by Hilary Zaid
( )
I didn’t hear from Fiona again until well after St. Patrick’s Day. I’d set a pan of blackberry hamentaschen, cooling, on the stove. Her announcement was terse. “I just wanted to let you know, Duncan has proposed to me. We’re going to get married.”
“Wow,” I said, trying to sound encouraging, rather than stunned. I’d resolved, since my email, to try harder. But my follow-up fell through, “That’s so—fast.”
“Duncan and I are soul mates,” Fiona answered. Then she added, “I’m not like you; I don’t need eight years to make up my mind.”
Soul mates. So, what did that make me and Francine? Playmates? Check-mates? Stale-mates? Fiona and Duncan had fallen in love and decided to get married in a single motion, a smooth, graceful arc that looked like the beginning of a perfect circle. Francine and I had fallen in love so long ago I could hardly remember it now. Yes—I’d fallen in love, madly, wildly, for the girl who danced with no bones. But we’d also nearly broken up after a stupid fight about shrimp. Nothing in our past was perfect.
Francine didn’t see it that way. At all. “The thing that really pisses me off,” admitted Francine, “is that you and I can’t get married anywhere, but she can meet some guy off the street and, six weeks later, be married with all of society behind them. It makes me sick.”
“But don’t you wonder,” I ventured, sitting next to Francine on the couch, “if they have something—some soul connection . . .” I didn’t say “that we don’t.”
“Are you kidding?” Francine turned to me. “They don’t even know each other.”
“But,” I mumbled. “We didn’t even propose, did we? Isn’t that unromantic?”
“He probably proposed to her on the top of the Empire State Building on St. Patrick’s Day,” Francine answered. “That’s not romantic; it’s a cliché. It’s like people playacting at love.”
“But what about us?” I persisted. “Are we wildly in love?”
“Don’t be so insecure,” Francine chided me. She took my hands. “You’re just not an impulsive person. Do you want to marry me?” she asked me now, her gaze shifting from my left eye to my right. “Do you want to stand up in front of everyone we love, everyone in our lives, and say that you choose me?” The glow of the evening firelight in our cozy living room haloed her whole face, which looked a little flushed, her eyes a little wet.
“Yes.” I touched Francine’s warm cheek with the back of my hand. “I do.”
Fiona called one last time. “We’re moving to Dublin,” she told me, “next month.”
“You’re quitting your job?” I asked, incredulous, “to follow a man?” Fiona was the one who’d petitioned to start a Women’s Studies class at Ferngrove. We were members of NOW! After school, Fiona had driven us down to the Westside Pavilion, where we cruised the parking lot with a green Sharpie, blacking out the word “Life” in the “Right to Life” bumper stickers, and penning in “Choose.” It had been one of our most thrilling acts of delinquency. Now she was quitting the only job she’d held for more than a year, and moving to a country she hadn’t visited since childhood, to follow a man she’d been in love with for all of five minutes. “Duncan’s going to write his book,” she said, as if that explained everything.
“What about you?” I protested.
“It’ll be like going home.”
I couldn’t see how Ireland would be much like L.A. That was our ancestral home, Fiona’s and mine—the land of the palm tree and the Galleria, the beach and Beverly Hills, the chaparral and the coastal mountains, brown on brown. What did misty green hills and tiny ponies, acres and acres of cold, rocky shore, and thousands of years of history have to do with that? Going home. That must have been a line he had used, Duncan Black, descendant of the Ulster Unionists. What a load of crap.
“You, of all people,” she added, “should understand.”
“What does that mean?”
“Everything you do is about the Jewish people. Your people.”
I thought of Elizabeth Landau and her return trip to Poland: There are no Jews in Lodz. “My people,” I answered, “and your people, too, will tell you that home—if you mean Europe—stinks. Home is the place you flee from, and put behind you, and spend your life trying to forget.” I gasped for breath. “No one goes back to Europe. Only Americans so American they can’t remember anything about why their ancestors left expatriate to Europe. And it’s not to go home, either; it’s to run away.”
