Sunday, March 15, 2009

Angstolescence

Twelve is an age when every day is momentous. What someone said to someone else, or who looked at whom how, or what new cruelty classmates had perpetrated on someone, or what note or slam book or graffitto had made whom burst into tears, all these things feed into  the daily angst-fest that is adolescence. But all this is the tip of the iceberg; in relation to those things we see, there is much that we do not, lurking under the water, massive and frightening. The rest of that mass is made up of the hormones ricocheting around from our emerging bodies, the terror and excitement both of the new beings we are becoming, but also the  things we don't know how to say. 

I think of my adolescent self as a kind of Easter Island statue, huge and solemn, silent and isolated from the outside world on an island, and massively, massively mute. Yet within that hulking self there are many secrets hid, stories that, when I was twelve, I had no way to tell. The sad thing is, those hulking figures stretch on and on for miles down the beach, lines of them, all equally desolate and tragic. The tragedy is that their muteness prevents them for sharing their pain with one another.

In the seventh grade, I was very excited about our new teacher. In sixth grade we'd had a nice but nerdy teacher who had talked to us as though we were still little kids, telling us for example that he came to work on a "choo-choo train", and it enraged me that he didn't see just how terribly adult we were, or at least, I was. When I found out Mr. R. would be our 7th grade teacher I was thrilled: he was the "cool" teacher, bearded, sandal-wearing and long-haired, a hippie, not only did he not wear a tie, he wore African printed dashikis over his unwashed jeans. And he talked to us about sex. 

The year before, I'd suddenly grown a pair of tiny breasts with which I was still so unfamiliar that when opening those schoolroom desks that swung upwards on a hinge, I frequently slammed the lid into my tender chest, forgetting that it stuck out an inch or two extra, and too embarrassed to let on what had happened I simply doubled over until I could hide the tears that had sprung up in the corners of my eyes. I was still unused to my new body. I was also fascinated to discover that boys suddenly stared at me, approached me in the playground and on the way home, whispered things to me or to each other in the halls. 

Our class was probably around eighteen to twenty five kids; probably a little over half our number had begun to show full signs of puberty. Mr. R. would look us up and down and take stock. The first time he did this, I nearly died of shame and wanted to climb under my seat.  I had worn a leotard top and because my mother insisted that I wasn't ready for a bra, my breasts I guess were pretty visible, because Mr. R. gave the entire class a running commentary on what he saw there, and on the state of my development in general. He proceeded to announce to the boys that most likely I had a fair amount of hair "down there" as well. I was mortified.

Now, this was all done in the guise of education. Telling the boys what they might expect when they had their first sexual encounter, which he intimated should be gotten over with as early as possible. 

I was horror-struck. At the same time, I was new to all this frank talk about sex that liberated people in the 70x were supposed to be capable of, and I thought Mr. R. was treating us like adults. Somehow I thought it would be childish to act upset or to tell an adult, so I didn't. Nobody wanted to be labeled what our cool teacher referred to as a "prude", and each of us assumed we were the only ones who were uncomfortable with his lesson plan.  A few days later, Mr. R. brought his pet boa constrictor to class, he took it out of its tank and placed it into a cloth bag which he proceeded to hand around to the girls. 

"This is what a man's penis feels like," he pronounced. We felt a massive squirming thing through the cloth and were terrified. 

Every day had fresh tortures, and as the year progressed we girls began to discover the lay of the land. We all had to go to a sewing class with Mr. R.'s wife, held at their house around the corner. Mr. R. would always saunter in, sometimes half-dressed, and lean across us, caress us, find excuses to come in when we were half-dressed for fitting a skirt or blouse. Without ever really discussing it we just stayed in groups, even to go to the bathroom. His wife seemed cowed, like the saddest person in the world, as she watched his antics. He stalked us on class trips, and during a sleepover trip he walked into the room where we girls were in rows on the floor in our sleeping bags, he wearing nothing but one of those Dashikis. "What," he said impishly as he sashayed between us girls, while  we in our nighties wrapped our sleeping bags tight around us as he tried to get a peek at any part of us left exposed, "does a red-blooded American male wear under his Dashiki?"  As he was standing right over me I had a pretty good view, and I announced: "Jockeys, and if you ask me they don't look all that clean". 

