Crossing California, page 32
Uh-oh, she thought. She hoped this wasn’t a serious sex talk; the last thing in the world she wanted to do, other than see Douglas Sternberg naked, was to have a serious sex talk with her father. Luckily, her mother had survived long enough to give her the basics—she’d been totally cool about it, handing her a copy of The Joy of Sex when she turned twelve and telling her to come to her if she had any questions. Michelle had only two questions—why did the book use sketches of ugly people to depict sexual techniques and why were the pages in the masturbation section stuck together? Responding to the first question, Becky Wasserstrom said that, in general, people were a lot uglier naked than you might ever suspect. And as for the second question, she said she’d have to ask her PTA friend Ellen Rovner, from whom she’d borrowed the book, for an explanation.
Charlie turned the edict facedown on the kitchen table and took a sip of beer. He didn’t want to discuss the note in detail, he said—there were a lot of words in there he didn’t understand, and after he’d looked one up in the dictionary, he’d decided he didn’t want to know what the others meant. The one thing he wanted to tell Michelle—that he wanted to tell both her and Jill when Jill got home from playing Scrabble over at Shmuel Weinberg’s house (“That little twerp?” Michelle interjected)—was that he was sorry. He knew he’d been thinking of himself more than of his children and that was “cruddy” of him. It had just been a long time since he’d had “someone his age” he could “be friends with” and the excitement of being able to be friends with someone his age had made him overlook more important matters. It had been wrong of Gail to suggest she stay over at their apartment and he’d been wrong to say yes—she was a very persuasive woman, he said (Ick, thought Michelle), but he wasn’t about to make excuses. He’d told Gail that they could still go out to movies and have dinner, but as far as all that “staying-over jazz” was concerned, that would have to wait either until they were married or his girls were grown up and out of the house. He knew that might sound old-fashioned, but he couldn’t help it; that’s the way he was. He wanted to set good examples for his daughters, he’d told Gail. He couldn’t expect them to live up to expectations to which he didn’t himself conform. And what did Gail say? Michelle asked. Charlie reported that Gail had said that his daughters probably understood a lot more than he realized. Charlie said maybe that was true, but still there was no reason for him to behave in a way of which he would absolutely disapprove were his daughters involved.
Michelle thought of herself lying on top of Millard Schwartz in the backseat of his Opel shouting “Yabbadabba-do me!” at the moment of climax. She contrasted that moment with a walk she and her father had once taken to Lunt Avenue Beach, where she’d spent an entire afternoon shoveling sand into a little windmill to make it spin. For a moment, she was depressed, thinking about the innocence of childhood and the defilement of puberty. But then she recalled that afternoon with her father more clearly and realized she’d never cared much for the smell of alewives on the beach and that she had found the windmill toy boring but kept playing with it because her father had been so excited about buying it for her. And then she thought of her Flintstone-esque yodeling in Millard’s car and realized that though Millard had turned out to be a Who ticket-cheating scumbag, that evening had actually been a hell of a lot of fun. And now here was her father making her feel like some whore, because he was stuck in the 1950s when, most probably, everybody had been getting laid except him. She knew—didn’t guess, knew—that she had already notched more sexual partners than he ever had, and though, for a while, keeping her father ignorant of that fact seemed best for everybody, the tactic now seemed to have outlived its usefulness. If he was going to start developing unreasonable expectations about her behavior, if he was going to start setting curfews and scheduling serious sex talks, then some misconceptions had to be cleared up right away.
Oh, by the way, she said, she’d had sex with five guys since she’d turned fourteen and she usually used protection and, anyway, she wasn’t dating anybody right now, so there was really nothing to worry about, because reading gave her a better high than pot and alcohol and pot and alcohol gave her a better high than sex. So what she guessed she was saying was that if he was going to change the nature of his relationship with Gail on her account, he really didn’t need to. So, she said, she was glad to have that all on the table, and now she was going to bed. “Good night, Dad,” she said as Charlie Wasserstrom contemplated his beer.
The next weeks in school had the quality and impact of a revelation for Michelle, beginning with the announcement that she had been named one of seven National Merit semifinalists, along with Matthias Kimmel and five other dweebs she didn’t know. On the day the pictures went up in the hallway with “Mather Salutes Our National Merit Semifinalists” cut out in orange construction paper on a teal construction paper wall, she giddily loitered near Vice Principal Ralph Mulvey’s office as Sarah Silver complained loudly that she thought it was “beyond unfair” that students who got straight A’s never got their pictures on a construction paper wall, while people who either “got lucky,” she said loudly, or “happened to be good at tests,” she said even louder, wound up with this “completely disproportionate” honor.
