Nanette Rayman Rivera - piece from memoir – title withheld
“Nana, what did I do? Why doesn’t anyone want me?”
“It’s not just that twenty dollars you took from your mother’s purse. It’s just - how could your father send you to me? Doesn’t he have any responsibility? What am I goink to do?”
She ends the “ing” words with “ink.” She speaks in harsh, masculine tones and there’s a strong hint of Eastern Europe. Hungary, Poland, Russia, maybe. She tells me her accent is Brooklyn, but I point out that, though I’ve never been to Brooklyn, even the Brooklynese on television don’t sound like her. I am not easily fooled.
“I know, Nana, but I’m here. Please don’t hate me. Let me be a girl.”
“Of course you’re a girl. What do you mean?” But she’s already away in the other room, hitting Papa in the head, telling him plain out that he better not take a drink.
“Here’s the paper. Start now. Calling jobs. You better get a job today. Today. Now. Immediately.”
Always that. Always now. That the whole wide world will bend to me. In my time. In her time. She thinks these companies are just sitting around waiting for me to call, that they will set up interviews today, not tomorrow, just because I say so. Then it’s her insipid questions: Is the interviewer Jewish? Is the receptionist? The bus driver?
Nana stands next to me, over me, around me as I call jobs. She places her paper-dry fingers over every kind of job, newsprint all over her nails. She never asks me what I would like to do. She tells me I’m not college material. It’s just hurry up, get a shit job, get out. We never want to deal with you again. We don’t care whatever becomes of you, you trollop, but, just like your father, we expect you to call and tell us you are ok, you are eating, you are not sleeping on the street. It doesn’t matter if I am sleeping on the pavement, you just don’t want me to let you know. Why do you even ask, would you help me? Would you give me money for food, a place to sleep?
I could disappear in Boston. Start clean. Be clean. Change my name. I could sleep under the underpass, like a troll or a hobo, I could watch people point at me and go: Tsk, tsk,
Nana. My father. My mother. For all they know I’ll end up eating the rotting petals of flowers, scrounging trash cans for half eaten pizza slices.
I am feeling a new shape to my body, a coiled misshapen turning, an inside-out, a need to disappear, a need to take up less space. All I can do is become smaller, draw my body back, draw my thoughts smaller, my desires erased.
And my father, is he sitting at the kitchen table, eating an apple, smoking a Winston, two hundred and forty miles away; is he waiting, thinking that Nana is straightening me out, ironing out all the things that make me, me, so I can get on in this world? Does he think she’s showering me with the kind words he couldn’t say, or does he know that she’s setting me up to fail?
“Call another job. Time’s of the essence. You are not going to be picky, missy.”
“Nana, please, let me breathe…”
“Oh, the drama beauty queen wants to breathe. You’re eighteen, time to stop wasting time.”
“Nana…”
“No dinner until you get at least three interviews.”
“Look – here’s a job for an exotic dancer.”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“What - you don’t want? Who are you, the Queen of Sheba? Your father says you’re a good dancer. So dance.”
Nanette-down-the-rabbit-hole falls into dreaming…
Down the street, in the brick houses, behind white doors, up the street in boxy apartment buildings, a mile away at the boundary line between outer Boston and inner suburbia, in Dedham, named after what? – Hamlet of Deads?- Dead Hams? – every where, there are girls my age who’ll never feel pieces of brain and soul erased. They’ll bask in dates and dresses, wait for college acceptances. There will be love. And acceptance.
For me, it’s only being laid bare, like a tomato to a blade, the flat of it parting me, never to know a stop-gap to this relentless Damocles sword, always hanging over my head – get a job – get a job –get one, take any job, there is no future.
One mistake. I was only trying to get your attention.
It’s like a small scrap of brain really knows about these other girls, but I’ve been brainwashed, fuzzied, hypnotized by my family into thinking it’s all my fault.
We’re taking your beauty, your delicate self, and shredding it. We’re placing you, precisely in the underworld, the low-life dead-end world.
You weren’t born to it, we’re placing you there. That’s what they say.
Through the living room window, the light precise, drawn tight as a needle, a blinding white syringe of light to pierce the heart…
“You ask them when they can see you. Demand. You’re too soft.”
Her voice like dentist drills shakes me out of my dreaming. Nana….
“How much time – how long do you think I’m supporting you?”
I’ve been here three days.”
And I can’t get the words out, how I feel, but mostly, I don’t even know how to do this – how to ask for a job. How to do a job. I am paled. Like dust.
~ ~ ~
“Take a break. I want you to cut my toenails.”
Some people walk through woods, searching for songbirds, finches and chickadees, little birds shoved from their nests by those pesky cowbirds. Some are naked, cold and without feathers and some people pick them up and feed them, take them home and make them whole birds. Some people do this. For birds. My grandmother orders me to cut her toenails. I knew I wanted to be a bird and not a girl.
What is dissociated?
A girl lives with her Nana and Papa together in an apartment on a lonely street that becomes a hill, where big black dogs bark, where the voices of her mother and father haunt her and her own voice cries out forever: Just disappear. There is no love here, no normal family bonds. This is a house of doom and neglect, of telling a girl her life is set. Her life is menial jobs and sleeping on old smelly mattresses in rooming houses that in a few years won’t exist anymore. Twenty dollars can ruin a life.
“Come on. Get on your knees and do it.”
Papa comes out of his little den and stands like an Apache in an old western movie, arms crossed, looking wise and all-knowing. And then he smirks.
~ ~ ~
“What’s wrong with your father? If you had a bad leg or a bad heart he’d take you to a doctor. Why aren’t you seeing a psychiatrist? I smile to myself remembering Dr. Freud.
My Auntie Thelma is visiting. She’s pretty and dowdy, a combination I’ve never seen before. Her hair is a dark stiff helmet that would stay put in a wind tunnel and her skirts are too long to be chic and too short to be riding in a stagecoach. Her skin looks like half and half. My mother hates her.
I can tell that she’s waiting to say something. I can tell she wants to stick it to my father. No one ever tells me why she hates him.
“Me? Did it ever occur to you Nana, that growing up in that house was growing up in a loony bin? You know my mother - you hate my mother, and Daddy, he acts like nothing’s going on. He’s no great Daddy. And she, she’s a sociopath, a creep, a female Hitler.”
“Don’t talk about them like that.”
“Oh, but it’s OK for you, right, Naaannnnaaa….”
“Stop it. You’re just like…”
“My mother, right? Or you, maybe? You know, I should be sitting in a straight jacket with my mouth hanging open and big, fat drool spilling out. I should have pinwheel eyes. I made it out sane.”
“Your father said you stole twenty dollars from your mother’s purse. He said that you’re a wild girl, that he doesn’t know how to control you.”
Again with the twenty dollars.
“Did he also say that he doesn’t know how to love me? That my mother doesn’t have a motherly bone in her body? That they don’t even treat me like I’m their flesh and blood. Did he tell you that?”
