by Hilary Zaid
“I think you mean a prodigal child,” she corrected me, shoveling noodles into her mouth. We looked up at each other and laughed, our eyes locking. Jill frowned. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
I stared away toward the pigeon man.
“I’ve really enjoyed our lunches together.” I felt my neck warming. What could I say if Jill confessed an attraction? Or accused me of one? It would be wrong to admit one. It would be a lie to deny it. Bottom line: Jill was hot. Hotter yet: she cared about what I cared about. Jill looked up from our shared lunch and smiled, a warm, sad smile. She spread her hands, taking in us, our lunch, the pigeon man. “When I started doing my research at the Foundation, I didn’t have any idea I’d also be meeting someone I liked so much.” This wasn’t supposed to be happening. My stomach tightened. My hands felt cold, but my cheeks felt hot. I hoped Jill didn’t notice.
“That was a huge plus,” Jill added, “for me.”
I nodded. When I looked up, I caught her looking back at me, a huge wave of self-consciousness rising over my head. “Me too,” I managed, my face a raging fire of guilt. It didn’t matter what my head knew; my body had its own agenda. Jill’s hands, on the blistered green bench, sat very close to mine.
“Ellen,” Jill ducked her head to find my eyes, “I’ve been offered a job at Brandeis. A tenure track position.”
My stomach flopped.
“I’m moving to Boston.”
Of course. What an idiot I was, thinking Jill wanted me, even when Francine and I were about to get married, even when Jill probably never had!
“I went on the market last year. I’d interviewed but nothing came up. Then, someone in the department at Brandeis died. An old guy. I’m leaving in August.” Next month.
“Congratulations,” I mustered the words. The continent was rearing up between me and Jill. Jill and I didn’t have a friendship that was established enough to stand up over that kind of distance, did we? We were sitting as far apart as a take-out container.
I looked hard at Jill’s intelligent face. Her teeth were small and white. It hit me now with a pang of real regret: We could have been friends. But now it was too late.
A roar of skateboard wheels filled the park, reverberated off the walls of the buildings. “Yah!” the pigeon man shouted. The pigeons gathered into a single noisy blot and rose up like a cloud of smoke into the sky. The pigeon man shook his fist, alone on the brick in his thin T-shirt, surrounded by a circle of breadcrumbs and pigeon shit.
“I’ll email,” I offered. But I knew I wouldn’t. I was too attracted to Jill to risk a virtual flirtation, too easily seduced by distance to share things that I shouldn’t share. And I was too insecure to watch her rise while I stayed here in one place. We watched the pigeon man retreat, a fistful of plastic bags trailing him like a cloud.
“Yeah,” Jill smiled. “I will, too.” But I knew she wouldn’t, either. And I was glad. I knew I would be sad to lose Jill, but I told myself it was better this way, that the sadness was a symptom of the danger I had skirted, that nothing untoward had happened between me and Jill, and, as long as she was far away, it never would. It was as if, by vanquishing the danger of Jill, I could avoid, by association, the danger of Anya.
Back at the office, I had a message from Vicky at the Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center. “Sorry,” Vicky apologized. “I’m having trouble with the name Sheva. Is it possible that’s short for something else? Batsheva? Sorry, Ellen,” Vicky told me. “It’s just not much to go on.”
If I really wanted to find out what happened to Sheva, I was going to have to ask Anya some questions.
Francine had warned me early on in my job, “You’re going to get into trouble if you think these people are saints.”
“I don’t think they’re saints,” I’d countered.
“You do. Because you loved your grandmother more than anyone else, and, in some strange way, all old Jewish ladies remind you of her.”
That was an oversimplification, I told myself, as I picked up the phone and dialed Anya’s now-familiar number. And even if it wasn’t, I conceded, what harm could really come of it? Jill, in whom I might have confided inappropriately, was leaving. And I wouldn’t let it become a concern for Wendy or Francine.
Elizabeth Landau and her husband had never talked about the Holocaust they’d both survived. Dignity, she had said. So why tell Francine about Anya? Wasn’t that Mrs. Landau’s point? That, like so many women of my generation—like so many women I knew—I often confused intimacy with telling the truth?
