by Hilary Zaid
Advance Praise for Paper is White
“Paper is White is a wonderfully tender, inventive exploration of survival, secrets, memory, and love. Zaid’s characters are wholly original and riveting, and this story is funny, moving and necessary; you will love this book.”
—Karen E. Bender, National Book Award finalist for Refund
“Written across histories as seemingly varied as Lithuania’s Jewish Kovno Ghetto and Queer Nation San Francisco, Paper Is White connects them in a very different sort of adventure novel, where remembering someone you love becomes one of the most radical things you can do. Zaid is fierce, a rebel with a cause, and her breathtaking leaps of imagination make new worlds possible.”
—Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night
“Hilary Zaid has written a beautiful, heartbreaking book about the stories that haunt us, about the ways silence can wielded as a weapon and ultimately about how love between women can be redemptive.”
—Nayomi Munaweera, author of the critically acclaimed novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors
“Paper Is White draws you in, word by word, sentence by sentence, until you’re so immersed in its world you can’t stop reading. Exploring the relationship between intimacy and truth-telling, as well as how past secrets complicate present-day commitments, this beautiful novel reveals generations of love.”
—Lucy Jane Bledsoe, author of The Evolution of Love
“Paper is White is a funny, bright novel about the stories we think we need and the stories that turn out to matter more than we could have imagined.”
—Ramona Ausubel, author of No One is Here Except All of Us and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
“One young woman’s late-20th century search for marriage equality and the Holocaust play off each other in Paper is White, distinct and yet merging worlds, a dialogue of whispers.”
—Jane Eaton Hamilton, queer activist and author of Weekend
“Paper Is White is a beautifully written and emotionally resonant novel, by a writer from whom we can expect to hear much more in the years ahead. Hilary Zaid is a name you’ll want to remember. Her book is one you’ll have a hard time putting down.”
—Steve Yarbrough, author of The Unmade World
Table of Contents
Advance Praise for Paper is White
Titlepage
Dedication
Paper is White
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About Bywater
To my mother, who loves to tell stories
and in memory of my beloved
Rose Reiser and Deborah Levi
( )
There’s an Indian tale you may know, from a collection called A Flowering Tree. It’s about a woman who knew a story and a song, but she never told the story, and she never sang the song. One day the story said, ‘Bahin [sister], this woman will never let us out.’ So the next day, while the woman’s husband was away, the story turned itself into a man’s jacket, and draped itself near the door. The song turned itself into a pair of men’s shoes, and sat partway under the bed. When the man came home that evening, he saw the jacket and the shoes, and accused his wife of unfaithfulness.
March 1997
On the night my best and oldest friend sped three thousand miles west to hear the news of my engagement, it struck me finally and with the force of revelation that I couldn’t get married without telling my grandmother first. My parents had loved me in their own, distracted way. But my grandmother, a widow, had cherished me. That night, as Fiona’s jet dipped into the thick, blurred batting over San Francisco Bay, I lied to my fiancée about where I was going and crept into the shadowed living room of the house we shared to dial my grandmother’s number. She had been dead for five years.
It was March. Through the French doors, small squares of milky, urban late-evening light glowed against the East Bay darkness. Lola’s collar jingled when I walked in; she lifted her head, then settled her muzzle down again between two paws. I was glad she wouldn’t be able to tell Francine what she saw as I palmed the phone from its cradle and stared at it, rehearsing the digits in my head. I had punched those numbers into the keypad so many times in my life that I could have sung the tones. In the years since my Gramma Sophie died, I’d often tapped my fingers lightly over the buttons, but I’d never actually dialed them. That night, though, as Fiona’s jet trembled heavily into view above the lights of San Francisco, I felt a desperate longing to press my thumb down into the numbers just to hear the song they made. I knew it was childish. I knew the phone wouldn’t ring that night in the little Culver City apartment that smelled like old carpet and leaking gas and chicken soup. I knew the old tin canisters lined up on the counter—Flour, Bread, Tea—wouldn’t shiver with the extra loud buzz of her phone. It wouldn’t ring anywhere she could be found. But I didn’t care. The search for a blessing: No matter how revolutionary we think we are, that’s what marriage is. I let the plastic hook slip from under my thumb and waited for the dial tone to call me back to the present.
