Anyone but my mother might have been wary of placing me in a competitive place like Hunter, where the threat loomed of heaping even greater strain on an already oversensitized and alienated psyche like mine. The effect, as it turned out, was just the opposite. To be suddenly thrown into the midst of twenty-five girls as smart or smarter than I was, and even more talented, infused me with an ecstatic new sense of my own ordinariness. Girls like Mary Beck, who at thirteen could play “Claire de Lune” and the “Moonlight Sonata” till tears welled in our eyes, girls whose braininess and genius made me glow with the relief of a burden shared, a burden lifted. I can never remember envying their gifts. I can remember feeling only as though at last I had become the little sister in the protection of bigger ones, of girls who, even at my age or a little older, were awesomely worldly wise.
So I let down my guard and I took a friend almost as one might take a lover, with my whole heart, a girl who, for once, did not either fear or patronize me. She was Carole, a big, rather full-bodied redhead with kindly freckles and inappropriately stern, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a sweet maternal way that reminded me of Meg in Little Women. Carole seemed at least three years beyond anyone in the class in terms of physical development and already had impressive breasts in the seventh grade. She was like a mother hen, nestling me under her wing. We wrote each other long, candid, gushing letters over the two following summers, she from Queens where she lived, and I, now, from Westchester.
It was Carole, when we finally entered the eighth grade, who told me the facts of life. She could have told me in the seventh, she said, but had postponed it to spare me some of the shock she knew was inevitable. I think I strangled a cry in the lunchroom. I wasn’t sure but that I might have preferred being pushed down onto the subway tracks. I did not feel spared. I think that even had I not been mute with outrage, as I was for days, I was incapable of phrasing the central question for me, which was how so savage, so animal an act could have anything to do with the transcendent emotions I had already experienced in my fantasies of love.
Had I asked, she might have actually tried to tell me. She might actually have succeeded. Perhaps my retrospect enlarges her, but I thought her very wise. As my fury abated, I sensed the greatness of her pity for me, the greatness of her sense of the pity of it all, both of us having come face to face with a knowledge she knew I did not want to know, because she had not wanted to know it either, once. But she did know, and it was as if she had made it to still another horizon, a place where you can finally take in the stunning wisdom for a girl that love can be an emotion of the body as well as of the soul. I did not yet want to know it for myself, let alone to think it was related to something my parents felt for one another. I did not yet connect it with the moans I sometimes heard in the night, now that the thin bedroom wall was all that divided my room from theirs.
Someday I would go there, where Carole had gone, if not now. And yet how merciful for so friendship-stunted a child as I was that I would be led to that crossing by a friend as motherly as Carole and as profoundly, purely, shameless. My own mother, for all her sweet moan, could never, in the shame of her body, have told me. At least not then, and then was when I needed to know.
And the more merciful, perhaps, because it had been so chancy. I should not even have continued into the eighth grade with Carole. Schools like Hunter were meant to be among the treasured rewards of city life, off-limits to children of the suburbs like me, now officially resident in New Rochelle. A hard rule, but enshrined in law. And yet there had never seemed to be any question about my staying. I had never been asked by my parents if I preferred not to lie about where I lived, not to rise in the dark and travel two hours to get to school, not to spend my afternoons in the dingy room at the back of the store trying to do my homework until my father was ready to close up and take me home. Whether I might simply prefer to attend St. Gabriel’s in New Rochelle, as my sister did. A touch of ink on the office file and I had simply moved downtown to 326 East 78th Street, where my Aunt Carmelina’s family of Alayas legitimately showed up in the phone book.
Thus Hunter had me straight through the eighth grade, in spite of the law, in spite of the lie. When it came time to think about high school, I followed, still blind and unresisting, my mother’s relentless script for my future brilliant career. I lied my way through another competitive exam and began my ninth grade in the fall of 1948 as an art student under the illustrious aegis of the High School of Music & Art.
Had I actually been asked what I wanted, I’m not sure what I would have said. It was a choice like Bartleby’s, and I would have preferred not to make it. I think I knew that there was no bearing to lose these fugitive life-chances, even if—especially if—we could not afford to keep them honestly. And yet I could never accept the simple expediency of this fiction. I suffered it new and stinging every fearful, sneaking day. It is a hard thing for a child to lie. It was a hard thing for me to lie and still believe that in every other use of my mind I loved the truth—that the truth loved me, as I thought more passionately each day. And yet I was a good child, a dutiful child. We never discussed it. I learned to nurture this strange, regrettable gift my parents had made me of a certain stupid courage and an even more certain cunning. And some little window of clarity about hard choices, which in time might have opened on a daybreak of readiness for life, instead slapped quickly shut on a dutiful daughter’s abject little soul.
Carole’s small window on friendship—that too seemed closed now. Friends were a danger, every one a potential informer. There were strict protocols of secure intelligence: Never to bring friends home, never to speak to them of your house or your street or, God forbid, your garden—city apartments did not have gardens. Never to visit them, lest they want to visit you in return and wonder why they couldn’t, when you lived so smack in the middle of the East Side—well, didn’t you? What would you tell them? What would you stammer? Oh, God, to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and never to go to parties in the city—because anywhere you went after commuter hours was a thousand miles from home, because if you stayed too late you might miss the last train. And what would you say to friends’ parents if they offered to drive you home?
No pajama parties. No sleeping over. Never, ever.
Actually, that was the only codicil of the Rule not strictly driven by the logic of the lie. Quite the opposite, since sleeping at a friend’s after the theater or a party was the single most transparent, rational solution to nearly all the other problems—except the returned invitation, which theoretically could be fudged.
And yet I lived more rigidly by this law than by any other part of the Rule, just because it was not meant to be rational, and certainly not transparent, but on the face of it plain, draconian, and opaque. Opaque to me. Generations have trod and trod, understanding what it meant, knowing it was about sex. But girls were not to understand, for breaking the chivalric code to tell them would tarnish the very innocence that made them worth protecting.
Still, by some miracle of intense mutual need there were girls who did become my friends, more memorable and perhaps more loyal because they had to be so few, and because out my dark secret (somehow more ominously illegal than some of the secrets other girls kept) would inevitably pop. And then the very frisson of it would become our bond. There was Letizia, for one. I befriended her in our first year at Music & Art because she was a brilliant painter and I had to tell her so. I could not say why she loved me, since I did not feel very lovable. Perhaps, I thought, she loved to be loved. She returned the compliment with such a funny, winsome, benevolent air that it felt lavish—theatrical—like the affection of a movie star.
She loved my name, of course. Any Letizia, captive in this New World of names, would. And she was captive, an Italian, a Pitigliani, from Rome—“Italian Italian,” as Italian Americans say. Italianness connected us, but to me it was a different kind of Italianness, a clue perhaps to the mystery I had not yet decoded, and she herself unlike any Italian girl I had ever known, a kind of Funny Girl, loping and tall, all shoulders and elbows and knees, moving her thin body both as spaciously and as awkwardly as a failed ballerina.
My father endorsed our friendship as flattering and safe, perhaps someday even useful. Neither she