I.M. Read online

  That day my mother and I landed in the leafy and genteel neighborhood of Gramercy Park. We lunched at the Woolworth’s counter on Third Avenue, then walked around the corner to the northeast side of the park, and entered a beautiful old Beaux Arts building. We were taken up a wood-paneled elevator by a doorman wearing white gloves to a high floor, where we let ourselves into someone’s living room. It was dark, with shards of light cutting through the shuttered and draped windows. I was immediately intrigued by the décor of the room. Lots of rich damask and red velvet upholstery trimmed with thick fringe, so different from the contemporary, stark, midcentury décor I grew up with.

  After a few minutes, a tall, spry old woman appeared. She introduced herself as Dr. Mossey. In my memory she looks like Eleanor Roosevelt—elegant in a rough-hewn, unselfconscious way. She had thick white hair and wore an unfitted, printed foulard dress with wooly tights. At the time she reminded me of my mother’s mother, the quintessential sweet grandmother I called “Meema,” whom I’d loved very much and who had died a year or two earlier. I think I loved and trusted Dr. Mossey almost immediately based on this similarity. Her ironic half-smile was like my grandmother’s, too. A curious smile for such a small mouth, was the thought that ran through my head, as if a bird is smiling. There were other similarities—her serenity, and her seemingly limitless acceptance of me.

  Dr. Mossey sat us in the living room for about fifteen minutes and talked mostly to my mother. Then she took me into her office, which was decorated in the same plush, old-world, comforting way. For the remainder of the session we were alone. She asked me to draw things and build things with blocks, and I obliged. I was apprehensive at first, afraid to make a mess. My mother was always so crazed about keeping the house tidy, and would complain to me if I left crayons or paints or scraps of material lying around. I’d be in the middle of some art project, surrounded by supplies in various states of disarray, and my mother would snap: “She just left!”—referring to the cleaning lady who had just tidied the house. With Dr. Mossey, though, that seemed the object of the game: to be messy, to let it all hang out. And for the remainder of my sessions with her—which would go on for three years—that’s what I remember most. It felt like a social occasion more than a doctor’s visit. This friendship was different from the one I had with my mother. Dr. Mossey did nothing but listen. She smiled that bird-like smile. She nodded. Those sessions all those years ago are why I’m so devoted to therapy today. All the associations were great—getting out of school early, emerging from the tunnel and lunching with my mother at the Woolworth’s counter (they served one of my favorite food items of all time, which I still long for: a tri-color ice cream waffle sandwich), and then spending the afternoon getting purposely messy with Dr. Mossey’s toys and art supplies, which seemed much better than the ones I had at home.

  When I came out to my mother at age eighteen, she was shocked and didn’t believe me. She referred to a conversation she’d had years earlier with Dr. Mossey, who had assured her I wasn’t gay. But just the fact that my mother had raised the question at all was an admission that she had more than an inkling. For years I wondered how Dr. Mossey, someone I thought really knew me, could miss such obvious signs. Then it occurred to me that she told my mother I wasn’t gay possibly in order not to alarm her or my father, and to prevent some kind of rash action on their part. I thought maybe it was a protective act. Dr. Mossey was deliberately keeping the truth from my mother and giving me the opportunity to figure things out for myself, before anyone could try to convince me otherwise. It was Dr. Mossey giving me a head start.

  Therapy got me back in the door at Yeshivah of Flatbush, causing a potent combination of relief and dread. My parents were relieved, and that eased things. My hysterical spells became less frequent. But I went down in that school’s history as something of an antichrist. I was a terrible problem to the rabbis and teachers. I imitated them to their faces and I disco-danced to the beat of the daily prayers. I defaced sacred volumes of Torah with sketches of shoes and hairstyles in the margins. I visited the nurse’s office on a daily basis, feigning a variety of ailments with the hopes of being sent home. The nurse, a tall, robust woman named Chaya, who looked like a poor man’s Ingrid Bergman with short sandy hair, had a pat remedy: She gave me Sucrets—cough and cold lozenges—and sent me back to class.

