You might recall, from my earlier epistle, I am, in my heart of souls, but a humble gefilte fish, long out of water.
As my tale continues, my father next uproots our family from St. Thomas. No, I don’t flee the island like Vicki, though I should have. Instead, imagine a family of gefilte fish hunkering on the tarmac in sweltering tropical sun waiting to board a Caribair flight to San Juan before transferring to Pan Am flight #612 (I made up the flight number, having no idea what it actually was) to Idlewild Airport in New York. In the dead of winter. No shawl to cover my shivering gefilte shoulders. . . . Oh, but wait: gefilte fish don’t have shoulders!
Before you know it, my family and I move into a suburban ranch house in Glen Rock, New Jersey. I enroll in junior high school, where everyone is Christian. Which of course is a mild exaggeration. Surely there are one or two other Jews. But not many. So I spend hours before the mirror yearning to witness my Christian transformation, hoping for my Jewish features to turn gentile.
I want to fit in.
That’s it, isn’t it? The crux of the problem: I don’t want to see myself as a round, pasty-looking gefilte fish.
But surely a gefilte fish, as luck would have it, contains the natural properties of a chameleon—like the lizards on St. Thomas—to change appearance.
A Chameleon! A Jew for All Seasons. Or none?
This gefilte, in short, over the course of this long journey, rushes here and there, helter-skelter, donning numerous masks, camouflaging herself (sometimes more successfully than others) into new habitats and surroundings, seeking her place in the world.
Because, at the root of it all, this little gefilte is scared to be Jewish. Even though of course I know I am Jewish . . . or as Jewish as a gefilte fish is Jewish.
Hold your boos, hisses, and sneers. Yes, I’m talking to you. Don’t throw any accusations of anti-Semitism and/or self-loathing my way. No, nope, don’t even think of it.
I ask you: Would you want to be Jewish if your Jewish father is a bad man? A bad, bad man? (Here, imagine a school of gefilte fish, headless heads shaking no, no, no.) Wouldn’t you, instead, want to be Christian if you believe Pat Boone is a good man, a good, good man? (Here, imagine gefilte fish, a whole jar of them, nodding yes, yes, yes.)
And since I’m convinced that all the Christian boys and girls in Glen Rock, New Jersey, represent some Mythical Ideal—right now, at this stage of the journey—I want to be them, or be adopted by them (just like I wanted to be adopted by the tramp or by Pat Boone), brought in from the cold, into their fold.
Will I be successful?
Well, unless you think that the problems of one small gefilte don’t amount to a ball of matzohs, then we’ve got our work cut out for us. . . .
Especially since I want to be Christian even though I don’t exactly believe in God. Only Pat Boone.
S.W.S.
The Endless Possibilities of Youth
There’s always something about that first love.
Natalie Wood
Suicide as Just One Possibility
I happen to see a girlfriendfrom high school in the rotunda of the Capitol who tells me that, shortly after graduation, Lynn committed suicide. Hearing Lynn’s name I also think of Christopher, my (our) ex-boyfriend. During much of junior and senior high schools, he arced between us—two rail-thin girls, one Christian, one Jewish—like an electrical charge between positive and negative poles. Now, after work, I catch a DC Transit bus outside the Longworth House Office Building where I’m a legislative aide. I sway in the crowded aisle, forward and back, gripping the metal handlebar. Christopher might not even recognize me now in a minidress and leather sandals, much like other hippies, so different from the primly starched shirtwaists Lynn and I both favored in our suburban high school.
Steamy air, gray with city grit, obscures white government façades. Even my face, glimpsed in the smudged windows of the bus, darkens with every block, the way I appeared to myself in high school. Then, afternoons, I leaned close to the bathroom mirror. I wanted to mystically command Lynn’s sleek ponytail and pale, snub nose to reflect back . . . to be me, mine. But my frizzy hair, my intractable Jewish appearance, remained. Only when Christopher smiled at me, I no longer felt gloomy, an alien Jew adrift in the tidy Christian world of Glen Rock.
