by Hilary Zaid
The biggest day of our life? The symbol of all our future happiness? Was that what Francine thought about our wedding? (Even as a kid, I had never dreamed about being a bride. Rebecca had conscripted the role. Five years old, Rebecca rubbed her old baby blanket experimentally against her cheek, then swirled the soft knit fabric high above her and let it settle against her fine, blond hair. “Let’s play brides,” she announced. “You be a bride and I be a bride.” She tilted her chin up and lowered her lashes coquettishly. “It’s like princesses.” “You be the bride,” I’d answered. “I’ll be the house painter.”) I felt a new pang of guilt about lying the night before to Francine. It seemed like a small thing: a phone call from an old lady. But if a wedding was all about symbols, what was a marriage that began with a lie? I decided I would tell her when Fiona wasn’t around.
“Obviously, no one wants to pay more.” Fiona blew into her steaming mug. Her upper lip was a little thin, like her mother’s. “The caterers take advantage of all the cultural baggage around a wedding, and the couples are so wound up in it themselves that they don’t revolt and boil spaghetti at home.” Maybe I was more indoctrinated than I realized: I may not have thought much about weddings, but I knew I didn’t want to boil spaghetti at home. Without a real wedding, a big public statement, what would getting married to Francine really mean? We were already a couple—had been a couple for over six years. No one was going to think of us as forever unless we made a statement. But our potential future happiness as a couple—somehow the dimensions of the thing were becoming enormous. There must be some kind of middle ground. I waited for Francine to inject her opinion, but she just chopped the wedges harder.
“And I’m sure, if the bride’s family is paying,” Fiona mused, “there’s the guilt factor. If they’re not paying enough, do they really love their daughter?” I didn’t want to think about whether my parents would offer to pay—I guessed they wouldn’t.
As if she knew I was thinking about her, my mother called. She’s always had a preternatural sense for calling when I least wanted to talk to her: All through college if Sam and I were pulling off each other’s clothes in my tiny dorm room, the phone would ring. But I had forgotten about that. Now as it trilled through the invisible center of the house, thinking only of the woman who’d called the night before, I leapt for the phone, and then it was too late.
“What’s new?” my mother sounded suspicious. In point of fact, she always sounded suspicious, a fact that I tended to forget when she happened to have grounds.
“Nothing,” I told my mother, cradling the phone between my cheek and my shoulder. Fiona and Francine were still sitting at the table, talking about catering and its discontents. My mother was definitely not the next to know. “Actually,” I admitted, tossing what I thought was a red herring, “Fiona’s here.” It was always safer, with my mother, to talk about someone else.
“From New York?”
“Mmm hmmm.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion,” I lied. “Just visiting.”
“No trouble?” my mother pressed.
Trouble. My mother didn’t mean, Is Fiona pregnant? specifically, though she might have meant that, too. She meant any of the kinds of trouble Fiona had been in and out of throughout the long history of our on-again, off-again friendship. Family trouble. Boyfriend trouble (Fiona had had more than her share). School trouble, job trouble. Fiona and I had known each other practically all of our lives. Our mothers were never friends.
“No trouble,” I reassured my mother.
“Well, say hello to Fi-ona for me,” my mother answered.
Francine stood up and slipped the potatoes into the oven. Fiona got up, too. Their voices trailed through the living room and out onto the back patio, a world away.
“There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.” My mother’s stern tone reeled me back to the small kitchen. (Could she know?) “Your father has worked very hard for over thirty years,” she started.
