Paper is White

by Hilary Zaid

  “What’s that you’re eating?”

  “Granola and yogurt.”

  “Wow. That’s enough calories to run a marathon. You’d better knock off the chow if you’re going to fit into a wedding dress.”

  I’d spent my whole life fending off the dresses my mother had tried to costume me in. She no longer got an official say in what I’d be wearing. So was I really going to start my married life by letting Francine take over the mommy role? I decided to surprise Francine by getting over my shop-o-phobia and getting my dress myself. It was a very bad idea.

  Bicycle messengers zipped by as I hustled up Market through the cigarette smoke trailing the downtown office workers who had begun to look suspiciously young to me. The day had warmed oppressively. The smell of food filled Union Square; men in Oxfords and ties cradled silver-lined boats of schwarma; women, starved for the sun, sat out on the steps sipping Calistoga and Diet Coke. I could use a Diet Coke, I thought longingly, as I fanned my face. Focus. I needed a store with loads of dresses. Racks and racks of dresses. The idea made me hyperventilate a little. The irony: Francine, who could have happily continued browsing the racks from now through September, had already found her perfect dress, while I, for whom fabric induced anaphylaxis, had nothing. But I could do this. And when Francine came home and saw that I, too, had a dress, it would be like an early wedding present, a proof that I wasn’t too scarred by my childhood to make a decent wife.

  A little light-headed, I pulled open the big, silent glass doors of Saks Fifth Avenue. The glittering buzz around my head felt cool, perfumed and bright, hard and hollow as a seashell. Well-dressed women moved past the glass cases, purposeful as nurses. White-smocked women leaned close over acquiescent, upturned faces, applying unguents through thick, magnifying lenses. And all around, the murmur of voices mingled tonelessly with the susurration of leather soles across the shining marble floor. The exit disappeared behind me like a dream.

  “May I help you?” A man in a dove-gray suit lingered above me.

  I squinted at him, my sweat-damp hair springing in bunches behind my ears. After the street, the cool, filtered air chilled me. My skin rose in bumps. “Dresses?” I croaked. I took a few steps forward.

  He nodded, a simple nod over the knot of his periwinkle tie. Of course. And swept his hand up behind him, half-turning as he appealed to the escalating floors of couture layered high above us. Up, up, up. I craned my neck: floor after receding floor of evening gowns, delicate laces, little black dresses; archeologically exposed strata of costume, class and correctness. Between the bands of social situation—black tie, semiformal, cocktail, tea—a huge, winding escalator rose like the spine of a nautilus, twisting endlessly up. The dresses pressed hugely down. I tilted my head so far up, my eyes rolled back. Inside my head, a confetti of sparks began to shower down, dissolving the glass, the escalator, the gowns.

  “Occasion?” the man asked. I tried to fake normalcy even as the irresistible force of hundreds, probably thousands of dresses, pressed down against the top of my head. A thousand wings—skirts and bodices, flaps and zips—thundered in my ears. His face dissolved over the periwinkle tie.

  I was already out before I hit the floor.

  “They were awfully solicitous.” I told Wendy, afterward, about the cream-colored couch to which the man in the periwinkle tie had led me, the crystal decanter of orange juice he had offered. Fresh-squeezed.

  “They don’t want you to sue them,” Wendy pointed out. “What happened to you?”

  “I didn’t eat,” I answered. “I was trying to find a dress.”

  Wendy nodded, as if buying a dress were a perfectly normal thing for me to do. I was still marveling at the fact that she had not once, in all these years, mentioned her first husband Moshe. I wondered if she would mention him now that she was pregnant. Or, if that was a reason she definitely would not.

  Wendy stood up. She’d been to the bathroom about ten times already this afternoon. “Time to go to Arachnid.” I glanced at my desk calendar, where I’d doodled in a tiny sketch of a spider in its web. Arachnid. Was that a person? An exterminator? “Sorry,” I shrugged. “I wrote it down.” I pointed to the cartoon, “sort of.”

