Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 72nd post, Helena shares more “flashes” from young adulthood in New York City. Enjoy!
Flash Photos
Leaning
She leans into my pocketbook with her elbow. We’re at a chic, arty store in Manhattan. I’ve got my wool embroideries with me, the pieces I am working on in lieu of painting since the birth of Theo, my daughter, my sister Jolene’s niece. My studio has been transformed into my daughter’s nursery. I’ve switched from oil paint to dry mediums I can work with in the living room, sitting on the blue couch, a gift from my parents. Or in the dining nook, on a brown Formica table Ted and I picked out at a store on Flatbush Avenue. That was before Ted took the name Harland, given to him by a holy man.
First, I worked in collage, but I didn’t get far; I didn’t yet understand its possibilities. But I had a huge bag of yarns, a bag full of colors, just gorgeous. My grandmother knew someone who worked in a yarn factory. Would that have been in the garment district? She may have known people there—my grandfather organized unions in those factories, though it seems to me, even now, my grandfather’s and grandmother’s lives were separate. Union organizing was hard and violent. My grandmother and their children—my mother, Benny, Rose, and Dorothy, my uncle and aunts—would have been protected. My grandfather had a nom de guerre, a name I learned much later from Yivo, the Jewish Archives. My sister and I knew nothing of that as children.
I bought a piece of wool, maybe a half yard at a store on Foster Avenue, and sewed, free-style, the way I do everything, in rows of stitches—I couldn’t follow the directions I found for embroidery designs in library books. I’d fallen in love particularly with the work of Mariska Karacz, worshipped it the way I worshipped Van Gogh’s paintings. Still, I had no patience for following her instructions. I couldn’t have if I tried. I didn’t work that way. I worked from inspiration. I stitched the wool in rows using a yarn needle. I painted with that wool. Flowers.
I’ve got two flower-embroidered pictures with me standing beside my sister. One piece is a pillow; the other is unhemmed, unfinished, but already glowing with those yarn stitches. I now recall the feeling of these stitches under the tips of my fingers, and remember that they were rug yarns, leftovers, bits and pieces. Not the yarns one would knit a sweater with, but perfect for these embroideries. Fiber art, long before the term was coined. Crafts was the category of this sewn work in the 1960s.
I must have gone into the city to meet her, to meet my sister. She was my champion, wanted me to show the work around. “Let’s stop in here,” she might have said.
We’re standing with our heads tipped back, looking up at the manager of that fashionable store who is in an enclosed cubby, built on a raised platform. I remember the feeling of this manager; she is interested in the work I’ve pulled from a cloth bag, my bag of yarns, a bag I think my mother has given me, rust colored rough weave cotton with flecks of color. It’s got a wooden handle. The manager whose face I can’t remember is interested in selling the work in her shop. It is at that point, at that yes-point, that I reach into my pocketbook to take out a cigarette, to light up. I must need the distancing, the bolstering, I am excited. No one has seen this work but my sister, and people smoked in public then.
My sister leans into my pocketbook with her elbow, casually, as she would if she were leaning on a table, just relaxing, shifting her weight. I think she is talking up my work to the manager, the buyer for that store. I got the message, don’t smoke now! My sister had a sense of propriety that I lacked. I was too informal to put aside my slouchy way.
We also stopped into America House that day. America House was a museum for American craftspeople, on 54th Street, near the Museum of Modern Art. And though the work never sold there, it was acquired and shown for a good year. My first public success.
But it was that lean into my pocketbook that became the thing we laughed about, laughed until we were breathless, part of the book of legends we gathered together. “Remember when I leaned into your pocketbook?” she’d ask. We laughed in a way I’m thinking only sisters laugh, until the muscles in our cheeks and stomachs were sore.
