Leaving Brooklyn (11 page)

“Well, dear,” she said, “that's nice. Are you sure you can afford it?”

My heart sank. Obviously this girl had never been near Brooklyn.

“Yes, I'm quite sure. You know I earn—” I cast around for a plausible sum but I didn't know what working women, usually teachers in my experience, earned. “I earn… enough.”

“Stop, stop,” implored the acting teacher. “You!” He addressed my mother. “What do
you
want?”

Lizzie shrugged. “I just want her to be happy, I guess.”

“That's not enough. You have to want something of your own.

“She has to want me to stay,” I said. “So I have something to fight against.”

“Why should I want you to stay? Maybe I want some privacy, after all this time.”

The scent of Lizzie's world breezed past the horizon of my mind, a world clearly orbs away from my own.

“This isn't working,” said the acting teacher. “There's no conflict. There has to be conflict. You have to want incompatible things, urgently.”

“I want to leave home urgently.”

“Okay. Lizzie, help her out. You want her to stay.”

“I think it might be better if you stayed home for a while, dear,” said Lizzie.

“But why, Mother?”

“Well…” She groped vaguely at the air. “I haven't been feeling well. I need your help in the house.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me be the mother. I can do it.”

So we switched roles. I sat down at an imaginary kitchen table.

“By the way, Mother,” said Lizzie with unnerving calm, “I've been thinking it's time I got a place of my own.”

“A place of your own!” I sprang up, aghast. “What are you talking about? Since when does a young girl move out all by herself ! Don't you have a perfectly good home here?”

“Of course I do. You and Dad have been great to me,” she said genially. “But after all, I am twenty-five and I have a good job. We could all use some privacy at this point. I could have my friends over without disturbing you—”

“Privacy?” I shrieked. “For what, may I ask? Don't you have a lovely room? And friends? Who ever closed the door to your friends? Haven't I made them welcome, more than welcome? Twenty-five years providing a decent home for you and this is what we get!” I darted fitfully around.

“Just a minute, Audrey,” the acting teacher broke in. “That has energy, that's on the right track. Except it may be a bit too much, at this point in the scene, anyway. To get to that pitch of emotion so fast there must be a strong hidden motive. Do you know what it is?”

Once I caught on, I played the scenes as life-and-death games. I was ruthlessly, obscenely tenacious.

“You're forceful, Audrey. But there's a time for understatement,” said the acting teacher. “The head-on approach isn't always the most effective. Try being a little more calculating. Think of your words as part of a process, with a goal.”

The next Monday I dressed in grown-up clothes again, brushed my hair, and put on make-up to go to Park Avenue, where the eye doctor leaned over me, his right leg lightly touching mine. He examined my bad eye in a new way, more inquisitively. Maybe he was trying to discover the exact nature and limits of its vision, and whether it had vision enough to see what he was after.

He must have found something—not the vision he was seeking, I didn't have that—but possibly my rampant longing to peer beneath the surfaces of things. He put his hand on my leg. I didn't move. I only looked at his hand, the fingers spread as if
someone were preparing to trace them on my dress, then up at his face, which showed the strain of mental exertion, a curious diagnosis. He moved his hand up and down my leg as if feeling for something beneath the skin. He was testing, I saw that much, edging towards some crossroads where I might leap up in fear or anger, should I choose that path, or I might let the unknown happen.

As though in a dream, as though it were not a conscious act, I reached out and touched him. I touched him where I knew he would want to be touched. I know that I—she—was not the kind of girl who could do that. In my old nighttime fantasies I had never touched a man that way. I was the one who was touched, gentle, romantic touches awakening me part by part. Even as I recall it, record it, I suspect I really didn't do such an outrageous thing and memory is falsifying, inventing what I wish I could have done or imagining it from what I have since become capable of doing.

Indeed this is the point at which memory may be at its least trustworthy. Things might well have stopped there and taken a different course or diffused into no course at all, into the endlessness of being sequestered in Brooklyn. It would seem much more likely that he didn't put his hand on her leg, that she only wished and feared he would. Or if he did, if I grant that he did, it seems more likely that she didn't reach out and touch him but instead stood up slowly, sliding her leg out from under his hand, which didn't move but allowed her to separate from it, then picked up her school bag and walked to the door with the tentative gliding motion of someone who fears she may be prevented or assaulted. But he wouldn't have assaulted her; probably he wouldn't even have tried to stop her, just watched her go. At home she would have told her parents fretfully that she didn't want the lens after all. It hurt. It violated her values—you can imagine by now the sorts of high-minded arguments she would have used. In the end she would have prevailed, yet felt abashed and
disgusted with herself, knowing that the arguments were irrelevant, that it was only fear that kept her away.

In case that was the way it was, if she was thwarted by her fear, I must let her have it now, do it for her, since it is right that it should have happened. It suits the person I became. So I can only repeat that I did do it, unlikely as it seems. I was taken over by my bad eye, wandering.

There was little of my childhood fantasy in this reality, especially not the doctor, neither dark-skinned nor notably graceful. I could not have said whether he was good-looking or attracted me—he was a man like my father and my father's card-playing friends, the sort of man I didn't bother to look at in those terms, although my mother had pronounced him handsome despite his glasses, and admired his taste in ties.

I touched him and felt what that was like. What I touched changed under my hand, moved of its own accord, and, like the dough my mother rolled out on the kitchen table with her big wooden rolling pin, grew and solidified, which was a little frightening and at the same time made me want to giggle, there was something so absurd about it, as if he had a small doughy animal, a mouse, stretching in his trousers.

And then he did an unexpected thing—though anything he did would have been unexpected. He very gently spread my lids apart and removed the contact lens. He placed it in a saucer and took my hand like someone helping a lady from a carriage. “I think you should stand up,” he said.

