by Hilary Zaid
“Yes,” Liz answered.
A peal of laughter from the terrace startled us. Liz dropped my elbow. Even in the bower, I could see her face harden. “We’d better go in. Not—” she added, dropping her voice, “—together.”
As we walked back in silence, I twirled a strand of hair over and over in my fist, wondering if she’d only thought I meant we shouldn’t tell anyone else, or we shouldn’t kiss anyone else, or both.
In the darkness behind the hedge, I was turned around. But Liz knew her way back. She led us to the dark parlor. Then she pointed past the girls smoking outside, their little orange cherries bobbing in the dark. “Go,” she mouthed. She passed back quietly through the door we’d come out, alone, only her white dress, luminous as a ghost, appearing for a moment through the garden doors. I walked alone along the back of the house toward the ballroom, my legs shaking so badly I thought I might collapse onto the gravel.
In the ballroom, I found Fiona fanning herself with a napkin at one of the tables by the dance floor and fell into the chair beside her. Sweat beaded Fiona’s upper lip; her eyelids hung low. “Hey,” she said.
I wondered if Liz was in the bathroom, examining her face in the mirror for signs of change, or if she’d gone back to the parlor and was sitting next to Ginny, her secret all tied up with a bright bow of irony. “Hey,” I said.
“Someone’s put rum in the punch,” she commented, wrinkling her nose at the paper cup she’d picked up.
I shrugged. It was a “wild night out,” right? It never got wilder than that—just a little rum in the punch. Then, with a jolt of electricity, I remembered Liz’s tongue in my mouth.
“I think I’m an alcoholic,” Fiona went on.
“Hmmm.” I nodded. “You don’t drink,” I pointed out.
“Ex-actly.” Fiona leaned back against her chair, case closed. She resumed fanning herself with her napkin. Then, lazily plucking at the fabric of her shirt, she leaned over and fanned down into the cleft between her breasts. She had been dancing all night.
To keep myself from thinking about what Liz and I had just done in the trees, I asked, “Why do you think you’re an alcoholic?”
Fiona blinked, a momentary eclipse of green. “Hel-lo,” she quipped. We were old enough, finally, to have put words to the fact that Fiona’s mother Cait Collins’s habit of traveling with a tumbler of whisky was not just a distinguishing personal feature, like having a mole or wearing a felt hat.
“You’re nothing like her,” I told Fiona. “You’re not like that.”
Fiona leaned in toward the table and grabbed both of my hands. “Ellen,” she pleaded—her green gaze nearly pierced me—“don’t ever let me start drinking.” She let her eyelids droop again, regarding me with a blend of sisterly comfort and deep gratitude. Then she squinted at me hard. I felt little pinpricks on my scalp as she tugged at strands behind my left ear. “What’s in your hair?”
“Ow!”
“You’ve got all this—” she freed something, held a piece of bark in front of my face, “crap in your hair.” She deposited the bit of wood on the paper tablecloth. “Oh my god!” she plucked at my head again. “You’ve got, like, an entire fucking forest in there!” Out came another piece of bark, a leaf and, after an uncomfortable bout of yanking—Fiona, with her wax-shiny black hair didn’t know anything about tangles—an entire sweet pea, its petals pale pink, and smelling intoxicatingly of Liz’s kisses, came out in her hand. I sniffed it clandestinely between my fingers as Fiona, who had moved around to the back, pulled at my hair. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Nowhere,” I choked, pressing the sweet pea deep into my palm, where I kept it, hidden, for the rest of the night.
I stretched my legs on the closet floor, wondering if I would find that flower on my shelf, pressed into a book. I wondered, too, now that Francine and I were “engaged,” was I supposed to throw it out?
Francine had never expressed jealousy over Liz, exactly. It was more like skepticism. Tall, blond, political and Southern, Liz was everything Francine was not. “What do you mean?” I’d reassured her. “You’re smart, and funnier, too.”
But that wasn’t what Francine meant. “Your big, blond WASP,” Francine called her. How could the same heart, she meant, possibly love them both? (I didn’t suppose she’d feel the same skepticism about Jill. But I decided not to think about that.)
