by Hilary Zaid
My mother remained impassive; she drew the cloak of her maternal power—all-knowing, all-seeing—around her like a royal robe. “There’s just something about her that reminds me a lot of you.”
Honestly. Was there really only the one thing she knew about me? “You mean, I’m gay.”
Across the line, a bell rang, formal and hollow. “The carpet man is here. I love you. Bye bye.”
I picked up the phone, pressed in Gramma Sophie’s number, put down the phone. Then I dialed Anya.
( )
Anya was wearing a simple black linen dress when she came to the door. She’d tied her blond hair back in a black ribbon. “Opening at the Museum,” she commented. I hadn’t seen her since I’d started snooping around, trying to find Sheva. I felt a little guilty. But Anya looked down at my feet. “Tennis shoes.” She was shaking her head. “So, are you going to play tennis?”
Anya felt like family. I stopped feeling guilty about digging around in her past. These were the small, calculated liberties that we took with people we cared about when we knew they would be justified in the end. I made a point of sitting in Anya’s seat, next to the table with the picture on it.
We sat, like before, at opposite sides of the coffee table. If the glass had ever held so much as a fingerprint, it had been wiped, impeccably, away. Before, she had had the photo at her elbow. Before, when we had talked about her past, Anya gazed out the large windows of her apartment, framing the sky. Today her gaze shifted to my right, toward the end table twined with passionflower vines. Anya told me that the plants flower. “In the spring. They’re quite grotesquely beautiful,” she assured me, with her enigmatic smile, half-Mona Lisa, half-misery.
I turned to look at the vines. There, nested among them in a simple leather frame, so close, sat the photo of Sheva. I wanted to pick it up; I rued the frame, imagining all of its secrets inscribed on the back. I wouldn’t dare to pick it up. But I managed the courage to ask. “Did you ever know a woman named Alina Sapozhnik? From Kovno?” Alina’s cousins had been deported from the ghetto for stealing a rotten potato. Like Sheva. I pulled Paneriu Street out of my bag, as if the question were not about Sheva, but about my research.
Anya’s gaze shifted to the window. “You don’t have large birds here,” she commented. “In Lithuania, we have large birds. Gandras.” Anya nodded, as if she had just discovered an envelope, lost for many years, with money inside it. She turned to me. “You’ve been to Kaunas?”
I shook my head.
“My father used to say the gandras bring luck.” I wasn’t sure which bird Anya meant. “He told me, ‘They can never live on the house of a bad man.’” Anya smiled, a small rueful smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes. They used to call Vilnus, a hundred kilometers from Kaunas, “the Jerusalem of the West.” There were more Jews living in Vilnus—a thriving cultural center—than anywhere else in Europe. Most of them were executed before the war even got into full swing. Where had the birds of good fortune roosted then?
“Such large nests. You can see them on the towers of Kaunas castle.” Storks. That’s what she meant. My Uncle Irvin had told me about the nests, bursting like handfuls of stuffing from the turrets of the castles, tucked behind the church spires. The city had set up huge nesting boxes on poles along the highway to encourage the storks to return.
Anya and I looked out the windows, both of us. “In Kovno, parents pretended these birds would bring things for the children. Candy, oranges, painted eggs. Like the Tooth Fairy. The parents would tie goodies up in the trees for the children to find.” Anya stroked her chin. “Gandras,” Anya murmured. She turned to me. “She brought things. Butter. Bread.”
Anya had told me that, as a partisan, she had brought things back to the Ghetto. “You brought things back,” I reminded her.
Anya closed her eyes, an acknowledgement. Then she said, “Not only me.”
“Alina Sapozhnik?”
“We never used real names.” Anya blinked, as if we couldn’t say these things out loud, as if it were still necessary to speak in code.
Gandras. That must have been Sapozhnik’s code name. She had come to the ghetto as the Gandras to bring supplies in, and to smuggle people away. Anya frowned, her mouth an upside-down parenthesis.
“Did you work with her, then?” Anya had been a partisan, too. But she had been in the ghetto with Sheva when Alina Sapozhnik came for the last time. Hadn’t she?
Anya stared out the window at the sky. She murmured “Mmmmm . . .”
