Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  “Thanks a lot, Livvy,” she said.

  Livvy looked up, returned to her magazine without answering.

  In the house, Beatrice said it seemed to her that not responding to an infant’s getting hurt went over some line. And then Livvy’s absolute refusal to acknowledge that anything had happened!

  I just nodded.

  Beatrice had gained a considerable amount of weight and perhaps for that reason, among others, tended to be in a bad mood at all times when she was not actually caring for Rebecca. Bad moods always find their reasons and after this time, Livvy, when she was around, was Beatrice’s reason. The following week, when Livvy had an evening off, she joined us for dinner. Whether because of Livvy’s presence or just because she felt like it, Beatrice had more wine than usual with the grilled fish, corn, and salad I’d served, and became relaxed and very happy. As Livvy polished off her second burger on a bun with ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, and sliced sweet pickle, Beatrice said, “Only a teenager can eat like that and lose weight.”

  Livvy didn’t look up.

  “Come to think of it,” Beatrice said, “how can a teenager eat like that and lose weight?”

  Livvy didn’t bother to reply. My father pointed out that Livvy was working hard.

  “So’m I,” Beatrice said. “Seriously, Livvy, I mean, I’m jealous of the weight loss. I’d just like to know—”

  Livvy stood up, said in a small, pained voice, “Please excuse me. I’m not feeling well.” And left the porch.

  We were silent. The kids were in bed. Beatrice had told my parents what had happened with the baby, and they’d not thought it important. I had mixed feelings. In recent days Beatrice had brought back to my mind the days when we were growing up, Gus was already in college, she was in high school, and she’d been on my case all the time, with comments on my behavior and jokes about my nonacademic proclivities. (She called me Dumbo when my parents weren’t around.)

  “You really mustn’t keep thinking about that business, dear,” my mother said. “She might just have been absorbed in her own, her own . . .”

  “Her own selfish, adolescent thoughts,” Larry finished. “You should be able to make some allowances. You see enough teenagers, God knows.”

  “Yes,” Beatrice said, “but I wasn’t being a psychologist. I was being a mother. And I was absorbed in my own motherly thoughts. I was also being a female, and I was wondering how a kid who eats like that could have lost so much weight. I was jealous. I mean, she’s probably throwing it up, but I didn’t want—”

  My father and mother put down their forks.

  My father said, “Stop it,” in his no-fooling voice.

  She stopped.

  My father asked which movies were playing in town that one or another of us was interested in seeing, but the mood around the table had changed radically.

  My mind went to the sight of Livvy, sitting in the ice-cream parlor with what had to have been the largest sundae they made. Then it went to one of the young women’s magazines Livvy had left in the bathroom for a long time.

  Bulimia had been sighted, identified, and discussed almost endlessly on television until AIDS came along and the media could wallow in an even more threatening and more obviously sexual disease. But occasionally some compelling personal tale of salvation from puking still got to float in the magazine mainstream, and this magazine had run the story of a young girl who called herself Scarlett, who wrote that she couldn’t control herself when faced with ice cream. The first time she’d thrown up it was because she’d eaten so much, she was nauseated. But the next morning, when she’d weighed herself and she wasn’t any heavier than she’d been the day before, she’d decided it was her solution. Her mother was one of those people who thought you couldn’t be too thin, and she herself had dodged checkups because the doctors suddenly all knew about anorexia and bulimia. A friend of hers had been caught by the doctor. But finally, she’d come to understand, with the help of that very doctor, that her problems couldn’t be solved by doing something so dangerous.

  Beatrice said, “I think my sister thinks I hit on something.”

  My father said, “I’m afraid Olivia is who you hit on, dear.”

  Beatrice was furious. “I don’t believe this. How come, whatever that little bitch does is okay, no matter how long she’s here, and the slightest—”

  “Come, come, Beatrice,” my mother said. “It’s easy to forget that she’s still far from an adult. She needs understanding.”

