by Jill Soloway
Six hours later, we got word that even though they’d sawed his rib cage open, let a bypass machine pump his blood for him and taken sharp knives to a tiny flap of tissue at the entrance to his aorta, he was doing fine and resting comfortably. Faith and I went into the ICU to see him. He was under, way under, sleeping and wearing a breathing tube and plastic mask. We stood at his bedside, waiting for him to come back from the depths of his anesthesia. We played it like an episode of Strong Medicine and he’d been a vegetable for twenty years. We put classical music on the radio and cheered at any sign of life.
As a little time passed, they removed his mask and and his eyes opened like a wet baby chick. That’s all he was—eyes, staring out from the prison of his anesthesia. As he came out of it, we decided to help bring him to the surface with a yes and no communication system where he could wiggle his toes to let his needs be known. There we stood, at the end of the bed, each of us holding a bare foot. Here he was, finally… the shoemaker. Without any shoes.
My sister and I explained, Dad, your left foot is going to be yes, your right foot is going to be no, okay?
Now, Dad, say yes. Dad wiggled his left foot. We cheered.
Good. Now say No. Dad wiggled his right foot. We cheered.
Left yes, Right No, Good.
“Okay, Dad,” I asked, “are you in pain?” But before he could wiggle, Faith said, “I just realized something. I think right should be Yes.”
My dad flapped his feet wildly as we meta-analyzed the debate: Faith made the reasonable argument that, as right was the dominant hand, and yes was the dominant answer, right should be yes. I argued that because we had already put the system in place, that was clearly enough reason to continue with it. I finally won my case by reminding her that both yes and left had the short e sound.
Soon after, my dad used his foot signals to make it clear that we should GET THE FUCK OUT. I guess we were annoying him. Oh well. Faith and I took a taxi back to our mom’s house, and remembered what it meant to be a Soloway: Pudgy little mouth-breathing tree sloths who watch hours of bad TV, only occasionally gathering the energy to say highly inappropriate things. I knew for sure I was home when, as I lay, half-passed out on the couch watching Entertainment Tonight, I heard my sister say in our flat family birdcall: “Mom, do you have any other soap in the house besides the one in the shower because my vagina doesn’t like that one.”
A couple of days later I went back to LA, and was hit with a renewed understanding of exactly who I am. I’m a mother, I’m a sister, I’m a daughter, but most important, I’m a writer unafraid of literary cliché. No, Gentle Reader, I am not afraid to reintroduce the tedious metaphor you prayed wouldn’t find its way back in to end the chapter.
But the metaphor’s back. And I’m here to tell you that as we speak, I’m designing my very own shoe. It might be a boot. Yes, in fact, it’s a boot, a cute boot, with a Southern flair, and it’s worn by the few people in my teeny tiny little brood: me, my son, my husfriend Dink and his daughters, my sister and her lesbian wife and offspring. Yup, we’re even approaching something like a clan. There isn’t a whole lot yet that we all share, but we do have a few traditions: We watch a fuck of a lot of reality television, say the occasional highly inappropriate comment, eat mashed potatoes till we beg for forgiveness, and rather than walk around barefoot, we make our own goddamn shoes.
9
Black Was Beautiful
Here’s that Holocaust chapter I promised you. Sort of. But don’t expect much in the way of dates and facts. Most of what I know about the Holocaust I’ve been able to surmise while trying not to see it but knowing I should, squinting out of the tiniest corner of my eye. I can’t look at it straight on, and I can’t understand anyone who can. I’m shocked when people drop the word Nazi or Holocaust conversationally in front of my son. Even worse than my fear that he’ll ask me how babies are made is the fear that one day he’ll turn to me and say, “What’s a Nazi?”
How am I supposed to tell him that someone thought it was a good idea to kill six million people just because they were Jewish, like he is? What about the part where everyone just went along with it for a long, long time? What will I say when he asks me why no one could make it stop?
