by Marra B. Gad
“This really isn’t the kind of baptism by fire that I would want for a date, Aunt Nette,” I said. “A family wedding is a big thing.”
I hoped this would send her away, and I breathed deep, inhaling the gorgeous perfume of the lilies that adorned the room. With about fifteen minutes left before the ceremony, the families and the bridal party had gathered to prepare for the processional. I was about to sing as Alisa and Keith walked down the aisle. I stood off in a corner, warming up my voice and silently praying I would not begin to weep when I saw my sister.
Before Nette approached, I had been, as my vocal coach had taught me, breathing in and out and running scales to warm up. Even on good day, my voice often wavered a bit on the high notes. When I knew my performance needed to be extra special, I was always concerned about it.
“If you’re a lesbian, we would be fine with that,” Nette said, looking me coldly in the eye. “It would probably help everyone to understand why you’re not married”—I took another deep, coach-approved breath—“at your age.”
“I’m not a lesbian. I just didn’t choose to bring a date,” I said. “Now if you’ll excuse me …”
I am fortunate that this pressure to marry has never come from my mother. Her desire is for each of her children to be happy, and she has always clearly understood that happiness takes a different path for every person. “If happiness means getting married because you love someone, then by all means, get married,” she has said. “Marriage isn’t for everyone, and it’s not for everyone at the same time. Just be happy. Everything else will work itself out.”
My sister and my brother both met their spouses and married when they were in their early twenties. Even without the internal familial messaging about marriage, my sister set her course when she was a teenager. When Alisa was fifteen, she spent the summer at our camp in Wisconsin, babysitting for our rabbi’s two youngest children. As she was packing, she smiled and said, “Marra, I’m going to get a boyfriend this summer.”
And, ever the patronizing older sister, I smiled back and said, “Of course you will.”
It turns out that my sister is an amazing manifestor, and she did get a boyfriend that summer. My family went up to camp to visit for the day, and there he was: an eighteen-year-old waterfront staffer named Keith. As we were quite close in age, I already knew him. Although we had different sets of friends, we had been at camp at the same time, and camp is a small place. That said, like many other people, Keith did not realize that Alisa and I were sisters. We look nothing alike, and our personalities are as different as are our looks.
When we arrived to be introduced to “the Boyfriend,” as we had taken to calling him, Keith stopped in his tracks. “She is your sister?”
Almost at the same time, I exclaimed, “He is your boyfriend?”
A sitcom writer could not have written it better.
But there he was. Utterly smitten with my little sister. And from that summer on, he and Alisa were completely devoted to each other. There was never a “break” like the one Ross and Rachel took on Friends—they even dated long distance when my sister went to the University of Iowa. When I realized after about two years that Keith wasn’t going anywhere, I sat my sister down and tried to talk to her about the importance of, well, playing the field a bit.
“I think boys are like ice cream,” I began. “How do you know that butter pecan is your favorite flavor if you’ve never tried mint chocolate chip?”
Without missing a beat, Alisa looked at me and replied, “I don’t need to be like you and try all thirty-one flavors to know what I like.”
The irony of this is that, unbeknownst to most people, I had not tried all thirty-one flavors when it came to men. For some reason I have never fully grasped, people have always assumed me to be more experienced in the ways of sex and dating than might be accurate. Nevertheless, she had made her point. The conversation ended. And seven years after they met, Keith proposed—at camp, where they had met those many summers prior. My mother made my sister promise she would finish her master’s program before getting married, and Alisa kept her promise, scheduling the wedding for one week after graduation.
And now the big day had arrived. I took a look around the room, hoping Nette would take my cue and go torture someone else. We were all—from the bridesmaids to the mothers of the bride and groom—dressed in shades of cream. Nette and her husband, Zeit, looked like a couple out of a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie—she in a bright-white, floor-length sequined gown and he in a white dinner jacket. Truthfully, she looked like a bride in her own right. I wasn’t quite sure if she had done that on purpose. It takes a special kind of chutzpah to dress like a bride at someone else’s wedding, even one with a cream color scheme.
She would have stood out even without the dress. She always did. Her lavender-white hair, perfectly teased and sprayed. Her nails painted a pale shade of purplish pink that seemed to be a reflection of her hair. Her dress a gleaming white mass of sequins that floated when she moved, even if the dress might have weighed more than she did. Even at age seventy-seven, her face was flawless, surgically smoothed and made-up to perfection.
“You know, we were a very liberal family to let you in, in the first place,” Nette continued, taking a long pull from her martini. “I mean, me having a Chinese husband is one thing, but nothing is worse than black.”
And then she took another sip out of her martini glass.
Though the bride and groom had been whisked away to take their preceremony moments alone, the room was far from empty. Among those present was my mother, who was standing within earshot. Bridesmaids and groomsmen and extended family were milling around, excited for what was about to happen. Champagne was being consumed. At Nette’s comment, everyone froze and turned sharply in our direction, and every single whisper immediately stopped. It was almost as if everyone ceased breathing at the same time, awestruck that those words had come out of Nette’s mouth. That any hush fell over a room filled with Jews was really something, much less at a wedding.