On my bookshelf, beneath the faded cover of A Separate Peace, I found the sweet pea, its petals faded the pale brown of old paper, and smelling like first kisses. Liz had always had a hold on me. She was my first love; the genie becomes a slave to the person who lets her out of the bottle. But it was more than primacy; our love had been a dangerous secret. That was powerful, too. I put the sweet pea back into the book and tucked the book deep into my bag to take back home.
( )
The next day, I had lunch in the Valley with my cousin Nathan. One of the last times I’d seen him had been at Gramma Sophie’s 85th birthday, where Gramma Sophie, literally stricken with surprise, had sunk to the floor before our eyes. Around the table, all of us Margolises, stock-still, almost blacked out from the g-forces required not to cry, while the ice in the glasses at the big, U-shaped table shifted, audibly clinking. Nathan and I met at Jerry’s Deli for matzoh ball soup—a pale imitation of Gramma Sophie’s, and too salty, but comforting, too—and blintzes smothered in strawberry jam. I told him Francine and I were getting married, relieved to be able to tell someone in my family something real, then buckled myself up and drove home to my mother.
“The car keys are on your desk,” I called out to my mother when I got back.
Her head popped out of the room I thought of as the Vault, the place where she hid away all her antique lace. My mother’s locked room was packed with turn-of-the-century lace skirts, tea gowns, velvet walking suits. It was like that warehouse in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. After Indiana Jones has rescued the Ark from the Nazis, someone asks, “Is it safe?” You see the Ark, sealed in an anonymous wooden box, stamped with a ten-digit bureaucratic filing code; the camera pans back as the crate gets slipped onto a shelf with a thousand other boxes just like it, then pans back again to a thousand other shelves just like them. Just like that.
My mother was holding a piece of yellowed fabric, something my Gramma Sophie might have called a shmata. It looked lacy. And old. “This is the Hapsburg Coverlet,” my mother announced. “It belonged to Empress Elizabeth during her accouchement at the time of the birth of Crown Prince Rudolph. The four crowns,” my mother pointed, “are the four High Orders of Austria and Hungary: the Golden Fleece, the Order of Leopold, the Order of St. Stephen, and the Order of the Iron Cross.” It was the new acquisition my mother had been telling my father about in the car. I looked more closely at the coverlet, trying to discern in its creamy loops and threads the story my mother had found there. “Empress Elizabeth was your kind of gal.” She held the coverlet out like an offering. Did my mother mean that she was a lesbian? My mother often spoke in code. “She was a fitness fanatic. She had a nineteen-inch waist when she was sixty years old.” As a matter of fact, she sounded a lot like my mother’s kind of gal. (A slow but determined treadmill runner on whom the skin, lately, had begun to seem a little loose, my mother liked to point out that she was still, at nearly sixty, a size four.) My mother held the fabric gingerly in her hands, careful not to distress the stitching. “She was out walking with one of her maids when a young Italian stabbed her under the corset with a needle file. She walked a little further, asked, ‘What happened to me?’ and died.”
In her own way, my mother was also looking for ghosts in the mirror. But she didn’t want to let them out. “Are you going to sell it?” I asked her. “To a museum, maybe?” I always wondered what her life might have been like if she had played a less traditional role in her marriage.
My mother made a sour face and whisked the coverlet out of sight. For all I knew, I’d be the last person besides her to see it again. “Di
d you ask your cousin why we never hear from him?” My mother frowned again. “Is he still seeing that Amy?”
Amy and Nathan had been dating even longer than Francine and I. They’d met at UCLA, where Amy was computer science, Nathan film. Francine and I both liked Amy. In some way that was totally different from Francine’s other-ness, Amy was the anti-Margolis. Straightforward, a little wonky, a little literal. She wore little wire-framed glasses and sensible shoes. My mother had never liked Amy because Amy wasn’t Jewish. Scratch a goy, find an anti-Semite my mother liked to say. (So why didn’t I get more credit for being with Francine?) “He’s only ever dated the one girl,” lamented my mother, who had never dated a man besides my father.
“He loves Amy,” I pointed out. It was so much easier than telling her I loved Francine.
