Leaving Brooklyn (15 page)

“Don't you talk to me that way! And don't raise your voice to me either!”

I ignored that. “You didn't even notice I wasn't wearing it. That's how much difference it makes. You never looked at me long enough or hard enough to notice. You don't understand anything about me. You don't have the slightest idea.” I burst into tears and rushed to fall on her neck as I had longed to do two weeks ago.

“My poor baby.” She stroked my hair as I sobbed. “What could be happening that's so terrible? Of course I notice you. Don't you think I know you? I know all about you. I know you're different. Now don't cry. Don't feel that way. Tell me what it is. Is it something at school? Those nasty girls again?”

I shook my head. My composure was returning. Whenever I heard that word, “different,” every organ got taut.

“Then what? You can tell me.”

“It's too awful.”

“You'd better tell me, Audrey, if it's that awful.”

I had gone much too far. Luckily I had something suitable to tell her. I offered, haltingly, the episode of the man on the subway. He too had his uses.

“Ugh!” She thrust me from her to look at my face. “It's disgusting. It never fails. You can't go through life without something like that… Look, sweetheart, there's not a woman I know who hasn't had that happen at least once. It's part of being a woman. Men can be animals, it's the honest truth. You have to fight back. Let them know you won't stand for it.”

“It was too crowded.” I wept again. The telling of it, and her response, revived the horror. That it happened to everyone made it worse, not better.

“It's all right, Audrey. I don't mean you did anything wrong. You're young, how could you know? Listen to me. Right now it seems very important. But you'll see, time will pass, it'll fade away. It doesn't mean anything in the long run. I thought maybe something
really
awful had happened.” Relief triumphant. She tried a little chuckle to lighten things, but this was premature, for just as she was saying it meant nothing, I was feeling his heavy fingers on my thighs. I squirmed in her tight embrace.

“And you' ve been walking around for two weeks with this weighing on you. Why didn't you tell me before?”

I extricated myself and blew my nose.

“I know. You were embarrassed. But you can tell me these things, Audrey. I 'm a married woman. I know what men are like. Don't worry that I 'll be shocked.” She had my anguish, which always threatened to become her own, under control now. Like a potter, she could twist the raw, earthy material around in her hands, taming it until it grew manageable. Soon she would have this so small and shapely that she could tell her mah jongg friends about it. Together they would nod and frown, and maybe recall similar incidents long ago in their own lives, and laugh a bit. They could domesticate anything.

Finally I started to drink my milk.

“I better call the eye doctor and explain to him,” she said.

“No!”

“Don't worry. I won't tell him that. I'll just say you couldn't make it, you didn't feel well.”

“No, don't. Please.”

“Don't be silly, Audrey. I promised to call back and let him know. I won't say anything to embarrass you.” She went to the phone at my father 's desk in the dining room. Through the door - way I could see her looking up the number. “You young girls are so sensitive,” she said as she began dialing.

I took a sip of milk but had to spit it back. There was something large, like an egg, in my throat, and when I tried to swallow, the egg corked my body. My mother and the eye doctor were actually going to speak to each other. This was a cosmic impossibility, like day and night occurring at once, or having each foot planted on a different continent.

I heard the ordinary words, real and unmistakable. “Audrey didn't feel well at school… ”

Hearing them on the other end, equally real, filling in her pauses, was that person who touched me in secret places, who said he loved me and thought about me constantly, and whom I had expected to vanish conveniently when I had had enough of him, as characters vanish when you slam a book shut. He would have vanished, too. It was my mother who insisted on resurrecting him.

“She stayed on at the nurse's office until they felt she might be sent home.”

When she spoke to outsiders my mother employed a more elegant and complex syntax than she did for family members, like dressing up to go out. She had a number of finely tuned variations: her unrefined, serviceable idiom for household use, something more sharply honed for her friends, and more self-conscious for the teachers at school. For the world outside Brooklyn there was this stylish, subjunctive-laden mode. Her versatility carried over into Yiddish too, which she threw out in short pithy remarks to my father around the house, but spoke to my grandmother in fluent and elaborate phrases. The strange sounds used to catapult them both over a border, out of my reach, until I realized that without even trying to understand, despairing
of understanding, I knew what they were saying. How this happened was incomprehensible. In English, which I floated in as I floated in water, my element, I knew the nature and function and potentialities of every word and every inflection. I had no idea, in my mother 's and grandmother 's Yiddish, what the words were one by one, or even when one word ended and another began—it was a steady flow of syllables like the flow of the chicken flicker's vowels, though far more rhythmic and civilized—yet at the end of the inscrutable journey of sentence or paragraph, miraculously I had arrived, which made it less a language than a form of subliminal transport, a direct delivery of thought and feeling.

This virtuosity of hers boasted of an enviable comfort in the ordinary world, an instinctive sense of degrees of propriety, a subtle economy of means. While I had only one language—my brand of stubborn integrity—and it had awkwardly to fit all circumstances.

No wonder I had to master all phases of language later on, and wanted to speak other people's words on a stage, to become promiscuous in every idiom and escape every sort of purity. And then others' words proved not enough and I had to learn to speak the languages of both my eyes and invent other I's to speak through, even this very I speaking now—to be certain no form of vision was denied me, and by an alchemy of the imagination, to turn vision into speech.

Hugging the phone to her ear, my mother paused. I imagined the doctor's voice: aloof, concerned.

“No, nothing serious,” she replied, and in a lower tone—though it was hardly possible for me not to hear, I was eight feet away—went on, “I think this experience with the lens has been something of a strain on her. I didn't realize to what extent… Yes, certainly, I'll tell her that. And I'm awfully sorry to have inconvenienced you.”

