Faith S. Holsaert: "Chosen Girl," 2003

ARTICLE IN CONSTRUCTION -- not finished

Reprinted with the permission of Faith S. Holsaert. Copyright (c) 2003 by Faith S. Holsaert.

Introduction by Jonathan Ned Katz

This long short story (80,000 words), set in the 1950s, in progressive, literary Greenwich Village, subtly evokes the loving, conflicted, and ultimately thwarted intimacy between two women, one white and the other African American, as told through the eyes of the white woman's smart, observant daughter. The three live together.

The story communicates the McCarthy-era fears, casual racism, and homophobic pressures of this particiular time and place (and as I personally recall them -- as a child I lived on the same street as Holsaert and knew her family).

The writer, Faith Holsaert, was raised on Jane Street, in the Village, in a two-mother family by her Jewish mother by birth, Eunice Holsaert, and Charity Bailey, her mother by affection. Bailey was the music teacher at the Little Red School House where Faith was enrolled, and Bailey later hosted a children's TV show in New York City.

I also attended "Little Red," as we called this "progressive school," and fondly remember "Charity" (we called most of our teachers by their first names) visiting my family, discussing the history of Black spirituals with my father who knew much African American history and culture. I also recall Charity radiating concern for and kindness toward young people, a kindness to which I especially responded. I also remember coming home from a 1950s visit to Charity Bailey's and Eunice Holsaert's apartment and my mother asking, circumspectly, without explanation, how many beds there were. I understood, I think, that she was asking whether the two women slept together, and I recall being annoyed at her prying suspicion. Like much fiction, "Chosen Girl" seemingly contains more than a few autobiographical elements.

Faith Holsaert has published numbers of stories and memoirs, mostly in small literary journals. “Chosen Girl” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “Creekers” (fiction) won first place in the Kentucky Writers Coalition Competition, in 2004. That year, “Freedom Rider, circa 1993” (fiction) won third place in the Fugue Annual Contest in Prose. “History Dancing,” a memoir, appeared in the autumn of 2006, in a collection published by University of Iowa Press.

I highly recommend this sensitive, wonderfully written art about history, and I'm also pleased to honor the memory of Charity Bailey, a beloved teacher, who, I believe, had she lived into the present, could have understood our need to look back and specify what we see. "Chosen Girl" is also available in paginated form (49 pages) on the 2004 edition of the web publication The King's English, pages 7-55.

"Chosen Girl" by Faith S. Holsaert

I.

In the beginning were my parents, shoulder to shoulder, the baby floating within their massed outline. I sat close, in either lap, during their disputes. My father said, "Oliver Twist. It's a wretched book, Deirdre. You like it because you read it as a child." "I like it because it's about people. Not like your Eliot, who writes about things."

"Deirdre, Fagan's a sentimental abomination." She held me tight against her bosom, and I learned how her muscles tightened when she clenched her teeth. “Well I love that book.”

“Fagan’s an anti-Semitic stereotype,” said my WASP father. She struck quickly. “Are you Virginia Woolf to my Leonard?” My Jewish mother.

Silence.

That was the form. Books and books and books. A book to say I love you. A book to say I hate you. Later, they attacked one another, down to the muscles of the hands that held me, saying names like Henry James, Robert Browning. When they agreed, Auden. The way they loved me was to teach me what they knew. And what they knew was books.

Before I could read, my father taught me how to open a new book. First I must riffle the pages, feel the paper with my fingertip, and smell the lingering odor of ink. His fingers were tapered, cool half moons at the base of each ridged nail. His hand warm. I must: open near the beginning of the book; press the book open until the spine gave; move through the pages in quarter-inch increments to crack the spine until the book lay supple and ready in my hand.

Books were their lifeblood. Later, Laurel would say the same about the blues.

▼▪▲

At four, I drew a scowling face on black construction paper with waxy red. My mother asked, "What is it?" I said, "The Angry Mother." My mother wrote, The Angry Mother, in pencil. I didn't like the silver graphite letters on my dull black paper with my scrawled red.

That evening over drinks, she showed it to my father. I snatched it from her.

"It's mine," I said.

She crushed my hands in hers. "Don't interrupt."

"I hate you," I screamed.

"A touch of the angry child?" my father asked, with a smile as thin as the slivered almond he fed me.

My mother knelt in front of me and stared rudely into my eyes. "You will say you're sorry."

I wouldn’t, so I was sent to my room.

I stared angrily at photos of my mother and her two brothers and sister, each mounted within a sepia oval. Her older brother, at age five or six, was in a sailor suit; the younger brother smiled from blonde curls and skirts; the sister at age seven or so, looked out from her oval with a studied gaze, chin propped on a ringed hand; my mother, a toddler, scowled from her oval, light tulle clutched to her bosom.

In the light from my bedside lamp, when I tilted my drawing with its red image, the silvery caption slid off the page.

▼▪▲

Laurel, the music teacher.

In my first memory of her, I stood beside the upright piano in the nursery classroom. The piano strings jangled. I could see the lines in the skin on the back of her hand as Laurel played absently. It was a hand smaller than my father's, squarer than my mother's. I reached out to touch it and she laughed and struck the keys. She took my hand, pushed my finger onto a key. A puny sound. She said my voice was as soft as this -- she plinked, the highest note. I went home and told my parents I wanted Laurel to live with us.

“She is colored,” my mother said.

“Colored?” I shrilled.

“Haven't you noticed her skin?” my father asked.

I looked at my own hand. “Look,” I thrust it at my parents. “I'm flesh colored.” From the box of crayons.

▼▪▲

At the first PTA meeting, as a pleasantry, my parents told Laurel I wanted her to come live with us.

"Do you have a room?" she asked.

