by Hilary Zaid
“Mmm,” I answered, pretending to consider the joker I held, secreted in my hand.
Jason looked up from his tray. Straight, dark hair flopped over his pale, upturned nose. “It’s still your turn, Gram,” he reminded Ruth Klein.
“Where can the one go?” she asked him, waving a red one in her gnarled hand.
“Before the two,” he pointed. “Or after the thirteen. Like an ace.”
“An ace. An ace. All over the place,” she muttered.
Jason slid the one onto a run. “Good move,” he said. “Do you have any more?”
She looked uncertain. He slid her tray toward him. “I think that’s it,” he concluded. “Pick three tiles,” he said, pointing to the pile of down-turned pieces beside Ruth Klein. On his right hand, I noticed, Jason wore a thick college ring carved with insignia; nevertheless, I liked him.
“Would you like a piece of cake?” Ruth’s daughter Carolyn held out a perfect square of golden layer cake frosted in white; between the layers glowed a single golden stripe.
“I would like a piece of cake,” Ruth Klein answered. Still pretty sharp, I thought. And her hearing was good, too.
Taking the plate from Barbara, I set it down at Mrs. Klein’s elbow, directly on top of a second plate streaked with white frosting. I introduced myself. “I’m from the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory,” I told her.
Carolyn Klein added, “Ms. Margolis came to talk to you about your experiences during the War.”
Mrs. Klein squinted up at me suspiciously. She’d already set to work on the cake, which was nearly gone. When she finished, she took my hand and turned it over in both of hers, exposing the small, blue tattoo on the inside of her forearm, the six digits she had never been able to reorder, flip to white, sweep away. “Are you the second wife?”
Jason scolded her harmlessly. “You know I’m not married, Gram.”
“I liked the first wife better.” She shook her head, and returned to the tile tray.
“Mrs. Klein,” I started, “would you prefer to speak in English or German?” My own German was only strong enough to have passed the graduate proficiency exam, but, typically, these narratives had a way of unfolding without prompting.
Ruth Klein looked up sharply. Her wet lips trembled slightly as she spoke. “In that language,” she poked a finger hard into the air, “I never speak.” The cake caught her eye, and she asked for a piece, a little peevish. But, when Carolyn Klein delivered it, she began to eat again with evident delight. “This is very good cake,” she said. She looked up hopefully. “Did my mother make this cake?”
( )
“Do we have any more cake tasting on the docket?” I asked Francine. I pulled a receipt from my pocket and tore it up; it was February; I’d brought Anya French tulips. “I’ve got a wicked yen for some lemon layer cake.”
Francine grunted. She was glued to the TV, to women’s giant slalom. Ever since the Olympics had started, she’d been coming home, flipping on the tube and parking in front of it. If she had work to do, she did it right there at the little coffee table, watching CBS.
“Bring me some chips, will you?” Francine called out as I headed into the kitchen to check the calendar. It was less than a week from Valentine’s Day, a day we never celebrate as a couple because it’s already been claimed by grief. The day was already dark. As I stepped through the kitchen door, reaching for the dimmer switch, a pale shape scuttled from the dogs’ kibble dish to the bottom of the fridge like a hurried ghost. “Whoa!” I flicked on the light.
“What?” Francine called out. It was good to know she could still make out voices other than Jim Nantz’s.
“There’s something in the kitchen. Alive.”
Francine was beside me in an instant—possibly a new linoleum-speed-skating record, set in her blue wool socks. “Let’s see,” she said. Bracing ourselves against the kitchen cupboards, we shoved the refrigerator aside and set our small, terrified poltergeist flying under the stove.
“There!” we yelled, hopping and pointing. Lola shoved her snout under the stove, face scrunched in ancestral fury, and barked like a maniac. The cornered mouse made a break for it; it shot out from behind the stove straight into the living room, Lola, all fur and teeth, in hot pursuit. Lola skidded across the pine planks, crashing against the coffee table as the mouse darted past the icy slopes of Nagano, and then disappeared, a quick gray smudge, between the two bricks at the back of the fireplace where the mortar had fallen out. Lola pushed her nose to the crack, snuffling hungrily.