I try to tell her, yes, I stole twenty dollars from Mum’s pocketbook, that I wanted the sweet high of those Quaaludes to smooth over the ache, the hole they’ve left in me, that yes, I was a wild creature running, always running, I wore tight jeans and tube tops I had to steal because Mum wouldn’t even buy me new shoes, while she bulged her closets with furs and chic sheaths in black and cream and pale peach, that yes, I stole and I stole and I stole a piece of life for myself. So what? Yes, I quit high school, but it was a wailing, a primal calling for help, for Daddy, for a new mother who loved me, who talked to me, who took me shopping and thought I was a real girl with girl needs, and yes, Daddy was there, in the principal’s office and he signed my life away. No matter that up until that point I got all A’s, I tried hard, I was good. No matter, right? No matter that I was afraid of being murdered if I didn’t get all A’s. No matter that other kids got little gifts for getting B’s, and there I was, waving my report cards in the sun, Daddy sweating beside the stalled lawnmower, reaching for it, saying, well, no big deal, you’re supposed to get all A’s and the neighbor kids smiling at their new money for records and clothes. For B’s. For not failing. He did it. Your son, my father. So what is it that you’re saying, Nana?
“What I’m saying is your father and mother said you can’t be trusted, that you’ll steal everything not nailed down. So if we go out, you go out. No matter what time, no matter when.”
“Where will I go?”
“Call a friend and tell them you’re coming over.”
“What if they’re busy? And anyway I don’t have any friends.”
“If they were really your friends they’d make time for you.”
Putting her tongue through her teeth and making a hissy noise was her most piercing weapon when she wanted to be mean.
“Nana, when would I make friends? You won’t let me out of your sight.” If you were really my grandmother, you’d be nicer to me. You’d listen to what I just said, you’d understand that my mother is against me and always has been. You don’t even like her. You hate her.”
“Shut up. You. You’re a bum. You’ll never amount to anything. Shut your foul mouth.”
I know she copies those words from Auntie Thelma. And here she is again. Days here, and she’s here again; drove here from Sharon. Here to see. To see the gone-girl, the bum. The woman my mother might hate more than me. The woman everyone says I look like. At least I have a sense of fashion, even if I have no money to buy anything.
And Nana says, “Get out; I don’t care what happens. Your father should help you. Take care of you. What kind of a father is he?”
“Nana, he’s your son. And that’s what I ‘m trying to tell you. He’s supposed to help me. Love me.”
“Shut up. Don’t talk about your father that way.”
I make a study of silent swallowing; know to cast my eyes away, to close my mouth. I’m knowledgeable with the mannerisms of phony humility, to save myself, the tilt of head and quieting of trembling hands. This is what I’m trying to learn.
She’s this, she’s that. She’s a bum. She’ll never be anything.
Auntie Thelma and her condescending mouth. Now I know my mother hates her for more than her beauty.
I respond so quickly, so suddenly, there is no going back. No trace left of the words for restraint, no more the girl who sits on the nubby brown couch and takes it. No more the girl they treat like a latrine. Just the trace of sailor-mouth and the threat of something dark as Auntie Thelma walks by, and me, sticking my foot out just a little so she catches her ankle, and she’s sent sprawling over the piss-color carpet Nana calls Goldenrod. Maybe this is all a hallucination, a memory of a time-space warp, maybe it isn’t a racing-striped-leg-Nana and a buttoned-up beauty Auntie talking words like I’m not even here.
I imagine there is one, just one God up there saying, Doesn’t matter what little rebel thing she did - No one deserves this. No girl deserves You People.
And they hate me more and more, hate me with a hate mixed with vicious agitation that is beyond my understanding, hate that lets me know at eighteen years old that I’m hovering over the threshold of a world where I yield no influence and never will. They hate me with the unconfessed notion that they can ruin me, un-blossom my newly formed womanhood and set a course for my life that mimics Greek tragedy.
My deep inner self, a place I have no name for, is prey to an unbearable despair, I pray to whatever is out there, I’m sure there’s no God, I pray to have a way to start over somewhere else, I pray to make my mother and father love me and want to help me, because it’s unendurable to keep on like this, never to live free, never to see myself reflected in a loving person’s eyes, never to have a chance at college or becoming an actress – or anything else. Please, I’ll try to believe in something, please, protect me, and I vow to forgive my father, I don’t think I can forgive my mother, I will go to the synagogue and drape myself in white on Yom Kippur as a constant reminder that I am now pure again and that you look out for the lost.
~ ~ ~
Nana creeps into the living room flashing the lights on and off.
“You’ve got the soul of a whore.” Eyes squinting, I think I’ll turn to her, show her where the soul of a whore lays, in the gnash of a jaw, the anger that would move me to tell Papa that he doesn’t have to put up with her witch ways, her endless yapping and bullying him out of even ten dollars of spending money. A gesture that would have as much to do with me as it does with him.
I don’t answer, so she goes on. “Men are all alike, you don’t need one now, you need a real job.”
“Why are you talking about men at two o’clock in the morning? What men?’
“This temping is not going to put food on the table. And you can’t rely on a man.”
“Nana, it’s better to have some money than no money.”
“You just won’t listen. Your mother wanted to make sure I knew you liked men.”
“Listen to what? You said I couldn’t go to college. And what men? I like men, should I like women? You don’t even let me shave my legs or wash my hair in the morning or wear nail polish. And what table? You only want me to live in a flophouse, like a pig.”
“Listen, you little tramp, men are all alike. They only want to fill holes.”
“I don’t care. I only want to get out of here. Someday I will go to college.”
I don’t really believe that. After all, wasn’t I just a whore, a motherless child, a zygote wandering the streets of cold Boston, a non-entity, a thing? I don’t really believe anything lies out there for me. Except peace from this vicious Nana.
I picture, for just a moment, a new me, the one I know lies sleeping under this thing-ness. Jasmine blooms in June, a man courts me with lavender roses and silver ankle bracelets, I bounce along New York pavement on my way to my theatre group. The Nanette I know I am, the Nanette who lies like a rabbit in a field, dreaming.
* * *
Days in that dark place, the men all yapping at my high heels, my see-through swirly scarves caught on the thin silver bracelet one of them bought me when I told him not to, and all of it moist with human breath and sweat and the cold fog and rain outside clumping up the weed by the turquoise door.
When the fat crowd empties out with the letup of rain, the other dancers begin their snotty badgering. Each day the one with no waist and uneven titties struts up to me to tell me no man wants ta see two oranges on a woman, no matter your face, honey, your tits too small. Each day the one with thin lips overpainted with purply black lipstick and too many moles on her backside stands right beside her like bodyguard and sucks her teeth in tune with the no-waist. Each day. In the dressing room, away from the fish-eyes of the owner, they throw my makeup back and forth between them like passing a football. Each day it gets worse until the no-lips one says I’m gonna cut you.
Each day I have no reaction. Each day I want to pop off their heads like you do to dolls and look inside to see if anything’s there. Each day they snicker when I dance part sex, part ballet to Down on Main Street and She Breaks Just Like a Woman, but the men, the boys go hog-wild. They reach up my leg and stuff tens and fifties in my red garter, which I push, lower and lower each day.
Each day I think: What is this thing called desperate? You can’t touch it or hear it or see it. You just feel it. I feel it like rote now. All this falling into homelessness and into Nanas and mothers and fathers not wanting me and all this laying myself out like raw meat makes me fall into a stupor I can’t climb out of. It’s like lying on the bottom of a river, sediment smothering me over.
