At the end of a shortened night the plane began its descent. Thoughts of the future vanished along with my attempts to appear indifferent as I craned my neck to admire the famous skyline. New York! The largest city in the world. I’d been to famous cities - Vienna, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam - but the very idea of New York carried a charge. This city was the gateway to America. Das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten. The land of unlimited possibilities. As the plane turned in its approach, skyscrapers swung into view. I recognized the Empire State Building’s spike and knew that I was looking at the tallest building on earth. We would be staying for four days before flying on to Greenville, South Carolina. I couldn’t wait to explore Manhattan.
Jet lag knocked me off center. My brain buzzed and my eyes burned. My father insisted that the secret to a quick adjustment was to force yourself to live by the local clock. As soon as we had stowed our luggage, we stumbled through the city to ward off sleep. I gaped at the rows of tall buildings lining the streets. I felt like I’d wandered into a roofless cathedral. My neck stiffened from staring up, up. When at last my neck tired, I lowered my gaze to encounter Rodin’s ‘Thinker,’ skaters twirling at Rockefeller Center, and, on Fifth Avenue, women in fur coats walking tiny dogs with bows above their eyes. I’d seen all this before, sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white, on large screens and small. What Hollywood had failed to convey was the noise and grit, the exhaust fumes and the littered gutters. I was surprised. The New York of my imagination was modern and clean, too young to show signs of wear.Exploring this vertical city was in itself so novel, that I didn’t notice at first that my parents had switched roles. It was my mother - guidebook in hand - who usually led our sightseeing trips to famous places. The evening before, she would have read up, so she could point out landmarks and identify architectural detail. She had dreamed of majoring in art history - instead of textile chemistry as the East German government eventually decreed - and knew how to tell a Romanesque arch from a Gothic and judge the period of a prehistoric ruin by its columns and capitals. On our last vacation to the Italian Lake District, she’d told me the Roman poet Catullus’ life story as we visited the remnants of his villa. I’d gotten so interested, I’d forgotten to keep my embarrassed distance. But in New York, her architectural references were useless, and besides, my father knew Manhattan. She left her guidebook in her purse as we followed my father’s confident lead.
When we arrived at our first restaurant for dinner, I peered into the gloomy interior. I’d never seen such a dimly lit room that wasn’t a theater or a cellar.
“Why is it so dark?” I asked my father.
He shrugged. “ I don’t know. A lot of American restaurants are like that. They seem to think it’s elegant.”
My mother wondered:” How can they see what they’re eating?” and started toward an empty table.
“Stop,” my father hissed. My mother froze. “You have to wait for the hostess to seat you!” My mother’s shoulders sagged.
“Why can’t you pick your own table?” I asked.
“That’s just how it’s done,” my father said.
As we waited, I soaked up every strange detail. There were no tablecloths. The plates and silverware sat directly on wood grain Formica. Ruby pressed glass goblets held dark red napkins. Once at our table, we pulled them out and placed them in our laps, and a waitress filled the goblets with ice cubes and water. My father had told me that Americans put ice in their drinks, but why were they giving us water? All my life I’d been told not to drink tap water because I’d get sick. “Smell it, “ my father whispered” it’s full of chlorine.” That it was. It smelled like the Krefeld public swimming pool. I couldn’t overcome a lifetime of training. I asked my father to order a Cola for me instead
He also ordered shrimp cocktail, salad, steak and a baked potato. I was excited about the shrimp. They were such a special, expensive treat. When they arrived, I was puzzled. The shrimp were huge. I bit into one and felt my taste buds wilt. Compared to the tiny North Sea shrimp we ate at home, they had no flavor. My father so clearly enjoyed them that I gave them another chance. They still tasted bland, but I liked the cocktail sauce. My father said:” They’re just different. You’ll like them once you get used to them.”
Our steaks arrived, each one sizzling on a metal platter. “One of these is as much meat as I normally buy for all of us for dinner! “ my mother exclaimed, as she picked up her fork and knife. She wrinkled her forehead. “ I don’t know if I can eat it all.”