When my mother told me this, I demanded, "Are we going to?"

"We'll see," she said.

In a few weeks, my mother said, "This afternoon, Laurel and her sister are calling. When they arrive, you must shake hands. You may say either 'How do you do?' or 'Pleased to meet you.'"

“Grown-ups don’t want to shake my hand.”

She looked me in the eye, the way cats and children hate to be stared at. "You will do it."

Laurel arrived with her sister, a fine lady in a copper and black skirt that rustled.

"Pinny, for the poet Pindar," Laurel said when she introduced her sister. The sisters said, "No, thank you," to stingers in long-stemmed glasses.

"Are you going to move in?" I asked Laurel, who said, "We'll see."

The grown-ups looked at the extra bedroom and returned to sit in the living room.

"Did you like it?" I asked, but they ignored me.

It was the end of the afternoon and I remember the three seated women looked as easy and elegant as the phrase, women of leisure. My mother sat in the armchair opposite Laurel and Pinny, who wore skirts. My mother wore trousers, belted about her waist, so small where her pearly blouse tucked into the gabardine, so small below her heavy breasts. She shook out a match with her large hands, on which the veins and muscles hung like vines. My mother explained to Pinny that my name was pronounced De borr ah, not Debra. Unlike three other girls in my class who were named after movie stars, I had been named for the Bible's desert warrior and judge. My mother spoke through cigarette smoke, eyeing the sisters skittishly over the beak of her nose, blue-black hair falling in one eye.

"Deborah, come see," Pinny said, and rummaged in her purse, which smelled of perfume and not of money and tobacco crumbs, like my mother's. My mother and Laurel talked. On the palm of her hand, Pinny held two inch-long metal dogs, one black, one white.

"What are they?" I asked.

"The Black and White Scotch Scotties," Pinny said.

“What’s that?”

“A promotion,” Laurel said.

“To sell scotch. Liquor,” my mother said.

None of it made sense, but I let it go when Pinny said, "Look.” She held the dogs nose to nose. Forcefully they whirled around, tail to tail. She asked if I could make them stand nose to nose. Her tea colored hands over mine, I tried it. The magnetized Scotties pivoted in my hand. They'd jump from my hand before they'd face one another.

▼▪▲

Sick in bed with the measles, I imagined monkeys climbing up and down my bedroom door, pointing at me and jabbering. It's imaginary, I told myself, but the monkeys screamed so shrilly and they pointed their hairless fingers at me so believably, I screamed and interrupted my parents' and Laurel's dinner.

My mother came to sit by my bed.

"Tell me a story," I begged.

"At the turn of the century, your grandparents' families settled on the Lower East Side," she began. "When he was a boy, your grandfather sold all-day suckers at Coney Island. He caught rides with farm wagons from Manhattan to the beach. One day, only half of his suckers sold, he paused to watch a man in red tights and big black mustache high on a tightrope. What the man did was marvelous to your grandfather: he took a little stove from a pretty lady, and he made pancakes right there, in the air. Your grandfather Ben was hungry and the pancakes made his mouth water. After the act, Ben approached Biaggio the tightrope artist and said, 'People do not believe you are really making pancakes.' Biaggio frowned fiercely. Ben continued, 'Toss your pancakes to me in the crowd and I will eat them, to prove they are real.' Biaggio agreed. The pancakes were delicious and the people loved Ben's role. They threw more coins to the lady in the tights than they ever had. That day, your grandfather sold all his suckers, was given money by Biaggio, and he ate all those pancakes, too. That night the family ate a fat chicken purchased with his earnings."

The monkeys had scampered off. I drank ginger ale and drifted in and out of sleep.

"Your grandfather bought his first book, the complete works of Shakespeare, from a book cart in the street. He paid twenty-five cents down, and ten cents a week.”

The pillows were full and smooth, for my mother had changed and plumped them.

"Your grandfather proposed to your grandmother."

"The Dowager," I interjected.

"So your father calls her. Ben proposed in front of an ash can on Delancy Street when he was twelve. He thought her the prettiest girl in the world."

"Was he right?"

But I didn't hear her answer. I slept.

I awoke. She and Laurel sat in my room. Laurel was saying, "...papers of manumission and settled in Rhode Island."

"I don't think of Negroes as coming from New England," my mother said. "But the way you say 'heart,' is a dead giveaway."

"Just because you mispronounce 'hot.'" Laurel did not release the “R” from her throat.

"I mispronounce 'heart'?" My mother ground down on the “R” with gusto. She laughed -- ha hah!

In my fever, I drifted through cool ether, gazing down upon their slight figures. The cold pinched out my sight and then I blinked back into awareness.

Laurel said, "Every Saturday, my father and I went to the farmers' market. In summer, he would go through bushels of corn. He was very particular about his corn. He'd discard them over his shoulder, right and left, saying contemptuously, 'For the horses. For the horses.'" My mother laughed again. "I was so embarrassed," Laurel said. "An ex-slave, rejecting the white farmers' corn."

"But that's wonderful." My mother whooped. "'For the horses,'" she parroted. She threw back her head to laugh. Her laughter gleamed. Laurel laughed, too. Together, they laughed and wiped their eyes, unseemly as the sweat in which I lay.

A red flannel fever engulfed me. I regained consciousness chattering and half naked on the bed. Alcohol seared my skin. I screamed when my mother put the wash cloth on my back. My arms and legs shook. She pulled a sheet over my legs. She moved the sheet and parts of my body as she sponged and called me her chipmunk. She turned me. Finished, she slid me onto a clean, ironed sheet. She balled up the soiled sheets and threw them in the hamper.

