I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (5 page)

At Passover dinners, my father sat at the head of the table with his yarmulke on. He would read prayers in Hebrew, and my cousins would read the English translations, and the sense I got from reading about the plight of our people was that we were not a popular group. Ever. Thrown out of Egypt, wandering in a desert for forty years. Thrown out of country after country. Despised, forbidden to own land. And finally, six million of us exterminated. Gassed. Shot.

Someone had given me
Oliver Twist
as a present, and it suddenly disappeared in the middle of my fascinated reading of it. “Where, where, where did it go?” I demanded. No one ever said, but I’m sure my parents got rid of
Oliver Twist
because of Fagin, the Jewish villain of the book.

Except for the high holidays, when my parents went to temple, and of course in camp, where Jewish services were held every Saturday morning, there was no practice or discussion of religion in our family. No one discussed beliefs or God. My sense is that my father, who was raised in a deeply Orthodox home, and my mother, whose father was a Zionist, had a deep respect for their own history and an equal awareness of their great good fortune in their families’ decisions to flee Poland and Russia and come to America. Also, that neither of them seemed to believe in the God of the Jewish bible. My mother believed in the possibilities, the promises; my father in morality and humanism.

I had a little Christmas envy when I walked along Riverside Drive, past windows through which I could see beautiful, brightly lit trees dangling with ornaments—the sense of surprises to come, of Santa Claus landing on rooftops, of a kind of United States of Christmas, to which I didn’t belong. It was a country I wasn’t a citizen of. I had that left-out feeling. The dreidel just didn’t do it for me.

On Saturdays I studied for my confirmation, the Jewish girl’s equivalent of the coming-of-age celebration of Jewish manhood. The other girls were thirteen, I was twelve—thanks to my mother’s usual need to push me to the head of the line. Was it a month we prepared for the Bat Mitzvah? I don’t know. There were about five girls, I think. Our assignment was to write a couple of pages, thanking our parents for giving us life and teaching us virtues and thanking God for making us Jewish women.

Just as I had in Hebrew class, I zonked out in Bat Mitzvah. Sitting with the other girls, all of them excited, I would sink into a vacant stupor. After
Thank you for giving me life
, I was done.

The youngish rabbi gave me kind, special attention. He sat me across his desk and asked questions meant to stimulate my mind, memory, and gratitude. I just didn’t know how to say thank you in the form and with the dignity he wanted. “Thank you to Daddy for all the songs we’ve sung together.” “Thank you, Mother, for thinking I’m brilliant, but as you can see, I’m not!” The young rabbi gave up on me and wrote out a standard form thank-you page for me to read in front of the confirmation audience. He gave it to me in his office and came around the big desk to hand it to me. Suddenly his hairy beard was on my bent neck, his arms around my body. I broke sharply away and looked at him. He moved forward. I ran to the front of the desk, opposite him. He moved. I moved. We both ran around the desk at least twice before he stopped. I said, “Thank you for writing my speech,” and ran out the door.

I read his speech at the confirmation celebration, at Temple Ansche Chesed on 100th Street and West End Avenue. I never told my parents. I never told them anything, because my mother was a hysteric. My father was so moral, I was afraid he’d jeopardize himself to right a wrong. So I learned very early to take care of myself, to keep it to myself.

One day, a girlfriend and I went walking on the Drive, somewhere around 130th Street. There were more small buildings than big ones, and we began to ring doorbells, then run away, hiding, to see if anybody stuck their heads out. It was daring. My heart was beating like crazy. I rang a white button buzzer and looked around for my friend. Had she gone around the corner?

A hand reached out and clutched my shoulder. It grasped the blouse I wore and pulled me inside the door to a small apartment at street level. A small, intent, angry, middle-aged woman was screaming at me. “What do you think you’re doing?” She shook me. “You’re not on your own street, are you? You rang our doorbells. I saw you.” She pushed me down onto a straight chair and went to a telephone. “I’m calling the police. They’ll take you to jail!” She looked at me closely. “You’re a Jew! Are you a Jew?” I nodded. “You’re a Jew.” She dialed. “Operator, get me the police. I have a Jew here who’s ringing doorbells up and down the street. I caught her. Yes, I have her here.” She hung up. The apartment seemed to be the super’s apartment. She spoke with an accent. German? Polish? I was silent, terrified she would keep me prisoner. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’ll never do it again.” There was a moment of heavy air. I didn’t breathe. “I knew it—Jewish!” She watched me. Then she opened the door and pushed me out into the street. “Don’t come back here!”

