Especially Gregory. I’d forgotten to panic about Gregory. Smart, lofty (for a Jew) and funny, he was my dream date, my math buddy who sat behind me for eight hours a day. Even though we spent a good percent of our lives in conversation, our romance existed only in my mind, comfortably nestled in my synapses.
The boys huddled on one side of the snack table and noble, noble Lila (who was, no shock, more advanced than me—she talked to guys on the phone) stood with me at the other as Daniel came over. Ran his fingers through his hair. Some kids just had it.
I did not. I felt sick. Mom’s physical affection was reserved for tears and tragedy: I did not know how to touch.
But, as Lila and Daniel began to chat about ski camp, I knew I needed to figure it out fast. I looked down at my socks, thinking of Lila’s mom’s encouragement. I had to succeed at parties, at people, at life outside Kildare. I had to keep myself afloat.
Thankfully, the others soon arrived and a gloriously ordered social began. Daniel—or probably his mathematical mother—had ensured an even number of boys and girls; for each song we all danced in two long parallel lines. During the pause between tracks there was a moment of shuffling panic, but it always worked out since no one wanted to be left out. (I hadn’t counted on others being insecure too.) Like a team of chess pawns, we each swayed side to side, playing our parts in the geometry of prepuberty, me relaxing into “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and INXS and the system.
Until Daniel announced that we’d be switching gears. The beats stopped. My insides raced. People gathered in small groups and I didn’t know where to go so I found my old friend, the bathroom. My social victories felt so fragile, but as I desperately rerolled my socks, I reminded myself that I had been invited, that I was not a fraud, that I was doing well and could survive another hour, that I could spin a bottle and kiss kiss kiss! I examined my lips, and though they seemed adequately unchapped, I delayed opening the door, no idea where I’d head from here.
Fortunately, as soon as I crossed the threshold, I was approached—by Gregory. My heart flapped. He was so tall, I wanted him to fold himself over me like origami, swallowing me whole. “Judy, can I talk to you?”
I froze, felt hot and cold, sweet and sour. This was actually happening, my dream come true! This was exactly how it had worked in my mind—he would pull me aside and ask me out. I knew I had it in me somewhere. I thought of the time in first grade when I walked into the advanced math class even though they hadn’t called my name, assuming they’d made the mistake. Despite everything, I had a sense that I could get things I wanted.
Now I nodded, completely unable to speak, and followed him to a corner of the basement, my legs on a moving walkway. Then he stopped and turned, and in order not to smash right into him I forced my legs to halt too.
“Judy,” he said. How could this person who saw my back and side every single day, who heard me laugh, sing, read, calculate exponential growth, who I heard chuckle and recite poems and divide fractions, now seem like a stranger, a landscape of uncharted humanity?
“Yes.”
“There’s something I need to ask you.”
It all became a sitcom, a bigger-than-me moment colored with a pink border. I had never been so happy. “Yes.”
“Will you go out with Stu?”
“Ye—What?”
“Stu really likes you, and he wanted me to ask you out for him.”
Stu? Stu? I’d barely noted that Stu was at the party. He was nerdy, with enormous glasses, huge eyes, extreme dental work. A laugh like a rooster. Stu liked me? Stu?
“OK,” I said, my mouth working without me, not sure what was happening or how life could just take you and throw you here and there like a Skee-Ball, bouncing off the wrong ring.
“She said yes!” Gregory called triumphantly across the room.
There was a murmur of “yes” that spread like mess around the room. Yes yes yes. I’d said yes. What had I done?
“Time for a special dance,” Daniel announced from his ghetto blaster, swapping mix tapes for a slow tune before ushering me into the middle of the room, where Stu was waiting. Stu was my counterpart, it hit me. Awkward, nerdy, also a bit unclear why he’d been invited. I half smiled and did as Lila had told me. Hands on shoulders. Side to side. Everyone else formed a large circle around us and swayed to Belinda Carlisle as my and Stu’s romance was anointed. Gregory’s smile couldn’t have been bigger.
They say in heaven love comes first.