I hadn’t been a stranger to the wrath of family members. However, when they lashed out at me, it usually happened in private—when no one was looking. Clever racists, like other abusers, like to do their work in secret, leaving bruises that only appear on the inside. Nette was the queen of the private hit. But not this time.
While it wasn’t the time to make a scene, I desperately wanted to. I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to slap her smug, painted face. I wanted to call her a bitch and a bigot. But my sister was about to walk down the aisle, and I wasn’t going to let anything ruin her moment.
The weeks leading up to the wedding were not without their stresses, but they were what one would consider to be normal wedding planning stresses. My sister did not want to formally seat the guests (at her rather formal wedding), and my mother had to have a rather serious talk with her about how such things are handled. The dressmaker in charge of the bridesmaids’ dresses had fallen far behind on her work, and with twenty-four hours to go, I had to give her a Don Corleone–esque talking-to about getting the dresses finished.
“My sister is getting married in one week. And I am not going to let anything ruin that for her,” I told her. “We need those dresses. Tomorrow. And we need them to fit perfectly. If you need to bring your sewing machine to my mother’s house, you’re welcome to do that, but we will have those dresses.”
Then, at the last minute, there was a change in venue for the rehearsal dinner. These normal stresses were quite welcome, given everything our family had endured the past few years.
The night before the wedding, my sister and I checked in to the hotel for a sleepover. We talked and laughed and listened to music. The next morning, my mother and the other bridesmaid joined us, and we had our hair and makeup done. In a MacGyver moment that we laugh about to this day, I even turned a hotel bedsheet into a rather fashionable wrap for my hair. It was the sweetest time, and I believed it was the perfect precursor to what was going to be a
n idyllic wedding.
But Nette’s cruel words had just shattered my hopes of a perfect day. My mother rushed over to make sure I was still standing. I could not imagine the pain she must have been feeling. Our family was once again under attack, but this time the attacker was someone on the inside, someone who my mother loved. I excused myself. “I’ll be right back,” I said, trying to reassure her. My poor mother was always in a state of heightened anxiety during large family events.
“Promise me you are coming back,” she implored. She knew instinctively that, wedding or no wedding, I no longer wanted to be there. My bubbie, the Yiddish word for grandmother, always said that weddings and funerals brought out both the best and the worst in people. I didn’t want to believe that a wedding could bring out anything but the best.
“I promise. I just need a minute.”
And then I went to the bar and asked for a shot of tequila. “Usually it’s the groomsmen who are pounding shots before the walk down the aisle begins,” said the bartender, amused. Normally, I would have smiled and flirted a bit. He was handsome, and something—someone—beautiful was exactly what I wanted in that moment. Instead, I downed the tequila in a swift gulp and let the burn of it melt away my rage.
“I’m back, Mama.” I kissed her cheek, and we each took a deep breath. Still able to taste a bit of the tequila on my tongue, I put on a smile, the one I had learned to carefully place on my face as a child. I took my place. I sang. My sister got married. And my voice didn’t catch on the high notes.
I was grateful that the madness had not derailed the day. Although my mother and I speak often and openly about the realities of what it has been like for our family, my sister does not. And she was, thankfully, not in the room when Nette dropped her truth on me.
“Are you happy?” I whispered in Alisa’s ear when I had a moment to hug my newly married sister.
“This is the best day of my life,” she gushed.
“It is the best,” I said, almost choking on the words. For her, it absolutely was. And I wanted her to have that without any darkness.
At only twenty-five years old, I had already known more than my fair share of dark days. On some level, I actually respected Nette for not sugarcoating what she believed to be true. After years of being stared at and whispered about, I found it bizarrely refreshing that she was so matter-of-fact about it. And I was relieved she had finally shown her truest colors in public. But that day shattered any illusion I had left about my relationship with Nette and how she truly felt about me. And I had had many, many dreams about what a relationship with my glamorous, well-travelled great-aunt might be.
But to her, nothing was worse than black. There was no coming back from that.
The wedding reception was a blur for me. And I am a girl who really does love a good party. As I had been a part of every moment of planning the wedding, I had been looking forward to the reception. The food. The music. The speeches. The dancing. Oh, the dancing. That moment when my sister and her brand-new husband would be lifted high in the air on chairs during the hora was something I had been living for during the months of planning. And all of that was gone.
I had not a drop to drink after my preceremony tequila shot. I did my best to be present, for what could be better than seeing your sister, whom you love, marry and be so happy. It was hard for me to come back from my own brokenhearted place. I smiled and danced and helped my mother with her hostess duties, but I wasn’t all there. It was supposed to be a day without this sort of ugliness—a day meant to celebrate love. The only sadness should have been when my late father’s and Bubbie’s absences were mentioned during the ceremony.
After the wedding, Nette went back to California and disappeared from our lives. I don’t know what my mother may have said to her, and I really don’t care. She was gone, and I was grateful. Life went on.