My father David was a real estate agent in L.A., commercial real estate, i.e., the Beverly Center. He’d started his business on the sale of a piece of the Atlantic City shore that became one of its biggest casinos. Then, fleeing their own Old Country, my parents moved to L.A.; my unlikely Uncle Irwin, who was only a teenager at the time, joined him a decade later. They never went back. If you spent any time in Los Angeles in the early ’80s, you probably saw their names on big white placards rammed into huge, empty lots, fixed to the corners of shining steel boxes: Margolis & Margolis. “There have been ups and downs, but he’s been very successful.” That was putting it mildly. My father’s success in real estate was huge, and both of my parents constantly measured my work at the Foundation against it as a failure. They had invested so much in me, my mother always reminded me, and what had I done to show for it? My mother herself had gone to school in fashion and textile design, gotten married, and kept a room full of lace antiquities locked up in the back of the house. “We don’t have you and your sister living here anymore, and there aren’t any grandchildren.” Was she blaming me for not giving her grandchildren? Did she want me to? I kept quiet. I couldn’t tell where this was going. “Your father and I would like to travel more.” For the same past thirty years that my father worked late every night, my mother had maintained a nominal membership to the American Society of Travel Agents, with her own Sabre number, which she used exclusively to book a spring and a fall trip to Europe for herself and my father. Now she announced my father’s retirement warningly, as if I didn’t know she had been waiting those thirty years to finally have my father all to herself. It was a paradox, I realized, waiting for whatever it was my mother had to say; my closest role model for romantic intimacy was the relationship from which I had been most painfully excluded. My mother paused dramatically. “We’re selling the house.”
“Oh.” I bit off the word before any others could come out after it. That’s how it was with my mother: the strongest feelings compacted into the fewest syllables.
The house on Dunsmuir Drive was where I had learned to bake at my Gramma Sophie’s elbow, soaking up the sweetness of her silent, flour-and-sugar love while my mother retained her mystery behind the locked door of her secret room, the egg whites glossed to white waves in the bowl. That house and baking with my Gramma Sophie were synonyms for each other. “Here, puppe.” Doll. Gramma Sophie would hand me the beater, frosted white with sweet meringue to travel with my tongue when my mother and Rebecca went shopping for clothes without me, when my sister moved on to boys, when I stayed home to study for my AP exams. Together, we baked the tin of chocolate chip cookies Gramma Sophie sealed with raisin-soft fingers and tucked into my suitcase the night before I left home for good. Without a place, where would those memories belong? That house was the Haunted House mirror in which I could still see my grandmother’s face. And my parents were throwing it away.
As I stared into the empty fireplace, it seemed suddenly that scraps from every album of my life, every era, torn, curled, burnt at the edges and all out of order, were being borne off on an eddying gust, swirling down everywhere. Among them, a single memory flared and settled like a page ripped from my gramma’s book of recipes: A day in winter. L.A., late February, hot and smoggy. A day like so many other days. My father was still at work. Outside, Rebecca and I were killing the hour before dinner, pedaling our bikes in circles up and around the sloping edges of the driveway on Dunsmuir, pretending we were gliding at the bottom of an ocean. Gramma Sophie was in the house making lasagna, stretching slick, white noodles blank as papyrus across the bottom of a Pyrex dish with wet fingers, shaking tomato sauce in runic letters across the top. Our mother stepped out, looking for the mail, waiting for something to change. She shaded her face, hovered on the step for a minute, and then disappeared behind the kitchen door, through which I could see Gramma Sophie, spaghetti sauce on her apron, looking up just as the door started to close.
We each have little compartments inside ourse
lves. I could hear my father’s voice again. I reminded myself: I didn’t get to protest. I was the one who’d left.
“When?” I asked her.
My mother went on in great detail about my father’s predictions for the spring real estate market. “As soon as possible,” she concluded. My father would keep working, but they’d travel half the year. “I just wanted to let you know,” my mother added. As if she might not have.
I hooked my fingers on the mantel of the old clinker fireplace in the living room, the phone tucked under my chin, my mother’s breath sucking hungrily at my ear. I thought of that old woman the night before with her mysterious phone call, her insinuating voice. Of course, it all made sense. My parents with all their clubby intimacy had never needed anybody else. Now they were scrubbing themselves of us, my grandmother and me. (In the new condo, there would be a climate-controlled, locked room for my mother’s secret collection of antique lace.) Why did it matter what my parents did? Getting married was supposed to make Francine my home; it was supposed to give me a new foundation, make my hearth the new family hearth. But as I stared into the ashy fireplace, I felt less like an adult about to start my life than like the child I had been. It might have been different if I knew that all of society, or if at least my own parents were behind me. But I knew they weren’t. “Okay,” I said. I couldn’t bear to be on the phone with my mother anymore. I could hear Francine’s voice, not the words but the music, drifting in from the backyard, and I wanted to go to it. “I guess that’s what you have to do.”
