Some years ago I went to Poland, alone and without tour guides or acquaintances. It was a shattering experience, partly because of my inability to read anything or understand more than about fifteen spoken words. People helped me, but I felt like an infant; they led me about by the hand, refusing to allow me to go out by myself—it seemed to them too dangerous for someone who could not read or speak even the simplest things. But that was an alien tongue. I have this problem with my own.
I remember one of the first times I was aware of this confusion about ordinary language. I was about eight, and walking the long empty blocks home from school alone as always, in my high brown shoes and white socks that kept slipping down into the shoes and disappearing. I walked strangely too, toeing in so extremely that sometimes I tripped over my own foot. I used to make up stories as I trudged what seemed a long weary way every morning and afternoon, stories about my family being saved by a sudden inheritance, or a fairy godmother, or my father’s getting a better job. I’d think about where we’d live and about the kind of person I’d be.
A bunch of the rougher girls from my class came running down the street behind me, and I shrank into myself, terrified. I thought they were chasing me, and they were much taller and heavier than I, being two years older and considerably more developed. As they came nearer, I tried to disguise my fear, both out of pride and out of some intuitive awareness that fear is provocative, and I held my neck taut, my chin high, and plastered my face with hauteur. But they were simply playing some—to me—rough game, and passed me laughing, until one turned around and pointed, crying in great gasps of laughter—“Look at Dabrowska! Oh, conceited!” And the others turned then too, and laughed, brayed at me, “Conceited! Conceited!”
I maintained my dignified pace and did not change my expression. They tore off down the block and through the empty lot, leaping over abandoned rusting gasoline drums, bedsprings, and other litter, laughing. And my heart squeezed itself together, wanting to force a tear into my eye, but I controlled it. I went into my house through the back door, as always. My mother was mopping the kitchen floor with an instrument I particularly disliked, a mop with long spaghetti-like strands that swished around uncontrollably as she pushed the handle. I did not tell my mother about the girls. I don’t know why. Although I told her many things other children would conceal, I concealed much, very selectively. I would have been ashamed to tell her about the girls: I wanted to appear in control of my away-from-home life. I waited on the threshold as she finished the last swipes with the ugly mop. “If you take off your shoes, Anastasia, you can walk over to the table and I’ll give you some milk and cookies,” she said kindly. I set my books on the table, which was near the back door, and removed my hated shoes, and did as she said. She brought me a glass of milk and some Oreos, and then sank into the chair opposite me, sighing. She lit a cigarette and crossed her legs: she was in her stocking feet.
“How was school today?”
“Fine. I got a hundred in the spelling test, and ninety-nine in the math test. It wasn’t my fault that I got ninety-nine. The teacher thought my seven was a one on one problem. I told her it wasn’t, but she said it was okay.”
She smiled. “That’s very good, Anastasia.”
“And in recess, we danced in a circle and I got picked three times.” This was an utter lie. I was almost never picked when we danced in a circle, and I knew it was because of my ugly high shoes. But I also knew that those shoes cost my parents a great deal of money they couldn’t afford, and that they sacrificed to buy them for me so my flat feet would grow straight. Or whatever they were supposed to do. But this was a lie I frequently used because it seemed to make her happy. She smiled very broadly: “Oh, how nice, Anastasia! You’re popular!” When she smiled like that, I could almost believe it had happened, that I had been chosen, that the children did like me.
We fell into silence then. I finished my cookies and swept the crumbs into a little pile. Mother rose and got a dishcloth and wiped them up.
“Is it okay if I walk on the floor now?”
“Yes.” She tamped her cigarette out and sighed again. “I’m so tired.” I glanced at her sympathetically. She was always tired. I knew her life was very hard.
“Mommy?” I turned to get my books. “What does conceited mean?”
She was standing at the sink, running hot water over the mop-head. “It means someone who thinks they’re good. Better than other people.”
I stood still. “Oh.”
She turned her head slightly. “Why?”
“Oh, some girls were calling that name—at Rhoda Moore—today. At recess.” I had used the name of the only girl in the class I envied, a tall, beautiful girl with long blond hair and big blue eyes. “They said she was conceited.”
“Is she?”
“I don’t know,” I faltered. “She’s the pretty one.”
“She probably thinks she’s prettier than the others, then,” Mother explained.
I left the room so she would not see my hot face, my anguish at slandering poor Rhoda Moore, and deceiving my mother, and even worse, concealing my own true nature. For the moment she said it, I knew it was true. I was conceited, I did think I was better than the others. I ran upstairs to my room and threw myself on my bed. I could feel my pulse throbbing in my head, as if I had a fever. I felt utterly alone, without virtue. I wished I could disappear, just die there on the spot, just blow away, like some crinkled dried-up brown leaf.
