I.M. Read online

  When my current revue was fully planned and costumed, I opened the garage door, and that was the signal to the neighborhood that the theatre was open and my show was about to start. I knew some of my audience, but not all. It was mostly children my age or younger than me, although older kids would often wander in. The show was free, and I had many repeat audience members. Three of my cousins who lived a few blocks away came often, and two kids that lived across the street were regulars, a brother and sister for whom I later babysat. Every once in a while some of the neighborhood bullies would drift in to taunt me, older boys I didn’t know, but for the most part my audiences were friendly.

  Every once in a while I’d do a show for my cousins after a holiday dinner, and an uncle or aunt would wander in holding a drink, amused or baffled. For the most part the kids who watched my shows were entranced. I could feel their attention and energy. Like any child performer, I had a natural, untaught sense for when I had my audience’s attention. Even while I was fully immersed in making the puppets dance, I heard their laughter—and even more so the good silence when I knew they were listening. I learned a lot about gauging my audience from that time, something that is second nature to me now.

  Going once a month with my parents to a show or a ballet wasn’t enough. I started going on my own, pursuing theatre and the performing arts with a kind of compulsion. The first play I took myself to see was a revival of the musical Irene, starring Debbie Reynolds. This was in 1972, when I was eleven. I saw an ad for it in the newspaper, and on a random winter Saturday I took the train into the city by myself for the first time. I told no one. I don’t remember where I got the money. I bought a balcony seat, which cost very little. Everything happened effortlessly that day—as if it were meant to be. I concentrated so completely on that show that I lost track of everything. Even during the intermission, I was transfixed. Riding the subway home felt like floating in a bubble. It was a small, encouraging sample of the freedom that existed when I was left to my own wits in New York City. I knew from that experience that if I could get away, I could give myself what really mattered, and I wouldn’t need anyone’s help. From that day forward I knew I could take care of myself.

  6

  In front of my puppet-theatre garage was the house we lived in. It was in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn, close enough to Yeshivah of Flatbush that my sisters and I could walk to school. It was a huge Dutch Colonial house built around the turn of the century, with a front lawn, three stories, an attic and unfinished basement, plus a yard, driveway, and my garage. It was a big step up from the two-family rental we’d been living in. My father’s business was doing well, and the move was a reflection of that. My parents remodeled the house before we moved in, but it never felt quite finished. There was always something either in progress or broken, and my mother was overwhelmed by the upkeep of it. All she wanted was a settled, elegant life in the new house. While for my father, someone who was good with tools and had a real appetite for an ongoing construction project, it seemed like a dream.

  Typical of my mother, she found a way to make our new home stylish, but without paying loads of money for it. At first she considered hiring a woman from Bloomingdale’s to decorate, but she discovered that “unless we want our house resembling a Bloomingdale’s chair showroom, we better look elsewhere.” So while her friends’ homes were being decorated extravagantly by famous, highly sought-after interior designers like Angelo Donghia and Joe D’Urso, my mother hired someone with considerably less celebrity but who had a reputation for taste and sophistication. Just the name sounded distinguished to me: John Banter.

  Observing John Banter at close range, I discovered he was different from most other men. Though not dressed in a Pucci bikini like Michael Sherman, he was not at all like my father or my uncles or any other men I knew. He was slim and good-looking and intimidating. I still had no real idea what homosexuality was—I didn’t even know the word. I didn’t associate the words “fairy” or “faggot” with any particular sexuality; I did know they were pejoratives I was hearing more and more. I certainly made no conscious connection between these concepts and John Banter, but he fascinated me, and I sensed he and I shared an affinity—though I was far too shy to speak to him.

  When John Banter finished the house he came to lunch and my mother served him a Middle Eastern hors d’oeuvre—a small, spicy, cheese empanada called sambusac. I was hidden in the kitchen, peering in; when he bit into it, he said, “Sarah, this is a little bit of heaven. I must have the recipe.” I watched him carefully from afar whenever I could, and his presence in our lives for that brief moment made me feel better and hopeful for some strange, unknown reason. On top of everything else, I was proud that my family went to the lengths of hiring someone as obviously tasteful as John Banter to decorate.

