White Walls

by Judy Batalion

  The past eighteen months had been a social whirlwind. Andy and I had continued to see each other sporadically, and I tried to find ways to make it work, keep his love, clean his flat. Then I spent Chanuka with my family in Montreal; Andy stayed in London to gig. On a blisteringly cold New Year’s Eve, I sat in a friend’s living room, listening as girls received calls from their fiancés. I checked my phone, feigning a smile. But there were no texts. I knew I wasn’t ready to get hitched, but still, I was crushed. It wasn’t just that Andy hadn’t called. It was that I was sitting with high school friends, hearing about their dream wedding color schemes, while he was doing a show. It hit me: I didn’t want to marry Andy. I didn’t even want to date him. I wanted to be him.

  I drank a shot of Goldschläger, its spiciness zipping through me, thawing me, waking me up. I’d been confusing what I needed in a partner with what I needed for myself. I’d expected that one day Andy would come to my parties and shows. I’d connected his love with my talent. If I was funnier, he’d like me more; if he loved me more, I’d be funnier. I was such a good joker, I’d been kidding myself.

  When I got back to London I’d asked him to meet me at a hamburger joint.

  “Can you spot me a fiver?” he’d asked.

  “This isn’t working,” I’d said. I’d wanted to prove I could be the nurturer and wasn’t as substandard as Evan had deemed, but I’d simply gone to the other extreme. The opposite of academia was the comedy club, but in the end these endeavors were for me similar attempts to claim originality, get attention. Avoid emotion. I’d been performing, with Evan, with Andy.

  “I guess.” His grin radiated. Did he even care? I’d bought him a hot dog and fled. As my tears dried in the cool January wind, I felt invigorated. What I got from Andy—persistence, assurance, mojo—I could give myself. I began writing jokes on my own, talking myself out of quitting, and even calling my mother after bad gigs (at least she answered). I worked harder. When I bombed, I imagined Andy coaching me: “Next time.” I mimicked the ease with which he networked. I lost weight, ridded my apartment of junk, and jettisoned layers of pretense. I began to admit my cluttered past, my troubled mother, the conditions of my formative life—especially to myself. I used the word “hoarder” for the first time.

  I even dabbled in dating. When I had a fling with Eric the stylish architect—he could literally build our home!—who didn’t show up on my birthday and then joked about being as inconsistent as Mr. Big, I knew sooner rather than later not to feel bad. When Richard the dashing dermatologist sent me a two-page e-mail detailing why he didn’t think it would work out after our second date, I was sad, but I moved on. I barely spent an evening with the prestigious critic who always criticized; I’d become quicker to recognize when I went out with someone because I fantasized being like them rather than liked being with them.

  Suddenly, new friends fell into my life, or perhaps, I decided to catch them. Arrivals from Montreal, Harvard, New York. Jewish friends with whom I could openly discuss my cultural discomfort and who laughed at my stories, but not at me. I admitted how alienated I felt. Just talking to them helped me crawl out of my embattled-foreigner frame of mind. I still couldn’t explain why I stayed in London, the safe haven that had, in some ways, turned out to be threatening and cold. For the first time in years, I began to see that I could leave. I could go back, even if I wasn’t sure to where.

  One of those new friends was Maya, an economics student from Toronto. She’d schlepped me to this Purim party because she was on a serious husband-finding mission. Was I? I asked myself now, still planted by the bar. Though it felt entirely strange, on paper I belonged here. It was Purim, but I wasn’t wearing a mask—well, maybe a slight I’m-doing-this-ironically one, but only slight.

  “You’re a real drinker,” a man said as he sidled up to me.

  I turned, surprised. “I’ve been in England for five years.” I hardly believed it.

  He laughed. He was taller than me and slightly overweight. He had dark features and sharp cheekbones. When had I last even talked to a Jewish guy?

  It turned out his name was Ben. As in, short for Benedict! Why didn’t English Jews just name their kids Christ? It would be less obvious that they were trying to fit in.

  “What do you do?” he asked, eyeing my artsy garb.

