The Promise of a Normal Life: A Novel

PART ONE

1967

wait

There’s a picture of me, at eighteen, on the boat to Israel. I’m wearing a white-ribbed wool dress and looking really thin and tan. I’m gesturing to my companions at the table. They all seem to be listening to me! Alice, the French girl, is next to me, and Devora, with her wide Israeli face and black hair, who was going to be a lawyer, is across from us.

I had just finished my junior year in England. On the last day of the term, the lowering gray sky had suddenly cleared to a light fresh rain, and then sun. The University of Sussex blossomed with students and faculty carrying transistor radios and listening intently to the news in Israel. It turned out to be a war that lasted only six days. I was walking down a gravel path to my dorm room, listening to the damp crunch of each step of my blue shoes and enjoying the bright rim of clouds around the first sunset in days, when I saw Professor Schiff striding dramatically toward me. Professor Schiff was American, a friend of my uncle, married to a British woman. They had once invited me for tea, and I had walked timidly around their house full of miniature American carousels with hand-painted ponies and full-sized gumball machines equipped with early American candies. Schiff looked and acted like Leonard Bernstein. His long gray coat swooped from side to side with each step, without apology. He was larger than life and handsome. So when the dazzling Schiff approached and asked me, by name, and in a slightly challenging and matter-of-fact voice, if I’d be going to Israel now that the war was won and the holidays started, I answered, Yes, just because he’d acted as if I was there, a real person, a grown Jew. Just because I could not think, suddenly, of any reason not to; it seemed such an adventure, so stirring, so like what someone should do. After all, I had just started to read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the first book I’d ever read from my own point of view, a young woman’s. I expected my parents to forbid me to go to a war zone, though I’d been to Israel years before at a summer camp with my sister, and I was surprised when they didn’t. Their voices on the scratchy international line seemed very far away.

I flew to Paris, then took the train down to Marseille, equipped with a map and Doris Lessing. From the day my father had driven me to college in the Midwest two years before, I felt as if I’d sailed out from under a brooding cloud that had always draped me.

Then I was spending mornings at the American Express office in Marseille trying to get passage to Israel. It was just a matter of waiting, and I quickly adapted to the day’s order. Eventually, a ship would have room for me if I kept returning and waiting in line. The harbor sparkled in the morning. Sometimes, I even got letters sent through the American Express office. One from Joyce told me that our parents were fighting, that they’d played a good game of tennis the day before.

Another letter arrived from a young man I’d met through a cousin the year before, when I was working at an ad agency in New York for the summer. Ben was also going to Israel after the Six-Day War. He was going to stay with relatives. I wrote back that I was trying to get there too. I wrote back more because I was proud to have a destination than because I cared about Ben. Especially in contrast to the sexual explicitness of the Lessing book, Ben seemed paltry. I had spent one night with Ben at his parents’ house when they were out of town. We’d been to a Brahms concert in the Botanical Gardens, and it was late. He’d tucked me into his sister’s bed and sat beside me as I drifted into a cottonwood blossom sleep.

There was nothing else I needed to do. My year of essay writing at Sussex was done. Nothing I needed to read, nothing I needed to explain. And I had a plan. I only had to wait until a ship became available. The sun of southern France fell on the mosaic floor of the American Express office. After my morning wait, I would walk—invisibly, I felt—in the crowds of international travelers. In the afternoons, I slept on the rocky beach, the sun beating into my brain until I was woozy. Afterward, to cool myself, I had ice cream by a river where French families seemed to have endless picnics like the ones in the Renoir films. The tables were small round ones, and I sat alone. At night, I ate steak frites by the harbor, then retreated early to a little room at a local university. In the morning, the sun reflected off a gold dome outside my single window. The sun, after months in the cold gray of England, was mesmerizing. And finally, after two weeks of waiting, a ship had room.

