Leaving Brooklyn Read online

  How could so much feeling and connection dissipate? Where in the universe did it go?

  Bobby continued working for his father and married a girl he had known in high school. He got an apartment in the neighborhood, becoming one more Brooklyn person, and this was a great mystery to me—that he could have gone so far on his ship and seen so many things, only to return and marry Barbara, also called Bobby, so that one of the local jokes was Bobby and Bobby. Whenever I saw him I felt a vague awkwardness on his behalf: how ashamed and disappointed he must be, I imagined, that this was his life.

  Things did not grow easier for us—for me—until I was thirteen years old and drifted into the store to buy my mother lamb chops. I waved at Bobby and turned towards Ben’s side to place my order.

  “Hey, Audrey, come here. You’ve got to see this.”

  He wiped his hands on his apron, pulled a wallet from the back pocket of his chinos, and showed me pictures of his baby, three weeks old: naked on its stomach, wrapped in a blanket, Barbara holding it, and Barbara and Bobby holding it, the three faces squeezed together. “How do you like that? Chip off the old block, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, he’s a beautiful baby, Bobby,” I said as I had often heard my mother do. “Really beautiful. Congratulations.”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell you, it’s a great feeling. A great feeling.”

  I looked at him tenderly. There was no awkwardness left, and no danger of anyone’s detecting improper feelings, for I was through with unrequited soulful love. I was planning to live an exotic life in some distant, turbulent place as soon as I could, Paris maybe, attending the Sorbonne, or Cairo, where, rumor had it, if you sat in a certain café eventually everyone in the world would pass by. Maybe not people from Brooklyn, but everyone else. I marveled that I could ever have given my heart and soul to Bobby. He rumpled my hair as he hadn’t done for years, and I tried not to shrink away. I saw that connections could dissolve and seemingly come to nothing, though they might be reabsorbed and reshaped to be used somewhere else in the world, a conservation of emotion like the conservation of matter or energy—the sort of open, unregulated process my bad eye would comprehend. I squinted my good eye and Bobby merged into the chicken store, his molecules mingling with the molecules of the display cases and the paneled walls and the sawdust.

  “So who do you have for History?” he asked. “Did you get Kuznetzov?”

  “Oh yes,” I groaned.

  “You have my sympathy. Is she still torturing people in class?”

  “Almost every day, I swear. She makes strong men weep when they haven’t done the homework. But her main thing is communism. She doesn’t let anyone open or close loose-leaf rings in class because it can lead to communism.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Clicking the rings creates excessive noise, excessive noise leads to chaos, and chaos leads to communism. I think she’s actually a spy for McCarthy.”

  Bobby was appreciative, as always. Five years ago his response would have sustained me for days and generated a lengthy fantasy culminating in declarations of eternal love and affinity. Now I just laughed along with him. Ordinary life, nothing to embroider with dreams on the way home. I was ready to go, I had my mother’s lamb chops, but he kept me. To think there could come a time when I would want to leave Bobby!

  “Who do you have for Geometry? Did you get Califano? He really had a thing for the girls. He’d go for you in a big way, Audrey.”

  “No, I have Schechter.”

  “I don’t remember him.”

  “Her. It’s just as well. See you, Bobby. Have fun with the baby.”

  I had a secret this time, about Miss Schechter, like his about Mrs. Bluestone. But it was a secret tacitly guarded by the ninth-grade girls—I could never have told Bobby.

