Why I'm Like This (14 page)

I recounted my history with migraine medicines and, as I
expected he would, Jeff asked me why I hadn't tried the new sumatriptan drugs like Imitrix or Zomig. I told him that I hadn't seen the point when I knew I wouldn't be able to use them while I was pregnant or nursing, and I could still take my trusty codeine. Besides, who doesn't like a narcotic? Codeine is a delightful drug as long as you don't take it on an empty stomach. How hard is it to have a little nosh while waiting for the blurries to subside? But Jeff told me that the new drugs weren't painkillers, they actually interrupted the relay of the message that your brain is sending to your head to stab itself repeatedly for the next five hours. Would they, I wondered, interrupt any other messages? Like the one that makes me furious when people don't use coasters on wood furniture? Jeff gave me some sample pills in a brown paper bag. The next week David and I went on vacation, and I got three migraines in seven days, which proves, once again, my theory that migraines eschew the daily grind. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten to bring the new drugs, so I spent a good part of the week doped up on codeine. Not the vacation I was looking for, but not bad, either.

I feel I am at a crossroads. How much worse can this get? Or rather, more importantly, what did I do to deserve it? My personality is already so prohibitive. How many obstacles to a relaxing time am I supposed to have to surmount? An article I read recently suggested that it is unclear that anyone has ever been cured of migraines. I suppose this means that I am
going to have to cure myself of everything else. All the phobias and neuroses and unhelpful quirks. But the two go hand in hand, don't they? Headaches have always been harbingers of ill. All I can do at this point is hope to God I never have cause to utter the words, “We thought they were migraines.”

Years ago, I brought my college friend Mark home to Connecticut for the weekend, and at dinner on Saturday my parents and I regaled him with Kaplan lore, or what little there was of it that would be of interest to an outsider. I told the infamous Dog Story, which begins on a melancholy note with the death of our first dog, an incorrigible cocker spaniel named Jasper, who fell through the ice on the river behind our house and drowned. It meanders over six years of tearful pleading on my part for a second dog, to no avail. Then there's the stunning twist when, the summer after I turned eleven, my parents announced that it was their intention to get another dog. We got one. End of story. Light applause.

What changed their minds? asked Mark.

Yeah, what changed their minds?

“We thought you were sick,” my mother said.

“What do you mean sick?” I asked.

“You were having terrible headaches and had to lie down in a dark room. James Stewart's wife started getting terrible headaches and had to lie down in a dark room and then dropped dead two weeks later. (For years I thought she meant the actor James Stewart but she didn't. There's some
other prominent James Stewart. Someone only my mother would know of.) We didn't know what to think. We were worried.”

“So you got the sick girl a puppy,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Did you think the puppy would make her better?”

“Well, we thought it might help somehow.”

“Or did you think, get her a puppy before it's too late?”

“That, too.”

D
URING
all of seventh grade I went to two bar mitzvahs. There were only what seemed like a handful of Jewish kids in my school, and there was no synagogue in our town. A few of us went to Sunday school at the Reform temple in the next town over. To each of these bar mitzvahs I wore the same outfit I wore on airplanes: a navy blazer, a kilt, a button-down shirt, knee socks, and loafers. I was seated with the bar mitzvah boy's Christian friends.

When my brother and I were young we got Christmas presents in addition to Hanukkah presents, so we wouldn't feel left out. Unfortunately, the result of this seeming abundance was that we got a lot of little, meaningless gifts, as opposed to one very large and excellent gift. My all time
worst Hanukkah present was a giant yellow pushpin that was supposed to hold down all the stray little pieces of notepaper with people's numbers and such on it. I was maybe twelve or thirteen at the time and I am pretty sure I asked my mother, “What the fuck is this?” I didn't get in trouble, because it was a legitimate question. My brother and I watched the Christmas shows—
Frosty, Rudolph, The Grinch
—all of which usually aired during the eight nights of Hanukkah.

There are no Jews in Whoville.

Every Christmas Eve I was invited to one or another friend's house for the tree trimming, and occasionally my family accompanied friends to midnight mass. For the music, my mother said. She meant that, and I understood. I love Christmas carols, I love their soaring melodies and peace-promoting messages. I love that they are in English.
“Hark, the herald angels sing!”
Is there any more glorious beginning to any song, aside from Neil Young's “Heart of Gold”? So it's about Christ, so what? I'm not even totally sure what “Heart of Gold” is about. And how about those standards? “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “White Christmas.” George Gershwin never wrote “I Love You
More
, on Yom Kip
pur
.” Why should he have? Who wants to write a song about a bunch of people sitting around hungry all day? And although every Jew I know claims that Passover is a favorite holiday, nobody seems particularly inclined to gather around the piano and sing the song about the two zuzim.

