13. The City We Never Knew

 

Once in a great while, I get into a conversation that leads to the question, “Where are you from?” I answer with the name of the city in which this block is located. It’s probably the most untrue, or at least the most inaccurate, thing I say to anybody.

I only know this block. As for the city, it’s one everybody in the world’s heard about and quite a few’ve vistited. Unless you come from this block, you know more of this city, or at least what people think about when they hear its name, than I do. Or ever will.

No one who began or ended up on this block has any interest in seeing all of the famous edifices, monuments or other preserved specimens outsiders see through the windows of buses and the viewfinders of cameras. Some might say it’s like having no interest in the house once you’ve been in the boiler room.

You don’t swear off or hate the city the rest of the world knows. You just never see it, unless work or have some other reason to venture into it. Knowing that the city has the biggest or most famous anything in the world doesn’t mean much when you’re living or dying on this block. Especially if you’re a woman, or among women.

Someone once said there’re deception, theft and death behind every great fortune. Someone else said that to make omelets, you have to break eggs. To build the bridge that connects this city to the rest of the world, a whole series of blocks—like this one, I’ve been told—were destroyed, edited off maps: obliterated from the face of the earth.

And what of those plazas and towers that stretch across and above the narrow, shadowy blocks of the city? Or of this block—the name of this street? Behind every name there is at least one death. And more often than not, there’s bloodshed, intrigue, chicanery or some other rupture in what people call “the social contract,” whatever that is.

None of the violence ends when the death certificate, the checks or the documents that certify possession are signed. The generations born and unborn continue to give, willingly or not, their voices to the others that roil in the cauldron of unending death. The ones who escape this fate—and I’m not sure that I have—do so only because they had no other choice.

Nothing’s been named for anybody who’s ever lived on this block. Yet they—we—die in the name of those who leave monuments to themselves. And those landmarks, like the pyramids or the cathedrals in European towns, cast shadows over their communities from which nobody escapes. Everybody in those towns or nations gives his or her life to build the church or palace or to win a battle. And nothing and nobody’s the same again, ever.

So, while I know nothing about the city in which this block is located, this block is the one thing I haven’t been able to go without thinking about since I left it. I know the lives that were lost or destroyed while I was living here—including my own.

12. Fate and Hunger

Foregone conclusions. Fait accompli. Perhaps the only one, or at least the first one, is the knowledge that they exist. And that each of us has a different time, place or way of learning about them—except, of course, the ones who come to comprehend them at the moment of their death.

Me, I learned about inevitability, about marching with fate, one cool, damp, overcast Sunday afternnon. In those days, I always knew what day of the week it was because I was expected to. That’s how it seemed, anyway: someone decided I had to be in a certain place at a certain moment. Or I knew by way of other people that it was Sunday because they were going to and coming from church. And the store down the block was closed.

People walk differently when they’re drawn by the impossibility of taking a different step from the ones they’re taking. They don’t walk like people who are doing what they “have to do,” such as when they’re going to work or the dentist. On Sunday afternoons, at least on this block, there is only the repetition of fate: people going to have lunch or dinner, or fights, with those people they’re bound to see: family members, in-laws or their equivalents or substitutes.

Really, they’re not any different from people who’re spending the overcast afternoon indoors because it rained in the morning. They’re drawn by the momentum, the inertia of destiny, like amusement park rides that continue to run even when nobody’s on them.

It was on such a Sunday afternoon that I learned that some things couldn’t be stopped or steered any more than the forces of life—or death—on this block.

I think there’s always a moment—I’d’ve called it a decisive moment but for the fact that I don’t believe in a humanoid god—when a person begins the deperate run from this block or takes the first steps in the march to death.

I was chopping onions for the huge bowl of salad that would accompany the two big pans of lasagna she was making even though none of her friends or neighbors was coming over that day. They decided they didn’t want to go out in the rain, even after it stopped.

But we made that big Sunday dinner anyway, even though neither of us got hungrier on Sunday than on any other day of the week. Or at least not hungrier enough that either of us noticed. There’d be leftovers for the rest of the week, at least. Not that I minded: I’d rather eat my favorite foods—and I’ve never eaten anything that’s more satisfying than that lasagna-- a few days after they were made than something I don’t like as much fresh off the stove.

But leftovers weren’t the reason my mother went ahead and made that big dinner anyway. She didn’t eat much of them herself. And I couldn’t’ve, even if I’d wanted to. So I didn’t know what the reason was, but leftovers weren’t it.

She’d’ve made that huge Sunday meal, or something else just as voluminous, no matter what. She always had and, I realized that day, she always would.

She always did. After I left this block, she’d always tell me what she was cooking whenever we talked. For a long time I wondered whether she was trying to entice me back, but I realized that she knew I wasn’t coming.

She was going to make those meals, no matter what. Before she had me in her kitchen, and long after she knew I’d never be there again, she cooked. We—or she—‘d eat them, or whatever portion we could, whether or not we were hungry. That’s what we and everybody else on this block did in the presence of a big Sunday meal.

Hunger is the reason to eat; the hunger of several people is the reason to cook a big meal. I realized that was how I’d live—it’d be my philosophy of life, if you will. Talk when there’s someone to talk to, broadcast when you’re trying to reach a lot of people. It’s not a matter of what you’re trying to say, or whether you have anything to say just as, really, almost anything will do when you’re really hungry. Of course spinach and mineral water are better for you than hot dogs and soda, but you don’t think about that when you’re truly hungry: that is to say, when you’re not thinking about the vitamins or other substances your body breaks down when…I was going to say, when you no longer experience hunger, but I realized for all I know , there may be more of the same after death.

