Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (27 page)

I sat down on the floor beneath the phone and tried to get my mind around what he was telling me. “Well, why—I mean, if she didn’t want to see you, then why did she have you come all the way down here?”

Henry snorted bitterly. “Here’s the real kicker. The really beautiful part. She said she, quote, ‘respected me too much’ to break up with me over the phone. She said she wanted to wait and do it in person.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Apparently not,” Henry said caustically. “She respects me enough to want to look me in the eye when she kicks me in the teeth. So,” he exhaled trying to sound chipper, “how are you doing? Get any action yet?”

“I’ve barely seen Jeremy. Last night I was too tired, and now he’s got a chem test.”

“Then I’m guessing you’re not quite ready to leave yet,” Henry said miserably.

I knew that as his friend, I should tell him it didn’t matter—that we should just go. But horniness didn’t tend to bring out any of my better qualities.

“Look,” Henry said after a moment. “I have one more night before they kick me out of the lounge. But frankly, I don’t think I can take it here much longer.”

As soon as Jeremy returned from class that morning, I eased his knapsack off his shoulder and told him we had to work quickly. “You won’t believe it,” I said, pulling him against me playfully and unzipping his jacket. “But Henry’s girlfriend just broke up with him.”

“Really,” Jeremy said, staying my hand. He sounded genuinely interested.

“Yeah, she locked him out of her room as soon as he got there,” I giggled, nuzzling his neck. “She said she wanted to break up with him in person. Can you believe that?” I reached for Jeremy’s fly, but he grabbed my hand again. A strange look passed over his face then, like the shadow of a cloud sliding across a field.

“What?” I said.

Carefully, Jeremy disengaged himself, then paced a few steps and sank down on his couch. He sighed and fixed his gaze on the floorboards.

“Look, I thought maybe once you came down here, once I actually saw you in person, maybe I’d feel differently,” he said uneasily.

“But the fact is,” he continued, “I simply respect you too much to do this over the phone.”

Twenty minutes later, Henry pulled up to the house in the silver Toyota while I stood on the porch trembling. Out of some perverse sense of gallantry, Jeremy insisted on escorting me to the car and holding the door for me as I settled in. “You’re a great girl, Susie,” he said gently, setting my bag on the back seat and kissing me perfunctorily on the cheek. “Try not to take this too hard.” Then he actually went around to the driver’s side and shook hands with Henry as if they’d just completed a business transaction. I felt like a mental patient, like a rejected game show contestant, like some public official who’d just been indicted and was being led away in handcuffs before a crowd of onlookers.

“Well goddamn it,” Henry said, as soon as Jeremy was back inside. “I can’t believe we drove twelve hundred miles to get dumped. Hell, we could’ve just stayed at school for
that.
”

I tried to smile, but at that stage in my life, the only default mode I had was crying. I should have ordered Henry to drive the Supra straight through the front porch of Jeremy’s fraternity house, but instead I sat there, drenched in shock, weeping from the campus all the way to the waffle house downtown where Henry stopped to have us fuel up for the long drive back. I couldn’t eat. I just sat in the booth with the fork limp in my hand, shielding my eyes from Henry while tears and mucus ran down my nose in highly attractive spindles.

“He said he wasn’t into me anymore,” I choked. “He said I was ‘overly sexual.’ Those were his words. But he’s only the second person—” I threw down my fork and sobbed baldly. Henry got the check and hustled me out.

I cried from North Carolina to Virginia, and from there all the way to D.C. In my head, I began hearing not only Jeremy, sitting on his couch, thoughtfully outlining for me a concise list of my shortcomings, but everyone else in my life who’d ever rejected me. I heard the boy back at college who wanted un-serious breasts. I recalled the guy at Stuyvesant who said “Making out with you is one thing,
going
out with you is another.” I heard Nathaniel Eggers nicknaming me “Flatsy” and every guy in New York who’d ever said “I’ll call you,” then suffered an amazing paralysis of both his index fingers and his vocal cords.

Then, horrified, I thought of our friends back at school. Wait until everyone in our dorm heard how Henry and I had driven seventeen hours—arguably one of the longest booty calls in recorded history— only to be ceremoniously dumped by our lovers. After all our boasting and carrying on, I could only imagine what was in store. All Burr would have to say was, “Hey, anyone want to take a road trip?” and everyone on the entire hall would crack up. We were going to be punch lines for the rest of the semester.