I was too sick for family stories. She opened a chunky book and said, “Edna St. Vincent Millay.” I’d never heard these four words. I barely heard them then, but slipped into the clean cool words issuing from within the cloud of her cigarette smoke.

Sighing winds, cool earth, dripping apple trees, and the repose of a child come home. How I relaxed into that home, but then Millay’s words turned on me, forcing me into the fires of Hell.

I couldn’t cry to my mother: Stop. Hot.

I slept.

The next day, I continued sick.

"When I was twelve," my mother said, "I had a massive collie named Bud. Bud had been abused by the cab driver who owned him. My middle brother won him at cards and gave him to me. Bud snarled at me, and my brother pulled off his belt and thrashed the dog. Then he told me, 'You must praise Bud when he is good and he will never snarl at you again.' Bud loved me so much and I him, we could read one another's minds. Every day, he and I walked around the Central Park Reservoir without a leash. He was bigger than a timber wolf. One day, a cop approached us on Amsterdam Avenue. It was illegal to walk a dog without a leash. I put my hand on Bud's ruff and said, 'Meet you around the block, Bud.' He turned and walked away from me. I walked ahead, past the policeman, turned right at the next corner and as soon as I turned right at the second corner, I saw Bud walking sedately toward me on his dainty white feet."

As the afternoon progressed, my fever rose in spite of the ginger ale, the ice cream, the sponging. Like my fever, my mother's narrative turned dangerous. She must have thought I slept. "My older brother cornered me in the corridor and pushed against me. Bud appeared in the doorway and ripped out the seat of his pants. Mother didn't believe me when I said, 'He was kissing me like Daddy kisses you,' but my middle brother believed me and of course, Buddy knew.”

The stories came one after the other, strung together by nothing but my mother herself, touching end to beginning to end. "My mother was a grand lady for an immigrant. No one loved her except my father. She was vain about her tiny feet, which she wore stuffed into heels with names like Cuban and Stacked and French. Without her high heels, she was a cripple; her Achilles tendon had shrunk. And she was vain about her children, so vain, she starved me.” My mother gulped smoke. “When I was a toddler, I was all eyes and bone. The Dowager would give me neither chocolate nor eggs. I was too sallow already, she said, and these rich foods would make it worse. My mother, with her little blue eyes and tiny feet, took me to an American doctor. 'Why won't my baby grow?' she demanded.

"'She's malnourished.' said the doctor. 'Feed her, Madame. Feed her. Eggs. Milk. Chocolate.'” My mother stubbed out a cigarette, started another, absorbed in herself, the malnourished, sallow child. I pulled the sheet back over my shoulder as she stared into the distance.

"Others found me attractive enough, especially as I matured. The primitive. A famous theatrical director fell in love with me when he saw me walking Buddy in the park. We spent many evenings after the show walking from the theater to my parents’ apartment. His father, who was a syphilitic maniac, made the director give me up. The newspaper pictures of the three successive women he married all looked like me." She laughed bitterly. "He was weak in everything except his devotion to his father.”

I stirred to tell her I was awake.

"When I was in my twenties, some of my friends called me The Bedouin," she said through her film of smoke. I could tell this nickname pleased her, for she smiled when she said it. "Names, Deborah, are important. If you had been a boy, I would have named you Spinoza."

Thank goodness I was a girl.

Days passed. I enjoyed the afternoon baths in dissolved baking soda. My mother made me what she called an eyrie in her bedroom window, so I could watch people walking in the street below. She cut my hair and sent the wisps floating, "for the sparrows to put in their nests." The week of attention and stories was drawing to an end. The doctor had said I could go outside the next day.

"How come you look so angry?" I asked and pointed to the photo of my mother I’d studied the night of the Angry Mother. Such a big-eyed little girl with tulle clutched to her naked bosom, scowling furiously. Above her were pictures of my uncles -- on a pony with ringlets was the molester and with a violin was the merciful middle brother. To the side was the sister, dead before my birth, whom my mother once sadly said was a nymphomaniac.

My mother said, "In those days, all babies were photographed naked on rugs. When the photographer tried to take my picture that way, I wouldn't lie down for him. Finally, your grandmother threw the tulle over my shoulders and he took his goddamn picture."

▼▪▲

In the beginning, I had rested within the massed outlines of my mother and father, but then Laurel came. Laurel called me, “my girl,” and held my hand in her short, broad one which was so warm. Laurel and my mother were close as breath the night of the fever monkeys, but my father hadn’t come upstairs that night. He stopped arguing about books with my mother.

I wished he’d read to me, as he had used to, but he didn’t. Instead, he taught me how to polish these things: the silver coffee urn with a lion crouching over its ivory handle, the mahogany table top which reflected like a mirror when we were done, and shoes, mine and his, brown and oxblood. Finished with these chores, we would wash the rags. He kept a jar of water into which he dropped leftover slivers of hand soap. He used the resulting soap scum to wash the rags. His rags came from his worn shirts, which he taught me to rip into strips. Once, after washing out the rags and leaving them draped over the bathtub to dry, as we prepared to walk in Washington Square in our newly polished shoes, he took my hand and said, "Let's go, Junior."

He was gone so often, I was surprised that he was there on Christmas morning, wearing pajamas, like the rest of us. He placed a flat package in shiny green paper with an enormous gold bow under the tree for me. While I opened this, a collection of poetry for children, Laurel and my mother opened presents from one another, identical fountain pens they laid side by side on the cherry side table. My mother handed my father an unwrapped box, liqueur in miniature chocolate bottles. He said I couldn’t have one because of the alcohol. “Will it make me drunk?” I asked and he said, no, not drunk, exchanging a smile with Laurel who, like him, was sipping eggnog from a glass cup. I picked up one of the two pens.

