I peeked into our room: a long, rectangular one, newly renovated, with blond-wood furniture, extra high beds, the delicious smell of fresh paint. Victoria, who’d arrived from California, had already unpacked. I eyed her magazine centerfold space: her bookshelf was filled with colorful hardbacks and trinkets. Her pale blue–checkered sheets were tucked in perfectly. Her slightly open drawers bulged with piles of warm sweaters. I wanted to crawl into her bed, into her knack for design.
Dad and Eli helped me with the rest of my luggage—which I now realized was hardly anything compared to the others whose rooms had carpets, fridges, large-scale hair-grooming appliances. “We should check into our guesthouse,” Dad said.
“OK.” I scribbled my phone number on a ripped sheet of packing paper.
“We’ll call you when we’re ready for dinner,” Mom said. I waved as they shuffled out my door.
And there I was, solo, in my new existence, my new incarnation. I thought of Bubbie and how, despite her increasing confusion, she was still so proud of me. From Chelm to Charvard, my Judaleh, she’d said. I’d made it.
Victoria, who’d stepped out, now returned with bags from local faux-hippie markets, colorful mugs and overpriced tchotchkes peeking from their tops. She dropped them on her small blue rug, comfortable with her own little mess. “My family’s waiting downstairs. We’re going out for an early dinner. Want to come?”
“Thanks, but my parents will be back soon.” I said, noting the browning New England skyline.
“OK, see you later.” In one graceful swoop, she grabbed a sweater and keys (our keys!) and headed out the door (our door!). Our other roommates also hadn’t returned from family outings, and so, to the buttery sunset—one I’d never experienced from this particular angle, illuminating my belongings and belonging in this way—I unpacked my minimalist stash. I placed clothes in my closet: they barely took up half the space. My shoes stood at attention, lined neatly under my bed. My gray Mac slotted onto the desk and my science books for my premed classes fit into one small area of my bookshelf, each spine straight. Open, neat, dustless, clutterless.
I breathed.
I sat down and went through the rest of the papers in the orientation envelope, skimming pages about test schedules, student clubs, and the visiting chef series. I heard loud laughter spiking in from the Yard outside, and looked at my small digital clock (a plain white one from Mom’s stash). It had been nearly three hours since my parents had left. I assumed there’d be traffic and maybe naps, but it was seriously getting late. Too late for the early-bird specials I was sure Mom had staked out from the car.
I checked that the phone was working. I didn’t know the number of the bed-and-breakfast they’d booked, so I called Dad’s beeper, but it had been turned off because he was in a different country. I tried my home number, even Uncle Moishe. No answers.
Not knowing what to do, I wandered through our suite, then once again examined Victoria’s nest, seeking solace. But, as the day darkened and shadows grew, her interior masterpiece began to taunt me. She’d hung a red-and-yellow Keith Haring print above her desk—how did she know how to do that? Her own charcoal artwork, thick bold marks, stood on an easel.
My side, I saw, did not match, and in the harsh fluorescent light, suddenly seemed eerily empty. The plaid sheets that I’d bought on sale were neat on my bed, my pens lined up in a drawer, each item curated by me, and yet. The look wasn’t right. My space didn’t seem comforting but unbalanced and awkward. It hit me: belonging didn’t just happen.
How would I do this? What would we talk about? How did normal living arrangements work?
And where the hell was my family?
My stomach rumbled.
The phone’s silence blared. I paced, stopped myself from imagining car accidents and armed robberies, random murders in crazy strangers’ homes. I didn’t want to miss my parents’ call, but couldn’t bear to be trapped in the room alone any longer.
Outside, the Yard was dark and filled with families wandering in pride and with purpose. I wished I could step into pace with one of them, saunter into their happy conversation as they headed for Herrell’s famous ice cream. Instead, I sprinted, leaving the enclosure, crossing Mass Ave, stopping at a deli where I ordered a tuna wrap. I fumbled for the American change I’d had in my pocket, and then, not knowing what else to do, feeling unhinged to anything at all, ran back to Weld. Victoria was in the lobby.
“How was your dinner?” she asked, as I hid the sandwich behind my back.
