Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “It’s gonna be a problem,” Dennis said. “There’s going to be a big problem is all I have to say. Carter’s going to do something really, really stupid.”

  “Let’s not forget,” Herbert said to Ben, returning to the original conversation, “that Brandeis is a Jewish institution. This is important. This is what makes it special.”

  Sharon closed her eyes. She didn’t know what had happened; one day not so long ago she woke up to find her parents no longer ate oysters, and Friday evenings they went to shul instead of the Brown Derby. They were full-fledged Jews now, and tonight her father wore a colorfully embroidered yarmulke pinned to the few strands of hair he had left. It reminded her of her father’s fanatical nationalism, the way he’d go nuts when they watched the Olympics together. Goddamn Reds! he’d scream, hitting the television when the Soviets were skating. He cried every time the national anthem played and an American stood with a hand over his chest.

  “Yes,” Sigmund said. “That historical aspect is interesting as well. But it is not in fact a Jewish institution, Herb. It’s not a synagogue; it’s a university.”

  Herbert shrugged. “Well, I’ll tell you this, it sure as hell wasn’t built by the gentiles.”

  Sharon hated it when her father spoke this way: of us and of them, especially since he had spent a large part of her youth trying so goddamn hard to be them. There had been a brief period when he’d gone by a different name—Thomas. Herbert Thomas, but then, when it had come to legally changing the entire family’s name, he had let it go. Sharon wondered, as she had many times before, exactly why Dennis was so angry at his father. Because Sigmund was so, well, cool. What would it have been like to have had him as a father? She knew Sigmund would have let her go on the Freedom Ride. He would have given her his blessing, and she would have gone down South and seen the disenfranchisement and the segregation and the sadness and the poverty firsthand. She would have had bruises of her own. Sharon looked around the table. Perhaps she wouldn’t even be here, she thought. Maybe she’d be a lesbian, as Louise turned out to be.

  “Ummm, can I talk here?” Benjamin said. “Because I’m the one leaving tomorrow, right?”

  “Yes, Ben,” all the adults murmured.

  “Of course, darling,” Sharon said, touching his wrist.

  “We know!” Vanessa said. “Ben’s going!” She set her spoon down loudly on the table. It seemed as if there had been talk of little else all month. Everyone deferred to Ben—the college boy!—and her mother must have cooked what he’d wanted for dinner each night for the entire fucking summer. Go already, she thought, just go! But she hadn’t yet processed what it would mean to have him actually leave. Because Ben was in nearly every memory she held. So many late nights they had met in this backyard and lain back on the soft grass, letting the night sky shift and twist for hours over their drunken heads. They’d make sure their mother was sound asleep before they tiptoed up the stairs—avoiding the creaking ones—together.

  “She’s upset,” Sharon said.

  “I am not!” Vanessa said. “I am not upset, okay?”

  Ben looked down at his soup, quiet for a moment, slightly panicked to think of arriving on campus to find that Grandpa Herbert had been correct, and he’d be greeted by several men in long black cloaks, white threads at their waists, and twirls of hair emerging from tall black hats. Or worse, a long line of reform rabbis would pat him on the shoulder—What a good little bar mitzvah boy! they’d tell him—and encourage him to join Hillel, date only girls with lifetime memberships to Hadassah, and exchange some of his bar mitzvah loot for Israeli bonds.

  He hadn’t thought of it much at all until last spring, when his friends got wind of his decision to go to Brandeis in the fall.

  “Brandeis?” His friend and teammate Nick Papadopoulos, left forward to Ben’s right, and who was heading to Notre Dame, was most incredulous. And Jon Ratner, the goalie, who got into Columbia, the lucky shit, said, “They don’t even have a football team. And the soccer, is it even Division Three?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. But he did know. Brandeis was hardly known for its excellence in sports. It was just that his priorities had changed, overnight it seemed, and what he’d valued so much until this point seemed saved for high school, completed. After that day something “Jewish” appeared in Ben’s locker each week: a jar of gefilte fish, the large ovals nesting in a gelatinous mass; a box of matzo, Go Brandeis Bagels! written across the label in blue pen; a massive jar of Manischewitz beet borscht that crashed to the floor and splattered along the hallway and all over Ben’s new Levi’s when he opened the locker door.

