Too Jewish (29 page)

She was silent for a moment, probably wondering, just like I was, whether to keep talking at all. "That school's a Petri dish, and you know it. I'm sure nobody thinks I pay attention, but I know almost everybody's name."

I laughed. We only had 31 girls in our class, and we took gym together. If she didn't know everybody's name, she really wasn't listening.

"What? I'm supposed to know all of those people? They all look alike. They all dress alike."

I told her that was definitely true. I tried to picture myself in English class. I didn't look like them.

"I've seen you hanging around with them since Catherine left," Becca said.

"Not really," I said.

"Really," Becca said. "You're on a reconnaissance mission. I wasn't born yesterday."

Oh, she used my father's favorite expression. I wanted her to like me.

"Listen," she said. "High school is where you do work so you can go to college. Nothing more. I don't want to know anybody."

I wanted to say,
Not even me?
but Becca had been looking into the Petri dish when I was wriggling around in there with Linda Hirsch.

"Who's Ethan?" I said.

"Somebody good," she said. Her tone was sweet, not shutting me out at all.

"Okay," I said, and we hung up.

My father's nightmare woke me up. My bedroom adjoins theirs, and I can eavesdrop if I want, though I never do because their private conversations probably would creep me out. When I heard the cries, screams like he was being flayed with a whip, I got out of my bed and listened. "The Scheinmanns want to kill your mother," I heard him sobbing to my mother after she had calmed him down. "No, I mean they actually would kill her. Auschwitz! I don't want to know about Auschwitz!"

Their words got too garbled for me to make them out, and after a couple of minutes I heard their door open and shut, and I knew one of them was going into the other part of the house. I hoped it was my mother because I was going to go out there, and I was shy about talking to a father who'd been that upset. He never got upset, which was what was wrong with him. But men weren't supposed to get upset. It was just that Daddy was a particular man who needed to.

I found him in the living room. The light was on, and he was on the sofa with the letters on the coffee table. That's what I called them, The Letters. He'd shown them to me when I was about eight, and I'd looked at them a few times since, but never in his presence. I'd always made sure no one was watching, not even Rena. They were in German, in peculiar European penmanship, and the older I got, the more I could understand. I'd looked at them a few months earlier, and I'd been able to read them pretty fluently. I'd tied them back exactly as I'd found them and gone into my room and cried.

They were all the letters my father had received from his mother from Germany.

I always pictured my grandmother Dora as a little fat lady with my daddy's face, so innocent, loving my young daddy, thinking of him, and my young daddy missing his little fat mother. I was homesick for both of them when I read the letters.

"I heard you guys," I said, trying to sound sleepy. "What's going on?"

"I was having bad dreams," Daddy said. "I can't go back to sleep. So I felt like going through some stuff."

"I think that's the world's worst idea," I said right out.

"What do you know about these?" he said.

"I read them sometimes," I said. "The handwriting's hard, but the German gets easier. You told me what they were when I was maybe eight."

"No, I didn't."

"How would I have known?" I said.

He thought about that for a moment. "Maybe your mother told you." He looked a little angry.

"I remember things," I said. "I always wanted to look at my baby book because, hey, any kid wants to look at her baby book. And when I was going through the drawer I found the letters. So you just said, Oh, when I came to America, my mother wrote me letters.'"

He had to admit that made sense. But he didn't understand why I read them.

I'd read them so many times, and I had a different reason each time. Since my terrible trip with Grammy, I'd read them twice, and it had been almost unbearable, seeing each word through the filter of her destiny, a destiny she didn't know about, but feared. Grammy had been wrong, of course, saying that my grandmother didn't know what was going to happen to her. She wanted to come to America. She didn't want to go to the camps. She didn't want to be transported. She knew people didn't come back when they left the barracks. This little old woman, who started off asking my daddy if he went to synagogue on the high holy days, eventually spent all of her days knowing she was not going to die a natural death. So much of that knowing was in the letters. And she was asking my father to take it away. He hadn't.

