by Hilary Zaid
But I worried: What if Fiona, with her guidebook and her new love-at-first-sight, managed to waltz right up to the altar, nary a care for the law or lesbian feminist politics, while Francine and I were still dickering around, trying to figure out how to get married?
After work, I poured from the BART station on a wave of commuters into the smell of spring as familiar to me as the first bike ride of late February on Dunsmuir Drive between my house and Fiona’s, the smell of bursting out of doors to pedal wildly up and down the hills of the neighborhood. A smell that went with the returning call of the mourning doves. I was happy for Fiona. But, just this one time, I wanted my life to come first. I had a plan and I couldn’t wait to tell Francine.
When I put my key in the lock, the front door pulsed like we were throwing a frat party. That was odd. I walked into a tsunami of sound, bass throbbing louder in our little house than I’d ever heard it, the wooden coffee table in the living room vibrating to the deep, groaning pulse of the Gap Band. Gap Gold. Francine had been thrilled when she’d picked the used CD out of the bin at Amoeba. The living room was empty. The dogs were outside. Francine’s jeans and sweater lay in a heap at the foot of the bedroom stairs. The thick hair on my arms rose up.
“Hi!” I called out. But the music, blaring from the downstairs speakers, swallowed my voice. I set my backpack down by the front door, stepped out of my shoes, and started for the stairs.
So I’ve got to get up early in the morning, the Gap Band crooned over the wonk of synthesizers, to find me another lover. The synthesizer growled, a piano throbbed, and a cowbell punctuated the beat with a steady, disarming clank. What if Francine had already realized that getting married meant never falling in love with another woman? What if she’d decided to do something about it, before it was too late?
I crept halfway up the bedroom stairs. The bedroom door was ajar. But I didn’t see Francine until I leaned in close, low. She was standing near the foot of the bed, her face contracted in intense focus. No, not standing: moving. Undulating. Dear god. Sweating, flushed, Francine threw her head back, throat exposed, and pulsed, her curls tumbling to the side of her face. From where I squatted on the steep staircase, I couldn’t see below her waist. My heart thudded with the bass. Francine pulsed again, her eyes rolling from the shoulder, a look of total intensity on her face. From below, the music pounded . . . Young and wild. I even wanted her to have my child. Francine’s eyes stayed shut.
I crept a slow step higher—I was pulling myself up the stairs by my fingertips now, my head hunched low—then another, until I could see everything. From top to toe, Francine’s whole body throbbed, her hips rocking, her head and arms swaying, the fluid line of her movement shifting easily from one bare, arched foot to the other.
I stared, thrilled and breathless: Francine in her tank top and shorts was dancing alone.
I wanted to crouch there and watch her all night, the sexy, self-confident girl I had fallen in love with on the dance floor. What did new love have on this? I wanted to get up and put my hands on her hips, to move with her motion, to seal her mouth with my mouth. But, as much as I wanted to watch her, to join her, in the pit of my gut, I also had the same strong feeling I’d had the time I’d found the notes for an auction catalog my mother had sketched out in black ink on a Margolis & Margolis pad, tucked high behind a hat box at the top of her closet—the unmistakable sense that I shouldn’t be looking. Privacy. Dignity. Mrs. Landau’s words whispered in my ears.
I crept back down the stairs, stepped noiselessly into my shoes, and stepped out again into the evening. When I crossed Broadway, I glanced over my shoulder, behind the redwood that stood outside our bedroom window, I thought for a moment that I could see the silhouette of her arms, outstretched above her head, moving in time with some invisible music against the blinds.
I came home an hour later. The house was quiet, Francine stretched out reading in the living room, the Journal of Early Childhood Education folded back in her hand. As if nothing had happened. That was okay. That was normal. I cupped her soft cheek in my hand, leaned down, stretched out along her body and kissed her, and Francine, flush with her own sensuality and anchored deep in her own body, kissed me back.
