Paper is White

by Hilary Zaid

  June stared with appreciation, as if she’d never quite seen Debbie clearly before.

  “So,” I said, taking in Debbie, her sweaty upper lip, her intense, scholarly gaze, “this is all about you?”

  Debbie didn’t smile. “Fuck, yes,” she answered. “Who else do you think is going to hold you two accountable to each other?”

  Francine came in from the kitchen, a glass of fizzy water in her hand.

  “Marriage is a social contract,” Debbie, our civil rights lawyer, went on. “So, you love each other.” Debbie waved her hand dismissively. “That’s wonderful. But you’re asking for more than that.” Debbie looked from me to Francine. “You’ve asked us all to watch. For a reason. This is a social contract. Between you, sure. But also: between us and you—your community and you.” She appraised us with the solemnity of a judge. Then her nose flared. “And I plan to hold you to it.”

  ( )

  That evening, after Debbie and June left, Francine and I went up to our bedroom to put on our bathing suits. The heat we’d hoped would return in October had rushed in with a vengeance, like a rogue tide. I couldn’t wait to get into the water.

  “I’ve got a million short hairs down my back,” Francine complained, pulling off her shirt and scratching vigorously between her shoulder blades; red lines materialized across her back like ghost writing. She caught my eye in the mirror. “Do you really hate it?” she asked me. Her chin dimpled in worry.

  “No,” I reassured her.

  “It’s just a haircut.” Francine looked wounded.

  “I know. You’re beautiful. It’s fine.”

  Francine, still a little wounded, stuck out her tongue.

  “Hmph,” I grunted. I was too hot to protest. Francine stepped into my arms. “Let me help you with that.” She pulled my bathing suit out of my hands and slipped her hands under my shirt, slipped it off over my head. Then she wrapped her arms around me.

  “Look.” Francine turned me in her arms to face the mirror. She stood behind me, her face peeking out over my shoulder, her arms pale around my naked waist. Looking into the mirror, we were not what five millennia of Jewish life and culture had imagined as its survival. And yet—living Jewishly together, after two generations of assimilation—that is what we were. Twined in each other’s naked arms, we were not what our parents and grandparents, heaping our unfused heads with hope and blessing, had imagined for each other, bashert. And yet—following generations of loving couples—that is what we were. In any iconography of any culture, that was clear.

  We showed up at Trisha and June’s door hand-in-hand.

  “Well,” June crowed, insinuatingly. Like she had x-ray vision into the recent past. She appraised us with greedy eyes. “Honey!” June called into the apartment. “Our friends have been practicing for the honeymoon!”

  “It’s getting close to D-Day, girls.” Trisha walked in, balancing a tray of champagne flutes.

  I reached into my old black satchel and unwrapped a secreted object as carefully as if it were the Holy Grail: the glass I’d smash at the end of our wedding ceremony.

  June hefted the goblet and pinged it with her fingernail. “Are you planning to wear steel-shanked boots with that dress?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Honey!” June’s eyes rolled sympathetically. “This is the kind of glass they serve ice cream sundaes in. You’re going to need a sledgehammer to break that thing.”

  “Come on,” I argued. “It’s a wine goblet.” I’d rejected Rabbi Loh’s suggestion of stomping a lightbulb—all bang, no substance.

  “I’ve seen Ellen do squats,” Trisha offered. “She can power through it.”

  June shot her a practiced glance of arch warning. Then she stood up and disappeared behind a cabinet door. “Here.” She returned with a thin-stemmed wineglass with a large, round bell. It wasn’t quite as curvaceous as ours, but it was traditional. June tapped the glass with a fingernail; the bell rang a long, soprano note. “Use this.”

  Francine reached out and took the glass. We took turns sliding our fingers down into the bell. The glass’s long beveled stem was at least half an inch thinner than the one on our glass; it would snap easily when I stomped on it in my dyed-to-match ballet flats.

  I hefted our goblet again in my palm. I pinged it. It emitted a short, low tone. I slid my fingers up the sturdy crystal stem. June was right. Our glass was unusable.

  June nodded. “Take it. We have dozens of them.”

