58. Moment Fugue

 

When you’re on this block, you have one thing in common with anyone else here: the moment, this moment. Some have lived in it for longer than you; others’ve just come into it. But you and they and I—are all in it, for the moment, for as long as we’re here.

Maybe you really do have to die to leave it. I don’t remember who told me that. Maybe Adam, maybe mother. Or maybe—like the question you know not to ask—I learned it simply from being here, just from being. That’s how Adam and mother left. And the man who fathered me. The lady whose name I never knew is still here, and Mrs. Littington, for all that she participated in the gossip, was never part of it because everybody knew she wasn’t staying. And of course, after today she’ll be gone again, having flitted into and out of the moment, the last mother and I will have.

Now, only now. I’ve been to lots of other places where people lamented some monument or edifice that once stood in their midst, in their moment. Then it was smashed, exploded or burned and something else was assembled in its place. Or maybe the place is left empty. The people mourn the passing of whatever’d been there before but they stop remembering it the moment it was gone. No one remembers the squalid squares in the old railway stations or the drab columns of office buildings, apartment houses or the local store. Somehow, in memory, whatever is lost rises into towering arches filled with the soft, smoky haze of sun through windows high near the ceiling. Anything—even the moment of this block—can dissipate in that light.

On my way back to this block, I passed by the onetime financial center of this city. Its most famous—tallest—structures were gone, leveled by what architects, engineers, scientists and those who wrote and spoke for them claimed their steel-girded glass boxes could withstand. I called mother when I heard about their destruction. Just making sure she was all right, even though I knew she’d never been anywhere near them. Everyone, it seemed, who’d ever seen a photo of the buildings was calling somebody. Other people’d had to wait hours to get to one of the phones on the street. Not me—Gail, whom I’d met while I was still cursing Vivian, slipped a cell phone into my bag. I didn’t realize I had the phone until the first time it rang. When the buildings fell, I broke her rule that I use it only to answer her, and called mother.

Now I use only cellphones.

I’m getting away from myself. Those houses of cathode ray screens and paper, built like a box of drinking straws with the middle straws removed, were gone. I noticed their absence only because nothing stood in their place. I recalled how they cast shadows over the streets, the people, even the other tall buildings around it. But the fall of those steel beams, and the glass panes shackled to the fluorescent space around them, did not flood the corners and alleyways with suddenly-unsealed sunlight. The skyscrapers that still stood spread over each other and stilted solar pulses through the channels between offices and cigar stores, the snakeskin-smoothed sidewalks and the coiled cables of the bridge between that part of town and the precincts around this block.

“The Towers,” as everyone called them, were gone. But apart from their general shape—breadboxes sliced on the ends and sides with serrated knives—I could recall nothing else about them. Not the details, scarecely visible on such tall buildings, yet present enough for the news reports to point out as metalworkers took apart what remained after the explosions. I vaguely recalled the view from the top, the end of some trip on a school bus and up a series of elevators with a bunch of boys who wanted to beat up a “faggot” and a teacher—a nun who would—could ‘--ve done nothing to stop them. I knew there was something called an ”observation deck” at the end of the elevator ride, but it could’ve been a milk crate for all that I could recall.

It’d been part f some moment long ago, which might’ve continued to today had I or the Towers not gone. But the fall was inevitable: the Towers’ moment wouldn’t, couldn’t, last into this one. Nor could that moment in which I lived through the births-- and the deaths I witnessed and helped to cause.

After mother’s buried, the moment—long as it was—of this block will end, at least for me. The lady whose name I never knew—I don’t know. No one else from that time remains here. Then again, the moment began before Mrs. Littington came to this block, before I was born, before she or mother were born. And it continued through the disappearance of the man who fathered me and the day when the police retrieved a body and gave it my former name.

55. Before Tomorrow

 

Today. Just today. I just have to get through this day in one piece. It’s the only way anybody’s ever lived on this block and it’s the only mode of life I’ve known since I left.

I can’t say whether anything’ll change after tomorrow. I know that I’ll never come back to this block again. It’s not a choice: I have no choice. Not that I’ve ever wanted to return. But I have no such choice in any event. Never did, probably never will.

Just today. Tomorrow, if it goes the way I foresee it, we bury mother. Hopefully, nothing’ll complicate maters until then. Mrs. Littington and the woman whose name I never knew glance in my direction, but neither speaks to me. Maybe they talk to each other when I’m out of sight, but I don’t recall that they had much, if anything, to say to do with each other when we were on this block. Their only connection was mother, and I’ve no idea of how much they talked about each other to her.

I’m not even sure that Mrs.L. and the lady recognize each other now, although—somehow not surprisingly—Mrs. L. seems not to’ve aged beyond a few gray flecks in her darker-than-chestnut hair. The edges of her hair that frame her forehead, temples and ears have softer, wavier edges than those of the sharper cut she wore when she lived on this block—but somehow even that seems not to’ve changed much, either. For that matter, the lady whose name I never knew doesn’t seem much older than I recall her, either; but her loose and dry skin always made her seem older than mother, or most of the other people on this block. Then again, I’d just barely passed puberty the last time I saw her. All the adults—which is to say the women—on this block seemed like fixtures that’d always been there.

Every once in a while, she catches my gaze. Maybe she won’t ask questions. That’s the unwritten—That goes without saying!—code of this block. Then again, she never needed to ask questions, or so it seemed.

Another code is not to tell, at least not so the person who’s being told about knows. Would she? Could she? Who was it who told me, “Them that know don’t tell; but them who tell don’t know”? What did thatt person know? What does she know? What—who—would she tell? Being on this block, still, she had to’ve heard about the body in the cellar. The one with my name—my former name—on it. And my date of birth. But not my date of death. Surely she had to’ve known better than to believe that version of the end of a life. On this block, who’d’ve remained, by that time, who’d’ve had any reason to kill me? The men—the boys—were all gone by then. Including me.

Who, then, ‘d’ve gone through the trouble of striking him on the head hard enough to knock him to the ground, but not hard enough to prevent him from regaining consciousness. Who’d’ve been anygry, obsessive or whatever enough to tie him by his hands and feet and tape his mouth while his eyes were shut? To peel the too-tight black pants and bikini brief away from his hairy midsection? Or—when he regained consciousness and grunted because he couldn’t beg for mercy—took a sawtoothed switchblade and gnarled at the base of his scrotum and removed an organ which to this day has not been found? And finally pulled—actually, slid and slogged—the briefs and pants back over the bloody crotch, hooked the waist tab and zipped the fly shut just as red heat began to ooze through them?

Could she’ve known t he answers, or enough to question what I –or the man whose body was identified as mine—would’ve been doing anywhere near this block at that time? As far as she knew—or so I thought—I was long gone, and possibly dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what mother told her. Or if she said nothing at all, except that I don’t think that lady’d’ve let her.

Hopefully, she won’t ask any more questions—or talk any more—about him or me, or to me—before this day is over, before I can leave for good, like mother, tomorrow.

One more day and mother finally gets to rest. And I’ll be able to continue—and hopefully complete—my transformation.

53. Winter

 

Some things I’ll never understand. Others, they won’t—not Mrs. Littington, the lady whose name I never knew—understand. Including the one thing I’m still trying to explain to myself.

The way Adam died. The story we all heard, the one that’s listed in the reports, is suicide. Found with head in oven, gas turned on. Still cold in the apartment, cold as it was outside. And clear, with stars as bright as the strings of lights glinting on cables of the bridge you can see across the cemetery from this block.

He’d’ve seen that bridge from his window, as I could from mother’s room, on such a night: the sky even clearer than the glass that separated me—and him—from it. It’s so clear on such a night, whipped by the early winter winds that come before a storm. Two nights before Christmas, eight before the end of the year.

Buried, gone before New Year’s Day. Then the stoop where he sat, where he gave me little bottles of soda as he sighed, coughed and sometimes talked, that stoop disappeared under snow—the heaviest this block had ever seen, according to the weather reports. For days, for weeks, the snow lay stubbornly, not yielding to footprints.

Nobody came or went. Far as anybody knew, nobody—not another person, or even a cat or a dog—lived there. I don’t remember anyone exiting or leaving that house and I’m not sure anyone sat on that stoop when I wasn’t there with Adam.

Haven’t seen anybody on that stoop today, either. From what I’ve heard, people don’t do that anymore—in fact, nobody stops for very long on this block. Most of the time, the sidewalk’s vacant. When anybody walks, she doesn’t stop until she’s inside her house or off this block, headed to wherever else she’s going.

