Whiplash. Detour.

long-island

And now for something completely different, a bit of whiplash and detour, lest I lull everyone into slumber with all that sweetness and light. I'm going to test drive one of my Long Island pieces, part of a collection I have been revisiting and expanding lately...all of them what I would describe as fictionalized memoir. It's a strange term, I guess, and hopefully not too evocative of Mike Daisey's now infamous "I am not a journalist" defense of the lies he presented on This American Life...but I'm talking about my own personal recollections, and although names and details have been changed, the essential truths remain intact, or at least they are the truth as I experienced it.

I've been writing about Long Island for a long time...not just any Long Island, but the Suffolk County of the 1960s, when my family became part of the great exodus into the suburbs from New York's metropolitan area. Actually, where we moved wasn't even exactly suburbs at the time; it was, as my mother bitterly proclaimed, The Sticks. It wouldn't be long before the woods came down, housing developments proliferated, and the usual shopping malls, traffic, and suburban infrastructure took hold in all its predictable tackiness, but for the moment this place was strangely new, isolated from what we had known, and still wild at the edges  The following fictionalized ("I am not a journalist") portrait of a neighbor contains plenty of fact, and maybe it conveys something about the loneliness that was sometimes the price of moving from the city to one's own Long Island house. It's called Come Back, You Son-of-A-Bitch:

Οurs was a wide, well-trafficked street interspersed with patches of woods that hadn’t yet been cleared for new houses, and there were no sidewalks, a fact that my mother, who actually liked to walk, grumbled about constantly. This was not a cookie-cut housing development: the homes were older, bore no resemblance to one another, and were set back at varying distances from the street..

About a quarter of a mile away, just beyond an adjacent clump of pine trees, Audrey and Sal Bruno inhabited a ranch-style house on a large unkempt lot––until one day Sal left her, and Audrey became its sole occupant. She placed a large painted sign in her front yard:

DRIVER OF GREEN DODGE: LIC# 3GF9662 COME BACK YOU SON OF A BITCH

She watched and listened for his car in vain and took to walking along the avenue at all hours, our own brooding Heathcliff, though female and unmoored. She dyed her already wild and massive hair a disturbing shade of red, muttered to herself as she strode along the street, and according to one story, purchased buckshot for her grandfather’s old deer-hunting rifle. I pictured her sitting at her window on rainy days, gun at the ready. It was worrisome.

She also acquired cats, many cats. You could see them curled up in the sunlight, wandering around the yard, or leaping from a shopping cart piled high with soggy newspapers. And she knitted hats, scarves, and potholders that she set out for sale, despite a conspicuous lack of customers, at a little roadside table with an honor box, in odd contrast to the son-of-a-bitch sign a few feet behind it. Mostly she just walked, head down, red hair exploding from one of her own hand-knitted caps, with no apparent destination.

Even without having been officially deserted, a lot of wives on Long Island were feeling stranded or abandoned in the 1950s and 60s. Women who had spent their lives in the city walking to stores and parks or handily taking buses and subways to further destinations had in many cases never even learned to drive––what would be the point? There had been plenty to see, and places to go, all within amble or transit. Streets were noisy with the sounds of kids playing, while nosy old crones rested their elbows on the windowsills watching it all, ready to meddle if needed. Now the wives had been deposited in residential blocks of single-family dwellings. But husbands’ jobs might still be in the city, and commerce took place at supermarket shopping centers several miles away. The strange suburban isolation could come as a shock.

As for Audrey, perhaps she too had relocated from the city, who can say? In any case, her current address was certainly not an easy one from which to wander and forget. Her usual route was south along our street to Sunrise Highway, then north all the way to Veteran’s Highway and back, and the mileage she put in was quite impressive.

Even early in the mornings, I might see her lurching along as I passed by on the school bus: gait heaving and hurried, long hair not quite contained by the odd little hat, a lumpy orange scarf wrapped around her neck and trailing like a flame. There was something tragic and pitiable about her, and I honestly thought about saying hello, leaving cookies on her doorstep, saving up my babysitting money to buy some hats or potholders. But I was, after all, only 12, and I had to admit she was creepy. She seemed the embodiment of misery, a reminder that all was not well in this bright new place to which we’d fled.

Then of course there came a day I didn’t see her, or the day after that, or the day after that. And one night, two policemen came up the long walkway to our house. It was a school night, and I was sitting in the kitchen doing homework. I remember the knock at our door, a loud authoritative rap.

Audrey Bruno had been lying dead for days in her house, no sign of foul play, autopsy pending. When had we last seen the lady? Did we know of any relatives? What could we tell them about her life?

We knew nothing but what we had glimpsed in passing. She went for long walks, she knitted things, she kept at least a dozen cats around…and she missed her husband Sal. She had sprung up here with no history or future. I’d never even heard the sound of her voice.

The little roadside table was dragged back inside and the sign was taken down, silencing the broadcast of her pain. Humane society volunteers coaxed cats into carriers and took them away, a clean-up crew arrived and filled three dumpsters, windows were boarded up with blank slabs of wood.

Many green cars passed but not a one stopped.