  My parents’ renovation of the house was an attempt at a loving restoration with modern additions. They added a den and a dinette in the back of the house (from which snaked the extension cord that powered my puppet theatre). At the front of the house, in place of what once was a screened-in porch, they built a rectangular windowed “conservatory,” where the light-walnut baby grand piano lived. The floors in the main part of the living room and dining room were beautifully restored, dark-stained cherry parquet, the upkeep of which was a constant concern to my father. There was always some sort of roll-down preventive rug-scrap or mat. The color scheme of the living room was based on a mustard-colored Schumacher chintz print that covered two dark-wood Louis XVI armchairs and the valances above all the windows in the room. The engineered area rug was matched to this mustard color and inlaid with flowers and stems that set off the browns and blues in that chintz print. A small bull-nosed brown velvet sofa and a chrome-and-glass “Barcelona” coffee table added a note of midcentury classicism.

  There was a step-down into the addition, the “conservatory,” where the flooring changed to turquoise shag carpet. It was a cold, exposed space, revealed to the street by three walls of paned windows. Through the satin-striped sheer curtains you could feel the presence and shadows of the neighborhood outside. I often imagined that people could hear my playing on the street, and I fantasized that someone out there would be captivated by my piano-playing shadow, and we’d meet and fall in love like something out of a Brontë novel.

  * * *

  By the time I was twelve, insomnia was a foregone condition. The most prominent and controversial factor in my bad sleeping habits was a small, portable TV with an oyster-colored pebble-textured plastic case. My parents bought it for themselves, but I commandeered it, and it became a permanent fixture in my bedroom. There were mixed opinions about its influence over me: Was the TV there to make me feel less alone when I couldn’t sleep? Or was it the very thing keeping me up at night? Around my twelfth birthday the TV was confiscated, my parents settling on the latter hypothesis, that it was the TV itself that was keeping me awake. But I carried on so vehemently and for so long that they finally gave it back to me. I remember the feeling of relief and triumph the night I got it back, as I tuned in to the Johnny Carson show and watched with special relish.

  The following summer the little oyster-colored TV met a horrible end. One night my sister Marilyn claimed to hear it through the paper-thin walls of the summer rental we were living in. She caused such a huge ruckus at 3:00 A.M. that my mother was awakened from a deep sleep and barged into my room—a zombie arisen from the dead, ecru-colored tricot-and-lace nightgown flying behind her like the exhaust from a broomstick. She leered at me through half-open eyes, picked up the TV and threw it to the ground, where it shattered into a thousand little pieces, then exited in another wave of nightgown lace. Part comedy, part trauma, my sister and I burst into laughter—what seemed at the time like our only logical reaction. That event did not set me back in my TV watching for long, though. The next day my mother felt so guilty she bought me a new, slightly larger, lighter-weight, portable TV in a shiny black plastic case.

  * * *

 
There was an appearance of affluence to our new home and neighborhood, even though it was a financial stretch for my parents at the time. After hiring John Banter and renovating the rest of the house, they could never afford to finish the basement. The paneled basement rec room they’d imagined—and that all the neighbors had—was not to be. It remained a raw underground reminder of their aspirations versus their financial shortcomings.

