Leaving Brooklyn (2 page)

I minded the mystery of the eye more than the eye itself. I craved an exotic story to tell, a label by which I might be known. At school there was Carlotta Kaplowitz, famed for her dark beauty and wondrous name—one of the few girls not named Barbara or Susan or Carol or Judy—who contracted polio. When she returned months later on crutches, scattering true medical tales like favors, she was lionized in the playground. Polio was dramatic, though Carlotta's case, like Hans Castorp's tuberculosis, was mild—she would walk again. Another girl, one of the Carols, stayed home for a whole term with an unnamed ailment.

I brought her the class assignments. How enviously I breathed the musty, invalid air of the shaded room where she sat propped up on pillows, her every need attended to by her scurrying mother, like a Victorian heroine enervated by vocation, like Elizabeth Barrett before she met Browning.

The iris of my right eye was smaller than that of the left. And at the top of the sphere, the part you couldn't see unless the lid was raised, was a milky, blurry patch, a scar. It was as if someone had painted an eye and smudged the upper rim, giving it an unfinished look, then was called away from the easel—an emergency, a long trip—and never came back.

The smudging was not all. Because of a weak muscle, the iris, of its own volition and at unpredictable times, would drift
from its resting place to float—I almost wrote “flee”—beneath the upper lid for a few seconds, leaving blank white space. A wand-dering eye, it is aptly called. Restless, bored with the banality of what is presented, it escapes to the private darkness beneath the lid, with the wild dancing colors. Soon it drifts back and attends to its duties, not being totally irresponsible. Much of the time no one would know about its little trip, just as no one knows about the secret journeys or aberrations of anyone else.

The eye was of scant use in seeing what had to be seen in daily life in Brooklyn. It was made for another sort of vision. By legal standards it was a blind eye, yet it did see in its idiosyncratic way—shapes and colors and motion, all in their true configurations except all turned to fuzz. Its world was a Seurat painting, with the bonds hooking the molecules all severed, so that no object really cohered; the separate atoms were lined up next to one another, their union voluntary, not fated. This made the world, through my right eye, a tenuous place where the common, reasonable laws of physics did not apply, where a piece of face or the leg of a table or frame of a window might at any moment break off and drift away. I could tease and tempt the world, squinting my left eye shut and watching things disintegrate, and when I was alone my delight was to play with the visible world this way, breaking it down and putting it back together. I had secret vision and knowledge of the components of things, of the volatile nature of things before they congeal, of the tenuousness and vulnerability of all things, unknown to those with common binary vision who saw the world of a piece, with a seamless skin like the skin of a sausage holding things together. My right eye removed the skin of the visible world.

And so the girl I was, the girl I would like to reincarnate here, possessed double vision. Not simultaneous. Alternate. Her world was veiled and then, when she shut the ordinary eye and allowed the other free play, it was unveiled; the act of learning anything was not absorbing or digging out or encountering, but removing a veil, and it was the most dramatic act imaginable.
From the start she had a taste for drama, self-dramatization, and her themes, naturally, were secrecy and hiding and revelation, the doling out and manipulation of information. She thought that she too could be unveiled in similar fashion, that like an ocean, she was surface and depths, and she feared this unveiling without knowing what would be revealed or why it might be dangerous. Perhaps it was simply the secret of her double vision that she feared would be exposed, for as her childhood moved along its dual paths she sensed she wasn't sup-posed to be seeing what she saw.

I still see as she saw. With all the advances of optics they have never found a way to fuse the two worlds. As I approached middle age I needed the usual reading glasses: my left eye got a mild prescription for aging eyes. For my right eye, nothing but window glass. That rebel eye refused to be corrected. It clung to what it had seen for her and done for her from the start.

