by Hilary Zaid
Back out in the sunlight of the L.A. afternoon, the Westwood sidewalk glittering with little chips of silica, Francine and I nattered over soft pretzels. “What is it, anyway? We don’t look a thing alike.”
“They sense there’s a connection between us, but they can’t quite put their finger on it.” Francine popped a big white grain of salt onto her tongue. “It just doesn’t occur to most people that girls with ponytails,” she swung her hair toward me, catching me on the cheek, “go home and make wild love.” Francine held my eye for longer than a second. I looked down at my pretzel, not wanting to talk about what we hadn’t gone home to do in a bit too long.
“I spent all my money in that place, once,” I confessed, changing the subject—one kind of intimacy exchanged, I hoped, for another. “In high school. I wanted to get Liz something special for her eighteenth birthday. Something she wouldn’t forget.”
“You didn’t want her to forget you,” Francine corrected me. “You wanted her to wear your ring and be your wife.” I stuck out my tongue, but my face felt hot. Francine had been so cavalier before, when I told her that Liz and I had “traded rings.” I thought she was joking now, until she said, “Were you really going to buy me a wedding ring from the same place you got Liz an engagement ring?”
As we drove back to my parents’ house, I protested. “It wasn’t anything like that.”
But it was. I’d walked into the Jewelry Mart with all the money I’d ever saved, a thick copper- and dirt-smelling bundle of tens and ones anchored with huge, silver bicentennial dollars. When I walked back out onto Westwood Boulevard, a dark blue velvet box bulged in my pocket where the money had been. Inside glimmered an oval sapphire, the color of the night sky in summertime. I had tucked the box into my drawer for September.
“How on earth did you wait three months to reveal a surprise?” Francine and I sat in the Volvo, all its parts creaking as it settled in my parents’ driveway. We stayed outside, not ready to assume our inscrutability yet.
“Are you saying I can’t keep a secret?” I countered, propping my feet up on the dash. A squirrel perched up in the oak above us, nibbled an acorn, and pelted it down onto the roof of the car. Sitting with Francine in the Volvo at the top of my parents’ driveway, I flashed guiltily on my car ride with Jill and then, more guiltily, on what I’d told her about: my meeting with Anya. I didn’t realize until Francine answered me that I’d been holding my breath.
Francine squinted up into the tree. “I know you’re full of secrets.” Francine turned to me; she spread her hand with its sexy, ringless fingers insinuatingly on the knee of my jeans and leaned in to whisper in my ear, “But you’re terrible with surprises.”
I conceded. “I gave it to her in June.”
Francine crossed her arms, satisfied, over her chest.
When Liz opened the box, her face had broken open in joy, her big front teeth shining, her cheeks flushed with embarrassed pleasure. “It’s beautiful!” she gasped, as overtaken as the woman in the diamond commercial. “Oh, Ellen!” She had flung her arms around me, buried her face in my neck. “I love it!”
“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” Francine reminded me. We’d already decided that we couldn’t afford diamonds. Another acorn pelted the windshield and ricocheted off onto the Italian pavers.
A few months later, Liz had given me a ring back. “It’s an early birthday present,” Liz told me, sitting me on her bed, her door firmly shut. Above us, Liz’s certificates of achievement, parchment and gold foil, hung from the same corkboard to which she’d pinned the garland of dried flowers from Junior Gown Ceremony. She pulled the small box from under her sweater. Inside, I found a small gold ring, a sapphire chip flanked by pinprick diamonds. Liz’s face glowed with expectation; she’d picked it to match. “That’s queer, isn’t it?” Gramma Sophie had squinted across the kitchen counter when I came home. “A girl giving another girl a ring?”
“When did you take it off?” Francine glanced at my finger, as if the ring might still be there. “Do you still have it?”
I’d taken the ring off in college, after Liz told me she was fucking a sophomore from the campus Republican Caucus. (No danger of being called “Lez” anymore.) “It’s gone,” I told Francine, pretty sure, in fact, that it was right here in my parents’ house, inside my father’s locked closet.