For that, I was punished nearly daily with new humiliations. He had an unerring instinct for hte jugular, worse than any bully our own age, and he wielded it mercilessly at anyone who didn't leap on board his fan wagon. He had a seductive charm that had students, parents, and school administrators in his thrall, and despite feeling that something was very wrong we all mostly vied to be in his good graces.The few students who were skeptical were treated to daily exposure: he would read their journal entries aloud to the class in scathing tones, ridicule their sexual development or lack thereof, propose theories of their probable sexual orientation, or simply rate their physical and psychological attributes, all in a diatribe to the class as a whole, who of course would chime in, making the humiliation complete. 

We never talked about this with each other; the desperation to be cool overrode all else. I feared that complaining would earmark me as a prude, a social kiss of death. If we admitted we were uncomfortable with it all, we were admitting to still being kids. 

It's also important to remember context. All this happened in the early 70's, at which time child-rearing was done very differently than it is today. Our parents were for the most part completely self-absorbed, and left us to our own devices much more than is done today. In fact, they barely noticed us, truth be told. I say this without bitterness, it's just the way it was.

Well, as you might imagine Mr. R. crossed the line many times. Usually 2 girls per class, sometimes 1, sometimes 3. The year after I had him as a teacher, a student forced the issue by running away from home and moving in with Mr R and his wife. (Mind you this is elementary school) Her parents threatened to bring in the police: Mr. R. was asked to resign quietly, no charges were pressed, no parents were told. In fact, that summer, he led his usual cross-country trip of a handful of eighth grade students, none of whose parents knew about the incident or his employment status. 

Back to the Easter Island image. Recently, thirty-five years after the fact, many of my classmates and I began talking about all this, and of course, a lot of new information came out. More than that, though, our adult selves were able to articulate all the complicated things that were going on back then and to share the equally complicated ways in which our year of learning dangerously had affected us over time. There were students who were sure they were the only ones being humiliated, or the only ones not having sex, or the only ones not cool enough fo Mr R to like, or the only ones who had been molested. Tears came pouring out in some cases, tears that had been stemmed for so many years they had turned hearts to stone. Tears from those who had been self-medicating and isolating themselves, from those who had buried all their emotions. The tears were therapy, the words were therapy, the stony Easter Island statues spoke to each other, no longer so incredibly alone.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Telecuisine

Cooking used to be, for me, mere construction. I viewed it as something to be gotten over with, a means to an end, and I used to calculate the time spent cooking and washing dishes versus the time spent actually eating, and think it was a tragic waste of time and energy. When I worked so many long days,  I kept energy bars in my handbag and chewed them when I'd forgotten to eat lunch or dinner; I hated taking the time to go out and get something when I had a lot of work to do.

Not to say I don't appreciate a good meal. Years ago I became an honorary member of something called "The Diamond Jim Brady Club, " to qualify for which honor one must consume, before witnesses, six dozen oysters. I managed that rather easily, one evening, and had another dozen or so along with some oyster bisque and a few oyster croquettes just because there were so many delicious varieties ( I recall Blue points, Malpeques, and a few of those long salty Pacific ones, along with many others), served with a sweet Riesling wine. I love good food, and love sitting down to savor it, it's just that sitting at table eating seemed to me much more preferable to slaving away in a kitchen, preparing it all. Traveling for business I often found myself in Paris, the gastronome's nirvana, and with delight I explored the restaurants in the evenings, and in the daytime I shopped for fresh crusty baguettes and pungent cheeses, tiny fresh Champagne grapes, patés, cornichons, and exquisite chocolates for lunchtime picnics. 

