Each room had furniture sets, not the stray inexpensive pieces that filled our apartment on Sixty-Fifth Street. There were dining room tables with matching credenzas, living rooms where the sofas and armchairs and coffee tables had been carefully coordinated.
Until then, my only glimpse of suburban opulence came from television, so that the living rooms and dining rooms I was entering reminded me of the houses on those shows I’d watched so avidly as a child new to America—or the grand prize on Let’s Make a Deal, where curtain number two would part to show a pretty model standing in a room filled with wondrous, matching pieces of furniture—the perfect bedroom, the ideal den.
Visiting Laurie was my first exposure to the American Dream—or at least its Orthodox Jewish equivalent. Laurie was the heiress apparent to Philip Roth’s Brenda Patimkin, as if Brenda had been transported from Short Hills, New Jersey, and plunked down on the southwestern shore of Long Island. Except that my friend in many ways transcended her background—she embraced her culture and its values, but was somehow grander than it.
Laurie Wolf, New York, 1970s.
Laurie’s parents were originally from Brooklyn, as were many of their neighbors. Laurie herself was born in a one-bedroom apartment on Westminster Road in Flatbush. As Mr. Wolf had prospered, he and his wife bundled two-and-a-half-year-old Laurie and her older brother and left their cramped apartment for the nirvana of grassy lawns and a newly built “hi-ranch.”
Yet they didn’t entirely sunder their ties with the past. Laurie’s dad, Cyrus, an amiable Court Street lawyer who had grown up in Borough Park not far from where I lived, still commuted every day to his law firm in Brooklyn. I got along best with him, and I think it was because I conjured up the hardscrabble life of the old neighborhood. He had been fond of that life, and I think he was fond of me for reminding him of it, reminding him of the days when he was a bundle of drive and ambition and longed to rise far above his background.
Inside Laurie’s living room was her mom’s collection of Lladro figurines. Mrs. Wolf had amassed dozens and dozens of precious and semiprecious tchotchkes. They, along with pieces of Lalique crystal, seemed to occupy every nook and cranny. No one ever seemed to congregate in the living room. I liked Mrs. Wolf, who was edgy and acerbic, and had a wry sense of humor, but Laurie’s relationship with her mother was tense, and the two stayed out of each other’s way. My friend and I gathered in the kitchen or den, but I was always anxious as I crossed the living room, terrified I would inadvertently break a delicate Lladro or Lalique and be banished forever from this idyll.
Instead, Laurie and her parents drew me in ever closer to their magical circle.
I had found an improbable city of refuge on West 116th Street and again in North Woodmere. I felt safe, happy, and shielded from my past, even though occasionally I encountered pieces of it.
One of the Five Towns girls at 616 was Karen Alter. I’d noticed her immediately, not simply because she, too, was friendly and expansive, but because of her name, which was the same as the doctor at Maimonides who had first diagnosed my Hodgkin’s. I found out very quickly that she was his niece and whenever I ran into her, I was taken back to my last encounter two years earlier with the imposing Brooklyn cancer specialist.
One afternoon, my parents and I had been summoned to his office. He had learned I was seeking treatment at Memorial in Manhattan, but that wasn’t his concern. Addressing my mom and dad almost as if I weren’t in the room, he made the case for an operation that could enable me to have children later on. There was a simple surgical technique that would shield my ovaries from the radiation. He had heard I was declining the surgery.
“She won’t regret it now,” Dr. Alter said, his eyes fixed on my mother, “but she will later. The older she gets, the more she will regret her decision. She will regret it more and more with every passing year.”
Edith nodded and said nothing. But his stark words must have registered because days later, as I insisted I wouldn’t submit to the surgery, she repeated what the doctor had said. She didn’t really try to persuade me to change my mind—she was too fearful of modern medicine, and like my father, terrified of hospitals and operations. She simply noted his prediction.
Scared and bewildered, my mother cared only about my survival, as did my dad. There had been so much loss—the baby daughter who’d come along before I was born, our home in Cairo, our very identities. Now, the focus was simply to save me.