My mother shrugged as if that were not a very good reason. “How does he know he can’t love a Jewish girl better?” My mother and father hadn’t been to synagogue since my sister’s bat mitzvah, when my parents might as well have kicked their heels as they fled the building, singing “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!” Still, my mother maintained a stubborn, deep tribalism that had nothing to do with religion. Then, as if it weren’t a complete contradiction to everything she’d just said, she asked, “Did you ask your cousin why he hasn’t gotten married yet?” It was a variation on the question my mother sometimes threw at me like an accusation: “When is your cousin Nathan going to get married?” Of course, she had any number of theories, including the supposed anti-Semitism of Amy’s parents, whom my parents had never met. “I don’t need to meet them. I know the type.” She’d never once asked the same thing of me.
Now, with smug pleasure at the dissonance I knew this would cause in my mother, I announced, “She won’t marry him.” With his thick head of dark hair, his strong nose, square chin, and neat white teeth, Nathan moved through life blithe as a movie star. That any woman wouldn’t marry Nathan violated everything my mother had ever told us about how unusually talented, good-looking, and special we Margolis children all were (and wasn’t Nathan, after all, sort of like her own son?).
My mother actually gasped. “Why not?” Her fingers gripped the door and she started back into her room, like a turtle retreating to its shell. I could see her waiting for me to confirm every suspicion she had ever had about Amy and her parents.
I hesitated. I remembered the look on his face when Nathan told me the real reason Amy wouldn’t marry him, or anyone. He had just smeared a glob of Russian dressing under the top layer of rye bread on the second half of his pastrami sandwich, replaced the bread and clamped the whole thing shut with one hand. At his throat, the dark skin at his jaw raised in one spot in the shape of a pale, thin new moon where he had slit his chin jumping off the diving board backwards. “She says she won’t marry me until you and Francine can get married.” My eyes had welled with tears. But I couldn’t say that to my mother. Not yet. So I looked my mother hard in the eye and, out of self-protection and spite, quoting Debbie, I lied: “Why would you want to support a patriarchal, heterosexist institution whose original purpose was the exchange of women as chattel?”
If I’d intended to hurt her, I’d missed the mark. As far as my parents were concerned, the exchange of women for goods was the whole point. In their eyes, Francine and I together had committed not one but two shandas: not marrying men and not making the kind of money earned by a man. So, when Francine’s Volvo stuttered up to 105 Dunsmuir Drive at last to say goodbye to the house and to carry me back home with whatever I had salvaged, my father settled down to his salad and started in with the usual routine. It was the same conversation my father had had with me and Francine since I’d left graduate school, the same conversation he’d had with me the first night I’d arrived. He played it back the millionth time now that Francine was here, as he always did, as if Francine had more sense than I did, and could help me see the error of my ways. “You’re still working at the Jewish place?” he asked me. He knew I did. It was almost quaint, his refusal to accept my reality, as if he could truly make it disappear.
“The Foundation.”
“That doesn’t pay very well, does it?” My father was the son of immigrants, a self-made man. He already knew exactly what the Foundation paid.
Like my father’s backup singer, my mother chimed in, “What those people went through was unspeakable. But you don’t have to sacrifice your life for them. You can do anything you want.”
“Those people? Mom, those are your people, my people—they’re our people.”
“Ellen, our people come from New Jersey. We’re Americans.”
My father, a forkful of salad stuffed into his cheek, took a more practical view. “All those old people are dying,” he reminded me. “And then what?” Then, as he always did, my father turned to Francine, as if she were the one who might save us. (It was sort of touching, really, his confidence in her.) He asked his signature question, as always, with the same fresh innocence as Fiona, aged 7, after her first Sunday school Christmas, asking, “Have you heard about the newborn king?”—“Have you thought about real estate?” Francine had not.
Having Francine with me had always been my bulwark against the vast otherness that was my parents’ life. That night, I found Francine in my childhood bedroom, where she had retreated for safety. On the old black and white TV, she was watching her secret vice, Antiques Roadshow. She lived for the dissembling. (“And, Mrs. Petroskas, how much do you think your great-grandfather’s Civil War-era musket ball collection might be worth?” “Oh!” pleaded Mrs. Petroskas, her small chin tight, set-curls stiff on her shaking head, all protest. “We really never considered it to have any value at all.”)