I get mad at those people who offer up other cultures’ massacres when the Holocaust is being discussed, à la: “I don’t know what Jews are always going on about. What about the Native Americans?” I am sure the Native Americans had it bad, it’s just that
(a) changing the subject is an admission of guilt
(b) I’m not Native American.
I also get all incredulous when people say it happened so long ago. It wasn’t that long ago. I say it’s still happening, for me anyway. Sure, I’m safe and comfy and I have a delightful cup of coffee at my side while I write, with delicious Hazelnut Coffeemate—something that wasn’t available during World War II. But when I wonder why I write these words, that beg some unknown “who” to love me, all this tap dancing might be all for him. For Hitler. I sit here tap tap tapping into the night in the hopes that if Hitler could’ve gotten a chuckle out of something in here, he might have said, “Hold on just one tiny little second, turn those gas chambers off. This is some funny shit. Maybe the Jews aren’t so bad after all.” I write to find out if all of this distress I have about being too damn sexy is something that he started or that just is. I write to ease the anxiety of hypervigilance. I write to leave something behind, in case he comes to get me.
But I’m barely a Jew. I grew up hardly religious at all. The headline for us was No Christmas. The trendy agnosticism that went with my dad’s work as a psychiatrist was the prevailing substitute for belief. No attempt to fill the hole created by the lack of spirituality—just the knowledge that horrible shit happens for no good reason, and it happens even worse to the Jews. There didn’t seem to be any reason to proclaim our Jewishness.
When I was five, our family moved to a new neighborhood and stayed there for seven years, until I was twelve. In that neighborhood we didn’t think about being or not being Jewish. We thought about not being black.
The development, called South Commons, was on the near south side of Chicago. Built by urban planners in the sixties, between downtown and a no-man’s land of projects and railroad tracks, South Commons was a mod collection of brown brick townhouses and apartment complexes, about a square mile around.
South Commons happened way back when the integration movement was starting. The prevailing mood was that in a matter of time, we were all going to love one another and want to live near people of different races. When we moved in, we were part of an inner-city-bound peace march, apologizing for white flight. Idealistic young white families and upwardly mobile black families plunked down what was then the high price of $60,000 to buy narrow, three-story townhouses built in squares around common areas with benches and playgrounds and woodchips if you fell.
Across the street, through gates, but still part of South Commons, there were low-income apartments filled with mostly black families, plus a few Indians and Filipinos with moms who were nurses and dads who were med students at the nearby hospitals. Drawing us together was the dream that all humans needed was the right architecture to get along.
South Commons was definitely not the ghetto, although I keep that quiet when I brag about my childhood. It beats the “my parents were inaccessible” or “I was a dork until I found myself in the drama department” for sheer coolness: “My sister and I were the only white kids in the school.” I get a gasp of disbelief, then a newfound respect for a few seconds. I’m happy for people to think we lived in a nasty-ass peeling-paint fourth story walk-up, our hair in cornrows, a bag of pork rinds in hand.
I must admit I drew the line at eating pork rinds. I tried one once in the drugstore, one of many attempts in my childhood to make black people like me. But I spit it out when no one was looking. Much like gefilte fish, there’s something chemical in certain foods that only works for the group for whom it was created; e
veryone else gags.
Making black people like me has always been a goal of mine. This annoys black people. I know they shudder when white people act like they’re down. Some black people hate it when white people use the word “black” instead of African-American. I still don’t know what’s appropriate, and if someone would tell me I would appreciate it. Some black people hate it when white people capitalize White but forget to capitalize black. More often, in self-hating guilt, I forget to capitalize white but use that big B for Black, just to make sure I don’t offend anyone. That all of the b’s for black are in lower case, not upper case, was the work of my copy editor, not me.