Each day I curdle at the touch of these men, their oil and dirt ridged fingers swooping up my leg, their lips trying to slather up mine when I’m forced to get them to buy expensive drinks to talk to me. When the gold-chained boil-on-his-face, shiny suited owner tells me I can’t end my set with my panties on, I tell him, no, I tell him that’s the way it is and after he laughs and slaps me on the back, you’re funny, he says tomorrow you take off the panties or you’re out kid; I like you, you’re a doll, but you’re out.
And so I took off my panties and I danced to Down on Main Street, Sweet Jane and Hey There Little Red Riding Hood, and slithered and grinded the pole, but I never, not once, spread eagled my legs.
Each day ends after eight days.
~ ~ ~
I never think of Nana as a woman. As a lady. When she talks to me she squelches any grace or beauty in my own movements and speech.
“Hurry up. What’s that way of walkink you’re doink? Just walk. And why do you speak so softly?”
Because I can’t be trusted, because she thinks I’m going to steal some candy dish or other knick- knack, because I admired her gold filigreed and fake-jeweled hairbrush, she believes my mother, my father - Don’t leave her alone in the apartment. She’ll steal something. Because of all this I have to go with her on every little errand, to every shop and grocery store, every stamp-buying at the post office. I almost look forward to job interviews.
Today I have to follow at her heels like a lapdog in the big supermarket while she picks up meat and cheese and frozen vegetables and then throws them back. “Too expensive” she says.
She looks like a fire hydrant with fur blooming down the front of her legs. Fur right there for the world to see in her sheer stockings and fat black lace-up shoes. A perfect racing-stripe of fur, two black-top lanes of black hair and she tells me I walk and talk all wrong.
Her lips are cemented in a permanent hyphen, unless she’s making fun of Papa. She calls him a dirty dog. Her eyes steel and mean, they’re trained to be hyper-vigilant to the possibility of a misdemeanor Papa or me could commit at any time. Overcooked potatoes stick in her tiny teeth and in her skin, like she’s perfuming herself with them.
She’s spitting mad because I wouldn’t take my panties off.
“What – you gut somethink no other girl has? You need money. You gonna have to get out soon.”
All of a sudden her face is blistered with spittle and her age-spotted hands are flailing around, the spots almost jumping off her skin.
Right here in the spaghetti sauce aisle she tells me I have nothing to hold onto.
“I can’t have you in the house anymore. I can’t take it.”
“Lill, come on, what did she do?” Maybe Papa likes having me around. It sure takes some heat off of him.
And some kid must have spilled some slimy goo, and I slip and sail forward into a sauce display, and my arms and legs are in among the jars and cardboard and I can’t see except for flashes of red and I don’t know if it’s blood or spaghetti sauce. Papa is reaching over and hoisting me up under my armpits and then I’m wobbling with my hands at my sides like a scarecrow, and teen-age boys are winking, and Nana is swatting them away, and the manager is beside himself apologizing and now Papa is saying we should sue and Nana says Shut up you dirty dog, and all the people gasp and I’m crying like a big baby when Nana swats my face like it’s a fly. Then she grabs my arm at the elbow just like Mum used to do.
Nana won’t let me in the car until she sprays me with Lysol. We ride back to the apartment with the windows open. The silence is like being in an open field with cows standing still, chewing and taking breaks between, and thunder starting to thrum over the horizon.
I know what comes now. Eviction. Banishment. Now she won’t take the chance that I’ll cause her aggravation, that I might slip in slime and smell like spaghetti sauce, so it’s out to the hall, without coffee or a shower, out in the snow in my nightie, which is really Nana’s nightie – I don’t own anything - the door slamming, No – you can’t be trusted with keys, with being alone in the apartment, we have to go somewhere and we can not leave you alone.
The hours passing, a neighbor handing me a robe, another inviting me in for coffee, my humiliation as anger, the coffee turning to cigarettes turning to big hairy hands on my breast. Again, out to the hall. The neighbor’s husband taking the opportunity to take advantage of this match-stick girl. Nowhere to go, but I go. Out to the hall, smoking and pacing. Day becomes night, I’m crouched in the corner, and a little girl runs out of her apartment with a baloney sandwich. And chocolate milk.
Running. Always running, vegetating, words like a .38 to my head. “You’re not college material. Get a job. Any job. Get a room.”
“But Nana, only drug addicts and weirdos live in those rooms.”
“I don’t care.”
That’s my Nana.
I don’t know now that most girls don’t run. Have no reason to.
Don’t have a Mac 10 to their skulls. They have a home.
What I mean to say is this: Neighbors will take me in when Nana throws me into the hall, they’ll makeme a cup of coffee and if I’m lucky husbands won’t touch me. If they pass me in the hall or on Grove Street, they’ll ask if I’m all right, and by the way, what was all the hollering about? They’ll accept my lame explanation; will believe me when I murmur, My Nana was yelling at my Papa again. Some people respect your dignity; they let you keep big secrets. What I mean is I’m more of a person to a neighbor than to my own Nana.
* * *
Before I’m put out like a junk-yard dog, I see the lack of love dragging from Nana’s insides.
“Use those tips they put in your panties and go rent a room. Any room. Just do it.”
I’m uncertain what to do, where to run. How will I live? I’ll end up eating thrown away orange rinds and burnt toast tossed into garbage cans. I’ll live on candy bars and wilted lettuce and dented cans of beets, the food I hate the most, handed out in food pantries. I’ll wait in line with the other thrown away people for food no one else wants.
I turn to the door and fall in a heap to the beige carpet.
I feel Papa slapping my cheek, get up, get, up, he says with no care in it.
“I can’t, I don’t even have a job. Why can’t you let me stay until I can support myself?”
Nana is standing over me as I struggle to get up. “You’ll never be able to support yourself.”
Now she’s gone and cracked, I think, she’s a loon, an unfeeling, unreasonable witch. I’m picturing myself months from now, hair split and caked to my scalp, an undershirted landlord beating down my door for the rent, the police coming to turn me out or siren me away to a hospital.
“Nana, I’ve only been here a couple weeks. What do you want from me? What does anybody want from me? I didn’t ask to live; I didn’t ask to have them as parents. Help me, please.”
“I’ll help you. I’ll give you carfare to go look for a room. Manny, get the paper, I’ll look up rooms for this ingrate.”
“Lill, we could at least drive her.”
Rooming houses are desperate and old places, buildings out of a past world. The first one we look at is in a dank, can’t walk the streets part of Boston, a no-man’s land on the trolley car line. It’s a very old crumbly building, its beige brick rotting, dark boys with combs in their hair hanging on the stoop, big mouths outlandishly open and red like that Rolling Stones logo. Nana pushes past them and knocks on the door. An old man peers through the dirty glass at us and then unlocks the door. Two weeks of twenty degrees and icicles are forming on her mustache and her ability to breathe is poor. She wants in. I want out.
“Yeah, whaddya want?” He looks like a Santa Claus that’s gone to seed. His beard is straggly and white, yellowing and coated with jam and his neck skin looks like fish left out in the sun. He flicks his cigarette, takes a deep drag, drawing the red ash to a fever pitch before throwing it down the steps, almost hitting Nana.
“She needs a room.” He beetles up his eyes and stares into my face before letting out a cackling laugh.
