“Oh, I know Morty, sure.” Sharon nodded. “I think he used to lobby for DDT, the creep. What is it?” She shook her hair out of her face.
“It’s this program that started in California.” Marlene looked down and brushed the front of her apron, shaking off invisible walnut dust. “It’s supposed to be just wonderful. I thought of going, but like I told you, synagogue was what I needed.”
Sharon turned the card over to the other side, a blank indigo. “Thanks. Really.” She stuffed the card in the back pocket of her jeans, her old ones, not the new, trendy ones she’d bought at Neiman’s a few weeks previously. Calvin Klein. It was not like her to buy expensive designers, but the salesgirl had said they made Sharon’s ass look incredibly perky, and she had been stupid enough to believe her.
Sharon went back to the counter, twisted off her wedding rings, and placed them in the teacup Marlene always had set out for her. She poured half the scone mixture onto the floured counter, cocking her head this way and that as she absentmindedly worked the dough into a perfect circle.
“This is the walnut-cranberry batch,” she said to Marlene, throwing flour on the patty of dough. Sharon thought of sugarplums. They could add sugarplums! She remembered seeing The Nutcracker, at the Pantages, a Weissman Christmas Eve tradition, one celebrated yearly before her parents denied they had so much as acknowledged Christmas. She’d wanted to be a fragile ballerina in a sparkly pink tutu and pink slippers, and so her mother had sent her to the finest ballet school in Los Angeles. There, Mistress Fonseca proclaimed her a flat-footed klutz who should give it up now. Helen declared the mistress an idiot communist and took Sharon to several other, lesser dance studios, where Sharon still maintained her flatfeet, weak ankles, and general lack of grace.
She slapped the dough and began to roll it out. They could call them the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy Scones, and they could make them a little smaller and serve them at next year’s holiday brunches, Sharon thought. They would be lovely; so delicate. Next year: would Carter make it to the next term? And since she was trying out this seasonal cooking, this wouldn’t work, as sugarplums were only really available in July and August. But then why were they always such a Christmas treat? Where had that come from? Some sugarplum lobby in the UK with a barn full of frozen sugarplums, to be sure.
“Okay,” Marlene said. “Got it.”
Sharon let the idea of sugarplum-fairy scones fade as she rolled out the dough and then sliced it into triangles.
“The next will be the walnuts, currants, and the orange zest. I got organic oranges since we’re using the zest.”
“Sounds good,” Marlene said. She went over to the counter by the sink, where all the variations of the recipes of the day were spread out on lime green index cards, and leaned in, looking for the scone recipe.
“Be sure to mark the organic part.”
“I got it, Sharon.”
Sharon laid the scones on the cookie sheet and brushed them with egg wash. When each one glistened, she went over to the second preheated oven. As she opened the door, she felt that rush of hot air she always loved, even in the dead of summer.
* * *
Sharon had found the midnight blue LEAP! card when changing purses, and she’d taken it out of her jeans pocket and thrown it facedown into her night-table drawer. Each day she’d gone for the lint brush or a pen, that blank blue square was next to her diaphragm, dusty with cornstarch, nestled in its case. Then one unbearably quiet morning at the end of October, after Dennis had left for the airport, she’d impulsively called and heard about this journey to self-fulfillment and enhancing one’s life in order to live in important and meaningful ways. This had spoken to Sharon; she’d gone to her first LEAP! training two evenings later, while Dennis was still in Moscow.
Now, nearly three months later, Sharon lay in bed, trying to use some of her new LEAP! tools to transform her negative energy about preparing for tomorrow’s party into a positive force for success. She and Marlene had decided on the menu ages ago—a far more traditional one than Sharon would have preferred—and now it was just a matter of precise execution.
It was a new year, a brand-new decade. Yet Sharon couldn’t stop thinking about the past, daydreaming about the Olympics, the winter ones coming up: slalom trails lined with evergreens, athletes unrecognizable through their padded jackets and hats and gloves but for the identifying flags sewn to their backs and at their hearts. She thought of shining rinks, skaters’ blades winking in the camera lights, the ice dancers’ diaphanous costumes swirling as they glided and turned. During the last games, in Innsbruck, she and Ben had sat propped against this headboard, two happy birds on a sturdy branch watching Dorothy Hamill spin to gold. But this year, she thought, as she did about so many things, he was gone.
