I stood on the sidewalk as the movers hauled my family’s belongings up the cement stairs fronting our new house. They were preparing to move the piano, an old black baby grand, and this promised to be dramatic. The legs had to be unscrewed and the body brought through the front casement windows of the living room, which gave onto the porch. An audience of curious neighbors had gathered to watch. In the midst of this scene I was surrounded by a clump of girls just my size, all telling me their names at once. It was my future, come to greet me. I was three and a half years old.
By pure coincidence, six girls of about the same age lived on the same block, scattered a few houses apart, on either side of the street. To this day, I can recite each girl’s address, the names of their parents, brothers, sisters, and, in a few cases, live-in grandparents, as well as the fathers’ occupations: one in the diamond business on Canal Street, one shoe salesman, one podiatrist, one buildings department inspector . . . Two of the mothers were schoolteachers, and the others were housewives.
Over time we girls evolved into a family of sorts, parallel to our individual families, possibly more tightly knit than our own families. Or a pack of street children, with tacit codes and survival mechanisms, but privileged street children. After hours spent sitting on stoops, leaning on car fenders, playing ball in between the occasional traffic, we returned at night to dinners and parents and warm beds—a double life.
Like family members or packs of street kids, we might not have chosen one another if not for proximity. Circumstance, habit and the simple pack instinct kept us entwined, accumulating our group history. Together we learned what intimacy was. We invented intimacy, both its benefits and its horrors.
And in the course of our inventing that intimacy, my natural evolution took an arbitrary turn, a detour. I’ve wondered ever since who I would have been without the two critical events in my eighth year that caused the detour. I might even say, who I was supposed to have been. During that year something wrenched inside, a wrench of the spirit like a sudden wrench of the back that leaves you stiff and barely able to move, and even after the spasm has passed, you never again move with quite the same nonchalance, taking ease of movement for granted.
The block was part of a new Brooklyn development begun in wartime: modest two-story attached row houses called Trump Homes, built by the father of the present tycoon, a man whose ambitions or at least whose practical achievements were considerably more humble than those of his son. Before that new house, my family had lived in a two-family house about a mile away, and across the street lived my paternal grandparents in a ground-floor apartment whose tiny, shadowy rooms held a tangy smell of rotting apples, a smell I always connected afterwards with old people.
My grandparents were small and stooped and wrinkled, like shriveled apples themselves, and spoke no English. They shuffled around the apartment in their ancient cardigans drinking tea out of glasses and seemed quiet and harmless, though my mother said that in their prime they had both been forceful characters and strict disciplinarians. This must have been the source of my father’s periodic shouts of “Discipline, discipline,” when his children irritated him—impotent outbursts, uttered for form’s sake only. Although he was a habitual shouter, rage being his first resort in moments of frustration, which were frequent, he was not a strict disciplinarian. Real discipline took more time and effort, more courage, than he had the will to give, so he left that heavy lifting to my mother.
Everyone in the family seemed to accept my father’s sudden and frightening eruptions as unfortunate but incorrigible, like a limp or a stammer or a physical handicap. His tantrums left me sick with disgust, but since I couldn’t see any other tangible repercussions, I must have assumed there were none. I must have thought one could behave that way with no consequences. Somehow I didn’t count my disgust as a repercussion, maybe because it couldn’t be seen. It festered, though, and I came to accept its festering as I would have accepted any accommodation I might have made, had my father indeed been physically disabled.
Of course there were tangible repercussions, but I didn’t recognize them as such. Certain friends of my parents would disappear for months or years at a time: I suppose my father’s insults at the weekly pinochle games—Moron, he would shout, or, Idiot—at some point went beyond the tolerable. After a while these friends would reappear; maybe he apologized, or my mother interceded, or they forgave him, and the whole cycle—Moron, Idiot—would start all over again.