There were strawberries for breakfast on the ship and bright oranges that said Jaffa in small print, in English, JAFFA, JAFFA, JAFFA. Unlike the Sunkists I was used to, whose navel peel fell into the palm, these Jaffas were tenacious. When I bit, a bright orange-red taste sprang to my tongue. At my table, Devora and Alice were returning home to Israel. At eighteen, the same age as me, Devora was already a woman. Her hair was thick, sexual somehow. Devora welcomed us, her table-mates, to the trip to Israel, to the table full of food, to our whole lives from then on. Devora did not even bother to hold the round and friendly mound of her belly in tight, as I had been taught. Alice, however, wrapped her thin arms around her waist. She wore skirts that flipped, Frenchly, I thought, at her stride. Alice painted her toenails red. Alice put an icy blue hand on my glowing one. Are you going to the dance? she asked. I ate my lox and bagel in measured bites, claiming possession of the table. Alice waited for me to answer.

Bob and Celia sat at their own table, next to us. They were married; on Celia’s finger was a big ring. Celia was Israeli but looked like Audrey Hepburn. Celia’s skin was cupped to her, tightly pale; it rounded her cheekbones and sank closely into dimples. Her hair was tidy and short, a neat straight cap on her diminutive head. Celia was a nurse. Bob had graduated from Columbia. Thus were their credentials established for me. Bob’s neck jolted out of his clean white shirt, like American boy necks I knew from westerns and college. Cosmopolitan Bob and Celia read bestsellers in English. They smiled, wearing duplicate cat-eye sunglasses.

Alice repeated, There is a dance in first class, and we could sneak up to it, after it starts. A stowaway bee buzzed over my breakfast, feasted on the open orange segment.

This is where I belong, I thought.

That night the moon draped the silky water in ribbons. Alice and I waited under warm stars. Alice was sheathed in a slinky garment with a black cashmere shawl held tight. Allons-y, said Alice when it was dark enough to escape tourist class. We streaked up the rubberized steps to first class. I, who was experiencing the whole trip as a dream, was imagining the late-night movies my father always fell asleep watching. I expected to see the couples leaning, in black and white, in simultaneous arching bends. I expected the dark cuffs of the men’s dinner jackets, the definition of their jaws against the Breck-halo hairdos of their partners. The dancers would skate over polished floors, the violins would lift waves from the sea.

At the top of the stairs, I noticed that the door was marked, in three languages, DO NOT ENTER. I heard violins and entered. Inside, lights above the small dance floor, cool as blue moons, reflected softly off the scuffed floor. I saw Alice, her skinny form already pressed like tape against the buttoned front of a man, her bony white arms dangling over his shoulders. Next to her, a gorgeous couple laughed. The woman, a blond decorated in rhinestones and wearing a gold lamé gown, touched the man with her long fingernails. I recognized her as the ship’s social director. The woman gestured in my direction, the man looked at me. He was breathtaking, his hair a dark velvet, his skin smooth and dark. Minutes later, I sensed his dark suit by my side. The man introduced himself as Jacov, smiled with onyx eyes, and offered a glass of wine. We stood together, silver cup almost touching silver cup full of cool dark wine.

I work for the ship, Jacov whispered, his voice fluttering over my head, his breath soft. I take care of people on the ship. Dancing with him, I imagined hundreds of butterflies nestled, like my hand, in Jacov’s. I am the ship beautician, he said. I do hair.

I tried to keep my breath calm, letting the words step into position. I should come to you for mine then. Mine had been scorched dry while strolling the Mediterranean shore in Marseilles.

It is lovely, Jacov said, professionally. He raised his cuffed wrist toward my hair. It hovered there, dipped as if to rest on my shoulders, then dropped to his side. He did not touch me.

When could I come then?

Jacov smiled. A waiter bowed in his direction, slightly. Jacov’s smile sparkled everywhere. I loved it flickering on me. He was all booked up, he told me.

How about lunchtime? he asked. Lunch together, I thought, pleased, imagining the white napkins of first class, the crusty bread, wondering what I would tell my tablemates. I think I am free over lunch, if you would not mind, he finished.

Why would I mind? The sangria was flattening the sharp edges of my mind.

Mind, he added, as if reading mine, if you came to the salon over the lunch hour.

The next day, the beauty salon surprised me since, of course, it was not built as one, but was a regular cabin with the beds removed and dryer chairs installed. No one else was in the salon.