Why were we even talking about Liz? I had let go of Liz long before I met Francine. But the ghost of our love, Liz’s and mine, was an old, implacable ghost, the way ghosts often are, so sensitive, so defensive, so reluctant to be swept away.
Fiona had another theory: “You need to get the fuck out of your parents’ house. Immediately.” Reprising the role of my teenage life, I had called her from my childhood bedroom for what I knew would be the last time. Fiona was living in one of those New York apartments with the bathtub in the kitchen; I could hear the running water in her apartment three thousand miles away. I cradled my old pink SlimLine to my ear, another installment in the three-thousand-year-long conversation we’d been having since we met. Fiona had always hated Liz for insinuating herself between us. She spat into the phone, as reanimated with ancient jealousy as I had been by ancient love, “Francine is ten thousand times better than that bitch Liz—who, hello! never even had the guts to acknowledge you were a couple.” That was just it. If Liz had still been in my life or at least been an acknowledged part of it, her memory never would have loomed so large. But she was gone. Except for one dried sweet pea blossom, truly gone without a trace. Because no one had ever known we were a couple. I remembered our picture in the senior yearbook, our arms around each other on the wide green Ferngrove lawn, hiding in plain sight.
Suddenly, I remembered Anya’s photo, the one of her and her “friend.” The girl with raven-black hair. “Shit,” I whispered out loud. Anya hadn’t said anything to suggest this girl had been her lover. But that was just the thing, wasn’t it? If that girl had been Anya’s lover, Anya wouldn’t say. Honestly, as an argument, it made very little sense. But it made perfect sense to me. Awed—I had never met an elderly lesbian, let alone a lesbian Holocaust survivor—I whispered: “No way.”
Fiona crunched a carrot into my ear. We had been friends all our lives, seen the same movies, listened to the same mix tapes. She had no idea what I was thinking about, but it didn’t matter. “Um? Way!”
Yes. Way! I had come back “home” to get my things, and I had the sudden sensation that I had discovered something huge that belonged to me, something I didn’t ever expect to find: Anya was my foremother. She was my “people” and her history was my history, too. If I had been born at a different time, I might have continued to live my life in secrecy. My entire past would have been erased, no record of Liz; probably, no Francine. Anya had been born in a different time. And her past was in danger! But not if I could help it.
The next day, as Francine and I pulled away from Dunsmuir Drive for the very last time, I determined to find out who the girl in Anya’s photo was. And what had happened to her.
( )
Down in the reading room, Jill’s black hair flashed. I ducked out before she could see me leaving the Foundation, glad that Anya had refused to meet at the Foundation. Francine and I were getting married. There was no sense risking a flirtation.
Anya looked skeptical when she met me at the door. “Tennis shoes,” she tsked, glancing down at my feet. It would become a refrain between us. She, herself, was dressed immaculately in gray flannel slacks, a white linen shirt, her hair held back smooth, the deep creases at the sides of her eyes and mouth bracketing her secrets.
If I had thought I was going to plunk myself down on Anya’s couch and start in with my questions about the girl in the photo, Foundation-Oral-Historian-style, I didn’t know much about Anya’s skill at creating a composition. Anya pointed to the white leather couch and sat across from me. She set two slices of cake—Linzer torte, this time—on two bone china plates on the gleaming glass tabletop. The small living room expanded with
air and light. Anya picked up her plate. She watched me until I did the same. Without speaking, we ate our cake. Once, I caught her glance at me and, parenthetically, smile.