  Toward the end of my days at Yeshivah of Flatbush, there was constant talk of my expulsion. One day, one of the many times my mother was summoned to school to meet with the principal, I was sitting outside his office, and when she arrived I almost didn’t recognize her. She had on a drab grey dress, not a stitch of makeup, no jewelry. Even her ever-present red nail polish was missing. Later she let me in on her plan: “If I came in dressed to the nines they’d probably have thrown you out!” A dreary, unkempt appearance would make them sympathetic to her pleas, she thought. And she was right—I was admitted back to school with no punishment. Forget the pen. Dress is so much mightier than the sword!

  2

  The Syrian-Jewish community had never seen anything like me before. I stuck out like a chubby gay thumb. There wasn’t a moment when I didn’t feel claustrophobic looking at my prospects there, and yet for those who were suited to it—like my sisters and some of my cousins—it was a mecca, its own little holy paradise closed off to the rest of the world. The only things or people from the outside world that were acknowledged served the community: customers, interior designers, caterers, cheap labor, Shabbat goys (non-Jews who are enlisted to do the things that Jews can’t on the Sabbath, such as turning lights on and off). Everything and everyone else was shut out. Even at a young age, I was demoralized by this. And while I had no other experience to compare it to, I knew there had to be a better place for me in the world.

  The community was founded in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century, when a few Syrian-Jewish families fled the anti-Semitism that was prevalent in Syria. Within a short time others emigrated based on stories of easy success in the various New York City industries. By the end of the 1940s they expanded south from Bay Parkway to Ocean Parkway and Avenue S where they erected a temple called Shaare Zion. By the late 1960s the community had grown to such a huge extent that the neighborhood, including the shul, was filled to capacity. Around that time someone got the idea to extend the radius to an area twenty blocks north to Ocean Parkway and Avenue J, a comparatively spacious and beautiful suburban area referred to as Midwood. By the early 1970s, forty or so courageous families who were willing to move to uncharted new Brooklyn territories, my family included, settled there and founded a second shul.

  The Beth Torah Congregation was the “new guard” shul, a modernist place that from the outside resembled a brick fortress. Inside the main worship chamber there were no windows; instead there was a massive oval skylight providing natural light that beamed down from the thirty-foot ceiling, giving the room a godly, ethereal quality. Hung directly below the skylight was a huge, modern light fixture best described as a twenty-foot neoconstructivist bugle hanging downward. It was made up of graduating hoops of brass and supported big brass globes suspended by a huge ball-chain. The fixture was an endless source of distraction for me. As massive and forbidding as the whole scheme sounds, it really was a beautiful room, thanks to the fabulous light and the muted neutrality of the beige- and olive-green color scheme. A tapestry in similar colors by leftist artist Ben Shahn dominated the entrance. Those modern, muted colors felt purposely different from the traditional cobalt blue and burgundy of Shaare Zion.

  Sadly, the progressive attitude of the décor didn’t make itself felt in the attitudes or traditions of the congregation. It was every bit as repressive as the old shul. Especially for women. For a few years after their migration in the early twentieth century the women wore the traditional hijab—the veils—which guarded their faces from any kind of outside scrutiny. They stopped wearing them by the early 1920s, but the underlying attitude didn’t change much. The exclusive purpose of women was to bea
r children, cook, and keep house. By the time I was born, the women in the community were far from hidden in hijab; they were displayed as commodities to be bought and sold. At the same time, divorce was considered aberrant, and when it did occur it was spoken of in whispers and the offending parties were shunned. Homosexuals were persona non grata—so taboo they weren’t even a subject of discussion.

  It was a bizarre mix of piety and flash that’s difficult to wrap one’s head around. The community seemed to place more emphasis on overt displays of wealth—the primary ways in which girls were judged marriageable—than it did on religious devotion. To the Jewish community at large, Congregation Beth Torah would seem progressive. The mere fact that the men could see the women during worship in the main temple was considered modern; at times women even waved to the men as they entered. The services took place at a central island surrounded by bleacher-like theatre seats that rose up each side of the room. Women sat closer to the entrance, and men were more centrally located, closer to the action.

