Coming Ashore

by Catherine Gildiner

  While Alina and I watched him eat, she said, “Mom said that you were probably starving.” Then she commented on how much bigger his care package was compared to hers. When Michael left the room, Alina said that Michael was the cherished eldest son who could do no wrong. I looked at her in amazement. How did they treat their least favourite?

  Alina noticed my pile of Jewish literature on the coffee table and said that she could see that I was struggling to understand what it was to be a “shiksa in a foreign land.” She offered, with her teenage optimism, to explain the whole thing to me in about two minutes. She spoke in short, precise phrases as though she were quoting sociological data. “Jews who came to America before the war have no idea what Jews suffered during the war. They are ­totally different people. They didn’t have gentile neighbours turn on them. They didn’t lose all of their relatives and friends. The ones who lived feel guilty for being alive when their relatives died. In order to keep the Jewish race from becoming extinct, Jews have to marry Jews. If they assimilate by marrying goyim, then eventually the Jewish people will only be a quaint sect who were wiped out during the war. Hitler will have won.”

  “Is this your view? Is it your parents’?” I asked.

  “During the war, my parents fled Poland hidden in trains to Russia. There wasn’t a scrap of food, and they lost a child to starvation in Leningrad. That does something to you. Then they moved back to Poland after the war where my father was a party official. Ultimately they settled in Israel and lived on a kibbutz, but they were six million short. I am not saying that I agree with my parents’ position. I’m just giving you the drill.” Before I could say anything, she was off down the hall to borrow our typewriter to fill out a summer job application.

  Alina had returned with the typewriter and was busy pecking away when Yael said, “Actually Alina didn’t tell you the bottom line about so-called goyim; she skipped the most important part.” I looked at her with rapt attention. Finally I was getting the key. One thing I’d learned about Yael, she was a teenager with no censor. “Jews think goys are stupid, drink too much and that shiksas give blowjobs. They don’t know that everyone gives blowjobs. Guess what? Guys like it.” She began giggling that uncontrollable high-pitched cackle that can only come out of teenage girls, particularly when they are talking about sex. After Yael’s treatise on “cultural differences,” I was shocked into silence: Alina looked askance at her, which suggested to me that she might have thought Yael had contributed a tad too many tribal secrets to the Global Village.

  Well, at least I didn’t drink.

  CHAPTER 24

  passover

  Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

  — William Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

  Shortly after the “different people have different customs ” disastrous meeting at Michael’s parents’, Michael’s aunt called one day and said, “Hello, I’m Aunt Clara.” She paused as though I was supposed to know her. I asked if she was calling for Michael and she told me she was inviting him to Passover. I assumed I was being passed over. Just as I was hanging up, she said, “I’m ­Michael’s father’s sister. I came from Poland when I was fifteen years old. I brought my brother, his family and our parents over when Mike was a teenager and they lived with us until they learned the language and were on their feet.” After a lull in the conversation, she added, “I’m surprised he never mentioned me.”

  “That doesn’t mean much. I haven’t had a lot of contact with his family but I’m sure you’re in his thoughts.”

  “What a lovely thing to say. In his thoughts — I like that.” Then there was a silence and she said with a soft accent, “Would you like to come to Passover dinner as well?”

  I’d had enough rejection so I said, “Only if I would be welcome.”

  “I wouldn’t have asked otherwise. I don’t ask someone and then put my nose in the air.”

  There was something I liked about Aunt Clara right away.

  >> <<

  Michael, his sister and I arrived on a freezing evening in April for Passover at Aunt Clara’s. As I walked up the gigantic driveway that had been professionally ploughed, I saw one of those sprawling split-level homes that defined the ’60s. There was a double front door with matching knockers shaped like lions with their tongues out. When I tried to lift the tongue to knock on the lower jaw, I realized it didn’t move. Alina was onto this and she found the lighted doorbell connected to an intercom. Suddenly we heard the echoing chimes of Beethoven’s Fifth. A male voice blasted out of the intercom: “I’m coming, I’m coming! Where’s the fire?” The voice was attached to a handsome, jovial man who answered the door. “Gut Yontiff.”

