I can’t imagine her not being in my life, my childhood friend, our story recounted so many times about how on the first day of school she’d asked to borrow a pencil when I’d turned around and handed Norma my extra one. We fit like a genome pair, exchanging what we lacked, and enjoying all the different ways we fit.
By the time I’d met Norma, I was over a fear that lived at the bottom of my stomach about being plucked from my home and into a classroom filled with 28 strangers who, I thought, smelled funny and were not to be trusted. I saw no reason why I should be shipped off to school, although my mother and sisters worked hard to make it sound exciting.
My kindergarten teacher Mrs. Burke had taught eons of school children, including my sisters. A bitter, mean woman known to punish insubordinate children by locking them in the clothing closet, she always wore a smock and tucked her hair into a net that drooped over her forehead. The milk she served during morning break was always sour. Thankfully, first-grade had become easier, largely because Mrs. Klein was cheery and smelled of perfume. She didn’t scare me, and by the time second-grade had rolled around, I’d become more confident. But I still felt insecure about so many things, the youngest in a family of much older three sisters who viewed me as a pest and a burden, particularly on the weekend when my mother enlisted them to take me places. But my favorite place to play was in the lot that adjoined our apartment building, studying weeds that presented themselves at different times of the year—chicory, dandelions, and clover—or befriending stray dogs that ventured into the lot hoping to find something to eat in the garbage.
The lot was my sanctuary. It was where I strained mica rocks into rusted cans and hid the results inside a wall that divided our block from the street below, thinking the mica dust had magical properties. I spent afternoons forging a pathway down a steep hill, holding on to the side of trees and rocks, didn’t understand why my older sisters were absorbed with boys, hair, and make-up, sat on a granite rock surveying what I considered to be my own Wonderland.
The idea of being thrown in with strangers made me nervous. I felt school would not welcome me, and I mistrusted whatever I was supposed to learn there.
Most of the kids on the block had been born in an earlier baby booming so there was no one my age to play with, except for Gail who lived on the other side of our apartment building, but she had moved to California long before I had begun school. Then there was my favorite doll, Judy, whose head had self-destructed into a pile of sawdust. Karen lived next door, but she also had moved away.
On the day I met Norma, I carried a briefcase containing a new pair of scissors, glue spread from a rubber nozzle, and a pencil case. Mrs. Hershovitz told us to fold a piece of paper into thirds. I tried to make the columns as even as possible. She asked us to write our names at the top right-hand corner of the page. I printed my name, concentrating hard on each letter, when I felt a tap, turned around. “Do you have an extra pencil?” she whispered. “I forgot to bring one.”
I zipped open my pencil case. Except for a runt resting at the bottom, there was only one other sharpened pencil, and I was using it. But this girl was in great distress with a pleading expression on her face that told me I was her last resort.
During recess she caught up with me. She was taller by a few inches and had a smile with large and even teeth, black brows and eyes that contained a hazel dot inside each one. “My name is Norma,” she said.
She had a fluffy brown braid that fell on one side of her face, about a half head taller than me; brown eyes like myself, but with hazel dots that glistened whenever she smiled. She liked to eat the whites of hard-boiled eggs, and I only the yolk, and so we shared our lunch boxes. She wore her knee socks straight up and they never fell down.
It was around 1955, not quite yet post McCarthyism in the United States, and before the all out civil rights era. But the Korean War was over and someone named Dwight D. Eisenhower served as President of the United States. I was a little Jewish girl whose parents had arrived in New York City between World War I and II. My mother gathered my thick hair into pigtails on either side of my face. Norma had not been in either my kindergarten or first-grade class; previously, she had attended private school and recently moved to the neighborhood with her family.
The area where we lived was mostly a Jewish follicle on one side of Hunts Point Avenue, and Puerto Rican on the other with a few black families in between. A single black family, the superintendent on the ground floor, lived in our apartment building. Mr. Davis wore denim overalls. Sometime I saw him swabbing the lobby with a strong solution of Pine Sol. Mrs. Davis once invited me into their apartment. They had a young son named Jeffrey.
