I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (3 page)

I
was raised in a house where no one ever suggested I read a newspaper. The outside world had no meaning for me whatsoever. If my mother opened the paper she went straight to the sales at Bendel’s. Or Bergdorf’s. She knew the salesladies intimately, and went to the final sales. My father was an intellectual, but his job was where he discussed the world, not his home. Our home seemed to be built around me. Like Gigi’s guardians, my mother and Aunt Fremo had very grandiose ideas, which they drank up from the American movies, and I was the recipient of all their passionate attention. Now I would be groomed to be a great painter, a great singer, then actor, and if all else failed, I would marry a rich boy, then divorce him, get alimony, then marry another rich boy. Oh, Colette! Oh, Gigi!

•   •   •

I
started public school in third grade, at the age of seven, at PS 145 on 145th Street and Broadway. Up till then, my mother and Fremo had taught me at home.

Mrs. Cherry was my teacher. Straight-backed, red-haired, hard. My first week in school we had a spelling test for the entire school. Blackboard walls were slid away and all the different classes were
revealed—one large auditorium holding first through eighth grades. Our class was in the middle of the last row. The teacher of another class sat at her desk behind me, facing her own class.

My mother had taught me to call pee
number one
.

In the middle of the spelling test I tiptoed up to Mrs. Cherry at her desk.

“I have to do number one.”

“Get back to your seat, we’re in the middle of a test,” she hissed.

I hurried back to my little desk and tried to concentrate on spelling. Trying to hold everything in. I couldn’t concentrate. I tiptoed up to Mrs. Cherry again.

“Mrs. Cherry, I really have to go,” I pleaded.

“Back to your seat.” She rose and pointed.

“Please?”

She pointed to my desk again.

I was wearing a short cotton dress with puffed sleeves. As I sat down again, the dam burst. My long wooden seat filled with warm, yellow liquid that spread and spread until my little bench filled. It spilled over the sides onto the floor. The boy at the next desk watched in disbelief. Looking at me, then at the seat, then at the floor.

The teacher at the desk behind me must have turned at the sound of liquid splashing. She grabbed my arm and guided me up the long rows of classes and out of the auditorium. She was young and kind. She took me to the bathroom, but I had no more use for it. My underpants were soaked, and the back of my dress and legs. I found the door to 145th Street and ran all the way home. My mother was furious with me. She changed my clothes and sent me back to school. I thought I would die of shame, but no one seemed to know what had happened. Not Mrs. Cherry, not even the boy.

The lasting memory I have of third grade is Mrs. Cherry and Foster. Foster was black. He was neatly dressed in a shirt and tie and was
the tallest boy in class. He did something Mrs. Cherry didn’t like. She punished him by having him walk from her desk, where she stood with a ruler, around the back of the class, back to her, then hold out his hands, which she hit hard with the ruler. At least ten times. The braver Foster was, the more I hated Mrs. Cherry; the harder she hit, the blanker his expression, the more I admired him.

One afternoon, I came home with a new friend from school. I remember how excited we were to find each other, running down 148th Street laughing. When I look at the face of my granddaughter Rachel, I see the face of that friend, so open, so dear, so beautiful, also black. After we played together in my room, and my new best girlfriend picked up her book bag to go, my mother swept into the dining room with a laundry bag of my old clothes, which she pushed on my friend with laughing generosity. “Take them, take them. Lyova can’t wear them anymore!”

My new friend looked at me. I looked away. “She doesn’t want them,” I muttered. “She doesn’t need them.”

“Take them, take them,” my mother insisted, pushing the full laundry bag into the little girl’s arms.

I avoided her eyes. There was no arguing with my mother.

“All right,” she said.

I was too ashamed to see her to the door. I was swallowing shame. “You ruin everything!” I cried, and ran to my room and wept. I knew, even then, how insulting an act of charity could be to a child, how demeaning, how “put in her place” my friend was. I never asked her home again.

•   •   •

O
ur new maid (housekeepers were called maids in those days), Rose, was a tall, thin, elderly black lady who had no teeth. She would hold her scarf or hand to her mouth when she spoke, covering it
in a very genteel manner. Rose was kind. She would travel by trolley, accompanying me to my new school on 135th Street and Convent Avenue. I had entered a new school in the fourth grade. I was eight. I didn’t know anybody in my class. They were a new breed. Wild. Reckless. I felt very outside.

