by Jill Soloway
On the way up the stairwell to my friend Takeyah’s apartment, the hallways were filled with smells of far away. Early on my nose had a sophisticated, geographically acute awareness of the way soul food came by way of Africa, sniffing out how the greens in apartment 207 mixed with the Ethiopian potatoes from 206, due south of the Indian cumin from 306. The people who didn’t have money made up for it by at least having great smells: collards and dirty rice and curry and fried oil. The only delicious aromas of culinary fusion that ever rose in our house were on Saturday nights, when my parents were going out and the apple cobbler accidentally seeped into the fried chicken in our TV dinners.
Over in the delectable-smelling low-rises, so many more people lived together in such smaller spaces. In Damitra’s apartment, her grandmother slept on a hospital bed in the kitchen, while four brothers and sisters slept on bunk beds in every room, cousins in the next room, parents on the foldaway in the living room.
Cousins, by the way, didn’t have to mean cousins. In early examples of the “it takes a village” method, there was a different way of naming relatives: Kids who had your same mama were your brothers and sisters, even if they were “by” different baby-daddies. No one used the words “step” or “half,” ever. If your mother’s sister (your aunTEE) had kids, these kids were also your brothers and sisters. Unrelated very good friends, as well as barely related distant relatives—kids by your mama’s sister’s baby-daddy’s other baby-mama—were your cousins. For all intents and purposes, everyone was your cousin.
The unspoken truth was that as cozy as life was on our side of the gate, things could get a little dicey on the other side. Though their lives appeared chock-full of cousins and extremely skilled double-dutch, all of it scored by a Sly and the Family Stone album, problems arose. My sister’s skateboard got stolen. There was a rape in a low-rise and a murder in a mid-rise. We started staying a little closer to home, walking a little faster to get to the gates that were now locked, keys distributed to our side only.
My parents weren’t ready to move, but they finally decided to send us to another school—a small, private Jewish academy in Hyde Park called Akiba-Schechter. The boys wore rainbow needlepoint yarmulkes and we all davened, bowing at the knees and leaning toward the ark in the chapel every morning. I still had to lip-sync when I sang, but now it was because I didn’t have a clue what the heck was going on.
My sister and I also found out we were quite stupid. At the black school we were the smarty-pants white girls. Sometimes I even corrected the teachers. But at Jew school we were the dumb-asses who couldn’t even speak Hebrew. Plus they were doing real science with smelly gases and actual dead frogs. There were no dead frogs at South Commons school, no hands-on teaching tools. Instead of stinky, alive formaldehyde, the only smell was cool blue glue heaven emanating from the mimeographs.
Our mom and dad also weren’t ready for the new religious demands Akiba-Schechter placed on them. We’d bring handcrafted tinfoil candlesticks home, but my mom would throw them in a drawer rather than put candles in to celebrate Shabbat. Praying and acting Jewish was something our family only did at relatives’ houses, twice a year, and that was just as a way to get Grandma Minnie to bring out the sweet-and-sour brisket and matzoh ball soup and potatoes cooked in chicken fat. I guess she was still poor, so she got to have the rich, savory good smells.
On Sukkot, the holiday where you’re supposed to make a hut to eat in, my sister and I were under direct orders from Rabbi Rob to build a sukkah with our families. My parents weren’t having it. The best Faith and I could do was make construction paper chains and hang them between the recessed balcony railing and the balcony roof. No one ever ate in there, but when Rabbi Rob asked kids to raise their hands if they had a sukkah, we could.
It was also the age when everyone was having bar and bat mitzvahs. We went to a few of them. But no one was thinking about the rite of passage. It was all about sneaking off for make-out sessions. Faith and I got in a fight at one because I made out with Andy Ackerman in the nursery school room. He had told Faith he liked her the day before, so he was basically cheating on her with her own sister. Eventually, when the topic of our own bat mitzvahs came up, I had an answer ready: “I would only be doing it for the presents.”
This didn’t bother my parents. It’s not like my father sat us down and told us there was no God. But I learned from overhearing intellectual debates with his doctor and lawyer friends that they all had the same post-Holocaust point of view: “God? God!? You think a God would let us go through that?”