  The basement, like the garage, was another area that I commandeered as a creative center. It had low ceilings that felt like they were on the verge of collapse, poured-cement floors, and crude makeshift lighting with exposed wiring that always seemed seconds away from an electrical fire. My mother kept an extra freezer and refrigerator there, also a store of canned and dry goods. And soda, specifically Tab, cases and cases of which were delivered by the local drugstore and kept on top of an old, rusted, metal cabinet right by the stairs. I was the only kid in my neighborhood who was allowed to drink as much Tab as I wanted. I imagine it had to do with my mother’s desire for me to consume fewer calories. It was my much-loathed job every night after setting the dinner table to act as soda sommelier. I descended to the cellar to bring up the six-pack of Tab and fill the ice bucket. Inevitably the ice would crash to the floor, which would elicit another “She just left!” reproach from my mother. Tab-fetching and ice-bucket-filling were considered the kind of manual labor that boys should do, making it the more detestable to me. All physical labor—any kind of heavy lifting—in our household was male-designated, and if I ever complained or asked why one of my sisters couldn’t do it, my mother would say, “You want your sister to drop her womb?”

  When I wasn’t being sent there to retrieve Tab, I loved the basement. There were horror-movie elements to it, like creaky stairs and dark, spiderwebbed corners. But I consciously overlooked all of them because it had so much to recommend it as a workspace. My father set up a woodworking shop in the corner farthest from the stairs. He never used it, though, so I took it over when creating sets for my puppet theatre, and later for building a portable hand-puppet theatre, which I used for years when I worked birthday parties. I never put a tool back in its proper place, and I abused tools that were never meant to be used the way I used them. Saws that weren’t meant to saw through metal, or drill bits that were the wrong size drilling into something that was never meant to be drilled into. Every once in a while, when the house needed a small fix, my father made an effort to give me lessons on how to properly use a screwdriver or a hand wrench or a power saw, but I was way too impatient to learn about tools. I came really close several times to drilling right through my thigh, or setting the house on fire when heating colored candle wax for puppets in my Thingmaker (a hot plate that made figures out of something called Plastigoop, the kind of insanely dangerous toy we all had in the 1970s).

  Around my tenth birthday I started noticing the fashion magazines my mother brought into the house every month. My sisters seemed to be properly engrossed in things like homework and movie dates with friends on weekends, while I studied the magazines and their pictures of women in fancy clothes. I hoarded them and ripped pages out and stuck them on the cork wall in my bedroom. When I could spare time away from the puppet theatre, I began to sketch—to emulate my favorite photos from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. There was a photo of a yellow Giorgio di Sant’Angelo sunburst-pleated chiffon dress, circa 1972, that I sketched from three different angles. I often sketched on scraps of paper, and I especially loved the cardboard sheets with a white laminate side that came in my father’s shirts from the laundry and which he saved for me. The first sketches were for their own sake. Crude pictures of fancy women, severe faces, the hair and shoes obsessively rendered. After a short while, though, the sketches became about something else. By the time I was eleven I began to understand the very basic ideas of design. Lines. Shape.

  In the remaining basement space, which was considerable, I set up my atelier. There was a hand-me-down drafting table from my uncle Sam where I did sketches under the light of a red-enamel clamp-on architect’s lamp that I bought with my allowance money. Next to that was a high console made of old lumber scraps that held all my painting and craft supplies. My father rigged an illegal telephone extension that hung on a two-by-four beam right near the stairs, for my mothers’ use while doing laundry. I erected a little desk underneath that, which became my “office area,” complete with Rolodex. In it I kept the numbers of the four fabric stores I went to, as well as Halston’s office address and telephone number, which I’d looked up in the phone book. I had no need for the number, no intention of using it; I just loved the idea of having it. Nearby I had another cork wall full of tear sheets from Women’s Wear Daily and Vogue. WWD was a staple in the household. My dad got his daily copy sent to the house so my mother could see it, too. My atelier was complete when eventually I took possession of the giant 1950s black-and-white console television that was retired from the family den, where it lived till it was replaced by a huge color console TV a few years after we moved in. Once I had that TV in that spot, I was able to spend hours on end working while it created a kind of white noise in the background (I still rely a lot on the white noise of TV).

