The Arrogant Years

by Lucette Lagnado

  And my mother had fed my sense of superiority. She encouraged my arrogance.

  Of course, now the dynamic had completely shifted. It wasn’t a question of my choosing to get married; it was about whether I would ever be chosen. What Edith couldn’t bear to say—nor for that matter could my father—was that I had become unmarriageable, at least under the unspoken rules of my Levantine community.

  Childless women are unmarriageable in Middle Eastern culture, and that was the most taboo subject of all. Mom, who had raised me to spurn a more traditional life, wasn’t going to dwell on the fact that it was denied to me now. My father, never one to tackle difficult subjects, avoided it altogether.

  I would probably have silenced them anyway. Ultimately, both were, in their own awkward, misguided way, trying to be kind—they knew I was injured, perhaps even more than I realized, and feared treading on any ground I would find hurtful that would wound me even more than I was already wounded.

  Even during the months of treatment, I’d had an inkling of the change in my social status. At some point, rumors of my cancer diagnosis had seeped out, and a friend of mine from the days of the Shield of Young David, Miriam, told her parents.

  Miriam had been an odd bird at the Shield of Young David—a relatively recent arrival to our congregation, she was an Ashkenazi Jew, one of the few in our midst whose family traced their roots to Eastern Europe as opposed to the Levant. Overweight and awkward, Miriam had been a social outcast at a string of religious schools and Jewish camps. Our shul and women’s section offered her a welcome embrace: That is what made the Shield of Young David so special.

  On Saturdays, we’d gather at the small apartment on Sixty-Eighth street she shared with her parents and little brother. We were far more entranced with her mother, Nora, an artist, than with Miriam. Nora’s canvasses lined the cramped dwelling, and we were sure that she was a great painter who had landed in our improbable corner of Brooklyn.

  Nora, we decided, was the epitome of cool.

  Yet this is what I heard happened when Miriam told her father and bohemian artist-mother that I had cancer:

  Miriam was forbidden from seeing me, banned from visiting me in the hospital, told to keep away from me. From my hospital bed, I was told her family believed I was contagious and told their daughter to stay away.

  That is how I learned that I was damaged goods.

  I had a secret I had to keep deep within me: I could tell no one about the summer of 1973 lest they, too, decide to shun me.

  As I sat around with my friends from San Francisco in their dorm rooms, I couldn’t bring myself to share my own narrative and the memories that still haunted me, so that with them as with the rest of my peers, I felt as if I were indeed contagious—in quarantine—surrounded by an invisible wall that kept me apart from them.

  · 16 ·

  The Spring of Nevermore

  Sunday nights were the hardest.

  Edith always insisted on accompanying me to Grand Central Station. She would stand there on the platform as I boarded the train to Poughkeepsie—or Po-Kip-See as the conductors insisted on calling it in their singsong recitation of all the stops along the Harlem-Hudson line.

  Hastings, they’d chant, Ardsley, Ossining, Croton-Harmon, Change at Croton-Harmon.

  We’d board another, older train and the singsong refrain resumed: Garrison, Peekskill, Cold Spring, Beacon, and Po-Kip-See.

  At first, I left New York in the early afternoon. I’d take a seat by the window, finding peace in looking out onto the expanse of the Hudson River. But I dreaded going back so much that I began to delay my return, each week opting for a slightly later and later train. It was already dusk when the train left Grand Central, and the ebbing light only added to my somber mood. From my seat, I could see my mom lingering—she always liked to stay until the last moment, waving and waving to me.

  Then I couldn’t see her at all.

  It was pitch-black when I’d reach Vassar. The train was usually empty except for a handful of other students—rarely anyone I knew. We’d share a taxi to the campus and then go our separate ways. Back in my dorm room, I couldn’t shake off the desolation that enveloped me. I’d walk to the central dining hall for supper; it was usually sparsely attended on Sunday nights, as if others had also put off coming back or made other plans.

