TREYF (11 page)

“That's lovely that you'd like to take her out, Mr. and Mrs. Gerson, but tonight is Shabbos, and Lissie is leading some of the prayers at services. You're welcome to stay and join us—I'll call the dining room and you can sit at the head table with me and my husband, and the Nordans. But Elissa is not allowed to leave the property with anyone but her parents.”

“
Lissie
is leading special prayers at Shabbos services?” Aunt Sylvia said.

“She is,” Ruth said. “Isn't that right, Elissa?”

I nodded; it was news to me.

“Well, that's
quite
all right—” Aunt Sylvia said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “We won't stay—but Lissie, why don't you
open the nice gift that Uncle Lee and I brought for you all the way from New York?”

I set the box down on the broad arm of one of the Adirondack chairs and carefully opened it; I pushed back the white paper lining the box. Inside it was tucked a zip-front, triple-weave housecoat with an enormous pointed collar. It was thick and weighty and festooned with jewel-toned Sumatra lilies and delphiniums and orange ranunculi.

“Take it out,” Aunt Sylvia commanded. “Let's see if it fits.”

I pulled it out of the box and it unfurled like a red carpet; I held it up to my chin and the bottom hem pooled on the floor of the camp office, half a foot beyond my sneakers. It was the sort of formal loungewear that one wore as a guest staying at Aunt Sylvia's home. If they were forty.

“Put it on,
for heaven's sake
!” she said, exasperated.

I unzipped it from neck to knee, and began to step into it.

“Over your head! Come now, Elissa—we don't have all day! We have to get back—”

I stepped out of it, picked it up from the bottom and pulled the housecoat over my dirt-caked, Queens College T-shirt and nylon gym shorts, my red-striped tube socks, and my dusty suede Adidas Gazelles. I had to bend down to zip it up.

“It's simply
beautiful
,” Aunt Sylvia cried, clasping her hands together. “I wish your daddy could see you in it. Give us a hug goodbye.”

I padded over to them, trying not to trip. I gave them a hug goodbye, flowers of sweat starting to bloom under my arms. Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lee thanked Ruth, and off they went, just as
quickly as they had arrived, down the main camp road to the parking lot, into their Lincoln, and home.

Ruth and I stood in silence, side by side at the screen door, and watched them drive away as the waiters began to place scuffed plastic pitchers of bug juice on every dining table in preparation for the arrival of Shabbos, and our Friday night meat meal.

T
he davening begins just as the sun is coming up.

The minute the first light shoots beams through my east-facing window—I can see the mottled, hazy outlines of the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the new Citicorp Tower with its oddly slanted roof in the distance—Moishe Garbfeld clears his throat and chants the morning prayers: the Shacharit, the Shema, the Amidah. I lie in bed, half asleep, half dreaming, in a gray, negative slip of consciousness. Staring at the ceiling, I place my hand on the bedroom wall I share with Shaina Garbfeld. I can feel Moishe's rumbling, weeping drone of devotion as he prays in her bedroom, facing east towards the city, and Jerusalem, while she stirs and the day begins.

Fear of God,
Moishe chants from the ancient Hebrew Psalm,
is the beginning of wisdom
.

•   •   •

M
oishe, Judith, and Shaina Garbfeld keep to themselves. I have spent almost fourteen years in and out of neighbors' apartments, and they ours; the only way I know there is someone living on the other side of my bedroom wall is when I hear Moishe daven every morning for an hour before he leaves for his job in the diamond district. Every day, he prays when the sun comes up; he is still praying when my father returns from walking the dog and heads into the kitchen to make our breakfast, while I dress and my mother showers and puts on her makeup. Strange, unfamiliar odors slither out from under the Garbfelds' front door, permeating our hallway—years later, I will recognize them as olive oil, garlic, lemon, tomato, and toasting cumin that to me smells exactly like sweaty armpits. Judith is making something that I will come to know as Israeli shakshuka: eggs cracked into simmering, cumin-laced tomato sauce and then run under the broiler; they will sop up the silken yolk with warm pita bread. When Moishe reaches the part of his morning prayer where he beseeches God to help save him from the bad influences he may encounter during the day—
May it be your will to protect us
—my father and I are sitting together in our kitchen, eating our cremated rashers of Oscar Mayer bacon and dry scrambled eggs overcooked to the consistency of an asbestos mat. My father passes me the ketchup and I whack the bottom of the bottle, and it bursts all over my plate in a crimson explosion.

On the other side of the wall, I imagine Shaina and Judith
are putting their plates in the sink while Moishe unwraps the worn leather straps of his tefillin down the hall in Shaina's room. He unrolls his sleeve, puts his jacket on and then his hat, walks out of the apartment, and runs into my parents, who are late and heading into the city for work:
Mosaic
, the English-language, secular cultural Jewish magazine my father has launched with my mother's old boyfriend, Thomas, is failing, and my mother has returned to her former life as a fur model after nearly fifteen years of being a housewife.