  “Ah, yes! Just like Gus needed it when he locked me out of the apartment,” Beatrice flashed out, astonishing me more than she did my parents, who were familiar with her old complaints. “And you said he just wanted to be alone with you for a while!”

  “Oh, dear,” my mother said. “Why do children only remember the foolish things one did?”

  I smiled sympathetically. “Better foolish than evil. Livvy thinks I’m evil because I yelled at her when she got in my way in the kitchen.”

  “Now, you have to admit, dear,” my mother said to Beatrice, “I never yelled at you in the kitchen.”

  “You were never in the kitchen,” Beatrice responded instantly, then relaxed slightly because her response had come so quickly and so well. “There was Caitlin and Caroline, then Suallen and Caroline, then Anna and Caroline.”

  By this time we were all laughing and the bad spell was broken. Later, I discussed the possibilities with Beatrice and we agreed that if her suspicion was substantiated, I would have to seek treatment for Livvy. But I knew that I had to be very careful, and I asked Beatrice please to stay away from the subject entirely. It was clear that the slightest verbal maneuver of hers would be read by Livvy as a declaration of war.

  In the meantime, the summer was coming to a close, and I had the phone call from Sheldon asking if I could fill in on “Johnny Wishbone.”

  I’d watched “Joy Beach” all summer so that I’d be able to converse about it with Sheldon. The hero was a real-estate broker who looked like a TV detective and had amorous-mysterious adventures while seeking out Caribbean properties to develop into a series of singles resorts not unlike Club Med. The show’s running joke had to do with whether the resorts would be called Sea for Two, Island-Uland, or one of many other possibilities that arose. I’d actually thought of one or two names for islands to tell Sheldon when we spoke. But the summons to “Johnny Wishbone” was his first call all summer, and it came in late August, during the Thursday-morning class I gave at Esther Steinberg’s. She had a huge kitchen with a long counter running the length of one side.

  We had devoted all eight classes to fish stew in its infinite variety, beginning with the (two r’s, one d) burrida of Sardinia, with its sweet-and-sour sauce, going through that morning’s Ligurian buridda (one r, two d’s), for which an earthenware pot and the ripest tomatoes in the world were required. The buridda was ready; we would eat it for lunch.

  The phone rang. Esther answered and said it was for me. It had to be some sort of emergency or nobody from my house would have called.

  I said hello.

  Sheldon’s voice said, “Where the hell are you?” as though he’d been trying to reach me for weeks.

  I said, “I’m teaching a class. In someone else’s kitchen.”

  He said, “Oh, shit. Can you be ready for cameras in twenty minutes?”

  I asked, “What are you talking about?”

  He said, “Some cookbooker was supposed to do a segment on ‘Johnny Wishbone.’ ”

  He’d told me he was trying to get me on a program that showed housewives various fascinating jobs other women did away from home, then told them how wonderful it also was to be in the kitchen. It had been one of a long list of things he was trying to get for me or that were about to happen.

  “The cooking segment,” Sheldon said. “The one who’s supposed to cook today is sick. Can you do it?”

  “Yes.”

  At least I didn’t doubt for a moment that I was going to try.

  H
e began to argue with me, then realized I hadn’t said no.

  “Where are you?”

  “Westport.” Oh, Jesus, maybe they wouldn’t be able to get me where I needed to be on time.

  “Where are you?”

  I gave him the address. “Are they going to come and get me?”

  “No,” he said, “they’ll do it right there.”

  “Who will?”

  “The local station. Hold on a minute.”

  I asked Esther if it would be all right; she assured me it would. The women started to clear out, but I told them I’d feel better if they stayed. They were delighted. A couple of them ran to the bathroom to put on makeup. The others helped Esther clean up the kitchen. I’m not sure who forgot to put the blade in the Cuisinart.

  Sheldon got back on the phone and said that someone from the station would be there in ten minutes.

