Too Jewish (24 page)

Daddy happened to be around when I was getting ready to go to Catherine's. She'd always been a shadow in the house. He'd never probed, never intruded. That evening he was just making polite conversation. "You know, I've never asked you Catherine's last name," he said. I'd been at Newman long enough to know what that question meant, even coming from my poor daddy. Catherine was the least Jewish-looking girl I'd ever seen, and Daddy knew that. She had a narrow perfect nose, not turned up at all, eyes as blue as Daddy's, hair that was still blonde but ragged on the ends. She was just a natural girl who didn't care about what she looked like. She never smelled bad at all, but sometimes I'd see a stain of jam on a pants leg. Her name was Martin, I told Daddy.

"Is she Jewish?" Daddy said. It was kind of a goofy question.

My mother came into the room right then. She'd checked out the bathroom to be sure I'd packed toothpaste and other things I didn't need. Catherine didn't exactly live in the woods. "What kind of question is that?" she said to my father. "Listen, I gather there's a clique of Jewish girls who all go to Sunday school together. You know we never sent Darby. I think Catherine's Episcopalian."

"Same thing," Daddy said.

"Cut it out, Bernie! You're going to confuse the hell out of this child!"

I told them I wasn't as dumb as they thought.

* * *

Saturday night Catherine was back at my house with her Episcopalian self. We'd worked it like that so she wouldn't have to go to church. Her parents didn't go to church, but they thought she and her little brother should suffer the same way they had, and the housekeeper dropped them off every Sunday morning and picked them up. Her mother said it was the best way for Catherine to figure out what she really believed. "Besides," Catherine said, "I'll like organ music for the rest of my life." But she didn't like it enough to want to get up on Sunday morning if she had an escape, and I was a good one.

We were playing Scrabble in my room. She went first and put down "b-o-o-g-e-r." We didn't care much about points. That was obvious because she made a six-letter word when she probably could have tried for seven and gotten fifty extra points. "I'm sure that's not in the dictionary," I said.

"Do you care?" she said.

"No," I said. I put my "i-t-c-h" down from her "b". "This is definitely in the dictionary," I said. I could remember finding "bitch" in the dictionary when we were in fifth grade and free to roam the lower school library. Lisa had caught us and said she was going to tell. "Whom are you going to tell?" I said. "Whom?" Lisa said, like I was speaking a foreign language. My father was very particular about my grammar. "She's using correct grammar," Catherine had said, and Lisa had been so confused she'd forgotten about telling. In fact, we'd seen her dragging three other girls over to the dictionary five minutes later.

"Let's stay up past midnight," Catherine said.

"You just like missing church," I said. "I never have to go. Only time I ever went was when Rena took me to St. Joan of Arc."

"That's definitely Catholic," Catherine said. "Though I don't know if Catholic Negroes are like Catholic white people."

"I think Catholics have the same exact rules for everybody," I said.

"They scare the hell out of me," Catherine said, then laughed at her own joke. It was pretty good. "I mean, you didn't take communion or anything, did you?"

I didn't know what that meant. She told me about the wafer and even a little about what Catholics believed about transubstantiation. I remembered walking up with Rena. I was the only white person in the church. They weren't going to send me straight to Catholic hell when I was the only white person for blocks around. Rena was another story.

"They think that really
is
Jesus Christ," Catherine said. "At my church we only think he's
in
it, which isn't a whole lot less mumbo jumbo, but you can't be too careful. Those people are serious about hell. Especially for Jews. Which would kind of serve some people right."

"Hey, I'm Jewish," I said.

Catherine was silent for a second. "I know you're Jewish, but not really, you know?"

It just kind of came out. "I'm probably the most Jewish person in that whole goddamn school," I said.

"Meryl said you weren't Jewish at all."

Meryl. Meryl was part of a clique of girls who went to that Sunday school my mother was talking about. "Meryl goes to the same temple we belong to. She just never sees me because she doesn't go to services. I don't go to Sunday school because my father says it's stupid. My father says it's so un-Jewish it's practically Episcopalian."