In retrospect I attribute my reluctance to cook to several factors: firstly, being engaged to someone for several years who literally demanded that I cook six nights a week as part of our living arrangement. (That's another story for another time.) After leaving him, I refused to have the gas connected on my new apartment's stove for three months, luxuriating in the array of takeout on the Upper East Side. For another, I spent many years in an apartment whose kitchen was miniscule; a half-fridge, tiny sink, two cabinets and a square foot of counter space. The oven was remarkably like the toy oven I had as a little girl, the Suzy Homemaker one with the light bulb inside that baked a cake the size of a tollhouse cookie. Growing up I'd learned a repertoire of a few basics so I wouldn't starve,  but they were workhorse recipes: steak, pasta, omelettes, Overall, though, I think the main reason was time. I was always working crazy hours, and rushing, so cooking tended to be done that way as well.

When Dale and I moved into this house, we found ourselves with a real kitchen for the first time in our married life. Our last two kitchens had been reasonably roomy by New York apartment standards, but that still meant that counter space was tight, plus I'd never really stocked my kitchen with the right tools so I was always having to do things the hard way when I did make any attempt to cook. Here we were with not only counter space and  a dishwasher, roomy fridge and freezer, a five-burner stove--but I'd also inherited some good kitchen tools from my mother and gradually I began trying things out.

I guess it really started with the guacamole. I 'd had a craving for guacamole for several days, and as we were in a new neighborhood, I didn't know the restaurants that well. Though we have a lot of good Mexican near us, I didn't know the lay of the land then and bought a plastic container of guacamole that I brought home and opened; inside was a pale green watery glue-like paste that looked nothing like guacamole and not even much like it had ever had anything to do with an avocado. It even tasted a bit like Elmer's glue. I was starving, and nothing but guacamole would do, so I went to the corner market and looked around. They had some bad prepackaged guacamole that didn't look promising, but I noticed they had some very ripe avocados, and the light bulb went on over my head.

I decided to just buy whatever seemed like it should go into a guacamole. I had some farmer's market tomatoes at home, I recalled, so besides the ripe avocados I bought garlic, lemon juice, onion, and jalapeno pepper, as well as some white corn chips. I minced a small purple onion, then chopped and seeded the ripest tomato, a small red Brandywine. I chopped some garlic, then scooped out two avocados. Leaving everything coarsely chopped I gently mixed it into a medium bowl and added in some ancho chile powder, then chopped about half the jalapeno and scooped it in.  Fresh black pepper and a sprinkling of kosher salt, a dash of lemon juice, and when I dipped a corn chip into the mixture I was incredulous..... it tasted exactly like guacamole, and not only that, it was just about the best guacamole I'd ever had. I think that was the moment when I realized I could actually make things, silly as that sounds in retrospect. It just hadn't dawned on me that my own utilitarian cooking could morph into delicious food, with a little effort. Of course, it helps a lot that Dale doesn't mind doing the dishes.

That was the beginning. Soon I was trying all kinds of things in the kitchen, mostly soups and stews in the beginning. I hadn't turned into some Stepford Wife, I liked making things that would supply us with leftovers for a few days afterwards, or things I could freeze batches of for quick reheating when needed. I began looking at the recipes in the Times and trying things, we have a wonderful local market with fresh herbs and terrific ingredients, and I was dumfounded as my kitchen began to turn out amazing concoctions. Utilitarian  but delicious pot roasts. Chili. Turkey with cornbread, walnut and sausage stuffing. Charlotte Malokoff and cherry pie. Crepes.  Fish chowder, maple-glazed meatloaf, homemade spaetzle.  In the summer we grilled constantly, fish, vegetables, chicken, and I began coming up with exotic marinades. Soon I bought an apron, something I'd never imagined myself owning. 

When it dawned on me that it had gotten serious was when I found myself making jam from the strawberries in our garden; they are always all ripe at once and we were overwhelmed with delicious juicy berries, more than we could eat ourselves, and I started processing them into jam jars, gradually getting the hang of doing it without using added pectin to get it to set, which allows for much less sugar and therefore a more flavorful jam. When the raspberries came in I kept going, and when the peaches ripened I was making peach jam, peach pie, and peach cobbler. My early pies had thick doughy store-made crusts, but gradually I've learned to turn out easy, flaky crusts that melt  on the tongue. I learned through practice to make airy, cloudlike biscuits, evolved from the hard hockey pucks I created as a beginning biscuit baker. I learned to fry chicken for my Southern-born husband, first soaking it well in milk with a little hot sauce and black pepper, though I am still aghast at how much grease the frying involves. I learned to make a garlic vinaigrette for artichokes, to roast tiny tender asparagus with a little sea salt and olive oil, to whip cream with a dash of Cognac to make it into Créme Chantilly and drizzle it onto freshly made crépes stuffed with strawberries. 