Fiona didn’t answer.
“I can’t believe you’re moving halfway around the world with someone I’ve never even met.” I started to have the feeling that was the point.
“I just called to say goodbye.”
“Do you think they’ll really stay together?” I asked Francine for the hundredth time.
“Read Angela’s Ashes again; it’ll make you feel better.” She patted the pearlescent pink cover of The Essential Guide to Gay and Lesbian Weddings. “Invitations need to be mailed two months ahead. Time to get cracking.”
( )
Francine and I sanded our fingertips smooth on 100 percent cotton ivory card stock, beefed up our biceps hefting sample books bulging with starchy invitations, all announcing with joy the marriage of a putative “Diane Helene to Mark Charles Cadwallader.” Finally, we decided to make our invitations ourselves: a crimson pomegranate tree crowning a square, cream-colored card. The fruit of fertility and marriage. At synagogue, silver pomegranates, little bells swinging from their crests, crowned each wooden handle of the Torah scrolls.
“Nigel and I just chose an invitation out of a book,” Wendy admitted, crunching a potato chip out of a can. “We were lucky,” she added. Were those Pringles? Wendy never even ate white bread. “We had it all set out for us. You and Francine have to make it up as you go along.” Wendy had always been so, so generous. I felt a flush of luck at having wound up working for her.
Wendy’s curls fell into her face, framing full, flushed cheeks. “Ellen,” she started. Her face looked strange, like she was about to either laugh or cry. “We need to talk.” For a second, my heart raced with panic: Wendy had been throwing up at work. Maybe it really was cancer. “You may have noticed I haven’t been feeling my best.” I glanced at the trash can beside her desk. “I’ve been a little tired,” she added, “a little run-down.” Oh. Shit. This, I knew, taking in the red Pringles can, the little gold watch that dug gently into Wendy’s wrist, was the moment before I knew.
“I thought it was menopause. I’m almost forty-four,” Wendy said. We both knew what was coming. Wendy was sick; Wendy had cancer; like her mother, Wendy was going to die. It was written in her genes, history becoming the future, inevitable. “I didn’t think it was possible.”
Of course it was possible. Was it possible that Wendy—Wendy Rosenberg, inscrutable witness to one of humanity’s ugliest moments—was flinching from the truth? Immediately, I chastised myself: Wendy has cancer.
“Ellen?” Wendy peered curiously into my face. “Did you hear me?”
Jesus Christ. She’d told me she was dying and I hadn’t responded.
“Ellen?” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
Tears sprung to my eyes. “Oh my god! Wendy! Sorry, I—” I was sobbing. I thought you were dying. “You’re pregnant,” I said. “You’re going to have a baby.”
“I know,” she said. “I can hardly believe it. Can you?” Far away, somewhere else in the building, you could hear a woman’s voice, laughing.
That was it. Wendy was a wonderful person and I had been lying to her. I decided I had to tell Wendy the truth about Anya. After all, wasn’t the truth what Wendy had always given to me? I promised myself I would tell her before she had the baby.
But, then, I ran into Barbara, one of the ladies from the Post-Soviet Jewish Diaspora Project upstairs, heading back to the building after lunch. She had always been friendly towards me, but only because I worked with Wendy. “Do you know I’ve been in that office since it opened, three, almost four ye
ars, and every year on my Marty’s yahrzeit, may he rest in peace, your Wendy brings me a tin of cookies—good ones, too, cinnamon rugelah from Norman’s. Not that I need it,” she added. Barbara gripped my shoulder for support, tight enough to make me regret the buckle on my shoulder bag. “You know she’s pregnant, right?” She eyed me, as if I were responsible for something very serious, as if I were the one who had done this to Wendy, as if she were chastising me. I didn’t understand it until Barbara told me something that Wendy herself had never told me: The last time Wendy was pregnant, her husband died.
