All the empty circles float across the page: a constellation of possibility. I could choose answer A. Except I love the idea of a “scientist ascribing the growth of the park’s remaining trees to the mutation of the same termite species that had damaged homes throughout the city.”
Mutation. My tongue clicks each consonant with satisfaction.
Can I mutate from Russian to American? From Jew to Christian? Am I
A) Anna Karenina?
B) Sandra Dee?
C) Both A & B?
D) None of the above?
If Lynn didn’t exist, I myself could fill in the blank of her absence.
Rapunzel as Teenage Role Model
I weave a chain of chewing-gum wrappers, folding the paper lengthwise, bending it in half, in half again. I slide the end of the next wrapper sideways inside the bend, linking them. I save my allowance for Juicy Fruit, Big Red, Adam’s Clove, Beech-Nut, Black Jack, Doublemint, Clark’s Teaberry, Beeman’s, Fruit Stripe, Wrigley’s Spearmint. Discarded foil, silver as coins, cascades to my feet.
I coil the gum-wrapper chain around the three-bulb lamp in my bedroom. I wind it over browned gardenia corsages, plastic Hawaiian leis, strands of pop-it beads. I will add to it until the chain reaches six feet. Longer. It will hang sturdy as rope, a braid of straight-straight hair—more valuable than rubles or gold.
Glen Rock Slumbers as West Side Story Rumbles
Christopher holds my hand in the darkened theater. I breathe in unison with him, his shoulders’ slight rise and fall. Along with Maria (Natalie Wood), I long for Tony as much as I yearn for Christopher. My breath pauses only when Puerto Rican Maria sings “I Feel Pretty.” Can you be pretty, even without all-American skin and hair?
Natalie Wood, born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, is the child of Russian immigrants, Nikolai and Maria. Therefore, she is a Russian born in San Francisco impersonating a Puerto Rican who wants to be like the white American girls.
Years later, Russian string instruments play at her funeral.
Glen Rock as Teenage Exploitation Film
We play spin the bottle in rec-room basements, empty Coke bottles willed to revolve toward Christopher. Forty-fives plop on turntables: “I Love How You Love Me.” Or give me just “One Last Kiss.”
Kiss me, Christopher . . . in this whoosh of green glass whirling, clacking in concentric circles around the linoleum floor. Except tonight Christopher doesn’t look my way. He watches Lynn. So I feel like a “Poor Little Fool,” just as the lyrics say.
Later in the evening, Coke spins into Rheingold, boys arrive in black leather with Chesterfield cigarettes and fake IDs. Lights dim. Bottles ricochet out of orbit. Sprawled on furniture, we look like refuse washed up on a foreign shore: jumbled arms, legs, and torsos. Christopher kisses Lynn. I kiss a different boy.
My parents go out of town for the weekend, taking my grandmother with them. I mold my hair into a perfect flip, rigid with Aqua Net hairspray. Without my grandmother’s gnarled and wrinkled presence, the strands relax their frizz and straighten. With the scroll of pearly lipstick, the matte of pale powder, I emerge as if from a genie’s bottle in a different, exotic form: pure, unadulterated suburban teenager. One, moreover, with her mother’s car, which she uses to lure her would-be boyfriend.
Christopher hotwires the Plymouth and drives us to Century Road, a few miles out of town. We join other kids also in parents’ cars. Lighting cigarettes, our wrists torque matches into flame. We drag race, headlights like movie projectors tunneling night.
Our energy unsettles Glen Rock. Drag racing itself transports us to something more, different, better. When the race ends, I don’t know who, if anyone, wins. We are dazed by speed, having reached the end of Century Road, our destination, so quickly. A residue of cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes lingers.
Glen Rock as a Lost Chapter from Vladimir Nabokov’s Famous Novel Lolita
This is a secret: Lynn’s father is Humbert Humbert. So is mine. Intersecting triangles of daughters, fathers, mothers. But these secrets are nighttime shadows slinking like black cats through suburban yards. Hope flattens, thin as bedsheets. Streetlamps blacken with gnats. The moon pauses behind a cloud.
The breeze stalls. Night insects rub their legs. Skin bruises in constant friction. Only fireflies—following their globe-lit path away from czars—flee.
