Dave was still for a minute. Finally, he brushed her cheek with his thumb. Jo let herself exhale. “Listen, lambie,” he said. “Whatever happened before, whoever you were with, that doesn’t matter now. We’re a team. Get it?” He shifted so that he could look into her eyes, and Jo nodded, feeling grateful for this possibility, for the ease with which this door had swung open, revealing another world.
Naked, Dave left the bed, crossed the room, and picked his clothes up off the floor. He had a black velvet box in his jacket pocket. He pulled on his pants first, got down on one knee, and when he asked, “Will you?” Josette Kaufman told him, “I will.”
* * *
There were benefits to marriage that Jo hadn’t even considered when she’d let Dave slip the ring on her finger: for the first time in her life, Jo had managed to make her mother happy. Not just happy: Sarah was overjoyed, flagrantly, embarrassingly, ridiculously pleased. She’d burst into tears when Jo told her the news, throwing her arms around Jo’s shoulders and hugging her for the first time Jo could remember in years. It was probably relief, Jo thought. Jo had been such a disappointment, for so long, and after everything that had happened with Bethie, up to and including her sister’s abrupt departure for California, Sarah was probably understandably desperate for something to go right.
“We just want a small wedding,” Jo told Sarah. She could tell that her mother was working herself into a frenzy, probably preparing to buy an entire trousseau with her Hudson’s discount, borrow money to throw a catered dinner for two hundred, and hire a private detective to find Bethie, who’d sent them a single postcard from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and hadn’t called home in six weeks. “Just a ceremony in the rabbi’s study,” Jo told her mother. A small, quick wedding would make her sister’s absence less noticeable. They would spend a night in a hotel, load up Dave’s car, and be on their way. Dave had a friend who’d moved out to the East Coast to work in a real-estate office in Boston, and had offered Dave an entry-level job.
“Boston?” Sarah asked. “But that’s so far!”
Jo didn’t answer, but she thought that, as far as she was concerned, the moon wouldn’t have been far enough. She was ready to go, ready to leave her job teaching fractious seventh-graders, in a middle school where the hormones formed a palpable fog, ready to leave the little house, where the couch was still covered in plastic, where the bare patch in the kitchen-floor linoleum got wider and the lines in her mother’s face got deeper every year, where every breath of air felt like it had already been in and out of her lungs a thousand times. Dave had spun her a story of life in New England as vivid as any of the fairy tales she’d told her sister: a cottage on top of a dune at the edge of an ocean, trips to New York City to see the shows, or to go dancing at the nightclubs. He knew how to sail—he’d picked it up one summer working as a waiter in Charlevoix, a resort town in Northern Michigan—and he ice-skated, and told Jo he’d teach her how to ski. “We’re going to have adventures,” he said, with his glinting smile, and Jo found herself unable to resist smiling back.
Jo submitted her teaching application to a dozen school districts within an hour’s drive of Boston, and scheduled interviews at three of them. She packed up her bedroom, as well as the boxes from Ann Arbor that she’d never emptied, and loaded them into the back of Dave’s Mustang. They made arrangements with the rabbi at Adath Israel for a Sunday-morning ceremony in his office, a luncheon for both families at the Caucus Club downtown, a night in the brand-new Pontchartrain Hotel.
The Saturday night before the wedding, Jo told Dave that she wanted to be alone.
“Old-fashioned,” he said, and lifted her hand to his mouth for a kiss. “All right. Whatever my lambie wants.” He’d moved out of the apartment in Ann Arbor that he’d shared with three other fellows and was “camping out,” as he put it, with his older brother Danny.
Jo spent a long time in the bathroom that night, curling her hair, applying her eyeliner, flicking the pencil up at the corner, into a little wing, like Shelley had taught her; putting on lipstick, rubbing it off, and putting it on again. Her best outfit was the kilt and forest-green sweater she’d worn to Passover at Shelley’s. She got dressed, left her bedroom without looking at her wedding dress, which hung on a hook on the back of the door, called “goodnight” to her mother, and stepped out into the first warm night of spring.
