Leaving Brooklyn

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  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.”

  The days crept by, a denser phase of dread. I waited for my father’s outburst when he found out. Did I think he was made of money? he would shout, forgetting I had never asked for the lens. But nothing happened; he remained his usual preoccupied self. Even worse, I dreaded calling the eye doctor to cancel the appointment and hearing the pleading, the madness. I knew that if for one moment I let myself truly hear his words, I would share his madness; I would be prey to love as I had been as a child. I too would dream of running away with him to some faraway place, as I had dreamed of running away with Bobby. And once we got to this place? I would have succeeded in leaving Brooklyn, but where else would I be?

  He was tenacious—I knew that much about him. I could try leaving a message with his cheerful receptionist. But I knew that if I didn’t appear on Monday he would telephone again. That mustn’t happen. I would do what had to be done.

  Seeing him would be safer than calling anyhow, for when I entered his office I became another person, an older person who didn’t worry about the proper words for the occasion but remained true in her silence like those brave few who didn’t answer the pig. Unwittingly he conferred this identity on me and I accepted it. I became the person he thought he was seeing, a person of mystery and power.

  On Monday morning I washed my hair in the shower and let it hang loose around my face. I put on new hip-hugger panties and a black bra. Nylon stockings and pumps and a jersey dress. I hadn’t planned to dress that way. I had planned to destroy his love, if that craziness could be called love, by appearing in the costume of a drab schoolgirl—pleated skirt, white blouse, knee socks, sneakers, hair held back by a rubber band. But at the last minute I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t for him, but for me, for the person I became in his office. She would not tolerate knee socks or an ugly pleated skirt. I stuffed make-up in my bag and ran downstairs.

  The kitchen smelled of Cream of Wheat—flat, bland, and virtuous. My mother was at the stove, stirring. My father, waiting at the table with his newspaper, raised his head, looked me up and down approvingly, said good morning, and returned to the paper. So she still hadn’t told him. Maybe there was a tacit alliance between us for which I should be grateful. I wasn’t grateful. I would sooner endure his tantrums than accept her complicity. I had kept my vow of not speaking to her, except for the mechanics of daily life.

  “I’ll be home late. I’m going to study for a history test with a friend.”

  “Oh? What friend?”

  I could make the friend a boy, an excellent distraction: she worried that I didn’t go out with boys. Her notion of delicacy didn’t permit her to express this outright—I might “feel bad”; rather, she reminisced about her own youth as an implicit example, presented as a wholesome, groupy whirlwind of parties and outings that suggested a Scott Fitzgerald story with all the sex and desperation leached out. That this ebullient social whirl had co-existed with the famous tribulations of immigrant life I found one of the great paradoxes of recent history, as if those gilded, gallivanting Daisys and Jasmines, Basils and Dexters, had turned up on the pages of the Jewis
h Daily Forward. But for all I knew such mixtures could occur, and my vision was simply too narrow to take them in.

  If my friend were a boy there would be the inevitable queries : Who? Where does he live? Will his mother be home while you’re studying? And afterwards: How was your afternoon? Coyly: Will I have a chance to meet him? No, I had no taste for lies so circumstantial.

  “Arlene. You don’t know her.” It was the first name that occurred to me. Worse than Carlotta, Arlene was the girl who couldn’t say no. She naturally had not been invited to pledge for a secret sorority and didn’t seem to mind.

  “Come home in time for supper, all right? I want to get things cleaned up early. We’re having a card party. Don’t you want to sit down and have some breakfast?”

  “No, I ’ll get coffee on the way.” I went over to kiss my father good-bye. He expected and liked this and it cost me nothing. Lately his indifference had made him lovable. He didn’t force me to lie in order to be true to myself and what I now termed my private life. My father had no wish to partake of my, or for that matter anyone’s, private life; that was hardly a man’s vocation in Brooklyn, and perhaps not anywhere.

