"The Pool on Ocean Avenue" by Denise Kaplan - 2022 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize Finalist

 

 

"The Pool on Ocean Avenue"

by  Denise Kaplan

 

Somewhere along the four-lane arterial of Ocean Avenue that connects Park Slope to Sheepshead Bay, where cars barrel down day and night,creating a constant Niagara Falls-like hum, and what was the gruesome scene of several of my cats being flattened by said traffic,sat a series of large single-family houses where the quiet was never interrupted by the incessant Doppler effect of cars, buses and motorcycles. Motorcycles were a particular assault on the ears in the summer months when the windows were opened during the day. Their roar was only drowned out by the rumble and cough of the air conditioner at night as my sisters and I all bunked up in the same cool room. The three-story house was large enough to shield my backyard from the urban clammer of Ocean Avenue and provide a sanctuary away from the noise and heat and monotony of summer.

In July of1978,every day was filled with lazily sleeping late, pouring salt on slugs, applying calamine lotion to mosquito bites, peeling off white bits of burned flesh and filling ice cube trays with orange juice. But the best thing about summer was having a backyard with a pool. The pool, the star of the Brooklyn backyard bonanza, the crème de la crème, the jewel in the crown that was our block was our pool. That magnificent body of water of my youth was four and a half feet of above ground majesty. In a simpler time before there was tik tok and selfies and before we discovered boys and smoking and roller skating and disco, we had water, and it was all we needed.

My fathers welled with pride over the swing set he built (total death trap) and the hydrangeas that lined our driveway that looked like pink cheerleader pom poms, but his crowning achievement was his pool. Easily viewed over a low fence by all the neighbors green with envy and sweat. Our backyard was mostly concrete with a patch of dull green Astroturf where my sisters and I used to peel away the edge and expose a mini biome of worms, ants, and pill bugs. Then we would poke the poor creatures with punk sticks. There was a weeping willow tree whose tendrils reached down into the pool like fingers to caress the water and at night. During those hot summer nights green spotlights lit up the willow and the water just like the hanging gardens of Babylon.  The pool had no heater and we stayed in the water until we were trembling, our skin like braille, and our lips nearly white.

My father built a deck at one end of the pool although the word “deck” makes it sound grander than it was. The deck was about 4feet by 4feet but large enough so my two sisters and I could stand shoulder to shoulder and jump in together holding hands.Our other favorite trick was to stand with our backs towards the pool, arms outstretched and take the Nestea plunge.

One day my sister Christine, the reckless one, ran into the house screaming “I have an idea”.  She came back out with Elephanté, a small blue, plastic, elephant with wheels on his feet. He was a toddler’s riding toy left over from our younger days. We thought we were saying “elephant” in French when we named him.Such sophisticated children we were. Christine positioned Elephanté as far back on the deck as possible and sat on the toy with her 14-year-old body. Elephanté was built for a 2-year-old, so he was a noticeably short elephant and when she straddled him her pelvis was positioned lower than her knees and her legs were spread wide. It looked slightly like she was giving birth to him. “Here I go!”, she screamed and took off, wet feet slapping, trying to pick up speed. I think she must have envisioned herself sailing through the air on the back of the elephant Dukes of Hazzard-style but Elephanté’s wheels caught on the very edge of the deck. He got stuck, bucked his hindquarters up and dunked my sister head-first in the water then toppled in on top of her while she caught a mouthful of chlorine water.

