I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (4 page)

The week that followed was the most extraordinary in my life. Lenny Black came to 148th Street every afternoon. He brought leadership and adventure into the lives of all the girls on the block. When we played ring-a-levio, he always chose me to be on his team. I asked him to come with me to the back porch of my grandmother’s brownstone. Fremo and my mother were lying in deck chairs. They shielded their eyes with their hands as they looked up at him. I was proud.

My status on the block shot up. I was no longer Lyova. I was Lenny’s girl. The star of the block. When we played hide-and-go-seek, he pushed me to hide with him, not from him. We crowded together in alleyways, warm breath intermingling, warm arms and knees touching. We skated down unknown streets, climbed dangerous ladders, ran across tarred rooftops. It was thrilling. The games we girls played before Lenny—“What would you wear if you were a princess?” “Emerald crown, matching satin dress, golden shoes”—all gone. He was the gangster. I was his moll. We were all his molls.

One night my mother told me the little girl with the hole in her heart had died. “Tomorrow you’ll get dressed, go up the hill, and pay your respects to her parents. It’s very sad.” The next morning, despite my begging and pleading, my mother insisted I wear the new wine-and-white-checked suit she’d just purchased from De Pinna’s. The pleated skirt was up to my thighs; the jacket didn’t close over my nine-year-old belly. The kneesocks emphasized my pudgy knees.

As I stepped out of my building on the 148th Street side, there was
Lenny, leaning against a car. I saw his eyes take me in. In an instant I knew it was over.

I crossed to the car and leaned against it, trying to hide everything he just saw. “I’m going up the hill to visit the little dead girl, want to come?”

“Nah!” He left the car and stood opposite me, unabashedly taking in the belly and the thighs, the whole thing. “Nah!” he said again, and put his hands in his pockets. I watched him turn the corner to Riverside Drive and knew I’d never see him again.

•   •   •

I
went up the street to the brownstone where the parents were waiting for condolences. They had pulled a long white basket to the bay window, lined with white ruffles and pillows. On it lay a doll-like child of about two, as beautiful as any princess in a storybook. Golden curly hair, rosy lips and cheeks, her little white hands crossed on her chest, wearing a long white net dress and little white Mary Jane shoes. She seemed to be sleeping, like Snow White after she ate the poisoned apple, just waiting for a tiny prince to come and awaken her. “Look, look—how beautiful,” her parents kept saying, wiping their wet faces. There was a smell of choking sweetness.

I left and walked heavily down the hill, past my grandmother’s brownstone, to the entrance of my building. I opened the apartment door, went down the hall to my bedroom, and undressed. I put on my green silk dress and left the checkered skirt and jacket on the floor.

Not long after, I saw
Wuthering Heights
around the corner at the Dorset movie theater and met the love of my life, Heathcliff. The fierceness of that passion, the lover’s rage, burned into my little heart, and it never left me. I walked out of the Dorset Theatre, around the corner, and down the hill dazed and stricken. I had given myself over
to Heathcliff. I understood his need, his undying need for Cathy. I understood his revulsion at Geraldine Fitzgerald. I even understood poor Geraldine’s hunger for his love. I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and wept for all of us.

Heathcliff burned himself forever into my brain chemistry. The angry orphan outsider, with more electricity in his little finger than all the landed gentry put together. The wild outsider, the moors, the wind. Heathcliff the outsider had set my taste in men for life.

Lenny Black had been replaced. I was free to worship a black-and-white star of the silver screen.

•   •   •

M
y father owned a boys’ camp, Pocono Camp Club. I was taken there every summer, from the first year of my life. Pictures show me, at eight months, perched on a nurse’s white shoulders; at three, saluting the flag at the flag ceremony; and again barefoot, in a white petticoat, with someone’s big sunglasses covering my face. I actually remember that picture being taken. The heat of the dry grass between my toes, the hot sun on my tan arms, and the person behind the camera saying, “Look here.”

Snap.

My father wanted to raise and train boys with the same kind of dedication and religious ethic that he’d had in his education as a first-generation good Jewish American, moral and ambitious Columbia graduate, and responsible executive of a huge social machine like the YM and YWHA.