  Before I left I went over to his mother to congratulate her on her new grandchild. She smiled and nodded vigorously and made some laborious sounds I couldn’t interpret, but I wasn’t afraid of her speech anymore. I was used to it and understood you didn’t have to grasp it, only be there and accept it. I understood so many things now that had been mysterious. The parade down the dirt roads was to celebrate the dropping of the atom bomb. While people in Hiroshima groped in the ashes for their families, shaved and skinned alive by the heat, the girl who grew to be me marched alongside her mother with her tambourine, banging a spoon against a pot, and dogs took their pleasure. How amazing that that person became me, or that I am she. But I have her eyes. That fire in the oven when Roosevelt died seemed a foretaste of the bigger fire and an echo of fires in bigger ovens, their flames sizzling and sneaking out into our kitchen from the crevices of the broiler door, while inside was the chicken so carefully plucked by the chicken flicker with her clever fingers, her wizardry. I understood that all the times I had watched her, entranced by the primitive and necessary thing she was doing, all the days she flicked chickens hour after hour till her broad lap was a mass of feathers to be emptied into the bin beside her, men in Nevada, also with amazingly skilled and accurate, speedy fingers, also wizards in their fashion, were fingering advanced equipment in order to make a bomb that would save boys like Bobby and bring them home with fanfare. The girl I was saw warriors welcomed back from Korea with a bit less fanfare: that war was undeclared and unclear and inconclusive. She couldn’t know that later ones would be received even more grudgingly, without any celebration, left to find their way without the light of torches, because we were never again able to claim innocence. We had television, and we were forced to acknowledge what they had done to return alive, that living flesh had yet again been rendered to ashes. It shook us with doubt, which may be the only kind of progress or education there ever is.

  I NEVER MINDED much the disfigurement of my eye. In the mirror I saw one iris slightly smaller than the other, not very terrible. I couldn’t tell when it wandered in its incorrigible, nomadic way; it was others who were made uneasy—I came to detect in people a flicker of discomfort, a glancing away. And my vision was excellent, the “good” eye, in fine fraternal spirit, making up for the defections of its twin. But my parents must have minded, or felt some residual guilt. Early on, they took me to doctors. Big men, as they were called in Brooklyn.

  “This one is supposed to be a very big man,” my mother would say anxiously to my father, in the front seat of the car. The trips were long, the big men rarely in Brooklyn. In order to be big, it seemed, you had to be elsewhere, in faraway boroughs, sometimes even New Jersey.

  There would be a consultation in a large, hushed, wood-paneled room, where the elderly man, not always big, would do the usual battery of tests, starting off with the simple chart. To my right eye, the chart was a distant porous rectangle with black squiggles skittering over it.

  He would ask me once more to cover the good eye. “Do you know your numbers? How many fingers am I holding up?” The fingers were stout and mottled and melted into the vibrating space around them. My mother watched with fevered concentration—puckered lips, glittering eyes—as though to will the correct answer by telepathy; she was feeling vicariously what she took to be my pain at failing the test. She wished to shield me—and by extension, herself—from all of life’s pain, and must have felt the pain of failure as among the worst. But I was delighted to fail a test, which I never did at school. I wanted to know failure as I wanted to know everything off limits and out of bounds. I was even fond of the wayward eye that could lead me past the borders and down those broader paths.

  One doctor’s receptionist suggested, “It might help if you wore your hair a different way, dear. The way you have it sort of calls attention to your eye, don’t you think?”

  My hair, long, sleek, and very black, hung in bangs like a shade over my forehead. I loved it. It was not like my mother’s, not like anyone’s hair in Brooklyn. I loved smoothing it down with my hand and feeling its sheen. Squinting my good eye, I disintegrated the plumpness and blondness of the receptionist into a mass of dots writhing on the swivel chair.


  How different were these big men of the outlands from the doctors of my fantasies! When I was seven or eight, I put myself to sleep with the same story every night. My skiing accident. I had never skied but I watched skiing every Saturday afternoon at the nearby Carroll Theatre. Movietone News with its dazzling skiers followed the coming attractions and the installment of Superman and preceded the movie of the week, which almost always contained scenes of passionate kissing and embracing. And since it was not the custom in Brooklyn to check on the hour of the main feature but simply to saunter in any old time and remain through the next showing, I often had no idea who was kissing whom or why, what the nature of their relation was—whether these were kisses of nascent love and mutual recognition, or illicit kisses, or kisses of recovery after loss or separation, kisses of tragic parting or of reconciliation, or false deceiving kisses, exploitative, opportunistic kisses. Whatever they were mattered less than how beautifully they were executed, the partners performing as if they had been schooled for romance, and I wondered if I would ever learn to do it as well.