Chapter Two
OUR APARTMENT BUILDING WAS ON THE NORTH-west side of Chicago, tucked away just down the block from North Park College on a pretty, quiet residential street. The building had been in my family since Bubbie and her husband, my zayde, bought it in 1946. Like many other buildings in our neighborhood, it was a four flat, meaning it had four main apartments, with two basement units. Bubbie lived in one of the basement apartments, and we lived on one side of the first floor. Eventually, when my brother was born, we took over the other first-floor apartment, creating an enormous, light-filled fifteen-room space.
It gave us all enough room to breathe, which is important in a family with an open-door policy, like ours. Everyone was welcome—and that went for friends, family, and, at times, even strangers. As long as someone was lovely and kind they had a place at our table, and visitors were hardly unusual.
While our neighborhood wasn’t particularly diverse, the makeup of our building always was. Mrs. Berg was an elderly Chinese woman who made the most delicious poppy seed cake I’d ever had. She and her adult son, Phil, lived across the hall from us. Above us, a black woman, who was a single mother, lived with her daughter. And across the hall was another single “career girl,” who may or may not have been a lesbian. As long as people were polite, kind to one another, and paid their rent on time, they were welcome to live in our building.
The same was true for family. Family visits weren’t just a regular occurrence at our home. They were lengthy—people didn’t just come for dinner. As if our home were made out of elastic, designed to stretch to fit, we accommodated them. They came for a month. They came for a season.
Sometimes it was tremendous fun, like when Uncle Harold, Bubbie’s brother, would live with us. He lived with a traumatic brain injury, which left him almost childlike. He loved me dearly and deeply. He never saw my skin color or had any concerns about my being adopted. His only concern was managing to take me down to the forbidden soda fountain at the end of our street for an ice cream sundae with rainbow whipped cream, which always managed to make me sick.
So, when I was ten and found out that Aunt Nette and Uncle Zeit, family members I had never heard of, were coming, I had questions. Lots of questions. And, as I did nearly every day, I sat myself down on Bubbie’s bed in her cool basement bedroom and asked them. Sometimes Bubbie would answer my questions, and sometimes she would not.
Bubbie was a formidable woman, both in looks and in energy. At nearly five-eight, to me she was tall, and never did I see her shrink or slouch. She stood tall at all times, even when she might have felt defeated. At a young age, I learned from her how to do the same. She had very long hair, which was pulled back into a perfect bun each day. I loved this because it allowed me to always focus on her beautiful blue eyes. Bubbie was stylish, too, mixing high and low fashion with a deftness that only truly chic women possess. And I loved her deeply.
“But who is she, Bubbie,” I asked, “and why do we have an aunt and uncle we have never heard about or met before?”
Bubbie’s eyes looked very sad. Her eyes were clear blue, like my brother’s would be, and usually they were bright and warm. “Nette was my best girlfriend at school,” she said. Bubbie grew up in Milwaukee with her mother, Anna, and father, Aaron Schumacher. “Nette is the person who introduced me to Alex, your zayde. Your zayde was her brother.”
Bubbie was the oldest girl in her family, the third born out of five. And as seems to be the case with older siblings, Bubbie was a born caregiver. Her parents owned a grocery store in town, which kept them busy, and so my bubbie often found herself playing surrogate mother to her three brothers and younger sister—a job she did with her whole heart but one she professed she wanted to escape in favor of building a family of her own. When Nette introduced Bubbie to Alex and their romance began, she saw her opportunity to do just that. And she took it, marrying him and moving with him to Chicago, where he built his podiatry practice.
By all accounts, Bubbie told me, Alex was an excellent doctor. He was not, however, an excellent husband. He carried on a long-term affair with his secretary and was emotionally abusive toward Bubbie—an
d emotionally and physically abusive toward my mother. Even before she and Alex married, Bubbie’s parents begged her not to go through with the wedding. They went so far as to offer to cancel it and just have a party instead. But my bubbie, stubborn and convinced that everything would sort out in her favor and, presumably, in love, moved ahead with the marriage.
Zayde died well before I was born, and unlike other family members who had passed away, he was rarely spoken of. When he was, it was never with joy or the bittersweet laughter that accompanies the loving memories of family who have passed on. For my mother and my bubbie, it was always with a tightness and a fear that outlived him. That’s the thing about abuse. Its ghost lives on long after the abuser has died.
Of course, learning my late zayde had a sister I had never known only raised more questions. “But why hasn’t she ever come to visit?”
Bubbie told me that just as Zayde had been abusive to her and my mother, he had also been abusive to my great-aunt. He had a “race issue,” and because Nette feared his reaction to her marriage to Zeit, a Chinese man, Nette kept her marriage hidden and herself safe. And part of that included not coming to Chicago.
“But we would not have cared that Zeit is Chinese, Bubbie!” I said. “Why did she wait so long? Zayde has been dead forever!” Even at ten years old, I clearly had a way with words, especially when things did not make sense to me.
“She’s coming now,” she said, “and that’s all that matters.” And that was Bubbie’s way of saying she was done answering my questions for the day.
I met Nette and Zeit’s luggage before I ever met them. And their luggage was gorgeous. There were seven bags, and that was definitely more bags than I had ever seen for two people. They were all different sizes and perfectly matched. Each bag had a small, rectangular tag on it with their names and address, written in what I would come to learn was Nette’s graceful hand.