Good Apple

by Elizabeth Passarella

  “Elizabeth, does he believe in Jesus?” she asked.

  “Yes, Mom. Good Lord.”

  “Okay, then. And he believes that Jesus is the Son of God and died for his sins?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  Only a believer married to a Jewish man for thirty years could know the reach of that simple fact. How she had longed for that one foothold over the years. How much she would have given for it. I’m sure, in some sense, my mother also knew that the two of us, in our early twenties, drunk on new love, had just walked through a dribbling sprinkler, and there were hurricanes to come. Nothing significant had changed in our relationship; we just needed to choose to go forward, if that’s where God was telling us to go. It’s what marriage is, much of the time: choosing, despite the irritating personality flaws, to go on. Every wedding we attend where the bride or groom mentions that love conquers all (worse: love is all you need), I dig my fingernails into Michael’s leg and have to breathe deeply or find a roaming cocktail waiter. I think of what Ada Calhoun wrote in Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, about what she’d like to say to couples who promise in their vows to be each other’s best friend every day and never let the other down: “I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever, you will look at this person and feel only rage. You will gaze at this man you once adored and think, It sure would be nice to have this whole place to myself.”

  Driving around Manhattan at night, Michael must have wanted to put on the brakes, reach across the passenger side, open the front door, and push my nagging, yapping face into the Hudson River. And we weren’t even married yet. We would have countless arguments over the coming years, intermittent cold wars, long stretches of apathy. And it would be ten years into our marriage before I finally learned the lesson of that first breakup. It wasn’t about him. He was fine all along. Figuring things out, yes, but he was one year out of college, for heaven’s sake. I was the broken one, proud and arrogant and committed to a list of qualifications that didn’t mean zilch. I didn’t need to fix him. I needed to fix me. That’s still the case—and it’s all any of us can do: keep our side of the street clean. When God or fate or your psychic friend Donna seeks to intervene in your relationship, I’m sorry to say that it’s usually not to confirm all of your worst thoughts about the other person; it’s usually to send you into the sunless valley for a little soul-searching.

  So, whether on the hill-tops high and fair

  I dwell, or in the sunless valleys, where

  The shadows lie, what matter? He is there.

  Lying with the cold shadows for a bit isn’t all bad. After a while, you round the bend, and the lights of the city are there to warm you up again.

  FOUR

  NAKED FAMILY

  IN JUNE 2002 MICHAEL AND I flew to Memphis for my friend Blair’s wedding. At this point, we had been dating for about two years but were not yet engaged. It was the start of a period I’ll call Engagement Insanity Warm-up. We were in love, Michael was applying to law school, and things were moving in a forward direction. But many of my friends were getting engaged and married, and I wanted, at the very least, a detailed timeline of his plans. During the following year, Engagement Insanity Warm-up had flared to Monstrous Engagement Dictatorship, a rougher period that did conclude in an engagement in July 2004, but not before I almost ran Michael over in his own car while he tried to reason with me from the middle of the road in front of his first-year law school apartment. Anyway, 2002 was still calm seas.

  Blair’s wedding was black-tie, and I had bought an amazing and impractical dress at a sample sale a few weeks before. Sample sales in New York were a funny business. Young associate editors and editorial assistants from fashion magazines, of which I was one at the time, would line up outside a nondescript building in SoHo or the Garment District to get into a room full of clothes by a designer they could never, ever afford at full price. I always thought that the rooms looked like they hosted English language learning classes or judge-ordered DUI safety seminars after the clothing racks had been wheeled out. There would be some flimsy accordion screens on one side, shielding a communal fitting room, where women would have piles of clothes they’d grabbed and were hoarding like fresh water in the rapture. In the end, I would always end up buying things that hardly fit or were only marginally flattering simply because the brand was unattainable and the sale price was so good. Once, I bought some wooden sandals from Kate Spade that were one step above traditional Japanese geta, only with a clear plastic flap to hold your toes down. I couldn’t walk in them, but I also couldn’t afford anything else, and I wasn’t leaving empty-handed. Such was my philosophy at a sample sale, and that’s how I ended up with the dress for Blair’s wedding, a cocktail-length, ivory silk column with a black-and-white beaded overlay that was so heavy, chainmail would have felt like relief. Holding this dazzling web onto my body were two thin straps made of flexible wire, which were also beaded. I imagine the wires were the diameter of something a surgeon might thread into a blood vessel to break up a clot.

