Last Halloween, my daughter—her name is Annie; she is ten years old—decided that the scary person she wanted to impersonate was the Countess Dracula, and so, without even knowing whether there ever was such a creature, I set out to make her a costume. I bought yards of gray and black lace, some black satin ribbon, and black thread. I stitched the black and gray lace together by hand to make a cape, and ran the black satin ribbon through a hem I had made along the neckline. The cape pleased her very much: I could see that from the way she twisted and turned while standing in front of the looking glass. Underneath the cape she wore an old black dress of mine that I had grown too fat to fit into any longer. She painted her face white, then blackened the area around her eyes with a pencil made for that purpose, drew long lines of red from the corner of her mouth to under her chin with my lipstick, and colored her lips with lipstick of another shade.
She also wore a hat—a black hat, made of corded velvet, that was flat and round, like a dinner plate. It had a tassel in the center—a piece of the corded velvet that had been deliberately unravelled by its maker. There was an elastic band that ran from one side to the other and was worn under the chin or tucked under the hairline in back, for anchoring the hat on the head. My daughter wore the band tucked under a bun I had made of her hair in the back. She did not scare anyone; she looked very beautiful. My daughter lives in a small village in a small state, and, when she stepped out to trick-or-treat, the neighbors greeted her with enthusiasm. Her hat, especially, was admired.
That hat was one I used to wear all the time. I bought it at a store that sold old clothes, but I cannot remember if it was a store called Early Halloween and owned by a woman named Joyce, or a store called Harriet Love and owned by a woman named Harriet Love, or a store whose name I can’t remember but which was owned by a woman named Enid. This was many years ago; I must have been twenty-five when I bought it, because I remember wearing it on my twenty-sixth birthday. I was born in 1949. My twenty-sixth birthday was the birthday when I felt old and used up—I had left home when I was sixteen, and ten years in a young life is a long time—and someone had taken me to dinner at a restaurant called the SoHo Charcuterie. While eating some absurd combination of food (or so it then struck me; no doubt it would seem quite ordinary now), I wondered aloud whether, at my advanced age, I would ever have any new relationships to look forward to.
Ilived in New York. It was not the forbidding place then that it has become to me now. I was not afraid in those days. I used to tell perfect strangers how they should behave in public—that is, if I saw them misbehaving in public. My hat was firmly strapped in place. I was invulnerable. And if, for my interference, they threatened to kill me, I would inform them that killing me was not a proper response. None of them killed me; they only threatened to do so.
I had found a place to live near Bellevue Hospital, in a small apartment above a restaurant. The exhaust fan of the restaurant was just outside the window that I slept next to, on a lumpy rollout bed. The noise the exhaust fan made felt like such an injustice that I went to the owner of the restaurant to ask if he could be more considerate and close his restaurant earlier in the evening. The restaurant was owned by a family who came from somewhere in Asia. He did not say yes, he did not say no; everything went on just as it had done before.
I had no money. In the middle of the night, the landlord would call me up to demand the back months’ rent. After a while, I did not answer the phone so late at night. I looked for a job, but I was not qualified to do anything respectable. On Sunday afternoons, I worked in a place where people rented bicycles. I changed my name, and started telling people I knew that I was a writer. This declaration went without comment. In this apartment, I slept with a man who used to buy me dinner. I liked fish of every kind, but I never ate much, no matter how hungry I had been when I sat down. When I went out with him, it was only to eat fish. Most of what we did together was inside the apartment, and that was soon over. In the middle of kissing me and doing other things, he would ask me to tell him of the other people I had kissed, but the list was so short then that he soon lost interest in kissing me and doing the other things. If only he had waited—for the list would become long and varied. So long and varied that if I met him today I would not be able to identify his face or any other part of him.
Soon I moved to an apartment on West Twenty-second Street. It was on the third floor; the walk up was tiring, but perhaps was good for me. The apartment was at the front of the building; it had two rooms and a small kitchen, which could hold no more than two people at once. The bathroom had a porcelain bathtub, and I used to lie in it and give myself coffee enemas. I don’t remember who recommended such a thing to me; I do remember that once the coffee was too hot and I burned my bottom all the way up inside.
