Still Here (9780748112357), page 17
That was the question, all right. Who was she? Not who I thought when I first laid eyes on her. Not, for example, the Jewish college kid whose parents sent her on a graduation trip to Israel, to hang out on a kibbutz and visit museums and imbibe a little culture before coming home and getting married.
Just to start with she was Canadian. She grew up in one of those white-bread towns in the interior of British Columbia, a region along the border called the Okanagan where they grow fruit and the burghs have names like Kamloops, Salmon Arm and Peachland. The Erica sitting in the café was only a few years away from being a farm girl, dwelling among her father’s orchards of apples, acres of land blooming green and red, and on Sunday they went to their Mennonite church.
‘You know why Mennonites don’t approve of fucking standing up?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Because it might lead to dancing.’ Eighteen years of her life in the middle of nowhere and yet she had a sense of humour!
‘And this is how you were brought up?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘My mother picked apples and washed apples and baked apples into pies and sold them at the farmer’s market in Penticton. She smelt of apples. That was her perfume. Is. She’s still back there in the Okanagan, baking.’
‘So how did you get away?’
‘I was a God-fearing girl all right and I expected I was going to marry one of the boys at school, another fruit farmer like my dad, it really never occurred to me that that wouldn’t happen, but you see I have an older brother called Everitt and something appalling happened to him when he was sixteen. One day when he was walking across the yard carrying a bucket of water to sluice down the stable - we had horses too - it suddenly popped into his head that he didn’t believe in God. He was so scared that he just dropped the bucket. It fell right out of his hands. Of course he didn’t say anything to anyone, in our house the Bible was the whole of our conversation. I remember one time a Jehovah’s Witness came to the door and my dad invited him in. Well, the Scriptures were flying all over the place, they weren’t just hurling verses at each other but whole chapters. In the end my dad showed him to the door and said, “You go ahead and worship God in your way and I’ll worship Him in His.” Anyway, Everitt hung around until he graduated from high school and then he moved away, to Vancouver, he became a postal worker. He was a mailman first, what we call a letter-carrier, then he went to work in the sorting office and rose to be a big-shot in the union. It broke my father’s heart but what could he do? At least there was still my baby brother to take over the farm. I went to Vancouver one time telling my folks I was visiting with a girlfriend in Osoyoos. In fact, I stayed with Everitt and met his friends, some of them were these scary big-time labour-union feminists who drank at the beer parlours on Granville Street and they persuaded me I should go to college.’
‘You talked your parents into that?’
‘Yes. But on one condition. That when I graduated I would take a trip to the Holy Land, and here I am.’
Here she was. She was sitting, drinking a glass of mint tea, I was coming towards her cursing my gun, the FN 30 calibre rifle I had to carry round everywhere when I was on leave when what I’d really wanted was an Uzi. Actually the FN packs a stronger punch than an Uzi, has a longer range and is a much more powerful weapon, but it wasn’t sexy. The Uzi is what you pick up girls with, and guys like me, schlepping these Belgian FNs around, man, we were dorks. First of all when you walked into a café with one of these things, you invariably caught it on the door going in, which was exactly what happened that day I first saw Erica, just as I was trying to think of what I was going to say to her and if there was any chance of getting a date. And the other thing about the FN, it’s really heavy, and it was hot and I knew I was sweating, which made my heart sink even further when I thought of this girl looking up and trying to assess if she’d want to get it together with me. Of course if I’d known the situation, I’d never have even approached her.
She’d come to Israel to do what she promised her parents, to look for Jesus, but as it would turn out she didn’t find him.
What a cataclysm that marriage was for both sets of folks. I really don’t think her parents understood who their daughter was or what she had become in the three years away from the farm at college. She seemed to have sloughed off altogether an entire upbringing, like the minute she hit the campus she was reborn. Together with her brother she got involved in all kinds of anti-war politics and was a member of a Church group that found places to live and jobs for the anti-war resistance movement, a kind of underground railroad for people like me. She helped out too in a law centre that advised draft-dodgers on their immigration rights and it became clear to her by the time she was graduating with a major in Political Science that the law was where she was heading.