In the backyard, Francine and Fiona were talking about breaking the glass. You don’t have to know anything more about Judaism than Fiddler on the Roof to know the sound of a Jewish wedding is the crash of glass, followed by a hail of cheers. The familiarity of it comforted me. After all, my parents had rejected most of Judaism, too, and the Jews still managed to survive. (If our wedding was “too Jewish,” would that part repulse them, too?)
I pulled up a chair on our small brick patio, shaded by the overspreading redwood, bordered by a small, dry garden of river boulders and feathery native grasses, and let my fingers fall against the back of Francine’s hand. I’d interviewed a survivor of Lodz, once, whose sister had gotten married in the ghetto. They’d shattered a broken pane of window glass. “When the glass shattered,” Roman said, “it returned them to our hell. But there was hope in that sound, too. Continuity. Life.” Continuity—that’s what I wanted, for a wedding to connect me with my culture and my past, instead of causing the line to break.
“It represents the woman’s hymen breaking.” Fiona made a face. She’d majored in Women’s Studies.
Francine bristled. Fiona had violated a rule torn from the same book as “No one criticizes my mother except me”: No one tears apart Judaism except Jews. The problem was, Fiona had spent so much time on the West side of L.A., she didn’t always realize she wasn’t a Jew.
“Actually,” Francine, who knew a thing or two about Jewish holiday traditions, cleared her throat, “breaking the glass is about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.” A jay darted down to the patio, hopped along the warm, dry bricks, and was unceremoniously barked back up into the redwood by the dogs. Francine got up and went inside for more tea.
“She doesn’t have to get so pissy,” Fiona whispered. But she left it at that. Maybe she realized, if forced to choose, I’d choose Francine. When Francine came back out and handed her a fresh mug, Fiona chirped, recovering, “I know how we can find out.” She disappeared into the house; when she returned, she was holding a brand-new copy of Jumping the Broom: Weddings in Every Culture. Francine and I glanced at each other. A wedding guide? Francine mouthed. I raised my eyebrows. Fiona certainly hadn’t bought it for the two of us.
Fiona plopped back into her lawn chair, her pale feet bare on the warm bricks, and, dropping her finger between the pages of Jumping the Broom, she guffawed. “This is great!” she roared. “‘The breaking of the glass is a symbolic enactment of breaking the hymen.’” Francine frowned. Fiona held up her hand. “‘Which explains why it was considered important that the groom ‘accomplish’ the deed. If the bride stepped on the glass,’” Fiona raised her voice significantly, “‘the groom’s traditional role as paterfamilias was threatened.’” Fiona looked up, her face bright. “I love it!” she roared. “So,” Fiona sipped her tea, “which one of you two brides,” she raised her eyebrows, “is going to do the ‘deed’?”
Fiona was hopeless. I shrugged, as if I hadn’t already started imagining stomping on it myself.
“Ellen,” Francine answered, leaning back in her seat. Her shoulders were pink with heat against the worn wood.
“Why?” I think my mouth hung open. I’d expected at least to put up a fight for it.
Francine considered me under her eyebrows. Just like my grandmother, who always sliced the frosting off her piece of cake and handed it to me, Francine said simply: “Because I know you want to.”
I reached for my tea, shifted my weight in my chair, and came down on a sharp pinprick of pain in my foot. “Ow!” I tapped Francine on the knee.
“It’s a wart,” she said. I grimaced in horror. Francine had just gone to the spa, for God’s sake, to celebrate her best friend June’s birthday. There was not being girly and then there was being a toad. I had to get rid of that thing.
Fiona looked up from the book. “When is the wedding?” she asked, eagerly. “I need to get plane tickets.”
Francine looked at me, uncertain, as if I’d already promised Fiona a wedding date. “Did you tell your mother?”
