Mr. Kaufman
I arrived late to Mr. Kaufman’s math class because I couldn’t find it. Room 462 was written on my schedule next to the very first class of my high school career. I knew it was on the fourth floor, but as I navigated Lafayette High School’s cavernous halls I searched with increasing anxiety. Orientations for incoming students did not exist then as they would for my daughters.
Because I came in after Mr. Kaufman had already started, I waited in the back with the other latecomers until he indicated that we could take a seat. He made a joke about needing a map to get there. We all laughed.
I did not realize it then, but Mr. Kaufman’s humor would make learning math fun. He taught us a cheer that I remember to this day, although I’m not sure what it means: “Two sine cosine/Two cosine sine/Two cosine cosine minus two sine sine.” (Some of us added, “Fight!”)
Mr. Kaufman encouraged me to join the Math Club and called me the tuna fish kid because my mother was still making me sandwiches for lunch. He treated the four female club members just like the 12 boys. He never supported the math-is-for-males stereotype.
When we were juniors, Mr. Kaufman came in a period early without pay, at 8 every morning for an entire semester, so he could teach his best pupils trig. We needed it to complete AP math our senior year, earn college credit and be ready to take calculus our freshman year.
I majored in math because of Mr. Kaufman. His respect for his pupils’ intelligence gave me the confidence to apply to medical school. The skills I learned in his class enabled me to be my husband’s junior accountant after he went into private practice.
As a college professor I channel Mr. Kaufman. Because I respect my students’ strengths, I fiercely push them as far as they can go.
I have yet to invent a cheer for multicultural American literature.
French Medal
I earned the second highest GPA of any female in my high school graduating class of a thousand. This achievement meant I was yearbook co-editor and sat on the stage at commencement.
My mother wanted to know why I didn’t get the French medal like my sister.
My shock and sadness over her disappointment would haunt me. They likely worsened my clinical depression after I quit medical school.
“Depression . . . happens when the child inside gets to a point when they can’t win acceptance with accomplishments any longer” (Rowley).
Open School Day
“Parents should not praise their children,” my mother said. “That is the job of others.”
Whenever my mother returned from Open School Day, I asked that she repeat the consistently wonderful things my teachers said, as if saying the words would somehow make them hers.
At some point, she would get too exasperated to continue.
“Enough!” she yelled.
Not enough for me. I never tired of hearing praise that was lacking at home.
There was no game over with my mother. Never any applause for a job well done.
Shame
I never knew who sent the box. Probably my mother’s cousin.
It contained clothes that no longer fit their previous owner. Clothes that were new to me.
I kept them all, joyfully wearing even those less flattering. (But who cared about fashion then?)
When I was in high school, my mother asked my well-dressed friend if she would pass down her clothes to my nieces. My friend never said anything to my mother, but she told me my mother had some nerve asking that. My friend never did give us any of her clothes.
Shame overwhelmed me, for my mother and for our lower-class existence.
Eventually, I could be angry at my friend.
No Birthday Cake
What little energy my mother had flowed toward my sister and brother and their families.
One year a high school friend came over on my birthday. She was shocked that I had no birthday cake. I wasn’t.
“Only mourning for what . . . [one] missed, missed at the crucial time, can lead to real healing” (Miller “Prisoners” p. 43).
Sacred duty
After my mother’s first stroke, she sat in her nightgown for most of the day doing crossword puzzles at the kitchen table, drinking cup after cup of coffee, never bothering to warm the pot as afternoon became evening.
In the late fall and into early spring, she wore the same pair of stained, blue plaid woolen pants. Neither these nor her faded nightgown were cleaned regularly.
She rarely shampooed. Spared the discipline imposed by a comb, her long graying hair falling wherever it wished.
She pushed aside the dirty dishes to make room for the newspaper. She never made the bed
At some point, still in junior high, I began to clean the house. I came home from school Friday afternoons and swept the living room, bedroom and hall before hand scrubbing the kitchen floor. If I did not wax it, dirt would soon reappear.
This continued through high school. I declined invitations from friends, as if my weekly housekeeping chores were a sacred duty.
Superb Performer
I was very young when I learned to avoid danger.