They have a point. If you’re keeping score, it seems a real leap of faith to continue to consider ourselves chosen. Chosen for what, some may ask. As for my mom, God was someone you talked to only on days loved ones were flying, as if He sidelined as a temporary travel insurance broker. On weekdays in school, we prayed to the Jewish God. On the weekends and at night, we were atheists who prayed to the god of television. We had started out white, become black, and then were white but Jewish-ish. Our neighborhood was integrated, but our identities were not.
I was also wildly unpopular at our new, tiny school. There were only four other girls in the sixth grade. When I alienated two of them in a typical 12-year-old-allegiance-shifting tribe maneuver, I was friendless. I had one terrific day when Sarah, the alpha of the other four— pulled me into the art room to tell me that I could be her best friend, as long as I didn’t tell anyone. I must have accidentally told everyone because a few days later, I was out again.
(All of this was around the time I went to summer camp and was shunned. I’m curious about what it was about me that was such a turnoff. Maybe I was used to being special without having to work at it, and when I got around a bunch of other kids who had been also treated like the messiah by their moms, I had to dig deep to find out what was actually unique about me. Turned out there was nothing.)
We stayed at Jew school for a year as the crime in South Commons got worse. One day I was walking home from a friend’s house when a group of low-rise boys swaggered toward me. They were only a few years older, but something in the way they pimp-rolled made me nervous. One pulled his ski mask down over his face, just like that kid in Fat Albert, and pushed up against me, brandishing a finger-in-your-pocket gun, saying, “Gimme all your money.” The boys were just playing around—they didn’t expect me to believe they had a gun, but I was terrified anyway. I ran home and hid in my mother’s hug. Everyone’s integration dreams were ending.
As we watched the rest of the white families move out, my parents too started to dream about movin’ on up, getting a whiff of the coming eighties consumerism. My mom’s thesis was turned in and she was exhausted from all that typing on her Selectric and correcting with those little correction sheets you had to stick under the typewriter ball. My father’s new psychiatry practice was growing and suddenly we had money to spare. My mom got her first fur coat, a Blackglama mink. We moved to a fancy condo on a beautiful leafy street called North State Parkway, smack in the middle of the Gold Coast. My mom got her second fur coat, an unplucked beaver, a name I wish I had realized how funny it was then as I do now.
In our new life, the only black people were our doormen. Of course, we wanted them to think we were the specialest nicest white people in the building. On holidays my mom wrapped up plates of leftover food with tinfoil to bring down to the lobby. With an overly familiar hug, she’d hand off the gift to whoever was unlucky enough to have to spend his Christmas in a uniform. I felt guilty watching them sit at the Pyrex desk, getting cabs for ladies in heels and hose, heading out into the snowy white night.
Maybe my false black pride is one of the reasons I don’t really have any close black friends today. They probably despise me. Or maybe the world just kept turning and landed at a place where for black people, power actually meant admitting they don’t want anything to do with us either.
Although growing up as the only white kid didn’t make me end up living in a black neighborhood, it did form my most e
nduring view of myself, that of the Outsider. (I know this must come as a shock to you based on the other chapters in this book.) But to this day, I feel most me when I am in the minority. There is nothing more excruciating to me than the idea of fitting in.
Although I am not very observant, my son goes to a Jewish school. When I first helped myself to a tour of the school on a Saturday afternoon when no one was around, it felt foreign and familiar to me at the same time. I realized it reminded me of Akiba-Schechter—the smell of the kosher kitchen, the cleanliness, the Ben Shahn art in the hallways. Even though I had always imagined my son at one of those agnostic/hippie Montessori schools where no one makes you try, I was suddenly hit with the idea that this was the right school for him. I thought maybe if he could spend his whole childhood there instead of one very awkward puberty year like mine, he might have a shot at something that never felt available to me—a connectedness between his intellect and his heart.