  “I thought I was the one with baby brain,” she clucked. “It’s the wedding,” she added. “You’re preoccupied.” I was preoccupied. Francine was coming home today—without a dress for me.

  “The website,” Wendy reminded me. “We need to be ready to leave in fifteen.”

  Barbara from the Jewish Diaspora Project upstairs was already in the elevator when we got in. “Ellen,” she nodded to me. Then she cast only a sideways glance at Wendy. “Hello, doll.” She reached out with one plump hand and squeezed Wendy’s arm. She seemed to make a deliberate effort not to look at Wendy straight on, but I caught her glancing at Wendy as the car descended, a look of secret pleasure on her heavily powdered face. Wendy had Barbara, I told myself, so why shouldn’t I have Anya?

  ( )

  Wendy and I didn’t have far to go. Arachnid’s office sat at the top floor of the old Barbary Coast Coffee Building, a seven-story brick building—unreinforced masonry. I thought, immediately, of The Big One. (On the other hand, that would solve the wedding dress problem.) The lunchtime courtyard swarmed with khaki-clad men and women in black knit shirts, sipping green super-food smoothies from plastic bottles. Wendy and I got into the elevator with two tall, thin women carrying shopping bags. One hefted an armful of pink spaghetti-strap T-shirts. “Corduroy is going to be very, very hot again.” We kept our eyes on our unfashionable shoes.

  The doors opened on Arachnid, a foyer of exposed brick and glazed, industrial cement. Across from the elevator, an iron spiderweb, backlit with red neon, graced the wall. While Wendy made her way to the reception desk, I studied the rows of open cubicles ranged throughout the big, open room, and the Bay views visible through the glassed-in offices banked along the eastern wall. A moment later, Eric Northpoint, tall and muscular in a tight black T-shirt, his head stubbled salt and pepper, pressed business cards embossed with spiderwebs into our palms and led us down the concrete hall to a large glassed-in room as he called out to the receptionist, “Tell the rest of the team we’re in the Box.” I glanced down at the card, black, the web, silver. Beneath it, in silver type: “We spin the Web. ™”

  During the meeting—which was accompanied by a huge tray of Specialty’s chocolate chip cookies—Eric and his team darkened the room for a PowerPoint slideshow in which they talked about “eyeballs” and “click-throughs,” and the importance of creating a “branded presence” on the web. “In the next five years,” Eric spread out his large fingers, “the web will be the site of 80 percent of all business and personal transactions and interactions.” Five years ago, I thought, the archive had been a few cardboard cartons collecting mold in a dank basement. But when an art guy showed us mock-ups of a bunch of interactive tools, Wendy looked impressed. “How much would something like that cost?”

  Shocking numbers were spoken. Wendy’s eyes bugged behind her glasses.

  Eric Northpoint assured Wendy that an online “storefront” would give us the edge we needed. Had the Holocaust needed an edge?

  The meeting dissolved into a white noise of voices as Wendy conferred privately with Eric Northpoint, and the rest of the team drifted back through the big glass doors. I followed them out to the restroom and, there in the big cement corridor, found myself nose-to-chest with six-foot-tall Charlie May.

  Charlie May had been my best friend in graduate school. A classicist studying ancient Greece, Charlie’s big blue eyes with their sleepy lids seldom opened wide, but his nostrils used to flare like a horse when he started comparing the city-states of classical antiquity to the birth of the nation in early modern Europe. Charlie had been the one to whom I’d confided about Francine when I’d first fallen for her, my careful and slowly worked-out plan to get to know her, the annoyingly platonic goodbyes in the parking lot. A self-professed expert with women, Charlie had sh
aken his head knowingly. “Maybe it’s different with you girls,” his nostrils quivered slightly, “but do you want to date her, or just be her friend? Because if you spend too much time just hanging out,” Charlie drew a thick finger across his throat, “it’s the kiss of death for sex.” Those days Charlie and I sat for hours in Café Milano at a table near the wall, where afternoon light filtered in through the huge windows like the dappled cubes of light at the surface of the ocean. Charlie’s eyes had looked bluer than blue, his skin tanner than tan against the white, mandarin collar of a sky-blue dress shirt. His J. Peterman look, he’d told me, a ploy to be taken more seriously by our professors. Charlie had gazed at me sleepily, the wisdom of the senior faculty painted across his brow. He’d leaned back against the booth, his long legs stretched out. “Don’t be such a pussy, Ellen. You like her. So, do something about it. Maybe you’ll make a total ass of yourself. But maybe you won’t.”