  Assuming he was inquiring about the hazardous driving, I ­assured him I was used to snow. He shook my hand, saying, “I’m Uncle Jack.” Strange that the house was called Aunt Clara’s when she had a husband of thirty years called Uncle Jack. I’d assumed she was a widow. He was nattily dressed in a pinstriped suit, complete with a tailor-made shirt, tiepin and cufflinks. When someone said he looked good, he opened his arms expansively, shrugged and said, “Why shouldn’t I look good? I’m in the schmatte business. Otherwise I’d be a bad advertisement.”

  Aunt Clara yelled out from the kitchen, “Jack, off with the boots!” in the same tone that the queen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland said, “Off with their heads!” Jack handed us each a pair of paper slippers that were exactly like hospital slippers. I had never taken my shoes off at anyone’s house before. While we were all attempting to stay on the tiny mat as we removed our footwear, Uncle Jack pulled Michael aside and began telling him a joke — something about two gynecologists in Miami. Michael was laughing hysterically, which surprised me, as I had never heard him say an off-colour word. Clara, yet to be seen, yelled again from the kitchen, “I can hear you, Jack! Enough with the jokes.”

  I held my breath in embarrassment, wondering how Jack would handle being reprimanded in public by an angry wife. I couldn’t imagine my mother ever raising her voice to my father or vice versa, let alone in front of guests. I assumed he would be either profoundly furious or humiliated. However, he didn’t seem to be either. He just laughed and said, “Uh-oh, I thought she had the tap on.” Then he whispered, “I’ll tell you another one later — heard the one about the tailor from Minsk?”

  Then Uncle Jack looked over at me, and Michael said, “This is my friend Cathy.”

  Jack smiled, shook my hand and said his first word directly to me: “Converting?”

  Shocked, I just stood there. Clara whipped into action. She whirled out of the kitchen with a knife in her apron pocket. She had dyed red hair, a shade I later learned was called Hungarian bar mitzvah red, and wore Marilyn Monroe–red lipstick. Already a grandmother, Clara was still a beautiful woman with the same warm smile of her brother, Michael’s father. “Jack, mind your own business.” She put her arms around me, hugged me and said, “You better be hungry. Jack, take the kids downstairs and get them a drink.”

  Jack looked at me and said to Aunt Clara, “Look at that blond hair on Mike’s girlfriend. She’s going to put Izzy out of business.” (Uncle Izzy owned a company that sold lines of hair dye wholesale to beauty shops.)

  The home was an ode to square footage with a Tara-goes-to-Toronto foyer complete with marble floors, winding stairway and flocked wallpaper. It was one of those split-level deals where you were always walking up three steps or down four. Paper slippers crinkling, we shuffled like wardmates down to the recreation room and stood behind a black leatherette bar. Jack lined up our options on top of the bar. I had never seen no-name pop before and I had been in the business for years in the drugstore. The bottles were all the same strange size with pot-bellied middles and labelled The Pop Shoppe. There was even pretend Coke called Cott Cola. Michael had a no-name vodka. It was strange living in a huge home and having no-name pop and alcohol. I thought they only drank these poor substitut
es in third-world countries.

  When we walked to the living room, we had to shuffle on narrow plastic runners that were laid on top of the white shag carpet. We had to make sharp turns to stay on the runners when entering another room and, since the slippers were too large and had no grip, we had to drag our feet. This combination of sliding and making sharp sudden turns made us look like a parade of Frankensteins. When I saw our robotic gait in the gilded mirror on the wall, I started laughing. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Uncle Jack said to Michael, “You’ve got a real live wire there, Mike. I haven’t even told her a joke yet.”