"You must never use another person's fountain pen," my mother said. If I ever, ever took her pen from her desk and wrote with it, even one word, it would be ruined. "The nibs are broken in to one hand." She let me watch as she filled her pen with its translucent turquoise ink. She tried it out -- brisk flourishes, galloping curlicues before she capped it and tucked it in her desk, before going into the kitchen to join Laurel who had carried her glass cup in there. I sat down with the colored pencils and creamy paper which my mother had given me.

In the kitchen, Laurel was talking. Among the welter of words, I heard damn it and like a daughter and I want.

"Don't say it," my mother said.

Holding up the poetry book, I asked, “Read this,” when Laurel came out of the kitchen. Instead she sat with me, leafing through a wide, glossy magazine, Look. She deliberately found a page and touched the picture of a man whose chest was bedizened with medals. His eyes squinted and his skin in the black and white photo was the same color as his uniform. "I was once married to him," Laurel said.

My father, dressed for a party, came into the room.

"Have you seen Deirdre?" he asked Laurel.

"I'm upstairs," my mother yelled.

"Are you coming?" he snapped.

"You know I hate cocktail parties."

"Are you coming?" he repeated

"Jesus, no." She slammed their bedroom door.

He put on his topcoat and left.

▼▪▲

That spring, my mother forbade me to enter their bedroom. She said my father was sick with strep throat and that I might catch it. She took his meals into their bedroom on a tray. After a few days, I saw the untouched food in the kitchen and realized he hadn't been home for who knew how long. It was like summer vacation with him gone. Meals got served any time and I got to eat with the grown-ups. The next time I saw him, my father walked into the dining room in a pale linen jacket. He had a flower in his buttonhole.

"Behold, the bridegroom cometh," my mother said.

He looked around the room, as if he expected to see some of his cocktail friends in the corner beside the cabinet. "I'm going out," he said.

My mother called me to her. "Your father and I are separating. He won't be living here anymore."

"Who will wash his rags?" I asked.

She reached for me, but I twisted down into the couch with my back to the room and cried and cried. Laurel and my mother tiptoed around. One or the other would call gently, "She's becoming calm." I didn't care. I would cry my eyes out. Slowly, slowly, I stopped, shifting imperceptibly from weeping to exhausted sleep.

I awoke. My mother sat in the dark watching over me. She led me to the bathroom and washed my face. “Let’s go to the Golden Dragon,” she said kindly.

When we got there, I was hungry, but when my mother asked what I wanted I plucked at the tablecloth and said, "Nothing."

When the waitress reached for our menus, I scowled and hung onto mine. While Laurel and my mother ate wonton soup, I ran my fingers over the heavy paper of the menu, skipping from letter to letter. I knew the consonants. The waiter brought Laurel's Egg Foo Young, my mother's Moo Goo Gai Pan.

"Anything for the young lady?"

I shook my head, no, with my finger poised on a "D". The grown-ups plunged serving spoons into their food. After the "D" came two "N's" and an "R.” "Would you like a taste?" Laurel asked my mother, who accepted. If I made the sound of each letter in my head as I touched it, the letters spelled dinner. The next word was menu. I didn't tell them. They didn't notice.

I refused fried rice, bits of shrimp, lush green pea pods, kumquats. I refused their weakness. I would never be imperfect, like them. They, who didn't know I could read, they, who couldn't manage to live with my father.

My father, who had left me.

The grownups, who didn't know.

▼▪▲

For a year, I saw my father on weekends. Saturday morning, he would pick me up. From the New Yorker, which he had marked in red, we would select a museum, a movie, or zoo to attend. Perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan at the Jan Hus Playhouse. One week, he phoned on Thursday night to tell me he would soon be going to Reno for a vacation. He would send me a post card. He was going to move far away, to San Francisco, where he'd been offered another job. Then he asked to speak to my mother.

When she got off the phone, she said, "I suppose he'll charge me with mental cruelty."

Laurel asked, "Tell me, would you charge him with adultery?" I sensed a painful need behind her words.

“No. It would be too humiliating. For me. For Deborah. And besides, you know I wouldn’t sue him for divorce.”

“We can have our life. When you’re divorced.”

"It will never be safe."

I didn't know what any of this was supposed to mean except, Don't think about the musty smell of the rag with which you once polished the silver lion crouched on the ivory handle.

▼▪▲

That summer, Pinny sent the only gift she ever gave me, the Black and White Scotties, with a note:

Dear Deborah, I found these in my jewel box and thought of you, such a beautiful little girl.

I put the Scotties in my own jewelry box and didn't tell my mother or Laurel. I was embarrassed by how beautiful I had once thought the three women, scandalized that Pinny applied that same word, beautiful, to me.

II.

On a summer morning, the street still wet in a swathe from the street cleaners' brushes, I stepped outside, looking for my mother. I was going swimming that summer morning and needed to find my swimsuit. That's all I wanted -- my suit. Stepping outside, I heard the grinding of the garbage truck. Up and down the street, building supers and tenants retrieved clattering cans.

I found my mother on her hands and knees, scrubbing with a coarse brush. Her cheeks, usually as drab as cheese rind, were bright. The light was soft. I have seen paintings by Vermeer with the same patina.

Scrawled on the sidewalk was "... nigger ... Mussolini was right."

"What's muscilini?" I asked, pronouncing it like the plural of small Italian muscles, ignoring the more troublesome word.

"Moosolini," she corrected me.

"Who is he?"

"A fascist."

"I need my swimsuit. I'm going swimming with Binnie Anne." It was all just too hard. And I needed that swimsuit.

"Oh, today's the day." She clapped the back of her hand to her mouth.

But then that word, nigger, got me: "What's it got to do with Laurel?" I asked.

