Banana Rose (27 page)

“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me instead of taking off your ring? What does one thing have to do with the other?” Suddenly, I was a mathematician, trying to make the equation compute. It didn’t. I went back to my old profession, a madwoman.

“Fuck you, George Howard!” I screamed.

T
EARS RAN DOWN
my cheeks and across my lips. I licked them. I was trying to paint. A brush was in my right hand and a cloth in my left. That morning, Gauguin and I had had another fight.

As he left for work, I’d yelled, “I’m not doing all the dishes. I don’t care if you work for your father. I’m not doing all the housework.”

I was having a hard time being married. Gauguin told me one night that he wanted to be boss. It was the second Tuesday in August at eight in the evening. It was still light out, and I could see the bathroom from where I sat at the kitchen table. The bathroom was white, but in the light of dusk, white took on the shadows of gray and blue.

We were eating an avocado salad that Gauguin had made. I was on my second bite. I crunched into a lettuce leaf.

“Gauguin, this is good,” I said cheerily.

“Nell—” He hesitated. “I don’t want to be cooking. I want to be boss in this house.”

When I heard that again in my head as I stood in front of the painting, the words shot down to the muscle of my heart and squeezed it. The blood rushed to my throat, and I had the urge to vomit. I heard it over and over,
“I want to be boss. I want to be boss...”
It was impossible for me to paint. I wanted to bolt out the door and go downtown, get Gauguin, and belt him.

I wiped my face with the sleeve of my painting shirt, put down my brush, and decided to go for a walk. I meandered down Riverside. It was still summer, but I could smell fall in the air and almost see it at the edge of tree leaves. Soon it would be Rash Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Being back in a city reminded me of the Jewish holidays. I’d fled all that when I went away to college. Judaism had seemed oppressive in Brooklyn, old-fashioned, something my parents did, but now I kind of missed it. I wondered where there was a synagogue.

I didn’t mind doing a little bit more than Gauguin, I mused. After all, he did go to work, but then again, I wasn’t just sitting around. I was setting up a studio in the living room. I’d begun a series of paintings: pears in the corners of rooms. I’d already painted yellow pears sitting in the four corners of the bathroom. One was of two in the corner under the toilet, another showed three together in the bathtub corner. I added a green one there.

Suddenly the sun peeked out from behind a cloud and struck the maple tree above my head in an extraordinary way. Gauguin couldn’t possibly be serious about being boss. That was George Howard, a million miles away in downtown Minneapolis at his father’s office. I was in love with another man. I was in love with Gauguin.

A warm feeling suddenly filled my belly. My knees got weak. Yes, I was in love with him. I thought back just a few nights ago. We’d been lying in bed with only a thin sheet over us. The air had been humid, but a cool breeze blew in through the screens. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, Gauguin had touched me between my legs.

“I want to tell you a story,” he whispered in my ear. “When I was at work today, I thought of you. I got up to go to the water cooler. I bent over and took a white paper cup”—I began to moan. “I took the white cup and put it under the nozzle.” He paused and put his tongue in my ear. “I pressed the nozzle. I wanted you.” The heat of his breath in my ear made me wet. “A bubble came up in the water cooler. My cock hardened behind my fly.” He moved on top of me. I spread my legs. “My cock wanted to spring out of my pants.” He entered me.

“Ohhh.” I felt like a thousand fireflies were feeding on the walls of my vagina.

“Gauguin.” I blew out his name with my breath.

“Yes, yes.” He kept his mouth at my ear. “Nell, Nell, I love you.”

I looked up at the sizzling maple. Now
that
was Gauguin, the man I had married. I shook my head. This George stuff—I was just imagining it.

The phone rang when I entered the house. It was Gauguin. “Nell, my mom wants to come over tonight. She baked us a peach pie. I invited her for dinner.”

“Great. What are you going to make?” I asked nonchalantly.

There was a long pause. “I guess I could pick up a pizza.” Pause again. “Alice doesn’t like pizza.” Another pause. “Nell, could you make something?”

A sparrow was singing on our window ledge near the petunias I had planted in the flower box. “Okay,” I said casually. And then I had a thought. “It’s Friday night. Why don’t I make roast chicken? We can do a Shabbos.”

“Great.” Gauguin was relieved that I’d cook. He hung up.