  When it was time to leave for the wedding, which my parents were also attending, we walked out of their back door and into the garage, where Michael and I ducked into the back seat of the car. I sat down, not particularly forcefully, if I recall, but that motion was still too much for the flimsy, possibly-not-made-for-real-life-outside-of-an-editorial-shoot, surgical wires to hold. Both straps popped at my shoulder blades, flying forward and showering tiny black beads all over the floorboards with a clatter of tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

  “Everyone out! Back in the house!” my dad shouted. “Get my sewing kit!”

  My father was the seamstress in our family. He excelled at any task that required deft hand movements. He was good at racquetball, precise chopping or slicing of any food, and mending stuff. When a button fell off our khakis or a hole sprouted in a pocket, my father fixed it. He kept his notions in a repurposed fishing tackle box, spools of thread and spare hooks and eyes organized meticulously.

  “Find me some quarter-inch black elastic,” he said to my mom, as he squinted one eye and poked black thread through the eye of a needle. “And Elizabeth, take that dress off.”

  I am not a large-busted woman. For me, a bra is merely a nipple-flattening device. So when it came to formal outfits, where wearing a bra would require purchasing something obscure, like flesh-colored gel cups that suctioned onto your boobs or strapless bras that were also backless, I declined. If the dress was tight enough, I went braless. And when my distracted dad asked me to please take the dress off, so that he could more easily get to the straps, I yanked it down, revealing my fully nude torso in the middle of our kitchen. No one in my family batted an eye. I sat down on a bar stool in my underwear and followed my dad’s orders, snipping off the remnants of wire that were dangling from the bodice and handing him scissors to cut the last thread after he sewed two utilitarian straps of black elastic onto my dress. (We were not even late to the wedding. That’s how good he was.)

  A dear friend’s husband once said to me about his wife, as the three of us happened to be getting dressed for an event in a hotel room together, “You can see her naked. I can see her naked. But we can’t see her naked at the same time.” That’s how it was with Michael. Seeing me topless in a room where my dad was also seeing me topless created a rip in the space-time continuum in his brain, and he understandably panicked. We had to coax him out of the laundry room to get back in the car.

  As I looked over at his blank face on the drive to the church, I realized I should have explained to him earlier in our relationship that I grew up in a naked family. But how are you supposed to remember to discuss something like that when it seems like the most normal thing in the world?

  . . .

  When I say naked family, I know you have some weird ideas taking shape. Let me dispel those. My parents weren’t nudists. There was no taking of stands or discussion of personal freedoms or anything remotely l
ike that. No one was getting the mail or packing school lunches in the nude; actually, my mom was and still is an avid velour robe enthusiast before 10:00 a.m. It’s just that there was never any shame or awkwardness about being naked in front of each other in the right context. We were always having conversations while someone was shaving or blow-drying hair, and not once did my parents say, “Don’t come in, I need to put my pants on first.” If I got out of the shower and realized that my favorite bra was in the dryer in the laundry room, I would walk shirtless past my dad on my way there to get it. If I came home from the mall with multiple prom dress options, both of my parents sat on the edge of their bed weighing in while I stripped one off, one on. I wasn’t going to go in the closet to change. I know families where no one comes down for breakfast unless they’re fully dressed for the day, who feel exposed if they don’t have their shoes on. Let’s just say we were the opposite. And God bless my mother, who never, in my memory, disparaged her own body in front of a mirror in front of me. It helps that she was (is) gorgeous and my dad told her—and us—all the time. But she never complained about imperfections or pointed them out while I was sitting on the edge of her bathtub, deep in conversation. Bodies were just bodies. Some parts were stretched out or wiggly. It just was what it was. Maybe things would have been different if I’d had a brother.

