GROWING UP SCARED

By Gayle Portnow

When I was seven years old and allowed to wander alone in my Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood, I was careful, walking only where it was safe, listening to grampa, who warned me to never walk too close to the curb because kidnappers might snatch me, who cautioned me to never walk near buildings or alleys or cellars because murderers could grab me. I walked on a path by the curb so that no one at the sidewalk’s edge could open a car door and pull me inside. I walked in my skinny space halfway between the gutter and the buildings, in the center of the sidewalk, so that no one could reach out and drag me away to kill me. I walked only in the middle, watchful, trying not to wander into the dangerous places, trying not to daydream and fall into their clutches.

Grampa tried always to protect me. He and mom taught me about the world, warning me to “never talk to strangers,” telling me to “never get into anybody’s car,” teaching me to “never take my money out in public,” reminding me to “be careful crossing—remember Mr. Kaufman who was run over twice,” reminding me to “never tell anyone where I lived,” reminding me every time I left the house to “be careful,” constantly reminding and reminding me, as if I could forget.

“Come upstairs before it gets dark.” Mom usually let me stay outside after she took my little brothers home for their baths, leaving me to play on the Parkway with my friends, or have a vanilla malted and a pretzel at Marcus’s Candy Store, or look for morning glories or peel birch bark, or search for mica in the back alley behind my house, the only alley we were allowed to play in. I loved staying out alone with my friends, without mom or anyone else’s mother.

When it started to get dark though, at dusk, when twilight fell—two of my favorite words—then, even when I was having fun, I felt sad. As much as I loved the colors of the magical disappearing light, the dazzling golden pink blue-purple glow in the sky, I was still sad. The last flicker of daylight before the night, the dark and darker and darkest moments before daytime vanished into nighttime, the shrinking days of late summer and fall and then winter when it was dark by 4:30, always made me sad.

The darkness, the danger, the watching, the worry, the unknown, the unseen, always made me edgy, always made me rush home. I hated when the dark invaded the streets, when shadows were giants that followed me everywhere, when I raced through light and then dark and then light and then dark places between the street lamps, when I couldn’t see into the corners. I hated it. I tried to stay inside my invisible lines of protection in the middle, even when I had to sidestep someone either coming or going. I balanced on my secret tightrope, trying not to slip off. Pushed by the dark, I ran fast through the long, poorly lit lobby and flew upstairs, hoping to beat it home, to be safe in my room before it blackened the world. I felt the shadows following me, the corners threatening, the night winning. The world was scary, especially in the dark. Alleys and cellars and doorways and shadows and strangers were scary, and the dark made them scarier.

“Be careful! Be careful! Be careful!” 

 

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