by Hilary Zaid
Francine, round-shouldered on the edge of my bed, apologized. “You don’t want to hear this,” she said, shifting as if to stand. But I knew that was part of the reason she needed to say it—to know if, seeing the worst she could think to reveal about herself, I would still want to be with her.
Truthfully, I’d felt a terrible pang of disappointment, regret. Francine, it turned out, like both of my girlfriends before her, was kind of fucked up. I didn’t know how badly, or what this would mean when we were together. Would she hate her body no matter how often I told her how beautiful she was? Would she think about food more than she thought about us? I didn’t know. Did I want to be with her anyway?
“Here.” I put up my shirt sleeve and wiped her face.
“You must really like me.” She laughed through her tears.
“I do,” I whispered. “I more than like you,” I said, wrapping my wet arms around her trembling shoulders. “Actually,” I added, clearing my throat a little, “I love you.”
Francine turned to me, our noses nearly touching. “Do you think you can?” she asked, looking from one of my eyes to the other.
“Yes. I do,” I told her. Her shoulders loosened. She leaned into me.
“I’m glad,” she answered in a quiet voice, “because I love you, too.” She closed her eyes and we held each other. I could feel her bones through her soft, gray sweater, and I wondered. She felt me feeling her body and wondering. She sat up.
“That’s all done now.” She looked at me intently, looking, for the first time that afternoon, like the Francine who had refused to kiss me for so long, the Francine who knew how to hold her own.
“What happened? Why?”
“A bunch of things,” she said, matter-of-factly. She ticked them off on her fingers. “I hadn’t had my period in nearly a year, and I got scared about that. I started seeing a therapist. I met Bonnie. I started being able to enjoy my body.” Francine had told me once about how she had gotten together with Bonnie, a math geek and a distance runner. I’d imagined the two of them outlined against the bare, gray sky; between them, clotting, the milky clouds of their breath, the unsaid made visible.
“’Becoming a lesbian saved my life,’” I joked, framing my headline in the air.
Francine smiled. “I was ready to be myself. I didn’t need the distraction of not eating anymore.”
I nodded. Hadn’t Terri told me she’d gotten drunk every weekend at boarding school so she wouldn’t have to face her crush on her roommate? After she came out, she never drank a drop. Hadn’t Glenn, before he came out, attempted suicide? Hadn’t Mika become an obsessive, concert-level oboist? An eating disorder, in some ways, seemed fairly mild.
“So,” I said. “You feel like you have this thing under control.”
Francine cocked her head. She looked past me at the Jewish Museum calendar on my wall. The artifact of the month was a ring with an enormous metal house on top of it, a communal wedding ring. “The opposite. I’ve stopped trying to keep everything under control.” Francine seemed restored. “You’re sure you’re not freaked out?”
“I’m from L.A.,” I reminded her. “Half the girls in my high school were either anorexic or bulimic.” Francine stared at me. “Actually,” I admitted, “my parents are kind of weird about food.”
“Weird how?”
“They measure it.” I coughed. “They weigh their chicken.”
“Are they really skinny?”
“No,” I admitted. “My mother is. But my father cheats.” Francine looked concerned. “My dad likes to eat jam straight out of the jar. I used to find him standing in front of the refrigerator with a spoon.” Francine laughed. Her laughter washed over me like cool water. She smoothed her forehead with the heel of her hand. Joyce had tried to annihilate her. She was still here.
I flicked on the light. My room filled with color again, Francine’s hair auburn, her cheeks pink, my walls charcoal and white. I stepped into the hall. “Come on,” I said.
Francine stood with her back to the stove while I rooted through my shelf in the cupboard, a chaos of canned pintos and Progresso soups. “Aha!” I plunged my hand into the darkness and pulled out an unopened jar of Bonne Maman apricot preserves. Holding Francine’s shoulder, I hopped down and fished two silver teaspoons—Debbie and I had only four—from the silverware drawer. The jam jar opened with a satisfying pop. The shimmering circle of jam glistened orange-gold in the yellow light of the kitchen; it parted with a faint sigh when I split it with the spoon, scooped out a small, gleaming glob of jam and handed it to Francine, a whole slice of jellied apricot suspended in its amber. We clinked spoons. “To the future,” I said.
