by Hilary Zaid
“And then there was a crash?” I imagined Betty, wild-haired, careening her rental car over a Pacific island cliff.
Francine gently picked up my hand. “There’s been a terrible plane crash. Near Canada. It went down in the ocean and no one knows why. I felt so, so scared. What if it had been you?” Francine gripped my hand so hard it hurt. Could you trust the feelings that came from that all-or-nothing place?
A line of twinkling lights stretched across the sky to the south; the closest wobbled and hovered, approaching, then materialized into an airplane and rolled smoothly onto the tarmac, slowed, turned and began its mundane taxi toward the gate.
“Listen,” she said, “I don’t know what’s been going on with you.” She put up her hand so I couldn’t protest. “And this stuff with my mom—” I softened a little “—it’s been confusing. But I think I can start separating us from them. I have to believe in us.”
I looked out the big plate-glass window. A Southwest jet lumbered slowly back from the gate, a man with long orange sticks waving it on. “I wanted to walk away from you so I wouldn’t lose you. But people can disappear,” Francine whispered, “really disappear. Just like that. I want to hold onto you.” She looked at me, but didn’t take my hand. “If you want to stay.”
I could still taste the stale airplane air in my mouth, could hear the thundering white noise of the jet engines, could feel the steady hum of flight under my feet. Francine stood up, waiting. She was asking me to trust her. “Let’s go home,” I said.
The house smelled like cedar and wood smoke.
“They offered me the job,” I told Francine. “But L.A. was . . . L.A.” For some reason, though I hadn’t even gone there, my thoughts zeroed in, right then, on the house on Dunsmuir Drive; I was thinking of the long, dark hall to my parents’ bedroom, and the distance between me and my mother, and of her hidden lace. I was thinking of my old closet, where Francine had stood in her underpants on the day of my sister’s wedding, emptied of all of Gramma Sophie’s things, emptied of all my things. I shrugged. “I can’t go back.”
Francine and I stood quietly together at the foot of our bed. She had met my parents at the house on Dunsmuir Road, and my Gramma Sophie. I wondered if she was thinking of her own home, and how much of it Betty had taken away when she left. “Come here,” she whispered. “I’ll be your home.” We stepped out of our clothes, into our red bathroom, its rusty tiles red as the inside of the human heart.
( )
Two girls, young women, emerge from the shade of the pine forest. The blond girl’s stray fingers pick leaves from the other girl’s hair. Then thunder rolls through the ground. Over the Ninth Fort, the sky breaks into a thousand small pieces, the cry of old men, the first sounds of the slaughter. For the first time, the two girls fear something more than they fear discovery. They fly to the city, fly to their mothers. (Girls! Go back! Lovers! Back to the forest!) Later, after it is far too late to fly, the blond girl will have plenty of time to stare up from behind barbed walls, into the sky, which she sees now is perfectly empty, and wish for the stork that will come down out of nowhere to carry her lover—the dark one, the one no one will mistake for anything but a Jew—far away.
( )
Anya insults my shoes, so I know she’s happy to see me. It’s been longer than I intended since I’ve gotten over to the Rose of Sharon. But Anya doesn’t ask any questions. She wears her straight blond hair, as always, pulled back. Her eyes and mouth, downward parentheses bracketing both sadness and love, as always, give nothing away.
We sit down on the couch. I’ve brought her late summer peaches.
“Did I ever tell you,” Anya started, as I sliced into a peach; deep veins of crimson ran red through the flesh. “About the first time I tasted an orange?” I shook my head. I hadn’t heard Anya’s story, though I had heard other people’s versions of that story—the story that began with a disembarkation, a grocery stall on the streets of New York; the story that began at a busy Mediterranean port, Tel Aviv, the whole brilliant world cupped in one hand, fruit of the Galilee; the simple bright tang of life, antidote to ashes.
“Sheva brought it for me.” I looked up, surprised. “We were teaching each other English, dreaming of America. A taste for a color!” Anya looked with unabashed longing at the photo of Batsheva, as if she could still taste that word, and the woman who had brought it to her, in her mouth. “We shared it,” she said.
I handed Anya a slice of the peach, and she set the photo of Batsheva carefully, face down, in her lap.