My mother didn’t offer any counsel about the proposed operation. She didn’t advise me about what to do. My siblings were far more assertive. My older brothers calmly suggested I consider it. But from her perch in California, Suzette weighed in most emphatically of all. She didn’t think I had cancer, the doctors were all wrong, and I certainly didn’t need an operation that could possibly backfire or lead to complications. Surgeries, she told me darkly, often help spread a cancer.
Separated from the family by thousands of miles, yet thoroughly connected to us in her own way—and to me in particular—my sister kept calling to tell me to beware of the physicians, to be careful of Memorial, and to warn me that the surgery would only hurt me in some way she couldn’t pinpoint.
Still, a strange whisper of common sense told me I should have the surgery, never mind Mom’s fears or Suzette’s objections. I made the arrangements and found myself in a drab six-bedded ward in the oldest part of Memorial, a section that had once been a public hospital for the poor. The women were all breast cancer patients who had had mastectomies and assumed that was what I was getting. Terrified, I buried myself in a book—the feminist bestseller du jour, Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness—and tried to ignore them. I requested a transfer to the children’s ward, where I’d stayed as a patient at Maimonides. But a young doctor told me darkly, “You wouldn’t want to be there.” It was even sadder than my breast cancer ward—filled with hopelessly sick toddlers.
On the eve of the surgery, the doctors returned to my bedside with some news. After examining my charts, they’d decided it was prudent to perform a far more extensive operation—so-called exploratory surgery where they’d search for signs that the cancer had spread, as well as removing my spleen lest it, too, was diseased.
My mom and I listened to them horrified. I had expected a relatively simple and brief procedure; now they were talking about a possibly dangerous four-hour operation that would leave me with an enormous scar. The original surgery wasn’t mentioned anymore; it seemed suddenly beside the point.
I watched as Mom, shaken out of her passivity, began to cry and to yell at the doctors.
I asked them point-blank if I needed this exploratory surgery: Could I be treated without it? They replied that I could. And that was that. I couldn’t bring myself to say to them, stop, can’t we go back to the original plan, the original simple surgery? I checked out of Memorial even as the doctors made plans to have me return almost immediately to begin radiation treatments.
I didn’t realize the import of my decision, not really. As I marched to my first radiotherapy treatment, I felt mostly numb—it occurred to me that I had made a life-changing decision, a choice that would change me forever, but I didn’t know what to do about it other than keep walking to the treatment room.
The regrets had begun only later, after I’d finished the therapy and was ensconced at Vassar and now, at Columbia. I would find myself haunted by what Dr. Alter had said, the coldness with which he’d said it.
I’d think about his words whenever I ran into his cheerful niece, and the longing to run would overtake me. But then I’d meet Laurie for dinner, or take a walk across campus and visit Robert Evans at the English Department, and I would calm down, forget all over again.
Over the years I would always be asking doctors the same question: Should I have had the operation? Would it possibly have worked? I secretly hoped that they’d say no, but I learned that the smaller surgery could indeed have been effective. As for the larger operation they had pushed, it fell into disfavor. It turned out to do more har
m than good, and many patients who were subjected to it developed awful complications and died.
One night at Barnard, I dreamed that I asked César for a bottle of Joy; my older brother spoiled me—even more so since my illness. I thought the perfume by Patou was the ultimate status symbol, and I longed for it in real life. But in the dream, I was very upset because I didn’t get Joy after all. Instead, César pulled out a bottle of Cache, the French perfume whose name means “Hidden.”
While visiting North Woodmere one weekend, Laurie decided we should stop at a designer shoe outlet. To my surprise I spotted that old object of my desire, Pappagallos, but at drastically marked-down prices, and I found myself telling my friend about my misadventures and obsession with the shoes, how they had overshadowed my entire Vassar experience. Laurie listened with her usual skepticism and tried several on. Without pondering the Great Meaning of Pappagallos, she promptly bought a pair.
