by Rebecca Dana
The first night I came home to Crown Heights, I tucked my iPod into my handbag for the walk home—all the better to hear my attacker as he crept up behind me, ether-soaked rag in hand. Once I did this, every sound immediately seemed threatening. Every person, by extension, seemed even more like a predator. I had moved to a neighborhood where, if you looked out through squinting eyes, everyone appeared to be a comic book villain. The Jews were all cloaked in black. There was a less than wholesome crowd perpetually lingering outside Liquor Store, and down the street was a dog kennel, whose employees always seemed to choose odd hours for loading and unloading crates of pit bulls from a dented white van. That first night, I had made it halfway home, my heart pounding in my ears, my fingers pinched together (all the better to jam into the eyeballs of an attacker, per the security expert), when my calm gave out. I sprinted the rest of the way home, in nonapproved ultra-high heels.
The next night was a modest improvement—I made it one more block before running—and on night three, I tried a different tack. I kept my headphones on. Jay-Z was playing when I left the subway, and Jay-Z walked me home. Midway, the loud barking of a pit bull interrupted the trance of Hova, and I jumped in fear. But instead of sprinting, I started rapping along.
She got an ass that’ll swallow up a g-string
And up top, uh, two bee stings
I rapped these verses like I was trying to scare away bears in the forest. I rapped them like a white girl with less than no chance of having sickle cell anemia. I did this every night from then on, and somehow, no doubt in spite of my fresh beats, not because of them, I managed not to be killed.
Mornings were generally better, but not by much. One lovely Wednesday shortly after I moved in, around nine a.m., I was walking to the subway with my headphones in, music blaring, dressed in what for me was pretty traditional work wear: knee-high boots, leather leggings, a short black shift that fell somewhere around my upper thigh, with a prim little green plaid button-up shirt underneath and a simple blazer on top. This was one of my favorite outfits. It emphasized my height and gave me the sort of confidence only a favorite outfit can give—that last-ditch feeling of presence in the world, when the one thing keeping you upright is your clothes. The music in my headphones was loud but not loud enough to entirely drown out a guttural scream from across the street. It couldn’t possibly be directed at me, I figured, so I kept walking. But the scream grew louder. I took out one earbud.
“Where’s your dress!”
That’s what it sounded like at least. I scanned the sidewalk. Crown Street had a gentle dusting of fall leaves. The sky was bright blue and the air was clear. It was a brisk, lovely fall day. The brownstones that lined the street were stately, and if you didn’t look closely at all the signs warning of Moshiach’s imminent return, this could have been the set of The Cosby Show. It was an idyllic New York morning.
My eyes ran along the horizon until I saw him—a tiny furious member of the tsnius police, maybe five foot four. He had a long salt-and-pepper beard, wore a black hat and black coat and jabbed an index finger high into the perfect fall air.
“Where’s your dress! Where’s your dress!”
I looked down at my legs. My “dress,” such as it was, was peeping out maybe a half inch beneath the bottom seam of my blazer. It was demonstrably there, right on my body, but somehow I didn’t think that kind of logic would prevail.
I kept walking. He kept screaming. It was four blocks to the subway, and he shouted the whole time. If I hadn’t already felt like a charred nub of former life, I would have curled up and died. The entire neighborhood—all the mothers out on the streets, all the little boys scuttling off to yeshiva, all the men buying donuts at the kosher grocery store on Kingston Avenue—turned and stared at me. I could sing at night to fend off the rapists, but I found myself powerless in the face of sheer scorn.
First came the wave of indignation. Who do these people think they are? This is America! I’m a woman! I’m free and independent, and what’s more, this dress is Diane von Furstenberg—hello?
“Where’s your dress!”
I took it as established fact that every female member of the Crown Heights Lubavitch community was horribly oppressed and every male was not only an oppressor but also a lout. I’d collected my Susan B. Anthony coins as a proper Ellis girl. I’d read my Steinem. Hell, I once tracked down Shulamith Firestone, the radical feminist who advocated a “smile boycott” on the theory that even a woman’s most basic expression of pleasure had been co-opted into merely a device for flirtation, designed to titillate men. (She lived in a brownstone on East 11th Street, and she didn’t answer the doorbell when I rang, with hopes of interviewing her about Sarah Palin.) The point here is that I considered myself a feminist. I was the daughter of a feminist. My teachers had been feminists, and my peers, male and female, were feminists as well. If there was one thing I could recognize, it was oppression.
“Where’s your dress!”
I saw oppression without even looking, really—since I was afraid to make eye contact—in the frumpy dresses and crooked wigs of the women of Crown Heights. In the way they walked around pushing double-, triple-, quadruple-baby strollers, kids hanging off them, all wrinkles and flab and bone-deep exhaustion. I’d felt this oppression vicariously when I layered on every item of clothing I had and ventured into Mea She’arim to spend the oven-hot July afternoon sweating buckets under my skirts.