•   •   •

I
t is 1977 and our closest friends have moved away in droves: Inga and George Hoffmann have rented a larger place in a distant part of Queens. Eddie has transferred to a school in another district and Tor is back in the hospital near his parents' new apartment, trying to kick the heroin that he buys from a married lady in The Marseilles; he shows up at Inga and George's last cocktail party wearing a blue bandana like Jimi Hendrix, to cover up the track marks that dot the vein running down the middle of his forehead like a cord. Candy Feinblatt is attending a special high school for gifted students in Manhattan—she will make it to MIT in three years, when she's seventeen—and Eugene and Marion have moved to a small condo in the city so that Candy can spend her time studying instead of commuting. Buck and Velma have quietly packed up Darleen and the Chihuahuas and left for an unnamed town on the South Shore of Long Island.

“They have to leave,” my father tells me when a moving van shows up one morning and we see their electric fireplace being
hoisted onto the truck; word has spread along The Champs-Élysées Promenade that Buck's deep and loving affection for children, particularly little girls, has become a problem.

My after-school hours are spent locked in my bedroom alone with my twelve-string guitar and the albums that Gaga buys for me at Sam Goody in Manhattan when she makes her thrice-weekly trips into town to visit Norah, her lady friend, who she has secretly loved for more than sixty years. Gaga comes home with Michael Martin Murphey's
Blue Sky–Night Thunder
, and I lie on my bed wearing massive brown Koss headphones, singing
Wildfire
at the top of my lungs until Gaga barges in with a plate of hot matzo meal latkes with apple sauce; I contemplatively fingerpick John Denver's complicated
Rhymes and Reasons
over and over again until my hands ache. My schoolmates are listening to early disco. I'm out of step and out of sync; I'm an outlier and a loner, and with my parents leaving for work before I go to school every morning, I dress myself, which thrills my teasing schoolmates and teachers alike: my friends point and laugh at my fake cowboy shirts with gingham yolks and pearled snaps. My teachers point and whisper at my stiff unwashed Wrangler jeans that I wear with enormous Western-style belt buckles the size of silver platters. I walk home alone from school every day wearing a floppy brown leather hippie hat with a braided lanyard that hangs down my back; one morning, I open the coat closet door to look for it and it's gone, like my father's shearling coat.

“I might have seen it
someplace
,” my mother says when I ask her about it. “But I couldn't possibly say where.”

The next day, after school, she meets me at the front door in her
mink jacket—she's left work early; it's a special occasion—and tells me to leave my coat on; she takes me shopping to her favorite boutique for the clothes she loves to see me wear: transparent voile blouses, tube tops, the Jordache jeans that are so tight that I have to lie down on the dressing room floor just to zip them up.

“You just have to lose some
weight
,” she says, tugging so hard at my zipper that her face reddens. On the way home we stop at the drugstore and she buys two boxes of caramel-flavored Ayds diet candies; she leaves one on top of the stereo in my bedroom, and the other underneath my bottle of vitamins in the kitchen, where I can't possibly miss them.

•   •   •

M
y friends at school are having sex. Marcus Goldberg was recently sent home from eighth grade for showing off a chain of dark purple bruises around his neck, a gift from Lily, a new girl at school, half Chinese, who has moved here from San Francisco. At fourteen, Lisa Epstein has lost her virginity to Stuey Steinman in the guest bathroom during Neil Taub's birthday party; her mother takes her to Manhattan and has her fitted for a diaphragm, which she proudly exhumes from the depths of her green canvas knapsack while on the school bus, gingerly prying open its beige plastic case and passing it around for show-and-tell.

“Don't drop it!” she cries, and we all handle it like a baby bird, examining it under the sunlight streaming in through the bus windows, while Neil's boom box sits on his lap, blasting
Bohemian Rhapsody
.

I pretend to be interested in Lisa's tiny round of rubber, and
in the package of pills that Lily passes around the next day, which she says she takes every morning with her daily chewable vitamin. I achingly lust after something I can't name; I know, instinctively, that it needs to be hidden. There's a slow burn that sometimes happens below my navel, like the striking of a match, when I see Karen, the seventeen-year-old lifeguard from the pool attached to The Marseilles; she's so quiet, so soft-spoken that I have to strain to hear her say hello. She wears a woven turquoise surfer bracelet, flat leather sandals, no makeup, and her thick brown hair pulled back in a loose ponytail held in place by a fat red scrunchie, which she pulls off and puts back on all summer, whenever she's nervous. The September night before the pool closes for the season, I offer to help her stack the lounges and do one last skim; we listen to America sing
Don't cross the river if you can't swim the tide
while we work, and when we're done, she orders a pizza from across the street and pays for it with a wad of cash pulled from her jeans pocket. In the dusk, we sit together cross-legged near the cement edge of the pool, and eat in silence, hot orange pizza grease dripping down the front of our slices onto the aquamarine concrete. Karen lives on the other side of Queens Boulevard and goes to school in a different district.

