One Boomer’s Difficult Rite of Passage

Do you remember moving out of your parents’ home? Joyce Zonana does, and unlike many of us, it wasn’t a time for celebration and excitement; it was a time for recrimination and self-examination. In this excerpt from her memoir, “Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, An Exile’s Journey,” Joyce writes frankly of her difficult rite of passage.

When I started having nightly dreams that my mother was cutting my long dark hair, I knew it was time to move out of my Egyptian-Jewish parents’ Brooklyn home. The year was 1968. I was eighteen, and I had tried leaving twice before— once when I went off to college just after high school, and a second time, the following year, when I came close to renting a studio apartment on a quiet street in Manhattan. Each of my earlier attempts had ended in failure: the first when I returned from college without completing my freshman year; the second when I allowed my mother to talk me out of making the move.

This time, I kept my plans to myself, locating a cheap, fourth-floor, rent-controlled walk-up, not far from Brooklyn College. The building, one of three identical brick structures that lined the street, had a dim central lobby with two worn staircases on either side; on each floor, four apartments opened out from a small, dark landing. My apartment was in the top right corner of the building, with a bedroom to the east and a living room facing south. I envisioned mornings watching the sunrise over the college clock tower, afternoons drinking tea, and evenings of quiet study looking out into the sky. I signed a three-year lease and surreptitiously transported my books and clothes.

“How, Joyce, can you do this to your mother?”

The voice was that of my mother’s best friend, Suze, calling me a month later, as soon as she had heard the news. For my mother had tried to keep my departure secret. That her only daughter was living in an apartment by herself was a shame, a sign of the family’s failure. But Suze must have sensed something wrong, must have questioned my mother until she confessed.

“You are killing your mother,” Suze said to me.

Slumped on my narrow mattress on the floor, I had no words with which to answer this woman I had known since childhood. I could see that she was right; my behavior was killing my mother, or a very large part of her dreams for me. Yet I was certain that to have remained at home would have been to court my death, the devastation of my dreams. For while my family hoped I would marry an Egyptian-Jewish man, keeping house for him and raising children who would themselves marry other Egyptian Jews, I cherished another ideal: the life of a writer, an artist, an independent woman— a woman who took lovers perhaps, but never a woman who settled into the domesticity and despair I could see had engulfed my mother.

But for a young girl, or as my mother called me in French, “une jeune fille,” to live alone, without husband or parents or other relatives, was among the greatest transgressions our Egyptian-Jewish immigrant community could imagine.

“You should be finding a husband,” Suze said now. “You should be out enjoying yourself. Instead you will be in your filthy apartment cleaning your filthy toilet.”

We both knew it was not the filthiness of the apartment that was at stake. I was the one who was filthy, I was the one who would never become clean, no matter how hard I scrubbed. The only explanation for my actions must be that I had given myself up to indiscriminate sexuality, refusing all respectability. I was “une femme perdue,” a lost woman, “abandonée.” How could I explain? It was not sex that I was after, not really.

Yet I was indeed “une femme perdue”— adrift in an uncharted and terrifying New World, without bearings or direction. It had taken all my strength to make the move, all my energy to shut the door against my mother’s grief and my father’s shame. Now that I was in possession of my apartment, what was I to do in it? Most days, I lay on my mattress, unable to rise, afraid to walk outside, paralyzed by the enormity of my offense, overwhelmed by the magnitude of what I had done. Authenticity? A life of freedom and creativity? It was all I could do to brush my teeth each morning and take a shower in the, indeed, filthy bathroom.

The apartment I had imagined as a sunlit nest loomed now as an alien darkness, inhospitable and cold. Mold grew in the kitchen sink and cockroaches prowled the hall. The empty living room— without furniture or window coverings— echoed loudly to my step. Only in the bedroom, with its mattress on the floor and a few wooden crates stuffed with books and papers, could I find any peace. Yet even there I could not still the voices that told me I was wrong, bad, ungrateful, sick.

“You are killing your mother,” Suze said again. “You should be ashamed.”

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