by Hilary Zaid
“Ms. Kamenets.” I offered my hand.
“Anya,” she corrected me without unknotting her own. Her eyes, a pair of sideways parentheses arcing up above her high, rosy cheeks, naturally asquint almost to the point of closing, squeezed tighter with a charming, close-lipped smile that sent a fan of wrinkles spreading out to all the corners of her face.
I introduced myself, too. “Do you have an appointment, Ms. Kamenets?” If Ms. Kamenets—Anya—had an appointment, it was news to me. My boss Wendy was out. Mi’Chelle was out. Francine and I were getting married. My parents were selling the house. So much had changed. Maybe I’d forgotten. “Does Ms. Kamenets have an appointment today?” I asked Jeremy, the temp, a disconcertingly skeletal guy with drooping, shoulder-length brown hair, sounding as calm as possible and hoping to god I hadn’t fucked something up. But Jeremy had burrowed his head back into a worn copy of A Brief History of Time.
Anya smiled again. “I would like to talk,” she consented. Her hair, which was perfectly straight, was pulled back and tied with a black silk ribbon.
We never took interviews with people off the street. No one ever came in like that. I tried again. “Do you have an appointment with Wendy Rosenberg?”
Anya shrugged, a big comic shrug, shoulders up to her ears, hands held open at her sides, eyebrows shooting up. She nodded encouragingly. “We can talk?” Was it her, the woman from the phone?
“Ms. Kamenets,” I asked her gently, “are you a survivor of the Holocaust?” Weird as it may seem, there were any number of reasons people showed up at our door, and weird things had been happening.
“Anya,” the small, parenthetical woman corrected me. “Yes,” she answered, nodding; her face broke out again in joyful wrinkles, as if she’d just agreed to something delightful, while her mouth turned down in a regretful smile of abject misery.
“Let’s make you an appointment,” I offered. We never interviewed without preparation. Some research, an intake, so that when I met with a client for the interview, I knew the context, I had some questions to ask. People think of the Holocaust as one monolithic event, but it wasn’t. It happened in differ-ent places to different people. There were six million different stories. I turned to the reception desk to use Jeremy’s computer. “What day would be good for you?” I asked, my back to Anya Kamenets.
Then something weird happened again. “What day would be good for me for what?” answered my boss, Wendy Rosenberg. Small, warm, and curvaceous as a round of challah, Wendy had stopped behind me, still pulling off her coat. Anya Kamenets was nowhere to be found.
“I thought you were out for the morning?”
“I forgot my laptop.” Wendy shrugged.
There was no way I was going to tell Wendy Rosenberg that a mysterious woman had called me at home, that a mysterious woman (the same one? A different one? I decided she must be the one) had shown up here and disappeared. (Had she been here, or was I imagining things? I glanced at Jeremy, who didn’t look up from his book.) There was no question in my mind what Wendy would say: Make it stop. I didn’t want to.
I walked into the large, upstairs office I shared with Wendy as if it were just a normal day at the office and, while Wendy picked up her laptop, glanced at my phone: no messages. Then, as soon as Wendy walked out again, I hurried down to the card catalog of survivor testimonies to look up Anya Kamenets.
I found her. Down in a booth in the media room, I learned that Anya was one of the few survivors of Lithuania’s Kovno Ghetto. It was a very typical interview, conducted just nine months earlier, right there in the new Foundation building, in the glassed interview room with its fresh blue carpet and its slightly uncomfortable, homey, overstuffed blue chairs. Wendy and Anya Kamenets. Same raincoat, same smile. I had probably seen her walk in.
Anya had gone from Kaunas’s Jewish intellectual elite to the ghetto, to the partisans, the hard-labor camps of the East. I usually loved to hear stories about the Resistance, proof that we fought back. But there was no joy in Anya’s tale, no spark. Kaunas. Kovno. Slobodka. She recited a hero’s tale. Told with great detail. Little feeling. She often smiled. The smile seemed to be a reflex of her face, a habit of survival. It hid her eyes.
