Joanne and I were allowed to walk each other halfway home, a distance of about a quarter of a mile. When we walked we talked nonstop. When we got to the midpoint, we often turned back and started again. Often we did this so many times that her mother would call my mother, wondering where we were. Then one of our mothers, annoyed and wiping her hands, would appear and divide us. It was late. We had homework. We needed to eat. I walked home with my mother, wearing my navy-blue wool coat. My mother is five feet one inches tall. Gus, who knew everything, had told me that soon I would be taller than my mother, a fact I turned over in my mind. In my family now our eldest daughter is the smallest, which irritates her, as if her power as the eldest is somehow diminished. When some children came by our rickety house last summer they were amazed. How could it be? Magic. I thought of Gus, who by the time he was five, or twenty, was dead. In the meantime he had grown wizened and hunched, even smaller. I went less frequently to Joanne’s house (a new girl she liked better played there more often) and I rarely saw Gus. He had begun to make me feel uncomfortable: he was a know-it-all, I thought. My own body was becoming less familiar to me. When I looked in the mirror I focused, in turn, on my nose (was it a different color than the rest of my face?) and my mouth (my gums were too prominent). I read fairy tales, and in each one the troll who asked questions or demanded recompense had Gus’s face. But it was you who had the answers, I would accuse the face, silently.
In the bookcase behind the piano in Joanne’s house was a volume of black-and-white photographs that looked wet to the touch. A roomful of shoes. Another of coats. A convoy of trucks. Barbed wire. Some chickens pecking at a semicircle of dirt. We rationed these images, but it was important to look at them. The rule was we had to look at each one before we could turn to the center page. It was the only photograph that spanned two pages, and it was bisected by four stitches of pale thread. This was the actual book binding, we thought, what held the book together. If we cut the thread, well, the book would fall apart, wouldn’t it? We didn’t cut the thread, just tested it. Our fingers were small and we could worm an index finger under the thread and give it a try. One place where we had done this a number of times was loose and little gray. We huddled on the window bench, our white legs curled up under us. It was the nineteen-sixties, little girls didn’t wear trousers to school. Joanne’s thick hair was the color of corn. She wasn’t made to wash it as often as I did. My hair was straight and black and fell halfway down my back, but I couldn’t sit on it. Joanne could sit on her hair. It was the aspiration of my life, at eight, to sit on mine. I am digressing, because even now it is hard to look at the photograph. Who could? Why were we expected to look? The truth is we weren’t expected to look, but there it was, on the bookcase. The rule was—
what was the rule? That rule was that we had to look until the count of ten. We took turns, counting. Was it the first time I saw fish piled on a dock in the seaside town where I spent the summer with my mother and father that I thought of the photograph?
Or did I see the fish first? The bodies looked like coats, one inside the other.
After we looked at the picture we would lie under the piano, and pretend to be coats, one inside the other, one over the other. The smell of the rug in the living room was animal. I traced the salmon-colored wool triangles with my finger. Then, we called adults by their last name: Mrs. This, and Mrs. That. Joanne’s mother was the only adult I knew who had told me to call her by her first name. Hello, Mary, I said. Good-bye, Mary. Thank you, Mary, for having me. Mary had told me the pattern of the rug was called “Tree of Life.” Once, under the shrubs with Gus, after the sun had gone out, I drew the tree of life with a stick in the ground. Our coats were off. Show me what you do, he said.
Do you like it? my husband asked. I did like it, I said. He looked at the door of the shop. It would be open at eleven o’clock in the morning. Then we went to the wine bar and when I started to cry again—I cried a lot in those days, I didn’t have children yet, to whom I would say as my grandmother had said to me, “Save your tears.” “For what,” my elder daughter would ask, who cried then as she does now in great, windy gusts, as if a storm has taken her. Then I cried what I later would call floods, tears I mark with my daughters by tracing the tracks of tears, like snails, running down our cheeks, tears laced with mockery, what my own mother called crocodile tears. In that contre … ben gret plntee of Cokarilles. Theise Seprentes slen men, and thei eten hem wepynte, wrote Sir John Mandeville in his travel journal, Voyage and Travailes, in 1372, buried under the epigraph, “rich only in memory, he settled after seeing much for a small continent.” In the bar I drew a coat on a napkin, a coat like the ones I had worn as a child, with its crocodile buttons and velvet collar.
