Yellow （1977） #2
“Oren doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him,” Jackson said.
“It’s not that. It’s just that I can only be myself.
I don’t see the point of pretending to be someone else.
I don’t understand actors—that seems like the worst job in the world—day after day pretending to be someone else.
Always having to speak someone else’s words, express someone else’s thoughts. ” I shuddered.
Reuben nodded. “I’ve noticed you boys trying to slip away after church…”
“It seems like Reverend Jack has summoned a legion to keep us from going off together.”
“That’s what I really wanted to talk to you about. Starting next Sunday, I’ll create a distraction with the recessional hymn so you can slip out unmolested.”
Sunday, March 27, 1977, Locust Hollow—Reuben kept his promise.
Today, the recessional hymn was so unexpected, powerful, and perfect, the congregation paused their hurried departure to stop and listen as if caught in an enchantment, while Jackson and I slipped away unmolested.
The weather was surprisingly mild for March, so we went swimming up at the quarry.
Thursday, April 14, 1977, Locust Hollow—Today, my college acceptance letter arrived.
I felt like the long-closed door to my prison cell was finally creaking open.
My grandfather came upon me like a shadow.
Spying the letter in my hand, knowing I had been waiting for it, seeing the smile on my face, he taunted me.
Pointing at the letter in my hand, he said dismissively, “That makes no never mind. You can’t go.”
“You can’t stop me,” I said.
“How you gonna pay for college, boy?”
I could hear Mr. Fabricant’s words when I’d asked the same question: “If you have the will, we will find a way.” I’d had the will, and he’d kept his word.
Mr. Fabricant is our French teacher, an unkempt, short man who teaches us French while wearing a tattered putty-colored London Fog trench coat.
Most days, he listlessly leads us through declining French verbs and the singing of the French National anthem and “Frere Jacques” all while drunk.
He is a terrible French teacher but proved to be an excellent guide through the thicket of applications, essays, and scholarship requests that lead to college admission.
“I got a scholarship,” I said, “and I can work part-time for walking-around money.”
I walked away before my grandfather could close his mouth.
Friday, May 13, 1977, Locust Hollow—Tonight was prom.
Prom always has a black-and-white color scheme; black-and-white posters and stills from old movies lend a bit of credibility to the scheme, as if it were a deliberate lark rather than a grim necessity.
You see, ours is a town where no one has money for prom dresses and rented tuxedos, so prom has always used this color scheme so the girls can wear hand-me-down wedding dresses and the boys’ their fathers’ old funeral suits.
From late winter until early spring, every seamstress and anyone who can thread a needle is pressed into service to transform the wedding dresses of mothers, aunts, and even grandmothers into prom dresses.
Tonight, Jackson and I sat together in a tree and watched our classmates arrive in their recycled finery.
Just before the dance started, Reverend Jack—who strongly objects to it each year, dancing being “a vertical expression of a horizontal proposition”— arrived with a contingent of deaconesses in tow; each carried a wooden ruler as if it were a crucifix in the presence of evil.
“What are the rulers for?” I asked Jackson.
“It’s to make sure the dancers are at least six inches apart at all times.”
I stared at him; he fell onto his back and crossed his arms under his head. I worried he’d fall out of our tree and, curling around him with my head on his chest, wrapped my arms around him.
Of course, Jackson and I didn’t go. Going with anyone besides each other was impossible; going together was a bridge too far even for us.
We watched our classmates, paired up boy-girl, boy-girl, marching solemnly with subdued excitement up to the gymnasium.
The last to arrive were Rio and his girlfriend, Victoria.
She was wrapped in yards of ruffles and tulle—her aunt was a set designer at the community theatre two towns over.
Rio, boldly, was wearing his grandfather’s zoot suit from the 1940s.
Shockingly yellow, it featured high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers and a long coat with wide padded shoulders and still wider lapels.
On his head, crowning his now-slicked-down hair, was a broad-brimmed yellow hat.
Once everyone was inside, we retreated to the fields that ringed the high school and watched the lights, listened to laughter and music: Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything,” K.C.
and The Sunshine Band’s “I’m Your Boogie Man,” and Natalie Cole’s “I’ve Got Love on My Mind,” which really drew the rulers into action, we imagined.