Not wanting to be yelled at, hit or touched inappropriately demanded supreme vigilance to both subtle and overt changes in tone, in mood, in posture or facial expression.
Pleasing others became a proactive defense.
Expressing my desires could trigger my parents’ unpredictable emotions. I learned when it was safe to ask, and when it wasn’t.
I realized that I could only get approval when I wasn’t me.
“In the effort to placate her abusers, the child victim often becomes a superb performer. She attempts to do whatever is required. . . . She may become an empathetic caretaker for her parents, an efficient housekeeper, an academic achiever” (Herman 105).
If
Since my family’s love was both conditional and intermittent, I internalized the belief that I was only good if.
If I took care of my parents; if I babysat my sister’s children; if I was an outstanding student; if I stayed in medical school; if I was an over-caring friend, if I pushed down my own needs to honor theirs.
College
For his studies, my then-boyfriend chose Williams College in Massachusetts. He suggested I apply to nearby Wellesley. After we broke up, I considered Cornell University in upstate New York because I liked snow. My academic advisor said I wouldn’t last a semester. “Girls always come back home,” he intoned. “Barnard. With your grades, Barnard would be a good choice.”
Maybe so, but Barnard College favored rich women who wore cashmere sweaters and pearl earrings to match their necklaces.
I knew I could never afford the requisite apparel. At a literature conference in 1994, I met a woman who came from the same working-class background as I. Although she chose Barnard, she stole clothing so she could feign her classmates’ wealth. She left for school every morning wearing an outfit her parents bought. She changed into her purloined clothes in a department store restroom, then reversed the process on her way home.
Hers was a deceitful, dangerous tactic that I never would have tried even if it occurred to me.
My mother liked Brandeis University because she so admired Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice of the Supreme Court.
Cornell became my choice. I requested a catalog and applications and a full scholarship. The latter required $1,000 a year from the parents, something we could not manage. My mother offered to go back to work, but I considered this an undue burden.
I just could not accept my mother’s offer, although getting dressed every day, using her skills and being around others might have lifted her spirits.
Besides, I was afraid. Besides, I would have had to take the ACT as well as the SAT.
Besides, my brother said Brooklyn College was good enough for my sister and him.
Besides.
Aborted Blind Date
I had agreed to a drive-in-movie blind date with my high school friend Karen, her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s friend.
As I dressed to go out, I became apprehensive. I would be sitting in the back seat of a car with a strange man whose friend I did not like. Karen had an older stepsister who was a bit wild, and she was the one who introduced Karen to her new guy.
I must have been so desperate for a date that I ignored reality.
I convinced my father to answer the lobby doorbell when they rang and to say that he forbade me to go.
They heard the anger in his voice. My mother supported him.
I probably did not reveal the circumstances surrounding the date earlier because my parents were so absent. I may have liked the freedom that afforded.
Parental Withdrawal
For a long time I thought my parents being uninvolved came from ignorance of American customs.
As immigrants, they could not get their heads around my world. My father retreated into himself. My mother became more an observer than an advisor.
In addition, they were so depressed.
“Depression leads to disruptions in parenting of . . . adolescents as a result of parental withdrawal” [which can manifest itself as] avoidance and unresponsiveness to children’s needs” (National Library of Medicine).
People cannot give what they don’t have.
A Spark of Empathy for Others
The American Red Cross, March of Dimes, American Cancer Society, Muscular Dystrophy Association — all knew that my mother could never refuse to collect money from the other 15 families in our apartment building.
She told each charity that she had done it before; that it was someone else’s turn; that her neighbors were tired of her coming to their door requesting money.
Then she added the statement that turned her no to yes: “Well, if you can’t find anyone else. . . .”
Letter-sized manila envelopes covered the hall bookcase with a sheet listing all the tenants’ names and how much they gave — a dime, a quarter, rarely a dollar.
She would get dressed after dinner and make her rounds, sometimes stopping for coffee and a chat, this CEO of donations at 161 Avenue P.
Another Sliver of Light
About once a month, my Aunt Ruthie, Uncle Benny, and cousins Lenny and Paula would visit from the Bronx. They stopped at a bakery around the corner and chose a sumptuous dessert for dinner, usually strawberry shortcake in a box tied with narrow blue and white intertwined string.