“Are you joking?” I turned my foot wart-side to the ground. Of course, with my parents, I’d eventually face the usual unpleasantness. I wasn’t in any hurry to seek it out.
I knew she wasn’t looking forward to telling them, either.
“Are we calling up Betty and Sol?” I gently tugged her earlobe. Francine’s parents, who lived in Berkeley, had always been more approving. They were older than my parents, inspiring a comfortable rapport with them Francine ascribed to what she called my AARP-o-philia.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Francine shook out her curls.
When you grow up different from your own family, you need to find your own “people” first, friends who can support you for who you are, before you expose yourself to the people whose disapproval will crush you most of all. Regardless of our different parents, we were no different that way.
Leaning back into her patio chair, Fiona, pale from a New York winter, rolled her boxer shorts up to the tops of her thighs. She squinted at me, her left nostril rising. “You could run off and elope.” It sounded like a dare. It sounded like something Fiona herself would do.
“Oh, come on,” I protested, “you can’t just,” I snapped my fingers, “get married.” Of course, you could. Just drive down to the county courthouse, or zip over to Reno. If you were straight, that is. We couldn’t just do that. We couldn’t do that at all. We had to do all the other things. Or else, what was it?
Francine started to open her mouth. Inside the house, the phone rang out. Probably my mother again. She never called just once. Francine got up. Fiona and I sat in the quiet garden, the soft breath of March in our faces. Inside the house, Francine’s voice murmured, grew sharp with interrogation then with impatience. It wasn’t my mother.
Adrenaline spiked my veins.
Francine came back and announced: “We just had a crank call.”
Not ten minutes ago, I had decided to tell Francine the truth. But now, a sharp and immediate fear of discovery told me that I would do no such thing. In a cheater’s way of thinking, I rationalized it quite easily: Francine, after all, encompassed her own worlds. Why shouldn’t I?
( )
Anya Kamenets appeared at the Foundation on the last bright morning of March, windswept and without an appointment, a diminutive woman of about seventy, wrapped in a gray rain jacket, wearing surprisingly fashionable, fine leather shoes. It had been a week since Fiona had packed up
her wedding guide and headed back to New York. Francine and I, having decided nothing more about what it meant for two people outside the law to get married, had gone back to work, where Anya Kamenets was lying in wait. I actually noticed her as I rushed from the Embarcadero BART station toward the Foundation, into the office late after an interview off-site, but the sidewalk was full of people rushing places and I didn’t know her. She was just another stranger. I didn’t stop.
Laid out right over the bones of the old Gold Rush steamers, San Francisco’s northern streets angle off Market into the Financial District like the tines of an old TV antenna, acute angles creating intersections where you don’t expect them. The Foundation for the Preservation of Memory sits right there on the seams, in five floors of an old building made new with internet money.
Just five years ago, the Foundation hunkered, a one-room archive, in the fog-damp basement of a house in the Sunset. Then one cold summer day the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor and the grandniece of a Lodz resident met on the steps, fell in love, and decided to start a database company. With the IPO of Max2, the little archive run by Wendy Rosenberg moved its load of fog- and sea-salt-heavy boxes out of the Sunset District basement into the big, blue-carpeted new archives building south of Market, a wide Bay-facing window in the entry-level reading room looking east toward the sharp, white compass point of the Claremont Hotel.
Foundation visitors entered on the fifth floor to a large burlwood reception desk and a tasteful black-and-white photo montage. A bank of computers provided access to the archive’s catalog; behind them, rows of polished cherry work tables, wide and smooth, ran between glass display cases of camp uniforms, lockets, photos and even hair, as well as framed archival letters; beyond these, in big, wooden file drawers and tall wooden bookcases, shelf upon shelf of memory books, manuscripts and transcripts lined the walls, mute and black as mourners at graveside. That’s where she was standing when Jeremy, the temp subbing for our regular receptionist Mi’Chelle, called me down from my office twenty minutes later: gazing toward the window, her hands folded together in a knot. She introduced herself.
