Leaving Brooklyn Read online

  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.

  “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.