Francine walked toward the fireplace, working something small and black in her palm, which she pushed into the crack. “It’s okay,” she told me. “It’s Fimo. It bakes dry.”
Back in the kitchen, we pushed the refrigerator farther from the wall to reveal an enormous pile of dog kibble. My eyes traced the short path from the dog bowl to the fridge. Each kibble probably weighed at least a tenth of the mouse, and there were at least two hundred pieces under there.
I held the dustpan as Francine swept. Together, we pushed the refrigerator back into place. Suddenly, I recalled the nasty “jimmy” I’d found on the counter. “I think I ate mouse shit,” I told Francine.
“And you’re usually so picky about your food.” She raised her eyebrows and handed me a bowl of hot salsa and a bag of chips. “Salt and jalapeno are very cleansing.”
We sat side by side on the couch, casting an occasional glance at the fireplace. It was raining hard outside. Night had fallen. “Do you think it will come back?”
Francine shrugged. “We’ll see.”
By Friday night, there was still no sign of the exiled mouse. No “jimmies” on the counter. No stench of death in the living room walls. I let myself think about its small, gray form, safe somewhere, out of sight, while I took down the matches, set the candle on the stove. Francine was in the living room, watching athletes fold themselves mummy-style into colored tubes and shoot noiselessly through the mountains. It was late Friday night, almost the fourteenth of February. The anniversary of the day that had crushed my heart to a fine, dry powder. In a minute or two, I’d go in and sit with her, watch the end of the day’s competitions and we’d go up together to bed, while, in the kitchen, on the stove, this light continued to flicker, casting shadows through the house.
The light was off in the kitchen. The sounds of the living room—television, doggy snores—were far away. I held tight to my New Union Home Prayer book. A woman of valor—seek her out/for she is to be valued above rubies. The match whispered. Give her honor for her work; her life proclaims her praise. The fire took hold without a sound. My eyes burned. The darkness of the room, growing darker, cupped the flame. I rocked back and forth on the heels of my feet; standing alone in front of the stove, I whispered my grandmother’s name.
( )
Behind the counter at Bacardi’s, tiny mousse cakes—lemon, chocolate, pistachio, mango—floated, perfect as Anya’s little Thiebauds. She’d been trying to get more modern art into me. Like playing Rummikub, looking at paintings was companionable, safe. We could sit next to each other without talking about anything personal. I took in the pale pastels of a dozen mousse cakes and imagined the impossible: Anya tasting one at my wedding.
“Can I help you?” a woman asked as we approached the counter. With her close-cropped auburn hair, light brown eyes and freckles, she seemed cocoa-dusted.
“We have an appointment,” I answered. “Margolis and Jaffe.”
She popped out from behind the pastry case and thrust out her hand. “Barbara Bacardi,” she said. “My husband Anthony is the pastry chef.”
We looked through Anthony’s album while Barbara brought us glasses of water and slices of cake on a shiny tray. There was the obligatory Torah scroll, the three-tiered wedding cakes. And then—what was that?—a pink cake in the shape of a pig. “Anthony made that for a fiftieth-anniversary party; it was a vegetarian luau.” Barbara sat down at the third chair. “Anthony can do anything you want.” She stayed
with us as we tasted the chocolate, lemon, and mango mousse.
A look of rapture passed Francine’s face. She had tried the chocolate. “Barbara,” she breathed. “This is incredible.”
Barbara smiled, unsurprised. “We can do that with a very light buttercream and some fresh flowers. And maybe a tray of petit fours.”
Francine and I exchanged hopefull glances. “Petit fours?” I remembered Anya’s delicate square of raspberry-filled cake. “Yes.”
Barbara’s face lit up. “We could do some pastry puffs,” she nodded. “Or little tarts.” She made quick notes on her clipboard.
I was nodding vigorously toward Francine. This was really starting to be fun!