Unlike the thrill Michelle got from performing, which began to dissipate the moment the applause stopped and the set was struck, leaving her desperately scrambling for another fix, another role, the excitement she experienced from her PSAT score did not wear off. She no longer felt self-conscious, clumsy, and slow around her precocious sister—let Jill see if she could do a dimebag, cannonball a forty-ounce, do her homework with Lynyrd Skynyrd blasting, and still pull a 3.0 grade point average. As most people saw it, she knew how to party and her sister knew how to excel in school, but now it was her duty to teach Jill that it was possible to do both. Neither Jill nor she had a mother anymore, and she could either brood about that fact—which she did occasionally when she was alone with Gareth and had drunk too much of his parents’ Framberry Dolfi liqueur—or, she thought, she could be a good, responsible maternal figure for Jill.
The Purim Carnival was held every Sunday in March and it was one of the most popular events the synagogue sponsored, though it took in significantly less cash than the monthly Las Vegas Nights. The carnival took place on both the main floor and in the basement of the synagogue. Events changed weekly. One week, there would be an auction, another week a costume contest. The carnival always ended with musical entertainment and dancing. In the basement, there were games and juice and hamantaschen. All week long, Rabbi Meltzer would drive his beat-up Datsun with a roof-mounted speaker, announcing “Purim Carnival, this Sunday at one. Come for the games, come for the music, come for the parade. Only $2 to get in and only $1 a ticket.”
Michelle had fond memories of the Purim Carnival. She remembered it as the occasion on which she had first discovered the power of her stage presence, playing Queen Esther in Einmal in a Purim, a rock opera written and directed by Rabbi Meltzer. Michelle had more lines than anybody and stopped the show with her three solos (the only solos in the show other than Larry Rovner’s, which had to be cut because his voice was changing). She sang “I Got Such Tsuris, Ahasuerus,” “Don’t Ask Me Why, Mordecai,” and “It’s a Shame about Haman,” and led the whole cast in the final chorus of the title song: “Everybody, get your groggers, / it’s time to make some noise. / That old Haman was a khazer, / just like all the other goys . . .”
When Michelle asked Jill if she wanted to attend the carnival, Jill said she’d rather be throttled. When Michelle asked Jill a second time, Jill said she’d rather be hanged. The third time Michelle asked, she said Jill had two choices—go with her to the carnival or with their father to Parmesan Sunday at Uncle Dave and Aunt Peppy’s—Charlie had recently declared Sundays were family days and his daughters could not spend them alone. And that meant spending the evening listening to Artie Schumer’s abominable imitations of Negro accents, which had grown even worse since he had discovered that Jill would be attending high school at Lane Tech, which had a sizable black population. The last Parmesan Sunday, Artie Schumer had spent the time after dinner (when the women cleaned off the table) and before dessert (when the women brought in new paper napkins, plastic forks, and Marshall Field’s fudge cake) imitating “Lucius Jefferson,” a character he invented to be Jill’s prom date. “Yes suh, Mistuh Wassuhstrum, suh,” Artie said, “Ah’d sho’ ’nuff lahk to take yo faahhn daughtuh to duh prom, Mistuh Wassuhstrum, suh.” Better to be subjected to a thousand Purim Carnivals than one more Parmesan Sunday.
That Sunday afternoon, before Jill and Michelle went to the carnival, they walked all the way west down Devon to the Schwartz-Rosenblum Judaica Bookstore and picked out two masks—a cat mask for Michelle; a Richard Nixon mask for Jill. The sidewalks were mostly unremarkable—people waiting in the checkout line at the North Water Market with bags full of vegetables, snacking on fried perch sandwiches in front of Robert’s Fish Market, browsing through paperbacks in revolving wire racks at Rosen’s Drugs. But every so often, a shock of Purim would burst through the quotidian—at Jerusalem Pizza, men with black overcoats, fedoras, and payess were shooting each other with squirt guns, five Queen Esthers and three Mordecais were waiting for their mothers to finish their loads at the Laundromat on California, and in front of Burghard’s Egg Factory, boys in army fatigues, dressed up like Israeli commandos, played Hide-and-Seek.
