Still, when the movie ended and a velvet curtain fell over the screen, I was stuck thinking of what I wasn’t telling Davis. I was stuck thinking—of all crazy things to be stuck thinking—of the rabbi and the rebel up the street and the man who was not my father.
Davis whispered to me, “I’m going to jet to the bathroom. Meet you in the lobby?”
“Sure,” I said.
And I waited for a while, in the red-carpet, gold-walled splendor, but then I didn’t. As people wandered out of the theater, I followed. Without really planning to, I wound my way to the colored-only entrance, taking the outside steps two at a time. The stairs were wide enough not to be panic-attack-y, but there were an awful lot of them. I passed only a few people coming down on my way up, and I didn’t stop to hear what they might be saying about the white girl in a hurry. Five flights, forth and back, until I got to the door at the very top.
Up in the Jim Crow balcony, I expected to be the only white person, but I was the only person, period, since the movie had ended what must have now been ten minutes ago. That meant I could keel over and catch my breath without having to explain anything. I didn’t sit. The wooden benches had no backs, and I imagined if you were taller than me—as most everyone was—you wouldn’t be able to stand up straight. I was so close to the painted gold stars of the ceiling I could have caught one, caught two, in my hands.
I pressed the button on the drinking fountain on the back wall. No water came out. I leaned on the button harder—and tried not to focus on the cracked porcelain and the rings of brown—and watched the water slowly, slowly burble. I lowered my head and took a drink. Even as I sipped, I felt like a fool. Who was I really helping? Yes, I was sipping in solidarity with Birdie and other Negroes—although I’d yet to meet so very many other Negroes. But I wasn’t sipping the way Birdie would—because in thirty seconds, I could walk back down the colored-only stairs and drink from any fountain in the city.
On my way down those stairs, I met Davis, skipping up the steps, two at a time. “What the heck?” he said, slightly out of breath. “I looked everywhere. What are you doing up here?”
I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand. “Getting a drink.”
“There’s a fountain downstairs. This one—”
“There shouldn’t be two fountains,” I announced. Even though it was true—that we shouldn’t be in a city, in a state, in a part of the country that separated people—I didn’t love the way I sounded. I was afraid I sounded like Max—like I wasn’t just doing something good but wanting everyone to know how good I was.
“Oh. Oh, right.” Davis grinned. “I’ve never met someone like you, Ruth.”
Back on the crowded street, he said, “What are you doing next weekend? There’s a swim-and-dinner party at the club on Sunday.”
I slanted toward him, looping my arm around a fancy streetlight in front of the fancy Fox. The metal was scroll-y and solid. “I’m free,” I said to Davis. Free and easy, Sara might’ve said.
Davis ran his hands down my sides. He could count my ribs, if he were so inclined. “Ruth Robb in a swimming suit—now there’s a fourth date. And how about the Magnolia? Come to the Magnolia with me. There’s a fifth date. Or maybe, by then, a sixth.”
I nodded then tiptoed up for a pressed-in kiss, not waiting for him to make the first (or the fifth or the sixth) move.
We went the long way home. Davis held my left hand with his right, threading his fingers through mine so I was half spinning the steering wheel. We pulled into a parking lot behind a ball field, in the shadow of a pine, or what have you. Davis reached under the seat and, in one practiced move, slid the front seat toward the back.
Honestly, if it were up to me, I’d have kissed him all night long. The kissing—the anticipation and then the actual, factual action—flooded sunshine into every corner of my mind. The kissing made me feel less tangled. The kissing made me feel like I could waltz right into a happy, uncomplicated southern life.
But instead of kissing, Davis pivoted toward me and turned on the overhead light.
I squinted and futzed with my hair.
“I like you, Ruth.”
I thought: You barely know me.
A few wayward petals from the roses he’d brought Mother had stuck to the seat. I picked one up—pure velvet—and ran my finger over and over it.
“What do you like?” he said. “Besides me. And besides roses.”