  At that time in my life my mother was my most important critic and champion. I’ve often thought that whatever she lacked in “mothering the person” she made up for in “mothering the artist.” There were times when she was more concerned with the mess I’d made than noticing the work, and times when I’d come up from the basement with a bunch of sketches that she would dismiss by saying she was too busy to look at them. But when she did pay focused attention to something I made, she treated me like a professional, not a child. Her cold-blooded assessments were the greatest form of encouragement because I knew they were honest and constructive. She’d say things like “that orange blouse would work better in white.” Or “that dress would be ‘dressier’ if it were full length.” She spoke to me like an adult and never sugarcoated her opinions.

  I loved that basement atelier, and if I wasn’t in the garage with my puppet shows, I was there. One day while I was finishing off one of my leading-lady puppets, I was confronted with a lot of extra purple “by-the-yard” fringe I had purchased a few days earlier. I got the idea to fancy up a red-and-white striped shirt of mine by adding the fringe onto the breast pocket and all the way down the sleeves and across the back along the yoke. I never had a particular inclination for dressing up, but that day I wanted to know how it felt to wear fringe. I still remember the moment of crossing over, sewing onto something other than a puppet. It was the first piece of clothing I ever manipulated with my hands. It was a magical sensation to wear that fringed shirt, something that one short hour before had been a mere figment of my imagination.

  That same day, maybe because I felt so good about the creation of the shirt, I decided to take a bike ride. I also knew it would please my mother, who was constantly admonishing me to get some exercise and fresh air. Before I left I made sure to put on a shapeless grey-wool crewneck over the fancy fringed shirt, which completely concealed it. I made it all the way to the old-guard Syrian neighborhood of Avenue S, and then I did something really out of character: When I encountered some of the boys in my class playing basketball, they asked me to join the game, and I decided it would be good to make an effort to be less antisocial. Within a few minutes of playing I got hot and decided to take off my sweater. And there, underneath, was my fancy shirt with the fringed trim that I had forgotten all about. The horror that washed over me was like the anxiety dream in which you’re walking down a New York City street and suddenly realize you’re naked. I didn’t even wait for the repercussions. Without uttering a word, I jumped on my bike and fled.

  * * *

  From the age of eight, I spent a lot of time in our windowed conservatory room taking piano lessons and practicing. The piano itself was distressed to look antique, a baby grand that felt and sounded more like a toy piano. Despite its flaws as an instrument, it was on this fake piano
that I acquired genuine appreciation for music. Mozart, Bach, Bartók, Debussy, Scarlatti. My reading skills were bad and they never really developed, but I had a good ear. Soon I could pick out any tune and even make up accompanying chords and create full, dramatic—albeit cheesy—arrangements. This might have won me favor with some musicians, but it only added an edge to my already difficult relationship with our piano teacher, Miss Rivlin. She preferred a more rule-bound approach to playing piano. And since my sisters were always much better at following rules than I was—and were always much better prepared for lessons—she much preferred teaching them. In contrast, I relied on my ear and spent most of my time at that tinny piano making up schmaltzy arrangements of Gershwin tunes that I copied from Judy Garland and Streisand recordings.

  Miss Rivlin was a sneery older lady with hard, small, judgmental eyes set beneath a dome of lacquered black hair. She wore cardigan sweaters draped on her shoulders and pearls, mostly to clutch in horror as I mangled passages of Muzio Clementi. Her tortoiseshell half-glasses hung from a chain around her neck and would get pinned onto her face like a dart when she was impatient or disdainful. She treated me like a hoodlum, and while I wasn’t, the more she treated me like one, the more I became one. After about two years I finally gave in to her disdain. I stopped practicing altogether and spent most of the lessons making up dramatic excuses for why I hadn’t practiced—injured fingers, wrist trouble, etc. I was fearless in my defiance. One day before my lesson I hid underneath the piano and watched as she settled in, waiting for me to appear. An awkward few minutes passed while she looked around the room for me. I let it go as long as I possibly could, and finally I jumped out from beneath the piano and yelled “BOO!” She leapt out of her chair and ran away. After that the atmosphere between me and Miss Rivlin became notably more hostile.