Anya had already left her testimony. So why had she returned? Emerging from the dark media carrel, rubbing my eyes against the brightness of the late March day streaming through the big bay-facing windows, I decided that she must have disappeared because she’d seen Wendy. I was convinced that she was the woman from the phone and that for some reason she had come to see me.
Sam, my college girlfriend, disagreed. Instead of going straight back to my desk, I’d stepped outside onto Market Street and found myself at a phone booth, where I’d pulled out my Sprint card and called the one person I knew who would never call up Francine.
Sam was a blazing intellect, and, by virtue of coming out nine months before I had in college, she had always seemed exponentially more certain of our place in the world. (As newly hatched gay college students, we matured in dog years, frantically making up for the true adolescence we had missed.) She’d spent the bulk of our senior year holed up in a windowless room we called the Monk’s Cell, smoking cigarette after cigarette, typing out a thesis on medical history and eighteenth-century French literature called The Anatomy of Desire. If anyone would have a brilliant insight about what it meant that I had fallen into a state over a little old lady, it would be Sam. She tended to dicourage obsessional thinking in others, having found it was much harder to nip the habit in herself.
Sam surprised me by picking up the phone. She was a medical resident now in Toronto, working days at a stretch, a far cry from the girl who had smoked on Sunday mornings in bed, picking out Tracy Chapman songs on her blue guitar. “Hey. You called me!” She went on to tell me that she had just met someone, another intern. It occurred to me that I should tell her Francine and I were engaged. But, as Sam told me more about this new girlfriend, she drawled a little ruefully, it seemed to me, for someone who was newly in love. I knew, too, that she was prone to epic fits of melancholy, to bouts of depression. Sam was my ex, the woman I had left in order to meet Francine. “I just had a strange visit,” I told her instead.
“She came in for an interview with you, even though she’d already interviewed with your boss?” Immediately, Sam sounded thoughtful, right in her element. She’d always been a magnet for confidences. “Do you think she’s a chronic?”
It was a term we’d used in college, back when Sam and I staffed SHOUT!, the GLBT sexuality/coming-out hotline run out of a basement room on batik-draped couches. Our supervisors had warned us about the chronics: not students, but lonely relics of a not-so-distant age who called year after year, hoping to tell the same agonized stories, to say the same forbidden words to a sympathetic, eager gay college student. (I glanced over my shoulder at the Foundation building, guessing my life hadn’t changed so much.)
Could Anya Kamenets be a “chronic”? I’d never heard that term used to describe a Holocaust survivor. Mostly because, more than anything, they were people who had chosen not to talk. But if Anya Kamenets wanted to tell her story over and over, compulsively, who would dare to call it chronic?
“If you’re not sure,” Sam suggested, “you should talk to your supervisor.”
“Hmmm,” I traced my finger along a heart scratched into the phone booth’s glass, “I’m not sure I should do that.”
“Because you already feel like you’ve done something illicit,” Sam offered. The illicit had always been Sam’s area of expertise, in literature and in love, but she sounded tired of it now. I did feel like I had done something illicit. As if, even though I didn’t know anything about Anya, I’d invited her there myself. (I hadn’t mentioned the mysterious phone call.) That was natural, Sam said, a kind of projection and counter-projection that was normal in these cases. As long as I didn’t act on it. Maybe she had grown up; even Sam didn’t think that everything needed airing anymore. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Sam reassured
me with the air of someone who had left the intrigues of Liaisons Dangereuses for the white coat and stethoscope. “Unless you hear from her again, I wouldn’t let it bother you.” She already sounded like a doctor. Though I knew I should take her advice, the idea that Anya was simply a chronic left me feeling strangely deflated.
After we hung up, I kept wondering what “acting on it” would mean. A normal person wouldn’t be thinking about how to have an illicit conversation with an odd old lady. A normal person in my shoes would be obsessing about wedding cakes and—and—wedding stuff. Clearly, I wasn’t a normal person.
