I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

Drive and knew I’d never see him again.
    •   •   •
    I went up the street to the brownstone where the parents were waiting for condolences. They had pulled a long white basket to the bay window, lined with white ruffles and pillows. On it lay a doll-like child of about two, as beautiful as any princess in a storybook. Golden curly hair, rosy lips and cheeks, her little white hands crossed on her chest, wearing a long white net dress and little white Mary Jane shoes. She seemed to be sleeping, like Snow White after she ate the poisoned apple, just waiting for a tiny prince to come and awaken her. “Look, look—how beautiful,” her parents kept saying, wiping their wet faces. There was a smell of choking sweetness.
    I left and walked heavily down the hill, past my grandmother’s brownstone, to the entrance of my building. I opened the apartment door, went down the hall to my bedroom, and undressed. I put on my green silk dress and left the checkered skirt and jacket on the floor.
    Not long after, I saw
Wuthering Heights
around the corner at the Dorset movie theater and met the love of my life, Heathcliff. The fierceness of that passion, the lover’s rage, burned into my little heart, and it never left me. I walked out of the Dorset Theatre, around the corner, and down the hill dazed and stricken. I had given myself overto Heathcliff. I understood his need, his undying need for Cathy. I understood his revulsion at Geraldine Fitzgerald. I even understood poor Geraldine’s hunger for his love. I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and wept for all of us.
    Heathcliff burned himself forever into my brain chemistry. The angry orphan outsider, with more electricity in his little finger than all the landed gentry put together. The wild outsider, the moors, the wind. Heathcliff the outsider had set my taste in men for life.
    Lenny Black had been replaced. I was free to worship a black-and-white star of the silver screen.
    •   •   •
    M y father owned a boys’ camp, Pocono Camp Club. I was taken there every summer, from the first year of my life. Pictures show me, at eight months, perched on a nurse’s white shoulders; at three, saluting the flag at the flag ceremony; and again barefoot, in a white petticoat, with someone’s big sunglasses covering my face. I actually remember that picture being taken. The heat of the dry grass between my toes, the hot sun on my tan arms, and the person behind the camera saying, “Look here.”
    Snap.
    My father wanted to raise and train boys with the same kind of dedication and religious ethic that he’d had in his education as a first-generation good Jewish American, moral and ambitious Columbia graduate, and responsible executive of a huge social machine like the YM and YWHA.
    At seven, when my parents reunited, I was the only little girl in the boys’ camp; I used to run after the ones my age as if I were a butterfly catcher. I would climb the hill overlooking the lake with my binoculars, lying flat so no counselor could see me, spying on theeight-year-old boys, leaping on one another, wet brown bodies with white backsides, naked, wild lemmings running toward the ice-cold water. Jumping off the pier, screaming with cold, shock, and joy.
    I used to run after them. “Play with me, play with me!” I’d call.
    The boys on the outer rim would turn their heads and look at me, alarmed, and keep on running.
    One summer my cousin Genevieve Rosenthal showed up. Her younger brothers, Jack and Jerry, were campers.
    We had each other. I was starving for a friend of my own. Genevieve was a leader. She’d bossed her two brothers and was up for anything.
    Hiding behind the social hall, she and I were alternately singer and audience, did dying scenes with each other, and stole packs of cigarettes from the niche in the office where they were sold. Her idea. Bold. Wily.
    I locked the hook on the small bathroom door in my parents’ cabin and lit a cigarette. I blew smoke in the