“This is a joke, right? A girl like you, so pretty and not, well, not accustomed to all this, why do you want to live here?”
Before I can run, before I can say I don’t want to live here, my mean Nana is making me; Nana digs her nails deep in my back. One of the comb-headed boys sees her hand on me and he almost creams himself with delight. A big bad wolf.
The hallway is papered with dirty pink cabbage roses, vines and leaves twisting up the wall, background for all the phone numbers and names scrawled in pencil and pen. Water stains in swirly, zig-zag lines coming down from the ceiling mix with the yellow cigarette smoke, and the small wallpaper rips let the mold and plaster peep through, like the too-white skin of a woman locked away from the sun.
I stand by the pay phone on the landing trying to read a number written long ago and now water stained and blurred while Nana taps her foot, Papa hold his unlit cigar and paces and the Santa goes to get the keys for the room. I search for the number for clues, for an insight into who wrote it and was it a girl like me looking down the abyss. A number written between a faded rose and a vine.
Already I’m a wild animal, not a girl.
Nanette-falling-down-the-rabbit-hole imagines fleeing this shit-poor room. Fleeing the mold lifting the wood off the floor, fleeing the green peel of the spotted wallpaper, the saggy, soggy mattress with some stain on it. What is that – blood? Nana thinks if you rent a room it comes with newly wallpapered walls, a bureau, a bed, a bathroom. She never thinks of eating. Rooms don’t come with kitchens. Granddaughters don’t come with hot-plates, cups, dishes and silverware and this Nana has no intention of giving. The bathroom is down the hall and we have to walk by more boys with combs in their heads and too many Fuck Yous wailing from behind doors. Nana’s a tank, rolling by. Doesn’t she see where she wants to drop me? The bathroom was nice once, the small white tiles like cobblestones, the deep white bathtub, the high ceiling. Now the window shows it’s been broken more than once, water stains form a pattern like flowers on the white tiles and the toilet needs to be cleaned. An old man in a white tee shirt and boxer shorts appears. The sunlight beating off the bathroom window forms a shiny spot on his bald head. He looks a lot like Papa. Gotta use the can. His teeth are all silver. Nana sneers and pulls me back to the room. Well, ya want it or not?
“She’ll take it.”
“Nana, there’s no girls here. There’s all these men and yelling and rotting floors.”
“Who are you to say anythink. You don’t have a pot to pee in. Now you do. Use the money you made at that dump you worked in.”
I feel like a half-skinned corpse. Like I’ve left my body standing there with Santa and Nana and Papa and I’m flying around the ceiling, a white whoosh, a see-through nothing, but at least I’m not down there. But no matter how much I want to be perch on the ceiling ready to take flight, I know I can’t exchange my place in the world for another. I already know this is my place, a ghetto. It’s not a way to start a life, already done in.
What I don’t know is that Nana has packed my few shirts and jeans; the winter coat she bought me with money she said crippled her budget, and that Daddy said he sent her for me. The coat I had to beg for – fake-fur trimmed brown sued with flowers embroidered on either side of the zipper. A hippie girl, free spirit-girl coat, a pretty pretty coat. Nana wanted to get me a pea coat. It’s good enough –it functions – whaddya want –you? I know she didn’t even want to buy me a coat, but she must have figured she’d get in some sort of trouble if I froze to death.
Who to believe? Who’s the liar when both are traitors? Now Papa is standing here with the bag, not even a suitcase. She couldn’t even spare a real suitcase or tote bag, no; my clothes are in a brown paper bag. Nana must have given Papa a signal to get the clothes out of the trunk, they had it planned the whole time. I didn’t have a chance. It must be snowing because Papa’s head is wet and I run to the bathroom window, hoist it open and look out. I’d rather sleep on snow.
~ ~ ~
I wake up the next morning mangled in the lumpy bed. Please, I don’t want to get up. I don’t know how to live. What to do. I’m hungry. What to eat? I cough to the rhythm of being alone.
I’m naked. I don’t even own a tee shirt or nightgown and cheap Nana didn’t even pack me one of her twenty year old ones, the pink and turquoise nighties with the lace at the collar so delicate and disintegrating Steam heat sizzling in the radiator. filtering through filthy slats, cedar chests with someone’s old clothes – arms and sleeves and wholly lace collars.
It’s so hot. This room is the Amazon. Why won’t the window open? I peak through fingerprints and dirt and see two sparrows drunk on figs and a soaked wicker table. Cigarette butts float in the silver ash tray.
I slip my slippers on and feel the catshit ooze over my feet. Aargh! What is this place?
Why am I here? I want to start over.
But no. I’m to wander the earth, or at least the neighborhood, blown apart by abandonment. Braless, hatless and famished. With cat crap on my feet. I could coat my lips with matte raisin, or dab my eyes with mascara. At least then, no one will know.
No. If I look ratty, some kind person may come to my rescue.
Someone. How am supposed to live like this? Surely, someone, someone….
I walk by the trolley tracks, kicking stones, smoking long cigarettes. I walk into a diner, Help Wanted sign in my hand. The loud, cotton-candy haired waitresses look at me funny. They say the job is filled. I know they lie.
I go back to the room to clean up the carpet, to find out where the cat lives, my head pounding like an African drum.
So hungry. No money. Shoulda ordered a big hamburger and ran out – they wouldn’t give me a job.
Woulda served them right.
Later my belly hurts so much I pray for death, never ever to be restored to the living.
It suddenly occurs to me that Jewish families don’t do this. They love hard and they love loud, they love with food and comfort and safety, but they don’t love like this. They love. It’s so Jewish. What is wrong with my mother, my father, this Nana? Do I come from the only Jewish family who doesn’t turn away in horror and shame at this vomit-eating low life they’ve arranged for me? Any self-respecting Jew wouldn’t force their granddaughter into a rooming house on the edge of town. I feel as if I’ve been smeared with fish oil, as if I am a fish head knocking in the shallows against we rocks. I feel the weight of my neck grow heavy, drawing me to a deep place within, a dream-like state, a place hard to push through and come back to the living. Screeching in the breaks the spell.
For some reason images of the black keys on pianos surface. Haunting melodies from the synagogue play over and over in my head. I’m speaking out loud hardly knowing what I’m saying, yet the words are strangely comforting. There is no god, I’m sure of it.
Shema Y’Israel, Adonai Elohanu, Adonai Echad.
~ ~ ~
I don’t have a job.
Eyes closed. When I laid myself down on the stage, legs closed, to drown, I waited for my father to rescue me, waiting for him or the ghost of him, because surely he was dead, surely Nana told him I’m a stripper, and surely he would’ve driven 270 miles to get me off this stage, if he knew. I was almost certain I would die, dancing naked, I was certain now that no one was with me. Sometimes you go blind and crazy when you have to do something that scares you; that takes pieces of you away, when you have to just to have a roof over your buzzed-out head. Sometimes the whooping whistling stomping men take your brain clean out and the small kisses they blow at you aren’t worth it. Because you’re dead. Finished. And it perfectly figured that the mobster boss would tell me I had to go further, spread those sweet thighs, he said. Show them that pussy, mmmm…
I was certain it was the devil that laid on me next, when I said no, sir, I won’t, and he said, sorry, doll, you’re out. And I broke, just like a little girl, not because I lost this job, but because Nana would kick me out, no matter, no matter.