For a long while after I stepped out of the phone booth, I watched the F-line trains glide up and down Market Street like colorful fish. Though the line was fairly new, the trains were old—refurbished, antique cars from cities around the world. This one was bright orange, and angular. Milan, it read. Underneath that, the original date: 1814. As I walked back to the Foundation, the F-Market sailed on, fresh, shiny and new, still haunted by the people to whom it had once belonged.
( )
But as Francine and I got ready to go to her parents’ house for dinner the next Sunday night, I decided I was being too hard on myself. I was starting a new life with the woman I loved. Not just the woman I loved—her family, too. Sunday dinners with Francine’s family had always comforted me with the idea that I could have a future that was better than my past. Her parents seemed so different than mine in such fundamental ways. What Francine always said about that: “Because they’re not your parents.”
Francine’s parents Betty and Sol lived in North Berkeley, in the house where Francine grew up, at the top of a dead-end road on the oak-gnarled outskirts of Tilden Park. The first Sunday night I met them, when we pulled up to the house on Laurel Road, Sol and Betty were working in the garden, Francine’s father pruning roses, Francine’s mother kneeling by the thick green sod, pulling weeds.
They’d been older than I’d pictured. Betty had straight hair that she kept short and almond-shaped hazel eyes, the color of Francine’s. Her cheeks were round, but loose under the jaw, and the skin on her neck looked slightly papery. Francine’s mother wore sensible, outdoor clothes that were the antithesis of any outfit in which I had ever seen my own mother: a plaid shirt, relaxed-fit jeans, dirty sneakers. (I could no more see my mother and father working in their garden together than I could imagine them scrubbing their own toilets.) Standing on the grass, Betty wore no jewelry, with the exception of a simple gold wedding band that cut slightly into the soft flesh of her finger, and, just visible in the V of her Oxford, a round gold locket, big as a silver dollar, the kind that held a photo. In her greeting—“Nice to meet you, Ellen” —I detected the faint traces of an accent.
“South Africa?” I asked.
“Very good.” Betty’s eyes twinkled with sardonic appreciation. “The really thick guess, ‘Scotch?’ That’s not even a language; it’s a drink!” She laughed just a little acridly. Her gaze, when she laughed, focused on a point far in the distance. “We came over when I was a little girl.”
Sol had put down his pruning shears. He took my hand in a big warm grip and shook it, grabbing my elbow with his gloved hand before he turned to hug Francine. He was short and compact with tendrils of pure white hair curling in a cultivated patch at the top of his head, mowed clean and straight around his nape and ears.
Next to her parents, Francine looked like a living model of the Mendelian genotype chart: her mother’s hair and eye color, her father’s hands and curls, evidence of a neatly split genetic merger. Unlike me, the genetic replica of my father, for whom my mother had apparently provided the services of a pod. (I do think she loved me for the resemblance, and resented me for the lack of representation.) Together, they looked a lot like people who had done it right.
Every Sunday for years, we’d returned to dinners and conversations over their French country table. And over the years, Betty and Sol felt more like family, more like parents, in a way, than my own parents, because the things Betty and Sol cared about were the things I cared about, too. For years, after Sunday dinners when Francine rose to help Sol with the dishes, Betty crooked her finger for me to follow her into Francine’s old room to talk politics while she sewed. “I have a feeling you’re going to be around here a lot,” was how she’d long ago put it, “we might as well teach you something useful”—but she was in fact sounding me out. Betty had a dangerously sharp little pick with which she tore out old stitches. While we talked, she picked out little details about my thoughts and opinions like bits of old thread. It was an interest in my life so different from my mother’s that I mistook it for reciprocity, for openness.
Though we hadn’t announced anything, Sunday dinner, now that we’d become “engaged,” had taken on a new weight. (“Will you love me when I’m fat?” Francine asked, pulling on a pair of jeans in front of the mirror. She’d started anticipating a married future in which we watched each other get lumpy and old.) We sat at the old French country table in our accustomed places, Sol and Betty just back from a trip to England. Betty told us all about Japan Centre. And then: “Your father took me to an interesting lecture about carbon molecules . . .”