Lunchtime, Jacov reminded me, shutting the door behind me, gesturing to a green vinyl chair. Jacov released the chair top, which leaned back with barge-like majesty, presenting me head first to the deep porcelain sink. My shoulders eased of their own accord against the green, my eyes fell shut. My head rocked easily on the fulcrum of Jacov’s hands. Jacov held my head in his hands and began to shampoo, rubbing with tumbling thumbs so that behind my eyes, rococo jugs rolled off shelves. He drew spirals with his fingers, paisleys in the deep undergrowth of hair. The water was warm, frothy in the shipboard sink, my hair swirling around his hands, like vines. Jacov hummed, serenading his own work. I must have drifted, supported on his palms, into a deep sleep, no longer alone, as I’d been in all the last traveling weeks. Under the cascading water of the sink, I dreamed of floral air, the primroses from the shady side of my father’s garden, the twittering of squirrels and doves.

Years later, I still puzzled about the next sequence of events. I could never remember what transpired between the shampoo and the moment in the hairdresser’s chair sitting before the mirror. There I was, upright, in the high-backed vinyl chair, my hair haloed over the top of my head, in huge pink curlers. My head weighted, slow in its turning, as if an icon in a procession. From my benign gaze into the mirror, I turned to the right, light glinting off the tight-pulled brown hair. I turned to the left, still in slow motion, tucking my chin, lowering my bedecked head slowly down from a level gaze, down the empty canvas of the mirror and into my own lap where Jacov, kneeling, had cradled his head. I saw his head, nestled between my legs. My black-and-white skirt was bunched up at my thighs; a crumpled wall of skirt obscured his face. My hands, I noticed, were gripping the chair. I saw my own legs, strong and tan, spread open on either side of him. And then, under the skirt, though his head barely moved, just a little, under my skirt, there was a wet licking. His long tongue was probing me. I felt hollowed out where he licked. His head seemed far below my conscious mind. As far away as the bottom of a chasm I had looked down into when I was a girl and hiking once in upstate New York. There too, my eyes shot down the dark walls to black water. There too, my feet seemed to be stretched inordinately, down to the cool bottom of the gorge, and my chest tall and dry atop a body distended, so the middle was only a wavery thin set of strands, and my long-ago feet, too far away to remember.

Wait, I said, breaking the silence in the voice of a child. I heard my voice simply, in English, in the small room. Jacov lifted his face, softened, like plants underwater, drifty and open. Wait. Wait … I repeated.

When I slid off the chair, my skirt flipped down over my thighs with starched familiarity. At the door, turning the handle, I found it locked. Only then did panic begin. It started to circulate in swirls around my ankles and up my naked legs. Jacov took a single long stride to the door. He twisted the knob and opened it. It hadn’t been locked.

I had taken a few slightly reeling steps down the corridor when Jacov called out. Wait, don’t go. I’ll brush it out. You should not go like that. Let me finish your hair. He sounded so reasonable and professional that I felt chastised, silly, standing in the dark hall with my hair in curlers, my arms oddly akimbo. A pleasant midday light filled the salon through the porthole windows. Jacov stood calmly by the chair, waiting …

1958

pistachios

All the early pictures of my mother are black and white, as if there really were no color then. I knew, dimly, about the trip to Cape Cod when my mother was sixteen. She’d told me, in one of her piecemeal stories, that she’d visited her cousin Belle in Provincetown on the Cape. I never met Belle but liked the name, and the familiarity with which my mother said the name, as though she didn’t seem to notice that it was beautiful, that the word itself meant beauty. To her, Belle was just the name of her cousin. Belle was there all summer, studying music. She was there with Ike, whom she later married. He got a Guggenheim. In art. I heard her pride, also the grammatically accurate and socially arrogant whom.

Belle and her boyfriend, Ike, must have met her at the Provincetown wharf. Might they have been wearing hats? You saw hats in pictures from the late twenties. My own father wore hats. Maybe Ike’s hat was straw, with a red feather upright; he was an artist. He’d have on white pants that would sound fresh and clean as they walked through the center of Provincetown, on Commercial Street. He’d carry Polina’s case with ease. That would be unquestioned; a man, even a young man, even a young artist living in a common-law marriage, would carry the suitcase.

What if Belle wrapped a suntanned arm around that young Polina’s waist and sashayed with her up the street? Belle’s long gold hair would