Page 40 - WTP Vol. VII #6

This is the Bronx, and you will find beauty here only unexpectedly. The street names lack reso- nance; no one dresses with style; the usual com- plaints are made on the supermarket lines.
Scenes from Childhood: 1965
The absence of things to see kept me indoors when I was young. I didn’t want to belong to this borough of broken sidewalks and looming apartment buildings:
I never dawdled by the benches of the playground with boys and girls my age. I sat in my room reading of horseback rides at night, of duels, of happiness achieved, and daydreamed of mountains and castles far from our 11th floor apartment. Or else I looked across the street at a thin tree, its leaves a shiny green in April. When the wind rode down the hilly street, the leaves shook: the shadows of the branches moved on a red brick wall. There, was my beauty.
We were in the living room. She was reading the newspaper with her half glasses and although it was getting dark, she hadn’t yet turned on the lamp. I had nothing to do. I dared not read the book I bought that afternoon: if she saw it, she would not like it. I didn’t want to practice the piano and break the stillness, which I thought was holy. I sat on the rug, my knees drawn up to my chest and looked out the window at the blank autumn sky. I shut my eyes. “There is noth- ing,” a voice—my bad angel—said. I opened my eyes, afraid of something indefinable and saw that the living room had continued placidly as before. I closed my eyes again and tried to draw something holy out of my fears.
Our household was consecrated to two ideas, both my mother’s. She had made herself a marshal of order and cleanliness. Everything had its place, including me, but it is hard for youth to understand that sort
She switched on the lamp at the same time that my father turned the key in the apartment door lock. I opened my eyes to see my mother glance from the newspaper to her watch. “Hello,” my father said to us as he stepped into the foyer. His voice had a sarcastic tinge; already we were in his dull, pedantic grip. He hung up his coat and laid his vinyl attaché case on the hall cabinet. My mother did not say hello. She folded the newspaper and as she put it on the footstool in front of her chair, said, “She wants to be a nun.”
of perfection. I was often found out of order: reading when I ought to have been practicing the piano, or standing by the open refrigerator, snack in hand, just before dinner. My mother would discipline me with a quick slap. My father would ambush me. “Who eats a slice of cheese before dinner?” How lonely I felt when posed a question that had no answer!
My father had come into the living room.
“A nun?” he said. I felt his stare. I got up from the rug. “Oh, forget it!” I said and went into my room.
My mother believed in her second idea as fervently than the first. When she and I were alone, she told me of the insults she suffered from my father’s family. As child I failed to grasp whatever nuances pricked her. In her repetition of my grandmother’s ‘insults’ I heard only the tiresome talk of adults.
As I closed my door, I heard him say “nun” again, before he went to the bathroom to wash his hands for dinner.
At the age of eleven I was briefly inspired to devote my life to God. I would be a nun. We were Jewish; all I knew about the religion of nuns was that they lived together. I thought the old stone house near our synagogue could serve as a Jewish nunnery. Dressed in blue and white, the colors of Israel, I imagined living there, away from my parents, and talking to no one. Every day I would go to prayers. For how beautiful were the voices that sang the Etz Chaim as the Torah was carried around! My spirits soared when a woman’s voice hovered above the singing congregation.
I looked at myself in the dresser mirror. My long face told me nothing about myself.
I told my mother. 33
“—wind up behind the cash register in Woolworth’s! You’ll have to—” but I wouldn’t listen to them anymore.
“Jews can’t be nuns,” she said in anger.
I heard the bathroom door re-open; my father passed my room and now they both were in the kitchen. I could hear them.
“—she doesn’t do her homework, she comes home late from school and lies around!”
I pressed my chin against my neck to have jowls like
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