Leaving Brooklyn (7 page)

But since my father expounded on politics while watching television and grumbling about the Senate investigations, I knew about logrolling. I wanted to take an acting class at a community
center at the closest edge of Manhattan, just over the Williamsburg Bridge—a girl at school already making tentative outbound forays had enticed me.

“Acting?” said my mother. She had had theatrical leanings, too, before settling into marriage. “Since when are you interested in acting?”

“I don't know. Does it matter?” We were on the back porch, hanging clothes on the line. I handed her each wet thing from the basket and she clipped it to the rope with wooden clothespins like tiny claws, every T-shirt and sock neatly attached to its companions, all holding hands the way we had been forced to do on line in the school yard. After clipping each item she moved the rope smartly along the pulley. She was so adept at using the pulley, so economically clever in the apportioning of rope, that she could fill almost the whole line, top and bottom layers, a feat in mechanical physics I now and then tried to reenvision—long after, when she was dead and I tossed damp laundry into the maw of a gas dryer—but never successfully.

“No, it doesn't matter. Just that until a few years ago you could barely talk to strangers, so how are you going to get up and emote in front of an audience?” Squeak, went the line, another few feet of rope became free, and she grabbed a wet pyjama top from my hands.

What she said was Brooklyn logic, yet it was entirely clear to me that those things were unconnected. Or if they were, if they had to be, I sensed that my infantile shyness might well contribute to my success as an actress. This was not something that could be explained in our language, so I thrust a handful of wet socks at her.

“Don't you see, if I have my eye fixed I'll be a perfect specimen and then I can go on the stage.”

“Very funny. You'll be a comedian.”

“Come on, it's only four dollars a week.”

Maybe she thought I could fulfill her discarded dreams, maybe she was thankful I had been docile about the contact lens.
She agreed. But I made her nervous. She dropped a nightgown and I had to climb over the porch railing and into the Schneiders' tiny back yard to retrieve it.

The road the contact lens represented was more traveled by. Conscientious parents pursued standardization as Calvinists performed good works, doing what they could for salvation regardless of the unfathomable caprices of destiny. They processed their daughters like ore or sugar, to refine and, in the refining, transform. Wealthier girls were given elocution lessons, to leach the remnants of East European inflections from their tongues. In our more modest neighborhood, orthodontists lined the roofs of pliant mouths with grotesque plastic bite plates. The girls wearing bite plates always made me think of the passage in one of my favorite childhood books, where Black Beauty has the dread bit inserted, in preparation for a life of submissive toil.

Those who have never had a bit in their mouths, cannot think how bad it feels; a great piece of cold hard steel as thick as a man's finger to be pushed into one's mouth, between one's teeth and over one's tongue, with the ends coming out at the corner of your mouth, and held fast there by straps over your head, under your throat, round your nose, and under your chin; so that no way in the world can you get rid of the nasty hard thing; it is very bad! yes, very bad! at least I thought so; but I knew my mother always wore one when she went out, and all horses did when they were grown up; and so, what with the nice oats, and what with my master's pats, kind words, and gentle ways, I got to wear my bit and bridle.

One of the Barbaras had her nose “fixed.” I visited her in the hospital where she lay covered by a coarse white sheet, mustardy rings around her eyes, which shone nonetheless with relief that the thing was done and with hope for a better life as a result.

“The doctor broke her nose with a hammer,” I told my mother. I pictured the doctor swinging his hammer at Barbara's anesthetized body the way a woodcutter swings his axe at a tree.

“Oh, go on! What are you telling me?”

“He did. She said so.”

“A hammer? I don't believe it.”

“Don't, then.”

“To thine own self be true,” my mother murmured, lowering a raw, superbly plucked chicken into a pot of water.

“I am.”

“No kidding?” She frowned. “Who knows, maybe it's worth it in the long run. Be glad you don't have to go through that. Your nose is perfect.”

It was done “for their own good,” so that eventually the girls could become “settled.” In effect, resettled after the brief uproariousness of childhood. Screaming, resisting, the infant emerges from the profound settledness of the enveloping womb into the unsettledness of the universe. The mother's task was to guide it back as quickly as possible to a womblike state, there to remain until the ultimate settledness of death.

Settled. Even the word, the popping, damp
tl
followed by that thudding
d
, sounded like a lowering, a surrender. My bad eye saw the gravelly residue of a grand experiment, all blaze and color and metamorphosis, sinking heavily to the bottom of the test tube, sadly exiled from the action above. I had seen such things happen in test tubes in the chemistry lab, though not, alas, in my own—I could not call spirits from the briny deep, maybe because during the first two weeks of chemistry I myself had been exiled to the far end of the lab, which the teacher called Siberia. My crime was touching the equipment—test tubes and Bunsen burner—before being given official permission to do so.

“Settled” meant following the prescribed plan for your life, becoming a person whose every impulse would pass an inspection as rigorous as Mrs. Bluestone's; an impeccable person with no reservations or questions, capable of nothing questionable either, merely of lying inert at the bottom of the test tube while the experiments continued elsewhere.

“They can't seem to settle,” my mother would say of the
recklessly unmarried older daughters of neighbors. For that was the most obvious meaning of “settled”—if not getting married, at least training one's mind towards marriage. School cooperated, offering the Pre-Marriage course—for seniors only, a reward, as marriage itself would be the promised end—taught by Mrs. Carlino, a twice-divorced woman, rumor tittered. Twice divorced and currently married meant she must have slept with three different men in her life, which was scandalously in excess of Brooklyn requirements as well as inconvenient: my mother maintained that when divorced people remarried, the ex-partner was a presence in the bed like a ghost or a shadow. Mrs. Carlino's mimeographed sheets circulated through school like
samizdat
writings, and it was these notorious mimeographed sheets, more than any universal instinct for marriage, that made her course so popular. I was taking it, just for the exposure; aside from Mrs. Carlino I didn't know anyone who had been divorced even once (unless mysterious sallow Mr. Singer). The most famous sheet, and the most difficult to obtain without actually enrolling, was on Dating and Courtship: Mrs. Carlino allegedly gave the definitive meanings of Necking and Petting—to her students, the climax of the term's work. But so far, one week into the term, we had covered only menstrual cramps. They were imaginary, Mrs. Carlino informed us as she demonstrated, from her crouch on the floor, an exercise to relieve them.