Sharon had always been drawn more to the Winter Games, probably because skating had been an anomaly in Los Angeles when she was growing up. There had been a single indoor rink in Culver City, not terribly far from their bungalow on Franklin Avenue, but Sharon’s weekly skating classes, begun when the ballet had failed, always seemed to correspond with the height of rush hour. She remembered being on the 10 for hours as Helen smoked and futzed with the radio until she found a station that played something big band enough to accommodate her singing.
Dennis also loved to skate; it was one of the few physical activities his Russian mother approbated, and when the kids were young, they’d drive downtown, parking at his office, and go skating on the Mall. Sharon, who’d had her own white leather skates in her youth, found the rentals were always either too big or too small, the leather too stiff or too soft, and this deflated her experience. Looking back on it now, she should have said, I will not be a perfectionist; I will simply accept this moment for what it offers. But Sharon had not yet begun her training. The kids, though, their teeny ankles caving in as they grabbed for her and Dennis’s hands so urgently, made her discomfort manageable, and she fought through the imperfection, looking up from their sweet smallness out to the grandness of the city, the exalted buildings before them. Dennis would always swoop in from behind and scoop up one of the children—Vanessa usually—and hold her high in the air as he skated swiftly around the rink. Sharon’s stomach would practically skid on the ice due to fear, but the kids’ delighted squeals were as close to flawless as she could find.
Sharon had encouraged Vanessa to take skating lessons—Look how much you loved it when we skated with Daddy! she’d told her—but she’d had no interest and Sharon hadn’t pressed it; she had her own negative associations with being pushed. For her very first lesson—when the dancing had not worked out—Sharon’s mother had dressed her in full skating regalia: shining white leather skates, a pink leotard with a lighter pink gauze skirt, opaque white stockings. She’d pulled Sharon’s hair in a bun so tight her cheekbones popped to the surface of her face. “Like a sugarplum fairy you look!” Helen had told her daughter. “Just lovely. Now stand up straight and show ’em what you got!”
Sharon was surprised how much the thought of her son in a different room in another city, watching the skating and hockey next to someone else, upset her. She was distraught to think that Ben and she would never again shuffle their legs beneath the covers, anxious as the skiers flew out of the gates and over the mountain. Because there would be girlfriends, real ones, not those fast girls he brought around from high school, but those who would deepen him, and one of these women would become a wife. Then there would be permanence. There would be children. And yet wasn’t this something a mother was supposed to long for?
Sharon wanted to continue the tradition of watching the Games as she had with her father. She remembered being barely eighteen and the dust motes in the living room rising in the huge shafts of light—brilliant, golden light; the light of the West; her West—streaming in from the glass doors that led out to the garden. That was the year Tenley Albright, an American figure skater, won gold. A great American story, her father had said, pride spilling over as this girl arched he
r back and lifted her graceful hands skyward. Watching her twirl, Sharon had felt her own appalling lack of grace.
But it was the Soviets who swept the medals that year. It was 1956, just before she’d moved East, and they’d watched the Soviets participate for the first time; it was as if she were watching the very moment they achieved world domination.
“Come on already!” Herbert got up from the couch and banged the television until waves of static threatened to overtake the screen. “Bums!” He looked at his daughter and threw up his hands.
This was not just an ice hockey game. She began to believe the Russians would steal everything: the secrets to the atomic bomb, yes, but also famous paintings, keys to towns and cities; they would be able to open every home, take anything they liked, her mother’s stuffed jewelry boxes, her father’s gleaming set of Olympic coins. The Russians came with a mission to succeed and they had seized their medals, as if their athletes’ bones had been kept from sport for so long they could no longer contain their strength.