I saw oppression in frumpy clothes because in beautiful clothes I saw freedom. I would not be exaggerating even a little—and in fact I’d probably be lowballing it—to say that if I could have back all the minutes in my life I’ve spent thinking about how I look, it would be enough time to earn a Ph.D. I’m vain. Not cripplingly so. Not to the point where I can’t get away from the mirror or where I don’t eat anything or where I lose all perspective entirely and believe vanity is a virtue. I’m vain, and it’s not great, but that’s what it is. Part of this vanity comes from a genuine love of fashion, which at its best really is a virtuous thing. A hand-stitched Gucci leather satchel made by trained artisans in Italy is hardly just a sack for carting around lip gloss and gum. A coat by Alexander McQueen is art. To wear these things is not just to feel fancy but also to feel joined, however superficially, to something beautiful. What you put on your body is not so different from what you put in your body or cram into your brain. It’s an assertion of an individual self. The items in your closet may not be terribly rare—there are lots of Gucci handbags in the world and lots more T-shirts from the Gap—but it’s all in how you put them together. An obituary made up of lines from other obituaries is still something materially new, and an outfit made from mass-produced items of clothing is distinct and consequential too. I don’t mean to get too highfalutin here: Fashion is ultimately just a lot of stuff. But I love stuff. I’m a girl in America in the twenty-first century, and, damn it, a pretty dress makes me feel alive.
So where was my dress? Here was my dress, under my blazer and over my leggings, which, yeah, were made of leather for no other reason than because it looks good. Put that in your shofar and blow it!
I managed to live in Crown Heights for weeks before making eye contact with a single woman on the street, which was easy enough since I avoided them and they avoided me. “Oppressed,” I thought as we passed each other. “Whore,” they thought—or I thought for them. It wasn’t a great feeling, being such an obvious interloper, but there’s always been comfort for me in playing the outcast. I read my primer in feminism and thought of myself as a feminist in the broadest sense, but I wanted nothing to do with the feminist movement just as I wanted nothing to do with Girl Scouts or organized religion or doubles tennis in high school. I didn’t run off and campaign for Barack Obama like half the people I knew, and I didn’t move to Williamsburg and dress like a hipster, and I never went to college football games or joined Tumblr or played for the Wall Street Journal softball team. I wanted no consciousness of membership in any class, and if sometimes th
at meant feeling ostracized, fine. I thought of myself as a smooth cylinder with no real parts for joining, not like a puzzle piece or a strip of Velcro. You can put a cylinder next to other objects and there can be closeness, even connection, but if you really got down to it, in my view we were all just glasses in a cupboard, separate and distinct. When you’re lonely as a kid, as I was, this is one way of making sense of the world. Over time, it grew into a protective shield; and it’s turned out to be a really swell defense mechanism, wonderful for getting over breakups, since you can just remind yourself you’ve always been in it alone. Whether this is a terrific way of going through life is another question.
At the moment, the questions I was asking instead were: Which designer will make Michelle Obama’s dress for the White House state dinner honoring Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh? Who will replace Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America? On a scale of one to ten, how much did you love Proenza Schouler’s fall collection, because I would say, like, eight? I spent my workdays researching these issues and writing up articles with what I found. My feeling was that these were all good questions. My efforts to answer them gave some people a few minutes of entertaining reading, and maybe on occasion even made them laugh, and that that was a worthwhile-enough thing to do.
It was a relief to get to Manhattan, to these worthwhile-enough pursuits, after my run-in with the tsnius police, and I put off coming back to Crown Heights for as long as possible. The glorious fall morning had turned into a blustery night by the time I got back, and a strong wind pushed me south on Kingston Avenue. I leaned backward, straining to stay upright, rapping quietly under my breath and avoiding eye contact.
At some point, I felt a heavy object graze my right ear.
I froze, my pulse racing: The long-anticipated assault was finally here! Despite years of warning, I was ill prepared. No sneakers, no whistle, no introductory-level jujitsu. All I had to lean back on was Jay-Z in my ear and a lingering indifference to life itself.
I looked behind me, expecting to face the villain: a gang of hoodlums or maybe a caped evildoer. Instead I saw a fat Lubavitcher teen cursing the heavens. I looked forward and saw his black felt hat skipping down the street, carried by the wind. Without thinking, I took off after it, sprinting down Kingston Avenue in my heels and my leggings and my too-short Diane von Furstenberg shift. I looked back for a moment and saw the yeshiva bocher waddling after me.
A block later, I caught up to the hat and tried to trap it under the right toe of my boot. In doing so, I lost my balance and skidded to the ground, where I landed on the brim of the hat and skinned my left knee on the pavement, tearing my legging and scraping skin. But I had the hat. I held it up at the boy, who huffed and puffed his way over, grabbed it and then scuttled away without looking at me. My heart was pounding in my ears. It was a nice reminder the thing still worked.
I got up, dusted myself off and began to make my way home. I heard footsteps coming up behind me and turned to see a young rabbi with short curly hair and a long red beard. He introduced himself as Yitzhak.
“I saw what you did,” he said. “That was very kind.”
“Oh, um, thanks,” I said, looking down at my knee.
“Are you new to the neighborhood?”
“Yes.”
“And how do you find it?”
“Different,” I said and then, feeling guilty, added, “nice.”
