by Hilary Zaid
Doesn’t everyone have a secret, parsimonious heart? Everyone withholds something: time, sex, love. The past—which most of my survivors kept hidden. Certain delicate facts. I thought, gingerly, of Anya, arranging her French tulips in a crystal vase. I sat quietly justifying myself, and tried to think of the thing Francine withheld from me. Right then, I couldn’t think of anything.
( )
Whether or not we merged our money, we still had plenty of spending to do. Some of it not as nice as cake and rings.
“I told you this was a bad idea.”
Francine pushed a piece of cheese pizza across the smeary brown Formica at Sbarro’s in the Stoneridge Mall. “Eat.” She took a swig from the tankard of Diet Pepsi sweating on the table, “You’ll feel better.”
Eight years ago, I’d marched up the escalators of this mall hand-in-hand with Debbie in our Queer Nation T-shirts, chanting “We’re here; we’re queer; get used to it!” while frightened mothers yanked their children away, hard, by the hand. Now, Francine and I sat defeated in a greasy vinyl booth, sucking up Diet Pepsi, two American consumer brides, out on the prowl for wedding dresses.
In the wedding shop, I had blanched at the bolts of lace that smelled like the inside of my mother’s secret room; I crouched, catching my breath, in the corner.
“Shopping malls make me sick.”
“Shopping makes you sick,” Francine corrected me. “Mentally ill.”
But Francine was not one to give up when it came to shopping for clothes. “I think we should look for dresses in New York,” she announced. “We have to go anyway, right?” She meant Fiona’s big fundraiser for GMHC. Fiona, at that moment, was sitting in our living room.
“It’s my biggest event of the year,” she confirmed. “Now that everyone’s on the cocktail the mood is actually festive again. You have to come.” Fiona had been parked on our couch for several days, and she was parked there now, waiting for ER to start when my mother called.
“Wasn’t Fiona just there?” My mother wasn’t going to be satisfied. “What is it? Boy trouble?” I hadn’t bothered to mention that Fiona’s last major relationship had been with a woman. Now didn’t seem like the right time to overthrow Fiona as the patron saint of heterosexuality. “Family trouble?” Fiona wasn’t speaking to either of her parents. But that wasn’t news. She kept coming, I thought, because her best friend was getting married.
“Actually, Mom, Francine and I are getting married.” Woops.
Stunned silence. “This weekend?” my mother finally managed.
“Of course not,” I told her. “This fall. October.” I slid, shaking, to the amber linoleum, and pressed my back against the cabinets.
“I see,” my mother answered crisply. “Ellen, please hold on. I’m going to get your father. You can tell him what you just told me.”
My father picked up the phone in his office. I could hear my mother’s muffled breathing on the other line. “Ellen,” my father started, all calm naiveté, “Your mother says you have something you’d like to tell us.”
I had moved away from home, established a life for myself away from them, lived with an emotional distance that kept me safe. And yet here I was, coming out to my parents all over again. Would it never end? I took a deep, silent breath. “Francine and I are getting married.”
My father cleared his throat. “Will this be a legal marriage?”
I tried to remain calm myself. Sol, I reminded myself, had asked essentially the same thing. “It means we’ll have a ceremony officiated by a rabbi—” Just thinking of Rabbi Loh made me feel more sure. “But, no, we can’t get married legally. Yet,” I added.
“Well,” my father considered this. “There won’t be any negative tax consequences.” Was this his blessing? “Are you sure this is what you want to do?”
“Yes, Dad, it is.”
My mother couldn’t stand it another second. “How do you know that?” she broke in. “You were in love with that other girl. Samantha. And now you’re not. How do you know this isn’t the same thing?”
My father’s level voice cut in. “If you want to do this”—he sounded preternaturally calm, practically medicated, but why not? There were no negative tax consequences—“of course, we’ll be there.”
I picked myself up and walked back into the living room, where I found Fiona and Francine, rapt, in front of the muted television, staring at me. Fiona looked stunned. Francine’s mouth formed a silent whistle of admiration.
