Too Jewish (31 page)

"My name's Darby Cooper."

"I know that," Mrs. Hirsch said. Everybody was quiet. I figured they were horrified. It was one thing to be sassy to Lillie, but this was pushing a limit. I kept my eyes wide and innocent. "But your mother's Letty Adler."

"No, my mother's Letty Cooper." Wide and innocent. It was possible to be smart in math and dumb in names.

"I thought so," Mrs. Hirsch said.

She needed to watch out, or I wasn't going to be so mad at my mother for not buying me those pajamas.

* * *

There were eight of us altogether. The only way I can explain the feeling I had by about midnight was homesickness. I'm not sure what makes a person homesick, but I think it has to do with wanting to be with mommy because she doesn't judge you. I've heard of people being homesick for a place, but I'm sure the place is like a mother. New Orleans is like a mother. Anything is all right. Of course it's also where a mother is.

Anyway, I wanted to go home. Everybody else had shorty pajamas, and I was in those terrible long silk things Grammy brought back from her last trip. It was hot in that room with so many of us in there, and if you sweat under your arms it shows up really fast on silk. Not to mention that silk is hot to begin with, while their pajamas were such light cotton and so short in the legs and sleeves that they all looked completely comfortable. I decided to go into the kitchen. At least there wouldn't be so many people giving off body heat.

Lillie was standing there, leaning against the sink, like she was on duty, waiting for someone to give her orders. I felt sorry for her, because it didn't seem to me that any amount of money was worth staying awake all night to fix snacks for spoiled girls. "It's so hot in there," I said, trying to get to be her friend in the kitchen.

"What you doing, wearing them baby nightclothes?" she said.

"My grandmother bought them for me in Japan," I said. I said it like a white person, in spite of myself. She was not going to be the person to make me cry. She was not going to be the person to make me call my mother to come get me. I walked out of the kitchen like I belonged in the other room.

Lisa was making the crank calls. Lisa wasn't in our math class, but I had French with her, and that was a class where it was easy to display contempt for learning. Lisa was one of those girls who thought it was cute to refuse to try to use a French accent.

As soon as I walked into the room, Susan put her finger to her lips, signaling me not to say something like,
Hey, Lisa, what do you think you're doing?
I just watched. Lisa might not have wanted to try for a French accent, but she was more than willing to do an extremely bad job of imitating a colored man. "I jus' got off o' work. You could send me a cab?" She stunk. She sounded to me mostly like a fifteen-year-old girl who was trying to make her voice deep and was forgetting everything else. Everyone else was holding her breath. "Yeah, uh," Lisa said. She fumbled and grabbed until she had the Newman directory in her hand and flipped the pages fast, found what she wanted. "Right, uh, 4119 State Street Drive." The other girls now had their hands over their mouths to stifle giggles. I had no clue whose address that was, but I could guess just from Jewish geography. That part of the city, the 25 postal code on the other side of Fontainebleau, was mostly the ones who were observant kinds of Jews, except for Vendome Place, of course. Vendome was two-story brick houses, Sinai-worthy. Girls like Shira and Carolyn lived over there. Probably their families once had belonged to the synagogue on Claiborne Avenue and had walked there or something. My bet was that if it was State Street Drive, it was Carolyn or Shira. Neither of whom had done anything to these girls except pass math.

"Yeah, it's all right, just press the bell," Lisa said and hung up, and the room exploded into laughter.

I asked Lisa why she didn't like colored people. She said she liked Negroes just fine, like she was correcting me; why was I asking? Because it was their cabs. I said. But they were out at night anyway, Lisa argued. So why not send a Checkered Cab? I said. "It's not as funny," Lisa said. "So you're prejudiced," I said.

"Hey, I've got a picture of President Kennedy on the wall in my room," Lisa said.

I didn't tell her that Rena had one in her living room, too, and not because she thought he was handsome.

I picked up the Newman directory, though I didn't need to look. I said, "It's either Carolyn or Shira, huh."

"Eww, Carolyn is so Jewish," Meryl said.

Carolyn.

"Yeah," Meryl said, "Carolyn and Shira are the only ones they let in from public school in seventh grade like that. I don't get it. They go to Hebrew school and everything." She looked at me. "Hey, do you go to Hebrew school?"