He smiled.
“Are you Jewish?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Only, not very.”
“Not very is enough.”
He gave me his telephone number and invited me to join him and his family for shabbas.
I pictured Yitzhak’s house on shabbas. Did his poor, bedraggled wife spend the day slaving over a hot stove while half a dozen children under the age of four ran around screaming? Did they look at each other like strangers across the table, since his thoughts were devoted to God and hers were confined to housework and babies? Did they collapse of exhaustion in separate beds as soon as the last wailing infant was coaxed to sleep? What did they talk about? Were they happy?
You meet a new person, and within seconds, you tell yourself a story of his life. I knew nothing about Yitzhak and his wife, and I knew nothing about the domestic customs of the Lubavitcher community in Crown Heights. If I’d just passed him on the street on a regular day, I’d have taken him for one more religious nut. If he’d struck up a conversation, I’d have assumed he was just trying to save another sinner, rack up one more point on the big Lubavitcher scoreboard of Jews. But in the moment, none of the familiar story lines seemed to fit. I said good-bye to Yitzhak, and as I watched him make his way in the direction of home, I felt the wind blow straight through my body, as if I weren’t there. I was cold and alone, and it was midnight, and I was on a street corner in Crown Heights, where absolutely no one wanted me to be. My knee hurt. My outfit was ruined. I was tired of fighting. Yitzhak had been so kind, I felt myself wishing him a happy life. So as I trudged home, I wrote him a different story. I imagined his house, warm and cozy, the dining room lit by candles, pots heating up on the stove. His rosy-cheeked children were asleep in their beds. His wife, played in my mind by British actress Emily Blunt, was kind and bright-eyed and full of vim. Underneath her shapeless clothes was a bodacious figure, and when he looked at her, he thought, “You are everything to me.”
I never went over for shabbas, never met his kids or his wife, and never saw Yitzhak again. But I think often of their family, or my imaginary version of it, because it was in that moment that I discovered a brand-new category of New York City fantasy. It was the first time I imagined that a family might be a nice thing to have.
What’s great about wanting clothes or party invitations or pretty hair is that those desires simplify life. You walk by a window and look in and say, “That’s me.” But looking a certain way only makes you look a certain way, when the genuine longing is within: for the confidence that is the real source of beauty or the calm that actually makes a person cool. In that moment, what I wanted was to feel like I was a solid presence on the planet, a barrier to the wind. And it wasn’t a matter of replacing my leggings or buying a heavier coat. I wanted the warm house and the soup on the stove and even, so help me God, the babes in their beds—only I didn’t want that particularly either. What I wanted was the essence of it, running like marrow through my bones.
You meet a new person and tell yourself a story about him, except it turns out the stories are never about anyone else. They are always about you.
The Jilted-Lady Beat
I hate the holidays. I might have loved the holidays if I were Yitzhak with three precious kiddies and Emily Blunt waiting for me at home. But I was me, and all I had back at the apartment were an irritable rabbi, twelve still-packed boxes of clothes and mounting evidence of a mouse problem. Holidays for most people are an exciting opportunity to gather with loved ones in front of the family hearth, to exchange gifts, to argue and to realize how truly fantastic your regular life is, because, if nothing else, at some point the holidays end and you get to return to it. For me, they conjured less warm feelings. As a kid, I spent the holidays in my bedroom, mostly, watching Christmas movies on television and wishing I were at school. More recently, Chad had used them as an opportunity to suggest desired physical and behavioral improvements. One year, for my birthday, he got me a yoga mat and the entrance fee for a single yoga class. Another year, for our anniversary, I got an espresso machine he’d really been wanting and a quick lesson in how to make him a cappuccino. For our last Hanukkah together, I’d given him a leather jacket, and he’d given me a paperback book called 834 Kitchen Quick Tips, with the price cut out of the back cover. “Some people are just bad at gift giving,” I would tell myself in lieu of considering the larger implications. I didn’t want to be one of those girls who cared too much about material things, so I just pretended not to be hurt.
Thanksgiving has always been my one pleasurable day in this otherwise dismal season be
cause Thanksgiving, like marijuana and pregnancy, is a free pass to overeat. I am a serious, rapturous, almost religious consumer of food, and if I hadn’t inherited my father’s metabolism, I would be the size of a Mack truck. It’s never fun to get too psychological about one’s excesses, because dissecting a pleasure inevitably diminishes it. But it’s true that on the many long afternoons and evenings I spent in my room as a child, I consumed an enormous quantity of Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream. For breakfast in the mornings, I ate two chocolate-covered Entenmann’s doughnuts, and for dinner at night I sometimes ate two more. The weeks after my breakup were the first and last times I was unable to eat.
“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” said the supermodel Kate Moss when asked by a journalist for her personal motto.
“I am always either guilty or hungry,” said human coat hanger Helen Gurley Brown, the great feminist and founder of Cosmopolitan.
“I’ll eat when I’m dead,” said Daphne Guinness, the beer heiress.
“You need to learn that sugar is not nourishment,” says Madeleine, who once climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and probably loves the taste of kale.