Francine’s little brother Jerome, who went by “Jigme,” had come back from Tibet in 1994 after two years away and surprised us all by announcing that he had decided to major in civil engineering. (We suspected he was a converted Buddhist, but didn’t want to tell his parents. Not because, like my ambivalent mother, they would think he had betrayed his people, but because Sol didn’t believe that God was subject to proof.) His brown hair stood in soft spikes all over his head, like firmly beaten egg whites. He pushed his glasses up his straight, blunt nose with the middle finger of his left hand and looked at Sol. “I thought this was vacation,” he said, swallowing a mouthful of penne.
“That is his vacation,” Betty teased dryly.
Francine and I had agreed not to tell her parents about our engagement until I’d told mine. Rather, Francine had announced to me that she wouldn’t be telling her parents until I told mine because she knew that, otherwise, I might never do it. If not telling Betty, Sol, and Jigme that we were getting married felt something like an itch, it was an itch soothed at least partly by the balm of their conversation. The dinner table banter at my own home always orbited around places and things—that parcel, that condo, this car—solid, finite, and, to me, uninteresting; at Sol and Betty’s table, we talked about books, movies, ideas, a medium in which I found I could swim, weightless. If Sol had a tendency to pontificate, so did my father. If Betty had a tendency to be wry, my mother did as well, and more pointedly. Sol always expected us to talk back, and challenging him was one of the sauces of the meal. If there were yawning silences, I was too used to them to notice. This, I thought, was family happiness.
That night, after dinner and sewing-table time, we collected quietly in the living room. Betty, carrying in tea, paused to touch Sol’s crown after setting his cup on the table. Outside the living room windows, hidden frogs croaked the spring night from puddles down in the park, where silent salamanders crept the night roads on sticky orange feet. Jigme padded across the hardwood floor in his socks. He settled down beside Betty on the couch with a copy of Snow Crash and a bowl of Phish Food. Betty’s eyes flicked over the top of her Gourmet magazine, while Francine and I sat on the floor, our knees crossed under the coffee table, playing chess, which Sol had taught me. She moved her knights aggressively across the board, forcing me, once again, to choose between my bishop and my rook. “Mmmmm hmmmm,” Sol cleared his throat.
“Dad, don’t help,” Francine protested. “He never wants to play, but he always butts in.”
Behind us, the glass door to the yard reflected the quiet figures in the Jaffes’s living room like still, luminescent creatures at the bottom of a silent ocean.
“I wish we could bottle this,” I said out loud. It was something I never would have said in front of my parents, even when we were happy together. It would
have spoiled the happiness.
“Chess?” Sol and Jigme asked at once.
I glanced up at Francine, her features warm and familiar in her soft, pale face. “Family happiness.”
Jigme blushed and looked at his socks. Sol guffawed and Betty, her pencil poised in the air over her puzzle, looked at me aghast, as if I’d just suggested praying together. “You’ve gotten too fond of us, dear.” She returned to her puzzle. A sharp wit, a dry humor, a powerful, self-effacing art of understatement: These were the things I loved about Francine, too.
When I looked down at the board, Francine checkmated me. It was time to go.
We were still standing in the light of the family home when Francine squeezed my hand and said, “You really see my parents as old people, don’t you?” Having an older mother, someone who never understood about fashion or music, had always been a sore point for Francine, who envied all of her school friends their young mothers. It drove her a little bit crazy that their white hair made Betty and Sol so appealing to me. But it seemed unfair that Francine had her old people and I didn’t have any. I protested, “What? You have a happy family.” Betty and Sol had a quiet, regular domestic life. It wasn’t fancy, just comfortable, and that seemed just right to me. “I want to be like them. Is that so bad?”
It seemed like an answer when Francine stroked my palm, the one with the pale, thin scar that had replaced my life line, and blurted, “Let’s get rings.” I didn’t realize she was changing the subject.
“Really?” I asked her. Of course, all the married people had them. “Rings?”