‘I wouldn’t say I have totally lost all faith in God,’ she told me. ‘I wasn’t entirely discounting some kind of divine revelation when I came here, but it didn’t happen. This just seems to be a country of stones and people who, one way or another, worship stones. I felt more comfortable on the kibbutz helping out with the grapefruit harvest, at least there I knew what I was doing. The conditions for growing apples and grapefruit are very different, but it’s all still fruit when you get down to it.’
She held fruit like no one else I’ve ever seen. Held each piece like it was a baby in her hand, running the pad of a finger across the flesh, holding it to her nose and smelling it with big gulps of breath. Like a wine expert she could detect with each inhalation all kinds of scents, and talk about the odours of the soil it grew in and their mineral and chemical content. I had never met a woman so sensual, or at least in such an unusual way.
Our marriage killed her father. Or so Erica believes. Let’s just say he had a heart-attack one early morning hour in the fall while on top of a ladder appraising his harvest. He fell to the ground and lay there, dying alone among the fruit of the garden of Eden. I never met him. Her mother is on the farm still, with Lloyd, the youngest, and his wife and their five kids. Erica calls her once a month. I always keep out of the room during those conversations. Once a year she makes the trip to Canada and she stays a week but, again, I have no idea what she and her mother discuss. I don’t ask, I don’t want to know.
As for my parents . . .
Here’s the joke. Erica, who came to Israel to look for Jesus in order to pacify her folks, wound up converting to Judaism to pacify someone else’s. I say converting, we went through the motions and only then because there was no way round it. I fought to marry Erica. For the second time in my life (the first was over the war) I faced down my father and it tore my heart out to do it. It was horrible, I never want to go through anything like that again as long as I live, and if they did come round in the end it was only because Erica herself won them over, and partly because of her own erudition. She knew the Good Book like the back of her hand and she sat in my father’s study while they talked about Job and Jonah, Jeremiah and Isaiah, she knew them all. I looked in on them and saw her sitting in a hard chair by his side while he read to her from one of the papers he was writing for a scholarly journal of Hebrew studies. It was difficult to square the attentive solemn face, the hair tied back from it, the sober dress she’d bought for the occasion, with the hot babe I knew from our sessions in bed. But maybe that’s what Canadians are, neither one thing nor the other, forever capable of becoming something else.
She sailed through the conversion. I told her she didn’t have to if she didn’t want to, I’d marry her anyway, but she said, ‘No, it’s not like a lot of this stuff is new to me. I’m sure I’ll pick it up.’ And she did.
Apart from little stresses on certain vowels in her speech you’d never know she was not an American, native born. Until the announcement of our break-up it had not occurred to me to wonder about the rupture that she had made with her own family, it seemed natural to me that she would want to escape from a life like that, growing up in the middle of nowhere with only God and your parents and two brothers for company and no intellectual stimulation, no movies or plays or anything to read except the Bible. No questing and questioning and travel. No engagement with your government, pushing away at what democracy is supposed to be. Everything I had grown up taking for granted she lacked. What she did have, land, acreage, earth, farm animals, dogs, I saw no value in and never questioned the haste with which she abandoned them, keeping her links to the farm only out of duty and affection for her mother and her nephews and nieces. She had reinvented herself as an American, as a citizen of the great city of Chicago, had reinvented herself as a kind of Jew. But I never questioned anything because that is what becoming an American is all about: whatever baggage you bring with you to the New World, you have to leave it behind you at the dock as my grandparents, arriving at Ellis Island in 1906, swore never to set foot again in the land of their birth, nor did they, and nor did their children retrace their parents’ foot-steps. It’s only my generation that has secured our world enough to risk the return, through exactly the kinds of projects that Alix Rebick is involved in.
So should I have been so shocked when Erica told me she was leaving? She’d done it once, now she’d done it twice. The only past she’d ever been interested in was my time in the army and this was because she could not decide from the little I had told her whether or not I had killed in cold blood. At heart she was a pacifist and the thought of war repelled her. But there again, growing up among the apple trees, what did she know from enemies?