According to Paneriu Street, Alina Sapozhnik had returned one last time to help her family escape, but found that they had already been deported. Had she taken Anya in their place? “You left with her?” Anya stood up, frowned minutely. She returned with two plates balanced in her hands, and set down two equal slices of cake. “She helped you escape the ghetto?”
Anya shook her head once as she sat. “Not me. Batsheva.” The leather sighed under her body. Batsheva—Sheva. As if it were obvious. As one piece of the puzzle clicked into place, another lacuna appeared.
“But Batsheva was deported. With her sister.” Wasn’t she? I was almost certain that was what Anya had told me. Or was it just what Anya had led me to believe? I hadn’t recorded that conversation. I had never even taken my camera out of the bag.
Anya shrugged. She held her palms up, open. She shook her head. “No. Batsheva was hidden.” Hidden? I was certain Anya had never told me this. Almost absolutely certain. I leaned in over the table. “Hidden? How?”
“I hid her. Until the Gandras came.” Satisfied, she sunk the side of her fork into the cake.
“You hid her?” Never mind where or how. Why hadn’t Anya told me the truth? “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
She dabbed her lips lightly with a napkin. “Why speak of things that never happened?”
I still didn’t understand. It had happened. She’d just told me so.
Anya leaned in. She spoke very softly, very slowly. “If it never happened, then she cannot be found.”
I leaned back heavily in my chair and stared with perfect understanding at the wide, blank canvas of sky. Who could be forced to reveal what she doesn’t know? Anya had resolved to keep this secret even from herself. Lies of omission—they were a tic, a habit of self-preservation, a way to protect not just yourself, but the person you loved the most.
But if Sheva had been hidden, and not been deported, that meant she could still be alive. I had been looking for a death record. I stared at Anya, the soft, worn lines of her mouth, the hands with which she’d brought me cake. My grandfather had died before I was born. My grandmother never talked about him. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized she had been lonely for half of her life. When I got home, I called Vicky back. If Sheva had escaped, she might still be alive, and, if she was alive, she could still be found. A new sense of righteousness blazed inside me, a renewed sense of innocence. I would restore Sheva to Anya. By the time it was too late to deny my role, I would be her hero.
( )
There was more than one kind of hunt going on in my life those days. “How about the Women’s Cultural Arts Building?” I was leafing, once again, through Here Comes the Guide, thumbing through its crisp, white pages. Getting married, I realized, was sort of like a huge research project. I’d always loved black words on a smooth, polished page, the dates, the postscripts: See also. It was one of the things I had lost along with Annie Talbot. “The Fireside Salon glows with a whimsical interpretation of the Garden of Eden painted on persimmon-red walls: trees laden with golden fruit and a mermaid disappearing into the sea . . .”
Getting a wedding date, it turned out, was all about getting a wedding place.
Francine, who was picking fleas off Bear with her fingers, laughed, a single, punctuating “Ha!” She dropped the flea she was holding into a glass of water. She was drowning them, pushing their buoyant little bodies, tiny as flakes of pepper, down with the tip of her finger. “Here.” I passed the book to Francine
. On the cover, a bride with something gauzy on her head and a groom who looked a lot like Art Garfunkel squinted against a rain of white rice. They were half-smiling, half-grimacing.
“How about the Brazil Room? Up in Tilden Park. I went to a wedding there once.” Francine turned to the window; she was staring down the yard, into the shadows of the redwood tree. “As the couple said their vows, you could hear a hawk screeching. It felt like it came from out of the sky, somewhere so far away you just couldn’t see, but close, too.” Francine turned to me. “Sort of like God.” She dipped her head self-consciously. We talked about Jewish holidays, and Jewish history; we never talked about God.
I considered Francine’s profile, the way her nose ran down into that little channel that connects your nose to the top of your lip. Once Annie Talbot had told me, “Before we’re born, we know everything there is to know. An angel shows us all of these things while we’re still in the womb.” I had imagined the entire world, and all of history, seen, spread out, as if from a very great height. “But then, right before we’re born, the angel touches its finger to our lips—“ Here, Annie fitted her finger neatly into the groove above her upper lip. “’Shh . . . ,” she said. “And we forget everything.”