They were pretty and elegant, but they looked like other shoes—not at all the pastel flats I’d seen at Altman’s. Even Pappagallo was changing, producing shoes that resembled the popular styles women favored, and not a throwback to some idealized, vanished, 1950s WASP America.
Late in the fall, it seemed natural to join the Wolf family for Thanksgiving dinner. They would be observing the holiday at the home of Laurie’s Aunt Eleanore in Hewlett Harbor, a community whose name my friend pronounced in hushed tones, urging me to prepare myself for the ultimate in luxury, beauty, and excess.
I was afraid to tell her that Thanksgiving was a strictly theoretical holiday in my mind. We had never really observed it at home even though we had now been in America more than a decade, and I had recently become a U.S. citizen. Turkey was foreign to us, not at all part of our Levantine fare. But it looked delectable in the pages of the magazines I leafed through, which invariably featured recipes and pointers for the “perfect” holiday table.
In our first years here, Thanksgiving had been virtually unknown among the families of the Shield of Young David. Our lives revolved around the religious holidays and only the religious holidays. As we became more Americanized, turkey began to make a sneak appearance in some homes. My friends, the Cohen sisters, decided to prepare it for the Shabbat lunch on the Saturday immediately after the holiday. They would invite me to join them and while I relished the delicious spread, it felt more as if we were enjoying a grand Sabbath feast than observing a secular American national holiday.
Edith tried to satisfy my longing for “du turkey.” At our local Key Food, the small supermarket on Twentieth Avenue, Edith had found a cooked kosher turkey breast in the frozen foods section. It came in a tinfoil container and had an enticing image of a golden brown turkey on its wrapping. My mother plunked down an exorbitant amount for it and then tried to follow the elaborate directions on how to prepare it. Yet no matter how carefully she cooked it—and how excited I was at the prospect of eating turkey—the final product was inedible. Yet my mother continued to buy it year after year, eager to have me enjoy a semblance of this holiday that filled me with so much longing.
Thanksgiving in Hewlett Harbor offered me a taste of that elusive all-American suburban life I craved. In a magnificent home where paintings covered every wall—Laurie’s aunt was an art lover—we were seated at a long table whose centerpiece was a massive roasted turkey.
It tasted every bit as wonderful as I’d imagined, and not a bit like the turkey breast Edith had insisted on making the day before, though I had assured her she needn’t bother.
As I left, Mom seemed both happy for me but also rather wistful. Though she loved this new world I was entering, and understood that it offered me so many more possibilities than she could provide, she still wanted to compete with that world even when it was a hopeless competition, even when she was clearly waging a lost battle against a Hewlett Harbor turkey.
As the new winter semester started, I enrolled in a playwriting seminar offered at Columbia. I had gone to college hoping to follow Mary McCarthy’s guiding star, yet I hadn’t taken a single writing course. Vassar’s English Department had been so thoroughly alienating, I had retreated to French and other subjects instead.
In a small room, about a dozen of us sat around a horseshoe-shaped table. Each week, we’d read out loud pages of dialogue to the professor and our classmates and learn from their feedback. There were no requirements, no exams, no assignments.
We were supposed to do nothing but work on plays.
Most appealing of all was the makeup of the class—all male except for me. A soulful-looking senior named Sean O’Neill was accorded a seat of honor near the head of the table, close to the professor, who treated him as if he were Eugene’s heir and descendant.
When Sean O’Neill read, we all listened spellbound. He had a wonderful manner about him, though I was perhaps as riveted by his hair, which was soft and blond and fell over his eyes, as by his lines of dialogue. I was once again excited about my classes—I couldn’t wait to get to my playwriting seminar each week and hear Sean O’Neill read. But I never seemed to be able to strike up so much as a simple conversation with him.
Though he was always amiable enough, and smiled at me, he seemed beyond my reach.
