Imaginary Men (4 page)

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Authors: Enid Shomer

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BOOK: Imaginary Men
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Page 19
"You must be joking. Ava and Debs treat us like their own kids."
"Mom says they spoil us rotten."
"That's because they don't get to see us very often," Fran said.
"I wish Aunt Florence would move to Alaska," I said. Aunt Florence was our mother's brother's wife. She was a stout woman, later diagnosed as diabetic, whose bleached-blond hair was done up in a zillion curls like a telephone cord on top of her head. She referred to her kids as "my Maury" and "my Melissa," even if they were standing right next to her. I was jealous of and hated both these cousins. "I'm glad you're getting married before Melissa," I said.
"Melissa's a bit young to be thinking of marriage," Fran said, from her great tower of eighteen years. Melissa was sixteen.
"Aunt Ava eloped when she was sixteen." "Eloped" was the word everybody in our family used for her shotgun wedding.
"Aunt Ava's different," Fran said as she opened the door and gestured me through it. "You can't talk about her and Melissa in the same breath."
Fran was right. The Florida aunts were different. Aunt Ava was a model, but not the kind who strolls down runways or appears on the cover of
Vogue
. Her portfolio was full of magazine ads for shoes, gloves, detergent, and jewelry. She had supplied the hands and feet for the photos. "A perfect size 7B," she'd say, pointing her toe. "And feet don't show age like a face does."
Aunt Debs had kept her husband's accounts. "They weren't ordinary books," my father had told my mother last fall after Uncle Teddy died. "Well, when he had the dry-goods stores, all right, pretty regular. But after the deal in Las Vegas?" His voice had trailed off to a low, knowing snicker.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
At the wedding the two sides of our family would have a chance to get to know one another better, my mother said at breakfast the next day. The Florida aunts were still upstairs asleep.
The northern half of my familymy mother's sidehad always acted superior to the Florida half. It had nothing to do with pedigreesthey were all immigrant Jews from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. I think now it was envy, for the northern relatives vacationed in Florida for two weeks each winter and talked of retiring
 
Page 20
there to a life of golf, sunshine, and shrimp cocktails. For them, Florida meant relaxation. Anyone who lived there year-round had chosen good weather over hard work. My father had told me at least a thousand times that I wasn't a Yankee like them. This was confusing coming on the heels of my mother's pleas that I attend Hebrew school and join the Young Judea group at my junior high. Would they need to know if I was a northern or southern Jew?
My father's familyfifteen of themhad left Baltimore's harbor district in the early 20s, part of the Florida land boom. My father spoke of this period with such reverence that as a very young child I pictured them in covered wagons, carrying rifles and beef jerky. My grandmother Minerva opened a beauty shop in Lemon City, claimed to have invented the permanent wave before Nestlé, and dropped dead of heart failure at the pari-mutuel window when I was four. She and her children took to the tropical landscape without a hitch. They ate hearts of palm, gambled on dogs, horses, and jai alai, and carried fishing tackle at all times in the trunks of their cars. Though my father claimed that the aunts spoke Yiddish just like my mother's side of the family, I'd never heard a word of it pass their lips in eleven summers in Miami. They had picked up
un poquito español
, which, Ava said, came in handy on weekends in Havana.
"I want to sit with the aunts at the wedding," I told my mother, handing her my empty cereal bowl.
"Out of the question. We've already discussed it."
"It's
my
sister getting married," I argued. No good. I looked at the wall calendar where the large red circle that represented Fran's wedding loomed at me like an angry eye. The entire month of December was full of arrows and asterisks and my mother's notes to herself. If I ever got married, I'd run away to Elkton, Maryland, just for spite.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
On the day of the wedding, Debs and Ava included me in all their beauty rituals: eyebrow tweezing, oatmeal facials, shampooing, hair setting, leg waxing, manicuring, and eyelash curling. Much of this was new to me because my mother, a size 20 most of her life, spent her cosmetic energy experimenting with the silhouettes various corsets and girdles provided. She paid little attention to her face. I'd watched her countless times after her morning bath. She used no
 
Page 21
foundation but blotted her shiny freckled face with a puff dipped in light rachel powder. The lipstick was applied the way you'd put a dash in a sentence.
Finally, after six hours of primping, we got dressed. Debs wore a green satin sheath that showed off how slim she waswithout dieting, my mother said. Ava was startling in a silver sequined dress that fell from her body like enchanted water. I stepped out the door in my red french-heel pumps as if I were wearing someone else's body, one that was fragile, required stiff posture, and allowed no contact with anything that might smudge my makeup.
The wedding went exactly as rehearsed. I had to eat with Maury and Melissa, but after dessert Debs and Ava made room for me at their table. Debs was a little drunk. She leaned on her elbow, her chin in her hand, and spoke slowly, drawling and cooing like a pigeon. Ava spent much of the night on the dance floor, sometimes dancing alone. The light bounced off her silver dress as she twirled and dipped. At eleven o'clock Fran tossed her bouquetright through Aunt Debs's arms and onto the floor. Debs stumbled trying to pick it up but managed not to fall.
After the wedding my mother relaxed, went off her diet, and spent a week with her feet up playing card games with the aunts while a record snowstorm buried the capital city. She set aside the donor luncheon she was organizing for the synagogue where she was president of the sisterhood and where the rest of us set foot only for the high holidays.
Looking back now, I think she didn't quite approve of the Florida aunts. If they had been men, she'd have had no trouble appreciating their guts and eccentricities. But as women they must have frightened her. They had survived hurricanes. They had moved alone through nightclubs, funeral parlors, divorce courts, and casinos.
Under their influence my mother recollected her girlhood. "When I was fourteen I had a blue silk matching coat and dress that cost $200," she told Aunt Debs. She turned to me to explain. "That was when you could buy a dress for $6.95."
"Hen," Aunt Debs said, taking the pack in a canasta game, "you wouldn't believe some of the getups I've seen in Vegas."
"Not in your wildest dreams," Ava added. She had visited Debs and Teddy while the casino was being built. "It's hard to tell the hookers from the rest of the crowd."
 
