Close Relations (13 page)

“Nope.” I was operating on a piece of corned beef, trying to separate the lean from the fat. We were having lunch in an overpriced, non-kosher delicatessen in Brooklyn Heights where they were willing to comply with Jerry’s disgusting request for a roast beef sandwich with butter and lettuce.

“But you’re lovable. I mean, when you’re not being a pain in the ass, you’re fun and pretty and smart.” But clearly not lovable enough to get him to tell me he actually loved me.

“But she didn’t think so. If it had been socially acceptable, she would have exposed me on a mountaintop.”

“That can’t be true,” he remarked and took a bite of his sandwich.

“That is the most disgusting goyishe thing I’ve ever seen you eat. I’ll bet you’ll want to follow it up with a Twinkie.”

“What’s a Twinkie?”

“Oh, it’s this kind of sickeningly sweet cake with …” He was smiling broadly. “You son of a bitch, you know what a Twinkie is.”

“Damned straight.”

I almost joined him in a smile, but instead I said, “My mother was very cold.”

“Tell me.”

“When she would help me with a zipper, she would hold that little tab of the zipper very carefully, between her thumb and index finger, so her hand wouldn’t touch my back or my hair or anything.”

My mother did not like touching of any sort. When receiving change from a shopkeeper, she never extended her hand but waited until he put the coins on the counter.

She kissed me, with less fervor than an actress kisses a talk-show host, twice after my father died: the day I graduated college and on my wedding day. Actually, she kissed me twice on my wedding day, but the second time she was ordered to by the photographer.

“But look,” Jerry began. He spoke slowly, the way he often did in strategy sessions, so he could think fast. “Isn’t it possible that she wasn’t—what would you call it?—a demonstrative person?” He blinked, waiting for my answer. Because his lashes were so thick and dark, his mere lowering of them seemed the initiation of a sexual act. I swallowed. “Well?”

“You know, Jerry, you’re such a politician. Everything has to be explained away, so there’s always the appearance of fairness. The whole world has to be happy.”

“You’re so fair with everybody else and so tough on your family. Christ, why won’t you give them the benefit of the doubt?”

“Why should I?”

“Come on. Your mother obviously cared about you.”

“All right. Do you want to hear the good or the bad news first?”

Grinning, he said, “The good news. Come on. Let’s see if you can say one positive sentence about her without gagging.”

“The good news is,” I announced softly, “she told me to watch out for speeding trucks.”

“Marcia, you are an unbelievable shit.”

It’s an inherited characteristic. But perhaps I am being unfair. In certain contexts, she cared about me deeply. Those contexts were always potentially public.

“When you’re having soup,” she explained, just after reading a biography of Jenny Jerome Churchill, “you must sip silently, like this.” She would demonstrate, using her fish stew in lieu of the cream of truffle soup I would one day be having. “It’s one of those small details that speaks volumes about a person’s breeding.”

Or, “You can never go wrong with basic black and pearls.” She said that the day I came home carrying a rather bright pink blouse. Since I had to split my babysitting earnings with her, it had taken me four months to save up for it. “It may be unfair,” she continued, “but people do judge you by your clothes.”

“Everybody is wearing blouses like this.” Some had it in lime green and purple, too.

“Not ‘everybody,’ Marcia. Many people prefer simple, classic clothes that you can wear year in and year out.”

My mother’s standards of deportment and taste came from her reading and were modified by her sister’s pronouncements. But they were so grandiose, so unyielding, that in my mother’s judgment, half of any graduating class of Miss Porter’s would be deemed schlumps. She and my Aunt Estelle could discourse on the correct placement of fish forks, how to publicly blow your nose, what to say to a bride on a receiving line (“I’m so pleased for you”).

Oddly, I never even had the opportunity to say “I’m so pleased for you” until my cousin Barbara got married, because most people in our family were too hungry after a long ceremony to wait around to shake hands and shoved their way straight to the smorgasbord. But Aunt Estelle insisted on a receiving line. “I’m paying for the finest room at the St. Regis, and for once, people in this family are going to behave like mensches.” When my turn came to tell her of my pleasure, Barbara flashed one of her zippy love smiles and grabbed and hugged me. I think I mumbled “Congratulations” into her veil.