"Hey, I'm Episcopalian!"

"Which is good if you're supposed to be. But my father says people like Meryl eat crawfish and have Christmas trees, which is all right if you're Christian, but it's stupid if you're Jewish. Jews aren't supposed to eat crawfish. And you know what Christmas trees are for."

"You eat crawfish."

"Uh-huh. At my grandmother's house. But my father doesn't. He just eats rice. I think half the time Grammy serves it just to make him mad. Maybe I shouldn't eat it, either. It's confusing. If you want the truth, I have a feeling my mother had a Christmas tree when she was little. I think I saw one in a picture once."

"Your family is as messed up as mine."

I'd have taken that as a compliment if my family had been messed up in a good a way like hers was. Her parents were too busy being crazy out of town to notice Catherine a lot of the time, so she didn't suffer any consequences of their craziness. Her mother smoked and wore beautiful clothes in the daytime, and she bought Catherine beautiful clothes, too, but she never asked whether Catherine wanted them, so Catherine never worried.

I had terrible Scrabble tiles, all high-point consonants, and Catherine must have had trouble with her tiles, too, because we were quiet enough to hear my parents fussing in their bedroom. That was when I realized my grandmother was willing to take me to Europe that summer. That was the kind of messed-upness that made me worry. Even though I hated my grandmother, I wasn't going to pass up a chance like that. It meant being sort of a traitor to my father, though. My getting even a little present from my grandmother always made him sad. So this would depress him terribly. But it was a free ride. I would promise him anything. I also would promise myself anything. I would make my grandmother sorry she took me anywhere. That's what I would promise myself. And would promise my father. I was sure I could be more adolescent and difficult than she could be nasty and overbearing. We could struggle our way across Europe, and we'd come home smiling like nothing had happened, but Grammy would say to my grandfather, "Never again." And I could say to my father, "She's sorry she was ever born."

Episcopalians didn't get complicated like that

The best way to describe how I felt was kidnapped, which is a weird thing to say, considering that I was riding in the first-class cabin on a Pan Am jet flying over the Atlantic Ocean. The only person I knew was my grandmother, and my plan was to be in control of her, but she'd already outsmarted me, and there was nothing I could do about it.

She waited until we'd taken off out of New York to pull out all the books she wanted me to look at before we landed in London. I thought I'd already seen all of them, so that was no big deal. I wasn't the kind of person who hated studying, especially historic subjects. I'd actually gone through most of them and marked places I wanted to see. Catherine had helped. She knew what was worth remembering, because she'd been dragged through a lot of museums by her mother. She'd crossed off museums and churches. But Grammy had one book that was brand-new, a Michelin guide to Germany. I plopped it on her tray table, which was empty because she didn't like to read, and I asked her why we had a guide to a country where we weren't going. I'd heard my parents make a deal. I could go, as long as I didn't go to Germany.

"Oh, I'd have given that to you before we left," Grammy said. "But I don't think your father would have liked to see you reading it. He doesn't know we're going there."

I said we weren't supposed to be going there.

She gave me this big smile, like we were going to be best friends on this trip. "Oh, we're going to have lots of fun secrets on this trip," she said.

"I don't have secrets from Daddy," I said. I said it in a friendly way. After all, I was over the ocean, headed away from home. I intended to hold my own, but I didn't want her to be mean.

"I happen to know you read Anne Frank's diary," she said. "You and your mother keep some things from your father."

I could feel my face turning red. It was going to be six weeks before I could tell my mother that she'd betrayed me. I wasn't going to confide in her anytime soon. Grammy looked awfully pleased with herself. I felt homesick. This trip wasn't going to be worthwhile at all.

"All I know is that Daddy probably has a very good reason for not going to Germany or knowing anything about Germany, so we shouldn't go there," I said.

Grammy let out a tired breath. "Oh, your father just thinks Jews shouldn't spend money there. So we aren't going to stay overnight. We'll honor his wishes. And he'll never know. The itinerary that I left behind says Austria on the days we go there."

