by Hilary Zaid
Despite what she’d said about hope, Elizabeth was a survivor from the school of aggressive normalcy. After fifty years of withholding it, she had come to handle the truth like a blunt object. When she described wheeling her mother’s emaciated body to the graveyard in the Lodz ghetto, when she told them how she and her sister scraped their own shallow pit with their raw fingers, how they heaved their mother’s corpse into a grave they could mark only with a stick, Elizabeth did not grow soft, or press her fingers to her face. She coughed once, then sipped slowly from the paper cup sitting on the corner of the table. It struck me: She had learned how to open the locked box inside of her without stepping outside of it.
“Does anyone have any questions?” Scanning the class, I raised my eyebrows encouragingly.
An athletic girl with blond hair looked at Elizabeth. “Do you forgive the Germans?” she managed to ask.
“Forgive?” Elizabeth’s hand flew up like a dazed, wheeling bird, injured, widowed, off course. “I cannot forgive,” she pronounced, “what only the dead can forgive.”
Elizabeth did not fully appreciate that her answers were showstoppers. “For the fiftieth anniversary,” Elizabeth offered—the anniversary of the Liberation—“they had a big reception for us, for the few of us who came back,” she told the students, her mouth moist. “They stood on one side of the room, and we stood on the other, but no one approached us.” Blank stares. “I went back to Lodz,” she continued, “to look for my mother’s grave. Of course, it was impossible. Nonetheless,” Elizabeth shrugged. “I went to the caretaker’s office to ask. Two men were there in long coats. ‘Who are you?’ they asked me. ‘Why do you want to know?’ ‘My mother is buried here,’ I told them. ‘I am a Jew.’ ‘Impossible!’ the man said to me, ‘There are no Jews in Lodz.’”
After the talk, bodies streamed out through the classroom door with polite, demure thanks. It was Wednesday at noon. From across the Bay, air raid sirens droned through the afternoon sky. Elizabeth blew her nose into a wadded tissue pulled from the corner of her sleeve. “These young people are very shy, very timid about the past.” She folded the tissue and tucked it back into her sleeve.
Elizabeth Landau wasn’t a fainter. Hers was the stolid, compartmentalizing gaze on the past that allowed people to survive. Jewish history of the late twentieth century was practically built on it. Little boxes. The morning after my sister’s wedding, while my mother sat at the turquoise kitchen counter ticking off complaints on her still freshly lacquered fingers, my father offered his wisdom about how to handle the things that upset her, a philosophy that seemed to have informed the worldview of so many of my clients: “We each have little compartments inside ourselves, and we just need to lock things up and put them away.” Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
Up in the Campanile tower, the carillon bells clamored. Elizabeth Landau, I remembered, had had a husband who died recently, a husband of forty years, who, like herself, had been a Holocaust survivor. She hadn’t mentioned him. “What was it like to be married to another survivor?” I asked her. “Did you have similar experiences during the War?”
“Ellen,” Mrs. Landau spoke my name for the first time; her accent made it sound truncated, somehow, like “Helen” without the “H,” the initial sound swallowed in a soft swirl across her palate. “We never talked about it.”
I nodded. “But you know what happened to him?” I nodded again.
But Elizabeth shook her head.
I expected her to confess that it had been a terrible mistake, a source of perpetual regret, this history they had never shared. But she didn’t. Her gaze fixed on the wide waters of the Bay. “We never spoke of those things to one another,” she said tenderly. “We never,” she added, “never needed to. It was already between us. And the details,” Mrs. Landau paused again, her tongue resting along the edge of her teeth; she waved the details away with a flutter of her hand. Sure, I realized, she was a talker now; but for fifty years, she’d been a withholder, and a very successful one. At the time, I judged her for that.
Elizabeth Landau turned from the students streaming through Sather Gate. She looked at my face so long I had to force myself not to look away. “Are you married?” she asked me. She glanced at my hands. “Do you have,” she asked, “a boyfriend?”
