In Brooklyn, my mother and I lived with a man named Menachem who taught me two sentences in Hebrew: “I love you” and “I need $500.”
Manny’s body was covered in hair as thick as wool, but his skin was slick, smoothed with baby oil. He never left the house without Afrin nasal spray and toothpicks. He drove a station wagon with buckets of paint, turpentine, and brushes cluttering the backseat. On the way to school, he always warned, “Whatever you do in the dark comes out in the light,” as if he knew a secret of mine that he would ferret out. But I was 10 then; I read Judy Blume and wore mismatched socks. I’d already learned how to keep my secrets hidden away, safe.
We lived in an apartment building in Borough Park, home to the few Italian families who refused to leave as the Hasid snapped up all the property below New Utrecht. Slowly edging their way into Bensonhurst but realizing their limits. They transformed 13th Avenue to a Glatt Kosher wonderland. Bakeries and their perfume of sweet apricot and bitter dates. Hamantaschen to celebrate Purim. Challah blooming in the back on metal trays. Doors shackled shut before the alarms blared at sundown. Shabbos. Storefronts covered in Hebrew and shop owners speaking Yiddish. They did what I have forever failed to do—make a place a home. A totem to their faith and history.
What was left was Carvel and Gino’s pizza—neighborhood strongholds. A community thundering, small voices shouting, we will never leave.
The women traveled in pairs, wheeling their strollers, every inch of skin cloaked and concealed. The men smelled of wool and wet cotton, men who tolerated our existence as long as we didn’t mix. As long as their children stayed away from the goyim who wore shorts in the summertime. Children who were all bare skin, wet hair, and flushed cheeks. We wrenched the johnny pumps until the streets flooded with water. A river that would make us clean until the men came out with their wrenches and sealed them shut. Some days, it would go on like this—two men with wrenches causing and ceasing the floods.
But they hated Manny. He was a stain, a humiliation with paint marks on his face and the beer he drank in the car. The Hebrew he refused to speak. Because he would wrap himself up in the American flag and fuck and eat and snort coke and drink and forget the wife and children he left behind in Tel Aviv.
I was a child who found it impossible to make friends. A girl who built herself a fortress, book by book. A girl who crept out onto the fire escape in her bedroom to watch the squirrels burrow in the trees. To peer into the windows of strangers. To sleep on iron grates and wake to a night streaked with stars. To wake to strangers leaning over your sleeping body. To wake to your mother’s shrieks and wails and scream, to a bed smashing against the wall that separated you. To wake on a subway in your mother’s lap as she pressed the money she stole deeper into her pockets. To wake to a snow-covered television and a plume of smoke wafting from the kitchen. Silence when Manny left for weeks at a time to Atlantic City.
Silence when your mother’s bed no longer quaked. Silence as the neighbors peered out their doors as you dragged your mother down six flights of stairs into a waiting taxi into the night into an emergency room because she couldn’t breathe (I can’t breathe), and miss, can you sign for your mother here, here, and here? Strangers tap, taping their nose. The snow on the television climbing up the Everest that was your mother’s nose.
How do I explain this was the last time I felt that New York was home? That being a child mothering her mother in Brooklyn was when I felt safe? Years later, I’ll sit across from a woman who will use words like childhood trauma, survival mentality, and I’ll laugh so hard it becomes a cackle that becomes a river—a johnny pump wrenched open flooding the room.
Before we loaded up the station wagon with trash bags and fled into the night. Before we barreled down the L.I.E. and my mother would wear a uniform and our basement apartment would become flooded because the boys above kept the tub running and one of their children would nearly drown in it, a teacher clasped a silver bracelet adorned with seashells around my wrist. A teacher who would later be fired for showing camp films to students. A pyre of bodies burning. Gas in the showers. Sheets of skin draped over walking skeletons.
A teacher who taught me about masks. How you could pretend to be someone else, somewhere else; you could live an entire life in your head. To survive. To not succumb to all that history. To keep you moving through your day without screaming.
And I’d spend most of my life like this. Affixing masks over my face. Being Lisa in private and Felicia in public to the point where I felt the distance between my given name and body widening like a chasm that couldn’t be crossed or closed. Now, after all this time, I look back at the lone photograph taken of me, my mother, and my pop on the day of my high school graduation—me turning away from her, me leaning into him, me hoping I could discard our history, that name, like a too-small suit.
And although my pop is the only person who still calls me Lisa, a name given to me as a child because Manny feared the multi-syllabic, I still carry her and the child I used to be into parts of the woman I am now. What’s left is a reconciliation of those two names because neither can be fully discarded or abandoned. They signify a forever divide, a fervent desire to call the space between the real and imaginary home when home was always just beyond my reach.
Decades later, I’m in an office. I play the part of an executive and preen on cue. I am what I’ve built myself to be—author and architect, frightened child and confident adult, poor and monied. A woman who lives in the nicer part of Brooklyn now.
My editor calls. It’s been a few years since my book was published and she tells me she received a call from my mother. A woman, who, in a single conversation oscillated between calling me Lisa and Felicia. A woman who threatened to sue me because I told the truth, had the last word. A woman who hated me because I was who she wanted to be. My editor tells me I have to contain this, deal with this, because my mother is a cancer.
When we finally speak, I’m in Brooklyn. She has a teenager daughter and a new family now. Her voice is raspy, smoke-filled although she tells me she quit it all—the smoke, the drink, the coke—and she’s a stay-at-home mother who crafts and volunteers. I imagine her running a brush through her daughter’s fine hair while she ripped at mine because the colors of our fathers’ skins diverged. I imagine her holding her daughter close while we sat at opposite ends of a table calculating the space between us.
She tells me about her daughter, and I ask her name. When she says it, I mute the phone and laugh because it was the name she considered giving me. A hand-me-down name. But what sets my teeth on edge is not the name but how consistently she uses it. She still refers to me as Lisa or Felicia, depending on her mood or the situation, believing these names to be flip-sides of the same coin. Forever dividing me until I interrupt her.
I am cold and complete when I tell her my name is not Lisa. I am cold and complete when I tell her I don’t love her. How I’ve spent the first half of my life frightened of her and the second half recovering from her. How it’s impossible to make a mother and daughter whole. We are parts incomplete. I am parts incomplete.
I don’t think I’ll ever love you, I say as my mother cries into the phone. It’s Felicia who is cold and complete when she sets the receiver down. It’s Lisa who opens her mouth in her home in Brooklyn, decades later and miles away from Borough Park, to scream but no sound comes out.
Very seldom do I read anything that forces me to slow down, to get it all, to avoid missing a single word. Thankfully, you give me those opportunities. This was truly an outstanding read!
Wow Felicia, this is amazing. Kinda don’t know what else to say, it was that good. Look forward to more!