My poor father. He was being tricked. "It's not fair," I said.

"Listen, Darby," Grammy said, "I'm doing things for you that nobody else can. Or will."

I tried to think about the catacombs and Madame Tussaud's and the Folies Bergeres. I folded my arms across my chest and tried to calm myself down. I thought I was ready for this trip with Grammy. Catherine and I had talked about it, and she'd convinced me that I wouldn't be sorry. I was sure my face looked a little grateful, but evidently it didn't.

"I know you're not going to be a brat on this trip and have me come home and tell your parents they're doing a lousy job, are you?" Grammy said.

I smiled and shook my head, no. I was smiling because I thought my parents would probably not be very upset to hear that.

* * *

I thought if I heard the word "civilized" one more time I was going to become uncivilized. Grammy's purpose in taking me to Europe was to civilize me. If she ever taught my mother to tip a soup bowl away from herself so she could teach me, it was nothing I ever knew. I knew I was supposed to switch hands when I cut my meat, but I never did it because daddy was European, and that was good enough for me. I thought Europe was a strange place to learn American manners. But Grammy had taken me there to clean me up, and that was the price I was paying. I'd already had a haircut. Grammy didn't mess too much with my hair actually. I got my blondness from my father, and even though it was kind of dishwatery by then, it was nice and wavy and a lot nicer than hers ever had been, so she respected it and settled for a trim. A trim meant neatness, and that was enough.

When we got to Paris, I wasn't going to go to the Folies Bergere, I was going to the opera. But children were allowed at the Folies Bergere, I said. I'd asked the concierge, using my very good French. Grammy spoke no French, which gave me a little power in Paris, but not as much as the person with all the money. We were going to see
Faust
, which had been playing the week Grammy and my mother had been in Paris together when my mother was my age. Grammy thought that was very important. She didn't come right out and say it, but I could tell she thought I was her second chance.

The suit I was wearing felt sort of like a costume. We'd bought it in London, and nothing I could say made any difference. It was dark blue linen with white embroidery, and I could not think of one place I was going to wear it after I got back home, not even temple. Just for starts, Rena was going to have a fit the first time it came out of the wash and needed to be ironed. But it wasn't the suit as much as the gloves. They made me feel so ridiculous. It was summertime, and I had on white cotton gloves, which made me feel like Mickey Mouse, and also like my father when he had that terrible trouble with his hands and had to sleep in gloves every night. My hands were so hot that I was sure they were sweating, and if they sweated enough, they probably were going to break out in hives and blisters and sores like Daddy's. I walked around behind Grammy like her pet human and kept telling myself that it was a hundred percent sure thing that no one I knew would see me there. I never cared what people thought of me because usually I was out being myself, but I was not being myself that night, and I needed people to know that.

We had to go out at intermission. Had to. Grammy wanted to walk around and look at people. I would have liked to stay in my seat. "Opera's sort of hard to watch," I said.

"It's an acquired taste," she said. "That's what this trip is all about, acquiring tastes." I thought she was being a little too loud. I didn't want people to hear us speaking English.

"Well, I don't understand a single word," I said.

"But you can sort of understand the story."

"Half the time they sound like chickens being killed or something," I said. I grinned. I was trying to sound dumb because I knew it drove her crazy. I whispered, "Buck, buck, buck," like I was singing it. It would be something to tell Catherine.

"You're as bad as your mother," Grammy said. "They were doing
Faust
that night, too."

She pointed toward the staircase. It was pretty spectacular looking, I had to admit. But she was pointing under it. "I opened the cable under there."

I'd heard all about it. My grandfather had sent her a telegram. She had gotten it at the hotel, but she'd waited until they were at the opera to open it. My mother said that showed how little she was paying attention to what was going on it the world. He'd told her to get out of France because Europe was about to blow up. It was the same time Daddy was trying to get out.

"I think it was very romantic," I said.

"I thought it was pretty stupid," Grammy said.

"No, I mean it was very romantic that Mama was leaving France at the same time Daddy was leaving France. They're sure they bumped into each other."