Then Francine noticed the museum sticker still clinging to the jacket I’d last worn a week before to SFMOMA. “Remember, I met Debbie there?” I prompted her, though, in fact, I’d never brought that part up. Francine squinted and bit her cuticle. “You agreed to go to a museum?” She stared at me as if trying to x-ray my skull. “Huh,” she stared at me, “that’s odd.” Though I hadn’t told her where we’d met, I’d told Francine what Debbie had said. Debbie’s disapproving stance on gay marriage hadn’t surprised her. (“Put four lesbians in a room and you’ll have a debate about it,” she reminded me.) She’d been disappointed, but not in the same way I had been. According to Francine, a person like Debbie should know better than to wait for the law. Francine’s confidence had been enough to turn our disappointment into fight. Now she was picking the sticker off my coat like a tick.
I plucked it from her fingers and rolled onto my elbow. Francine had her secret life, I reminded myself, remembering her dancing silhouette on the shades. These were the distances married people gave each other: privacy. Dignity. “Fiona’s dating a woman.”
Francine blinked up at me. “Oh my.”
I sat up and pulled her up next to me. “Are you surprised?”
Now Francine pursed her lips, which were still wet from mine. “Am I surprised?” Staring out the French doors, she squinted into the distance and tapped her chin with a finger, until finally she answered. “Yes.” She paused. “But also, no.”
I nodded. “We need our own damn wedding book.”
Francine turned to me like a gangster who had just agreed on a hit. “Yes,” she sucked her teeth, “we do.”
But when it came to looking for wedding guides, Francine’s bravado seemed to desert her. We agreed to meet after work at Cody’s Books on Telegraph, the biggest bookstore around. On Tuesday evening, I walked into Cody’s and started cruising the aisles for Francine’s hair. This is probably not the most intimate, her-soul-knows-my-soul means of seeking out one’s beloved, but Francine’s auburn curls are pretty easy to spot in a crowd. No hair in Psychology, New York Times Best Sellers or Gay and Lesbian. I headed out to the Children’s Annex, but she wasn’t there, either. Finally, sidled up by the magazine racks, I found her. Despite the warm, late spring weather, she had her denim jacket pulled tightly around her, and her hair carefully tucked up under her dad’s old fishing hat. The cap on her head—Francine never hid her hair, which she thought was her best feature—gave her a distinctively furtive look, like a PTA mom out on a porno run.
She looked up, startled, her eyes wild. “I found these.” She revealed the magazines she’d stuffed behind the covers of an open New Yorker: Bride, and Modern Bride and Contemporary Bride. Wedding porn. My sister had collected stacks of them.
“Are we modern brides?” I flipped through about a hundred reeking pages of ads for perfumes and makeup. Stick-thin models in body-hugging, white satin dresses leapt from every page, yards of lace running riot behind them like fantails. “Don’t they have one called Postmodern Bride?”
Francine looked concerned. “I haven’t seen that.” Her sense of humor had drained away with the color in her cheeks.
“Why are you acting so freaked out?” Francine and I had agreed we needed some game plan for this. Why was she acting weird about it now? I stuffed the magazines back into the rack. “You’re not afraid someone is going to find out you’re marrying a woman, are you?” That didn’t seem like Francine’s style. But she wasn’t officially “out” to the parents at the preschool, either. In other parts of the country, that could cost you your job. Francine worked in Berkeley, but the parents, I remembered; the parents . . .
“Ha!” A single, explosive laugh burst from her throat. “Did you see that crap? I’m afraid someone might think I’m a bride-zilla!”
I h
eld up The Essential Guide to Lesbian & Gay Weddings I’d spotted in the Gay & Lesbian section. Francine turned the pink-pearlescent cover over in her hands. “Were there inessential guides, too?” She pulled off her cap and shook out her curls.
In the line snaking toward the registers, a young woman with long blond hair and a huge diamond ring glanced down at the book in my hand. “You might want Here Comes the Guide, too,” she offered. “It’s really good.”
( )
Francine and I were starting to get excited. Maybe not first-lesbian-love excited, but, for the first time since we’d used the word “married,” we started being able to imagine what a wedding could look like. Debbie might not approve. But we weren’t alone. Someone had written a book for us! It was in this mood of hopeful anticipation about claiming our rightful place in the world that I waited at the elevator banks for the arrival of Michael Freund, seventy-one, who had shimmied up a light post to see Hitler’s smudge of a moustache as the Führer marched into Austria.