And Judy is going out with Stu.
Who was I supposed to discuss this with? Where could I seek advice? I’d never seen Mom and Dad kiss, not even once. I thought of the boxes from our 1983 move, still sitting full in the basement, unpacked histories forming walls between them, between all of us, a family joke, a heavyweight suggestion of Mom’s ambivalence: I am planted here and yet, not settled.
“How was the party?” Dad asked when I got home. He was nestled in his corner of the den, behind the newspaper, like always.
“Great,” I lied, then tucked myself into my cramped dusty room, repeating over and over my new identity as a girlfriend, repeating it so I would believe it.
But Monday was a disaster. As soon as we sat down in class, Stu looked my way and grinned, his braces glistening in the fluorescent light. I smiled like I’d had a stroke, half my lip shaking, then looked away. At recess, Stu thankfully ignored me, but lunch was inevitable. As I tried to hide the tuna-and-cottage-cheese-stuffed-between-slabs-of-old-challah sandwich that Mom had cobbled together before leaving for work at six a.m., Stu sat down next to me. “How was your weekend?” he asked.
I closed my lunch bag.
“Good,” I said. My mouth was a desert. Was this how you were supposed to talk to a boyfriend? What else? Cumberlands drugstore had a great special on liquid soap. Mom got four dozen bottles. Amid the giggles, I could feel Gregory, Lila, everyone, staring, assessing. I’d wanted a boyfriend to make me seem normal, but it didn’t. I was used to oblique attention, to being seen over hedges; the fact that people were noticing me felt too much to bear.
“I got your number,” he said. “I’ll call you tonight.”
When the phone rang that evening at eight p.m., slightly too loud, too lingering, I knew it was him. He was a man of few surprises, except for picking me in the first place. “Judy,” Dad called from the den. “Phone for you.”
It’s my boyfriend, I told myself. My boyfriend.
But I had nothing to talk about, nothing prepared. Would I be expected to kiss him? How would I move my body? His braces? My tongue? It all seemed so dangerous, so complicated. Everything about me was wrong, out of place. I ran to the den. “Tell him I’m not here,” I whispered. “Please.”
Dad looked at me, knowingly. “Sorry. She’s not here right now,” he said into the beige receiver, complicit in my hiding.
I retreated to my room, and nestled in my unmade bed among the palimpsest of budget blankets. The headboard was dusty, and the pink edge of my Holly Hobbie comforter—the one with the girl whose hood was so large it hid her face—was frayed. I felt like the bed. The mess was me. The ugly reflected off me and back to me, an endless pattern.
• • •
AFTER A WEEK, I heard a rumor at recess. “Stu dumped Judy,” it went. “He said it wasn’t a real going out.”
They were right. It was not real. I was not real. I was just a blurry reflection of the person I should have been.
I was rejected, dumped, ditched. And elated. No more pressure. No more having to worry how I would ever bring him home.
• THREE •
7 WEEKS: I’M LATE
New York City, 2011
I sprinted to Sixth Avenue, running late. For three weeks, I’d existed in a closeted daze, harboring this secret life in my belly, Googling Web sites that went on about orifice development and lanugo hair, alternately fascinated and horrified (I was hir
sute enough, I joked to Jon, I’d have to book this kid’s eyebrow waxes in the womb). But none of it felt real. Sure, my unusually fierce daily cramps had me checking continuously for miscarriage (as the books said to) and I napped more than I had since my own babyhood, but it was all so temporary, fragile, an idea. Until now. My first ob-gyn appointment was due to take place in an hour. And, it was all the way uptown, blocks from any subway.
Ideal location for an emergency hospital, I mused, stepping into the street, despite the fact that I was now negotiating traffic for two. I waved my arm in the hope of attracting a yellow cab. I’m late resonated through my mind and I let out a cackle. The one line I hadn’t had the chance to utter.
No taxis stopped. Their lights were off. I looked at my phone, watched a minute go by. Then three. Then six. I waved more frantically.