  One Sunday evening I was joined by Betsy, a lovely girl with ash-blond hair who had struck me as friendly and unassuming. Betsy was with a freshman boy I had noticed on campus and liked from afar. He was the son of a college president, he told me, and as he kept talking, I fixated on his sweater, his wonderfully expensive brown woolen sweater that he wore over gray cuffed pants. Both Betsy and he embodied this WASP ideal—and because they were so thoroughly, so completely American in their manner and demeanor, they seemed absolutely foreign to me.

  Dinner was congenial and relaxed. I was at last a part of a small group—me, Betsy, and the handsome boy in brown.

  I resolved to have what my companions were having: roast beef. I wasn’t going to keep kosher anymore, I decided then and there. As it happened, even César, my favorite sounding board in the family, had offered me religious dispensation. During the semester break, my brother and I had discussed in detail how I wasn’t eating especially well, how my health was still in jeopardy, and we agreed it made perfect sense to eat the regular fare. I was going to befriend the wonderful WASP boy in the brown sweater, eat whatever I wanted to eat, wear Top-Siders, and throw away any vestige of my old self.

  I took a hesitant bite of roast beef, then another, and a couple more. Then, I stopped; as my two new friends talked, I kept pushing the roast beef on the plate around with my fork, not really eating it. Afterward, we walked through campus together, though Betsy left us to go to the library. The boy in the brown sweater kept up a steady stream of chatter, and while I had no idea what he was saying, I realized that I liked his manner, his gait, the sound of his voice, his American accent. I enjoyed simply being with him.

  We parted ways in the quad, and as he turned to go to his dorm and I to mine, I wanted to call out after him—WAIT, don’t go. I didn’t, of course. I couldn’t seem to do what many of my peers would probably have managed in a heartbeat—prolong the evening, walk back with him, accompany him to his dorm, his room—which is what I realized I wanted to do.

  Back in my room, I felt oddly agitated—angry with myself for having eaten the roast beef, and for not having eaten it. Angry for wanting the boy in the brown sweater and not wanting him enough. Angry that I was playing a new game by old rules. Angry above all that I couldn’t change the game or the rules or myself.

  I wondered why I had bothered to come back.

  There was only one solution to my Sunday night blues. I decided that I would no longer return to Poughkeepsie on Sundays.

  It meant missing a couple of my classes Monday, but no matter—I would figure out some way to make up the work. Instead, I began to amble back late in the morning, well after Edith had left for her job at the Brooklyn Public Library. She couldn’t accompany me to the train.

  And somehow, that made leaving easier.

  I’d sit with Leon in the morning as he fixed himself breakfast—typically one modest egg in a pool of melted butter that he prepared in a miniature frying pan, along with a piece of bread and feta cheese. He was always generous, offering to share whatever he was having with me in the same way that months earlier he had fed me his favorite black olives to sustain me during my treatment.

  He would be done eating and ensconced in his prayer books by the time I left. I’d try to hug him good-bye. He’d simply nod, as if it didn’t bother him that I was leaving again—as if he weren’t even mindful of my departure. I would close the door behind me and go.

  I arrived on campus in broad daylight, which felt slightly more manageable. The more classes I skipped, the harder it was to keep up or even to focus on what I was studying. The exception was the French Department, which I found more hospitable than any o
ther on campus.

  Located in a small building known as Chicago Hall, it had a group of professors I found accessible and friendly. There wasn’t a single American in the bunch. Most were from France and had been educated in Europe; at least one was a Holocaust survivor. I happily chatted with them in French, at ease again, as if I were carrying on a conversation with Mom in her kitchen.

  As I padded around Chicago Hall, I had a sense of peace that eluded me elsewhere at Vassar.

  I was taking a literature class with a Frenchwoman named Elisabeth Arlyck. Professor Arlyck was deeply charming, but she gave tough, demanding assignments. We were reading many of the authors Edith had talked about as I was growing up—Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal. Mom would always say their names so reverentially.

  Nervous about having to analyze and contrast the heroines of Balzac’s Le Lys Dans La Vallée and Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir for a paper the professor had assigned, I decided to seek out my mother’s help. That week, I left school even earlier than usual and went home to show Mom my daunting assignment.

