by Hilary Zaid
“A little.” Francine sat down on the bed, carefully, so as not to wrinkle her skirt. “I just want them to take us seriously.”
“Won’t they?” I’d started rooting hopelessly through my dresser.
“I just want them to know it’s real.” Real, she meant, despite the fact that no state in the United States, and no country in the world, except Denmark, recognized same-sex unions. Rabbi Loh would officiate our wedding, he promised us, but the State would not approve. Such distinctions matter. Francine tugged at the toe of her sock. Under her long brown skirt, she was wearing the fuzzy pink, green and orange-striped knee-highs I had given her for Chanukkah. “I don’t want them to think we’re just playing house.”
“Then don’t wear a costume,” I pleaded, stripping off my third pair of pants.
“Just wear what makes you comfortable,” Francine advised. As if it were as simple as that. (I still wasn’t sure which thing my mother resented more: my being a lesbian, or my wearing shirts from The Gap.)
My mother’s chastisements rang in my ears. “I can’t,” I complained. “I don’t want your parents to look at us and think that their beautiful, sexy daughter is planning to marry some ‘ragpicker’s daughter.’”
Nervous, we got to Betty and Sol’s early. Francine’s parents were still mucking around in the garden, Betty in her faded work shirt, Sol in his worn gray corduroys, their faithfulness to their Sunday routine a picture of all we meant, in our own way, to become. “But don’t you two girls look fancy.” Betty nodded at Francine’s long skirt. Sol kissed Francine. His face was pink with January cold, stubbled white, like a winter field. Out in the garden, Francine and I looked ridiculously overdressed, like penguins at the city park. I wished I’d worn jeans, and I wished Francine had, too. I wanted to blend in with Betty and Sol, a Sunday like any other Sunday. Wasn’t an endless line of these ultimately the point? “We’re putting the garden to bed.” Sol turned the ground into itself with the tip of his spade.
I know for some people—people who get married before they know the other person’s annoying habits—pushing their toothbrush directly up against the tube, leaving the cereal bowl on the counter—marriage is an adventure, a big crazy leap into the unknown with someone else, someone they hope is the perfect match. I didn’t want that kind of adventure. My parents, who’d met when they were kids, hadn’t done it; my sister and brother-in-law, who’d met when they were twenty, hadn’t done it; and I didn’t want to do it, either: pledge myself forever to someone whose socks I hadn’t washed.
I wanted to hold on tightly and never let go of the body that was already imprinted on my body, her dreams half-woven with my dreams. I wanted to be sure. And, sure, I wanted a lifetime of Sunday dinners, and Sunday pancakes, and Sunday dog walks, the certain, familiar pace of a life plotted out together. It’s not that I didn’t want anything to change—adventures, surprises. It’s more that life seemed to me like nothing but an endless string of surprises, uncertainties all piled up, waiting to happen, and some of them bad.
But marriage could be the certainty, the thing you could count on, the frame through which you took all those disparate threads and wove them into something whole, something you could show people, and call a life. Whatever their shortcomings, my parents had it in their marriage, and I thought Betty and Sol, dirty in the knees, did too.
“Ellen and I were hoping we could talk to you.” Francine’s cheeks flushed a little; her lips went white.
Betty pulled herself up on Sol’s arm and tugged at the fingers of her gardening glove, its tips blackened with moisture, earth, and age. “Are you okay?” She touched her bare fingertips to the back of Francine’s hand.
“I’m fine, mom. Really,” Francine reassured her. Betty eyed us both curiously. “We’ll be inside when you’re done.”
Francine and I, nervous as mice, decided to wait in the living room. We wanted to be right there when they came in; we wanted to get it over with. We perched on the overstuffed floral-print sofa and fidgeted with our socks. “Are you sure we shouldn’t have just told them out there?” I asked Francine. I imagined a quick, “We’re getting married!” exchanged between Hellos. I’d realized as soon as we sat down: We’d set ourselves up.