Page 22
"Hookers?" I asked.
"Whores," Debs explained.
"Please watch what you say," my mother whispered, glancing at me.
"I'm old enough to hear," I protested.
"I'll decide that," my mother said.
"Teddy knew everybody," Debs said, without a hint of wistfulness in her voice. This remark was met with silence by my mother and Ava.
"Even Frank Sinatra?" I asked.
"Sure," Debs said. "You want to know something about Frank Sinatra?" I nodded. "He still calls his mother every day. Just to check in."
They talked, too, about people who were long dead, people out of the family mythology. They ran through a slew of names and infamies, recalled favorite foods, recited the names of my grandmother Minerva's eight brothers and sisters, listed every set of twins on both sides of the family, and praised the spirit which had brought all our relatives out of the hopeless bondage of eastern Europe and onto the shores of America.
"You know you're part Gypsy, don't you?" Aunt Ava asked me at the end of one of these recitations.
We were playing rummy in teams. My mother and I against the aunts. "Gypsies?" my mother and I repeated.
"Our grandfather's father was a Gypsy who became a stable boy for a branch of the royal Romanian family," Ava explained.
"Really?" I asked, my mind already full of campfires, gold hoop earrings, and wide, colorful skirts.
"Absolutely," Debs said, stubbing out a cigarette and lighting another.
"I never heard that one," my mother said.
Aunt Debs cupped my chin in her free hand. "That's why you're so dark. Like your great-great-grandfather."
"Come on," my mother said. "There are no Jewish Gypsies." Her laughter was met with silence.
"Hen, we wouldn't kid about a family thing," Debs said. "He worked in the stables, taking care of the horses. And the riding boots."
 
Page 23
''Riding boots?" My mother's voice sounded for a second just like Eleanor Roosevelt's, it was so shaky and high-pitched.
Ava elbowed me and smiled. "If you ever get the urge to roam, you'll know where it comes from."
I knew it had to be true. I could already feel the Gypsy blood in my veins. It had always been there. It was the reason I didn't want to join Young Judea. I couldn't belong to any group.
"He must have converted," my mother said, still puzzling out loud.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
After the aunts left, I moved into Fran's room. The wallpaper with its profusion of birds and flowers reminded me of the house we had rented the year before in Miami with its hibiscus bushes and iridescent hummingbirds. But we didn't go to Florida the following summer. My parents sent me, instead, to a Jewish camp in the Poconos, where I stumbled through transliterations of blessings and songs and sneaked out at night to smoke with the boys. I didn't see the aunts again for eleven years. They stayed in touch, thoughchatty letters on pastel stationery arrived several times a year.
Debs continued to live in seclusion on her houseboat. She became involved with the Humane Society, gave up meat, and adopted a variety of dogs and cats. Ava gave up Judaism, a faith she claimed only barely to have embraced, for the teachings of an Indian avatar named Meher Baba. When I was about fifteen she sent us a photograph of him with his finger to his lips. Her letter said he'd taken a vow of silence more than twenty years before and that she was going to India to live in an ashram with his followers.
I wasn't too surprised to learn in the mid-60s that Ava and her husband were living in a religious commune near Orlando and that Debs, who'd been hitting the bottle again, had been persuaded to join them.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
I like to tell my friends that I was the poster child for my familythe one with something wrong that no one could fix. After
 
Page 24
Fran married, she moved into a split-level home ten minutes away from my parents and had four children in quick succession. I tried not to hold it against her that my parents never complained about her, that she was my mother's idea of a model daughter. My own interactions with my father and mother over the following years went something like this.
"Have you met any nice boys lately? What about that boy Maury introduced you to? What does his father do? Is he going to college?"
"
What
boy?"
"Maury's friend."
"Maury
who?
"
"Your Aunt Florence thinks you should go to college here in town. What's wrong with George Washington University?"
"It's here in town."
"She hates me. My own daughter hates me."
My brilliant report cards failed to impress them. In my mother's eyes, I was valuable cargo waiting to be unloaded. Then her marriage mode would set in: invitations, napkins, and matchbook covers with a red embossed heart and my name intertwined with the name of someone nice, someone they approved of, someone Jewish. Caterer. Photographer. Bridesmaids' gowns. Ushers' handkerchiefs. Dyed silk pumps. And me, dressed up in white, an offering to the same God my mother served at her donor luncheons.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
At last I graduated from high school and won a scholarship to a college in New England, a Yankee after all, my father complained. I didn't come home for the summers. After college, I went to Europe for a year. I threaded my way across the continent on a Eurail pass, picked grapes in Italy, and worked as a secretary in London. I pictured my relatives speaking of me the way they used to speak of the Florida branchwith the slightly disapproving nonchalance reserved for the inexplicable. My parents sent me a couple of hundred dollars every month, an emotional blackmail I gladly extorted knowing they felt helplessexcept financiallyto influence my life.
It was a beautiful fall day when I picked up my mother's letter from general delivery in Edinburgh, where I was visiting friends from college. General delivery was the only address I used that whole year;

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