She was not deterred. She had a better idea. With lobster red arms hanging over the edge of the pool I watched as she stumbled inside the house again and came back with Hoppity Horse, another left over toddler’s toy. Hoppity Horse was made of an industrial strength,heavy-duty,yellow,rubber and was roughly the size of a wrecking ball with a horse’s head. It had rubber handles sticking out of the sides of the head and black vacant eyes. This was in in-door toy. The point of the Hoppity Horse was to sit on it with the head sticking out of your crotch, hold on to the head sticks and bounce around the house while possibly learning how to masturbate. But Christine had other plans for him. She climbed the five steps up to the deck with Hoppity and shoved him between her thighs. Standing there on the deck with a yellow horse head sticking out of her coochie and giant yellow rubber ball coming out her ass like a cartoon fart, she took her peach-colored rubber nose plugs, adjusted them to either side of her nose and squeezed her nostrils shut. One hand on a Hoppity Horse handle, one hand in the air she screamed a very nasal “One….two” she bent her knees deeply, and on three she launched straight up into the air.With a giant splash, the positively buoyant giant rubber ball shot back up to the surface like a breaching whale but at an angle and flung my sister into the side wall of the pool. Unfazed, Christine half-swam, half-flopped back to the deck a bit bruised and possibly a little concussed to try again. But I was already on the deck with hoppity between my own legs eager to try the new game. I had lost my nose-plugs in the depths of the pool already, so I held one hoppity stick and with the other hand I squeezed my nose. Not wanting to make the same mistake as my sister, I angled my body and leaned forward. When I jumped, I leaped a bit too far forward and landed in the water on my face and belly. My hand instinctively let go of the hoppity and when we hit the water he bounced backwards out of the water and hit my sister square in  the nose plugs.

Don’t worry, she was fine, and all summer, and for many summers after that, with zero parental supervision, our goal was to jump into the pool with hoppity horse between our legs and stay on, riding him like Poseidon’s bucking bronco but we never could break that noble steed.

 

“Lessons From A Dead Moth” by Glenn Moss - 2022 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize Finalist

 

 

“Lessons From A Dead Moth”

 

by Glenn Moss 

 

Long ago, my encounters with nature and the creatures of the earth consisted of my silent stalking of fields and Prospect Park with a butterfly net.

In early morning and near dusk, I would wait patiently, breathing slowly, watching for the flutter and glimpse of movement and color. Purple against a deepening green, a splash of yellow-orange on the thinnest hint of white, a mauve prayer of opening and closing wings, as a flower sways with more than a morning breeze.

Believers in long balance have told me the endgame...when my earthly time is over, my soul will be captured by a million sticky feet as it seeks final release...the silent beating of millions of wings, mocking me as their rainbow dust covers my mouth and eyes, so my cries will not be heard and I will be denied even the briefest glimpse of what I have lost, carrying me to a cracked expanse of dry and forgotten earth.... with the slow pleasure of eternal redress, my soul is lowered to an awaiting space where the antennae of all my former recipients of pinched death pin me forever, so that I may ever know the fate I so willingly dispensed with formaldehyde.

It is within this time that sealed my fate that my story unfolds.

I am walking in Prospect Park when Spring is beginning to outpace the tiring plod of Winter. I know what I seek and where to look. There.in that copse to the left, just enough away from the path to escape disturbance….at least disturbance that is unintended.

But my intent is clear. I find the chrysalis. It is heavy and fat from metamorphosis and building desire to be free. I have other plans.

I break the branch to which the life transforming case is bound by hardened once wet lines spun from a mouth now changed and ready for life again. But I have other plans.

In my apartment, I have taken a cardboard box given to me by Mr. Clifford, who owned the small toy store on Flatbush Avenue. I placed a green mesh net over the top to allow air and a captor’s gaze to get in.

Whether this effort was made for a school project or simply for me, I can't remember. I don't have a recollection of any academic purpose. My guess is, understanding me then, as I have come to know myself more, living as I did in my own meshed box of fears and isolation, I may have been seeking comfort from bringing a shared existence to a creature I could control.

I placed the branch inside the box and waited. Within two days the chrysalis began to rock back and forth, evidence of pushing from within appearing at several points. When I returned from a brief errand outside, I saw the Cecropia Moth emerging.

Smiling, I ran outside and across the street to the park. I gathered what plants, flowers and stems I thought useful and necessary. I returned home and placed them inside the box. The moth was sitting on the branch, still flexing its newly discovered wings. so large and lush with color.

Watching, as the moth fully opened its wings and was motionless, I had a vision of what this moment would be had I not taken the chrysalis. The moth would sense its place, its time, its purpose. Here, except for the uprooted plants and flowers, it received only the passing of the subway and my heated breath.

Over the next few days, I would come home and see if it had eaten any of the new plants and flowers I brought in from the park. I thought it was feeding; at least that is what I told myself.

And then, I noticed a change in behavior. The moth attached itself to the side of the box and its fat brown body began to pulse. I didn’t know what was happening. Maybe it was dying and I had served only to hasten a death.