I really want black people to know I had all the Color Me Coffee coloring books as a kid, and that I knew instantly that the Osmonds were a bullshit rip-off of the Jackson Five. I am not like the other white people, I speak their language. When I talk to a black woman, I purse my lips and bob my head ever so slightly, saying “mm hmmm” with emphasis on the “hmmm.” If I can wrangle an “I hear you,” I am redeemed. If can I get a “Girl, you crazy!” I float on air all day. I want them to know that, beneath my Uggs and hundred-dollar vintage T-shirts, there’s a chick who’s “Young, Gifted, and Black,” the song we sang to start our weekly assemblies.
Yes, we are Young, Gifted,
and Black and that’s a fact!
Besides singing that I was young, gifted, and black, I also lyrically proclaimed that because I was young, gifted, and black, my soul’s intact, and, at the song’s conclusion, that I was where it’s at! Of course, this meant that, as a white person, not only was my soul not intact, but additionally, wherever I was, was not where it’s at.
As far as I knew, I was the minority and all over the world, black people were reinforcing their greatness, and all of us low-pigmented, un-gifted whiteys were going to have some serious catching up to do if we were ever going to make it.
In fact, I was more comfortable singing along with the idea that I wasn’t “where it’s at” than I was mouthing the holiday melodies of Christianity. I devised a system for myself that kept me straight with my Jewish God during caroling season at our school: I decided that I could say Christ and Savior, but never in the same line of a song. That meant that at the end of “Silent Night,” I could sing “Christ the (hum) is Born!” or “(Hum) the savior is born!” Even today, as I sing along with Christmas carols, I have to replace certain words to buy Stay-Out-of-Hell points. During the climactic chorus from “O Holy Night,” instead of “O Night, Divine!!!” I sing “O Night, So-So!!!” Gotta-be-a-Jew Josh Groban seems to think he’s not going to get in trouble for his Christ-loving bellowing, but frankly, I don’t know where he gets his chutzpah.
It wasn’t until we eventually moved to the near north side in 1977 that I realized growing up in South Commons wasn’t normal. After meeting other Jewish kids whose parents were professionals, it became apparent that at some point in our childhood, my parents took a left turn that was very, very different from their contemporaries.
In 1969, my mom was in crisis, trying to make a pretty stack from her prizes won in the Jewish-American Dream contest. My dad was going to be a doctor, after years of my mother working as a teacher to put him through medical school. Back then, instead of getting their MSWs and doing social work like today’s Jewish wives, they taught at the inner city public schools.
When my father graduated med school, they bought a house and moved to the suburbs, scrimping and saving to buy one piece of furniture at a time to fill the giant, white-shag-carpeted rooms. They’d escaped the Jewish ghettos of Chicago and made it to this yellow-brick flat house in Glenview, in a subdivision called the Weeping Willows.
The Weeping Willows were filled with people just like my parents, Ruths and Louises and Howards and Barrys, popping out Debbies and Lisas and Jeffreys and Jasons. But while the other moms cooked and cleaned as their children played in sandboxes, my mom actually Wept in the Willows. She sat on the benches with the other moms, wondering how to get in on the recipe conversation without letting it slip that she had no idea how to devil an egg. She soon got wind of the fact that most of them depended on a daily diet pill to get it going and half a Valium to bring it back down. She knew she was about to get swallowed up in a disguise that would eventually suffocate her, and threatened to have a “nervous breakdown” if we didn’t move back to the city.
Nervous breakdowns aren’t as popular as they used to be. No one has them anymore. Instead people either load up on Zoloft, or, if things get really bad, they suffer from exhaustion and check into Cedars for a little Courtney-Love-esque rest. But in those days, everyone was either having one, or promising to have one, if things didn’t change. I imagined what a nervous breakdown might look like, seeing my mom cry, then shake, then throw herself onto the thick, pilly pile of our shag. Surely her cries would turn to screams, she’d vomit, then her nerves would pop out of her flesh, visible like sprung coils on a broken-down Stepford wife. For my mom’s sake, I was glad we left the suburbs, although I did feel bad for the friends Faith and I left behind to grow up watching their moms writhe around the floor.