Still, there was never any doubt in my family circle that we were Jewish. We acknowledged our faith at high holiday services and seders and family meetings, which were something my father's large family insisted on having every year, as though there were some kind of annual political agenda to be addressed. The longest discussion usually revolved around where next year's meeting was to take place.

“It should be at Phyllis and Milton's!”

“What? I still haven't seen Jack's house in Connecticut!”

“Oy, Connecticut's so far.”

 

I met my Jews at the Jewish country club my parents belonged to and at my Jewish summer camp. Our family friends were mostly Jews, left over from our life in Manhattan, and some of them had summer houses in Connecticut. My mother never actually wanted to move out of Manhattan in the first place and referred to our house as Misery Manor. She joined a bowling league and was a Cub Scout den mother and to this day I am not sure she has completely recovered from either. My brother was not bar mitzvahed at thirteen because it seems the bar mitzvah classes conflicted with his busy Ultimate Frisbee schedule. At sixteen, either a renewed interest in his Jewish heritage or a pressing need for cash inspired him to rethink this decision, and he and my father, who couldn't remember if he'd been bar mitzvahed or not, decided to study together. On a Saturday morning in the spring, we celebrated their accession to manhood with
smoked salmon on pumpernickel rounds and all-white-meat chicken salad from William Poll. This was our version of Jewish food. Not a pickle in sight. No one was even remotely concerned about whether I was bat mitzvahed, so I wasn't, which was fine with me. First of all, I would have had to give up field hockey, basketball, and the spring musical,
Finian's Rainbow
, and second of all, at the time, it was antithetical to the cause. The cause being my assimilation into the non-Jewish world.

Actually, that is not exactly right. I wasn't trying to assimilate. I just
did
. I have always passed. In my town there were so few Jews that unless you were dressed like the Hasidim, it just didn't occur to people that you might be Jewish, although now that I think of it, most of them had probably never seen the Hasidim. And if your name didn't start with
Silver
or
Gold
or end in
stein
or
berg
, you were pretty much in the clear. I had a fair complexion and blue eyes and light brown hair. It didn't occur to
me
that I was different, either. Or it didn't seem as if there was much of a difference, anyway. Only once in a while I would get an inkling that I wasn't all I was cracked up to be. One friend's mother, when I mentioned that I wouldn't be in school the next day because it was Yom Kippur, said, “Oh, you're
Jewish,
” as though I had just revealed some terrible secret, like my father was a transsexual.

I never heard a girl called a JAP until I was seventeen. There weren't enough Jews in Connecticut for word to
travel overland from Long Island. For a long time I honestly thought it had something to do with the Japanese.

The culture shock I experienced during my first months of college was a result not of being on my own at a big-city school, but of seeing so many Jews in one place. We were everywhere. I was both mesmerized and repelled. The girls were warm and quick to make friends but the boys all seemed to be overdressed. They wore khakis or new looking jeans and loafers and Italian-made color-block sweaters. I immediately gravitated towards the grungy, WASP-y jocks. Some of my friends would only date Jewish boys, even at eighteen, just on the outside chance that they would fall in love and want to get married. They didn't want to give themselves even a chance to fall for anyone else. It was a notion they grew up with, that their parents instilled in them. My parents pretty much left me to my own devices, possibly because I apparently didn't have any devices, but also because they wanted, above all, for me to be happy. I know that if I had come to them and said “I love a Ubangi,” they would have welcomed him with open arms.

In college, I felt that people had to rethink me when they found out I was Jewish, that I was more exotic, more complex. I looked like a nice Christian girl but I got to be Jewish, with all that that implied: the liberalism, the wit, the intensity that is a result of our collective indignation, and, of course, the classic Jewish superiority complex. Fraternity boys
sometimes told Jewish jokes in front of me and as soon as I heard where the joke was headed I would start furiously plotting my unveiling. How would I announce myself? Should I cut right in? Should I wait and see who laughs? Should I…and by then the joke would be over and if I got anything out it would be a weak sort of “Um, I'm Jewish, you know,” a peep beneath the blare of Duran Duran. I saw myself as a warrior in a kind of socio-religious war, but I was too shy to let my righteous anger be felt in a meaningful way. An argument between two boys I knew ended when one hurled: “You're such a Jew!” across the crowded cafeteria. I stormed over to him and said, “Why do you think that is an insult? Would you be insulted if I yelled ‘You're such a Christian' at someone?” He looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. I wanted to be Jewish, but I also wanted to be like everyone else. I didn't like carrying the burden of two thousand years of persecution around when everyone else looked so fancy free.