I had felt my face flush. I hated that a simple, honest answer had the power to derail the entire conversation, and Francine and I weren’t engaged to be married then. Would I have said I had a girlfriend? A lover? I said: “I’m in a relationship.” Elizabeth smiled, a polite, disinterested smile. “Yes, of course.” Her lips had been frosted with a pale pink that had faded, now, to the deeper red-brown of her mouth showing through. Then her smile, too, faded. “You understand, Ellen. You allow each other separateness, things you do not speak of.”
“Privacy,” I suggested, remembering my grandmother’s quiet hand on my back.
“Dignity.” She corrected me firmly, and with finality. In her shining pupils, two tiny versions of me looked back.
Before Francine and I decided to get married, though, I didn’t see my reflection in those mirrors. If anything, I feared I would always be the fainting sister. Compared to my tight-lipped parents, to my cool, MBA sister Rebecca, I’d never been able to keep my feelings under wraps. Not well. I’d had a passionate, painful, and very secret first love in high school, and that had ended terribly.
Then, in college, I’d started dating Sam, a petite half-Cubana Canadian with thumbprint dimples and Chairman Mao pants. Brilliant, charming, and sometimes melancholy, Sam had coached me through my coming out. Coming out in college had seemed like the antithesis of all that familial withholding, life out of the closet a repudiation of silence, a path to power. Pinned to the straps of our book bags, buttons draped our chests like the insignia of decorated generals: Lesbians Ignite!, Defeat Homophobia, SILENCE = DEATH! But that powerful outspokenness was never native to me. Sam went her own way after college and I went mine. All her effortless intelligence that I loved, and admired, and was leaving. By the time I moved to Berkeley, I’d become a girl who picked up a carton of mu-shu vegetables every night and shared it with her dog.
I didn’t feel like I was hiding, though. I believed I was just waiting for someone to share my stories with. Then one full-moon Friday night in early October 1990, Francine and I met on the steps of her little wisteria-covered East Oakland cottage, got into Francine’s car together, and drove to Club Q. My college friend and grad-school roommate Debbie had introduced us because, according to her super-scientific formula, “you both have dogs.” The wind was blowing in my face, and, for just one unfraught second, my heart skipped with the vacant joy of all the things it stood just on the other side of knowing.
The dark, strobe-lit room smelled like perfume, beer, sweat, and smoke. I found an empty chair at the edge of the dance floor. It was still early, not quite ten. “Scoot over?” Francine tapped my knee. She was wearing black jeans and a navy blazer with the sleeves rolled up over a white “Queer Nation” T-shirt. She nudged in next to me and we sat, not trying to talk over the music, watching dykes in vests and T-shirts snap and grind to Soul II Soul. Then they started playing Sister Sledge.
Francine closed her eyes when she danced; her hair flashed auburn under the lights; her body moved like liquid. Afterward, we stepped out onto the sidewalk, our ears hissing with the static after the music, our bodies chilled in our damp T-shirts in the cold night air. That night, alone in my bed, I lay awake, stricken with panic, fallen hard, in knee-knocking, cold-sweat, can’t-sleep love with a red-haired girl. Eventually, Francine fell in love with me, too. We thrilled ourselves with our abandon. Have you done this? This? But it was never just literal with me. I was trying to reach under her skin more deeply than anyone before me; I thought that if I could reach far enough into her heart, she wouldn’t want to let me go. I thought I’d let her all the way into mine.
We stayed true to each other. We withstood trials. A year into our relationship,
Francine had gone back to school for her master’s. Two years after that, she finished, precipitating the crisis I’d been anticipating since she took her first class at Mills.
“So.” I’d perched next to her on the futon we’d come to think of as our futon, in the house on Manzanita Court that had become our house. “You’re leaving. I mean, you’ve finished grad school, and now you’re leaving.” I wanted to say it first. I’d wanted at least that much control. Early in our relationship, Francine had talked about how much she’d liked living in Ann Arbor, where she went to college. She said she wanted to see Boston.
“What are you talking about?”
I didn’t answer. After my preemptive announcement, I’d found it suddenly difficult to speak.
“Ellen.” Francine looked at me. “I’m not leaving. I love it here. I like my family. And I love you. Did you really think you were getting out of this that easy?”