She told me Italians who were angry about Ethiopia, or proud, I couldn't tell which, had written on our stoop.

Back in our apartment, my mother heard Laurel leaving the bathroom. Hastily, she chucked the scrub brush under the sink.

"They used mustard gas. The Fascists," she said to me.

"Good morning, Deirdre," Laurel said, "and Deborah. How's my girl?"

Though she still looked sleepy, Laurel had sheets of staff paper in her hand. "What a lovely day," she said, and my heart dragged. Fascists.

"Where are you off to?" she asked me.

"The beach."

"You don't sound enthusiastic."

"Mommy's making me go."

"Deirdre, whatever for?"

"Mrs. Grady asked her. It would look ungracious to say no," my mother said as she trimmed the crusts off my sandwich.

"You'll have fun," Laurel said.

"Were the Irish fascists?" I asked my mother who waggled her eyebrows: shut up.

The doorbell rang.

I grabbed suit, towel, and sandwich, stuffed them in a paper sack and ran downstairs.

Carrying towels and lunches in paper bags, Binnie, her mother, and I rode a subway, a ferry, a bus to the far side of Staten Island, where the Bedouin hadn't even known there was a beach. We were going to a beach where Irish people went. Binnie's mother, Mrs. Grady, said I must sit with my legs together during the trip, or the boys would look at my panties. The bus let us off beside the road, as if we were in town. With our paper sacks, rather than the picnic basket my mother took on such trips, I didn't think we looked like we were going to the beach. We walked from the road where tough sea grass grew through the asphalt. In our street shoes, we walked across the sand. It may have been an improbable place for a beach, and we may not have looked like beach-goers, but there it was -- a beach with a June breeze and white foam slipping in and out on the damp sand. We settled near wood pilings. Binnie and I clung to tarry ropes stretched between the pilings as the tan water jerked us to and fro. There were no concession stands. No boardwalk. No Jews, no Italians. The wind buffeted Binnie's mother who sat in her dress on the blanket with her feet crossed. Binnie and I screamed as the waves came at us. We ate lunch and Mrs. Grady told us there were rough boys waiting to hurt us if we strayed from her side. We waited twenty minutes so we wouldn't be dragged under by uncontrollable cramps. Then back in the water. Mrs. Grady crossed her ankles and watched us as we swam.

Going home, we slept on the bus, the ferry, the subway.

Back in the neighborhood, we walked up the block. I had sand in my socks; my skin stuck saltily to itself; my hair was matted; the noon sun still glared beneath my inner eyelids. And the ocean sighed and roared in my ears. My skin was hot.

I ran toward my mother and Laurel who sat on the stoop. Treacherously, my body shifted like the waves pulling back from the shore they had just desired. Goose bumps broke out on my arms. I shivered. A foghorn sounded. My mother threw her red cardigan over my shoulders with a giddy laugh. The wool hurt my skin. Laurel pressed her cool fingers on my upper arm and said, "You're flaming red."

Mrs. Grady and Binnie said, “Good night.”

The horse police, a dozen of them, rode through our block on their way from the Twelfth Street stable to the theater district uptown.

"Was it horrible? No restrooms or concession stands?" the Bedouin asked me, trying to rub tar off my shin. I jerked away and said it had been all right.

"Thank you for going," she said.

The three of us sat on the stoop, where the letters had been chalked that morning.

"Oh, look," my mother said.

“What?” I asked.

“Under the bushes.” I crouched down. “Careful,” she said.

A cat or a mouse would have run off, but the twig-like insect below the sticks of the yew just continued to run its folded “feet” across its jaw.” What is it?” I asked.

“A praying mantis.”

“Praying.” Like Binnie Ann and Kathie did in their Catholic Church.

"They say a mantis will attack a cat," my mother said. I leaned closer. “Hi.”

"It's against the law to kill them," Laurel said. “What’ll they do to you, if you kill one?”

“I don’t know.”

“I want it to move.”

“It probably won’t. Tomorrow in the daylight, look at its eyes,” my mother said.

I crouched on the ground and watched it until it was time for a bath, and bed.

The next morning, I ran outside before breakfast. No slogan on the sidewalk. The mantis was there. I ran back inside for breakfast. For a week, the mantis was there every day. Behind a metal fence, it sat on the same dry and dirty twig, and craned its head, lost in thought. Almost fifty years later, I remember the mantis. In our militantly humanist household, it was the closest I came to seeing a miraculous sign. I paused daily to worship the mantis among the twigs. As I gazed at its round eyes, supremely physical eyes shaped so differently from the eyes with which I received the world, I would think, Rejoice, Rejoice.

▼▪▲

One morning, the mantis was gone. That same day, we drove toward the beach through bumper-to-bumper traffic. My sunburn had dimmed to an even tan. I couldn't wait to reach the ocean.

The car radiator steamed and spattered the windshield.

"Uh oh." My mother pulled off the highway in front of a diner and gas station.

"I hope this place has a jukebox," I said.

Inside, the air conditioning was as frosty as the blue glass above the booths. I imagined the cool air hanging above our heads in curlicues like the chrome arabesques that skirted the walls. I spun on the padded seat at the counter.

"I want a Broadway soda," I said.

"As soon as the waitress comes," my mother told me.

The waitress poured a new batch of coffee into the urn. She cleared a booth and placed devil's food cake on a clean doily under the glass dome of the cake plate. My mother said, "Miss" twice, but the waitress flung dirty cups into soapy water with her back to us. "I'm going to the bathroom. Just tell the waitress about my Broadway soda," I informed my mother.

"Say please," she said.

