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.

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…