I was alien back then, for I wasn’t a denizen of my own home, either. I always awoke to the arthritic shuffling of my Russian grandmother in her terrycloth slippers. Unable to live alone in her own apartment, she invaded my family with a black babushka, rolled wool stockings, a gnarled Yiddish tongue. She even cleared her throat in Yiddish. She skulked suburban streets as if still fleeing pogroms, even though she’d immigrated to America decades earlier. Or she prowled our neighborhood trailing the scent of boiled cabbage as if she, now the pursuer, hoped to capture me, save me from the Christians whom I emulated and desired.
From the balcony of my high-rise apartment, I watch the oval dome of the Capitol gleaming white and familiar, like the moon. My family left Washington DC years ago, but now, a recent college graduate, I’m drawn back to my birthplace: the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the White House, the ellipse, the rectangular reflecting pool, columns, domes, pentagons, ovals. It’s a city built upon the irrefutable, reassuring logic of geometry.
But tonight the marble seems too cool, the breeze off the Potomac moist. A thin chill shivers from my palms up to my scalp. Brain freeze, like that sharp yet numbing pain in my temples when I once sucked on Kool-Aid ice cubes on summer afternoons.
As if my brain is frozen, I now can’t remember my girlfriend’s exact words: did she say that Lynn “killed herself” or did she say “committed suicide”? The words “committed suicide” sound more exact, each letter chiseled in stone. No margin for error. No different ending.
You walk into your garage. You close the car door. You turn the key. Exhaust billows.
No going back.
The Love Triangle as a Problem of High School Geometry
Mornings, when I arrive at school, I go into the girls’ room and bolt the stall. I unhook the Star of David from the gold chain around my neck. I slip the black-and-white saddle shoe off my left foot, dropping this present from my grandmother inside it. I retie the lace, taut, double knotting it.
Later, in class, I grip my pencil, ruler, and protractor to draw circles and parallelograms on a piece of graph paper. Equilateral, isosceles, obtuse triangles. Here in geometry I’m able to prove, at least on paper, that if I am point B on a scalene triangle and Lynn point C, then I am the one who stands closer to Christopher, at point A. And if I stand closer to Christopher (the antecedent), then that means he loves me (the consequent).
Or: If Christopher smiles at me even once during the day then he loves me—not Lynn.
But suppose this geometric proof of love is merely a postulate? For if Christopher smiles at Lynn then ______.
I don’t want to fill in the blank.
Memorize the following equation as if it’s hard evidence: Lynn hates me as much as I hate her. This hate = the amount we both love Christopher.
Without turning around, I sense Lynn a few rows behind me wearing the pink dress she sewed in home-economics class. Her stare needles my back.
Lynn, Christopher, me. Really, we’re an equilateral triangle: Lynn and I, equal sides, lean inward, reaching up toward Christopher at the apex.
Glen Rock as an Outpost of the Cold War
Next class, English, I watch the backs of Christopher’s wrists through lowered lashes. The winter sun, slanting through the row of rectangular windows, casts the wispy hairs in platinum light. Last autumn, the sun tinged them a reddish yellow. By June (I know I’ll still be spying on him), after weeks of baseball, they’ll deepen to gold. I rest my chin in my palm, canting toward him, inhaling his scent of Ivory soap and Juicy Fruit gum. The overlap of his front teeth, this one small flaw, makes me want to kiss him, though he’s never even held my hand. I, with my darkness, feel almost inchoate in the presenc
e of such incandescence.
Even the blunt shape of his hands appears all-American: exotically ordinary. Neither overly strong nor frail. His palms seem as at ease guiding a girl across a dance floor as pinning a wrestling opponent to the mat. His nails are neat, the lunulas pale as the tip of a day moon rising in a young summer sky. I long to touch his fingers, his wrists, those nails. I long for his sun-warm hand to lead me down Rock Road past Kilroy’s Wonder Market, People’s Bank, Mandee’s Dress Shoppe . . . the Nabisco plant on the edge of town exhaling the scent of pure vanilla.
I pay scant attention to the teacher, Miss P. Five days a week her vague voice instructs on themes, plots, similes. We read boring short stories, one about a child who eats too many pancakes. These stories teach me nothing of boys, of love, of triangles—or how aliens meld into an all-American life. During class, my gaze strays from Christopher only when I press the nib of my fountain pen to my gray cloth notebook. In cursive I write Christopher, Christopher, Christopher across the front, the back, the spine. I dot each letter “i” with a ♥. Ink from the letters bleeds into the fabric.