“Nana, what did I do? Why doesn’t anyone want me?”
“It’s not just that twenty dollars you took from your mother’s purse. It’s just - how could your father send you to me? Doesn’t he have any responsibility? What am I goink to do?”
She ends the “ing” words with “ink.” She speaks in harsh, masculine tones and there’s a strong hint of Eastern Europe. Hungary, Poland, Russia, maybe. She tells me her accent is Brooklyn, but I point out that, though I’ve never been to Brooklyn, even the Brooklynese on television don’t sound like her. I am not easily fooled.
“I know, Nana, but I’m here. Please don’t hate me. Let me be a girl.”
“Of course you’re a girl. What do you mean?” But she’s already away in the other room, hitting Papa in the head, telling him plain out that he better not take a drink.
“Here’s the paper. Start now. Calling jobs. You better get a job today. Today. Now. Immediately.”
Always that. Always now. That the whole wide world will bend to me. In my time. In her time. She thinks these companies are just sitting around waiting for me to call, that they will set up interviews today, not tomorrow, just because I say so. Then it’s her insipid questions: Is the interviewer Jewish? Is the receptionist? The bus driver?
Nana stands next to me, over me, around me as I call jobs. She places her paper-dry fingers over every kind of job, newsprint all over her nails. She never asks me what I would like to do. She tells me I’m not college material. It’s just hurry up, get a shit job, get out. We never want to deal with you again. We don’t care whatever becomes of you, you trollop, but, just like your father, we expect you to call and tell us you are ok, you are eating, you are not sleeping on the street. It doesn’t matter if I am sleeping on the pavement, you just don’t want me to let you know. Why do you even ask, would you help me? Would you give me money for food, a place to sleep?
I could disappear in Boston. Start clean. Be clean. Change my name. I could sleep under the underpass, like a troll or a hobo, I could watch people point at me and go: Tsk, tsk,
Nana. My father. My mother. For all they know I’ll end up eating the rotting petals of flowers, scrounging trash cans for half eaten pizza slices.
I am feeling a new shape to my body, a coiled misshapen turning, an inside-out, a need to disappear, a need to take up less space. All I can do is become smaller, draw my body back, draw my thoughts smaller, my desires erased.
And my father, is he sitting at the kitchen table, eating an apple, smoking a Winston, two hundred and forty miles away; is he waiting, thinking that Nana is straightening me out, ironing out all the things that make me, me, so I can get on in this world? Does he think she’s showering me with the kind words he couldn’t say, or does he know that she’s setting me up to fail?
“Call another job. Time’s of the essence. You are not going to be picky, missy.”
“Nana, please, let me breathe…”
“Oh, the drama beauty queen wants to breathe. You’re eighteen, time to stop wasting time.”
“Nana…”
“No dinner until you get at least three interviews.”
“Look – here’s a job for an exotic dancer.”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“What - you don’t want? Who are you, the Queen of Sheba? Your father says you’re a good dancer. So dance.”
Nanette-down-the-rabbit-hole falls into dreaming…
Down the street, in the brick houses, behind white doors, up the street in boxy apartment buildings, a mile away at the boundary line between outer Boston and inner suburbia, in Dedham, named after what? – Hamlet of Deads?- Dead Hams? – every where, there are girls my age who’ll never feel pieces of brain and soul erased. They’ll bask in dates and dresses, wait for college acceptances. There will be love. And acceptance.
For me, it’s only being laid bare, like a tomato to a blade, the flat of it parting me, never to know a stop-gap to this relentless Damocles sword, always hanging over my head – get a job – get a job –get one, take any job, there is no future.
One mistake. I was only trying to get your attention.
It’s like a small scrap of brain really knows about these other girls, but I’ve been brainwashed, fuzzied, hypnotized by my family into thinking it’s all my fault.
We’re taking your beauty, your delicate self, and shredding it. We’re placing you, precisely in the underworld, the low-life dead-end world.
You weren’t born to it, we’re placing you there. That’s what they say.
Through the living room window, the light precise, drawn tight as a needle, a blinding white syringe of light to pierce the heart…
“You ask them when they can see you. Demand. You’re too soft.”
Her voice like dentist drills shakes me out of my dreaming. Nana….
“How much time – how long do you think I’m supporting you?”
I’ve been here three days.”
And I can’t get the words out, how I feel, but mostly, I don’t even know how to do this – how to ask for a job. How to do a job. I am paled. Like dust.
~ ~ ~
“Take a break. I want you to cut my toenails.”
Some people walk through woods, searching for songbirds, finches and chickadees, little birds shoved from their nests by those pesky cowbirds. Some are naked, cold and without feathers and some people pick them up and feed them, take them home and make them whole birds. Some people do this. For birds. My grandmother orders me to cut her toenails. I knew I wanted to be a bird and not a girl.
What is dissociated?
A girl lives with her Nana and Papa together in an apartment on a lonely street that becomes a hill, where big black dogs bark, where the voices of her mother and father haunt her and her own voice cries out forever: Just disappear. There is no love here, no normal family bonds. This is a house of doom and neglect, of telling a girl her life is set. Her life is menial jobs and sleeping on old smelly mattresses in rooming houses that in a few years won’t exist anymore. Twenty dollars can ruin a life.
“Come on. Get on your knees and do it.”
Papa comes out of his little den and stands like an Apache in an old western movie, arms crossed, looking wise and all-knowing. And then he smirks.
~ ~ ~
“What’s wrong with your father? If you had a bad leg or a bad heart he’d take you to a doctor. Why aren’t you seeing a psychiatrist? I smile to myself remembering Dr. Freud.
My Auntie Thelma is visiting. She’s pretty and dowdy, a combination I’ve never seen before. Her hair is a dark stiff helmet that would stay put in a wind tunnel and her skirts are too long to be chic and too short to be riding in a stagecoach. Her skin looks like half and half. My mother hates her.
I can tell that she’s waiting to say something. I can tell she wants to stick it to my father. No one ever tells me why she hates him.
“Me? Did it ever occur to you Nana, that growing up in that house was growing up in a loony bin? You know my mother - you hate my mother, and Daddy, he acts like nothing’s going on. He’s no great Daddy. And she, she’s a sociopath, a creep, a female Hitler.”
“Don’t talk about them like that.”
“Oh, but it’s OK for you, right, Naaannnnaaa….”
“Stop it. You’re just like…”
“My mother, right? Or you, maybe? You know, I should be sitting in a straight jacket with my mouth hanging open and big, fat drool spilling out. I should have pinwheel eyes. I made it out sane.”
“Your father said you stole twenty dollars from your mother’s purse. He said that you’re a wild girl, that he doesn’t know how to control you.”
Again with the twenty dollars.
“Did he also say that he doesn’t know how to love me? That my mother doesn’t have a motherly bone in her body? That they don’t even treat me like I’m their flesh and blood. Did he tell you that?”