She couldn’t remember where she’d heard the name of the bar. Gigi’s, it was called, and it was just off Congress Street in downtown Detroit. Jo drove as if she were in a dream. She parked the car on the street, made sure it was locked, and walked down three steps, through an unmarked door, and into the bar, where the lights were dim and the air was a fog of cigarette smoke, hairspray, and perfume. A dozen stools were lined up around the bar, six wooden booths stood along the wall, and it smelled like every other bar that Jo had ever been in, a mixture of tobacco and the sour tang of beer. Peggy Lee was on the jukebox, singing “Fever,” and a man behind the bar was drying glasses with a white towel. The man’s hair was cut so short that it stood up in bristles, and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to reveal an anchor tattoo. At the end of the bar, two women were talking, their heads so close together that their temples almost touched. Four women sat together at a table toward the back. Behind them, in the small cleared space, two other women slow-danced.
“What can I get you?” Jo blinked, and saw that the man behind the bar was actually a woman. At least, she sounded female, and what Jo had translated as stockiness was probably breasts, bound tight. The bartender looked at Jo, took in her startled expression, and smiled kindly. “First time?”
Jo nodded and asked for a Grasshopper.
“Are you meeting someone?” the bartender asked as she poured and shook and stirred. Jo sipped her sweet, frothy drink and shook her head. This was a mistake, she thought. What if she saw someone she knew? What if one of the girlfriends she said she’d been out with called the house and her mother, or Dave, learned that she’d been lying? What if she crashed the car on her way home, and . . .
Someone tapped her shoulder. Jo turned and saw a woman with bobbed dark-blond hair, a man’s button-down shirt, and a vest on top. Her body was shapely and solid, and her eyes were bright and interested.
“Do I know you?” Jo asked.
“Would you like to?” the woman replied. Jo could see the strong line of her jaw, but her voice was feminine, light and teasing.
“Yes,” Jo said. It felt like she was watching someone in a movie, a college girl who’d left her parents’ house the night before her wedding and had driven into the city, to a bar where women came to meet women, to dance with them, to kiss them in dark corners and maybe, later, to do more. “Yes, I think I would.”
The woman put her hand on Jo’s waist. She led Jo toward the back of the room and wrapped her arms around Jo’s waist. They swayed together to Etta James. Jo could feel the other woman’s breasts against her own, could feel the other woman’s inhalations, and the warm puffs of her breath on her cheek, and it felt good, and right, not something she’d have to convince herself that she wanted, not something that could be, at best, dimly pleasant, but something as naturally and sweetly delightful as taking the first deep breath once your bra and girdle came off, or jumping into a cool lake on a hot day.
“Kiss me, honey,” the woman said, as the jukebox played “How Long Has This Been Going On.” The woman stood on her tiptoes, and Jo bent her head, and they were kissing, lips pressed together, tongues brushing lightly. Jo settled her hand against the back of the woman’s neck, trying not to think of Shelley, and how Shelley had touched her in the same spot. The woman slid her hand around to cup Jo’s cheek and pull her close and whisper that she had a place, a room, not far.
“Yes,” Jo said. She sounded like she was gasping, like she was a drowning woman who’d managed to pull just enough air into her lungs to call for help, one last time. “Yes, please.”
The woman pulled back, laughing a little. “Aren’t we the e
ager beaver.”
“That’s an awful joke,” Jo said sternly.
“I didn’t mean it,” the woman said. “I’m a terrible tease.” She took Jo’s arm and guided her up the stairs, out of the bar, down the street, through the doorway of a narrow redbrick row house. Her door on the third floor opened into a small, neat living room and a galley kitchen. Hanging over the stove’s handle was a red-and-white dish towel, a twin of the one Sarah used in their kitchen at home.
“I’m Cal,” said the woman, pouring Scotch into a glass. She took a sip and kissed Jo, letting Jo taste the burn of the liquor on her tongue. Cal had a narrow, foxy face, thin lips, and deep-set brown eyes.
I’m lonely, Jo thought. I’m so lonely.
Cal was looking at her closely, her head tilted to the side. “You okay?”