But then I saw something beginning to emerge...small pinkish masses. Eggs! The moth was following a path stored inside of it and was laying eggs. First in one part of the box, then it moved and over half the box was covered with small pools of pink.

Looking back, I like to think it was this egg laying that moved me, but I can't really be sure. What I do know is that I decided to take the moth out of the box and let it be free within the apartment. Whatever impulse I had to allow the moth to live more than its boxed existence, I didn't go so far as to take it to the park and release it.

Instead, much to my mother's consternation, I would take the moth from the box and let it fly about when I was home. It would land on my bed, on my books. And, more and more, on me. Often on my shoulder, like some trained bird. I would walk around the apartment with the moth on my shoulder and my parents would look at me as they too often did, as if I was something too perplexing to communicate with. They asked me to put the moth back in the box.

I would comply, but always seek that moment when I could free it-- but never completely.

Over the next three weeks, I would bring back new plants and flowers and take the moth out. I convinced myself it was happy and was living longer than it might in the park where birds or some other predator than me would kill it.

One day, I came back and looked into the box. The moth was lying motionless on the bottom. I reached in and touched it. Moved it. It was dead. I keep saying "it"; I never named it. I took the moth out and brought it in to my mother in the kitchen. She looked at the moth in my hand and quickly suggested the incinerator. That handy crucible offering a swift ride to cremation.

I had no other ideas; burying it in the park did not occur to me. So I found a brown paper bag, put the moth inside and walked to the incinerator room in the fourth floor hallway and opened up the door. As I reached for the chute to open it, I looked at the bag and thought about what I had done and relived my moments with my moth.

I placed the bag at the lip of the chute and gently pushed it forward. I watched it slide down and into the sooty shaft down into the smoldering mass of garbage in the basement.

Later, when I went outside and looked up at my building, I saw gray smoke coming from the vent on the roof. The smoke spread, mostly drifting over to Eastern Parkway. A few wisps though, maybe pushed by a wind I couldn't feel on the street, moved over my head and to the park.

I tell myself now that I believed the burned remains of the moth were in those wisps. Maybe I did. Because I never went butterfly catching again.

 

  

 

 

 

 

"A New Life in Brooklyn" by Torraco, Pamela - 2022 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize Finalist

 

"A New Life in Brooklyn"

 

by Torraco, Pamela  

 

 

 

"I'm getting married and moving to Brooklyn!"

 

My 67-year-old father's enthusiasm came through clearly as he made his

announcement in one of his rare phone calls to me from 600 miles away.

 

"To whom?" I stammered, my shock nearly blocking my voice.

 

He had been widowed almost 20 years earlier when he was 48 and I was 11. Each of us had lost our favorite person and our anchor and had struggled hard as we adjusted to our new lives.  After I left for college, knowing that I had to separate from him for a time in an attempt to find myself, he had lived for years as a semi-recluse.

 

So, for the first time, I was hearing his sweet, almost unbelievable story.

 

 

A few years before he met my mother, my dad, Pete, had been engaged to a woman named Jessie.  The engagement was broken for some reason and Pete and Jessie parted ways. But they had met again recently, 35 years later, still found each other attractive, and had decided to marry.

 

My dad had grown up in Jersey City and my mom in Washington, D.C.

After they married they moved to West Hempstead in Nassau County where I was born and raised. My family of three was a relatively happy and well-functioning unit. My dad was a hard-working aeronautical engineer and my mom, a former teacher, enjoyed being a homemaker, engaging in her many art projects, and welcoming neighborhood kids into our home. But when she got breast cancer, everything changed.  Following a mastectomy and radiation, both of which were rather brutal and debilitating at that time, she was never the same. Pete took loving care of his wife until her death less than a year later.

He then responsibly attended to the tough tasks of dealing with his own grief and raising a confused child-teenager.  I think he understood my need to go away to college to find some distance from our difficult relationship. But it was painful for him and I felt guilty leaving him alone.  Nonetheless he remained supportive of my endeavors and we were usually together during school breaks.  He kept the house, fully expecting that I would return.

 

While he waited, Pete lived mostly quite alone with few friends and little social contact outside of his work. I, along with relatives and friends, expressed concern about him but he brushed us off and politely refused offers of help. While he could be quite personable and had a wonderful sense of humor, he was also very stubborn and probably rather depressed. He dated only one woman that I ever knew of and that relationship was short-lived. I, meanwhile, had completed college and graduate school and was living and working in Michigan.