"No." I was soaking wet now.

"God, Darby," Linda said, "we crank-called her house one time, acting like we were a boy, and her mother answered, and she used all these Jewish words. I mean we sent a colored cab to their house, and she talked about shwotzers. What kind of Jewish stuff is that?"

This was going to be tricky. I knew some Yiddish stuff because I knew German, but if I wasn't careful this crew was going to take me up on the levee and shoot me.

"She was using a derogatory form of a German word," I said, wondering if they remembered "derogatory" from seventh-grade vocabulary lessons. "It's not very nice, but it's not Jewish. The German word's
schwartz.
Like Jerry Schwartz in twelfth grade It's German for black."

Meryl got all huffy. "Jerry Schwartz is on the basketball team. Don't call him that."

This wasn't going to go down easily. "Look, it's like Joey Weiss in our class.
Weiss
is German for white. You don't think about that."

"Hey," Linda said. "How come you know so much German? We take French. You sure you don't talk Hebrew?"

"My father taught me German, not Hebrew." I couldn't believe I was sitting there admitting it right out. If Linda told her mother, and her mother told Grammy, and Grammy told Mama, there was going to be a big blow at my house.

"I don't believe you talk anything unless you go to Hebrew school," Linda said. "Say something in German." Linda sure was forgetting about ever learning to talk math language from me.

Everybody was all interested. This was going to be a more fun game than sending Negro cabs to poor Carolyn's house. For everybody except poor Carolyn.

"Hey, say, You are smart and beautiful,'" Linda said.

So I said, "
Du bist bose und hasslich."
That meant, "You are mean and ugly."

"That sounds exactly like the way Carolyn's mother talks," Lisa said.

No one was listening. "Okay, me now," Susan said. I want you to say, Boys think I'm sexy.'"

Oh, I wished Daddy were there. We loved private jokes with ourselves. Susan was never going to be sexy. Her hair was stick-straight, and so was her body. Her money was sexy. "Okay, wait," I said, like I was doing a trick, which in a way I was. "Here goes.
Manner denken dass Ich rieche wie Pferdescheisse."

I grinned proudly. Nobody knew I'd just said, "Boys think I smell like horseshit."

"Monner dinkin doss ickoh, I can't remember it all," Susan said.

I told her the important word was
Pferdescheisse.
All she had to do was point to herself sexily and say it.

"Easy. Fair-duh shice," Susan said.

"Hey
, you
really sound German," Linda said to me. "I don't get it. Susan doesn't sound German."

I explained that my father was from Germany and spoke to me in German.

"Nazis are from Germany," Meryl said. "And your name's not Jewish. You're probably a Nazi."

"Yeah, my mom says your dad's different or something," Linda said.

Nothing had hurt my feelings yet, but that did. I wasn't going to cry in front of them, though. "Cooper was K-U-P-E-R until my father got to Ellis Island and they changed it." I realized they didn't have a clue what that meant. "That's where you go when you come from Europe." I didn't say Germany. They had limits. "I'm Jewish, for Chrissakes." That was a pretty good joke. I looked around, but nobody got it.

"How do we know you're not a Nazi?" Meryl said.

Now I was really close to crying. "Because the Nazis killed my grandmother."

"If the Nazis killed her," Meryl said, "how can she be your grandmother, when she was dead before you were born? I mean, the war ended in what, 1945?"

Oh, thank goodness for stupidity. I couldn't cry in the face of stupidity. "Because my father had a mother, and that's how you have a grandmother, no matter what," I said.

"Prove it," Meryl said.

"There's a bundle of letters in my parents' bottom desk drawer," I said.

"Letters from a real Nazi?" Lisa said. Lisa never paid attention.

One more second and I really was going to cry.

"Letters from my Jewish grandmother right before the Nazis took her away," I said.

They all got quiet on that one.

Finally Susan said, "Um, you guys want to call Carolyn's house and see if the cab got there? I'll be the dispatcher."

Linda hollered for Lillie to make tuna fish sandwiches, which were on white bread cut in triangles with no crusts. If I didn't eat any, I could make it to morning without throwing up. Perfect little sandwiches.