I sat in the back of the class at first. The boy next to me leered at me and poked his yellow pencil up and down on the zipper of his pants. I looked away. He kept doing it. After the school day I told the teacher. The next day he was gone.
Hmm,
I thought to myself,
this teacher will like me if I keep telling her what is going on in class.
I didn’t know what a snitch was. I soon found out.

One afternoon the teacher left the room. Two high-spirited athletic Irish girls started throwing the blackboard eraser to each other. Laughing and scrambling over the desks. Shards of chalk swam in the sunshine.

The teacher reentered. “Who did this?” she demanded, waving her hand to dispel the chalk and picking up the fallen eraser. “Who did this?” she demanded again.

I looked around the room and saw that no one was going to tell the teacher the truth but me, the new girl. I raised my hand high.

“Yes, Lyova?”

“It was those girls there. That one and that one that threw the erasers.”

Silence. The girls I pointed out turned toward me, openmouthed, as did the whole fourth-grade class, even the teacher. Obviously, I thought, I impressed everyone with my honesty.

On the clanging iron stairs down to the courtyard after school, one of the Irish girls hissed in my ear, “I’m gonna get you for that. Just wait till we get outside . . .”

I can’t believe this is happening. One shaking foot goes from one step to the next. I am becoming very afraid of what is going to happen
to me. We empty out into the school courtyard, and the whole class forms a ring around me, my school bag, and my De Pinna dress. The two Irish girls are making boxing motions toward me, yelling, tough. The whole class is encouraging them. I am “it.” I’ve never hit anyone. I don’t know the protocol. I realize I am just going to have to take it when Rose, who just arrived to pick me up, breaks through the circle, grabs my arm, and pulls me out. I’m not scared. I’m confused. But the lesson was loud and clear: Don’t Ever, Ever Turn Anyone In. Ever. That lesson was burned in my brain in the fourth grade. Thanks to two tough little Irish girls. The lesson served me well.

When Rose left, a peculiar little German lady replaced her. We were all scared of her. Sure enough, my mother found small shards of glass in the chicken soup. The German maid was trying to kill the Jews.

Then Carrie came. Carrie was the real deal. Competent. Smart. Relaxed. Ample. A lap comfortable to sit on, a bosom to rest my head on. She smelled of hot soapy water and fat.

I was sitting at the dining room table with my mother. She was babbling to me about the sales. De Pinna’s was where she bought my clothes, all French labels or English imports. My winter wardrobe was bought in the summer sales, my summer wardrobe during the winter sales. On each item she’d proudly show us the sale tag: a ten-dollar skirt marked down from four hundred, a thirty-dollar dress down from whatever. And so it was that I was sent to public school in fancy dresses entirely inappropriate to the current fashion for skirt and sweater sets, which I longed for. I would rip the hems of these fussy dresses on the way to school, preferring that the ragged edge be stared at rather than show my pudgy thighs.

My mother was perusing the newspaper at lunch, talking in her high movie-star voice about the sales. We were eating aspic cubes held together with toothpicks. A toothpick broke and lodged in my throat.
I tried pushing it down with water, with bread. I excused myself and headed into the kitchen, where Carrie was washing dishes in soapy water.

“Carrie,” I said, “I have a toothpick stuck in my throat.”

She scooped up a cup of soapy water and walked me past my mother, up the hall, and into the bathroom. “Drink this.”

I drank the water, threw up the toothpick, and went back to my seat. My mother had not stopped talking. I resumed lunch; she looked up from the paper. “Where were you?”

“I had a toothpick stuck in my throat. Carrie got it out.”

Her face paled and she started to slip from her chair. “My brassiere, undo my brassiere.” I did. “I almost lost you,” she cried, wailing, now flat on the floor. “Call Fremo, Grandma.” Fremo and my grandmother still lived next door in my grandmother’s brownstone. They arrived. My mother was lifted onto the living room sofa, where she told the story of how she almost lost me again and again, begging me to play “Für Elise” on the piano, which I did.

