Feast Your Eyes

by Myla Goldberg

  JOURNAL ENTRY, JULY 1963: Your grandfather is thicker around the middle, and he and your grandmother have wrinkles where none were before. Your grandfather wears bifocals now, which he trades for a separate pair of magnifying eyeglasses to work on his planes. The house has been repainted, and there is new carpet in the entry. I was prepared for my room to have been converted into any number of things—a sewing room, a guest room, a second study—so it came as a surprise to find it unchanged. All my books and posters, all the random childhood objects—my souvenir pop bottles, my clay dog, my matching plush kittens—were pristine after ten years of your grandmother’s faithful dusting. I was surrounded by signs that time had stood still, yet there you were, asleep on the cot your grandfather had set up beside my childhood bed.

  It’s almost funny how desperately curious and fearful your grandparents are regarding our New York life. They clearly can’t fathom how a woman can raise a child on her own without dying of starvation or embarrassment. While the truth (hard work, stubbornness, overwhelming love for you) might have put them a little at ease, I refused to answer a question they couldn’t bring themselves to ask. Luckily, you were an excellent distraction; and once you were asleep, we filled the time discussing the changes in the neighborhood, and the policemen and plumbers and clerks and lawyers who had married my high school girlfriends, until we could make an early show of yawning in order to retreat to our rooms without seeming too eager.

  Awkward as it sometimes was for the rest of us, Squirrel, for you it is simple. You love it all—the green and the quiet, the uncluttered rooms and the unchanging schedule—and of course you love your grandparents, who love you back with a ferocity that makes it easier for me to overlook the rest.

  Despite my gratitude for the various combinations of kindness and generosity and forgetting that allowed us to visit, I was looking forward to going home when your grandmother made her unexpected offer. As soon as I saw your face, I knew it would be cruel not to let you stay. And why not, when staying means a mattress with a ruffled bed skirt and matching curtains in a bedroom twice the size of our shared one at home; a grandmother to show you the city; and a grandfather who reads to you from the same Hans Christian Andersen book he once read to me, with the same character voices that made me forget where I was until “The End” brought me back to his lap.

  Your absence means darkroom time to print my photos exactly as I’d like for the Lacuna show without relying on my prescription, but the apartment is empty without you. When I look around, I worry that you’ll be disappointed with the home you’re returning to. Grete teases me about this. She’s used to a daughter who travels between two worlds that are no less different for being at opposite ends of a subway line. Grete is right, of course, because each Sunday when you telephone, you ask me questions—Is it hot? When you get back, can we go to Coney Island? Can Kaja sleep over? Is Mr. Fanelli opening up the hydrant with his special key?—that show me all the ways you look forward to coming back. Then there was your excitement describing the shopping trip to Higbee’s with your grandmother, and the new dress that you insist on keeping a surprise until the night of the gallery opening. I can’t wait to see you in it.

  “The Samantha Series”

  * * *

  63. Samantha’s tattoo, Brooklyn, 1959

  “Brooklyn Lives, photographed by Lillian Preston” opened at the Lacuna Gallery on September 14, 1963. My dress was white organdy and taffeta, with a blue embroidered Peter Pan collar, blue embroidered birds on the front, a blue velvet ribbon at the waist, and remains the fanciest piece of clothing I have ever owned. It was a summer dress, and Lillian warned me I would be cold, but I didn’t care. I spent that whole evening rubbing my hands up and down my goosebumped arms as I stood at the back wall where my photos were arranged in chronological order, starting with Samantha’s tattoo and ending with Sleepwalker. Grinning like a maniac, I waited for people to ask for my autograph. My mother had told me gallery openings didn’t work that way, but I was ready, just in case.

  Photographs have an annoying habit of corroding whatever real memories you have of a moment until the photo is all that’s left, but with Samantha’s tattoo I can still feel the tip of that Magic Marker pressing against my stomach. I’m in my underwear because it’s hot. I’m sitting upside down on the couch because that way it’s easier for me to draw the monster so it’s right side up when I look down at it. It’s a big monster because the marker feels so excellently cool and wet on my skin. My belly button is supposed to be it winking. My underwear is supposed to be its hat.

