Chapter 17
Jake told me the dentist had gone well and that Alex had called to say he would be delayed due to a situation at work but would get to Boca Raton as soon as possible. Several neighbors had asked Jake to come for a meal. I couldn’t help but think that I could be home on my own for a thousand years and not one neighbor would propose I stop in for a meal. Sexism. Only men were invited for a “you must be so hungry and lonely with your spouse out of town” dinner.
“I said yes to Karen and Bob.”
“They don’t eat. They drink,” I said.
“I know.”
I heard the toaster pop up. I imagined Jake browning the cinnamon-raisin bread he had a weakness for adding a gob of cream cheese on top, and spreading it evenly all around.
“What are you eating?” I said to see if I had guessed correctly.
“Cinnamon bread with butter. We’re out of cream cheese.” He asked whether I’d gone to see the property he’d mentioned, the expanded Cape in Great Barrington. “The more I think about it, the more I want to move. Don’t be stubborn. Go check on that house with Di. She’s an agent.”
“Jake, please sing a new tune. I’m not looking, and in any case, I’d never enlist Di to help. Today, she announced she’s having friends over on Friday. I have the feeling she’d like me to make myself scarce. Get this part. She calls it a book club, but no one reads. I don’t want to spend one more minute with her than necessary. And I don’t think she’s the best influence for Callie. She’s cold, calculating. A narcissist. If I choose to go house hunting, I’ll call someone else.”
“You know, Jodi, I’ve always believed in doing business with people we know. She’s Lisa’s mother-in-law. She won’t steer us wrong. Besides, she’ll be upset if you retain another agent. And rightly so.”
“She won’t find out. I’m not buying. The most I’d be doing is exploring.”
“You’re there, I’m not. Do whatever you think is best, but please go look,” he said.
“Okay. I’ll reach out to another agent in Great Barrington. How’s the toast?”
“Not worth a dime without the cream cheese.”
I knew he’d say that. I had, after all, known him since I was eighteen. I met him the first day of college, and we had grown up together since then. I thought back to meeting him, how it all unfolded. Although my father had no direct hand in introducing us, he certainly influenced my choice. I went straight from living under my parents’ roof to a relationship with Jake.
My father had come to America from Europe. He believed in living a certain way, and he always made clear what he thought. The night before I left for college, after dinner, he beckoned me into the living room of our modest house. I anticipated that he expected to hold court from his wide armchair.
“Come in here,” he had said in the tone of a king addressing a messenger.
I was in the kitchen reading about the war in Vietnam in the newspaper, wallpaper blooming with harvest gold and white flowers, my mother forever at the sink. I sported sandals that a friend had procured on her summer trip to Israel, bell-bottom jeans, a peasant top. I dropped the Hartford Courant , hurried into the living room immediately, expecting a serious conversation, parting words of wisdom. He’d been munching on an apple. He handed me his apple core wrapped in a paper napkin.
“Throw this away,” he had said, no emotion in his face.
I hated when he handed me his apple core. Honestly, was there anything more repellant than another person’s apple core? The handing of the core was a habit of his that my brother and I had grown up with. I considered the Red Delicious more disgusting than a McIntosh, the squishy Golden Delicious most vile.
Not one of us—not me, my younger brother, or my mother—ever mentioned how gross it was to take his core from him and chuck the slimy seeds and browning center in the garbage. It was our duty. My mother would retrieve a core from Dad, ask if he wanted another, and throw the first core away. She’d bring him another apple, talk to him as he chomped, then dispose of the latest remnant of that one as well. If I was in the same room, I would relax in the high-back chair by the window with my book open, observe her subservience, and feel relieved I wasn’t the one he had asked. No one ever said no to my father. I never doubted his dedication to our family, and I lived in fear of disappointing him (I could still remember each occasion I did). If he told me to be home by ten o’clock, I was in at 9:45 p.m. A lifetime later, I still fretted about disappointing, failing, the people I loved, and I made decisions based on what they would think.
After he died, I continued to wonder what he would have advised at every turn I made. The mantra in my head: “What would Daddy say?” If I was unsure, I’d ask Jake what he thought my dad would do. I felt fortunate that Jake had known my parents.
That night before college, after I threw away his apple core, Dad leaned back in his armchair, opposite the box television with the big back and antennae. His eyes were bright, giving the impression he was cheery. “Tomorrow, you start college,” he began, lifting his head a bit as if to say how great is that? My daughter. College.
I had enrolled in a school I had never seen—although it was only a quick drive from our home in West Hartford. I had applied early decision. The school color was deep purple, my favorite. So that was enough for me. In any case, back then, high school seniors didn’t travel to check out colleges or apply to legions of schools. Many never set foot on their college campuses until freshman orientation.
I waited for my father’s next words.
“Although you could commute, we’ve permitted you to live on the campus.”
Thank heaven they agreed to that, I thought. I had to find my own path. I couldn’t do it living at home. I didn’t have any specific rules I wished to break. I wanted to breathe. That was it. I selected courses in subjects I’d never studied before. I refused to room with a girlfriend from high school because her mother knew my mother, and I wanted to be with somebody entirely new to me. My mother couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to room with her. “But she’s a known quantity, she’s Jewish, and her father is a dentist. You’d be able to shop for bedspreads together before the semester starts.” The preceding quote sums up my mother.
“Mom, no. And no one uses a bedspread anymore.”
“No bedspread?” she asked, questioning my knowledge of interior decorating.
“Just a blanket,” I said, attempting to nudge my mom into modernity the same way my grown kids now attempted to nudge me.
“So, when a girlfriend comes over, she plotzes down right on your blanket?”
