by Susan Isaacs
“That’s it.”
“That can’t be it.”
“That’s it, Marcia. What do you think we did, hung around the corner talking about Jews all day?”
“No, but I’ll bet they just didn’t say that Jews were pushy and leave it at that. It must have been a lot nastier.”
“And what did you say about us?”
“Just about the drinking and stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“You know. Smacking your wives around and having those tenor voices because you don’t have enough sex hormones. But it’s just an attitude. No one really discussed it or even thought much about it.”
“Why is it, when anyone makes a derogatory comment about Jews, that you interpret it as meaning they want to drag you off to Auschwitz, but when you talk like that about other people, you call it just an attitude? How come?”
I responded, “Because there was an Auschwitz.”
“But there’s not one now—and don’t give me that crap about how it could happen here, when you people have done better here than any other goddamn group and you know it.”
“See? You just lump us all together and call us ‘you people.’”
“And you? For your information, Marcia, my father never got drunk, and for your further information, he never laid a hand on my mother—”
“Who’d want to lay a hand on a saint?”
“Eat shit.”
“It’s not kosher. You eat shit.”
But aside from the little exercises in ethnic awareness that Jerry and I had, I was generally of little use as a Jew.
My old boss Dave Flaherty asked, “Jesus, kid, why did you try and shake hands with Mrs. Wolk?” We were emerging from a small brick house in Kew Gardens, part of Flaherty’s district, where I had accompanied him on a condolence call.
“What was wrong—”
“When you pay a shiva call at an Orthodox house,” Flaherty explained, “it’s a custom not to shake hands with the mourners, so they don’t communicate their sorrow.”
I grew up knowing that some Jews lit candles every Friday night and mumbled something after they did this, but I had no idea of what the substance of the mumbling was, for I knew no prayers—in Hebrew, at least. A friend in third grade had taught me the Paternoster, but I sensed somehow that it was best left unsaid. Better no prayers.
“What are you wearing?” my mother demanded.
“What?”
“Slacks. You’re wearing slacks.”
“So?”
“So, it’s Yom Kippur and you don’t go outside wearing slacks. If you’re going out, wear a skirt.” I should have known it was a holiday because there was no school and because the small radio in the kitchen had just emitted a wish for its Jewish friends to have a peaceful and healthy New Year. “This is the most important holiday of the year. A very serious one,” my mother added. And skirts are far more serious than slacks. The radio began playing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” by George Gershwin, one of its dearest Jewish friends. “You say pajamas and I say pajamas …” I knew nothing about Jewish liturgy and law until I took a college course in comparative religion.
“We have to be married by a rabbi,” Barry said. We were lying together in his dorm room at Columbia. It was May, so we weren’t cold, even though we were naked.
“Why? Why go all through that? You know you’re an agnostic.”
“But that’s an intellectual position, Marcia. Look, it’s a nice tradition and it’ll make our families happy.” Furnald Hall had been built in the days of gentlemen. Its walls were thin. Down the hall, another couple was coming; she made long, high aaaah sounds and he staccato grunts. “Come on,” Barry whispered and moved down the bed so his mouth would be nearer to my breast. “Come on.” So we began again. He took my nipple between his teeth and slowly began to bite it, harder and harder.
“Okay, Barry,” I agreed. “Okay. Whatever you want.”
Seven
Barry was smarter than I was. When we met, in our senior year at Forest Hills High School, he was already initiated into mysteries that would forever remain obscure to me. For the entire first marking period of Mr. Pforzheimer’s honors English class, I was so intimidated by Barry’s brilliance that I was afraid to speak in class. And I developed such a crush on Barry that I was afraid to speak to him after class.
I had no idea what to say to a boy who dropped terms like “objective correlative.” I wondered if someone who could make offhand references to John Ruskin would want to go to a prom.
Barry was so appealing. In a school full of boys with loud voices and purple mohair sweaters, he spoke softly and wore pale crew necks. And once, when he stood to read a short biography of Thomas Hardy he had compiled, an erection rose beneath his khaki slacks.