“Amen,” Francine licked jam from the round underside of the spoon. I slurped off the front of my glob. The jam tasted sweet and tangy; it tasted like fruit and flowers and the spring that was coming.
“Is this wrong?” I asked her.
“Eating apricot preserves?”
“You just told me about all your food and body issues, and here we are, stuffing our faces with jam. Am I co-ing you?”
“Co-ing?”
“You know. Being co-dependent. Enabling. Whatever.”
“Where do you get this stuff?”
“Lesbian rap groups,” I said. “Fiona.”
“Right.” Francine dropped her spoon into the sink. It rang against the old enamel like a distant bell.
That day seemed like it had happened a thousand years ago. Had Francine really wanted to marry me then? I’d written it off as insecurity. But maybe she had. The wind ripped through our hair. Down the field, twenty stunt kites danced a minuet across the cloudless sky. A huge Pooh bear, trailing a dripping pot of honey, billowed overhead.
Debbie squinted up into the sky. “You’re getting married in three months. You two are going to need a chuppah.” For thousands of years, Jewish couples have gotten married with the chuppah over their heads, a giant prayer-shawl, maybe, or a big piece of white fabric, raised at four corners by friends or relatives. According to Rabbi Loh, it was the chuppah that defined the sacred space in which that thing, that transformation from lovers to beloveds would take place, the same sacred space in which our parents, and their parents, had stood: the space of history, the space of timelessness. Debbie looked from me to Francine. “And I’m taking care of it.” Her shoulders shone smooth and brown under the straps of her blue sundress. Could this be the same person who had told me there was no point in getting married if it wasn’t legal?
I felt suddenly breathless. I opened my mouth, and the wind rushed in. “Wow,” I inhaled. I knew she really was happy that Francine and I had decided to stay together indefinitely, but I didn’t have any idea she would want to play a role in a wedding. “I thought you didn’t really believe in lesbian weddings.”
“Your wedding? Please.” Debbie licked the salt from her fingers. “Anyway, I’ve changed my mind. Some people I know in New York are starting a group called Marriage Equality. This is starting to look like this might become our fight.”
( )
“Did you see this?” Francine shook The Chronicle flat against the kitchen table. “There’s an article in the Business section about your friend Charlie May.”
“Charlie May?” I leaned over Francine’s shoulder. Across the top of the page, the lead headline blared “Investors Go Gaga over IPOs.”
Francine settled a finger on a much smaller headline in the lower right corner and read: “Arachnid Interactive, the Internet business development operation, filed for a $20 million initial public offering Thursday. Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch & Co. are underwriting the IPO, blah blah blah.” She skimmed the rest, a patois of numbers in the millions and billions. “Here.” Francine jabbed at the page and continued: “Company CFO Charlie May said that Arachnid’s numbers are very strong. ‘We spin the web,’ Mr. May told reporters.”
“Wow,” I said, though I realized, suddenly, a simple tenure-track position at Columbia or Yale, affairs with long-legged undergrads
, fame of the provincial, academic sort would never have been enough for Charlie May.
“You know what this means?” Francine looked up.
That protean Charlie May was one of those people who knew how to be in the right place at the right time? That he probably would have been a Survivor? That he’d elevated to an art simply being Charlie May? “What?”
“Your friend Charlie May is a millionaire.”
“No,” I protested. He was lucky, I thought, but not that lucky.
“Yeah.” Francine nodded coolly. “Probably.” We both stared at the paper, trying to conjure the hidden smile under the studied, heavy-lidded gaze of CFO Charlie May.
“Poor guy.” Francine folded the paper with a crisp snap.
“Why?” I asked, surprised. “You just said he’s a gazillionaire.”