We all have compartments inside ourselves, I reminded myself. I guessed my father was right about that.
( )
It was cold. Another Bay Area August. Francine lay upstairs in the blood-red bathroom, soaking in a hot, hot tub. I sat on the floor, sponging sudsy water over her flushed pink nipples. Her auburn curls floated on the surface of the steaming water like kelp and she lay, sweltering, in a steaming brew of cedar and cinnamon, warm smells, red smells that matched the tiles, matched her hair. And, come to think of it, O’Keeffe’s Red Canna.
Francine panted. “I could use a roll in the snow. Like the Norwegians. Or is it the Swedes? Hot sauna, cold snow.”
“You’d never make it as a Swede,” I told her.
“Are you calling me a wimp?” Francine released a long, hot gasp, the only other sound between our words, the drip drip drip of the leaking faucet. Her face was young, and beautiful, and I planned, despite all my failings, to love her even when it no longer was.
“No,” I said. But I let uncertainty hang in my voice. I just felt like teasing her, a vestige of having a little sister. “Not exactly.”
Francine’s sweaty eyebrows arched up.
“If I gave you a hundred bucks, would you run into the garden naked and let me spray you with the hose?” Our yard lay under a damp gray blanket of mist.
“One hundred. That’s not very much.”
“Forget the money.” I changed tack. “I dare you.”
If the neighbors had cared to look, they would have spied Francine’s pale flesh glowing against the camellia leaves. “You’re a cheap thrill,” I told her as I led her, shivering, back up the path.
“That’s what all the girls say.”
The phone was ringing when we got in. “That bitch!” Fiona’s words were sticky with tears. I’d seen Fiona cry a thousand times. I knew her eyes, rimmed with red, turned into sparkling emeralds of righteous fury. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about her mother or her girlfriend Chandra. “I was going to meet her at her apartment. After work. Except, I left early.” Fiona took a punctured breath. I could hear the edges of her teeth meeting. “I saw her truck parked in front of her building. Except, it couldn’t be hers—” Fiona sounded truly confounded “—because there were two people inside it making out—” Fiona’s voice rose dangerously high. She took a breath, descended. “After about a million hours, the two of them finally stopped kissing long enough for me to see her face.” Fiona paused dramatically. “It was Chandra and that bitch ex-girlfriend of hers!” All Fiona’s hardened private-eye cool fell away. She broke into rhythmic sobs, and I didn’t know what to say. I can’t believe it? From what I’d heard—graduate student, baby dyke—the drama didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was this: Fiona sobbing her heart out over a girl.
Later, when I called to check on her, Fiona’s line was busy forever. I told myself she was in the middle of a hideous drama with Chandra, though a tiny, cold chunk of me suspected she had called up her old boyfriend David Charles.
Francine and I lay in bed. Francine was reading something she’d pulled from the sci-fi collection in Jigme’s bedroom. I was reading Aimee & Jaguar for the second time, thick in the history of the two German women—one Gentile, one Jewish—who had become lovers in Berlin during the War. Felice, the Jewish partner, had tried to remain undercover in Berlin, a “U-boat,” moving through the city under the noses of the Nazis. In the glossy black and white photos at the cen
ter of the book, the young Felice, her hips wide in her black bathing suit, could have been my Gramma Sophie. I was rooting for Felice, the bold young lover who stayed in Berlin despite the danger. But I’d already read the book.
“Fiona’s lovers come and go.” Francine looked up behind reading glasses. “You’re the one who’ll always be the constant.” Then she tucked my hair behind my ears and kissed me, just to remind me that I would always be her constant, and she would be mine.
The phone rang again. It was Fiona. Not sobbing, but subdued. “Oh my god,” she breathed. “You’re not going to believe this.” I was prepared for Chandra’s miraculous explanation, the reconciliation, the love-fest. I was even prepared for David Charles.
Fiona breathed disbelief into the space between us: “Princess Diana is dead.”
