by Hilary Zaid
“I read about Arachnid in the paper,” I admitted. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” he said, nodding his head, practically a bow. “I’ve left the company,” he said. “I’m thinking about starting a few other projects on my own.” His gaze settled with disconcerting intensity on my face. “But what about you?”
“I’m still at the Foundation.” I bowed back at him; I didn’t have to apologize for not being rich; I’d stayed true to myself. “I’m still getting married. Tomorrow.”
Charlie’s eyes bugged comically. “Congratulations!” he reached out, half as if to shake my hand, half as if to poke me in the ribs, but didn’t do either. “The red-haired girl?” he asked. I nodded. I wondered if he remembered telling me not to be a pussy. I owed him for that.
“It’s good to see you,” I told him, stepping away. Ahead of me, Sam had already pushed through the turnstile to the parking lot.
“Ellen—” I turned back. Charlie dropped his voice confidentially. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
Charlie’s lips looked white against his tan face. Sam and Debbie waited in the parking lot, leaning in the late afternoon sunlight against the cars. “I’ve been thinking about you lately, Ellen.” Charlie stared at me with unmodulated intensity, the way he had sometimes at Caffe Roma when he talked about the Peloponnesian War and the War in Iraq, his big square hands spread wide across the table. I resettled my bag against my hip, uncomfortably aware, all of a sudden, that I was standing there half naked, a towel wrapped around my waist. Francine had always claimed he had a thing for me. That was the last thing I needed her to be right about.
Charlie’s face was still and serious. “I didn’t just leave Arachnid, Ellen.” Charlie gazed at me appraisingly. A wry smile lifted the corner of his lips. “I walked out of that company with enough in options to build myself a brick shithouse.”
I had no idea what that meant, or what it had to do with me. And I felt uncomfortable: When it came to talking about money and cash and capital and shithouses, I was neither my father nor my sister. My face felt fixed, like a mask.
“I want to start my own archives, Ellen. A record of our own times. This is the new wild, wild West. And I don’t want to miss it.” Charlie eyed me, then gazed over my shoulder toward the pool. His voice softened. “I need someone, Ellen. Someone smart, like you.” Charlie stared at me, unblinking, his face stony. “Listen,” he said; his nostrils flared. “I’ve already incorporated the May Foundation as a 501(c)(3). I’m looking at office space South of Market. Ellen,” Charlie frowned, swallowing, “I want you to run it.”
My hand, which had been twisting my hair into a damp rope, stopped in midair.
Charlie went on. “It’s going to be a huge project, but you could ramp up as slowly or quickly as you wanted.” He smoothed the air in front of him with all-encompassing hands. “I’d be in the background; you’d be directing the whole thing. I’m prepared,” he added, “to offer a competitive package.”
A little jolt of mercury, icily silver, flashed through my nerves, both fear and excitement. Saying no to the Voices Project in L.A. had been easy. But a competitive package? Right here at home? “I don’t know what to say.” I was getting married tomorrow. And here was another proposal. A proposal to make it big time, the way my parents always wanted me to. How could I say no? I squinted through the golden, dust-thick air spreading slowly over everything, past the white stone spire of the Campanile, out over the Golden Gate.
The soot of Treblinka settled down. The faces of Wendy, of Anya. How could I say yes? “I’m . . . flattered,” I began, pulling my bag higher up on my shoulder.
Charlie looked at me with liquid blue eyes. “Ellen, you’re the first person I’ve asked. Here.” He reached back into the pocket of his bathing suit and pulled out a card. “Get married. Then call me and tell me what will make you say yes.”
He was the same Charlie May, I thought, as he’d always been, but smoother, the grandiosity and love of pretense that had made him seem too big for his paws in graduate school refined, through the rock tumbler of time and money, polished to the high gloss of adult success. He had become something.
“It’s compelling,” I said, recovering my composure. “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t.”
We weren’t students at Roma anymore, arguing over lattes and biscotti. Charlie had become adept at moving people, and more subtle. “Contribute.”