  Trisha settled right next to June on the couch, smiling sweetly as the first notes of Anita Baker’s “Rapture” began to play. “Thanks,” I said, something curiously like relief breaking over my head and shoulders. I raised my eyebrows toward Francine. “I think we just got something old, or borrowed. Or something.”

  “She’s so traditional.” Trisha tilted her chin demurely to Francine, who turned confidentially back, folded one of my hands between hers in her lap and said, “I know. It’s kind of sweet, isn’t it?”

  ( )

  I woke up early, the morning light bright on the empty bed. We had seven days left, and, like the miller’s daughter, more straw than we could possibly spin into gold.

  I grabbed our final checklist—I was never without it now—and wandered downstairs, where I could hear Francine stirring tea in the kitchen. Light flooded the living room. Even the clatter of the spoon against the mug sounded bright. I stared out the French doors at the bricks and the blazing blue. If the weather held, we’d have a perfect, cerulean wedding day, the sky warm and deep as waves. I stood entranced, our little world of domestic peace spread before me like a kingdom, when—crack!—something sharp struck the glass.

  Adrenaline surged through me; my legs shook. I looked down, straight into the beady eye of the world’s smallest velociraptor, gasped, and leapt away.

  Almost every culture in every part of the world tells at least one tale of an animal bride, of a man who marries a bear, a monkey, a horse, instead of a human. Almost always, in the end, the animal reveals itself as a beautiful woman. Almost always.

  The beast stared at me with its auburn-feathered head. Francine had been turned into a chicken.

  Then I heard the pages of the Sunday paper turn. “Francine!” I cried, fleeing. I just wanted to hear her human voice.

  Francine looked up from the paper. “It was standing by the side of the house. It looked terrified.”

  I stared at Francine, her hand loose around her mug of tea, her bony ring finger bare, but not for much longer. Of course, she’d brought home the chicken.

  I shook the list in my hand. This chicken was not on it. “We have to pick up our dresses from the tailor.” I ticked off task after task. “And we’re having lunch with your father today.” Our one thousand and one tasks stared me, hard, in the face. “We’re getting married,” I whispered fiercely, so the chicken couldn’t hear. I could just picture it now, my friends and parents showing up, and a crazed chicken roaming our yard, out for blood.

  “We’ll make some calls.” Francine kept reading. Betty was gone; the worst had already happened. “Don’t worry about it.”

  ( )

  Francine and I sped toward Tiffany’s Bridal Boutique, our checklist clutched like a magic hanky in my hand. We were going to pick up our hemmed dresses and the pair of dyed-to-match, cardboard-soled peau-de-soie ballet flats I’d ordered in defeat after trying six dozen pairs of flats, sandals and pumps in every shade of off-white, cream and ivory but the right one.

  (Early on, not long after I started spending nights at Francine’s little wisteria-covered bungalow in East Oakland, we stepped out of the chain-link fence in the morning together. It wasn’t a great neighborhood: Broken bottles lay in the street, syringes. But it had been a grand old neighborhood once, filled with huge, three-story, gabled houses. Francine and I stood on the corner, squinting up into the light. Shared mornings were new for us. The shingled rooftops glistened. I followed Francine’s gaze. Way above, atop a brown-shingled house four storie
s high, a pale white cat stepped out a dormer window, lithe as a spirit. “Look at the cat,” I said. Because, when you’re just in love, you say all the obvious things. Francine looked at me. A wry smile curved her lips.

  “When you look around,” she said, like someone who has finally come to accept a critical but counterintuitive fact about the world—like, say, gravity, or the fact that, even though we can’t see them, the stars are still out there, even in the daytime—“I’m really the only woman you see, aren’t I?” I turned and looked. There, lounging and grooming and stepping and sunning, twenty or thirty or forty cats, blond, brown, black, fat, narrow, dotted the rooftop. Cats had slithered in and out of the dormer window as we watched.)

  The ballet flats were an admission of defeat. At least, I reminded myself, my warts were finally gone, sheet by sheet of peeled skin, thick as a manuscript.

  But when we got to Tiffany’s, there was a problem with my dyed-to-match shoes. They hadn’t been dyed.