I try to tell her, yes, I stole twenty dollars from Mum’s pocketbook, that I wanted the sweet high of those Quaaludes to smooth over the ache, the hole they’ve left in me, that yes, I was a wild creature running, always running, I wore tight jeans and tube tops I had to steal because Mum wouldn’t even buy me new shoes, while she bulged her closets with furs and chic sheaths in black and cream and pale peach, that yes, I stole and I stole and I stole a piece of life for myself. So what? Yes, I quit high school, but it was a wailing, a primal calling for help, for Daddy, for a new mother who loved me, who talked to me, who took me shopping and thought I was a real girl with girl needs, and yes, Daddy was there, in the principal’s office and he signed my life away. No matter that up until that point I got all A’s, I tried hard, I was good. No matter, right? No matter that I was afraid of being murdered if I didn’t get all A’s. No matter that other kids got little gifts for getting B’s, and there I was, waving my report cards in the sun, Daddy sweating beside the stalled lawnmower, reaching for it, saying, well, no big deal, you’re supposed to get all A’s and the neighbor kids smiling at their new money for records and clothes. For B’s. For not failing. He did it. Your son, my father. So what is it that you’re saying, Nana?
“What I’m saying is your father and mother said you can’t be trusted, that you’ll steal everything not nailed down. So if we go out, you go out. No matter what time, no matter when.”
“Where will I go?”
“Call a friend and tell them you’re coming over.”
“What if they’re busy? And anyway I don’t have any friends.”
“If they were really your friends they’d make time for you.”
Putting her tongue through her teeth and making a hissy noise was her most piercing weapon when she wanted to be mean.
“Nana, when would I make friends? You won’t let me out of your sight.” If you were really my grandmother, you’d be nicer to me. You’d listen to what I just said, you’d understand that my mother is against me and always has been. You don’t even like her. You hate her.”
“Shut up. You. You’re a bum. You’ll never amount to anything. Shut your foul mouth.”
I know she copies those words from Auntie Thelma. And here she is again. Days here, and she’s here again; drove here from Sharon. Here to see. To see the gone-girl, the bum. The woman my mother might hate more than me. The woman everyone says I look like. At least I have a sense of fashion, even if I have no money to buy anything.
And Nana says, “Get out; I don’t care what happens. Your father should help you. Take care of you. What kind of a father is he?”
“Nana, he’s your son. And that’s what I ‘m trying to tell you. He’s supposed to help me. Love me.”
“Shut up. Don’t talk about your father that way.”
I make a study of silent swallowing; know to cast my eyes away, to close my mouth. I’m knowledgeable with the mannerisms of phony humility, to save myself, the tilt of head and quieting of trembling hands. This is what I’m trying to learn.
She’s this, she’s that. She’s a bum. She’ll never be anything.
Auntie Thelma and her condescending mouth. Now I know my mother hates her for more than her beauty.
I respond so quickly, so suddenly, there is no going back. No trace left of the words for restraint, no more the girl who sits on the nubby brown couch and takes it. No more the girl they treat like a latrine. Just the trace of sailor-mouth and the threat of something dark as Auntie Thelma walks by, and me, sticking my foot out just a little so she catches her ankle, and she’s sent sprawling over the piss-color carpet Nana calls Goldenrod. Maybe this is all a hallucination, a memory of a time-space warp, maybe it isn’t a racing-striped-leg-Nana and a buttoned-up beauty Auntie talking words like I’m not even here.
I imagine there is one, just one God up there saying, Doesn’t matter what little rebel thing she did - No one deserves this. No girl deserves You People.
And they hate me more and more, hate me with a hate mixed with vicious agitation that is beyond my understanding, hate that lets me know at eighteen years old that I’m hovering over the threshold of a world where I yield no influence and never will. They hate me with the unconfessed notion that they can ruin me, un-blossom my newly formed womanhood and set a course for my life that mimics Greek tragedy.
My deep inner self, a place I have no name for, is prey to an unbearable despair, I pray to whatever is out there, I’m sure there’s no God, I pray to have a way to start over somewhere else, I pray to make my mother and father love me and want to help me, because it’s unendurable to keep on like this, never to live free, never to see myself reflected in a loving person’s eyes, never to have a chance at college or becoming an actress – or anything else. Please, I’ll try to believe in something, please, protect me, and I vow to forgive my father, I don’t think I can forgive my mother, I will go to the synagogue and drape myself in white on Yom Kippur as a constant reminder that I am now pure again and that you look out for the lost.
~ ~ ~
Nana creeps into the living room flashing the lights on and off.
“You’ve got the soul of a whore.” Eyes squinting, I think I’ll turn to her, show her where the soul of a whore lays, in the gnash of a jaw, the anger that would move me to tell Papa that he doesn’t have to put up with her witch ways, her endless yapping and bullying him out of even ten dollars of spending money. A gesture that would have as much to do with me as it does with him.
I don’t answer, so she goes on. “Men are all alike, you don’t need one now, you need a real job.”
“Why are you talking about men at two o’clock in the morning? What men?’
“This temping is not going to put food on the table. And you can’t rely on a man.”
“Nana, it’s better to have some money than no money.”
“You just won’t listen. Your mother wanted to make sure I knew you liked men.”
“Listen to what? You said I couldn’t go to college. And what men? I like men, should I like women? You don’t even let me shave my legs or wash my hair in the morning or wear nail polish. And what table? You only want me to live in a flophouse, like a pig.”
“Listen, you little tramp, men are all alike. They only want to fill holes.”
“I don’t care. I only want to get out of here. Someday I will go to college.”
I don’t really believe that. After all, wasn’t I just a whore, a motherless child, a zygote wandering the streets of cold Boston, a non-entity, a thing? I don’t really believe anything lies out there for me. Except peace from this vicious Nana.
I picture, for just a moment, a new me, the one I know lies sleeping under this thing-ness. Jasmine blooms in June, a man courts me with lavender roses and silver ankle bracelets, I bounce along New York pavement on my way to my theatre group. The Nanette I know I am, the Nanette who lies like a rabbit in a field, dreaming.
* * *
Days in that dark place, the men all yapping at my high heels, my see-through swirly scarves caught on the thin silver bracelet one of them bought me when I told him not to, and all of it moist with human breath and sweat and the cold fog and rain outside clumping up the weed by the turquoise door.
When the fat crowd empties out with the letup of rain, the other dancers begin their snotty badgering. Each day the one with no waist and uneven titties struts up to me to tell me no man wants ta see two oranges on a woman, no matter your face, honey, your tits too small. Each day the one with thin lips overpainted with purply black lipstick and too many moles on her backside stands right beside her like bodyguard and sucks her teeth in tune with the no-waist. Each day. In the dressing room, away from the fish-eyes of the owner, they throw my makeup back and forth between them like passing a football. Each day it gets worse until the no-lips one says I’m gonna cut you.
Each day I have no reaction. Each day I want to pop off their heads like you do to dolls and look inside to see if anything’s there. Each day they snicker when I dance part sex, part ballet to Down on Main Street and She Breaks Just Like a Woman, but the men, the boys go hog-wild. They reach up my leg and stuff tens and fifties in my red garter, which I push, lower and lower each day.
Each day I think: What is this thing called desperate? You can’t touch it or hear it or see it. You just feel it. I feel it like rote now. All this falling into homelessness and into Nanas and mothers and fathers not wanting me and all this laying myself out like raw meat makes me fall into a stupor I can’t climb out of. It’s like lying on the bottom of a river, sediment smothering me over.