  But the skiers of Movietone News were always the same, always dazzling, and in bed I would picture myself, in dark glasses, skimming over the gleaming snow and hurling myself out into space till I fell and broke every bone in my body. I was carried to a hospital bed and swathed in splints and bandages. Immobilized, I could only breathe and feel and think. I was fed through straws, thick sugary concoctions like chocolate malteds. A young doctor with dark sweet skin like an Arab or an Indian, tall, who moved with the baleful grace of a giraffe, was brought in especially for my case. He began healing me, working the parts into motion piece by piece. Toes, feet, ankles, knees. Hands, wrists, elbows. Working his way from the extremities inward. Little by little the parts regained sensation and movement. I would test them tentatively, coaxing them out of their torpor. Soon I could sit in a wheelchair. Soon I could walk on crutches. Then with a cane. Finally I took my first hesitant steps unaided. My heart thrilled with gratitude to the doctor who had saved me. He leaned his dark face over me and kissed me on the lips, lightly, with skill, as in the movies. I trembled all over. But that was the beginning of the end. The excitement was greatest when I was half or three-quarters disabled and feeling the parts come to life again under his touch. As soon as I was restored to the full use of my body the thrill evaporated. So, in quest of new excitement, I would go skiing again and have another accident. Even more serious. They feared for my life. Things deep inside were broken this time. Again I was wrapped in bandages, again nothing would move. Again the young doctor, a different one each time, though they all had a family resemblance and all wore white, pristine as the snow I skimmed over. Every night I lay in bed stiff as a plank and slowly felt the parts awaken. Sometimes it took so long for every part to awaken that I fell asleep halfway through.

  Other times I couldn’t fall asleep at all, no matter how many accidents I suffered, because of the card players downstairs. My father’s pinochle men moved from house to house weekly. Every sixth Wednesday my mother set up a bridge table and chairs in the living room and put out bowls of cashew nuts and pretzels and grapes and little round flat chocolates sprinkled with white dots. Big ashtrays, because the men smoked cigars. The cigars came from Havana bearing embossed gold paper rings that my father would give me for my finger and I would pretend I was married. Tall glasses, because the men drank soda. Our soda man, unlike the milkman, came at a reasonable hour and we saw him and spoke to him; he delivered soda in many flavors: cherry, grape, celery, orange, orange-lemon, lemon-grape, cream, root beer, strawberry, cherry-grape, black cherry, black raspberry. My father, a soda addict, would boast to friends, “Audrey doesn’t drink any soda,” the way a smoker might be proud of a child who had never succumbed, enjoying a mastery of the flesh by proxy. It irked me that he would boast of something not a matter of earned merit but of taste—I just didn’t like it. But in Brooklyn, whatever virtues, inherent or acquired, the parents did not possess, it was hoped the children would possess or acquire for them.

  The card game men were Mr. Zelevansky, Mr. Tessler, Mr. Ribowitz, Mr. Singer, and Mr. Capaleggio, whom everyone called Cappy. Only I was expected to call them all Mr., and when for the first time—I was almost sixteen—I addressed Mr. Zelevansky, whom I had known all my life, as Lou, I felt as daring as if I had reached over and unzipped his fly. But that day was far off. Meanwhile when the men arrived one by one and handed their hats and coats to my mother, I was supposed to greet each of them, and when I went up to bed a short while later, say good night. My father was not overly demanding about manners but he had his sticking points: he detested any playing with food at the table, could not bear my referring to my mother as “she,” and insisted that I look up at the men’s faces and say hello loud and clear. This last I found extremely difficult when I was seven or eight. They were so big and formidable, and there were so many.

  “Is it too much to ask,” he would grumble to my mother, “to expect her to say hello to people who come to the house?”

  This was invariably said in my presence the following day, and instead of answering his question directly my mother defended me. “Yes,” I wanted her to say, “it is too much to ask,” or even, “No, you have a right to expect that.” Either way, whichever she truly thought. It was worse to be defended. She talked about being true to one’s self but her instinct was to evade.