( )
If we’d needed any further reminder that life was short, that what seemed immutable could change in a moment, there it was. As the doors of the BART train opened on the yeasty breeze of West Oakland station on a clear night in late September, I realized no one was going to give us permission to get married. Not Debbie, not my parents. If we’d been waiting, like Debbie suggested, for the world to change, well, you couldn’t wait for that. When I got home, I called Sarah from Byzantium. I told her we wanted her to cast our rings.
Sarah had told us that, before Byzantium’s goldsmith makes a ring, he carves a prototype in wax, a perfect replica. Then the jeweler pours plaster around it to make a mold and then bakes the mold, allowing the wax to run out. The plaster mold remains, ready to receive molten metal. Which is how something solid gets shaped in the place of an emptiness left behind.
( )
Francine stood at the counter, prepping vegetable momos for dinner with her brother Jigme and his new girlfriend while I mulled the book review for Paneriu Street: Tales of Kovno. I was still trying to find out more about Anya’s story without asking her directly. The book, an anthology, included essays by survivors who had made it into the forest and conducted forays with the Soviet partisans. Survivors like Anya. Paneriu Street included a short essay by a woman named Alina Sapozhnik, also of Kaunas. Alina, like Anya, was one of those Jewish women whose so-called “Aryan” looks—blond hair, blue eyes—allowed her to pass between the ghetto walls and the outside world. I wondered if Anya knew her.
Sapozhnik had provided information that led to the bombing of several rail lines. “Before I escaped to the forest—the Germans were looking for me then; they suspected me—I returned to the ghetto wall one last time, looking for my cousin. But Pasha and his wife, his wife’s family, had all been deported. This, for the terrible crime of stealing a rotten potato.”
The words to an old Yiddish tune wound their way through my brain—“Zuntig bulbes, muntig bulbes . . .”—as I got up and slid a tray of hot cookies out of the oven.
Francine swung her hip toward the oven door. “My brother loves your cookies.” I smiled. I liked knowing that in spite of all his groomed Buddhist inner peace, Jigme hadn’t tamed a sweet tooth I shared.
“Speaking of dessert . . . ,” I started, “we’re going to have a wedding cake, right?” I nipped a piece of broken cookie off the tray and tucked it into Francine’s mouth. Now that our rings were underway, cake seemed like the obvious next step.
Francine licked a smudge of chocolate from her upper lip. “Some big, dry white thing covered in brides?”
“No brides,” I said. “Not dry. But, what’s wrong with white?” For someone who had never had a single girlhood fantasy about a white cake or a white dress, I found myself oddly attached to the big white cake. What was the point of getting married, if you got rid of all of the symbols?
Francine looked at me indulgently. “Nothing. As long as it’s chocolate.”
She bent into the fridge to root through the vegetable drawer, pulling out carrots, garlic, little yellow butter potatoes. She held out a potato on her open palm. “Too starchy for a dumpling?” She glanced at the potato, which was a little dusty, and tucked it against her shirt, wiping it, and brought it out again into her palm. As if it had disappeared. Bulbes!
The world is full of connections, these crazy coincidences that mean nothing unless we choose to see them. Sheva, Anya’s “friend,” had been deported for stealing a rotten potato. Just like Alina Sapozhnik’s family. The coincidence was just too great. Hell, it wasn’t even a coincidence. I tore out the book review and folded it into my pocket.
Francine and I were still talking cake when Jigme and his girlfriend Suzanne arrived. “Do you just tell them you’re getting married?”
Jigme opened the fridge. “Who’s getting married?” Despite his impassive face, Jigme looked nervous for a second, as if it might be him.
“Hello.” Francine kissed him, exchanged an air hug with Suzanne. Suzanne was friendly and smart, but something about their match seemed improbable, and not just because they’d met in the campus computer lab.
“Cookies?” Jigme observed, hopefully.
“Ellen and I are getting married,” Francine announced. Just like that.
Jigme poked his glasses up his nose with an index finger, blinking. “Cool,” he said. He bit into a cookie.
Suzanne murmured, “I didn’t realize two women could do that.” Then she excused herself to the bathroom.