After the fourth week of school, after endless conversations with girl friends on the subject of How to Get a Boy to Notice You Without Seeming Too Obvious, I returned to class and smiled. He didn’t notice. I made myself read a book of essays by Edmund Wilson and spent a week with my hand raised, trying to get the teacher to recognize me so I could work Wilson’s name into the class discussion and wow Barry with my culture. Mr. Pforzheimer did not call on me; he did not care what I thought about Hamlet.
Instead, Barry was chosen. “What do you think, Barry? Is it ‘solid flesh’ or ‘sullied flesh’?”
“You can make a good case for either one, Mr. Pforzheimer.”
“Well, what case would you make for ‘solid’?” Mr. Pforzheimer leaned forward and licked his lips, hungry for Barry’s analysis.
“Melt is the key word.” Barry Plotnick stood by his desk one row away from me and several desks behind; between us were the alphabetical interlopers: Kaplan, McCann, Nussbaum, and Obermaier. As usual, he spoke enthusiastically, stopping only once or twice to gaze up at the ceiling and gather his thoughts and let the tip of his tongue make a quick pass over his lips.
“Fine, Barry,” said Mr. Pforzheimer. “And what about ‘sullied’?”
Barry spoke of nausea, of sickness unto death, and mentioned something about teetering on the brink of an existential abyss. He pronounced “Sartre” beautifully, and even Heidi Gold, who had gotten early acceptance to Radcliffe, peered at him with interest.
He was cute, even while proclaiming that hell is other people. Barry had a moon face, round brown eyes, and a short broad-bridged nose dotted with endearing freckles. The corners of his mouth turned up slightly and he generally looked pleased, even when grim. In fact, I later realized he looked a little like Howdy Doody, friendly and approachable, and indeed, most people, without knowing him, assumed he was a real regular guy.
I decided to act fast. I got to him after class, successfully blocking Heidi, whose tactics were refined and scholarly. “Hey,” I said, “you were very incisive.”
“Thank you.”
I could not tell if he was shy or was used to being complimented. But Heidi seemed about to come up on his left so I asked, “Have you ever thought about applying that same sort of existential analysis to Lear? I mean, dealing with an absurd universe and …” I let my voice trail off, hoping that I was making sense; I was not sure what I was talking about.
“Hey, that’s interesting,” Barry said. His round eyes seemed to grow in circumference, widening enough to accept me as well as Shakespeare.
We met after school that day and on most other days. At first, we talked about Shakespeare, then Proust, then about the 1960 Presidential election which was a few weeks away. Naturally, I wanted Kennedy. Barry thought J.F.K. a “fake intellectual” and Nixon miles beneath contempt.
“How can you not care?” I demanded. “Don’t you have any idea how important this election is?”
Fastidiously, Barry lifted a piece of lint from his gray sweater. “Ultimately,” he said, “politics has nothing to do with the human condition.”
But mostly we made out, progressing from excruciatingly extended kisses—exploring each other’s mouth till we nearly dr
owned in saliva—to Barry touching me on top, to me touching Barry below. By the time Kennedy picked his cabinet, Barry was touching me, with astounding expertise, below.
“Oh, boy,” I said, upon achieving my first male-induced orgasm.
“Like it?” he asked.
Loved it. By that time I was carrying about a purse pack of Kleenex, to mop up his semen.
By Valentine’s Day, I used them to wipe off my Cherries in the Snow lipstick before going down on him. On George Washington’s Birthday weekend, he knelt on the tiled floor of his finished basement, prepared to oblige me.
“No, Barry.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It’s not necessary.” I sat primly on an icy leather chair, trying to put my knees together so my thighs would look thinner. He pried my legs apart. “Barry, no, please. Come on, Barry. Stop. This is like sixty-nine.” Not quite, since he remained on the floor, which must have been as cold as the chair. Soon, though, I closed my eyes. “Oh, my God,” I whispered.
