by Marra B. Gad
Then I saw them. I had never seen such an elegant couple in my life.
Nette sparkled. She sparkled like the diamonds that adorned almost all of her fingers. The only person I had ever seen sparkle like this was Dolly Parton, who had come to my grammar school in the city for a special concert. That day, I was seated on the floor at Miss Dolly’s feet, as I was one of the younger students in the room. She walked out, wearing a pale-blue ruffled dress, her hair teased into an enormous blonde confection—and she sparkled. Real sparkles. Like she was covered in pixie dust. As she began to sing “Coat of Many Colors” for us, I thought she surely had to be magic and that no one sparkled in real life the way she did.
Until I met Nette.
The next thing I noticed was her hair, for it was tinted lavender. Premature grayness runs in the family, and like my mother, whose hair was fully gray by the time she was thirty, Nette’s was the same. But she used a lavender rinse to make sure it never looked yellow. I don’t think the lavender was meant to actually show, because when she encouraged my mother to use the rinse, my mother’s hair never looked that color. I think Nette used a bit extra for dramatic effect. And it worked.
It wasn’t just their travelling attire—Nette and Zeit were always impeccably dressed. He wore a suit every day, with or without a tie depending on where we were going. Nette was dressed in the highest fashion of the day, not shying away from anything. She bared her cleavage, even though she was a woman of a certain age. She wore high heels with grace. Dresses, skirts, pantsuits, even denim—Nette wore it all, and everything was perfectly tailored to fit her tiny frame, which never strayed above eighty-nine pounds.
Then there was the jewelry. So much jewelry.
We learned quickly that Nette and Zeit were travellers. World travellers. Even as a young girl, I had a sense of the gorgeous enormity of the world, and I wanted to see it all. To know that Nette and Zeit had been to places that, truly, most people only read about in books only fascinated me more. And they were doing it as senior citizens. They had been to the whole of Asia several times, including to India and Russia. And in every country they visited, Zeit bought Nette jewelry.
Her jewelry collection was like a scrapbook from each of their trips, and she did not hesitate to bring as much of it as she pleased with her. One of the smaller bags in their pile of luggage held jewelry. Only jewelry. There was costume jewelry made in the style of the host country. The pieces were made of wood, silver, beads, or adorned with filigree—and almost every piece was enormous. It was incredible. I’ve always found it fascinating that Nette wore the largest pieces, given how very petite she was.
The collection also contained, of course, fine jewelry, with every possible kind of gemstone represented. When they were in Thailand, Zeit bought her sapphires. She also had rubies, emeralds, and opals of differing sizes. Zeit bought her, when it was still legal, ivory and jade. And there were diamonds. Lots of diamonds. To this day, I have never seen a personal jewelry collection quite like it—and from the moment she started to pull it out of her designated jewelry suitcase, I wanted to try everything on.
That first visit, my mother, my sister, and I sat on Nette’s bed, watching her carefully unpack her bags. Slowly and meticulously, as if each item were more precious than the last, she hung up her clothing, put her toiletries in the bathroom, and took out all of the jewelry to show us what she had brought.
“Alisa,” Nette said, “would you like to try something on?”
A love of jewelry runs in our family, and so my sister was thrilled. “Yes!” she shouted. “Please!”
My sister had fixated on an ivory-and-black piece that must have come from China. It was a large rectangular pendant with Chinese characters on it, suspended from a thick gold chain. Nette gently put the piece over my sister’s small head and turned Alisa around so that we might all admire her.
“Aunt Nette, may I try this?” I reached toward a brooch that I thought must have been made of diamonds. Her eyes were blue like Bubbie’s, but sharp and cold. They narrowed.
“No,” she snapped. “It is getting late. I am tired.”
I didn’t think anything of it then. My mother told Alisa to take off the necklace and suggested we leave Nette to finish unpacking in peace.