I was conceited, I did think I was better than the others. But I was better than the others. I was clean and they mostly were not; I was smarter than any of them, in all subjects. They were ignorant and ill-spoken and their manners were bad and they were loud. I felt they were another order of being from me, another species even. And this was true: this was objectively true, I felt: that I was better in these ways, and that my superiority was recognized by the teachers, even the principal. Why else had they skipped me so often? Why did the principal come into the room and always stand behind me, gazing down on my work? Why did the teachers so often send me to his office with a drawing or a poem I had made? They thought it was good that I was superior. My mother did too. But it was conceited to be superior, and to be conceited was bad. I lay there in an anguish that was to become familiar to me over the years. What I was was good, and made some people like me but others hate me. I did not enjoy my isolation from other children, but I did not want to stop being superior either. Doing things—the things I could do—doing them well was practically my only source of pleasure.
I don’t know what words I used to think about this. I do know it ramified far beyond itself, into something so complicated and interrelated with other things that it felt overwhelming. There was no solution to it that I could see except to not-be, to stop being what I was, in short, to die. I half-believed that if I could lie still as if dead for long enough, death would eventually creep through my body. But I never could do it. My body would always assert itself. An arm would fall asleep, a leg would absolutely demand to be moved, and would poke its demand into the oblivion into which I felt my mind fading. And so, heavy and sad, I would sit up and return to the life I had already recognized was a dead end, a double bind. There was no way to be oneself and to be good and to be loved. Whatever one chose, one sacrificed the rest. “For matter is never lacking privation….” It was too hard for me.
Of course I went on, as one does, and even managed sometimes to forget this old insight. But I continued to suspect words. So when a woman said to me that my mother was strong, when others said “Your mother is a lovely woman,” I’d simply smile and nod. If you question such statements, people look at you as if they have suddenly discovered you are retarded. Years ago, I would go off by myself and ruminate on such statements: Is she strong? What does that mean? How does it show? Is she lovely?
I took such judgments as authoritative, and believed they were based on profound perception. I did not then understand that people were in the habit of running around in
the world making judgments on all sides without really thinking about what they were saying. I was a very serious child, and believed the state of adulthood was blessed with knowledge and awareness from which I was cut off. I saw adulthood as a special state, people sitting in a brilliantly lit room laughing and talking and nodding their heads, while I stand in the shadows just outside the room unable to understand why they are talking so animatedly about the weather or the traffic, knowing from their vitality and amusement that beneath their ordinary words was a world of hidden meaning, that language was a code known only to the initiate—adults. Oh, in time I learned to read the silences and pauses, learned what the omissions in conversation meant—sex or shame, money or scandal. But I still have trouble with the words. The only word I could place on my mother, surely, without question, is one I have never heard anyone use: in her heart, at her core, my mother is furious.
4
STILL, SHE WAS LIKE me too, hanging back in the shadows, timid and alien, knowing herself unwelcome in the adults’ room, knowing herself ignorant of it. She wore high shoes too, even higher than mine, but they were in fashion then, and she had the same long spaghetti curls she later visited on me. She would make me sit on the step stool while she heated the curling iron in the gas flame, the same flame she used to singe a chicken, which created a smell similar to that of the singed newspaper she used to twist the iron in before applying it to my limp hair. She would comb off a section of hair, twist it in the evil-smelling iron, then flip it loose, and continue around my head until I was judged “done.” Like the chicken, all its feathers having curled into wisps at the touch of fire, ready to be cooked.
“Did your mommy curl your hair like this?”
“Oh, no, Anastasia.” She said this in what I privately called her “mad” voice, a tone mingling tiredness and disgust. But then she added mournfully, “My mother never combed my hair.”
But it was there, in the picture, I insisted: Mommy at seven, my age exactly, with the same spaghetti curls. And I ran upstairs to get it, to show her. Her shoulders slumped, she grimaced. She was disgusted with me. “Oh, I don’t know, Anastasia, maybe the maid curled it.”
“I don’t remember, Anastasia!” She is getting irritated now, as she rolls up the crimped newspaper and stuffs it in the garbage, lays the curling iron on the gas stove to cool, and pours herself another cup of coffee from the dull aluminum drip pot. She sinks into a chair at the kitchen table and lights a cigarette. Clutching the photograph, I leave the room, run to the front room we call the “porch” and squat on the floor. High black shoes with buttons. They come almost all the way up to her hem. And the shy eyes, the shy smile, the look of being not-quite-there. This is my mommy. With her is her brother, Eddie, who is nine. He is there, self-possessed, dark, a round mature face. I recognize him, my uncle Eddie whom I love. He is wearing a white suit with knickers and a shirt with a rounded collar. I never saw a white suit like the one in this photograph except when Louis Ferraro died. He had appendicitis, and the teacher made all of us go to his house to pay respect, she said. He was lying in a box in a white suit, with flowers all around him. He was just as fat and tan as ever, but he was dead. His mother and grandmother and all his aunts had black dresses covering their huge bodies, all sitting around the coffin crying. They hardly even looked up, they hardly even answered the teacher. I couldn’t understand that: he was only a child, after all. If I had died and was in a box and the teacher came to our house, I knew my mother would be polite and pleasant to the teacher. I thought they were pretending. They couldn’t have cared that much about just a child.