  The saleswoman—Tiffany herself?—eyed me and Francine over half-moon bifocals as she fingered through her file box for our receipt. “You two—sisters?”

  This again.

  “You,” the saleswoman jerked her head toward me: “the bride?” She followed my rolling eyes to Francine. “Who is the bride?” She pulled our receipt. “One shoes. No dye.”

  Francine and I looked at each other. “We need them dyed by Friday.”

  “Friday?” The saleswoman’s big, flaccid face frowned with uncertainty as she peered at us over the rims of her glasses. “Dye takes three week!” She held up three fingers in front of our incredulous faces.

  Francine and I sped up Piedmont Avenue in a blur of panic. In their box, the ballet flats thumped, soft and dull, heavy as dog turds. I felt close to hysteria. I was a bride: At this point, why the fuck not?

  “Hang on.” Francine swung the car around and pulled up in front of a cobbler. Clutching the box, I ran in while Francine waited in the car like Thelma waited for Louise, engine idling, ready to peel off.

  Inside the cobbler’s, an acrid little hole-in-the-wall reeking of brain damage and birth defects, the shoemaker lifted the shimmering white shoes with blackened fingers. “Can’t dye these,” he declared. At the tip of his finger, where the satin met the cheap sole, a blob of translucent glue had oozed out and hardened. “They’ll just fall apart.” I stared at the shoes, willing the soles to fuse to the satin with my mind.

  “Look,” I pleaded with him, “I’m getting married next week.”

  The receipt flapped in my hand as I raced to the car. “We’ll know on Wednesday,” I told Francine, as she knocked the car into gear and we sped away.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Francine apologized as she kissed her father. “It’s been kind of a crazy morning.”

  “No hurry, girls.” Sol answered. “Just an errand.” He looked at Francine. “Something I used to do with your mother . . .”

  My mother used to take me and Rebecca to do errands with her—“Daddy’s” jobs. These usually involved going to the bank, into the steel-doored vault, where in the privacy of the sealed, faux wood-paneled booth, my sister and I watched as my mother clipped bond coupons. Afterwards, she’d put back the safe deposit box, slide it into its place in the tidy columbarium of wealth, secure inside the foot-thick doors of the safe, a box inside a box inside a box.

  What could Sol and Betty’s job have been?

  Francine and I, still trembling with adrenaline, waited by the car, toeing the moss that was growing up between the bricks, a stunning border of deep emerald that was threatening to overtake the shaded path. Gazing at the living track of green, all I could think of for a second was Fiona’s eyes. As my gaze traveled the bricks, the thick margin of moss became the ancient residue of crumbled monasteries, their Gothic arches half moldered over, slow and seeping as time itself, a sign not so much of growing back, as growing over.

  “They need to get rid of this stuff,” Francine murmured, “it’ll get slick when it rains.” Then she caught herself. “Shit.” She crossed her arms and sighed. I thumped onto the door of the old Volvo beside her. Francine leaned into me. There were things we’d never stop worrying over—Sol, alone; us, the possibility of two people together, making it—but as we stood by the car in the sun, the moss lush and green, our eyes smoldered. Because we’re always discovering what the Romantics already knew: that what’s ruined can also be beautiful. The way that tumbled, roofless walls, stripped and broken, uninhabitable, given time and covered over with green, can become a lovers’ cloister.

  Sol came back from the house carrying a pitcher of water and a towel he set by the front door. Then he bent down in the garden and picked out two, smooth, flat stones, and slipped them into his pocket. I looked sharply at Sol. For once, he avoided my eye.

  We wound down the hillside, across the east side of campus, where we found ourselves clogged behind a line of belching city busses toward the stadium. Sol’s fingers disappeared into his pocket, where they worried his memorial stones.

  It wasn’t until we were headed down Claremont, the big cranes of the Port of Oakland stretching their primitive claws against the skyline, that Sol cleared his throat. “Here,” he told Francine. We had nearly reached our own house. “We’re going to Mountain View.”