“Let’s go!” her father would scream. But his concern—she soon understood it was also scorn—was not directed at the Soviet Union. It was the Americans, she realized, who were losing everything.
The Russians! It had always been the Russians. March 29, 1951, the day Ethel and Julius Rosenberg got the death penalty, was a day of celebration in the Weissman home.
Herbert hung his American flag out in the front yard when he heard the news. “They got what they asked for,” Herbert said. “Those provincial Jews, so ungrateful to this country. That has given them everything!”
Helen smoked her Winstons and drank coffee at the kitchen table in her blue nylon bathrobe that zipped up the front. “Enough, Herb,” she said when he came inside. She pointed her cigarette at Sharon and her older brother, Michael. “They don’t need to know this stuff yet.”
“I think they should know,” Herbert said. “Those two shoulda gone back to Russia is what they shoulda done, they love it there so much. Let’s send them there COD. You couldn’t get me back there for a million bucks.”
Helen stubbed out her cigarette. Her mouth was caked with the coral lipstick that also filled in the fine lines that intersected at her lips. “Come on, scootch,” she said to her kids. “Time to get ready for school.”
“Ahh, who cares, Helen,” Herb said. “Let ’em burn.”
Two years later when the Rosenbergs were killed, Sharon was fifteen. That night they’d grilled hot dogs and hamburgers out back, and the adults all milled about, cigarettes sagging with condensation from their highballs, talking about the Rosenbergs’ guilt. They were guilty as hell, he was for sure, but so was that little commie bitch who typed out the information. They didn’t give a damn about their country, that’s for sure, or their children. Hm-hmmm, they assured one another. Just like Hoover said. Really, it was the crime of the century.
Sharon’s brother, Michael, found the newspaper clippings, and the siblings stole into their father’s closet with a flashlight and sat beneath his suits, his smell of Old Spice and shoe polish, as they read the news of the Rosenbergs’ executions. All the reporters claimed they were guilty. So did J. Edgar Hoover. And President Eisenhower said the punishment was appropriate to the crime.
But what Sharon could not shake was the image of dowdy Ethel Rosenberg refusing to die. They had to zap her twice, the papers said, and Sharon wondered what it would be like to live through an electrical surge that had wiped her husband out in seconds. Ethel was an immigrant from her parents’ old neighborhood, a place they rarely spoke of but to curse it, a street filled with the stink of horse manure, cold-water flats shut away from the world’s light, chickens squawking, bleeding in the street. How could they have grown up under such grueling conditions when she lived beneath this white, white desert light, under bougainvillea-scented skies, along streets so wide they were always better suited for cars than horses?
That night Sharon dreamed it had been she, not Ethel, who was strapped to that chair. Only in the dream she was an X-ray of herself with white bones and organs shot through with forked lightning, her body a house for a tremendous electrical storm. Upon waking, her armpits damp, sweat pooled in the caves beneath her eyes, Sharon couldn’t understand how her father could encourage such violence. And how could this country—her country—have sanctioned it?
Now Sharon heard Dennis pull up in the drive and roused herself to greet him.
“Hello,” she said from the top of the stairway as he left his briefcase on the landing, something she had tried for years to discourage.
“The embargo’s on,” Dennis said, stomping up the stairs. “We’re fucked.”
Sharon breathed in and out, trying to be mindful and maintain her tenuous state of relaxation.
“Oh, shit, D, I’m so sorry.” She followed him into the bedroom. Dennis had cautioned that a grain embargo with the Soviets could be coming, despite his warnings of the cost to the United States, to those poor farmers. Sharon pictured them leaning over their hoes—as if any farmer still used such agrarian implements—and weeping. People will be ruined here; and the Russians, they’ll starve. That’s what he’d told her night after night since the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan last month. “No warning?”
“Nope,” he said, sitting on his side of the bed, near the crammed bookshelves, and kicking off his Hush Puppies. “Security, security.” He laughed. “We wouldn’t want the Soviets to find out and then buy up all the grain before it happens. Then they wouldn’t really suffer, now, would they?”