I too had a violent temper and a very short fuse. Nature and nurture contributed. Aside from whatever incipient anger resided in the DNA, I was schooled by my father. I never used the words moron or idiot, as he did, but with my friends—the girls—I would occasionally erupt in rages and storm out of rooms. Resolving a difference reasonably was not something I had ever witnessed or imagined as a possibility. I was famous for storming out of rooms. Then I would quickly forget all about my outbursts and departures and was surprised if anyone else remembered them. My mother warned me that if I didn’t control my temper, no one would want to play with me. It was, in its bluntness, an appalling thing to say to a child—hardly the sort of thing today’s enlightened parents would say—but time would prove her right.
But back to the girls. Shamelessly, heedless of privacy or discretion, we told each other what went on in our houses, all of which I recall in precise detail. I knew the textures of the lives in each house, the unique, intimate tone of each family: the kinds of arguments they had, the nature of the parents’ dissatisfactions with each other and with their children, the smell that met you in each doorway, the foods they ate, the sleeping arrangements. Our front doors were rarely locked. We didn’t knock, just walked in and announced ourselves. A meal might be in progress. Did you eat yet? our friend would say. If not, we’d be given a plate. Or we might say, I ate already, but can I watch you? Watching each other eat was a chance to glean more intimate information, to be sifted later and added to the database.
I knew the life of that block so well that everywhere I’ve lived since then is measured against it and what it signified, measured mostly in terms of how far behind I’ve left it—a distance that can vary from day to day, not in miles but in consciousness. It’s not that I think of the block with nostalgia—hardly. Rather, it is memory’s default setting, permanently fixed.
I knew what phrases Lois’s mother, Myrna, used when she cursed at her antic teenaged son, a Lenny Bruce precursor whom Myrna, to our delight, would sometimes chase up the stairs armed with a wooden hanger. (Among ourselves we called all the parents by their first names, which we would never have dared to do in public—Mr. and Mrs. were the custom.) Not every house was so entertaining. Brenda’s was more formal—we weren’t allowed to sprawl on the puffy living-room furniture. Annette’s I tended to avoid, because one of her older brothers was sullen and menacing, and the other intimidatingly handsome. Diane’s house was a favorite. Her frivolous mother would join us in the living room, contributing to our gossip, advising us to put on lipstick whenever we went out: you never know who you might run into, Prince Charming might be walking down the street. Though we didn’t have a term for it, we all knew there was something wrong with Cynthia’s mother, who would preen in front of the mirror that covered one entire wall of their living room, smiling and chatting with her reflection. One day she disappeared and months later returned chastened, back in the kitchen and helping in her husband’s shoe store a few blocks away.
Although they were not all happy families (and they were unhappy in different ways) they were what used to be called “intact,” except for one, the family of my closest friend, Suzanne. Her family appeared intact, but I later learned from my mother, when she judged that I was old enough to know, that Suzanne’s father, a podiatrist, lived part of the time in his secretary’s apartment three blocks away, which also housed his office. He turned up at home often enough to create the semblance of an intact family, and meanwhile enjoyed this Captain’s Paradise arrangement bounded by a few Brooklyn blocks. Several times Suzanne took me on visits to her father’s office, and the secretary made us tuna fish sandwiches while he scraped corns in the next room.
Most of the girls had an older brother. Annette even had two, the sullen one and the handsome one. I envied them their brothers; I believed that they provided insight into the world of boys, of which I knew nothing. I longed for a brother. Of course an older one was no longer possible, but still I would watch for the first star that came out at night, and make my wish for a brother of any kind. What I had was a sister who was eleven years older—she seemed closer to my mother’s generation, and in fact she and my mother were very chummy. Bright children skipped through the grades in those postwar years, so my sister began attending Brooklyn College when she was fifteen. She had to memorize poetry for her English classes and she would have me hold the book and check on her as she recited the poetry, gliding around her bedroom brushing her long chestnut hair in preparation for a date with some soldier studying under the G.I. Bill. I enjoyed all this—her glamor and her hair and the poems I memorized along with her—but it was no substitute for the longed-for brother.