The truth was that I'd read the letters to know my grandmother, and then I'd read them to know my father. I wasn't sure how to tell him that. "I guess I need to read them," I said.

"And you don't think I need to?" Daddy said

I knew the worst thing he could do would be to read them. I grieved over his mother when I read them, and I didn't even know her. He would surely miss her, and he would have to think about not getting her the money she needed to save her life. He would think it was his fault. Or maybe he would think it was my grandparents' fault. I certainly thought it was my grandparents' fault. Either way, he would be sadder than he already was.

"You don't need to read them," I said. "You already knew your mother. I didn't. This is how I know her."

"Memories fade, Darby, memories fade."

"I think that's good," I said.

He smiled at me, a sleepy, sad, loving smile. Almost a gotcha smile. "You don't need to separate me from my memories," he said.

I was thinking that now his memories were going to be changed, that now he'd read the letters the way I did, with the specter of Auschwitz laid over them, that he wouldn't be able to stand them. He'd get some kind of sick, far worse than when his hands almost burned off. I came out with the truth. "Grammy ruined everything. If you read them, you'll know what was going to happen. You won't be able to see that she didn't know."

"I think I can put myself in her place," he said.

"Can't you just take my word for it?" I said. I was a lousy liar. He could tell I'd read the letters with Zyklon B gas poisoning every page.

He let me win. He started to put the letters back together. He was doing it wrong, like he'd never done it before. I took them away from him before he could mess them up. I was an expert, having done it enough times so carefully because I didn't want anyone to suspect I'd touched them. "If you were in her place, and I was in yours, how would you feel?" I said.

"You mean, if they started rounding up Jews and shooting them on the levee, and you were in California?"

"Kind of possible, huh," I said.

"If they didn't hate Negroes more." He was right. "Well," he said, "if I didn't know better—and I wouldn't know better—I'd be wondering why you didn't get your movie-star friends to send their private jets to come get me. And I'd think you were ungrateful and spoiled. And I'd hope you felt guilty for the rest of your life."

I tried to imagine my daddy being that sort of father. That was what this was all about, him and me imagining ourselves as other people. I knew he wasn't talking about his real self. But he also wasn't talking about his real mother. I knew his real mother from her letters. She would have gone to the levee with a little bit of peace that her Bernie was out in the California sun with famous people. She would have wanted him to take care of himself. If he'd chartered a plane to come fight the Ku Klux Klan, she'd have been frightened that he'd have crashed into a mountain. I was sure he sent her letters signed with love.

"Does it count that I love you?" I said.

"It counts a lot," Daddy said.

I put the letters back into the drawer. They were tied with a slender ribbon, which made a little bow on the top. I laid the packet down in a corner of the drawer. No one ever went into that drawer, so I knew it wouldn't get rearranged for any reason. So I fixed the bow in a way that made both ends turn up as if they were wrapping around the loops. That way I could check in a few days to see whether my father had gone back when I wasn't around and taken them out. I had a feeling he wouldn't, but I wanted to be sure. If he suddenly got upset, I'd know why.

* * *

My father started getting migraines after that. I checked the bottom drawer of the desk, and the ribbon on the letter packet never changed, but maybe once a week Daddy would get a headache so bad that he couldn't do anything but lie in a dark room and holler if he heard even a floorboard creak. Rena was terrified of him, and my mother was back into her college major, believing that it was caused by whatever wasn't coming out in his nightmares. I simply was sure I was going to drop something and kill him with the very sound of it.

We knew they were migraines because Daddy went to the doctor the second time thinking he had a brain tumor. The doctor gave him codeine, so then he got relief by throwing up, and I could hear him no matter where I went in the house. Nothing makes a girl feel more unsure about life than her father throwing up. He couldn't work for a whole day when he had a headache, which made Grammy say he was faking, and it made me ask my mother why she told Grammy to begin with. "I thought it might humanize your father for her," Mama said. "Some of her best friends have migraines, so I thought it might make him socially acceptable. Even worthy of sympathy."