  “It’s a radical place to be,” Ben had told his friends that day, and he told his family the same thing now. “The Ten Most Wanted on the FBI list of 1970 all went to Brandeis. Abbie Hoffman, the Yippies, they were all there.”

  “Yes, they were,” Dennis said, pointing his spoon at his father. “Radicals come in every generation, Ben.”

  “Oh my goodness, we forgot a toast!” Sharon wobbled up from the bench and lifted her glass. “To Benjamin!” she said, leaning awkwardly over the table. “At the beginning of this brand-new adventure!” Sharon choked on the last word.

  “Hear, hear,” Dennis said, standing, also raising his glass, in part to save his wife from tears. “Ben, may this next chapter of your life be fulfilling and fruitful. We wish you the sweetest happiness and success.”

  Sharon waited as Dennis clinked glasses with Ben.

  “Wait, wait!” Tatti said after all the glasses were lowered, because they had not clinked in every conceivable combination, and she had not yet touched stemware with her son’s.

  “Pust’ sbudutsya vse tvoi mechty!” she said. May all your dreams come true.

  “Vashee zda-ró-vye,” Dennis said to the table. To your health.

  “What?” Sharon said. “Tell us!” She disliked it when Dennis and his mother spoke in Russian together. While Dennis’s Russian was useful for his work, and while she understood that it was a gift passed from mother to son, she envied it.

  “Don’t worry. It was just one of Tatti’s many toasts.” Sigmund laughed.

  “In the old days, every first toast was to Stalin.” Tatti shook her head. “Well, at least when we thought the neighbors were listening. But not now.”

  “I’m not worried,” Sharon said, sniffing toward Sigmund. “Though I can’t say I’ve learned the entire collection of them.” Sharon sat back. She had sat through countless long and sentimental Russian toasts: to the dead, to the newlyweds, to the soldiers who had died in the war, to those who were still fighting. But she had never heard one to Stalin. “When did you?” She smiled at her father-in-law, thin and wiry in the blue jeans he’d taken to wearing, right around when he’d started getting into disco music, odd choices both, as she had always seen him as a man steeped in the past. Sharon wondered now, if she were to shake Sigmund, would his bones break and only those ridiculous dungarees, perfectly creased and thick with Tatti’s starch, keep the rest of him intact?

  “I manage in Russian,” Sigmund said. “After all these years.”

  “Oh, go ahead, have some wine.” Helen reached over Vanessa for the bottle of Chianti on the table. “It’s a special occasion tonight.”

  Vanessa covered the top of her glass. “I don’t drink anymore, Nana.”

  “Since when?” Helen’s ash blond hair, sprayed high, was now wilting like a dying bouquet, and beads of sweat trickled down her brown, spotted chest into the deep opening of her blouse. “You don’t eat and you don’t drink. What else is there?” Helen said, turning to Sharon.

  “I don’t think I want to know,” Sharon said, laughing, but she had also begun to wonder about her daughter, who seemed to be reducing herself to only the most necessary elements.

  “I’m not interested in living numb,” Vanessa said. It might have been Jason’s lingo, but there was truth in it. And truth was what she was after now. Which was why she had stopped doing the empty, false activi
ties her friends seemed to favor and that she too had once fallen prey to—drinking at country-club bonfires, smoking pot at Rachel’s beach house—stuff that led them on an endless search for comfort, for male attention, for beauty. It made them live life unaware of the larger machinery that kept them all down. When she’d met Jason this past June, she’d felt able to cut loose from what she only now realized had been an isolating experience with her friends.

  “My lord, sweetie, you’re young! Have some fun while you still can!” Helen said. “Right, Herb? Tell the poor girl to have some fun. Do you dance, honey?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Have a good time. Whatever you want, sweetheart.” He smiled at Vanessa.

  “Yeah, Nana.” Vanessa smirked. “I dance.” In a way, though, her grandmother was not wrong. She had stripped herself of frivolity and had begun to go to shows this summer at Fort Reno and d.c. space, entering a world where kids thrashed to hard music and whipped themselves fiercely into one another. And while she couldn’t say she felt a natural connection to this world, it was new, and it felt important; the music itself was essential. It seemed to be making a case for art in general, that it was not stupid or tertiary or unnecessary, and it brought her away from her girlfriends and their beach houses and crocheted bikinis and their transistors blasting ELO and Styx.