When I had come out to my parents, back in college, Sam had advised me: “Tell your parents on April Fool’s Day. That way, if they threaten to disown you, you can tell them it was just a joke.” As if. Actually, my mother moved through all the phases of grief—anger, denial, all but acceptance—within about an hour. After the predictable lament (“What about grandchildren?”) she announced, “I’ve called your father. He’ll speak to you when he gets home.” Then she wouldn’t say another word (except for “What do you want me to do, kill myself!?”). Five hours later, when my father finally pulled up in his gold Beemer, the two of them left immediately for a long walk. An hour like pulled taffy stretched endlessly from an already endless day. When they came back, the three of us ate dinner in silence.
Finally, over the remains of the salad and the Dover sole and the little apricot tartlets, my father demanded, “Have you ever slept with a man?” His tone, clinically prurient, made my skin crawl. Did he want me to say yes, or no? How much was I expected to prove?
I remembered Sam’s coaching. “This isn’t a phase,” I answered, my face blank.
“You have a choice,” my father explained. Which choice was that? To lie to myself and some poor schmuck, to make both of our lives miserable? “And you’re making the wrong one. But we support you.” The last little bit was critical—for them. What he meant was, “We’re disappointed, disgusted even. But we’re not willing to lose a child over it.” Because in some Jewish families You’re dead to us was an option.
Then my parents were finished with me. They went off to watch the news. I called Fiona. She pulled down my parents’ steep driveway in her father’s classic green Mini Cooper, smiled with exaggerated politeness at my parents, and whisked me away. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she said, shifting quickly into second. We sat clutching hands through three endless hours of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. When she brought me back home, Fiona announced, “I’m staying.” She was whispering “my li’l segotia” in my ear when my mother popped in without knocking, recoiled, and backed out again. “Jesus,” I groaned. It had been the longest day of my life.
Now here we were, Francine and I, waiting for Betty and Sol, painted into a corner. Their house smelled of redwood beams and black tea: dark, warm, ancient smells. I glanced at the grandfather clock that stood between the French doors; mercifully, the pendulum hung still. Then I looked at Francine, whose pale skin had gone a little paler, and tried to get a hold of myself. They were her parents, after all. And I wasn’t nineteen, coming out to my father, who paid my college tuition. I was twenty-eight, declaring my intentions to people who had already, for all practical purposes, accepted me into their lives. Of course, I wanted their support. More than that. Their joy. But I had already learned to accept less. Francine and I would get married, our own joy, if necessary, enough to get us by. “It’ll be okay,” I mustered, “either way.”
Francine nodded one too many times. Her moist eyelids shone in the light of the lamp. “My family doesn’t do this either, you know,” she said, her hazel eyes burning pure rust in the last of the afternoon light. It was winter; suddenly, it was nearly dark. “Emote.”
It was true. I hadn’t really thought about it, but Francine was right. Betty and Sol talked about ideas—discussed, inquired, debated—and they showed affection for each other—teased, hugged, fed—but the Jaffes didn’t have conversations about feelings. In that way, they were like my own family, but milder: no scathing attacks, no white flashes of teeth on bone, no suffocating, impermeable silences. But no feelings talk, no big self-revelations, either. What had Betty said when I’d gushed about their family? You’ve grown too fond of us, dear.
Which is why it shouldn’t have surprised me that when Francine, finally, stood up in
her straight skirt, pulled in a deep breath, looked her dirt-smeared parents both in the eye and announced, “Mom. Dad. Ellen and I are getting married,” Sol settled his hands on the knees of his corduroys and asked, “Is that possible?”
“Yes,” Francine retorted, abrupt with determination. Then, “Do you mean, is it legal?” Sol nodded. “No. But we are anyway.”
Betty was smoothing the hem of her work shirt absently with her fingers. She fixed Francine in an intense stare, her lips tight. Despite my anxieties, this was actually going worse than I’d allowed myself to imagine. I wished desperately—and I got the feeling that Betty did, too—that I had stayed at home. “Marriage is a lifelong commitment. The price of a mistake,” Betty gazed intently at Francine, “is very high.” A mistake. Is that what Betty thought of Francine choosing me?
Francine colored—with embarrassment, or anger? “Mom. Dad. Ellen and I are getting married.” Francine didn’t smile. “Just be happy for us.”
After a long silence, Sol spoke. “You feel strongly about this.”