After he snapped the lock of the door he began caressing me, very slowly, first with his hands under my clothes and then he took off my clothes. He must have thought I knew all about it, from my touching him and from my knowing look. I did know a number of things, the facts inscribed on my blank mind by teachers, the foolish things in the wine-colored book, as well as some things hidden behind the edges of doors. But this, what he was doing to me, was not one of them. My mother claimed there was a right and wrong way to do everything. I would stay very still
and accept his caresses, not daring any wrong move that could show my ignorance.

From scenes in books and movies, I thought passion always made its entrance in haste and urgency, grasping at clothing and clutching at bare flesh, panting and gasping. But this scene was languid and took time, and my body accepted and absorbed each sensation it offered with a wondrous impassivity. I was seeing such a multitude of things that there was no attention left to feel. I was all eye, the bad eye.

I had never seen a man's body except in pictures, yet that was no great surprise; it seemed something I had known all along, just as I had known how to touch him. What I hadn't had any inkling of was the immeasurable tactile reality of bodies. Suddenly the world was matter, not words. People were their bodies, not minds incidentally occupying flesh. The only other time I had been so aware of humanity as pliable flesh was the First-Aid course in junior high, those luscious manic weeks we bandaged each other, rollicking through the spring with graying rags and gauze, giddy with the feel of flesh.

But that was long ago and fleeting. I still thought knowledge could be licked off a page; daily life was a chore to be endured while the spirit waited, at one remove, to return to vivid, nourishing reality—in bed with a book on my lap. What I was doing now, though, what was being done to me, was as vivid and insistent as any book and gave the same relief of arrival at a resting place, a bedrock reality. It was even like a book, with new passages rolling through me rhythmically, each bearing its multitude of sensations, while I followed along—captive and heroine, feast and feaster—through infinitely opening spaces and elongated time. Every instant held more than seemed possible, unveiled more of the life hidden behind edges, the most startling revelation being that whole dramas could be performed in which the mind had barely any part. And as if I were turning pages with the rapt expectation of something glorious and astonishing waiting at the end, this too tantalized; I was consumed with
curiosity yet wanted it to last and not reveal its ending too soon, just as in bed I needed all my powers of will not to peek ahead and spoil the last page by hastening it. Though I did not know pleasure in the common sense, that first time. That was beside the point, it could wait till later, when I was not so dazzled. I knew only the solitary pleasure of seeing beneath the surface.

The doctor, with his hairless chest, his muscled legs, his large yet fragile-looking hands, his softened and—with the glasses removed—profoundly puzzled eyes, stood up when he was done, walked nakedly to a cabinet, took out a bottle, and poured himself a drink. He offered me some but I refused. That is, I shook my head—I had hardly said a word throughout. “Do you like this?” he had whispered from time to time. “Do you like this?” And I had murmured some wordless sound. This too was altogether new—a situation where words served no purpose. Even the doctor had not used double-edged words to persuade me it was for my own good. It was for his good—I saw that with both eyes.

With my silence and acquiescence, my knowing look, he had assumed I had done this before. He discovered I had not. No wonder he was puzzled. How could he know why I went along so readily, or that my greed in its fashion was as perverse and rapacious as his own?

Staring down at me in puzzlement, he said, “Wait just a minute,” which was needless—I was in no hurry to go anywhere, ready for whatever else the scene might bring. He gathered up his clothes and disappeared behind a door. I heard water running, and when he returned he was dressed, with his glasses on and an air of presiding over his office once again. I was embarrassed. I saw that I should have used the interval to get dressed too, resuming my role as patient. Very well, if that was how things were done… I gathered up my clothes and went into the tiny bathroom. When I came out he was sitting on the couch, bent over, head in his hands.

His shoulders jerked up and he rose to his feet. “Are you all right?”

I nodded, not sure what he meant, what being not all right would be, at this point.

“I mean, you understand, I never… I wouldn't have unless you seemed—I didn't mean to… I'm going through a very bad time—”

I wanted to stop hearing those words, which cast him in a ridiculous light. I cleared my throat, I hadn't spoken in so long. “It's all right, I'm not going to say anything.”

That must have been a good answer, for his face eased and he gave a rueful smile, more befitting his role as seducer. It was the first time I had seen him smile, standing up. Standing up, he had a withdrawn manner, nothing resembling a bedside manner. His teeth were quite nice and white. I was glad of that. I hated yellow teeth and would not have liked to think my tongue had touched yellow teeth.

“These things happen sometimes,” he said. It was what my mother had said when I first asked her about my eye, long ago. He was fussing with some metal instruments on his table, the way she fussed with forks and knives, when I asked her to explain, not only about my eye but about many other things in the world.

“Mm-hm,” I said, as if I knew. It was just what I didn't know, how things happen, especially this thing, which apparently happened so easily, all over the place for all I knew, while I had imagined it as momentous—each time like crossing a border with armed guards and showing a passport—and arduous, something the body needed to anticipate and be morally armed to undergo, like major surgery.

In Brooklyn mythology it could not happen outside of marriage, at least not to girls of fifteen who read books, though maybe to girls visibly out of bounds, the exceptionally flamboyant (dark-eyed Carlotta Kaplowitz, ex-polio victim, had become one of those) or the exceptionally ignorant (Arlene, in my History class, “didn't know you could say no”). According to Mrs. Carlino in her Pre-Marriage course, such creatures had no “self-respect” and their fall occurred in unspeakable circumstances. On her
long-awaited Dating and Courtship sheet, which I had in my book bag at this very moment, was the definitive meaning of Petting: “The prolonged caressing of parts of the body that do not usually come in contact before marriage.”

And in romantic movies, where after the kissing and panting the scene discreetly changed, I had assumed the heroine firmly drew the line, as we were expected to do on dates. How utterly mistaken.