My father grinned. He promised me that, since meat was so cheap here, we could have steaks every week. That sounded great to me. As I dug in with pleasure, my mother fretted. If she ate the whole steak, she’d get a stomachache. My father reassured her that Americans didn’t think anything of leaving some food on their plates. “ And if they don’t want to waste it, they ask for a ‘doggy bag’ and take the rest home,” he explained. We were both incredulous. Take food home from a restaurant? It sounded unspeakably rude and admirably practical at the same time. Did they really feed it to the dog? My father shrugged. How could anyone know? I’d been making good progress with my steak, but the foil-wrapped baked potato was another mystery. My father showed us how to split the potato’s top, squeeze it open and scoop out the insides. I love sour cream, and quickly realized that I could use the potato to indulge in lots of it by slathering each forkful.
After that first meal, I was sold on steak and baked potato. I added the meal to my list of foreign favorites. In Italy, I’d fallen in love with the custom of sprinkling grated Parmesan into my soups, and I relished the grilled lamb sausages they served in Yugoslavia, the huge selection of cheeses in Denmark and the potato croquettes sold in the streets in the Netherlands. It hadn’t penetrated yet that I wouldn’t be going home to restaurants where I could count on the menu to feature Schnitzel and Gulaschsuppe. My father had booked rooms at a hotel that was in a skyscraper built in 1927. I watched the lights counting off floors on the elevator and expected to feel dizzy when I stepped off, but the floor felt solid. The rooms themselves were shabby. I was trying hard to hold on to my sense of adventure, so I refused to let them depress me. Squishy king-size beds, nicked nightstands, a dresser, and a TV filled each room. I checked out the bathrooms and stared at the tiny bathtubs. I’d heard Americans preferred showers and found the idea of them appealing, but with bathtubs this shallow and narrow, I couldn’t imagine ever being able to read in the tub again. Instead of central heating, each room had a noisy unit with pushbutton controls under the window. How would we sleep? I leaned across the heater to console myself with the view I expected to find at this height. Another surprise. Outside rose other tall buildings, gray concrete with uniform windows, most blind with dust. At the bottom of the concrete canyon ran a stream of honking cars. At the top a slab of sunlight angled across the building, but didn’t reach down to our floor.
Ah, but the bed was a marvel of American ingenuity. Next to the nightstand was a small box with a label that explained this was no ordinary bed. This was a “relaxing massage” bed, activated by a mere 25 cents. I begged my father to sort through his change. My mother spread herself out on the bed; I dropped in the quarter. The bed began to hum and vibrate. My mother lay there, giggling. I hopped on next to her. I wouldn’t exactly call it a massage, but it was an odd feeling, being jiggled like a slab of gelatin. All too soon, the bed fell silent. I wasn’t sure the experience had lived up to its advertising.
We bought tickets to a real Broadway Musical, ‘Hello, Dolly’ starring Ginger Rogers. My parents oohed and aahed. Ginger Rogers! She danced in all those movies with Fred Astaire. My mother loved watching American men dance. She’d watch them on TV and sigh: “European men just don’t know how to dance and look masculine at the same time.” And Ginger Rogers: I had a vague memory that she was tall, slim and had wavy hair. My mother let me wear my nylons to go to the theater that night. We had good seats, close enough to see the expressions on the actors’ faces. Ginger Rogers’ wrinkles showed even through the layers of pancake. She was an old lady trying to use make-up, false eyelashes and who knows what else to look young and glamorous. I felt cheated. Maybe it worked at a distance, the way Manhattan looked clean from an airplane.
I strained to follow the plot for at least the first ten minutes. I knew Frau Tümmler - my English teacher- had studied at Oxford and that Americans had a different accent, but I wasn’t prepared for this huge a gap. Where English sounded tight and appeared to be articulated with a mostly closed mouth, American was loose-lipped and broad. I only recognized the occasional word. My ears searched for all the wrong clues. My head throbbed. I gave up, settled back in my seat, and let the words become a wash of sound. My head ached and my ears shut down. How was I going to manage at school, all day, in American English? I would worry about that later. Next to me, my mother wasn’t giving up on the musical. The only way she could follow the action was to whisper questions to my father. After a few of these, he resigned himself to giving us a brief synopsis during the songs. And so we limped through an endless performance.
The New Jersey sales agent for my father’s company called and offered to take us on an excursion. Henry had grown up in Greiz, the East German town where my parents studied and met, but he’d been living in New Jersey for the last twenty years. Twenty years sounded like forever to me. In twenty years, you’d probably forget how to speak German, I thought. Or at least you’d sound like you were out of practice.
