Leaving Brooklyn Read online

  I tried to help her. I sought remedies—photographers’ lights, jewelers’ magnifying glasses, even elaborate machines with lighted screens for reading. Every time I saw her I brought a new toy. See, Mother! You must try to see! But she accepted no help. The remedies were all too difficult to get used to. She accepted the darkening at the center of things. It was an obsession with me to make her see, make her, by any contrivance, want to see. But I failed. Maybe it was wrong to try, as it is wrong to interfere with anyone’s vision. And God, how I envied and scorned her vision when she had it—so focused, so suitable, so thoroughly useful. Then it dragged her down into the dark.

  She kept on with her soothing words but I interrupted, shouting that the rejection had nothing to do with my eye, either, because I had been wearing the lens at the interview, the lens she wanted me so badly to have, and see? it hadn’t served the slightest purpose. I was no more acceptable with it than without. So there. She looked so pained that I was wretched over my outburst and too ashamed to tell her I had actually been blindfolded at the interview. Perhaps that was a mitigating fact, but I was not sure what it mitigated. My mother would have been appalled to know they had required and I had submitted to the blindfold; she would have said her usual words.

  No matter. It served her right to be denied the truth. It was all her fault that I had turned out the way I did. If she had not handed me over so promptly and obediently to the authorities the minute she had me, if she had watched over what they did to me, my eyes would have been ordinary and seen things in the ordinary way. I would have been content to live in Brooklyn and settle.

  I ran upstairs to take a shower and collapse on my bed, where I relived the scene with the eye doctor. Those mortifying words about my body, what it did to him … That my humdrum girl’s body, the most familiar thing in the world, not me but the thing that contained me, could enthrall him, was outrageous. I had never been outraged about what he did to me, but this was different, full of danger. He had no right to feel that way about me. He said he was possessed, but I had no wish to possess him. Children, in Brooklyn mythology, were blank slates, not possessing anything, not responsible for anything. Hadn’t my own mother brought me there to have him breathe his hot breath on me and brush his leg on mine?

  His words might be banal; their force was not. I sensed where it could lead. It was starting already, a tug behind my ribs. I was on the verge of caving in to it, contracting my body around the central core like a dancer rounding to a passionate crescent, on the verge of feeling something myself for the eye doctor—whether pity or contempt or love or loathing mattered less than that it was feeling. He, it, would become part of my real life, and from this moment on, if I wanted to be true to myself, that would be part of what I must be true to.

  My eye ached; I wasn’t ready to keep the lens in for so long. I took it out, standing over the bathroom sink. In the palm of my hand it became a jellyfish. I flinched from the sting. In the small, windowless bathroom something of the aura of the church returned to me, the space to think a free and true thought: how ugly the lens was and how I hated it. Even more, more than anything else, I wanted never to take that subway ride again.

  If I never went back, the eye doctor would cease to exist. My visits would have served their purpose and could be left behind like the improvisations we did in acting class. Weren’t my scenes with the eye doctor, self-contained, circumscribed in time, also improvisations in their way? In that light, I had been a very poor actress. I hadn’t played them with any energy—“energy ” being a word the spindly acting teacher used often—because I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Perhaps I had gotten what I wanted and there was no point in repeating the scene. It “didn’t work,” as we said in acting class.

  I wrapped the lens in a tissue and flushed it away. As it vanished in the swirl of water my right eye teared with joy.

  SOMETIMES DURING SPELLS of pain you can wake in the morning drenched with freedom and light and well-being, and this lasts a few glorious seconds while your life waits, like a resplendent party, a gala, for you to make your entrance. Eager to rise and put on your finery, you linger just an instant on the threshold, anticipating—when the pain comes up from behind like a sneak and grabs you. Back in its familiar embrace, you know that all along it was lurking in the folds of the sheets and you were only toying with freedom, allowing yourself to be deceived, and the light and well feeling which a moment ago filled the room evaporates like dew.

  The next few mornings were that way. I woke from the sweet, dense sleep of the young, ready to suck the juice of the world as I would an orange, and then the story I had tried to shape closed around me: the man on the subway, the eye doctor and his terrifying words, the lens and what to tell my parents— for eventually I would have to tell them it was gone, it was all over with perfecting me.

  Only my bad eye took no part in my worries. As always, it went its blithe way, following its desires. Light and air stroked it, a forever fresh, unencumbered eye, an explorer.

  Days passed. I was swimming three times a week in school—no one graduated without taking the rigorous swimming test, though a number graduated semi-literate—and under the spicy green water, the world far away, I found another kind of haven. Most of the body was water, the chemistry teacher had once said. To be water was to be fluid and elusive, nothing could grab you. I was at one with my water self, safe in my element.

  And falling asleep at night, recalling not the eye doctor himself but the things he had done to me, I relaxed and almost convinced myself that my problem would go away. My parents would forget. Especially my father. He had never said much about the lens; probably he was unaware of the stages of my getting used to it, occupied as he was with the things in his department. Except that he paid the bills—the same day he got them, as I knew from watching years ago, sitting on his lap at the little desk. And the eye doctor would stop sending bills: hadn’t he said it wouldn’t be fair… ?