Perhaps I had been careless with Alix Rebick. She might once, when she was younger, have been a woman with whom I could have had sex out of time, but not any longer. There are single women of her age whom men will fuck because they believe that they will be grateful for anything, that they can’t expect any more than what they’re offered. To those guys, Alix would fit right into that category. But she’s too good for that kind of treatment. She deserves better, though I don’t know how she’ll get it. Her problem is that she’s just not the kind of woman most men are interested in having a relationship with, she doesn’t look the kind of woman anyone would marry. Though it is odd how my thoughts keep coming back to her, throughout the day, standing on the roof of my hotel, looking out across the city with that great bush of hair around her horse face, something going on in her head that I didn’t get at all, even if apparently, according to Sam, she’s gone to London and has no plans to return, so that, I would say, is the end of that.
One night, a couple of weeks after the beach incident, Erica rang me and asked me to come back to Chicago for a few days because she had got to the end of her rope trying to figure out what to do with our wayward teenager, Michael, who at sixteen was flunking all his grades and who was showing no evidence whatsoever of either aptitude or interest in any course of study available to him, apart from doing ‘tricks’ on his skateboard in a series of concrete walkways down by the lakeshore in the company of a crowd somewhat older than himself; roughnecks and dropouts, my father would have called them when I was Michael’s age. And that’s exactly how they seemed to me now, except they didn’t have enough drive to be hooligans. They listened to hip-hop, scored dope and a bit of Ecstasy (if they had some get-up-and-go, even sold it), dressed like gangsters from the ghetto and believed in nothing. They were transparent vessels for whatever capitalism could fill them with, fish-like, swimming about the city with an attention span seconds long. And my son had got himself drawn into this life of inertia. His reports were awful, just terrible, there was no indication that he could do better if he tried, there was barely a sign of life at all, yet nothing the matter with him, mentally, not one thing. We’d dragged him round every educational quack in Chicago, had him tested, measured, invited him to express his feelings and everything was normal. Good IQ, no sign of dyslexia, no problems with his eyesight, no psychological problems that anyone could discern. He answered all their questions politely, no rage, no sudden upsurge of violence in him, no sign of repression either. He was normal. And then they asked him what was his problem with school, was he picked on, did he feel the teachers had a down on him, did one of them represent some repressed feelings he had about his mother or his father? He said, no, school was fine, the teachers were fine, he just wasn’t interested in education, didn’t care to learn, it wasn’t his thing. ‘Not your thing?’ I screamed. ‘How can education not be somebody’s thing? Education is what stands between you and the trailer park. I don’t notice that when we go on vacation you’re averse to staying in a fancy hotel with a pool. When we go to a sports store to buy you new shoes I don’t hear you saying, “It’s fine, Dad, the cheapest pair will do.” On the contrary, you’d skin us alive for the price of what you put on your feet. You don’t tell us, hey, we could do without this expensive sound system and the big TV and the computer we got for you. Well, where do you think it comes from? How do you think we earn the money to pay for it? You think you’d have all that stuff if your father worked as a security guard or a janitor or in a convenience store?’ ‘Actually,’ the little fucker said, ‘Adam’s dad works in a convenience store and he’s got pretty much the same stuff as we’ve got.’
Years of demonstrating against the Vietnam war has come to this. Where are the values, the ideas? Where’s the confidence we had (misplaced, admittedly) that it was possible to change the world? How could my own son turn out so vacuous?
This was what Erica wanted me to address, urgently, when I picked up the phone on a Sunday evening, the sun setting on the river after a warm day and the red brick of the dock flaming under the light as the ferry passed across the Mersey to the Cheshire hills on the other side, a place I still hadn’t been to yet, and when I’d asked Alix what was there, she’d said, ‘Shipyards. Suburbia. And the worst beach resort you’ve ever seen in your life.’
I said to Erica:
‘Your voice sounds weird.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know, different, muffled, thick.’
