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.