her constant refrain. She thought it would be romantic if there were invading armies we had to flee, or if we were …
S: She wanted to join the leisure class.
M: … or if we were winning a fortune shipping boatloads of spice on the high seas, or if the family was harboring an assassin, or if there was incest secretly afoot.
S: And there was incest afoot, on your side.
M: What, Simmy and Lala?
S: Well?
M: That was no secret. They bragged about it. My father’s parents were first cousins.
S: Jennica thought we led boring lives. What do you tell a sixteen-year-old? “Be grateful you live in peace and comfort”? And expect that to be the end of it? “Nothing interesting ever happens to us. All you and Dad ever did was go to college and buy a house and have us.” I told her she could say whatever she wanted to us, since we were her parents, but she shouldn’t just go around telling other people that she thought they led boring lives, because she would hurt someone’s feelings. She said, “At least hurting someone’s feelings would be interesting.” What do you say to that?
M: And it’s not as if our family is notable for its ordinariness. I mean, the stories your family has about the war?
S: Or that cousin of yours.
M: Cousin of mine?
S: In Israel, with the skin disease and the spa.
M: Oh, he is a freak. Robby, with his friends from EST.
S: Robby. Oh, he was awful. Those showers we had to use.
M: Nineteen eighty-one. Susan and I went to Israel and left the kids with Susan’s parents. We visited my cousin Robby at his spa, outside Haifa. These people, at the spa. They thought that magnetized mud would halt the spread of certain cancers. This kind of pathetic fantasy. People dying for their ignorance. Just losing weight and disassembling their minds out there in the desert. Talking in EST jargon about the chemotherapy conspiracy, over dinner in their communal cafeteria.
S: And what dinners. Quinoa with yeast sauce. Kelp salad.
M: Robby’s spa was macrobiotic. He served seaweed grown at some awful kibbutz somewhere that he wanted to take us to visit. The only Jewish socialist solar-powered aquaculture tanks in the world. In his converted Toyota pickup, he wanted to drive us halfway across Israel with his Russian girlfriend. Who was the worst of them all. A wraith of a woman, talking about Talmud and rising signs versus moon signs and Kabbalistic poetry. As if she’d only learned English from Robby himself.
S: Oh, I am so glad we got that ticket to Rome instead.
M: What a tragedy we left Gabe and Jennica behind. That trip would have taught her something about illustriousness.
S: We told her, my mother and her parents escaped Hitler, your father’s grandparents moved to the Bronx from Russia with nothing and worked in cigar factories and pencil factories, my father’s family has that whole fascinating side in Venezuela, the ranchers, and the one cousin in New Zealand. And she says, “It’s just you guys who are boring, it’s just my parents. The whole Green family is interesting except my parents.” What do you say to that? But you see what it is she likes about New York City.
M: And since when aren’t we interesting?
NADINE HANAMOTO weighs whether or not the Greens were illustrious (early August 2000):
I don’t think Jenny ever appreciated that she lived in a house where no one was insane. I mean, you’d go over to the Greens’, open their refrigerator …
My family’s refrigerator was, like, some gross, burned fried rice that my mom made, my dad’s beer, and some limp celery. You know ants-on-a-log? Where you fill a celery stalk with peanut butter and sprinkle it with raisins? If you made ants-on-alog at my family’s house, the celery would be the least crunchy part.
But you’d go over to the Greens’, open their huge new refrigerator, and in the condiments compartment, like: pickled herring, pickled grape leaves, four kinds of mustard, salsa de no-pales, anchovy paste, smoked Riga sprats, some jar fi lled with Susan Green’s homemade mayonnaise, every single possible variety of salad dressing. Susan Green’s homemade jams, with these labels that Gabe created with their dot-matrix printer. And that was just the condiments. In the meat drawer, all these white packages, deli wrapped: smoked salmon, Havarti, roast beef, head cheese, two different kinds of salami, a whole, real liverwurst, blood sausage, Gorgonzola, three kinds of Brie, deli pickles.
You open up their pantry doors: Nutella. Three kinds of rye bread, six different kinds of vinegar, and a complete Tupperware dream set filled with three kinds of rice and two kinds of sugar and four kinds of flour, and whole-wheat wagon-wheel pasta and tomato-infused fettuccine and spinach-infused spaghetti and a mountain of ramen. The Tupperware sales guy would open this pantry and stand tippy-toe with pride.
This is the Greens’ kitchen.
I’d be over there, and I would be pleading with Jenny to let me eat, but there was always some reason why we had to wait. I’d be like, “Please, just let me put some blue cheese on these Wheat Thins.” Jenny’d be like, “No, I think my mom is making Schmüchlblärchl tonight, so we should wait. You can have an olive maybe.” So I’m devouring the Greens’ olives, famished. Jenny’s eating nothing.
Susan Green would come in with a paper sack full of groceries. I’d be like, Why? Why? Why is she buying more? When there is this whole gorgeous picnic in the fridge? And Susan Green would be like, “Well, Nadine, you can have those olives if you want, but tonight I’m making Schmüchlblärchl.”
It didn’t matter what was for dinner, it was always worse than what was already in the fridge. Because Susan Green cooked some weird shit. Jenny and Gabe were totally brainwashed. Susan would be like, “You should stay for dinner, Nadine. Tonight we’re having the Apricot Dish.” And she’d be chopping apricots into a frying pan full of ground turkey sautéed in cumin. And Mitchell Green would come home from work and be like, “Smells like the Apricot Dish! Let’s put on La Traviata.” Then they’d all start arguing about which opera to listen to while eating the Apricot Dish. Gabe would say, “So long as there are no arias in a minor key, because minor keys inhibit digestion.” I’d be like, What are these people talking about? And Jenny would be saying, “The best thing with the Apricot Dish is the goat’s-milk yogurt.” And Mitchell would be like, “I agree,” and start burrowing through their fridge for the goat’s-milk yogurt.
Jenny and I would set the table. With napkins and napkin rings and wooden bowls for the salad. And then, at seven P.M. sharp, they’d all sit down together at this table for six. Susan, Mitchell, Jenny, Gabe, me, and one chair where they would balance all nineteen kinds of salad dressing they had brought out for Susan’s shiitake mushroom and red bean salad. And out would come the Schmüchlblärchl and the Apricot Dish and some mashed potatoes. They’d all be like, “Yum! The Apricot Dish!” I’d be like, Why? Why are we eating fried apricots and turkey with goat’s-milk yogurt? When there is deli meat right in the fridge? And rye bread in the breadbox? The Greens aren’t insane, like my family, so why, why must we suffer? Meanwhile, Mitchell would be like, “Nadine, this is an important aria. This is where Violetta declares the folly of love,” and he starts singing along. And I’d be making myself swallow the Schmüchlblärchl and thinking about the pastrami and the mustard.
At
