"Is he dressed for Halloween?" one of my classmates asked when I brought a picture of my brother to school. I saw my brother then through the eyes of these strangers, people who knew nothing about my life before I moved to New York City.
That moment in the classroom encapsulated what I had felt for the past year, ever since my family moved from the country. The picture of my brother showed that when we were home, before the move, we were free. It didn't matter what we wore or did, because nobody could see us. We had absolute privacy, a privilege that had been stripped from us when we moved.
In the country, we wore home clothes and public clothes. The public clothes were tucked away and preserved so that when we presented ourselves at school we were truly actors on a stage. These clothes appeared to be new, but were actually hand-me-downs from other people, people I never knew. My uncle, who owned a dry cleaning store, gave us these abandoned articles.
With the dry cleaning castoffs, we borrowed the respectability of the former owners. That persona was shed as soon as we returned home. Then we would become ourselves...free. I understood that the way we looked was disreputable, but I didn't care. My older sister did care. She tried to personalize the clothes, to make them attractive. She matched top to bottom, rolled up sleeves to improve the impression. Not me. I just put them on and went outside, liberated from the view, and judgement of others.
The trees, the grass and the stream didn't have eyes, didn't see.
I remember once we were playing behind the house. A car stopped on the road. This was unusual, because traffic on our road was limited to locals mostly. But this car was different. Two well-dressed people emerged, a man and a woman. They had taken a wrong turn and found themselves on this back road.
My sister, the sister who cared, later described their expressions as we emerged from the shadows. We were young children, not one of us over 11 years old. This sister had such awareness she could see us as they saw us.
"Did you see the way they looked at us?" She asked. "It seemed like they didn't want to leave, as though they wanted to do something for us."
She was right, of course. The grass on the front yard often grew quite long. It stayed that way until my brother cut it with a scythe. We must have looked like pond people, with our miss-matched, miss-sized clothing, as we approached their car through the overgrown yard.
When we moved to the city we left behind the ungroomed yard and our ungroomed clothes. We shed that identity. The dry cleaning clothes were gone.
My mother announced one day, "We're going shopping." I had never bought clothes in my life. I didn't like the stores any more than I liked the streets. Too crowded. Too confusing.
I hadn't felt myself since we moved. There was almost no place of refuge. Even our apartment was stifling, because the place that was preserved for me in those rooms was a corner. I shared the bedroom with my sisters and each of us was assigned a corner.
Fortunately, my corner was next to the fire escape. At night, when everyone was asleep, I'd go outside and sit on the fire escape. I'd look up into the night sky and ignore the buildings that surrounded me. It was the same night sky I used to look up at when I sat on the roof of my country home. It was on the fire escape at night that I was most comfortable.
In the daytime there was nowhere I could be alone. As soon as I opened the apartment door I was in public. On the sidewalk eyes were all around--on the street, in apartment windows, in passing cars.
Astonishingly, people even made comments as I walked by. I remember the first time that happened. Men collecting garbage whistled and called out to me.
What did they say? "Hello? Hey there? Hi?..."
Whatever they said, I was twelve, and I was mortified. The episode cemented for me the sensation of being exposed.
All these complex feelings, all the challenges I had faced since we moved to city became clear the day in the seventh grade when I pulled out my brother's picture. There he was, dressed like a hobo. The freedom to look like a hobo and not care about it was taken from us.
What did I say when they asked if my brother was dressed for Halloween? I lied.
"Yes," I said. "He was."
The picture of my brother in his hobo clothes is gone. It was swallowed by time. Over the years, the boy from the country also disappeared. He and I, and my sisters had in a sense become strangers to those children who lived in the country. And yet, one can see by my drawing that I have managed to preserve a little piece of childhood. Inside my head, inside my heart there exists a small pocket where the child from the country can still be free.
I drew the picture of my brother digitally, from memory. It's my impression of him. I couldn't get the shoes right so I borrowed them from Alexas_Fotos on Pixabay. Also, the stick was hard to draw, so I borrowed that from frauke riether on Pixabay. The leaves I borrowed from @muelli at the LMAC image library. The distressed look on the clothes I managed with a Lunapic filter.
The Inkwell prompt for this week is, "A stranger's view."
Thank you for reading my blog. Hive one!