  “Be good, kid,” he said. “This could be It. I’m taping you.”

  I combed my hair. I was wearing a white T-shirt and white pants, as I normally did for classes because food stains could be bleached out. There just wasn’t time to worry about clothes. If Johnny Wishbone (or Leon) wanted a well-dressed, twenty-year-old gorgeous blonde to teach cooking, he was going to have to find her in the next ten minutes.

  Sheldon was thrilled with the show, convinced the networks would be all over us in a nanosecond, but apparently the networks didn’t know what a nanosecond was, because it was weeks before anyone expressed interest, months before anyone was ready to think about a show—for the following year.

  In the meantime, Labor Day weekend arrived, Livvy’s job ended, and on Monday night we all had dinner together, an unexceptional meal because I couldn’t focus on the food, all I could think about was Leon, who had very likely found a woman he adored among the millions of beautiful and accomplished females who spent their summers at the tip of Long Island. I would never see him again, except on the staircase. The only question in my mind was whether the woman he’d fallen in love with, in addition to being a superb cook, was a gorgeous actress, a gorgeous famous writer, or a gorgeous nuclear physicist.

  At dinner, when someone teased Olivia about what she was going to do with all the money she’d earned, she said that first of all, she was going to get her own telephone so she could have some privacy.

  “That’s great, Liv— Olivia,” I said sincerely. “You’ll be able to talk in your room.” This wasn’t the time to say I hoped she’d be prepared to pay the bill. (She was.)

  Silence. It was difficult, even for my parents, to ignore the suggestion that she was hounded and eavesdropped upon when she shared a phone with me.

  “Well,” Beatrice said brightly, “end of vacation, why don’t I serve dessert. Who wants coffee? Iced coffee? Iced tea?” She took everyone’s orders and she and Larry disappeared into the kitchen. She reappeared a while later with a bowl of fruit and a plate of rugelach from the local Jewish bakery. “That’s what a month in Westport’ll do,” she announced, “make you ready to try rugelach that aren’t from the Royale.”

  The plate was passed around, my father offering it to Livvy, telling her the name and, when she looked puzzled, saying he thought she’d love them. She obligingly ate one, told him it was delicious, took another, asked him to say the name again.

  “Rugelach,” he said. “It means little roll. It’s not English, as you can probably tell. It’s Yiddish.” He paused, then asked, “Do you know what Yiddish is?”

  She shook her head, nibbled more slowly than she had on the first one.

  “Basically,” he said, “it’s Jewish German. That is to say, the German language as it was spiced up and made homier, more expressive, by the Jews.” He then paraphrased what he’d said to make it more comprehensible to her, using Ebreo to define Jewish when she seemed to be failing to get his most basic meaning. “We’re going to have some fun,” he promised, “teaching you Yiddish as soon as you’re bored with English.”

  Her face was a study in cautious confusion. It was as though she’d failed to understand, until now, that if I was a Jew, I’d gotten it from someplace. Here was this man she adored, telling her he had the same loathsome disease as the woman her father had taught her to despise. What could she do? Where could she go? I watched her looking around the table at our various faces as though trying to figure out how she might have known we were Jews if my father hadn’t told her. Her eyes rested on Larry, who had the worst nose in the family, but then they weren’t content to remain there because she liked Larry and she was looking for someone she didn’t like. Finally reaching me, they were vaguely accusatory—as though I had figured out a way to ruin Labor Day by making everyone Jewish.

  “Ah, well,” I said, meaning to ease us all past a difficult moment, “I don’t know if this is the time. Liv— Olivia and I haven’t really discussed . . . the fact that she’s half Jewish.”

  “I’m not half anything,” she said angrily. “I’m a Roman Catholic.”

