You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read online

  When we were in Karen’s home, or in church, we never held hands or touched, but the first time we went for a walk together when it wasn’t to or from church—this was on a Saturday afternoon, in Prospect Park—she suddenly stopped and glared at me.

  “Are you my brother, or what?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  “Then why aren’t you holding my hand?”

  I took her hand, and after this whenever we were together, except for when we were on my block, or near her home, or in church—and even in the hallways at school between classes—we would hold hands or walk with our arms around each other.

  Because we didn’t dare make out in her home, and because our time in my apartment was limited to an hour or so a few afternoons a week, what happened was that we came to spend most of our time together talking. On weekends, and during late February and early March, when my father got laid off and was home all the time—we’d find luncheonettes on Flatbush Avenue, or on Empire Boulevard near the Botanic Gardens and Ebbets Field, and spend hours talking while we drank tea and hot chocolate, and ate toasted English muffins and French fries.

  Although everyone at school knew we were going together, and some students and even a few guys on the team began giving us the cold shoulder—not returning our hellos, or crossing to the other side of the street if they saw us coming—and though doing what was considered forbidden back then (West Side Story didn’t become a movie until a half-dozen years later) may have been part of what made our being together exciting, when we were apart and I thought of being with her again, I found myself looking forward to our conversations—to all the things I wanted to tell her—as much as I did to our physical closeness, because no matter how much we talked, when it was time for us to separate and return to our homes, I always felt we’d hardly even begun to talk.

  Some of the time we talked about ordinary stuff: our teachers, or students we knew and which ones we thought were for real and which ones were phonies, or about the kinds of things Olen and I had always talked about—basketball, college, and what we wanted to do after college. We talked about our families too, but in a different way from how Olen and I had. With Olen, conversations were mostly about how we would do anything to get away and be on our own, and about what we’d do when we got there, but with Karen, I found myself talking more about what I felt about my family—about what it was like to be an only child with parents who made each other miserable and who took their misery out on me. I talked about how angry I got sometimes—totally out of control—and how this made me do some of the crazy things I did so that I could get my parents angry back at me and then have a justification for shouting at them or storming out of the house.

  I knew my anger was probably a cover-up, I admitted, and that what really bothered me—why I got so angry—was because of how sad and lonely I felt a lot of the time. Nothing I ever did was enough for my parents—if I got a 98 in a course, why hadn’t I gotten a hundred? If I cleaned up the kitchen and living room while they were at work, why hadn’t I cleaned the bathroom too?—so that being an only child who was always being criticized made me end up feeling that some essential part of me was missing—as if, without having given me a brother or sister, my parents had somehow never finished making me.

  Karen talked a lot about what it was like to be the oldest girl in a large family—to be put in the position of being responsible for her younger brothers and sisters, and to be blamed when they did things that upset her mother, her grandmother, or her Uncle Joshua. She was determined to go to college, but whereas her mother and her Uncle Joshua were counting on Olen to go, the idea of Karen going to college was out of the question. Even though she’d always been a straight-A student, her mother had insisted she take a commercial course of studies so that when she graduated she could get a job as a secretary and help support the family.

  My parents didn’t fight me about going to college the way Karen’s mother and her Uncle Joshua did, but I wanted—desperately—to get away to an out-of-town college, and, because my parents claimed they didn’t have enough money to send me, they insisted I apply only to the city colleges—Brooklyn, Queens, or C.C.N.Y.—which had free tuition then. “With a brain like yours,” my mother would argue, “why should you go somewhere where you’ll be a little fish in a big pond, when you can live at home and be a big fish in a little pond?”

  When I argued back that if I didn’t win a scholarship, I’d work my way through with part-time and summer jobs, they’d become even more upset, my father yelling that you had to be a total idiot to pay for an education that wasn’t as good as one you could get for free (and presenting as proof the fact that C.C.N.Y. had produced more Nobel prize winners than any college in the country, including Harvard), and my mother starting in with what it would be like for me to be a poor boy among rich boys at some Ivy League school where I’d have to work all the time, even on vacations, and how all she ever wanted in life was to spare me suffering.

  So Karen and I talked about these things, and by acting out antic responses that even I, for all my anger and big mouth, didn’t have the courage for—like telling my father the reason he wanted me to go to a place like Brooklyn College instead of a place like Swarthmore or Dartmouth was because it would show him up for the failure he was—we were able to laugh about our situations, and to console each other.

  We also talked, at length, about our feelings and about how wonderful it was to feel free to talk about our feelings. Sometimes, too, we fantasized about enrolling in an out-of-town college together—a small liberal arts school in upstate New York or New England, or a school that specialized in the arts like Oberlin or Antioch or Bard, where people would be more tolerant of an interracial couple—and how, if we had to, one of us would work at a job for four years and put the other through college, after which we’d switch, so that within eight years, when we’d still be in our early twenties, we’d both have college degrees and, married, we’d be able to start a family of our own. Mostly, though, we talked about how lucky we were to have discovered each other—and about how good it felt to be able to tell each other anything and everything and to feel understood in a way nobody else ever had or, we believed, ever would understand us. We also agreed that the biggest surprise for both of us was not having fallen in love after knowing each other for so many years, but that being in love had turned out to be—the word we came back to again and again—so easy.