  Lillian could have cropped this into a photo of a cute kid doodling on her belly, but that isn’t the point. The point is that the couch is a swamp of books, toys, and newspapers, and our makeshift coffee table is a dirty-dish graveyard. The monster I’m scribbling onto my upside-down half-naked self is basically the room’s spirit animal. Lillian meant for the shot to be both a little funny and a little alarming, and she succeeded. As I think I mentioned, she wasn’t the world’s best housekeeper. But even back in the bad old 1950s, crummy housekeeping or letting your kid draw on herself was not against the law.

  So there I stood under my photos, waiting to be famous. Grete and Kaja showed up with paper and pen to ask for my John Hancock, but mostly I was bored. Proud but bored. Not many people came. The ones who did mostly stuck by Nina and Lillian, except for a few passersby who looked like they were from the neighborhood. I watched them, trying to figure out what they thought. Nina had told me that anyone who really liked the photos could buy them, giving me ideas about owning a bicycle like the one I’d ridden in Cleveland; but Lillian had advised me not to hold my breath. Still, when one lady stood looking at my pictures for a long time, I decided to make my move.

  They’re for sale, you know, I said, tugging her arm. She looked down at me, wide-eyed, her nose twitching. Is that you in these . . . pictures? she asked. Sure is, lady, I gloated, and you can buy as many as you want.

  For a second before walking out, she stared at me, her nostrils flaring like I was a bad smell. After she was gone, Nina sidled over and asked me what I’d said. When I told her, she laughed and said next time to leave the hard sell to her.

  During our phone interview, I kept expecting Nina to guess who I was the way Grete did, but she never recognized me. Then again, I wasn’t the first person Nina had talked to about herself and Lillian. Nina has cameos in a bunch of documentaries, and her name is in the index of any self-respecting textbook about art history or women’s studies or First Amendment issues. Which probably explains why she sounded so self-congratulatory on the phone.

  NINA PAGANO: At Pratt I spent my undergraduate years realizing I was talentless, but I partied with the studio-art crowd, and that was all it took for the Vitalists to be born. It was basically eight of us writing manifestos, sharing studio space, and boinking each other in various combinations. Being the historian of the group, I was there to get it all down. If anyone asked, I’d have said we were destroying the barrier between art and viewer; we were placing the goals of the collective above those of the individual. Then, in 1957, we graduated. Lorraine and Eric got hitched, lit out for Vermont, and started raising bees. John embraced the big ugly and started law school, and Susan married him so that she could embrace something big and ugly, too. That left Katherine, Gary, Milt, and me. We all debased ourselves at the same parties and bars; I watched them drag their portfolios to the same Tenth Street galleries. We all knew that Katherine’s stuff was the strongest but that Gary talked the better game. Guess who got a show? And then turned his back on everyone except Milt, who went and got a show of his derivative color-bar paintings with Stan Kohl after Katherine’s superior color-bar paintings had been nixed? The difference being that Milt had to talk jazz with Stan while matching him drink for drink at the bar, while Katherine had to leave the bar with Stan and go back to his apartment, which Milt did and Katherine did not. Well, that was my limit. Seeing Katherine get shafted made me want to shit on the whole e
stablishment, so that’s exactly what I did one night when a bunch of us were passing Milt’s second-rate paintings in the Kohl Gallery’s window after an otherwise undistinguished night of getting blotto around the corner. It had been the same big talk, big whiskey, and big laughs until I squatted in the middle of the sidewalk and yelled, Number two for number two. As the cold air kissed my bare ass, it got very quiet. After that, it was either leave town or start my own place.

  Manhattan, home to the art establishment I’d so eloquently rejected, was obviously out. Not to mention I was so broke that I couldn’t have covered a deposit or first and last month at any price. Besides, Brooklyn was my home turf. My pops knew a guy who needed a building manager for a place on St. John’s. The location was off the map, natch, but if I showed quality work that people had no chance to dig elsewhere, they’d have to start paying attention. Which they did, didn’t they?