“I’m getting married,” Jo blurted.
Cal’s eyebrows lifted. “Oh?”
“Tomorrow,” Jo confessed. She felt a great weight pressing down on her chest, and she struggled to breathe. “There was this girl . . . my girlfriend.” My Shelley. “We were going to go away together, to travel, but she changed her mind.” Jo couldn’t bring herself to say the rest of it: how she’d spent a chunk of her money on her last-minute ticket home and the rest on Bethie’s abortion, how she couldn’t afford to go to New York like she’d planned, how she’d met her husband-to-be at her girlfriend’s wedding, how she’d given up on her dreams. How she’d given up on herself.
Cal was looking down at her glass, turning it around in her hands. When she looked up, Jo could see faint lines around her eyes, twin grooves between her eyebrows. In the bar, she’d thought that they were around the same age, but now she could see that the other woman was at least in her thirties, maybe older than that. “This life,” Cal said. “You have to give up a lot. I have family who won’t see me. It’s hard. It’s not for everyone.”
Tears were streaming down Jo’s face, and her throat was too tight for her to say the words, I thought I was one of the brave ones. I thought that this could be for me.
“Come here, honey,” Cal said. She took Jo’s hands and led her to a neatly made bed covered in a stiff wool blanket. She unfastened Jo’s shoes, unbuttoned her sweater, lay Jo on the bed, and curled around her, and held her as she cried, sobbing like her heart was breaking and thinking, I can’t marry Dave, not when there is this in the world; I can’t settle for just that.
* * *
She did. Of course she did. The next morning, feeling hollow and hot-eyed, her temples and the center of her forehead throbbing with a headache, she put on a Playtex girdle and her mother’s wedding gifts: a newly purchased suit made of golden-tan tweed wool and a pair of brown leather pumps that pinched her toes. At ten o’clock in the morning she stood in front of the rabbi’s desk in his office at Adath Israel with her mother beside her and her sister God only knew where and Dave’s parents and brother and sister standing with him, and promised to love David Braverman in sickness and in health for as long as they both shall live. Neither of them had invited any friends. Even if Jo had wanted Shelley there, Shelley Finkelbein Ziskin was still on her honeymoon, taking a three-month tour of Europe with her husband. “I do,” she said. “I will.” Dave slipped a gold band on her finger, and Jo tried to feel the appropriate emotions—love, excitement, anticipation of the years to come. Instead, all she felt was a grayish exhaustion, and a thin relief. That’s over, she thought. And now I’ll be safe.
PART
three
1974
Bethie
As her flight from Madrid touched down in Detroit, Bethie bet herself that it would take her mother less than five minutes to start yelling at her, and less than ten to start crying. She followed the shuffling crowd down the airplane’s narrow aisle and through the Jetway. When she stepped out into the airport, with Jo’s backpack on her back and her embroidered duffel bag slung over her shoulder, there was Sarah. She was dressed in a turquoise chenille suit and black pumps, with clip-on pearl earrings and a necklace that matched. Her hair looked freshly set and sprayed, and her face was as immobile as if someone had sprayed that, too. Bethie tucked her hair behind her ears. She hadn’t cut it since she’d left Detroit, and it hung down to the small of her back in shiny waves; her best feature, by far. She wore a loose-fitting peasant-style blouse with embroidery at the yoke; bell-bottom jeans; her old red cowboy boots, the pair that Jo had given her, now scuffed and creased and run down at the heels; and a battered brown felt hat that she’d picked up . . . in San Francisco? Barcelona? She couldn’t remember. It had belonged to some boy, some boy she’d met in some bar. She’d sat down beside him, plucked the hat off his head, put it on her own, and worn it all night. When she’d woken up in the morning, the boy was gone, and the hat was crushed under her pillow. She’d pulled it out, shaken it into shape, and worn it ever since.
Sarah pressed her lips together as she eyed Bethie. “Do you have any luggage?”