But now, with only minutes left of class, the light suddenly darkens. The pale hairs on Christopher’s wrists become invisible—or the same color as his skin—as if it’s possible to be bleached by an absence of sunlight. The once-glittery day grows mute, clammy. I stir in my seat, Christopher’s spell broken.
I glance around. My classmates’ faces remain turned toward Miss P., paying attention. Am I the only one to notice the windows darken, implacable as lead?
Then, with no warning, the words “iron curtain” invade my consciousness with such force I’m stunned, motionless in my chair. The four stony syllables thud the base of my brain. My breath feels shallow, tight.
Even in school, beside Christopher, I’m subverted by a foreign power, my Russian grandmother. The icy hem of Siberian winters clings to her skirt. She casts Old World spells scented with wood smoke, wrenched from crooked alleys of shtetls, to shadow the golden streets of my new world. Her unblinking evil eye is a searchlight. I am x-rayed in its glare.
The Star of David sears the sole of my left foot.
Sock Hop as Wish Fulfillment
At the Paradise of Hearts dance, after I watch Christopher for more than an hour, he invites me to dance. That hand with the warm palm holds mine as the DJ plays “Blue Moon” by the Marcels. I wear a sweater with fringes that (I realize too late) resemble tzitzits, ceremonial fringes on Jewish shawls. I’m reassured, however, when a swirling light casts into relief the filaments of hair on Christopher’s wrists, as if I, too, am now warmed in this glow. Except why, then, doesn’t Christopher hold me close enough to hear his heart beneath his cotton shirt?
Valentines and paper roses adorn the school cafeteria, in whose blossoming Christopher next asks Lynn to dance. He holds her tight. Tighter. His cheek brushes hers. Her shiny ponytail sways on her shoulders. Her crisp poodle skirt floats around her knees. Her snip of a nose wrinkles when she smiles. I glare, willing her nose to grow, her shoulders to droop, her cheeks to lose their bloom.
At the end of the evening, girls cluster outside the school entrance waiting for parents to pick us up. I huddle with my friends, Lynn with hers. She and I pretend to ignore each other. We rarely speak—though I think about her constantly. My father’s car stops beside the curb just behind her father’s. As Lynn opens the door, the dome light shadows rather than brightens her father’s features. His sharp “get in” sounds like pebbles pitched against glass. Lynn and I close our doors. My father says I should have called earlier for him to bring me home. I lower the window of his black Fleetwood Cadillac, smoky from cigarettes. I feel his gaze on me in the rearview mirror. Headlights from a car behind us glint on his glasses. We slowly follow Lynn’s car along the driveway and onto Harristown Road, as if we’re in a procession.
Suburban Glen Rock as Refuge from the Shtetl
The Christian street I live on, Lowell Road, is elliptical, a perfect oval. Evenings, after dinner, I ride my bicycle around and around, glimpsing inside houses, all the parted curtains. Each picture window frames a still-life living room, a painting of modern Danish furniture adorning a background of wall-to-wall Euclidean carpet. Lamplight etches damp weedless lawns, reflecting exact rhombuses. Moths beat wire-mesh screens, this golden perfection irresistible. Pedaling past neighbors’ houses, my heart quickens, too.
Later, inside, I stand by my bedroom window, a finger denting parallel slats in the venetian blinds, intersecting sight. If only I could conjure Christopher in his father’s red Rambler, tires swishing to a stop in front of my house. But the only sound is the scuff of my grandmother’s dirty terrycloth slippers, so frayed I imagine her wearing them in the shtetl, on the boat as she sails toward Ellis Island, all along the Lower East Side, tramping across the George Washington Bridge and into my teenage life.
As Technicolor Heartthrobs Take Suburbia by Storm
Christopher and I watch teenage movies such as A Summer Place. At the second-run, drive-in theater, as Molly (Sandra Dee) and Johnny (Troy Donahue) fall in love, I snuggle beside Christopher in my floral dress, our clothes damp against the seat of his father’s Rambler.
The camera pans in for a close-up of Johnny and Molly alone in a lighthouse.
Molly: “We’ve got to be good, Johnny.”