  The days accumulated. A week. Two weeks. Each time my eyes met my mother ’s I waited to be called to account, but she never said a word. I looked her straight in the eye on purpose, testing my nerve and testing her too. Did she ever really look at me?

  On the Monday of my regular appointment with the eye doctor, I went to the library after school, taking care to arrive home at the time I usually returned from his office. My mother was cleaning the broiler. We had an electric broiler now, and seldom used the one below the oven, which had erupted in flames of grief the day Roosevelt died. I rummaged in the refrigerator for milk, milk that no longer wore little wires around its neck as it had during the war, and that no longer needed to be shaken up—it was homogenized by machine. Even the milk had settled, or maybe just grown up. We kept shaking, though, out of habit.

  My mother turned to me, placing her hands on her hips.

  “And where were you this afternoon?”

  The tone and the combative stance meant this was a moment for truth telling.

  “The library.”

  “The library!” As if I had said the pool hall or the opium den. “Well, the eye doctor called,” she announced.

  “Mm.”

  “He sounded worried. He wanted to know why you didn’t show up. He called himself, not his secretary.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “What is this mm-hm? Why didn’t you go? What’s the matter with you?”

  “I didn’t feel like it.” I spilled some milk as I poured. She rushed over with a damp rag before I could set the bottle down.

  “What do you mean, you didn’t feel like it? This isn’t something you do because you feel like it. If it has to be checked, you go whether you feel like it or not.”

  “I don’t want to wear it. It hurts. I never wanted it in the first place.”

  “Oh, you didn’t? Now you tell me! You might have thought of that before we spent all that money. Not to mention the trips I made back and forth.”

  “Two trips,” I breathed.

  “Whatever. Why didn’t
you say something then? You don’t seem to have too much difficulty opening your mouth.”

  “You never gave me a chance. It was just decided. You’re the one it bothered, that I wasn’t perfect. I never cared. Who needs to be perfect?” She was silent, a silence so magnetic that it pulled out my words: “I ’ll never be perfect now anyway.”

  The skin around her mouth and eyes tightened—her canny look. I could sense the cells of her brain drawing together with energy.

  “Just a minute. Hold everything.” She pulled out a plastic kitchen chair and sat. “Something is fishy here. Sit down and tell me what’s going on.”

  I backed away towards the door.

  “I never said you had to be perfect, Audrey. You know we love you the way you are. We were doing this for your own good. I thought you understood that. We thought, now you were at an age when it could make a difference, when it might be easier when you get to college—”

  “Oh, who cares about all that! Boys, dates. Believe me, it’s not eyes they’re interested in. You don’t need twenty-twenty vision to have some creep want to put his hands all over you. And who ever said I wanted to be popular and get married and settle down and play mah jongg?”

  “Don’t you talk to me that way! And don’t raise your voice to me either!”

  I ignored that. “You didn’t even notice I wasn’t wearing it. That’s how much difference it makes. You never looked at me long enough or hard enough to notice. You don’t understand anything about me. You don’t have the slightest idea.” I burst into tears and rushed to fall on her neck as I had longed to do two weeks ago.

  “My poor baby.” She stroked my hair as I sobbed. “What could be happening that’s so terrible? Of course I notice you. Don’t you think I know you? I know all about you. I know you’re different. Now don’t cry. Don’t feel that way. Tell me what it is. Is it something at school? Those nasty girls again?”

  I shook my head. My composure was returning. Whenever I heard that word, “different,” every organ got taut.

  “Then what? You can tell me.”

  “It’s too awful.”

  “You’d better tell me, Audrey, if it’s that awful.”

  I had gone much too far. Luckily I had something suitable to tell her. I offered, haltingly, the episode of the man on the subway. He too had his uses.

  “Ugh!” She thrust me from her to look at my face. “It’s disgusting. It never fails. You can’t go through life without something like that… Look, sweetheart, there’s not a woman I know who hasn’t had that happen at least once. It’s part of being a woman. Men can be animals, it’s the honest truth. You have to fight back. Let them know you won’t stand for it.”

  “It was too crowded.” I wept again. The telling of it, and her response, revived the horror. That it happened to everyone made it worse, not better.

  “It’s all right, Audrey. I don’t mean you did anything wrong. You’re young, how could you know? Listen to me. Right now it seems very important. But you’ll see, time will pass, it’ll fade away. It doesn’t mean anything in the long run. I thought maybe something really awful had happened.” Relief triumphant. She tried a little chuckle to lighten things, but this was premature, for just as she was saying it meant nothing, I was feeling his heavy fingers on my thighs. I squirmed in her tight embrace.

  “And you’ ve been walking around for two weeks with this weighing on you. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  I extricated myself and blew my nose.

  “I know. You were embarrassed. But you can tell me these things, Audrey. I ’m a married woman. I know what men are like. Don’t worry that I ’ll be shocked.” She had my anguish, which always threatened to become her own, under control now. Like a potter, she could twist the raw, earthy material around in her hands, taming it until it grew manageable. Soon she would have this so small and shapely that she could tell her mah jongg friends about it. Together they would nod and frown, and maybe recall similar incidents long ago in their own lives, and laugh a bit. They could domesticate anything.

