Feast Your Eyes

by Myla Goldberg

  The manager at Remming’s didn’t like the gap in my waitressing resumé, but I happened to appear on a day he was short-handed, so he gave me a try. It feels equally strange and familiar to be back at a restaurant. If my younger self and I were somehow to meet, I have a feeling the girl working lunches eight years ago on Madison would admire the photographer I’ve become but wouldn’t know what to make of the woman; and I’d certainly see right through how “modern” that girl was pretending to be. Really, Deb, it’s a wonder you had anything to do with me at first, but I’m so grateful that you did.

  From home to the restaurant is a forty-minute walk, an hour if I take pictures as I go. Each week, I choose a different route. I use Monday and Tuesday to get to know the streets, and by Wednesday I know what to look for. I noticed the Lacuna Gallery the first Monday I walked down St. John’s Place, which is otherwise all grimy brick row houses and stray cats; but I didn’t go in until Thursday, when its door burst open and a ball of brown curly hair wearing red cat’s-eye glasses came running out to introduce herself. Her name was Nina Pagano, she’d been watching me all week, and she couldn’t stand waiting any longer to see if I’d come in.

  59. Christmas tree, Brooklyn, 1962

  The picture is accurate, since it was usually boys who set Christmas trees on fire, but Kaja and I tried it once. Ambitious girls that we were, we picked a tree doubly taller and wider than ourselves, which had been left at the curb for the garbage truck. To avoid fighting over who got to ignite it once we’d dragged it into the street, we lit our matches at the same time. Back then, setting old Christmas trees on fire was as venerable a tradition as sitting on Santa’s lap at Germaine’s, but this was the only time I was up close and personal when one caught. The noise and the heat took me by surprise, and for the first of many times in my life I was afraid I’d taken things too far. But the smell was incredible: wet and sweet and so thick and heavy that when I put my nose to my shirt a month later, the scent was strong enough to bring back Kaja’s tree-side rendition of Ella Fitzgerald singing “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.”

  The tree in this picture is bigger than ours was, but then again so are the budding pyromaniacs, their silhouettes black against the blaze.

  GRETE WASHINGTON: For more than one year after she gave it to me, I kept the address of Lillian’s parents in the drawer beside my bed. At first I told myself this was in the event of some terrible emergency, but in that case I would have written this number into my address book and thrown away the paper long ago. You see, my parents lived almost four thousand miles away in Braås, and while we never got along very nicely, I was sad to think they had not met Kaja and perhaps never would. Such was my thought each time I saw the piece of paper inside my drawer. This is why on Christmas I wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Walter Preston in Cleveland, Ohio, which was not even five hundred miles away, to share with them Lillian’s address and phone number, and to tell them of the lovely seven-year-old girl who happened also to be their granddaughter.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, DECEMBER 1962: The phone rang on a Sunday, near seven-thirty. I almost didn’t answer because I was helping you into your pajamas, but since the only person who ever called was Grete, and she knew this was your bedtime, I picked up just in case. “Lilly?” a woman’s voice said in a quiet, careful way that made me catch my breath. When I said, “Mother?” the voice on the other end began to cry. “Oh, Lilly,” your grandmother said. “It is so good to hear your voice.” By this time you’d stopped brushing your teeth to stare at my face, which had twisted into an odd combination of alarm and relief.

  My first thought was that something had happened to your grandfather, but after your grandmother assured me of everyone’s health, she explained that for years she had despaired of finding me, since letters sent to my old address on East 6th had come back stamped Address Unknown. “Until,” she explained, “your friend’s Christmas letter arrived like a gift from an angel.” I was angry with Grete for a heartbeat, but it was silly to stay that way. Your grandmother and I didn’t talk long, phone calls being so awfully expensive. She only asked questions she knew she’d like the answers to, which was anything to do with you. What color eyes and hair did you have? What games did you like? Were you shy? What grade were you in? If she sent a box of oatmeal cookies, should they have raisins or chocolate chips? Could she call again next Sunday and talk to you?