“Such a tragedy,” Barbara clopped along. “She was expecting Jenny.” Jenny was Wendy’s fourteen-year-old daughter, the daughter I’d always assumed she’d had with her husband, Nigel. “You didn’t hear?” I hadn’t heard. Barbara’s left leg, a bit shorter than the right, struck the pavement with each step a half-beat late. Walking with Barbara felt a little like being hitched to a pony. “His name was Moshe. Young Israeli fella. He was walking on the beach with his brother, talking—then—” Barbara gripped my shoulder hard and stopped walking. The pavement, which had echoed her clip-clopping, fell silent. Barbara released my shoulder and held up her hand. “‘Wait a minute.’ He just held up his hand, like that. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. And then he fell down dead.” Barbara’s face searched my own. “Electrical storm, they said. Electrical storm of the heart.” Wendy had never told me about Moshe. And that was how I understood, Wendy, too, had mastered it: the silence after a heartbeat.
( )
I didn’t begrudge Wendy her secrets. Wendy’s life was filling with a precarious joy I dared not shatter. And mine, too. My wedding, of course. And a sly and careful little friendship with a kind of person I could never have imagined I would meet. Anya must have felt that way, too, because, for the first time since we first sat down in her apartment, she brought up the past.
It was a Thursday afternoon. For the first time, Anya led me into her bedroom, which I’d only glimpsed, and pulled out a small, battered cardboard box. Tossed in along with her expired passport: a few letters, and one loose piece of metal type—the Hebrew letter bet. From the box, she extracted a life-sized egg, which I took in my two fingers. “From Ukraine,” she explained. “After.” After she was liberated from the Soviet hard-labor camp in which I felt sure she had survived on the hope of finding Sheva again, Sheva whom she had rescued, Sheva whom she had given her own escape. “An Easter egg?” I asked her.
Anya frowned. “Pysanka. A gift of friendship.” A harlequin pattern in red and antique umber covered the shell, diamonds of various patinas intersecting across its shining circumference, a thousand little lines of tracery woven through the design. It was a real, hand-blown egg, onto which an intricate design, fragile as lace, had been traced in wax; after the egg had been dipped into dyes, a warm bath removed the wax, exposing the brilliant white filigree; it was a perfect negative, an intricate network of shining bones.
I felt aware, as I held it in my hand, of the space inside it, the careful hollow its curved walls cupped, smooth as a skull. I examined the fine webbing of white lines—wax resist. That’s what it was called: resistance.
“The woman who gave this to me,” Anya told me, “was a farmer’s wife.” She had let Anya sleep in the hayloft, and hadn’t told her husband because, after the war, in the villages from which the Jews had been deported, the neighbors greeted the few who had had the audacity to come back with swords and guns. “Before I left, my protector told me, ‘A pysanka egg given from the heart will never spoil.’” Maybe that’s why Anya kept her egg tucked away in the dark, in the box, so that the color would never blanch.
I took the egg on the tips of my fingers and held it up to the light. Negative images danced across its surface. The world is fundamentally a place of loss, and our ghosts are everywhere, taunting us to dare to try to make even one thing last. But if it was possible for something as tenuous as an eggshell to hold its shape, hold its color, then perhaps other things, ineffable things, dyed true, could hold true, also. Anya watched my eyes as I handed the egg back. Sharing the egg was a sign, I thought, that we were friends. What was less obvious: Our connection was a thin shell cradling the potent absence of those who had left us.
( )
“Ellen?” It was Vicky from the Red Cross. “I’ve got a few names for you. Bat Shewa Lewinas,” she said, “born Kaunas, 1935 to Yitzhak and Tziporah. Perished in the Kaunas ghetto.” Vicky read me her notes. All of the Batshevas and Bat Shewas were either too young or too old. And Anya’s Batsheva hadn’t perished in the Kaunas ghetto after all. She’d been rescued, at least temporarily, by the Gandras. I didn’t want a death record, I thought, hoping against hope; I wanted to find her.
“A last name would help,” Vicky said. “Who did you say is looking for her?”