I threw the petal his direction. “How do you know I like you?”
He smiled. “Empirical evidence.”
“I like Hitchcock,” I said.
“Me too. Bet you like one of the Janes—Eyre or Austen.”
“Please. Give me some credit. I like . . . I love . . . Truman Capote.” Actually, Sara liked Truman Capote. But last year, Mademoiselle had published one of his short stories, so that was something.
“I should read him then.”
The thought of Davis doing something because I loved it was sort of exhilarating. “I don’t really love him,” I said, wanting to tell the truth when I could. “I just read one story of his about Christmas, and it was depressing as dirt.”
“Ah, so in the neighborhood of true.” Davis one-dimpled me. “That’s what we say when something’s close enough.”
I might have puzzled over this, but suddenly we were kissing full tilt.
When we broke to grab a breath, Davis tipped my chin to look out the windshield, which we’d fogged up. He cleared a spot so I could see the stars—the real stars, as opposed to painted ones on a ceiling.
Somewhere out the window were the constellations or the cosmos, if those were even two different things.
I whispered, “Sainte, sainte merde.”
“Not a constellation,” he whispered, his fingers drumming my collarbone.
“It means ‘holy, holy shit’ in le francais.”
And he laughed a laugh that might be my new favorite sound.
“Is that what you want to do with your life, beyond falling for me—to live in France and swear like a sailor and wear fancy clothes?”
“France-y clothes,” I said, laughing. “No, that’s Gracie’s plan—to go to the Sorbonne like Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.”
He smiled his thousand-watt smile. “What about you? What’s your plan, Babe Ruth?”
No other person—outside my immediate family—had ever asked about my future, with or without a southern drawl.
If he’d asked me a year ago, even two weeks ago, I would have said I wanted to be an editor at Mademoiselle. The magazine had guest editorships for college girls. But instead, I said, “I want to be a reporter. Like my grandfather and my mother.” I imagined taking vowel-less notes, finding the perfect detail to start a story, pounding away on the Underwood, coming up with a last line that would kick a reader in the teeth.
He nodded. “Ambitious.”
“And you? What’s the Davis Jefferson plan?” I tried to strike the same jokey tone, but I had to hiccup the words out. I suddenly cared so much, too much.
“I’m hoping Georgia Tech. Like my brother, but not like my brother,” he said.
“I told my mother you wanted to build a bridge.”
He grinned. “Why?”
“I thought it would impress her.”
“My dad wants me to study forestry, but I want to be a test pilot—like the Mercury astronauts. To see constellations from space.”
For some astonishing reason, I felt a tear slide out of my eye. I quickly wiped it away, unseen, and cranked the window down.
Davis started the car. “It’s nearly ten. I better get you home so your mother won’t hate me—hate me more.”
“My dad wouldn’t hate you,” I said, which may or may not have been true. It was, perhaps, in the neighborhood of true.
Before he shifted into drive, Davis reached up to flick the lig
ht off but then flicked it right back on.
I breathed in, ready for an earth-defying kiss. I wanted to go through that trapdoor, like the trapdoor to the temple roof that let in all the light. I wanted to blow that door wide open and expose the wonder of the sky.
But instead, Davis looked at me, the light still on. He didn’t move for a long, long second. “You,” he said. Just that. Just perfect.
13
One Hundred and Forty-Two Bricks
Nattie and I waited, waited, waited for Mother and the Savoy to turn up at Piedmont Park. We’d taken Frooshka for a Sunday afternoon romp.
Nattie was hopscotching on an imaginary grid when finally—twenty minutes late, natch—the car pulled up, Mother’s ciggie dangling out the window, waving us over.
Except it wasn’t Mother behind the wheel. It was Sara.
Nattie screamed. Okay, I did, too.
Sara slammed the car in park and came out to squish us both to her like we all shared the same skin. Froo jumped up and put her paws on Sara’s shoulders, slow-dance-style.