 

I sat down and took a deep breath in an attempt to steady myself as he continued his amazing story.  My alone and lonely father had been surprised when an old friend had invited him to his home in Long Beach. Others were there, too, people he had known years earlier.  And there, while swimming in the Atlantic ocean, Pete and Jessie reconnected, 35 years after their separation!  Jessie had never married and still lived in the Brooklyn apartment she had shared with her parents as a teenager, near Grand Army Plaza. Following a short courtship the couple decided that their marriage could probably work this time and, with no more time to lose, planned their simple wedding. 

 

I don't remember what I said to my dad when he finished his story but I hope I managed to find enough voice to congratulate him. I do remember asking for a few more details about Jessie, hoping that this woman I'd never met was a good choice and not one that  might further hurt and disappoint this tough yet vulnerable man.

The wedding day arrived and it touched my heart when Pete asked me to help him dress for his big day.  A radiant Jessie walked down the aisle of a Brookkyn church (unfortunately I don't recall its name) on the arm of her brother.  It was, of course, a happy event for our family and for Jessie's.

Jessie retired. Pete had already done so several years earlier. He sold his car and his Long Island house and happily moved into the Brooklyn apartment. Jessie took to calling my dad "Petey" - which he apparently didn't mind - and quickly set about improving his tired wardrobe. My dad, the better cook, set about making regular dinners for two. He loved to walk so he and his shopping cart put in several miles every week, returning with groceries. He took well to city living and soon looked and sounded more relaxed than he had in years.

 

For the next twenty-plus years the couple explored together much of the metropolitan New York area, especially Brooklyn and Manhattan. They went to concerts, shows, operas, museums, restaurants. Pete became the darling of the apartment house. He regularly picked up and delivered newspapers to residents who couldn't get out themselves. Every week he made a cake from a Betty Crocker mix, delivering an eagerly anticipated slice to friends in 3D, 12C, 9F, etc. Jessie and Pete were subway  regulars, of course, and they often took the train to visit relatives in Jersey and Westchester. They went on several cruises and trips to Europe, sending me smiling photos of themselves with the ship's captain or with new friends they'd made. When they visited my husband and me I could only smile when I heard them giggling upstairs in bed.

 

I had grown up knowing Nassau County and having some familiarity with Manhattan since I relished the few day trips we made there every year for special events.  I knew how Queens looked because that's where we drove to get the subway into "The City" and the Bronx was well-known by us kids for its wonderful zoo. We visited relatives in Queens, and in Elizabeth, N.J., Jersey City, Yonkers,  and Washington DC.  My high school boyfriend went to college on Staten Island so I had been there. But I had no connections to or memories of Brooklyn. Pete and Jessie introduced me to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, Prospect Park and Grand Army Plaza among other attractions, happy to share their love of the borough.  They had enjoyed many dinners at the Montauk Club so I arranged a 90th birthday party there for my dad and 40 members of both families spent a splendid afternoon celebrating.

 

At age 91 or 92 Pete was traveling alone on the subway one day and absentmindedly nearly missed his stop. He stubbornly caught the doors as they were closing, exiting just in time. But he was thrown off balance and fell on the platform. Waving away the kind folks who rushed to assist the older gentleman, he got to his feet and walked the few blocks home. A few hours later when his pain became unbearable he somehow got to the hospital where a broken hip was diagnosed. On the phone his doctor assured me that he was healthy enough for a hip replacement. And, indeed, a few days later when I visited, there was Pete with about ten other rather elderly patients, each with a walker, moving in single file in a large counterclockwise circle. "They've all had hip replacements," the physical therapist told me matter-of-factly, "and they're all recovering well. We have them gather here several times a day to walk these circles!"

 

Pete slowed down a little bit after that and he walked with a cane for the first time in his life. But he and Jessie lived quite contentedly together for a few more years in their vintage, rent-controlled, beloved Grand Army Plaza apartment.

 

Brooklyn truly gave my father a second chance and a new and life. He was grateful and so am I.