Each day I curdle at the touch of these men, their oil and dirt ridged fingers swooping up my leg, their lips trying to slather up mine when I’m forced to get them to buy expensive drinks to talk to me. When the gold-chained boil-on-his-face, shiny suited owner tells me I can’t end my set with my panties on, I tell him, no, I tell him that’s the way it is and after he laughs and slaps me on the back, you’re funny, he says tomorrow you take off the panties or you’re out kid; I like you, you’re a doll, but you’re out.
And so I took off my panties and I danced to Down on Main Street, Sweet Jane and Hey There Little Red Riding Hood, and slithered and grinded the pole, but I never, not once, spread eagled my legs.
Each day ends after eight days.
~ ~ ~
I never think of Nana as a woman. As a lady. When she talks to me she squelches any grace or beauty in my own movements and speech.
“Hurry up. What’s that way of walkink you’re doink? Just walk. And why do you speak so softly?”
Because I can’t be trusted, because she thinks I’m going to steal some candy dish or other knick- knack, because I admired her gold filigreed and fake-jeweled hairbrush, she believes my mother, my father - Don’t leave her alone in the apartment. She’ll steal something. Because of all this I have to go with her on every little errand, to every shop and grocery store, every stamp-buying at the post office. I almost look forward to job interviews.
Today I have to follow at her heels like a lapdog in the big supermarket while she picks up meat and cheese and frozen vegetables and then throws them back. “Too expensive” she says.
She looks like a fire hydrant with fur blooming down the front of her legs. Fur right there for the world to see in her sheer stockings and fat black lace-up shoes. A perfect racing-stripe of fur, two black-top lanes of black hair and she tells me I walk and talk all wrong.
Her lips are cemented in a permanent hyphen, unless she’s making fun of Papa. She calls him a dirty dog. Her eyes steel and mean, they’re trained to be hyper-vigilant to the possibility of a misdemeanor Papa or me could commit at any time. Overcooked potatoes stick in her tiny teeth and in her skin, like she’s perfuming herself with them.
She’s spitting mad because I wouldn’t take my panties off.
“What – you gut somethink no other girl has? You need money. You gonna have to get out soon.”
All of a sudden her face is blistered with spittle and her age-spotted hands are flailing around, the spots almost jumping off her skin.
Right here in the spaghetti sauce aisle she tells me I have nothing to hold onto.
“I can’t have you in the house anymore. I can’t take it.”
“Lill, come on, what did she do?” Maybe Papa likes having me around. It sure takes some heat off of him.
And some kid must have spilled some slimy goo, and I slip and sail forward into a sauce display, and my arms and legs are in among the jars and cardboard and I can’t see except for flashes of red and I don’t know if it’s blood or spaghetti sauce. Papa is reaching over and hoisting me up under my armpits and then I’m wobbling with my hands at my sides like a scarecrow, and teen-age boys are winking, and Nana is swatting them away, and the manager is beside himself apologizing and now Papa is saying we should sue and Nana says Shut up you dirty dog, and all the people gasp and I’m crying like a big baby when Nana swats my face like it’s a fly. Then she grabs my arm at the elbow just like Mum used to do.
Nana won’t let me in the car until she sprays me with Lysol. We ride back to the apartment with the windows open. The silence is like being in an open field with cows standing still, chewing and taking breaks between, and thunder starting to thrum over the horizon.
I know what comes now. Eviction. Banishment. Now she won’t take the chance that I’ll cause her aggravation, that I might slip in slime and smell like spaghetti sauce, so it’s out to the hall, without coffee or a shower, out in the snow in my nightie, which is really Nana’s nightie – I don’t own anything - the door slamming, No – you can’t be trusted with keys, with being alone in the apartment, we have to go somewhere and we can not leave you alone.
The hours passing, a neighbor handing me a robe, another inviting me in for coffee, my humiliation as anger, the coffee turning to cigarettes turning to big hairy hands on my breast. Again, out to the hall. The neighbor’s husband taking the opportunity to take advantage of this match-stick girl. Nowhere to go, but I go. Out to the hall, smoking and pacing. Day becomes night, I’m crouched in the corner, and a little girl runs out of her apartment with a baloney sandwich. And chocolate milk.
Running. Always running, vegetating, words like a .38 to my head. “You’re not college material. Get a job. Any job. Get a room.”
“But Nana, only drug addicts and weirdos live in those rooms.”
“I don’t care.”
That’s my Nana.
I don’t know now that most girls don’t run. Have no reason to.
Don’t have a Mac 10 to their skulls. They have a home.
What I mean to say is this: Neighbors will take me in when Nana throws me into the hall, they’ll makeme a cup of coffee and if I’m lucky husbands won’t touch me. If they pass me in the hall or on Grove Street, they’ll ask if I’m all right, and by the way, what was all the hollering about? They’ll accept my lame explanation; will believe me when I murmur, My Nana was yelling at my Papa again. Some people respect your dignity; they let you keep big secrets. What I mean is I’m more of a person to a neighbor than to my own Nana.
* * *
Before I’m put out like a junk-yard dog, I see the lack of love dragging from Nana’s insides.
“Use those tips they put in your panties and go rent a room. Any room. Just do it.”
I’m uncertain what to do, where to run. How will I live? I’ll end up eating thrown away orange rinds and burnt toast tossed into garbage cans. I’ll live on candy bars and wilted lettuce and dented cans of beets, the food I hate the most, handed out in food pantries. I’ll wait in line with the other thrown away people for food no one else wants.
I turn to the door and fall in a heap to the beige carpet.
I feel Papa slapping my cheek, get up, get, up, he says with no care in it.
“I can’t, I don’t even have a job. Why can’t you let me stay until I can support myself?”
Nana is standing over me as I struggle to get up. “You’ll never be able to support yourself.”
Now she’s gone and cracked, I think, she’s a loon, an unfeeling, unreasonable witch. I’m picturing myself months from now, hair split and caked to my scalp, an undershirted landlord beating down my door for the rent, the police coming to turn me out or siren me away to a hospital.
“Nana, I’ve only been here a couple weeks. What do you want from me? What does anybody want from me? I didn’t ask to live; I didn’t ask to have them as parents. Help me, please.”
“I’ll help you. I’ll give you carfare to go look for a room. Manny, get the paper, I’ll look up rooms for this ingrate.”
“Lill, we could at least drive her.”
Rooming houses are desperate and old places, buildings out of a past world. The first one we look at is in a dank, can’t walk the streets part of Boston, a no-man’s land on the trolley car line. It’s a very old crumbly building, its beige brick rotting, dark boys with combs in their hair hanging on the stoop, big mouths outlandishly open and red like that Rolling Stones logo. Nana pushes past them and knocks on the door. An old man peers through the dirty glass at us and then unlocks the door. Two weeks of twenty degrees and icicles are forming on her mustache and her ability to breathe is poor. She wants in. I want out.
“Yeah, whaddya want?” He looks like a Santa Claus that’s gone to seed. His beard is straggly and white, yellowing and coated with jam and his neck skin looks like fish left out in the sun. He flicks his cigarette, takes a deep drag, drawing the red ash to a fever pitch before throwing it down the steps, almost hitting Nana.
“She needs a room.” He beetles up his eyes and stares into my face before letting out a cackling laugh.
“This is a joke, right? A girl like you, so pretty and not, well, not accustomed to all this, why do you want to live here?”