Before we left, Francine and I put down a deposit on a two-tiered wedding cake finished with white buttercream and fresh pansies (Francine’s little joke) and a tray of lemon meringue tartlets. We walked out of the shop giddy, clinging to each other like drunks. “It’s like we’re stoned!” Francine giggled.
“No,” I corrected her. “It’s like we’re brides!”
We looked at each other, startled, then burst out laughing.
When we’d calmed down, Francine whispered, “So this is what it’s all about.” One of those moments all that bridal porn was about, all the anticipation of the girly girlhoods we hadn’t had—all the sweeter, I guessed, because we hadn’t expected it at all.
Then I went home and recorded the check.
It was that time of the month. I sat at the coffee table, studying the phone bill with a double-sided highlighter in my hand, the big-button calculator from Margolis & Margolis on my knee, and striped all of Francine’s phone calls orange, all of mine green. Forty-three sixty-eight. Forty-three, I thought reflexively, the year Hitler declared total war; sixty-eight, the year Francine was born. Who took the extra penny last time? I couldn’t remember.
“Francine!” She didn’t answer. “Francine!” I yelled. The hair-dryer drone of the popcorn popper blotted out my voice. I sighed, gathered the detritus of our joint expenses, and marched my fistful into the kitchen.
“Ow!” A scalding pellet glanced off my forearm, so hot I couldn’t tell if I’d been burned or frozen. It ricocheted to the linoleum with a skitter that multiplied like hail. Popcorn kernels were flying everywhere. Francine’s head emerged from the cabinet below, where she’d been rooting for the popcorn bowl, just in time to catch a flying kernel to the scalp.
“Ow!” She flung the bowl up in front of her face like a shield. A kernel hit it with a ping! “Ellen!” Francine shouted from inside the bowl. “Help!” I stepped into the kitchen with the bills fanned out protectively in front of me. By the time I reached the popper, popped corn was rising out of the machine like a head of beer. “Turn it—“ Francine yanked the plug, “off.” The kitchen went silent. From deep in the popper’s metal cylinder came the thud of a single, emphatic pop. Francine took the broom from the side of the refrigerator.
“Jesus!” A little red welt had risen on my arm. I clutched the phone bill, crushed, in my hand. “Do you think you can write a check today?”
“Are we ever going to stop doing this?” Francine asked, tipping the dustpan into the trash.
“Popping without the lid on?”
“Keeping all our money separate.” She gathered popcorn from the counter in both hands. “Nickel and diming each other over every bill.”
“We’re not nickel and diming,” I protested, my heart suddenly clenched fiercely around my bank account. “We’re splitting things. Evenly. That’s just fair.” We’d already paid the deposit on the rings and on the Brazilian room, but there were plenty more bills to share.
Francine popped a piece of unbuttered corn into her mouth. “It’s not about being fair, Ellen. We’re supposed to be a team.”
“We are a team.” Why did that mean we had to share everything? I absently picked up a dry puff of corn, then noticed a strand of my own hair curled around it. I changed tack. “What if I wanted to buy you a present?”
Francine was measuring out a new scoop of kernels into the canister of the popper. She looked up encouragingly.
“If I wanted to buy you a present, it’s just like you’re buying it for yourself, right, if our money is all,” I swirled my hands in a confused circle to illustrate the hopelessness of it, “merged together.” Merged—that seemed like just the right word to scare a self-respecting lesbian. Isn’t that what the self-help books try to warn us against? Letting our identities merge. Losing our selves. Wasn’t it Francine who had announced, right from the start, “I don’t ever want us to wear each other’s underwear”?
Kernels began to explode one at a time. “Ellen,” she said over the whine of the popper, “it’s not like I want to quit working and become dependent on you. Couples share their resources. Honestly, I think keeping everything separate is a little weird.” I bristled. “Especially at this point,” she added.
Just because we’re getting married, we should marry our bank accounts, too?
“When are we going to stop handling our money like it’s every woman for herself?”