I stood on the empty sidewalk, looking around me in shock. Then I walked home.

M
y parents added a girls camp. Pocono Camp Club was coed. I was falling in love with all the beautiful boys. Rough, pushy, ball-throwing, shoving, shining-in-the-lake-water boys.

The press of slow-dancing body against slow-dancing body, the rainy days, the pressing of tan cheek to tan cheek. The smell of fresh-cut mountain grass. Earth. Sun-warmed stone. The pine smell of the social hall. Lenny Buckner. Arny Roth. Mike Schimmel. Jerry Brown. Every summer these same children met again in July and said good-bye September first.

At eleven I was a nonperson, a non-girl. At twelve, to my great shock and rapidly beating heart, I emerged a hot girl—my dream come true.

I was in the arts and crafts bunk at the Pocono Camp Club, twining leather strips for a key chain, when I turned, and in the old foggy mirror between the windows I saw a beautiful girl. I stepped closer. Touched my face. Touched the mirror. It was a miracle. The beautiful girl was me!

I looked around for someone to show, but the bunk was empty. Where was everyone?

I ran down the hill to the dining hall. I knew my grandmother was in the kitchen.

“Grandma, Grandma, look at me! See my tan? It makes my eyes so blue, Grandma, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? I’m pretty, aren’t I? I’m so pretty.”

My grandma became my mirror and nodded, caressing my hair.

Narcissus, gazing in the pool of water, falling in love with himself, and drowning in his own image—that was me.

My adolescence had begun. I’d morphed into Scarlett O’Hara. Pocono Camp Club was Tara, 148th Street the Old South. Completely delusional.

At Pocono Camp Club, from age twelve on, I slashed through all my competition, telling the senior girls to their shocked faces, “I can have any of your boyfriends I want.” Boys, men, followed my Fabergé Woodhue perfume and my Flame-Glo lips. A spell was cast. I could not believe my sudden power. I developed whims, which changed weekly—for Lenny, then Marvin, then back to Jerry. But I could never have Mike Schimmel. Mike had contempt for me. I was the privileged daughter of the camp owners; you couldn’t punish me. I couldn’t be sent home. I fell into arrogance. I could do anything I wanted and it was all right, no one said no to me.

Mike Schimmel, who was the oldest boy and the camp conscience, bought a hundred tin clickers shaped like frogs. At lunch, the clicking started and seemed to spread. Conversation stopped. All was quiet except for the clicking sound. The boys swiveled, facing the girls’ tables. At my place was a little tin frog facing me. Looking at me. I suddenly realized I was the target. I was being chastised and criticized for bad behavior, for hurting many feelings, boys’ and girls’. I felt humiliated and helpless. I grabbed the little frog, ran through the girls’ side of the dining hall to the screen door, and ran up the steep dirt steps, hurt and ashamed, holding one of the clicking frogs in my
hand. I ran up the hill to my bunk. I threw myself on my cot and sobbed, clicking the little tin frog to further punish and humiliate myself.

A counselor came in and talked to me. I don’t remember her words, but I knew I couldn’t run away. I had no place to run. I had to take it.

I was very mean to the girls’ head counselor that summer. I did caricatures of her in the camp newspaper. She was a tall, gangly Christian lady, very nice, but awkward. One day she called me in to her bunk, showed me a particularly devastating cartoon I’d done of her, and asked, quivering with hurt, “What have I ever done to you?”

My shock was total. Till that minute I had had no idea that children had the power to hurt adults. Caricaturing her had made me popular; any collateral damage was undreamed of. I was awkward and unprepared for her obvious pain. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Just go,” she said.

Years later when I was on my way to the Neighborhood Playhouse, I ran into her on the subway. “I’m really sorry and ashamed to have . . .” She turned away from me.

Looking back, I think other children always taught me about boundaries. I never knew there were boundaries until I was slapped down; then I became shocked and aware. Like the little Irish girls in elementary school teaching me never to turn anyone in. Like Mike Schimmel. I always respected him for it and wanted desperately to be his friend. He wouldn’t have it. The other girls couldn’t stand up to me. I was the boss’s daughter—a privilege I abused without realizing I had it.