  I wasn’t thinking of it as a women’s gallery. Start using labels and you seal yourself into smaller and smaller boxes until it’s just you in there. Plus, some see a label as asking for a favor. As in: Oh, Kind Sir, would you please spare a glance for Women’s Art, which needs your special attention? Not to say I wasn’t showing work by women artists, because I was, but that doesn’t mean I had to call it anything. It’s not like the Tenth Street places were calling themselves men’s art galleries, even though that’s exactly what they fucking were.

  It wasn’t until later that people started calling me a feminist. I’ve got no beef with that, but things smelled different back then; “feminist” still meant some chick in a long white dress, circa 1918, marching for her right to vote. Remember, The Feminine Mystique didn’t hit until 1963, and women’s lib came on four or five years after that. Now do the math: I opened the Lacuna in 1961. I was an underemployed, overeducated, underappreciated, overconfident art-school pain in the ass who wanted to give her friends a place where they could show their work. It just so happened that those friends were women. When I met Lil, I could see straight off that what she was doing with her camera was the real deal. So, naturally, I made her my friend.

  64. The Popsicle eaters, Brooklyn, 1960

  Again with the underwear? you ask. Well, again, it was hot. Summers in Brooklyn got pretty ugly, hence those old-timey photos of whole families sleeping on fire escapes, and wide-angle shots of people draped over every grain of sand at Coney Island. Hence children willing to expose their soft child parts to the bruisingly high-pressure water streams of popped fire hydrants. Let me tell you something: it was much easier to lie around in your underthings pressing a dripping Popsicle to your chest between licks, as demonstrated here by me, age five. Naturally, Lillian (camera engineered by Joe Kubiak) is sitting perfectly straight and dripless, hair neatly brushed, looking like she could be the doyenne of Popsicle etiquette at a finishing school if she happened to be wearing anything more than panties.

  LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, SEPTEMBER 1963: Nina kept handing me cups of Irish coffee and promising that things would pick up, but the sight of Sam grinning beside her portraits did a lot more to temper my disappointment. Back at the Little Gallery eight years ago, in what feels like another life, I accepted Manhattan and Mr. Stromlin’s connections and my circle of friends the way a child takes for granted all the pretty presents at her birthday party. By the time I left the Lacuna, only fifteen visitors had come and gone. Nina wanted me to stay through midnight, promising that the Saturday-night art crowd made Brooklyn their last stop, but I decided it was better to risk missing Mr. Stromlin than remain outnumbered by the faces on the wall.

  65. Bath, Brooklyn, 1960

  It looks like I’m floating. There I lie, arms outstretched, palms up, gazing beatifically at the ceiling, belly and thighs and toes peeking above the water. Depending who you ask, I look like a water nymph or a drowned corpse. Guess which one the newspapers went with? The whiteness of the water is hiding the upside-down cup that’s propping up my butt. The water’s white because I’d let the soap sit in it for a really long time in order to make “milkshakes.” The whiteness of the bathtub almost exactly matches the whiteness of the water, a happy coincidence Lillian wasn’t about to pass up.

  The first half of opening week was crushingly similar to the first half of any other week. I got up, went to school, then played at Mrs. Ardolini’s until Lillian brought me home. It was just like my mother had said: no autographs, no bicycle. Optimist that I was, I kept telling myself it was just a matter of time. In a way that involves yanking optimism into a back alley and kicking its teeth in, I was absolutely right.

  Maybe it was the twitchy woman I offended with my sales pitch, or maybe it was someone else, but that Thursday Lillian didn’t come for me at Mrs. Ardolini’s when she was supposed to. Which was fine, because that meant getting to invent bonus accidents for the Judy Splinters doll Kaja and I were torturing in Mrs. Ardolini’s backyard. An hour later Grete came for Kaja, and Lillian still hadn’t shown. As Mrs. Ardolini handed Grete a phone message, she said that I needed to go home with them, something to do with a gallery and a woman named Nina. From the way Grete thanked Mrs. Ardolini and danced us out of there, you’d have thought we were on our way to a ball at the Ritz. Instead, she took us to a stoop a block away. She sat us down on the crumbling steps to read what Mrs. Ardolini had written, but the message didn’t say anything Mrs. Ardolini hadn’t said already.

