Leaving Brooklyn Read online

  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 feelings 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.

  Even on the good days—mild late afternoons—I had to undergo ordeals before reaching Bobby, like a knight performing feats of valor and endurance for a kiss from his beloved. I accompanied my mother on her rounds, the ration line, the six-block stretch of Rutland Road with Cheap Charlie’s, the fruit man, the shoe store, endless stations of monotony, until finally we arrived at the chicken store. It was a fairly large shop, by Rutland Road standards, Ben the butcher occupying the righthand side and the chicken man the left. Their counters, about twelve feet long, were separated by a center aisle some two yards wide, and the aisle was strewn with sawdust, soft and fragrant, its smell edging out the rich pungent odor of raw poultry. Ben the butcher was a big, dark, red-faced man who seemed kin to the slabs of raw meat arrayed before him, and in fact Bobby resembled Ben more than he did his own father, who was small, wiry, and fair-haired, with a mustache and white apron and cap. The chicken man would display his wares for my mother, chickens complete with grayish feathers and bright yellow feet and toes and curved witches’ toenails. Fresh-killed, the sign outside said. He expounded on their virtues as my mother scrutinized them; meanwhile Bobby winked at me, and if he was not busy, came from behind the counter to talk, crouching down so that he was my size. He told me to watch out for Mrs. Bluestone when I reached second grade, but he wouldn’t tell me what she did. He taught me how to play tic-tac-toe and showed me little round plastic discs where the trick was to make tiny ball bearings roll into the eye and mouth holes punched in a clown’s face, and once in a while he bought me a Dixie cup at the candy store next door, holding my hand as we walked. If he grabbed my right hand I would pull away and go around him to be on his right.

  When my mother had chosen a chicken, the chicken man brought it to his wife in her special corner. This was the best part. For the glory of Bobby was not simply in himself; it was in his having this creature for a mother.

  She sat on a folding chair at the back of the store, beside a large wooden bin. In winter she wore layers of fuzzy shawls in drab colors, while in summer her arms were bare, and in all seasons she wore a kerchief on her head and her housedress was covered by a broad white apron. She sat with both feet solidly on the floor, wide apart, in black high-laced boots. She smiled but almost never spoke. When she did speak, the sounds were garbled, as if they came from an animal struggling to speak, yet they were close enough to human speech to be familiar and frightening. The struggling sounds were all vowels, wild and overflowing the boundaries of consonants; the consonants pursued the vowels to trap and tame them, but the vowels were headstrong and couldn’t be caught.

  This, my mother explained in the special tone of Brooklyn “tolerance,” was because Bobby’s mother had a cleft palate. She was not stupid, my mother said, and I must not be afraid of her; she understood everything we said to her and had thoughts and answers in her mind exactly like everyone else, but it was hard for her to make the words. And I, who so often felt impelled to speak, to hear what I knew made real and given shape in undulations of sound, and equally often regretted the words coursing out uncontrolled, regarded the woman’s silence as a wondrous talent, like riding a unicycle or spinning straw into gold. She did not need to give speech to the voice inside. It was sufficient that she herself knew and heard it within. Her silence was part of her power.

  But it was the lesser part. More miraculous was what she did. She was a chicken flicker, and although my father used this term to denote a person on the lowest social rung, to me she was queenly in her dominion. She reached out to accept the chicken from her husband and the spectacle began. With fervor, absorbed in her task, she pulled the feathers from the chicken, her fingers so swift that they dissolved in a blur like the blades of a propeller as they dug into the skin and released little puffs of feathers. She got faster and faster as she went along, turning the chicken around in her hands, the chicken that was growing a larger and larger bald yellow patch. Feathers flew, tossed up by the energy in her fingers, and for a brilliant instant rested poised in the air, then changed direction and made their descent. Feathers drifted through the air around her, wafting down to her lap or her boots, or to the floor. The air was dappled with flying feathers, gray and white, a little snowstorm, while the chicken flicker sat in the midst of them, large, solid, and draped, a Madonna assumed into a cloud.

  Sometimes my mother, who was friendly and spoke to people in stores, especially and deliberately to those she considered less fortunate, would talk to the chicken flicker as she worked, about household or neighborhood matters. I wished she wouldn’t. Her talking distracted me from the vision of the feathers and the transforming chicken and the woman with the astonishing fingers who was another order of being, a wizard absorbed in her wizardly task, while my mother was stuck in the daily quicksand of Brooklyn. And because the chicken flicker couldn’t speak, I felt something unfair about my mother’s chattering to her—as if speech demanded a response and my mother was demanding something the chicken flicker could not give. But speech does not always demand a response. Speech can be a simple gift, no strings attached, and no doubt that was what my mother offered. I was the one who wished to ration and dole out and barter speech.