“Liz and I loved each other,” I countered. My high school girlfriend. “Sam and I loved each other, too.” We’d left each other, it seemed, so easily.
“Liz was straight,” Francine pointed out, getting up. “And I think you left Sam.”
“People fall in love,” I went on, following her into the kitchen, “graduate from school and then leave each other. It’s practically a rule.” I’d only ever broken up with anyone through attrition. We’d stayed together until we drifted thousands of miles apart. I ground my teeth miserably. Nothing was wrong between me and Francine. It’s just the way it was.
“It’s not my rule,” Francine said, laying two plates out on the table. “And since I’m the one graduating, I get to decide. I love you, I want to be with you, and I’m staying.” The thing about Francine was, when it counted, she had this remarkable clarity about things I found impenetrable. Then she added, handing me a glass, “When you graduate, you can decide and you can leave, if you want to.” I felt desperately sad and thrilled at the same time. “But, Ellen Margolis, you’d better not. Want to.”
Francine frowned at me, her chin breaking into a dozen tiny dimples. A mock scowl. I threw my arms around her. I hugged her so tightly, I broke the glass in my hand. At the ER, they told us the wound was clean. I got a shot of Novocain, six stitches, and a Band-Aid, and they sent us home.
In this way, I forgot something I knew about myself: that as much as I strove in true lesbian feminist fashion for openness and honesty and real communication, I believed deep in my bones that silence was safer. Did I think by coming out of the closet I had excised my entire cultural history? That by slapping on Day-Glo orange stickers (Loud, pushy, Jewish dyke!), my secrets and longings were visible from outer space? My parents and their generation had shed Jewish ritual observance like their bubbe’s old shmatas, but they couldn’t shed the old fears and superstitions that come with centuries of expulsions and pogroms, the glance over your shoulder to make sure no one is looking, the pinch of salt tossed in the eye of the devil, the kine hora twined into the DNA. Neither could I. I wasn’t really loud. Or pushy. No matter what I said, I was still my grandmother’s child, still my parents’ daughter. I was a Jew of the late twentieth century, and silence was my legacy. But when Francine and I decided to get married, I couldn’t see it then. Because the best way to keep a secret is to keep it from yourself.
( )
Despite the three-hour time difference in the other direction, Fiona, characteristically, slept until eleven, dead to the world in the middle of the house while Francine and I attended to the usual, domestic routine. Francine and I still lived in our tiny Craftsman bungalow at 6156 Manzanita Court in Rockridge, just off Broadway. “More of a schmungalow than a bungalow,” Francine liked to say, because sometime in the early ’70s, someone thought it made sense to turn the six-hundred-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-story house into a six-hundred-and-eighty-square-foot, one-bedroom, two-story house. Aside from the wooden coffee table and the futon, the secondhand desk and the bed, we still didn’t have any real furniture, which was fine, I reassured Francine whenever I saw her curled up with the Pottery Barn catalog, because we didn’t have room for anything else. Yet! I always added, at Francine’s frown. (I thought of style as something we would grow into; she saw it as something we perpetually did without.)
We’d moved into Manzanita Court six and a half years earlier, the second weekend of October 1991; the very next weekend, the Oakland Hills went up in flames. The sky went coal black; hot dry winds pushed the fire to the hills just above the house. We packed the dogs and ran. We didn’t come back until the next day; in the yard, a single, complete page from someone’s diary, only its edges charred, had blown up on the lawn.
Water rushed through the pipes. Then the dogs swirled into the living room to the crooning of Fiona’s voice. Francine and I were holed up in the kitchen, the first big announcement behind us, relieved to have to decide only what to eat.
Francine stood scrubbing the potatoes at the sink. She was making her “famous” potatoes, little red ones chopped in wedges, baked on a tray with olive oil, salt and pepper, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day weekend. Italian, not Irish, but still: potatoes. It was all gourmet to Fiona, whose mother, Cait Collins, I had never seen take anything out of the kitchen cabinet besides a glass. I kept one eye on the phone, but it didn’t ring. “I’ll never forget how strange it was, the first time I saw your mother and your Gram peeling the mushrooms.” Francine shook her head, scraping at the crevice of a potato with a fingernail. These were the bits of history we carried for each other, the small shared accumulations of a lifetime together.
