You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  From then on, they were always together: days after school, evenings doing homework, mornings at breakfast. Winters in the Catskills and summers on the Vineyard. They were together at every party, every dance, every evening at home with friends smoking joints and listening to Mott The Hoople or David Bowie or Lou Reed or Santana, every day, it seemed to her, of the rest of her life: perfectly unacknowledged, perfectly unquestioned and perfectly unsexual.

  And now, as she advanced through the room, at every step she felt dizzy with the room’s familiarity, as if the instant before seeing, her eye supplied the image that it was about to capture. Outside the window, she caught a glimpse of the flagstone path to the back of the garden, and her mind supplied the moistness of the chestnut-shaded air, the smell of damp bark. She had meant only to step out of the dining room for a moment, a moment to quiet the anger that had swept through her with its peppery heat when Danny gave up the seder to Uncle Nat. But now tears were welling in her throat, so she went up the stairs, past the parlor, empty now, and up. On the staircase an image of herself appeared in a frame on the wall, surprising her with the picture of a long-haired, black-eyed girl, watching her quizzically from a quarter-century before. As if against a physical force she pushed forward, up, and into her old bedroom, now the studio in which Eleanor painted, and without turning on the light she moved to stand by the window to now, really, freely, fully cry.

  What had ever tied her to this family other than the shared years in this room, in all the other rooms? Old Yankel Sinai’s Mount Morris apartment, Evelyn Singer’s Kips Bay house, Jack’s legal offices in the Exchange building which had been his father’s, the Martha’s Vineyard rooms with their sea-sodden vistas over Menemsha Bay? What had they ever talked about, Danny and she, other than these places, and the sacredness with which they had been invested by time, by the vast continuity, the accidental and unexpected continuity in a century of massacre? Then it had been an exchange of ideas, high concepts, nearly translucent, like the flocks of geese they’d see each year, late summer over Martha’s Vineyard, faintly etched against the distance of sky. But in them had been their entire future. And then had come that summer in New Haven when they went to Hammonasset Beach and slowly, surely, he began to harden away. Years before, as early as high school, he had said to her, lying on the beach, watching a delta of geese pass overhead:

  “You know, Klary, Dad’s appeared five times before the Supreme Court?”

  They had been on their backs on the beach in front of the summer house, watching up into the summer sky.

  “Yes, Danny, I know he has.”

  “And you know what? When he dies, I’ll be the last Sinai not practicing real-estate law, or dermatology, or trading bonds. Eugene Debs? Peekskill riots? None of those little shitheads in Larchmont even know why Dad wasn’t in World War II. And none of them know why my brother is underground.”

  Klara remembered that well, for she, only a few years an American, had not known either. Jason, of course, she understood: the war was still on in Vietnam, then, and the country was still largely the country Jason had known. For the former point, later she checked it in my grandfather’s interview for Griffin Fariello and learned about Jack’s Spanish Civil War service and his ensuing Dies Committee blacklisting for that bizarre crime of “premature antifascism,” the fact of having opposed fascism on moral grounds, before the war, rather than political grounds, during it. Then, considering Danny’s deeper point, she turned one cheek to the sand to look at him.

  “Okay. They’re shitheads. So what?”

  “So it’s such a farce. We’re like those Canada geese, you know? The kind that still migrate. And the rest of the family, they’re like the other kind, the ones that winter inland on golf courses and parks up in Westchester or out on Long Island instead of flying south. A couple more generations, the two won’t even interbreed any more. They’ll be two separate species, and you can be god damn sure that we’re the one going extinct first. That’s what we are, Klary: a dying species.”

  She remembered thinking about that for a long time, not understanding, as she would not for a very long time yet to come, the difference between herself, adopted by camp survivors from unknown Israeli parents, and her American cousin who had lived, at home, in a culture populated by generations before him. Maybe, had she known my father better, she would have gotten it. As it was now, a quarter-century later, she still did not understand why she was the one at home in the house and he a stranger. Then, watching him curiously in profile, she had spoken into the noise of the surf: “You don’t get it, Danny-boy. And neither does your brother.”

  “What’s not to get, Klary?”