  After the last class I went to the girls’ room to apply my make-up, where I was joined by none other than Arlene. Side by side we stood before the cracked and clouded mirror, Arlene with an array of cosmetics spilling from her purse that humbled my tiny supply.

  “This guy from Brooklyn College is picking me up,” she told me. “A sophomore. He has a car.”

  “Oh really?” Boys in college bestowed a priceless status. “Where’d you meet him?”

  “At some frat party.” She pulled down the lower lid of her right eye and aimed a black pencil at it. “We’re going to Coney Island.”

  “I thought everything there was closed up for the winter.”

  “It is. But we can still walk on the Boardwalk. What are you all dressed up for?”

  “Oh, I have to see someone in Manhattan,” I said airily.

  Arlene was silenced. After she outlined the moist pink rim of each bottom lid, she held her right upper lid shut with one finger and, leaning forward over the sink till her face almost touched the mirror, drew a thick black line just above the lashes. She did this to the other lid and then, from the outer corner of each eye, drew a half-inch arc curving upwards. This was called doe eyes.

  Watching her gave me grief. I couldn’t wear eye-liner. The few times I had tried, at the bathroom mirror at home, I had botched the left lid because I couldn’t see enough with my right eye. It didn’t matter that I deplored the way Arlene looked, those thick lines giving her face a sickly, waif-like air, or that my father would have had a fit had I appeared one morning with doe eyes, the mark of trampy girls, or that eye-liner hadn’t been feasible with the cumbersome contact lens. It was simply her freedom to do it, and the sure deliberateness of her hand holding the pencil. I grieved for all I could not do, for everything in the flesh that was arbitrary and unjust. The grief caught in my throat, and when I finally released a breath, acid anger filled my mouth. My mother should have complained when they brought me back to her imperfect. Even if it was too late, even if it meant facing down all her Brooklyn demons. For truth she should have made the gesture.

  I finished much faster than Arlene. As I turned to leave she said, “Wait a minute. I’ll walk out with you.”

  She wanted me to see her get into the college sophomore’s car. She might offer me a ride to the subway, but I was in no hurry. What if I saw the porcelain-eyed man again?

  “I can’t, Arlene. I ’m late already. Have fun on the Boardwalk.”

  “I will.”

  It was a long walk and I walked it slowly, as slowly as Susan of the sorority who never had to get anywhere urgently. The urgency was all on the eye doctor’s side. A block from the station I slowed down even more, stopping to look at what was already killingly familiar—the plate glass windows of Dubrow ’s Cafeteria, where disheveled men huddled over cups of coffee; the giant neon ice cream sundae in the window of the Sugar Bowl, where boys plied their dates with malteds; the drugstore of pudgy Mr. Lieb and debonair Mr. Hoffner, whom my father called the Laurel and Hardy of the pharmaceutical world; the Carroll Theatre of my childhood Saturday afternoons; the new Chinese restaurant; the beauty parlor where Ella the beautician had cut my hair when I was thirteen and told me I was a beautiful girl, but she looked right into my eyes as she said it, so I was sure she only pitied me.

  Displayed in the corner lingerie shop window were steely girdles and long-line bras of the sort my mother and presumably other settled women wore. These were so different from the wispy little things my friends and I wore that they might have been designed for another species altogether, and I hoped I would never become part of that species. Imagine the eye doctor undressing me and finding something like that!

  I paused at the subway steps. I felt the man’s fingers on me again and wanted to run the other way. Go on down, I commanded. But my legs were stone. Then my bad eye twitched impatiently and sent a message: How do I dare dream of escaping from Brooklyn and living in Paris if I can’t even get on the subway to Manhattan?

  The train was almost empty. Of course—not quite four o’clock, a dead hour. The trip home was the real danger. But that was far away. Maybe never. Something might happen, the eye doctor could carry me off… Maybe I had seen the last of Brooklyn.

