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‘I bought her, I bought her. You know, Jews believed that if someone you loved was in danger you sold them and that warded off the evil eye.’ She laughs. ‘If they weren’t yours what could happen to them?’
I stare hard at her. She ignores my stare.
‘Roseman came to the door and she said to me, “The girl is dying. Will you buy her?” So I bought her. I think I gave Roseman ten dollars.’
‘Ma,’ I say, ‘you knew this was a peasant superstition, an old wives’ tale, and still you took part in it? You agreed to buy her?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘But, Ma! You were both communists.’
‘Well, listen,’ she says. ‘We had to save her life.’
Everything about Nettie proved to be impossible. She was a Gentile married to a Jew like no Jew we had ever known. Alone most of the time and apparently free to live wherever she chose, she had chosen to live among working-class Jews who offered her neither goods nor charity. A woman whose sexy good looks brought her darting glances of envy and curiosity, she seemed to value inordinately the life of every respectable dowd. She praised my mother lavishly for her housewifely skills – her ability to make small wages go far, always have the house smelling nice and the children content to be at home – as though these skills were a treasure, some precious dowry that had been denied her, and symbolised a life from which she had been shut out. My mother – secretly as amazed as everyone else by Nettie’s allure – would look thoughtfully at her when she tried (often vaguely, incoherently) to speak of the differences between them, and would say to her, ‘But you’re a wife now. You’ll learn these things. It’s nothing. There’s nothing to learn.’ Nettie’s face would then flush painfully, and she’d shake her head. My mother didn’t understand, and she couldn’t explain.
Sometimes, after an hour or so of this, she would say to me, ‘Now you say what you’d like to have happen.’ And I would say, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a flood or an epidemic or a revolution, and even though I’m this little kid they find me and they say to me, “You speak so wonderfully you must lead the people out of this disaster.” ’ I never daydreamed about love or money, I always daydreamed I was making eloquent speeches that stirred ten thousand people to feel their lives, and to act.
heh
The shabby tenement streets below our windows were transformed by darkness and silence. There was in the nighttime air a clarity, a softness and a fullness, indescribably sweet, that intensified the magical isolation I sought and that easily became a conduit for waking dreams. A hungry fantasizing went instantly to work as soon as I was seated with my back to the apartment, my eyes trained on the street. This fantasizing was only one step removed from Nettie’s ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful’, but it was an important step. Mine began ‘Just suppose’, and was followed not by tales of immediate rescue but by imaginings of ‘large meaning’. That is: things always ended badly but there was grandeur in the disaster. The point of my romances was precisely that life is tragic. To be ‘in tragedy’ was to be saved from what I took to be the pedestrian pains of my own life. These seemed meaningless. To be saved from meaninglessness, I knew, was everything. Largeness of meaning was redemption. It was an adolescent writer’s beginning: I had started to mythicize.
She had a way of walking up the block that had made me uncomfortable from the time I was ten years old. She walked like no other woman in the neighbourhood. A woman’s walk might be brisk or lazy, but inevitably it was the errand-bound walk of a housewife; her legs were attached to her torso for the strict purpose of useful locomotion, she was not walking to feel her body in motion or to have its movement acknowledged or responded to. Nettie was. Her walk was slow and deliberate. She moved first one haunch, then the other, making her hips sway. Everyone knew this woman was going nowhere, that she was walking to walk, walking to feel the effect she had on the street. Her walk insisted on the flesh beneath the clothes. It said, ‘This body has the power to make you want.’ There was nothing like her for a thousand miles around. Men and women alike hungered for her. It was awful. I could see she aroused strong emotion, but that emotion seemed bound up with punishment not privilege. The way people looked at her – the cruelty in the men, the anger in the women – made me fearful. I felt her in danger. Nettie walking up the block became woven into the fabric of early anxiety.
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A glorious day, today: New York hard-edged in the clear autumn sun, buildings sharply outlined against the open sky, streets crowded with pyramids of fruits and vegetables, flowers in papier-mâché vases cutting circles on the sidewalk, newspaper stands vivid in black and white. On Lexington Avenue, in particular, an outpouring of lovely human bustle at noon, a density of urban appetites and absorptions.
:)
In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, ‘It’s like second childhood,’ and the other one replies tartly, ‘Better than anyone’s first.’ I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that she could have said that. Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly.
That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing.
I think this was true for most of us at City College. We still used the subways, still walked the familiar streets between classes, still returned to the neighbourhood each night, talked to our high school friends, and went to sleep in our own beds. But secretly we had begun to live in a world inside our heads where we read talked thought in a way that separated us from our parents, the life of the house and that of the street. We had been initiated, had learned the difference between hidden and expressed thought. This made us subversives in our own homes.
As thousands before me have said, ‘For us it was City College or nothing.’ I enjoyed the solidarity those words invoked but rejected the implied deprivation. At City College I sat talking in a basement cafeteria until ten or eleven at night with a half dozen others who also never wanted to go home to Brooklyn or the Bronx, and here in the cafeteria my education took root. Here I learned that Faulkner was America, Dickens was politics, Marx was sex, Jane Austen the idea of culture, that I came from a ghetto and D. H. Lawrence was a visionary. Here my love of literature named itself, and amazement over the life of the mind blossomed. I discovered that people were transformed by ideas, and that intellectual conversation was immensely erotic.
<3
But it wasn’t really a matter of what I could or could not do with the degree. We were people who knew how to stay alive, she never doubted I would find a way. No, what drove her, and divided us, was me thinking. She hadn’t understood that going to school meant I would start thinking: coherently and out loud. She was taken by violent surprise. My sentences got longer within a month of those first classes. Longer, more complicated, formed by words whose meaning she did not always know. I had never before spoken a word she didn’t know. Or made a sentence whose logic she couldn’t follow. Or attempted an opinion that grew out of an abstraction. It made her crazy. Her face began to take on a look of animal cunning when I started a sentence that could not possibly be concluded before three clauses had hit the air. Cunning sparked anger, anger flamed into rage. ‘What are you talking about?’ she would shout at me. ‘What are you talking about? Speak English, please! We all understand English in this house. Speak it!’
Her response stunned me. I didn’t get it. Wasn’t she pleased that I could say something she didn’t understand? Wasn’t that what it was all about? I was the advance guard. I was going to take her into the new world. All she had to do was adore what I was becoming, and here she was refusing. I’d speak my new sentences, and she would turn on me as though I’d performed a vile act right there at the kitchen table.