  Finally I started to drink my milk.

  “I better call the eye doctor and explain to him,” she said.

  “No!”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell him that. I’ll just say you couldn’t make it, you didn’t feel well.”

  “No, don’t. Please.”

  “Don’t be silly, Audrey. I promised to call back and let him know. I won’t say anything to embarrass you.” She went to the phone at my father ’s desk in the dining room. Through the door - way I could see her looking up the number. “You young girls are so sensitive,” she said as she began dialing.

  I took a sip of milk but had to spit it back. There was something large, like an egg, in my throat, and when I tried to swallow, the egg corked my body. My mother and the eye doctor were actually going to speak to each other. This was a cosmic impossibility, like day and night occurring at once, or having each foot planted on a different continent.

  I heard the ordinary words, real and unmistakable. “Audrey didn’t feel well at school… ”

  Hearing them on the other end, equally real, filling in her pauses, was that person who touched me in secret places, who said he loved me and thought about me constantly, and whom I had expected to vanish conveniently when I had had enough of him, as characters vanish when you slam a book shut. He would have vanished, too. It was my mother who insisted on resurrecting him.

  “She stayed on at the nurse’s office until they felt she might be sent home.”

  When she spoke to outsiders my mother employed a more elegant and complex syntax than she did for family members, like dressing up to go out. She had a number of finely tuned variations: her unrefined, serviceable idiom for household use, something more sharply honed for her friends, and more self-conscious for the teachers at school. For the world outside Brooklyn there was this stylish, subjunctive-laden mode. Her versatility carried over into Yiddish too, which she threw out in short pithy remarks to my father around the house, but spoke to my grandmother in fluent and elaborate phrases. The strange sounds used to catapult them both over a border, out of my reach, until I realized that without even trying to understand, despairing of understanding, I knew what they were saying. How this happened was incomprehensible. In English, which I floated in as I floated in water, my element, I knew the nature and function and potentialities of every word and every inflection. I had no idea, in my mother ’s and grandmother ’s Yiddish, what the words were one by one, or even when one word ended and another began—it was a steady flow of syllables like the flow of the chicken flicker’s vowels, though far more rhythmic and civilized—yet at the end of the inscrutable journey of sentence or paragraph, miraculously I had arrived, which made it less a language than a form of subliminal transport, a direct delivery of thought and feeling.

  This virtuosity of hers boasted of an enviable comfort in the ordinary world, an instinctive sense of degrees of propriety, a subtle economy of means. While I had only one language—my brand of stubborn integrity—and it had awkwardly to fit all circumstances.

  No wonder I had to master all phases of language later on, and wanted to speak other people’s words on a stage, to become promiscuous in every idiom and escape every sort of purity. And then others’ words proved not enough and I had to learn to speak the languages of both my eyes and invent other I’s to speak through, even this very I speaking now—to be certain no form of vision was denied me, and by an alchemy of the imagination, to turn vision into speech.

  Hugging the phone to her ear, my mother paused. I imagined the doctor’s voice: aloof, concerned.

  “No, nothing serious,” she replied, and in a lower tone—though it was hardly possible for me not to hear, I was eight feet away—went on, “I think this experience with the lens has been something of a strain on her. I didn’t realize to what extent… Yes, certainly, I’ll tell her that. And I’m awfully sorry to have inconvenienced you.”

  She was apologizing! I could b
arely breathe. The egg in my throat grew steadily larger, blocking off my body from my brain. I cast about for what to say when she hung up.

  “Yes, she’s right here. Audrey dear, the doctor would like to speak to you.”

  “What for?”

  She covered the mouthpiece with her palm. “How should I know? Just come here and talk to him. And behave yourself.”

  I took the phone. She stood at my side.

  “Audrey? I was frantic when you didn’t come. Are you all right?”

  I moved a few steps off. “Yes, fine. Thank you,” I added, so that my mother would see I knew how to behave.

  “You know what I mean. Nothing ’s happened? Nothing’s wrong?”

  What did he think could have happened? Here I was. He sounded as silly as my parents when I stayed out late. “No, nothing.”

  “You haven’t said anything to your mother, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Audrey, don’t leave like this. Please. I have to see you. We must talk.”

  My mother was watching me in her telepathic mode, trying to instill the right answers, though this time she didn’t even know the questions. I mimed a look of impatience, rolling my eyes at his tedious doctorly concern. An unnecessary precaution. It was beyond her imagining—a doctor, a big man. Even I could not have imagined this—his pleas in my ear as my mother gazed on stolidly, praying I would not disgrace her further by crude manners.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Yes. Next week. You’ll feel better once we talk. I know you’re upset and confused. At least let me speak to you.”

  “I’ll have to see.” I hung up.

  “Well,” said my mother. “If you had told me right away what happened on the subway we could have avoided all that.

  I would have gone with you if you wanted. Anyhow, I told him you’d be there next week. He’ll make time for you. Look, I know it’s not easy getting used to the lens, but once you are, you’ll see it’s for the best, in the long run.”