  ( )

  Mountain View sits just on the margin of Oakland and Piedmont, a big slice of the old ungridded hills, its huge iron gates open at the top of Piedmont Avenue. It was one of our dog-walking spots, a big urban greensward, trekked by clusters of women with strollers, old people meandering in pairs. On drizzly mornings, the dogs ripped across the lawn to throw themselves on the grass, tossing up clods with their muzzles. Once, turning a corner in the fog, Francine and I had encountered a full herd of deer on the hillside, one shy form after another stepping out of the mist. Pass through the arches, cement and brick gingerbread Gothic, and what strikes you most of all is its vastness, ascending green hills everywhere you look, islands and mounds and seas of green afloat with obelisks and stones: endless green registers of the city’s historic and its unremarked dead.

  Sol’s neck reddened visibly. “Your mother and I always went together, but . . .”

  Francine looked confused. “You and mom always went to the cemetery . . . ?”

  “On the yahrzeit. Once a year. ” Sol sounded embarrassed. “It was all before your time. We didn’t want to bother you kids with it. Maybe that was a mistake,” he added. “I don’t know.”

  Inside the cemetery gates, the leaves of the birch trees flickered bright as pennies, the high paths hovering over pristine views of the entire city. Tumbling across the hillsides, Chinese grandparents peered from oddly colored photos, behind shining, tilted pinwheels. The Jews, in death as in history, lay apart: Just inside the cemetery’s gates, ancient letters traced the names of our own tribes.

  “Here?” Francine asked, looking uncomfortable.

  Sol shook his head. “Your mother thought that was too close to the road.”

  Francine piloted the Volvo up through the narrow lanes, up past the fiery, turning maples, past the lone, disconsolate angel inscribed with slow and heavy hand, “REST, DEAR ONE.”

  Francine’s Volvo shuddered as it mounted the hill. Behind us, like a map of everywhere we had ever been, lay all of Oakland and, beyond it, in a haze of light, the pyramid-spired City. The Bay Bridge spiderwebbed across the water, touching down on Treasure Island; the Golden Gate barred the western horizon. Inland, Lake Merritt, spreading blue under the colonnaded city government buildings, filled like a cistern of tears. And all along the horizon, stretching to infinity, the Bay’s bright water reached endlessly south, shimmering, an unbroken plain of light.

  There, at the top of the hill, Sol motioned for Francine to park the car. We’d come over the crest. Here, on the back side of the cemetery, the margins of the graveyard and the world outside were much closer. Below, you could see the gas station on Broadway Terrace just two blocks from our house.

&nb
sp; The Volvo’s heavy doors opened reluctantly. Sol led us down through the graves. As we crossed the wet grass, I picked up Francine’s hand. Francine pursed her lips, and the little dimples in her chin stood out.

  Sol looped up, disoriented, then back down the slope again. Then, suddenly, we were standing directly over the grave.

  Julia’s stone wasn’t much, a pinkish rectangle of flecked granite set into the grass:

  Julia Michelle Jaffe

  March 21, 1962–August 23, 1963

  Across the bottom, the plaque read simply: “Our Baby.” It had been thirty-five years since Julia had died, thirty-five years the week Betty left. Thirty-five years since this little parcel of dirt was the open hole into which they’d lowered their only child’s body. On the upper left corner of Julia’s polished pink marble sat a round, black stone like the two in Sol’s pocket. “Your mother’s been here,” Sol said, drawing the stones out of his trousers. He handed one to Francine. The second he set, still warm from his body, on the grave marker next to Betty’s.

  Could all the years of suppressed loss have coalesced around a single point, a place where the rupture between the past and the present and the future-that-might-have-been collided at a major fault line: Betty couldn’t bear to see her younger daughter marry before her first?

  Francine bent and set her stone on the grave with a shallow click. Sol brushed a little cut grass from the edge of the stone. Francine stuffed her hands in the pockets of her jeans, looking down the hill toward the gas station. I couldn’t tell if she was angrier at Sol for bringing us here, or for not having brought her all these years. She squinted. “Do you miss her?”

  Sol, who had stood at this grave when it gaped, who had filled it with rough clods of earth, scuffed his shoes in the thick, trimmed grass, stuffed his elderly hands into the pockets of his corduroys, looked out over the hills, and smiled.