I remember him as a taciturn boy who refused to look me in the eyes. Mrs. Davis had told me on one of my visits, “boys put out fires and girls water plants.” She offered me a cookie. I can remember my mother saying that Mrs. Davis had told her we were the only family who didn’t call them names.
My guess is that had Norma had been white, we’d would’ve never met. Her father worked as a probation officer and her mother worked for a Jewish social service agency. My mother had finished high school and worked at home. Growing up, after his father had died, my father had dropped out of high school to help support his family. Norma’s godparents ran the first black-owned cab company in Harlem. My parents didn’t own a car. On the weekend, Norma went to dance lessons while I played in the lot, but in those dandelion years, we found each other. .
I could tell her anything and she would tell me exactly what she thought. She was the first person who listened to me. She had strong opinions about everything and wasn’t shy about expressing them with wit and sarcasm emphasized by a single raised eyebrow. We matched each other in our love of language, read and discussed books, spent weekends together taking the subway to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, and to any other museum just as long as we could get there with a subway token. We went ice-skating at the Wollman rink in Central Park and snuck into the Ritz-Carlton to use the bathroom. She joined my family during the summer at Orchard Beach where my father, an amateur hand-balancer, would hoist her over his head as he did all his daughters. I went to her house in the days before Christmas and helped her mother in the solemn ceremony of laying silver icicles, one at a time, on the branch of their Christmas tree. She introduced me to her favorite dish: an American cheese sandwich and she ate my mother’s Hungarian stuffed cabbage. We were everything best friends are. Within all that we knew that it was unusual for black and white girl to be close friends, but reveled in the fact that were our own example. Our classmates and teachers accepted us. We danced to Chubbie Checker’s Twist.
C’mon baby, let’s do the twist. Round and round and up and down we go…
“What do you think about Mrs. Hershovitz?” she asked me about our second grade teacher.
“She has nice handwriting.” I’d copied the way she wrote a capital L.
Every morning I stopped at Norma’s house and we walked to school together. In the morning, Mrs. Bogues opened the door and greeted me. “Norma, are you ready? Lenore’s here.” But Norma was always in various states of getting ready: either almost ready, or about ready, or had one last thing to do, which was to brush her hair. “Do you mind waiting?” her mother would ask in clipped tones so that Norma could hear every word, “or shall I tell her that you’ve gone?” I always waited, except every so often I’d get fed up with sitting on her doorstep. “Why can’t you ever be on time?”
We were both stubborn, and she never wanted to conform to any notion of what I thought she should or shouldn’t be doing. Sometimes I’d get so angry; I’d walk home by myself along “the boy’s way,” a longer route that circumvented her house. But after a day or so, we’d make up.
Once again, we walked arm-in-arm to and from school, and depending upon the route we took, refueled ourselves at different candy stores. Our favorite stopping place was Nate’s with its multitude of goodies that included Dots, blobs of sugar that peeled away from strips of paper; tiny wax bottles of sugar water that we opened by biting off the top, and Bazooka gum, pink as a tongue with a comic strip and fortune folded inside. Around Halloween there were red and black Dracula lips and orange puffs of marshmallows and for Easter, chocolate eggs embossed with frosted curlicues. Come every season there was a new game that swept the neighborhood—Jacks, marbles, pick-up sticks, hula hoops, and Spaldeen balls that were always in season and could bounce six feet into the air.
Most of the time, I found making conversation with other people painful, but not with Norma. We laughed until our sides hurt, assumed that we were both meant for greatness, and that the dull brick and vacant lots of our neighborhood would not always circumscribe our lives.
“Richard looks like he woke up with an elephant sitting on his head,” Norma said. Richard was a boy in our third grade class who was slightly cross-eyed.
“Maybe we should give him an ice pack.” Our classmates viewed us a force to be reckoned with. Few others gained entry to the citadel of our friendship that bolstered me in difficult social situations. Unlike Norma, who was cheerful and chatty with a ready stock of deadly imitations of our classmates, I clammed up around other people. While she spoke, I remained silent. I also admired that she had godparents.
