Leaving Brooklyn by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Page A

all urge to fly.
    The husband was supposed to begin by kissing his bride gently, stroking her body and her breasts, and then carefully enter her, lying on top. This was the ideal. But in many if not most cases, the kindly instructor acknowledged – with a tolerance familiar to me from my mother’s tolerance of the chicken flicker’s cleft palate and the tolerance we were taught to feel towards people of other races—the bride might not be “ready.” In that event the husband was to take his bride on his lap, first removing or at least raising her nightgown, wet his fingers in his mouth, and gently spread the saliva over her genital area.

    I thought of my mother’s cold cream and my father’s shaving cream, which I had seen them spread on their faces with three fingers. After a bit of this, the husband replenishing the saliva from time to time, they could lie down again.
    Now came the moment for his bride’s single initiative: when “ready,” she was supposed to tell him to “come up over.” My body jerked with an electric shock when I first read those words, and every time after, too, I shuddered and winced as I felt them approaching on the page. Through my unwilling eyes the words suffused me with shame; what mortified me was not the invitation itself but the unnatural coupling of objectless prepositions, the vast and ominous clumsiness of the phrase. It seemed even more keenly peculiar under the circumstances, since no other words were apparently spoken.
    â€œCome on over,” which sounded almost the same, and so amiable and smooth, was a way of inviting someone to your house. But “up over”? I recalled the dogs on the field at twilight years ago, when our gamboling parade celebrated the bomb that ended the war. The black dog really was “up over.” But people in such positions? The words suggested very different sorts of activities: mountain climbing, or scaling fire escapes and roofs, as I did in the apartment building of friends around the corner on Montgomery Street. Or Red Rover, which we played in the streets on summer evenings, when the light lasted forever and the parents sat out on the porches reading newspapers and eating cherries and watermelon. One child got down on all fours and the others leaped over her in turn. “Red Rover, Red Rover, let Audrey come over.” I would put my hands on the back of the crouching girl or boy, straddle, and leapfrog over.
    And “come up over” what? Over the bride herself. She was referring to herself, her body, but not naming herself—no pronoun to satisfyingly close the scaling prepositions. The words were maddening, itching with incompleteness and balked expectations. I would have to do those things someday, and though they seemed alien and absurd—especially having someone’s spit
all over me—I didn’t worry about it, I assumed I would grow into it like everyone else. But those words? I could never, never speak them. It pained me to think the skilled and graceful heroines in the movies spoke them after they were married. Maybe the book was wrong. That might not be the only way to go about it, or even the correct way. My father was always telling my mother not to believe everything she read.
    In any event, I was older now. I knew enough not to barge through a closed door. I took another step down the hall and saw that in fact the door was open a few inches. There was a faint light I recognized as the flicker from the television screen. I had badgered my parents so much about the gloom—playing on their conformities, quoting The Ladies’ Home Journal and its six sister magazines on the subject of the home as an open, cheerful place to which a child should be proud to invite her friends—that they had moved the TV upstairs to their bedroom, restoring light to the living room.
    Edging closer, I heard low canned voices, one of which I knew well. Safe. They were