I slept on the floor in one of the rooms, because I could not afford a bed. I slept at first on newspapers and then on an old mattress I found on the street; someone gave me sheets, though I no longer remember who. I know that I slept more comfortably on the mattress than I did on the newspapers. The other room was empty except for a large old office desk, an old typewriter, and books that were piled on the floor. I was hungry; I could not afford to eat much real food. In the refrigerator I kept yogurt, a tin of brewer’s yeast, orange juice, powdered skim milk, and many different kinds of vitamins; in the freezer compartment I kept slices of bananas. It was the refrigerator of someone who lived alone.
Below me lived a man who talked to himself: he had been in a war, and after that he never worked again—only talked to himself. On the ground floor, a man and a woman lived in the apartment they’d had since they were married, sometime in the nineteen-twenties. How the landlord wished them dead, for they paid a low rent. At first, the landlord had no luck at all: then the husband died, and the wife was very sad. I know she was very sad because she told me so. I don’t know what became of her; I lost interest. Nothing happened to me as a result of all this.
In the New York days of my twenties, the streets were wide and open and always sunny, not narrow and closed and dark, the way they are now when I walk down the same streets. When I lived in the house on Twenty-second Street, I used to get up late in the morning—so late that the morning was by then quite stale, on the brink of being another time of day altogether. Then I would parade around the apartment without my clothes on, and I would bathe and, if it was the right day of the week, take my enema. I would have a small meal of something liquid, for I still would not and could not satisfy my appetite—any of my appetites. And then, finally, I would put on some clothes. This was not done carelessly.
I was very thin, because I had no money to eat properly, and because what little money I had I used to buy clothes. Being very thin, however, I looked good in clothes. I loved the way I looked all dressed up. I bought hats, I bought shoes, I bought stockings and garter belts to hold them up, I bought handbags, I bought suits, I bought blouses, I bought dresses, I bought skirts, and I bought jackets that did not match the skirts. I used to spend hours happily buying clothes to wear. Of course, I could not afford to buy my clothes in an actual store, a department store. Instead, they came from used-clothing stores, and they were clothes of a special kind, stylish clothes from a long-ago time—twenty or thirty or forty years earlier. They were clothes worn by people who were alive when I had not been; by people who were far more prosperous than I could imagine being. As a result, it took me a long time to get dressed, for I could not easily decide what combination of people, inconceivably older and more prosperous than I was, I wished to impersonate that day. It was sometimes hours after I started the process of getting dressed that I finally left my house and set off into the world.
My world at that time was a restaurant, someone else’s apartment, or any other place where I had agreed to meet a friend; the location was almost never chosen by me. One rainy day in spring, I left my house after my elaborate dressing ritual, and when I was two blocks away from my house and two blocks away from the subway a wind came and blew my hat off my head. My hat, the one made of black corded velvet, landed in the gutter. When I picked it up, it was wet and dirty. That was a moment in my life when I could not take much more of sad realities: I turned around and walked home, and when I got there I took off my clothes and lay down on my bed. When my friends called to inquire why they would not be seeing me that day, I only repeated, again and again, the words “Because my hat fell into the gutter.”
The day that the wind blew my hat into the gutter, my hair was not in its natural state, which would have been black and long and thick and tightly curled. I had left it tightly curled but I had made it short and blond. Had I worn this hat with my hair in its natural state, I would have been wearing it with sincerity, with good intentions; I would have meant the hat to be a hat. But this was not so at all. With my hair in its natural state, such a hat—a style of hat that had been popular when my mother was a young woman—would not have appealed to me. For, really, it was impractical for a modern woman, suitable only as a costume. To wear such a hat, I needed to transform my hair. And should I say that transforming my hair was a way of transforming myself? I had no consciousness of such things then.