Francine shook her head. “Poor schmuck. He always wanted you.”
Poor Francine. I was glad she believed it. I stared at the dots that made up Charlie’s face, then looked back at Francine, there in the flesh beside me, and told myself that all the money in the world could never equal what we had.
Which was a good thing, because we didn’t have the money for the odd-sized envelopes our invitations required, and we were going to have to fold envelopes ourselves. Fortunately, Francine’s best friend June and her girlfriend Trisha were suddenly also getting married. (“This is going to be such fun! Don’t you realize? We can plan everything together!”) These days, whenever June waved her hand, which she was doing quite a lot, her fingers sliced through the air with a blinding flash. That night, we planned to head up to the big family table at Betty and Sol’s, the four of us, and get the envelopes done.
It had rained so much and so long that winter that everything on the edge of the park, instead of drying out to its annual golden stubble, stayed green, trailing vines of jasmine and trumpet vine twining around the stop signs near Sol and Betty’s house. Francine pulled into the driveway, still carpeted with bright moss, Trisha and June in the back seat, the dappled light on their faces.
“It’s so lovely to see you,” June, parent-proper, gushed, while Betty took both of her hands. Trisha, towering next to Sol in front of the French doors, looked out over the green edges of the park like a king acknowledging another man’s kingdom. Trisha turned to Betty. “You must be so proud—your oldest child getting married.”
At that moment, Betty’s smile stretched wider and froze there on her face, and she looked imploringly at Sol, who said, “Well.” Julia, I remembered.
We set ourselves up at the dining-room table, unpacking a thick stack of cream-colored paper, several glue sticks, and three pairs of scissors; a rubber stamp of our pomegranate tree, a pad of adhesive, a bottle of crimson embossing powder, and a hair dryer. June organized each article into its own tidy area, while Trisha sat at the head of the table, her white, waxed legs stretched out. In the kitchen, the discordant strains of the news sounded tinnily down the hall while Sol puttered around, preparing tea.
Francine picked up a creamy sheet of paper—a lightly speckled French vanilla—and turned it over in her hands. Trisha, June and I watched as Francine held the sheet up, the three of us enchanted to a stupor by its shining blankness. We stared at the paper, the glue sticks, the fixative and the powder, as bewildered as if someone had demanded we turn them all into butterflies.
Like a sleeper struggling to wake, I, too, took a sheet from the top of the stack and squared it in front of me on the table. Slowly, Trisha took a sheet, and so did June.
Ten minutes later, we had not produced a single envelope.
Betty passed by, glanced into the dining room and stopped. June, looking up, twisted her diamond ring around her finger. I sat with my elbows stretched across the table, my chin perched against the heels of my hands. Trisha had uncapped a glue stick and sat twisting it all the way up and all the way down, the little torpedo of glue emerging and retracting like a remote-controlled phallus. Francine had let her sheet of paper drop, a frown of concentration creasing her forehead.
Without a word, Betty drew up a chair, pulled a fresh sheet from the stack of thirty-two-pound bond, swiveled it once left, then right, and began to fold. “Let’s see,” she said. In four quick folds, she had produced a neat, square envelope. She took the sample invitation between her fingers and slid it in, response card and all.
“Wow!” June crowed. “Mrs. Jaffe, you’re incredible!”
“Now, if that were true,” Betty answered, “Sol wouldn’t still be in the kitchen, watching television.” (I had never known Betty not to deflect a compliment, and, in that, she wasn’t entirely unlike my own mother, who rarely missed an opportunity to interpret a compliment as an insult.) Betty straightened her shoulders, made a final, sharp crease and fit the sample invitation into a second, perfect envelope.
Trisha and I both reached for sheets of paper. Betty stopped us. “Girls, let’s get organized.” At her direction, June and Betty folded. Trisha glued. At the end of the line, I stamped the far right edge of each envelope with the rubber stamp dipped in fixative, and Francine dusted the sticky spot with crimson embossing powder, and we both watched in amazement as, under the hot blast of the dryer, the blood-red grains melted, swelled and settled into the smooth and shiny red form of our fruiting pomegranate. After ten envelopes, we stopped needing to throw every third envelope away; we were cranking them out.