And maybe I had some idea that if people got to know me and found out that I was Jewish, then they would think to themselves, “Hey, if
she's
Jewish I guess I must have been wrong about the whole lot of them all these years.” I'm like one of those okay Jews. Not too Jewy. Which can backfire on me. I took my son to a class at the Ninety-second Street Y, a very Jewish institution, and the other Jewish mothers didn't talk to me at all. I wanted to say something offhand, throw in a Yiddishism, just to let them know, but I know very
little Yiddish. So I have learned to sneak the words “Yom Kippur” into a conversation just to make sure people are clear about things. “That's a beautiful watch. A Christmas present from your husband? Mine got me one just like it for Yom Kippur.” “I'd love to see pictures from your Caribbean vacation. I have some pictures from Yom Kippur. Do you want to see them?” And I am finally ready to do battle, not just in the name of Judaism, but in the name of anything. If therapy did one thing for me it pushed my anger from its longtime residence in the space between my ears and sent it rocketing out my mouth. At one time, if a car cut me off as I was crossing the street, the event would provoke a furious interior monologue about where the driver had to be that was so
important
that it was worth running me down. I would fantasize about confronting him, perhaps from my hospital bed or in a dramatic courtroom showdown. Now, I will just kick the back of the car as it makes the turn and yell “Asshole!” What a nice example I set for my son. I am so primed for an actual confrontation that David sometimes whispers, “Choose joy,” if I seem to be building up a particularly frothy head of steam. Where this comes from, I don't know. Perhaps it is all those years as a good girl. Or perhaps it is what happens when you finally wrest your Jewish self from Connecticut.

And yet, in that I have not been entirely successful. I married a Jew with light brown hair and enormous blue eyes and, like most of us, two slightly different profiles, one sort of
Jewish, one not. This affords him a certain flexibility, if only in my diseased mind. And evidently we have named our child wide of the mark. Jewish people we know keep telling us that Jews are not named John, but Jon, for Jonathan. These are Jewish people who name their children Porter or Layne or Brooke. Fuck them. I like John. It is a strong name, a solid name. I can't help it if all of the popes like it too. I have loved men named John. I have never loved a Jonathan, never. One tried to kiss me once and it was horrible, all wrong.

As it turns out, John is as blond and fair as a California surfer. Even our rabbi gave him a second look. (May I say that our rabbi is a hunkalunka and makes being Jewish a double blessing?) It is clear to me that part of my responsibility to John will be to prepare him for the fact that because he looks like a young Aryan he may hear things people don't intend him to hear, and he will have to unmask himself and defend his people. Once, a long time ago, a theatrical manager in Los Angeles suggested that since I didn't look Jewish, I should change my last name, a fairly common Jewish name, to something more neutral, maybe even the last name of someone already famous, to bring up more “pleasant connotations.” As it was, he said, my name sounded like a girl people had gone to summer camp with. I told him, I probably
was
a girl people had gone to summer camp with, and as I remember it, we all had a damn good time.

 

This year, in a last-minute bid for a summer vacation, David and John and I decided to spend five days at a resort on the shore of Lake Champlain. We had never heard of the place, but it had been recommended by another place, which was already fully booked by people who actually
plan
vacations, and we figured we had nothing to lose but five days and a lot of money. It turned out to be a beautiful, family-oriented resort with tennis and golf and boating and a beach and a pool and activities for kids and even baby-sitting. The weather was glorious. Every morning we sent John to Kids Camp with a baby-sitter and we played tennis or kayaked or just lay there. Every afternoon we took John to the beach or pool and splashed and swam until four o'clock, at which time we broke for ice cream. Then we rode our bikes to the resort's grass airstrip, where we watched the little planes take off and land. “Plehn, plehhhhn,” John shouted. It was perfect.

Well,
almost
. David and I both had this niggling feeling that something was missing. Something substantial. We just couldn't put a finger on what it was. And then, sitting in the dining room on the second night of our stay, right after the appetizer of selected crudités and just before the band struck up “The Girl from Ipanema,” it hit us.

Jews.

There were no Jews. We looked around. Yes, three out of four men at the next table were, indeed, wearing kelly green blazers. A man on the dance floor sported plaid slacks. The
women all had pageboy bobs and wore brightly colored shifts and shoes they had bought at Papagallo in 1975. We'd wandered into the Protestant version of the Catskills. There had been other clues. Only children and camp staff participated in the talent show. What Jew passes up a chance to perform in front of total strangers? Our round-robin tennis partners: Bets, Trish, Kath, Kev, and Chip (all right, it wasn't that bad but it was close) never swore at themselves or threw a racquet. Now, anyone who has ever played tennis at a Jewish country club knows that tournament protocol requires that every time you miss a shot you pound your racquet strings with the heel of your hand and bark at yourself: “Goddammit, Bobby, watch the goddamn ball.” Also, the food stank.

I missed us, us Jews. It is such a comfort to have a few of us around. I was still glad we were there, though. It is our duty to maintain a presence in every corner of the globe. But at the same time I wouldn't be caught dead at the Concord or the Nevele. No Christians.