When I asked my mother about his white suit, she said it was a Communion suit. Communion suit. That was new. I had heard of union suits, but not Communion suits. I wondered if Eddie’s suit was a Communion suit too, and I wanted to ask Mommy, but I knew it would be better if I didn’t. I sat on the porch floor, knees together, ankles out, considering. This was a decision I had often to make, but I had no way to predict consequences. I urgently wanted to know if Eddie’s suit was a Communion suit too. Finally, I decided to risk it, and jumped up and returned to the kitchen. Mommy was still sitting at the kitchen table, smoking. She was staring at the window, but she didn’t seem to be looking at anything. When I entered the room, she didn’t move.
“Mommy?” I asked tentatively at the door. “Is Eddie’s suit a Communion suit?”
She looked at me.
I held the photograph out. “It’s white, like Louis Ferraro’s.”
She leaned forward and reached out her hand. “Let me see.” She examined the picture. “Well, it might have been. But he probably made his First Communion when he was seven—that’s what the picture is, it’s me in my Communion dress. So his Communion suit was probably too small when he was nine. But maybe Momma made it bigger, Momma was wonderful at that. Or maybe he had a new suit.” The weariness returned to her voice. “I don’t remember.” She returned the picture to me.
I stood transfixed. “There are Communion dresses too?” My next question would be a big one, and I hesitated. “What’s Communion?” I had been lucky so far, and I knew from experience that I always pushed my luck a little too far. I did this time too.
She burst out tiredly. “Go and play, Anastasia! Stop bothering me!”
I disappeared.
I went upstairs and lay on my bed. Whenever my mother spoke to me that way, I felt cast into some whirling black place, I felt wrong, I felt all the things she said I was when she was angry with me—selfish, willful. I felt like a throbbing wart, and I wanted to disappear completely. I wanted to die, and I wondered if she would cry at all, if she would be sorry if I did. Sometimes I thought she would, other times I thought she wouldn’t care at all. Yet someplace I knew she did care for me, and that I would understand that if I could only understand her. And so I would think about her, that little girl just my age, and what it was like to be her, and I would remember what she had told me about her life, and the next time I sensed she was in a good mood, I would ask her more about it. I sat up, and leaned back against my pillow. I could feel a certain expression coming on my face. It still does, but now I know what word to label it with: renunciation. I sat there and felt calm, feeling I had a purpose, a cause, an approach—although I did not know those words. I would enter into my mother, and in this way discover the springs of her love.
II
1
IN JULY OF 1907, THEY lived on Grand Street, Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. It was a neighborhood in the old sense. The cobblestoned streets were lined with little shops; above them were two tiers of railroad flats, where the people lived. The street was always full of action: trolleys clanked by, and drays pulled by great full-buttocked horses. Sometimes a couple pushed a cart through on their way to sell their wares in what everyone here called “Jewtown.” Sometimes a dray would stop, and its driver would jump down, speak to the horses, then heave a heavy keg from the back of the dray and roll it into a shop. Many things came in kegs—flour, butter, barley, nails, beer. Men would pass by carrying sloshing pails of beer home from the saloon. Children ran through traffic, darted in and out of doorways. And above it all, the women, leaning from the windowsills, maintained a running critique. Everything that happened on the street interested them, and on everything they had an opinion. They would carry on conversations with those on the street below; they would shriek at the children; and sometimes they would turn sideways and speak to each other, window to window, after one disappeared to return with a plump down pillow on which to rest her arms.
It was a lively, vivid, tough, loud street, a place some might remember fondly. But not the three-and-a-half-year-old girl standing at the second-floor window. Hidden from the room behind her by a lace curtain, she stands so still she seems dead, so pale and fragile she could be a china doll propped there. She is small for three. She knows she is sickly, but does not know what the word means. It is like a synonym for her name: Isabella is sickly.
For her, although she stands
often at this window looking down, the street is frightening. It is so noisy, so rough. People bump into each other, sometimes they push. The men have thick arms, and some roll their shirtsleeves up so the dark hair shows. The women have loud voices and cackle in laughter. The trolleys glide by, huge and terrifying. One time when Eddie took Bella for candy, a trolley came right up to her and she didn’t see it. Eddie pulled her back fast and yelled at her she should look where she was going. Then he hugged her and bought her two pieces of candy, but she was still crying. She hadn’t seen the trolley.
In fact, she doesn’t see well. The cornea of her left eye was scarred by measles, but no one knows that yet. She sees well enough to be aware of the street, and to know she hates and fears it. Sometimes, when the sunlight makes everything shimmer in front of her, she pretends she is on a different street, one she saw long ago.
Momma and Poppa took her and Eddie and the baby to visit Momma’s sister Mamie, who lives far away—two trolley rides and a long walk. Momma was fat and she carried Wally so Poppa let Bella sit on his lap; she gazed with fascination through the trolley windows at streets that had no stores at all but only houses all in a row, brown houses with high stoops and trees shading quiet sidewalks. There was a place for the children to play in this neighborhood, although no children were playing. But on one stoop, Bella spied a little girl with long yellow curls and a pink dress, sitting neatly and prettily, her figure splotched by the dancing of the unfurling buds of the tree. And Bella’s heart squeezed so hard, she almost cried out. She longed to be that little girl and live in that quiet dignified house. Her yearning was a band tying her to the little girl, stretching further and further as the trolley moved down the street.