  Charlie May had been right. Now here he was, larger than life, in the polished-cement halls of an internet design company. “Ellen Margolis!” He smiled his big, toothy grin while I told him about my job at the Foundation and the website meeting.

  “What about you?” I asked Charlie. “What are you doing here? I guess you finished your degree?” I tried to sound neutral. Why wouldn’t Charlie have gotten his Ph.D., an associate professorship in some department of history or classics? He’d always had the face for it.

  Charlie shook his head. “Degrees are for pansies.” He winked. “I work here.” He smiled. “Can you believe it? I love it here,” he whispered, conspiratorially. “I make way more than any professor ever made.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “I’m sure it’s not as important as what you do,” Charlie offered, composing his face into a mask of classical gravitas.

  “Hey, Charlie!” A short guy with a ZZ Top beard and a long, frizzy ponytail was passing us in the hall, a sheaf of papers clutched in his hands. “If you ever doubt whether what you’re doing here is important,” his slow voice cracked as he began to laugh, “just take a look in your bank account!” He walked away, still chuckling.

  Charlie May smiled. Then he asked me, “Whatever happened with the red-haired girl?”

  “Francine,” I brightened. She was coming home today from New York. I may not be making the big bucks like Charlie May, but I had Francine. “Actually,” I added, smiling for the first time since I’d walked into Arachnid, “we’re getting married.”

  Charlie looked at me down his long, equine nose. His eyebrows hunched together. “Can you do that?” He gazed at me for a moment, then cocked his head like a dog when it hears a squirrel in a high branch. “It was really great to see you, man,” he said. “I’ll call you.” Charlie May pantomimed phone-to-ear and disappeared down the hall.

  ( )

  “You should have invited him,” Francine teased me, folding a pair of jeans into her drawer. Her black garment bag hung like a flag over the closet door: Francine’s wedding dress. “He might need an excuse to spend some of that career-boy cash.” Francine shook a sweater out of her suitcase. “You know, a bread machine, an electric mixer . . .”

  “Oh, he’d never come.” I watched Francine lift a camisole out of her bag, sniff it, then tuck it into her drawer. I lay at the foot of our bed on my stomach, the way I used to lie watching Gramma Sophie unpack her nightie and slippers from her overnight bag, sedated by the smooth movement of her softest things back into their place in our closet.

  “He’s still not over you,” Francine said, pulling out a plastic bag of underwear and dumping it onto the floor.

  “What?”

  “Oh, it’s just because you’re unattainable,” she answered breezily, adding a pair of jeans to the pile of dirties.

  “Thanks,” I muttered, throwing myself back against the pillows. Outside, the trumpet vine that crept to the top of the redwood tree thrust its long, red blooms against the bedroom window.

  The bed rocked as Francine threw herself down beside me. “Come here.”

  I didn’t really believe Charlie May had anything to “get over” with me. I wasn’t the girl he’d never gotten. It was the other way around: His was the life I hadn’t picked. “Don’t you wish I’d become a career girl instead of a . . . sad old story solicitor?”

  Francine’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t you wish I was a psychotherapist serving the troubled spawn of the wealthy?” Well, my father did. I fidgeted my feet. “Ellen,” Francine sat up. “What do we really need?” she asked, lifting her hands to our bedroom, ourselves, our life. “Oh! That reminds me!” She hopped off the bed. “Here,” she said, “Live, from New York.” She handed me a wrinkled white wax bag. “Krispy Kreme!”

  Careful not to smear the frosting, I lifted a chocolate doughnut out of the bag, igniting a gentle shower of rainbow sprinkles, and sank my teeth in. I’d read about these in The New Yorker. “Mmmm,” I murmured. What had we been talking about, anyway? “Bite?”