From what I hear, nobody’s sat or stood on that stoop since the last time I saw Adam. After the snow cleared, after the ice melted and the shadows that precede evenings were swept into extra minutes, then hours, of light at the end of the day, the bricks of that stoop and that house crinkled and started to come apart at the cement seams that held them together like stitches of winter coats at the end of the season, when the weather’s still cold enough to wear them but there’s enough light to show how worn they are. Someone came over to look at them, mark them. Then other men accompanied him, chipping, scraping and painting. I don’t know who those men were—nobody said, and Adam didn’t have any relatives anybody knew about—but they were there, it seemed, the first day the weather broke. In almost no time, they smothered the flaking red bricks with a sticky shine in the color of chewing gum.

52, Identities

 

So, as far as anybody on this block knows—if they ever know anything at all—that body found in the basement was mine. Or, at any rate, that of the person who bore the name I once had. Now that mother’s died, there’s nobody left on this block who remembers that person with that name. Only the body: If they’ve heard about anything, that’s it.

Just what I expected: Once the body’s gone, so’s the person. All of the people who could possibly remember any of the time I spent on this block are in this silent room now. And I have to wonder just how much they remember. Actually, I hope not much. That woman whose name I never knew did a double-take when I walked to the bathroom. But I don’t think—I’m not sure—she made a connection. Mrs. Littington didn’t seem to notice at all. She used to do that a lot—until she told mother she heard me using curse words or saw me smoke around her kids.

Maybe she’s recalling those times. Or she isn’t. Pas important, as she would say. She might’ve been looking my way, perhaps not. But somehow I don’t think she’ll ever recall me, mother or anybody in this room as soon as she leaves. As far as I know, there’s no reason why she should, for she never seemed to share even what little taste her husband had for telling amusing stories about all the places to which they’d gone and from which they’d come, like the people they met and left. When she talked about any place besides this block, or any person who wasn’t here, her eyes never met those of anyone standing or sitting within her vicinity. She might’ve been looking at someone—a member of her family, someone who lived in Toulon before the war, the aunt in Paris, one of the many expatriate Europeans she encounters in verandas and parlors misplaced throughout the world—and describe what she saw and what they said. As soon as she finished her monologue, her gaze disappeared and she returned to this block.

She’ll be gone soon; so, I hope, will I. She and the woman whose name I never knew don’t seem to recognize each other at all—actually, I think Mrs. Littington doesn’t remember her, and she won’t make any attempt to bring Mrs. L back to this block. For that, the lady whose name I never knew has my respect, if not my love-- were I capable of giving any.

Neither of them, none of us will be here tomorrow, any more than the body that was pulled out of that basement. The one that was supposed to be mine. The one that was too old—though no one but the medical examiner could’ve known—to be mine.

The body was removed; the body was moved. That’s the sequence believed and reiterated by the cops, reporters and everyone else who matched that body to the person they believed to be in it. No one’s name is ever mentioned; they are only signatures at the ends of reports. Police officers, medical examiner, coroner, undertaker—I’d guess there was an undertaker, or someone in charge of whatever rite followed the autopsy and all the rest, because he was buried in a cemetery: the same one into which we’re going to place mother’s body. The man who ran the place wouldn’t have it any other way, it seems: A religious—Catholic or Jewish—ceremony for the body’s death is required for entrance into the gates surrounding the rows of marble slabs. As far as I know, they don’t have vaults, urns or anything else for people who’ve been cremated, or for that matter, a tombstone that doesn’t have a cross or Magden David on it.

Enbalmed, with a clean suit or dress. Frozen in a moment that never existed, for eternity or posterity or whatever they want to call it. A moment that never was: the eternal present.

If the moment never existed, nor did the people who lived in—I mean, bodies that passed through—it. They can—will—would—no more accompany the body they’ve sealed against light, air and water than the person who inhabited will return to that time, to this block.

No more than mother will. Or he, or I. As long as someone thinks I was inside that body at the moment of its death, or that it had the same name I once had, it might be safe to stay here, on this block Or maybe not. But I know that if anybody asks the question—actually, any question—I’d have to go. Now I know why mother and the nuns and teachers I had didn’t want me to ask “too many questions.”

Where was I at the moment I was supposed to have died? Where is the person, the name, that once belonged to the body?

49. Bodies

 

Two of the main streets that enclose this block—a Parkway and an Avenue—are named “Ocean.” Three thoroughfares—a Boulevard as well as a Parkway and an Avenue—are named “Bay.” And there are still other streets with “Ocean” or “Bay” in their names. Oh, and I mustn’t forget about the other streets that share their names with bodies of water that are found nowhere near this block.

I never connected the words “bay” or “ocean” with great basins of salt water. I still don’t, even though I finally got to taste the surf after I left this block. “Ocean” signified tides and winds only because some books, which I had to read for school, represented it that way. The same for “bay” and mirrors of moonlight rippled by breezes: that is how the books depicted such bodies of water. With Vivian, I hadn’t gone to the ocean; I’d gone to the beach and a town—a village, really—splintered like driftwood.

Where Bay meets Ocean, they couldn’t bury Adam. For some reason—the way he died, I was told—he wasn’t allowed into the Jewish cemetery there, at Bay and Ocean. He couldn’t be buried there—that’s what I’ve heard ever since. No one said he wouldn’t bury Adam there, only that he couldn’t be interred there.

He also couldn’t be buried in the other cemetery near this block, at Atlantic and Bay Bridge: It was Catholic; they wouldn’t have taken him either. One of the nuns—no, wait, it was a priest, who instructed me in I-forget-what before we made Confirmation—told us that the ground itself couldn’t take him, wouldn’t keep him, because it was sanctified, which was a fancy way of saying holy, which meant that they couldn’t keep him buried there.

Father—I forget his name—said it was because Adam killed himself. Same thing the rabbi said. Of course, neither of them talked to me or any of the other kids about him. We’d just heard what they said about him later on, one kid from another, though none of us knew who spoke first.

So they couldn’t bury Adam at Bay and Ocean or Atlantic and Bay Bridge because, they said, he’d killed himself. He couldn’t stay submerged like the bodies tossed by their killers at the beginning of winter. Those bodies stayed down, under the cunningly calm, cold surface, until the undercurrents warmed and lifted all things that wouldn’t wake for long, warm mornings to the light above the water.

When you grow up on this block, you learn at least this much: People don’t, by accident, end up at or in the water when they die. They’re always tossed, thrown, pushed, shoved or dropped in. Or, if they get to the water on their own, they die only after they’re held under, by themselves or somebody else.

I’ve never believed for a moment—oh, forget that, I’ve always known—that Adam’s death wasn’t what the priest, rabbi or everyone else on this block called it: a suicide. Whenever people from this block used that word in connection with Adam, they shifted their eyes from me and the word escaped from them, as if they’d sidestepped their own voices. And their echoes would drift away from that word,, creeping along like a ship that’s left its dock before its scheduled time and is slipping into fog.

47. Nakedness

Somehow I always knew that if I’d ever seen the ocean, I couldn’t come back to this block. The sea was only three miles away, but I got my first glimpse of it from a plane. By then, I was far away from the beach where the Puerto Ricans and Blacks –but nobody from this block—went.

I had no idea what people looked like when they sunbathed, swam or simply fidgeted about on the sand. I’d seen pictures, heard stories about them, about waves that turned and spread their skin over sand. Nobody on my block went to the beach—not to that one, anyway.

Never could I understand why anyone would want to take off most of their clothes in front of total strangers. Or—especially—in front of people they lived with.

I can’t remember mother or I seeing each other without clothes. I’m sure she saw me, when I was a baby, perhaps in that part of my childhood that returns in dreams I don’t remember.

And mother: She must’ve known—or did she?—about the rape: she never made me strip. She didn’t even mention the calls the dean made—I know, I saw him—when a gym teacher sent me to the dean’s office because I wouldn’t go into the locker room and change my clothes. Oh, those nuns could be so unpredictable and sadistic. But, no matter how badly they treated us, they never made us take off our clothes.

I’ve since heard that in junior high or high schools everywhere, boys and girls go to their respective locker rooms and change from their pants or skirts and sweaters to T-shirts and shorts. And at the end of gym class, everyone takes off his or her gym clothes and showers. No way I wanted to shower in front of all those boys—or the gym teacher. And I told the dean so. And every week or so, after I’d spent a few days worth of gym classes in the dean’s office (or didn’t go to school at all), I’d be back, and the cycle would begin again.