Back home at 616, I would tell Laurie of my hopeless crush on this boy. She couldn’t advise me; in the same way that she had arrived at Columbia with a coterie of girlfriends from the Five Towns, she knew many of the boys from her area. They had grown up together, gone to the same schools and sleepaway camps, or else they were close to her older brother, Eddie, a junior at Columbia. If I’d been drawn to one of them, it would have been easy. Using her extensive social network, Laurie could have provided chapter and verse on the boy’s family, prospects, background, his reputation back in high school, and whether he was a worthy object of my affections. She would have done what she could to help the romance, since in her world, there was a premium placed on matchmaking and “fixing up” people.
And yet even as I kept falling in and out of love—from afar, of course—it was never with one of the perfectly nice and presumably attainable Orthodox Jewish boys who would have been more compatible with me on a hundred different levels, from our shared religious backgrounds to the holidays we observed and the generally conservative cultures that had formed us.
These boys had one significant trait in common. While they were coming of age in a period marked by a push for social freedom, they had the values of a much older era. From the moment they arrived at Columbia, they were—every bit as much as Laurie and her girlfriends from the Five Towns—on the lookout for a mate, the person with whom they’d settle down, start a family, and share the fruits of the spectacular achievements they had every intention of attaining. They were driven and ambitious, intent on going to medical school or law school or business school—nothing else would do. But unlike other driven, ambitious young American men, the notion of settling down at an early age was deeply ingrained and even sacrosanct.
I knew that I would never pass muster.
At the first hint of a serious entanglement, I would be obliged to tell all, to reveal my sad, sordid story, and what would happen then? To my mind, the mythical Sean O’Neill as well as the yarmulke-wearing Jewish boy from the Five Towns or the outer boroughs would both leave.
As I wandered through that great campus bazaar, the souk of love and romance that flourished at Columbia and every other college campus, where men and women came together to barter for social and sexual favors with all the wiles of traders in an old Middle Eastern market, I stayed resolutely alone, persuaded I had lost most of my value.
It didn’t matter that my new world was more enlightened than the one I had left behind. It didn’t matter that I had found myself a home where education was valued. It didn’t matter that here, a woman was encouraged to study and flourish and become a professional. It didn’t matter because inside of me, there was still the tune that had haunted me at Vassar. It was a variation of Helen Reddy’s anthem to the women’s movement,
I Am Woman, which I had first heard in high school. Back then, I had made it my own, embracing all it signified. The song had followed me to Poughkeepsie and now to West 116th Street.
Except it was a more personal rendition I kept hearing now, a more anguished refrain: I am not woman enough.
Still, I was changing or maybe simply changing back into the person I had once been.
I found pleasure in my studies, and some of my old arrogance was creeping back into my demeanor. I enjoyed surveying the world around me from my regal perch. I was the Egyptian princess again—albeit with a tarnished, broken tiara. After a year wandering around with my head bowed, wearing dark clothes, hoping no one would notice me, I wanted to be noticed again.
Which is, of course, what happened as I tooled across the campus and the city with Laurie.
She was very charismatic and charming, an expert at attracting attention, and wherever we went—to Central Park, to our favorite Broadway eatery, for coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, or uptown to the Cloisters—we were often being approached, and men seemed eager to get to know us and the city was ours.
With my newfound confidence, some of the old bravado also returned.
I enjoyed regaling Laurie with stories about my family’s illustrious past—our grand life in Cairo. But then my mother would come to 616 to hand-deliver the small hamburger patties she insisted on preparing for me each week and the banana nut cake from Entennman’s she thought was essential to my survival, and Laurie couldn’t help noticing how broken-down Edith seemed—how different from the self-assured and pampered mothers she knew from the Five Towns, women whose lives were crammed with trips to beauty parlors, who would never be seen leaving the house without their nails polished and their fingers bejeweled and their hair curled and sprayed and lacquered into shape.
Edith, she noticed, never had her hair done; it was loose and gray and slightly disheveled. She didn’t wear a stitch of makeup. Did she ever have her nails done? Did she not own any jewelry? My friend had trouble reconciling the grandiose stories I told of my family’s past—my own exotic princess airs—and my impossibly humble, self-effacing mom.
The Arrogant Years Page 25