  The night before our quarterfinal game against Lafayette for the Brooklyn championship, Johnny Lee came down with the flu. He suited up and kept drinking liquids, but he wasn’t himself and wound up playing less than fifteen minutes and only scoring seven points. Olen was a maniac under the boards and on defense, and, scoring thirty-three points, single-handedly kept us in the game, but by the time Jimmy Geller fouled out with four minutes left and the coach put me in, we were eleven points down. I played well enough, but the guy I was guarding, Stan Groll, their All-City ballplayer, pretty much did what he wanted with me, using up the clock by dribbling around near half-court like he played for the Harlem Globetrotters. I was able to steal the ball from him once, which, from the look in his eyes, he seemed to regard as an insult, but I also had to foul him three times to give us a chance to get the ball back, and he made all his foul shots. We lost by seventeen points.

  With the basketball season over and my father back at work, Karen and I had more time alone in my apartment, where she tried to cheer me up by telling me obvious things—that, like Olen, I’d given it my best, that there was always next year, and that—believe it or not—she still loved me even if I wasn’t on a city championship team. This helped some, but what really got me out of my doldrums was when one afternoon, as soon as we were in my room, instead of lying down on my bed, she started picking up and examining some of my model airplanes and looking through the windows of a few of the houses I’d made.

  “Okay,” she said. “Tell me how you make these things. I mean, how does a guy as rest
less as you are have the patience ?”

  So I started showing her how I put the planes together, and took a few old ones out of my closet (she remembered me bringing them into class in elementary school for show-and-tell, and flying some of them around the schoolyard at recess) to show her how much more detailed the newer ones were: pinheads on the propellor mounts to simulate bolts, blackened string next to the wheels to represent shock absorbers—and then I showed her sketches I’d been making for houses, and—I couldn’t resist—the plans for a house I was designing for the two of us to live in some day.

  The house was based on one by Frank Lloyd Wright, its main section cantilevered out over a waterfall, with enormous wraparound windows that would make you feel there was no separation between the interior of the house and the exterior. Karen liked the sketch, but what interested her more than the fact that I’d dreamt it up for the two of us, was how I was going to turn it into a model.

  For the next week and a half, whenever we were in my room, we worked on the model, which, because it had huge windows that seemed to have no supports, was more complicated than any model I’d ever built before. I made the exteriors of most of my houses out of sheets of oaktag that came in different thicknesses, and I’d glue two pieces together, which made the finished product surprisingly strong and, unlike the kind of thin wood people usually made models from, had the advantage of never warping.

  For the houses I’d made so far, I showed Karen, I began by drawing the main walls and roof sections on a single sheet of oaktag—the way, on the backs of cereal boxes, cowboy ranches, fire stations, or Army bases were made of one piece of cardboard that you cut out and folded along dotted lines—and with my razor blade and a steel straight-edge, I’d make half-cuts along the lines that showed where the walls and roof sections of the houses joined to each other. I’d prick the corners of windows and doors with a straight pin first so that the unneeded pieces fell out cleanly, after which I’d cut out pieces of celluloid a little larger than the window openings, and, with a phonograph needle held in a pin-chuck, I’d scribe in the sashes that separated the window panes, then tape the celluloid to the back side of the openings.

  I kept most of my materials and tools (razor blades, nails and pins, files, compasses and protractors, scribers, small saws and hammers, rolls of adhesive tape, jars of poster paint, glue) in an old dentist’s cabinet I’d gotten a few years before when our family dentist renovated his office. It had lots of compartments, including three flat slide-out drawers where I kept different size and color papers I’d been collecting for glueing to the outside walls—imitations of brick, stone, wood, and stucco—along with sheets of oaktag, Bristol Board, celluloid and—my favorite—a flexible glass called Perspex.

  After Karen and I had laid out and put together the main section of the house (I decided to construct it in two parts, then to join the parts together), I cut out a large piece of Perspex, drilled holes in it for attaching it to floor and roof, and then, with a small Bunsen burner, began experimenting with warming it to different temperatures in order to bend it to the shape we wanted. The great thing about Perspex, which was almost as rigid as glass when it cooled down, was that it could be used for walls without needing any extra supports. The not-so-great thing about it was that it was almost impossible to find and maintain the right temperature for bending it.

  About ten days after we’d been working together, on an afternoon when we were as close as we’d been to getting the Perspex to stay fixed (I’d cut out a curved piece of wood to use as a form around which to mold the glass), and when we were trying to set it in place on the model, we suddenly heard noise behind us—the front door opening and closing. A few seconds later my mother pushed the door to my bedroom open.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “Helping Alan with a school project,” Karen answered quickly.

