by Marra B. Gad
One day, this man hand-delivered to our home his newest manuscript of poems. And every single poem was about me. He wrote an entire book of poetry about his dream of deflowering my young, caramel-colored, budding, virginal body. I only had to read a few pages to know this was far bigger than anything I could manage. The shame was immediate, as was the profound discomfort. I felt dirty.
“Mama …,” I whispered, “you should see this.”
I gave the book to my mother. She in turn gave it to my father. And we went together to the rabbi that afternoon. I cannot remember much besides sitting between my parents on the couch in the rabbi’s study—fully collapsed into myself physically and emotionally.
“We will take care of this,” the rabbi said. “No one who would do something like this can be a part of our community. Marra will be safe. I promise.”
I knew that I was safe and that the rabbi and my parents were not going to let this man touch me. I knew that this man would never be allowed to step foot in the synagogue again. But the damage had been done. A place that should have been my safest place for so many reasons was not, and now that had been taken to a whole new level.
I was angry. Exhausted. I wanted to disappear. If no one looked at me, I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this. And neither would my family. I felt responsible for the level of stress that existed for my parents because I existed. And along with that sense of responsibility came guilt.
My parents would say it was never a hardship to steer our family through these sorts of waters. There are days when my mother still goes out of her way to make sure I know there has never been a moment when she wished that things were different—certainly not that I was different.
“I do wish that people were different,” she has said. “But never you.”
—
I wish that some people were different too. This was never truer than when I saw my young brother have to come face-to-face for the first time, at least to my knowledge, with the cruel way that some choose to view our family.
For my brother, Merrill, being the youngest and the only son came with a set of privileges I have always envied. For starters, he never had to do anything while my bubbie was alive. He didn’t have to do dishes or help clear the table. He got the exclusive use of a car while he was still in high school, and he was able to come and go much more freely and at a much younger age than my sister or I was allowed to.
“I swear to you, when I die, I’m coming back as the only boy in the family. Youngest by a decade,” I have often said. “It’s the greatest gig in town.”
Unfortunately, his position in the family also came with a set of drawbacks. Among the most awful was that he never really got to know our beloved father. My brother was a very tender eight years old when we lost our father. While Merrill embodies our father in so many ways, he did not have the benefit of years I had to really get to know him. I see that sadness in his eyes each time someone tells him how very like our father he is.
Additionally, my brother’s exposure to those who were uncomfortable with our family came very early in his life. My mother was thirty-five years old when she became pregnant with my brother, and in 1980, that was considered remarkable. Her age coupled with her beautiful, prematurely white head of hair led people to talk. And often, the talk was about whether she was his mother or grandmother.
My brother was repeatedly asked this question. And when he was, I would see his clear, beautiful blue eyes turn steely and cold. “No,” he would say emphatically. “She is my mother.”
When asked where his father was, his response was similarly curt: “He died.” The answer was simple, truthful, and straightforward, as children so often are.
But one day, he was asked a new question.
I had met him as the school bus dropped him off so we could walk home together.
“Is that your sister?” asked one of his classmates.
“That is my sister,” my brother replied.
“Why is your sister a nigger?”
My brother did not understand the word nigger because he had never heard it before. He stood there, looking at the kid on his bus with a confused but slightly angry stare clouding his bright blue eyes. I returned the young boy’s taunting, arrogant gaze and gathered my brother into my arms for a hug. “What does nigger mean, Marra?”
It’s not often that I am at a loss for words, but this was certainly one of those times. The bus stop was at the corner of our very short block, but the walk home felt endless. We stopped on our driveway and stood under the basketball hoop before going inside. I swallowed hard and took a deep breath, and I did my best to navigate the precarious conversation.
“Well, you know how Mom and Daddy always tell us to watch our language and think about how we speak?”
“Yes …,” he said, only semiconvincingly.
“They say that because there are things that should never be said. Names we should never call another person. And nigger is one of those words.”
“But why did he call you … that name?”
And then, differently from the way Louise had told me many years prior, I held up a mirror and explained to my brother that we didn’t look alike.
And there it was. My brother had his first taste of racism.
Despite the decade age gap, Merrill and I are very close. We have always shared the same appreciation for silliness, so much so that even as adults, my mother often sits between us at family functions, and certainly when we are at synagogue, so that we will be sure to behave properly.
We speak openly about the things going on in our lives. The joys and the pain. Recently, Merrill and his wife adopted a baby girl who, being half-white and half-Latinx, is also mixed race. I have never been so proud of him as I was the day I saw so clearly that openhearted color blindness was something he inherited from our parents.
But much like our sister, Merrill rarely speaks about what people have said to him about me beyond that day when I had to teach him what a nigger was. In their silence, I think my siblings believe they are helping to take care of me. Protecting their big sister in what ways they can.
Chapter Six
I HAVE SPENT MUCH OF MY LIFE BUILDING MY FAMILY. I chose my parents. I have chosen my friends, both when to welcome them and when it is time to let them go, carefully. Business partners too. I have tried, in vain, to choose romantic partners. And as I have built my world of kindred spirits, I have always sought guidance from those around me.