Annie had told me about the Brazil Room, too. Not long before she died. It was one of the few times she’d talked to me about her own life. The building had originally been part of the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition on Treasure Island; the World’s Fair on the Pacific, she’d called it. “‘We were no longer young.’” Annie gazed out the window of her study toward the Bay; through her windows, in the distance, you could see the towers of the Golden Gate. “It was still the Depression. The world on the brink of war. Franklin Roosevelt opened the Fair himself, over the radio.” (“Ms. Talbot, nee Anne Marie Giamartino, native of San Francisco, daughter of Anna and Frank Giamartino, also native of San Francisco . . .”) “My mother went on the ferry to watch the hula girls dance. It was the first time she had ever eaten a crepe.” Annie Talbot smiled. “She met her husband there, walking through those magical places: The Tower of the Sun. The Court of the Moon. I imagined they were on another planet.
“Just a few months later, war broke out. Treasure Island became the Naval base. My mother’s husband left for the Pacific Theater.” (“Ms. Talbot is pre-deceased by her mother Anna Giamartino and by her stepfather, World War II Lance Corporal Jackson Ames.”) She gestured with her palm toward the big picture window facing the Bay and out beyond it, toward the Western rim of the world. “The luminous city,” Annie Talbot mused. (Ms. Talbot is survived by her daughter Camille, by her brothers Peter and Douglas Ames, and by her former husband Thomas Talbot.) Her eyes were far away. Her face was bronze, the golden hairs above her lip dusted with golden light. (“She was renowned for her generosity and for her high standards. For many of her graduate students, she was an inspiring professional model, a strong advocate, and a friend.”)
I wished Annie Talbot were still alive. I wanted to touch my finger to her lip.
“Whose wedding?” I asked Francine.
Francine shook her head dismissively. “A cousin of Jordan’s.”
I could feel my eyebrows lifting my forehead into my scalp. “You went to a wedding there with your high school boyfriend?” Why would I want to celebrate our love in a place she’d already consecrated with some guy she’d managed to fake straight with? Yet, almost every lesbian I’d ever met had a story like that, each woman who seemed so often to know just what she wanted had remained untrue to herself for so long.
Francine pulled her legs up and hugged her knees. “I always thought, when I got married”—I blinked; I had never heard Francine suggest that she had ever spent a moment thinking about marriage—“I wanted to be under that huge sky right next to the person who would be my forever.” I could see us there, then, two tiny figures, white dresses fluttering, under a fluttering chuppah, against the endless, unfurling golden grass of late summer, minuscule but together, side by side under the huge, unwavering canopy of sky.
“Okay,” I said.
( )
On a Tuesday afternoon in October, Francine and I drove up into the Berkeley hills, pulled into the little parking lot off Wildcat Canyon and, without a clue whether we needed sitting room for fifty or a hundred, went in to reserve a wedding date at the Brazil Room.
I’d seen pictures of the building, its stonework walls and leaded glass doors, in The Guide. What you couldn’t see in the pictures was the space around the Brazil room—not the thick roadside border of forest, not the high green slope over which the patio perched, rolling down into the park, but the huge scoop of blue carved out above the slope, the living air, ascending and extending out over all two thousand acres of eucalyptus, oak and pine. Standing out on the patio, I understood what Francine meant. I wanted to get married under that sky.
Francine and I made our way into the little foyer. Several straight couples stood in the dark, wood-paneled entry, pressed close along the wall where a printout listing every weekend for the next twenty-four months stretched from one end of the room to the other. We edged our way uncertainly toward it. Several of the men consulted glowing PalmPilots, the small cold flames cupped in their huge hands; the women hefted tabbed binders. “Come on.” Francine stepped forward, pulling me after her.
Time unfurled in front of us, slot after slot, like entries in the Book of Life; almost every one, we discovered with shock, was already penned with the name of another couple, two per day, like litigants’ outside a courtroom, except that an ampersand, instead of a v., linked them: Phillips & Sanders, Roth & Kaplan, Chavez & Hirsch. “Well,” Francine frowned, “it looks like we’ll need to wait until . . .” she trailed her finger along the wall, “February 18, 2001.”