It’s not that as a kid and a teen I didn’t think—I thought constantly. But none of it was ever put together with school, a place I spent all day nearly every day. I was absolutely 100 percent checked out and faking it, from kindergarten straight through my senior year of college, save for that one women’s studies class and a couple of film classes. The fact that I’ve made anything of myself is a shock to me.
I thought maybe I could give my son the confidence I’d seen on the faces of the kids who spent their lives in private school. I need him to be different from me, not burdened by shape-shifting hunger for identity, for self, for admiration. Maybe these kids had that way about them from being seen by highly paid administrators, from having their curiosity endlessly slaked by teachers who weren’t angry, starving civil servants.
Beyond giving my son that brain–heart connection I craved, his school is making us less Jewish-ish and more Jewish. They tricked us by starting easy in nursery school, sending home challah and those very same tinfoil candleholders. Next thing I knew, I’d memorized the words to “Hatikvah,” looked forward to dancing with the Torahs at Simchah Torah, and made time for Bible study in my week.
I’m happy to let them turn us all into big Jews, but not so that my son will grow up to be super-observant. I do it so that, as they say in certain gospel songs and e-forwarded poems about parenthood, if I keep my feet on the ground, my child can fly. He can rebel against Judaism by considering atheism and Buddhism (but not born-again Christianity). All I need him to know is that he came from a place that is his.
As far as I can tell, he is known at school; he is part of something. When they sing songs in Hebrew, he knows the words, which is a good start. Yet somehow, by being from a nontraditional family—or at least my cobbled-together, single-mom version of a statement about family— I hope I’m sifting in the helpful parts of what I got. Growing up as a minority, for all its problems, at least forced me to look at life through a prism of perspectives.
And maybe, just maybe, he won’t be a hypocrite and he’ll want a bar mitzvah for the passage instead of the presents. Maybe he’ll be able to laugh when he hears the words Chosen People, or put his head and his heart together to find an answer to why Jews always ask, “Why us?” Maybe he’ll have an idea of how to replace the self-hating, depressive genes I’m trying so hard not to pass down. Maybe he’ll think black is beautiful because he’ll never know that anyone ever thought it wasn’t. Maybe he’ll think Jewish is beautiful. Maybe he’ll think his soul’s intact, and most important, that he’s actually where it’s at.
10
Everything Happens for a Reason
Everything happens for a reason.
People say it, yes they do. I say to them, EVERYTHING? EVERYTHING? Are we sure about this one? I wish I knew what asshole made this up. It’s so retroactively faux-helpful, it may as well be Trust Jesus, it’s such a load. It really is. Even intellectuals and atheists say it; they smile and they raise their eyebrows helpfully, everything happens for a reason!
But what if nothing happens for a reason? Or if everything happens for no reason? Or what if some things shouldn’t happen AT ALL?
I sold my house. I am about to move. We have five days left and my insides feel like a punctured baby pool, deflating. I live in a storybook house. It’s wooden and small and brown with orangey red under eaves. It’s high on a high, high hill, way at the back of the longest stretch of green green grass anyone ever has seen in Los Angeles East of La Cienega.
I come home from a meeting with a movie executive who listens like a freight train: “UH HUH UH HUH UH HUH UH HUH UH HUH UH HUH” is what she says, a staccato off-kilter rhythm track under everything I say. I hopelessly pitch my ideas at her; they burst into fluffy sad goose eggs, wafting down to the table where she bought me lunch, a lunch to which she was twenty minutes late. I tell her my ideas and she comes at me like a train, UH HUH UH HUH IT SOUNDS MORE LIKE A SERIES THAN A MOVIE WHAT ELSE DO YOU HAVE?
I come home from a meeting like that and open the gate, and I laugh: Look at where I live. I am the luckiest person in the world. My yard is an opera of overwhelming leafy greenness. It’s the size of a small park, with this awesome tree smack in the middle of the yard. Shortly after I closed on this house, the first I’d ever bought, I came here by myself and lay down, arms out, part of the grass. I was beneath this giant tree, incredulous at the idea of us. Me and that tree, a hundred or two hundred feet into the sky, fifty feet wide in canopy. That tree was the biggest, tallest boyfriend of my life. I looked up at him and thought, “I love you. I own you.” And then I thought, “I could cut you down. I never ever ever would, tree, but I could.”