  I am not sure when Edith had last looked at those novels—probably a quarter of a century earlier or more. I sat by her in the kitchen, and as if she had read the books the day before, she calmly began to dictate an essay about Balzac’s shy female protagonist, Madame de Mortsauf, comparing her with Stendhal’s Madame de Rênal. The sentences flowed and the thoughts coalesced and the books themselves, which I had found hard to follow, made sense.

  When Professor Arlyck handed the paper back to me, I saw that I had earned my first “A” at Vassar—or rather, Mom had. Professor Arlyck scribbled that I had the ability to get straight to the point, “ce qui est une grande qualité.”

  I had cheated, of course—this was my mother’s paper, not mine—but I didn’t feel in the least bit guilty. I was simply elated at the thought that Edith, forced to abandon her teaching career at L’École Cattaui at nineteen, could still wow a Vassar professor with her style and erudition.

  I was now cutting more and more of my classes.

  I’d think, Why wait till Friday to go home for the weekend? Why not go ahead and leave Thursday night?

  Or even Thursday morning.

  I was always looking at train schedules, calculating the next train I could catch. I would race by taxi from Vassar to the ancient redbrick station and sit in the vast, chilly waiting area, staring at the incongruous chandeliers hanging from the ceilings, until they announced the train to New York. Once in New York, I was ready to turn around and go back to Poughkeepsie.

  I wasn’t spending more than a night or two at Vassar each week, and even that was becoming an ordeal. I was constantly, frenetically shuttling between Poughkeepsie and New York, New York and Poughkeepsie. No matter where I found myself, I felt I should be somewhere else.

  Finally, I made an appointment to see a Vassar psychologist, an older woman who enjoyed a kind of cult following. I walked to her office in Metcalf, a building tucked away in a discreet part of campus, hoping and praying no one would spot me. Seated in front of her, I spoke haltingly about my illness the year before starting Vassar.

  To my surprise, the doctor began to cry—and revealed that she herself had recently suffered from breast cancer. I sat there stunned, and oddly more shaken than when I came in. I hadn’t expected a psychologist to cry.

  Was this an anniversary for me, she wanted to know, turning sober and professional and impassive again.

  An anniversary?

  The question was jarring—I had always thought of anniversaries as happy occasions. It was February 1974, and I felt very far away from any joyful events. Then I remembered that February night exactly one year earlier when I was getting ready for my friend Celia’s wedding and put on my first floor-length gown and noticed my leg was swollen. I recalled the terrible weeks and months that followed as doctors deliberated about what was wrong with me and then diagnosed me and pondered what to do. Celia’s wedding—when my life had changed forever.

  I nodded: Yes, it was an anniversary, it was the one-year anniversary.

  I didn’t go back to see the school psychologist. Somehow, her teary outburst had unnerved me. I saw it—unfairly, perhaps—as a sign of weakness or vulnerability, qualities I didn’t want in a shrink. I wanted someone tough and strong, someone who could take on my demons and defeat them, someone who could stop me from running. That was what I wanted most of all—I wanted somebody to put a stop to my restless, anguished peregrinations from Poughkeepsie to New York, from New York to Poughkeepsie.

  Early one Tuesday morning, I woke up in my dorm room and decided to leave Vassar. Ignoring all of my classes and assignments, I boarded the first train for New York. Once in Grand Central, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. All around me, men in suits and women in high heels were off to work, and they seemed so purposeful.

  But where was my sense of purpose?

  Months back, when I had confided my distress to my sister Suzette, she had seemed impatient and unsympathetic. “What would you rather be doing?” she had asked crossly, her voice filled with resentment. “Working as a salesgirl at Macy’s?”

  And because she was my older sister and I trusted her implicitly, I thought those were indeed my only two options in this world—Vassar, or manning a cash register at Macy’s—and I’d forced myself to stay in Poughkeepsie.

  Now I couldn’t—I simply couldn’t be there anymore.

  I decided instead to go shopping. Passover was around the corner and I needed to buy the new dress that had been denied to me the prior year when I was ill. It had always been such a lovely tradition, going shopping with Edith. I had been in the hospital until the eve of the holiday, so a shopping trip had been impossible. Besides, my poor mom seemed beset with worries: Buying me a dress was nowhere on her mind.