  “No thanks,” Francine said, disappearing into the bathroom. “I had two in New York. Don’t look in that garment bag!” she called out before the shower rushed on.

  The water was still running when the phone rang. It was Fiona’s old boyfriend David Charles. “I can’t seem to reach her,” David Charles drawled, “and I’m worried.”

  Touching. “She’s fine,” I answered. I didn’t need to protect her anymore. “She’s gone,” I told him. “She’s getting married.”

  David Charles went silent for a minute. “Isn’t that something,” he said. But he didn’t really seem surprised. Come to think of it, neither was I. Inside my chest, something shifted, the way a safe deposit box slides into its snug and silent vault, and you turn the key, and lock it away.

  ( )

  It was May, but because of the rain, everything had bloomed late this year. Francine and I woke to the shameless cacophony of birds, piercing and clear after the insistent monotony of the rain, the sickening hush of the rain, the thick, gray batting of the rain. Now that the winter had broken, everything felt nearer, more pressing, more real. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. It was nearly the beginning of the summer and, after the summer’s end, we’d be getting married. Petals littered the sidewalk like scattered rice.

  I drifted down Shattuck Avenue, the women in summer skirts, the bubbling notes of clarinet floating out onto the sidewalk as I drove by to go pick up Francine for lunch, confident, self-possessed, young. Surely, our lives had always been just like this.

  But when I pulled around the corner, two black-and-whites loomed outside the Jewish Community Center doors. At the sight of the police cars, my exuberance shifted gears directly into panic: Of course, it was only a matter of time before some crazy bastard came to extract his “price” against the Jews. An image of preschool children holding hands like paper dolls across four lanes of traffic unfolded inside my brain.

  Trembling, I dropped the keys. Francine was in there. If she hadn’t already been shot. What was I doing, locking the car? It was something I’d never forgive myself for, I realized, after. I turned and ran, nearly tripping, to the big black doors of the Jewish Community Center, which burst open in my face. Andy Stein, the mother of a little girl named Emma, flew out of the building, sobbing, her tears splashing into the dark, mussed hair of the chubby baby dangling from the carrier on her chest.

  “Andy!” I shrieked, eyeing the baby for blood. I knew, already, that little Emma lay inside, her little pink legs akimbo.

  Andy’s chest heaved with grief. “I dropped the cupcakes!”

  I stared at her lips, trying to make sense of her shock-garbled words. Andy reached around the baby to palm tears from her face. “I put the container”—she pointed out toward the street; two police officers, pizza slices in hand, leaned against the hood of a patrol car, chatting—“on top of the trunk.” Purple frosting spattered the road like a bruise.

  “Wow,” I muttered,
my limbic system scrambling to catch up with my mind, my chest and palms cool with sweat. Cupcakes. Jesus.

  I wasn’t the only one freaking out. Wendy had confessed that, as the baby’s limbs fitted themselves to her ribs, as the head—that familiar, solid globe—revolved, she found herself doubled over with pangs of certainty that Nigel would suddenly die. At long last, as if it weren’t something she’d withheld all this time, she told me about Moshe. “It’s not that I’m thinking about Moshe, exactly,” she tried to explain, “it’s more like my body remembers.”

  That was our tradition, wasn’t it? The glint of future happiness draws dybbuks, greedy spirits who will claim whatever they can see. The old, culturally inherited fear. So, for every compliment, a kine hora—the charm uttered to ward off the ever-roving evil eye. And it wasn’t just the Jews, either. Look at Orpheus, the musician, alone along the lanes of the dead, dust rough beneath the soles of his lime-white feet; the forbidden backward glance that catches one pale shoulder, before it disappears, forever. If you promise ’til death,’ doesn’t it follow that the person you love most in the world is going to die? That, I reminded myself, was why we didn’t tell each other everything—as a charm to ward off disaster.

  “Ellen, this is Vicky. I think I’ve found the record you’re looking for.” Batsheva.