I knew that the drive back would be brutal—long, deflated, tedious. I knew that the pain of rejection would linger, forming a fine little keloid scar on my ego, making me second-guess myself anytime I flirted with a guy, as if the first year of college didn’t fuel my insecurity enough. And I knew that strangely, inexplicably, I wanted to go home, to be surrounded by people whose pathologies were at least familiar and predictable to me, the bunny slippers of weirdness. When Henry and I pulled into the Vince Lombardi Rest Stop on the New Jersey Turnpike at daybreak, I knew that I would reluctantly eat half a banana split for breakfast, then slide off the stool and wander back to the pay phones. Sheepishly and humiliated, I would dial. And as I listened to each ring, my heart would constrict wildly with nervousness, with shame.

What I did not know was that when she answered, my mother would say simply, “Well of course, sweetie. What time will the two of you be here?”

I did not know that even before we crossed the Hudson, my father would move the sofa and the bookcases back into the living room. That my mother would run out to Key Food to stock up on steak and roast beef, stuffing virtually half a frozen cow into the refrigerator. “Well, Henry is from Dallas, so I assume he doesn’t know from vegetables or miso soup,” she’d say brightly.

I did not know how elegantly my family would smooth themselves out for the occasion.

I did not know that Henry would not be repulsed by them at all. Rather, he’d be charmed, even impressed. “Boy, your folks are cool,” he’d say. “For starters, they’re sober.”

And I did not know that for the entire week we stayed with them, not once would my mother mention that you could cure emphysema with soy beans. She would simply sit beside me at the edge of my bed, quietly stroking my hair. The sex lives of their children, parents might not want to know. But heartbreak, they understand.

PART III

Reality Says “Hello”

Chapter 10

Picnic at Treblinka

SO HERE WAS THE PLAN:
after graduating from college, I’d return to New York City and walk around Midtown radiating talent and intelligence. Dazzled by my aura of competency, the editors of the
New York Times
and
Vanity Fair
would dash out of their offices and run down the street calling after me, “Stop! You’re a genius! We’ve got to hire you!”

In no time, I’d be mentioned in the gossip pages of the
New York Post
as a “hot young novelist.”
New York
magazine would profile me as “one of those under-thirty Wunderkinds who make you question what you’ve been doing all your life.”
The New York Review of Books
would declare me simply “a revelation.”

Instead, of course, after finding only two want ads for proofreaders (5+ yrs. exp. nec.) and absolutely none for writers who’d written political “prose poems” for their college newspaper, I lay around despondently in my bedroom for a month reading back issues of
People.
Until that moment, my life had been as pampered and well supervised as that of a laboratory rat. Now, suddenly, as a college graduate, it was just me, alone, facing the Void of All Eternity. Me, alone, facing the Void of All Eternity plus my student loans, which came in a deceptively cute little coupon book designed to make me think that, at 9.25 percent interest, I’d been getting some sort of bargain.

Eventually, I mustered up enough effort to carpet-bomb the publishing industry with my inventive idea of a rÉsumÉ. This resulted in a handful of interviews—mostly for trade journals with names like
Sheetrock Weekly
and
Kitchen Appliance Gazette.
When the editor of
Aluminum Siding Times
asked me, “So, what entices you about aluminum siding?” I had to resist the urge to reply that it seemed like a topic you could write about regardless of how much recreational medication you happened to be taking.

Much as I told myself that every writer had to begin somewhere, and that a paycheck was a beautiful thing, given the starting salaries I was being offered, this seemed like a stretch. At $265 a week before taxes, my paychecks would not only
not
be beautiful, they’d be things you wouldn’t even want to look at without the benefit of grain alcohol.

In the end, it turned outs that only one newspaper was willing to hire me anyway. And this was primarily, I suspect, out of morbid curiosity.