It didn’t.
Silence blanketed the line: It was the sound of sitting with my grandmother on the couch watching The Price Is Right with her hand on my back, of perching across from each other at the kitchen counter, playing 21. I pressed the phone to my ear like a shell, like a landlocked sailor listening for the sea. I thought I could hear her breathing. “Gramma?” I pressed my lips to the receiver, but my voice had gone weak, tremulous, as if I were the ghost.
Finally, a woman’s voice answered, an old woman’s. “Hello?” she asked, as if she were lost between this world and the next. “Hello?”
In all the times I had imagined speaking to my grandmother again, I’d pictured myself crying out “Gramma, I love you!”—words I had never managed to say during her life. But when it came to an actual, breathing presence on the telephone, I panicked and hung up.
A few seconds later, it rang, like a bomb going off in my hand.
“Hello?” Francine, in the kitchen, had picked up at the same time.
“I’ve got it!” I called through the house, trying not to sound sneaky, feeling as secretive as I had in high school when my girlfriend called and I pulled the phone as far as the cord would stretch into the depths of my closet. Francine hung up.
A woman’s voice, gravelly and lightly accented, wondered languidly: “Is that your roommate?” My neck pricked hot and cold at the base of my skull. I had picked up the phone to call her, but I had never for an instant believed that I would end up speaking to my grandmother’s ghost. Longing and shame, surprise and accusation, peppered my nose. I didn’t answer. “Yes.” She sounded pleased with my silence, with the way she had caught me up when she said: “That’s what I thought.”
Outside the French windows, beyond the low-hanging clouds, the comet Hale-Bopp inched across the late-winter sky, an ancient glimmer ambered in the blackness of night. If there’s anything dangerous about calling up ghosts, it’s believing that you’ve found one. Her voice was familiar. But finally, I realized: This wasn’t my grandmother.
How many voices had I heard with that faded accent, with that cultured lilt, with that softness that muted a half-century of loss? Dozens? Hundreds? In the five years since my grandmother had died, it had been my job to entice those voices out of their decades-long silences, to capture them and cork them in a bottle. I worked at the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory in San Francisco, where I recorded and archived the testimonies of the last living survivors of the Holocaust. As the Assistant Curator at the Foundation, I spent my days across from the placid, silent faces of people who for fifty years had picked up the bread and the cheese, and merely blinked at a stranger with a familiar accen
t, who grabbed the mail and sidestepped dogs; those quiet ones who sat down to tea and kuchel, played cards, and in the still, polite moments between other people’s words, refused resolutely to let certain phrases take shape on their own lips, applied entire atmospheres of silent pressure to their history until, spurred by mortal urgency, they decided: Now. It’s time. The San Francisco main library may have been jettisoning books by the thousand, but I was holed up just blocks away, collecting as many stories as I could before they vanished from this earth.
My clients and I met on the Embarcadero, down in the interview rooms of our bright new SoMa office; we exchanged our words within the safety of its sealed glass walls. My supervisor, Wendy Rosenberg, would never give out my home number to a client; she wouldn’t let me give it out myself. There were too many survivors, too much need; they were too vulnerable and, if we thought we could save them, so were we. “There are limits,” Wendy often reminded me. There was a code of conduct. It was very, very clear. Whoever it was, I should have told her to call me at the office. I should have gotten right off the phone. I should have remained professional. I should have wondered: Why are you calling me at 7:30 on a Friday night? But I didn’t. I felt so comfortable with my clients, so familiar. That was why Wendy had hired me. And that, she had told me, was the primary danger.