Mr. Freund arrived precisely on time, a tiny, adorable man with a twinkling smile and sweetly wrinkled cheeks who reached out to pinch my own. “You’re Ellen?” he mimed complete surprise. “I expected a middle-aged lady! But you’re so pretty!” He was so effusive in his neat gray slacks and charming smile, I took it as a compliment. As we walked down to the interview room, Mr. Freund kept exclaiming over my lovely dark hair. “Do you have a boyfriend?” he wanted to know. “A husband? Do you have kids?” It might sound creepy, coming from an old man, but it was sweet, the way all of my clients’ polite questions were sweet. They had suffered terribly in their own lives and, for me, they wanted unadulterated happiness. They wanted me to have a future.
I turned to Mr. Freund and smiled as widely as I could. Debbie had accused lesbians who “marry each other” of pretending. So, I would stop pretending. “A girlfriend,” I winked, “and she’s a beauty.” If he had been an old lady, it would have been harder, but I had never known my own grandfather, and I’d always had a certain collegiality with male friends on the subject of women. It was the most natural thing in the world.
But Mr. Freund did not seem to think so. His face fell flat, toneless, the face of a person who has just suffered a cardiac event. “I’m sorry.” He rooted around in his pockets, as if he’d just realized he’d forgotten something. “I think I would feel more comfortable with someone else.” At that, I could feel my face go flat, too. One survivor I knew had had a gay brother, had seen him suffer doubly for being gay and Jewish. Some of them had seen the original pink triangles. Sometimes that didn’t matter. I was glad he wouldn’t look at my face, so he couldn’t see me blink back tears.
I paged Wendy. When she came down, she assured Mr. Freund: “Ellen is the best we have. She’s a trained oral historian.”
But Mr. Freund repeated, “I’d be more comfortable with someone else.” And what else could she do? Our clients needed to be comfortable. This was about them, not us. That’s why we didn’t tell clients things about our personal lives. Or, at least, why I didn’t. Mentioning a husband wouldn’t be the same.
Afterward, when we debriefed, Wendy was apologetic. But she was also curious. “What prompted you to come out to him?”
“He asked if I was married.”
“Huh.” She looked puzzled. The springy little curls around her glasses trembled. “I’m surprised no one has asked you that before.”
“They always ask,” I told her. “I just never answer.”
“It’ll change,” Wendy reassured me. I imagined Anya’s parenthetical smile folding down.
Maybe it would change when these people were all gone. I loved these tribal elders and their sweet, wizened faces. But their quiet discomfort hurt more than any random “Adam and Steve” ever could. Their personal lives and mine were two worlds that had to be kept apart. That was the day I decided once and for all I would stop trying to run into Anya Kamenets.
“Hard day at the office,” I told Francine when I got home. It was early May. The mourning doves were cooing in the eaves, and it seemed right then they mourned for us. I worked with the very old and Francine worked with the very young, and this would always be a problem.
“The very young aren’t a problem at all,” Francine corrected me. “Their parents are. For now.” She kissed me sweetly, and I disappeared to work on the one thing I could maybe sort of control: my wart.
As I sat on the lurid, red-tiled floor of our little bathroom, I remembered the first time I lay in Francine’s queen-sized bed watching her dress for work. “Why do you always put your hair up?” I’d asked, as she clipped in a barrette. Much as I loved the notion of Francine uncostuming herself from her public life, pulling her hair loose at the end of the day just for me, I also loved her long hair and wondered, selfishly, why she smoothed every curl away from her temples every day.
“Lice,” she answered.
“Oh.” I’d tried to sound unconcerned, and resisted the urge to scratch. “Um, isn’t there anything you can do about that?” I’d tried to sound casual. I’d waited how long to get into her bed? I couldn’t exactly go flying from her room at the first sign of . . . animal imperfection. (“There’s nothing you could do,” I’d told her, trying fruitlessly to seduce her, “that would make me stop wanting you.” Bad habits, I’d meant, or finding out she didn’t like popcorn with Raisinettes. Not being infested with parasites. What else didn’t I know about her?)
