Red High Heels

We ran away at Halloween when we were eleven years old.  Stephanie had decided that we could not just do the usual trick or treating in our two safe streets of Newark, New Jersey.  We had to go “beyond” the neighborhood to somewhere unfamiliar.   The well ordered streets of Newark where we lived turned to streets with large apartment buildings where it was not possible to knock on the door and chant our usual “trick or treat.”  These were streets that were more imposing, closer to the center of town with more traffic and department stores like Woolworths.   I prayed my parents would not worry or find out that we had broken awat from our neighborhood, Grumman Avenue, where we both lived.  

            We dressed in sexy, tight fighting clothes.   I usually wore baggy, muted shirts which would become my uniform as I got older and as my breasts developed. 

             Stephanie burst out of everything.   Her breasts bulged, her thighs were perfectly sculpted, and she enjoyed showing off her body.  She was one of the few eleven year old girls who actually had cleavage to show.  Boys loved her, adored her.  She was a risk taker, a seeker; I was the intellectual, the critic, and fearful.  I was infatuated with her and her chain smoking mother who wore equally sexy clothes, had bleached blonde hair and spoke in a sultry, sexy, smoker’s voice. 

             I was always “hiding” my full size breasts, yet with  Stephanie I dared to wear the kind of clothes that were more her style than mine.  We careened and wove our way through the streets of Newark in our red high heels and in our over the top sophisticated, much too adult kind of clothes in search of adventure.

             It was the first time I felt sexy and aware of my body and it was only because of  Stephanie that I dared exit my safety zone.  We were not only exiting our safe, well know neighborhood of Newark, but venturing forth into a more flirtatious, adult world.  We were budding women in our eleven year old bodies. 

            I envied her body: her calves were well developed and seemed to bulge with muscle and she knew how to reveal cleavage.   Stephanie was part “shiksa,” (Yiddish for not Jewish) since her mother was not Jewish, and while many of us in Newark were darker, and less svelte, her blonde hair and sexy body seemed more exotic than the rest of us.  The risk I took with  her that Halloween signaled the change in Newark as it was on the verge of exploding into violence and fires set throughout the city set by the black community in one of the infamous “riots” that swept the nation pre 1967.

            Newark pre 1967 riots was a middle class Jewish neighborhood that appeared ordinary.  I found refuge in our green and white house on Grumman Avenue playing in the street with neighborhood kids.  I felt safe in the elementary school on the main street which took up half the block. I knew every teacher by name.  I especially remembered my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Novack,   with her steel rimmed glasses and kind voice.  Her graham crackers and milk, and naps that followed, had been a cocoon before  the days when children would experience kindergarten as a pressure ridden class that decided the rest of your academic future.  In those days, we were still allowed to look forward to our snacks of graham crackers and milk and to our naps. 

            It felt deliciously taboo to follow Stephanie in her red high heels, blond hair, and sexy clothes with me in pursuit.   I would have followed her anywhere, not just through our Newark neighborhood of middle class homes.

            I have no memory of those streets, or how long we were away, or if my parents worried, and any consequences that followed for us as possible punishment.  As an eleven year old, I dared to dream of being out of the box and struggled for my need for safety while at the same time I yearned for adventure. 

            Stephanie became my mentor for a window into a world I was desperately curious about but not ready to enter.  It made sense, then, that she would designate me as a “timekeeper” for her and her boyfriend while they made out.   Sex is not always about having sex: it is about a feeling, a moment, a turning point, a visual.  That moment sitting a few feet away from Stephanie and her boyfriend on a roof as the evening turned dark and our parents had not called us to dinner yet, was an erotic moment.    I can still feel the summer breeze on the roof as they kissed in the twilight of the evening as I “kept time.”   Was I already the writer or sexual peeping Tom who observed and mentally recorded and documented rather than doing?

    Stephanie taught me about taking risks.  For someone like me, who was already a proverbial bookworm and full of existential” angst”;  I could vicariously be the “bad girl and  dress up in sexy outfits and run away.  I could allow myself to be anonymous on the brink of adult adventures.

             Stephanie and I lost touch after I moved from Newark to the suburbs. I moved to a street named “Pleasant Valley Way,” and the neat homes and basketball courts with well trimmed lawns and replaced the more urban, gritty streets of Newark.    Later, I heard that she became a teenage mother at seventeen.   She married her boyfriend and had a son.  I wondered how she felt about it:  being a single teenage mother in the sixties was still fairly outrageous and unconventional.   I wanted to talk to her, to ask her how it all worked out.  I wonder if she wanted to be me as much as I wanted to be her.