Behind Francine, the pops suddenly slowed. A crowd of popped corn huddled together under the clear plastic dome, jammed together, unable to come out. Francine tapped the dome a few times with her finger. A few pieces fell into the bowl. Then, suddenly, the entire mass released and a great whirlwind of popcorn swirled once around the dome of the popper, down the spout, and was gone.
( )
I was still reciting bank balances like a mantra as I walked into my office and discovered Wendy vomiting into her wastebasket. The pale blue cotton of her blouse stretched tightly between her shoulder blades, outlining her bra straps. “Are you okay?” I managed. I tried not to breathe through my nose.
Wendy looked up, pale and sweaty, a few strands of loose hair stuck to her forehead. “Sorry,” she panted, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. Grabbing the trash basket, she lurched out of her seat and hurried down the hall. She was having hot and cold nauseous flashes every afternoon. “I knew it wasn’t going to be glamorous,” Wendy had panted, gripping the side of her desk, “but I never expected menopause to be so damn chemotherapeutic.”
Wendy’s mother had gone through breast cancer. Every three weeks, Wendy had taken the afternoon off to drive her mother to the treatment and, the next week, to hold her mother’s head while she vomited into a plastic bucket. I secretly feared that Wendy, whom I could hear retching down the hall, had cancer herself and was going to die.
I shivered. Was it the thought of Wendy’s death or the lingering smell of vomit I needed to escape? I dropped my bag on my chair and fled to the reading room, which was closed to the public on Mondays. A little nauseated myself, I drifted toward the wide window and looked out at the dark, choppy blue of the Bay, toward home. What was it that made Francine so open about money and me so jealous with it? You have to hold on to what you’ve got, my guts urged me, or you’ll have nothing!
It’s impossible to have a solitary thought in the reading room. Behind me, beside me, surrounding me on every side: the uttered testimony of a thousand voices. I moved toward the shelf, toward any voice whose solid timbre would cover the high relentless whine of my own compulsive brain, and reached for Jerry K.
Jerry K. himself had come to my undergraduate History 1B class once. His tan face framed by a full head of white hair, Jerry had stood in front of the classroom in a butter-yellow sweater, talking quietly about his childhood in Prague:
>My father was a piano tuner. My mother, a cellist who gave lessons in the little parlor at our house. We were just kids. Even after the anti-Jewish laws, the noose was getting tighter, but we had no idea. My brother Josef—he was older. He understood first that we would have to grow up too soon.
>It was my father who came to tell us, after the others were asleep, that we were to leave. Josef and I. They would tell the neighbors we had been sent to relatives in Holland, when, in fact, it was a student of my mother’s who took us.
> >That night, my father came to us with his watch. It was the only thing, beside his tools, he ever prized. He gave the watch to Josef. Josef didn’t want to take it. But my father, Josef discovered later, hid the watch in the lining of Josef’s coat, and it was too late. We never saw our father again.
I remember thinking, as he stood in my class, touching his fingertips together as if in prayer, He’s going to pull it out. Right now. His father’s watch. Like a rabbit from a hat. But he didn’t. He pulled his hands apart, empty.
I slid Jerry’s testimony back in its folder, and the folder back into its file. I rubbed my eyes. The sun had shifted, throwing big squares of light onto the tables. I shrugged my shoulders, checked my own watch, and felt suddenly remorseful about my argument with Francine. All the voices in the reading room repudiated me: Everything you think you have is nothing!
But that wasn’t what my family believed. My grandparents sewed on buttons in a women’s garment factory for twenty years to send my father and my uncle to school. And my father became a tycoon. I was supposed to build something bigger than myself.
But wasn’t that what the archive was? Something bigger than me?
When I’d declared my major in Folklore & History, my father had reacted as if I’d declared Penury & Hardship. And yet. My father hadn’t done it alone—he had my mother. And my mother counted on him for financial support. Even my grandparents were a team. What about me and Francine? Was I being homophobic? Not treating Francine the way all those married heterosexuals treated their partners?