Telling about her is an attempt at unveiling her, an act of self-sabotage, if one assumes that the woman I am today is that girl worked over and layered by time. The common wisdom holds that the process of growing older involves a toughening of the skin. But it may be the opposite, a gradual removal of layers, a peeling process. The girl has been stripped by time to produce me. I suspect I was there all along, though she is so very tough and layered that when I focus my vision to see her I can scarcely glimpse myself beneath. Before she vanishes altogether from memory—for even now memory threatens to be more invention than recall—I want to make her transparent. I want to expose the mystery of change and recall, peel her story off her the way some people can peel an orange, in one exquisite unbroken spiral.

 

MY MOTHER OPENED the broiler door and orange and blue flames leaped out. Inside was a chicken we had bought that afternoon from the chicken man on Rutland Road, whose son, Bobby, off fighting the war, was my secret love.

“Oh my God,” cried my mother, and she ran to the sink and filled a glass with water.

At last. Something was happening in Brooklyn, our remote little outpost. I put down the
Reader's Digest
and watched as though it were a Technicolor movie. My mother poured the water on the flames, which made them leap higher and glow more orange. They brightened, they sizzled and cavorted. She watered the fire and it grew like an overwrought plant.

My father ran in from the back porch where he was smoking his cigar in the early spring evening, kicked the broiler door shut, and turned off the oven. A few bluish-green flames oozed from the crevices. My mother stood gasping, rubbing her hands up and down her flowered apron, as the escaping flames dwindled to smoke and the rancid smell of drowned grease filled the kitchen. After a moment or two my father bent and cautiously opened the door. The flames were still alive but sizzled in a more docile way. He poured a pot of water over the chicken, and there was a weak dreary noise, a dying sputter. The fire was quenched.

I waited for some sarcastic insult to come from my father's lips, for he was compelled to insult people at moments of crisis. But he was so shocked he could not say a word, only glare. His face darkened. A muscle in his neck started twitching.

“I couldn't help it,” said my mother. “When I heard it on the radio I was so upset I forgot all about the chicken.”

Roosevelt was dead.

This, I knew, had something to do with the war. My earliest years were years of wartime. Someone born elsewhere and writing those words might be recalling carnage and deprivation. At college a student older than I read aloud a personal essay about trudging along a road leading out of Dresden, the bloody bodies of people and horses sprawled in her path. I had never seen a bloody body, not even an ordinary dead one; her essay made me feel innocent, criminally innocent. Earlier, in an acting class I took when I was fifteen, I saw branded on the forearm of a pale girl a many-digited number two and a half inches above
the wrist. I had known the girl through the fall and winter, but only in the spring when we wore short-sleeved blouses did the number show itself. I knew it for exactly what it was, though in Brooklyn we never spoke of those details of the war and I did not read the papers much. It was something one knew, that was all, like competition and death. I felt a twinge of envy between my ribs and was immediately ashamed and horrified, for we were trained, in Brooklyn, to feel shame at every wayward emotion, but I forgive her now, that girl I was. She was ignorant and impoverished. I didn't covet the other girl's suffering, only her knowledge; I wished it were possible to have the one without the other.

The immigrants and children of immigrants who settled Brooklyn did so precisely to shield their children from carnage and deprivation and numbers, both the suffering of them and the knowledge: they chose their place and shored it up as a fortress. They were very successful, and it would be naïve to disparage their success out of lethal nostalgia for sufferings never suffered. But perhaps only such a fortress could produce that particular vanity, the vanity of craving a more elevated position in the hierarchy of pain.

My war in Brooklyn was three things: the departure of Bobby; the ration lines in the basement of the building that would be my school when I was old enough to go to school, where I stood at my mother's right side holding her hand and waiting for our turn; and the wires on the milk bottles. The milk came in thick glass bottles left in an unpainted wooden box on our front porch in the early hours by someone we never saw but communicated with by notes left in the box. Cream gathered at the top of the bottles and caked the inside neck with a thick ring. Before opening a bottle of milk, my mother shook it up and down with swift twists of the wrist. Then she carefully unwound the thin metal wire holding the paper cap in place, a cap meticulously fluted at the lower edge like the paper booties wrapped around the bones of lamb chops in the Coney Island restaurants where
we often drove for Sunday dinner. She saved the wire for the war, putting it in a drawer near the kitchen sink. Every so often my father would carry off the accumulated wires to some mysterious place, the headquarters of the war, where, he said, they were used to make things that helped our soldiers fight. Fight who? I asked. Hitler, he said, in such a way that I couldn't tell if it was the name of a person or an army or a country or a monster. He muttered the word fast, as if he were speaking not to me but to ominous enemies crouched in the air, as if it were a perilous magic word that might rot his teeth or sear his tongue if he said it too loud or let it linger too long in his mouth.