“Ellen!” Francine exclaimed. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you speak to your parents like that.” She looked at me as if I’d just emerged from the kitchen with a dragon’s head in my hand.
Fiona raised her eyebrows knowingly. “I’ve known her practically since she was born,” she said. “Believe me. She never has.”
( )
“It wasn’t so good. In the end.” Sitting across from me, Rose Kantor, née Bloch, had survived Auschwitz thanks to the scrupulous vigilance of her then twenty-four-year-old sister, Theresia. Theresia had married and lived in New York. Rose had married and moved to California, but the sisters, six children and twelve grandchildren between them, had remained close.
“We’re old women. My sister, she’s nearly eighty years old.
“‘How did this happen to me?’ she asks.
“‘I don’t know.’
“‘Don’t forget me,’ she says.
“‘I won’t,’ I tell her. The next time we were together, I was throwing dirt into her grave.”
( )
When I got home from Mrs. Kantor’s interview, there were not one, but two messages from Fiona. When I called her back, she sounded both excited and cagey.
“How’s the big fundraiser coming along?” I closed my eyes, expecting a Fiona-length answer.
Instead, she said, “It’s fine.”
“What’s going on?”
Fiona took a deep breath. “I’ve just had—” She paused, “the most incredible night of my life.” She exhaled theatrically. “With the most incredible person I’ve ever met.” Usually, Fiona qualified a statement like that with “except you.” “Do you remember Duncan Black?” Fiona had gushed a few months ago about a volunteer who had revolutionized her databases.
“The one with the great-granduncle the Ulster Unionist?” When she’d first told me about Duncan Black, Fiona had also mentioned that he was researching his Irish roots. He had an ancestor who had fought in the Battle of the Boyne. “He’s not gay?”
“Not gay,” Fiona warmed up a little. “He’s very polite. Charming. But I never really looked at him that way, you know?”
“Hmm.” Francine was downstairs, listening to Ella Fitzgerald and, from the smell of the wood smoke filtering up through the floorboards, starting a fire; it had rained all day, and now the wind shook big drops from the trees that spattered the windows in bursts.
“Last week he started working with me on our contingent for Pride—there are about a thousand marchers to coordinate; and last night we went out and—” Fiona hesitated; a thin fiber of excitement vibrated through each word. “Ellen, it was the most intense night of my life.” She stopped for effect. “We talked and talked. We went out for drinks afterwards—”
“Drinks?” Fiona had renounced drinking back in high school. “I thought you were an alcoholic.”
“That was just some dumb thing I said. You weren’t supposed to take it literally.” That was the problem with having a friend you’d known forever. You remembered too much about each other. You held each other to your own forgotten words.
Fiona cleared her throat. “He walked me back to my apartment and we talked, Ellen, all night long. About everything—his family, my family, our work, our dreams. He wants to write this book about his family history. He’s an incredibly sensitive and perceptive man. More like a woman than any man I’ve ever met.”
My eyes strayed to the pile of ketubot on my desk. The Jewish wedding contract has undergone a few changes since Jacob took Rachel in exc
hange for 200 zuzim and a herd of sheep. They vow to remain friends, I read. To talk and listen to one another openly, remembering apology and patience. Fiona swallowed. I could hear her spoon clinking against her mug and tried to imagine the thousands of miles of desert and farmland and mountains that lay between us.
“Ellen,” Fiona whispered, confiding something fragile. “I’m so into him.”
“That’s great,” I told her. Then I added, “Hey, you’ve officially moved on to the letter D.” I’d teased Fiona about how she only dated people whose names began with the letter C—Chris, Chandra, and David Charles, who I always pretended to think was Charles David.
Fiona didn’t laugh.
“We spent the entire night together,” she went on. “We stared into each other’s eyes, Ellen, and talked about how we want to have beautiful babies together.” I pictured the two of them stretched out next to the tub, Fiona’s Babar and Celeste gazing down at them from the hot air balloon suspended over Fiona’s bed.
I rubbed my knuckles across my face. Francine and I were going to have to get our ketubah custom calligraphed. All the preprinted ones said bride and groom. “Wow,” I told her. “Babies? Don’t you think you might be moving a little fast?”