 

"The Bones, They Walk" by Miranda, Gabriel - 2022 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize Finalist

 

 

“Zo, li mache”

                                                                             — a Haitian proverb

 "The Bones, They Walk" by Miranda, Gabriel 

 

I know I’m not supposed to be here.

 

At least, that’s what I tell myself. I tell myself my is skin too white to be Caribbean, my words too clean from the grit found in our shared roots to be called real. I guess the best way to say this is I’ve fallen prey to the colonial project, to its divisiveness and the way it makes you question who you are.

 

I tell myself I’m not supposed to be here, at a festival to celebrate the family of lwa Erzili. I’m not fit to celebrate the spirits of love because love left me a long time ago. The story of Spanish conquest is not unknown, you don’t need to hear it again from me.

 

What you do need to hear is how wrong it is to cut yourself form your own shared root. How other plants will send life to support that selfsame root whose stem had been severed.

 

I’m on a roof of an old industrial building turned event space in Prospect Lefferts Gardens feeling compelled to dance. The drums are thundering and the Haitian woman’s song is electrifying the air. My vision is hazy, my heart storming in time with the music’s tempo. Dum-tatucum-dum tacum dum. Vibrating my bones, the rhythm pulls my blood like the tide.

 

I don’t remember too much about what happened next.

 

I remember colors and lights. Rose petals in a whirlwind of summer fervency. I remember the breath of bittersweet tears like sweat rolling down my face. Calls of ayibobo! sounded in my ears as the heady rush of Lotion Pompeia filled my nose. There was nothing but the ghosts of roses swirling past my skin, head thrown back as my hand ran down my neck. It wasn’t me. My limbs moved but I couldn’t make out how. All I knew was that in that moment, my body was not mine alone.

 

I do remember what happened after.

 

I fall back from a circle of people who are holding space for those who are being taken by the spirit of the dance. I stumble, completely and utterly exhausted, into the waiting hands of a kind Haitian woman I had met earlier in the night.

 

“Gabriel, are you okay? Ayo, move, come this way! Do you need water?”

 

I shake my head. My head is too full of rumbling petals and tears.

 

“Ah, no I think I’m okay. Let me just sit down.”

 

She brings me over to a stool while others crowd around to help her carry me. My legs are heavy, my body listless as if the spirit took with her all of my strength.

 

Another woman comes near to me. She seems to be a friend of the first woman I met that evening. They speak with great love in Creole and I am able to understand a few words here and there with the help of my college French.

 

The new woman looks over to me and smiles.

 

“How are you feeling?”

 

“I’m alright. I’m still very tired and a little woozy but otherwise I think I’m good.”

 

She laughs gently, “Yes, they can do that to you.” She takes a moment to look at me. I feel anxiety rippling across my skin. Not from her — no, her eyes are too warm for that — but from within me.

 

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me to dance like that. It happened so suddenly though I didn’t want to do anything that offended the tradition.”

 

She smiles and scoffs lightly. “No, no, you danced beautifully. I could see what had happened. Where are you from? You moved with steps similar to our own.”

 

“I was born and raised here in the city but my family is from Puerto Rico.”

 

Her lips shape into a knowing tilt, I imagine her eyes shining a bit brighter. “You know some Creole too? You looked like you understood some things.”

 

“Ah no, not Creole mais je parle un peu de Français. C’est pour ça que je peux comprendre.”

 

A hearty laugh leaves her and she looks over to her friend beside her.

 

“Same root then.”

 

Simple as that.

 

No grandiose explanation. No judgment. No pushing away for not being a part of the larger community. No gatekeeping. No need, even, to unnecessarily coddle one twenty-something year old’s bruised identity. With one clean phrase the mental gymnastics of belonging was paused mid-flight.

 

Here on a rooftop in the heart of Brooklyn, people who’ve come from places so unique are gathered to dance for love. People born from islands vastly different from one another, whose histories are ripe with their own villains and heroes, their own spirits and lovers. Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba.

 

Same root.

 

Nacido de la misma raíz.

 

Né de la même racine.

 

Born from the same root.

 

There’s nothing left to wonder then. We are the diaspora of a people torn from their lands. A people shored up in foreign places taking root in remembrance. Drumming wildly into the night whether in our island's past or here, this island that once too belonged to others before us.

 

Simple.

 

I guess I am right where I am supposed to be.