I squinted into Charlie’s face, confused.
Charlie’s shoulders hung, loose and massive, from his jutting collarbones. He looked relaxed, confident. “You. Contribute your own story. Say something. Anything.”
“Why me? I haven’t worked in High Tech. I’m not one of your Miner 99ers, or whatever.” What did I have to do with “our times”?
“You’re part of a cutting-edge social movement, aren’t you?” He raised his eyebrows and glanced pointedly at my friends, gathered in the parking lot under the crunchy apostrophes of the oak leaves. Charlie smiled; his brown cheek dimpled winsomely. “Get married,” he tossed his head toward the parking lot, “then interview yourself about it. And call me.”
My head felt like I’d just sucked in a balloon full of helium, light and swirling, and I ran toward the parking lot like the same balloon untied, shot through the air. As I ran, the idea of Charlie’s job offer shed its particulars until it had become nothing more than light energy, the excitement of the offer itself, the possibility of the proposal, any proposal, blurring, as I ran, my hair flying behind me, with the excitement of the wedding. And as I ran toward it, the wedding, the whole idea of the wedding, began to form itself into words—as Charlie May had certainly known it would.
For a fleeting moment, I allowed myself to consider that The May Foundation might offer what the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory never could: the future.
( )
Our little house on Manzanita Court trembled with anticipation, friends and relatives pouring in and out of the French doors like atoms of the evening air, visible in the growing dusk. Scattered in the grass, trodden Cheerios, the last remnants of the fugitive chicken, gave way under the feet of our friends. Nathan and Francine consulted over lighting the coals. Sol and Amy huddled in a corner of the garden talking about the Hubble. “They’ve just taken photos from a clump of galaxies that reveal what those galaxies looked like when they were only 700 million years old.” I smiled, as if this meant something to me. Just the last century seemed more than I could manage. “If you can look far enough away, distance becomes time. They’re images from the origins of the universe.” Sol’s eyebrows rose.
I remembered what Anya had said, about pentimenti. Images from the past. Repentance.
I left them, thinking about how far back you would have to look to see into the origins of things, and the way that the past could still live, could still unfold before you, if you were able to move out far enough from its source. I was still thinking about that as I floated through my friends, clustered together in the house, in the yard, among them but, somehow, apart from them, and I was relieved when I found Jigme, a bunch of irises clutched in his hand, poking around the kitchen, ostensibly looking for a vase, but holding Gramma Sophie’s cookie tin.
“Good idea,” I told him, reaching into the cupboard for a mixing bowl.
Jigme protested, “You have a thousand people here.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Everybody likes cookies.” I was already pouring sugar into the bowl. “Can you go out and see if there are any oranges?”
I broke an egg. Then another. The clear, viscous fluid ran down the side of the bowl. I could hear Uncle Irvin arguing loudly with Trisha about land values out in the yard. My parents hadn’t arrived, and wouldn’t until the next day.
Jigme came into the doorway, trailed by Francine. Seeing her, my heart felt suddenly as big and warm as the orange Jigme held out to me in his hand.
I had the orange zested, the flour sifted and the dough finished in ten min
utes. Then I went out to the garden and found Debbie. “I’ve got a job for you,” I told her.
Debbie stood over the cookie sheet with me, shaping dough into little, triangle-shaped cookies. She had a way of crimping the edges with perfect, artistic little twists. “You’re going to overfill it,” she warned me, gesturing toward my spoon, quivering with a big, ruby dollop of jam.
“Intellectually,” I conceded, “I know you’re right. But when I look at that tiny little spot of jam on the tip of the spoon, it just doesn’t feel like enough.”
“I’ll get you a salt spoon,” Debbie said. “You can load it like a Mack truck.”
When the cookies came out of the oven, everyone went for Debbie’s perfect little tarts—everyone except for Uncle Irvin. “Hamentaschen,” he said, sweeping an entire cookie into his mouth and reaching for a second. “Gramma Sophie’s.” He was wrong. My bursting little cookies were nothing like Gramma Sophie’s. But just hearing her name tonight was nearly enough.