Leaving the bathroom, I saw them seated at the counter. Laurel wore a white blouse against which her skin bloomed red brown. She was shaking her head, possibly disputing with my mother. Her black hair sat in a circlet on top of her head. Taller than Laurel, my mother leaned her elbows on the counter. She wore a dress I especially loved -- gold, with tiny designs in it, a wide skirt, a peasant neck that showed her collarbones. She, too, frowned. She caught sight of me and smiled. There were no frosted soda glasses in front of our places. We had not been served. Before I could slip onto my stool, my mother put her hand on my newly tanned shoulder.

"We're going to a different restaurant,” she said.

"But I like it here."

"It's so cold here, and we're tired of waiting.”

"But where are we going?"

“We’ll find some place. I’m going to see if the gas station will give me water for the radiator." She walked out of the restaurant.

"Are you coming?" I asked Laurel whose cheeks were cherry red as if they burned.

Her lips jerked once. Had they quarreled? Laurel put out her cigarette and we left, side by side. My mother was walking toward us with a watering can. She opened the hood and opened the radiator cap. “Careful, love,” Laurel said as steam hissed. My mother poured in the water until it slopped over. She took the can back to the gas station.

Back on the highway, we made a U-turn.

"Careful. A policeman might see you," I said from the back seat.

"Shut up, darling," Laurel said.

My mother parked in front of a clapboard restaurant called Country Farms. I reached to open my door.

"Wait," my mother told me.

"Why?" My thighs stuck to the leather seat. "It's hot in here."

"I'll be right back."

"I want to go." I reached for my door.

"No."

Infuriatingly, my mother dawdled: she looked in the rearview mirror; pushed her bangs with her finger.

"Go on," Laurel said, "just ask."

"Ask what?" I demanded.

"Little bat ears," Laurel said and serenely looked out the window.

My mother returned. She yanked open my door. "Okay," she sang out. "Time for that Broadway soda."

We got to Ethan’s family’s beach house within the hour.

After dinner, in the dark back yard, with butter from my ear of corn running down my wrist, I asked my mother, “Why did we leave the first diner?”

“Shh.” She gently touched my mouth with the flat of her hand. “That’s our little secret.”

The weekend by the sea with my friend Ethan and his parents was fun -- the glad, glad sun, rocking in the water, the two families cooking on the beach in the dark, the grown-ups drinking wine until they were giddy and kind. Coming home half asleep in the car full of wet towels to crawl between sandy sheets, getting up the next morning to do it all over. Ethan and I threw ourselves at walls of water while the grown-ups talked behind us in the blinding sun.

▼▪▲

In the afternoons, when I was in grade school, I would lie on the floor in Laurel's room and do my homework. Laurel's was the only room in the apartment I asked permission to enter. Her special things were in this room, a desk she had designed herself, the driftwood lamp, a "Danish modern" butterfly armchair, the only stereo in our household, a tank of tropical fish. Occasionally she or I would speak on these afternoons, but only occasionally.

It was here that I used to draw with the colored pencils from my father’s last Christmas at home and even occasionally reverted to the crayons and construction paper of “The Angry Mother.” One year, I copied rigid Egyptian designs, another year I drew almond-eyed odalisques with heart-shaped faces.

Entering the room, I paused to look at Laurel's work -- sheets of staff paper covered with clefs and musical notes. Lesson plans written between the melodies, sometimes the words over- running the staffs.

One day, her paper was covered with minute boxes, some inked in, some not, lines zipped here and there, all in the optimistic, turquoise ink of the paired Christmas pens.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Laban Notation."

When I asked, she said Laban Notation was a way to write down the body's movement in space. Come here. She traced around me in the air with her fingertip. “Now, reach for the ceiling. Further,” she said. She outlined my body from fingertips to toes, in space. “You're tickling me,” I said. She said, ”The two shapes you made, one standing with arms at your sides and then reaching up, are each distinctive. No one reaches up in the air quite like you. With Laban Notation I can capture the distinctness of any human gesture.” I felt her considered tenderness for people, especially children, and I felt with a pang that I would one day stop being a child.

“Look,” she said, and opened a book which showed silhouetted human shapes. They lunged, stood on tiptoe, flung things. Each was inside a circle, rather like the globe carried by the sculpted Atlas at Rockefeller Plaza. She traced one of the globes and said it was a dynamosphere. “Each of us has a dynamosphere,” she said. “Each of us moves in our dynamosphere characteristically. We can go up, down, sideways, or on the diagonal. The rest is all a matter of force and degree.”

"They look like prisoners," I said.

She laughed. It was not the dynamosphere which trapped us, but our perception of it, she told me. I touched her hand as I had when I was four beside the piano, but she didn’t seem to notice my touch.

I asked, “The dots are shorthand for the gestures?” “Very good,” she said. She picked up her pen and returned to work.

Dark filled the room, sharpening the voice on her maroon Zenith radio to a point. The light of the gooseneck lamp gilded the wood of the desk. I could feel her possessions in the shadows. On the shelf beside the mahogany turtle from Haiti was a nut carved into the face of a peasant woman. When I tipped her forward, tiny white eyes on ivory stems shot forward. Lying on the braided rug, my book forgotten, I studied Laurel's face. Lamplight splashed her head and shoulders; her face was sealed and thoughtful. I thought, she is happy in her work. Someday, I will be just like her.

▼▪▲

The phone rang. I ran to answer it, but it stopped ringing. Knowing my mother had answered it, I picked up the receiver anyway.

“Hello dear, this is your mother, remember me?” My grandmother, The Dowager. Listening on the extension, I heard every word. “Next Tuesday is my birthday. For my sake, Deirdre, make up with your brother.” The child molester.