My Mother Cried
My grandmother also had a bag of fabrics, probably a paper bag. There were no plastic bags then. Another friend who worked in the garment district? Scraps of colors. My mother passed them to me, the one who was always making things. Maybe that’s why my grandmother had them. Maybe she’s asked her friend for those scraps, thinking of me, and that I made things from anything I could get my hands on. I sewed them together to make a shower curtain, before anyone had fabric shower curtains. I lined it with a plastic shower curtain. When my mother saw it, she cried. “You’re like a gypsy,” she said, using the word of the time. I couldn’t understand how she’d made that out of my beautiful shower curtain. I showed it to her with such pride. But I understand it now. How she worried about me. I was out there, but she was out there when she was young, too. She dressed in clothes that must have turned heads. Where did she get those outrageous suits, tight sweaters, adorable feathered derby hats? Were they hand-me-downs? My mother was a bookkeeper, she’d dropped out of school to support her parents. But there are her pictures in the black photo album that lived on the shelf in the hall closet on Crown Street, the photo album my parents paged through over coffee some evenings, me looking over their shoulders before I went to bed. I have those pictures of my mother now. She was as out there as I was. She was just so much older than she was in those pictures when she had her children. I was confused by her tears. I thought she’d be proud of me.
Now I understand my mother’s tears. I was an artist, dropped out of school, still making calls to book photographers for school graduations. My sister with her 172 IQ was still a secretary. I have my own children. I understand worry. She didn’t know that we would make something of ourselves after all. And had she lived to know who we became; she knew well that life was hard. I ache to hold her and let her cry. I understand her so well now. I have become her sister in understanding.
Girlie
Your sister, Jo, didn’t suffer gladly things most people would not take notice of, or worse, they would ignore. They’d ignore that queasy feeling in the pit of the stomach over a young and lovely girl, serving ice cream at an ice cream stand you’ve stopped at with your younger sister on a hot, summer’s day, travelling upstate, to Loon Lake, to Warrensburg, to Lake George, retracing the steps of a vacation your parents took you both on when you were eighteen and your sister was fifteen, your parents retracing their own steps of vacations they took before you and your sister, their children, were born. You are retracing the retraced steps of your parents, making a holy pilgrimage, though you don’t call it that, though it might only dawn on your sister years later that that’s what you were doing, though you could not mourn your parents. And while your sister was so thick in mourning for them without you, you hushed her to speak of them by your cold and in fact unspeakable rage. You are alone in your grief, too overwhelming to allow it to sift up into mind, and she, your sister, is alone with hers.
Your sister is now 30 years old, holding in her arms her second child, her son, your nephew, nursing, modestly concealing herself and the child under a cloth diaper, and you are 34. You are both still lovely, too, still young and attractive, but not in the way that that peaches-skin girl handing you, through the window of that dairy stand, the vanilla ice cream cone dipped in chocolate you’ve just ordered, is attractive, handing it to you, saying, “Here you are, M’am.” You didn’t suffer gladly that constriction of stomach muscles at being categorized m’am, or the way that address is considered a polite way to speak to a woman older than that young girl, an address that is blind to the presence, the living presence of you. And you are only one in a line of five or eight people waiting on that summer day to get their mouths around that cool ice cream. And we are not yet educated to be awake. Who will educate us so? So what woke you? And what woke her? Is it the family’s sense of justice that opened the door to feeling?
You and she are so far from home, following the way your parents travelled. The feeling is nostalgia. Nostalgia: a costume masking a grief too great to feel; try looking without blinking, without sunglasses, without a hand over your eyes, directly into the sun, and that doesn’t come close to describing the upheaval threatening to consume all capacity to go on living.
Here’s how you accept that dripping ice cream cone: You say, “Thanks, Girlie.” Your younger sister’s eyes open wider. A smile begins at the corners of her mouth. And when you both nearly stumble getting back into the car, you can’t get there soon enough, back to your blue Toyota, your sister watching that the top of the door doesn’t graze the head of that nursing infant, her four month old boy, that newest to the family, her nursing being as foreign to you as giving birth to a child is foreign. She is not a person whose body expresses love; she is a person whose sense of justice expresses love, expresses love fiercely, through the law, through litigation, through winning for the underdog, literally the underdog, because she is an animal rights lawyer, the avante guard that sees a dog’s sentience, a cat’s. The way she longs to be seen. And she is not alone, there is Jane Goodall and Diane Fosse, and Frank Serpico, who you know. They also know about being seen. They see those animals that feel pain and the relief of being loved after abuse she won’t tell you about—though she herself makes it her business, her practice to know, she won’t tell you because she loves you so much and protects you from their terrible plight, those animals at the mercy of the callousness, and worse, of human beings who are meant to love, but have not understood who they are, not yet.