Until I learned that we are neither family nor kindred spirits, I wanted desperately to learn from Nette about the ways of men and romance. Surely she must know a great deal, I thought. No one ends up having five marriages if they don’t know something.
To me, Nette was meant to be my Auntie Mame—a wholly authentic guide through the world. Her sense of style, fashion, and glamour cemented that for me. That she had had multiple husbands only enhanced the fantasy!
Ah, to be young. And foolish.
Really, what I sought was connection. And I thought that this might be a place for Nette and I to connect. After all, men seemed to be all around us both. Only later in my life would I come to understand how different, and how similar, we were in ways of men.
My mother and I often talk about marriage. When I was in my twenties, she offered her thoughts on what was important when choosing a partner, telling me that it is critically important to choose a someone who I would be happy to be with—even when the passion and sexual chemistry might no longer be there.
“I just don’t understand how people your age are choosing their spouses,” she sometimes says. “You live together for years, know exactly how much toilet paper the other person uses, and then divorce after four months of marriage. I married your father nine months after we met. I knew he was a good man. I knew he loved me. And I knew we wanted the same things. We worked to build a good life and a good marriage. I don’t know if people do that anymore …”
She has often offered her thoughts on how one best tend
s to the garden of one’s marriage: focus on the marriage, always, because children grow up and leave their parents, and couples that don’t make their marriage the top priority—and instead focus all of their energy on their children—often end up strangers. She sees this as something lost in our generation of relationships, and she hopes that, when my time comes, I will give my marriage the care and attention it needs to thrive.
But recently she shared that, once upon a time, she had been afraid to get married. The only examples she’d had of marriages were awful ones, and she had grown up believing men were either womanizers or abusers or both, as was the case with her father. Her grandfather and uncles all had girlfriends “on the side.” And then there was Nette, who had arguably been her strongest female influence aside from my bubbie, and Nette had many husbands and lovers and never seemed to be happy. There were no role models or examples to inspire my mother.
By the time I was a teenager in the 1980s, Nette and Zeit were making regular visits. Often, they would arrive together, and after a few weeks, Zeit would return to San Francisco and Nette would stay for an additional month. Sometimes two. I started to become more interested in their relationship—and Nette’s past love life and what I might learn from it. And, as always, I had questions. And I drove my bubbie insane with them.
“Why has Nette had so many husbands?”
“How many were there? Really?”
“And no children? How can you have that many husbands and no children?”
“Oy, mamaleh!” Bubbie cried. “Enough with the questions. I will tell you everything I know, but that’s it. Now sit.” She patted a place on her bed, one that had long been mine.
Bubbie told me they were just girls when Nette married for the first time, at age seventeen, as did so many girls during that time. His name was Hyman, and during her short marriage to him, Nette worked taking tickets at a local movie theater. My bubbie was already a close friend of Nette and knew this man. And when Hyman raped Nette during the early part of their marriage, it was my bubbie in whom she confided. Nette’s mother fiercely held on to her Old Country ways, never learning how to speak English, and the story goes that when Nette told her mother that Hyman had raped her, her mother asked her, in Yiddish, what she had done to upset him, blaming her for the entire episode.
In an act of bravery, Nette divorced him, which was not something women did during the 1930s without true fear of being ostracized. But Nette’s desire to be free was stronger than her fear, and she divorced Hyman and fled her hometown of Milwaukee, where she was considered an outcast, for Los Angeles. In the past, I have often wished that my bubbie had possessed this same bravery, but then my mother would not exist. My life, as I know it, would not have been.
Bubbie told me that Nette then became a bookkeeper in L.A., and that job eventually moved her to San Francisco, where she worked for Ralston Purina, the pet food company, and lived for the rest of her life. It was there she met George. George was a chef, and by all accounts, he was a good, hardworking man. Although Nette remained close to my bubbie, she lived in fear of my zayde, and so she did not come for visits, and they did not go to visit her in California. Zayde, like his mother, blamed Nette for anything Hyman may have done to her and did not approve of her life. At all. She was smart to stay away.
For reasons unknown, Nette divorced George. And she took a Mexican lover named José. My bubbie was the only person who knew about José, and she didn’t tell me much about him that day. As my mother didn’t know much of this part of Nette’s romantic journey, his story died with Bubbie. That Nette took a Mexican lover fascinates me, for obvious reasons. She clearly had established a ladder of racial acceptability, and Mexican was high enough on the list to be allowed into her bed, if not into her heart.
Bubbie told me that Nette eventually remarried George. In my young heart I assumed that meant she was fond of him. Perhaps even that she loved him deeply. Later, when I asked my mother if she believed Nette had loved George, my mother said, “Did Nette really love any of them? I don’t think she knew how to love.”