“Yes,” she answered, “we do.”
Betty looked at Francine. The skin on her face had been softened, worn from use, lined with a lifetime of Sunday gardening, creased with maternal concern. In that moment, she looked even more deeply worn, wizened, like she could see something that we could not. She turned to Sol. “This is what they need to do.”
Francine and I retreated to her childhood bedroom; we sat on the floor, debriefing in whispers. “And these are the supportive parents,” I marveled. “It’s definitely not like this for straight people.”
Francine gazed across the room, unfocused. She’d pulled her skirt up to her knees. On her left kneecap, a little white lozenge of flesh marked the place where she had fallen onto a sprinkler and cut out a perfect cube of flesh; Betty had lifted her out of the grass like a bride. “Except Romeo and Juliet.” She bunched her skirt in her fists.
“And Rebecca and Ted,” I considered.
Francine shook her head. “Your mom got into it. The whole idea of a lace-covered, heterosexual wedding totally outweighed your sister marrying the wrong man.”
“The wrong idea of a man,” I corrected her. It had nothing to do with Ted, personally; his history was the wrong history, his continent the wrong continent, overflowing with the wrong peasants eager for escape—not our people, not our past. Well, my sister hadn’t found it. But I had. I settled my hand on Francine’s bare knee. “You did great,” I told her.
“Thanks,” she answered, sliding her hand over mine.
At a sudden terse knock at the door, Francine and I instinctively startled. Our adolescence had turned us as timid as Bambis, alone in our room with a girl on the bed, listening at each second for the hand on the door, the gunshot cry of “Girls!” Francine drew her skirt down over her legs.
Betty and Sol were standing in the hall in their coats. “We’re having dinner out. To celebrate. Go get your coats.” Francine and I looked at each other. “Don’t look so surprised,” Betty chided us. “We’re slow, but we’re not stupid.”
Betty embraced Francine warmly. I got up and she kissed me. I guessed it was good enough. Then I looked at Francine, all dressed up in her skirt; her cheeks were glowing, her eyes bright. Her parents had accepted her; it still mattered; at that moment, it was all that mattered.
I hesitated. “What about what’s in the kitchen?” I was waiting for the daily routines—chopping, washing, cooking—to reassert their primacy.
Betty stopped in the front hall. The locket she always wore in the hollow of her neck caught on the collar of her blouse. It clung, half in, half out, like a kite caught on a fence. I’d never seen her open it. “Unless you have any other announcements for us,” she settled her gaze on me, “I expect Sol and I will be around to eat dinner tomorrow night.”
( )
Now the house was quiet, except for the rain. My mother had finally stopped calling daily. Trumping her loneliness, the unspoken rule in our family: Nobody called anybody around this time of year. That’s what you do, isn’t it, to commemorate an unspeakable event?
Rain drummed steadily against the drainpipe outside our bedroom window. Inside, Francine and I lay on the bed, littered with remnants of the Sunday paper. I was daydreaming about Gramma Sophie, a faded blue beach towel wrapped tight around her middle. An orange towel hung around her shoulders, clasped in one hand like a bishop’s cassock. As she bent to pick up her flip-flops, she let out a voiceless “oh.” The sky echoed back a low, thickening thunder. My sister and I had spent the summer watching jets pass. “Aer Lingus!” Rebecca called out. We thought we could master them, every color a country, a starting point left miles behind. My sister’s pale legs cycled wildly. Then she slipped under the water. Silver bubbles trailed from her nose.
“Can I get you something, doll?” Gramma Sophie asked me.
“Why do you have to go inside?”
“Your father will be home soon,” she said. Her towel clasped in her hand, she flip-flopped to the back door in her Sav-On sandals.
Why did she have to go?
( )
“Take my car.” Wendy, ever trusting, handed me directions to the Western Home for the Aged. I had an interview that day at two with a Mrs. Klein. It was only eleven, but Wendy had spread out her lunch on her blotter: an apple, a bag of corn chips, and a green bag of sour Skittles. It was a very strange lunch for an adult human. “Honestly, I’m not sure how much you’ll get,” she offered. Mrs. Klein, her daughter Carolyn had told Wendy, suffered from senile dementia. Today was Mrs. Klein’s birthday. Her family would be there; they thought that might make the interview easier.