The two critical events occurred when I was seven. First, after years of my wishing on stars and chicken wishbones, my mother became pregnant. Right before I was told about the impending baby, I had read an article in The Reader’s Digest that made a great impression on me. The article said that every third child born in the world was Chinese. I told my parents that since the baby would be the third child in our family, it would be Chinese. This amused everyone no end, but I didn’t understand why. My grasp of the meaning of statistics is still rather undeveloped.
My mother’s pregnancy surprised everyone, not only my parents themselves but all the aunts and uncles—eight pairs of aunts and uncles on either side of the family, each pair with their several children. Later I understood that it was an unplanned pregnancy, what my mother called a change-of-life baby. She was forty-three, and since she’d had several miscarriages in the years between my sister and me, she had to stay off her feet, the doctor told her, if she wanted to keep this baby. The doctor was her sister’s husband, a squat, Humpty-Dumptyish man with a low, gravelly voice and a slight foreign accent, bald-headed, as slow-moving as a tortoise. We called him The Doctor, even though he was an uncle and the other uncles had names.
The Doctor, whom we consulted about all our medical matters, always assured us that everything would be fine, but in this matter of my mother’s risky pregnancy he was firm about her staying in bed. So for months my mother lay in the big double bed in the second-floor bedroom with the casement windows—directly above the living-room windows through which the piano had entered—and sometimes she would send me downstairs on errands or to fetch her food. I don’t remember who did the cooking during this period of enforced repose. Perhaps my sister. It was before the age of takeout.
The second event was the Monopoly craze, which developed while my mother was lying in bed. My girlfriends and I were addicted, enthralled; we couldn’t stop. We played rabidly. We knew the prices of every property, the cost of every house and hotel that could be erected on that property. The games, intricate, baroque, went on for hours, sometimes days: if we were summoned for meals or bed, we left the board with its tokens, cards and money spread out, not to be touched. The games continued in our Technicolor dreams: green houses and red hotels, yellow Community Chest and orange Chance cards, and the dark dread of landing in jail.
Like any addiction, Monopoly brought out the worst aspects of our characters: the greedy became disgracefully so, the timid shrank, and those with a passion for justice or a prosecutorial bent, such as myself, policed everyone’s behavior. I watched each roll of the dice, each transaction at the bank. I never cheated, but I kept a keen eye out for cheating in others, maybe because in my heart of hearts, I longed to get something for nothing but didn’t have the nerve.
The Monopoly thefts were petty: an extra fifty- or hundred-dollar bill snitched from the bank, an extra house finding its way onto someone’s property. But when I noticed, one Sunday afternoon, that my B&O Railroad had migrated to Brenda’s array of property cards, I had had enough. I called her a thief and grabbed the card back. Brenda, my next-door neighbor, was a genial, not very bright and occasionally sneaky girl. She protested, I persisted and finally I stood up and kicked at the board until everyone’s cards, houses, hotels and tokens were jumbled in a heap. I shoved the whole mess in Brenda’s direction and stormed out.
Anger—why it erupts so fiercely, what to do with it—has always been an enigma to me. For my father, it was the immediate, unthinking response to the world’s not behaving as he wished it to do, or to anything or anyone who crossed his will. But how did he get the notion that the world and the people in it would or should act in accordance with his wishes? As a Jew growing up in Russia in the early years of the century and as a twelve-year-old immigrant, he surely would have had enough experience of frustration to know what to expect of the world and maybe even what tactics might serve best in response. But character is never so rational. Maybe his outbursts were a function of temperament; that is, he was born angry, wired to lash out the instant he was displeased. Whatever the source, his pattern could be learned or inherited. I know: I was his pupil as well as his heir. And, dreadful as it feels to be in the grip of anger, I also know, as he must have known, the raw pleasure of it, the jolt of release, of freeing a vast and amorphous, pressurized hostility. Anger at the world’s being the way it is.