  At yeshiva, prayers were referred to by the Yiddish word “davening” and were performed in a singsong-y Yiddish dialect and cadence, very different from the Arabic style of prayers at Beth Torah, a style that sounded more like howling than praying. No matter what the style or context, I loathed it. It consisted of men and boys in rows, all swaying back and forth, their mouths full of mumbling, begging god’s forgiveness and confessing to sins they didn’t commit while ignoring the ones they did. Not to mention the misogynist overtones.

  It was easy enough to fake the swaying and mumbling, but what I couldn’t fake was the faith. Even though I took part in prayers many thousands of times in those years, and I understood the words when I bothered to actually read them, I never remotely felt any bit of their spiritual meaning. I hated wearing a yarmulke. It never stayed on my head and had to be bobby-pinned to my hair. And after my bar mitzvah, we were expected to daven every morning wearing tefillin, which are sacred scrolls in odd little boxes that are strapped tightly to one’s head and to one’s left arm with black leather straps. The strap left a long winding welt up my arm that I always associated with the markings from a beating. At school we had to wear something called a tzitzit under our shirts, which was a muslin tabard with long string tassels attached at the corners. It was hot and uncomfortable, and I never got used to it. At services I wore a tallis, a prayer shawl with tassels, layered over my clothes.

  When I wasn’t daydreaming or considering the engineering feat of the fabulous light fixture, I’d look over at the women and pine to sit among them. They seemed to be having much more fun than the men, who were tasked with reciting the solemn, terrifying prayers. The women weren’t pressured to pray, and they never did. Instead they held a kind of fashion show. Each woman’s entrance was scrutinized and accompanied by whispered commentary. The latest looks. Major jewelry. Short, short skirts. High, high heels and price tags. Big hair. If not décolletage, then skintight clothing that showed exactly what was going on underneath. Dressing always sends a message, whether we mean it to or not, and these ladies, especially the mothers of all the eligible daughters, meant it to. And the message was: We’re in the market for rich husbands. Some of the young women may have liked putting themselves on display that way, but even if they didn’t, they had no choice in the matter. You weren’t going to catch a rich husband in a long skirt and flats. And it wasn’t as if any of them had an option of going to college and establishing careers and financial independence. That was out of the question—not even considered.

  I observed all of this with a mixture of fascination and disgust. It made me so uncomfortable that girls were viewed as objects up for barter. And pity the girl who was fat or unattractive—she was reviled. Any girl who passed the age of twenty without being married was considered an old maid. If she didn’t marry she had no other option than to live at home and become a spinster aunt. Maybe she’d be allowed a menial job in the family business, but nothing more progressive than a sales clerk or a secretary. I’m pretty sure my early exposure to this mix of sexism and fashion-obsession—and my responses of both fascination and revulsion to different aspects of it—influenced, if not founded, my ideas about feminism and style. Certainly growing up in a household with three strong women—my mother and my sisters—who rose to the challenge of the very repression they were victim to, taught me how to be respectful of women and to be considerate of whatever specific social mores they were dealing with.

  As upsetting as this objectification of women was, it had its heady sides, which made it more confusing. No doubt it was a tradition based in misogyny, but, boy, were the clothes good! The High Holy Days were like a fashion sporting event. I had my favorites out of a few chic women in shul, but I was always rooting for my mother and sisters, who made their entrances in outfits that were styled down to the last barrette. I have a memory of my mother sometime in the early 1960s, her hair teased into her signature coif, wearing a fawn-colored twill coat-suit with an azurine mink collar and a pale-grey satin pillbox hat. She dressed my sisters in abbreviated grey or pastel tweed suits with Mary-Janes. In the 1970s, as things became more casual, my mother dressed in layered sweaters and boots. And lots of suede; I particularly remember a rust suede A-line skirt with a red fox-trimmed cable-knit wrap cardigan. An espresso-brown knee-length suede coat, lined in mink over a black sweater and skirt. And my favorite shoes of all time, which were YSL—chocolate brown suede and leather wingtip T-straps with heavy stacked heels. She wore those shoes with everything that year. While my mother was elegant, my sisters went more bohemian in maxi skirts made of patchwork, accessorized with wedge boots. The girls worked hard on those outfits.