Sharon could not measure his sarcasm. “That does make sense, I suppose. If we are trying to keep the grain from them, I mean.”
“Hmm.” He placed his hands behind his head and lay back. “I was so depressed I left early. Announcing it so late on a Friday afternoon, too.”
Even in his most tense moments, Dennis had a relaxed, fleshy quality that Sharon still found so sexually appealing. It had been there from the first night she’d met him, at a mobilization meeting; he’d approached her without apprehension even though she had come with a date. She had always thought Dennis would be the only one—even when the married couples they knew were opening up their relationships. Maybe she was square, but she had never felt jealous of those women who took off for the Continent with Carole King records and a year’s supply of birth control pills. It just wasn’t her.
Sharon studied her husband before going to the dresser, her sympathy quickly shifting to anxiety about how Dennis’s unhappy situation would soon make them all miserable.
“Should we go out tonight and celebrate the world’s demise?” Dennis asked.
“I’d love to but I can’t.” Sharon looked at him in the mirror as she dabbed her nape with Joy; Dennis almost always brought her a little bottle from the duty-free. “Marlene and I have to get ready for the Epstein party tomorrow night. Actually”—Sharon looked at her watch—“I’m running late, I was supposed to be at the office by four.”
Dennis looked at her blankly.
“The Epsteins, Dennis, on Kalorama. I’ve told you.” She stopped herself. I am me, she thought. I am myself, and I am calm. She took out a folded pair of jeans, shook them open, and stepped into them. “He’s Mondale’s advance man. Marsha hired us months ago.”
“Oh, right.”
Sharon stopped herself from chastising Dennis for forgetting. I will complete my mission and I will let Dennis complete his. Sometimes our journeys cannot be the same, but I, she reasoned, zipping up her pants, remain in control of all that I can be.
She turned away from the mirror. “Well, I’m off.”
“Say hi to Marlene,” Dennis said as she headed toward the stairs.
She looked at her inventory in the deep freeze in the basement, which still stank of Dennis’s stale sweat from his morning sun salutations and jump roping, which he insisted on practicing in the nude. Though they had decided when the kids were little that nakedness was to be encouraged so the children would not fear their differences and a
t the same time could have a look at what they would most likely grow into, Sharon had had her doubts. It was her damn 1950s upbringing, but despite her discomfort, she had strutted around the house, her nipples freezing and erect, her bum flailing in the breeze, just to have the body seem natural. A lot of good it had done; Benjamin was a little too comfortable with being naked, and Vanessa, poor breakable Vanessa, seemed to hate her body. Sharon could just look at her and see it, and yet what could she do now? Strip down and sit next to her daughter and tell her, It’s okay to feel vulnerable. One day, I promise, you will be you.
As she went to the freezer, she wondered if all this nudity had been the right thing. The thought of Vanessa coming upon Dennis jumping rope in the nude, his penis flapping, buttocks shaking; should this be an image to carry with her into adulthood? Did her son really need to see the thick thatch of her own pubic hair? Sharon heaved open the old freezer to count her trays of anchovy puffs and cheese sticks and crab cakes, and after lifting cartons of ice cream and pastry dough, shifting several plastic containers of various pestos and sauces, she saw that the canapés she needed for tomorrow were all in place. She breathed out.
I have made the right choices, thought Sharon as she let the heavy door fall. I am exactly the woman I was meant to be.
CHAPTER 3
Winter: Unbreakable Chain
January 4, 1980
When President Carter announced the embargo, Dennis did not initially think about the American farmers who would be wrecked, or of the disastrous effects on trade, or the implications of using food to swing politics. What he first thought of was his mother, her hips knocking the linoleum kitchen table as she mixed egg whites and sugar in a porcelain bowl for her tiny meringues, her long, bony fingers, knuckles white, gripping the metal eggbeater. He watched her sprinkle in dried cherries—because, she’d say, wrapping the cookies up in wax paper and sealing them tight in Christmas tins to send to her brother in Moscow, Americans love their cherries—from high above the bowl. She rubbed the tips of her fingers together as if casting a spell.
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