“She seems like a settled type,” my mother remarked about a few friends I brought home, one of the Susans in particular. Susan answered questions willingly, carried her empty milk glass to the sink, and smiled a lot. When I drilled her in French verbs she insisted on pronouncing the silent
ent
of the third-person plural present tense; if she didn't, she claimed, she would forget it was there. Her placid glistening teeth, her obedient hair, her muscleless body, fit unquestioningly into space. She had the slowest walk in Brooklyn—there was nowhere she had to go with any urgency; her French pronunciation didn't matter, for surely
she would never get as far as Paris. She drifted through the unresisting air, which shaped itself around her like a silky cocoon.

So powerful was placid Susan and all she stood for that, with my mother's encouragement, she persuaded me to pledge for one of the illegal, secret sororities that flourished at school. Girls pledged not to enjoy the advantages of membership but to see if they would be accepted. Then they could judge others in turn, by standards teasingly obscure: a Kafka story, a Calvinist's heaven.

That I agreed to pledge is hard for me to believe: it does not fit with the girl I think I was, or the girl I am attempting to reconstitute in the telling, who is perhaps turning out to be not the girl I really was. I am confused about who I was: why else would I need to tell this story of my eye? The confusion is that I seem to have grown up into someone who could not have been me as a child. Yet in the telling the girl grows to sound more and more like the woman I became. The voice overcomes her. The real girl with her layers concealing me becomes more elusive the more I tell. She has been superseded, but I am sure she existed. As I try to find her in me, I keep finding me in her.

I must have pledged for the drama of it, for I was almost bound to be rejected. I can reconstruct, if not quite remember, how I felt: yes, even the misery of rejection would be more welcome to her than stale corridors and gym suits and teachers. It would be something she could feel, and a kind of knowledge beneath the surface, too. For misery drew me then, as more complex and instructive than settledness, or even happiness. Pledging for the sorority would also ease my mother's doubts about the acting class. I am sure I—the girl—would have thought of that.

Above all, settled meant “settling for,” as in making the best of a bad bargain, such as one's life, or as my parents had settled without question for the damaged goods brought to them from the hospital nursery. That settledness, that passivity in the face of circumstance, led me to the office of the contact lens doctor.

AN EVEN GREATER postwar novelty than contact lenses was television, that most powerful lens. People regarded it as dwarf movies, and it was viewed in the dark. We were among the last on our block to succumb, and our living room took on a perpetual gloom, a cloak of grief. Farewell to light. We lived—all of Brooklyn did—like cave families who sat around sighing in the dark until the accidental discovery of fire.

From the flickering eye of the room beamed the image of the man my father called “the pig,” in fuzzy black and white on the evening news, marbly eyes darting, shoulders hunching, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth, while my father, stretched out on the red couch, ground his teeth audibly, gnawed on his cigar, and said, “Somebody's going to get that bastard one of these days.”

This was Joseph McCarthy, the senator, and he did resemble a pig, with his balloony face and small mean eyes and snout. He moved like the larger sort of pig or ox, too, a boar or buffalo, rolling his cylinder of a body about in one unarticulated chunk, great shudders rippling down from his shoulders. Savagery had frozen on his face, vindicating my mother's warnings. When he confronted his prey his lips glistened with the foam of condensed rage and his cheeks and eyes exuded a brutish ardor, like pigs' faces when they make ready to fall on the orts and peels heaped in their trough.

“But what is he doing?” I asked when it began. I was in junior high and had been warned that chaos leads to communism.

“Oh, he just wants power. Power mad. It's not even communism. Ego.”

This was confusing. It had to be communism; that was all everyone talked about, especially Miss Kuznetzov in History class.

During a commercial, my father explained that power was the ability to use and exploit and even destroy other people for your own purposes, you merely had to find a timely pretext, and while unfortunately that was what the world was all about, power and greed, in this case it happened to be unconstitutional.
It was precisely for madmen such as this one that we had a constitution. Law was a curb on passion. Without it where would we be. And so forth.

It was the first time I had heard anyone openly suggest the world spun on an axis of passion, with power and greed its poles. The living room darkened. I closed my good eye and it grew darker still, splintering into implications. Was there no real goodness, then, in human nature? Was all our civilized behavior contrived, induced by artificial constraints? If left to our true desires, would we be savages? All the secrets I felt and hid began to throb: what might I find myself doing if these secrets demanded freedom and expression? How could my father have uttered such thoughts in our own living room, where the very walls, listening and fathoming, might collapse in rebellion—what law decreed they must stand forever and shield us?

Worse, these notions were not entirely unfamiliar—they had the trembling, shadowy echo of things deeply known, the kind of knowledge Socrates claimed is inborn and waits, dormant, to be fired into life by the bellows of inquiry; or the kind of knowledge Wordsworth says we forget from infancy as shades of the prison house begin to close, though these shivery recollections of mine were hardly the billowy glories of the infinite that trailed Wordsworth's cherubs.

But in Brooklyn! It was everything Brooklyn kept at bay, the very reason for Brooklyn's existence.

My mother entered from the kitchen and sat down to watch. My father was grumbling at the screen again.