48, What They Knew

 

Some things are the same everywhere. Including here. People’re always afraid of what’s not there, or here. And then—guess what?—it happens.

They’re all afraid we’ll leave: the ones who’ve no reason, no wish, to stay—even the ones who have to leave if they want to continue living at all. Yet there’s always a sense of betrayal—nobody wants to know you—in fact, some may even want to kill you—once you’ve left.

So we go. Anyone with any sense—like mother—doesn’t try to bring us back. She may’ve hoped for my return at one time, just maybe, but I think she knew it’d happen. Did she know what I’d done? Somehow I think she must’ve. How could she not’ve? How could anyone, including (especially) that woman whose name I never knew, not know? Somehow I guess Mrs. Littington knew, too. Or at least I expect that if she’d found out, it wouldn’t surprise her. Now would Adam’ve been shocked, I think.

Actually, mother understood that what’d been done to me was enough reason to leave. So would the things I’d witnessed or learned about. Like Adam’s death. If there’s any sort of existence after this one, and whoever’s there can, or wants to, look at this planet again, how could he not understand? After all, I think he wanted to get off this block as much as he wanted anything else, save perhaps for getting away from Bergen-Belsen.

And mother: If the heaven she believed in actually exists, she’s going there. Not because she was any more virtuous than anyone else—well, maybe she was, because for all that she might’ve said to the woman whose name I never knew, I’m sure she kept as many secrets as anyone I’ve ever known. If I know anything about the man who fathered me, or anybody else, it wasn’t because she told me. It’s because she knew.

But really, how could she not’ve known about the murder? Me and the murderer. Other people’ve been killed on this block, but that killing was the one nobody could deny they knew about. Not even mother. And especially not me.

I know this much: that none of the information. save for the date of death, was correct on the crime report, or on the death certificate. Some of the information was more or less accurate, like the time of death. They came upon a figure based on the amount of time it takes someone to bleed to death, or by some such method of computation. But the rest of the information—the name, the date of birth—none of it has anything to do with the person it was supposed to identify.

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.”