Leaving Brooklyn (3 page)

“How did the war end?” I asked my mother.

She stopped banging her tambourine. “We dropped a bomb and they surrendered.”

Maybe this meant Bobby would be home soon.

When I first fell in love he was sixteen, twelve years older than I, but over the few years I loved him I learned, by reading and observing couples around me, that a dozen years did not remain an uncrossable gap. Time shrank with age. When I was sixteen he would be twenty-eight, when I was twenty he would be thirty-two…

From as early as I can remember, until I was about twelve years old, I was always in love, though Bobby was the first and, perhaps because of the supernatural gifts of his mother, the best and longest love. Sometimes it was a boy in my class; more often it was someone older and unattainable, a friend's big brother or a boy working after school in a luncheonette, or the sons of my parents' friends. I would see them two or three times, barely speak to them, and spend the next few months talking to them in my head, telling everything I thought and dreamed, supplying their responses and gestures, inventing their characters and temperaments from the bare physical elements. So I was never alone. This being in love, in my early years, felt like a
condition inherent to life, like having body temperature; or a sixth sense, an extra mode of perceiving, of extending my reach in the world and bringing it all back inside. And it never seemed strange that love was always with me, attached to someone ignorant of the attachment, or that I lived my life with an image secretly installed in my head while the original went about his life all unaware that his image dwelt with me in captivity. And then at twelve years old, just when most girls are starting, I stopped falling in love. I opened my eyes and apprehended the tangible world of bodies and boundaries, limits and mortality. I saw how absurd and illusory my being in love was. Why should I do this? How foolish to love so much, give so much in secret, and get nothing real in return. Love was not a condition of life, but an artificial corrective to the truly inherent condition of being alone. Love had disappointed me, and I broke myself of the habit of loving and gave myself to solitude.

There is no explaining these sudden and terrible conver - sions, but surely mine had something to do with Mrs. Amerman, the seventh-grade Social Studies teacher. “Accuracy and speed. Accuracy and speed,” chanted Mrs. Amerman, training us to excel in the standardized tests that determined our school's rank in the city. “Accuracy and speed.” The sort of prayer that, no matter what the political climate, is always permitted in the public schools. “Those qualities are not only for the test. They will help you get through life as well.” She also taught outline form, which had a certain classic beauty and feeling of safe containment, like the gardens at Versailles, and very unlike my kind of love. The largest category was the roman numeral. Below the roman numeral came the capital letters. Below the capital letters came the Arabic numerals, and below them, the lowercase letters. In case you had to subdivide further, there were the lowercase roman numerals, little
i
's:
i
,
ii
,
iii
,
iv
. The headings marched down the page, each one indented farther to the right till the design on the page was an upside-down staircase. Any thought could be fit somewhere in the outline, once you figured out its
degree of significance in the pattern. Above all, every single thing in the world could be outlined.

There was one major rule to remember, Mrs. Amerman warned. “You can't have a I without a II. You can't have an A without a B. It's only logical. Because nothing can be divided into one part. Do you see, children?”

I was accurate, logical, speedy. No fact escaped the net of my outlines, like wayward hairs tucked into a bun. Through high school, I took notes of the teachers' casual remarks in outline form, corralling the syllables that bounced haphazardly on the air into right-angled shapes on the pages of my notebook.

 

NOW WHAT I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow. And inaccuracy. Things just slightly off, falling nonchalantly from perfection. Things beautiful in spite of.

And it is possible, on occasion, to subdivide into one part. The one part becomes refined and polished and narrowed, the shavings fall away, out of sight, till the kernel is exposed like a gem absorbing and reflecting the multiplicity of the world.

 

TO TELL HOW my eye led me down the road it did, I must say a word or two of the climatic conditions of postwar Brooklyn. The air was suspended on a discrepancy, something like the discrepancy between my mother's use of the words “To thine own self be true” and their true meaning. It was a presumption of state-of-nature innocence, an imaginative amnesia, and a disregard of evidence such as photographs of skeletal figures in striped pyjamas clawing at barbed wire, of mushroom clouds and skinned bodies groping in ashes. News of distant atmospheric pollution. The evidence was not only in newspaper photographs. The most zealous Brooklynites had themselves fled the armbands and the midnight blazes. They knew, they knew. Yet with all that furor in the air, the slogans they sent forth on placid streams of breath were simple and pure, extolling righteous
endeavor, progress, and conformity, as if the pollution were illusory, only a haze veiling the reality, which was human decency. The slogans were enforced through a tacit system of mutual surveillance and with a magnificently unwarranted faith in will power, education, and the forming of proper habits. As everywhere, perhaps, children were designed and packaged to embody an “image” of human nature. What was special about Brooklyn was how ingenuously it admitted no gulf between image and reality. Now that corruption is publicly taken for granted and “image” has detached from reality to acquire independent life, every child over ten knows what Brooklyn pretended not to know.

I knew some things apart from the slogans, though, things that gnawed and nibbled away at the smug sound of them. Late at night, in bed, I read the old books my parents stored in my room, somber black Harvard Classics with gilt lettering on the bindings and green Little Leather Library books, the corners of the faded pages crumbling in my fingers and littering the blanket. I read stealthily as though the books were forbidden, just for the glamour of it—they were not forbidden, only I sensed it was the better part of valor to keep my passion secret.

After the orgies of reading, I played games with my eye. There was a way, if I closed my “good” eye, as my mother called it, and kept the bad eye open, that I could see through the edges of solid objects like pillows or doors—see the margin of what was on the other side of the door. And so I squinted and peered through the corners of my pillow to see bits of the blue and orange clowns and dancers stenciled on my wall in repeating yellow squares. I could make the figures jiggle and dissolve, and see parts that were out of range when I had both eyes open. With my good eye shut I could even see a different design of leafy branches through the casement window, and different patterns of stars, maybe the stars as they were in another time or place. I could vault out of my time and place and be somewhere else in history, in the world.