Saturday, June 25, 1977, Locust Hollow—Graduation was yesterday.
My grandfather didn’t attend. Neither did my brothers.
Today, Mr. Fabricant, as is his tradition, had the senior class at his house—an immaculate two-story cottage placed in the middle of an acre of pristine green lawn and bordered in the back by a neat row of apple trees—for a picnic to celebrate our graduation.
Mr. Fabricant asked me to help him bring out the homemade sausage and hamburgers for the grill.
On the way to the kitchen, I spied his living room, full of plump, white velvet sofas like clouds sealed in clear plastic with gold-colored plastic trim.
The tall, iridescent white lamps dripping crystals were capped with tall, white shades wrapped in cellophane.
Plastic runners crisscrossed the white shag carpeting like highways through fields of white corn.
The wall behind the sofa was mirrored; the other three walls were upholstered in crushed red velvet.
It was the most beautiful and pristine room I’d ever seen.
I vowed one day I would live in a house like it while I avoided my classmates’ curious stares and waited anxiously for Jackson to arrive.
Unable to stop him from attending altogether, Reverend Jack had settled for delaying Jackson’s arrival as long as possible to decrease his exposure to Mr. Fabricant’s radical ideas and encouragement of free thinking.
Reverend Jack didn’t approve of Mr. Fabricant encouraging his students to leave Locust Hollow and find their places in the larger world any more than he appreciated Mr. Fabricant’s exhortation to examine the beliefs they’d been taught and to discard those beliefs as necessary.
Thursday, August 18, 1977, Locust Hollow—The hallway outside our only bathroom stank of Hai Karate cologne, my clue that my grandfather was going out with one of the several church widows he was making time with.
Usually, these dates occurred on Friday and Saturday evening, but the stench was unmistakable and positive proof he had a date.
My grandfather is neither good-looking nor particularly clean and certainly without any discernable charm; still, he’s made his way through the widows in the church choir and is now at work on the deaconesses. I guess a man shared is better than no man at all.
Anyway, I knew he was going out and my brothers were already in bed, so it was an opportunity to spend time with Jackson.
I called him. We had a signal system set up: when one of us wanted to talk or see the other, one of us would call the other and let the phone ring once then hang up.
The other would then call back if it was safe.
We were forced to make love in the dark; we felt like we were dancing in the moonlight.
He goes with boys, they whispered about each of us, and we hadn’t cared.
My brothers—that pigeon-shooting, puppy-drowning, football-throwing legion of assholes—discovered Jackson and me in the barn, in medias res, at our most vulnerable and defenseless.
My brothers stared at us agog, twittering and giggling, the looks on their faces as difficult to decipher as the sounds they made.
My brothers don’t speak; instead, they utter a series of shrieks and squawks that vary in pitch and volume, but which are uniformly rhythmic and repetitive, from morning to night.
At times, their emissions are quite prolonged and dramatic, making me think they are singing an opera, but instead of French or German, they are singing in a language of their own making.
As Jackson struggled to get dressed under their wide-eyed stares like spotlights, he shouted, “I thought you said they were in bed.”
“They were,” I said, struggling to dress myself. “Get out of here,” I shouted at my brothers. “Go back to bed.” When they stood still staring, I chased them away with a certain violent gesture and a shout as guttural as the sounds they make.
By the time my grandfather returned, Jackson was safely away, and my brothers and I were in bed. I hoped for sleep, which eluded me until the early hours.
Friday, August 19, 1977, Locust Hollow—Jackson and I hadn’t spoken since he rushed away yesterday, after my brothers caught us in the barn, so I was anxious to see him at work today.
Jackson works at Lewisohn’s like I do, but while I work the sales floor and the registers, he works as the “receiver”—unloading deliveries and sweeping and mopping and cleaning the bathrooms. So, we don’t work together, but Mr. Lewisohn lets us take our breaks together.
We don’t know if he’s oblivious to the rumors about us or if, as the lone Jews in Locust Hollow, he and his bookkeeper wife are inclined to cut us some slack since we share the same pain of exclusion.
Jackson was pacing in the breakroom when I arrived. “Sunday is gonna be a shitshow,” he said.
I shrugged. “It always is. They’ll pray over us, put their hands on us. They’ve done it before.”