  Somewhere, someone today must pull the feathers off chickens, or more likely it is done by machine, but either way, it is not done where I can see it. Had I not watched the chicken flicker at her work I might almost believe chickens come in naked yellow skins, the only hint that they do not being the tiny holes along the surface and the occasional stump of quill you find, that escaped the machine.

  Right after Bobby graduated from high school he vanished. I didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye: our connection was not sanctified by any institution like romance or family; it was purely in my mind. Like famous literary adulterers, like poor foolish John Marcher of “The Beast in the Jungle,” who had no special status at the funeral of the person closest to his heart, I stood apart from the vicissitudes of Bobby’s life. Mine was a love outside the social structure, that dared not speak its name.

  “Where’s Bobby?” I asked t
he chicken man one day, made bold by desperation.

  “Bobby’s in the Navy, sweetheart. He’s away on a big ship.”

  I knew immediately this was part of the war. And I thought:Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea

  Silver buckles on his knee

  He’ll come back and marry me

  Pretty Bobby Shaftoe.

  The role of waiting at home was an acid impatience. Stinging as if my blood were laced with vinegar, I dreamed of flying off to join him, stowing away on the ship. I had read of stowaways: often they were accepted by the crew after the first shock of their presence passed. I would make myself useful and become a kind of mascot. When the ship put into port I would see all sorts of glamorous places, and maybe Bobby and I would like one so much that we would never come home.

  I wrote Bobby a letter telling him I had started first grade and had to sit quietly at my desk while the others learned to read, and I asked him about his ship. In my mind, as always, I told him how things truly were and felt. I told him about the somersault in my gut after the first few days of school, that sick flip I later came to recognize as meaning: Aha, so this is what it will be like. School was lining up in a chalk-drawn rectangle, one for each class, in the chill mornings, being forced to hold a partner’s damp woollen mitten, and waiting, in the dismal silence imposed by the sixth-grade Guard Force—identified by their white strap running diagonally from shoulder to waist—for a bell to allow us in; it meant the patrolled march to the classroom, where the morning proceeded inevitably and without variation: roll call, pledge of allegiance, reading aloud in turns, milk at ten-thirty sharp, enforced rest—arms folded on the desk, heads down—the trek downstairs to the bathrooms, where the teacher handed us in pairs to the matron, a mammoth dressed in white. Recess. Forced play.

  “Oh, you’ll get used to it,” my mother said.

  I suspected—it sounds uncanny, I know, but I truly had the ghastly presentiment, at six years old—that all of life could be this way, sick with rote, and I no longer envied grownups their freedom. All this I told Bobby as I lay in bed at night dreading the morning, but I could not yet write well enough to put it in my letter.

  Later on I told him, silently, in bed at night, about the eye tests. The teacher hung an eye chart over the map of the world and each child came forward, covered one eye, then the other, and read the letters on the chart. Those few with glasses got to do it twice, with and without. It was no use trying to memorize the chart, because the teacher aimed her pointer at random. My turn came. I covered my right eye and read everything she pointed to, down to the tiniest letters at the very bottom.

  “All right, cover the other eye now.”

  The chart was still there, pulsing in the distance, and the chubby figure of Miss Tilford next to it, amorphous, threatening to shatter into its molecular components at any instant. The watery broken line must be her pointer. It shook and shimmied.

  “Well, Audrey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The pointer danced up in the direction of a dark, thick squiggle, probably the E. But since I couldn’t make it out, I didn’t say.

  “Can’t you even see this big one?”

  Around me hung a taut energy. Not the mumbles and giggles that greeted the nearsighted children who fumbled through a line or two and gave up, like dummies who couldn’t read. Only a stunned awe. I could barely distinguish my classmates, grainy faces in the crowd of an antique photo, but I could feel their attention seeping passionately into my skin like raw sun. I was special. With one eye I saw everything and with the other, nothing.

  “Audrey, come up to my desk before you go home for lunch. I want to give you a note for your mother. You can sit down now.

  My mother wouldn’t tell me what was in the note. “It’s all right,” she said in a consoling way. “You won’t have to take the test again.” And she gave me a note to bring back to the teacher, and it was true, I never took the test again.

  My letter to Bobby was not much, compared to these stifled intensities, a mere few lines. My mother approved of cheering up our fighting men, and said if we put the letter in an envelope with a stamp and gave it to Bobby’s father, he would send it to him. She asked to read it and I said no. To emphasize my refusal I sealed it in her presence and held on to it until we next went to the chicken store.

  During the three years Bobby was away I had small flurries of attachment here and there, but I kept my love for him sealed, intact. I knew there was a chance he would not return. That was what war meant: boys left home to fight and sometimes didn’t come back, which was why people dreaded it, though this had not happened to anyone I knew in Brooklyn, only to the farm woman who had lost her son and didn’t have the heart to march in our parade. But I knew too that the war was over—the parade had taken place shortly after Bobby joined the Navy—so probably he was not really fighting but simply sailing here and there, keeping things in order.