I know now that it was the very first sign I was not going to be Nette’s favorite. You see, there are two things that happen when someone is trying to decide what they are going to do with you. Where they are going to put your otherness. For some, there is a blankness in the eyes that takes over, as if they are lost in thought, trying to figure out how they feel. For others, there is an immediate narrowing, a sharpness that engages. And it is because they don’t need to think.
It says, before their brain can even activate, “You are not welcome here.”
By contrast, Zeit took an immediate liking to me because he found me to be smart. It became apparent when I was reading by age two that I was a bright girl. But I was officially deemed a “genius” when I was IQ tested at age four to attend a special, new, experimental magnet school in Chicago. And I landed at a score of 178. By the time I met Nette and Zeit, I had already skipped three grades and was on my way to a private high school the next year. Education and intelligence were of tremendous importance to Zeit, and he was so impressed with my academic prowess that, at one point during their visit, he offered to pay for my schooling. Nette immediately ended that conversation.
“Zeit,” she shouted, “you are not doing that! That is our money, and you cannot just offer it without talking with me about it.” She would say this again a few years later when Zeit offered to pay for my college and graduate school. As their wealth was clear, I wondered why Nette was so unapologetic about not wanting Zeit to be generous in any way. Bubbie said it was because Nette had grown up quite poor—at times without enough food or proper clothing—and that she always worried she wouldn’t have enough.
It’s a strange thing to want so badly to be close to someone who does not want to be close to you but who is working very hard to keep that hidden. But that was the dynamic set between Nette and me from the moment we met.
My mother was beside herself with excitement whenever Nette visited, because she was my mother’s favorite aunt. For her, Nette had been an escape from my zayde, a man both she and Nette feared. Nette, with her unconventional lifestyle and unapologetic series of marriages, encouraged my mother to do as she had done—to forge her own path in the world. If my mother did not want to be a doctor, as her father wanted her to be, she should not have to be one. Nette encouraged my mother to be whoever she wanted to be, which was not an easy task when trapped with a man like my zayde.
My mother was three years old when she was a flower girl for Bubbie’s sister, Aunt Muriel. For my mother, the best part about being a flower girl was absolutely the outfit. Isn’t that always the case? Aunt Muriel had a rainbow motif for her bridesmaids, and my mother had a gorgeous frilly dress to wear, made with all the colors the older girls were wearing. And she had shoes. Very special patent leather party shoes, which were the biggest thrill of her young life. Shortly before the wedding began, Alex took my mother’s beloved shoes and threw them into a furnace, right in front of her.
“Stop that crying,” her father screamed, “or I will give you something to cry about.”
She stopped, of course, but the damage had been done. Her beautiful party shoes were replaced with hard, black orthopedic shoes, and for her, the day was ruined. As a podiatrist, he believed that children should only wear orthopedic shoes, even if there was absolutely nothing corrective needed, and his daughter was certainly not going to be the exception to that rule, even for a couple of hours. When the story began there, the only place to go for my mother was down. As a teenager, her father conducted weekly weigh-ins and beat her if she gained a pound. And these were only the stories I knew.
We were, all of us, survivors, an unfortunate thing to have in common.
Chapter Three
THEY SAY YOU NE
VER FORGET YOUR FIRST TIME; normally, that applies to when a girl makes her first purchase at Chanel or loses her virginity. On some level, that is exactly what I’m referring to. The virginity part. Not Chanel.
From the moment I was in their arms, my parents went about the business of making sure I knew I had been adopted, so it was a piece of myself that I grew up understanding. Our living room doubled as a magnificent library, filled from floor to ceiling with shelves that were, in turn, filled with gorgeous hardcover books, the kind that aren’t really made anymore. Tucked away in the library was a book about adoption told using a peacock. The story spoke about a beautiful peacock that had been taken in by a group of other birds. The peacock stood out, because she did not look like the family of birds that had adopted her, but they were a family created out of love. Just like ours.
