LITMIR.BIZ

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HOW I LEARNED TO THINK

      In the years before I discovered how to think, I was lucky enough to have two best friends. They lived in opposite directions, and every day at three p.m. outside J.H.S. 141 in the Bronx we stood on a corner and they sang to me, “Walk my way.” “No, walk my way.” I always chose to walk with Stacy, who was mean, rather than Emily, who was understanding. Still, I would toss imploring looks over my shoulder at Emily as I vanished down the street as if to say, “I adore you, you can see I’m helpless, can’t you? Stacy’s an ogre, I have no choice in this, and you are my absolute favorite.”

      And Emily was. She was a passionate, windswept, science-besotted only child always in the grips of a cold, and with hot-pink crumpled tissues tumbling out the sleeves of her sweaters, and innumerable missed days at school. Our emblem was Nostradamus’s prophesying, severed head lurching across a laboratory floor—we’d seen it on Creature Feature one Friday night when the rest of the world was asleep. First we’d turned off the bedroom lights and held aloft lit wands of sparklers—a seething fountain of stars and asterisks scorching into our gaze an instant before they wove into the air our names, and then, after a further spewing, blinding moment, divined the names of our husbands, the cities we’d visit, the artistic or scientific works we’d accomplish, the lolloping, incandescent skirts we’d wear someday, before the guttering nub scorched our fingertips. (Emily’s father had brought home the illegal silver stalks from New Jersey; her parents were divorced and he was always corrupting her with treats, for which she held him in resolute contempt.) After that, we’d eaten string cheese we frayed with our fingers, a sophisticated delectable “gourmet food,” a braid of caraway seeds and tangy fat, and watched, glaze eyed, from our beds, as across the rough-hewn Gothic lair came Nostradamus’s chopped-off head, still alive, jolting forward on its stump of neck, ranting its visions of the future.

      “Nostradamus’s head!” we murmured to each other after that, and burst out laughing to ward off our horror of that unvanquished skull. In those days it was unknown what would become of us. Women intellectuals still had something of the mutant and pitiful about them: Madame Curie sickened by her radium, “She’s in the library!” a howl of horror rising out of It’s a Wonderful Life. Emily and I were bookish girls—she even more than I because she could indulge her passions, having no siblings and a bedroom of her own in which to pile her ever-increasing volumes.

      She stayed up however late she pleased. As long as she was physically in bed by ten p.m., her mother didn’t monitor. The door to her room was solid oak. Emily read novels to her heart’s content under her black-light blanket. At last, losing the train of the story, she turned off the overhead and flicked a switch on a midnight bulb, and her blanket pulsed with phosphorescent hot-pink lines, whorls and carbuncles and exploded fingerprints, the insignia of the maze of existence itself somehow, a labyrinth burning the dark.

      No such decoration in my own bedroom, which I shared with my sister. I taped up only the earth from space, a circle isolated far off in a sea of black; it had been given away at school. Anything else was mockable—likely to inspire my older siblings’ ridicule. I played no records of my own, hung no art of my own, certainly lit no incense of my own, all of which Emily did without a second thought. It was as if, instead of my being merely a Bronx daughter of a newly middle-class family, I were some orphan ward, beholden. I returned to Emily, still sealed, the album of Hair she’d given me as a birthday gift, with its acid green and sickly lemon color-fields clashing behind a young man’s backlit, luminous ’fro. We played Emily’s copy of that record over and over in her bedroom—“LBJ, IRT, USA, LSD,” the chorus dreamily harmonized—but my family’s stereo sat in our living room. I couldn’t possibly enjoy listening to those songs in my own house! Wasn’t that obvious to Emily?

      And yet I craved what seemed her daring verve. We both fell in love with Tony Curtis in The Great Race, but she bought a chunky, toppling paperback that listed every picture he was in, and she spent her final year of junior high watching each and every one, even if it came on at three thirty or four a.m. She cranked her round neon-orange wind-up alarm that exploded with a firehouse jangle, and then set a checkmark beside each movie once it was seen. In contrast, my own passion remained flat, static, hidden within me like a wick engulfed in paraffin. She and I both prized self-forgetfulness but only she pursued it. And I found that aggravatingly admirable—that she did the thing, she did it, whatever anyone might think!

      Whereas Stacy, in contrast, was worldly. She never dismissed what others might think. By “success” she meant precisely what most people meant. She was an impeccably groomed, ambitious, pragmatic figure sweeping down the street in a long coat that gave her the silhouette of a queen on a chess set. I was drawn to her because she too was a girl of imagination, a girl ablaze, although her focus was altogether different. She folded and stapled pretend bankbooks and induced me to invest my allowance dollars with her, and she took lessons riding English-style on horses in Harrison, New York, her hips hoisted aloft as the horse loped, her spine straight as our teacher’s wooden pointer. Her father was a corporate lawyer, and it was assumed that she, being the eldest, and clever, would triumph in life as well. He drove a low white Jag like the runabout on the Monopoly set, and they summered on Fire Island, where she wore low-slung bellbottoms streaked with bleach, and her mother shopped for clothes only at “boutiques.”

      “Are skinny-legged jeans in, in Riverdale?” Stacy asked the last time we spoke. She’d finally moved to Harrison after years of riding lessons there, and now owned a horse, and planted an herb garden, and had a live-in maid. “A live-in maid, Bonnie!” she repeated when my response was insufficient. Her father had even made a postcard of their sumptuous Tudor house, which she’d shown me the last time I visited. The postcard was 1950s sepiatoned, with a scalloped edge—a campy artifact whose jolly façade and cool irony impressed me. And then she called with her question. She had a new set of girlfriends whom I heard laughing in the background. “I can’t stay on,” she declared. But, well, Harrison was ahead of Riverdale fashionwise, wasn’t it, she seemed curious to establish—by phoning me, her last contact in that old outpost, someone oblivious to the looks of things.

      “Skinny-legged jeans?” I asked, racking my brain. “No, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that.”

      “I thought not,” said Stacy and hung up.

      I hung up too, a moment later. Skinny-legged jeans. Obviously they were trivial—being mere fashion—and yet if they were completely trivial, then why were my cheeks blazing, why did my throat and chest sting?

      I was lost within myself and remained so for a decade, unable to draw conclusions about anything, living as if my mind were a door I must hold open for yet more information, as if, if I came to a conclusion too soon, I would miss the crucial valence of things, the particular nuance that provided the key. Only when I had sufficient information could I determine what things meant.

      In the meantime I sat for hours behind a curtain swept around my semicircular chair, a book open in my hands as my brothers and sister rampaged through the house. My parents had a multivolume set of Dickens, the type crimped into the binding so that the lines of text ascended, a rising mountainside I climbed, happiest when I’d disappeared entirely into a story. The more demanding the act of reading, the more thoroughly I disappeared. Even the heavy stamp of the print into the pulpy yellow paper made me happy, as if each letter were a sunken compartment in which I might hide.

      “Bon-don-lonchikle!” my brothers often crooned to me, a name derived from some creepy old man on a public bench who had moaned that while pinching my cheeks. “Bon-don-lonchikle!” they laughed, but the strung-out moniker seemed to capture a truth: it identified my secret self, spazzy, twitchy, a girl! For in those days, the word that named my gender often curled like a lubricious smirk. “Here, girly!” said the pimply man who sold pizza slices for twenty-five cents. “Take it, girly,” said the man who offered six-cent candy. Something mortifying was all over me, something that inspired lewdness and condescension. And this something helped to explain, I believed, why I was stupid, carrying home barely passable grades from school on the Friday retest, having no idea of how to use the mind I possessed. How did the other children know

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