The funny thing about all this is, you'd think I would have put on a few pounds, right? Tell the truth, you've been sitting there muttering, "yeah, this chick is like the size of a house by now."
The truth is, I have lost a ton of weight (well maybe 15 lbs) and lowered the cholesterol to boot, despite all that cream and butter I cook with. You doubt me? Well. here's my theory. We Americans don't sit down and savor our food, we eat on the run, distracted, we eat when we're working or watching TV, and we just aren't satisfied. We snack. We nosh. We're always picking at this and that, so instead of three meals a day we probably end up having twelve. In France they sit down at meals and enjoy what they are eating, take their time, and get up from the table satisfied. Their diet is full of butter and cheese, wine, bread, meat, and nobody can figure out why they aren't fat--I think much of it has to do with how they treat eating; a enjoyable pastime as opposed to either guilty pleasure or a necessary evil. Perhaps its the Puritan ethic again. Anyway, Dale and I are eating much healthy meals now, and also enjoying cooking and eating them together. 

We no longer look at each other and say,"Oh, its my turn to cook, where's the phone?".

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Trees

When Dale and I bought this house, five years ago in April, we were really pleased with our funny little block with its oddball houses and stoop-sitting neighbors, the ethnic mix and the friendliness we experienced right away from nearly everyone. What struck us, though. coming from the leafy, brownstone-y Heights, was how stark and treeless our street was. We're not in the brownstoned part of Park Slope, ours is the New Slope, the South Slope: lots of frame or brick one and two story little houses, many covered in odd patterns of siding. Of course, in my long-ago youth, this was not considered Park Slope at all, but some sort of wilderness with no name, where none dared to tread. While the architecture is kind of forgettable, what's nice is the large open sky above us, as most of the buildings are two and three stories. Walking in the spring and summer on the brownstoned streets in other parts of Brooklyn, you find yourself under a kind of Gothic arch made by the soaring branches of London Planes, Maples; graceful,  majestic and towering, shady, green, and lush. Yes, you are hearing a bit of tree envy in my tone.

There are two ways to get a street tree planted in Brooklyn. One way is to get a permit and plant it yourself, paying for it of course, and the other way is to go through the city and have them plant it, which is free. Dale and I just wanted a tree so we decided we'd apply for both and see which materialized first. That turned out to be the city method; about a year after we applied I'd begun thinking that they'd forgotten us entirely and was considering calling to find out the status of both applications, and then suddenly one day I was in the house and heard a deafening, grinding, inexplicable uproar outside, and stepped out to see what the hubbub was all about. There was a crew tearing a hole in my sidewalk:"Hey lady, you ordered a tree, right?" My neighbors began gathering in little clusters on their stoops to observe the ruckus. 

One walked over to my stoop to ask me what was going on. There are definitely two camps on the block: old timers and new arrivals, and they don't always see eye-to-eye on various subjects. The old-timers had been very nice and accepting of us, but you could tell they thought we were nuts to pay what we'd paid for the house, and when we'd had a crew there doing some renovating there were endless questions and I could see that we were definitely the object of much merriment on the street. On the tree day, one of the old-timers sauntered over to see what we were up to now.

When I, enthusiastically, informed him we were getting a tree, his face fell. " You know it's going to make leaves, right?" I assured him that I was aware trees made leaves and was OK with it. Pretty soon I had a coffeeklatsch of older guys  milling around telling me horror stories about trees of yore. One of the men was an ancient Spanish guy who had lived up the street since the 194o's;  he managed to coax astounding bumper crops of tomatoes from his rows of plants every summer, fussing over them and spoiling them like a proud grandfather. He pointed to a spot on the sidewalk a few feet away from our house. "There was a tree right there, in 1957!" said Tomato Joe, his voice shaking with emotion. "It was terrible!" 