My mother, a woman willing to toss someone else’s apple core, felt that sitting on a blanket was revolting? And I did take note of the word girlfriend —because a boy on a girl’s quilt was beyond my mother’s imagination.
With a nod of his head, Dad instructed me to sit, so I took the piano bench, anticipating his words of wisdom. He had many memorable sayings about how to behave in the world. This included the adage, “You take a horse around the world. It still comes back a horse.” I clasped my hands, anxious to hear the words I would carry with me to the dorm room I would not share with a girl I already knew whose father was a dentist.
He leaned toward me. “Listen carefully, Jodi.”
I’m all ears, Dad. Impart your wisdom.
“If I hear as much as a word about your association with marijuana, drugs, or boys, I will tug you out of that dorm so fast your arm will come off.”
Stunned, I rocked with fear. The drugs I couldn’t care less about—but the boys? Did he not understand this was my only chance to find a husband?
I nodded. I certainly didn’t want him to know I had an interest in any of the no-nos.
“Dad, I’m grateful.” I was the first person in my family to go to college, but no one ever mentioned that. My parents assumed I would attend college. The point of their existence was to make life better for my younger brother and me, the next generation. I would pass their accomplishments on by having my children surpass me. On and on. Forever. In three generations, we’d elevate our mishpucha —the endearing Yiddish word for “family”—from penniless immigrants unable to speak English to stalwart, highly educated leaders in preapproved fields of employment.
“You must set an example for your brother,” he said sternly.
I nodded in agreement. I was always setting an example for my brother, who considered me a goody-two-shoes nerd. I lived in fear of my father. My brother? His goal was to put fear in my mother. Easy for him to do because, unlike my father, my mother was sensitive, softer than the inside of a challah . When upset, she shed tears as she washed the dinner plates. It seemed as though the faucet was always running.
After my father dismissed me, I went to my room and studied the office-supply box I’d decorated with markers and tried to decide what to store inside. I was pretty sure my dad wouldn’t hear a thing that would cause him to drag me home, but still I imagined him ordering me out of the dorm, forcing me into his car like the KGB. I imagined bawling in the back seat as he drove through Connecticut, until we’d hit a tie-up due to repairs on Interstate 84 and, worse than going home forever, I’d have to sit in traffic with him—for eternity.
When I landed at school, the very first night, my roommate and I were invited to a party thrown by graduate students—in their twenties. I was a socially immature eighteen. They were men—not boys—to me. The party was off campus in their apartment on Ledge Avenue. I’d never been in an apartment where young people lived before, never conjured such a mystical place. To me at that age, an apartment was where my aunt lived and held Thanksgiving dinner and we ate sweet potatoes with marshmallows.
The boys’ place was jam packed, dark except for strobe lights, pungent with the scent of marijuana. Tattered fake Breuer chairs, some with holes in the rattan, crowded the space. The group Chicago blared from giant speakers. I zigged left instead of right to see a large room with four unmade beds, gold carpet that had been walked on before my bubbe was born, curtains of wooden beads dividing one student’s space from another’s.
I returned to the main room. A long-haired guy with a stubbly chin stood next to me near the window and offered me a hit of his joint. I saw my father’s face in my head and wondered whether taking a hit was worth losing this new world that I already liked. I held the joint trying to decide. And then it happened. I heard a police siren on the avenue. Another siren, longer and louder. Horns piercing the night. I passed the joint posthaste back to the guy, now so close to me I could feel his breath. He wore the college-issue fashion of the day—a short-sleeved tie-dyed T-shirt, torn bell-bottom jeans, and a wide leather belt.
The siren got closer. What now? What if I was arrested and my dad had to climb out of his bed, pull on his pants, and come get me at the station? Worse yet, what if it was my father who’d called the police because he knew where I was and with whom and what I was doing? That was it. He had alerted the cops. What a fool I was, squandering my chance to live on campus on my very first night. In no time, I’d be commuting to some second-rate school back and forth from the bedroom in the West Hartford house I grew up in. I’d be as good as incarcerated—setting an example for my brother.
“You seem concerned,” I heard someone say. I swiveled to see the same tie-dye guy to whom I had returned the joint. His smile said, Would you like a hit?
I shook my head too vigorously.
“You’re shaking.” He seemed genuinely concerned.
Hold steady, Jodi. “Well, the sirens.”
“Happens all the time.”
“Oh,” I said weakly.
“I’m Jake Wexler. If you like, I can accompany you to campus.”
Walk me? He was a stranger. What would be worse: staying in the apartment about to be raided or walking to my dormitory with a stranger?
“I’m in the business program.”
Well, now I feel safe, I thought sarcastically.
“I appreciate it,” I said as I proceeded toward my roomie, who was wrapped in a boy. I touched her shoulder. “I’m going.” She didn’t seem to care. We’d known each other no more than a few hours, and it was evident from first glance we had nothing in common.
As I dashed back to campus, I imagined two enormous policemen banging on the door to the sin-filled apartment I had escaped—then knocking it down with an axe and arresting everyone inside.
I burrowed into bed under the blanket my mother was afraid my girlfriends would sit on. My heart was still thumping when my roommate finally returned.
“Best first night of college ever,” she said, jumping in the air like the cheerleader she had been in high school.
Jake Wexler came by my dorm, the one and only freshman dorm, the next day to find me. As soon as Jake tracked me down, my roommate raised a finely plucked eyebrow, said she was off to the cafeteria, then the library, and wouldn’t be back for hours.
I joined Jake, who had made himself comfortable on my bright Marimekko quilt, a surprise from my mother. Jake—I have a weakness for the name Jake—touched my thigh. We smoked a joint. My father didn’t find out. I was not yanked out of school.
A few weeks later, certain I was in love, I asked what I knew my father would want to know. “Jake, what does your dad do for a living?”