Dream Homes by Joyce Zonana

Author:Joyce Zonana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2018-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Seven: Ocean Avenue

♦ ♦ ♦

Tante Suze, Cairo, 1940s.

When I started having nightly dreams that my mother was cutting my hair, I knew it was time to move out of my parents’ Brooklyn home. The year was 1968. I was eighteen, and I had tried leaving twice before—once when I went off to college just after high school, and a second time, the following year, when I came close to renting a studio apartment on a quiet street in Park Slope. Each of my earlier attempts had ended in failure: the first when I returned from college without completing my freshman year; the second when I allowed my mother to talk me out of making the move. I could do whatever I liked, she promised, if only I would stay home.

But my dreams convinced me otherwise. Each night, I would see my mother approaching me with scissors. She would tie me into a barber’s chair, gag and blindfold me, then spin the chair until I was dizzy. I could feel the scissors making sharp, wild cuts, nearly piercing my scalp. When it was over, most of my hair lay scattered across the floor, leaving me with nothing but a few jagged tufts on my head.

It had taken four years to grow that hair. I loved its thick, dark weight, the way it fell over my shoulders and onto my back. Every night, I brushed it faithfully—the requisite one hundred strokes, lulling myself into dreams. I wore it up or down, sometimes half up and half down, twisting strands into what I imagined were artful shapes held in place by elaborate barrettes. Strangers on the subway admired it; boys I knew stroked it. As a child, despite my longing for a ponytail like those of my classmates, I had worn my hair in the short curls my mother favored. But now that I was grown, my hair was mine to do with as I liked. Or so I imagined, until the dreams came.

♦

I kept my plans to myself, locating a cheap, fourth-floor, rent-controlled walkup on Ocean Avenue, not far from Brooklyn College. The building, one of three identical brick structures that lined the street, had a dim central lobby with a worn staircase on either side; on each floor, on each side of the building, four apartments opened out from a small, dark landing. My apartment was at the top right corner of the building, with a bedroom to the east and a living room facing south. I envisioned mornings watching the sun rise over the college clock tower, afternoons drinking tea, and evenings of quiet study looking out into the sky. My part-time job at a veterinary clinic would cover the rent, and I would have few other expenses. I signed a three-year lease—the only choice the landlord offered—and surreptitiously began to move my books and clothes.

♦

“How, Joyce, can you do this to your mother?”

The voice was that of my beautiful Tante Suze, calling me a month later, as soon as she had heard the news.

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