I was so proud of our tree, watering and feeding, planting pansies and star ivy around its base, watching the leaves as they emerged and keeping neighborhood dogs and kids from doing too much damage. What struck us immediately was that the moment the square of earth appeared in the sidewalk, people strolling by assumed that it was an OK place to throw their trash, simply by virtue of its being unpaved. Every day I would fish out assorted detritus surrounding my poor baby tree: dog logs, empty bags of chips and soda cans, a disposable diaper. Muttering imprecations , I put on latex gloves and cleaned up the pit daily. Still,  I discovered that imprecations worked less well than the pansies and the tiny little border fence I put up around it. We still had litter, but I found that if our little patch looked more as though someone cared about it, there were fewer objects tossed into it on a daily basis. Still, I defended it daily, proud of my little tree. Even the dogs seemed to get the message, for the most part they chose the lamppost up the street instead.

(That summer was brutally hot, as I recall, and I set up a new hose long enough for me to water out front comfortably. In the evenings or early mornings I'd water the thirsty south-facing front yard, and of course, I would give the soil around the tree a nice soaking, too. More than once, though, passers-by stopped to ask me exactly why I was watering the tree. I think there is a perception that the street trees are "other"; either that the city waters them, or that the sidewalk trees should be able to take care of themselves. Sadly neither is the case, and during that drought summer I noticed many neglected street trees withering and turning brown.)

That fall, I was thrilled to watch the leaves turn to vivid scarlet, our own little burning bush. I kidded Dale that there was no need to go leaf-peeping in Vermont, that we had our own fall foliage tour right there in Brooklyn. One day I was with a friend, running some errands, and we got chatting about the tree, and she offered to drive me home so she could have a look. I'd been telling her how resplendent it was, a thing of beauty, and she wanted to see for herself. Driving down our spare and treeless block under gray skies as a windy rain whipped through the air. I smugly thought of the glorious shock of red leaves we were about to see, and gleefully imagined my friend's admiring gaze, her oohs and aahs. 

Pulling up to the house, I was taken aback. The wind had been fairly strong that afternoon, and there stood our tree, naked to the world but for one lonely leaf like a flag at its topmost branch, and without its layer of leaves I had to admit it was a tiny, spindly thing, barely more than a twig. My companion said cursory complimentary things about the tree but I could tell she was thinking I was out of my mind bragging to her about this little twig in front of our house. It was like my child, though, and I was proud of it, I just hadn't expected it to be completely naked all of a sudden.

Here were Dale and I, thinking that we'd start a trend of tree-planting, that if only our neighbors realized it was free, that it made the block look nice, and if nothing else, increased real-estate values, that they would all run to their phones and call the city, reserving Bradford Pears and Red Oaks, (actually we weren't given a choice of trees but did get a nice red oak) gleefully tearing up the sidewalks and that we'd have a beautiful, tree-lined street like other people do.  While that hasn't happened, gradually there have been a few young saplings making their appearances along the street here and there, standing lashed to their twin supports like the training wheels on a kids' tricycle; and some of the old-timers have conceded that our tree looks nice now, even as they shake their heads at me in the fall when they see me sweeping up the leaves.  



Saturday, March 7, 2009

Green Beginnings


Spring seems to be making an appearance today, though we're technically still on the "in like a lion" end of March, the "out like a lamb" is going to take some time, still. Nevertheless, let's hope the snowy days are at an end and that we can slowly begin to shed the layers of fleece and wool that we've been swaddled in since October.

I went out to the front yard today and gathered up some debris. In New York the winter debris in a front yard is not limited to the usual twigs and leaves, but includes chewing gum wads, twinkie wrappers, and countless cigarette butts, bits of styrofoam, car-service coupons, and wet Chinese menus. Usually on my way in I'll use my cane to scoop out one or two offending bits of trash, but over the course of the winter things accumulate and as the snow melted yesterday it revealed quite a collection. Sometimes its the neighborhood raccoons; they enjoy snacking on the trash and will occasionally wash it in the birdbath, leaving a half-bagel or a chicken leg as a calling card. As destructive as they are, their sins are more easily forgiven than those of human passersby who think nothing of flicking a wad of Juicy Fruit into one of my rosebushes, or leaving a half-can of Old English 800 lying on its side amid the irises.I have become one of those old people who scared me as a child, muttering on my stoop and waving my broom at miscreants, ranting about manners and how the world is falling apart as I fish half empty Snapple bottles out of the birdbath.