“Mother, I have no desire to do so.” My mother later said she lost her teeth to an infection caused by neuralgia, a disease that no one seems to get anymore, but I believe she ground them to nubs. I thought I could hear the grinding on that extension phone.

“I won’t be with you long,” continued the Dowager. “After my death, you never have to see him again.”

“We have nothing to talk about, he and I.”

“Deirdre, whatever happened is over and done with.”

“Nothing is ever over and done with.”

“For me,” Grandma pressed. “it’s my eightieth.”

The next day, my mother said to Laurel, “I told him, if he lays a hand on Deborah, I’ll put a gun to her head and shoot her.”

“Why shoot me? Why not him?”

“Please don’t be rude,” she said to me.

On the birthday afternoon, Laurel reminded me, “Extra places for your grandmother, your Aunt and Uncle.” She poured herself a glass of sherry, reminding me of the giddy grown-ups the weekend we’d gone to the beach with Ethan’s family.

“What are they like, my uncle and aunt?”

“You can be sure I’ve never been introduced,” Laurel said.

“Where’s Mum?”

“Finishing a rush job.”

I put out the notched crystal glasses, washed the demitasse cups through which light shone like the gleam of an eye. Laurel ironed the linen napkins, releasing a sweet scent that reminded me of skin in summer. She took the roast from the refrigerator. The Italian butcher had assured Laurel he cut the roast from a side that had aged in the locker for a week.

When I took my aunt’s perfumy fur coat to my bedroom, it slipped from my arms and slid willfully away when I tried to retrieve it. Unobserved, I grabbed it by an arm and dragged it like a carcass to my room.

With his baby blue eyes, my uncle roved around the festive table. My aunt held her shoulders up around her ears and called my mother Sissy Dee Dee. The Bedouin gritted her teeth. My mother said if Eisenhower were elected, we might as well count on World War III. My uncle swept the table with his roguish eyes. “I think it’s so amusing to hear my baby sister mouthing the communist line,” he said.

After dinner, Grandma said she didn’t want a chocolate; she couldn’t tell which were the ones she liked, or more to the point, which she didn’t like.

“What kind do you like?” Laurel asked loudly.

Grandma liked opera creams, maple.

“We’ll fix you right up,” Laurel said and reached for the foil candy box. Her cheeks flamed red.

“Laurel,” said my mother.

My Aunt said, “Dee Dee, where did you get those divine cafe curtains?” Though I had read the word divine in books, never in my life had I heard it used in conversation.

Opening the box, Laurel poked her thumb in the first cream which oozed pinky red. Cherry. She poked another. Mint. She punched another. Indistinct sugar color. She licked her thumb. “Mmm, maple,” she said, sounding pleased, but her lips jerked as they had when we’d been ignored in that Long Island diner. Laurel slapped the candy in front of Grandma. There it sat, finger-poked. In front of Grandma, a woman so fancy that even her bedroom slippers had heels.

My mother said, “I think you’ve had enough to drink.”

Grandma set the candy aside. Laurel reached for it, but my mother got there first and stuck the oozing chocolate into her own mouth. Laurel poked one more cream, put the candy in front of me. It was a creamy, dizzying caramel. Laurel rose to make coffee.

“Dee Dee. We have theater tickets,” my uncle said.

“I’ll get your coats,” I volunteered.

“How about a cup of coffee first?” my mother asked.

“No darling, we can’t,” my uncle said.

My mother turned to Grandma, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wasn’t invited to the theater,” Grandma said.

“It’s mother’s night,” my mother said to her brother. She sounded as if all she wanted in the world was for him to stay.

He swiveled his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Coats,” Laurel prompted me.

My fingers smeared caramel on the perfumed fur. As I tussled with the unruly coat, my uncle entered the room. I dropped the coat. He put on his own and lightly tossed the fur over his arm. He winked at me.

Grandma had a demitasse of espresso. “I don’t believe they really had tickets,” my grandmother said. After my mother had put Grandma in a cab, my mother slammed the door to her room. I made a conciliatory card with a drawing I thought she would like -- a bounding collie -- and knocked on her door. When there was no answer, I thought I would leave it on her bureau, and opened the door. She lay on her studio bed.

“What are you doing in the dark?” I asked and reached for the light switch.

“Don’t,” she said and glanced at her window. Directly opposite hers, across the narrow street, a neighbor stood in his window with his hand in his pocket.

“When he knows I’m in here, he exposes himself,” she said.

“Why don’t you pull the blinds?”

“Usually I do, but tonight, I don’t want to feel shut in,” and she gulped.

I looked at him in the dusky street light. He strained to see shapes in the dark chute of my mother’s room. He had that kind of white hair that is splashed with nicotine yellow and a big red nose. When we roller skated, he would pass us kids in the street and yell at us. We called him Red Face.

“I gritted my teeth so much, it made my head ache,” the Bedouin said with a weak laugh.

“May I bring you ginger ale?” I asked and she accepted.

I went to the kitchen. In a dudgeon, Laurel was putting away pots and pans with a great clatter. I thought of her poking her finger into the candies. She turned recklessly, suddenly, and I startled. She saw me flinch and said huskily, “ I could never hurt you.”

The next morning, my mother put the drawing of the bounding collie on the table.

“It’s very good,” she said.

“Thank you,” I smirked.

“But you’re too hasty. You need to discipline yourself.”

“I am disciplined.”

I downed my juice, grabbed roller skates and headed for the street. Binnie Ann and Kathy were already skating. I hurried to tighten my skates and skimmed to join them. Two younger boys rolled orange crate scooters up and down the sidewalk with a grating sound. A truck pulled out of the end of the block, and disappeared into traffic on cobbled Hudson Street. Jimmie McDougal and Jessie, Mike and Jimmie Madden resumed their ball game. Red Face came out of the apartment building opposite ours and slammed a Macy’s bag of tinkling trash into the garbage cans.