I think going through puberty, coming out on the other side with sudden breasts and waist and cheekbones, made me fall in love with my new self, my new popularity, and the mirror. My new best friend, the mirror! Want me. Want me. Everyone.

I
was a poor student in everything but English. In spite of that, my mother pushed me, and PS 145, so that I could graduate from elementary school at eleven. That left me too young to start at the High School of Music & Art, which had accepted me on the basis of my portfolio of drawings. While I waited to turn twelve, I attended the Art Students League, finally starting Music & Art in October 1939, a month after World War II began.

My first week there I was asked if I wanted to sing in a musical written by one of the music students. Of course I did. The art classes bored me. My artwork was sentimental, cliché. Any art I did at that age was entirely derivative of my Aunt Fremo’s. Fremo, who attended the Art Students League every day of her adult life, was a second-rate artist except for one great painting of fat Suzy in a red hat, which is hanging in my house now. I painted large black women who looked like Carrie, with a baby at her knee.

It was some transition, from PS 145, De Pinna dresses, and Mary Janes to Music & Art, which seemed to have no rules at all. I went around the corner to the dress shop on Broadway and bought a blue
silk dress with my allowance money. I skipped classes, climbed to the top of the metal doors in the girls’ bathroom, eating my sandwich, and swung back and forth. I wandered the halls, peeking through the glass square on each door to wave to a friend. Mr. Rosenthal, my nice history teacher, looked at me with real regret in his eyes.

“You can do this work,” he said. “Why aren’t you doing it?”

My grandmother made me an evening dress out of green net to sing the song in the student musical. My song went like this: “I’m deep just like a chasm / I’ve no enthusiasm / I’m bored when I’m adored / I’m blasé!”

I was twelve, blasé, and had gone to high school heaven. At the end of the term I was called to the principal’s office. I opened the door, and to my shock, my mother was sitting there, across from the principal, Miss Dvorak, looking anxious and small in her chair, shocked by my mascaraed lashes and red, red lips.

I was being thrown out of Music & Art for skipping classes and low grades. My heart thumped. Miss Dvorak was talking to me, but her words were a buzz. She leaned in close.

“You can’t get through school on charm!”

Charm, me? I was charming? Really? Charming. I looked at my mother’s anxious face. I had no idea what my punishment would be. I only wanted to hold on to this backhanded treasure of a compliment. What was it I had that I couldn’t get through school on? Charm, that’s what!

Punishment was my parents sending me to Walton High School in the Bronx. Walton was a run-down, third-rate institution. It would be a good place for me to finish out the half year. Next term I would enter George Washington High School in Washington Heights.

I had to be up very early in the morning to catch the subway at 145th Street for the half-hour ride to the Bronx. My parents were impressed by my lack of laziness in the morning. Orange juice and toast
and I ran to the subway station. What they were unaware of was that I was the only girl on that subway, surrounded by twenty or thirty DeWitt Clinton boys on their way to their very high-achieving all-boys high school, also in the Bronx. They rode with me all the way there and got off one station ahead of mine.

“Java, Java,” they’d call, since no one could pronounce Lyova, as they held the subway door open for me to run onto the train. The blue silk dress slid easily on my body, and the circular skirt swung. My heart fluttered under Russian blouses. Every morning, cute boys, funny boys, flirty boys, studious boys, were hanging on to the poles and overhead straps, bursting with boy stuff, and me. Java.

Once, I went to school without panties. In my circular skirt. I’d never been touched, my body had never been touched, by anybody but me. I wanted a secret, a daring secret to frighten myself with, to ride the train with. I was twelve and a half. Fearless.

•   •   •

I
don’t remember how we met. Maybe he was a friend of one of the boys on the subway. He was absolutely not Jewish—very proper, tan skin, blond hair, medium height, pleasantly Christian. He asked me to be his date for his high school graduation dinner and dance at the Waldorf Astoria’s Grand Ballroom. Of course I said yes. I was at Walton by then. I was twelve and a half or thirteen. I know I wore the green net formal that my grandmother made for my song in the Music & Art musical.

