I Was Told There'd Be Cake Page 3
In 1989, the summer I turned ten, there was a girl who lived in my cabin, a girl from Darien, Connecticut, with long wavy blond hair, who was set to play Mary in the Christmas play. She had also been the recipient of the Madrid girl’s gift, the Secret Santa jackpot. Perhaps if I’d had God in my life growing up I would have been able to understand the total and complete unfairness of the universe rewarding mean girls. I had befriended other wavy blond bunkmates before, but this girl was new to camp and I hated her on sight. She used to stand in the middle of the cabin and flip her hair upside down, combing it from the neck down, a habit which I found bizarrely unsanitary. She wore pearl earrings while swimming in the lake and slept beneath a Ralph Lauren comforter. She used Skin So Soft instead of Off!, and wore Esprit bathing suits instead of the regulation army-navy surplus store ones. In her monogrammed Caboodle, she had a sticker collection that would make grown women weep. She was mean to the ugly girls, the flat-chested girls, and most of the Spanish girls (not a wise move, as one of them would turn out to be the niece of that country’s president). She went to a boarding school in Connecticut, and I knew that she represented the end of my childhood.
Within the next few years, the camp would double the cost of an eight-week stay. Then they would do away with the regulation uniforms and puke green one-piece swimsuits of which we all owned three (like a troupe of Smurfettes with the same dress on every hanger). Eventually, campers would be allowed to watch television, call home, and bare their midriffs. Girls would no longer be asked to address their counselors as “Miss,” cell phones would blink in the night along with the lightning bugs, and Field Day would be recorded live for the new website.
One thing would remain the same: the powerful popularity of blondes. My being flat in the chest and poofy on the head did not win me points with the Girl from Darien. And points with her suddenly seemed more valuable than the colored feathers we earned for treading water. Not only did she have a steady boyfriend, she had tongue-kissed him. A modeling scout had approached her in the Stamford mall and asked her to model for Guess Jeans but her mother said she was too young. If not for that, we would have all seen her before we met her.
One night, as we lay awake in our bunks, the Girl from Darien told us a story about her mother, who, while attending the University of Oklahoma, had met a Jewish girl and asked her if she had horns. She expressed a ten-year-old’s outrage at the narrow-mindedness of the world. Her frankness was met with commiseration in the dark and a glee at how adult our conversation was. My mind spun. I had no idea that people thought Jews had horns. Where I came from, Jews had good grades and BMWs. I would have just as soon asked the Girl from Darien if she had wings. I also didn’t know why having horns was an insult. Unicorns had horns and they were the coolest creatures in existence. What I did know was that this girl was far too proud of her tale of injustice.
My father did this sometimes, so I recognized it—a tweaked-out kind of racism in which one is abnormally accepting of others simply because they’re different. To this day, he has a keen interest in how my black and gay friends are doing. He loves seeing old Chinese men and Mexican babies. Once, at a local Indian restaurant, my mother asked the waiter how to pronounce a dish. At which point Dad chimed in with, “He doesn’t know, Derry! Do you have any idea how many dialects there are in India? Millions!” It was one of those moments when I wished to be better educated or fluent in an obscure language. “They’re not called dialects, Dad, they’re called [insert foreign word I don’t know]. And there are only [insert number I don’t know] of them.”
Lying there in the chilly New Hampshire night, wrapping my Blankey around my hands like a muff, I became prickly on behalf of my former religion and its keratin-faced adherents.
“I don’t think the Jews need our pity,” I whispered into the rafters. “I don’t think anyone who has seen me would believe I have horns either.”
“Everyone needs pity,” the Girl from Darien replied, whip smart, “and I’m not just saying that because I believe in God.”
I mumbled, “Skyblankeyspeechkim,” and rolled over in my squeaky bunk. Did girls like her not have summer homes or Swiss Alps to terrorize? I wanted her to leave my humble hamlet of goodness. One week later, I got my wish. It was just before the Christmas play and I was playing a strenuous game of Ping-Pong when word came that the Girl from Darien had slammed into a dock while waterskiing, broken her toe, and had to be taken to the hospital in Keene. Her parents picked her up from the ER and took her with them on vacation in Bermuda rather than returning her to a world of mothballs and communal showers. In a twist worthy of Showgirls, I wound up taking her role as Mary, the lead in the big Christmas play. The religious significance was insignificant. My nervousness stemmed from the fact that the girl who played Mary was always blond. Also, the only other time I had appeared on the camp’s stage was the year before, when I had “choreographed” a dance to Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” and leapt around stage in stirrup pants until the tape mercifully faded to silence.