  Now, I planned to resume my beloved childhood ritual. Though I wasn’t a child anymore, and the holiday didn’t seem nearly as important as it had once, I was determined to recapture a semblance of the joy I had always felt on the eve of Passover, with me and Edith venturing out hand in hand to scour the stores for that all-important, perfect holiday outfit to wear at the Shield of Young David.

  I headed for B. Altman’s on Thirty-Fourth Street and made my way to the sixth floor, home of the Shop for Pappagallos. I sat down and asked an obliging salesperson to bring out several pairs in my size—Pappagallos trimmed with colorful piping, Pappagallos with whimsical tassels, two-toned Pappagallos, Pappagallos shaped like ballerina slippers.

  Didn’t I deserve to own at least one pair? Surely, surviving nearly a year at Vassar had entitled me to that. With a newfound sense of resolve, I picked out a pair of slender, delicate navy blue flats and paid for them with cash I had painstakingly amassed over months.

  I carried my treasure in a small Altman’s shopping bag over to the young women’s department, where I wiled away the afternoon trying on dresses—beautiful dresses, dresses that brought me back to a time when I liked the way I looked, when I felt so proud about the way I looked, dresses that reminded me of my arrogant years. I slipped on my new Pappagallos to get the full effect, and settled on a short, elegant pale blue empire dress. I was, at last, properly outfitted for Vassar.

  Yet now, armed with the accessories that would allow me to fit into my new world, I wanted nothing to do with that world. I was missing a raft of classes and forgoing reading assignments. I was probably risking my scholarship. But none of that seemed to matter on this March afternoon.

  Altman’s had opened a chic hair salon, and my brother Isaac had been critical of my long hair. I had worn exactly the same style since I was a teenager in Brooklyn, straight and flowing past my shoulder. My brother had made it clear I looked a tad déclassé—as if I had taken Bensonhurst along with me to Poughkeepsie. I stopped to chat with a hairstylist who offered me a brand-new look—one of the fashionably short pageboy haircuts that were all the rage. I climbed into a chair and let her get to work.

  As I watched several inches o
f my hair dropping to the floor, I couldn’t help feeling somewhat doleful. It wasn’t that long ago that I had despaired as I saw it become thin and fall out after the radiation. It had taken months to grow back, yet here I was cutting it off.

  As the stylist trimmed and brushed and blow-dried it into shape, she kept assuring me I would be a new person without my big head of Brooklyn hair. Don’t you look great, she kept asking. Don’t you look great?

  I wasn’t so sure, and she seemed cross when I didn’t reply. Though my new hairdo was chic, I missed my free-flowing hair.

  I returned home to Sixty-Fifth Street with my bundles from Altman’s and my semishorn head. Then, I started calling old friends; I was anxious to show off my Vassar look and my Pappagallos—though not to anyone at Vassar.

  A few days later, I made my way to a house a couple of blocks away where some of my neighborhood friends had gathered. They all peered curiously at my feet. Rena Douek, who had been close to me in high school, seemed amused: “But what are these?” she said pointing to my shoes. The slender wisplike blue loafers must have looked so odd and decidedly unfashionable.

  I had been so eager to leave these friends of mine behind—the world beyond had beckoned with such intensity. And I was also secretly contemptuous of their plans to go to Brooklyn College—the institution of choice for most of my classmates from New Utrecht. Yet Rena and others seemed perfectly content at Brooklyn College—happier and more stable by far than I felt at Vassar. The horror was that I couldn’t go back—I couldn’t simply admit I’d made a mistake, return to Sixty-Fifth Street, and register at one of the City University colleges. I wasn’t at home in Brooklyn anymore, and I wasn’t at home in Poughkeepsie; all I could do was frantically, erratically, run from one to the other.

  I realized that I no longer fit in with my old friends. I wasn’t sure I fit in with anybody.

  I was due for my checkup at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. The appointment was my chance to huddle with Dr. Lee, my oncologist. I was anxious and wanted simply to hear that I was fine—the possibility the illness had returned haunted me constantly. But I also viewed it as an opportunity to make inroads with a man I found both elusive and charismatic.