Sadly, George was not enough for Nette. Ever in fear of not having enough and still working hard as a bookkeeper, Nette wanted more. Security, in whatever way Nette defined that for herself, trumped love or the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps, to her, security was happiness.
Enter Vince.
Vince, Bubbie said, was a wealthy entrepreneur, and Nette smelled money on him and divorced George a second time to trade up. Vince had a large ranch in Portola Valley, California. There were horses and riding clubs. Convertibles. And Vince owned a number of businesses, which translated into a very comfortable lifestyle for them. They mingled with people like Shirley Temple, who was a member of their riding club, and they were photographed regularly for the society pages in their town.
For the first time, Nette did not have to work. She chose to continue, however, managing one of Vince’s stores so that the salary would, effectively, stay in the family. She did not want money being spent on strangers when it could go to her.
Also for the first time—at least for the first time we know of—Nette openly built a love triangle. While she may have divorced George for Vince and his lifestyle, she did not let George go. Vince even gave George a restaurant to manage, thereby keeping him close for Nette. A part of Nette’s security also lay in being surrounded by men who worshipped her, and this would not be the last time she asked one husband to care for the one who had preceded him.
What Nette did not know when she married Vince was that his money came from the mob. And after ten years of a marriage that seemed to have been happy, Vince divorced Nette to protect her from his debtors.
My mother lived with Vince and Nette while in college, and she was able to observe them together. She believes Vince may have been the love of Nette’s life. He was the only one of her husbands to divorce her, rather than the opposite—and it was done as an act of protection. Not out of unhappiness.
Nevertheless, Nette was single again, and at some point in the mid-1960s she moved into an apartment building in Redwood City owned by Zeit Wang, who was an engineer with Lockheed. He would become her final husband, but much like her previous marriage, he was never to have Nette all to himself. Vince remained a part of Nette’s life until he died. When he became sick, it was Zeit who arranged and paid for his care, and he and Nette went together to visit Vince each week until his death. To say that Nette liked to have things her way was an understatement, and it clearly extended to her marriages.
More wealthy than was Vince, with millions amassed through his hard work and clever and careful investing, Zeit was the husband who truly gave Nette the financial security and lifestyle she desired. She stopped working and took up Zeit’s passion of ballroom dance. Together, they travelled the world, going on tours and cruises to every corner of the earth and on almost every continent. She was safe and well cared for, and she was denied nothing. Jewels, furs, cars. The sky was the limit, and Zeit never said no.
My bubbie and I were both exhausted by the time she finished the story of Nette’s marriages. It was a lot to take in all at once. But I had asked for the whole story, and Bubbie did not disappoint. It may seem strange to think that I learned about things like love triangles from my grandmother, but Bubbie was always very open with me about very adult subjects. I knew, directly from her, about the darker parts of her marriage, and she shared those details with me before I’d become a bat mitzvah. I guess Bubbie wanted me to have a real sense of the world in as many ways as possible. And for that, I will always be grateful.
But I did feel like, at least for the moment, I understood what was about to happen next. Until it actually happened.
During one of Nette’s visits, she met a man named Tom at a ballroom dance event. He was also married, but was immediately struck by Nette, and they quickly began a barely concealed affair that would last for several years. Nette’s lover Tom was the reason why Zeit would go back to California and Nette would stay on with us
without him.
The affair was conducted primarily out of my bubbie’s apartment. Tom came and went, but we usually only saw him when he was picking up Nette to go dancing. One afternoon, Nette told us she was leaving to go shopping, and my mother and I were left to entertain Zeit.
“Uncle Zeit,” I said, “would you like to play cards or something?”
We began a game of gin rummy, sitting in the cool living room of my bubbie’s apartment. After a while, Nette came home, with Tom in tow, and said hello to everyone.
“Zeit,” she cooed, “you remember Tom, don’t you? He’s my dance partner here in Chicago.”
“I do,” Zeit said. The two men exchanged terse pleasantries.
And then Nette and Tom retired to Bubbie’s bedroom, which became Nette’s when she was in town. They proceeded to have an afternoon liaison, their lovemaking loud, clear, and unapologetic.
“Mama, are they … ?” I started to ask. “I mean … those noises …”
“Just focus on the card game, Marra,” she said, looking cautiously at Zeit.
Zeit never spoke a word, nor did he leave the room to perhaps go somewhere farther away from Nette and Tom’s afternoon delight. And so we sat there, playing cards, each of us praying for different reasons that they would finish soon.
Most kids have the horrible, awkward tale about having walked in on their parents having sex. I don’t have that. But I do have this.
What I now understand is that Nette used different men to fill her many different needs, often at the same time. Nette and Zeit did not have much of a physical relationship. I never saw them touch each other unless they were dancing. There was never a hand held, an embrace, or a kiss, which is strange given how intimate ballroom dance can be.
But I never saw so much as a loving glance exchanged between them. And they also had separate bedrooms, both in their home and when they travelled. It was an arrangement that seemed to work for both of them, and while their relationship may have seemed romantic on the outside, it was clearly devoid of any sexual connection.