The pages were edged with gold, and they made a glorious sound when we turned them. My parents read me that book over and over again, teaching me through the pictures and prose about the poetic act of adoption. The whole of that book collection is now mine, and when I have a library big enough to unpack those precious boxes, the peacock book will be the first one I sit down to read.
Though I grew up knowing I was adopted, understanding that I was mixed race was a different story. My parents were not concerned about my skin color, and so I wasn’t concerned about it. It just wasn’t something we talked about. Being mixed race wasn’t something anyone talked about in the 1970s, and as we didn’t talk about it, I didn’t realize I looked different from my family. That people whispered and stared was something I had grown accustomed to, but I didn’t know it was my skin color that caused the commotion. I just knew that people tended to point and whisper at me. I didn’t focus on the why until I was about six years old.
We knew my friend Louise and her family from the large Reform synagogue to which we belonged in Chicago. Although we did not attend the same secular school, we carpooled to religious school and often played together.
One afternoon, while playing at her house, Louise looked at me and said, “My parents say your real mother didn’t want you, which is why you live with this family and you don’t look like your parents.”
I stopped—dead in my tracks—devastated. I had never been told my origin story in such a horrible way. And none of it made any sense to me. I had always been told that it was because I was so loved, by both my birth mother and my parents, that I had been adopted. That my birth mother knew she could not take care of me but loved me so much that she gave me to a family who could. And that my parents loved me so much the minute they saw me that they could not imagine having any daughter other than me. At no point did the story include the detail that my biological mother didn’t want me. My story was that I was deeply loved.
But much like when Adam and Eve took that first bite of the forbidden fruit and learned they had been naked the whole time, so too did I learn that not everyone believed adoption to be the grand act of love I had been taught it was. To make matters worse, this was the first time anyone had ever directly pointed out to me that I looked demonstrably different from my parents. Prior to this, everything was passive-aggressive and, at least to my very young mind, a bit hazy.
Take Aunt Goldie, for example.
Goldie lived in Las Vegas, and her sense of style reflected her home city. She was loud and tacky in her brightness—sequins during the daytime, mismatched colors that screamed at you when you glanced her way. She chain-smoked, and her gruff voice sounded like the two packs she smoked per day were more like twelve. She came for a visit each year, staying for a few weeks so that she might catch up with her family.
My parents loved Las Vegas. And their yearly trip there was the only time they went on vacation without us kids. Goldie’s son, Phil, was a host at the historic (and now gone) Sands Hotel and Casino at the height of its popularity, and so my parents were given the royal treatment from the moment they landed. The Sands was the coolest spot on the strip—or so said the Rat Pack and every other entertainer of the day. Far from high rollers, my parents were nonetheless treated to limousines, center tables, and tickets to the best shows in town. Whether it was seeing Sinatra, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, or Jubilee, my parents painted the town red as guests of Aunt Goldie and Cousin Phil, and so Goldie’s visits had always been most welcome.
When my sister and I were around three and five years old, Goldie was in town visiting. We were in the backyard playing, and Goldie took my sister onto her lap to read her a book, so I came close and asked if I could sit on her other knee. “No,” Goldie rasped, “but you can be a good girl and clean up my ciggie butts. Your mother and Bubbie will like that.”
I did as I was told—until my mother came outside and saw what was going on. “Marra Beth-Ann,” she screamed. I had never seen my mother’s face get so red. Her nostrils flared as she continued. “What are you doing!?” It was the first time I had ever seen my mother lose it. And I wasn’t quite sure why she was losing it. I had been told to do something by one of my elders, and so I was doing it.
“Aunt Goldie told me to clean it all up,” I stammered, starting to cry.
“Stop that immediately—and Alisa, go into the house!”
And so she did. My mother drew me close to her, hugging my tear-stained face into her belly while she laid into Goldie with a tone of voice I had never heard before. “What is wrong with you?” My mother rarely speaks loudly, but she was screaming. “How could you stoop so low as to treat one of my daughters like a slave while you read a book to the other?”