I sucked my teeth, a betrayer. “Anya Kamenets,” I answered, spelling her name.
( )
At the beginning of April, Francine went to New York on the wedding dress expedition we’d planned weeks before. Alone. “New York City is the best place to shop for clothes,” Francine repeated, unable to suppress her excitement about going back to a city that was, for her, mostly unruined by Fiona’s absence. “I’ll find something for you,” she promised.
Though I hated to have Francine leave me for a week, I hated the thought of shopping even more, so I kissed her at the gate and went home, unable to shake the feeling that Francine had left and (plane crash, taxi crash, mugging, murder) wasn’t coming back.
I was at work, down in the media room, my head deep in the gloom of a viewing carrel, ghost worlds racing by, when a white shape flickered in the corner of my eye. “Jesus! You scared me.”
Wendy hovered at the edge of the carrel in a loose white blouse. “Call for you,” she said. “It’s Francine.”
I took the carpeted steps two at a time.
“Ellen?” Francine yelled. Beyond her voice, I could hear the thousand voices of New York, the dull throb and roar of it.
“Where are you?”
“I’m outside Century 21,” Francine hollered. I pictured yellow cabs zipping by, huge buildings blotting out the spring sun. “Ellen,” she called across all the miles that stood between us, “I think I’ve found our dresses!”
I hardly knew what to imagine. We’d already agreed: “No meringues.” But what else could a wedding dress look like?
Francine started. “Mine is floor-length, kind of a shimmery rust and green. It’s kind of hard to describe.” I heard a click.
“Francine!?”
“Hold on.” I heard a series of clicks as the coins dropped into the phone. “Okay,” Francine continued, “so, on the top layer—it’s all lacy, kind of antique, with shimmery beads.” I could already hear my mother’s voice drawling machine-made lace. “It’s very elegant. And, it’s only three hundred dollars.” She let that sink in. “I’m getting it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Great.”
The sound at the other end went muffled for a second, then Francine’s voice returned more clearly. “Now your dress,” she went on, more tentatively. “It’s not the same, but it’s in the same style, so they go together without being, you know . . .”
“Twins-y.”
“It’s an ivory silk sheath covered with bone-colored antique lace—” if only she could stop using that word—“with some shimmery sequin things. I think you would look incredible in it.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess so.”
“Oh—and they’re both sleeveless. And they only have yours in a size six.”
I hesitated. I pulled up the sleeves of my T-shirt and fingered the tops of my arms. “I don’t know.” I didn’t have my Gramma Sophie’s pizza-dough arms, but I wasn’t Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, either.
A taxi blared impatiently. If I said Yes, I’d be done. If not, I was on my own.
“I don’t know,” I told Francine. “Six sounds sort of small.”
There was a long pause. “It might be small,�
�� Francine conceded. “But it’s the only one they have.” The taxi driver leaned on his horn long and hard.
I stared absently at my desk phone. “I don’t think so,” I said, finally, wincing.
“Okay,” Francine said. “It’s okay,” she reassured me, reassuring as a Lamaze coach. “We’ll keep looking for you.”
In Francine’s absence, my mother called to check on me. “Have you thought about writing a book?” Recent publications had rekindled in my mother the hope that, even if I would never become rich studying the Holocaust, I might at least become famous. “Just do that. Be the next Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.”
“I’m not sure the world wants another one.”
In her own way, she really did try. “How’s the planning?” My mother handled the word at the edges, like a tissue picked up off the ground, the way she usually said the word, gay.
“Fine,” I said. “We’re having the invitations designed.”
“I see.” What did she see? We still hadn’t figured out how to word them. Traditionally, wedding invitations announce that the parents of the bride cordially invite you to the wedding of their daughter. No one’s parents were cordially inviting anyone to this wedding. Though my parents, my mother had informed me, were going to pay for the flowers. It was the same gift they had made to my successful entrepreneur West L.A. sister. That was something. I finished spooning yogurt on top of my cereal and took a bite.