Suddenly, there were no more envelopes. Francine and I looked up expectantly for the hitch in the line. But there was no hitch. In front of Betty and June, the white mound of paper had melted to nothing. Trisha had recapped her glue stick. At Francine’s right elbow tottered three stacks of perfect envelopes, glossy red pomegranate trees bold on their far left edge like a Chinese imperial seal.
“Betty,” I said, looking up at Francine’s mother, her worry lines creased to softness at the corners, like a page that’s been folded and re-folded many times. “Thank you,” I said, true and simple gratitude flooding my whole heart for the mother of my fiancée, who had come in and, in her own straightforward way, put everything in order.
Betty stood, her magazine in her hand, turning to Sol’s voice in the hall. She walked around the table, put an arm around me and an arm around Francine, drew us close to her tea-smelling cheeks and kissed us each. “I think I’ve done just about all that I can do,” she said, lingering a moment before she left the room. “Now, go home, girls.”
( )
Upstairs, in the red tile bathroom, my foot was peeling, thick, translucent sheets, the whorls and swirls of my print giving way to raw pink flesh underneath. And with the skin, I realized as I pulled the flat white balloons away from my foot pad, went my warts, the thick, painful nubs of them, where they’d pressed for months into my feet. Under the biggest one, in the depression it left, I found a tiny black splinter, small as a bee sting, which I gingerly picked out with the tip of the scissors.
By the eleventh of August, the first three response cards had arrived in the mail. Every day after that, cream-colored cards collected, slowly at first, and then in a windfall; they scattered like apple blossoms after spring rain across our little coffee table, where I hunched, checking off names against our list. By August 20th, we’d received over seventy replies.
“I hate to throw them away,” I confessed, fingering the stack. I thought I could feel the idea of a wedding, and all the blind, lurching steps we had taken toward it taking shape in that compact rectangle, a pure, concrete reality, a moment about to be. I was good with the past. It was the future I could never see clearly.
“Here.” Francine held out the recycle bin.
But, when I came down later, after peeling my foot, I found my beloved, a pair of dagger-sharp shears in her hand, slicing the perfect, crimson pomegranate tree from the crest of a reply card. A blood-red grove of trees spilled across the table. She looked surprised, caught in the headlights. “Our kids will love these things.”
Our kids? The kids at the preschool? Or, our kids? I
raised my eyebrows.
What else could it mean? Never a sentimental person—willing to throw out photographs if she thought the people in them looked bad—Francine wanted to commemorate our wedding; she wanted it to bear fruit; she wanted us to have kids together, and she wanted them to draw the long arc from the future back to the past. I decided not to rib her about the clutter.
And when, three days later, Francine suddenly lost interest in our children, and our wedding, and everything that went with it, I quietly piled the last dozen reply cards in the side-table drawer, saving them for the day when Francine might stock up her small, neat orchard of fruiting pomegranates against a future with which she could, I hoped, once again imagine filling our lives.
When the call came, I was crouching at the coffee table, stuffing a few late invitations—change-of-heart inclusions for my mother’s side of the family. (“They won’t come,” my mother had assured herself, “but your father and I went to the son’s daughter’s bat mitzvah and we gave her a very generous gift.”) Francine clutched the phone, mute, disconnected, in her hand. She moved toward the windows.
“My mom left.”
“Where’d she go?” Two more envelopes, two more sets of stamps, two lines of glue stick.
Francine didn’t answer.
I looked up from the clutter of my impromptu assembly station. Francine stood in front of the patio doors, the color drained from her face.
“What?”
Francine stared out the doors to the garden. Lit by the late afternoon, late summer light, she stood, a shadow, her mouth slightly open, her left hand clasped in a little birdcage over her heart. Finally, her dry lips parted. “My mom walked out on my dad.”