  “Of course you are,” my mother said. “Of course you are.” She shifted a bag of groceries from her right to left hand so she could wag a finger at Karen. “But let me tell you something, young lady—you don’t fool me for a minute, do you hear me? You don’t fool me for a minute, you or your famous brother.”

  After saying this, my mother did an about-face and left. I thought of apologizing for her—of telling Karen that my mother’s bark was worse than her bite (which wasn’t true), or of following her out of the room and ordering her to come back in and apologize to Karen, but I knew my mother would use anything I said to stir things up more, so I just stood there, and after a few seconds, Karen put down the tube of cement she’d been holding and reached for her coat, which was on my bed.

  I pointed to the clock on top of my dresser. It was nearly seven-thirty.

  “I guess we lost track of time,” I offered.

  “Yeah,” she agreed, and then: “They say that’s what happens when you’re happy, right?”

  She put on her coat, picked up her books, and walked to the door. When she turned and looked back at me—her cheeks were flushed, a patchy rust-red—I wanted to rush to her and put my arms around her and tell her that everything would be all right, that I would love her forever no matter what my parents said or did, that we would go away to college together and have a home of our own someday, that if we stood by each other everything would work out…

  “I’m sorry,” was all I said though.

  “Well, things could be worse,” Karen said. “At least we weren’t dry-humping on your bed, right? At least we still had our clothes on.”

  That night, after my father came home, my parents summoned me to the living room to tell me they’d heard rumors about me and Karen—“Love may be blind, but the neighbors ain’t,” my mother said, repeating one of her favorite sayings—but that they had talked things over and made a decision to let things run their course and not to interfere. They loved me very much, they insisted, and they knew, despite some of the things I did and the choices I made—my “eccentricities,” they called them—that I hadn’t intended to hurt them.

  I told them I didn’t need a sermon, and my father said that given how much time I was spending in church, I was probably right, and then my mother said we didn’t need to be facetious at a time like this and, more important, that we shouldn’t have secrets from one another: that it was time I learned something about them—something they should have told me long before this, and that it had to do with how once upon a time she had been in a situation not unlike the situation I was in now.

  What amazed me was how calm my mother suddenly was. She was like a different mother than the one I’d grown up with, and when she told me the story, it was as if she’d been preparing to tell it to me since the day I was born.

  Before she married my father, she said—this happened when she was nineteen years old—she had become engaged to a Catholic boy named Tommy O’Connor, and when both sets of parents objected and made life hell for them, she and Tommy had borrowed a friend’s car and driven down to Elkton, Maryland. Elkton was famous then for allowing marriages where, if you were under twenty-one you didn’t need your parents’ consent, and she and Tommy were married there.

  When they returned to Brooklyn, they didn’t have a place of their own—realistic planning was not their strong point, my mother noted—so they had returned, separately, to their parents’ apartments, and their parents had taken each of them in. A few months later—without their ever having lived together—the marriage was annulled. Seven months later she married my father.

  “It’s all true—” my father said “—it’s all true, every word of it,” and he added that what they’d learned from this—given how their parents’ opposition had only served to drive my mother and Tommy into each other’s arms—was not to make the same mistake with me. So they’d decided that if I continued to date Karen, even though they wouldn’t like it, neither would they oppose it.

  By this time we were sitting at the kitchen table—my mother didn’t want the brisket she’d prepared to get cold—and my father was mak
ing a speech I’d heard before, about how the point of it all was that he had married my mother, that they’d stayed married for twenty-three years, that they were still married, and that they would go to the grave married.

  I asked my father if he wanted a medal for his achievements, and he called me a snot-nose who was still wet behind the ears. My mother seemed to snap out of it then, and talked to me the way she usually did.

  “Here,” she said, picking up the carving knife and leaning across the table, the knife pointed at me. “Why don’t you just cut my heart out with this and get it over with now?”

  My mother put the knife down, and my father, who was sitting between us, picked it up and placed it in front of me, after which he started yelling at my mother that it wouldn’t help things for her to get so worked up and histrionic, and off they went again, arguing with each other about the best way to deal with me.

  The big news around Erasmus—this happened less than a week later—was that Johnny Lee had chosen Yale, and would be going there on a full scholarship in the fall. By this time it was early April, when most seniors had heard from the colleges they’d applied to, and when it was warm enough for Karen and me to take long walks in the park together again. By this time, too, the park was the only place where we could be together by ourselves.

  The reason for this was that on the night after my mother found Karen in the apartment with me, she had telephoned Karen’s mother. The result was that I was no longer welcome in Karen’s home—and when I went to choir practice, Mr. Pidgeon came up to me before rehearsal started and said that it was probably best if I didn’t sing with the choir for a while.

  Things were just as bad with Olen. Whenever I tried to talk with him, he became quiet and sullen the way he was with everyone else, and when I’d offer to go for a Coke and fries with him and ask if he wanted to get together over the weekend to play ball or do other stuff, he’d say he didn’t have time to hang out with guys like me.