My mother prepared a delicious roast beef she bought from our butcher, who would spend time talking with her after he dropped off the weekly order.
Ruthie was my favorite aunt, giving me a big hug and kiss as soon as she entered the apartment. My Uncle Benny called me the smart one and wondered why his son was less of a student.
My mother loved Aunt Ruthie, 20 years her junior. They were pregnant at the same time — my mother’s third, my aunt’s first. I am about two weeks older than Lenny.
After dinner the two would wash and dry the dishes, then sit at the table to talk and smoke. My father and his brother watched TV in the living room. My cousins and I joined our fathers or walked the neighborhood. When I tried to hear what my mother and aunt were saying, they would shoo me away.
After our guests left, the glow of their visit vanished far too soon.
A Cold Place
I often returned home reluctantly even when my father was at work or off to the beach or shopping.
My mother was not supportive. I did not trust her advice. She often was frustrated by my lack of self-confidence, never seeing her part in it.
Macy’s Herald Square
At the end of junior year, I decided to apply for a real summer job. Babysitting didn’t count.
I could not earn nearly as much as my friend who had taken stenography and typing our senior year at her stepmother’s insistence. An academic diploma required more science than she could complete, but it didn’t matter. A Long Island college had already offered her a full scholarship.
Eileen took a full-time, good-paying job in a Manhattan office, which meant keeping her college plans a secret. I had to set my sights much lower.
I applied to be a salesgirl at Macy’s Herald Square. After filling out the application and being interviewed immediately, I got the job!
I earned $1.25 an hour, 20 hours a week — Monday and Thursday evenings and all day Saturday, with a union-required hour off for lunch.
I was thrilled and hurried to a phone booth just outside Macy’s to call my mother. She was not pleased. “I thought you would never have to work,” she said.
I was confused. This was my first step toward economic independence. Did she think a prince on his white horse would sweep me away to his castle?
Would he come to Brooklyn?
“The passivity that is the essential characteristic of the ‘feminine’ woman is a trait that develops in her from the earliest years. But it is wrong to assert a biological datum is concerned; it is in fact a destiny imposed upon her.” — Simone de Beauvoir.
Working
Macy’s Herald Square ran from 34th Street to 35th Street and from Broadway to 7th Avenue.
The store seemed like a cathedral to me. Regularly spaced two-story Corinthian-style marble columns topped with ornate cornices divided the retail space. Other Beaux Arts features, like the arched windows and ornate entrance, evoked awe. Before its early 21st-century modernization, shopping at Macy’s was pure elegance.
In 1963 bargain tables dotted the 90,000-square-foot main floor. Instead of being assigned to a specific department, such as women’s accessories, I rotated among tables, never knowing what I was to sell until I clocked in on the mezzanine.
I sold women’s nightgowns, socks and underwear my first day — a busy, crowded Thursday evening. Newly trained, a former member of the Lafayette High School Math Team, I confidently took my place behind a beautiful bronze cash register. I entered the number and price for each item, added the tax, and placed everything in a Macy’s bag before handing it to the customer.
I began to notice a lovely pink strip on the receipts but didn’t have time to ask what it meant. Suddenly, no more receipts appeared
I had to leave 10 customers waiting to find a supervisor.
The pink line meant time to replace the tape.
I waited while the supervisor showed me how. I was a bit embarrassed but proud of my new skill.
Hubris
The more customers, the quicker the time passed. One Saturday, I looked out the front door and it was dusk. Since my watch said 5 p.m., I was surprised to hear nearby cashiers counting their change. All of a sudden, the 6 p.m. closing bell rang, and my fellow workers quickly left to turn in their register drawers. My watch had stopped.
I panicked. Rumor had it that big dogs patrolled the floors at night. I closed out as quickly as possible and ran to the mezzanine office imagining frantic animals growling behind me.
Only later did I learn that Doberman pinschers did indeed work with Macy’s security guards until 1998.
Turning Point
I opened a savings account. I added my babysitting money.
I kept track of my earnings and expenditures. I spent as little as possible on lunches.
My account grew.
I stopped worrying about finding a prince.
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