  It wasn’t merely wardrobe and hair that were scrutinized and styled to such a degree. When my eldest sister turned fourteen, she mysteriously disappeared one day and returned a few days later with a bandaged nose. The most exciting part of that event was that Jackie Onassis was espied in the surgeon’s waiting room, thereby confirming his A-1 status. (My parents were obsessed with “the best” when it came to things like doctors, and obviously if Dr. Thomas Riis was good enough for Jackie O, he was good enough for us.) When my sister’s bruises disappeared after her nose job, my parents took us out for what amounted to a “nose job celebration brunch” at one of the most fabulous places in New York City at the time, a restaurant called Maxwell’s Plum. It was Warner LeRoy’s first restaurant, a fixture in the city’s landscape of see-and-be-seen places with a mod atmosphere, part olde-time saloon, part acid-trip hippie.

  In preparation for the High Holy Days fashion parade, my mother and sisters spent days and days shopping for clothes. After all, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur weren’t merely opportunities for celebrating the New Year and atoning for one’s sins—this was also prime husband-hunting season. Part of me felt jealous of their shopping pilgrimages, while another part of me felt sorry for them. The pressure on them to turn themselves out every week was enormous, and nothing less than their future happiness rested on the outcome. They combed the tristate area. Lord & Taylor. Bonwit Teller. Loehmann’s. Another discount place in the neighborhood called Lupu’s. (I kid you not. It always struck me as rather funny that someone named Lupu would open a women’s clothing store in a Jewish neighborhood.) Up and down Kings Highway they shopped, ending up at Jimmy’s, which was a very expensive shop that held special status in the community. Jimmy’s specialty was flashy European designer clothes, which weren’t necessarily any better or worse than what could be found elsewhere, but their cachet went above and beyond their actual value simply because of their astronomical prices. And since every Syrian family shopped there, it was common knowledge how much you paid for something. My sisters and I were in awe of the clothes, but my mother knew better. She hated the idea that anyone should know what she did or didn’t pay for something so we rarely patronized Jimmy’s. That was a big lesson to me: Mystery is the soul of style, not money.

  Another aspect of style was simple common sense. No one wan
ted to be a “fashion victim.” My mother used that phrase, which had recently been coined by Women’s Wear Daily, a lot. One year in the early 1970s Rosh Hashanah fell on a terribly hot day in September. My mother’s best friend at the time entered Beth Torah wearing thigh-high suede boots with thick tights and a short dress, a safari-looking Yves Saint Laurent with a lace-up neckline over a ribbed turtleneck. My mother said to her, “Aren’t you hot?” Her friend said, “These are statement boots. I’m making a statement.” Later, my mother said to me, “Yeah, she was making a statement, all right. A statement about what a moron she is.”

  * * *

  My sisters were gorgeous. Norma, who was nicknamed Bridget after Brigitte Bardot, was my father’s favorite. She was born with blond hair and blue eyes, an anomaly in a family of hazel-eyed brunettes. Norma easily grasped and held on to all the responsibilities of the eldest child. There was never an issue of who had priority in the house among the three of us; Norma had first dibs.

  Marilyn was even more beautiful and a little more complicated. My mother insisted on her having a Louise Brooks bob, which traumatized Marilyn. When she finally got to pick her own hairstyle as a young teenager, she grew her hair down to her waist. She was the middle child, and my parents’ love for her was a bit more conditional. By the time I came along there were even more conditions on love, but as a trade-off, there was less scrutiny. Marilyn was considered “high-strung,” something I was accused of as well. She was nervous and easily set off, and she was difficult about eating. My mother sometimes had to force-feed her. Once when she was about seven, Marilyn locked herself in the bathroom in order not to eat dinner. My mother borrowed a ladder from the next-door neighbor and climbed up and through the bathroom window. Marilyn describes that scene: my mother’s face appearing in the window out of nowhere, like something out of a horror movie. Marilyn didn’t eat for the same reasons that I overate. It goes back to the nervous energy around the subject of food in our house, as well as comfort; and having too much, or too little, or just enough love. It came from parents raised in the Depression, who were always scared of being plunged again into poverty, and who carefully, scrupulously balanced love and food, wealth and food, food and truth.