Glen Rock as Illusion
Summers, I taste time as it rises slow and yellow from morning skies. I watch for Christopher at the turquoise-tinted swimming pool, even though he doesn’t always watch me. We high school girls clump at one end of the patio area, boys the other. We slather Coppertone on wintry skin. We lie on our stomachs. We flip onto our backs. We wish on four-leaf clovers and shooting stars. We are stunned by warmth, thick and sweet with humidity, greening trees the color of Glen Rock grass. Chlorine seeds the air until I seem to swallow it. And when rain comes, it moistens summer and hydrangeas with possibility.
No one can prove we aren’t more than we seem.
Raskolnikov’s Ax as an Appropriate Tool to Nail a Mezuzah to the Door
My grandmother positions a mezuzah on the doorpost.
“That will only help czars—Nazis—whoever, find you,” I say.
“Pass over,” she hisses, believing the mezuzah will protect her from all future pogroms.
She gets the hammer and tape measure. I stand outside on the front stoop trying to hide her from neighbors. I turn my transistor radio full volume as the crack of the hammer splinters the usual silence of the neighborhood. With steely fingers, she nails the gold-plated sphere one-third down the frame, slanting inward. By tradition, it’s positioned at an angle because rabbis couldn’t decide between horizontal and vertical.
“Barukh atah Adonai, Elohaynu, melekh ha-olam,” my grandmother intones. Why can’t we simply recite “Our Father who art in heaven”? Straightforward. You know where He is, where you are. Hebrew words slosh together, soupy, indecipherable on the tongue.
Later, I find my grandmother asleep in the den, sitting straight up, the television tuned to I Love Lucy. Even though her eyes are closed, I feel her watching me. Her lids tremble. Her snores could wake the dead.
I consider Raskolnikov bludgeoning the ancient pawnbroker with the blunt side of an ax. I stare at my grandmother. She’s not frail. Her solid peasant Russian frame could nail me to the door.
My grandmother lives several more years, though I don’t remember exactly when she dies. Perhaps it’s around the same time as Lynn. I don’t remember who calls to tell me of my grandmother’s death, if the caller is sad, or whether I’m relieved. I don’t attend the funeral, probably don’t consider it. Nor do I know where it’s held or where she’s buried. I never visit the gravesite. My desire not to be my grandmother’s granddaughter remains. In the many houses in which I live after leaving Glen Rock, no mezuzah is ever displayed.
Shakespeare as Oracle
In English class, toward the end of the year, I barely pay attention to the discussion of feuds and warring families in Romeo and Juliet. I’m more conscious of Christopher, golden from baseball practice. At least, I barely pay attention until I hear the phrase “star-crossed lovers.” I suck in my breath. When Miss P. explains “irony”—Juliet swallowing a secret potion to feign death—I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn around. A girl, seated behind me, slips me a note. She nods her head toward the back of the room, indicating the note traveled up the row from Lynn. It’s folded into a neat square, my name printed on the outside.
I no longer remember what Lynn wrote in the note. Did she ask if I liked the play? If I had a date for the senior prom? Was I upset Christopher hadn’t invited me—though he hadn’t invited her either? Did Lynn want to know what I ate for dinner, if I wanted to go to the drugstore after school for a Coke? Or did she ask me about Juliet? Did she wonder if I thought love worth dying for? What would I do for love?
If only, now, I could peel back the corners again, open the note as if it is origami, a delicate paper swan to unfold. Peer insid
e at its secrets. Read it like prophecy.
Lynn as Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko
At the senior prom, Christopher dances with his date, a girl from Ridgewood. Lynn’s lashes lower as she hugs her fiancé, a boy from a different town. A ring with a tiny diamond encircles her finger. For a precarious moment the metal glows platinum, the gem sparkling prisms, before the decorated cafeteria darkens. I dance with a boy, a pale facsimile of Christopher.
No more geometry class. No teacher erasing triangles at the end of the hour, chalk evanescing in a cloud of dust, like smoke. Yet now, on the threshold of the future, the particles of chalk seem trapped—yet oddly unsettled—as if forever humming in a shaft of sun angling through a window, or in my mind.
I never quite let go of geometry, the triangles on my graph paper smudged from my palms, from my pink eraser. Forms fade, but ghostly outlines remain.
Lynn, as it turns out, is Juliet, Anna, Emma, Natalie Wood.
Ferris Wheel as Denouement
Christopher disconnects the odometer in his father’s Rambler. He drives us to the Jersey shore, the windows open on this summer day. A chiffon scarf flutters around my head.