I can’t be late, I thought, now conjuring images of my mother, her den stuffed with asynchronous clocks, the colons flashing between the numbers, here and not here. As if the abundance of watches helped her keep track of time. I, on the other hand, was a scheduler par excellence. Being prompt was my ultimate sign of social awareness, of respect for the other. I revered the base-twelve contract around which the entire world functioned. I was the to-do woman who had to-done it. Deadlines were deaths I craved. I was urgently early, forced to walk around the block when I arrived to gigs or meetings so that I wouldn’t appear overly eager, underly artistic. I did not stay for eleventh hours; I lived by clean spaces, and numbers. A calendar girl.
If there’s one thing I learnt from all this, I’d said to Jon the other night, it’s that the pill really works. Or, he’d answered, we were beshert, meant to procreate. Damn romantic.
I peered into the horizon for the light of availability. “Shit.”
I hated being late. Last to the party. Left behind. Like the world is going on without me. I kicked the curb. This pregnancy was not part of my narrative, not how I planned for it to happen. Not here, not now.
I could feel my world, my ways, slipping from me already.
Then an open cab turned the corner. I ripped open the door. Finally.
Settled inside, I watched as minutes passed on the television screen, my hand on my soon-to-be-examined belly. I’d read that babies loved reggae. Its beats per minute were the same as the average maternal heart. In the womb, they became accustomed not only to the sound of their mother’s voice, but to her internal mechanisms. Stomach gurgling, gas, the rhythms of her organs. What beat had I heard, did I grow to? What tempo formed my blueprint for marking time?
My mother was a fetus in 1945, I thought, conceived in the Siberian work camp to which my grandparents fled from Warsaw in ’thirty-nine. During her stay in Bubbie’s uterus, she was taken from Siberia all the way down through Russia, on horse, by foot, crossing various Stans, finally landing in Kirgizia, where she made her way out. She’d been conceived into the tempo of a heart stalled, terrorized, waiting to see if parents and siblings were still alive, waiting to see if her parents themselves would get out alive. She’d been formed in the cadence of hiding, running, survival.
The taxi sped.
What pulse had been passed on to me, ticking away? What bpm would I pass on?
ON TIME
Montreal, 1989
“Is everyone ready?” I called from my room.
One of my eyes was focused on the mirror as I checked out my creation—an all-white Working Girl power suit from Jacob Jr. with shoulder pads, a pleated skirt, and a blue-and-white polka-dot shirt that sported a medieval jester’s six-inch collar, all of which molded my twelve-year-old shapeless physique into the strong, sharp contour—of a square. I’d had my hair done the day before; I’d gone with Samantha Horowitz and her mother, Fran, to the salon in the Cavendish Mall. Samantha got a flowing perm, but I knew Dad would freak out (no piercings, tattoos, or perms—NOTHING PERMANENT) so I just said “tease me” and lord. Sylvain the Quebecois Indian hairdresser who bore an incredibly suspect resemblance to Vanilli (including both leather pants and mane) had split my fringe in two, making half my hairs stand on guard, while the other half were plastered down my forehead. Then he’d blow-dried my long frizzy tresses straight, his arms sinewy as he drew out the strands, humming at how alluring I appeared. Girl . . . you know it’s true. Of course, sleeping on it all night had not tamed the look, shall we say, and now several areas of the do were fully erect. Worse, the bottom of my hair turned outward like a seventies artsy fling. I used two brushes and all my strength to try to curl these tasteless waves under, power-woman straight. Overall, the look had the sexual appeal of smoked trout.
“Everyone? Anyone?”
My other eye was on the clock. June 12, 1989, nine forty-eight a.m.
In seventy-two minutes, I’d become a woman!
I brushed harder. Damn rebellious hair ends. “Hello?”
No answer, except for the sound of morbid trumpet calls and a voice so deep it was as if the speaker had awoken from his own death. It’s Jewish hour, emanated from one of the many radios that were always on in the house, crowding even the air with sound waves. Today: a new story from the gas chambers. “Hello?”