The phone rang again right away. “Uh, Nell, I don’t know about Shabbos. Alice doesn’t know much about Jews. You know, an Iowa farm and all. Maybe we shouldn’t do it?”

“We’ll just light candles. It’ll be okay.” We hung up. Well, it’s time she learned, I thought.

I rummaged through an old jewelry bag and found the Star of David my father’s mother had left for me in her will. I put it on and looked in the mirror. “Banana Rose, you are still magic.”

The table was all set when Gauguin came home. “Hey,” he said. He was pleased.

I smiled primly. With an apron covering my tight jeans and white T-shirt that read, “Georgia O’Keeffe lives in New Mexico,” I was the perfect little wife.

Alice came soon after. Her pie was covered with a blue-checked cotton cloth. We placed it between the two unlit candles.

She surveyed the kitchen. She could smell food cooking. A suspicious look crossed her face.

“Oh, Nell made this whole meal,” Gauguin said cheerily.

I understood. She thought her poor son had had to cook after being at work all day.

I turned from the sink. “I made a traditional Shabbos meal.” Then I explained to her what Shabbos was.

“My,” she said, “my.” She sounded like my mother.

I lit the candles and said the prayers.

“My, I never heard Hebrew spoken before,” Alice said as we sat down at the kitchen table. “I guess that’s what Jesus spoke.”

“Jesus doesn’t have much to do with this.” I cut a leg off the chicken and put it on her plate. “Dark meat?”

“Yes.” She smiled weakly. “Gauguin told me how your grandfather used to play school with you, and you played the teacher.”

I nodded. “Yes, we had a great time.”

“Is that Jewish?” she asked. “I mean, it sounded so indulgent. No adult played with me when I was growing up.”

What was she getting at? “That’s too bad,” I said. “It was a lot of fun.” I forked some green beans into my mouth.

Alice looked around the kitchen and into the bedroom. “Gauguin, this place looks a little messy. Maybe Nell should buy a vacuum cleaner.”

Reaching into the refrigerator for some ginger ale, I said, “Oh, Gauguin, you can pick one up tomorrow.” The kitchen was a combat zone.

“This is good, Nell,” Gauguin said as he bit into a buttered potato. He saw his comment wasn’t going to amend things. He tried another angle. “Alice, after we finish, Nell should show you some of her paintings.”

Bingo! I lit up. “I’d love to show you my work.”

Gauguin’s face relaxed.

Alice’s didn’t, though. “What work? I thought you were a schoolteacher.”

“Oh, we Jews do a lot of things,” I said gaily, screwing the top back on the ginger ale.

Her peach pie was delicious. I made tea to go with it. The Shabbos candles were half burned down now. We had no electric lights on except the bathroom one in the hall.

“I love summer, don’t you, Nell?” Alice asked.

I nodded, holding my cup of Lapsang souchong in both hands.

“Especially after a winter here, it is such a relief,” Alice continued.

I nodded again. I was content that she was addressing me.

“Two winters ago it didn’t go above twenty below for four months straight,” Alice said.

I sat up in my seat. “Really,” I said, amazed. “I knew it was bad but not that bad.”

She nodded emphatically. “Oh, yes.” She was pleased she was impressing me. “But it doesn’t matter what the weather is, my Volks always works.”

“That’s good news,” I said.

Gauguin coughed and got up and headed for the bathroom.

“You know, they were designed for the Third Reich. Every time it started that winter, I’d say to myself, “Thank God for Hitler!’ ”

Just then, the space in that summer kitchen became twenty below. Outside the window I could see the lilac branches freeze, standing still against the white picket fence.

I never heard
thankfulness
and
Hitler
used in the same sentence.

Hitler had invented the Volkswagen, and life in Minneapolis, Minnesota, some thirty years later was easier because of it.

I said nothing, but my whole body was an ice brick.

Alice knew something terrible had happened. She didn’t know quite what, but she could sense it.

Then I reached my hand across the table for a jar. I asked her in an unfamiliar voice if she wanted wild honey for her tea.

Her hands flew to her face. “I must be hurrying home. The ham I took out of the freezer this morning must already be defrosted.” She got up suddenly and blew out the front door. “Oh, say good night to Gauguin.”

I was stiff as a cadaver. I heard her pull away in her Volkswagen.