  After seven years of just me, you were quite surprised to learn you had grandparents, but you accepted that we had “fallen out of touch” with the grace of any child too young to absorb more than a simple answer to a complicated question. I showed you an old family photo, and your eyes grew wide. “This is your grandmother,” I said, pointing to the smiling woman in the flowered dress standing on the white porch of a white house, “and this is your grandfather,” pointing to the proud man in the three-piece suit standing beside her. “Who’s that?” you asked, pointing to the serious girl in the plaid skirt and knee socks standing between them. “That’s me,” I said, and your eyes practically fell out of your head. Until that moment, I don’t think it had occurred to you that I was once a little girl.

  When your grandmother called the following Sunday, you told her your favorite animal (monkeys, of course), your favorite ice cream flavor (Rocky Road), and sang her the chorus of “Hit the Road Jack” before it was time to hang up. Your grandfather didn’t come to the phone, but your grandmother passed along his good wishes, which is more than I ever thought we’d receive.

  60. Hands (Nina talking), Brooklyn, 1963

  Even without the picture, those hands would be hard to forget. Whenever Nina was speaking, which was most of the time, her hands flapped like birds pinned to the ends of her arms, the right-hand bird somehow managing to flap without ever dropping the cigarette it was holding.

  In a double whammy of good fortune, I met Nina around the same time that Grandma invited Lillian and I to visit her and Grandpa in the summer. The first time Nina appeared, she brought Chinese takeout. The only restaurant food Lillian brought home was the occasional overdone steak that a customer had sent back. Nina’s first appearance in the middle of February with strange flat-bottomed containers filled with chicken chow mein and egg foo young felt like a visit from a skinny, chain-smoking, seasonally dyslexic female Santa Claus of exotic foods.

  While she and Lillian looked at photographs, I ate. Nina was around Lillian’s age but wasn’t married and didn’t have kids, so she felt more to me like a big sister. I could tell she laughed at my barf and fart jokes not to be polite but because she thought they were actually funny. This doesn’t say much for her sense of humor, but when she called me Sammo, it felt gratifying even before I knew about Groucho or Zeppo. Nina tickled me, and read me stories using funny voices, and always brought Chinese, which never stopped tasting like magic, and from the middle of second grade to the last half of fourth, I loved her.

  LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, FEBRUARY 1963: I didn’t know what to make of Nina in the beginning. She’s always so terribly excited about things that she comes across as a phony, but stick around and you realize that she means every word. A conversation with her can be exhausting, but her interest in everything combines with her enormous intelligence to make it a pleasant sort of fatigue.

  I wasn’t sure of her motives at first. She clearly liked the photos, but anyone could see she was lonely. However, one nice thing about Nina is that you can be on the level with her, so I simply asked if she wanted to represent me or be my friend, and she convinced me it was perfectly reasonable for her to be both.

  The Lacuna Gallery used to be a tailor’s shop. Nina calls the old dressmaker’s dummy next to her desk her silent partner, but actually she uses the storefront in exchange for managing the two upstairs apartments. I get the impression that her neighbors on the block appreciate her rather less than I do. Though Nina’s opinions about women and art and everything else are pretty strong for South Brooklyn, she would have fit right in with our old Tuesday-night crowd.

 
; Considering everything you’ve said about San Francisco, it makes perfect sense that the spirit of East Sixth is alive and well on Waller Street. (It’s nice of you to invite me to your weekly potluck, by the way, but unless it decides to move east, you shouldn’t expect me anytime soon.) I’m so glad the Poetical Theater’s production of your poem cycle in the park was a success! I’m glad you miss the snow, and no, I won’t send you some. If you want a snowball, you’ll just have to come back and make one for yourself.