Silence hung between us on the line. I stared out the French doors at the gauzy gray mist darkening the bricks on the patio. That word—danger—hovered in the periphery of my consciousness, as I imagined deep crow’s-feet fanning out at the corners of her eyes. “I can’t talk right now,” I whispered, like someone who was already guilty. Francine was clattering in the kitchen, collecting my mixing bowls. The thick static of the faucet wrapped my words, offered in the darkened living room, in silence. Francine had encouraged me to take my job at the Foundation to contain an interest in old ladies she thought was bad for me. A client calling me at home would not reassure her. Never mind why I’d picked up the phone in the first place. On the mantel, two silver filigree candlesticks sat slightly tarnished, one cup half-filled with hard white wax. Absently, I flicked a drop with my thumbnail; it popped off with a satisfying click. “Who is this?” Urgency edged my words with furtiveness, ±but the doorbell had started to ring; the dogs had begun to bark.
“Are you having company? For Shabbat?” the woman asked, her voice as curious and sly as if by bending it just so, she could look through the phone and see into our house. My hand curled reflexively around the tarnished candlestick. In her tone, I thought I heard some version of my parents’ own second-generation scorn: “It’s fine to be a Jew,” my mother liked to say, “but you don’t need to make a career out of it.” I remembered our screams, my mother’s and mine, trailing each other through the house, when I refused to wear dresses for High Holidays. But the idea that we might actually pursue it beyond the age of thirteen. . . . They’d wanted their children to be Jewish, but not too Jewish: kosher-keeping, Old Country, provincial. Suddenly, I ached to get off the phone.
The soft, insinuating voice prompted me, insistent as the barking dogs, “Are you having friends?”
“Yes,” I answered. “I’m sorry,” I told her, not sorry but relieved. I didn’t need another voice of disapproval in my world. This was supposed to be one of the happiest nights of my life. And I was speaking with a dybbuk. “You’re welcome to call me at the Foundation.” Finally, I made it clear that she was from my other world and she would stay within its bounds. Immediately, I felt more professional. I sounded chillier. This person didn’t belong on my home phone. None of my clients did. None of them even knew I was gay. (Would that change, I wondered, if Francine and I were married? Wouldn’t it have to?)
But maybe I’d been too harsh. Now the woman seemed to hesitate. The barking had become an eager whine. Behind the closed door to the living room, I knew Fiona was standing in the hall. “We’ll see.” She remained unhurried, or was it uncertainty I heard in her voice? I didn’t get a chance to find out.
“Hell—ooooo!” Fiona called through the house. “Honey, I’m home!”
“I’m sorry. I—” I needed to get off the phone before Francine realized I was talking to an old woman.
But she cut me off, as if she, too, were too familiar with keeping secrets. “Go,” she said, as if she knew me well enough to tell me what to do. And then she hung up the phone.
“So what is it? What’s the big news you couldn’t say on the phone?” My best friend Fiona stood in the little foyer of the tiny Rockridge bungalow Francine and I shared, the three of us crowding the corner where we always piled our shoes. Fiona hadn’t slipped off her shoes; she hadn’t even dropped her bags on the mat. Twenty times more impulsive than I’d ever be, she had hurtled west at 400 miles per hour on a maxed-out credit card at the merest suspicion of a secret. But now that she was here, what she really wanted was to guess. “You’re not sick?” Fiona whispered, her voice grainy with dread. Fiona had recently been promoted to Volunteer Coordinator at Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York.
“Of course not!” I reassured her. I felt like I, too, had just hurtled into this room from somewhere far away, a place somewhere between the present and the past. I tilted a little with jet lag, a vertigo I hoped neither Francine nor Fiona noticed.
Fiona didn’t. In a black turtleneck and jeans, Fiona, as always, looked dramatic. Her shining black hair hung in curtains around her face; her cheeks glowed like two round spotlights over high cheekbones. (Sometimes it was hard to be friends with someone so stunning—my own hair too frizzy, my nose too “striking.” It probably helped that Fiona was straight and I wasn’t.) We had been best friends since we were slight enough to slip behind the ball shed at Hillside elementary, and tough enough, when discovered hours later, to withstand our mothers’ frantic rage. If I was going to get married, Fiona would want to be the first to know. But Fiona was on a roll.