Most Jewish families didn’t have such accouterments. Uncle George had been born in Trinidad and Chappy, in North Carolina. Norma advised me that Chappy and Uncle George would take care of her if her parents ever died. I didn’t know if anyone had been assigned to take care of me under similar circumstances. Her Uncle George had started the first African-American owned taxi cab fleet in Harlem. Chappy was a bird-like woman, always immaculately dressed in pastel wool colors and liked to sport pillbox hats, years ahead of Jacqueline Kennedy.
Her father worked as a probation officer on the Grand Concourse. Later, he became the first African-American Senator who served New York State representing Harlem and the Upper West Side. Like my father, he was a tall, elegant, and imposing man. Whenever he opened the wrought iron gate to their house, he addressed his daughter in a basso profundo voice. “Norma, my dear. Lenore is here to see you.”
Norma had a brother several years her junior. I had older sisters. Our friendship healed that solitary gap for both of us.
My father worked six days a week at his shop near Bellevue Hospital making orthopedic shoe supports. Almost every weekend of the year he went to Orchard Beach in the northeast section of the Bronx, low-budget entertainment for families who swam in the polluted waters of the Long Island Sound and walked along the boardwalk eating a rice pudding and hot dogs. On weekends we patrolled the beach for empty beer bottles, collecting ten cents on each return, the smell of ammonia inside super-heated glass.
Norma joined my family at Orchard Beach where we ate egg sandwiches. My father, an amateur hand balancer, taught her how to do a birdie, to point her toes in the air. We loved picking lilacs growing at the side of an abandoned synagogue. Surrounded by concrete buildings, we longed to steal beauty back into our lives.
Norma was African-American and I was white, but that reality didn’t loom large for us, a passing fact to which others ascribed significance. Our families did not stand in the way of our friendship, but encouraged it.
On Christmas, I went to Norma’s house to help decorate her family’s tree. Her mother was particular about layering each shimmering foil icicle individually on a branch, taking hours and many glasses of eggnog to complete the project. Mrs. Bogues worked at the Jewish Community Center and also knew about Jewish holidays. On occasion, our families socialized. I recall a picnic with generous helpings of fried chicken and stuffed cabbage.
“Mmm,” was my mother remarked as she munched on a wing. “How do you fry chicken?”
Mrs. Bogues wielded a drumstick. “I scrub the pieces with a fresh lemon. Then soak them overnight in buttermilk. How do you make your stuffed cabbage?”
“Use sauerkraut and barley.”
Then there was a Saturday when I attended a Cotillion with Norma at the Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem. It was a formal affair, some kind of coming-out party for the debutantes of Convent Avenue. As someone who was chubby, my taste in clothing leaned toward large shirts, but somehow, I managed to dress for the occasion, a white girl sitting at a table who was asked to dance by a boy. He knew I couldn’t. But everyone was kind, amused by my crossing over into a territory that was obviously foreign to me. During the evening, I experienced how Norma must have felt—surrounded all the time by white classmates in a white world and needing to rely on her charm, looks, and intelligence, of which she had ample supply.
Norma and I instinctively knew that we were different from our peers; our friendship allowed us to cultivate and nurture that sensibility. We reminded people of something that needed to be put right. Wherever we went, we were accepted as an odd couple, didn’t wish to conform, to be shaped by society. As friends, we trusted each other never to let that happen.
If Norma had been white, I believe there’s a good chance we would have never met. While both of our families were from the lower middle class, she was from a more professional background. Her father had graduated from college. Neither of my parents had; my father knew four languages and had studied to become a rabbi at his family’s urging. But once he passed beneath the Statue of Liberty, he felt empowered to make his own decisions.
My mother’s family also was from Hungary. As the youngest, she was born in the United States and worked at home until my father became ill and then drove him to work every day. By that time, we had a car. My parents were secular Jews and taught us by their example to make the world a better place—tikkun olam.
Norma was raised in a lower-key tradition of “uplifting the race,” a knowledge that she would be judged in part, not only by her individual accomplishments, but against the collective backdrop of “her people.” The name of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball, was mentioned in her house with pride.