I would never again tell my mother anything alarming about myself. Her fear that something would happen to her only child was matched only by her wonder at my genius. Jews in that period had lots of geniuses, virtuosos, in music, math, theater, films. All some proud mother’s boy or girl.

The black-and-white films of glamorous women with glamorous lives were as real to her as food. Isadora Duncan, dancing the world over with all those lovers. The reality she chose to believe in was a magical reality. And that’s what she imbued in me, her one child. “Look, Fremo, how she picks up the bread! Look how she spreads the butter! Look how she walks, talks, sings!” Omigod—sing!

I would sing “Embraceable You” to my mother and Fremo, seated on the couch, clutching each other.

“You and you alone bring out the gypsy in me!” I’d sing, pointing my finger at my mother.

“No, no, Lyova, don’t!” she’d scream, so affected by my power was she.

“Lovey, please,” Fremo would plead beside her, overcome.

How could I doubt my effect on the world when I had these two grown women hypnotized by my every move?

There were reasons I didn’t tell my dear, silly, vulnerable, and theatrical mother anything that happened to me—except the things she could celebrate.

Carrie and I sat in front of the radio for hours, gossiping about all my programs. We went to the movies together. We saw Errol Flynn in
Captain Blood
and were both smitten. By his beauty, his smile, his dedication as a doctor, the sweat pouring down his wonderful face, the earnestness in his eyes. Carrie and I were bound together by Errol. We never called him Errol Flynn. Just Errol.

Carrie brought in the newspaper every day. The
Daily News
. Errol was being accused of doing something to a fifteen-year-old he wasn’t supposed to.

Every day for a year, Carrie and I scoured the papers. Peggy something was her name. Hours of indignation: “Errol wouldn’t do that,” Carrie said. “She’s just trash.”

“Trash,” I’d agree happily, “that’s all she is.” And we’d look at the picture in the paper again. In the morning I’d say, “What’s happening with Errol?” and Carrie would shake out the day’s paper. We’d read the story in shock, angry at anyone who was not on Errol’s side. “Listen to this!” “Listen to this!” we’d say to each other. Carrie, the person in my house most in touch with reality. The one there for me in every emergency. Carrie was my closest friend and comfort.

Carrie left to have a baby. She called that poor little girl Lyova.

I must have been fourteen when my mother told me Carrie died.

I went by myself to the funeral home to say a private good-bye. The hard, unyielding body in the coffin didn’t look like Carrie’s. Nor did the face. Gray. The upper lip stuffed with something round and hard. I was shocked and shaken. My Carrie lives on, at 706 Riverside Drive, with her friend Lyova.

An odd postscript to our crush on Errol Flynn, Carrie’s and mine. I read his autobiography many years ago. At the end of the book, a habitual drunk, but now a decidedly sober actor, he stands in front of his bathroom mirror on the boat he lived on. He examines the broken veins on his nose, the bags under his eyes, the folds on his neck, with triumph. He has managed to wreck his own beauty and free himself from its expectations. Many years later I bought an initialed belt buckle at an auction that once was worn around his waist. I wanted an object to remember him by. To remember Carrie by.

•   •   •

T
here was a very sick child who lived more than halfway up 148th Street in a brownstone with a big bay window. Her anxious, sweet-faced parents said she had a hole in her heart. They dressed in brownish dark colors and spoke in European accents. I always looked in the bay window when I passed their house. Sometimes they would hold up their frail blond-haired child and wave.

One day I was invited to a birthday party. Not on 148th Street, but another street on the other side of Broadway. I didn’t know any of the children there. I was nine. Why was I invited? They were in a circle playing spin the bottle. When the bottle pointed at you, you left the circle, went into a closet with the boy who spun it, your lips pressed his, then you went back to the circle. It was strange, thrilling, but matter-of-fact. I don’t remember a birthday cake at all.

Afterward, Lenny Black asked if he could walk me home. Tanned,
dark-eyed, silky black hair. I was wearing the only dress I looked good in. Pale green silk, and saddle shoes. I kept looking at my saddle shoes, shyly walking beside him down the 148th Street hill, across the street from my building. It was spring. “Will you be my heartthrob?” he asked. There was a buzz in my ears as my heart sped, and my breath momentarily stopped. I kept looking at my saddle shoes, and in a conversational tone said, “Yes.”