“Too bad,” she says quietly, folding a big triangular slice in half, New York–style. We say goodbye and she gives me a warm hug; she doesn't let go first. I think about her all year; I don't even know her last name. Six months later, in the middle of winter, I'm waiting in the bitter cold to cross Yellowstone Boulevard around the corner from the Tung Shing House. For some reason, I'll never know why, I look up as the Q60 city bus drives by, and
there is Karen, sitting in an inside seat, resting her head against the window. She turns towards the street, puts her palm on the glass, and smiles. I pull off my ski glove and hold my hand up and smile back, as if sending code, and the bus careens by.

During Aunt Sylvia's formal sit-down Thanksgiving dinner for twelve that year, my father pulls me and my cousin Sarah into my uncle's darkened, book-lined den. Older than me by twelve years, Sarah will spend every one of Aunt Sylvia's holidays with me huddled in a corner, from the time I am a young child: she will read to me and talk to me for hours, while the party swirls around us. She is kindness.

“Tell her what colleges you want to visit next year,” he says at me.

I sit down on the love seat in the long green crushed-velvet skirt and the high-necked, puffed-sleeve, ruffle-front blouse he has bought for me at Macy's; all that's missing is a bustle.

“Well,” I say, “Mount Holyoke, Smith, Wellesley, Wheaton, Goucher.”

“That's great,” Sarah says. “How nice! Wonderful women's colleges, all of them.”

“My grades aren't very good,” I say, “so it's just stupid.” I study the basket-weave pattern on the carpet.

“You won't know until you try, though,” she says. “Right?”

We both smile and look over at my father, whose face is reddening; he pulls on his tie.

“We have determined,” my father announces formally, as though I'm not there, as though I have vaporized in front of them, “that Elissa is heterosexual.”

A wave of nausea creeps up my legs; my knees feel unsure.

“How, exactly, did you determine
that
?” Sarah says.

He is tongue-tied and can't answer. He abandons the conversation, defeated, and laughs nervously. He leaves us alone in the den together.

“Let's get some air,” Sarah says, standing up. “Dinner won't be done for a while.”

We put on coats and hats and she deposits her year-old daughter in a stroller and we leave the house. We walk my aunt's tidy suburban neighborhood in silence, street after street, up hills and around corners, down the block to the highway entrance, past rambling 1960s ranch houses and massive landscaped colonials with streams of cars parked in their driveways. We walk back in stillness, even her small baby has fallen asleep, and we open the basement door, which leads to my uncle's office; we slip inside and remove our hats and coats, and skulk back up the stairs into the living room, past the walnut butler's table and its resident silver tea set, the family photos from Woodstock on every shelf in every room, and the Greek Key silver on the dining room table set for twelve, and no one has even noticed we were gone.

In Forest Hills, Lisa Epstein is losing her virginity and passing around her birth control on the school bus for all of us to gawk at, and Suzi Quatro has replaced Olivia Newton-John on my childhood turntable, and the leather-clad bassist stares back at me from the cover of
Your Mamma Won't Like Me
, which I keep buried in my closet, behind my guitar case. All winter long, I write to my coltish English counselors from Camp Towanda, sending them flimsy aerogram letters to places called Hertfordshire and Devon,
truly believing in the recesses of my sloppy teenage brain that they will remember me. I am certain that this is my secret, this separateness, this difference that I feel grinding at my core, as real and mine as a fingerprint, forbidden as failure.

“Don't go near the gym teacher,” my father says to me after a parent-teacher conference at my school. “I don't like the looks of her—” he adds, pulling his snuff tin from his pocket. “You know what they say.”

My face is pocked with the weeping ravages of teenage hormones; I spend hours sitting in a chair at Garren at The Plaza, the most expensive salon in Manhattan, where my dark blond hair is chemically, violently straightened on demand by my mother—my scalp is burned and singed and I bite my lip to keep from weeping—when all the girls show up at school with silky tresses blown out like Farrah Fawcett. Two weeks later, after repeated shampoos and swims in the heavily chlorinated Forest Hills Jewish Center pool, my entire head inflates to a wide triangle of frizz under the stress of humidity and chemicals. She drags me off to a dermatologist who spends a full hour jabbing my swollen, aching face with hypodermic needles packed with acne medication; when I fight her on it—it's not working and it hurts so badly that tears run down the sides of my face into my ears during every procedure—she bursts into the examination room, all bluster and shouting, held back by two nurses who have grabbed hold of her arms as if she's in a barroom fight, to make sure that I'm not giving them
any trouble
. She stocks the medicine cabinet in the bathroom I use with makeup—mascara and eyeliner and lip gloss in a color called Perty Flirty—as a hint.