mom would burn some rice and eat it in front of the TV. Setting the table meant asking my sister to move over on the couch. My sister, who would be eating ants-on-a-log.
JENNICA GREEN again fails to explain what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
And here’s why I can’t explain it just like that: because I have to explain about California before I can explain about New York. Or, like, about San Jose before about Manhattan.
I mean, San Jose.
I am from San Jose, California. A city of never quite one million people. Well, city? Municipality. Sunny, and quiet, and always a little brisk at night, and the summers never humid. With lawns and lanes, all spread out sort of low, across the flats of this valley, the Santa Clara Valley. Where before I was born there were orchards.
And there was such a sense of shame about the orchards! The first mention by any of my teachers of, like, the deportation of San Jose’s Japantown in World War II? Junior year of high school. But the first mention of the annihilation of Santa Clara Valley’s orchards? Second grade, Ms. Rappe, Trace Elementary. We thought Ms. Rappe was mean, because she made us do multiplication a year early. And because she yelled at us sometimes. She had an allergy to chalk dust and so she used the dust-free kind, which was shinier and crumblier than regular chalk and which made that horrible noise on the chalkboard, but if we even peeped when her chalk inevitably scratched, she would yell at us. And she would yell at us if we called her Mrs. instead of Ms., like, “I learned your name, you should learn mine.” But despite all that, she still maintained some popularity because of her two Great Danes, these mammoth Great Danes that she would bring to school a few times a year and let the smallest kindergarteners ride like ponies during recess. For example, Nadine Hanamoto was tiny enough to get to ride Ms. Rappe’s Great Danes when we were in kindergarten, although she and I only became friends later, in the ninth grade, when we had English together. Anyway. Ms. Rappe was forever nostalgic about the orchards. Cherry and apricot and pear orchards. And, along the ridges of Santa Clara Valley, to the south and east, cattle ranches, on estates granted by the king of Spain. She was forever waxing sappy, and forever making us do coloring projects involving the Spanish missions and local fruits and fruit blossoms. She told us it was our civic duty to save the coastal redwoods because they were the last real trees left.
The history is, between the world wars, developers started cutting down the fruit trees in Santa Clara Valley and subdividing the orchards. So by the time I got to high school, in 1986, you could tell the age of the shade trees in San Jose by the age of the houses. Like, “That’s an Eichler from the fifties, so that maple must be in its thirties.” Eichler was this notorious developer, to be mentioned only with distaste. It was a point of ridiculous pride in my family that our house was built in 1924 and was in the Rose Garden District, which Eichler hardly touched. And that our house had wood-frame windows, not aluminum. And that instead of having a swimming pool in our backyard, we had cherry trees, and a cement fountain of a shepherd pulling a thorn from his foot that came from a 1920s Sears, Roebuck catalogue. I knew about all of this before I knew how to multiply, about Eichlers and wood-frame windows and fruit trees versus shade trees.
And if there was a big earthquake, I knew how to turn off the gas.
I mean, just, this atmosphere of desolation, in San Jose, as a teenager. In 1985, when I was thirteen, the City of San Jose started a redevelopment campaign, “San Jose Is Growing Up.” With a purple-and-pink logo that was the exact color combination I would have picked for my bat mitzvah if I’d had a bat mitzvah. The city planted these sycamores, these gangling sycamores, along 1st Street and San Carlos Avenue. And they proposed a new downtown convention center and a new downtown shopping concourse and a new downtown light-rail corridor. And the Fairmont built a twenty-story hotel on Market Street. It was San Jose’s tallest building. Twenty stories, salmon pink, with an open-air swimming pool on its fourth-floor patio. After the graduation ceremony from middle school, Herbert Hoover Middle School, the dare was to sneak into the Fairmont Hotel and go for a swim. Except no one would admit to knowing what county bus line would get us from our graduation ceremony at the Rose Garden over to Market Street, because familiarity with the county bus lines was shameful. So instead we all walked over to the Rosicrucian Museum, twenty or thirty of us, in our navy blue vinyl graduation gowns. And we kicked each other with the chlorinated water from the fountain surrounding the Rosicrucian statue of the hippopotamus god. And then we went home and felt exquisitely desolate and waited for high school to start.
This is San Jose. This is where I am from.
MITCHELL and SUSAN GREEN explain about the bat mitzvah (early August 2000):
M: She complained and complained, and we relented.
S: You relented. I never needed any convincing. She said, “I don’t believe in Torah, you don’t believe in Torah, what’s the point?” And I said, “Look, you’re missing the chance to have a big party and make some money.” She said, “I’ll get a job if I need money.” And I thought, What more can you ask from an eleven-year-old? Jennica is very sensible when she needs to be.
M: But can we say we would have let Gabe quit? Would we have let him, as a boy, at age eleven, drop out of his Hebrew classes? We tried very hard to be evenhanded, but would we have let Gabe quit?
S: Well, Gabe never complained, so it was never an issue. But Jennica hated those classes. And I can’t say I blame her. She never became friends with a single one of the girls at that synagogue. Nor did Gabe, I might add, with the boys. And, the mothers. These women were just so … Asking me wasn’t I anxious about keeping the kids in public school. Good riddance. I told Jennica, You may not marry any right-wing evangelicals; otherwise, as far as religion, do what you want to do.
M: It’s more than that. She should marry a Jew.
S: Mitchell has some opinions about this.
M: I don’t have some opinions, I have one opinion. Jennica should marry a Jew. I had the same opinion about Gabe, and his wife is Jewish. And it’s just my opinion. I’ll let the fiancé know my opinion, and then I’ll keep my mouth shut.
S: And Jennica did get a job, when she finally did need money. Not just in college, but very early on in high school. She wanted to join the Los Gatos Rowing Club, but Mitchell put his foot down about the fees, which were very high. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars, to join a rowing club. So Jennica got a job at Yogurt U.S.A. and paid her own way for three years. Because she wanted to be on a rowing team.
M: She said that there was no point in being Jewish in California. Remember this? “Why won’t the Green family admit that there is no point in being Jewish in California? We aren’t wandering in the desert.” And then she joins a rowing club.
JENNICA GREEN succumbs to nostalgia; the uptown No. 6 train, forget it (early August 2000):
All of which is background for why it was so … poignant to get a letter from Nadine about her brother.
I said Nadine was cosmopolitan. Which … fine, caveats … but sophistication is always relative. What I mean is, by the time Nadine and I became close, in high school, she had tastes and some opinions. She was nearly through with her parents and was buying herself a used car, with her own savings, she said. And she was making her own arrangements with a city, on terms she seemed to be negotiating for herself. Which was impressive to me. It was like she was the sole proprietor of her own flea market. All these curiosities, these five-and-dime thrills. She would always be chewing on hard candies with indecipherable Asian wrappers. Licorice? Sesame? Taffy from, like, Korea? Or Thailand? She wouldn’t tell me unless I put one in my mouth. She bought them at Vietnamese and Salvadoran