“I’ve missed you weirdos,” she said, driving us back to the guesthouse with the help of Mr. Hank’s road atlas.
It turned out Sara, in her beatnik all-black, had taken the Greyhound from Penn Station—twenty hours chugging south. She was here for fall break and for the Ten Days of Repentance that started with Rosh Hashanah and ended with Yom Kippur. Holy days I hadn’t planned on observing. That was the other reason Sara was here. She’d been summoned by Mother following the rabbi-and-rebel dinner to “remind Ruth who she is”—Mother’s words, according to Sara.
That night, after a roast beef dinner in which Fontaine questioned Sara’s political and sartorial choices, Sara shoehorned herself into my bed. It wasn’t the first time we’d shared a twin bed, but the first time in, oh, twelve years. Nattie asked Sara to sing a lullaby Dad used to croon when we were little—and then, the second Nattie fell asleep, Sara and I whispered about her Jerome and my Davis.
It felt so good to talk—to not think and rethink and rehearse, but to talk in the dark. To not have to hide the Jewish part of myself from the pastel posse, or the T&E part from Mother. To talk about how I loved feeling popular, even tangentially, and how I ached to earn a crown like Mother and Fontaine. “I want it, even though I don’t know why,” I said, and that felt good, too—to admit how much I didn’t know.
“What do you have to do to get it?” Sara shifted to her elbow. “The crown.” I could see the vaguest outline of her hair, calmer, saner than mine.
“For the school dances, it’s pretty much popularity. But for the debutante—” I caught myself. “Pre-debutante balls, which are the Magnolia and the White Rose, I have to attend Tea and Etiquette meetings, be recommended by an established member—a grandmother, for instance—and beat out some hundred girls in Atlanta.”
“Eh, you can best ninety-nine other girls.”
“You don’t approve.”
“I’m not Mother—I don’t approve or disapprove. If you want it, go get it.” What Sara wanted for herself, she then told me, was to actually finish James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which she called “an experiment in incomprehensibility,” and to bop Jerome like a bunny on a near-daily basis.
For sixteen years, Sara and I had shared the same air, the same air-shaft view from our bedroom window, the same family jokes, list of words, and favorite books, and I drifted off to sleep now so very happy to have her elbowing me in the ribs.
The next morning, Mother, Nattie, and I were on our second bowl of cornflakes when Sara surfaced.
“Is that your temple outfit?” I asked her.
Sara pirouetted—black headband, black leotard, black capris, black ballet flats. She looked like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face without the beret.
Frooshka leaped her floofy black self into Sara’s lap like she was part of the ensemble.
“Black is my color—the color of bohemia,” Sara said, as if she’d read it in Mademoiselle, which I guarantee she had not.
A smile formed on Mother’s lips.
“Black is for funerals,” Fontaine said. She had knocked and walked in without missing a beat. She unclasped her pearls and held them out to Sara. “You know what would look great—these. ‘No pearls, no power.’ That’s what I say.”
Fontaine, bless her, had been only too happy to call Covenant’s school nurse earlier to report I was feeling queasy. I was surely queasy about anyone finding out why I wouldn’t be in school. Fontaine promised to make the same call for Yom Kippur.
Mother poured Sara coffee—black, of course.
Sara sidled up to Fontaine. “Thanks, but I’m not a fan of adornment.”
“There’s nothing that can’t be made better with a little adornment,” Fontaine said.
“We better adorn ourselves and change,” Nattie said to me. I was still in my pj’s, and Nattie was in her bathing suit; she’d slept in it.
“Ruthie?” Fontaine offered the pearls to me.
I’d coveted Fontaine’s pearls—and her motto—every day I’d been here. I nodded, and she made a production of lifting my hair and nestling the strand around my neck.
Fontaine stood back and assessed. “They’re daytime pearls, cultured. But they’re lovely—even with pajamas.”
We were seventeen minutes late to services. The usually deserted parking lot was packed, and we pulled into one of the last open spots.
