:: Sarah Rosenthal
(please maximize your screen size for best view)
from Manhatten
*
I always forget how Manhatten can look like
a bunch of inverted icicles. And how from a
certain intersection the skyline looks like a
mirage. Extremes of ice and heat. I´m making
the hotel bed of the woman who hired me to
teach Catholic summer school a few years ago.
In another time she would have been a nun.
Instead she has an MA in Divinity, a willingness
to work overtime and a serenely tough attitude.
I´ve accompanied her to Manhatten for a
conference. I´ve got nothing to do so I´m
making her king-sized hospital bed. I stretch
across, trying to pull the mattress protector
down over the sides. It keeps popping up.
I should stop making this bed because it proves
I´m not important. She returns and says,
Remember to regulate the heat with the
windows, not the thermostat, or it will be cold
tonight. Manhatten has the capacity to drift into
sand at the edges, warm towns where ocean
water is allowed to creep into the streets, we
wiggle our bare feet in it. We´re on a guided
tour. I wait forever for a port-a-potty, a woman
waits ahead of me. After 15 minutes the
proprietor of the nearest restaurant tries the
door--no one´s inside. The woman ahead of me
is fast. When she emerges, we chat--she´s from
the outskirts of Chicago. But she orients toward
Manhatten. This is where she spends her
weekends. I say How interesting. She says Why
shouldn´t I love culture and the thrill of the big
city. I lose the tour, wander through the edges of
town and come across an apartment complex, so
barren and barred it looks like projects. A man
disappears into one with his little girl. How
grateful everyone is in Manhatten for even a
little box to live in. People complain but they
love it, they are proud. They fill the corners with
their days and decide that it is right.
*
I forgot to say my grandparents were from
Manhatten. They didn´t move to Philly where
my mother was raised until they were 40ish. My
grandmother had flat feet because she was so
poor she had to wear ill-fitting shoes.
Grandfather, potato famine origin, to New York
via Prince Edward Island. Story of the Twinsies.
Story of "Keep your eyes peeled." Story of
Grandfather telling off Ormandy and getting
kicked out of the Philharmonic, tried to
compose. Invalid, invalid. Pronounce it how you
want. She did, worked hard, taught languages
into her 80s. And he never said I love you. In
the terminal home she finally complained.
Bitterly. And so then that was suspect too. Was
it physical. Response. Ever physical. To
produce my mother. Everyone says he was a
lovely man but ineffectual. This is why I can
never claim Manhatten. Who would want that
one. But he treated her like an equal. This gets
repeated. Lunch at Horn and Hardardt´s for a
nickel. My mother´s people are intellectuals.
They are mostly women, there is one man, kind,
misguided, who disappears into his illness.
There is my great-great grandmother who is
mad and red of hair. Red-haired woman goes to
the loony bin. They take out her teeth. Or she
takes them out herself. She pulls out her own
hair. There is my great-grandmother who stays
up all night sewing a dress for her little girl. The
little girl has her picture taken by Ivory Snow,
golden ringlets framing her cheeks. Plump
hands scrubbing a washboard. Her mother says
No, fame will spoil you. Little girl grows up,
receives a full scholarship to Swarthmore. Takes
her mother along. Marries late. Her child goes to
Bryn Mawr, straight A´s, the stellar paper on
Wordsworth, these are people who raised
themselves up by their intellect. My mother just
read The Life of the Mind and liked it.
*
liquid blue transfer from there to here
this could make me
sick. the motor revving,
air stirring, the
wait for tidings, blue
liquid passage from there
to here
*
I´m teaching a poetry writing class to fourth
graders. The principal sits and watches. I lead
the students through a sun salutation. Fewer and
fewer join in at each step but I stick to it. If even
half the class does it, isn´t that good? I´m
driving on a freeway, construction in the
median. The lane gets narrower and narrower
till there´s nothing to do but take the detour. I do
but the construction continues, I´m walking not
driving but it´s barely passable thanks to all the
equipment, raw material, pipes, exposed earth.
Men carry things back and forth, almost
knocking me over. I need to do my laundry. The
radical rabbi´s in the laundromat talking to a
Middle Eastern man--he believes people can
tolerate each other, discuss the issues. A man´s
laundry--a stack of blue business shirts--has
been left all folded up in the dryer. I keep
unfolding and refolding the top shirt--the whole
stack is wrinkled and I don´t want to be
implicated in that. How unhappy he must be,
having a job that makes him wear these shirts.
Henry says I shouldn´t be so critical. I feel
Henry is being overprotective of this man, his
old friend from college, who lives in Brooklyn
Heights.
*
The first time I went to Manhatten I hitched
there. I was sixteen. I´d been at Brandeis for
Christmas, sitting on a spare bed in my brother
Paul´s group house reading Even Cowgirls Get
the Blues. Paul was in the attic studying for a
math test. Everyone was Jewish so no one paid
any attention to Christmas. Paul´s best friend
Ben wanted to go to Manhatten too so we
hitched, on New Year´s. We stood in the rain on
an on-ramp. A guy with a truck picked us up
and offered weed. Ben had slept with my sister,
Hannah. There was the lurking idea that if I
weren´t me, maybe I´d sleep with him too.