‘It’s probably just the line. When can you get back?’
‘I’ll have to talk to my site manager but it should be within the next few days.’
‘Have you met a Beatle yet?’
‘There are a number of plastic models of them in their mop-top days, but apart from that, no.’ On my second day I’d visited the museum called The Beatles Story and later asked Alix if she had gone herself. ‘No’, she said, ‘or at least only in real life.’ It was odd, she said, to have your own past served up to you as a theme park. I tried to imagine her at thirteen or fourteen, this lanky Jewish teenager, there at the very birth of sixties rock and roll while I was in Chicago listening to the dregs of the fifties, pallid, manufactured talent like Paul Anka and Fabian.
‘Another thing,’ Erica was saying, ‘have you spoken to your mom lately?’
‘Yeah, at the weekend, why?’
‘I bumped into her at the market a couple of weeks ago and she looked very shaky, such a shame, I always loved your mom right from the word go. Your father with his big mind was another thing, I felt like anything I said made me sound like such an ass.’
‘Come on, you gave as good as you got, the two of you hurling those Scriptures around. You really had him when you got on to the New Testament, you drew a complete blank there, I’ve never seen him stymied before.’ It made me laugh to think about this kid from Canada spouting stuff about the Epistles and my father powerless to respond.
‘I can still see him looking at me over his glasses, that moustache, so black it was on his face, bristling. But, Joe, honey, they’re not that way now. How old is your mother? Nearly eighty, something like that, and your father a couple of years older? We went for coffee and she really poured her heart out, about how hard things have been getting lately, your father’s osteoarthritis is getting worse and worse, he can hardly get out of his chair, he can’t hold a pen any more. You know, she told me not to tell you, but he can only just about peck at the keys of the Mac you bought him. She says his mind’s the same as ever, just as sharp, but he can’t really write, it tires him out just to type a paragraph. And she has to do everything, help him to the bathroom, wash him, even clean his teeth, she’s exhausted all the time. I went over there, the place was a mess, there’s a smell in there, sour, like they don’t open the windows ever, and when I asked her, she said, no, they didn’t, your father can’t stand draughts. I found the kitchen stuff and I began to clean because I couldn’t bear to see the house the way it was, there’s crud all over the place. A cat got in and lived in the cellar all winter, she left food out for it and when I went down there it was full of its shit. I vacuumed and washed down the kitchen and opened the window in the bedroom to air out while they were eating dinner, and gladly I’d do that for them, but not as regularly as they need it.’
‘Do you think it’s time for a retirement community of some kind?’
‘I think so, but I raised it with her and she said, “Well, I’d love it, but not him, never, he’ll never go.”’
True. I could not imagine my father playing cards, taking part in art classes, going on trips in a bus with a bunch of other old people, unless in Chicago there’s some home for retired rabbinical intellectuals where they can spend all day hair-splitting about the Mishnah. Which would drive my mom round the bend.
We talked for another half-hour; everything seemed to be softening in her, that hard implacability which I had confronted when she told me she was moving out was giving way, returning to the old Erica, my wife. There had always been something round about her, not just her figure, which she moaned about and I loved, but her whole personality had no edges. She didn’t confront situations, she just walked away from them, like she’d walked away from the farm and from her parents, and when she did fight me it was by stealth. But someone in a marriage, someone in a country, needs to take on life’s shit and that had to be me. I was the one who took out the garbage, and not just literally. I saw off the kid in high school who’d threatened Gil with a knife and never even told Erica. I left work early and waited for him and rammed the little pisser up against a wall and told him I was a crazy fucked-up war veteran and if he ever so much as looked at my son again I’d slit his throat. And instead of reporting me to the school authorities, as I’d figured, he never said another word and walked past Gil with averted eyes. I didn’t want Erica to know because I didn’t want her to develop the hardness she would need to confront this kind of crap - who wants to come home to that? And the price I’d paid for not exposing her to horror was keeping the war locked up inside me, like there is an iron chest behind my ribs which sometimes lurches and knocks against my heart.
