Just Kids From the Bronx (15 page)

Also like most women of my generation, I was ambivalent about being smart. This came out most clearly in our advanced math class. The three or four of us girls in the class all suffered from what came to be called “math anxiety.” Because everyone “knew” that girls weren’t good in math, we always felt that if we got the answer to a hard problem it was a fluke. No matter how many flukes we achieved, we were sure that we would get the next one wrong. Our teacher, Hans Holstein, loved giving the class challenging problems, and he never understood why we were so stressed while the boys were so exuberant. “Math anxiety” was something else the women’s movement helped us understand—and overcome.

Something I never really outgrew was my lack of interest in clothes. My mother would take me to Loehmann’s, the big department store near Fordham Road. They had this big open women’s changing room, and everybody tried on clothes in front of everybody else. That was my first experience seeing older women’s bodies. And girdles. Those orangey skin-colored girdles. It was fascinating and a bit shocking. The women there were not only big, they were loud and demanding. They would yell at salespeople. They fought over garments. It was a real Bronx experience. I don’t think anybody who used that changing room would ever forget it.

STEVE JANOWITZ

Comedy writer, retired math teacher

(1941– )

I never had a focus or a clear direction as a kid. That was one of my issues, I think. I was always getting into trouble, fooling around, trying to be a little bit of a wiseguy. I used to hear about the gangs, like the Fordham Baldies, but I never saw them or saw the action. Basically, I hung out with a bunch of young Jewish kids, but we would hear these stories and try to be cool and tough ourselves. So we had pompadours, and we smoked cigarettes when we were twelve or thirteen years old, and we wandered around like we were a bunch of tough kids—which we weren’t.

Once in a while, though, we’d get into fights. This is the thing—I was always a very careful person. They were like … Jewish fights. One guy would get hit and the other would say, “I give.” And that would basically be the end of it. And I’d always make sure that the guy I was fighting was someone like Arnold Katz, who is now a physicist, or Jerry Zelinsky, who had thick eyeglasses and looked nerdy. Guys like that. So we’d fight once in a while among ourselves, but no one would get hurt.

Our neighborhood was middle class, but there was one really tough guy there. I’ll never forget this guy. His name was Billy Flanagan. People were terrified of Billy Flanagan, with his perfect pompadour. There were all these stories about him and how he would break people’s heads. One time he was in the barbershop on Eastchester Road at the same time I was there. The barber was literally trembling because he was afraid he was gonna mess up this guy’s hair when he cut that perfect pompadour.

In junior high school, a group of my friends and I decided that we should start our own gang.
Yeah, that’s a great idea. Let’s have our own gang!
There was some sort of carnival taking place out of our neighborhood. It might have been on Gun Hill Road or somewhere like that. So how’re we gonna know we’re in a gang? By dressing alike and wearing that uniform to the carnival that night. Our uniform was black pants and a white shirt. We must’ve looked like we were going to a school assembly or like we were accountants. Now that I think back on it, me with my black pants, white shirt, glasses, I think I looked like a cross between Arnold Stang and Alfred E. Neuman.

So we’re at the carnival doing the games and walking around in our black pants and white shirts, maybe about five or six of us, when two other kids come up to us. And they looked tough! “We heard you’re a gang now. Wanna fight our gang?” Our guys looked at one another, and within three seconds it was like, “Gang? What’s that? We’re—no, no—we’re a club. A club!” Next thing you know, we’re on the phone with one of our mothers.
Get us out of here!
At that point, we realized that even though we were trying to be tough, smoking cigarettes, our hairdos—all of that—it really wasn’t for us. When I think back on our Jewish gang, I think we should’ve called ourselves Price Waterhouse or maybe the Accountants.

Fortunately, about a year later, the Beatles hit. As soon as I saw them, even though I thought they were weird-looking with those haircuts, I knew those guys were really good. That’s when my focus changed. I listened to the music and started the shift toward peace and love.

MARGARET M. O’BRIEN

Sisters of Charity nun, educator

(1942– )

Education was very important to my immigrant Irish parents. They told us that we were all going to go to college but that we needed to get scholarships. My brother, who was probably five at the time, said, “Mommy, I’m going to get a scholarship. Mommy—what’s a scholarship?”

I was in seventh grade when a nun came to talk to us about what we called vocations. She was an older lady, and I can remember her saying, “If you have this little voice, this little idea in your mind that doesn’t go away, maybe you need to pay attention to it.” At the time, I was thinking,
That’s me
. My sister Ann and I were sitting in front of the mirror of the vanity in our shared room, and I said, “You know what that nun said the other day? About that little voice and paying attention to it?” And my sister said, “Oh, you’re hearing things.” But I thought about it a lot through the high school years and then I did it. I entered the Sisters of Charity a week before my eighteenth birthday.

