Sophie's Choice - William Styron [56]
Her whole experience of America was New York—mostly Brooklyn—and eventually she came to love the city and to be terrified by it in almost equal measure. In her entire life she had known just two urban places—tiny Cracow in its Gothic repose and later the shapeless rubble heap of Warsaw after the Blitzkrieg. Her sweeter memories—that is, the ones she cared to dwell upon—were rooted in the town of her birth, immemorially suspended in a frieze of ancient rooftops and crooked streets and lanes. The intervening years between Cracow and Brooklyn had forced her—almost as a means of retaining sanity—to try to obliterate that time from recollection. Thus she said that those first mornings at Yetta’s rooming house, waking in a strange bed surrounded by strange pink walls as she drowsily listened to the faint far-off rumble of traffic on Church Avenue, she would for long seconds be so unable to name or recognize either herself or her surroundings that she felt herself to be in a somnolent trance, like the enchanted maiden in one of those Grimm fairy tales of her childhood, transported after a nocturnal spell to a new and unknown kingdom. Then, blinking awake with a feeling in which sorrow and cheer were curiously commingled, she would say to herself: You are not in Cracow, Zosia, you are in America. And then rise to face the pandemonium of the subway and the chiropractic patients of Dr. Blackstock. And Brooklyn’s greenly beautiful, homely, teeming, begrimed and incomprehensible vastness.
With the coming of spring Prospect Park, so close at hand, became Sophie’s favorite refuge—wonderful to recall, a safe place in those days for a solitary and lovely blonde to wander. In the pollen-hazy light, dappled in shades of gold-flecked green, the great towering locusts and elms that loomed over meadow and rolling grass seemed prepared to shelter a fête champêtre in a scene by Watteau or Fragonard, and it was beneath one of these majestic trees that Sophie, on her free days or on weekends, would deposit herself, along with a marvelous luncheon picnic. She later confessed to me, with just the vaguest touch of shame, that she became quite possessed, truly unhinged by food as soon as she arrived in the city. She knew she had to exercise caution in eating. At the D.P. center the doctor from the Swedish Red Cross who took care of her had said that her malnutrition was so severe that it had probably caused some more or less permanent and damaging metabolic changes; he cautioned her that she must guard against quick overconsumption of food, especially of fats, no matter how strong the temptation. But this made it all the more fun for her, a pleasant game, when at lunchtime she entered one of the glorious delicatessens of Flatbush and shopped for her Prospect Park spread. The privilege of choice gave her a feeling achingly sensual. There was so much to eat, such variety and abundance, that each time her breath stopped, her eyes actually filmed over with emotion, and with slow and elaborate gravity she would choose from this sourly fragrant, opulent, heroic squander of food: a pickled egg here, there a slice of salami, half a loaf of pumpernickel, lusciously glazed and black. Bratwurst. Braunschweiger. Some sardines. Hot pastrami. Lox. A bagel, please. Clutching the brown paper bag, the warning like a litany in her mind—“Remember what Dr. Bergstrom said, don’t gorge yourself—she would make her methodical way into one of the farthest recesses of the park, or near a backwater of the huge lake, and there—munching with great restraint, taste buds enthralled in rediscovery—would turn to page 350 of Studs Lonigan.
She was feeling her way. In every sense of the word having experienced rebirth, she possessed some of the lassitude and, as a matter of fact, a great deal of the helplessness of a newborn child. Her clumsiness was like that of a paraplegic regaining the use of her limbs. Small things, preposterous tiny things, still confounded her. She had forgotten how to connect the two sides of the zipper on a jacket she had