At Devon and Albany, Michelle asked Jill how Muley was. Jill said that Michelle had probably talked to him more recently than she had. At Devon and Sacramento, Michelle asked Jill what the deal was with this Shmuel guy—she wasn’t really dating him, was she? Jill said nothing was going on. He wanted to hang around her and sometimes she didn’t say no. Near Devon and Richmond, Michelle asked Jill how school was going. Jill said fine. Near Francisco, Michelle asked Jill if she was looking forward to high school. Jill said she guessed so. At Mozart Street, Michelle asked Jill if she was considering participating in any extracurricular activities once she got to high school. Jill said she didn’t know, maybe something involving politics. Once they turned onto California, Michelle, trying to contain her pride, revealed that she had scored in the 98th percentile on her PSAT and she was now about to be flooded with mailings from crap colleges. “Oh, that’s pretty good,” Jill said. The two masked girls walked in silence the rest of the way to the synagogue.
The K.I.N.S. announcement board said “Purim Carnival.” Below it, the title of Rabbi Shmulevits’s most recent sermon—“Reagan is Haman.” On the front steps of the synagogue, Hillel Levy—dressed as a gorilla (“It is too a Purim costume; it’s Megillah Gorilla,” he told anyone who challenged him)—was trying to get Moshe Cardash (dressed as Mordecai in sackcloth) to mount his shoulders to challenge Connie Sherman and Dvorah Kerbis (who wore heels and miniskirts and tube tops under denim jackets, calling their costumes “Queen Esther for the ’80s”) to a chicken fight. All the while, Rabbi Meltzer’s Datsun, parked with its flashers on in a loading zone, blared its tape-recorded message: “Only $2 to get in and only $1 a ticket. We’ve got rock ’n’ roll, groggers, Megillahs, and more.”
Inside the synagogue, Rabbi Jeff Meltzer in tennis shoes, a tie-dyed shirt, and blue jeans, tsitsis dangling out of the faded Levi’s, was lugging an amplifier into the auditorium. Rabbi Shmulevits was standing near the yarmulke bin, chuckling politely as Cantor Fishman told him about a hotel he had discovered in the northwest suburbs called the Sybaris, which catered solely to couples and had revolving beds and mirrors on the ceiling. A half dozen kids from the Aleph and Beth classes in shimmering gold Esther outfits and pointy-hatted Haman costumes were walking past the carpeted Tree of Life memorial hallway and into the Hebrew school. On the wall opposite the basement door, there were framed pictures of each Hebrew school graduating class since 1953—pale boys in pressed white shirts and skinny black ties, their hair short and slick or trimmed into crew cuts, two girls in the class, hair dark and shiny, starched white blouses buttoned up to the neck, black skirts; one of the girls wore pearls. In 1967, the photos turned from black-and-white to color. In that year’s picture, there were thirty-one students, a number that edged slowly but unmistakably downward with nearly each passing year.
Michelle Wasserstrom, Jill tailing grudgingly behind her, found herself in the 1975-76 picture, hair down to her waist. She had deep shadows under her eyes that contrasted starkly with her white spaceman-style pantsuit that zipped up the front. It was only four years since she had graduated from K.I.N.S., and of the twenty people in the picture, she only could say for sure what six were doing. There was Yehuda Rovner, their Heh class valedictorian—an honor that resulted largely from the fact that he was the only one who really wanted the scholarship to Hebrew high school—in a white ruffle shirt with a black bow tie. That boy in the tan corduroy sport coat was Millard Schwartz. She had seen Missy Eisenstaedt, Ben Jacobs, and Randy Weinstock around the neighborhood, Missy shopping with her mom at Dominick’s, Ben and Randy with basketballs, dribbling them down North Shore. As for the others—the girls with their horsetail hair and their knee-length patterned dresses, Rivka Fishman with her pale-orange pantsuit, the boys with their side-burns and their salmon, powder-blue, or dark-brown sportcoats, Avi Sherman with his stoned blue eyes that matched his suit—Michelle had no idea what had happened to them. They were at Lane Tech, Ida Crown, or private schools in the northern suburbs; their parents had moved either north to Evanston or Skokie, or south to condos on the Magnificent Mile; or else, they had moved out of state altogether—to Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami. The great Diaspora continued.