The first Tuesday in March, when Sheri had her canasta game in her living room, Barry and I had intercourse for the first time in the Plotnicks’ 1960 Chrysler Imperial. First, we wrapped ourselves in a beautiful, heavy blue quilt we found on the floor of the garage, a quilt Sheri had determined was perfect for the Salvation Army when she redecorated the master bedroom in what she called “peaches and cream.”
I was trembling. “It’s freezing.” I could feel the goose bumps on my upper arms as Barry rubbed me briskly. But his massage only made me shiver more because his hands were freezing. “Maybe not today.”
“But we talked about it,” Barry said. “We discussed the whole thing and we both agreed—”
“I know. Okay, let’s do it.”
Barry maneuvered on top and put his cold hands under me, causing me to arch my back. This got him quite excited and he started thrusting, although he was closer to my navel than to his goal.
“Barry, please, your hands are so cold,” I commented lightly, turning my head away from his, toward the driver’s seat; I had been panting a lot that afternoon—from fear and desire—and was afraid my dry mouth was a breeding ground for virulent bad-breath germs. “Barry, what if I bleed? Barry?”
What if Barry’s father, Dr. Plotnick, found blood on his green leather seat? “Don’t worry, Marcia.” His father was an obstetrician with a very busy practice; he had no time for unessential spotting. “We have the quilt.”
“But what if your mother changes her mind about it? What if she …?” Barry found his way inside. “It hurts. Barry, please stop for just a minute. It hurts so much.”
He stopped. “Uh-oh, I forgot the rubber,” he remarked. He reached down to the floor of the car and picked up a foil packet. “Just a second.” It took nearly a minute, actually, with Barry balancing his weight on his right hand and reaching under the quilt with his left, to roll up the condom.
“Barry,” I tried again, as he finished his contraceptive ordeal.
“I’ll be careful,” he whispered, finding his place again quite quickly. I writhed a little, trying to displace him, but he moved with me. “God, oh, God, it’s so hot inside there,” he said.
Unlike seventeen-year-old boys of fiction, Barry was not an easy come. Within a month I would appreciate this attribute, but that first time I was not pleased.
“Marcia,” he said, “stop crying. Please.”
I did not bleed. We wrapped the condom in Kleenex. Later, we put it directly in the next-door neighbor’s outdoor trash can, under a neatly brown-bagged package of garbage.
We walked into the Plotnick living room. The canasta ladies lifted their matching heads—they all wore a hairdo called a beehive—and stared at us. Barry grinned at them. I stared at the dark-red velvety rug. Sheri asked, “Did you have a nice walk, Barry?”
“Yes. Great, wasn’t it, Marcia?” I think I mumbled yes.
It became the greatest thing in my life. I felt so valued. We had sex daily; neither cold nor rain nor menstruation nor fear of parents stopped us. We did it in every room in Barry’s house. We did it in the basement of my apartment building, in the laundry room, where we switched off the lights and humped to the easy rhythm of the wash cycle. We went to the city and did it in a dressing room in the men’s department at Macy’s. We did it in a smelly little room that said “Employees Only” at the Donnell Library.
We still talked at other times, of course. We discussed Mozart’s life. We debated whether George Bernard Shaw was a great dramatist or just a good one. We decided that since Barry was a Renaissance man anyway, he might as well go to medical school and make his parents happy. But naturally, Barry would have to break the news to his family that he was not only going to be a doctor, he would be a writer too.
“Look at William Carlos Williams,” he said.
“Chekov,” I added.
“And who else?”
“I’m not sure, but I know I’ve heard of others. Anyway, if you want it, Barry, you’ll make it. No one can stop you.”
“I know that, Marcia.”
It never occurred to me that the above was our warmest, most personal discussion. I never considered that all our talks could have taken place between two very bright students at some college’s freshman orientation program.
I never realized that we only had fun with our clothes off. We were grand together then, enthusiastic and inventive and nearly indefatigable. And since we were also able to find things to say to each other when dressed, I believed we were chosen by heaven, a stellar match. “We can screw or discuss Hegel,” I boasted to my cousin Barbara the following year. She paled, both at my hymeneal loss and at my language, but still nodded respectfully. It did not dawn on me until long after our divorce that Barry and I were merely compatible. We were two very bright people who loved to fuck. We certainly never fucked to love.