“Phone!” Jigme called out. I was loading up a plate when Jigme appeared, the phone cradled in his hand, as if to protect the tender spot where its umbilicus might have been. “For you,” he mouthed. Behind his glasses, both his eyes blinked.
I took the phone into the living room, reconsidered the crowd moving back and forth through the French doors, and made my way up the stairs. The bedroom lay quiet; I held the phone, gazed at the light on the bed, waited.
“You’ll wear white, I suppose.” The wary voice, lined with all the rivers and roads of an ancient map, I recognized at once as Anya’s.
“Cream,” I told her. I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to convince her of. Our faithfulness to tradition, or our departure from it?
Anya sighed. But it didn’t mean anything. It was just the role she liked to play.
Then it dawned on me: She had my home number. “Anya, did you call me at home? A long time ago?”
Anya blew into the phone. “Why would I do that?”
But we both knew why she would do that. I answered with a question: “How did you know?” I guessed that she had seen me when she’d been at the Foundation, probably seen me in and out of the Rose of Sharon, but, aside from my resemblance to Batsheva, what had made her so sure I was the right person to talk to? How had Anya known about me?
Anya suppressed a very dry chuckle. “I have eyes,” she said.
Downstairs, the dogs erupted in a frenzy of barking. A cacophony of voices filled the hall. Someone had arrived. Something was changing.
“Anya.” I realized, suddenly, how far the Rose of Sharon was from Tilden Park. “Do you need a ride?”
Anya tsked. “I don’t need a ride,” she protested. “She’s going to pick me up.”
Downstairs, the trail of voices had drifted together into the garden. Debbie and Sam rushed into the house and out again, cradling a bundle. It tinkled with celestial music as they carried it out into the yard. They held the chuppah by its corners to show everyone their places in the tapestry our lives had made. Francine and I crowded under it. Then Sol, sounding, for a second, a lot like Betty, asked, “Does anyone have a camera?”
I ran into the kitchen for film—we kept the canisters inside the butter compartment in the fridge—and Fiona, still anxious to be the best friend, to do the right thing, to stay by my side, rushed to follow.
“Can I get it for you?” she was asking me for the third time.
”Really,” I said, “we’ve got it—” I was about to say under control when I uncapped the cold black film canister and turned it over into my palm, releasing a tiny landslide of earth. I gasped. Fiona, wide-eyed, stared at my hand and then back at me. It was the dirt my father had scooped up on his roots trip: earth from Ponar, from the clearing in the woods where the Jews of Vilna had been shot, plowed under, erased.
Fiona’s huge, green eyes locked on mine. Despite all our recent strife, I knew Fiona and I were thinking the exact same thing at that moment: about how many molecules of how many thousands of Jews I had just tumbled out into my palm. Every atom of that Ponar earth, a soul. “Oh sh—!” I dumped the earth back into the canister, dusted the grains from the life line of my palm, snapped the top back on. Only then did my hands start to shake.
Fiona and I clung to each other, giggling. It was one of those strange, sudden, hysterical moments, the kind of laughter that could just as easily become tears. I felt so grateful to have Fiona with me then, alive on earth, my oldest friend. On the way out the door into the garden, I couldn’t help thinking about Gramma Sophie. About Annie Talbot. About Liz and Betty. About how, when a person dies, the body goes back into the earth; but when you love someone intensely, and then, suddenly, the person is gone—where does it go, all that love? Can it really just be gone?
( )
“Sweetheart, it goes back into the humus, into the deep, rich soil of the earth, just like everything, to feed the person you’ve become.” Night has fallen. We’re together, alone. “Come to bed,” Francine begs me. “You’ve been up all night.”
“Just a little bit more,” I tell her.
“Sweetheart, it’s our wedding day.”
Francine lies in bed. Her hand flutters, smoothing out the place on the clean white sheets where I belong. Behind her head, the dogs lie curled, open quotations.
Papir iz doch vays un tint iz doch shvarts.