She narrowed her eyes, which were almond-shaped, huge and green as a cat’s, to slits. I could practically hear her thinking. Her voice dropped to a confidential murmur. “You guys aren’t breaking up?” Fiona brushed the dark curtain of hair from her forehead. She glanced from me to Francine and back again with those huge, circumspect green eyes, as if she assumed the answer must be yes. I wondered where that one came from. And Francine didn’t leap in to correct her. A preschool teacher, Francine could be preternaturally patient with people prone to drama. Though this rightfully should have been our moment, she was thoroughly enjoying the full spectacle of what she called “the Fiona show.” Her mouth crinkled mischievously at the corner. I shook my head. “Of course not!”
Fiona blinked beneath thick lashes. The surprise on her face lingered for only a second, chased by a wild, hopeful guess: “Are you moving? To New York!” Fiona’s smile could sell used cars.
Moving to New York? No matter what I said now, Fiona was bound to be disappointed. Come to think of it, this was how this game always ended, Fiona creating an outsized reality I could never be part of while I stood next to her and didn’t say a thing. Fiona’s huge personality had always cast a comfortable shadow in which I could slip out of sight. It had always been so much easier for me that way. But tonight I needed things to be different.
Francine stood at my side in her jogging shorts and Clinton/Gore T-shirt. She looked at Fiona, still clutching her bags, and laughed. “You two really pick up just where you left off, don’t you?” Her comfort with the enormity of this friendship was one of the things I treasured about Francine. Her auburn curls still damp, her pale cheeks flushed, she slipped a declaring arm around my waist. I looked at Francine with her kind, quick eyes, eyes I had stared and gazed and blinked at for the better part of seven years, and I knew again how much I wanted to marry her. Why couldn’t I just interrupt Fiona and say it? I wasn’t in the closet. I had been a Queer Nation girl, slapping Day-Glo orange stickers onto lamp posts and chanting in the streets. But, when it came to sharing personal things with the people closest to me, I shied in a hereditary
way from what my mother would call “shouting it from the rooftops.” When my sister finally admitted she was engaged to her Chinese boyfriend, my mother had indicted her: “I don’t see her shouting it from the rooftops!” She inferred shame, rather than sensible defensiveness, from my sister’s shy, reluctant tone. But who was my mother to talk? Marilyn Margolis would no sooner want me to shout the love-that-dare-not-speak from the chimney tops than watch me fiddle from a shingle while the pogroms roared. It wasn’t only personal. The demons of this world have always hunted down our plaintive cries of joy and pain. Love, fear, devotion: We never spoke about those things.
Francine cleared her throat. Presented with the torment of small and suffering creatures, she would always be the first to put a broken thing out of its misery. “Ellen and I are getting married.” It was strange to hear the word out loud. Married. It was the right word, but, like a word in a foreign language or adopting a different name, it had never belonged to us and it was going to take some time to get used to.
“Married?” Fiona’s eyes went searchlight-wide. “Oh my god!”
There was a moment as Fiona inhaled, the long rush of her indrawn breath, that was like the whistle of a rocket streaking upward, and a noiseless moment as it arced, a moment of breathless silence as Francine and I waited to see if it would crash back to the ground. I remembered the years in college after I started dating my girlfriend Sam, two years during which Fiona and I hadn’t spoken, and I hoped not. Fiona caught her breath. “Do you mean, like, married-married?” Her eyes narrowed again as she glanced from me to Francine; her voice dropped. “Can you actually do that?” But Fiona wasn’t really waiting for an answer. After all, she’d just flown three thousand miles to hear big news. She jumped up and down in the little foyer, dropping her bag on the mat. “Oh my god! My best friend in the entire world is getting married!” Bewildered, the dogs began to leap and bark. Fiona leaned forward, threw her arm around my neck, her other arm around Francine’s neck, and drew us together. “We’re getting married!” She screamed. A light went on behind her eyes. “In Hawaii?” Fiona shot me a let’s-do-something-crazy look.