I don’t know what mother told that dean or gym teacher. But, like I said, I never heard about it from her.

And the first time I saw the ocean, from a plane, I’d taken off only my shoes. In fact, I put on a jacket I carried with me—Why are planes so cold inside? By the time I saw the ocean for the first time, then, I didn’t have to think about or fear my own nakedness, for I had exposed my body—for money. They never looked, except perhaps for a moment, at my flesh. It was there for them to touch, grab, pull, for as long as they rented it.

At first, I didn’t understand what they were doing to me—I’d experienced it only in the basement of that abandoned house down the block, with Rob. Most of the customers were close to the age Rob was when he raped me. Though I experienced no pleasure—I wouldn’t’ve known what that felt like in my body—they were still somehow different from Rob, and not just because they paid.

They paid, and left me alone. They probably wouldn’t’ve known me in daylight, or acknowledged me if they did. They probably wouldn’t’ve looked at me even if I approached them stark naked and stopped them.

They probably would’ve ignored me on the beach, too. I wasn’t offering; they weren’t buying. Of course, they never would’ve gone to the beach near this block, or any one in this state, on this shore, for that matter.

One of them wanted to take me there. For pay, of course. It tried the litany of excuses: I didn’t know how to swim, I burned easily and my eyes and skin were really sensitive to sand. “It doesn’t matter,” he insisted. “But you must pay first,” I told him.

I set my fee, he paid and on the day of our scheduled rendez-vous, I was nowhere nearby, nowhere where he could find me. His fee was enough for the plane ticket. I had no idea of what I’d do when I got off the plane, but somehow that didn’t matter.

Getting that ticket was surprisingly easy. They ask where you’re going so they know how much to charge you; they don’t ask what you’re doing once you get there. You just go. And, in my case, it meant crossing the ocean, seeing the ocean. No one tried to get me to the beach, take off my clothes, not unless they were going to pay for it. Even then…

46. Destinies

I wonder whether mother ever had a moment when she knew, for that moment and all others in her life, exactly what she’d be. Mother. Could she’ve avoided it, changed it, ended her life or begun it again? Mother, another life on this block, for the moment, for every moment she, the woman whose name I never knew and the voices—I thought I’d escaped them, but I’m hearing them again—stayed here. Did she ever think it could or couldn’t’ve been any other way? In short, did she think she might or might not’ve had a choice.

I don’t remember her ever criticizing other people, or second-guessing the decisions they made. Not that they always made her happy—not that I always did so, I’m sure—or that she agreed with them.

How else could she’ve, for all the years that’ve just ended, kept herself from asking about the changes in my voice, or what the voice said? Perhaps she saw those transformations—part of the bigger, longer one in which I’m about to reach a major turning point—as inevitable. As I realized they were, one day.

Nothing’s as scary—no, terrifying, in the way of a near-death experience—as knowing exactly who and what you have no choice to become. Well, for some—like me, anyway—it’s traumatic in part because there’s no way to prepare for the experience or what you learn from it.

I realized, of course, that I’d do what I’ve been doing for the past few years. I had no vision of time: I could see myself as a woman in the present moment, but I knew that I might still be living as a man ten, twenty years hence. Gradual transformations—the prospect of them, anyway—generate more anxiety because it’s harder to see the stages than the end (at least, the end one hoped for or imagined) of such a journey.

I knew that I’d no choice but to “turn” female, though I had no idea of what or whom that would mean. My mother? Mrs. Littington? The lady whose name I never knew? The nuns?—oh, kill me first!

Wait a minute. None of them lived with men, I realized. (I don’t recall seeing Mr. Littington.) They didn’t have to have children who would be abandoned by the men who fathered them. They didn’t have to get fucked, literally and figuratively by men. Or did they? They still could be raped, after all, and have other people’s children.

Still, most of them lived in a world without the male race—except the ones they taught or raised. No men, and they were women. Only the children interrupted their cloistered calm. Now I know why nuns were so mean to kids!

Still, nobody’s ever been able to explain why Sister Martha O’Connan slapped Amy Deirian across the hand with a yardstick when she refused to—no, the truth is, she couldn’t—put her hand down for more than half hour. She grimaced, her skin turned red and she began to cry the lonely, desolate moan of someone who knows she’s not going to get help because nobody’s there to give it or even to explain what’s happening. Actually, there was one—Sister Martha—who could, but to this day, I don’t understand why she didn’t.

She struck Amy, who would’ve furled into a fetal shape if there hadn’t been a desktop between her head and knees. Tears dripped, slowly, like wax from a candlestick, down her fingers cupped over her face, which her arms propped on the desk across the aisle from mine. I glanced downward as the blood oozed from her seat to the floor and crept toward the book basket underneath my seat.

Through the ensuing weeks and months, other girls, some of whom snickered into the palms of their hands when Amy bled, would meet Amy in a corner of the playground at lunch time. First there was Melissa Farrington, a pale girl who was repeating the sixth grade because she missed two months of school the year before. Then Joanna Torres, a plump, dark girl who, according to the aunt who was raising her (One never heard about the parents or grandparents.) never “got into trouble” because she came directly home from school and wasn’t allowed out again unless she finished her homework before it got dark. Even for someone as dutiful as Joanna, such a feat was impossible, at least from some time around All Saint’s Day (when we were supposed to go to church) until Easter or thereabouts.

I wasn’t surprised when Stacy Sunnyfield joined them: She was always trying to win a popularity contest that nobody was running, at least not officially. But I saw, at a glance, that her face bore a more thoughtful, less calculating and expression and that she hardly talked at all.

Although nobody explained what she or the other girls in that new clique were doing, I knew somehow that Amy’s blood brought them together.

The following year—or maybe it was two years later—Joanna’d moved, or been moved, to some other relative, I don’t know where. All I know is that the relative was male because I heard he raped her. Abortion was out of the question, so she was moved again, to some other place. And neither I nor any of the other kids heard about her again.

By the time I left this block, not only Joanna, but also Stacy, already had children. Melissa didn’t only because getting fucked didn’t improve her health, as some smooth-skinned man twice her age promised. Amy was gone, too, but I never found out where she went…except to the yard, like the cemeteries on either side of this neighborhood, where everyone remained as I knew the: not safe, not immutable, but touched by nothing but the moon , which I am bound to follow.

That, by the way, is—at least as best as I can tell—the light of those few dreams I can remember. It’s like seeing shadows of moonlight during the day.

Back to those girls: Whenever a boy stood on their periphery or anywhere near it, at least one of the girls would flash the stare of someone who could kill or knew someone who would. A lot of men say they see that look on Sunday afternoons, when they take themselves away from the football game on TV long enough to go to the kitchen for a drink and they find their mothers, sisters, grandmothers and aunts gathered around the table as dinner simmers.

The only woman from whom I’ve ever gotten such a reaction was the one whose name I never knew, when she was talking with my mother. But I never encountered it, oddly enough, from those girls on the playground. I don’t think they liked me better than the other boys in the class. I take that back—Joanna did, or at least once she told me so. I stood, my head tilted slightly forward, like the girls who hadn’t yet entered their circle, but would.

The last time I tried to play basketball with the boys on the playground—because Father Byrnes, who taught catechism to those of use who were about to “become confirmed as soldiers of the Lord” said I should—Tom Rupett, my height and weight in solid muscle, flung the ball at the side of my head. When I fell, two other boys—maybe more—ran and threw punches at me. “We don’t want no sissy boys here,” one of them growled. “Yeah, go to the girls, where you belong,” snorted another.

By then, I knew better than to believe that one of the boys would pick me for his team or include me in their “parties,” which included everything from going to old Lenny’s store and helping themselves to whatever they wanted to fights with kids from other blocks, if I spent time by the court, played and started a conversation with one of the boys. I forget who told me that, and I’m not sure which was more misguided: that person’s method of making friends or his notion that I wanted to play basketball or any other game with those boys.

If that person—whomever he or she was—had known what I knew about myself at that moment, he or she probably would’ve tried as hard as I did to wish it away, forget about it, “train it out” of me or to deny it in some other way. After I left this block, I met people who left families whose members ridiculed, beat or tried to kill them when they realized there was no way to deny what was in their bones.