She was apologizing! I could barely breathe. The egg in my
throat grew steadily larger, blocking off my body from my brain. I cast about for what to say when she hung up.

“Yes, she's right here. Audrey dear, the doctor would like to speak to you.”

“What for?”

She covered the mouthpiece with her palm. “How should I know? Just come here and talk to him. And behave yourself.”

I took the phone. She stood at my side.

“Audrey? I was frantic when you didn't come. Are you all right?”

I moved a few steps off. “Yes, fine. Thank you,” I added, so that my mother would see I knew how to behave.

“You know what I mean. Nothing 's happened? Nothing's wrong?”

What did he think could have happened? Here I was. He sounded as silly as my parents when I stayed out late. “No, nothing.”

“You haven't said anything to your mother, have you?”

“No.”

“Audrey, don't leave like this. Please. I have to see you. We must talk.”

My mother was watching me in her telepathic mode, trying to instill the right answers, though this time she didn't even know the questions. I mimed a look of impatience, rolling my eyes at his tedious doctorly concern. An unnecessary precaution. It was beyond her imagining—a doctor, a big man. Even I could not have imagined this—his pleas in my ear as my mother gazed on stolidly, praying I would not disgrace her further by crude manners.

“I'm not sure.”

“Yes. Next week. You'll feel better once we talk. I know you're upset and confused. At least let me speak to you.”

“I'll have to see.” I hung up.

“Well,” said my mother. “If you had told me right away what happened on the subway we could have avoided all that.

I would have gone with you if you wanted. Anyhow, I told him you'd be there next week. He'll make time for you. Look, I know it's not easy getting used to the lens, but once you are, you'll see it's for the best, in the long run.”

I had always been puzzled by those words, “in the long run,” rhythmic twin to “for your own good.” So much of my time was invested in this famous long run—when would it ever begin? I might have amassed so many burdens by then that I wouldn't be able to run at all. Weren't there any short runs? Or were they sucked in and annihilated by the longer run, like stellar matter in a black hole? Definitely what I did in the doctor's office was, for the short run—done for its own sake, over when it was over. Was it for that unabashed self-containment that the short run was slightly disreputable? And yet while it lasted, time leaped alive out of its turgid preparatory trudge. The short run left memories, too. Were they for the long run, making the short run a kind of energetic servant, proxy for an ancient master too gouty and pompous to run on his own? If the long run was made of memories, then I had better do lots of things in the short run, storing them up.

(This, now, is the long run. I found it. I'm in it. I run with my story, stored up so long, scattering it before me, leaving it behind.)

“You told him I'd be back next week?”

“Yes. What's wrong with that?”

“But I've just been telling you—”

“Oh, you were upset. You didn't really mean all that.”

“Of course I meant it.” Tears of frustration were the hottest kind. “You don't believe what I say. You don't hear me.”

“I do hear you. But I know better than you do what you mean.”

If I had had a knife in my hand at that moment I would have plunged it in her heart. Or mine.

“You don't know everything, though,” I said.

“Why? What's more to know?” She was slipping her apron over her head; in a moment she would begin cooking dinner
in the clean broiler. Her bustling movements meant her patience with me was used up.

“I can't go back because I don't have the lens.”

She stopped tying the apron and the strings fell gracelessly to her sides.

“What do you mean, you don't have the lens? Where is it?”

“I lost it.”

“Lost it! When? Where? Why didn't you tell me?”

“Stop yelling. It's only a piece of plastic. It's not made of gold, you know.”

“It may not be made of gold but it cost over a hundred dollars. Did you know that? Do you think we can throw hundred-dollar bills around? And all those visits? Did you think of that?”

I wished she would say exactly how much they paid for each visit to the eye doctor, but she just stood waiting, the air around her white-hot. I had never seen her this angry. I had flushed away all her hopes for my future life. I should have been one of the miscarriages.

“I've had about all I can take for one afternoon.” She came very close to me, trembling. “Now tell me where you lost it so I can look for it.”

“You can't look for it. It's gone. It's down the toilet.”

She stared as if I had answered in another language. Very slowly, her face turned red, as something in her gathered and solidified. She was slow to anger, my mother was, even tolerant, but her vision had clear borders that couldn't be crossed. Once you crossed, there was no tolerance.

“You did it. You did it on purpose.” As she stared, I had a powerful urge to laugh, as children laugh when they are so frightened and helpless there is nothing left to do—the broad absurdity of human life erupts in bubbles of hysteria. I bit my lips.

“How could you have done such a thing? I don't know what kind of child I raised. Tell me the truth. Why? Tell me, so I can know what kind of a person you are.”

The truth again. She was obsessed with truth, as if by
possessing it she would possess me. But if she knew the truth she wouldn't want me. I stared back and kept silent.

Her right hand shot out and slapped me hard on the cheek. The whole side of my face stung. My left hand ached to fly up and soothe the sting, but I willed it motionless. Only my head moved ever so slightly, as if to offer the other cheek.

I was almost sixteen and she had hit me. I would never speak to her again. The sting shot through me, a rash of shame and desire. I wanted the eye doctor. Instead of my mother standing before me, I wanted it to be him. I wanted to pull him in and feel him inside me. I was wet and furious. I closed my good eye and tried to conjure my mother into him, rearranging the cells, all the same carbon and nitrogen. I would have him right in the kitchen, right in her place. I wanted to spring on her, claw her and clasp her. But I didn't move.

“Now I'll have to call him again and tell him,” she said. “After all that, to cancel. How do you suppose I'll feel doing that?”

“Forget it. I'll call.” My final words to her, ever, I vowed.

“You'd better.” She tied the apron strings and went to the sink to wash her hands. “And don't think you're getting another one,” she flung over her shoulder. “You had your chance.”