“Good, you?” I deflected. “Where did you go?”
I wanted to both rush to our room and to stall so she wouldn’t see my side, which was complete and yet had not even begun.
She talked about the upscale hotel restaurant her parents had taken her to, how they’d allowed her to have a glass of wine. I couldn’t even locate my tap-water-only clan.
“We just went to a diner, casual,” I said, nonchalant as we walked into our bedroom. My family had literally disappeared, as if they’d been delusions, apparitions in my younger mind. No one would see them. No one would know about the Tetris-puzzle of cobwebbed credenzas, the secrets stuffed between tins of baked beans. I could make up any backstory I wanted—any revisionist, minimalist, conventional history. I was a champion at hiding. I realized: I could conceal my whole life.
The other roommates were back. We sat in our living room and talked about where we came from, introducing fragments and versions of ourselves to our new families. Montreal, music, science. I half participated, listening for a ring that never came.
Finally, after midnight, I grabbed the portable phone and headed for the farthest corner near the window. On instinct, I dialed Kildare.
My mother answered.
“Where are you?” I hissed, my worry madly flipping to relief and then anger.
“Sorry, honey,” Mom said. “The hotel wasn’t very nice. Dad said it was easier if we drove home.”
Why didn’t you tell me? I wanted to shout, but saw my three normal-looking roommates smoking cigarettes and laughing on the futon. Plus, I sensed the answer. Served me right. I had left. I would be left.
“OK, great,” I said, chipper, so everyone could hear, muffling the sense that I was floating free fall in the universe. I stroked my violet bangs, my new costume, reminding myself that I was in America, land of the free refills, endless opportunity. That this was my chance to create a new life. This was what I wanted, why I came. I pushed all my guilt aside, right up into my dark roots. “Good night.”
And so began my search for home.
• • •
BY SOPHOMORE YEAR, I’d figured out a few things. Victoria and I now had a suite to ourselves, and though we still shared a bedroom, our living room was a quirky nineteenth-century space with slanted ceilings and large sash windows. I’d purchased a set of green glass wine goblets, their long stems and bold color reflecting my dream elegance, my dream body; my matryoshka frog dolls lined up along my bookshelf showing my quirky, cultural side. When people came over I offered them black cigarettes, blue cheese, and white wine, hoping I’d pulled off a veneer of ultrasophistication, suppressing niggling worries that they thought my prized flutes tacky and transparent, that I was a poseur. “Welcome to the Shitz Carlton.”
My intense amount of frantic, all-night biochemistry study (getting As at Jewish school in Montreal was less tricky than among the math minds at Harvard) had led to a dramatic decrease in my sight. While at first I’d been appalled to hear I needed glasses—lord, more nerdy—when I adorned my face with tiny wire-framed circles, I marveled at my new clarity of vision (each leaf was a masterpiece!) and self-vision. The caramel color leather jacket I’d once bought at a vintage market now fit perfectly. I walked into an elite Cambridge hairdresser and he immediately took a scissor and chopped across my mane: I exited the salon with a bright red gamine cut.
To match my new look, a
nd complement my growing exasperation with science midterms, I’d enrolled in seminars in European intellectual history and the influence of primitivism in post-Victorian experimental novels. I raised my hand fiercely, unable to contain my newfound opinions, completely unaware of intellectual trends.
Until Peter. “I liked it that you unabashedly defended first-wave feminism,” he said, sidling up to me as I left the archetypal red-brown humanities building. “It’s refreshing that you speak with such passion about nontheoretical gender concerns.”
I hadn’t particularly noticed Peter, a senior, an urban intellectual with large framed glasses, slow speech, understated confidence. Everyone agreed with Peter. Miles out of my league. But now that he’d noticed me, I perked up. “Thanks,” I said, not sure what else to say, not sure if he was being serious or sarcastic, flirting or just making chat.
He e-mailed me that night asking if I wanted to have lunch with him.
Peter. It was as if I’d skipped all the high school boyfriend steps and was now being courted by the sovereign crush, the grand prize! For a week, I daydreamed about our initial meeting, how he’d relay his deepest affections for me; I rehearsed all my ideas about nontheoretical gender. And some theoretical ones too.