In those days it wasn’t unusual to enter young, right out of high school, although some entered out of college or nursing school or older. When I entered, I was very homesick, but I thought of my mother coming to America at age sixteen. She had relatives here, but still, within a few weeks she was out working, “living out” as a maid. I thought,
If my mother could do what she did at sixteen, then I can do this
.

I became a nun and taught in Scarsdale at the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Then I went to teach on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. What an awakening! From Scarsdale to the Lower East Side. In the Lower East Side Parish, St. Brigid’s, there was no convent so we traveled in each day. It was the late 1960s and we wanted to be in the neighborhood, so we found an old tenement to live in. It was an unusual place, where the stairs were crooked and small and went up at an angle. If you looked at the front wall, there was a gap between it and the side wall, which was eventually pulled together with cables. Six of us moved in. We loved it. We were young. Those were incredible and wonderful times for us. Wonderful community. Wonderful experiences in the parish. The school looked right out on Tompkins Square Park. That was in 1967, when the park was the center of drug activity, but we weren’t fearful. The school was broken into one night, so several of us stayed there the next night to make sure that nobody would break in again. When the police found out they nearly killed us.

I knew deep in my heart that I was very happy in my work, but when I was in my late thirties and early forties I went to Berkeley, California, on a sabbatical. I looked around and noticed,
Gee, everyone’s in couples
. It was during that time of upheaval when I wasn’t sure who I was and what I wanted. I started therapy out there and wasn’t ready to come home. That was when I had to kind of rechoose. I think of that as having been a very healthy searching. I was so young and inexperienced when I entered, and so I had to rethink my decision on an adult level. My ties to the community were close so I didn’t leave, but I did live in California for those twelve years. I had a friendship and that was one of those things that really made me stop and think about whether to recommit. I was at a funeral of a sister who used to pray for me all the time. I was kneeling, talking to her and kind of thanking her and also realizing at the same time that we were in the chapel of a retirement home for this funeral. I remember thinking,
I hope I can die here too
. And then I realized what I had said. I had basically already made up my mind.

I grew up in Kingsbridge Heights, one of the highest points in the Bronx. On our block there were apartment houses, private houses, lots of trees, and empty lots across the street with tree roots that looked like little rooms so you could play house in them. That neighborhood was wonderful, full of places to explore and plenty of kids to explore with. I even have a picture that someone’s father, a photographer, took. There were maybe fifteen of us all sitting on the trunk of an old tree that had fallen down. I can still name most of the kids in that picture.

When I was a first grader, my parents would give us a nickel each to put in the collection basket. Some Sundays my nickel never got to the basket. It was spent on candy on the way home. It got to the point, when I was eleven or twelve, where,
Oh, there’s a little change on the table
and it got into my pocket. I wasn’t getting an allowance then. My parents caught me and then I was in big trouble, but my punishment was mostly interior. I felt embarrassed because I was supposed to be a good kid. My parents learned from it, though, because we started getting an allowance after that. It was small, but it was an allowance. Thirty cents.

When it was report card time and we were young, they used the report card as an incentive. I got a nickel for every A or mark over ninety. A good report card was worth a dollar ten. The only time I got a B was because I talked in church. That mark came under “reverent and religious duties.” With it all, I was a studious girl who loved to read. I loved to sing. I loved plays. I loved history and learned it just by reading.

We were very secure until my mother got ill with several brain tumors when I was just coming into adolescence. Those were uncertain times, let’s put it that way. We thought she wasn’t going to make it. She survived, partially paralyzed, blind in one eye and deaf in one ear. She was forty when this happened, and lived until she was ninety-five.

My mother was very dominant and so we toed the line. There were five of us, with me the oldest. I struggled with that control when I was a teenager. I would be fresh. Talking back. Disagreeing with her, but really mild stuff, like: “Get in there and do those dishes.” “We’ll do them at the commercial.”

I also wanted a pair of heels. How long it took to get stockings and heels. My mother gave me a gift one Thanksgiving of stockings.

I went to dances and there were a couple of boys that I kind of had my eyes on, but I never really dated. We didn’t step out of line too much, but my siblings tell me that they learned by watching me fight to just be quiet—and then to do what they wanted.

There was a girl, Annette, who I used to argue with. I didn’t like her. My mother refused to get involved.
You got into it. You’ll get out of it
. That’s how you learned life, you know? You got a sense of yourself by being away from your parents but knowing that they were still there. I feel sorry for children today who don’t have the freedom to just be with other kids, especially to work out their difficulties and relationships. Our kids have a harder time today.

JOYCE HANSEN