If I’d thought
Shippers and Truckers Daily
or
The Paper Fastener Picayune
were lethal,
The Jewish Week,
at first glance, didn’t strike me as a whole lot better. It was a musty-looking publication full of grainy photographs of octogenarian philanthropists and fuzzy-faced rabbis. “Torah Portion of the Week” was one of its regular offerings, along with something cryptic called “Federation Appeals Update.” What
The Jewish Week
did have going for it was that it was, in fact, a bona fide newspaper—in addition to “hard news,” there were features, movie reviews, and entertaining personal ads that began “Enough with the Dating Already, Make Your Mother Happy” and “Frum Mensch Seeks Kosher Cutie.”

When I arrived for my interview, Sheldon, the managing editor, leaned back in his chair and looked at me wryly. “So,” he said, tossing aside my meticulously Xeroxed rÉsumÉ. “What do you know about Judaism?”

The truth was, I knew about as much about Judaism as I did about aluminum siding. For most of my life, I’d been under the impression that Judaism had been created by three “lost tribes”—the Coins, the Levi’s, and the Israelites. The Coins, as I understood it, had become bankers, the Levi’s blue jeans manufacturers, and the Israelites modern-day Israelis. Do not ask me where I got these ideas. It wasn’t until a born-again Christian clued me in that I learned there’d actually been
twelve
tribes of Israel, not three. Apparently, this wasn’t any secret, either: it was right there in the Bible for anyone who bothered to read it.

Sitting in Sheldon’s office, surrounded by his journalism awards, I realized it was one thing to feign interest in hand-blenders and Sheetrock, but quite another to fake expertise in an entire religion.

“To be honest, I don’t know a thing about Judaism,” I said plainly. “The only time I ever set foot in a synagogue was to attend Lloyd Goldfarb’s bar mitzvah in eighth grade. And mostly I went because his parents were taking us to see
Beatlemania
afterward.”

“I see.” Sheldon exhaled. At that point, I expected him to end the interview and usher me out the door. Instead, he made a little tent with his fingers and said affably, “So in other words, you wouldn’t be approaching your subject matter with a lot of bias.”

That my ignorance could be in any way construed as a selling point had never occurred to me. Yet somehow, I felt an almost pathological need to be candid—if not to sabotage my case outright. The truth was, I wasn’t exactly keen on writing for a Jewish newspaper.

Ever since making my grand debut as an archangel in the sixth grade Christmas pageant, all I’d ever managed to learn about Judaism was that people could kill you for it for no good reason. As a result, I tended to regard it as a kind of genetic deformity. Whenever someone actively embraced their Jewishness, I couldn’t help but think that they were some sort of moron.

What was there for Jews to be proud of, I wondered. Christians had inspiring cathedrals and interesting saints. They had Christmas, and Easter bunnies, and suntanned ministers in ice-cream-colored suits with their own TV shows. They had numbers and certainty. Granted, heaven and hell seemed to me like transparent attempts at crowd control. But all we Jews seemed to have was Israel and the Holocaust. Christians were visited by angels, Jews by the Gestapo. It was no contest.

I warned the editor I’d been educated in Presbyterian and Quaker schools. “Not only that, but I sang in the choir,” I confessed. “My family has a Christmas tree that we don’t even pretend to call a ‘Chanukah bush.’ My mother quotes this guru named Baba Ram Dass. We spent a year following a Maharishi, another doing Buddhist chanting, and another being macrobiotic, which, believe me, is kind of a cult. So you see,” I concluded haplessly, “I’m really not Jewish at all.”

“That’s funny,” Sheldon laughed. “You sound pretty Jewish to me.”

“Really?” I said, trying to hide my displeasure at this news.

“Sure. Who else puts their kids through all that? You don’t see Catholics sending their kids to synagogue just to ‘expand their horizons.’ Look,” he said, “if I want a religious expert, I’ll hire a rabbi. Until then, we pay $22K and 80 percent of your medical. When do you want to start?”

My first day on the job, I was given my own desk, computer, press card, and stapler—all the trimmings I associated with world-class journalism. After rearranging my office supplies several times, I practiced whipping out my press card with authority. Then I called my father and made him call me back so he could listen to my professional-sounding voice mail message:
Hello, this is Susan Gilman, staff writer for
The Jewish Week
newspaper.
After that, however, the thrill and novelty pretty much wore off, and I settled down to demonstrate to my editor just what a terrible choice he’d made by hiring me.