It’s much harder to interrogate someone who doesn’t have any intention of speaking to you than it is to listen quietly to someone who has decided to speak. I had never really learned the art of interrogation. I’d learned the opposite. How to sit across from my Gramma Sophie to the flick of playing cards, the click of Rummy Tiles. Even with my clients, I had learned to listen, to be still. So I was hiding behind my teacup, working up enough momentum to initiate a conversation with Anya, when she slid a large, coffee-table art book from the side table at her elbow and opened it in her lap. On the side table, the mysterious photo huddled inside the bower of vines spilling from a potted plant. “Do you like art?” Anya asked me, paging through the book. Big Georgia O’Keeffe flowers slipped through her fingers. I almost laughed. Those huge, labial flowers were the staple of lesbian college dorm rooms the world over. I congratulated myself. She glanced up at my black pants. “Are you going to a funeral? Young people should like color.”
“I do,” I hurried to reassure her. Most of my work clothes were black, but I have so many purple T-shirts! I wanted to protest. Red, green, blue! (All the colors except yellow, which my mother always told me looked terrible on me, and which only she could wear.) Already, I was trying to please her. “I had that painting on my wall. In college.” I pointed at O’Keeffe’s Red Canna, the most lady-parts flower ever painted, a print Sam had picked out for me at the Coop to get me up to lesbian speed.
“Mmm.” Anya’s invisible eyebrows rose up in two invisible arcs. “It’s a kind of paradox.” I panicked, wondering what she meant that my having this painting on my wall was a paradox. But, of course, she wasn’t talking about me. “By looking at it so closely, O’Keeffe turns the most delicate object into something so powerful, it is almost monstrous.” Anya’s finger tapped the book, but she had looked up at me. “Don’t you think so?”
Suddenly, there was no question in my mind that she was talking about me. I was a person whose job was to look at small things closely. She seemed to be warning me that if I looked too closely at something fragile—like her story, like the girl in the picture—I would make it turn monstrous. Involuntarily, I glanced at the photo hidden in the tangle of vines.
Anya shook her head. “No. Not Sheva,” she warned me. I was right. She didn’t want me probing. But now it didn’t matter.
“No,” I reassured her. I picked up my teacup and told Anya I had finished my tea. I didn’t need anything else.
When I got back to the Foundation, I made sure Wendy was out and then I called Vicky at the Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center and placed a request to find a person from Kaunas, Lithuania. Kovno Ghetto. A woman named Sheva.
( )
Not long after Rebecca and Ted got engaged, my mother had called me to tell me she was giving her engagement ring to my future brother-in-law Ted. “If he wants it, fine. If not, fine.” Her pronouncement startled me. It hadn’t occurred to me that my mother was going to give her engagement ring, which she still wore herself, to anyone, let alone my sister’s fiancé.
“Didn’t his mother already give him her jade necklace and earrings?” My sister had showed me the set, handed down from Ted’s grandmother, saved for the Hsu’s oldest son’s bride. That the bride had turned out to be a nice Jewish girl instead of a nice Chinese one hadn’t disrupted the transmission. Rebecca, it was assumed—wrongly, I might add: my sister had long ago declared her intention to remain childless—would pass the set on to the next generation of Hsus, my sister, in the long lineage of Ted’s family that stretched from the Tang dynasty into the future, just a brief moment of static on the line. I was the oldest daughter. Shouldn’t my mother be doing the same for me?
“Was she asking your permission?” Francine had wanted to know. “Did you tell her you might want it?”
“That’s just it,” I told Francine. “It’s not that I want the ring. I just wanted her to ask me first.”
But she hadn’t and I would have to move on. When I picked Francine up from work the next Thursday, we headed out to find something that could be ours alone. “Maybe we’ve been doing it wrong,” Francine mused. “Maybe we shouldn’t try to find rings we like. Maybe we should have rings made.” Fairy tales are full of transformations, magical moments when the princess utters the secret words, and suddenly a door appears in the floor, a hidden forest lit by moonlight. Francine’s suggestion was like that: where we had encountered a solid wall, suddenly a door appeared.
We’d walked by it a thousand times. Byzantium. It was no more than a closet tucked between a diner and a tiny Provencal chicken and frites place with five tables and a wicked draft under the door. The door to Byzantium was an afterthought, a sliver, a hole in the wall. We rang to get in.