  “Oh my God, the meat!” Sharon said, standing suddenly and beginning to stack everyone’s soup bowls, Vanessa’s half-filled bowl on top.

  “Let me help you,” Sigmund said, rising.

  “It’s okay, Grandpa.” Vanessa stood to help her mother clear. Even though Tatti had waited on him for nearly forty years, Sigmund had recently become acquainted with women’s liberation. It was a logical extension of workers’ rights, and he seemed amazed—and a little ashamed—that he had not thought of this sooner. Now he often made huge efforts to help, getting up from the dining room table at holiday meals and clattering his own dinner plate and flatware toward the kitchen.

  Tatiana rose as well. “Not tonight, my dear. Just sit.”

  Helen lit a cigarette.

  “Mom!” Sharon said, climbing over the bench with the enormous serving bowl. “We’re eating, for Christ sake!”

  “Go on then,” Helen said, pointing her Winston, mashed between two brown fingers, at the door. “You won’t notice if you’re not here, now, will you?”

  Dennis looked over at his mother-in-law and shook his head as she threw her head back, cackling with laughter.

  “Oh, Dennis, relax. What are you going to do, report me? To your friends.”

  “Yes,” Dennis said, bracing himself.

  “Your friends in Moscow?” Helen squinted at Dennis, then at Tatti. “Huh?”

  “I’m from St. Petersburg,” Tatti said, laughing, the deep red hair at her hairline darkening, wet with sweat. “My brother is the only person I know in Moscow, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes,” Dennis said again, getting up awkwardly off the bench. He thought of his uncle Misha in a badly cut boiled-wool coat, the collar rimmed with fur, the Kremlin rising behind him as they made their way through Red Square. Red for beauty, Misha had told him. Not for communism, he’d said, wagging his finger. Misha was his mother’s only living relation, yet only Dennis had met him, when he was on business in the Soviet Union. The old ladies, hair tied in kerchiefs, bending over their wares, always threw out their bright scarves and polished their babushkas when he stepped up to their carts with Misha. “I believe I will have to report you,” Dennis said. Helen had been accusing him of being a spy since Vanessa’s birth, which he’d missed. He’d been on a business trip to Moscow, traveling for the Department of Agriculture, and Vanessa had been two weeks early! The Cold War had heated and cooled for sixteen years since then, but no matter its temperature, Helen was convinced her son-in-law was not really an undersecretary at Agriculture, but an agent in some complicated espionage ring. “I need to make a call to my superior,” he said, “right after I get us another bottle of wine.”

  Sigmund shook his head. “This gets more and more ridiculous every time I hear it.”

  “Oh, lighten up, Sigmund,” Helen said. “It’s just a game I play with your son. Games are good! They don’t hurt anyone, now, do they?” She exhaled up into the sky, but the smoke lingered, heavy above the table.

  “You really shouldn’t,” Herbert said across the table to Helen. “It bothers her.”

  Vanessa wished she could have a cigarette with her grandmother, the way they did behind her house in Beverly Hills, Helen’s housecoat pulled tight around her, balled-up tissues and matches bulging from her pockets, as they blew smoke toward the mountains and talked about Helen’s past—as a singer, in a nightclub, before I married that son-of-a-bitch grandfather of yours. Helen had taught Vanessa how to blow smoke rings, and she had spent an entire visit jutting out and popping her bottom jaw just so, and then watching the smoke rings rise up and cross one another—which always reminded her of the rings of the Olympics her mother so freakishly adored—before they disappeared. Cigarettes, Vanessa found, were not something that she had to forgo.

  Helen shrugged. “Everything bothers her. All I can say is, we gotta live how we gotta live, right, Dennis?”

  “As long as everyone is happy,” Dennis said, picking up the empty bottle and turning toward the porch.