  Patiently, she had said: “You see, it doesn’t matter how different we are. Daddy and Uncle Nat; Peres and Sharon; Noam Chomsky and Henry goddamn Kissinger. There just isn’t any other kind of goose for us to turn into.”

  It was the first thing of any importance on which they’d ever failed to communicate. Neither knew the damage it was going to do. Neither understood how nonnegotiable it was, that sense of loss that my uncle held in him, subjacent to everything he believed. Now the tears were coming as if wholly independent of her being, rolling and rolling down her cheeks. Was it the pent-up emotion of her return? Her return to mourn her adoptive father? She knew it wasn’t. She knew she had not returned to America to mourn Jack. What faced her in America, what she had stayed away from for all these years, was something else. Danny had been the promise of happiness to her. She had been meant to be happy. She had been promised that by all the death, all the death and dislocation that had come over her life like a spell cast by the war over her childhood in Israel: the gassing of her grandparents, the violent death of her birth parents, and then her adoptive parents, one after the other, like a curse. The Sinais were meant to rescue her, to graft her on to the continuity of this house, this culture, this country. Danny had been promised to her, it was their turn to be this family, just as Jack and Eleanor had had their turn. But in the end, it had turned out that it was the happiness that was the exception, not the suffering, hadn’t it? In the end it turned out that Israel’s capacity for horror and privation, that was the norm all over the world, and the happiness of this little enclave in history, America, was the exception.

  Someone was coming up the stairs, or rather, down, and slowly, like a swimmer surfacing, Klara Singer’s focus came to her image in the glass of the window, a middle-aged woman, thrice orphaned and never recovered, with wide, lost, nearly panicked eyes. And in her mind, she said, We loved each other, and I thought everything else was just words. But it was the opposite, wasn’t it? There were all these words, words, words. And everything else was just love.

  7.

  Once Nat had launched into the seder, Daniel Sinai lifted his sleeping son out of Maggie Calaway’s arms and carried him upstairs.

  It was a welcome excuse.

  Upstairs, in his childhood bedroom, a moon was above the rooftops to the north, throwing silvery light through the early leaves of the chestnut, and in this mottled luminescence Danny stood, rocking slightly on his heels. People would remark his absence from the table, he knew that. He also knew, though, that he didn’t care.

  God, if someone had told him that adulthood contained feelings this awful, feelings that made the pains of adolescence seem trivial, he simply would not have believed it. His teeth were clenched, now, and with an effort he relaxed his jaw. Only then did he put his son down under the quilt, roll him to the side, wedge a pillow next to his back. He turned on the baby monitor and clipped the receiver onto his belt. He planted a kiss on the inscrutable roundness of his son’s cheek, just below his closed eye. He descended the stairs deliberately, his mind empty, to the third-floor landing. Then he turned and stepped into Klara’s room, unsurprised to find her by the window, the rising moon casting bars of shadows through the branches of the chestnut.

  For a time they stood in silence. They could not pretend, as they would have as children, that they had com
e to be together in this room perfectly by accident. Nor could he pretend, as he would have as a child, that she was not crying.

  And then she was moving toward him, just allowing him a glimpse of her tear-covered face, and he opened his arms to her.

  For a long time they stood like this, Klara crying hot tears that ran down his neck and under his collar, her body—thinner than he remembered, more bony—shaking with hard paroxysms against his. For a long time they listened to the far sounds of the family in the house below, their bodies together, belly and breath, in silence.

  A long time during which neither of them saw, nor realized, that Maggie Calaway had come to look for her husband, and was standing at the doorway, looking in.

  In her chest Maggie felt her heart, swollen with blood, leaking tiny beats as realization after realization cascaded down around her. They still did not know she was there. Then Klara, like a sleeper briefly waking, opened her eyes and saw her. But instead of reacting, as if it were all a dream, she simply put her eyes, again, against Danny’s neck. And only after a suite of minutes did she, slowly and unwillingly, move away from Danny to the window. There was a silence, Danny standing helplessly in the middle of the room, Klara by the window. When, at last, Klara spoke, it was still as if Maggie were not there. With a lean of her head to the family gathering downstairs, she said in an expressionless voice something that made no sense whatever to Maggie.