My mother stopped her rant to take a deep breath. She saw how clearly upset and confused I was, and the volume of the discussion wasn’t helping things. She held me tighter, and her voice dropped to almost a whisper.
“What is wrong with you, Goldie?”
At a certain point, I was also sent into the house, and my bubbie joined the argument. I couldn’t really hear the words being hurled in the backyard, but afterward, Goldie packed her bags immediately, and we never saw her again. She had been told to leave, and she was not welcome back under any circumstances.
Goldie wasn’t the first relative to be cast out of our family when bias had been made known, but it was the first time I witnessed it. It was the first time I can remember knowing that something horrible was happening and that I was at the heart of it. I could not hear everything Goldie said, but I knew she was talking about me and was criticizing my parents for loving me. And I knew it was all rooted in the fact that Goldie treated Alisa differently than she did me.
As young as I was, I could feel Goldie’s hatred. It was the opposite of the love I felt from my parents and my bubbie. It was palpable. Love and hate are. It was the first time I understood how deep hatred can run and how completely divisive it is. And although my mother had been born a warrior princess and had been my defender from the moment I became hers, it was the first time I saw the full breadth of her rage, strength, and unapologetically full heart. Until the birth of my brother, she had two children. And anyone who was unable to treat her daughters with the same love and respect simply wasn’t welcome.
If Goldie’s last visit was my first memorable experience being treated differently by someone who did not voice why, Louise was the first person to say it to my face. But I probably wasn’t thinking of Goldie as I stared back at Louise. My tiny system was in shock. I did not look like my parents. How did I not look like my parents?
“Look at you,” Louise said, like she could read my mind. “Your skin is brown, and your parents are white. You don’t look anything like them at all.”
My skin was brown. And my parents had white skin. My skin was brown. And Louise’s skin was white. I saw the difference now, but I had yet to figure out—and I wanted to immediately understand—why this was a problem. I found myself reeling. I wanted to explain to her that adoption wasn’t what she thought it was—that I had been both given up and taken in because I was absolutely loved. But the added kicker of being told my skin was anoth
er color threw me into complete silence. With tears streaming down my face, I ran home. I threw myself, weeping, into my mother’s arms.
“She … told … me … that … the lady who had me didn’t want me. SHE SAID THAT I DON’T LOOK LIKE YOU!” I wailed, almost hyperventilating.
My mother held me and calmed me down. Then, for the first time, she was forced to acknowledge that I was, in fact, different. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but in that way mothers have, she made it all better. She told me that because I am different I am extra beautiful.
And then she called my father.
Up until that point, I had only ever seen my father as very kind and loving. At six feet two, he was ever imposing upon sight, but he was a gentle giant in every way. He loved to lie in bed with me on Sunday mornings and read the comics in the newspaper. He loved to try to brush and style my hair, even if it was never a successful experiment. The song “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang was his favorite, and he would dance to it always—even when he believed he was alone. I had never seen rage in him until that day.
But enraged he was after my mother called him, and when he got home from work, he and my mother prepared to confront Louise’s parents. I’d never heard the question, “What is wrong with people?” as many times as I did that day.
“How can parents teach their children these things?” my father asked my mother, barely containing his rage. Goldie may not have had the chutzpah to say it that day in the backyard, but Louise did—because her parents, in one way or another, had given her permission to.
But that is the thing with racism. It is taught. Carefully taught, just like the Rodgers and Hammerstein song says. It’s passed down from generation to generation—like a precious family heirloom. And Louise inherited hers when we were young.
My mother and father left me at home with Bubbie when they went to speak with Louise’s parents. After their conversation, the distance between our families became as big as an ocean. We stopped carpooling to synagogue. We did not acknowledge them when we saw them in the building. And Louise and I never played together again.