I always wondered where my mother and my aunt first got it, their fanatic snobbism, their fascination with the mores and the manners of the aristocracy. Their own mother had ironed pleats into skirts in a sweatshop until she was married at seventeen by a terribly unchic-looking Orthodox rabbi. Their father, Herschl Shochet, a house painter, had rainbow-speckled hair and, I remember vaguely, used to spit into the street quite a bit.

Yet they knew all about Gracious Living. My Aunt Estelle could give an account of Brenda Frazier’s debut as though she had been cavorting at the table next to Madcap Brenda’s. My mother’s most cherished tidbit was about one of those dear Baronesses de Rothschild, although she never wasted it on me alone. Only Aunt Estelle could bring it out.

“Hilda, tell Barbara and Marcia how the Baroness de Rothschild coordinates her dinner parties.”

“Jesus,” I breathed.

“Marcia,” my aunt said patiently, “right now you’re a newlywed and Barry is in medical school, but once he graduates you’re going to be called upon to function as his hostess. You’re not going to keep on working forever.” She gave me her most genteel smile. “Go ahead, Hilda,” she ordered.

“Well,” my mother would begin, glancing around Estelle’s beige living room as if checking that none of the Baroness’s social competitors were hiding behind the brocade drapes, listening to this gem, “she keeps a system of filing cards. Each time someone comes for dinner, she writes down the date and what she served.”

“So that next time,” Estelle carried on, “she won’t repeat the same menu!”

God forbid that should happen. Barbara, recently engaged to Philip, leaned back on her mother’s beige sectional sofa, picking at a thread on a white silk pillow and nodding. She seemed fascinated. Sitting next to her, I heard the low-pitched choking noise meant for me, as though Barbara were about to heave. “How clever,” she told them.

“And there’s more, Barbara,” her mother said, leaning forward.

My mother leaned forward too. “She writes down the name of the china pattern she’s using, and the sterling too. She has more than a hundred sets of dishes!”

Later, Barbara and I sat in her bedroom, dangling our feet over the edge of her narrow bed onto her white shag rug. “And what do you serve the viscomte when he comes to dine?” she asked.

“Pork.”

“But of course.”

Yet right beside this idiot infatuation with the elite, the two sisters had a different set of values which admitted a little more reality. Under this system, Roz Weinberg, wife of Lou the Podiatrist, had compensated for her husband’s lack of an M.D. degree by wearing Kimberly knits and having an apartment in Palm Beach, as opposed to Miami Beach. Norma Klein, who had grown up with my mother and aunt, had married well—her husband was a lawyer for what Estelle called “corporate interests”—but her house!

“Hilda, let me tell you,” said Estelle. “Unbelievable.” Estelle had been invited to a reunion. My mother had not. “Custom-made plastic seat covers. I mean, if she’s not going to take them off for us, who is she going to take them off for?”

“I didn’t think she was that lower class,” my mother observed.

“That’s nothing. You know what her color scheme was? Purple.”

“No.”

“Purple. I mean it. All right, I’ll be fair. She mixed it with a little lavender.” And they both shook their heads, filled with awe and pity for the tragedy of Norma Klein. “And you should see her. Hilda, you wouldn’t believe the change. Remember that sweet, lovely Norma? So understated? Well, she wore bright orange lipstick and iridescent green eyeshadow. I mean, she looked like a kurveh.” Kurveh is Yiddish for whore.

The two sisters dropped bits of Yiddish all around them, apparently never considering that it littered their refined landscape, that Brenda Frazier would call last year’s dress “that old thing” rather than a shmateh. The mother tongue was as much a part of them as their receding chins.

But that was the extent of my ethnic heritage, unless prejudices were counted. In that case, I scored quite high, having learned early (Jews being both precocious and brilliant) that: (1) If anything is missing, its disappearance can be blamed on a black maid or the most recent black to pass through the neighborhood, (2) Irish men are alcoholics and Irish women have thick ankles and somehow, despite their lack of discernible sexuality, they have large families, (3) Italians comprehend the importance of a meal and are almost as good parents as Jews, except they smack their kids and don’t worry about higher education, (4) Poles are stupid and anti-Semitic, (5) Puerto Ricans carry knives, and (6)
WASPS
feed their children TV dinners and won’t let Jews work in their banks.

