Christmas was coming and the war was over—no more black shades or bombs. I could look out of the clear windows and see city people below almost bouncing instead of trudging along. Everything was happy.
I’d seen pictures of dancers called the Rockettes in the newspaper. These lady dancers stood in a straight line and moved their legs all at once, so they looked like a string of paper dolls cut from a single piece of paper that when you shook it out there they were all strung together. The Rockettes were precision dancers, the latest big-city phenomenon. I read that they could kick over their heads and change costumes like lightning, sometimes forty times in one show. To keep up their stamina they ate chocolate and other sweets and never had to go on a diet.
“Daddy, can we go to the Rockettes?” I begged. “Look at their legs.”
“Pretty amazing,” he said.
“Yes, but can we go?” I persisted. “My legs might be like Mommy’s some day.”
“Well, we’ll see, Lynnie,” he said.
I felt pretty.
I often wondered if he suggested the Rockettes excursion to my aunt, who soon invited me to go as a Christmas treat. It was like him to do a thoughtful thing like that when he wasn’t attached to his martini glass.
Radio City Music Hall was enormous and filled with children whose usually immodest voices were hushed. You would love this, I whispered to God. We sat in row fifteen. I counted the rows to pass time, and hardly noticed the man who took the aisle seat to my left. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed his long white beard, sleek and silky—like God’s, not Santa’s. The curtain slowly slowly rose and the lights dimmed. I was spellbound. It wasn’t long before I felt the old man’s hand on my left leg. He began to caress it softly, going further up every time I took his hand away, further up under my brand-new green-and-purple dirndl skirt.
What is he doing?
I knew this was bad, but my skin tingled with pleasure. At the same time I felt paralyzed with terror. I felt as if I had no power and no voice at all. All that moved was my left hand, which like a robot removed his hand—over and over and over.
I never saw the Rockettes.
Going home in the taxi, my aunt gushed about the the show. I listened carefully so I could tell my mother all about it. I couldn’t tell her I’d missed the Rockettes, because I’d seen the bearded old man in the lobby after the show and his fierce beady eyes caught my gaze, paralyzed me the way his touch had, and gave me a message: don’t ever tell. The other reason I didn’t tell was that a new and sharp feeling clutched my gut. It was shame, not the same as hot cheeks and a blush in school if I got the wrong answer, but a full-body blush that didn’t go away.
City buses hissing and taxi horns beeping no longer had their usual lullaby effect as I tried to sleep that night. I might have had visions of lovely ladies’ legs and dreamed them right onto my grown-up dream body. Instead, I felt the old man’s touch. I tried to pray but it felt wooden. All that came out was a dutiful blessing list, then amen. My thumb was still attached so I sucked it raw and finally, finally dozed off. In the morning I no longer felt the old man’s touch but I couldn’t stop thinking about him. My mind demanded that I make sense of this horror; it searched for some place to land and found a memory. I’d overheard my mother say to my father, “What’s wrong with that child? She never says hello to the doorman, dear sweet man. Every morning she just walks on by.” My father gave no answer.
Being nasty to the poor doorman was just my way of trying to be me, and not my mother’s project—perfect and never quite right. Mom’s comment was a thing of the past by three years and nothing unusual for any frustrated parent, but my frightened and needy mind seized on it and turned it against my very soul. Something was wrong with me. It had nothing to do with the doorman, but it did have to do with the shame I felt because my body had felt something my mind didn’t want it to feel. I could no longer get God, my anchor and confidante, to tune in. My spiritual confusion hurt almost worse than self-condemnation because, you see, the old bearded man looked so exactly like my mental image of God. My mind named him the old god-man.
Rationalization is a very poor substitute for the whole truth, but what frightened eight-year-old knows that?
What happened to me? What is wrong with me?
In silence I yearned and hoped my parents would ask or guess that something had happened. I couldn’t tell God about it because God, I believed, had betrayed me. The child in the framed photo was far away. I hung my dirndl skirt in the closet where it would stay till I outgrew it. My mother never asked about it. So I focused on something else—school, especially music class.
Miss Ball, the music teacher, was tall and had a big voice. She wore her hair curled into a bun covered with an almost-invisible hairnet. I loved her with a childlike adoration verging on envy. Miss Ball had become Mrs. Davis over Christmas that year. Things happen over Christmas. But she looked the same so I was sure she would call on me, as usual, to demonstrate my “whole-throated notes.” When I got up to sing, my notes came out squished and ugly. I tried over and over, until finally Miss Ball told me I must have a sore throat and sent me back to my seat. My throat wasn’t sore, just locked. This was another humiliation—a public one. My radical voice change, I decided, must be like Miss Ball becoming Mrs. Davis over Christmas—the same person and not. After the old god-man I was the same girl—and not.
Nothing is wrong with me and I will prove it became my solemn vow, and school my ally and proof text. What mattered now was being good at things. Art was out and now music. But theater and languages, even Latin, proved vow worthy. In fact, Nadine Nash Blackwell, the red-haired drama teacher who was only a little taller than me, the shortest girl in my class, starred me in our fourth-grade pantomime play Cinderella. She coached me to evoke horror on my face so the audience would know without words that Cinderella had spilled an entire bucket of water while scrubbing and was therefore in grave danger. I could act it without feeling it. I’d rather have memorized lines. Memorization was proof of achievement. Still, I had the lead and mattered to Mrs. Blackwell and my theater buff mother.
School success and best friends kept my soul alive. We best friends felt flawless to each other. Together we were allowed to walk to the movies at RKO 86th Street. On the way home my friend Nancy and I were accosted by a group of girls who pulled our hair and snatched our scarves. We got away and ran ourselves breathless. Even after the girls had given up the chase I kept running. I felt a terror almost as keen as what I’d felt in the theater, but this time I could run, and this time I told, something I later regretted because I thought it might have been a factor in my parents’ decision to move to the suburbs, away from the city, where conditions were changing, they said.
We moved to Darien, Connecticut, by the time I turned twelve. Because of social and, I believe, class pressures, my parents also decided that we should summer in Westhampton, Long Island. Twelve is not the best age to move—my school, my city, my friends, my farm, and my pony, all gone. I bet by then I could have taught a whole course in how to mourn without dying of grief—or how to hate your parents and still love them. But I was getting to the age when I had to urgently concern myself with Project Life, which to me meant getting a boy, getting a period, getting some boobs, and getting a best friend—also not bothering God about my plans, or for that matter thinking that God, who never uttered a darn word, was any kind of savior.
I hated Darien, not so much for its social purity, or the fact that, by “gentlemen’s agreement,” Jews were excluded from buying real estate on its shore, or even because there were embarrassing jokes about