Child of newly arrived immigrants, I was aware of standing outside a blonde and blue-eyed dominant culture, and knew that my ability with language was my ticket toward gaining acceptance. None of the girls on television or in magazines looked like me: chubby, dark-haired, and brown-eyed.
“What’s so special about us anyway?”
She laughed. “We’re crazy.”
I agreed. “But why is skin color so important?”
“Adults are stupid.”
We knew our friendship was unusual. I also knew that skin color was important. When adults looked at us, they saw an African-American girl standing next to a white girl. We saw each other without the filter of race. We viewed each other through the prism of our friendship. This was the late fifties and toward the end of McCarthyism, when it was no longer required for children to hide beneath school desks in nuclear bomb drills. More families talked about moving to places like New Jersey and Long Island, even to California, the home of Disneyland.
In school, we moved through the IGC’s, short for “Intellectually Gifted Children.” Those were the days in the New York City public school system when students were tracked into different achievement groups. We were aware of being assigned the best teachers and going on the best field trips, but as part of our own sense of noblesse oblige, did not flaunt our assumed superiority. We benefitted from an outstanding public school education and served as each other’s study partner, crammed for tests, and helped each other to memorize dates in history. Mrs. Langberg, our beloved sixth grade teacher, engaged us with books and stimulating projects.
In junior high school, our homeroom teacher introduced us to the acronym MYOB (mind your own business). Our first assignment was to learn how to spell her name. Norma did an outstanding imitation, waving her arms, or what Mrs. Bogdavich referred to as “gesticulating.”
We loved the rhythm of language, particularly Norma, who had a sarcastic streak and an eyebrow that she could arch at will. When we became old enough, we took the subway to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and spent hours in the Egyptian wing of the museum or viewing the sculptures of Rodin, or the extensive French Expressionist collection with paintings from Gauguin, Van Gogh, Renoir, and Rousseau. Norma was particularly fond of the Museum of the City of New York with its focus on the Dutch founding fathers. I liked going to the Museum of Modern Art and sitting in the sculpture garden. We walked up and down Fifth Avenue, went ice-skating at Wollman Memorial Park, and grabbed a counter seat at Chock Full O’Nuts for a cup of hot chocolate or a slice of their raisin bread with cream cheese. On weekends, she took classes at the June Taylor Dance Studio. I went to the library or walked beneath the El, the elevated along Westchester Avenue, and waited for her to return.
Both of us were sheltered within the tent of loving parents, but also afforded the freedom to wander everywhere. For my eleventh birthday, Norma and I decided to go the movies downtown. Our parents had given us enough money to buy subway tokens and tickets. We walked along Broadway and found ourselves in Times Square. We didn’t know anything about pimps, prostitutes, and drug dealers; only that the theater tickets seemed cheaper by several dollars along 42ndStreet, and The Sound of Music was on the parental approval list.
“Norma, this theater costs way less.” Buying a ticket here would leave us with more money to do other things in Manhattan.
“How come? What’s wrong?”
“It’s the same movie that’s playing everywhere.” I was always more foolhardy. “Let’s go!”
We bought tickets from a woman who eyeballed us carefully, and tip-toed inside, glanced around to see if it this was a movie theater or a ruse to catch young girls. Inside, the theater was a dark cave. The seats seemed sticky and filled by older men. During the course of the movie, there was a sensation of a high tide lapping at our backs. We were glad to walk out of the theater into the sunshine.
When we returned home, our parents were relieved that we hadn’t been molested. I asked Norma, “What does that mean?” We added the word molested into our growing vocabulary, collecting new words that bombarded us from outside the safety zone of our friendship. As preteens, Norma and I no longer moved with the same fluidity. Our social groupings splintered and swept us along in different directions. Socially, white boys were not interested in dating African-American girls and vice-versa. I And for the first time we had to face the world separately, different from the one we had encountered within the safety zone of our. She was my best friend who’d taught me to see a person before skin color, that is, until we got older and the social norms of society wrenched us apart. There was a new important word to absorb.
Racism.
The sun became a white hole in a cold grey sky.
Holding on to the Fringes of Love
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