Leaving Brooklyn Read online

  On card party nights, in addition to the table in the living room for the men, another was set up in the adjacent dining room for the women. The rooms were connected by a wide arch, and now and then there was banter between the two groups, or perhaps the woman who was East or a man sitting out a hand would wander into the other sector—my father, particularly, liked to graze among the women—but for the most part the evening was spent in separate sectors, like Berlin, which had just been divided up by the Allies, as a punishment, apparently, and to keep Germany impotent and out of harm’s way.

  In bed I was the unseen audience for a symphony of social noises: the men’s table sent up cannonades of belches from the soda consumed, and a crackling of nuts and chips, and the percussive slapping of cards and shuffling of the deck and the voices. Below those sounds was the muted, reedy tinkle of the ivory mah jongg tiles being tossed one by one to the center of the table, then periodically the livelier ensemble of many tiles sliding off the four racks to the center of the table, to be scrambled for the next hand and turned over face down; that was like soft hail on glass, or piano keys struck at random with the soft pedal down. I knew the sound of the tiles well because I helped my mother set up the game before the guests arrived—I would build little walls around each rack, then crash them down to hear the gentle avalanche—and she let me separate the money by color, too, tiny hexagonal plastic wafers in blue and red and green with holes in the middle like doughnuts, and stack them on the little brass poles, attached to each rack, that had joints and could bend in four directions.

  The women drank coffee rather than soda—I heard the amiable clink of their cups and saucers—and ate chocolate kisses and sugared fruit candies, orange and cherry and lime, in half-moon shapes with a white line around the arc, and their voices were higher and constant and more convivial: they didn’t argue, or if they did it was in small, oblique grace notes, rarely confrontations.

  When everyone had played enough, the bridge tables were folded, the extra leaves were put in the dining room table, and the men and women sat down together, husbands next to wives, as my mother brought out coffee and platters of smoked fish and salads. I would join them at the table and listen, friendly, detached, and curious, like an anthropologist, though anthropologists had not been heard of in Brooklyn. And while I enjoyed the food and the talk I secretly vowed that the life I would lead as an adult—as my unknown, not yet existing self; me, that is—far from Brooklyn, in Paris or Cairo, would not include anything resembling card parties. We—my unknown future friends, perhaps at this very moment mired in other Brooklyns but destined to be dark, gaunt, and intense—would not be married. We would sit on the floors of garrets drinking wine, smoking Turkish cigarettes, and talking of art and life. We would be living our lives in the fullest Jamesian sense.

  Still later, not in Cairo, merely in Manhattan, after I learned to check on the times of movies so I could begin at the beginning, I also learned it was considered gauche for couples, married or not, to sit together at parties. People should get to know other people. But I knew that wasn’t the real reason. A principle was operating in both cases: in the great world, a naughty, mercurial principle of divisiveness, entropy, and unsettling, and in Brooklyn the principle of cohesiveness, a valiant fight against the forces of entropy and division. And these contrary principles mirrored my eyes, the good eye with its seamless smooth coherent world, everything fitting together in just and sensible, enduring relations, and the bad eye breaking things into parts, blurring proportions and distances and harmonies.

  The only result of the consultations with the big men was that for a week or two my mother would repeat the exercises in the kitchen as she rolled out dough with her huge wooden rolling pin. I covered my left eye, and she held up fingers dusty with flour.

  “Two?”

  “Try again.”

  “Maybe one? Three?”

  “You did better in the doctor’s office, I think. Are you sure you aren’t teasing me?”

  “Five?” I was bored. I molded shapes out of leftover dough.

  “Come on, Audrey, you can do better.”

  “Two.”

  “To thine own self be true,” said my mother.

  After these spasms of activism the eye was not mentioned.

  Except for the notes.

  Twice a year, at the same moment all over Brooklyn, teachers interrupted their lessons—the division of decimals, the Louisiana Purchase, the relationship between the highwayman and the landlord’s black-eyed daughter—to hang eye charts over the map of the world, where our country was always at the center. Twice a year my mother sent a note to have me excused from the test.

  I carried it to school like a boulder in my pocket and sat rigid, my cheeks ablaze, until my name was called. I felt the contours of my body cut through the heartless air as I navigated the aisle to the teacher’s desk to hand her the note, and I felt the dozens of eyes on my back. Finally I got the idea of giving it to her first thing in the morning. She would read it, offer a doubting glance, and pass over me later when my turn came. Notes from home about health matters were incontrovertible, coming from a higher authority. The hierarchies of authority were complex but everyone grasped them, just as we knew Rock, Paper, Scissors: scissors cuts paper, rock breaks scissors. If we children were paper and the teachers were scissors, home was rock. (Later, only later, paper would cover rock.)

  My classmates might look around in surprise—had the teacher made a mistake?—unless they knew me from previous eye tests; one or two bold ones might even question me in a whisper. I whispered back that I didn’t have to take the test, I went to a private doctor, echoing my mother’s words in the note though they made no sense to me. Who was the private doctor? There were only the anonymous big men we visited, once each. It is perilous to speak someone else’s words, above all when you don’t understand them. The self vanishes for the moment, leaving you—whatever remains of you, a dumb animal sentience—unbearably weightless and adrift, yearning for your self to return, as a ball swept out by the tide sometimes returns on the next wave.

  Twice a year I dreaded the eye test and longed to take it. My eye might well have been a social asset, a conversation piece, like an exotic disease that luckily didn’t hurt. But my mother, who had no idea of the classroom’s social assets, or of what were my pains and pleasures, wished only to shield me from humiliation. And I was her accomplice: I told her when the tests were scheduled. To do otherwise would have violated her vision of the world, and it was undeniably and irrevocably her vision, her world, that my good eye saw. In it she spoke with the voice of an oracle and knew which things were proper to enjoy and which caused pain. There were so many times when I longed to make her see what I saw; then we could inhabit the same world, our visions shared and mutually permeating like the atoms of the air. Later on there was one special time… But always, the world my bad eye saw was mine alone, invisible to everyone else in Brooklyn, especially to my mother. And I couldn’t, back then, place my faith in it. I might choose what to read—the Harvard Classics instead of Reader’s Digest—and what to dream—the handsome doctor who awakened my battered body. But to trust that solitary vision, to act on my wayward feelings and cherish a different yardstick of pleasure and pain, was hardly possible in that smooth, cohesive place. It would have taken a leap as daring as the leaps of those poor children we read of in the papers every so often, who, after watching Superman, trusted the simmering in their bones, spread their wings, and gave themselves to air.

  THE SUMMER I was fifteen years old—just before my senior year in high school, for I had skipped grades—a new thing under the sun appeared in Brooklyn. Contact lenses. My parents made inquiries. Apparently a lens could be designed that would fit my eye, magnify the iris to the same size as its partner, and discipline its wanderings. The lens would not correct my vision—not possible, the big men said—nor grant me the fabled perception of depth: its use would be purely cosmetic.

  Somehow it was decided tha
t I would get this contact lens. I don’t recall any solemn sitting down to talk it over. Things would hang mutely in the air and then happen after a while, in Brooklyn; action would be taken, or more often not taken, like Frost’s road in the poem I was required to memorize every year, as if no English teacher ever revealed her syllabus to her successor, or else there was a shortage of poems.

  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

  And sorry I could not travel both

  And be one traveler, long I stood

  And looked down one as far as I could

  To where it bent in the undergrowth; …

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  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.