  I could tell Grete was worried because she asked me and Kaja what we wanted for dinner, something she never did. Chinese, I said even though Grete never did takeout, and I was a big fan of her cooking. Thursdays were Nina nights, and I wanted wonton soup so bad that eating over at Kaja’s was actually a letdown. After we’d finished off Grete’s meatballs, my mother still hadn’t come, so Kaja and I got to watch The Flintstones. Next came Donna Reed, and after that My Three Sons, an unprecedented glut of school-night television that eclipsed thoughts of my mother or Nina until the phone rang and Grete turned off the TV and I learned I’d be sleeping over that night—as well as Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—because Nina had been arrested, and my mother had been arrested with her.

  NINA PAGANO: The whole thing was just bum luck and lousy timing. Lil had dropped by on her way back from work, so we were rapping at my desk when the two cops came in, a pink one and a jowly one. You’re a little late, I told them, the party was Saturday. Usually the badges crashed my openings around two or three a.m. to shut things down. Anyway Pink said, You the owner? and I nodded, and then Jowly said, You’re under arrest for pandering obscenity and illegal use of a minor.

  Well, that just about skinned me. Pandering obscenity and illegal use of a minor? That’s dirty-old-man stuff. So I looked at the two cops, and I asked Jowly to repeat himself, which he did, and then I asked him what the hell he was talking about, which probably wasn’t the best way to phrase it, but at a moment like that the words choose themselves.

  Jowly warned me not to get wise with him. He pointed to the pictures of Lil and Sam and said that I was in a family neighborhood selling dirty pictures. Pink grabbed my wrist and started in with the handcuffs. When I demanded to know what he was doing, he said something clever like, Lady what does it look like I’m doing, at which point Lil, all watercress and cucumber sandwiches, suggested there must be some mistake, which inspired Jowly to ask who she was.

  You made these? he said when Lil answered, and that was that.

  I bet even money it was someone on the block. Not counting the two upstairs tenants who said I was the best super they ever had, I wasn’t too popular, especially not with the Suzy Homemakers down the street, who thought I was either a Commie or a dope fiend or both. As I mentioned, there’d been calls to the fuzz before, on nights that went loud and late. One Suzy H went off on me after her paragon of manhood showed up at one of my parties on his way home from the bar and got cozy with the talent. I don’t know what that particular Suzy said or did to change things, but afterward the local gentry quit making evening social calls. All of which was a few months b
efore the show.

  Once I got over the twist of being handcuffed, it didn’t take me long to start feeling righteous. Part of it was having friends who’d done civil disobedience already, so I was hip to that dog-and-pony show, and part of it was the ridiculousness of an art gallery getting busted. But Lil? She was petrified. After they cuffed us, they marched us to the squad car, and the whole block came out to watch. Poor Lil was pale as a slice of Wonder Bread. Oh god oh god, she kept saying, what am I going to do? Like he was doing us a favor, Pink explained that we were going to get booked; then we’d wait for our arraignment. After that we’d post bail, and if it all went real good, we’d be out in time for dinner on Monday.

  When Lil heard the word “Monday,” I thought she was going to throw up. You got to be kidding me, I told him. That’s four days from now! You think judges work weekends? Pink said. I pointed out that it was only Thursday. Like he was talking to a four-year-old, Jowly explained that if we were real lucky, our paperwork would be done by the end of tomorrow so that, come Monday, we’d be ready for the judge.

  By this time, Lil was taking really small steps, like her legs had seized up. I was afraid she might faint or fall over. When I told the cops they needed to understand that Lil was a single mom, Jowly shook his head like he couldn’t believe it. Lady? he said to her. Can I ask what you thought you were doing?

  At first I wasn’t sure Lil heard him, but then she looked him straight in the eye. I was making windows, she said.

  66. Ice, Brooklyn, 1960

  Here’s how it usually went: if Lillian and I were doing something that seemed promising, she’d move Ro-Ro to where we were, set it up the way she wanted, then resume whatever we’d been up to. If I was doing something solo, my mother would grab her regular camera from wherever she’d left it, place herself a sofa length away, and start snapping pictures. She never told me to smile or not smile, to look or not look. And she never told me to take off my clothes.