At that lunch, for which I wore a skirt (I never wore skirts—first wave?) I grabbed only a salad, not sure how I’d even fit a confetti strand of carrot beneath my beating chest. But, within minutes, he tactically mentioned that his girlfriend might stop by to say hi. But, in the same breath, he added: “Not that I’m sure she’ll be my girlfriend for long.” I was crushed that my crush had another crush, but also, filled with hopes and dreams for us in the future, for a life in which I could be loved by this charismatic, hip brainiac who was from a family of notable scholars—the rock stars of Cambridge. His inability to fall madly in love with me tout de suite was actually reassuring. I found it nerve-racking enough to be having a meal with him, us sitting opposite each other like two bespectacled weights on an oak balance—I wasn’t sure how I’d handle more.
We continued to meet for lunch every week or two, in between which I spent hours analyzing our e-mails, preening myself and fashioning my wardrobe (would Peter find my coat artistic?) just in case we happened to see each other on the street. Peter, who analyzed our interaction as we were having it, who was tall and had long curly hair and eyes that drank me in, making me feel like I was floating between worlds, outside time, inside his mind. Like many people at Harvard, he had strong philosophies for every situation, which seemed thought-through in ways I just couldn’t—I didn’t have strong belief systems, set ways of seeing, honed over years and generations.
“Where are you going?” Victoria asked one Tuesday as I sprayed on perfume.
“Just lunch with someone in my class,” I said, shutting the door quickly behind me. I never confessed my crushes, knowing how unlikely it was they’d ever be reciprocated. I tried not to dream directly about what I wanted, fearing I would jinx it from ever happening.
I’d just returned from a Passover trip to Montreal, where I still went for all holidays, a magnet to family guilt, but also, secretly hoping that somehow my refreshed world would change the one I was from. It hadn’t. I used to love Passover in part because we’d scrub our kitchen, throw away old bread, and for eight days, use only a small number of clear, glass Pesach dishes; now, the counter was lined with four different sets of kosher crockery, extra blenders, juicers, infusers we’d never open. Even our seder had become more dramatic than usual, Mom exploding at the table when she felt she’d been left out of a blessing, then storming off and shutting herself in her room. Dad, Eli, and I had stared at one another blankly. Eli went to coax her back. She didn’t come. We finished the seder to the background sound of a shrill laugh-track emanating from her TV.
Back in Boston, however, I was feeling good, able to put my past in my pocket, excited for a new spring and the touch-up to my hairdo. I held my stomach in as I brought my tray to the long wooden table in my all-wooden dining hall that always smelled of syrup. Peter was already seated, his perfect portions awaiting him. His still-girlfriend, I’d spied a few weeks earlier at the library, was also perfectly composed, blond and skinny.
He glanced at my tray. “Why are you vegetarian?”
“Animal eth—,” I started to say, but his piercing stare, his rigorous academic investigation of me and my values, threw me off. I knew he wouldn’t buy it. And he was right. The truth—which Peter’s intensity enabled me to admit to myself—was that I was a vegetarian because we were the only kosher family at my grammar school. Instead of eating hot dogs at parties, I’d feigned a dedication to pasta and bean burgers, too embarrassed to add another odd difference to my list. “I, I,” I stammered. “I don’t know.”
He leaned over, his energy field close, pulling me in, away from myself. What else would he uncover about me, for me? I wondered what worlds he might lead me into.
• • •
AFTER LUNCH, FULL of pasta and empty of purpose, I headed upstairs to my room where the answering machine flashed. My roommates had gotten used to Mom’s messages and I’d gotten used to them being public tender. In fact, I’d turned them into shtick for my dinnertime comic monologues (“Judy—don’t sit at the FRONT of the plane.” “Judy—NEVER use petroleum-based lip salve”). I made her out to be “Jewish mother gone wild.” It was almost true, a version of the real story: she was wild, just not as funny. But this time was different.
Bubbie had died.
Bubbie.