  I was by far the most free-spirited of my friends. My best friend Vanessa and I would skinny dip in her pool when her dad and brother had left the house to run errands on a Saturday. (We also, years later, skinny dipped in the Gulf of Mexico after dark at a wedding, only to be told by a bartender at the oceanfront restaurant—where approximately seventy-five people watched us cluelessly walk out of the ocean buck naked—that the hurricane that was brewing offshore pushed sharks into shallow water, and we were lucky we didn’t get eaten.) But most of my friends would duck into the bathroom to change or squeal when I barged into a dressing room unannounced. When I would strip down in front of a newish friend who wasn’t used to me, one of them would have to pipe up and say, “Don’t mind Elizabeth. She’s from a naked family.”

  I still had insecurities growing up. I am extremely pale and hated it and was an early adopter of any self-tanning product that hit the market in the late 1980s. When I began attending school dances in fifth grade and realized that, in photographs, I looked like an anemic, Dickensian urchin next to my friends, I started pasting on self-tanner the night before any school function. This led to one particularly embarrassing photo of me standing up, arms draped around my girlfriends, legs poking out of some Gap boy’s boxers with a button fly that I mistook for girl’s shorts, with knees the color of a Sunkist can. Today, I have a bit of a thing about my upper arms, but that’s really it. I attribute much of this attitude to being naked a lot at home. Remember, in the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were naked and not ashamed. It says that right in the Bible. “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25). It was when sin entered the world that their nakedness became something to hide. In a perfect world, bodies are bodies, and we get to show them off. I think that means I get to be naked in heaven as much as I want, when I’m not wearing a groovy caftan.

  We don’t live in a perfect, garden of Eden world though. And even worse, for me, is that New York apartments are harder to be naked in than houses in Memphis, Tennessee. Just last week our building was having work done on some sections of brick that had crumbled, letting in water and creating damage on a few windows on high floors. To get to the windows, workmen rigged up wooden platforms on motorized cables that slowly ascended from the building’s inner courtyard. Our building manager sent out an email: “The scaffold will be on the living room and bedroom windows. Apartments on the D line will see the rig as it travels up and down. Please remember to keep blinds drawn for privacy.” The cheap bamboo Roman shade that covers my living room window is permanently stuck in position, so even if I wanted to lower it, I couldn’t. But you’ll be pleased to know that the workmen were passing by that window while I was simultaneously walking through the living room naked only once. I consider that a huge victory. There are times, mostly during the summer, when I am so overheated coming out of the shower and so loathe to put on clothes that I will contemplate if I can, say, open the back door off our kitchen that leads to the garbage area and dump the recycling quickly before any neighbors or building maintenance staff happen to see. (The answer is yes. So far, so good.)

  . . .

  Whether I put clothes on isn’t always up to my own whims; I know that. It’s necessary to take other people’s comfort into consideration. I manage to consistently have at least a bra and pants on when talking to a babysitter who has just arrived as I’m frantically trying to get out the door. Note: I consider a bra the same thing as a bikini top, because it is, and we walk all over public places in bikini tops. I can’t debate that point. But I’m cautiously optimistic that my children are converts to this lifestyle. They’re still fairly young. And we do have a mixed boy-girl bag, which might muck things up, but no one has ever expressed outrage at anyone else’s nudity or told me it’s inappropriate to serve breakfast topless. We talk about things. There’s been much discussion about why my stomach looks like a lump of pizza dough (my son’s words)—pale, slightly puffy, and rippled with velvety wrinkles. We have covered nipples extensively, which, if you have ever nursed a baby or pumped in front of your children, is completely unavoidable. I tell my children how amazing our bodies are, not because I did anything to make it that way, but because God did. The message I want them to take away is that God made their strong muscles, interesting birthmarks, different eye colors, ability to breathe and blink and burp—all of it. Our bodies are on loan to us, and we are supposed to use them for good—which means we need to care for them well and treat them with kindness and respect. And because God made our bodies, it’s no work of ours, which, for me, is a great equalizer. It eliminates all the blame so many people lay on themselves for not having the body they want. It mellows out the pressure to change it.