Every date was a family affair, Grandmother Dora making my dresses, Fremo and Mother questioning the boy—was he rich? Living their romantic movie dreams through me. I was a kitten picked up by the back of the neck, helpless, that’s me, examined until I meow, then put down.

I was nervous. The boy was a total stranger, and neither of us knew how to make conversation. Also it was a huge night—high school
graduation, the Waldorf Astoria. We were seated at a big round table with five other couples. All the girls were blond and pretty. Everyone was smiling and glowing. They all knew one another from school. I was the only stranger. I wanted to go home. I wished I were home. We danced, stiffly. Everyone around us was loose—talking, doing dance moves, turning. In the middle of the dance floor a tall young college-age couple, she dressed casually in skirt and sweater, he in slacks, were moving together, as if no one else were in the ballroom. Just the two of them, slow dancing to the orchestra. It was so magical that it took me out of myself. They were so rich they didn’t have to dress up, so sure of themselves. So involved and in love that they moved to their own beat. Long body to long body. Scent to scent, breathing each other in. Dropping into the ballroom from where? With high school formals and tuxedos bobbing all around them, pinks, blues, accentuating their offhand elegance.

The boy led me back to the table, where all the glowing strangers were seated. They started by introducing themselves to me. Each one focused on me, saying his or her name. Fear rose in me with each name. I was the Jew at the blond table. My heart was pounding. My turn. Low voice. “Lyora Rosehall.”

My date turned to me with a smile. “I thought your name was Rosenthal. Didn’t you say it was Rosenthal?”

I looked up, dizzy with shame. All the festive eyes were watching me, waiting. “No, no. It’s Rosehall,” I mumbled. Everyone leaned back in their seats. They began to talk to one another. My date and I sat there, not speaking.

•   •   •

T
he next year, my social life was soaring, bursting. I was fourteen. The older boys from camp were now in college, and their friends wanted to date me—boys from Harvard, Columbia.

Weekends were full of great New York places. Afternoon tea dances at the Pierre, evenings at the Plaza, fraternity parties at Columbia. Fremo and my mother were planning my future. Their Lyova was a popular party girl—convertibles, theater, opera. My grandmother had her sewing machine going on the old linoleum floor in her kitchen—she made me a blue velvet dress, a black satin dress, a beaver hat with a veil, a coat with beaver trim.

World War II was raging. One of the really handsome boys I knew from Harvard became a lieutenant. I met him and a naval cadet with his date at a huge restaurant in a hotel downtown. It was a warm night. They ordered Cuba Libres. “Is that okay?” they asked. “Sure . . .” I didn’t know what a Cuba Libre was. I usually had ginger ale. I felt awkward, a little dazed by the white uniform and gold braid. They were a little old for me. The drinks came, tall, cold, with a straw. I was thirsty and drank it all down fast because I didn’t like the taste.

Suddenly I was in a world by myself. I looked over the table at my date and there were two of him. I experimented with others at the table. I looked at his friend. Double. At his friend’s date. Two of her smiled and nodded at me. If I moved my head too quickly, I had to hold on to the table to steady myself. My face was on fire. I told them I wanted to go to the ladies’ room, but when I stood up, the black-and-white floor tilted, and I slid to the floor. The cadet’s date held my arm while we crossed the slanting floor. When we reached the ladies’ room, I looked in the mirror. I only remember seeing one of me, but I’d never seen that look before. My face was shimmering pink, my hair wet with perspiration, my eyes dilated and bright light blue, instead of blue-gray.

“When will this stop?” I begged the girl. “How do I stop this? I hate this feeling.” She sat me down on a bench and tried to comfort me. I couldn’t breathe. I stood up and begged her to get my date to take me home. I held on to the open window on the cab ride home. As
soon as I stepped on the curb, the Cuba Libre vaulted out of me, a jet stream of six different kinds of rum. I took a deep breath of good summer air. That night I held on to my bed as I lay spread-eagle on my back, focusing on the ceiling as my bed tilted this way and back till the dark became light and I could safely close my eyes without sinking into a spinning vortex.

I hate being drunk. I hate the taste of rum, or any hard liquor but gin or vodka. I don’t drink. I don’t like those rides in the amusement park, either. A boy I used to like took me on one in the Jersey Palisades. I felt betrayed that he hadn’t prepared me for how frightening it was. I walked away from the ride, away from him, went home, and never spoke to him again.