I did not know then that I had embarked on something called self-invention, the making of a type of person that did not exist in the place where I was born—a place far away from New York and with a climate quite unlike the one that existed in New York. I wanted to be a writer; I was a person with opinions, and I wanted them to matter to other people. I can admit that about myself as I was then; I cannot admit it about myself as I am now. It was just when I had despaired of ever becoming a writer that I applied for a secretarial position at the magazine Mademoiselle. I was twenty-four years old. To my job interview I wore a very short skirt, a nylon blouse under which I wore no brassiere, red shoes with very high heels and white anklets, and no hat to cover my short-cropped blond hair. Mademoiselle did not hire me. The people I talked to there had been so kind and sweet toward me, both on the phone and in person, that it took me a very long time to understand that they would never hire me. I wondered if it was my shoes and the anklets, or perhaps my hair. I was speaking of these things to a friend, wondering out loud why had I not been offered a job at Mademoiselle when the people there seemed to like me so much, and he said, But how could I have applied to a place like that—didn’t I know that they never hired black girls? And I thought, But how was I to know that I was a black girl? I never pass myself in a corridor and say, I am a black girl. I never see myself coming toward me as I come round a bend and say, There is that black girl coming toward me. How was I really to know such a thing?
This life went on, this life of being young and in New York. I wondered if I would be young forever; I wondered if I would live in New York forever. Neither prospect gave me pleasure. What did I yearn for? In the New York of my youth, the evenings were too long, no matter what the time of year was. What I did with some people I knew was to drink. What I did with other people was to go and buy drugs from a man who kept a Physicians’ Desk Reference on a table in his very pleasant living room. We would sit on his comfortable sofa and order drugs. He would present us with a tray of tablets, small and in many colors—it reminded me of going to a shop in my childhood, where I would stand behind a counter and gaze at the jars full of sweets, sweets I was too poor to afford more than one or two of. In this man’s pleasant living room, we would gaze upon his tray of colorful tablets, and we would decide which ones to buy on the basis of our attraction to the colors, and then look up the results they were expected to give in the Physicians’ Desk Reference. On a day we were not visiting him, he was taken away by the police, and I have not heard of him since.
There were other ways of filling those long evenings. The list of the people who kissed me and did other things with me became so long that now I cannot remember the names on it. And though I remember many faces, I cannot say with certainty whose face I allowed to kiss me and do other things to me, and whose face I stood with in the dark before we shook hands and said good night. It was always in the dark, at night. There was a reason for that, perhaps practical, perhaps not; to give a reason now, I would have to make it up. Sometimes I meet people who say to me that they knew me well very long ago, and I can only wonder, How well could that have been? Sometimes I meet people who tell me they knew me in those days and they mention an event. I can remember the event, but I cannot remember them. At least, I don’t recognize their faces; perhaps I would recognize other parts of them. But even the act of recollection is exhausting. My youth was exhausting, it was dangerous, and it is a miracle that I grew out of it unscathed.
Really, the list of those who went in and out of my bed was not so long; it was only a long list when compared with the sad facts regarding a part of my upbringing. I was brought up to marry one man and to have children with this one man, and this one man would be the only man to go in and out of my bed. It was understood that this one man would go in and out of the bed of many other women and have many children with them, which is not to say that he would have been a father to them any more than he would have been a husband to me. The person I had become, the person I had made myself into, did not place an obligation on anyone I allowed into my bed. But this was not without its snags and inconveniences. So many people are not as pleasing to look at in the light of the sun as they are to look at by the light of a lamp. It would happen that some of them left their smell with me, and it took the smell of many others to get rid of the one smell. It would happen that I would wake up, my throat raw from hours of gasping, my tongue sore from being fastened between my teeth, suppressing cries of ecstasy or boredom.
One year, I created a Halloween costume for myself by buying a dozen and a half bananas made of plastic (the sort used in some homes as a centerpiece for the dining table), stringing them together so that they made a skirt of sorts, and then tying the whole thing around my waist. I wore nothing underneath, had nothing to cover the rest of my body except an old fur coat that I had bought in an old-fur-coat store for thirty dollars. When I arrived at the party, of course, I removed the coat. The hair on the other parts of my body was not the same color as the hair on my head. I wore no hat to conceal this; it was not a detail that concerned me. And the evening passed, joining the other long evenings that were so exhausting to fill. What did I want? Did I know? I was twenty-five, I was twenty-six, I was twenty-seven, I was twenty-eight. At thirty, I was married. ♦
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