Fran Rose Schumer
A Nine-Year-Old New Yorker
Well, lah di dah, I was that one,
nine years old and living
in
New York. Brooklyn born,
we called Manhattan the city.
Downtown was Fulton Street,
A&S. And yes, I did read
the Eloise books, though
I never
set foot in the Plaza.
And
surely I didn’t have a Nanny.
But I had a mommy, and she
loved me too much to let me
stay in school without her.
We took the D train, or
drove,
into the “city” and
shopped
in B. Altman and ate
lunch
in the antebellum style
Charleston Gardens
or
The Bird Cage in Lord & Taylor,
where I swooned over stories
she told me, or that I told her,
eliciting like a snake charmer
love from her bottomless, wet
brown eyes. How prophetic
that the names of both those
restaurants suggested entrapment,
slavery, prison. I found a book
later by Hilda Bruch, also
prophetic, about how young
girls develop anorexia. It was
called The Golden Cage.
Fran Rose Schumer’s poetry, fiction, personal essays and articles have appeared in various sections of The New York Times, including Op Ed, Book Review and Sunday Magazine; also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, The New Verse News and other publications. She was the winner of a Goodman Loan Grant Award for Fiction from the City University of New York. She is the writer of Powerplay (Simon and Schuster; NYT bestseller) and author of Most Likely to Succeed (Random House). She lives and teaches writing in New Jersey and on Martha’s Vineyard.