  “Okay,” I said after a while, “you consider yourself a Roman Catholic. But your mother’s Jewish, and you’re surrounded by Jews in New York . . . here. . . . It seems like a good idea . . .” A good idea to what? Everyone else at the table remained cautious. Silent. “I mean, I don’t know what your father told you, but the Jews are as different from each other as the Catholics are. There are Jews who are very religious, follow a lot of ritual, and ones like us who don’t do very much about it but still feel we’re Jews. Ones who believe in God and ones who don’t.”

  “Don’t what?” she asked.

  “Don’t believe in God,” I repeated. “In some all-powerful creature who controls our destiny.”

  She looked at me incredulously, asked if I was trying to make her believe that there were people who didn’t know about God. The silence at the table grew heavier.

  “Indeed, there are,” I finally managed. “But maybe we’d better talk about them some other time.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” she said. “I don’t know any of them.”

  As she stood up and excused herself from the table, saying she had to make a call, something that had tried unsuccessfully to enter my mind came to me, full blown: Of the various names of her friends that I’d heard since my daughter had begun school in New York, there wasn’t one that was likely to belong to anyone Jewish. This was extraordinary in a city where Gentiles made jokes about finally meeting someone else who wasn’t a Jew. If I’d known anti-Semites, I’d never had to be aware they were that, though my parents had referred to the days when Columbia had quotas on Jewish students and hadn’t hired any Jews to teach. It had never occurred to me that this wasn’t the truth, but the truth had changed. I’d always known that I was a Jew, but when a Jewish Columbia student from Detroit had asked me whether someone else was one, I hadn’t been able to tell her. At first she’d thought I was just trying to prove something.

  If I’d had any earlier experience of anti-Semitism, perhaps Angelo’s would have surprised me less, left a deeper mark in my mind. As it was, I’d assumed that in leaving Rome, I’d left such nastiness behind. Then I’d had little snatches of Livvy’s prejudice. During her first months at Humanities there’d been some comment about how only the Jews could get the schools closed down for every little holiday. I’d pointed out that they were the big holidays, and that, for a long time, most of the teachers had been Jewish, but she hadn’t been interested. Anyway, it had seemed so clear that her anti-Semitism was about me. She’d once adored my parents; surely she’d known they were Jewish, even if she’d chosen not to think about it. I had agreed with them that it was probably only a matter of time until reality set in, until she noticed that the kids she was making friends with were Jewish. . . .

  I waited until Beatrice and Larry weren’t around, then told my parents I thought that of all the girlfriends’ names I’d heard that year, none was likely to be Jewish.

  They agreed that we might have to try to deal with the matter at some point. But they pointed out th
at being at Humanities and not having Jewish friends wasn’t like being at the Bronx High School of Science and not having Jewish friends. Livvy had adapted so beautifully to life in New York. It seemed unlikely that she would hold on for any length of time to what seemed like such an anachronism in late twentieth-century New York.

  We returned to New York early Monday, hoping to get around the Labor Day weekend traffic. On Tuesday morning, Annie and Ovvy came by on the way to school to hug and kiss me, explain that they hadn’t reached home until almost midnight. We agreed they’d have dinner with me that night, but I didn’t hear from Leon. By late Tuesday afternoon, I was angry. A simple call would have sufficed. A message on the machine. Caroline, I have lost even minimal interest in you, so please don’t bother to change your mind about going to bed with me.

  I did some shopping, returned home. The first message was from Sheldon, telling me to keep Friday morning open for a meeting. The second was from Leon, who said they’d all missed me and looked forward to seeing me. He would drop by on the way home. Ciao. My anger wouldn’t go away just because it had lost its reason, so I homed in on the word ciao, telling myself he must have knocked himself out to find something that didn’t sound too personal.

  The closest I can come to understanding this nonsense is that I couldn’t believe things were going to turn out all right, and I wanted to be in control of my misery when they didn’t. It was too much to hope that Leon and I might peacefully come together, have a lovely, long affair, raise his children. Something or everything was going to get fucked up, and I needed to be able to cut my losses when that happened.