  We arrived in a living room that was so huge that it had twin seating arrangements at either end. There were white brocade French provincial couches with matching chairs and curtains in the same fabric as the couches, with huge tassels holding them open. Everything was cocooned in plastic. The chandelier lit up the room like an operating theatre and light glared off the plastic — even the lampshades — and light from the chandelier glared off all the shiny surfaces. When I sat down on the couch, I nearly slid to the floor. I had never seen plastic covering on furniture before, and I had no idea if this was a regular occurrence. My research told me that while sitting shiva, all mirrors were covered with black cloth. Maybe during Passover all furniture was covered in plastic? Even the pictures, dot-to-dot needlepoint of ­biblical figures from the Old Testament, were covered in plastic. I whispered to Alina, “When does the plastic come off?”

  “Never.”

  No one else was there yet except for one couple sitting in the corner of this cavernous room. The man was reading The Canadian Jewish News and the woman was sitting primly, clutching her purse on her lap. They were clearly the relatives who dressed in an old-world style, while the others wore the latest in fashion. The room was so large I didn’t recognize them at first. As I walked toward them, I realized they were Michael’s parents. I smiled at them and Michael’s father returned the huge Michael-smile I’d come to love and the mother nodded almost subliminally while uttering the forlorn greeting, “Next year let’s hope for better things.” What had gone wrong with this year?

  Wanting to avoid that subject, I detoured into the dining room. Every square inch of the table was covered with food piled high on platters. Several tables had been joined together, and the seating stretched out into the hallway. There must have been seating for thirty to forty people. Oddly we were the only ones there. I asked Uncle Jack, “Where is everybody? Is this the right night?”

  “They’re on Jewish time,” Uncle Jack announced, as though it were Daylight Saving Time or a newfound Greenwich Mean Time. Finally a half an hour later, the doorbell rang and Uncle Jack said, laughing, “Ah they’re early,” and trotted upstairs, leaving Michael with his nuclear family.

  Michael’s father grasped his son, throwing his arms around him. “I’m so glad to see you, synu,” he said, hugging him as though they were two men who had found one another after the siege of Leningrad.

  Michael’s mother, who had remained on the plush chair, squinted my way and asked, “Who is that?” She took her husband’s glasses off his face to further assess me. When she put those huge glasses on her delicate face, she looked like a giant grasshopper.

  “It’s Cathy, obviously,” Alina said.

  Michael’s mother didn’t say anything when I came into focus but looked as though she’d seen a dybbuk and Satan rolled into one blond goy.

  “Mom,” Alina said, “why don’t you get your own glasses instead of using Dad’s?”

  She shook her head. “What? I need glasses? Believe me, I see too much already.”

  Alina let out a long breath as though there was no point in saying any more about the glasses. Then she leaned over, placing both hands on the arms of her mother’s chair, and looked straight into her eyes. Just like Michael, Alina had a vein in her forehead that pulsated when she got angry. She hissed in her mother’s face, “Do not utter one word about finding a man for me.” She leaned forward and spat, “Un-der-stand?”

  I was shocked that a daughter would speak to her mother with such ire. Michael’s father, who had returned to reading his paper, didn’t look up, even as the mother grabbed her chest and said as though wounded, “Listen to how your daughter speaks to her mother. What? I need to ask relatives for a man for my daughter?”

  Michael, sitting in a chair across from his parents, ­interrupted her and said in a tone I had never heard from him before, “Enough already … Just don’t do it.” Everyone was silent. His voice dropped an angry octave and I was as shocked by his tone as I was by Linda Blair’s voice change in The Exorcist. His ire terrified me — my parents had never expressed a harsh word to me or to each other. If I had spoken to my mother that way, she would have been crushed and gone home immediately, and my father would have been furious with me or anyone who dared to speak rudely to her.

  Michael’s father said to his wife over the newspaper, “Do you hear Mike?”

  His mother theatrically grabbed my hand with both of hers, saying in a stage whisper, “You want someday to marry a man who speaks to his mother in such a way? You’ll be next, believe me.”

  I kept looking over at Michael for clues — anything that would give me a context for this behaviour. He never acknowledged one thing his mother said, but, to my amazement, she continued ­undaunted. The doorbell rang, thank God, and within a few minutes an agitated older European man entered, wearing a large black coat and old-fashioned boots with metal buckles that crawled up them like ladders. He was panting from either exertion or anxiety. “I can’t find my wife,” he said, gesticulating wildly. “She was supposed to pick me up at the bus stop on my way home from work. She never showed. A wife of forty years and she’s missing. With my luck, she had an accident.”