But we were proficient. In college, when Barry’s fraternity brothers bragged about making a girl hot by high-pressure ear blowing, Barry would slowly draw his tongue over me, from my heels all the way up to the nape of my neck, where later, between nips, he whispered, “This is your cervical vertebra.”
Afterward I said, “I would have thought the cervical vertebra would be much, much lower. I mean—”
“No,” he explained. “Not that cervix.” He paused. “Let me put it in layman’s terms….”
From his first day at Columbia, Barry embraced his premedical studies with a passion even greater than that which he brought to bed. He was a gifted student, a natural scientist.
But he continued to take English courses. We each wrote a paper on Blake; his was more subtle, profound, and better written than mine.
And he would glance at me sideways, his heavy lids half closed over his large brown eyes, and sigh, “Please, Marcia, not e. e. cummings.”
“But I like e. e. cummings.”
“And I suppose next it will be Ogden Nash?”
It already was. By the end of freshman year, I sensed I would not be the scholar Barry was expecting. After college, we would not strut up to Cambridge, arm in arm, Mr. and Mrs. Barry Plotnick, and emerge from Harvard four years later as Dr. and Dr. Barry Plotnick, he from the medical school, me from the university’s English department. I did not enjoy research. I was sloppy. I lost index cards with bibliographic information. I cared mainly for expedience. I learned to choose my subject with an eye to my professor’s prejudices; one look at Professor Prager and my term paper in nineteenth-century English literature became “The Genius of Oscar Wilde.”
Our meetings would be called to order. Any old business? Not really, although as we undressed he showed me how the bite marks I had made the previous weekend had cleared up. New business? “I don’t think I want to go to graduate school, Barry.” It had taken me a year and a half to find courage to say this.
“Then what are you going to do while I’m in medical school? Marcia, we discussed it. I’ll have very long hours, and I can’t take responsibility for amusing you.
”
“I’ll work.”
“As what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe as a reporter.”
Barry lay back on a filthy, green-draped couch in his fraternity house. The only light in the room, coming from a red bulb screwed into an unshaded lamp, caused his freckles to look purple.
“Or maybe something in politics.”
“What?” I had said the last sentence very fast.
“Politics,” I repeated. “I don’t know, maybe something else. But I’ll get a job and—”
“I can’t believe you’d want to make a career of hanging around those people. I mean, you’re the only one in that club who doesn’t have acne.”
Barry did not like my friends, the members of the Queens College Young Democrats. He claimed they would have me chomping on Juicy Fruit gum within six months.
“They happen to be very interesting,” I said. “I mean, they may not win the best-dressed award, but they’re very involved.”
“In what?”
“Politics.”
“Wouldn’t Metternich be surprised. Look, Marcia, they’re involved because no sorority or fraternity would have them. I mean it. Try to be objective.”
I tried. Barry was a brilliant student, the most popular pledge in his fraternity, and an increasingly natty dresser; only during our admittedly frequent beddings was he without his Harris tweed jacket and meerschaum pipe.
On the other hand, I looked decidedly shabby. My cousin Barbara had departed for Syracuse University with a trunk full of clothes so fine they would not wear out, and thus, after high school, no hand-me-downs came my way. And objectively, those lovely sorority girls my mother kept murmuring I should meet did not find my baggy gray skirt and chestful of campaign buttons alluring enough to want to call me sister.
But having heard Kennedy’s call, I didn’t mind. I was doing for my country, eking out a B-plus average and working with the college’s Young Democrats, which served as a kind of Kiddie Korps for the regular Democratic political clubs in Queens.
Unable to vote or tote petitions until we were twenty-one, the other club members and I did what we were asked, sticking leaflets under windshield wipers, driving voters to the polls, running to the library to return a city councilman’s wife’s overdue books. For an hour a day I read Milton and for another six hours I stuck handbills onto lampposts, handbills which touted the virtues of a Democratic candidate who could barely utter a simple declarative sentence.