“If I know, everybody else must know.” I don’t remember where or when I heard or read that. But, recollecting those days one more time, before mother, I know they had to’ve known. At least some of them did, anyway. Mother, certainly—I can’t think of any other reason why she didn’t fight it, why she kept me in the kitchen. Possibly those girls—and the boys, too—knew. But, even if you believe in their God, how can you ask him to “say it ain’t so.”

I don’t know whether Adam knew my destiny, or whether knowing it would’ve stopped him from beckoning me over to his stoop to drink soda and listen to his stories. If he understood, he also would’ve understood that it couldn’t’ve been prayed away or exorcised in any other way. The woman, the girl in the chimeric embryo of a boy, or what appeared to be a boy: Could he’ve seen that? Or maybe—I know this is a wild guess, as Adam’s been dead a long time—he saw his own life in me. He couldn’t stay in the house in a Polish town to which he returned, he said, in his dreams—“but so different, like an accident let it.” Soldiers marched him and his family away; other soldiers burned it. And the synagogue where he had his bris, his bar mitzvah—it closed its doors forever because there wasn’t even a minyan—ten men—left in the town. Somehow the building survived a Nazi-ignited firestorm, he said. Or at least that’s what he heard. He never knew for sure, because he’d never gone back, as he knew he never would.

He once told me, “You leave. You don’t come back.” Somehow, in the way he said it—in that almost-British accent inflected with, I would learn later, the French vowels and German rhythms prewar Continental Europeans learned in gymnasium—told me, in its otherworldliness (at least in comparison to anybody else on this block) that “you” meant “me.”

45. Why We Cannot Reunite

 

Mother has now accomplished something I didn’t think she’d even try to do: For the first time in my life, I’m part of a reunion.

Or am I? I’m here with a bunch of other people who lived on this block and who—with the exception of that woman whose name I never knew—haven’t been here in many, many years.

So I suppose some people would call it a reunion. Except that we haven’t been reunited. We never will be because we were never joined, save for the fact of having lived on this block. Mother and the woman whose name I never knew never left and, as far as I know, never disconnected their relationship, which of course was a consequence of living on this block. They talked about things they never talked with anybody else, including me. Now that mother’s gone, I don’t know who else she’ll talk to, if anybody. Somehow I imagine she won’t have any reunions after today.

For that matter, I don’t know if I’ll ever have one. I didn’t graduate from any school or participate in any of those other rites of passage that seem to mark other people’s lives. No war, no marriage, no Manhattan Project. In fact, I haven’t stayed on any job or lived in any place long enough to develop a camaraderie with anyone.

Then again, I’ve been told that I’ll never develop such relationships, no matter how long I live or work with anyone. I wonder if he—my guidance counselor—ever knew about Louis’s rape, or that I knew about it. In any event, he made his judgment of me not long after it happened, which was not long before I stopped going to school for good.

Funny, though, how he never talked to me about staying in school. I remember another time when I had a conference with him—I forget exactly why, but I think it was about my always low-but-still-falling grades—when I told him I wouldn’t be around for very long. “I know,” he said.

I’d already made up my mind that I was getting out of that school the first chance I got, but I still don’t know whether that’s what he meant. He was known for giving his one-sentence assessments: “You’re not staying in this neighborhood” or “It’ll be the Army or jail for you.” Then, I’d’ve accepted either to get out of that school and off this block. But his most famous one-liner, which he bestowed on one of the cheerleaders, was, “See you at the reunion.”

If he’d told me that, I don’t know whether I would’ve heard it as a sentence or a challenge. A dare, maybe—and only because I’d already developed such a thorough contempt for the place and almost everyone in it, including him. Somehow, I don’t think anybody said, “He inspired me” after spending sessions with him in his office or, in his earlier years, his social studies classes. Then again, maybe he did inspire, or at least motivate, somebody for all I know. But there’s nobody I can point to and say, “He (or she) inspired me.”

Sometimes mother instructed. Other times she empathized. But inspired, no. Adam--as much as he tried (and as much as he could) cultivate a companionship with me-- never could’ve motivated me because I knew, even before he stuck his head in that oven, that I would never, in any way, become a man who resembled him. Then again, I never expected to become a man—or even get to where I am now, on the brink of my sexual reassignment surgery—because I’ve never seen anyone do that on this block.

For that matter, I never saw anybody become a woman, or grow or change in any significant way on this block. Of course, when we’re children, we can’t imagine our parents as children, no matter how many photos we see or stories we hear about them from that part of their lives. But my mother: it seemed that she had been born as she is, as my mother. As, in other words, the one I’d always known and will probably recollect for the rest of my life. I say “probably” instead of “will” simply because predicting the course of anything in my life has never been a talent or skill of mine.

And then—then what? I’ve never had any faith in any of the religions that entangled my mother and other people and purport to teach what happens in this life and show or warn us what happens after it. According to the nuns and the brother, in whose classes I sat for as long as mother could afford it, she and I’lll be together again—or at least we’ll re-encounter each other—if both of us lead moral or immoral lives. Or we’ll be together again for a while, then part and possibly reunite later on if one of us has to purge more than the other.

If I survive the operation—I expect to, though I may become someone I can’t imagine now—there’s no way, I think, we’ll be together again. I was sent to this planet male; according to the teachings I got, I can’t enter the kingdom female. Or that’s how it seems, anyway. As far as I know, my mother didn’t commit any sin deemed irredeemable by the old men who run the church. Then again, I never quite knew whether she’d been married to, or divorced, the one who fathered me. Well, I had his last name all through school, so I don’t know; I guess they were married. Then again, she never used his name, except to enroll me in school.

I never asked mother about him, about his name. In time—not much—I realized my situation was different from what was supposed to be and I came to my own ideas about how it came to be. I knew that, one way or another, they weren’t married for all the time I can remember. I didn’t need to know anything else, really.

Maybe that’s why I never had what most people think of as curiosity. When you learn what you need (or want) to know without asking questions, you don’t learn how to ask questions. And you never expect to learn the truth about anything, about anybody, by asking questions.

When you don’t expect to know anybody long enough to be curious or need to know, you lose the need and the desire to ask questions. You don’t wonder what will become of somebody, mainly because you don’t know whether you’ll survive long enough to find out. Or whether your life will be entangled with someone else’s for long enough so that any of it matters.

Then there’s no point to meeting somebody again five, ten twenty or however many years later. I read or heard, I’m not sure of which, that people who don’t go to their school reunions don’t form long-lasting relationships throughout their lives. Well, I guess I’m another ticker on that statistical table. Maybe I can’t predict the future, but I don’t expect to come back to this block again after we bury mother. For that matter, I don’t think anyone else—except for that woman whose name I never knew—will ever be on this block again.

I’ve the feeling I probably won’t be at another funeral, except my own, if anybody decides to have one. It doesn’t matter to me, and how could it once I’m gone? But I can’t speak for other people.

I expect—I didn’t say think, much less anticipate or predict—that barring some accident or disaster, no one who knows me will die before I undergo the operation to complete my transformation. So mother’s the last person to know me only by my current name, a label chosen for the vessel I’ve inhabited through these years. For a good many years, she’s heard my voice only over the phone. Still, it was the voice of the boy, the young man, she raised. As time went on, of course, I wasn’t as young or as much of a man as the one who inhabited her house, ate her and ate her food. Had she seen me, I’d’ve borne less and less resemblance to the one she birthed.

But, I guess she’d’ve recognized me. And that’s the reason why our relationship continued only over the telephone through the years. I know this; I stayed away because I didn’t want to be around anyone who’d recognize the boy, the man, I once was, even if they could see and understand who stood before them and what that person—I-- was becoming. For no one, including me, ever recognizes what is present. And there’s no way to reunite with it, and sometimes no way to connect with it in the first place.

42. What Is Enough

 

Some people think they’re underpaid, which is to say they think others make too much. Mother’d hear about some actor or baseball player in the news, shake her head and exclaim, “Nobody needs that much money!”

I’d’ve liked to’ve believed, or should I say agreed with, her. But all I could think was, How did she know?

And I thought it was a strange thing for her to say. After all, from her I learned that all that matters is whether you’re making enough to pay for what and who you have to pay for. I never knew the details of her finances—still don’t—but neither I nor—as far as I know, anyway—she missed a meal. Sometimes one or the other of us was hungry, or simply didn’t want to eat.