I ran down the slippery hall (particularly so due to my fishwife beige stockings) to the den, where Dad lounged hidden behind his papers. I smelled rare minty aftershave and saw his shoes sticking out from beyond the newsprint. He was ready, as always. Eli, on the other hand, was wearing a shirt and navy blazer, but no pants. “Eli!”
“I have two hundred and twelve lines,” he said from behind his Game Boy.
“Wow.” That was pretty good. We were both obsessed with Tetris. I spent my days trying, in my imagination, to make the shapes around me fit neatly together—which this house’s piles of expired TV Guides and bargain basement towels did not. At school, I’d dropped out of drama, choir, and the annual reading competition to become a scientist, like Dad. I was a math nerd, drawn to balanced equations, ordered graphs, patterns that plotted neatly along the x-time-axis.
“It’s getting fast,” Eli said, his thumbs punching with force.
The more blocks that dropped, the more time that passed, the faster it all became, heading toward frenzy. I understood. Nintendo was one of our sibling ways of interacting along with a slew of imaginary characters—the Ukrainian Robot, Tony the Tiger, the jailer of Nottingham—that had peopled our make-believe games and our real conversations. “When you’re done, please put on your pants, Captain Crunch,” I pleaded and left for the kitchen, where I assumed I’d find Mom among the piles. “Mom.” I took a deep breath. Gentle, abrupt, I was always saying the wrong thing. “Mom, I—”
She wasn’t there.
“Mom?” My heart skipped, but excited for the day, I had hope. Her absence could be a good sign! Perhaps she was ready, slipping on her shoes, grabbing her coat, spraying on the final touches of her Charlie or Jean Naté or even Dior Poison that Dad had bought her as a special gift last summer (the name was so apt, Dad hadn’t even made jokes about it), beaming, proud. Normal. Her present to me.
I hopped to her room. “Mom!” But as I opened her broken blue folding door, the one that was missing several hinges so it actually lunged toward me when I moved it (a relic of the former home owners, 1960s divas whose bold taste we never erased but instead covered over with layers of mess) I glimpsed Mom’s backside, her beige tights pulled over extra-large underwear, the rolls on her sides. She was sitting at her desk, in front of a complex of boxes filled with colorful fastening supplies: paper clips, pins, sewing kits. “Mom.”
“Shut the door, Judy. I’m getting dressed.”
“We have an hour,” I said. “Until my actual bat mitzvah.”
“I know.” She didn’t turn around. “Now go.”
Behind her loomed her king-size bed, the real Mount Kildare, stacked with clothes, blankets, and papers that now covered its entire surface except for a small edge where Mom slept. I w
anted to hang out with her in the evenings and watch Thirtysomething, pretending I understood it and laughing along with her chuckles, but there was no room. A broken door wasn’t the same as an open door.
I tucked my worry into myself, and decided to go practice my speech. This wasn’t really a bat mitzvah, just a group simcha; the girls—all nine of whom I would be celebrating my personal coming of age with—would not read from the Torah. Though my Montreal Jewish community was obsessed with Club Med and teppanyaki dining, and though my school taught experimental Hebrew poetry instead of prayer, the synagogues were strictly orthodox, and there was no such thing as a bat mitzvah in Jewish tradition. Instead of reading from the Bible or leading prayers, we girls gave speeches about Jewish themes we’d studied. This was fine with me. School—with its clear systems, tests, grades—was my forte; my solidity.
For my speech, I’d picked my favorite holiday. “Passover is the celebration of freedom. It commemorates spring. It is a time of fresh starts. A holiday symbolized by the egg, itself representing the circle. Life. Cyclical life.” Then there was the fact that Passover was the quintessential holiday of order. Obsessive order. The word seder means order; the whole evening begins with a chronologically determined to-do list and ends with a repetitive chant about goats. Ten plagues, ten commandments, four glasses of wine, three forefathers, two tablets.
The one meal of the year that my family ate at home, together, at the same time.
“Mom?” Forty-five minutes. No answer. The rush to flee Egypt. Why is this night different from all other nights? But, of course, it wasn’t.
White Walls Page 4