Being Mary would require me to memorize a few more lines than that of my prior character, a sheep. I waited in the open air backstage with the wise women, giggling and getting bit by mosquitoes. I missed my cue to enter, but Joseph (whose actual name was Josephine) pulled me by the arm while we mumbled our lines and wandered around stage like drunken homeless people. After being turned away from the inn, Joseph and I settled on a pile of center stage hay and curled up beneath a giant crucifix some girls had made in woodshop. And then I gave birth to Jesus.
Shortly after, the Girl from Darien returned to us. Metallic WELCOME letters hung from the rafter above her bunk. SweeTarts and FireBalls, Starburst and Dum-Dums lay waiting to be eaten on her pinstriped pillow. It was only because I returned early to the cabin—after a minor altercation between some lake water and my nasal passages—that I came upon this display. I squeaked short in my flip-flops. I stole an unkosher watermelon Starburst from her pillow, then flopped down on my bed and ate in celebration with myself. Had I known the plague about to befall the camp, I would have taken two.
Starting with our cabin, a few scalps in our bunk began to get scratched. Then the whole cabin. Then our whole area of camp. A lice epidemic had broken out. The Girl from Darien’s days of casual hair brushing in the middle of the room were numbered. Apparently we all misunderstood—she had not fled to Bermuda but somewhere near Bali. A remote communal-living island with personal palm boys but a poor laundering system. We threw out all our combs and scrunchies. Like the Gestapo, the camp directors came in the middle of the night. They took our hair towels, drove them away on golf carts, and set them ablaze in a field somewhere. The last week of camp, the Girl from Darien hugged me good-bye and said she was sure I made a “fine” Mary. She pressed that waterfall of an infested blond mane to mine.
“Everyone needs pity,” I whispered, and hugged her back.
I was sent home with a letter, a box of special shampoo, and a plastic comb. When I got off the bus—which let us off at a McDonald’s on the Connecticut–New York border—I handed my mother the note. I was petrified. If there was a God in her house, it was the God of Hygiene. She was furious. Since the age of two, any illness was treated as something that was done to me. I may as well have marched across the parking lot with a black eye.
I had to get rid of a lot of my lice-ridden childhood icons after that summer, including my felt archery champion patch, my “Native American” feathered headdress, and an amiable stuffed rabbit named Bruce, whose hobbies included warding off ghosts and being thrown at snoring girls. I was also forced to throw away the candle that I had used in vespers, through no fault of the candle itself, but the birchwood holder it came in, which was “probably full of bugs and mildew.” I hid my Blankey.
I was upset. I felt lost. I felt itchy. Camp was over and I was back in Westchester, where everything meaningful was gone. My mother, high on Nix fumes and annoyed from triple washing all my sheets, pulled my Mary cost
ume out of my camp regulation duffel bag and examined it carefully. She pinched the lace collar between her fingers and, after some time, sniffed it. The scent of mothballs filled the room.
“What the fuck is this?”
I had written her about my role in the play and she had been proud, even found it funny, but seeing physical evidence of it was different. I had never heard her curse before—at least not with such venom and not without slapping her hand over her mouth immediately afterward. It wasn’t the kind of rage I would have chosen for her, as I knew it wasn’t on my behalf. It had no traces of shame or nostalgia or regret. It did not say, “This has gone too far,” or, “My child could grow up to become a fanatical but vital leader of the Christian right. Whatever shall I do?” It was instead simpler than that, an in-the-moment disgust that did not reflect any changes to come. We would still be bad Jews. We would still have a Christmas tree with favorite ornaments. We would still feast like Catholics on the Christmas Yule log with plastic reindeer prancing through icing. We would have the biggest tree on the block, and bagels and lox the next day, and light Hanukah candles as carefully as surgeons to the tune of a prayer we barely knew. But this costume was not us.