Years later on another visit to Boston he took
me to Crane´s Beach. When I arrived at his
house he told me a story about how he had been
nude at the beach and a woman came up and
said what a gorgeous body he had and took
pictures of him and they had sex. He showed me
the pictures. He told me about volunteering on a
hotline for people in some kind of trouble. That
turned out later to be where he met his wife,
Pam. Crane´s Beach was deserted, this was the
off-season. We trudged for miles. Ben loved our
family. He was the only child of driven Israeli
intellectuals with health problems. On the way
back, we got fried clams at a famous place. His
gas gauge said empty. He said we could make it
all the way back to Crane´s Beach and home
again on what was left. Ben had an exaggeration
problem; my brother says it´s better these days.
When we got to my sister´s in Manhatten there
was a letter waiting for me on the kitchen table.
It was from Kibbutz Aliyah. It said, in effect,
We didn´t realize you´re only sixteen. You can´t
travel to Israel by yourself. You have to wait till
you´re seventeen. That was two months and
eighteen days away. I couldn´t go back to
Chicago. I´d said goodbye. I had my El Al ticket
and everything. My sister thought up a plan. We
called a man we used to baby-sit for in Chicago,
an Israeli who worked for Kibbutz Aliyah. He
lobbied for me to be able to go at the beginning
of March. I thought it was a real coup. I snuck
into the NYU job office with my sister´s ID, and
got a job as a receptionist for Frank T.
Richardson Jr. and Frank T. Richardson III, in
the penthouse of the Graybar Building, right
next to Grand Central. You entered through a
glass door from the station. Even then there
were homeless, with bags, on benches. It was
1976. The Richardsons did consulting with big
government guys. They knew all these power
brokers in corporations and the military. My
favorite part of the job was cutting out
newspaper articles and pasting them into a
scrapbook. When I typed I made mistakes on
draft after draft. The elder Richardson would
peer at me over his bifocals. I knew he didn´t
know why I made so many mistakes. I couldn´t
read when I was scared. I still can´t. This poses
quite a problem since my main thing is writing
and reading. But then I was just trying to get to
Israel. And fill in the time and support myself
while I waited, not be a burden, not go back to
Chicago. My uncle Max was another kindly,
distant man. He had taken my sister under his
wing when she moved there to attend NYU.
He and his wife Charlotte. I know them a lot
better now. Max was very moral, unlike my dad,
who was more of a system-worker, system-hater.
He thought it wrong for me to sneak in and get the
job. He thought it even worse when I quit six
weeks later, with a sob story about how my
mom had high blood pressure. She did, but I
wasn´t going back to Chicago to take care of
her. Frank T. III was incredibly concerned. He
was sweet, like a stork. He was sort of my
friend, he liked to talk to me. Actually I don´t
think Ben had even slept with Hannah at this
time, that was later, when I was at Brown and
she had moved into a loft in Soho. That loft was
the real deal. She and Manhatten were
identical--they both were the ultimate insiders.
Anything that she did, anything that Manhatten
did, was right. The loft was big and drafty, she
shared it with a visual artist named Katja. They
kept their kitchen utensils upright, sticking out
of a big paint can. Even my mom, who keeps an
extremely tidy home, loved visiting--my sister
told me how my mother had been sitting in the
area demarcated as living room and had picked
a piece of lint off her sweater. With an
exaggerated, dancerly gesture she let it drop to
the floor. One night when I was visiting we
were woken by a splashing sound. In the
morning there was a huge brown rat drowned in
the toilet. Hannah fished it out by the tail and
put it in a baggie and threw it out. My sister
defined my universe. Unfortunately I was
opposite her in most respects so I was living in a
hostile world that constantly rejected me, it had
to, I was like an infection. My sister cinched a
belt tight around her waist and wore a beret. It
was the late 70s. We took a freight elevator up
to her home. Outside, in the spring, there could
be cobblestones, daffodils. On the Lower East
Side lived Lawrence. He was the main reason
she had transferred, followed him from Wash.
U. in St. Louis. He lived in a tenement and
cooked us pasta with fresh clams he´d caught,
taking them from a big bucket in the fridge. He
thought I was just as beautiful as Hannah, he
thought we looked similar. He talked about
painting us sometime. I suspected him of saying
these things out of pity--everyone knew
Hannah was the desirable one, that´s why she
had all the boyfriends--but still I loved him for
it. Later in D.C. when Hannah had already
moved to Germany he came to a party I helped
throw, I was doing an internship there. He was
picking up on a ditzy blonde and then also, it
seemed, on me. He sat close on the couch after
the blonde left, offered to give me a driving
lesson, then barked at me when I stalled his car
and drove through a red light. I kind of hated
him after that. But my sister defended him.
When I ended up living with her for those
weeks before Israel, I see now it was as much
for her as for me. She was lonely. Plus I had the
job so I could help with rent. I slept on the
couch. The roommate was an overweight albino
asthmatic who ate only Entemann´s chocolate
cake, milk, and peanut butter sandwiches. The
apartment was tiny, the shower was a standing
plastic box in the roommate´s bedroom. Hannah
and I fought loudly every day till the wheezing
roommate sat us down at the kitchen table and
told us we had to stop. We got mad at her and
we also stopped fighting instantly. The rest of
the visit was completely pleasant. We marveled.
Hannah went to Chicago for a week and the
roommate was away too. Spring break? I said
I´d be fine, we lived just off Bleeker, people
around day and night. Hannah said darkly,
You´re loneliest in a crowd. It was exactly like a
curse. I had a horrific week, trying to listen to
soul music on the radio. Trying to know what to
do.
*
[______________]
I between
each snowflake
dance
(invent) a road from shoulder to
shoulder
keep the rose
petals in the showy bowl