His arm brushes mine as we lie beside each other on beach towels. Sand radiates heat. The sun bursts with sweat, steaming from the sky. Seaweed decorates the shore. Sandpipers and seagulls skitter foam to lace. We suck saltwater taffy, sugar and ocean water sweet and tart on our tongues. Tips of my wet hair cool my shoulders—hair, while damp, hanging straight as Lynn’s on this one perfect New Jersey day.
That evening, the boardwalk throbs with bare feet. We drop coins in machines for candy, gum, prizes. I win a glass ruby ring. I pass it to Christopher to slip on my finger. Which one? Ten possibilities, only nine of them incorrect.
But how could he marry a Jew?
In English class, after reading Romeo and Juliet, we studied The Merchant of Venice. When Miss P. said the word “Jewish” aloud, I was aghast. For the first time in Glen Rock, I heard that word spoken outside my house. I cupped my palms on either side of my face, like blinders. If I couldn’t see anyone, maybe no one could see me. I turned away from Christopher, sliding low in my chair.
Shylock. Jewish moneylenders.
My father was a banker. Worse: he was president of a bank.
At the end of the play, after the trial, as part of the settlement, Shylock must convert to Christianity.
If my father converted. . . . If I converted, I wouldn’t be destined to be me.
Now we glide around the carousel, joggle in bumper cars, hurtle on the roller coaster. Soaring gondolas, dotting the circumference of the Ferris wheel, gently rock us. Rather than loop around and around, we float over the Atlantic Ocean. The miniature ships, flashing red and blue neon, bleed into night. I lean close to Christopher, his tanned skin. He holds my hand, the imprint a golden tattoo on my palm. His blond hair ruffles. I am giddy, sailing from land to sky to sea. Below the Ferris wheel, streetlights necklace the shoreline. Above us, starry ice blazes across space.
Soon the wheel slows. The breeze slows. The night slows. The motion stops. “I want to ride again,” I whisper.
Does he hear me—what does he hear—in this dark absence of sound?
Christopher nods and lets go of my hand.
Swimming Like a Gefilte Fish
The Jews are coming to visit, is how you think of it, back then. As if you, yourself, are not a Jew.
Who are these Jews?
Distant relatives and old friends of your parents, your grandparents. From the Old Country. Russia. Kiev. Jews who fled.
You sit on the couch in the perfect, gold-carpeted living room—as far from icy steppes as possible—staring out the picture window. You watch Jew after Jew struggle to emerge from the interior of a black, battered car. They struggle because they are ancient, struggle because they are burdened with parcels of Jewish food (not available—thank god—in Glen Rock) and with boxes of religious totems (ditto), the contents of which—leather phylacteries, fringed tallises, yarmulkes, and siddurs—will scare you. Horrify you. Will make you feel as if you’re surrounded by aliens. Struggling to emerge, because, raised in a shtetl, to them, cars are alien. As parcel after parcel is stacked by the curb it’s as if they’re unloading the entire baggage of the diaspora.
They arrive at your house smelling of musty Brooklyn or Bronx apartments where (you know because you’ve been forced to visit) closets smell of damp wool and lox, even though winter oranges, studded with cloves, hang on hooks. By March, the skins of the oranges have puckered and shriveled. Like the skin hanging from your great-aunt’s forearms. Once you sat on the floor of her closet and plucked every single clove from an orange, hiding them in the toe of her shoe. For no reason. Or, because hiding cloves was your sole means of protest. A dislike of gefilte fish, after all, didn’t warrant carrying placards or boycotting dinner.
Now, when the Jews open the door to your house with much kissing, pinching of cheeks, and gut shabeses, the soft murmurs of Glen Rock—sprinklers, playing cards snapping in bicycle spokes—are suddenly obliterated. The green-grass scent is overwhelmed by pickled and sour-cream herring, horseradish, borscht, tongue.
A real cow’s tongue protrudes from a platter, the flesh goosebumpy and pink.
The back of your own tongue shivers as if you’ll never swallow again.
Matzoh, kugel, blintzes. Your mother’s best china, to hold all this food, appears on the dining room table, green Wedgwood purchased in the West Indies.
You think of your Christian friends eating steaks, hamburgers, fries. Cookouts. Picnics . . . kids and parents wearing Bermuda shorts, pedal pushers, seersucker. The Jews never eat outside. The women wear slightly formal dark nylon dresses, brooches pinned to the collars. The men wear white shirts and dark ties.
