapses of time between progeny. My aunt and uncle had two children, a son, who drew beautifully and disappeared to live in Alaska, who was ancient before I can remember him, and his sister, whom I adored. I knew immediately even as a small child that my uncle loved women: his wife, his daughter, and me, with wry reverence. He loved clothes and shoes, and scent. My aunt's clothes, like my piano teacher's, were beautiful. They were in very much the same style: fitted suits, Dior waists, hats from Hattie Carnegie.

Many years later when she was old she called me and asked me to come to see her. I was then living in the apartment which I had bought in part because the black-and-white Vermeer floor in the lobby reminded me of the black-and-white tiled floor of her dining room. When I arrived she brought me into the bedroom. The wall in the dressing room was lined knee high in white shelves with sliding doors, which had been especially made, I knew, to hold her shoes. “Here,” she said, “take them.” Evening pumps with diamanté buttons, by Delman, sandals with high heels by Roger Vivier. Almost none of them fit, but I scooped them up and took them home, where my daughters claimed a few pairs and the rest went into the dress-up box. In my aunt's mind, I knew, shoes were a close cousin to destiny: when she was fourteen and went out to work, one day—it was Indian summer, because heat figures in the story—the heel broke off her shoe, and she had enough—a nickel—to either fix the shoe or take the long trolley ride home, but not both: out of her wages her mother had given her trolley fare but kept the rest. She fixed the shoe. But by the time she walked home the other heel had broken, and she limped down Broadway. When she got home she told her mother she had to keep back ten cents a day for herself. Even at eighty, telling the story, she flushed: the peculiar family mix of guilt and desperation to keep something, anything, to oneself. Into my thirties, she always asked me if I had enough for a taxi; when once I looked in despair at myself in her hall mirror, at a coat I was wearing that was covered in cat hair and the remnants of a child's ice cream, which had melted onto my shoulder on the Eighty-Sixth Street bus, she immediately gave me, from her closet, a blue velvet double-breasted Chesterfield the color of flax. Some people's lives occur on moving conveyances, and my aunt was one of these people.

Ten years after she lost the heel on her shoe, she fell in love with my uncle during a summer job waitressing in the country. After an argument they parted, enraged. A family of raised voices and not speaking. Some months later on a crowded trolley, she saw a familiar set of knees in front of her. He lowered his newspaper and asked her to marry him. A story at the dining room table, another argument: Is that the way it happened? It's the way I remember it. The heat of the day she lost her heel, and the heat of the argument, like a prickly rash, hot to the touch. My grandmother liked to tell it, and then, how my aunt, my father's sister, danced on the dining room table when my great-uncle came back from the war. He gave her a nickel. Outrageous! When I was very small my aunts and my grandmother would still argue about whether it was permissible to throw coins down to the street, eighty years ago, through the parted curtains of my grandmother's tenement apartment, to the street musicians who sang for their supper below.

I
have never seen the trouble with clothes worn by others, perhaps because so early for me the clothes that I inherited from my cousin, I loved. She was four years older and infinitely sleeker than I was and she had her own skate key, which she sometimes let me borrow when we were taken on a long car ride to Bear Mountain outside the city, where my aunt, who loved skating, would stand on the side of the rink in her fur hat and clap her hands when it grew dark and it was time for us to rush in, the gravelly snow underneath our runners, which had a harsh tang when we wiped our fingers along the pronged blades. I remember a party dress with a Battenburg lace bodice, and a tulle skirt the color of old honey. When I was twelve and she was sixteen she suddenly grew beyond me. In art class in school we had bathed photographs in the darkroom and watched images emerge, like creatures crawling out on land: pictures of ourselves mainly, or the trees in the schoolyard, predactyl, ganglia in the gray proto-light. With my cousin it was the reverse. She grew sleeker and stranger. In one photograph I still have of her she is in a white nightgown, posed in a doorway. Asleep or awake? Soon I would vanish into my own world, and those curtains would come down too, but I didn't know that yet. I wanted to be her, to have grown up in the house behind the green curtains, with my own skate key, and to choose where to step on the piano-key floor tiles, black, white, black white, where when we were girls we shot hazelnuts, and counted the numbers of squares they crossed, and won pennies for our trouble.