At seven, when my parents reunited, I was the only little girl in the boys’ camp; I used to run after the ones my age as if I were a butterfly catcher. I would climb the hill overlooking the lake with my binoculars, lying flat so no counselor could see me, spying on the
eight-year-old boys, leaping on one another, wet brown bodies with white backsides, naked, wild lemmings running toward the ice-cold water. Jumping off the pier, screaming with cold, shock, and joy.

I used to run after them. “Play with me, play with me!” I’d call.

The boys on the outer rim would turn their heads and look at me, alarmed, and keep on running.

One summer my cousin Genevieve Rosenthal showed up. Her younger brothers, Jack and Jerry, were campers.

We had each other. I was starving for a friend of my own. Genevieve was a leader. She’d bossed her two brothers and was up for anything.

Hiding behind the social hall, she and I were alternately singer and audience, did dying scenes with each other, and stole packs of cigarettes from the niche in the office where they were sold. Her idea. Bold. Wily.

I locked the hook on the small bathroom door in my parents’ cabin and lit a cigarette. I blew smoke in the mirror, the way the movie stars of the thirties did. So glamorous, so sophisticated. As was I, eight-year-old Lyova, head back, hair swaying, eyes half closed under my eyelashes, a stream of smoke pouring out, the boy in the mirror under my spell.

“Lyova. Lyova.” My mother’s sharp voice. “What are you doing in there?” Knocking sharply on the wooden door,
rap rap.
“Open up this door.”
Knock knock.

I quickly threw the cigarette in the toilet, flushed it, opened the hook on the door, and faced my tall, angry mother. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” My mouth opened, a gob of smoke escaped and hung between us. I started to cough. The rest escaped. She dragged me to the sink, then thought better of it, shook me, talking all the while. “No, the soap is too drying.” I’d cunningly concluded that I’d escaped
my mouth being washed out with soap when my mother grabbed her cold cream jar. “Open your mouth!” On my wail—“Noooo!”—she slapped in a handful of Pond’s cold cream. I retched. “Cold cream is good for your skin,” she said as she slammed out the screen door. I lay on the cot gagging and crying, trying to spit out the cold cream.

For a long time I couldn’t even stand the smell of cigarettes.

But my cousin Genevieve taught me to be bold and lie, to be tricky and adventurous. Two against the parents and counselors. She was a great bad influence. Being bad was good.

The next summer I was alone, walking somewhere, it had to be August because the grass was parched. Stanley Baumschlag was standing watching me. I was nine; he was at least eleven. He stood barefoot, brown-bodied, thin, and muscular, in khaki shorts rolled up his thighs. He held a long stick of gum in his mouth between his teeth. His dark eyes watched me. He was the God of Mischief.

“Bite the other half of my gum off,” he challenged.

“No, why should I?” Secretly thrilled.

“You’ll see.”

“Oh, all right.” Acting bored, reluctant, I walked up to him, carefully putting my teeth around the stick of gum, biting, my lips brushing his. He jumped away, pointing at me. “Gotcha!” Running away barefoot, turning and calling “Gotcha!” again.

I stood, hands on hips, showing exasperation, like he’d really tricked me.

I wrote in my diary that night,
I am going to torment Baumschlag!
If. Only. My first kiss.

•   •   •

I
had a very bad earache and my mother called the doctor. The doctor said I needed a mastoid operation. A lot of children did at the time; this was before antibiotics were common. I never hear about
mastoids anymore. We were at camp. The summer was over. The boys had all gone home on buses. I remember lying on a cot in my mother and father’s cabin. Looking up, I saw the doctor’s white face, glasses, and gray suit, and my mother and two other strangers. The doctor held a large white gauze patch to my face. It had a terrible smell. It was chloroform. I was drowning in brown rushing water, reaching for the brambles on the side of the ravine, screaming for my mother to save me. “Mother, Mother. Save me, help me!”

I could hear my mother’s voice. “Oh God,” she cried, “let her go.”

For a long time I was swept down the stream. And then I drowned.

There is life after death. The pavilion above the lake was turning slowly in the blue sky. I was on it, holding on to the sides. It landed softly. I looked out at the lake, the mountains. I was safe. Alive.

•   •   •

I
wandered through the empty bunks. In one I found a book of poetry. The lines made me sit on a cot and read.
When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.
Then,
Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
The inevitability of the inevitable. Pauline on the tracks—“Save me, save me”—with the train coming on.