When my son and I moved into this house we were leaving our life with Chaz, leaving the arguments about money and why Chaz had to play electric guitar at two in the morning. Chaz did a lot of passive-aggressive TV watching and made empty promises to get to the dishes. “Yeah, definitely by the time you wake up in the morning. The dishes’ll definitely be gone.”
The dishes were never done. One night I was heading out to the Mayfair to grocery shop, and I asked Chaz if he could please do the dishes while I was out. I knew he wouldn’t, but I said it twice a day anyway. Then, when I was at the grocery store, something happened. I was in the meat aisle and right next to me there was a couple. They had their arms slung around each other, fingers casually stuck in the back pockets of one another’s jeans, having a conversation about dinner. Their casual “we’ve got each other” vibe was identical to the couple on the Costa Rican bus. Amidst a simple conversation, she said something like, “Well, if we do the T-bones, I could make asparagus.” And then the guy said, “Okay, how ’bout I make that sauce?” And then the girl said, “Perfect, I’ll pick a wine and meet you at checkout.” They let go of one another and went off, but I stayed there and felt my eyes well up with tears. I was looking at love.
For all I know that grocery store couple got into a huge fight that night because she didn’t let the asparagus boil long enough and he thought the stalks were woody. But it didn’t matter. I was done with Chaz. I walked in the door and told him to leave. He did, but for a year after, he walked in without asking, stayed too long once inside. I changed the locks, but we still argued about everything. I knew I had to leave that apartment, because he would always think of it as ours.
When my son and I moved out, and walked into this storybook place with this park-sized yard, we exhaled. It was going to be fine. And it was. It was heaven. While I lived there I found Dink, a real love instead of a tree love. We both fell in love with Dink, my son and I. More than a house, or even a storybook house, this house was a story.
Change is good.
All change? What if someone ran over one of my feet? That would be change. I’d only have one foot. Would that be good? The guy to whom I sold my beautiful little house, David Someone, called to say his real estate agent thought it would be fun if the three of us got together and had a drink. FUN? To listen to them talk about putting a skylight in my house? David, tell Jill what you were thinking�
��about opening up the ceiling? Tell her your idea about using a giant sharp implement to pry apart her rib cage to stab at her heart. Jill, the waitress is waiting for your order? Are you crying?
No, I’m not crying, I’ll have a mojito I guess.
Leaving my storybook house and buying my new house makes perfect sense. The new house is a really smart buy. The previous owners just fell out of escrow and were desperate to accept any offer so it was really inexpensive. It’s on a street where, within one block, two houses have people I know really, really well in them and one has that Rebecca from Real World I told you about. My son can stay in the same school, and we can still go to Eatwell, our favorite little diner on Sunday mornings, for pork chops and eggs and gays.
Plus our new house is bigger, much bigger. This storybook house only has room for me and my son, but the new house will be big enough for me and my son and Dink to all live there together, finally, and we need space and it’s smart, smart, smart smart smart it’s a smart smart move. But I don’t want to. I want to stay here in my cute little wooden doll’s house.
Let go and let God.
Or let go and let gosh. Either one works because neither one means anything. If you’re like me, letting go is easier said than done. My thinking works like a tired kiddie pony ride that goes around the track at Griffith Park for $1.25. Around the neck of that horse is a bucket filled with brain chum. It’s not food, it has no value, it’s garbage. It shouldn’t be examined, it should just be emptied.
But I can’t empty it and instead, my mind gets ahold of a problem and goes back and forth over it, around and around the horsie track, until it is understood. Like Bruce Boxleitner. One day I really saw the name, truly saw it for the first time and found out it’s not Boxel-nighter at all, like I’d been saying it in my head. During that week, you may have seen me at in my car, at a red light, moving my lips, Box-leit-ner, box-light-nur, boxel-nighter, over and over again until it was second nature. Boxleitner.