The third set of curtains on which I set my heart I had seen only in a photograph. They belonged to the Isak Dinesen, the Baroness Blixen. They hung in her house outside Copenhagen, a trio of doubled lace curtains hung from high rods that pooled on the floor. Decades after seeing this photograph, a few hours before a flight out of Copenhagen to New York, I paid a taxi driver to take me to Dinesen's house, which, as he pointed out on his GPS, was directly out of the way of the airport. Isn't there somewhere else, he asked, that you would like to go? There was not. It was raining. The rain clung to the windshield, to the trees. On our right for a while were high peaked Danish houses, fronting the sea. The roofs looked like wimples. It was green, green, green: I had never seen so much green so close to salt water. The opposite, I imagined, of Africa. When we arrived at the house—the drive took about forty-five minutes—the gravel drive was wet. The tiger's-eye pebbles glittered. Although the driver had grown up in Copenhagen, he had never been to Dinesen's house. He knew all about her, though. He had read
Seven Gothic Tales
at school, and he had seen the movie. Over some details of this, he shook his head. We went in together, wiping our shoes carefully on the rubber mat the foundation had provided. Room after room of flat rugs, blue and white—I have similar rugs in the hallways of my house, even now—the smell of lemon and furniture wax, flowers from Dinesen's garden whose great-grandparents she had planted: lupine and oxeye daisies. The lace curtains puddled on the floor, exactly as they did in the photograph. I was in Copenhagen to interview an artist who worked with light. In his first project, he poked holes in a garden hose so that the water sprayed, shone a light on it, and called the rainbow
Beauty.
It started to rain again. The world outside the long windows was watered green silk. By now, I knew that the taxi driver's name was Lars. Looking out the window he took some of the lace in his hand, and said a word in Danish whose equivalent in English we determined on the way to the airport: “petticoat.”

When I moved from the apartment the size of the shoe box I moved to one with eleven windows. At that time, I was married to a painter and green was seldom allowed in my household. It was a color he found both irritating and enrapturing, and he would have none of it. In New York, lace would turn to rags of soot within days. Nevertheless, when I moved into that apartment with eleven windows, as if in a dream, curtains—neither silk nor lace—appeared on almost all of them. They came in pairs, like couples arriving for a dinner party for which I couldn't recall issuing invitations.

The bedroom was the first enshrouded. Shortly after my husband and I moved in, a friend, an owner of coasters and blanket covers, now almost ten years dead, and in whose house I am writing this, by a series of accidents, announced that her old dining room curtains would fit the bedroom windows. They arrived the next day, heavy, lined, the color of milky tea. Sometime after this, I had a baby, and the curtains in her room, too, came about by serendipity. As new mothers do, I moved through the days like a somnambulist. One afternoon—it was after I had left a job that I loved, and the world seemed to be perpetually starting and ending, like the sirocco—I found myself in a shop on Madison Avenue, buying, for the price of a ticket to Paris, seven yards of printed cotton, which my mother immediately identified as an almost exact replica of the curtains that had hung in my room as a child. I hadn't remembered, or had I? The kitchen then had a shade, the bathroom window was frosted glass: only the windows that faced east, across Harlem, were bare. One day, rummaging in the hall closet, I found white voile curtains that the previous owners had left. Two pairs fit the dining room; the last pair was too short for the study. Wantonly, I pulled down the hems; the little holes left a pretty row of eyelet. In a well-run house, by autumn, those curtains would have been changed to velvet, snug against the cold. But once up, the voile, a measure born of impulse, stayed. Everything stirred them.