  Mr. Singer and Mr. Tessler, partners in a furniture business, looked alike, with their jowly cheeks and thick glasses and potbellies, the fourth button of their shirts tugging identically away from the fabric when they leaned back to study their cards. Lanky Mr. Capaleggio, who owned a service station in Queens, wore plaid flannel shirts and had thinning, rust-colored hair and was the only one who smoked a pipe, not cigars. Bald Mr. Ribowitz was tall and skinny with a caved-in chest; I could always remember he had an electrical supplies store, because his head was like a bulb. Mr. Zelevansky and his wife, Belle, were my parents’ closest friends. He was an accountant like my father, with thick lips and huge unruly gray eyebrows, and a small bluish scar on one cheek which I liked to think he had gotten in an excit-ing way, such as a barroom brawl over principles or defending someone from criminal attack, but knowing Brooklyn, I suspected it was probably a household accident.

  I knew the men by their voices as well as their looks, and from upstairs in bed could distinguish the soft whine of Mr. Ribowitz, the gentle, phlegmy voice of Mr. Capaleggio, the gruff, conciliating tones of Mr. Zelevansky. The loudest voice was always my father’s, bullying, prodding, reproaching, mocking, and I was amazed that the others tolerated him, but they did. For all the years of my childhood.

  Pinochle. It didn’t sound like English. It sounded inaccessible and dull, like business or taxes, a man’s game. I learned to play gin rummy and hearts and canasta and Michigan rummy and poker, but never pinochle, with its cigars and soda and melding, whatever that was. Even the deck was peculiar, truncated, all the cards below the nine banished, as though the low numbers—the ages I was—were too negligible to bother with.

  At the end of my skiing fantasies, on those Wednesday nights, I tumbled in and out of troubled sleep with the men’s voices in my ears. Melding, Lend-Lease, the Marshall Plan, and Harry Truman, his marriageable daughter, his piano playing. And those words and the images they evoked, war-torn Europe and its starving children, “The Missouri Waltz,” lonely Margaret Truman doomed to spinsterhood, as well as the men themselves, paunchy and graying, mingled in my dreams with the skiing and the pain that was not really pain and the young doctors, till I would wake in the dark bewildered: Was I skiing or starving in Europe or home in bed? Was it almost time to line up in the school yard or was there still the whole night to pass?

  From time to time there would be a card party. The card players’ wives came along and played mah jongg while the men played pinochle, and I had to say hello to twice as many people, though it was not fully twice as agonizing. The women were easier: they were smaller and occupie
d less space than the men, for one thing, and they occupied their lesser spaces in a less proprietary way, only renting, as it were. They also greeted me in an easier way, as if I were one of them, only smaller still, while the men spoke to me as a member of another species, a house cat, perhaps, with language.

  At some point I became aware of a flaw in the fearful symmetry of the card parties. One of the men—I figured out it was sallow Mr. Singer—did not have a wife attached to him. I asked my mother where she was and she brushed me off with one of her vaguenesses. That there might not be a Mrs. Singer didn’t occur to me, since unmarried men over thirty were a rarity in Brooklyn, though as a matter of fact there was one right across the street who lived all by himself in a narrow attached row house exactly like ours and was friendly enough, but my mother told me to keep away from him, and later on in junior high there was a French teacher who we girls agreed was unmarried because he was too ugly for any woman to sleep with and moreover smelled bad. Apart from those, the category seemed not to exist, except for widowers. Was Mrs. Singer dead? I asked my mother, and she was vague about that too, though, a bit older now, I pressed her, pointing out there could be no vagueness regarding the question of someone’s being dead or alive. She told me to mind my own business and I deduced that if Mrs. Singer were dead it must be of cancer or suicide, the two unmentionable ways to go about dying. I tried to imagine Mr. Singer’s grief and loneliness, to bear it in mind when I greeted him, and get a fragrant whiff of drama and tragedy, but it was difficult to work up much emotion when I wasn’t sure: my efforts might be wasted. Perhaps she was an invalid, vaporous like the heroine of a Victorian novel or the girl to whom I had brought the class assignments. That would be another kind of drama, more subdued and poignant—but I never heard anyone ask how she was. If she was neither sick nor dead, it was quite possible the Singers were divorced, a situation that seemed to exist only outside Brooklyn, and that would bestow on Mr. Singer an aura of exoticism that, with his potbelly and straining shirt and jowly cheeks, I found him hardly qualified to bear. In any case her absence was convenient and even fortuitous, since the maximum number for a comfortable mah jongg game is five.