“Have there ever been others?” I asked her. Who can account for my boldness? Did it matter, now that I’d broken all the rules?
Anya gave a curt, dismissive nod. “They all wanted to talk.” Her gaze shifted to the window, the wedge of peach, a still life, neglected in her hand.
I considered the ripe fruit in that wrinkled hand. Then I shifted my gaze, too, toward the window, toward the huge blue sky. I had been right all along. Somehow, though, instead of triumph, I felt disappointment. I considered Anya, and her lifetime of waiting, and all of a sudden, I wanted to run, hard and fast, back to my own life.
Instead, I bit into the peach. The last of the summer burst in wild flowers across my tongue. I sucked the fiber from between my teeth. I wiped the juice dripping down my chin and glanced at the back of the photo. The little clasp on the back had worn a groove, a grayed-out rainbow, where it had been pushed open and shut many times.
In three days, it would be Rosh Hashanah, the time for return, the time for confession, the time for repentance. I needed to tell Anya that Batsheva had died. But I’d already waited too long. Instead, I slipped my hand into my bag and pulled out a piece of cream-colored card stock. Anya flinched. For the first time, I realized the shining crimson ink crowning the card was the color of blood.
“What do you want from me?”
“I don’t want anything,” I lied. But I did. I had never had the courage to come out to my own grandmother. I wanted something different. I slid the invitation across the transparent, unbroken surface of the table. “I’m getting married.” Anya left the envelope between us, untouched.
( )
Sol looked the same, kneeling in the garden in his old corduroy pants, his gloved hand extended, finger pointed down with the cold poise of a surgeon, or a murderer, wrapped around the reedy tendon of a weed. When he pulled it, the entire weed came up with its roots dangling like a tangle of pale hair. “It’s no good unless you get the root.” He shook the loose dirt from the root back into the grass. “It’ll just come back again.” He kept on, working the ground with spade and glove, uprooting tenacious, stringy tendrils of dandelion and mint, whose crushed leaves smelled of dusky earth and chewing gum. As he plucked, he bundled his leavings into a careful pile.
I don’t know what I’d expected. That the grass would shriek where Betty’s knees no longer pressed it? That he’d let the garden grow crazy, overgrown with grief? Sol did, we did, what people do to survive: We just went on.
Inside, Francine got the plates out of the cupboard. Jigme swung in, garlic-and-chili-wafting bags of Chinese food swaying behind him like a censer. We’d returned to as close a version of normalcy as the four of us could bear: On Sunday nights, Francine and I and Jigme—and sometimes Jigme’s new girlfriend Anne—all came over, one of us bearing take-out, and we set the kitchen table, and resumed, in our own, revised fashion, Sunday night dinner.
“So.” Sol cleared his throat, reaching behind his head with one hand to smooth down the hair at the back of his neck. (Betty had used to cut it; now a tentative line had begun, covering his tanned nape with a budding forest of curling white tendrils.) It was a habit he must have acquired as a boy. “I called her today.”
Francine set her glass down with an audible thunk. Anne and I exchanged glances. I liked Anne. She wore little wire-framed glasses, the same shape as Jigme’s, and, before Jigme, he’d told us, Anne had dated Elizabeth.
Sol heaped a glistening mound of o
range chicken onto his plate.
“You called Mom?” Francine worked to keep her voice neutral.
Sol frowned, waving his napkin in front of his face. “Your mother?” he answered. “Nah.” He frowned. He waved the napkin as if to make the idea disappear.
“Who?” Jigme asked. He wound a chopstick expertly into a pile of chow fun, his lips shining with oil.
“Marion Silver,” Sol answered as he dug into his chow fun, the noodles slithering away as he lifted them with a fork.
“Marion Silver?” Francine asked; she sat up straight, her chopsticks poised in her fingers like spears. I remembered Betty teasing Sol about his “old flame.” Was something going on between Sol and Marion? Was that the real reason Betty had left?
“Mmm,” Sol nodded, sounding gruff. Betty’s letter hadn’t said anything about infidelity, or an old romance rekindled. Had she been covering for him? “So many years,” Sol mused, softening, his gaze focused out the window, into the dark folds of the hidden hills. I wasn’t used to hearing Sol talk like that—about time, like it was an unmeasurable, viscous liquid, instead of something solid, measurable, stratified, with fixed periods, with fixed limits. “And we’re still so much the same.” Sol rubbed again at the back of his neck.