  Uncle Jack patted him on the back and said, “Come in, Leo. With your luck, you’ll find her.”

  Uncle Leo tried to tell everyone who would listen how worried he was, but no one even answered him, except for Aunt Clara, who came out the kitchen, yelling at Uncle Jack, “You had one job, one job — get the boots!” Then she turned to Leo, saying, “You have to drag in salt to ruin my floors? What kind of schlepper stomps in wearing dripping boots? Both of you mop this up with paper towels.”

  Eventually, other families with scads of children dressed up in little suits and party dresses arrived and everyone kissed and hugged everyone else. I don’t mean little kisses; I am talking about bear hugs with screamed greetings. It looked like those extended families at the airport, except these people had all seen each other the night before because this was the second night of Passover. No one kissed in my house unless it was to kiss someone goodbye ­after extreme unction — the ultimate kiss off. Uncle Jack ­introduced me as “the perfect sample size” to his sons-in-law who shared the schmatte business with him.

  Finally Uncle Max arrived. He was the uncle who Clara said thought he was a “big macher”: “He thinks he made it rich with his stretch limo company.” Everyone said he was crazy twenty years ago, but he knew that people wanted stretch limos for proms and birthday parties. Clara pulled back the curtain an inch and peered out the front window. When he got out of the limo, she bellowed, “To your seats and pretend we’re saying the prayers and eating.” Everyone ran to their chairs and crumpled matzo on their plates. She said, “Why should Mr. Big Shot think we waited for him? Close the curtains. He wants to make a grand entrance. Of course he has a limo — it’s his business.”

  He came in and said, “You couldn’t wait?”

  Aunt Clara said, “What, you’re the rabbi?”

  Uncle Jack said in a conciliatory tone, “Who’s eaten? Who’s eaten?” and Uncle Max condescended to stay after pointing out that he had helped everyone in the room get a job. “When you’re hungry — how soon you forget.”

  “Who is that?” he asked, pointing to me as though I were a wolf in a chicken coop.

  �
��That is Cathy. You didn’t get her a job so she ate,” Aunt Clara said, laughing. She covered my hand and whispered into my ear, “So prust. In-law by marriage. What can you do?”

  To him she said, “Have some maror on matzo, Mr. Big Macher.”

  We’d arrived at the religious portion of the festivities. I felt more comfortable with this because at least I knew how to be devout and religious. I’d spent my whole childhood in Catholic school and I also knew the Old Testament. The Haggadahs, paperback prayer books, were passed out and to my shock, the swarms of kids said to each other, “Read fast, skip lines. Zeida Jack won’t notice. Just keep up the rhythm.”

  One teenager said, “Zeida Jack, it’s the Stanley Cup playoffs. God heard all these prayers for hundreds of years already.” Other males at the table made loud affirmative noises.

  Jack implored, “People, people, it’s once a year.” Aunt Clara called Uncle Jack “Sholem Aleichem” and told him to hurry it up. There was an uncle next to me named Ira who lowered his head toward his book and was praying. As he moved his head up and down to his book, I admired how he could daven in all of this chaos.

  Aunt Clara tore over to his chair and said to this devotee, “Every year we tell you,” and she grabbed the book. When she opened it, there, in the hollowed out centre, in this pre-Walkman era, lay a transistor radio no bigger than a playing card and the Stanley Cup played on.

  Uncle Jack said, “Okay, okay let’s have Uncle Isaac do the bracha.” Uncle Isaac was blind and had been since the war. I never asked what happened to him. He had a white cane but was mostly led around by his rotund wife. Her feet were folded into her tiny high heels and large chunks of flesh gushed over the sides of her pumps as she lumbered to her chair. (She was the only one who didn’t have to wear paper slippers for, as people said, “She has her own burdens.”) She sat her blind husband down and hit his hand when he reached for the kosher wine that tasted as though it could put a diabetic into insulin shock.