This was not pure fancy: the center of my vision was in front of my “good” left eye rather than over the bridge of my nose; it follows that my world was two inches to the left of everyone else's. But logic doesn't nullify anything, it is only a little breeze. I did have the power to glimpse what was behind things. And because these secrets were mine alone, I was greedy for them. What is politely called curiosity in children is greed. The objects of greed are shaped by what we feel we have in short supply. I was told I didn't see in the regular way, so I had to acquire special sights. I had to know what was behind everything. I had to peel whatever I saw.

If I knew something others did not, the opposite was true too. What would be forever denied me was “depth perception.” I could see nothing extraordinary through the viewing machines at the top of the Empire State Building, while others gasped at the panorama. With only one eye, they told me, everything was flat and in the same plane, and therefore I was doomed to live in a flattened version of the world. This was painful to hear, and not true. I saw gradations of distance. I was a good judge of distances, a whiz at punch ball in the streets. It might be true for
them
, when they shut one eye, but I had learned to compensate. This fact an eye doctor volunteered years later, though I couldn't remember consciously learning anything of the kind. My eyes and hands and body learned. But if I had indeed invented distance and proportion for myself, who could know it better?

There was something people saw with their two eyes pressed against those machines, though, and the girl I was feared she would die without knowing what it was, because no one who had it could explain it, just as you can describe a landscape to a recently blinded person, but where are the words to explain “cloud” or “shadow” or the act of seeing them to someone blind from birth? And even if I suddenly had it, I might not recognize it or like it, just as some people blind from birth and suddenly given sight cannot make out the world at all, cannot reconcile the light and dark patches they see with their inner vision or comprehension
of objects, and take weeks or months to accept the shapes and patterns of the world, or maybe never do, and live longingly in exile from their own perceptions.

Most things cannot be explained unless the listener has some prior inkling of them, which doesn't augur well for traditional forms of education. We learn what we have the nerve paths prepared to receive—grammar and justice and cause and effect for all, music or quantum physics for a few. Socrates believed his students had an innate, if dormant, grasp of the principles of geometry and logic and justice, but formal learning in Brooklyn was very far from Socratic; each student was a
tabula rasa
on which teachers doggedly inscribed four reasons for British imperialism, three reasons for the outbreak of World War I, three products of Brazil.

Whatever depth perception there was in Brooklyn was flattened by the collective will, but I couldn't know that. I knew only that I would never see depth as others saw it. And so I persistently looked for the endlessly receding, stratified planes, even in cases where there was no depth. I tried to make more out of less, even out of Brooklyn. I couldn't accept that some things remain flat no matter how hard you strain to confer dimensions on them.

I say Brooklyn with a certain acidity, though at other times I might—I do—say it with affection. The Brooklyn of my story is not the place, a rather pretty place of tender low houses and gracious trees and regal avenues, a place lapped by saltwater and rich with briny air, with innumerable earthy charms, and so this cannot be a story built with the ordinary scenery of stories, furniture and interior decoration and local color. The Brooklyn of my story is a state of mind or perception, the shadow field on which my good and bad eyes staged their struggle. It could as readily be called Cleveland or Rouen or Johannesburg. It moves from place to place wherever opposing visions struggle, but unlike a shadow it never changes with the light. One can only live in it or flee.

BEING IN LOVE is one kind of flight, and in the early years of my love I longed to fly to the chicken man and butcher's store to see Bobby: tall, swarthy, burly, with translucent blue eyes, dressed in black chino pants and a gray sweatshirt, an easy-mannered boy who charmed the women customers and always had a ready word for me. When I was lucky enough to find him in the store—he helped out after school hours, from four to seven—he would look up as I entered, his hands busy wrapping chickens in brown paper or doling out change, and say, “Well, if it isn't Audrey the geisha girl.” He called me that because my hair was black and shiny and combed in bangs. “How's the world treating you, kiddo?” and I would feel joy in the roots of my hair.

But this could not happen if my mother did her errands in the morning. And I could not beg her to go in the afternoon. I was ashamed of the force of my longings. I knew enough of the world to know people my age were not supposed to be in love. If I said “I want to see Bobby,” my mother would say “Who? The chicken man's boy? What for?” then catch on and laugh. My love was not a feeling that could or would have been ordained by my mother, who knew not only what to do in every situation, but what to feel, too, and monitored my errant feelings. “Don't feel that way,” she said when I had a grievance or wound, when I was envious or petulant or sullen. Feel the way I tell you to feel; that will feel better. She knew which feel-ings were proper for the occasion and which must be stamped out like a brush fire or sponged away before they hardened and set. Feelings could be read on the face, and if she read an infelicitous feeling on mine she would say offhandedly, “If you keep walking around with that expression on your face it'll freeze that way,” making me think that each bad feeling would last forever, iced in my cheekbones, and this edged my every transient melancholy with a braided border of eternity and hopelessness. Wrong feelings were the most terrible kind of impropriety, and it was the hardest thing in the world to know what the right ones were, according to my
mother, and then try to have them. So my love for Bobby, along with so much else, had to be secret.

Sometimes my mother had so many packages to carry, or the weather was so snowy or rainy, that she would order our dinner over the phone, and on those days Bobby would appear on our doorstep. The bell—three chimes set in a niche in the wall—would ring and I would trail my mother to the door and stand half behind her, shyly, because everything was different outside the store. On our doorstep he was another Bobby, older, with a manly dignity in his pea coat and scarf. As he handed over his package he would say, “Hey, Audrey!” and maybe reach out to punch me on the shoulder, while I could not speak for strangeness.