And I can remember a time when somehow or another she got a watermelon late in January—a particularly cold month and season, as I recall.

I don’t know how she got it or what—or if—she paid for it. But there it was. And it was one of the few things she ate from which she didn’t offer me even a bite, and it never occurred to me to ask for it.

Why didn’t I ask? Not because I didn’t care for watermelon: every year, I looked forward to that pink flesh that crumbled in my mouth without scraping my tongue or the slippery tissues above it. Just moist pieces that disintegrated before they slid down my throat.

Somehow I always felt like I was getting away with something when I ate watermelon. There was that texture; there was the coolness and the colors I’d never seen on anything else. Somehow, even in my ignorance of geography, I knew that nothing like it could come from this block.

And every year, right around the Fourth of July, we’d have it. I’d look forward to it, enjoy it. But I knew enough not to look for it in the middle of winter. No one told me: I just noticed that nobody ate it at any other time of year but those few weeks before Labor Day. Whatever mother had, there was enough for watermelon during the summer.

Since then, I’ve been what some people would consider poor. I met boys—and some girls—who sucked somebody so they could eat that day. And they didn’t have any place to stay that night, except for the bed of whoever fed and fucked them.

They weren’t making enough to live any other way; sometimes all they had were a sandwich and beer in their bellies and the stained sheets at their backs. Some people would say they were underpaid, which they confuse with being exploited.

I don’t imagine the question ever crossed their minds. One night, they needed only something to eat and drink, maybe something to smoke or snort, and some place to lie down, whether or not they get any rest. Another night, they’d need a pair of stockings or boots, a new makeup compact or something else, and they’d have to find another trick. Sometimes they didn’t have anything to eat or drink; sometimes they’d notice.

So maybe they weren’t making enough money. But were they underpaid? All anybody knows—and only sometimes do people actually know this—is what other people make, sometimes for doing the same kind of work they do, other times for doing things they can’t even imagine. Even if someone knows what you make, how could that person know what you should make?

After I left this block, I heard people say that other people in certain jobs, like teaching or social work, weren’t “paid enough.” How did they know? Sometimes they said the same thing about priests, rabbis, ministers and astrologers. How could they make such statements? Since I’ve tried so little to recall any part of my life, I’ve never needed religious people or spiritualists, and since I don’t fear ghosts, I have no need for the services such people render. I’d never have to pay for them, so they’re worth nothing to me. But I’ve known people—just-divorced suburban housewives and men who can only imagine they’ve seen this block, or something like it, in movie or on TV—who think ministers, mystics and mediums ought to live in big houses, drive cars that are almost as big and have wallets full of unlimited credit.

I’ve never tried, and don’t think I would ever try, to argue someone out of such a belief. On the other hand, I don’t think they or their kids—and certainly not their pets—shouldn’t have enough to eat. I think I learned this belief from mother. And this: Even though there weren’t that many people either of us really liked, I never—and I don’t recall that she ever—wished deprivation on anyone else. There just never seemed to be any point to that. Not even for the ones we wished dead.

But there were others, like one man—acutally, there were others like him, but I just happen to remember him right now—who thought he could starve or beat his wife, his kids and the kids on the team he coached into doing what he wanted them to do. Actually, I only saw him once or twice. But Nancy Hambramunde, his daughter, hunched over like the old women on the block even though she was my age. She never looked in my, or anyone else’s, direction. In school, she sat in an almost-fetal position, furtively, as if she’d never had and never would have the chance to rest before her teacher, her father or somebody else snapped her to attention.

We’d been in the same class, I think, for the year or two before I stopped going to school. And the teacher—Mr. Actun—called on her whenever she seemed ready to sleep or simply shut out the rest of the lesson, which she’d already learned anyway.

During the first few weeks of that term, she never answered—until one day when Mr. Actun informed her, and the rest of the class, that she’d fail the class if she didn’t answer his questions.

She lifted her head slightly, just enough for us to know she’d heard him. But she remained curled and held her hands to her stomach. From that day on, she answered—she always had the answers—as if she didn’t have to hear the question and we—and possibly someone else—would hear.

Although she always seemed to know anything she’d read, anything on which she could be quizzed, forward and backward, having Mr. Actun call on her never got easier. And he went from calling on her once during each class to twice, and more, until one day he subjected her to an impromptu cross-examination of a reading assignment (which, as I recall, I hadn’t looked at) punctuated by his shouts of “Speak Up!” and “Let the whole class see you!”

He was about to ask another question when a long, viscous tear streamed down each of her cheeks—and the bell rang. Her tears grew more liquid and her head bent almost into her when we pushed out and shuffled around her into the hallway.

I don’t recall seeing her after that day, at least not in school. I saw her around the block—I’m not sure it was after that day, or when—and I don’t think she saw me. Not that I tried to get her attention, or would’ve wanted it. But I do remember how she glanced sideways to ward off the sort of man who looked as though he’d just bellowed, “No comment!” as he barged past a TV news camera. If Nancy had always tried to stay curled, he looked as if the slightest motion or gesture could spring him like a trap.

Mr. Hambramunde drove the only Cadillac on this block—at least, the only one that didn’t come and go. And Nancy was, if not the best, certainly the most impeccably dressed girl in that school. Even when she slouched (which was almost never), she couldn’t disturb the straight lines of her starched, buttoned blouses and skirts that neither clung to, nor bellowed nor bagged, around her. And if a hair had rippled out of place, it’d’ve been as noticeable as if she’d forgotten to wear her glasses with tiny hexagonal lenses—which, of course, she never did.

After she’d left that school, I heard Mr. Hambramunde left after he and Nancy’s mother argued over the cost of private school. By that time, I’d stopped going to school. But it would be a while before I left this block.

41. The Yellow Gown

 

I—the funeral director, really—chose the soft yellow gown in which she was dressed when the women of our block and I saw her for the last time. I told the makeup artist that she always liked loose but neat fabrics that could drape, but not billow, on or away from her skin, depending on whether she’d been lying down or standing up. The crepe de chine fabric was finer and softer than anything I’d ever seen her wear. But I don’t think it would’ve upset her, if she could’ve known she was dressed in it.

But the color was---perfect! Though the woman who dressed and made my mother up was probably my age or younger. But looking at the way my mother was dressed and made up, I’d’ve thought the stylist/hairdresser had accompanied the girl who’d become my mother when, for the first time, my mother bought a dress: a soft, drapey frock in the color of August afternoon light or sunflowers. Mom’d saved her allowance—literally, what she was allowed to keep after she handed her mother the pay envelope from the shoe factory where she worked in the office. Having to save and wait frustrated her, she said, but it turned out for the best: the dress fit her perfectly, she said, for she’d grown two inches and hadn’t gained any weight.

But I can only imagine that color on my mother. Hardly anybody looks good in any shade of yellow and I, no matter how I’ve changed, couldn’t help but to look like fruit that’d over-ripened in the cindery haze of a malarial swamp. Mother’s skin, a bit earthier than mine, and her brown eyes coulldn’t’ve done that hue any more than justice than it could’ve done for her. But in the one photograph I ever saw—in black and white—of her in that lovely dress, there was a tension miising that she seemed to carry even as a very young girl. Could’ve been something about that dress, I guess. I don’t know, I’ll never know, about that color, though.

I’d never seen that color--I’d known it only from my mother’s descriptions—until I saw her in repose. That tension, gone again—before the other women of our block. I hadn’t seen that color, that look, certainly not on her, until then; haven’t seen it since. And it was the only time I saw her in a gown. She didn’t have photographs, at least none that I know of, of her wedding or any other formal occasion. Since she didn’t graduate from high school, or even junior high, I doubt she went to a prom.

In fact, the only occasion of her life marked by any ritual, besides her death, was her birth. I guess she wore a gown then, as I did. (She showed me the photos.) But then again, who knows: She entered this world in her mother’s house, only two and a half street blocks—forty-one doors—from the funeral parlor. Down the street, turn right, go four avenue blocks and there’s the window I peeked out of the night they pulled Adam out of the house across the street from ours, his head out of the oven. They wrapped a gown around him in the hospital, just as they did the one and only time I had to stay. A gown at the time of my birth, and then, in that room, as sterile and odorless as the funeral parlor, but colder.