The only way to the bathroom was through our bedroom. “If Suzanne’s uncomfortable with two women getting married,” Francine quipped, “I’m not sure our queen-sized bed is going to help her forget about it.”
Jigme gave her a warning glance. “She’s cool,” he said.
“What do you do?” I went on, preoccupied with baked goods. “Just call up and say you want to taste cake?”
“You must need proof,” Jigme countered. Fizzy water sputtered in his glass like champagne. “Otherwise, people would just show up, posing as fiancés, asking for cake.” The fact that Jigme imagined cake-inspired crime sprees was one of the reasons I liked him so much.
“Like Bonnie and Clyde,” Francine cracked. “Culinary crime couples moving from bakery to bakery, making off with tiny squares of cappuccino truffle torte!”
“Actually,” Suzanne appeared in the doorway, “I think you need an appointment.” When Jigme raised his eyebrows, she added, “My sister just got married.” She looked from Jigme to me and Francine. “You weren’t being serious, were you?” The kitchen went quiet.
A flicker of worry passed over Jigme’s face. Suzanne turned to him, as if seeking confirmation that she’d been pranked. “They know they can’t get married, right?” and then she smiled, as if it was all one big joke, and punched him in the arm.
( )
By the time I called the fifth bakery in the phone book, I realized I was going to have to stop answering the question, “Wedding date?” with the word, “No.” When I wised up and told the little bakery right next to our bagel place, “December 15th,” they found a spot for us the following Saturday. Jigme met us there. Alone. “It wasn’t a cake-tasting kind of relationship,” he conceded.
The three of us flipped through glossy shots of sheet cakes topped with baby booties and Torah scrolls, triple-tiered wedding cakes garnished with curlicues and dots, until the server appeared, bearing three glasses of water and a platter of samples: permutations of chocolate and vanilla cake and frosting, some with mocha cream spread between the layers. We sipped water between bites while the server took our names and our made-up wedding facts. We were really doing this; still, I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable sense that we were faking.
Jigme scraped a smear of chocolate frosting up off the plate with the side of his fork, hopped up to the refrigerator case, and downed a pint of milk in three chugs. (We had asked him not to say anything, yet, to Betty and Sol; he didn’t need any persuasion to let us take that one on ourselves.) “Thanks for the cake.”
Outside, I complained to Francine, “I can’t keep lying to bakery ladies about when and where we’re getting married. I feel like I’m making the w
hole thing up.”
“You are making that part up.” I stared at Francine. “Okay,” she said. We walked along under the BART tracks. “So, let’s get a date.”
( )
On Wednesday night, just before the first Ellen episode of the season, my mother called. They were back in L.A. Not just for the season. Forever. My father, it turned out, hadn’t proved as peripatetic as his people. After a single summer knocking around quaint little towns in Southern Italy, he bought a small condo complex (“Would you buy an egg? Or would you buy a dozen?”), a place big enough to secrete my mother’s antique costume collection, but too small for us to visit, and decided he didn’t need to travel more than two months a year, and that he wanted “to work the other twelve.” My mother, who had waited her entire married life for time alone with my father, found herself, once again, simply alone.
“Are we watching Ellen?” I recognized her tone, all chummy confidence, from those nights when my father’s competitors came over for collegial cocktails with their wives, to whom my mother sidled up with her terrible, formal intimacy.
“Yes,” I said, “we are.”
Ever since they’d washed up back in L.A., my mother had been finding reasons to call daily. Had I spoken to Fiona, because Fiona’s old neighbor had been struck by a car on Sunset Boulevard. Had Fiona heard? I knew my mother just wanted to be close. But I’d spent all my life being the daughter my mother hadn’t liked or understood. Indulging her need for contact never ended well.
“You’re a lot like Ellen, Ellen.” My mother’s voice, echoing off the high ceilings of the new condo, assumed a philosophic tone.
I wasn’t in the mood to be summed up. “I don’t own a bookstore. I don’t live in L.A. I’m not blond.” I wasn’t wholesome, either, or daftly affable.