At one o’clock, I drove out to the outer Sunset, where the city-scape of downtown gives way to a carpet of little pink, blue, and yellow bungalows. Farther along, the streets flattened, and, though the ocean was still too far to see, the wide, unobstructed Western sky reached out toward it, worn thin with longing. At one time, this neighborhood had been nothing but sand dunes, stretching out to the Pacific. In the nineteenth century, San Franciscans called it “the Outside lands.”
Piloting Wendy’s Volvo through the Avenues, I felt like an outsider in the Outside lands. I had driven out past the tideline of internet money, past the high-water mark traced by internet cafes, little storefronts advertising Bubble Tea, where the crumbling stucco facades of Thai and Italian and Russian restaurants announced the cultural pluralism of the Thirties and Forties.
In the middle of the next block, an ancient movie theater managed with aching joists still to lift its forlorn marquee: “Welcome to the Western Home Availability NOW!! Wed. Night Bingo.” Inside the lobby, half a dozen residents lolled in wheelchairs on the faded red carpet; their heads, hanging on the frail stems of their necks, bobbed low, clouded eyes settled on their laps, on their tremulous clasped hands, on the unmoving front door. Behind the old concession stand, two attendants in floral nurses’ scrubs stood talking in rapid Spanish.
“Excuse me.” I stepped toward the nurses’ station. A man in a brown suit didn’t move his head, but his marble-blue eyes followed me like the eyes of a painting. “I’m looking for Ruth Klein.” Without breaking her rapid-fire stream of Spanish, one of the nurses pointed a lacquered pink nail to the double doors on the right.
I walked into a large, bright room where old people sat in scattered pairs, or alone on faded couches. One pair of women actually sat talking to each other; another woman played solitaire on a tray. An attendant in white pants and a white tunic approached her. “Would you like some cake?” he asked. He set the cake in front of her without waiting for an answer.
At the far end of the room, a middle-aged woman in a silk blouse stood assiduously slicing piece after piece from a large sheet cake. “Ms. Klein?” I asked. “Carolyn?”
“Ms. Margolis.” She wiped her hand on a napkin before offering to take mine. “I’m so glad you could come.” Ruth Klein’s daughter and I exchanged introductions. “My mother has never spoken m
uch about her experiences during the War,” she told me. “But, lately, she’s become,” Carolyn hesitated, “a little looser. We were hoping,” she smiled a large, eye-wrinkling smile of polite grief, “you could capture some of that before it’s too late. To leave behind some good. And for my son Jason.” She gestured toward a couch near the window, where a young man about my age with dark hair and khaki pants sat playing a game of Rummy Tiles with the hunched, white-haired woman who I thought must be Ruth Klein. They sat quietly, kitty-corner, brown plastic trays set up in front of them filled with numbered tiles, red, blue, yellow and black.
Rummikub. Gramma Sophie and I had played it endlessly, perched on the stools at the turquoise-tiled kitchen counter, long hours unspeaking, surveying the runs and sets laid out before us. I’d tried to explain it to Francine once. It’s a lot like gin rummy. Except that, once a set or a run goes down on the table, any player can add to or subtract from them, reorganize them, realign them in order to use as many possible tiles from their own tray. (Woe to the player, like Rebecca, who moved around half the pieces on the table, realized she had nowhere to put a yellow eleven, and got stuck putting all the other tiles back where they’d started.) Gramma Sophie and I spent the bulk of our turns silently working through our strategy in our heads, like chess masters, without touching a thing. It was a very slow game. “Just one more,” Gramma Sophie would beg, already starting to flip the tiles over on the counter, blank side up. She’d sweep the blank tiles together into a pile Rebecca and I swirled. “Mix ’em up good.”
The very last game we played, Gramma Sophie won. “How many rooms does it have?” she was asking me, picking from the pile on the counter with the click of her fingernails; she wanted to know about the house I’d just moved into with my “friend” Francine. “How many bedrooms?” I kept my eyes fixed on the tiles. “You have your own bedroom?” Gramma Sophie pressed me, looking up from behind her tiles.