That was not the response Fiona wanted to hear. “I was happy for you when you told me you were getting married.”
“Are you telling me you’re getting married?” Hadn’t she just met this guy? What was going on?
Fiona had disowned her own parents for their various acts of disapproval. This tone was not what she wanted in her best friend. “Call me when you can be happy for me,” Fiona retorted. Then she hung up.
A week later, I got home to a terse message from Fiona. “We need to talk.” Probably, I thought, she wanted to apologize.
But when I reached her, Fiona sounded hedgy, defensive. “I’ve been thinking about your trip,” she started. “You know my apartment is really small, and it’s going to be crazy for me that weekend.” Fiona paused. Her apartment, a studio, was small. But Francine and I had stayed there before, regardless of who was sharing it with her. “Duncan and I think it would be better if you find a different place to stay.” Duncan and I. “It is New York,” Fiona added. “There are a million hotels.”
“You do realize that we’re planning a wedding?” I stared at the receipts spilling from my desk. “We don’t exactly have money to spend on hotels in New York City.”
“I’m sure you can find something cheap.” Fiona’s voice had resolved to the icily professional tone I’d heard her use with her mother. “Duncan and I are starting a new relationship. I just can’t handle four people in my apartment.”
“Your new relationship doesn’t seem to leave much space for your old relationships,” I pointed out.
Fiona simmered. “I’d appreciate you not bringing Duncan into this.”
That night, while Francine sat down in front of ER, I stayed upstairs in front of the computer and did two things, which, in combination, a person in a state of mental distress should never do: I wrote Fiona an angry email and I hit “send.” And then, full of second thoughts, I did it again. If you really wanted me to come to your event, you’d have come up with some real alternatives, I charged. Then I got a little closer to the heart of it. I don’t know why, I wrote, but I feel like you‘re pushing me away.
We had never had an electronic relationship before, and it wasn’t starting out well.
Francine’s attempts to talk me down only made it worse. “Fiona’s being incredibly insensitive,” she reassured me, “which, honestly, is not that surprising. She’s a drama queen and you’re her perfect audience.”
( )
Fiona or not, our wedding train had left the station. We were talking with a caterer about menus. So Francine and I went to Betty and Sol’s late on a Friday afternoon to tackle Betty’s Gourmet collection. “My mother has a ton of cooking magazines; maybe we’ll find lemon ricotta ravioli in one of them.” It seemed to me that caterers should have the recipe for everything, but the one we wanted to work with hadn’t heard of the pasta dish Francine and I had fallen in love with at a Los Angeles restaurant with my parents, and they wanted us to do the legwork. I guessed that’s what you get from going discount.
In eight years of Sunday dinners, I had never been in Betty and Sol’s bedroom. Francine herself seemed to hush as she leaned against the double doors of the sanctum sanctorum. The bedroom was dark and quiet, the curtains drawn. Betty had decorated the room in a tasteful, feminine style, country French, dark wood, floral spread. Opposite the curtained French doors, a long, high dresser stood against the wall under a Cassatt print.
Francine disappeared into the closet, where she slouched on the rug, sorting through piles of magazines. I’d stopped at the dresser, drawn to the gleaming row of silver frames, the Jaffe family history. There, in black and white, stood a dashing young soldier with jet-black hair, clutching his cap under his arm: Sol. In the next frame, the same young rake wrapped one arm around a slender, pixie-haired girl in white; together, they piloted a knife into the top tier of a white cake: Betty and Sol. Their lips and cheeks had been hand-tinted pink. I held the frames by the edges, careful not to leave prints.
Francine had turned on the light inside the closet, but the dark still wrapped around us, like a cave. “There’s a lemon spaghetti,” Francine wrinkled her nose.
A shining object on top of the second dresser caught my eye, another photo. Pulling it out into the light, I made out Francine and a small, bald creature that must have been Jigme, propped together on the flowered couch that still sat in the living room. Francine wore a smocked white dress and scuffed white shoes; she gripped an enormous bundle of brother, his triple chins luxuriant as a centerfold. I set the photo carefully back on the dresser and lifted out the only other picture next to it. This one was framed in ceramic with pink alphabet blocks tumbling down along the side. It was a photo of Francine, a toddler with elfin hazel eyes set in a toddler’s chubby face. I held the photo, disconcerted. “Was your hair straight when you were a baby?”