  I came up into dying winter light. It was beginning to snow, though it didn’t feel cold enough—fine specks of snow like dust drifting in a weak beam of light, and the beam was everywhere, was the twilight itself. I walked past the church, past the doorman, into the elevator, lapsing into the passivity that draped me whenever I came near him. I sank into my body.

  All was as I had left it three weeks ago: leather chairs, travel magazines, black and white prints of snowy scenes. The receptionist was gone. Waiting, reading a paper, was a white-haired man in a dark suit and tie with a briefcase at his feet. He must be a diplomat or a stockbroker, I thought, and in fact his paper was the Wall Street Journal. He glanced up and gave a vague smile. Clearly I had no effect on him. Whoever I became in the eye doctor’s office, whatever the eye doctor saw, the stockbroker didn’t see.

  The office door opened; out came a mother holding a little girl by the hand. I couldn’t see anything wrong with the girl’s blue eyes. The doctor was startled to see me, I could tell, and I liked that. He only nodded, though, and motioned the stockbroker inside.

  A new patient arrived, a large, heavily made-up woman in a fur coat and a hat with purple grapes on the brim. She took a long time getting out of her gear and settled down to chat about the weather, the unexpected early snow, in a juicy, operatic voice. I decided she must be an opera singer. It was odd to be talking to her about weather, its recent trends, its prospects. I had seen the weather but not felt it. For weeks I had been moving about in my private microclimate, overheated, tropical. I was never cold.

  The stockbroker soon emerged wearing a black eye patch over his left eye, which made him even more distinguished. As he slipped gracefully into his chesterfield I rose, but the eye doctor said, “Audrey, I think I may take Mrs. Gamanos first because she’ll be just a few minutes. Would you mind?”

  Before I could reply, the woman said, “Oh, but this young lady was here before me. I wouldn’t want to—” She gazed at me appealingly.

  “I don’t think Audrey would mind. Is that all right, Audrey?”

  How clever. I couldn’t bring myself to say my mother wanted me home for supper so she could use my chair for the card party. “Yes, I guess so.”

  The lush lady was finished in less than ten minutes and he locked the outer door after her.

  “Come inside.” He locked that door too. “My God. I thought you might not come.”

  “I wasn’t going to. My mother made me.”

  I didn’t know where I ought to sit, or if I should sit at all. The big chair was for having my eyes examined and the couch was for the other thing. Wh
at exactly was I here for? The lens was what had brought me, and it no longer existed. The only other seat was the swivel chair at his desk.

  “You look very nice. It’s good to see you.”

  I shrugged.

  “I know I frightened you last time. I ’m sorry. I forgot how—how young you are. Do you know I went back to your records to see? I didn’t realize. I figured, a high school senior… Not that it makes much difference … I don’t mean to make excuses.”

  “I skipped.”

  “Yes. You would. Anyway, I said some things that must have sounded absurd. Even though they were true. Please, sit down at least.” He waved at the couch and I sat.

  “Look, Audrey, I’ve been very worried since we spoke on the phone. You’re not… in any trouble, are you?”

  “Trouble?”

  “You know. You’re not… ?”

  “Oh! No, no.” I could have laughed. Me, with a baby! I was barely more than a baby myself. Up in a closet I still kept an old doll with moving eyelids and auburn ringlets. Harriet was her name.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “Of course I ’m sure,” I snapped. I had had my period the week before, but I could no more say those reassuring words than I could fly. I blushed just thinking them in his presence.

  “Jesus! I haven’t slept all week. Your mother said you didn’t feel well, you had to see the school nurse.”

  “That was just an excuse.”

  “I see.”’ He sat down at his desk and spun the chair around a couple of times. “Well, it can happen, you know.” He stared at me with a trace of malice. “You do know that’s how it happens?”

  I stared right back. “Now that you mention it, I guess I’ve heard that somewhere.” He wouldn’t weaken me by sarcasm. I had had plenty of training, in Brooklyn.

  “You’re not wearing the lens. Why?”

  “I just didn’t feel like it.”

  “Did it give you any pain or discomfort?”