My mom got wind of South Commons in a newspaper article, and wanted to be in on the first wave of the new community. It was within a few blocks of the hospital where my dad worked, so he agreed. It promised the same things the suburbs did: a place where moms could sit around talking while their kids played. Because the houses surrounded the square, moms could even cook dinner while they watched the action out of their kitchen windows. Some would get dinner made and come out to share a glass of wine with each other on their front steps. Husbands would come home, change out of their suits and wash up, and we’d get called in from our adorably integrated games of Kick the Can and Spud. As urban as it was, it truly fulfilled a suburban dream of safe community.
(In fact, now that I’m a parent, I can assuredly say that we all want the exact same thing: a group of kids with whom my kid can play in plain sight, plus a few parents who will sit nearby but allow me to sip a Corona, page through a People magazine, and say nothing of consequence.)
Although the square in the middle of our townhouses was integrated, the school Faith and I went to, called South Commons School, slowly got less and less so. In kindergarten, not too long after Martin Had a Dream, our classes were about 50/50. But as the balance changed to 70/30, then 80/20, more and more white families pulled their kids out to go to the private schools of Hyde Park, the next neighborhood south—home to the University of Chicago and a few more whiteys.
No one wanted to be the last white family in the school. Except our parents. When the balance hit 98/2, all that was left was me and Faith. But it coincided with the time when Mom was going to the University of Illinois–Chicago, getting her masters in Urban Planning. Her thesis: integration in South Commons was being threatened by the lack of commitment to the school. She proposed that if parents didn’t have all of their kids’ common interests to hold the school together, the surrounding neighborhood would fall apart. We couldn’t very well leave or we’d wreck her thesis. She was the activist, and my sister and I were her little cardboard signs.
And I had no desire to leave. I felt I fit in fine. It was only when I traveled with my class outside of the school on field trips that I was reminded I was different. On the faces of the crackers of the world who made eye contact with me, I could see they thought I’d gotten lost or had been kidnapped by a rogue band of black children in matching field trip T-shirts. The stupid honkies searched my eyes, needing to know if they should call the police and help me escape.
But I didn’t mind. Being the only white girl in my class meant being a star named Gio—that was the way my friends said Jill. Everyone wanted to touch my hair, all the time. If anyone reading this can think of anything that feels better than getting your hair played with by three girls at once, I want to know about it. And I loved their hair too. I’d sit behind Djuana and Wanda, high on Dark ’n’ Lovely, staring at the way their heads were divided into in
tricate, seven-ponytail patterns, with clear turquoise plastic balls that looked like clickety clacks. The boys’ hair was all the same—perfect little round microphone covers. They kept big seventies picks in their back pockets, fluffing at their spongy fro’s, all day long.
On share days, a girl named Tanqueray (pronounced Tanjeray) would get up in front of the classroom and sing, better than Whitney Houston in her prime. Cedric would share by doing the Robot or the James Brown, jumping in the air and doing wild pivots with his knees. Me, I didn’t share. Not so much.
I got a perverse thrill watching the way they treated each other. “BOY PUT THEM EYEBALLS BACK IN YOUR HEAD!” was a common suggestion from teacher to student. Everyday conversations were chock-full of brutal teasing, kids often accusing one or another of having knees too ashy to leave the house or a mama so fat she finds food in her folds. There was a fight every day, and not just among the boys. One January morning I looked out the window from a spelling test to see two girls ripping off each other’s shirts, slapping, bouncing, and dodging in their bras. Somehow, I felt safe, privy to a great seat at the drama, the recipient of a reverse prejudice that worked in my favor.
The more the other white kids left, the tighter Faith and I hung on to our black cred. I easily called white people honkies, laughing at their stiff, dorky ways. Although the black families in the townhouses near us were middle class and were more or less just like us, I preferred spending my time across the way, at the low-rises, where the Real black people lived.