Behind a small, wobbly wooden desk placed in front of the basement door, Lana Rovner was seated, taking $2 entrance fees and selling strips of $1 tickets. She had a plastic tiara in her hair and glitter on her cheeks. She had recently been appointed class treasurer, an honor that resulted from her attention to detail and propriety. And she had, over the past two Sundays, only embezzled a total of $17, far less, she reasoned, than what any of her classmates would have taken. Charlie Wasserstrom had given Michelle a $20 bill and, with it, she paid for admission and ten carnival tickets. She and Jill walked downstairs, the sounds of Jewish comedy disco and rock ’n’ roll records (“Take a Walk on the Kosher Side,” by Gefilte Joe and the Fish, “Shul’s Out for Summer,” by K.C. and the Shabbos Band) becoming louder as they descended.
In the dank, low-ceilinged basement festooned with already-faded and dusty streamers, there were tables with cups of Kool-Aid and hamantaschen. The walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling Purim murals created by each of the classes from nursery school to Dalet. They began with scribbly, Crayola depictions of Queen Esther and led all the way up to magnificent, illustrated comics in which a snake-wielding Mordecai felled a phalanx of soldiers, saying, “Take That, You Persian,” while a voluptuous Queen Esther in a slit skirt beckoned King Ahasuerus—“Come into my casbah, big boy.” There was a pyramid of borscht jars you could try to knock over with a Wiffle ball; a strongman contraption that called out different phrases depending on how hard you hit it with a mallet (“Oh, big shot, vot a mensch,” “All right, so you’re strong—vot do you vant, a medal?”). There was a Purim quiz game—get four questions right and you’d win a plastic bag with a pair of goldfish in it. Hillel Levy had been working the Haman dunking booth, until Rabbi Meltzer had informed him that his Haman had been too abusive to the Aleph students (“You Jews are all pussies,” he had declared, adding Yiddish slurs his father had taught him—“Go get killed by a Chinaman,” “Be a chandelier—hang by day, burn by night,” and “Grow like an onion with your head in the ground”). In the Queen Esther kissing booth, Connie Sherman had also been relieved of her duties when it was discovered she was taking extra money for frenching. At the hockey net, Muley Wills—who was taking a break from editing his film, Lost—fired shot after shot past the outstretched arms of Shmuel Weinberg.
Michelle had not recalled the basement being so small; she had remembered it as a dark, labyrinthine hideaway where she had smoked her first, unremarkable joint with Avi Sherman and made out with him while everyone else was outside enjoying pound cake and grape juice in the yellow canvas sukkah. Jill found the carnival dull, so Michelle took an overly interested attitude in everything around her. She insisted they spend all of their tickets. They were wearing masks, she reasoned; no one knew who they were.
Thus, they bought hamantaschen and drank cherry Kool-Aid. They whipped Wiffle balls at borscht jars, listened to the strongman machine mock their efforts: “Vot, you got a hoinia?” Jill got four Purim questions right and won a pair of goldfish, which she vowed to set free in Lake Michigan. Jill told Michelle the answers to four other questions and asked Michelle if she’d give her her pair of goldfish, so she could set them free too. Behind her Richard Nixon mask, Jill was smiling just a bit—this was altogether better than veal Parmesan in Elmhurst. And then Michelle said oh, there’s Muley Wills over by the hockey net, why don’t we just go say hi. Jill asked where. Michelle said over there, shooting the puck at that troll in the hockey net. Jill said that Muley was Michelle’s friend, why didn’t she say hi if it was so important to her. Michelle said that Muley was Jill’s boyfriend, not hers. Jill said Muley was not her boyfriend. Michelle asked who was, that troll in the hockey net? Jill said no, nobody was her boyfriend, she didn’t want a boyfriend, why was it so important for her to have a boyfriend, why couldn’t people just hang out and be friends and not be girlfriend and boyfriend? Michelle said there was no need for Jill to bottle everything inside her, she’d wind up with an ulcer before she was twenty-one. Jill said when she was twenty-one, she hoped she’d be a lesbian. Michelle asked why she wanted to be a lesbian. Jill said it was because lesbians were cool and nobody bothered them if they didn’t have boyfriends. Michelle said that if Jill had a boyfriend, nobody would bother her about getting one. Come on, she said, grabbing Jill by the arm and pulling her past the kissing booth, where Hillel Levy was standing in line with three tickets asking whether he could get to third base if he used all three tickets at once. Come on, she repeated, we’re going to say hi to Muley.