“What did they used to say about Jews in the Bronx?” I asked Jerry. “Come on, tell me.”

“Nothing much.”

“Really, you can tell me.”

“They used to say, ‘Give a Jew a quarter and he’ll make a dollar.’ Stuff like that. About Jews being pushy and greedy and loud.”

“Did they really?” He nodded, looking quite cheerful. “Come on, what else?” I urged.

“That’s it.”

“That can’t be it.”

“That’s it, Marcia. What do you think we did, hung around the corner talking about Jews all day?”

“No, but I’ll bet they just didn’t say that Jews were pushy and leave it at that. It must have been a lot nastier.”

“And what did you say about us?”

“Just about the drinking and stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“You know. Smacking your wives around and having those tenor voices because you don’t have enough sex hormones. But it’s just an attitude. No one really discussed it or even thought much about it.”

“Why is it, when anyone makes a derogatory comment about Jews, that you interpret it as meaning they want to drag you off to Auschwitz, but when you talk like that about other people, you call it just an attitude? How come?”

I responded, “Because there was an Auschwitz.”

“But there’s not one now—and don’t give me that crap about how it could happen here, when you people have done better here than any other goddamn group and you know it.”

“See? You just lump us all together and call us ‘you people.’”

“And you? For your information, Marcia, my father never got drunk, and for your further information, he never laid a hand on my mother—”

“Who’d want to lay a hand on a saint?”

“Eat shit.”

“It’s not kosher.
You
eat shit.”

But aside from the little exercises in ethnic awareness that Jerry and I had, I was generally of little use as a Jew.

My old boss Dave Flaherty asked, “Jesus, kid, why did you try and shake hands with Mrs. Wolk?” We were emerging from a small brick house in Kew Gardens, part of Flaherty’s district, where I had accompanied him on a condolence call.

“What was wrong—”

“When you pay a shiva call at an Orthodox house,” Flaherty explained, “it’s a custom not to shake hands with the mourners, so they don’t communicate their sorrow.”

I grew up knowing that some Jews lit candles every Friday night and mumbled something after they did this, but I had no idea of what the substance of the mumbling was, for I knew no prayers—in Hebrew, at least. A friend in third grade had taught me the Paternoster, but I sensed somehow that it was best left unsaid. Better no prayers.

“What are you wearing?” my mother demanded.

“What?”

“Slacks. You’re wearing slacks.”

“So?”

“So, it’s Yom Kippur and you don’t go outside wearing slacks. If you’re going out, wear a skirt.” I should have known it was a holiday because there was no school and because the small radio in the kitchen had just emitted a wish for its Jewish friends to have a peaceful and healthy New Year. “This is the most important holiday of the year. A very serious one,” my mother added. And skirts are far more serious than slacks. The radio began playing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” by George Gershwin, one of its dearest Jewish friends. “You say pajamas and I say pajamas …” I knew nothing about Jewish liturgy and law until I took a college course in comparative religion.

“We have to be married by a rabbi,” Barry said. We were lying together in his dorm room at Columbia. It was May, so we weren’t cold, even though we were naked.

“Why? Why go all through that? You know you’re an agnostic.”

“But that’s an intellectual position, Marcia. Look, it’s a nice tradition and it’ll make our families happy.” Furnald Hall had been built in the days of gentlemen. Its walls were thin. Down the hall, another couple was coming; she made long, high
aaaah
sounds and he staccato grunts. “Come on,” Barry whispered and moved down the bed so his mouth would be nearer to my breast. “Come on.” So we began again. He took my nipple between his teeth and slowly began to bite it, harder and harder.

“Okay, Barry,” I agreed. “Okay. Whatever you want.”

B
arry was smarter than I was. When we met, in our senior year at Forest Hills High School, he was already initiated into mysteries that would forever remain obscure to me. For the entire first marking period of Mr. Pforzheimer’s honors English class, I was so intimidated by Barry’s brilliance that I was afraid to speak in class. And I developed such a crush on Barry that I was afraid to speak to him after class.

I had no idea what to say to a boy who dropped terms like “objective correlative.” I wondered if someone who could make offhand references to John Ruskin would want to go to a prom.