I was gobbling books. Up the hill on Broadway was a small bookstore. It was there I discovered Tolstoy and Turgenev, and read them for hours on the window seat in the living room, eating apples.

My Uncle Raymond told me a joke as we walked up Riverside Drive. It was about the midget lady and the giant in the circus. On their wedding night, as they performed their conjugal duties, the giant said, “Is it in yet?”

She said, “No, not yet.”

“Now?”

“No, not yet.”

He pushed harder. “Now?”

“Yes,” she garbled, lisping, her throat full. “It’s in.”

Something in that inappropriate joke stayed with me. Nobody had ever discussed sex with me. I knew where things went and what it was, but that was it. At nine I had found a hand-drawn picture of Hitler sticking his penis into Mae West. Shocked, I ran home and burst into the living room. “Do you and Daddy do this?”

My mother said gently, “Sweetheart, that’s how babies are made.”

Revulsion. “Like Mae West and Hitler? How could you!” Slam of bedroom door. Fury and shame, sobbing on a bed. That was pretty much it as far as technical information went.

Annie Kay and I had been best friends since we’d spied each other at our mothers’ knees. Her red hair curled around her snowsuit hood, freckles sprawled across her nose. Annie Kay and I were inseparable. She lived on 150th Street, between the Drive and Broadway. She was there for me, sturdy, never leaving my side, when Mr. Forster, my fourth-grade history teacher, asked me to stay after school. Mr. Forster had a habit of touching my neck where my braids parted. A tall heavy-breather, he would stand by my desk during tests, whispering the answers to questions I couldn’t answer. “Seventeen seventy-nine,” he’d say. “The French and Indian War,” or “John Adams.” I’d feel a clutch of revulsion in my stomach, a temptation to get the questions wrong rather than write down his answers. So when he asked me, his big red face smiling, to discuss the problems I was having in history after class, I asked Annie Kay not to leave my side as he, hand on my neck, sought my averted eyes to discuss my lack of studiousness. Because my mother was prone to hysteria, I instinctively sought other allies to solve my problems. With Annie Kay by my side, Mr. Forster was blocked.

•   •   •

O
ne day I walked up the hill on 148th Street and crossed Broadway on my way to the five-and-ten-cent store on 145th Street. On the way I saw a man stalking a woman. Like a snake ready to strike. They were off the sidewalk, in the street. A small circle of onlookers surrounded them. She, terrified, was moving within the circle, trying to get away from him. A bus pulled up. The doors opened. She tried to get on. When the driver saw the situation, he closed the doors and drove on. I looked at the faces of the onlookers. No one was moving to help her. How could that be? I looked around for a policeman. I ran about three blocks on Broadway before I found one and dragged him back to the place the woman had been. All gone. No more crowd, nobody left to tell but me. “He was going to hurt her. Find him, stop him.”

“Oh, no, little lady, they’re fine. They’re probably sitting in a bar now around a table, talking about it.”

“He’s going to kill her.”

“No, no, it’s just a normal thing, don’t worry your head about it.”

Things happen in your life that leave an imprint. Injustice left the deepest imprint on mine.

•   •   •

W
hile walking down Convent Avenue I discovered that the convents on the avenue had angry nuns who encouraged angry parochial school children to hate Jews. The nuns encouraged the children to throw nails at Annie Kay and me. “You nailed Jesus to the cross!” they yelled.

Outside of “I’m Jewish” and “I’m Amish,” there is no comparable “ish” in describing a person’s religion. No Protestant-ish, Catholic-ish, Muslim-ish. If someone asks me, “What’s your religion?” I say, “Jewish.” I don’t say, “I’m a Jew!” unless I’m answering defiantly. As in,
“I’m a Jew, what are you going to do about it?” “I’m a Jew, so what!” “I’m a Jewess—a woman with powers to entrap a Christian man.” I became scared about being Jewish when I was growing up. First there was the blond child on the
Île de France
who knew somehow that I was Jewish and believed I couldn’t wear the ship’s ribbon in my hair because of it, then the convent school girls on Convent Avenue being allowed or encouraged to throw nails at Annie Kay and me. How did they even know we were Jewish?