464
PARTISAN REVIEW
sweepstakes.
The first boy who ever asked me for a date was Robert Lubitz, in
eighth grade:
tall
and skinny to my average height and teenage chubbiness. I
turned him down, thinking we would make a ridiculous couple. Day after day,
I cast my eyes at stylish juliano, the class cut-up; day after day, I captivated
Robert Lubitz. Occasionally, one of my brother's Italian-American friends
would ask me out, and I would go, often to
R.
O.
T.
C.
dances. My specialty
was making political remarks so shocking that the guys rarely asked me
again. After awhile, I recognized destiny: the jewish man was a passport out
of Bensonhurst. I of course did marry a jewish man, who gave me my
freedom and, very important, helped remove me from the expectations of
Bensonhurst. Though raised in a largely jewish section of Brooklyn, he had
gone to college in Ohio and knew how important it was (as he put it) "to get
past the Brooklyn Bridge"; we met on neutral ground, in Central Park, at a
performance of Shakespeare. The jewish-Italian marriage is a common
enough catastrophe in Bensonhurst for my parents to have accepted, even
welcomed mine - though my parents continued to treat my husband as an
outsider for the first twenty years ("Now Marianna. Here's what's going on
with you' brother. But don't tell a' you' husband.")
Along the way, I make other choices, more fully marked by Benson–
hurst cautiousness. I am attracted to journalism or the arts as careers, but the
prospects for income seem iffy. I choose instead to imagine myself as a
teacher. Only the availability ofNDEA Fellowships when I graduate, with
their generous terms, propels me from high school teaching (a thought I
never much relished) to college teaching (which seems like a brave new
world). Within the college teaching profession, I choose off-beat specializa–
tions: the novel, interdisciplinary aproaches (not something clear and clubby,
like Milton or the eighteenth century). Eventually I write the book I like best
about primitive others as they figure within Western obsessions : my
identification with "the Other," my sense of being "Other," surfaces at last. I
avoid all mentoring structures for a long time but accept aid when it comes to
me on the basis of what I perceive to be merit. I'm still, deep down , Italian–
American Bensonhurst, though by this time I'm a lot ofother things as well.
Scene Three: In the summer of 1988, a little more than a year before
the shooting in Bensonhurst, my father woke up trembling and in what ap–
peared to be a fit. Hospitalization revealed that he had a pocket of blood on
his brain, a frequent consequence of falls for older people. About a year ear–
lier, I had stayed home, using my children as an excuse, when my aunt, my
father's much loved sister died, missing her funeral; only now does my
mother tell me how much my father resented my taking his suggestion that I
stay home. Now, confronted with what is described as brain surgery but