In the end, I left Venice with both coats. When we returned to the hotel I opened the enormous wardrobe and modeled for my husband the coat I had bought that afternoon. Turn around, he said. He especially liked the little belt in the back, which I had not noticed. In the morning without discussing it we returned to the shop, a store where I would later, in New York, at its Madison outpost, buy extremely expensive wallets although I had almost no money to put in them, wallets which looked as if they had been woven from vellum, all of which were stolen within months of purchase, and bought the other coat. When we left Venice, it was thirty degrees colder than it had been in Sperlonga, but I was warm. In New York a few weeks later, I received a postcard from our friend; she had been swimming—in October! No husband! No earrings! She had bought a new bathing suit!
I wore both coats for years. I wore them, as my great-aunts would have said, and did say, into the ground. In time the two coats were joined by others. From the store where my husband sat and drew Violet, I fell in love with two more: one in purple wool, knitted into a shape like a tulip, and another made of mohair in which I looked like an owl. I wore the coats when the children were small-by that time my husband and I had a child, and then parted, and the second man I married had two small children, and the smallest children pulled at the buttons that said Fendi but which were sewn on so well they never came off. In time the suede coat my first husband had found in the window of the shop in San Marco collided with a platter of just roasted chickens, in the market where I went almost every day with the children, to shop for pasta and diapers and juice. There was a stain the shape of Africa on the sleeve, and when I sent it to be cleaned, it returned stripped of its glow, like the saltimbanques by Picasso, the faces scrubbed like potatoes, that just yesterday my daughter, now eighteen and trained in how to look by her father, stood in front of at the museum, and after an hour of barely speaking to me or to anyone, let out a groan. “Look what they’ve done!”
In the long closet I hung up coats I bought: the Japanese cape from the school thrift sale; a pink jacket from Paris I had convinced my mother to buy and which she had almost immediately given to me; my father’s coat, thick with grime at the hem: a fake fur coat that looked like no animal that had ever lived, and under which I carried my youngest child in the park, along the river, all the fall and winter after she was born. In a shop, when she was small, when I was momentarily disenchanted with being anyone’s mother, anyone’s at all—a shop on Eighty-Second Street that sold other people’s castoffs or things they had bought and couldn’t afford—I tried on a narrow black leather double-breasted coat which skimmed my knees. It was less than the coat had been a decade ago (seventy-five percent off) but now those dollars directly translated into my mind into school fees and the light bill and new socks and chopped meat.
I went home and pined for the coat. There was no reason for this. I had many coats. I told myself I wasn’t cold: indeed, I had more coats than any person needed to have. It was winter in New York, and on the street corner near the building where we lived then, there was an outsize box from the Salvation Army, overflowing with coats discarded by those who didn’t hoard their clothes but gave them away. There was nothing I needed. Nevertheless I thought about the
black leather coat. I drew it on a napkin. By the third day the price of the coat reduced itself in my mind. By sleight of hand, a honed agility in which one hand does not know what the other is doing, I calculated that it was worse to spend so much time pining for the coat, which was, after all, a material object, than to buy it and be done with it. I was in the midst of the years in which I didn’t know that desire is infinitely replaceable. I called the shop and asked the girl if she could put the coat aside for me: I would pay for it over the phone and pick it up later in the week. I described the coat, she went to look. It was gone. For a few weeks the image of the coat hung before me, then turned ghostly and vanished, only to be resurrected a month later: the coat was gone because my husband had taken the picture I had drawn on the napkin to the shop. He had bought the coat. He had wrapped it in tissue paper, and kept silent when I mourned the loss of the coat which had not and now would never be mine.