With all my mother's shaking, a ring of cream still clung to the neck of the bottle; it could not be fully homogenized by hand. Even after milk arrived homogenized, it was a long time before I lost the habit of shaking it as my mother had done. Thus do our parents cheat mortality, for a while.

Roosevelt was succeeded by Harry Truman. Who the hell was he? my father sneered, just a haberdasher from Missouri who played the piano. I asked what a haberdasher was—it sounded like something thrilling, a swashbuckling pirate or an explorer who sailed the seven seas—and he told me. So Truman was like Charlie of Cheap Charlie's Bargain Store on Rutland Road, where underwear and pyjamas and socks were piled on tables and women fingered them while children like me waited alongside, melting in a kind of boredom endemic to childhood and to Brooklyn, waiting for our lives to begin. Charlie was a tall, gray, stooped, soft-spoken man who always knew what underwear would fit whom. Our President was just like a man in Brooklyn, and I shared my father's dismay. But in time my father felt better about Truman. In time Truman even ended the war.

We were away in the mountains then, for the better air and different neighbors, though in essence the neighbors were not so different from our city neighbors, merely possessed of different faces and bodies: they moved and spoke in a more relaxed mode, gentler and more affable, like the air.

We celebrated with a great parade down the dirt roads on a sunlit August evening. My mother was the leader, prancing and banging a tambourine that she had obtained I knew not where, and I, as always, marched at her side—her right side. It was easier for me to see people on my left. I had almost no peripheral vision on the right and had to turn my head in order to see. I was not conscious of arranging myself that way; it happened.

Behind us stretched a long line of mostly women and children—the men worked in the city and came up on weekends. My mother had the tambourine and the rest of us banged pots and pans with spoons, singing “You're a Grand Old Flag,” and new paraders joined us from cottages along the way.

It was a thrill to be walking freely along the dirt road where normally I was not permitted to venture alone, and the only unlovely part was the cakes of cow dung we stepped over, which I used to think were chocolate cakes until my father enlightened me. I had asked, during a twilight walk, why there were so many chocolate cakes in the road, and he replied with a laugh, “Do you want to bring one home for dinner?” I was puzzled. He told me the cows made them and I was mortified.

I noticed that one woman, the wife of the farmer whose farm we were staying at, was not part of our parade.

“Why?” I asked my mother.

“She lost her son. She doesn't have the heart for it.”

I pictured her son gone astray in the dark, a boy around my age—six—who had wandered off down the forbidden road or into the woods, while his mother waited anxiously for him to turn up. Then, in the instantaneous way that children grasp the meanings of words, some convulsive juncture of ganglia in the brain, I understood. I had a million questions about him, this victim of the war, but I said nothing amid the jangle of pots and pans and tambourine.

As twilight descended the paraders lit torches that flamed in the enveloping shadows, to light the way, I thought, for the returning heroes.

We were passing a scruffy field where a black dog flecked with auburn circled a gray terrier who stood still and meditative. After a moment he climbed on her back, balancing on his hind legs.

The woman parading on the other side of my mother poked her and nodded in the direction of the dogs. “Also celebrating.”

“And why not?” my mother answered, and the two of them grinned.

The black dog, poised over the terrier, jerked his body a few times while his partner gazed about with her meditative air, as though nothing were happening. Then he pulled away, and both dogs went trotting off in the weeds, separately, and our parade passed on.