  “So, Danny-boy. This is you as the guardian of the species, is it?”

  Her husband said nothing. And Klara, her voice hardening, went on.

  “And it still is. One species. Isn’t it?”

  Neither did he, Maggie saw, seem to understand. “What are you talking about, Klary?”

  “Your geese, Danny-boy. They still seem to be one species.”

  Now, Maggie sensed, he understood. But Klara spoke on, her voice rising, as if inflicting punishment for her recent exposure, as if for an audience.

  “In fact, I’d say the gene pool’s been strengthened, wouldn’t you? What with the good, strong stock you’ve introduced. The Sinais should be thanking you. God knows the Singers should.”

  I think my uncle was shocked how wrong she was, and when he spoke, it was not to protest, but to correct.

  “Klara. You don’t understand.”

  She shook that off. See, she did understand. “Ten years with Jack. Eleanor still here. Maggie’s as lovely today as she was in New Haven. And those meerskeits of yours, your Laura’s the image of Jack. And you dare, you fucking dare, to have become an unhappy man.”

  “Klara.” To Maggie, now, it sounded like pleading.

  “Daniel, what the fuck were you doing, putting that idiot in your father’s chair? What the fuck are you doing? Everything that means anything in the world is here, and you’re wasting it.”

  “Wasting,” she nearly shouted the word, and instinctively, Maggie stepped back. But not Daniel, standing miserably in front of the woman in rage.

  “Klara. I did what my father would have.”

  Sudden contempt in her tone. “No you did not, Danny-boy. Your father kept that old fraud at bay for five decades.”

  “He was my father’s peer. I’m his junior.”

  “Exactly.” With the same contempt. “Your father was a mensch, you’re a coward.”

  And now—at last, it seemed to my other aunt—he raised his voice. “None of this was my choice. None of it.”

  “No? What was your choice?” A shocking bitterness was in her voice now, so much so that Maggie found herself nearly shrinking away from the door. “What was your choice? To be the one who had to go live in that pitiful little third-world hole?”

  “I did what I had to.”

  “Ah, as opposed to I, who did what I wanted to. Isn’t it amazing, that we both could have gotten it so entirely wrong?”

  What would he have answered? Maggie didn’t know, nor would she, because before he could speak the hallway light, controlled from the floor below, went on, casting a trapezoid of light through the open door at which Maggie stood, and they both turned to her, Daniel with shock, Klara with a slow, impersonal inspection. For a moment, everything paused. Then, moving toward the open doorway, Klara spoke to my aunt slowly, clearly, and with infinite cruelty, as if ten years had not diminished by a fraction her hurt.

  “See, Maggie Calaway, you should have asked me ten years ago. I would have told you then: he married you because you’re a WASP, but don’t be surprised, dear, when one day he dumps you for not being a Jew.”

  8.

  Ten years earlier, on one of the first spring days of 1986, my Uncle Daniel and Aunt Klara had driven up the Connecticut coastline to Hammonasset and walked out on the beach. They walked cross-armed, patrician, as if they owned the place; shoulders touching and in silence, silence that had been cultivated over the fifteen years they had been each other’s closest friend—a clear understanding that they were people whose communication only rarely required words—and a silence that it fell to Klara to break. This she did when she was first to notice, high in the light-flooded sky, a flock of geese.

  “Well, there you are, Danny-boy. Life imitating art.”

  My uncle stopped and looked up, as she directed, to the tiny forms etched faintly against the blue, so far that they seemed bled of all substance. The tiny waves on the pebbles ebbed, paused, and in the domed silence he felt the distant sky pressing against the drums of his ears as if it, too, were waiting for an answer. More of their lives had been lived together than not, and almost all of that time together had been as Jack and Eleanor’s only children. They had been to Elizabeth Irwin together, Yale, and now Yale again for grad school. Now they were nearly thirty: Klara a woman of full, red lips and black hair, her face above the black cashmere coat a combination of perspicacity and vulnerability far too adult to be pretty, arguably beautiful. My uncle certainly thought so. Danny himself, he was just losing the slimness that had been his effortlessly all his life, but still had his light expression and thick blond bangs. There was nothing similar about them: Klara had been adopted by Izzy Singer, too. That made my Aunt Klara and my Uncle Danny no kin, despite their familiarity, and, in turn, enabled what was about to happen.