Inside Byzantium, potted orchids on thin necks craned from golden pots; a golden bowl held silver-wrapped chocolate kisses. In black velvet-draped jewel cases, hand-wrought gold rings massive enough for the fingers of giants (black pearls, black gold, titanium set with diamonds) sat beside smooth bands of swirling red and yellow golds, delicate as Pompeiian treasure. And behind each case, beckoning, sat a siren.
“How can I help you two ladies today?” A voice like running water. Long hair cast loose over her shoulders. “I’m Sarah.”
“We’re looking for rings,” Francine told her. “Wedding rings,” she added.
Sarah arched an eyebrow over one deep brown eye. “Congratulations, you two!” She glowed. “Why don’t I show you our collection. And, of course, if you like, I can help you design your own rings.”
I noticed Francine’s back and shoulders drop an inch; I felt my own neck loosen. We weren’t a ready-made couple. Why should the symbol of our relationship be off-the-rack?
Sarah’s smile twinkled. She pulled out a set of colored pencils—jewel-toned reds, purples and greens, metallic yellows and grays, chatting gaily as she chose each color. Before our eyes, two solid, bright shapes emerged; the rings, sketched in Sarah’s hand, looked real enough to pick up with your fingers.
“That’s my ring!” Francine held the sketch as if peering into a magic looking glass. Inside it, I thought, watching Francine’s gaze, she was seeing the future in which we were married.
Sarah smiled. She took out a yellow slip and began to fill out our information—name, phone number, price of the rings. Wow. The price of the rings. Francine and I both started. “I’ll just need a credit card.”
I panicked. But Francine pulled her card out of her wallet. It flashed, gold, among the gold and jewels.
Out on College Avenue, sucking chocolate kisses, we took tentative steps. “What just happened in there?” I asked Francine. Little bits of silver foil stuck to the cuticle of her index finger. The receipt from Byzantium, along with Sarah Fine’s card, peeked out the top of her pocket.
“I’m not sure,” Francine said. Her fingers brushed mine and caught as we headed slowly toward home. “I think we just agreed to get married.”
( )
“Lunch?” Jill caught my sleeve and I nearly tripped. I’d been avoiding her. It wasn’t just the attraction. Since I’d seen Anya again at her apartment, I wished I hadn’t told Jill about Anya at all. Before I’d been resolved about dropping the whole thing, but now called the Red Cross Tracing Center and I felt like I’d somehow cheated on her. I reminded myself I hadn’t done anything wrong. How could I cheat on Jill? I hadn’t slept with her. Jill was my friend; friends fall into something like love with each other, right?
We took our brown paper sacks out to Chiang Kai-shek Park, where we sat watching an old man in gray pants and a white T-shirt dump crumbs for a thousand cooing, crapping pigeons. Once, we’d had a long, intense conversation in that very spot, our knees nearly touching, about whether or not to have children, without ever mentioning husbands or wives, partners or spouses. I couldn’t do that anymore.
> Jill started talking first. “An editor from Oxford called me,” she said.
“Wow!” I gobbled down my mouthful of greasy noodles. “I can’t believe you’re going to publish your book before you finish your degree. With Oxford!” My neck flushed. Of course, I was happy for her. Jill’s work, her intelligence, was part of what made her so attractive. But I was starting to feel mildly insecure. “Don’t people usually wait until they’re facing down tenure review before they even start contemplating a book?” Earlier in the summer, Francine and I had gone to see Alvin Ailey at Zellerbach Hall. We’d sat spellbound while dancers flew, suspended, in jewel-toned spandex. I knew, though she loved it, watching dance always made Francine feel wistful. Now, contemplating Jill’s meteoric ascent, I felt a pang of it myself. The thing about Jill was, and I could see this myself, all her strengths, all the things I found attractive in her in small doses—her social ease, her intellectual panache, her certain success—were things that, in close proximity, would highlight all of my failures. It was good to remember that. “Shit, Jill,” I teased her, “you’re a regular child prodigy.” I didn’t need to compare myself to Jill. We were just friends.