The day after the Monopoly debacle, I saw the girls sitting on Lois’s stoop across the street and went to join them as usual. When I said hello, Brenda and Suzanne, who’d been Brenda’s partner in the Monopoly game, ignored me. The others greeted me, but in a muted, clumsy way. At first I was puzzled, but very soon I realized that Brenda and Suzanne were acting as if I didn’t exist. When I understood this, something massive and ungraspable washed over me, like a cloud or a fog. What they call, in a snowstorm, a whiteout. I felt I had indeed turned invisible because they didn’t acknowledge me. I was whited out. At the same time my whole body turned hot, blazing hot, as if I had become a flame.
The betrayal—I felt it as a betrayal though I didn’t yet know the word—cut even more keenly because Brenda and Suzanne were the two girls closest to me. Brenda’s bedroom and mine were adjacent, separated only by a wall. Our windows, looking out over the back yards, were some dozen feet apart; with our parents’ help we’d rigged up a contraption involving a rope suspended between the two windows and a basket we guided across it, so that at bedtime we could pass things back and forth—cookies, trinkets, God knows what. As for Suzanne, far more than proximity, an affinity of the spirit drew us together. She was quick and clever and had a cynical streak that infiltrated me and which in later years I worked very hard to dig out, like an irritating splinter. But at the time I found her irreverence—towards school, rules, earnestness of any kind—immensely seductive. Maybe her cynicism came from a subliminal understanding of her father’s double life, making her distrust all appearances, but this is only conjecture. Maybe skepticism and irony are bred in the bone, just as my father’s anger may have been.
I didn’t know what to do about the white fog and my body on fire, so I slunk away and home. Upstairs, my mother lay in bed guarding her embryo. I didn’t tell her what had happened. It didn’t occur to me to tell her—I was too stunned. My presence, my visibility, my displacement of space, had always been so solid that the notion that I could go unacknowledged was unthinkable. It altered a basic law of nature, like gravity or breathing. I wouldn’t have known how to explain it. Besides, lying in bed had made my mother languid; she didn’t appear energetic enough to take in the vastness of my humiliation, even had I found words.
For six months I remained invisible, in the white fog. I would leave my house cautiously, looking for the girls as always, but checking to see if Brenda and Suzanne were among them. A tacit routine developed. If those two were in the group, I was not to approach. If they weren’t, I could join the others, who would treat me as they had before. But if Brenda or Suzanne came by, I had to slink away, because I became erased. There would have been no point in staying, since I was effectively no longer there. I became accustomed—as one becomes accustomed to a chronic pain—to being visible then suddenly turned invisible by their presence, vanishing when it was decreed that I must, like a ghost with firm and precise orders from the beyond. As far as the Monopoly games, I didn’t dare show my face at them.
Reliving the story now, what strikes me with force is not so much my friends’ cruelty as my own silence. I lived in this limbo of nonentity for six months and never told anyone about it. I certainly wouldn’t suffer anything so patiently or diffidently today. Odd, also, that my mother didn’t notice anything; maybe lying in bed so much had glazed her vision, or she was too focused on the baby gestating inside, who seemed to be taking an awfully long time to make his appearance.
But I’m judging by the habits of today, when parents oversee their children’s moods, tracking every nuance and dragging it into the light for scrutiny and dissection. In that distant, blinkered time and place, parents were content—they considered their responsibilities discharged—when their children were healthy and went to school and stayed out of trouble. To acknowledge painful emotion was avoided. The war was over. Everything was fine. Only happy feelings were welcomed. In those recumbent months, my mother fended off distress as if it could infect her. Even when she was perfectly well, she was alarmed at the prospect of herself or anyone else being “upset.” So had she noticed my trouble, she might still have taken the path of least resistance and waited for it to pass.