Just then, a park ranger, the person in charge of the events calendar for the building, grabbed the black Sharpie that dangled from a piece of yarn and crossed out a name. Francine stepped over lightly, a dancer’s neat, sideways step. “Unless,” she said, frowning, “you want October 11, 1998.”
Sunday, October 11. National Coming Out Day. The eleventh of October, the leaf-strewn, pumpkin-porched, three-day weekend when the last surge of equinoctial heat pulses into the brilliant sky-vaulted blues and molten-golds of fall. It was Columbus Day, or, in Berkeley: Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Both of those seemed right. We wouldn’t be the first two women to marry each other, but we would be among the first to call it that in front of others, and that was to sail toward a horizon with no assurance of not falling off the flat edge of the mapped world. But this was aboriginal ground, too. We are who we are, indigenously: each the whole world to each other.
I grabbed the black Sharpie hanging on its tattered string. Francine rested her hand on my shoulder, her breath hot in my ear as I marked our names in jagged capitals on the calendar, Margolis & Jaffe. “Call Fiona,” Francine said. “She’ll probably buy her ticket today.” We’d just inscribed our names in the Book of the Future.
When I did call Fiona, she surprised me. “Well, it’s about time.” Fiona, whom I’d expected to be excited to the point of overbearing sounded, instead, unaccountably sober. She was back to balancing David Charles and Chris. “We’re about to turn thirty. You don’t really understand yet,” Fiona advised me. She was six months older. “But we’re about to hit a decision point in our lives.”
I was standing in the kitchen, holding the phone in one hand and paging through the calendar. The rest of the year unfurled under my fingers, sectioned out in perfect white squares. Francine and I had chosen ours. But what about Fiona?
“We’re at the turning point,” Fiona went on, a little heavily, I thought. I was getting married. Fiona wasn’t. I didn’t know what to say. As I turned toward the sink, I noticed a stray chocolate jimmy on the counter near the toaster, a remnant, I guessed, from the box of See’s candy Francine had brought home from school. Reflexively, I blotted up the loose jimmy on the tip of my index finger and popped it into my mouth. Fiona was carrying on w
ith her gloomy tirade. “Either we make our major life choices now, or we don’t.” The jimmy tasted dry, hard and old as the earth. Spitting as I said goodbye quickly to Fiona, I had the distinct feeling that I’d just eaten shit.
( )
On Sunday night, I found myself, as I often did, watching my future mother-in-law stitch a quilt at her machine. She was making something covered with the little purple and yellow flowers Francine had told me once were called Johnny Jump Ups. “Damn.” Betty tugged the fabric away from the machine and snipped at loose threads with her sewing scissors. Little bits of the satin border kept unraveling at the cut edge. I watched her reseat the fabric. We still hadn’t told Betty and Sol because I hadn’t told my parents. There was something else I wanted to broach with Betty, something Betty knew a lot about.
“Who’s it for?” I asked her.
“Hmmm?” Betty drew her lips together like the strings of a purse. “A woman I used to know.” Betty was always tight-lipped about her work, which was for a battered women’s shelter. There were significant parts of her life, too, I reassured myself, she couldn’t share with Sol. Outside, Francine and Sol were dragging trash cans together from behind the house down the long driveway, their plastic wheels rumbling against the rough cement.
Betty looked up. “Hand me the chalk?” She nodded toward an old wooden matchbox filled with hard, flat lozenges the shape of guitar picks. “Thank you.” I watched her fingers as she fished through the box, looking, as I often did, for clues, faint foreshadowings of the person Francine might become. Betty gripped the slim, blue triangle between her thumb and her fingers, marking out a swift, clean line. “She got away from one of those tough guys who spells everything out with his fists.” So, the blanket was for one of her former clients, a woman Betty and her shelter had helped escape from an abusive husband. Betty frowned, blew at the chalk line and dropped the little tab with a plik into the matchbox. “I like it when stories end this way. She managed to get away, put herself through school. And now,” Betty looked up, her eyebrows rising to telegraph contented surprise, “she’s having a baby.”