We had moved a year earlier from Summit, New Jersey, a suburban town inhabited — as it is now — mainly by prosperous professionals commuting to New York City. Although I lived with my parents in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment, I spent much of my first five years in the care of my grandparents, whose spacious two-story house on Ox Bow Lane rose above a sloped, manicured, tree-shaded acre interspersed — at least in spring and summer — with the petals, foliage, and fragrances of roses, peonies, dahlias, as well as daffodils, tulips, irises, and lilies-of-the-valley. As a toddler I squatted in green-mossy mud, playing with the bells of purple fuchsias. I took my first running steps across wide expanses of soft mown grass. And best of all, I clamored into my grandmother’s silken lap. My grandfather jested and tumbled, guffawed and tickled. They were daily presences, Grandma stroking me on the sofa as I played with her rings, her pearl necklace, inhaled the fragrance of her skin mixed with hints of stale Arpège.

… my parents never mentioned what we had left behind. Eyes front and forward, none of us would turn into pillars of salt, headed as we were for a new lease on life.

After we left Summit, flying cross-country in a DC 3, my parents never mentioned what we had left behind. Eyes front and forward, none of us would turn into pillars of salt, headed as we were for a new lease on life. In the Phoenix sun my blond-complexioned skin burned brilliant as Arizona Highways’ sunsets, and my pale eyes winced from the hot glare. My mother was pregnant again by the time we saw The Wizard of Oz, her belly so mountainous the cat hissed at the sight of her. An enthusiastic new member of the Valley of the Sun’s Chamber of Commerce, my father adopted Western dress, even learning to ride a horse in the Rodeo Parade. Snapshots show me slumped, sullen in the sun, while my parents beam from pristine Stetsons under an unfenced sky.

ILLUSTRATION FROM Cinderella
BY Edward Dalziel AND George Dalziel
(George Routledge and Sons, 1865)
COURTESY OF THE INTERNET ARCHIVE

When the Good Witch Glinda entered the movie, something about her voice, her movements, reminded me of Grandma. And the flowers. And New Jersey. It wasn’t Kansas I wanted to go home to. I was trapped in a black-and-white, or, rather, dust-brown land — and Oz glittered like paradise lost. The movie jerked the loneliness stored for months in my lungs, yanked it up to the surface, boiled it over. But even as I cried and cried, unlike Dorothy I did not know what it was I wanted, could not say out loud, plainly, “I want to go home.”

By the time of my second cinematic foray, a year later, to Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I sat all the way through the final credits, only closing my eyes and crouching behind the seat in front of me every time the Wicked Queen burst onto the screen. I had nightmares about her for months, but the music also stayed with me: “Whistle While You Work,” “Someday My Prince Will Come.” When I was eight, my parents took my sisters and me to Cinderella, and I did not cover my eyes once. I bought a Disney coloring book with my saved-up nickels and colored every picture, careful to stay inside the lines. With the strokes of my crayons I could pretend it was my own long skirt that billowed as I waltzed with the prince, my own pet mice who unlocked the door for me, my fairy godmother making sure everything turned out all right. Someone even gave me a set of molds so I could form figurines of these characters, and paint them with a tiny brush.

These three, The Wizard of Oz, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Cinderella formed the cinematic trinity of my childhood. But of the hundreds of movies I have seen during the fifty-four years since, none has had the impact of Judy Garland’s classic, even though I did not follow Dorothy down the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City until years later. Snow White and Cinderella I believed in with all the longing pent-up in my rib-lined chest. Until my teens I breathed deeply from the heady air of Snow White’s success: even though a Wicked Queen (who reminded me of my own mother when she lost her temper) might try to hurt me, I could survive by working cheerfully (although, try as I might, I never learned to whistle), staying very still and quiet, not bothering anyone, and someday, a kind prince would find me, kiss me, take me home. It seemed that the more we moved… the less we talked about what really happened in our lives, between each other, within ourselves.We played a game called statues in those days; one of us swung the others around by the arm, and then said “freeze.” We had to stop exactly as we were, but when the person who was “it” said “move,” we flew into a frenzied enactment of whatever our position suggested: a ballet dancer, a bull fighter, a baseball pitcher. Someday someone like the prince would tell me it was safe to “move” and I would spring to life. The message from Cinderella was similar: help would arrive, albeit from unexpected sources. No creature was too small to be a guardian angel — even mice, or birds might turn out to be rescuers. And if I were very lucky, I would be found by an absent-minded fairy godmother, an elderly, doddering (perhaps grandmotherly?) lady who would free me from the locked-in emotional life of a family where almost any overt expression of jubilance was too loud, sorrow too troubling, and anger too rude. It seemed that the more we moved (and we lived in five houses in Phoenix in four years), the less we talked about what really happened in our lives, between each other, within ourselves. Certainly no one seemed aware of the titanic surges of emotion that shook my ribcage, the longings that flooded my growing frame.