by a different girl every time. She did see a lot of Hank, though: Hank and Irving. She started coming to Los Angeles on her own, riding the Red Car line up from Long Beach and then taking a bus to their apartment so that she could spend the weekend with her new “sister,” as Hank insisted on being called. “I would go anywhere with her. Even buying milk was an adventure. She and Irving took me to the movies and gave me books to read, ideas to think about. Hank changed the way I dressed, the way I wore my hair and makeup. The way I spoke. She had such high energy and so much assurance and style and … and verve. Yes, that’s probably the best word. She had verve, and she was enchanting, or I was enchanted with her. I suppose it was a combination of the two …”
One of the women I did not know said, “You were young. It sounds like you were infatuated.”
“My heart used to race when I saw her,” Merona said in a quiet voice. Then: “That kind of infatuation—it blinds you. To a lot of things, and for a long time.”
Another of the women asked the inevitable question: How was it that she went from being tootz to being married to her brother’s brother-in-law?
This, too, was a story I knew, because pretty much since the day I understood that these two sets of siblings had married each other, I had been asking how that had happened—everyone who met our family wondered the same thing. Sometimes my mother made it sound like a comedy (“There was no one else, and I was an old maid of twenty-three”). But sometimes she told the story as though she were looking at it herself … not for the first time, exactly, but with a kind of first-time curiosity or bewilderment, as if even she, after all these years, had not quite understood how it came about.
In the serious versions she began with her mother’s illness. After Sylvia was diagnosed with breast cancer, Shalom asked Merona to come home from school to help out. Merona took a leave from UCLA and returned to Long Beach. It was not an easy time for her. She had left behind her studies, her independent life. Now she was back in the world of her parents, the congregation, the temple. Huffy, watching all this from a distance, and acting as a conjurer once again, came up with the idea that Marty and his best friend, Murray, should invite her out, just to distract her for an evening or two, to let a little air into her life. And so on two successive weekends Merona rode up to Hank and Irv’s apartment and went out first with Murray, then with Marty. She was eighteen; Marty was twenty-five. “He was charismatic and intelligent and more grown up than any of the other boys I’d gone out with, and once I worked up the courage to ask him to stop calling me tootz, we actually started to talk to each other and, what with all the people we already had in common, we found we had things to say to each other and, well, it was a long time ago now, dear …”
That was how she had put it to me. To the women in our living room she said, “I was attracted to Marty—very. I was also asleep. Weren’t we all? I suppose part of me thought that it worked for my brother with his sister. My mother’s illness scared me … and my father liked and trusted Marty, which was important to me … and it’s not as if we hurried to get married. We got to know each other over time, several years actually, and we kept on going together even after our siblings made their disapproval known. They were so worried. ‘What if something goes wrong? How will that affect us?’ Irving said. ‘Have you thought about that?’ But I think there was more to it than their selfishness. I think Hank felt I somehow wasn’t enough for Marty, smart enough or pretty enough or powerful enough to become one of the Mighty Franks, or maybe it was just simply that I wasn’t Hank-like, or Huff-like, enough. Yes, it was probably that most of all …”
She paused. “The secret conversations—you would not believe how many there were. I would go up to Marty’s house on Lookout, and by the chair in the living room there would be an ashtray full of cigarette butts with lipstick on them. I recognized the color. Salmon Ice. Hank’s color. She had been there, talking and smoking and trying to convince him that it was a terrible mistake—that I was a mistake. It was one thing for me to be her husband’s kid sister but something else entirely for me to be her brother’s wife.”
From her audience, murmuring, digesting.
“It’s no wonder that we could only become engaged when they were away in Europe,” my mother continued. “I’ll never forget the letter she wrote to me from France: ‘Sister-in-law twice over, hurrah!’ it began. ‘I think this has to be one of the happiest moments in my life.’”
The room was silent for a moment … then another …
“From the woman with the ashtray full of cigarette butts?”
“The very same,” said my mother. “Welcome to my world.”
Greenvalley Road: From the beginning of my consciousness it was as alive to me as certain people. I knew the house, our house, better than I knew most human beings. I knew its scents, its sounds. I knew when the light or the changing currents of air suggested dramas about to build, moods about to shift. My father’s temper—I could feel it gathering steam five rooms away. I could feel it leveling off afterward too. I knew where everyone was by the way sounds carried. I knew who was awake and who was asleep. I knew from the depressions in the seat cushions which chairs or sofas had been recently vacated, and I knew who had eaten what, and often when, from the trace scents that lingered in the kitchen and elsewhere. I knew what each room looked like from the outside, the downstairs rooms anyway, because ever since I had been a child I loved to slip away, especially at night when the lights were on, and peer in through each of the windows. It was an old, old game: I would pretend that I did not live on Greenvalley, that I had happened upon it the way you happened upon an unknown house, and I would try to figure out who these people were and what their lives were like.
Even when I was inside I tried to find ways to alter my perspective. I used to play a different game when I was a very small child. I would lie on the floor on Greenvalley, in the living room or the dining room or my bedroom or even at the top of the stairs, and I would imagine the house turned upside down, and I would imagine myself walking on the ceiling-turned-floor, with its soffits and beams and thresholds underfoot altering the familiar configuration of the spaces I had known forever.
That was what listening to my mother tell her stories to the women in her consciousness-raising group was like. It was as if the house I knew and loved so well had changed shape before my very eyes, not turned upside down so much as inside out.
Where would all this storytelling lead? Nowhere simple—that one thing seemed pretty clear.
After the women took a break to go to the bathroom and replenish the Triscuits, they sat down again, and instead of moving on, as I prayed they would, one of them asked my mother the other inevitable question that came up when people got to know our family. Not Linda, who must have known, but one of the others wondered how it was that these two such different mothers, these grandmothers, ended up living together.
This story, too, I never before heard laid out the way my mother put it that night. She described the suddenness of her father’s death—at fifty-seven, of a heart attack, just a year after he’d been “invited” to retire from the congregation that he and her mother had spent twenty years of their lives building. Sylvia and Shalom had so recently moved out to Tujunga to be near one of Sylvia’s sisters that they had not yet unpacked his books. They had no life out in the deep Valley and no friends other than Sylvia’s one sister—my grandmother barely knew where to buy a decent loaf of bread. Shalom, my mother told the women, had died “most inconveniently for my brother and sister-in-law”—just two weeks before Hank and Irving were due to go on location with a movie. Without consulting Merona, who had adored her father and was utterly unprepared for his death and was so grief-stricken, as she described it, that she had scarcely gotten out of bed for ten days, her brother and sister-in-law took it upon themselves to rent Sylvia a smaller place to live in Tujunga,