On the fridge, Betty and Sol stared, unseeing, out of the old photo of Francine’s graduation day. Beneath the Rosie the Riveter magnet (“We can do it!”) that had held it for so long in that spot, Sol had tucked a scrap of paper on which he’d penciled, in a scientist’s precise hand: “Coffee/Oranges/Toothpaste.”
Francine studied her father, the mound of rice on her plate untouched.
“Dad,” said Jigme, who was more than forty years younger than Sol, the child of his old age, “you’re turning into a real old fart.” Sol laughed, and Francine started to eat.
“What did she say?” Anne asked. In the company of the family, Anne always seemed serious, but I’d heard her giggling uncontrollably behind Jigme’s closed door.
“She has two sons.” Then he murmured. “Back then, they said she could never have children . . .”
Jigme looked up. “Why?”
“Polio.”
Jigme poked the black frames of his glasses onto the bridge of his nose with the tip of his index finger. Anne, watching, repeated the gesture.
“That’s what they thought at the time,” Sol repeated, reaching for his mug. Then he told us the details: how he and Marion had been high school sweethearts. How, after he’d enlisted, he’d written Marion a letter every week, filled with little clues meant to evade the army censors. How she’d stopped writing. How he’d panicked, convinced she’d met someone else, perhaps gotten married. How he’d gotten her parents’ letter, telling him Marion had become partially paralyzed. How she’d written him herself, before his signal cryptography unit began its course through Italy, begging him to find someone else. His own parents’ letter, following, agreed. “Then the War ended, and I met your mother.” Sol turned to Francine, as if looking for Betty in her face. “She was a lot of fun, irreverent, a pixie.”
(A pixie. According to, my grandfather’s brother Jack, whom I met only once, at her funeral, my Gramma Sophie, too, had been a “pixie.” Gramma Sophie with her soft curved nose hunched down in the center of her face like a fuzzy magnolia bud, Gramma Sophie with the one wild hair she pulled out every week from her chin. My Gramma Sophie had been a raven-haired beauty; my grandfather, his milk bottles rattling, had serenaded her, “Fil sheyne meydelech - tsu dir kumt nisht gor-/Mit dayne shvartse eygelech un dayne shvartse hor.”)
“They were playing the Choo Choo Boogie.” Sol smiled. “She was dancing with someone else,” Sol told us, “and so was I, but Nat King Cole came on, and then we realized we’d been dancing with the wrong partners . . . ” His voice trailed off here, where the story of romance became the family story.
“But she did,” Francine recalled Sol. “Marion Silver. She got married. And had kids. But not with you.” Francine appraised Sol with a scrutinizing glance, the one she used when she thought I hadn’t apologized thoroughly enough for something I’d done. Did she blame him for loving someone before her mother? Or did she blame him for leaving her?
“Her sons are a little older than you.” Sol gestured towards Francine with his chopsticks. “One of them,” his face pinked up, “is gay.” Sol lifted his eyebrows and blotted his lips with a paper napkin.
“You must both have gay genes,” Jigme cracked, Betty’s droll tone in his throat. Under the table, Francine braced her feet against the front legs of her chair, toes down, as if she might at any second spring up and sprint away. (She’d been running more, I suspected as much because there was something she needed to run away from as something she was running toward; still, she’d joked, aping June, “Those wedding photos are forever, baby. When I’m hauling a baby on one hip and an extra ten pounds on the other, I’m going to want proof that when you married me, I was hot.”)
Sol, if he’d detected sarcasm, didn’t acknowledge it. “If there is such a thing,” he said, “and I think there have been some studies . . . ” He returned to his element like one of those ancient sea turtles, sliding from the gravity-pressing ledge of a rock back into its weightless, liquid element. “. . . then, yes, I suppose it’s possible that Marion and I might both carry a recessive gay gene.”
Jigme loosely draped his hairless, brown hand around Anne’s smaller, whiter one and pressed the smile out of the corner of his lips. “So,” he said, “if you two had gotten married, your kids would have been supergay.”