•   •   •

M
y mother was now living her life through me, the dating she never had as a daughter of immigrants, caring for her younger brothers and sisters. I kept two diaries: One I hid for me, the other I hid for her to find and read in secret.

I was standing in our white kitchen on a weekend morning when my mother came through the swinging doors with an anxious face. “Lyova, could you come into the living room and stay with me when Sylvia comes?” Sylvia was Aaron’s wife, my Uncle Aaron, Dad’s brother. “I’m afraid of her,” she said.

In that one instant our relationship changed, forever. I protected my mother. She was a charming bird of plumage, and Sylvia a pretty but deadly hawk; I became the kitchen cat. I realized for the first time that in the outside world my mother was vulnerable, helpless.

That morning, as my little, charming, but deadly aunt made light conversation, peppered with comments that shook my mother—“You really think those pants are becoming? They’re so gaudy”—I broke in. “Sylvia, don’t talk to my mother like that. It’s mean.”

Sylvia, unfazed, turned her pretty face to me.
Okay,
it seemed to say,
new game. I can’t pick on Witia anymore.
Then she went on to tear someone else apart.

But something changed between my mother and me. She knew I would be there for her. And I discovered a grown-up strength. The instinct to defend the bullied and the unfairly treated coalesced into a new strength, even a talent.

•   •   •

T
wo of my best friends the last two years at George Washington High School were Chester and Duke. One day I walked into an empty classroom and there was a lone dark-haired boy playing the saxophone. Playing it well. Jazz. We looked at each other. My knees went weak. So did his. That was Duke. Duke’s best friend, Chester, was a slim, funny, light-haired boy. They were attached at the hip. Duke did nothing without Chester. Romance fled. Together they were ten-year-old boys who played tricks on me, but I was fifteen and full of hormones. They pursued me on buses and subways. One afternoon they showed up laughing on a subway and I told the conductor they were pursuing me and had them thrown off the train. Their shocked eyes watched me from the platform as the train moved on. They sent me a book on charm. The cover had an inscription:
Although in beauty you do excel, in charm and discretion you sure do sm—! Signed, Chester and Duke.
Excel “in beauty” from two discriminating boys? My real report card was swelling my heart. Charm, I knew I had. Hadn’t I been thrown out of Music & Art because of it? Discretion! Yes. I was guilty (of stranding them on a platform), but so what? Discretion is not interesting; it has nothing to do with being attractive.
In beauty you do excel.
Yes! My mother’s daughter.

I went on to Juilliard after high school. I knew I was a minor, minor talent. I had no chest tone, just this tiny sweet lyric soprano
voice coming out of me. My teacher, Madame Fouchard, gave me songs appropriate to my voice, and my age, which was sixteen: “My Love Is Like a Bubbling Brook” and the weirder “Daddy’s Sweetheart.” The end lyric goes, “Oh, if Mummy hadn’t married Daddee [high note], Daddy might have married me! Tadum!” I sang these songs to great effect in my living room, my mother accompanying me, her eyes moist in appreciation of my talent. Even my father, the opera lover, approved of the direction my life was taking. Juilliard, after all!

I have a distinct memory of sitting in the Juilliard common room and receiving a phone call telling me Chester was dead. After graduation he had enlisted in the Air Force and was a pilot in training camp. He was eighteen when his plane crashed.

When I heard the news, I almost blacked out. I don’t know how I got back to the apartment on Riverside Drive. I had to get someplace safe to wail, and I did as soon as I leaned against my front door. The apartment was empty. Sounds were coming out of me that I didn’t recognize. Big, low, guttural heaves and openmouthed screams, hot and salty tears streaming down my face into my throat and down my neck. I howled in pain. I was sitting on the carpet in the living room, holding on to the leg of a chair, tasting my own tears. I rose to get something to blow my nose into and caught sight of myself in the mirrored wall above the sofa. I didn’t recognize myself.

This is what grief is,
I thought.
Remember this. This is what grief is
. I stepped closer to the mirror and looked at my contorted features and wet face. I became interested. I studied myself. I tried to cry for the mirror, but the moment was gone. Many years later, when my daughter, Dinah, was two and having a tantrum, I would grab her and carry her to the mirror, where her tears would fascinate her and she would study her pain as I had then. When my friend Chester died.