  Now there was another war, without fighting, called the cold war. When I was seven, I saw a picture illustrating an adventure story in The Saturday Evening Post, which I read regularly, along with the other magazines my family received in the mail: Redbook, The Ladies’ Home Journal (“Can This Marriage Be Saved?”—yes, almost always by the wife’s learning to be more “tolerant”), McCall’s, and Reader’s Digest (“Life in These United States”—what a quirky, home-spun, bumbling, lovable bunch we were, for a major power). The picture showed an American spy captured in a communist country, sitting on a stool in a cellar room with his hands tied behind him, surrounded by his tormentors, the communists. The American has a tin bucket over his head. The communists batter on the bucket with sticks to break his will. That was the nature of the cold war. I never dreaded this happening to Bobby. It was nearer, already happening to me.

  The image sprouted needles and tattooed itself on my brain. I lived inside a bucket of sorts, blind darkness of a sort, too, even if the living conditions were infinitely gentler. Maybe too much gentler, you may feel, for me to venture the comparison. I suppose it would only weaken my story to claim a misery or repression greater than seems warranted. Granted, then, that on the scale of brutalities Brooklyn occupied a most humble, far from epic, place. Even its repressions were humble, which made them all the more difficult to locate. Nonetheless in the hazy moments before sleep, I saw the velvety black inside of the bucket and felt the pounding of the sticks, arrhythmic, chaotic, resounding through the hollows of my skull. And I read. The sticks, such as they were, padded, nudging little sticks, tried to pound my brain into a more rudimentary state, to break the truths in the books into dusty lies. Reading was resistance, and resistance, too, was not telling what I knew.

  Bobby returned. With no warning, there he was in his father’s store one afternoon. Changed, resplendent in his uniform, a sailor suit identical with the ones some boys in my third-grade class wore—navy-blue, a big square collar with three rows of white ribbing at the edges, and bell-bottom trousers just as the song on the radio said:Bell-bottom trousers

  Coat of navy blue

  I love a sailor

  And he loves me too.

  “Hi there, Audrey. Thanks for the great letter.” He smiled, but something was different. I was too surprised to feel what was happening, but I filmed it all with my bad eye—my storehouse of visual memory—so I could relive it later and feel its meaning. He picked me up and swung me around in the air. From the low, tentative arc of the swing, I could tell I was heavier than he had expected. How I’d grown, he said. No baby anymore. He put his white sailor hat on my head, and his wordless mother, in a whirl of feathers at the back of the store, laughed open-mouthed at the sight. I tried to persuade myself that everything would be the same as before, but in my heart I knew better. Bobby had sailed halfway across the world, far far from Brooklyn, to places whose names I didn’t even know, where people dressed in sarongs and lounged under palm trees and lived in grass huts under amber skies, maybe banging drums and painting their bodies and dancing the night
through with savage ecstatic wails. How small and dull and insignificant everything here must seem. What could I offer him? How could my stories of class trips to the Botanic Garden or the Prospect Park Zoo, where we giggled at the purple-bottomed apes climbing over one another, compare with the exotic things he had witnessed? Could it matter to him that I knew all about Mrs. Bluestone now? For the secret was this: each morning Mrs. Bluestone made the entire class line up at the front of the room for inspection, boys on one side and girls on the other, and examined each person’s hair, ears, teeth, fingernails, shoes, and handkerchief. She made us hold our collars open to show our necks as she moved slowly down the lines, peering at each neck to judge if it was properly washed. I had told my mother Mrs. Bluestone was crazy. She was amused and said, “Oh, don’t feel that way. It’s silly, but it can’t do any harm.” Then she thought it over and added, “She’s the teacher, maybe she knows what she’s doing. Maybe some children aren’t kept clean.” So I made an effort to be amused and philosophical too, and the effort entwined with my true feelings of outrage to form a tight knot in my head. Bobby, had I told him, would have laughed his clear, straight laugh at how nothing ever changed in school, and it would have been plain that Mrs. Bluestone’s way need not be the way of the world; my knot would have dissolved in laughter too. But I didn’t tell him: I was ashamed that, inexplicably, my fate was to endure Mrs. Bluestone’s obsessions while his was to sail the seven seas in a splendid uniform.

  Soon my mother began sending me on errands. I would wait in the chicken store as all the women did while the chicken was flicked, and pay Bobby, who had become brooding, almost dour. He was never rude to me, only there seemed to be nothing special between us.

  Even worse were the snowy days when he delivered the order and my mother sent me to the door. “Give Bobby half a dollar,” and I had the agony of handing him his tip, which he accepted politely, thanking me as though I were just another grown and distant woman.