She threw it at me. “Toss it,” she said, moving on to my socks and underwear with a pair of salad tongs. “Now.”
I walked obediently toward the garbage, keeping my eyes fixed on my mother. She systematically and unemotionally dismantled a summer’s worth of grass-stained clothes, leaky sun-screen bottles, and a cardboard snowflake with loosely glued glitter that fell in slow motion. Her fingers sparkled like an angel’s as she wiped them clean on her jeans. And for the first time, I found God.
THE URSULA COOKIE
There is a point in most abusive relationships when it occurs to the beaten party that they are guilty of putting their face in the way of someone else’s fist. The speed that sucker was going, it was bound to hit someone, so why not you? You’re qualified. Why not be the first in line for a grade-A white-collar beat-down? Pack up your college degree and camp out in your new suit the night before your interview. Pitch a tent using a Mont-blanc as the pole and watermarked résumés for walls. When your future boss comes into the office, greeting the downtrodden mouse of an assistant you hope to replace with an “Any messages now?” let yourself scream inside: “Pick me! Punch me! Thank you, ma’am, may I have another?!” Pay your dues like a Girl Scout and crumble like a thin mint. I’ll tell you why not.
By the time I graduated, I had groomed myself into an ideal liberal-arts worker bee with a pitch-perfect buzz for magazine publishing. I had more magazine internships under my belt than I had actual belts. My first was for Westchester Family magazine, located in the office space above a bicycle repair shop in Mamaroneck. The hours I logged in there were some of the more useless of my life. Which is really saying something. I remember almost nothing of my experience except for the tray of inexplicably unwrapped cherry frosted Pop-Tarts in the office kitchen and the one article they allowed me to write all summer: a two-hundred-word reportage masterpiece on a teen fashion show at Macy’s. In it, I attempted to explore the seedy underbelly of thirteen-year-old runway models, all of whom had better skin and better social lives than I did. What came out went something like: Shoulder pads. All bad?
Before long, I moved on to simultaneously bigger and skinnier things. Like some heartless family “forgetting” to bring their mangy cat with them when they moved, I quickly dropped Westchester Family off my résumé as soon as I had something with national cachet and a 212 area code to replace it. Over the course of three summer internships in Manhattan I filed articles, ran errands, mastered the electric hole puncher, transcribed interviews that took place on windy sailboats, and gave myself more than one paper cut in that little stretch of webbing between one’s thumb and one’s index finger. I had gone on wild mousse chases for mauve mascara at one publication and a synonym for “decoupage” at another. I had been drooled on by sleeping Metro North commuters in neckties. I had blisters on my feet and Frederic Fekkai in my hair. Ladies and gentlemen: I had blown on another woman’s tea.
And this merely accounts for my jobs that were illuminated by fluorescent bulbs. It says nothing of my illustrious mall career at various high-end clothing retailers, places where there’s an eternal snobbery tug-of-war between customer and employee. Nor have I mentioned my brief stint as a stylist to my neighbor’s cats or my even briefer stint as a tennis coach to prepubescent teens, popping out the phrase “shake hands with the racquet” with the consistency of a ball machine.
Yet despite my self-grooming for fashion magazines, or perhaps because of it, I knew two things: (1) there is no synonym for “decoupage” and (2) I wanted out as fast as possible when it came time for my first job.
It’s not that I didn’t want to learn about thickening vs. lengthening mascara, because truly, I did. My mother, bless her heart, had taught me many life skills but knowing the difference between matte and powder foundation was not among them. But what I realized was that magazines would be ruined for me if I made them my life. I would no longer be able to enjoy Vogue on the train if I associated its creation with my commute. Books, however, seemed a more indestructible passion. I read. I was a reader. “Are you a big reader?” the headhunters would say, squinting their eyes from their Midtown East cubicle farms. Oh, big. And with that, I shifted my focus away from the notoriously cold and calculating world of glossy mastheads and back to the warm, welcoming womb of bound prose. I was ready for my true calling. I was ready for a career in book publishing. I could smell the glue already.
