Occasionally, we’d walk to City Island east of Throgs Neck surrounded by the Long Island Sound where restaurants served up fried oysters, clams, and eels. I thought the world consisted of the Manhattan skyline held together with roasted coffee from the Café Bustelo factory—a smell that will forever be enshrined in my memory together with garbage festering in the summer heat.
If I wasn’t playing in the lot, I held court upstairs in our one-bedroom apartment, on cold days sifting through the contents of a toy box that was stored in the foyer, just beneath the dumb-waiter, a door that that been used at some point as a garbage disposal, but now primarily served as a highway for cockroaches, allowing them to make excursions throughout the building. We rarely opened the dumb waiter. Anyway, it had probably been painted shut. The toy box, on the other hand, easily exposed its gifts, which included a stuffed squirrel that my father had given my mother during their courtship days, and as such, was an artifact of love. Then there was a mismatched collection of building blocks and a plastic bag that included a lump of clay, too hard to shape into anything, but nonetheless, still interesting. Next to the toy box was the hallway closet (my parent’s closet) with a box of comic books and a wine-colored velvet bathrobe. On days when I was sick, my mother allowed me to use it as a cover.
I wasn’t excited about starting kindergarten at P.S. 48. After teaching for thirty years, Mrs. Burke had a reputation of being a tyrant. She wore printed smocks and suffocated her hair in a net. I didn’t know why. Her hair was thin and I could see her scalp. She believed in disciplining children by making them stand in the darkest corner of the clothing closet. The only happy thing I remember about her class is looking for the first time into a kaleidoscope. I also remember, Frankie, a boy whose parents owned the Garrison Bakery. He had a birthmark in the middle of his forehead that frightened me.
Leaving home every morning for kindergarten made me sick to my stomach. I was afraid about being cast out into the kindergarten of the world when I was perfectly happy to sit in the apartment and examine the many shoes that had been pushed to the back of the closet, including red and black galoshes, all of which had a rubbery smell and still not dried out from the last snow storm, spent time with my box of crayons, and mourned for each one that had been broken and was no longer whole. I felt insecure in being pushed outside the apartment where I remember learning to walk holding on to the arm of a chair and scouting my way to a glass table in the living room, and my joy in making it there. I was a private child who shared a room with my sisters. Leaving the security of the apartment to attend school was an excruciating experience. As the youngest child, I was afraid of failure, frustrated by a lack of ability, not understanding that it took years to develop what I wanted. I roller-skated down the hill by myself when all the other children were gone.
–to be continued