“Jerome,” Sol barked. But Francine and I both exploded in a terse burst of laughter. Anne coughed into her napkin.
Francine stopped laughing. “Maybe you should invite her.”
“Who?”
“Marion.”
Sol told us that Marion’s kids lived in different parts of the country. Her husband had died. I saw where Francine was going. And why not? We’d already paid the caterer for Betty’s plate. “Where? Here?” He looked alarmed.
Francine wiped her lips, crumpled her napkin, and tossed it onto the table. “Invite her to the wedding.”
( )
Francine and I lay on the couch in the living room together, quiet and thankful. We understood that we’d nearly lost each other. And we both felt that we’d returned, not slowly, but with the force of a planetary orbit.
Sol had told us once—it was a Sunday in February, just after Valentine’s Day,—about the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, a robotic space probe sent up to study the asteroid Eros. “The probe will use Earth’s own gravitational field,” Sol told us, “for a gravity boost. Which means,” he continued, “that Earth’s gravity will draw the probe toward it and then fling it out into space at a greater velocity than it had before.”
Betty’s defection was like a huge, dark planet with its own mass, its powerful gravitational pull, and Francine and I had found ourselves drawn under, into the dark shadow of its bulk. But then, we’d found ourselves just as powerfully flung out again, our trajectory changed, our velocity altered.
On the floor beside us sat six champagne flutes, still wrapped in bubble wrap. Every day now, the UPS truck arrived at our door with deliveries from Macy’s and Crate and Barrel, white boxes tied in silver ribbon, proclaiming “A lifetime of happiness.” Though these were gifts we’d picked out ourselves, their arrival nonetheless filled us with surprise and delight. Finally, we were being feted, initiated into a new, domestic life together, filled with domestic things. We mimed real surprise each time a package showed up at the door: What? For us? We loved the white, textured papers and the silver ribbon topped with little bells. I didn’t want to open them, but Francine reminded me that we were going to have to write Thank You notes, and we’d better get started.
“Are you afraid I’m going to freak out again,” she teased me, “and we’re going to have to return it all?”
For the past three weeks, our gifts had piled up in the living room, big white questio
n marks about what would happen after Betty left, a blank space growing, block by block where our future together had once been. Now the only absence they marked was Betty’s.
“I just like how they look,” I admitted, settling lumpily on Francine’s belly. “I don’t even care what’s in them. The pretty boxes, the sweet, formal cards. I like the symbolism more than the stuff—you, me, together forever.”
“I’d like seeing our living room floor again,” she said, shifting her weight under me.
“Don’t you like surprises?”
“Like you?” Francine looked at me. “Aren’t you full of surprises?”
Surprises, did she mean? Or secrets?
That night in her hotel room, Jill and I sat on her bedspread in our socks, eating nuts from the minibar, and Jill pressed her back against the lacquered headboard, her leg tossed up on the spread, looking out at the darkening city. “There was a woman,” Jill started, “who knew a story and a song; but she never told the story, and she never sang the song. One day the story said, ‘Bahin [sister], this woman will never let us out. Let’s run away.’ ‘You’re right, Bhai [brother],’ replied the resentful song, ‘but let’s do more than that.’ So late that night, the story and song escaped. The next day, while the woman’s husband was away, the story turned itself into a man’s jacket, and draped itself near the door. The song turned itself into a pair of men’s shoes, and sat partway under the bed. When the man came home that evening, he saw the jacket and the shoes, and accused his wife of unfaithfulness.
“But she hadn’t cheated on him?” I’d asked Jill.
“No.” Jill and I sat in the dark hotel room, huddled against the gathering night.
My father was right, I thought now, pressed into our couch with Francine: We all have compartments inside ourselves, compartments in which we seal parts of ourselves away. He was also right when he told me: You have a choice. We all do. But not about who you love. You have a choice whether or not to make a life out of silences—whether to let them become as solid as shoes under the bed—and about whether you flee. Whether to lose each other. You could sit across from someone, across a chasm like that, an omission, a silence, and let it grow until it was as deep as the ravine at Babi Yar. Howling. Or you could try to exhume it. Fill it. Bury the dead.
