Leaving Brooklyn Read Online Free Page B

looked for the endlessly receding, stratified planes, even in cases where there was no depth. I tried to make more out of less, even out of Brooklyn. I couldn’t accept that some things remain flat no matter how hard you strain to confer dimensions on them.
    I say Brooklyn with a certain acidity, though at other times I might—I do—say it with affection. The Brooklyn of my story is not the place, a rather pretty place of tender low houses and gracious trees and regal avenues, a place lapped by saltwater and rich with briny air, with innumerable earthy charms, and so this cannot be a story built with the ordinary scenery of stories, furniture and interior decoration and local color. The Brooklyn of my story is a state of mind or perception, the shadow field on which my good and bad eyes staged their struggle. It could as readily be called Cleveland or Rouen or Johannesburg. It moves from place to place wherever opposing visions struggle, but unlike a shadow it never changes with the light. One can only live in it or flee.

    BEING IN LOVE is one kind of flight, and in the early years of my love I longed to fly to the chicken man and butcher’s store to see Bobby: tall, swarthy, burly, with translucent blue eyes, dressed in black chino pants and a gray sweatshirt, an easy-mannered boy who charmed the women customers and always had a ready word for me. When I was lucky enough to find him in the store—he helped out after school hours, from four to seven—he would look up as I entered, his hands busy wrapping chickens in brown paper or doling out change, and say, “Well, if it isn’t Audrey the geisha girl.” He called me that because my hair was black and shiny and combed in bangs. “How’s the world treating you, kiddo?” and I would feel joy in the roots of my hair.
    But this could not happen if my mother did her errands in the morning. And I could not beg her to go in the afternoon. I was ashamed of the force of my longings. I knew enough of the world to know people my age were not supposed to be in love. If I said “I want to see Bobby,” my mother would say “Who? The chicken man’s boy? What for?” then catch on and laugh. My love was not a feeling that could or would have been ordained by my mother, who knew not only what to do in every situation, but what to feel, too, and monitored my errant feelings. “Don’t feel that way,” she said when I had a grievance or wound, when I was envious or petulant or sullen. Feel the way I tell you to feel; that will feel better. She knew which feel-ings were proper for the occasion and which must be stamped out like a brush fire or sponged away before they hardened and set. Feelings could be read on the face, and if she read an infelicitous feeling on mine she would say offhandedly, “If you keep walking around with that expression on your face it’ll freeze that way,” making me think that each bad feeling would last forever, iced in my cheekbones, and this edged my every transient melancholy with a braided border of eternity and hopelessness. Wrong feelings were the most terrible kind of impropriety, and it was the hardest thing in the world to know what the right ones were, according to my
mother, and then try to have them. So my love for Bobby, along with so much else, had to be secret.
    Sometimes my mother had so many packages to carry, or the weather was so snowy or rainy, that she would order our dinner over the phone, and on those days Bobby would appear on our doorstep. The bell—three chimes set in a niche in the wall—would ring and I would trail my mother to the door and stand half behind her, shyly, because everything was different outside the store. On our doorstep he was another Bobby, older, with a manly dignity in his pea coat and scarf. As he handed over his package he would say, “Hey, Audrey!” and maybe reach out to punch me on the shoulder, while I could not