Paper is white and ink is black.
Tzu dir mine zis-lebn tsit doch mine harts.
My heart is drawn to you, my sweet-life.
Ich volt shtendig gezesn dray teg nochanand . . .
I could sit for three days, one after another,
Just kissing your sweet face and holding your hand.
Last night I went to a wedding
And I saw many pretty girls there,
Many pretty girls, but none of them compared to you
With your beautiful black eyes and your raven-dark hair.
Dearest God, hear my plea
To the rich you give honor and an easy path
But I ask only for a little house on a grassy green
In which my true love and I can dwell.
“I’m almost done,” I tell Francine.
But this is not the end of our story.
( )
The old kabbalists, Rabbi Loh told us, wrote that a bride sees with special eyes, that once the veil has been drawn and she begins her walk toward the chuppah, she not only walks there with, but also sees her descendants, all of her generations stretched out before her, like Banquo’s trees, stretching out to the crack of doom.
As the thinnest veil of dawn draws light across the Oakland Hills, across the flat lands of Berkeley, down to the still, shining panels of the dark Bay, what do I see? What future stretches out before us?
Today Francine and I will wake up late. We’ll have breakfast in our little garden, with friends. Today, early, with the precision of a team of astronauts moving toward launch, my parents Marilyn and David will walk off a plane side by side, clutching the black garment bag in which she’s hung her 1925 Fortuny beaded silk dress, cream-colored—a little bit too bridal; a bit, in fact, more than one guest will comment, like my own gown—a nice dress, an expensive dress, a rare and beautiful dress, though not the dress she might have chosen had this been another kind of wedding. All down the aisle and all through the ceremony, she will hold carefully onto the tips of my father’s fingers.
Across town, Francine and I will race to get our hair done; a song we both like will come blasting like a willing spirit through the speakers. We will roll down the window, our hair flying, the car flying, everything within us taking flight.
Later, up in the ancient hills, among the redwoods, I will step out into the big, wood-paneled room hung with green and gold. Francine’s dress will shimmer in the fall’s afternoon light; her hair will float around her head like seaweed; the green flecks in her eyes will glow like emerald islands. Francine will gaze at me as I cross the floor, curiously, as if I, in my off-white dress, am a crea
ture of the clouds. We will clasp hands to make sure that neither of us floats away. We will look out the windows together as the people arrive.
Anya will come very, very early, dressed in mother-of-the-bride charcoal gray, with seed pearls stitched into her jacket. She and Anat Singer will find two white folding chairs and sit, facing each other, talking. We will wait for Rabbi Loh to arrive, Francine and I hidden inside the Brazil room, our family, our friends massing like brightly colored birds on the stone porch. Jigme and Rebecca will practice marching together with the chuppah poles down an imaginary aisle. They’ll step slowly, the fabric gathered between them, and then, on cue, step apart.
Across an ocean, escaped, yet caught in a twining net, Betty will make careful note of the time and start a very slow game of Scrabble, playing both hands.
The musicians will come, and tune up, a scattering flock of notes, and wait.
Francine will squeeze my hand.
Then, smiling his freckled smile, Rabbi Loh will walk in the door.
At the table near the window, Francine will place a wreath of flowers on my head, and I on hers. Bedeken. We will be veiled. We will see, with special eyes, the things that lie before us. We will see children. We will see our parents’ parents, feel their spirits swelling, under the chuppah’s pale sky. We will step out onto the flags. The klezmer trio will play. A little warm breeze will lift the corner of the chuppah, a small melodious tinkle of the bells. Francine will slip a ring onto my finger, the finger whose vein, according to medieval Jewish tradition, runs straight to the heart. I will do the same.
And under that piece of fabric, stitched together in Betty’s little sewing room, something will happen to us, something invisible, but something nonetheless real; like moving through a membrane, something will shift; the words we say will change us. We will be changed. Then I’ll drive my heel down through the napkin, down through the wineglass, straight through to the river-stone flags, shattering the shape that filled the napkin, turning it into the fragments of something else.