“But now you think it’s normal, right?”
“No,” Francine answered. “I think it’s kind of like ironing your underwear.”
Fiona appeared in the doorway in rumpled boxer shorts and a big gray sweatshirt, blinking away sleep. “Good morning, little lovebirds,” she cooed. She looked significantly from me to Francine. “So, do we have plans?”
“Tea?” Francine offered.
Fiona reached for a mug. “For the wedding.”
The last wedding I had been to was my sister’s. It was two years before, and on that morning my mother galloped down the hallway to the bride’s bedroom, bony ankles visible between the hem of her cotton nightie and her high-heeled bedroom slippers, belting “I’m Getting Married in the Morning!” Passing through the hall with all the melody of a lone Canada goose, she burst into my sister’s room and grabbed Rebecca fiercely. Unmoving, Rebecca touched three fingers absently to the twin gold braids wound in a coil at the top of her head.
Never mind that my mother didn’t want Rebecca to marry Ted Hsu. (Shelling a pistachio with a long, pink nail the night before, she’d offered coolly, “I’m sure his parents feel the same way.”) From the half-opened door of my childhood bedroom, I watched my mother disappear into my sister’s room, propelled by the urgent, purely generic truth that this was a wedding, her daughter the bride. Standing inside my own former bedroom’s closet, Francine had pulled her camisole over pale, damp shoulders. Her brown suit hung on paper-covered hangers over the top of the door. I stared at the tops of her thighs, white in her white cotton underpants. The closet smelled strongly of plastic, faintly of groomed leather. Francine and I exchanged glances; she rolled her eyes, but in her forehead I saw a faint wrinkle of real distress; Francine was costuming herself for the euphemistic role in which my mother would always script her: Ellen’s “friend.”
It didn’t matter that Francine, unlike Ted, was Jewish, a coupling my mother should have approved as within the Tribe. Women did not “marry” each other. Not in the pages of the Sunday Times.
Was it pathetic that some part of me wanted my mother’s frenetic displays of fake enthusiasm? I knew she would never sing that song for me.
“Well,” Fiona, ever eager to be my chief problem-solver, started, “what kind of weddings have your friends had?” Fiona always imagined we knew all the lesbians. We lived in the Bay Area, didn’t we?
Francine moved to the chopping board and
whacked the potatoes into wedges. “No kind,” I admitted. We’d never been to a lesbian wedding, had never even heard of anything besides a “commitment ceremony.” And we hadn’t even been to one of those. In retrospect, given that Bill Clinton had sold us down the river with the Defense of Marriage Act—or maybe it was because Bill Clinton had signed the Defense of Marriage Act—I don’t quite know what gave us the chutzpah to decide we would have a wedding, except that maybe, like the recent Newsweek lesbians and the Dateline lesbians and the Queer Nation lesbians we had been, we were just tired of waiting.
Fiona put the kettle on. “I saw a Dateline exposé,” she started again, as if there were upsides to our ignorance. “They sent fake brides out to caterers for quotes. Then they sent in guys allegedly planning bachelor parties, and old ladies throwing luncheons for their church groups.” Fiona picked up a raw potato, stuck it absently in her mouth, made a horrible face and spat it back out. “They all asked for the same food. They all had the same number of guests. But the bachelors and the church ladies paid less.” What was she saying? That people who want to get married are chumps? Or that we’d get a discount if we pretended not to be getting married? That would be ironic. Or, did she mean that, if we said we were getting married, we’d pay the price? I should have been wondering: Why was Fiona watching exposés on wedding caterers? The kettle whistled, more whine than whistle, something else Francine thought we needed to replace.
“Sure,” said Francine, scraping a pile of potato peels into the paper bag she’d set at her feet. Scraps clung to her wet fingers. “Who wants to skimp on their own wedding? The biggest day of your life, the symbol of all your potential future happiness as a couple.”