When the first pin prick of something going awry touches our skin it is often so light, so benign, that in an instant it is gone. “Button up your overcoat, when the wind is free,” I sang to the children, as my mother sang to me. “Take good care of yourself, you belong to me.” The wind comes up. Why could I not have what I wanted but it had to be given to me, instead?
I’ve worn the coat for many years. It is the coat I take with me when I travel. The black leather is turning silvery at the seams. When we moved from the house with the long serpentine closet in which you had to search on your hands and knees for a familiar hem to a house with ten closets with tall doors that we bought from a building next to ours which was being torn down (we liked to tell people the house we built inside the shell was built around the doors, as if someone was always coming or going, which turned out, in that house, to be true), I packed all my coats—the long green coat I had bought in Venice, with my then husband, and its companion, now stained almost beyond wearing, and the navy-blue Japanese cape, and the indeterminate fur coat in which I’d carried my last baby like a papoose, and sung her the overcoat song, and the song about Georgie Porgie, and the boy in the Milne poem who lets his mother go down to the end of the town, in Riverside Park with bright leaves and then snow on the trees, and my father’s coat, and my mother’s pink jacket, into bags, where they lay one inside each other, and moved them into the basement next to the coat closet in the mudroom. It was summer by then, and I had no time to unpack them, and when I looked for them the morning of the third day of our move, they were gone. My husband had mistaken the bags for trash. All but the leather coat, which I had thrown over a chair upstairs, in the big echoing house with its long interior views, in order to feel at home.
For a few days I called trash companies to see if there was a way I might find the coats. A fool’s errand. At night I was overcome with remorse, and at the same time I was disgusted with myself, crying for coats. The children were well, after all. We were happy. It was a new chapter: What did I need with my old coats? I pictured my coats with their arms around each other, on a heap of trash, on a barge going out to sea. A ludicrous image.
I now have other coats—a raincoat with an all over pattern over purple pansies, the second shearling, with its notched collar. Over the years my second husband bought me a pale coat cut almost on the lines of the coat I first bought in Venice, a coat so beautiful that people stop me in the street when I wear it, which is almost never. The last Christmas we lived together, I bought him a coat: a thick gray worsted coat, with a hood. Button up your overcoat, don’t step on hornet’s nests, one if by land, two if by sea! When Dido arrived in Carthage, she asked, in exchange for gold, for all the treasure she could put inside the skin of a bull. When they gave her the skin she cut it into tiny pieces and placed them in a semicircle that enclosed the city. When I was a child, like my children I was always hot, and now I wear a sweater at the seaside even in summer. When we sat under the hedge with Gus, who was both older and younger than we were, and now that we are older and he is dead, is always younger, the chill mounted as we drew stick figures in the ground with twigs, our stiff coats next to us in the dirt, waiting for it to get really cold. My children hand their coats made of feathers back and forth, they leave them at school, they forget them.
When the children were small they read a book I had read as child about a little bear who is cold. Each time he comes to the door he tells his mother, “I am cold, I need something to put on.” His mother gives him mittens, a hat, a coat. At the end, he is still cold and she says, “But little bear, you have a fur coat!” And he takes off his hat and gloves and coat and goes out to play in the snow. Now, I too have a fur coat. It belonged to a friend, who gave it to me when she was given a new one. She called and said: Do you want this? You are always cold. When she called I was sitting in our drafty house, in front of a space heater. The coat was remodeled to fit me. When I went to the furrier in order to have this done he said, “What do you want to spend?” and I said, “The price of a good cloth coat.”
