Leaving Brooklyn by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

rock breaks scissors.
    Miss Schechter gazed at my breasts as though they were the first on earth, a mutation, the way she might gaze through a microscope at a brand-new virus had she been a scientist, or upon an illuminating figure drawn on the sands of the Mediterranean had she been Euclid. (“Euclid alone has looked on beauty
bare,” motherly Mrs. Gompers, the English teacher, recited to us in the afternoons, and everyone in Miss Schechter’s morning class erupted in giggles, to be chided for immaturity—“I certainly wouldn’t expect this from ninth-graders.”) Miss Schechter’s gaze made breasts and all their connotations arcane and rare, not ubiquitous: family heirlooms taken out of their locked case only on very special occasions.
    Her gaze reflecting the rarity of breasts haunts me to this day. When I walk along a European beach where the women lie with bare breasts like dozens of pairs of huge eyes in every shape and shade staring blank and quivering at the sun, I shudder and want to look away; like a prudish lustful child I want to cover them, toss an enormous blanket as I would over beautiful obscenities that can consume the retina. Oh, it’s only a passing shudder. I do it myself when I’m there, take off the top of the bathing suit—after all, if there’s anything I know how to do it’s how to conform. I never knew anything but doubleness; I never had the cozy expectation that what I feel and what I do should converge.
    Despite our silence, Miss Schechter’s passion saturated the air like humidity, sliding into our pores. The next term in First Aid, the ninth-grade girls spent six giddy weeks bandaging one another—splints, slings, tourniquets, knee bandages, head bandages—all at once grasping the tactile reality of bodies, the thickness of arms and the bony resistance of knees, the delicate trellis of the ribs, the damp of the inner elbow, and the tepid smell of skin and hair. We fell on one another in springtime hysteria, giggly and wild and drunk with the chance to touch and to know. Not a day passed without some girl murmuring, “Schechter would love this, wouldn’t she?”
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    IT WAS CLOSE to ten-thirty as I started down the hall to my parents’ bedroom. I had to arrange to meet my mother the following day, for she was determined to accompany me to the contact lens doctor’s and had been anticipating the trip to Manhattan as
though it were Constantinople. Their room was dark, or nearly dark, the door closed. I paused. When I was small I used to barge in without warning, but now I was aware that they might be doing the things described in the book with the thick wine-colored cover, which I found under a pile of magazines in their bedroom when I was nine.
    For months I had kept the book beneath school papers in a night table drawer and would read it in bed—a kind of dessert after the Harvard Classics or the Little Leather Library—until I knew the best parts by heart. Then I put it back under the magazines, gone but not forgotten. A kindly, pedagogic book, it treated its subject as a procedure—unusual almost to the point of requiring apology—that could not be executed properly without instructions, like how to curtsey in the presence of the Queen of England, or what to do in a Tibetan religious rite; and also infinitely delicate and complex, like repairing the engine of a truck or performing brain surgery. It was a manual for first-timers: it called the man “the husband” and the woman “his bride.” His bride was a tender, timid creature who needed to be handled with the utmost care and solicitude. It was hard to gauge from the book whether his bride knew what her role was, or whether she had any functioning consciousness at all, since the text was addressed to the husband. His bride was a soft pet, something feathered and fluttery you could turn round in your hands, a bird that had lost