The first time I saw Ursula she came rushing past me with two large canvas bags slung over each shoulder, holding a full-sized floor lamp by its neck. The tassels on the shade vibrated and the plug dragged behind her like a small obedient dog. I sat invisibly in the waiting room of the strangely old-fashioned seven-person office that would become my home for the next year or so. The office secretary, Lenore, nodded at me and I followed the tail of the lamp down the hall and into Ursula’s office. It looked like the cover shot for some gag book on how not to feng shui your home. Stacks of manuscripts formed tiny forts around smaller stacks of recently published books. These in turn hid untold treasures, perhaps in the form of loose contracts or petrified rubber bands that had not seen the sunlight through the unwashed windows since the 1970s. It was the kind of room that you look at and think, simply: forensics. I was smitten with every asthma-inducing bit of it. The search for one’s first professional job is not unlike a magical love potion: when one wants to fall in love with the next thing one sees, one generally does.
Ursula asked me to sit down as she pulled manuscript after manuscript out of the bags. It was as if the Paris Review had a clown car and she had rented it. For the grand finale, she pulled out a hand-painted vase with an image of the Mona Lisa holding a rose in her teeth.
“Isn’t it terrific?” she said. “Flea market.”
Then she plopped down in her old leather chair, smiled, and said: “So.”
We talked for over two hours and I fell in love with her. And she fell in love with me back. She stopped picking up the phone. We discussed the state of book publishing, the state of Iowa, the seminal decades for the art of the short story. We were both Leos and we both had a penchant for bad Mexican food. Better still, she was the exact same age as my mother and her husband was the exact same age as my father. She talked faster than I did, laughed at everything I said, and called me “a good egg.” Eventually I became so comfortable that when she asked me how my friends would describe me, I said, “Oh, you know, a loose cannon”—using air quotes—“no, but seriously…”
If book publishing was this woman, then book publishing was for me. I felt almost Calvinistically destined to be her assistant. This was a woman who would take me under her wing. This was a woman who needed someone to understand her and anticipate her needs. This was a woman who needed her plants watered. I could do these things. When I got home from the inter
view she had already called, brimming with compliments and offering me the job.
Sarah was the name of the assistant I replaced. She stayed for two days to train me before going back to grad school to become a prison psychologist studying the calming effects of Chopin on mass murderers. Those two days were dreamy and simple. I was the storefront and Sarah was the supply room. Every time Ursula asked me a question, I went back and asked Sarah, who provided me with the answer. On Sarah’s last day, Ursula took us out to lunch, where my eagerness to please was an early-onset disease. I intentionally left Sarah in the dust during a conversation about Virginia Woolf simply because I happened to have written my senior thesis on the woman. I figured, what did it matter? I was only competing against myself and, really, she was already gone. By Friday the only sign Sarah had sat in the same chair for two years was a postcard of Alcatraz tacked to the wall, her initials on Ursula’s letters, and a single sheet of vital phone numbers as if I were inheriting an incontinent house pet.
At this point I feel I would be remiss to not mention the prevalence of a specific kind of person who enters the field of book publishing. This is the English lit major who never should have left academia, a genius who has read all of V. S. Naipaul but can’t photocopy title pages right side up. This person is very thin, possibly vegan, probably Ivy League. He or she feels as if answering the phone in a chipper voice is a form of legalized prostitution. He or she has a single quirky and defining fashion piece, usually red or black, and waxes poetic about typewriters and the British, having never truly known either. Regardless of sex, they all want to be David Foster Wallace when they grow up.
I was not this person. My stint as a vegan was brief, as was my tolerance for postcolonial Indian literature. Plus I had a cast-iron upper-middle-class work ethic that was akin to a superpower. Or at least an electric fence—one that simply wouldn’t let me deny my basic skills as a glorified secretary. Nothing was beneath me but the sidewalk. There was no fax machine I couldn’t operate on sight. No database I couldn’t navigate through. No letter of the alphabet I couldn’t file under. Which is why I was just as surprised as Ursula the first time I lost a phone message. I told Ursula the name of someone important who had called while she was in a meeting, but when I went to retrieve the piece of paper, it had vanished. I don’t know where it went. Maybe the foreign rights elves took it, I don’t know. I would suspect sabotage, but aside from Ursula I was the youngest person in the office, by approximately 167 years, and I just didn’t think the others had it in them. I stood in her doorway, my head hung low. She sighed and rolled her eyes.