A beauty
That daring dreams
Have wrought—
They had told us a former student had composed the song, which only made it the more secretly endearing. Quaint, laughable in its way, no one would have denied how it stirred us to our depths just the same, how it challenged voice students all over the auditorium to more spectacular, bravura harmonies every time, making a thundering chorale out of our single, inconsequential little voices. I think we had come to believe we were defending that realm above, whatever it was.
Judy did not process the pain of this mortal wound the same way I did. Almost nothing had affirmed my existence so consistently from infancy as my little talent, that once astonishingly precocious coordination of eye and hand that had got me to Music & Art. My inner child was an artist, and I felt as my own mother might have about her, righteously outraged, burning with a flame that was not in the least hard and gemlike but bituminous, red-hot, and smoking, wishing for the power of witchcraft, for command of the evilest evil-eye, to prove to Miss Ridgeway unequivocally and forever how wrong she was.
Judy’s inner artist-child simply giggled.
“How can you?” I implored.
“Wicked Witch of the East,” she muttered roguishly, giggling again.
Judy, like Letizia, had a celluloid idol, but hers was Judy Garland. She had seen Wizard eight times before I met her, in the days before VCRs when seeing a feature film again and again meant catching every rerelease in every third-run little movie house all over town. She lived her life as if it shifted periodically into the screenplay, an intricate, whimsical weave of real and unreal and surreal, maddening and enchanting, hugging her Toto and trying to decide whether it was ever going to be Kansas anymore.
This was whenever she wasn’t wandering in the country of Pooh-sticks and Piglet. She was big, way taller than I. Unlike Winnie-the-Pooh, whom she adored, she fought her weight with the strenuous practice of yoga and dance. But Judy could never be fully strenuous. She combined her amazonic proportions with the tenderness of a Cereal Goddess, protector of small stray creatures, preferably warm and furry ones, which she might take into her den and feed with an eyedropper until they opened their eyes and began to locate the cream on their own.
Maybe I was one. We had met in bio, where in our first weeks dishy Mr. Rappaport, in what I suspect was a ploy to deflect the crushes of his more nubile girl-students in the upper rows (every one of whom would have walked barefoot to China for a touch of his nether lip), had pretended to have a crush on me. It had become a running class joke that both mortified and uplifted me. For even if he didn’t really love me—and I never allowed myself the wonder of dreaming that dream—his fictional fondness was kind, unmocking, a way of seeing me at a time when to be seen was a little like a life raft in the ocean of my bewildered and lonely selfhood. His gestures seemed so tender and genuine that they actually baffled and confused my classmates. And so they were forced to see me too, as something more than a nervous little ferret too good at math for an artist, who had maybe had one helluva good summer at fat camp.
But over that winter, in something like a female conspiracy of my mother and a pride of Spagnola aunts, there came a singular ritual of initiation into womanhood for me, and my long hair—still woven into the coarse brown braids I’d been known for—was finally cut off at the classy Richard Hudnut salon on Central Park South. For them it must have meant a great deal that I’ve forgotten. I remember only that it seemed to transfigure me for him. He must have seen, suddenly, a soulful little woman sitting there where I used to sit, a Latin lovely-to-be with an oversized mouth and dark-shaded bedroom eyes, and that new mass of soft dusky curls around her face. Looking down at me from way up on his lab-table perch, he uttered, “Oh, Flavia,” in so melting a way that it must have checked my breathing for a full, red, blinding minute and made the big girls in the back swoon with envy.
Judy was not among them. She had befriended me months ago, after all, when I was still one of those small stray creatures needing an eyedropper. She didn’t particularly care for me to bloom, or rather didn’t care if I bloomed or didn’t, locked in as a sort of Piglet to her Pooh. I forgave her. I didn’t have to forgive her. I understood. It was a kind of motherliness she had nurtured in the misery of a lonely boarding-school childhood before her own mother had finally, irrevocably, divorced her father and reclaimed her, brought her back home to the two-bedroom apartment they had to share with her old and dying grandparents, who were stolid, unregenerate Christian Scientists of upright British stock.
Judy wanted to dance with me now through worlds she had never been allowed to enjoy as a child, worlds whose blisses needed sharing. I didn’t mind. There had been plenty of childhoods missing from my life too. I think she soon came to see—and to like—that there was some peculiar something in me independent of her waifish projections, perhaps some courage to stay afloat on my own disorienting little ocean. I took from her a certain recipe for play, for skewering reality. In exchange, she found in me some key to accepting it, some seriousness and ambition she was willing to consider respecting.
Judy lived with her mother on East 81st Street, just off Lexington, a sunny fifth-floor apartment mere blocks from where I was supposed to be living. At first she was a study of puzzlement and curiosity that I made such a mystery about where home actually was. She was thrilled with the intrigue of the awful truth. Much less so her mother, Muriel, part Cereal Goddess’s Great Mother and part Mature Parent. Muriel in fact was the Mature Parent. In a tiny storage room off the parlor in which you could barely have fit a bathtub, Muriel sequestered herself to write a Hearst-syndicated column that offered advice on the sensible raising of children to every storm-tossed parent in the country three times a week, every week of the year. She encouraged her daughter to take this reputation seriously, probably because she was having a little trouble taking it quite seriously herself.
Yet Muriel lamented my predicament with a certain jaded total innocence of judgment. She herself was always short of money and knew what it meant to struggle on, to keep up an East Side appearance in her case while living from hand to mouth, nursing her Aged Ps through their long, slow dying. She measured my situation, and of course my parents’, as a sad fact of life. Maybe she thought a striver like me would have a ballasting influence on Judy, who might otherwise fly off to the tops of honey-trees.
She wished we could spend more time together. “You are always running off to some train or other,” she would say in her plummy near-British way. Her annoyance was only half self-mocking as she leapt up from her armchair and fluttered off to the kitchen. I loved how she looked when she strode away, always dressed in a pale-colored jersey gown of some flowing variety, as if she were just stepping off a temple pediment.
Judy chided her. It was no use. She was never ever even to suggest I sleep over, no matter how convenient. And Muriel would chortle in that chesty way that came from smoking too many Pall Malls when she wrote her columns.
“You know he is afraid,” she’d say, speaking as blandly of my father as if she were reading a fortune cookie, “that you will bring him an illegitimate child.”
So much for the opacity of the Rule.
6
In most cultures, just to be an adolescent girl is to be confused about the safety of knowledge. In me, a girl at the American midcentury, with part of my personal consciousness already under a gag rule, the confusion may have bordered on hysteria.
Self-knowledge, elusive at best, was for me over the rainbow. I knew desire, boon friend, boon enemy. I knew it as ravaging sometimes as the fever that had gripped me in the summer of my menarche. It clung like a second skin to everything I wanted to know, to do, as if knowing could not stop before the locked door of the body, as if all knowledge were carnal. Everything except the crystal theorems of geometry or the majestic and imperturbable balance of chemical equations—even book-stuff as well-upholstered as Vanity Fair—seemed to demand