I swept and clipped, raked and smoothed, and as I worked I took note of all the little green shoots of various kinds making their appearance. I can see the beginnings of tulips, daffodils, crocuses, irises, hyacinths (grape and otherwise), and the little pink nubs on the rose canes heralding the arrival of the day when the front is transformed from gray and brown to green and lush. The neighbors I had barely seen since October began drifting out onto their stoops, unwrapped from their winter layers and recognizable as themselves, everyone smiling and calling out cheerful greetings, waving, pointing to the blue sky and the green beginnings below. As people walk up the hill they smile when they see my garden with its rows of green spikes twice the size they were yesterday, babies in strollers hold out their little starfish hands to touch the leaves as their moms or dads call out the probable names of the flowers to come. I sipped my coffee on the porch, grateful for the sunshine, grateful for the opportunity to make something beautiful, and smile back, we are all complicit in this conspiracy, eager to see the beauty in this world.

Friday, March 6, 2009

Clotheslines

I remember a time when there seemed to be a giant network of clotheslines connecting every building in Brooklyn. We had a washer/dryer, in the sixties my parents were considered affluent newcomers to a Brooklyn Heights that would be unrecognizable today. There were boarded-up buildings on every street for one thing, though many had recently undergone renovations by new middle-class families. Real Estate had not yet turned into the pastime of choice for New Yorkers, and the other partners at Dad's law firm were mildly shocked at his choice of residence. "It's wonderfully close to the office, Arthur, but really....... Brooklyn?" Anyway, the clotheslines swept the skyline, and pieces of the most intimate information about other people's lives were flying like flags, all kinds of announcing inside information to passersby. 

The neighbors down the street had one that went across two rows of backyards to the building on the street behind us, and there was a network of these stretching from various windows in the various houses you could see from our own top floor windows. In the middle of the day, housewives in curlers would lean out , smoking and calling to their neighbors, and the pulleys would creak like birdsong as the wash was gathered in. You would see gigantic baffling undergarments with clips and elastic and all kinds of armor and boning, looming beige and immense, inspiring awe and fear. Surely nothing human wore these plated structures. You might see the rows of undershirts and boxers, slips, stockings and panties, supernaturally large bras which were as bewildering as the girdles, and rows of flowered house-dresses and work shirts. The women themselves, leaning on their elbows from the windowsills as they called down to their children in the street, were plated in their rows of curlers, like armadillos. There was one woman in the building across the street whom we'd never seen without her helmet of bristly gray curlers; she sat outside every day on a webbed folding aluminum chair, in a housedress from her clothesline, surveying the street. At night when she leaned from her window to call her kids to dinner or bedtime, her head was still covered in its curlers. We imagined a moment in each day, perhaps when her husband stepped through the front door of their apartment with his  lunch bucket in hand, when she would unwind her hair from the spools, and stand in rapunzel-like glory for her husband's admiration for a golden moment, then inevitably, solemnly, rewound her hair into its armored shroud.  Her face, though was as forbidding as the curlers, so they seemed a part of her as firmly attached as her square jaw or her large reddened hands.

Those aluminum chairs were a fixture of the street as much as the clotheslines, women sat and sunned themselves and watched each other's children learn to roller skate, jump double dutch, play stoop ball with pink spaldeens. The streets were always full of kids playing after school and before dinner, drawing hopscotch and skully squares in chalk on the slate, games of tag, chants and clapping games. There was also a bit of shoplifting from the corner store, run by a short friendly spanish man named Pepe who nevertheless watched every kid like a hawk when they neared the candy. comics,  and soda. Anyone caught by Pepe would get his ass kicked in the store, then most likely a slap from each mother from the stoops as he passed on the way home to get another whupping from first Mom then Dad. The shoplifting was pretty minimal, needless to say, mostly the Irish family with the thirteen kids and most of them were such delinquents it didn't surprise any of us when we heard about it. Each of the older sisters usually was saddled with three or four little ones to watch; those girls seemed overwhelmed and belligerently independent at the same time. Their mother seemed perpetually pregnant, exhausted in her folding chair as her laundry loomed above, countless cloth diapers and toddler's britches, her husband's work clothes, rattling like a rosary counting off a litany of pleas.