“Just this.” Bethie tugged the embroidered bag more securely over her shoulder. The bag had come from a street vendor in Cherripond, and it currently contained the sum of her possessions: a few pairs of jeans, a few shirts, underwear, and a bra. Her wallet, a comb and a toothbrush, the Swiss army knife that she always kept close, and, most important, two ounces of extremely good hash that she planned on selling to her former Detroit acquaintances.
Sarah scrutinized the bag. Bethie could follow the path of her thoughts, so she wasn’t surprised when her mother asked, “What are you wearing to the wedding?”
“I thought I’d pick something up at Hudson’s.”
Her mother gave a single nod. Her lips were so tightly pursed that they’d disappeared, leaving only a slit in their place. She walked stiffly along the fluorescent-lit corridor, with Bethie a few paces behind her. Bethie wondered if people who saw them even thought they were together, and if Sarah would want them to know. Probably not, she thought, as they pushed through the glass doors and out into the Michigan night.
Bethie breathed deeply, smelling dirt and grass and growing things, the essence of Midwestern spring. The essence of home. Barbara Simoneaux had always wanted to be a June bride, and she’d gotten her wish—her preferred month for the wedding, her chosen man for the groom, and Bethie, her best friend since forever, to stand with her under the chuppah.
Bethie followed her mother to the parking garage and got into the passenger’s side of a car she didn’t recognize, a Buick sedan in an ugly shade of beige. “New car?”
“New used car.” Sarah’s voice was neutral, but Bethie could remember when their father would come home, every few years, with the new model Chevrolet. They’d pile into the car for a slow ride around the neighborhood, breathing the new-car smell, listening to their father talk about the car’s construction, what made the New Car better and safer than the Old Car. Sarah put her key into the ignition, gripped the wheel tightly in both hands, backed out of the parking space, and said, “You look like that Mama Cass.” Her jaw trembled and her nostrils flared, as if she were preparing to say more, or cry. Bethie checked the dashboard clock and saw that she’d won her bet with two minutes to spare.
“Mama Cass is rich and famous,” she said, trying to keep calm. She did her best to avoid mirrors, and her own reflection, but she knew how she looked, how far she’d come from the pretty, peppy, trim teenager with shiny hair and a big, bright smile. She tried not to let it bother her. A body was just a body, just a vessel for her soul, and she was under no obligation to keep her body looking any certain way, no more than she was obliged to do anything just because it was customary, or traditional, or expected of women in America. She didn’t have to get married, she didn’t have to have kids, and she didn’t have to be thin.
“If you were rich and famous maybe you could get away with it.” Sarah’s voice was waspish. “But you’re not. Unless I’m missing something. Do you have a hit record in Nepal?”
“I haven’t been in Nepal for a year and a half, Mom.”<
br />
“You look like a slob.”
“It’s nice to see you, too.” Bethie was determined not to let her mother draw her into a fight, and she’d taken a quaalude an hour before, just to make sure things stayed mellow.
“How long since you’ve been to a dentist?” Sarah asked.
Bethie shrugged.
“I made you an appointment with Dr. Levin for tomorrow morning at ten. And at Mister Jeffrey’s at two o’clock.”
“I don’t want my hair cut.”
“Just a trim, I told him.”
“Mom, it’s my hair. I can do what I want with it.”
“What is Barbara going to think when she sees you looking like this?” Bethie didn’t answer. She’d tried not to think about it. “It’s disrespectful,” Sarah continued. “It’s the biggest day of her life, and you’re going to show up looking like the Wreck of the Hesperus.”
Bethie smiled. She’d heard her mother use that phrase a hundred times, but only about Jo.
“Did you even comb your hair?”
“Leave it alone, Mom.”
Sarah made a huffing sound and gripped the wheel even more tightly. Bethie rolled down her window, feeling the softness of the misty air on her face. The new world, the settlers and the Pilgrims had called America when they’d first arrived, and Bethie felt, or imagined she could feel, how it was different from Europe, how there was a fresh, unspoiled quality to the air. Or maybe it was just a lack of history. In Italy and Spain, she’d walked on cobbled streets that had been there for centuries, slept in buildings that had stood when Columbus set sail for the Indies. In Michigan, things were considered old if they’d been around in 1924.
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