That gown, which barely covered my crotch, was made, it seemed, for an eleven-year-old girl. I still don’t know how long they made my mother’s final dressing gown: The casket’d been open only down to her breasts; below that, the linen-colored silk lining dissolved into a shadow. Somehow I get the feeling Adam’d never been covered quite enough until the medics pulled the sheet over his head as he lay stretched on the gurney on which he made the trip from the hospital to the morgue.

Maybe some people never get to be gowned; they don’t get the chance to have their bodies covered but not confined: protected from the cold, but not prevented from gathering the shadows of trees together to allow light to pass through. Some people may get to wear such a gown when they are named; others—only women—when they take on someone else’s name; and a few people, like my mother, at the end of their lives. A garment under which their energies—their echoes and reflections—are gathered. But one which still allows the arms and legs to move, even when the newborn, the enjoined, the recently-deceased, cannot or do not want to touch anyone.

Besides mother, the only other person on this block I’ve seen in a gown was Mrs. Littington. And hers wasn’t like any of the others: only slightly too long to be a cape or poncho but too short and not bulky enough to be a kaftan, only the caps of sleeves circled her forearms. As a kid, I thought it was some French costume they didn’t tell us about in social studies class; now, as far as I know, she might’ve made it or had it made.

Sometimes some other woman—who wasn’t at the funeral—would appear at Mrs. Littington's front door or by one of the windows. She was the only person I’d ever seen who shared Mrs. Littington’s facial shape: all angles and refractions of olive bark and chestnuts baked by centuries of sun and wind. But the other woman’s—I was never sure of her relation to anyone, or role in that house—basic, earthy tones and sturdy shape hadn’t transmuted, as Mrs. Littington’s had, into a statue of shadows, each in her own reflection, or rather, refraction through time. But this is not to say she was timeless.

That is to say Mrs. Littington, before any of us met her, was not the person we knew, and she changed again after she left this block. She was just like that. On the hand, the other woman was always that, wherever she went, which is to say, wherever the Littingtons lived. She wasn’t of this block, but she was of its equivalent, in Toulon or some other place. Wherever it was, it was this block.

Which, of course, is the reason no one made any attempt to speak to her. The only one less trustworthy, or worthy in any other way, than someone who leaves this block is someone who comes from its mirror image in some other town, some other country, some other world. They’re always too dark, too coarse, too uppity, too something. So they survive they way anyone else does in the moment they’re about to enter after that uncertain and hostile moment they’ll always think of as the present—protected or at least covered up. We enter, or exit, in a gown, and don’t trust anyone who hasn’t entered our lives in that way.

40-A, Her

Still wonder about that lady, the one whose name I never knew, the one whose voice I heard only once before the funeral. Did she recognize me? Now I’m remembering something else. The day before the funeral, when I walked through the graveyards that separate this block, this neighborhood, from every other place I’ve seen since living on it, the wind—at least I thought it was the wind—flickered across my face and the back of my hands, which I shaved every day at that point in my life. I felt my blood fluttering under my skin and another current of wind rushing over my pores. But—no tingles, no goosebumps—I realized the air was still and the sun, behind translucent clouds and the chill of headstones against my fingertips seemed still, almost neutral.

When I walked under the bronze cross at the top of the gate, she glanced from across the street, a few yards to my left. I hadn’t remembered, at that moment, that she was our old neighbor, but I exhaled fully, wholly, when the step I thought she took in my direction cut to her left and toward a house on the corner.

Didn’t occur to me that it was her—or that she was looking at me—until long after the funeral, after I ‘d left the block for the last time. She’s probably still there, for all I know.

37, Crossing

There comes a day when you realize you’ve lived your entire on this block. It could come some Tuesday afternoon in the office. Or you may see it when waves roll on some shore you didn’t grow up with. And you realize you couldn’t have done anything vut take those steps down to the bones, the foam, the stones and perhaps the sand that are inevitable once you’ve crossed the place where an avenue and a boulevard collide at oblique angles with the street that you’ve lived on. No one ever tells you what’s on the other side; they only tell you not to go there.

You wake from a dream and somebody asks you about it but you’re not sure why. You’re not even sure of what you’ve dreamed; no one can tell you how those stories end. You only know that you begin some place you thought you’d forgotten and proceed through people you haven’t thought about since you left the block. Or even before that.

It all puzzles, frightens, infuriates and annoys me. Now I understand why mother stayed through all those years, alone, with me, alone with me alone. And why she kept me, even when she couldn’t afford to replace the clothes I’d just grown out of, much less the Catholic schooling she provided until there wasn’t money for anything else.

She knew something that men very often act upon but women understand intuitively. What other kind of understanding is there, anyway? What other kind of understanding does anybody need? Anyway, she told me this once: Any memory is paid for. Those recollections that people use to comfort themselves: That’s all they are, re-collections. The pieces, the shards, all picked up and rearranged, whether by reflex or design, into the stories other people use to acquit themselves or the world they’ve lived in. Things could’ve been better or worse, or they are. Either way, people sill conclude that they’re where they’re supposed to be or that they’re going there and that God, or whoever, is leading them there and providing them with everything they need along the way.

I don’t long to go back to some Garden of Eden that I never saw in my life. By the same token, I don’t regret anything. That’s helpful, in a way: I expect nothing of the future, not for myself or anyone else.

There are a few indisputable facts about my life, and they’re not on any certified documents. And they’re not the sorts of things that someone will find by making inquiries or by questioning me. Even knowing me, whatever that means, wouldn’t be enough. Of course I was a child and I grew. And what of it? What other incontrovertible facts are there? Oh, I was enrolled in school X for however many years, but how much did I attend, and how much did I learn? Even that’s not something I know for sure. I’ve never completed any sort of diploma, and to some people that means I don’t have any education or intelligence. Maybe I don’t. But that doesn’t worry me now, and I won’t argue the point with anybody. Maybe I’ve learned a few things; maybe I haven’t.

And what of it?, I ask again. If I have an education, it explains some of my life; if I don’t, it explains other things. Mother was protective, mother was domineering, mother was projecting. And….I was sensitive, I was a sissy. Which label suits your explanation of me? Or mine of you?

Someone, somewhere always has a label to stick on you. Once they’ve named you, they’ve tamed you. That’s what they know about you, and if they think they’ve tamed you, they also think they’ve solved you.

The name, the label is a lot easier to carry, to remember, than what’s been named or labeled. But some—most—people confuse it with a memory, which is an experience remembered. Mother told me that, or something like that, once. That it’s all about pain: the method of payment extracted for true, precise memories. Pain: that which can’t be transformed, transmitted; that which no one can take away. I don’t think anyone can ever share it. Pain is always solitary despite—actually, because of—all those people who devote themselves to muting it in other people.

What of all of those people who visit strangers, or even friends, in hospitals and nursing homes? Or the ones who try to feed and teach the children in the gutters of places no god would ever go anywhere near? Now, I know I never lived in such poverty, and somewhere along the way I stopped feeling guilty over the fact that I never did. Actually, I never had such pangs, not on my own anyway. There was somebody, usually a priest or a nun (when you’re a kid, that person is an adult)  who resents you for…existing.

Some people don’t remember their own pain, don’t feel it. Even after suffering through the deaths of people they’ve known, or their own selves, they only have some story, some name that someone else gave them to describe the experience. And what someone else told them to feel. I guess that’s a pretty good definition of guilt: what someone else told you to feel.

So that’s how rich girls end up in the gutters of Calcutta. And how people end up at the bedsides of people they barely know, or don’t know at all, mouthing platitudes when what the person in bed needs, more than anything, is sleep. Or at least rest.

And so they recollect someone else’s suffering, or more exactly, some image of it. Or some way, perhaps in which the person expressed his or her suffering. Out of naivete, out of ignorance, sometimes out of condescension, disrespect or contempt for the other person, they try to quell their cries, their bodily contortions, the look in the eyes of a person in pain.

Truth is, the only way you can end another person’s suffering is to kill him or her. And even then I couldn’t tell you for sure: What happens when a person stops functioning in ways we’re accustomed to seeing? I don’t know.  But I do know that a person’s pain can end only when it’s run its course. There’s nothing anyone can do to change that.

Any attempt to end another person’s suffering and pain is therefore an act of the basest sort of arrogance and self-righteousness. What right have I, or anyone else, to deprive another person of his or her experience, of memories—the only things that a person can truly claim to own?