  When no answer came, she spoke again.

  “But of course, those are geese, Daniel, not people. We know that because people don’t fly. At least, the rest of us do.”

  Wordlessly, he conceded the point.

  This was, after all, Klara.

  It was, after all, a negotiation.

  That afternoon, in the bedroom of her apartment on Linden Street, as if keeping an appointment made years ago, Klara Singer and Daniel Sinai made love. And in fact, like an old appointment, to each in its own way, it was without surprise. The solid weight of his body on hers, the scrub of his palms, calloused year round from his summer sailing; the short hair on the base of the warm, blood-bathed muscle of his neck. Nothing was unfamiliar to my Aunt Klara.

  As for my uncle, he felt the breath of this quiet, tall, powerful woman against his ear. The whisper of her voice did not grow confessional, did not abandon its reserve, but grew thick, flushed with emotion, the fluent emotion of someone who felt a great deal of it. And then the weight of this slim woman’s long body came upon him when suddenly, with surprising strength, she turned him, shifted her weight onto his and then pushed herself up, hands on his chest, arching her back and watching him from a face draped, now, with hair.

  Nothing of what he was experiencing was unexpected, no more than the topography of beauty marks that lay on the olive skin across her breasts and stomach—he had always known they were there, or felt that he had. So much so, in fact, that little intrusive stabs of entirely nonsexual familiarity nipped through the sensuality of the encounter, like tiny fish feeding, tempting but alarming. For my uncle, Klara was as known as the smell of his skin, a sensation so interior that he had never really noticed it was there. Now, joined to that life-long awareness was the sense of a perfectly naked woman, golden-ski
nned, Mediterranean, skin to skin in the ripening fall of Atlantic spring light through her window. “Haimish,” he thought to himself, lying by her, afterward, using the Yiddish word, “home-like,” familiar. Then he pronounced, in wonder, Freud’s weighted German word for the opposite: “unheimlich,” “un-homelike,” “uncanny.”

  Haimish. His grandparents had had an arranged marriage in Lithuania; his parents childhood friends from Mount Morris Grammar in Jewish Harlem to Bronx Science, married when they were both at City College in the early ’30s.

  Uncanny. Night after night, that week, Daniel woke hours before dawn, feeling the heat of Klara’s naked body next to his.

  And next, to each of them came an experience of rupture that would determine the future course of their lives. To Klara, it was as bad as any of her childhood, even, in some ways, worse, because she had expected never to have to feel pain like that again. To Danny, who had had a sheltered life, there was a reverberation with his only other experience of tragic loss, but much more faintly: his brother had gone underground when Danny was only twelve and, in fact, his disappearance had also provided Danny with some relief, because my father was an angry and often violent young man who did not like his brother. And yet, Danny could have no idea of how long this reverberation would last and how, ten years later, it would open a faultline that cut right through the center of his life.

  That spring of 1986, in late May Danny and Klara together graduated from law school. The next day they were to drive home to New York where Jack and Eleanor Sinai were throwing a party in their honor. They spent that afternoon in Klara’s bed in Linden Street, their last, as the apartment was already packed and movers would be coming in the morning.

  Outside the window, by Willow Street Pond, a flock of squat geese waddled over the ruined grass, not the migrating geese they had seen coming north earlier in the season, but the kind that in the past decade of warm winters had taken to wintering up and down the eastern seaboard. Watching them from the bed, through Danny swirled all the shared afternoons of their lives: Vineyard summer afternoons or those, up at Camp Treetops, of the long Adirondack light; autumn days in the ’70s outside Elizabeth Irwin; endless Sundays in the West Village home of their youth. He missed them, those afternoons, suddenly and with an intensity that he knew only she, of all the people he would ever know, would understand. And what would he have said, had she not spoken first? As if seeing through his eyes out the window; as if continuing the old argument that never stopped, she spoke from behind him, her breath against the skin of his shoulder.