Those clotheslines sketched details about our neighbors and we knew each others most intimate secrets. Today I stroll down the empty sidewalks on the street where we used to live and the windows are all closed, there are no old folks sunning themselves and chatting in their folding chairs, the children are all behind the brownstone walls engaging in organized activities instead of playing in the street. One lonely clothesline remains, defiant, a remnant of a past when we knew our neighbors, when we socialized in front of, not behind, our houses. Many of these houses still have pulleys attached, ancient and rusting relics, in some corner of their gardens or hanging near a window frame, and the new generation doesn't notice their existence or know what they are. Those clotheslines connected us all to each other, to ourselves, a giant web encircling and embracing the lives led within it.


The Red Shoes, or Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn

When I remember things that happened a long time ago, I can usually figure out what year they took place by running a kind of mental audio track and trying to remember what songs we were listening to on the radio. In 1973, it was the song "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder. I was thirteen, and I learned to dance to it in the schoolyard across the street from the Woodward School. Marshmallow platforms were in style, I didn't have anything so glamorous, but I had a pair of Kork-Ease wedge sandals, flared faded jeans, and a soft snug-fitting cotton flower-print shirt that, when out of sight of my dad, I would tuck under so it showed an inch or two of my belly. We all wanted to be as sophisticated as the eighth grade girls, and copied their styles slavishly.  My hair was long, straight, and parted in the middle, like every other white girl's hair in our class; most of the black girls by this time had Afros of varying degrees of impressiveness. We wore a little clear Yardley's Pot o' Gloss or Bonne Bell on our lips, if we dared, and no other makeup. Our idea of perfume was something called Love's Fresh Lemon that smelled, well, like a lemon. Smelling like lemons seemed a desirable thing; our mothers smelled like flowery perfume, it was hopelessly old fashioned.  We were dizzy with the newness of the world. Everything was exciting: the music, the politics, love, the world, lemons, hot pants, it was 1973 and we were  twelve and thirteen, becoming women.

All of us stood in a circle near the hopscotch squares painted on the cracked pavement, the building that housed the girl's bathroom shielding us from our gym teacher's eyes as he timed the boys running. (What passed for a track was more cracked pavement encircling a fenced-in area of towering plane trees and garbage-strewn ivy.) One of the neighborhood girls, with all of whom we were forbidden to associate, was teaching us the funky chicken while we practiced smoking and tried to look nonchalant about it. I kept a crumpled pack of Benson and Hedges in my Indian print  cotton bag, but I was still a novice and the smoke rushed to my head, making me dizzy and nauseous, but I tried to pretend I was enjoying it while I tried not to barf. "Very superstitious'...." wailed Stevie. "wash your face and hands..." the bass beat and we were like the ballerina in "the Red Shoes," our feet flew and we were helpless to stop them. Our booties shook and swayed, we turned, swooped, shimmied. All the music was so fresh, there was James Brown singing "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", and oldie but we loved James, and again, we couldn't help ourselves. 

There were some boys hanging around by now, staring at us, and Marvin Gaye singing "Trouble Man".  "I come up hard, babe, but that's OK, trouble man, he don't get in my way" and we swayed and the boys were joining in. We girls had been playing Double Dutch for years, clapping and stamping complicated rhythms, but the boys followed our movements more awkwardly, new to these moves but captivated by the music. The cooler boys from our class were dancing but the other boys were from the neighborhood, a struggling formerly genteel area sandwiched in between Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy, and we girls knew that any minute our teacher Jerry would come over and break it up, chasing off the locals and herding us back into the rambling brownstone building, a former convent, that housed the school. Later in class, as we sat behind our desks with our books open, our feet in their Kork-Ease and marshmallow stompers were still twitching, remembering the music.