As the Jews descend upon the food like schools of fish, you envision hiding in your bedroom, turning on the record player, and blasting Pat Boone.
Gefilte fish: White mysterious mounds ground up with matzoh flour, eggs, and onion and stuffed (according to the traditional recipe used by your relatives) back in fish skins. Served in a transparent jellied slippery slime.
Not one fish actually swimming in the ocean has ever been labeled “gefilte.”
No taxonomic phylum, subphylum, or infraspecies exists.
How can a fish that’s not a fish end up in a ball floating in jelly, stuffed in fish skin (and whose skin is it, anyway, if it’s not even a fish?), as if it’s wearing a jacket? All evidence of its fishness—its true identity—gone. (Which is probably why you’ve secretly identified with gefilte fish all these years in the first place.)
You eat salmon, tuna, trout, blue, sword, perch, bass: Christian fish.
What you don’t know then, but what you surely must suspect—even as a teenager—is that you will eventually marry a man who isn’t Jewish, who has never eaten gefilte fish. In fact, you will marry (and divorce) two men who aren’t Jewish.
Your first husband, the director of a preservation project, in anticipation of the sale of a historic building, will one day say to you, “I won’t let him Jew me down.”
On this day in the future, you and he will be walking down a sidewalk together. You will stop as if you are driving in a car and suddenly slam into the iron front of one of the buildings he’s trying to save. He will turn to you. Apologize.
You will be mortified. Because he dissed your religion? Or mortified because you haven’t “passed,” because, even though you changed your last name to his—a neat, tidy, one-syllable name—he will always know you are Jewish.
Your second husband, also a lapsed Christian, will never utter a religious slur. Instead, both he and his mother will brag about all their Jewish friends: your husband’s academic mentor, for example. At Christmas, they give you books about famous Jewish people. Instead of “passing” with his neat, tidy, one-syllable Christian name, you will feel, instead, your very Jewishness drubbed down upon your head.
But now, back in Glen
Rock, the men wrap leather bands, phylacteries, around their arms, leather bands around their heads, leather boxes attached, containing portions of the Torah. They protrude from their foreheads like tumors. Yarmulkes perch atop skulls. Fringed tallises wrap shoulders. Veined hands with gnarled fingers grasp siddurs, daily prayer books. Soon they are swaying and bending back and forth, davening in Hebrew.
You’re relieved it is hot, windows closed, air conditioning whirring. None of your friends will hear them.
As the men daven, you stare at the plate-glass window. The sun, round as an orange (or a gefilte, depending), fractures the glass. White rays radiate from the center of the pane, inappropriate as a halo.
For Jews Only
Teenage boys dive-bomb into the pool, spraying water. Or they sneak behind girls, grab them, and toss them in. Girls’ voices shriek in mock anger, but I can tell they like being singled out, noticed.
I dab Coppertone on my nose and shoulders. Humidity frizzes my dark auburn ponytail. Here, I look like the other girls. They look like me. Is this why no one talks to me, notices me: I don’t stand out?
In the distance, men in caps stroll the golf course.
Women play mahjongg, a Chinese game. Men play a Scottish game.
I slide into the water and lie on my back, barely bobbing on the surface. The mahjongg words sound like a meditation, a poem, a chant.
Women, wearing straw hats and sunglasses, sit beside the swimming pool on patio furniture speaking exotic words as they play. Tiles click.
Plum. Orchid. Chrysanthemum. Bamboo.
Dragon tiles. Season tiles. Honor tiles.
Prevailing winds. East winds. West winds.
Sun warms my face; water cools my back. I am at the Westwood Country Club in Bergen County, New Jersey. But I could be in Shanghai. I could be Chinese.
That Summer of War and Apricots
Bukra fil mishmish. (Tomorrow, when the apricots come.)
At the same moment Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 mission float across the Sea of Tranquility, I lie alone on the ground beneath stars and planets in an orchard of mishmish trees. I am in Israel, having recently quit my job on Capitol Hill, my first after graduating college. I’m not actually trying to see Apollo 11 with a naked eye. Rather, it’s as if I sense the pearly skin of the moon invaded—moon dust, silent for eons, startled by thruster rockets—marred by boot prints.
Pat Boone Fan Club Page 5