  “Whatever you need,” I joked.

  He smiled. “What brings you here tonight?”

  “My finding-a-husband-obsessed friend.”

  He chuckled again.

  “And you?”

  “Guilt!”

  The lights began to flicker and a disembodied voice announced the end of the party. Typical British classiness. Last call, rushing, fluorescent lights, discussions about train times, the buzz killed in an instant. Maya approached with her flock of friends and pinched my arm. “We’re going to get our coats.”

  “I’d like to see you again,” Christ said, taking out his phone. “Your number?”

  I gave it. Why not? A synagogue date. A whole new old world that I’d never imagined would like me.

  I rushed to meet the others, all buzzing with gossip; they lived nearby in the Jewish neighborhood or were heading west. I of course lived miles away. At the tube station, I asked the conductor when the last eastbound connections were running, and he assured me I’d be fine, as long as I ran for my final train.

  I ran, and yet. My train had terminated. I had no choice but to follow the crowds up the mile-long elevator to an island in the middle of a highway that was the entrance to the Canada Water station. The irony: the familiarity of Canada and yet the total strangeness of this industrial landscape in southeast London. (Not sure what the Canada or the water referred to except for a sewage stream.) It was definitely not safe to walk anywhere in this pitch-black, sidewalk-less neighborhood. I searched for information about the nearest night buses and car services but when I called, no one answered. Worse comes to worst, I calmed myself, I would stand here awake for five hours until dawn . . . I’d call someone . . . Mom?! . . . Then I noticed another woman reading the poster boards. “Are you trying to get out of here too?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she answered in a heavy accent.

  Just then a black cab with its light on emerged from the obsidian horizon. I never took black cabs—the outrageous expense was prohibitive—but what could I do? I ran into the highway and flagged it down, forcing it to stop in the middle of a lane. “Come with me,” I called to the stranded foreigner; for once, that title went to someone else.

  As our car sped through the dark night, I pondered how well I knew the bulk of London’s winding geography, how intimate I’d become with its neighborhoods and parks, its radio programs and urban systems. Yet I still felt so out of place. Crossing the iconic Tower Bridge, I wondered whether it was my fault, if I harbored some internal flaw, a wrongly flicked switch that never allowed me to feel a fit. Or, I questioned, watching the Thames jet out from two sides under me, if it was the city’s fault in its ambivalence, its hunger for and antipathy to us aliens.

  • • •

  I DIDN’T HEAR from Pope Benny for three weeks and forgot about him. But then he called, engaging me in a long conversation about his entrepreneurial work in holistic medicine based on a family inheritance (a businessman?! . . . A self-starter? . . . Strangely frank about his life? . . . This, now, turned me on). “You sound like a spiritual person,” he repeated, and though I had no idea what that meant, I kind of liked it.

  The next night he picked me up in front of my tiny apartment in a massive BMW sports car, himself posed against the convertible as he waited for me to come down. The car of assholes, I thought, but I also liked it that he drove and, admittedly, that he made money.

  “Interesting neighborhood,” he said, raising his brow.

  “Interesting person,” I answered, getting in.

  We went to a local Vietnamese restaurant. He ordered eve
rything on the menu. “Why not?”

  Back in the car, he leaned over and kissed me, his strong lips warm on mine.

  “How old are you?” I asked, eyeing the crinkles at the sides of his eyes, not wanting to beat around any bushes. I figured he was almost forty.

  He paused. “Forty-five in a few days.”

  Whoa. Crazy. But then I thought, I’m almost thirty. An adult. And so is he.

  “I’m going to Montreal next week,” I said.

  “I’ll call you there,” he said.

  Yeah right, I thought. But it didn’t matter. I’d had fun.

  • • •

  “GET UP,” MY mother pleaded. “It’s nine a.m. You said you’d help me.” She spoke from the threshold to my old bedroom. The floor was a storm of stuff, impervious, ominous like quicksand.