  I consider myself a feminist, but I get a little preachy when I hear women talk about “my body, my choice,” because it’s only half true. I know this phrase is tied to pro-choice politics (for my thoughts on that, turn to chapter 8), but if I think about it as a larger cry for protecting your body, for loving it, for respecting it, I’m even more belligerent about my position. It’s my choice, yes, plenty of things are. But it’s not my body. It’s God’s body. He made it. He thinks it is worthy and good and to be delighted in. The same God who spun solar systems and put stars into patterns so children could trace dot-to-dot pictures with the tips of their fingers in the night sky, who made peonies and elephants and redwood trees also made me a body. Here we think we’re a used Hyundai with a busted side mirror—currently the car I own, so I say that with love—and it turns out, God sees a handcrafted Rolls Royce, every part buffed with the breath of heaven. He says, “You are a work of art, even if you don’t think so. Some parts may look damaged—your skin or your belly or your heart—but that’s by design, and I know what I’m doing, even if it doesn’t seem that way. My body was damaged, too, for you. Now use yours wisely, and don’t get caught up in the fat-free SnackWells craze that’s coming in the ’90s. Carbs are the real problem.”

  This is all good news and bad news. I’m more beautiful and loved than I know. But this body is a loaner, and I should probably exercise. If only I could do it naked.

  FIVE

  FIGHTING OUTSIDE

  IN 2008 MICHAEL AND I WENT to a Pat Benatar concert at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side. We were with another couple, Michael’s best friend from college and his girlfriend, and the girlfriend and I had slipped about a dozen airplane liquor bottles in our purses and pants, like college students, to avoid paying jacked up Beacon Theater cocktail prices but still get as tipsy as one needs to be to sing “We Belong” at top volume. This was just the latest in a long line of concerts we’d attended together that featured middle-a
ged musicians who had peaked during the early 1980s. While Michael was in law school, we saw REO Speedwagon at House of Blues in New Orleans. A couple of years after Pat Benatar, I bought tickets to see Air Supply for Michael’s birthday. The show started at 7:00 p.m., was over by 9:00 p.m., and I swear that one of the two Air Suppliers, who were both almost seventy, had a PICC line, outlined in surgical gauze, in one of his arms. Music that sounded like it was ripped from the soundtrack of The Karate Kid was our preferred speed.

  Pat Benatar was tremendous. She looked great, to start, and she played all of her hits, some of them acoustic, while she perched like a mountain lion on a wooden stool. Walking out of the Beacon Theater onto Amsterdam Avenue, we had that rush of satisfaction that the thing you’d just paid money to see was worth exactly the amount of money you’d paid to see it, if not a little more. The next thing I remember is that Michael threw his shoe at me.

  We were standing in front of the Cottage, a Chinese restaurant on the corner of West 77th Street that is famous for its decent food served with free, boxed white wine. It’s very popular with Columbia students and broke young professionals. My memory that we were in front of the Cottage is especially vivid because the manager came outside, looked at my husband, who was standing on the dirty New York City sidewalk in his sock, yelling at me, and asked if I’d like him to call the police. I declined. After all, I was yelling back—for the life of me, I have no idea what we were arguing about—and had certainly said something sinister enough to warrant the shoe being thrown in my direction. I was complicit. We’d gone from giddy and jubilant post-concert to rageful in the span of ten minutes and in front of hundreds of bystanders. Our friends flagged down a cab, shoved us in it, and we continued our argument until one of us fell asleep on the couch in our apartment. That’s how most arguments ended in our early years of marriage. Going to bed angry was the only way for things to peter out.