  61. Grete and Kaja in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 1963

  The day Lillian took this one, she wasn’t even being a photographer, which is to say that she had her camera, but her finger wasn’t tyrannizing the shutter release. People seem impressed that, in the age of three-martini lunches and thirty-five-cent cigarettes, my mother didn’t smoke or drink, but if you ask me, she wasn’t loftier or purer than anyone else; it was just that a cocktail or a Pall Mall would have gotten in the way. This picture happened on an afternoon when Lillian and Grete were walking Kaja and me back from Mrs. Ardolini’s. I’ve since realized that Mrs. Ardolini got paid to look after children between the end of school and when their parents got off work, but at the time I thought she was just a lady who didn’t mind having lots of kids at her place while she smoked Winstons in her green BarcaLounger. Kaja and I had convinced our moms to make a park detour so that we could practice our flying technique on the ratty playground swings. Until recently, we’d been allowed to hit the playground on our own, but that had stopped when the South Brooklyn Boys and the Untouchable Bishops started hashing out their differences with baseball bats and car antennas up and down the park.

  The instant Kaja saw the tree, she ran over and started climbing. Unlike me, who had to be lifted onto any limb higher than my waistband, Kaja could climb everything. Lillian caught Kaja balancing on that branch as if confident the air will hold her up. Grete is less convinced, and voilà, Michelangelo’s famous ceiling, slightly revised: large white hand almost but not quite touches small dark ankle.

  When Nina first came over to discuss a gallery show, she didn’t know about the pictures of Lillian and me. My mother’s street photos covered all the available kitchen surfaces, along with the steamer trunk we used as a coffee table, and our few chairs and the sofa, leaving us to sit on the floor, eating dinner off our laps. Grete and Kaja in Prospect Park was one of ten photos Nina got excited about. If Lillian had known the people in the other nine, she would have asked for their permission, too, but she didn’t, so Grete and Kaja were it.

  When Grete declined, Kaja started yelling that she wanted to be in the show. The floors of our apartment were old, and the wood was coming away from whatever subfloor it was supposed to be fastened to, so each time Kaja stomped her foot in protest, the room shook a little, like we were sitting on a parquet trampoline. I was so used to Kaja getting everything—grace, charm, a father on alternate weekends, a mother who knew how to cook, a free ride to the cool Quaker school—that I felt too secretly gratified to act offended on her behalf.

  GRETE WASHINGTON: Mainly I feared for Kaja’s safety. Life in that neighborhood was not easy. Below Third Street was not safe for her, and even the blocks along President were not so good. Of course, there was risk wherever Kaja and I were seen together. Our block was mixed, with whites and Puerto Ricans living as neighbors. People were friendly, and because we were quiet, the people with opinions were quiet also, but maybe you can see why I did not want to call extra attention to us with the photograph.

  Please do not think, because of this, that I predicted what would happen. After Nina saw the photographs of Samantha, I also thought what a beautiful idea to include them in the show. You must understand, this was not the MoMA or some other big museum. This was only one small gallery on a small street, where people looking for a tailor still came to the door with suit jackets for mending.

  I do not think Nina saw the future any more clearly than I did, but following the exhibition, she thought only of herself. I can explain it this way: no matter where a white mother and her black daughter went, people stared. The stares in Washington Square Park might have been kinder than the stares in South Brooklyn, but a person who stared to make a show of their acceptance used Kaja and myself in the same way as a person who stared to make a show of their contempt. True acceptance does not stare, because true acceptance sees nothing to stare at. To both kinds of people, Kaja and I were a symbol.

  I must tell you, it is very tiring to be a symbol. Good symbol or bad, it is tiring all the same. From the moment of her birth, Kaja and I had no choice in this matter, but Lillian and Samantha became a symbol only because Nina turned them into one.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, MAY 1963: When I showed Nina our photos later that night, it was as a friend. I wasn’t thinking of the Lacuna show. Not because I considered our photos any less important or serious: if anything, I take them more seriously because they belong only to us! Nina, however, can be quite convincing. Though she was passionate on the importance of showing women and girls through female eyes, I was more persuaded by the look that crossed her face before she said a single word.

