Bloomer

Memoir Excerpt - 1970s New York

Art was forever and always my favorite subject, but if you were to pry open my ribs and peer into my childhood soul, my dearest desire was to bloom. 

“You’re a late bloomer,” said my mother.

I’m a defective bud, I thought.

The thing that didn’t sit right with me was that the bloomers were doing all the things I was told not to do. They were pouring salt into the sugar bowl and sugar into the saltshaker. They put plastic doo-doo on the teacher’s chair. They were sneaking off somewhere when they said they had to go to the bathroom. I had no idea what they were doing but it couldn’t be good. When they whispered in class I told them to stop it. Didn’t they know they might miss something important?

In our home zone there were kindly doormen in blue uniforms standing under every awning. One block west was the pet store where we bought our parakeets, and on the York Avenue corner was the Mansion Diner where I ordered spaghetti and meatballs. Just west of that was Woolworth’s with one of the O’s in “WOOL” listing sideways, where my brother and I would ogle the games and tools and packages of socks. A little further along was Schaller & Weber, a holdover from the era when East 86th Street was German Broadway. My mother would buy white sausages while we coveted fruit-shaped marzipan displayed like jewels.

A few doors the other way was Carl Schurz Park, which all the kids called Carl “Shurks” Park. From nineteen floors up, I would lean on our long broad windowsill for what felt like half a day and study its curved paths and oval lawns. An ice cream truck the size of a half a stick of butter parked there in summer, and in wintertime a Christmas tree cast blurry colored lights onto the snow.

On Saturdays, we raced up the curved granite steps that were so wide and flat we had to take two extra steps at each level before stepping up again. The avenue’s honking of horns was quieter at the top, and we breathed in the smells of cut grass, trampled soil and dog poop. Another flight of wide granite stairs led to the boardwalk – a mile-long balcony high up over the East River. A wrought iron railing was all that separated us from the dark and salty waves below, churning like boiling oil. Directly below our feet, an endless stream of cars hurried unseen through the East River Drive. Across the river were gloomy brown buildings that showed no sign of life, day or night. 

Starting in kindergarten, I held my mother’s hand for three blocks down East End Avenue on our walk to school, I in my navy blue tunic and she in her cotton print skirt, allowing her arm to be pulled up and down while I jumped and skipped. When we crossed 85th, 84th and 83rd, I glimpsed the narrower streets where old people came and went from four-story Brownstones, unchanged since the time of an Edward Hopper painting. On 85th it was a bent woman carrying a stack of wide-brimmed feathered hats down the front steps while four workmen stood by eating jelly donuts, and on 84th it was an old man in a three-piece suit eating peperoni pizza on a piece of wax paper while a delivery man whizzed by with a dozen orchids bobbing their heads. When we reached 83rd Street, I squirmed out of my mother’s hand so that I could run the last hundred feet on my own. 

The Brearley School was a girl-empowerment zone, designed to maximize our gumption so that we could take charge of the male-dominated field of our choice. Accordingly, when we needed worms to dissect, we marched to the park to hunt them down. The parallel bars were a freedom machine, where the curve of my body carried me around and launched me into the air. In History we probed the unfamiliar practices of foreign civilizations. We asked why and why not. School rules were not royal edicts from on high; they were respectfully explained. We didn’t just learn the Greek Myths; we impersonated a God. 

Of course I chose Aphrodite. For me there was no other choice. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths said “she was so lovely to behold that the wind almost lost his breath,” and I instinctively felt it. That is the power I need. Although I could not have put it into words at the time, I knew that men were the keepers of many things that I wanted: recognition, access, professional success. Men were in charge of things. I liked that Aphrodite rendered them helpless.