  After the steak—which Sharon had marinated in ginger and soy, and a touch of cream for sweetness, even though she knew Vanessa, who had a few weeks back announced she was a vegetarian, would not touch it—and the corn and the salad were finished, Sharon brought out the cobbler she’d made with blackberries and raspberries from the Haley farm. Dennis opened another bottle of wine, though he wasn’t sure if anyone but he and Helen, whom he had never seen refuse a drink of any kind, would partake.

  He filled Ben’s empty glass.

  “College boy,” he said. Ben, I hardly knew ya, he wanted to say, thumping him on the back. But it was true; how he had raised a kid whose thigh muscles bulged from the speed and coordination that enabled him to start varsity soccer as a freshman still confounded him. Ben had lettered. Dennis had felt as if he were living in some teen movie about high school when Ben had come home with that big W, for “Wildcats,” and handed it to Sharon to sew on the back of his jacket. Only now did Dennis realize he had been waiting for the moment that Benjamin would come home with a passion that was not of the body.

  Because that was another thing about Ben. Ben and his body. Sometimes if Dennis arrived home unexpectedly, he would be greeted by the sound of his son schtupping in the bedroom down the hall. Always some different little tart. If it weren’t so off-putting, it would be admirable, Dennis supposed, but it was off-putting, terribly so. He tried not to think of the girls. Just last week, Dennis had been unable to sleep and had gone downstairs to the basement, his little spot beneath the house where he did his own brand of yoga. It was also where he stored his living-room-banned artwork from the painting and sculpture classes he’d taken at the Corcoran when the kids were young. As he’d slipped into the sleeping bag he kept rolled behind the couch for just this purpose, his bare legs were met by something cold and wet. He stuck his hand inside and was besieged by the sharp, tinny smell of what he realized, as he brought his fingers to his nose, was semen.

  He wouldn’t miss being confronted by Ben’s semen, that’s for sure, Dennis thought, clinking glasses with his son. But he missed the young Benjamin, the one he’d carried around in that little sack strapped to his chest, the Benjamin he’d buckled into swings at Candy Cane City and pushed high in the air to his exhilarated delight, the preverbal Ben, his hot breath on his cheek as he lay in bed with him on Sunday mornings while Sharon baked popovers downstairs. That Ben—the one bobbing to Peter, Paul and Mary, pretending he had a hammer, and a bell, and a song! to! sing!, going at the bongo drums and the xylophone, gifts from a friend at the State Department—he’d been gone for quite a while now.

  “Oh, Ben,” Dennis said. “We’re really going to miss you.” />
  Everyone watched Ben take a sip, and then they saw him smile over the rim of his glass as three blushing young women, followed by Jon Ratner, made their way up the side path to the back of the house.

  And that, Sharon thought, stacking the plates in the dishwasher, was that. The torches had been extinguished, the gray twilight had darkened to night, and everyone had moved inside. Her father was talking to Tatiana in the living room about how Brandeis was giving Russian Jews asylum, which was really nice, he was saying, didn’t she agree?

  Ben was gone for the night. He’d gotten up to greet the girls, his back turned to her, his arms wide, and Sharon had seen the girls’ faces—such tan, small-featured, young faces—their eyes shut tight, lips quivering into smiles, their chins hooked over his shoulder. “Hey, Mr. and Mrs. G,” Jon had said. “Looks like I missed a good dinner.”

  “Ben,” Sharon had nervously said, just before he shook free of the girls’ embrace.

  “Let him go,” Helen said. “It’s his last night home, darling, just let him.”

  Sharon sighed and sat up straight. “Are you going out, Ben?” she asked stiffly.

  He turned back to face the table. “Yeah. Just for a bit, okay?”

  “There’s a party over at Papadopoulos’s,” Jon said by way of explanation.

  Sharon nodded quickly and, looking down at the table, ran her finger over the scratches in the wood. “Sure.”

  “Of course!” Dennis grandly stood up. “Have fun, gang.”

  Vanessa cringed. Gang.

  “Thanks.” Ben went to kiss his grandparents good-bye. And then his mother. “Dinner was totally great.” He waved at Vanessa. “See ya, pal,” he said, to which she rolled her eyes and flipped him the bird.

  “Bright and early.” Dennis leaned lightly on Helen’s shoulder for support as he climbed off the bench.