Henry arrived in a wide American car to pick us up at the hotel entrance. The clothes on his slim frame looked American, though I doubt if I could have explained what that meant. There’s an informality and relaxed fit to American men’s wear that contrasts with the sharp precision of German clothes. His hair was cut just a little too short to fit in on a German street, too. But when he walked toward us to shake our hands and then opened his mouth, what poured out was a pure Thuringian accent. He sounded like my aunts and uncles. I felt a wave of relief. I’d been in the US for only two days, but the sound of another German voice warmed me. We were still saying Guten Tag when a bellboy rushed toward Henry. I was in for another surprise. When Henry talked to him, I could barely understand any of the English words he used, but I could hear that the rhythms of his speech had never adapted. He had never mastered American th’s and r’s, and the rise and fall of his sentences followed the patterns of his hometown. I hoped I could learn to speak English better than that.
The bellboy hurried us out of the lobby; he’d apparently been concerned about Henry leaving his car idling outside the door. Once we got underway, Henry swooped around corners, down to the river, past rows of trees, and arrived at ‘The Cloisters.’ I have no idea what possessed Henry to take us - newly arrived from Europe - to this artificial monastery, filled with French medieval art. My mother and I whispered to each other as we followed the tour guide who talked too fast for us to understand. My mother had picked up a brochure and from it she deciphered that someone had shipped whole arcades and interiors from four Provencal monasteries across the Atlantic and reconstructed them here. She shook her head in disbelief. What a crazy thing to do! Why would you import somebody else’s history? I agreed it was hard to believe. Like all European kids, I was hungry for historic traces of Indians. I’d seen plenty of medieval churches.
Even though she disapproved of this artificial history, my mother’s eyes began to shine as she took in the museum’s riches. The walls were hung with ancient tapestries, illuminated manuscripts glowed from glass cases, and gargoyles stuck out their tongues. My mother didn’t need the tour guide’s explanation to point out details I would otherwise have missed. The courtyards were filled with herbs labeled in Latin. When we looked up from the lavender, out a Gothic window, we saw what Henry explained was the coast of New Jersey. I felt my sense of reality turn itself inside out. Here I was, just arrived from Germany, in a courtyard meant to recreate medieval France, getting my first glimpse of the American mainland. The thought circled in my head until I gave up trying to fight dizziness.
The next day, my father took a picture of me in front of the Plaza Hotel. I stand in the open square, my shoulders slightly hunched. My hair flows smoothly from a side part to a bobby pin and barely brushes my shoulders. My dark brown eyes reach toward the viewer, and my nose - it is long and narrow - looks a bit out of proportion to my small oval face. I do not smile - smiling for a photo is childish, I am trying to look mysterious - and as a result my lips look pinched. I am wearing a mini-length coat, fitted beige wool that I remember as the height of style in mid-sixties Germany. On my feet is a fashionable pair of black leather shoes with bows and tiny heels- we had bought them on a shopping trip to Holland. Behind me bare trees draw fragile shapes against the backdrop of towering concrete. The buildings surround me. They block all but a sliver of the sky.
I don’t remember feeling as scared as I look. In fact, I don’t remember feeling anything at all. I moved through New York with all my senses set to receive. Every little thing was new from the shape of toilets, to doorknobs and light switches to the pulsing howl of police car sirens. After the jet lag wore off, I began to realize that, this time, the differences weren’t curiosities I could file away when I returned home from my summer vacation. As I struggled with the language I submerged my growing apprehension about attending an American school. I concentrated harder. I was too exhausted to feel, or at least to try to name my feelings. As the end of our vacation drew near, I noticed a growing impatience. Being in New York was just a holding action that couldn’t really reveal the full truth of what lay ahead. Even as I felt my anxiety build, I wanted fling myself forward to my destination in South Carolina. Wondering what my life there would be like must surely be worse than getting there and knowing.
Just before we left, I photographed the Statue of Liberty from the edge of New York Harbor. The statue is a small shape in the picture’s center, floating between water and sky. To the left sparkles a bright streak of reflected light. I wanted to take the ferry to see how big she was, but my father said it was a long ride and there was nothing to do once you got there. I knew that she was supposed to welcome immigrants, that we were supposed to arrive yearning to be free. I wasn’t poor or desperate to be here. From where I stood on the shore, Liberty was turned away, holding her torch high, welcoming someone else.
No comments:
Post a Comment