I probably played a part in keeping her ignorant. Though I was carrying this burden of isolation, a vacuum so heavy that it shattered my center, there must have been spells when I behaved like an ordinary seven-year-old. I went to school, I had my piano lessons and my books and the prospect of a new baby in the house. Some Sunday mornings, I would climb into my parents’ bed to feel the bumps and bounces in my mother’s stomach and to sing the song from Carousel where the doomed hero fantasizes about his unborn child. (“Like a tree he’ll grow, with his head held high, and his feet planted firm on the ground.”) My parents found this an endearing performance. They didn’t suspect that I was living the life of a pariah, cast out of a family as essential to me as they and my sister and the coming baby were essential.
The baby was a boy, a brother, as I had wished. A red screaming thing. My mother was out of bed and bustling around the house as before, and my father seemed proud of having finally engendered a son in middle age, although as my brother grew up, there would also grow a lifelong tension and hostility between them. But that was way off. I wanted to hold the baby but my mother was afraid I’d drop him. She hardly let me touch him: perhaps she regarded him as more precious and vulnerable because he had cost her all those months of bed rest; she transferred the fragility of the pregnancy to the baby himself.
The baby scratched at his face and red lines appeared. The Doctor, our Humpty-Dumpty doctor, told my mother to swaddle him, wrap up his hands so he couldn’t damage his face. He resembled a miniature mummy. I thought the swaddling was cruel, an unforgivable restriction of his freedom of movement. She kept him swaddled for months. He was a cranky baby and since I wasn’t allowed to get near him I lost interest fairly quickly.
But while I was still excited and emboldened by the birth, I took the daring step of approaching the girls on the stoop even though Brenda and Suzanne were there. The others included me in the conversation, maybe because of the novelty of a baby in my family. One day soon after, Brenda addressed a remark to me. The other girls didn’t quite gasp, but there was visible surprise, as if a ban had been lifted. As if my harsh sentence had arbitrarily come to an end. Soon I was included in the group, chatting and gossiping as if nothing had ever happened.
We never talked about any of it. I don’t even recall feeling angry, afterwards. Simply relieved that my exile was over. For a while, humbled. And soon, not even that. The configuration and my place in it resumed its old shape. Brenda and I went back to sending toys and treats from one bedroom window to the other in the basket. Suzanne became my best friend again.
I’ve always thought of my eighth year as one of transforming agony, a turning point—literally. Something in me turned and I ended up facing the world from a different angle. I began it with a particular, if tentative, stance towards life—a confident, expectant stance—and ended it with quite another, one not intended for me, more wary, more withdrawn, as if pain might be lurking around any corner.
In time, when my father grew unaccountably—to me—antagonistic to my brother, I joined in his taunts and teasing. My sister had meanwhile gotten married and moved out, and the family divided into factions: my father and I against my mother and brother. I despised my role in this scheme but couldn’t stop enacting it, so I moved away too, at seventeen. Whatever drama they had to play out, I wanted no part of. I came back only to visit.
From then on, I saw the girls sporadically. Since I was no longer living on the block, we had to make phone calls and appointments, which felt unnatural after years of unlocked doors, impromptu visits. I didn’t keep up with all of them, only the two or three with whom I felt some genuine affinity. But soon even these connections frayed. When we were in our early thirties, one of them organized a reunion. We met in a restaurant like grown-ups and laughed and talked about old times, as well as about the husbands and children and jobs that had meanwhile accreted to us. But no friendships resumed after that meeting, at least for me. A few times over the years I heard of plans for more reunions that included the older brothers and some of the neighborhood boys we used to go out with; there was one in particular, a dark, morose boy I had hankered after but never managed to get near. Even though I was curious to see him—could I succeed in capturing his attention now, at this late date?—I never went.
I haven’t ever been as intimate with anyone in quite that way since, yet the “girls” as they are today hold no interest for me. They interest me only as they were then. When I think of them—grown women nearing old age—I imagine them thinking of me as well, remembering everything as I remember it, each of us bearing the same encyclopedic, ineradicable history of our entwined childhoods.