I staggered back to the futon, flailed down, held my head. I’d just seen Bubbie two days earlier at her nursing home. She’d been in bed, weak, her cheeks denting inward, clinging to her jaws. We’d hugged and kissed, she’d cackled loudly when she saw me, so happy I was visiting from Charvard. “Zelda, Zelda,” she kept calling me, and I laughed, touched. “Bubbie, that’s your name, not mine.” I’d held her hands. Her bare fingers, which had killed bees, picked me up from ballet, clutched family photos while she ran from Nazis, were still delicate and curved, her nails oval and soft. And now her fingers were gone. The most solid, conspicuous presence of my life was suddenly the most elusive. I made two fists, felt my own pudgy digits grasp onto nothing but themselves.
Hours later, I was back at Kildare, hugging Mom, Eli on her other side. For the first time in years, the three of us pushed aside papers, sat on the end of her bed.
“I just want to be with my kids,” Mom gasped between cries. We held on tight, her body so warm, shaking. What would Mom do now with all her time? Who would she take care of? Me? I questioned, but then chastised myself for my selfishness at such a horrible time.
• • •
MY LITTLE BROTHER, already sixteen, stood up on the pulpit, delivering a speech that was so eloquent and quirky, moving and humorous, I couldn’t believe he’d written it in a day. I wished I’d done the same thing. The crowd of mourners laughed.
Mom grabbed my hand. “It’s not funny,” she hissed. “Not everything is funny.” She was livid, her eyes shooting venom.
I was at first shocked. Didn’t she feel proud of her son? But I also understood. She needed to experience this loss in a different way. She’d spent years caring for Bubbie full-time, every single day. Not everything was funny. “It’s OK, Mom.” I put my arm around her. “Bubbie was a character, she would have loved to be remembered like this.”
Mom shot the venom my way. I turned, tried to ignore it.
“That was amazing,” I whispered to Eli when he returned to his seat. Then I listened to the rabbi speak about Bubbie’s life, how she’d escaped the Nazis, how she worked through Siberia, gave birth to my mother, gave birth to another girl who died in infancy, tried to set up a new life in Poland, Israel, Canada. This was my family story, not unlike many of the others from my Montreal shtetl.
I ran my hand through my short red hair and thought of Peter, of friends at Harvard, pe
ople who were not Jewish at all, who did not have families who survived the Holocaust (not everyone had survived the Holocaust! Or perished in it either), people who would never assume a refugee background was a normal backstory. For the first time, I saw my story through their eyes and noticed that it was unique, damaging, so much to deal with. My arm was still around Mom’s shoulder and I turned to her, examined her profile, its bumpy contours, her round, reddened cheeks heaving with her breath. There was a specific history to my family, a key to its guts. Mom’s childhood was precarious, slippery. Torture and fear were packed into her sharply slitted eyes. I imagined her fugitive life, the chemicals that made up her jagged elemental bonds. I saw how my family had run away, which had saved them, and ruined them.
• • •
“SO,” THE PROFESSOR said, as if slowly sipping in this new information. “Victorian interior design.” He repeated my field of study, assessing its worth and interest to him as if I was presenting fine jewels. He sat back in his swivel chair that reclined to touch a bookcase. Everywhere, there was a bookcase, stocked with the latest edition of his five-hundred-page masterpiece on the history of measuring tools. Riveting, I’d said, when I walked in, hoping it sounded genuine, desperate for a mentor to take hold of me, guide me onto a track.
“I’m studying the way that scientific color theories influenced design,” I explained, each word rehearsed but wobbly as I pitched my thesis idea. “That’s why nineteenth-century design is so ugly—to contemporary aesthetic sensibility, that is. Can science affect taste?”
I was new at this humanities spiel. I’d dropped out of premed. Competing with Harvard whiz kids had only gotten harder. The more I studied, the worse I did. A teaching fellow had chased me down hallways, cackling wildly, “You got the worst score of anyone I ever saw!” My entire self-concept—the numbers geek, the A student—imploded. Science no longer offered absolute answers, order plotted along neat graphs. Everything I’d excelled at was slipping from me, electrons leaking from my soul.
White Walls Page 9