My fourth-period class let out five minutes early that day because my teacher had to go to the dentist, so for once I was in the cafeteria before all the tables filled up. I made it through the short line with my Coke and decided the smartest place to sit was at the end of a table. But it didn't help. Ten minutes later, Susan came up to me and told me to scoot over a seat, and then Linda took the place on the other side of me, while Meryl practically slammed down her tray across the table. They assumed something, and I didn't want to think that all of a sudden I was part of a set of four friends.

"It's not your fault," Linda said to me.

I had a mouthful of potato chips. "What," I said, not caring if some crumbs sprayed out. Salty potato chips weren't as perfect as warm brownies, but in their own way they were close.

Meryl was looking me straight in the eye from across the table, like she was sizing me up. "She really doesn't know, guys."

They all laughed. "Well, it's not like her mom gets called into Mrs. Prescott's office or anything," Meryl said.

I was jammed in. I started wrapping up my sandwich. My poor potato chips. "Hey, that's a compliment," Linda said.

I just sat there. Those girls were complicated. It was possible to be complicated without being a genius.

"
Our
moms all got the your ass is going to public school' talk," Linda said. "See why that's a compliment?"

I had to smile. Being able to care so little was astonishingly funny. Though I did remember that it wasn't my fault. Which meant it really was my fault.

"But it's my fault," I said. Daddy always said the best defense was a good offense. That was surely something he got from the Army.

"Oh, no," Susan said. Susan wasn't the worst phony in the group, but she was pretty bad right then. She put too many syllables in "no."

"Listen," Meryl said, and she splayed her hands up in front of herself, palms facing me, like she was stopping traffic. "I think about twelve people are flunking geometry. Well, not flunking. I mean, I'm getting a D."

"Hey, my average is about 68," Linda said. She sounded like she wanted me to be proud of her. "That ought to be really passing if you think about it. Especially in a math class. It's way more than half."

I said, "Sorry."

"We're not blaming you," Meryl said. "We get our homework right. But evidently she doesn't count homework."

I could have told them that. Mrs. Walter was not born yesterday.

"It's tests," Susan said. "Maybe if you wrote a little bigger"

Susan sat at an angle behind me. She could have copied off my paper. I looked at her to see if she was joking. It was hard to tell.

"You're joking," I said. "That woman has more eyes than a fly. She'd get us in so much trouble even public school wouldn't want us."

Susan gave the other two a "well, I tried" look. I couldn't believe it. I was going to have to write Catherine about this one. Though for all I knew, by now she was in some kind of cheating ring at boarding school.

"You know the old bitch better than we do," Meryl said, and she sounded accepting. "Anyway, I don't care. My dad gives a shitpile of money to the annual fund. That's the number they look at."

* * *

They invited me to a slumber party at my own house. I don't remember exactly how it happened because it was so smooth and easy, but before I knew it, it seemed like a very good idea. I couldn't figure out if those girls were the ones who made me want to belong, or if I talked my own self into it. All I knew was that by the time I went home that afternoon, I needed to have that party.

I blasted into the kitchen and made the announcement without even saying hello. Mama and Rena usually were at the table just breathing for a little while at that time of day. "I have to have a slumber party," I said.

"Is this for school?" my mother said.

"Well, it's people from school," I said.

"Social," she said.

"I guess so."

"Here?" Rena said.

"Unless I have it at Grammy's," I said, looking at my mother. "But everybody said they wanted to see my house."

Meryl had said my house was really cute. I wondered whether they'd had their mother's drive them by or something.

I saw my mother exchange funny looks with Rena.

"Hey, we don't have to do much." I thought about the one party I'd been to. "Just have snacks. And Rena can stay over and make brownies and sandwiches, and we'll have Oreos and Cokes and Fritos." In our house we always had Hydrox cookies and Pepsis and potato chips.

Rena said, "You don't have to pay me, no."

"I don't have to humiliate you, either," my mother said. "Rena's not staying."

I was kind of relieved when she said that. I thought Lillie standing in Linda's kitchen was practically slavery. Even though Lillie kind of deserved whatever she got, being so mean about my pajamas.