“I love this place more than New York,” Nattie said out of the blue. It was like one of those analogy tests: Nattie was to temple as I was to Davis—completely, extremely smitten.
“New York will always be special—you can love both,” Mother said.
Nattie paused for a second. “Dad would let me bobby-pin his yarmulke on.”
“That’s right, honey.”
“His hair was sort of sproingy,” Nattie said.
Sara shouldered between Nattie and me, locking arms. “Super sproingy.” We were back to being a trio—the girls.
As we approached the lipstick-red doors, I wondered if Sara would hate it here—the red, the gold, the plaster flowers on the ceiling, the stained glass that turned ankles lilac. Would she think it was too much, too gussied up, compared to our sleek and modernist temple in New York?
Mother stopped short. “I can’t believe it, on this day of all days.”
Sara dropped our arms. “Holy shit.”
“Sara!” Nattie said. But then we all saw.
On the brick wall above the lipstick doors was a scrawl of black paint—JEWS ARE NEGRO LOVERS—with one giant swastika for emphasis.
Mother dug out her notebook and jotted down the exact wording. “This is what happens. The rabbi speaks up for what is right, and people get scared.”
“Those bastards,” Sara said.
“We don’t see this all the time.” My voice cracked. “Don’t think we see this all the time.”
Nattie kept staring. “Who would do this?”
“I can’t believe you have to live here among this”—Sara looked around at the loveliness of the building, the loveliness of the long, graceful lawn that swelled from the street, the loveliness of the pale-blue sky, light as chiffon—“evil.”
Somehow, Mother had her arms around us all. “Let’s go in,” she said.
“It ruined one hundred and forty-two bricks,” Nattie whispered. She’d been counting—not staring, but counting. Cataloging what was lost.
There was room in the back row, where Mr. Silvermintz and his peacock-hatted wife were in residence. We squeezed past them on the aisle and entered the row in our usual order: Mother first, then Sara, then Nattie, then me. But instead of Dad next to me, I had Mr. Silvermintz.
He leaned over. “Ruth, meet Mrs. Silvermintz.” She smiled one of those could-be-sincere smiles and went back to thumbing the prayer book.
Every man i
n the place had on a white yarmulke—rows and rows of white satin circles perched on the heads of men who were not our father. I scanned the pews, looking for Max, but I couldn’t find his head among all the others.
The choir, in shiny gold robes, sang out. And Nattie sang out, too.
In the special High Holiday prayer book, I flipped through pages of Hebrew words that looked, that sounded, familiar. I fingered Fontaine’s pearls, turning them around one by one on the knotted string.
After nearly an hour of all of us standing, sitting, standing, praying, standing, singing, the rabbi took a step back from the podium and cleared his throat. We were in for the sermon. From our way-back row, I could see only the top half of the rabbi. Instead of his usual rumpled suit, he wore a white robe with gold trim. He looked vaguely royal.
“These are sacred days,” he began, “but even amid the sacred, we are compelled to acknowledge evil in our backyard.”
Mother leaned over to Sara. “Hand me my pocketbook.”
“You’re taking notes?” I whisper-asked.
“Habit,” she said, pen poised in her lap.
The rabbi’s voice rose. “Shortly after the discovery of the words on our walls, a neighbor, a Christian, came over with a large white bedsheet.”
The congregation seemed to suck in its breath.
“He wasn’t a Klansman, if that’s what you’re thinking,” the rabbi said. “He just wanted to hang a sheet over the words to cover them up, but I turned him down. If we cover up the hate, we are only brave in theory. The KKK makes no secret of its hatred of many races and religions. Is there comfort in not being the only target?”
“No,” Sara said, not even pretending to be quiet.
“No,” the rabbi echoed. “We’re sometimes fooled into thinking hatred doesn’t happen here because the magnolias are in bloom. But hatred cannot be hidden.”
In the Neighborhood of True Page 12