“Are you sure my Dad’s not right?” I pointed at the TV, where a Roadshow appraiser was announcing the value of a Chippendale desk. “You love that stuff,” I ventured, considering Francine’s true passion for the Roadshow. Here in my parents’ house, I felt so small. My father had given my mother everything. Without a fortune, what would I have to give? “Antiques.” I mouthed the word with distaste.
“It’s fun.” Francine shrugged at the TV. “It’s history,” she added, meaning I should like it, too. It wouldn’t have been a sore spot, if my mother weren’t always trying to sell me on the provenance of objects.
“But, I mean,” I cleared my throat, “you want those kinds of things.” Like a fabulous, sparkly wedding ring. Things I would never be able to afford.
“You mean, I want nice things?”
I shrugged, self-conscious. “Yeah.” I worked at a small nonprofit. Francine was a preschool teacher. Should two people with such limited incomes really get married to each other? Shouldn’t we each have found someone rich?
“Don’t you want nice things?” Francine asked. When I didn’t answer, she added, “Not fancy things. Just a nice house with nice things. Like a real couch.” She looked up from my old, iron-framed childhood bed. It wasn’t fancy, but it was nicer than anything Francine and I owned.
“I guess.” I frowned at Francine, turning off the TV. When had I started scrutinizing Francine not through my eyes, but through the eyes of the world, in which Francine and I could never really be married because one of us wasn’t a male-salary-earning man? Since dinner? Since I’d walked into this house?
Francine lifted a corner of the blanket and waited for me to climb into bed with her. (It never occurred to my mother to require us, like Rebecca and Ted before they were married, to sleep in separate bedrooms; she preferred to think of us as “girlfriends” in her generation’s sense of the word.) “I’m not the one who grew up in a house full of antiques, remember?”
I hated having my parents’ wealth held against me. “Exactly,” I pressed her. Wasn’t that how it went? I’d had everything, and I didn’t care. But Francine, who hadn’t, almost certainly wanted more.
Francine chewed at the cuticle around her index finger. She was a preschool teacher; she had the infuriating, nat
ural ability not to get drawn into stupid fights. “Maybe you just assume that you’ll eventually have all that stuff, because you grew up with it. Maybe you don’t even know you want it. Maybe,” Francine looked at me piercingly, “maybe you’ll be the one who’s disappointed.”
“Hmph,” I grunted, turning off the light.
I thought that was the end of it. But as we lay side by side on the creaking trundle bed in my childhood bedroom on Dunsmuir Drive, Francine spoke into the dark. “Are we taking the dolls?” Silent, mutinous, the dolls’ shadowed faces huddled on the shelf beside the bed. The dolls had been my mother’s idea (“Every girl should have a collection of something”); the crinolines made my fingers itch; the lace trim sent goose pimples up my arms. “They’re probably worth a fortune,” Francine mused. I bristled at this, more evidence of her secret love of “nice things.” But I made myself behave.
“Would you mind if I leave them?”
“Hell no!” Francine pressed her icy feet against my legs in the creaking trundle bed. “Those things have always given me the creeps!”
Francine didn’t want anything fancy. Just a ring. From me.
( )
Los Angeles, seen from the night sky above, is a vast carpet of glittering jewels. It is a city made of glamour and dreams. I figured that, by association alone, L.A. would be the perfect place to get Francine something fabulous. The next afternoon, I took her out to find it.
From where Francine and I stood deep in the hidden recess of the Westwood Jewelry Mart, the shimmering light off the hot sidewalks looked as far away as the light at the mouth of a cave. Francine and I walked into the jeweler’s too close together, but not holding hands. We crept from case to case, reverent as museumgoers, resting a finger here and there on the cold glass: What about that one? An older man glided toward us, quiet and solicitous. Could he help us? The jeweler whisked out a small palette of black velvet, and set one ring down, gleaming. He watched silently as we took turns slipping it on. Maybe he thought I was the bridesmaid and Francine was the bride, expediting the process by leaving the man at home. We moved on to another stall where a Persian vendor peered at us curiously, a colorful silk scarf tied up around her hair. “Are you sisters?” She looked from my olive features to Francine’s fair cheeks, smiling, accusing. “Auntie and niece?” She tried to catch Francine’s eye with a conspiratorial smile. Her pointing finger seemed to say, “Gotcha!” Francine smiled a tight smile and shook her head.