  I put the question to you as neutrally as I could. You’re young, but being eight is not like being a baby, as you often remind me, and you’re certainly at an age where you can hold and defend your own opinions. When I told you that Nina was interested in showing our photos, your face lit up. “Does that mean I get to be in the show?” you asked, and clapped your hands. Only if you want to be, I explained, which made you laugh. “Why wouldn’t I?” you asked. Well, I said, for one thing, it would mean people seeing pictures of you naked. “Mama,” you said, rolling your eyes, “I’m only a little girl.”

  62. Exhibition announcement, “Brooklyn Lives, Photographs by Lillian Preston, Lacuna Gallery,” 1963, with reproduction of Diner

  The day after second grade ended, Lillian and I took the subway to Grand Central, where we boarded the Cleveland Limited, an overnight train ride that was the most exciting experience of my eight-year-old life. My seat reclined. There was a car filled with couches and round tables, and a car that was a restaurant, and a car with doors that opened onto little cabins with bunk beds inside. For as long as it was light out, I looked through the window at all the trees and rivers and bridges and houses and roads and cars, a world that, for me, had only technically existed until that moment. I waved maniacally at every kid in every backyard I passed, and some of them waved back. When it got too dark to see out, I played Go Fish with Lillian until way past my bedtime, the rocking rhythm of the rails making it feel like everything was exactly as it was meant to be.

  Precocious girl that I was, I shouldn’t have been surprised that the grandparents waiting at Union Terminal were not the smooth-skinned, sparkly-eyed specimens from the photograph, but older, cautious-looking types with sagging faces. This, however, did not slow the stampede of my love for the tidy house on Fernvale and those tidy people, especially Grandpa Walt, whose maleness in my maleless world trumped even Grandma Dot’s sit-down meals with folded napkins.

  When Lillian gave them a copy of the notice for the Lacuna show, my grandparents eyed it like food they weren’t sure was safe to eat. Well, isn’t this something, Grandma said. Grandpa nodded and added that it was good to have a hobby. I told them they should come, that there were going to be pictures of me. To which Grandma smiled and remarked, How nice, and Lillian said nothing, and that was that.

  Not that I was paying much attention: I’d just ridden a train. I was staying in a house with a staircase that led to more of the same house instead of connecting downstairs and upstairs apartments. When Grandma took me grocery shopping—in her car—she filled a shopping cart with three times as much food as Lillian and I ever bought at one time. Grandpa taught me how to ride Lillian’s old bike, which I was allowed to do in the street, which was wide and quiet. When I was done, I could leave the bike on the lawn, and no one would take it. Every afternoon at three-thirty, Grandma and I sat at the kitchen table with a pi
ece of homemade apple spice cake to look for birds in the many trees outside her kitchen window. At five, Grandma would start cooking. At six, Grandpa would come home from work. Dinner was at six-fifteen. There was always a tablecloth, meat, and dessert.

  We were supposed to stay a week. The morning before the date on our return tickets, Grandma asked if we wanted to stay longer. Lillian said she had to get back to work; plus there was the show to get ready for. Grandma said that even if Lillian had to go, I was welcome to stay if it was all right with her and if I wanted to. My mother said I was too little to ride the train by myself. Grandpa agreed and explained that was why they’d send me home by plane, at which point I was smiling so wide that my face muscles hurt the next day. And that was how I spent my first summer in Ohio.

  Everyone being so happy to see each other made it easy to treat our whole eight-year separation as some sort of fluke, what with Grandma touching my head like she couldn’t believe I was real, and Grandpa telling knock-knock jokes while I helped him sand and paint his model planes. At no time that summer did I consider the one-sidedness of the Grandma-didn’t-know-where-to-send-a-letter scenario. It didn’t take a Sherlock to observe that the porch in the old family photo featuring girl Lillian was the same porch that Grandma and I were sitting on to drink lemonade and read the funnies: meaning, Watson, that even though my grandparents hadn’t known where to find my mother those many years, my mother had known exactly where to find them.

  But why dwell? I was eight. For the first time in my life, I belonged to a family I could count on more than two fingers. Besides, I wasn’t the only one not asking questions.