Johnny: “Good. Is it that easy to be good?”
Molly: “Have you been bad, Johnny? Have you been bad with other girls?”
She whispers the word “bad” with longing that swells from the base of her throat.
If “bad” is “good,” is “good” “bad”? How to prove the theorem? How to decipher who Christopher wants me to be? Christopher, would you be bad with me, kiss me—do more with me—if I didn’t look Jewish, if I resembled Lynn or Sandra Dee?
When I audition for my high school play, everyone thinks I’m perfect for the role and laughs at the right lines. Well, everyone thinks I’m perfect but the drama coach, Miss M. I don’t get the part. Miss M., also my Spanish teacher, worships General Francisco Franco, who supported the Fascists during World War II. She brings photos of him to class. I squint, not wanting to see, willing the images to burn to vapor on a white-hot Iberian breeze. My mother says I didn’t get the part because I’m Jewish.
Now, disembodied voices crackle from the speaker box hooked on the car window. When I lean my head against Christopher’s shoulder, the movie sounds garbled, as if they’re speaking a foreign language.
Big-Time Wrestling as Metaphor for the Vicissitudes of Love
I sit in the bleachers, hands folded, watching Christopher wrestle. He’s captain of the team, and I long to wear his letter sweater. Sweat drips from Christopher onto the square red mat, a white circle in the center. His skin glistens. I don’t want him to get pinned. Halfway through, when I think he might lose, my shoulders feel narrow, drawn. I focus on my kneecaps, pale between kneesocks and a plaid kilt.
Earlier, while dressing, I was sure he’d love my pearly nail polish and pink-bubblegum lipstick. With religious fervor, I shined the copper pennies wedged in the leather slots of my loafers. If only he’ll glance up in the stands, notice the lipstick, the Lincoln-head pennies.
I nervously scrape the polish from my nails before the match is over. Luminescent chips fleck my skirt.
Christopher drives me home. His good-night kiss brushes my lips, feathery, quick. After settling in the den of my split-level ranch house, I watch professional wrestling on our black-and-white Zenith. My grandmother hunches beside me. The Crusher. Black Jack Mulligan. Mad Dog Vachon. Killer Kowalski. Nothing like Christopher’s orderly high school wrestling. Nothing like the gentle—“good”—way he hugs me, either.
“No Jews are such meshuganahs,” she says. In this, at least, my grandmother and I agree as we watch gentile wrestlers slam off the ropes or plummet onto the mat.
Anna Karenina as Teenage Role Model
Saturdays, I ride the bus to the bookstore in Ridgewood to buy mo
unds of novels. The wooden floor smells raw, like a forest, in the damp morning air. I climb the rungs of the ladder on runners that glide past the floor-to-ceiling shelves. The words in all the books seem muffled, tightly packed together. Which ones most want to be released, read? In which ones will I discover the meaning of teenage life?
I ease a spine from the shelf and ruffle the pages. Words seem to spill everywhere. I must gather them. Believe every word I read. I leaf through Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. Surely these women will teach me of love and all its triangles. Anna/Alexei/Vronsky. Emma/Charles/Rodolphe.
I also slide from the shelves Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov. Russian novels! I consider slipping them back in their empty niches. After all, no Russian novels are assigned in high school. None of my friends read them. Maybe I should only read American books instructing me how to be like Lynn?
Oh, but the passion of thousands of pages of operatic Russian intrigue! Grand gestures! The cashier puts the books in a sack. I keep my reading habits a secret.
I place my dollar bills on the counter and notice the Great Seal on the backs. Is the eye atop the pyramid God’s? Is it my grandmother’s? Has she been watching me, commanding my hand along the bookshelves to Russian titles? Both?
Failure as an Art Form
Don’t know much about history . . . But I do know that I love you . . .
Answering SAT questions, I grip my no. 2 yellow pencil, guessing wildly.
Choose the word or set of words that, when inserted in the sentence, best fits the meaning of the sentence as a whole.
The scientist ascribed the ____ of the park’s remaining trees to the ____ of the same termite species that had damaged homes throughout the city.
A) decimation . . prevalence
B) survival . . presence
C) growth . . mutation
D) reduction . . disappearance
E) study . . hatching
Pat Boone Fan Club Page 4