“Huh?” Francine had begun to flip pages so quickly, they sounded caught up in the wind. “No,” she said. “My mother had to pull my curls out of my face with a tiny barrette before I left the hospital.” Francine looked up.
I held up the photo in the ceramic frame.
“That’s Julia,” she said. Then she went back to flipping pages.
Julia? A cousin, I guessed. Francine had never mentioned her. “Julia?”
“My parents’ first child.” She said it without looking up, flipping through the July 1991 issue of Gourmet.
Her parents’ first child? “Your sister?” Instantly, I imagined another Francine out there, an older woman named Julia, living abroad—back in South Africa, maybe?—the family black sheep. But Francine was a lesbian. What could Julia have done?
“She died.” Francine turned the page. “When she was a baby.”
“Oh.” I looked more closely at the picture. Julia looked older than a baby. She was eating a cookie. She was walking. “How?”
“Choked on a button.”
Francine threw the magazine behind her and pulled another from the pile. It sounded like a phrase Francine had memorized from a foreign language. It sounded like an epithet. “Julia, who choked on a button.” She’d tossed it off with the kind of nonchalance you could only pull off if you’d grown up with it.
“That’s . . . sad.”
“I know.” She said it without feeling.
I set the photo back on the dresser. “I can’t believe you never told me you had a sister.”
“I’ve told you about her.” Francine flung the next magazine down and picked up a third. “You probably just don’t remember.”
“You did not,” I insisted.
“Well,” Francine murmured, “I probably never told you about my grandfather, either.”
“Didn’t he die before you were born?”
“Exactly.”
I stared into the gloom of the back of Betty’s closet, then back at Francine, her hair glowing like a flame. “Did your parents ever talk about her?”
“Hey!” Francine looked up, eager. “Here’s a ricotta ravioli with brown butter and sage.” She turned down the corner of the page.
A sister. The world tilted. Francine had had a sister and never, in eight years, told me about her. What else, I wondered, was she capable of not telling me? “Did your parents ever talk about Julia?”
Francine shrugged. “I don’t think so.” And yet, Julia had had a birthday. Julia had a yahrzeit. Dates that came back, like stubborn weeds, every year.
“What did they tell you about Julia?”
Francine looked like she was getting annoyed. “How much can you say about someone who died as a baby?” Francine handed me a magazine and I took it. I recognized her detachment. Francine, I thought, was like a child of Survivors, a child whose birth had in some way answered the deep, resounding echo of tremendous grief; a child insulated from her parents’ ancient loss, for whom the story of that prehistoric, antenatal loss can only ever be a story. (But how many of my subjects, when they came to the Foundation, came to speak, finally, not for their own sake, but for the sake of their children, for their children’s children?) To Francine, Julia came from a time before time. I was shocked she had never thought to mention this piece of her family history, but I guessed it made a certain kind of sense.
But I wondered in a new way about Betty and Sol; I wondered whose picture graced Betty’s locket. I wondered about where they kept this loss, and why they had never talked about it. What might you say about a person who died so young—if the pain weren’t too much to bear? That the day she was born, whole peaches clung to the trees? That they held her little body in their arms while she slept, and watched her dream? I had known these people, whom I loved as parents, for over eight years, and they had never mentioned another daughter. They kept her photo in a closet. It troubled me, this utter silence, smoothed over Julia’s life like water over a stone. Julia wasn’t a secret exactly. She was one of those big things everyone knew but no one talked about, either a screaming absence or a fantastic erasure, a big white spot. I had thought of Betty and Sol as the opposite of my parents. They weren’t, and it troubled me. But then I remembered Hannah Weiner, who couldn’t remember her four-year-old daughter’s name. I knew too much about terrible things to blame Sol and Betty for their silence. They had watched their daughter die. At that moment, I forgave them. Maybe the best you could do was survive.