Mother cooked, no matter who was or wasn’t there. Adam talked—to me, to anybody who’d sit still for a while—even though he didn’t have anybody to talk to. They died on this block. So did Moon, the football player who attacked me, when he got into a fight with a guy who wasn’t perceptibly gay, hadn’t stolen his girlfriend (whether or not he ever actually “had” her or not) and hadn’t looked at Moon the wrong way because, well, he hadn’t looked at Moon the wrong way and thus couldn’t be accused of a provocation.

Of course, on that gray mirror of a Sunday afternoon when I learned about fate, I couldn’t yet know what propelled Adam to his death or what he’d share with anyone who’d died and would die on this block. I knew only that I wasn’t going to die, at least not there or here. I couldn’t. I didn’t know why—I just knew I wouldn’t. That knowledge terrified me as much as—possibly more than—knowing that I’d have to make a choice not to.

I didn’t know how or when I would leave her kitchen—or this block—for the last time. I knew only that I would. For that matter, I knew that I wasn’t going to spend much more time in school, even though I had no premonition that Moon, Jack and Tigler would attack me.

I only knew that mother was going to make her dinner. That some people were spending the day indoors because it’d rained in the morning. And that the rides in the amusement part would run whether or not anybody was there to ride them.

And—I didn’t know how I knew this—I could never be a man, not even a young one, on this block. Not a woman, either. So I wouldn’t’ve been able to stay in the kitchen, with mother, for much longer.

11. The City of Ladies

I’m sure that if I stay on this block after her funeral, after her burial, and someone were to realize who I am, someone’ll blame me for mother’s death. People’ll say that my absence, through all these years, put too much strain on her heart, her spirit. (The one is a physical organ, so their accusations would make no sense. As for the other: What is it, anyway?) I’d be accused of selfishness when selfishness. In a way, that would be right, if not fair, I guess.

I haven’t been around because I was worried about my own safety, and how mother’d react to me. Even though she could sense that I’d changed—sometimes she said as much when we talked over the phone—I’d had no idea of how she’d react to my hair, nails, the new clothes, the changing shape of my body. And, even though she’d told me, “Everybody’s gone” time and again, I still wondered whether I’d get off that block alive if I came back. Until recently, I wasn’t entirely confident about my transformation. When you’re not among the community of which you’ve become a part, whether by birth or choice, whatever image you try to project has to be created and transmitted even more seamlessly than when you’re among your own. When you’re not in one of those neighborhoods where people in transformation congregate, or at least are accepted or tolerated, it’s all the more important to pass—to be unnoticed, in other words. I even wondered how I’d navigate through the wake, the funeral, the burial.

I must say that until today, it had been a while since anyone gave me a second glance or stared. Now only the operation to alter my genitals separates me from the next stage of my life, whatever that may hold. People hearing me for the first time over the phone call me “ma’am,” even before they’ve heard my name. Older men—and sometimes younger ones—hold doors open for me and let me pass in front of them. More important, they—and women, too—give me more space than I ever used to get.

Just last week, Charmayne, who’s shaped my hair as I’ve grown it, slid the hem of her skirt over her knee and revealed a scar and two bruises that her boyfriend, the father of her three-year-old daughter, left. I resisted an impulse to tell her to leave him. Instead, I embraced her as she sighed. “As long as I don’t set him off, he’ll get better.” Once again, of course, I didn’t say what I was thinking. She just knew: I could tell when she lowered her eyes.

After I was gone a while from this block, mother’d begun to tell me about the brutality of other men. She never named names, but I knew that at least one of them had to be my father. All the more reason not to find him, to find out about him. He left her bitter and angry: spent, even though she had to—or at least felt that she had to—continue living and working in whatever ways she could for my sake. A man hit her, pushed her head against a wall. And she never could recall what she did next, but the next thing she remembered seeing was him, doubled over with his hands gripping his crotch. She doesn’t know how she could have kicked or punched him after he knocked the wind, and nearly the light, out of her. At that moment she wasn’t even thinking of me, she said, though she’d decided earlier that she wouldn’t let him do to me what he did to a baby girl—hers?—who was classified as a victim of “crib death,” whatever that is.

I remembered those conversation, and our days in the kitchen with other women, no men anywhere in sight. And the things mother used to say as if she were instructing me rather than answering a question or explaining a point. Mother never wore—in fact, as far as I know, never even owned—any polo or T-shirts, sneakers or any other shoes or articles of clothing she was brought up to believe were men’s except for pants—and long ones, at that, which she wore only with completely enclosed shoes. And no sleeveless tops, and always a jacket, even on warm days. Only her house slippers had open toes and backs, and sometimes on warm days she’d wear something that looked like a cross between a housedress and a smock if she didn’t have anywhere to go.

But one day she put on a black silk dress that skimmed her breasts and curves down to her knees. I didn’t know that she owned it, or the black pumps she slid into. Though they were out of style—actually, nobody on that block is ever in style; some of the women are simply en vogue—she seemed elegant, even pretty, if a bit severe. I didn’t even have to ask. “A lady wears a dress to a funeral,” she intoned.

That was all I need to know for today. The fact that I don’t have a dark men’s suit or even a sportcoat is beside the point. For that matter, I no longer own any ties, or anything that resembles men’s dress shoes.

A lady: the only kind of person who could attend her funeral. Mrs.Littington, and the woman whose name I never knew—when my mother talked about them, they were “ladies.” So were other females of a certain age. As in, “the lady up the street,” or “the lady with the sheepdog.” They were the only ones she talked to, who talked to each other about each other. The ladies: The Crossing Guard Lady, The Grocery Store Lady. “Go to the lady at the newsstand for some change.” All my life, as a kid, I was always directed from one lady to another by my mother or some other lady.

So who else could come to see her at the end of her life but other ladies?