“Here you are, M’am.” One, maybe two beats. “Thanks, Girlie.”
That young and lovely ice cream girl will not know what girlie means. She is upstate, not on the streets of Brooklyn, where girlie is a coarse and a pejorative address, even a threatening thing to call someone.
You hit that front seat of the Toyota, windows open, eating your ice cream cones, and break up into the contractions of that laughter that falls upon you. She is as surprised as you are at what came out of your mouth in response to being addressed as m’am. There is another grief here, it strikes you now, the loss of that very early youth, before the grief that pilgrimage honors, though you won’t speak of your mother or your father, and your sister is locked out in silence. You and your sister can laugh until you are both weeping because you can’t weep any other way. And now you think, that’s why this sister-laughter is so physical, like a birth.
Mercy
We’re together, in your apartment on 81st Street in Yorkville. It’s night, a sleepover. A sleepover at your place is the pinnacle, better than romantic love. Two sisters, brought close by family conflict. Thick as thieves. We’ve gone to dinner at Maria’s Cin Cin, a restaurant you love, somewhere in the East 50s. You love Maria’s the way you love the things you love, with passion. Maria’s Cin Cin is a legend. Maria is a legend. She has a following of regulars, movie stars, writers. At Maria’s is Table 8, where that night she seated us. Table 8 is a place that is touched, enchanted. Table 8 has an atmosphere, a history. It is called holy. The holy of holies of Maria’s Cin Cin. There is a list of things that have happened at that table. During the blackout, a child was conceived at Table 8. And that night, at that table, we’ve eaten our spaghetti dinners.
Now it’s late, we’re back at your apartment, we’re sharing your bed. There is no air conditioning in summer yet, except in movie theaters. People use electric fans. The window over the bed is wide open. We can hear the voices of that summer’s night, people still awake, talking in their apartments. We are talking too, late into the night. Talking for hours as we did, though I can’t remember about what, we just talked. Everything was interesting to us.
Now there is another sound. Wailing. And shouts, “Shut up!” “Shut the hell up, you’re drunk!” coming from other open windows along 81st Street. We get to our knees on the bed and look out the window, leaning on the wrought iron grate, solidly imbedded in the concrete of the window casing. Across the street is another apartment building. But on the ground floor there is something other than a store front—a monastery. The sign, carved stone above its wooden door, reads, “The Monastery of Saint Stephan’s of Hungary.” Someone is still calling from a window, “Go home!”
My sister and I watch, spellbound. A man, disheveled, weaving, directly across and below my sister’s first floor window, is crying out in drunken torment. Our hearts go out to him; my sister and I are one.
The thing that happens next seems to unfold in slow-motion. The wooden door of Saint Stephen’s opens. A man dressed in a brown robe, tied with a rope, comes slowly out, leaves the door open. Walks to the man, puts his arm around him, and draws him toward himself, takes him inside. The door closes behind them.
This thing, so opposed to the shouts, to the scorn, the humor, the contempt, the bother, is a movement in a direction I have not witnessed before. A man doing the reverse of anything I could have imagined. Taking unto himself, and to his brothers inside the monastery, this drunken, suffering man, pulling him into the shelter of that mysterious place, lit golden inside that open door on that dark night. It was a moment I would not forget. It was the beginning that I would only see in hindsight, backwards in time, after learning again and again that such mercy exists—exists, secretly in concrete streets. In the concrete streets of the world.
Have you ever tried dilating a small but clear memory this way, as a piece of flash nonfiction? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
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