"If it's not happening to her, it's not happening," I said. I figured there was some fancy psychological term for being that way, but I liked how it sounded as I said it.

"He needs to talk to somebody," my mother said. We were in the car on the way home from Grammy's.

"I assume you mean a shrink," I said. I wished she had a friend she could talk to about this. It wasn't supposed to be my business. But my mother relied on me a lot.

"Oh, don't say shrink,'" Mama said. "That makes it sound stupid,"

Seeing a shrink, and that's the word for it, was Mama's solution for everything lately. Her friend Shirley wasn't married, and she was angry at her boss lately, and my mother told Shirley she should see a psychiatrist because Shirley had problems with authority, and that was probably why she wasn't married and wasn't getting along with a man who had power over her. She told Daddy all about it over dinner, so I got to hear about it, and I thought about the Shirley I knew, who I thought was really funny and had the right idea about most things.

"Okay, I assume you mean Daddy should see a psychiatrist," I said. "But I think he's a little complicated for that."

"You know that the smarter a person is, the more he can profit from seeing a therapist."

"Being smart has nothing to do with it," I said. Sometimes I got a little tired of the importance placed on being smart.

I'd gone too far. My mother's tone got annoyed. "Being smart and being educated are two different things, too," she said. "I majored in psychology, so I hope you'll keep a low profile when I talk to your daddy about this."

"What if you don't talk about it in front of me?" I said.

"But he's always in his best mood when his plate's full."

I couldn't argue with that. Sometimes Daddy took seconds before he finished firsts.

"Trust me," my mother said, "I'll make it sound downright medical."

And she did. Over dinner, she used the term psychosomatic like she'd discovered it, until Daddy put his fork down and said it was an insult. "I know the word doesn't imply my pain's not real, but it definitely sounds as if it does," he said.

"Oh, your pain's real," my mother said. She sounded like she was talking to a child, and I tried to give her a dirty look, but she'd forgotten I was in the room. I kept eating.

"Then please don't oversimplify it," Daddy said.

"That's the trouble," she said. "It's too complicated. You need to sort it out."

"You're dredging up your bachelor's degree again. You want me to go talk to Dr. Freud's emissary in New Orleans."

My mother nodded. "I feel bad for you, Bernie," she said. "I don't know any other solution. When you're in that much pain, taking a pill that makes you sick isn't a good solution."

"I've been thinking of laying off the codeine myself," he said.

I was glad to hear that. I didn't know the connection between many things, but I knew codeine made people throw up.

"That's not my point!" my mother said

"Okay, listen," my father said. "Nobody knows of any organic reason why people have migraines. That doesn't mean there isn't one. And nobody knows there's an emotional reason why I get the headaches. Though maybe there is one. I know you're going to say it's more than a coincidence that they started when I learned about my mother, but the world's full of coincidences. Either way, I'll tell you what I think."

"Okay," my mother said.

"I think I'm supposed to have them."

After that night, he still had headaches, but not as often. I never told my father that he was a biblical sort of guy. My parents didn't know I read the bible. The Jewish one, that is. They had one in the house, leftover from my mother's childhood. I had to know who all those people were in the books I read in school: even Kipling went into the jungle talking about Nineveh and Tyre. The God I found in the Jewish bible sure was mean. He liked to teach people a lesson. He must have been reform Jewish.

It never failed, that I would go to my locker to put my books away and get my lunch and decide to get everything lined up for next period, and by the time I got to the cafeteria, all the tables were mostly filled. Sure, there were a few seats here and there, but it meant I had to move in where groups of friends already were together. If I got there early, I could sit down alone and people would have to choose to sit next to me, but I always forgot. Having Catherine had been such nice protection, even though Catherine bought hot lunch every day. I was standing at the edge of the tables when Linda called to me to come sit with her and her friends. As my father always said,
hesitate and all is lost
. It was one of the lines he'd learned in the army. The other was,
never volunteer
.