Mother understood all this, I’m sure. And that’s why she never left this block. You never realize you need to hold onto anything until you have recollections. And the more you describe them to yourself, to anyone else, the further you stray from them. And the more you try to base your relations with other people on them. Really, you can only have a memory of the present, however long that moment may be. On the block where I grew up, it lasts until you leave. Until that moment when you cross that intersection, traffic circle or boulevard, and see a side, coast or any other boundary you’ve never seen before, you don’t have a past. And, of course, when you don’t have a past, you don’t have a future. To remain on this block, you don’t need either one: In fact, they’re burdens.

Once you make that crossing, you see that your street and others end or continue under different names. And another street, avenue, boulevard or perhaps a highway opens in front of you. Then there’s no choice but to follow it.

Mother really was right. She’d always told me—no, wait a minute, she never did that; she just somehow made it known to me—that I shouldn’t cross, that there was nothing but trouble on the other side. As if she should worry about trouble! She, raising me by herself, told me never, ever to answer the door. Or the phone, not unless I was expecting a call. There’s no telling who’s on the other side, who’s lying in wait.

How did she know? There is always trouble, only pain on the other side. Suffering: It’s what nobody and nothing can prepare you for. Some can warn you, but only about what they’ve known. They can never tell you what your own individual death—which is to say your life—will be. Nor can they describe their own in any way that will help you, that will change the outcome of your tribulations. All anyone can offer is his or her recollection.

Now I understand why I feel uneasy on those rare occasions when someone who’s never seen this block asks m to describe my experiences or my dreams. And why I came to distrust them much more intensely than anyone I knew on this block—that is to say, all of the women, including my mother, in the funeral parlor,  I haven’t met anyone away from this block whom I needed or who needed me. The things they told me, I could’ve heard anywhere, really, even from the men on this block, however briefly they stayed. And anything I’ve told anyone since those days could’ve been uttered by anyone, anywhere. The stuff they could understand, that is. And that doesn’t include mother or anyone who came to her funeral.

And the women at the funeral: Could they’ve steered, consciously or not, some piece of me—whatever they grasped, for whatever reasons? The one whom the teachers kept after school: Most of the time, I didn’t understand why.

36. Naming

Having an “illegible scrawl” is not such a bad thing sometimes. I’ve never liked putting my name on any kind of list. But how can I not name myself as one of the people who attended my mother’s wake and funeral? At least my mother, if she could see it, would recognize the long loop underneath a staff that contracts into the sharp joints of a seismometer wave. She’d know it anywhere—even in death, I believe—but no one else, not even my father, I’m sure, could ever read it. Not that it would’ve mattered. Something occurred to me as I signed guest book at the entrance to the funeral parlor: If anybody else could decipher that blue gash I sliced across the page, it’d be the lady whose name I never knew. I don’t know why I thought that—well, I didn’t know at that moment, anyway. But somehow it would make sense that she, who’d never before that day done more than glance at me while she spoke with my mother, could decode that scrawl, or many of the other things that, it seemed, only my mother understood. After all, she seemed to notice, as I did, mother’s mouth, firm but delicate with a top lip like a crossbow, the lines darting and disappearing around it into the soft but unyielding curves of her cheekbones. And, I thought, if anybody besides my mother could recognize my voice after not seeing or hearing from me for generations, for lifetimes, it’d be the lady whose name I never knew.

She short-circuited the sigh I was about to heave when she avoided looking at my name by staring at me. Besides her, only mother could’ve done that.

And then a dream—one of the few I’ve ever made any effort to remember—came to mind. I don’t remember when I first dreamt it, but I’m sure it was long ago, probably when I was still on this block. Could’ve been a daydream, for all I remember. A shadow descended—quickly, at first—but its plunge fluttered to a glide as it neared the ground like sand skittering under ripples spilling into foam in the horizon. Long, silky strands unfurled as the shadow touched the ground.

It swirled in the wind like clouds and whirled more furiously around something I couldn’t see; it was like the eye of a storm. In the distance, the wind stuttered the tail of the shadow. It was a mare -- Don’t ask me how I knew; you just know certain things sometimes in dreams. – that skipped in widening loops through tall reeds flickering where I would’ve seen a dusk—or a dawn—if the gray tide of the sky hadn’t spilled against the line of that shore.

The long strands of that shadow, turning brown and silky, writhed and wriggled in the wind, which was winding along curves I couldn’t see and wrapped themselves around cumulus curlicues.

I followed one strand, softening in a wind, that seemed to be falling off a line at the edge of that land—I wasn’t sure whether it was a tidal marsh, a beach or simply a cool, damp , windswept field.—until I saw her face. In my real world—that is, my everyday, waking world—she’d never had such hair. But in the dream, it was hers; it couldn’t’ve been anyone else’s: it was soft in a way you can only remember, like a light in a room where you spent your very first days: a light you never can experience again, except in your dreams

Mother and I never talked about dreams, and only rarely about other people. I can’t remember a conversation about “the future” or my future. For that matter, she never mentioned the past—not hers or anyone else’s—and this doesn’t surprise me now. Somehow it never occurred to me to ask her if she envisioned herself at a kitchen table with me, or with any one child—I am her only one, as far as I know—and no one else. No man, no friends—neither mine nor hers—nor any other sentient, conscious being.

I can’t remember her uttering any forbiddance of bringing my friends to the house. It would’ve been superfluous, anyway: I had no contact with the other kids beyond the school hallways ant the paths we took along the sidewalks and streets to and from our homes and school. And my mother talked to Mrs. Rolfe, Mrs. Littington and that lady who followed me to the bathroom and the sign-in book when they passed each other’s houses or when they met surreptitiously in a store or some other place.

I doubt she’d foreseen coming to know any of them, any more than I can envision this person whom I’ve become, who came to mourn her. Perhaps this was the reason she—and, as far as I could tell they—could only see themselves in that eternity of their own lives: that moment called the present, which of course they never named. Giving a moment--or any person, place or thing—a name, or calling it something, makes you as separate from it as my mother’s (and presumably their) God from the word, the light, the water, the garden and Adam and Eve. And those names for the way people acted, for circles of friends, for neighbors: Once you use them, they separate you from them or them from you, the way foods you ate when you were growing up become memories when you learn the names other people call them. I learned that mom’s eggplant salad was called caponata; the tomato sauces she made were called marinara, boulognese and so on. Once I learned those names, those foods—even though I still love them—were no longer mine or my mother’s.

Now I know that people—some’re called psychoanalysts, others call them priests, fortunetellers, soldiers or any number of other names—have their names for my home, my mother, the clouds and everything else in the dream, and for the dream itself. And for whatever part of my brain, or whatever it was, that made the dream happen. I don’t know those names now, and maybe I never did or never will. Somewhere along the way I stopped getting an education (with a capital E). You spend enough time in school and everything becomes a type or a category—here or there, this color or that color, the past or the future. But not the present: there is only Time. (Yes, with a capital T.) Everything on this block—all of the people, the houses we lived in, the funeral parlor where we met, probably for the last time—are all moments out of Time. Until the moment when that lady followed me, I’d been living in Time, never in any moment, because all those other moments were gone.

But that lady didn’t know my name, the one I chose for myself. Nor did anyone else in that funeral parlor. If they’d wanted to, they could’ve talked all day with me and they’d’ve forgotten it by now because they didn’t know my name. I wouldn’t’ve minded that, really.

35, Behind Them

 

Someone gives the respectful yet truncated stare one directs toward, but not quite at, someone she vaguely recognizes. And she’s not sure she wants to find out. Barbara Fabriaferro, nee Moskowitz, the lady who lived two doors down from us. I used to spend afternoons, evenings and sometimes weekends at her house when my mother was out fulfilling obligations I wouldn’t understand until much later.

Mrs. Fabriaferro had a husband—Did he father her sons?!—who went “around the corner for a pack of cigarettes” and was never heard from again. Willie, the oldest boy, was my age and would never talk about him. Gerald and Tomy, the younger ones, never talked at all—not to me, anyway. Willie spent most of his time in school and away from it starting fights with other kids. Except for me. So we had no reason to acknowledge each other.—actually, he had even less use for me than I had for him. If Willie wouldn’t fight you, no other kid in the neighborhood would. I wasn’t worth hitting, especially not for him. Even under his school uniform—which, even though I saw him every day for years, I still cannot picture him in it—he seemed wired together, ready to pounce at any moment. I would never’ve tried to fight him back: My pituitary gland had done its work early, leaving soft flesh on the parts of my body where sinews twined with muscle on his. In those days, I wasn’t much of a runner, either, so there wouldn’t’ve been any thrill for him in a chase or capture.