Before I can run, before I can say I don’t want to live here, my mean Nana is making me; Nana digs her nails deep in my back. One of the comb-headed boys sees her hand on me and he almost creams himself with delight. A big bad wolf.
The hallway is papered with dirty pink cabbage roses, vines and leaves twisting up the wall, background for all the phone numbers and names scrawled in pencil and pen. Water stains in swirly, zig-zag lines coming down from the ceiling mix with the yellow cigarette smoke, and the small wallpaper rips let the mold and plaster peep through, like the too-white skin of a woman locked away from the sun.
I stand by the pay phone on the landing trying to read a number written long ago and now water stained and blurred while Nana taps her foot, Papa hold his unlit cigar and paces and the Santa goes to get the keys for the room. I search for the number for clues, for an insight into who wrote it and was it a girl like me looking down the abyss. A number written between a faded rose and a vine.
Already I’m a wild animal, not a girl.
Nanette-falling-down-the-rabbit-hole imagines fleeing this shit-poor room. Fleeing the mold lifting the wood off the floor, fleeing the green peel of the spotted wallpaper, the saggy, soggy mattress with some stain on it. What is that – blood? Nana thinks if you rent a room it comes with newly wallpapered walls, a bureau, a bed, a bathroom. She never thinks of eating. Rooms don’t come with kitchens. Granddaughters don’t come with hot-plates, cups, dishes and silverware and this Nana has no intention of giving. The bathroom is down the hall and we have to walk by more boys with combs in their heads and too many Fuck Yous wailing from behind doors. Nana’s a tank, rolling by. Doesn’t she see where she wants to drop me? The bathroom was nice once, the small white tiles like cobblestones, the deep white bathtub, the high ceiling. Now the window shows it’s been broken more than once, water stains form a pattern like flowers on the white tiles and the toilet needs to be cleaned. An old man in a white tee shirt and boxer shorts appears. The sunlight beating off the bathroom window forms a shiny spot on his bald head. He looks a lot like Papa. Gotta use the can. His teeth are all silver. Nana sneers and pulls me back to the room. Well, ya want it or not?
“She’ll take it.”
“Nana, there’s no girls here. There’s all these men and yelling and rotting floors.”
“Who are you to say anythink. You don’t have a pot to pee in. Now you do. Use the money you made at that dump you worked in.”
I feel like a half-skinned corpse. Like I’ve left my body standing there with Santa and Nana and Papa and I’m flying around the ceiling, a white whoosh, a see-through nothing, but at least I’m not down there. But no matter how much I want to be perch on the ceiling ready to take flight, I know I can’t exchange my place in the world for another. I already know this is my place, a ghetto. It’s not a way to start a life, already done in.
What I don’t know is that Nana has packed my few shirts and jeans; the winter coat she bought me with money she said crippled her budget, and that Daddy said he sent her for me. The coat I had to beg for – fake-fur trimmed brown sued with flowers embroidered on either side of the zipper. A hippie girl, free spirit-girl coat, a pretty pretty coat. Nana wanted to get me a pea coat. It’s good enough –it functions – whaddya want –you? I know she didn’t even want to buy me a coat, but she must have figured she’d get in some sort of trouble if I froze to death.
Who to believe? Who’s the liar when both are traitors? Now Papa is standing here with the bag, not even a suitcase. She couldn’t even spare a real suitcase or tote bag, no; my clothes are in a brown paper bag. Nana must have given Papa a signal to get the clothes out of the trunk, they had it planned the whole time. I didn’t have a chance. It must be snowing because Papa’s head is wet and I run to the bathroom window, hoist it open and look out. I’d rather sleep on snow.
~ ~ ~
I wake up the next morning mangled in the lumpy bed. Please, I don’t want to get up. I don’t know how to live. What to do. I’m hungry. What to eat? I cough to the rhythm of being alone.
I’m naked. I don’t even own a tee shirt or nightgown and cheap Nana didn’t even pack me one of her twenty year old ones, the pink and turquoise nighties with the lace at the collar so delicate and disintegrating Steam heat sizzling in the radiator. filtering through filthy slats, cedar chests with someone’s old clothes – arms and sleeves and wholly lace collars.
It’s so hot. This room is the Amazon. Why won’t the window open? I peak through fingerprints and dirt and see two sparrows drunk on figs and a soaked wicker table. Cigarette butts float in the silver ash tray.
I slip my slippers on and feel the catshit ooze over my feet. Aargh! What is this place?
Why am I here? I want to start over.
But no. I’m to wander the earth, or at least the neighborhood, blown apart by abandonment. Braless, hatless and famished. With cat crap on my feet. I could coat my lips with matte raisin, or dab my eyes with mascara. At least then, no one will know.
No. If I look ratty, some kind person may come to my rescue.
Someone. How am supposed to live like this? Surely, someone, someone….
I walk by the trolley tracks, kicking stones, smoking long cigarettes. I walk into a diner, Help Wanted sign in my hand. The loud, cotton-candy haired waitresses look at me funny. They say the job is filled. I know they lie.
I go back to the room to clean up the carpet, to find out where the cat lives, my head pounding like an African drum.
So hungry. No money. Shoulda ordered a big hamburger and ran out – they wouldn’t give me a job.
Woulda served them right.
Later my belly hurts so much I pray for death, never ever to be restored to the living.
It suddenly occurs to me that Jewish families don’t do this. They love hard and they love loud, they love with food and comfort and safety, but they don’t love like this. They love. It’s so Jewish. What is wrong with my mother, my father, this Nana? Do I come from the only Jewish family who doesn’t turn away in horror and shame at this vomit-eating low life they’ve arranged for me? Any self-respecting Jew wouldn’t force their granddaughter into a rooming house on the edge of town. I feel as if I’ve been smeared with fish oil, as if I am a fish head knocking in the shallows against we rocks. I feel the weight of my neck grow heavy, drawing me to a deep place within, a dream-like state, a place hard to push through and come back to the living. Screeching in the breaks the spell.
For some reason images of the black keys on pianos surface. Haunting melodies from the synagogue play over and over in my head. I’m speaking out loud hardly knowing what I’m saying, yet the words are strangely comforting. There is no god, I’m sure of it.
Shema Y’Israel, Adonai Elohanu, Adonai Echad.
~ ~ ~
I don’t have a job.
Eyes closed. When I laid myself down on the stage, legs closed, to drown, I waited for my father to rescue me, waiting for him or the ghost of him, because surely he was dead, surely Nana told him I’m a stripper, and surely he would’ve driven 270 miles to get me off this stage, if he knew. I was almost certain I would die, dancing naked, I was certain now that no one was with me. Sometimes you go blind and crazy when you have to do something that scares you; that takes pieces of you away, when you have to just to have a roof over your buzzed-out head. Sometimes the whooping whistling stomping men take your brain clean out and the small kisses they blow at you aren’t worth it. Because you’re dead. Finished. And it perfectly figured that the mobster boss would tell me I had to go further, spread those sweet thighs, he said. Show them that pussy, mmmm…
I was certain it was the devil that laid on me next, when I said no, sir, I won’t, and he said, sorry, doll, you’re out. And I broke, just like a little girl, not because I lost this job, but because Nana would kick me out, no matter, no matter.