Now and then I’ll hear a bit of news: one moved to Florida, one is living in New Jersey; there are grown children, grandchildren. I try to picture them but all I can summon up is their childhood faces. The girls I knew ceased to exist years ago, embalmed figures in a story long over. I prefer to keep that old configuration, that rare intimacy, static, a museum piece behind glass, to study at leisure—the embodiment of my education in human relations: how close people can be and what torments such closeness makes possible.
During those months of exile, it never occurred to me that there might be help from some source—a path out of the isolation, a few judicious words spoken, even an apology on my part. None of this was in my repertoire, or in my experience. I witnessed reflexive, unthinking rage so often and it came so naturally to me that anger, even now, remains the mystery it was then, the basic features of anger, that is, which others apparently learn. To begin with, when is anger justified? No, the question only shows my ignorance. Justification isn’t the proper framework for such a powerful emotion—for any powerful emotions. They’re simply there, not subject to reason. But surely the expression of anger requires discretion. I wonder if, in other families, children were taught to examine anger—why they feel it, how to direct it. Whether to direct it at all or restrain it. And taught when the targets of anger are truly deserving of it, and when these targets are simply going about their business, which happens to contradict or interfere with our business.
These elementary questions must sound disingenuous. Granted, as an adult I’ve discovered strategies better than tantrums to use against frustration. But I’m still uncertain which ones are appropriate, and when and how. My ignorance reminds me of a woman I once met who was anorexic. Please, she asked me, write down what would constitute three normal meals; I just don’t know. I found this incredible, yet her ignorance about eating is no more peculiar than mine about anger. Because I came upon the answers to my questions late and laboriously, my efforts to use them feel forced and artificial, as if I were consulting a daily diet written down by an obliging if puzzled friend.
I don’t feel anger at the girls who banished me, nor do I blame myself for being hot-tempered. The episode is too remote. Anger dissipates; I know that much about it. At least my kind of anger: quick, uncensored, uncontrolled, then gone like smoke, heedless of the charred remains. I simply acknowledge the incident as something that marked me, and the marking is what I regret.
Of course we can look back on any number of events and think, If not for that, my life would have been different. As Diane’s mother, advising lipstick, used to say, You never know who you might run into walking down the street. If my parents hadn’t chosen that specific house, for instance . . . If I hadn’t noticed Brenda cheating, or if I’d let it go, let her have my B&O Railroad in the interests of peace? Would I be the happy, confident child I remember before that Monopoly game? (If memory can be trusted.) It’s quite possible I’d be eaten with self-contempt for not speaking out, and to compensate, I might have indulged my prosecutorial bent, becoming thoroughly obnoxious.
In any event, the marking changed the way I’ve behaved ever since. I’ve never given free rein to my temper except, alas, with family, on the assumption, I suppose, that blood ties can’t cast you out. (Though I saw my father’s brothers and sisters—all of them congenitally enraged—not speak to each other for years at a time.) With friends I’m cautious, reluctant to give offense for fear of being banished all over again. I approach thorny subjects with what looks like patience and forbearance, even wisdom. Yet I suspect my forbearance is less virtue or wisdom than a shield against my hasty words and what they might wreak. The feeling of banishment remains, a simmering pit in the gut, something to be avoided at all costs—an avoidance as illogical, as primitive, in its way, as my mother’s dread of being “upset.”
Her words keep coming back to me, decades later: if you keep losing your temper, no one will want to play with you. I wish she’d never said it: it’s the kind of thing that can’t be dug out like a splinter, as I dug out Suzanne’s cynicism. Because her prophecy came true. My mother implied, and I guess I agree, that I have something explosive inside, like a grenade, which I must keep close watch on or it will obliterate me. If I feel anger, I suppress it (as painful as suppressing urgent desire), rationalize it, hide it, try to think generous, Zen-like thoughts and wait for it to pass. It does pass, but the pressure of restraint can’t help but leave bruises, permanent black-and-blue marks on the spirit.