In other words, Willie, though he seemed born to fight, was not the school or neighborhood bully. Although he won every fight—that I heard about, anyway—he only fought kids who could fight him. No question, he fought to win. But he always seemed to know whose reflexes matched his, and who could land a punch as quickly as, or faster than, he could.

I, on the other hand wanted to—could—fight only in self-defense. It wasn’t a matter of pacifism or pussilamnity: The fight itself and the opponent’s combat-readiness never interested me. If I were ever to throw punches, only death would stop me—or my enemy.

And the one time I had any reason to strike back at anybody, nothing in my mind or reflexes would’ve been enough: I didn’t get the chance to hit first, hit hard or hit at all. Not even to kick or throw something: from behind, he clasped his hand around my mouth and dragged me. But Willie never knew about this, at least as far as I know. Nor did his mother, or anybody else. He could just as well’ve been there, photographed it, remembered it. Then again, if any of the boys in the neighborhood could’ve seen it, it could just as well’ve been him. Then again, if he had, he might’ve fought that man. And, well, who knows…

Anyway, his mother, Barbara, came to the funeral. Was she remembering those afternoons, those Saturdays, when Willie sat taut and motionless on the edge of the couch while war movies rattled the television and I slumped at the other end of the sofa, reading or just staring? Or does she realize that up to this day, the eve of my surgery, I’ve had hardly even a scar, or even a scrape, mainly because of Willie. Had she known, would she have extorted an expression of gratitude from me—for her son’s contempt, even disrespect of me?

He wasn’t there. Nor were her other two sons. After I left this block, I never heard about them again. Or for that matter about Mrs. Littington, who said something—troppo malo-I didn’t know she spoke Italian—to a woman in a black nun’s veil.

And what of Mr. Littington, who met her during the war in Toulon. Came back, never looked back, he said. She followed. When he didn’t understand her, which was most of the time, he’d promise, “N’aura pas de faim.” Apparently, he learned just enough to know that they say “Je t’aime” only in movies and first-term French classes. When Phil first brushed his epaulets against Francoise’s black dress, she said something about how he’s an American who thinks life is “just like een ze moo-vees.”

Glancing at me, she arched, then lowered her high fine brows—some things don’t change—then turned toward the casket and clasped her hands. I thought I heard her whisper, “Sacre Dieu, ce ne’est pas important” or something like that. Then again, I might’ve been remembering something—that was her response to anything he couldn’t answer with “N’aura pas de faim.”

Once, after she’d moved away—something to do with Mr. Littington’s work—she wrote to Mrs. Rolfe, whose earliest memories followed her to and from the camp where she and her family were imprisoned with other Japanese-Americans. Mrs. Littington wrote about the place to which she’d moved: some town with mediocre, expensive coffee shops and a theatre that showed Dirty Harry and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Mrs. Rolfe described the letter to my mother. “She asks about you. And she says ‘but it is not so important.” My mother never spoke about her again. But I remember Mrs. Rolfe mentioning her to another woman the rest of the neighborhood saw only when she picked up her mail from the curbside box or planted or pulled from the patches of rock and dirt between her house and lawn.

That lady came to the funeral too—the only time I’ve ever seen her away from her house or wearing anything besides pastel-colored smocks. Her black dress, also a smock, hung in loose folds from her shoulders to her calves, where even her support stockings couldn’t smooth away the wrinkles.

Even she—until and after that day I didn’t know her name—glanced with furtive recognition. I didn’t know why she’d remember me, except for the fact that I lived on the block. In fact, I don’t know whether she knew anybody else besides my mother, Mrs. Rolfe and perhaps Mrs. Littington: I never saw anyone go to or come from her house. Years later, at the funeral, I recognize her the way I can recognize just about any woman: by her voice. Especially hers, which I’d heard only once before the day of the funeral. One of those sounds that’d never change, ever: rather low, but not throaty; rather like my mother’s—and mine. Even though they don’t echo, I hear them again and again, because somehow I return to them when I’m not thinking about them.

Now I realize that she and my mother probably hadn’t been talking about me, or anybody on that block. In fact, the one time I can recall hearing her speak to my mother, she said something like, “They will not come back.” At least that’s what it sounded like: She spoke in a way I hadn’t heard before or haven’t heard since. It wasn’t her accent because she came as anybody I’ve heard to speaking without one. And, although the phrase came out seamlessly, it was too taut, too terse to seem smooth or polished: It had none of the effected restraint one hears in the uninflected speech of actors and academicians.

I only heard her that once. Any other time I walked by when she and my mother conversed, my mother’s stare would glance off her, in my direction, then just as quickly back to her. I’d immediately head for our house, school—any place but there. Of course I wanted all the more to hear them, but no matter how quietly, how softly I walked, my mother’s face’d dart in my direction as soon as I’d gotten close enough to see what either of them was wearing.

Talking to that lady whose name I never knew, my mother’d lose or leave something, some force, that kept the corners of her eyes and mouth horizontal and parallel to lines I didn’t see but seemed to radiate from her jawline into the air around her. Whether she listened to or interjected in that lady’s talk, her cheekbones arched and furled broken swirls underneath her eyes and around her lips, which would seem softer. She didn’t seem older or younger—indeed, at those moments, my mother and that lady seemed to be unbound by time and undefined by age. Perhaps this was the same look that Mrs. Littington said when she declared that my mother was “pretty” and “sympathique.” I don’t think the man who fathered me, or any other man, saw her that way.

I think the one other time I heard the lady whose name I never knew speak, she told my mother, “You look very pretty today,” even though that day she hadn’t brushed her hair and she wore beige stretch pants and a T-shirt that didn’t conceal the weight she’d been gaining. Perhaps my mother looked less like an anonymous housewife than other mothers, but I don’t think that’s what that lady liked about her. Maybe it was something in the sound of her voice, or more precisely, the expression in her speech.

She gestured, in my direction, by the foot of my mother’s casket. I jerked my head away and turned toward the door of the airless, climateless funeral parlor. Out the door, to the left, a few steps down the corridor to the bathroom. Wrong move: She followed.

Relief! It’s a single stall, and I got to it first. Why do they always assume that in a room full of people, especially women, only one will have to go at a time? And doesn’t anybody ever clean these things? You can go to nice restaurants, libraries, opera houses—all those places where people are supposed to be, or at least appear, civilized, and they all smell like they’ve been power washed with piss, and the seats and bowls are always stained, streaked and marked. I mean, women are better about picking up after themselves and cleaning themselves up, but how is it that our bathrooms are dirtier and smellier than the ones for men?

But at least the door closed on this one—before that woman got to it!

Not that I didn’t trust her. Or more exactly, I couldn’t think of anything she could use against me. I didn’t expect to see her or anyone else in that room, ever again, and of course there was nothing she could tell my mother. My mother’d’ve probably reacted differently to anything that woman could’ve said if I could say it too.

But for some reason I became curious. How would that pale gray lady see me? What would she find in my eyes, in my face, that she couldn’t find five, ten, twenty years ago? She hadn’t changed much, except that she seemed a little heavier even though, as far as I could see, she hadn’t gained any weight. And she still had those austerely, nakedly feminine jawline and eyesockets I remembered. Hadn’t heard her voice, though. What could she say to me?

After combing my hair, brushing my face and smoothing over my clothes (One good thing about black: It doesn’t show wrinkles too much1), I opened the door to the narrow, colorless alcove where she stood. Didn’t look like she’d turned her head, or even flinched, while she waited. Her gaze, then as in my childhood, always seemed turned in my direction. Whether she noticed me or not seemed to depend on what she’d been thinking about. However, if she wasn’t looking at or noticing me, no movement or gestures could bring me to her attention.

She stared, her nearly black eyes not meeting mine but sweeping a tide of chilly crystalline light under my skin. “It’s good that you made it,” she intoned. I nodded, thinking of all I could’ve said, none of which would’ve mattered: Wish we didn’t have to be here. Should’ve come to see her sooner. I know, it does seem odd that I could talk to mother every week but still manage not to visit her. Other people I could write off if they didn’t come to see me. And I did, even though I made it next to impossible for them to find me.

“I’m sure she would’ve appreciated you herE”…her tone fit the moment too well for her to have been relieved. “Perhaps you can sign the book.” She gestured toward black leather covers opened to one of a dozen pages.