Restaurants
Some restaurant stories are tales of the lost world. On the corner of ll6th Street and Broadway, now, is a Chinese restaurant called Ollie’s to which one of my daughters, since she was very small, has gone to so often with her father that the proprietor, a blade-thin man whose high cheekbones are two half moons in his worried face, brings her scallion pancakes as soon as she sits down. She is seventeen now; she has eaten there, conservatively, thirty times a year since she was two. For a very long time it was the only place she went out to eat: it’s her protorestaurant. But to me Ollie’s is on the corner where an old Chock full o’Nuts used to be. The other day I was headed down into the subway on that corner when my phone rang—it was an old friend who was born in Manhattan, twenty blocks away, but who has lived in the country for years (in New York, anything beyond a commuter rail is the country, but he lives in real country, roads with nothing on them but fir trees) and when he calls he always asks where I am: the city is still, for him, the grid of his heart, and I said I was by the old Chock full o’Nuts. Or I could have said, where T— used to live. Ollie’s means nothing to him.
Like most New York restaurants, Ollie’s is on the ground floor of an apartment house—twenty-five years ago, he lived for a time in that building on the fifth floor. It was a borrowed apartment (borrowed from T—); in those days, apartments were sublet and borrowed more casually: they were mainly rented, not owned, and at least in that neighborhood, near Columbia, they passed from hand to hand. All I can remember of the interior is a black leather sofa and a red dressing gown hanging on the hook in the bathroom. T—— ended up marrying the girl I once found, unexpectedly, on that sofa. Once in a while we bought coffee at the Chock full o’Nuts, and whenever I see Edward Hopper’s picture Nighthawks, I think of that coffee shop. Even during the day, it had that brooding, hopeless quality, of conversations not started because, even if she said something, there was nothing to say. Very early in the morning, the harsh smell of the coffee coiled itself into that apartment and slowly browned the old copies of Newsweek and the Asia Times.
In those days I never ate at home. We certainly never cooked at T——’s. We went to the Knickerbocker, down on University Place, or a restaurant whose name I’ve forgotten at One Fifth Avenue, or to the Blue Bar at the Algonquin, where we pretended it was nineteen forty-five. There was a restaurant we liked on Seventy-second Street above a flower stall where we always ordered the butterflied pan-roasted chicken breast, something I’ve never eaten or made since, and a French restaurant on Broadway which has had a dozen incarnations since then: it’s one of those haunted New York corners where restaurants cannot flourish, a culinary Bermuda Triangle, and any ship that pulls up there capsizes, with no survivors. Sometimes we went to the Indian restaurants down on Sixth Street that my daughter has recently discovered; they’re still there, just a little more expensive, the smell of cumin and curry wafting up through the grates. One of those restaurants was supposedly better than the others, but
the joke was that it was all the same kitchen, smoking down under First Avenue in a cul-de-sac of the subway, that subterranean landscape where any kind of enterprise flourished. You could get your shoes shined and buy a bunch of roses, and you still can.
The first great restaurant-going epoch of my life was in 1963, when I ate once a week with my parents in a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan near the 125th Street IRT overpass. I was about four. Because soon after that my sister and brother were born, we moved out of the city, and became a family that almost never ate out (the economics of this were opaque to me then), that cramped restaurant, in its halo of fragrant steam, the Day-Glo ducks hanging in the window, remained with me. Eating out was in its way more private than eating at home, where even the chairs knew you. That it was the last moment I had my parents’ attention to myself is a thought that has only recently occurred to me. I always ordered the same thing: ten different ingredient soup. Tiny shrimp, slivers of chicken, and shreds of orange pork floated in the magic broth, along with tiny white squares of—what? It was more than a decade before I saw it again, floating in a particularly gruesome meal at the college co-op, where good cooking meant tossing every bit of refuse into a stockpot that simmered endlessly on the stove: tofu. After that, it was like looking up a word in the dictionary—bean curd, at least in Cambridge in the seventies, turned up everywhere. But there was a Spanish restaurant, on Boylston Street, where I was taught how to eat black squid in ink sauce, and prawns … That restaurant is closed too, and the street has another name.
An Enlarged Heart Page 10