The toilet flushed. Gauguin walked into the kitchen. “Hey, where’s—” He looked around. “What happened?”

I turned my head and looked at him blankly. All emotion was flushed out of me. “How do I get to your mother’s house? She left her pie plate. I know she’ll want it. She told me she plans to bake some more.”

“Nell—”

“Just give me the directions,” I demanded.

I got in the car and put the key in the ignition. How could she say that about Hitler in front of me? I pulled out of the parking space and turned left at the corner. Six million Jews were murdered because of that monster. Those are my people! Turning onto the freeway, I started to sob. I was crying so hard, I could hardly see the exit signs, but I kept driving. I pulled off at Cretin Vandalia in St. Paul. I had driven in the wrong direction, farther away from Alice’s, but I didn’t care.

At the light I made a left and drove down an unfamiliar residential street. “Ashland Avenue,” the sign read. I pulled over in front of a row of duplexes and fumbled in the glove compartment for a tissue. Snot was running out my nose. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I could see by the light of a passing car that my eyes were swollen. I’d been crying a full twenty minutes. I found a tissue, blew my nose into it, and crumpled it in my tight fist.

And what she said about my grandfather! I’m not spoiled—he
liked
to play with me. He liked the
kindala.
The thought of my grandfather made me collapse over the steering wheel and sob anew. I loved him and I loved being a Jew.

At home my family had talked about the Holocaust so much, I was sick of it. When I came back from college, I used to say to my mother, “Yeah, but the U.S. is doing it now in Vietnam, and the Turks did it to the Armenians.”

“It’s different,” my mother cried.

I didn’t believe it was different; I didn’t understand that it was different because the Nazis had done it to my people. At the time, I was afraid to identify as a Jew. But now, sitting in this car in St. Paul, I was all Jew, every cell in me, all the way back in an unbroken line to Moses. No one could take my Jewishness away from me. And no one around me was going to slur my people. I felt my body grow as big and as deep-rooted as a tree. I had to get out of that car before I burst through it.

It began to rain. A few drops fell through the open window, dampening my left arm. Suddenly I wanted nothing in the world more than to be in that beautiful rain, beating on the black street, with the streetlights glittering in the puddles and on the slick asphalt. I shoved open the car door and flung myself out. I thundered down the sidewalk, past stoops and garbage cans lined neatly along the curb for the next morning’s pickup. The rain fed me, and I gobbled it up.

My T-shirt was soaked by the time I got back to the car. I slammed the door shut, then began to laugh. At first it was more like a hiccough, but then it grew and grew until I was gasping and wiping my eyes. Eight full years of Hebrew school had left me a devout rebel. It took an ignorant comment by an Iowa-bred farm girl to bring me back to my roots.

Sitting behind the wheel, I breathed deeply until I regained my composure. Alice’s pie plate sat on the passenger seat. I took an old envelope out of my purse and wrote a note: “Alice, here’s your plate. I thought you might want it. I think you and I should get together in the next week and talk. I’ll call you. Nell.”

I turned the car around and headed toward Minneapolis. Alice’s street was quiet. I climbed the stairs—the elevator was on the blink again—and left the pie plate with the note at her door.

I got in the car and hugged the steering wheel. I started the motor and flipped on the radio. John Lennon was singing “Imagine.” I sang along with him as I drove home through the empty streets.

Alice called me the next week during her lunch hour. We met that Wednesday at Tommy’s Grill. Alice said it was one of her favorite places. I didn’t pay attention to the place and only ordered a bowl of split pea soup. I was nervous, and I wanted to get to the point right away.

“Alice, you know I get the feeling you don’t understand that I’m Jewish. What it means.” I began shredding the paper napkin in my lap. “Sometimes you make comments that are offensive to me, and I don’t think you realize it.”

Alice gazed at me intently, and as I spoke, she nodded her head. “I know you’re Jewish.” She stopped nodding. “Of course, I didn’t know any Jews growing up in Iowa, and even here, I’ve rarely met one. There’s Dr. Eisenberg, the dentist down the hall, but he doesn’t look Jewish. I mean, he’s blond.”

“There are blond Jews, even redheads with freckles, like Gauguin,” I said. I wasn’t going to let her get away with anything. “That’s a stereotype that we’re all dark.”

“You do seem different to me, though,” she confessed.