I slipped a finger nonchalantly against my scalp. There must be some chemical you could use to kill them. Napalm, maybe?
Francine was staring at me. “Oh my god!” She laughed nervously. “I don’t HAVE lice!” She stepped toward the bed and pushed her head into mine. “Ellen!” she scolded me. “You’re such a hypochondriac.” She pulled my hand away from my head. “Here.” She sunk her fingers into my hair and I went limp with delight. Gramma Sophie had used to scratch my head like this in front of Marlin Perkins’s Wild Kingdom. “I work with children. Putting my hair up is a precaution.”
Francine had always seen my weaknesses, I realized. It was a good thing I had decided to forget about Anya, because, no matter how clever I thought I was being about sneaking around, Francine would definitely find out.
I was still sitting on the bathroom floor, scraping away at the wart with a small plastic scalpel, congratulating myself on my good sense, when the phone shrieked by our bed. The knife slipped. The point caught in the thick skin at my heel, where I would soon sprout another wart.
“Have you seen Die Hard with a Vengeance?” My mother pronounced the name of the movie gingerly, the way a woman in high-heeled shoes might lift her own dog’s shit out of her garden, delicately, with the tip of a spade.
“Have you?” I answered.
“No. But the assistant to the associate director was here yesterday.” My mother waited importantly.
“And?” I prompted her.
“And,” my mother ignored me pointedly, “they’re buying the house.”
105 Dunsmuir Drive. “Oh.”
“Escrow closes in two months.” I studied the blade in my hand and shut it absently. “We’ve lived in this house for almost thirty years.”
“Right.”
“We had a good life in this house.” Her voice got all chunky, clotty with swallowed tears, but she didn’t say more. Why did my mother do this to me?
I wished that I could share this simple sadness with her, but I’d known her all my life. I squeezed a single word out. “Right.”
Downstairs, I could hear Francine flipping channels on the TV.
“Well,” my mother inhaled loudly through her narrow nose, “if you want to save anything, you’re going to have to come clean out your own crap, my dear.”
( )
My crap would have to wait. I had a very important interview with Mrs. Hannah Weiner, survivor of Janowska, a transit and forced labor camp on the outskirts of Lvov, serving the German army as part of the German Armament Works. The camp had been liquidated in 1943. Bu
t before it closed, the Jews at Janowska, ordered to burn all the bodies in the mass graves, “struck back with what we could find, what we could muster,” and a “very, very few escaped.” Mrs. Weiner was one of these. She may have been one of less than a dozen who were not rearrested and killed, deported to Belzec or shot in the Piaski ravine. This was not an interview to miss. People changed their minds. They were old. They died.
Mrs. Weiner came to the door of her eighth-floor apartment in a pale blue silk blouse and a straight skirt, her belly pressing outward in the shimmering fabric like a waxing moon. “Come in, come in,” she said, her accent familiar, thick and warm. The skin at the bridge of her nose was thin and pus-colored, like a scab recently picked away. She’d had cancer, I remembered, chemotherapy followed by a series of tenacious infections. Don’t, I reminded myself, think about it.
Mrs. Weiner slipped behind the counter of the little kitchenette, struggled to fit the mouth of a kettle underneath the tap of the little porcelain sink. The apartment was small, but light and clean, its cozy sitting area squared against Mrs. Weiner’s miniature veranda. An angular loveseat, clean lines and match-stick legs, drew close against a spare wooden coffee table. Perched on a stand, a potted philodendron trailed a small jungle of heart-shaped leaves across a side table strewn with intricately carved walnuts, their shells knotted with twined, pleading faces. They looked merely knotty, until you picked one up, and then the eyes stared back at you, face upon twisted face. Disarmed, I set the walnut back down. I’d come to claim something more elusive, and rare: the tale of a survivor of Janowska.
In 1939, Lvov had the third-largest Jewish population in Poland, some 200,000 Jews. Between the Soviets and the Nazis, ghettoization and “reduction,” the population dwindled to 86,000. From the ghetto, only 2,000 of Lvov’s Jews made it to Janowska. Of those, a mere 120 were used for forced labor. All the others were killed. Of the 120, how many had escaped? Five? Ten? A dozen?