  I’d arrived from London the night before and was jet-lagged. I sat up, groggy. The room was a disaster, laden with her mushrooming collection of swivel chairs, reams of printer paper, growing stacks of remainder hardbacks about Canadian modern art and Italian ghettos. My luggage took up the only remaining place on the ever-grottier pink carpet. The ceiling fan provided circulation while pouring dust, probably the same shed skin residues that had been there for years. My pillow pile—I needed to use many because each individual one was thin, a bargain basement purchase—was held upright by two large lamps and a stack of printers on what was once a night table. It struck me that my mother’s home office was like the British Home Office, scouring for terrorists, protecting the country’s borders. I felt the piles poking at the back of my neck. Now they seemed less my mother’s barriers than her whole being, as if her stuff was what imposed on others, proved her existence. See, they were saying to my nape, I touched you.

  “I called the taxi already,” she said. “It’s here.”

  “Here?” My mother was perennially late. But not for this. She’d never let me take a taxi, she’d never wake me. Unless it was about her houses.

  “Please go. I need you to be there, to see what’s going on at the open house. Please, for me, your mother.” I knew the rental property was up for sale because her brother wanted to retrieve his share of their inheritance. She thought the real estate agent was in cahoots with my uncle and wanted me to listen in on his conversations.

  “You want me to follow the agent around as he shows people the property?” I reiterated her seemingly crazy request.

  “Yes! That would be excellent. Follow him closely. Wait—I’ll get you a tape recorder.”

  “I’m not taking a tape recorder,” I blared. Then, “Welcome home,” I mumbled under my breath.

  I pulled on a pair of jeans that I fished out of my suitcase, my anger mounting. When other people went home for visits, their parents took them out for dinner and planned family get-togethers; they didn’t ship them off on espionage stints.

  Then again, I knew how this house—which she’d cared for meticulously, lovingly for years—connected her to her parents, her past, her purpose. I could feel my chest tighten, feel myself slip into her world wholly, stepping into its vestibule, its winding hallways, cramped rooms, tugged against my will. “Hurry, Judy, please,” she begged, standing at my door as I changed. I turned away from her, but knew it didn’t matter—she wasn’t really looking.

  It was an early spring day. The sun was vibrant, the rays reflected off cars, off surfaces that had long been covered with snow, happy to do some reflecting. I arrived at Hutchison Street, noting the irony: the only neighborhood where in the 1950s my refugee grandparents could afford to buy a house was now the center of artsy, haute-boho Montreal, filled with artisanal chocolate bars and Latin American bruncheries.

  I’d been inside this triplex only once, years earlier, and only in a small front room in which one of the tenants—an alternative medicine man/plumber—diluted homeopathic solutions. Now, I walked up to the third-floor flat, where my mother’s family had lived decades ago, climbing the outdoor spiral staircases, the DNA strands. I was nervous as I opened the door and introduced myself to the agent, who sneered. Perhaps Mom was right.

  I looked around me—wood floors, hanging plants, retro red-and-white sofas, an antique coat rack that looked like a cubist tree. It was hard to imagine how this chic space had become so firmly tied to my mother’s identity. I wandered through the small rooms, spying. Not on the agent, but on my mother, trying to transpose stories onto spaces, to make sense of snippets of narrative. This was the first house that my grandparents had owned. After their escape to Russia, they journeyed back to Poland (Mom being born on the way), where they lived for several years, trying to find their families and reassemble their lives. My grandfather became a successful furrier in postwar Wrocław, my mother’s first home, which I knew from a black-and-white photo of her clutching her one doll, smiling, holding hands with a governess, surrounded by pigeons. You had a nanny after the Holocaust? But they soon left on a boat for Israel, where they lived in her uncle’s hand-built garage. Away from the death of her younger sister, whose life had lasted only a few months. They couldn’t take any more death.

  Two years later, when my grandfather’s heart condition proved too difficult for the work of pioneering, and with my mother’s baby brother, they all left the Middle East for Montreal, where my grandmother’s one remaining sister had opened a fruit store, just a few blocks away. Finally, with their work as furrier and seamstress, Bubbie and Zaidy had been able to buy Hutchison, the house that made them part of a new society after theirs had been ravaged before their eyes. It was here, I thought as I touched the wooden windowsill, that my mother lived when she was a top student in Quebec. Here, she was the pillar of potential.