“Drunk,” Kathie said.

Smack! Jimmie Madden hit a softball and it fell with a full- bodied thonk on the hood of a parked car.

“Watch where you hit,” Mike yelled.

“Catch it,” Jimmie scolded back

“Do you like Edwin?” Kathie asked Binnie Anne.

Smack! Another hit.

Crack! the ball hit me in the face.

My skates jumped out from under me.

“You dumb boys, watch it,” Kathie yelled. Jimmy was sorry.

Jessie punched his glove and yelled, “Hey guys, play ball.”

On a glaring surface of tears, I skated out the afternoon. In June, my left front tooth looked blue in some lights, like milk starting to turn. Over the summer, the color darkened and became warmer, greener. My mother insisted my father pay to replace the tooth, and if his insurance didn’t pay for it, it would have to come out of his pocket.

▼▪▲

Laurel showed me pages of Laban Notation in a loose-leaf binder. “This is a Virginia reel. Here’s a debka jump. The miserlu,” she said. She chuckled when I asked if she could notate roller skating. She said, ”The problem with Laban Notation is that it is so tedious. That our relation to space and time is so fluid. That we can approach all that with finite jottings, but that at some point, we must acknowledge the limitlessness of motion.”

▼▪▲

When Ethan and I were nine, he had me pull down my jeans and he put his hand on my thigh. It made me feel sickish in a sweet way, to have his alien hand on my thigh where no one had touched me since I started bathing myself. He put his penis out. It flopped, then stood up like a skinny pencil.

I didn’t discuss it with him.

I didn’t discuss it at home.

I knew what we did was forbidden. I thought my mother would know, would guess, but she didn’t. I kept waiting for her to let on that she knew.

Nothing.

▼▪▲

Binnie and I ran up three flights to her apartment, intent on the box of Mallomar cookies she had sighted the night before. “Oops,” I said when my roller skates popped Binnie in the ribs. I rushed ahead of her into the apartment. The skates smacked my own ribs when I stopped stiff legged in the kitchen door. Binnie ran into me.

Her mother sat at the kitchen table, writing. A candle flickered and guttered. The only sound was the scratch of the pencil. “Come on,” Binnie pulled me into the kitchen. “She can’t hear us. She’s in a trance.” Binnie took the yellow and red box of cookies from the shelf covered with oil cloth. Her mother tore a full sheet from the pad, and poured words onto the next one.

“What’s she writing?”

“Gaelic.” Binnie bit a cookie.

“What’s it say?”

Binnie shrugged. “She can’t read it. Maybe she can when she’s in a trance. We don’t know.”

“How do you know it’s Gaelic?”

“We just do.”

Mrs. Grady, who had insisted Binnie and I lock our legs against the eyes of boys, sat at the table taking dictation in a language she couldn’t read.

“Why? How?” I asked Binnie, but she fed me Mallomars, intractable mountains of marshmallow on stale graham crackers, waxed with chocolate. Mallomars were not permitted to cross the Bedouin’s doorstep.

▼▪▲

Maybe my childhood would have continued -- Gaelic beaches, work drenched afternoons, couch swoons, even the caramel smeared fur of my aunt’s coat, my mother’s hypnotic tales, most of it sweet -- but for Laurel’s concert.

The concert began like other times I had seen her perform. It began, for me, with my pride and fear. Pride that she was associated with me, fear that she might somehow not do well. I went with my best friend, Ethan and his mother, who wore a turban and high-heeled shoes. My mother was backstage with Laurel. Seated in the audience, Ethan, and I, and Ethan’s mother, craned our necks to see Laurel.

In a red dress with a sweetheart neckline, Laurel came on stage.

A lady in front of us asked who Laurel was. “She’s my aunt,” I said, so proud I thought I would pop. The woman looked at pale me, as if to say, How dumb do you think I am, little girl?

Laurel opened her mouth in a Christmas card angel “o” and began to sing, “Hello, everybody, yes indeed.” It was sweet. Sweet, because it was Laurel. Sweet, because I knew the words. She sang without a care. She stopped to introduce each song and at one point she chuckled her throaty laugh and I grinned so hard tears came to my eyes, to hear that domestic chuckle sailing from her on stage to me in the auditorium. She said a few words about jailed victims of McCarthy, for whom the concert was a benefit. She played the opening bars of a song I didn’t recognize and it disturbed me that Ethan’s mother and the woman behind us stirred appreciatively and said it was a Leadbelly song. I wanted to say, Laurel, what are you doing, singing this Lead Belly song that I don’t know? Laurel’s fingers hovered on the keys as they had all those years ago in nursery school. So I felt a little sad for the four- year-old whom Pinny had said was “beautiful.” From my seat beside Ethan and his mother, I felt the warmth of Laurel’s smile. My heart opened wide to her as it always had.

Wide open, I followed her, but she, my city Laurel, sang to all those people that sometimes she lived in the country and I hated it, because she did not live in the country, she lived with me, but I couldn’t stop listening. She sang about loving some woman, and that was a story, too, but it was an okay story like when she sometimes sang that she was the Noble Duke of York who had ten thousand men. But she did not live in the country and she did live with me.

Laurel sang with her mouth open in that happy-to-be- singing way she had, that way which made me happy along with her, but then despite that voice which was sweet like when she sang to us at school, she sang that she would jump in a river and drown and the music was still sweet and it was still Laurel and I couldn’t bear that she might be so sad and feel such despair when she had me.

I could feel the audience welling up to her, surging toward an expected end when she sang that she would see me in her dreams. I didn’t believe her. What if she turned this, too, around?