  The old windows let in the bright light. The 1920s moldings cast shadows on slivers of the ceiling.

  I moved to the kitchen with its black granite countertop. Bubbie never chopped kosher meat on this, I knew. I tried hard to feel her bunioned, sturdy feet in my steps, but my toes just felt cold.

  A couple dressed in black, both wearing tall black leather boots, walked in.

  “Welcome,” I said, gesturing around me, as if I was a host.

  In England, I recalled as I checked out the storage closet that hosted expensive bikes, people lived in the same neighborhoods as their ancestors. No one was obsessed with questions about their pasts or their heritage, because they lived the answers.

  Then I climbed down one flight and stood on the balcony, watching people headed to fancy bistros and organic bagelries for brunch, remembering that lunch at the Greek restaurant. A woman with a young son came to tour the building. How oblivious they are, I thought, to this house’s past, to the role it played in psyches and psychoses.

  “I’m the sellers’ daughter,” I explained to the woman when she turned to stare at me, wondering why I was following her around.

  • • •

  THAT AFTERNOON, I stood in front of the coffee shop where I’d just bought a Frappucino—one I could never afford in London—my hands shaking. After going back home and reporting to Mom the day’s nonevents, describing in detail every viewer I’d seen, I’d taken the metro back to this neighborhood, trying to relive the missed moment of the morning. Instead I felt lost, bloated with too much time and no direction except “not home.” I’d watched Montrealers who sat for hours in funky coffee shops. I’d wandered between artisanal soap boutiques and vintage clothing stores, trying to be in the present, but my mind raced. My mom was not OK. Not OK. Today had not been normal. This wasn’t just anxiety and stress. Her rage and fear that her houses would be taken from her were identical to what Bubbie experienced, why Mom had had her hospitalized and medicated. Mom’s case seemed worse, especially since Bubbie had not been depressed, but aside from that, wasn’t it the same condition?

  And what was I supposed to do?

  Then, my phone buzzed. Somehow I’d missed a call. It was a voice message from Ben. He was thin
king of me. “How’s the French food?”

  My head rushed. A way out. The potential of a different life, a different love.

  Maybe I could make something normal after all.

  • • •

  THEN AGAIN. HE took me to a twenty-four-hour restaurant in Chinatown. “Cheap and cheerful” as the English said.

  I wasn’t sure how much I cared. On the one hand, I was growing tired of the casual rencontre. I stared at the plastic menu of options, moo shoo dishes swimming in front of my eyes, tired of choice. Ben was open, older, established. I’d been hoping for something more solid, but . . .

  On the other, stronger, hand, I was excited to see him and was feeling fresh and alive, the new spring air coiling its way up to my brain, pushing my neurons to fire too quickly in odd directions, reminding me of his passionate embraces, his strong arms. I was ready.

  I’d put on strappy pink sandals—cheap ones that made me look cheap, in the right way, I hoped—and met him downstairs, still not allowing him up. I was not about to give up my home so easily, to expose my space, not like with Andy or Evan, and especially not to a high earner who was probably used to much fancier digs. Ben leaned against his Beamer. I tried to stay balanced on my shoes, then leaned into his body.

  “Whoa, you’re looking sassy tonight,” he mumbled. I knew he knew that I knew that tonight he would know me.

  And then I found myself here, at a corner table, in a near empty dive off Leicester Square. “This place is particularly good,” he said, as if their drenched fried noodles were more outstanding than their neighbor’s.

  I ordered wine. It was sweet. Syrupy sweet. He drank tea.

  Then he tried to show his big-spender status by ordering copious amounts of fried rice. “And let’s have the bamboo shoot foo yung! And the sweet and sour dough balls!” The waitress scribbled like a courtroom scribe. “Judy, is there anything else you want?”