doing without such tangible editorial guidance.
What were they doing? It took me a while—months—before a Tuesday rolled around on which my mother was hosting and my father was kept late at work. When she received this news by telephone, my mother very solemnly gathered us boys together and, as she assembled a tray of sandwiches for us to take upstairs, explained that we were in no uncertain terms to think of leaving our rooms until she called up to us to say that the group had disbanded and the coast was clear.
Even as she was laying out the rules of the evening, I was already planning how to break them. Since the time of my uncle’s daily visits during Huffy’s illness, I had further honed my eavesdropping skills. I had learned that it was never wise to start listening at the beginning of a conversation, because that was when people (= my mother) were most suspicious. I had learned that a good time to slip down a few stairs was when someone had gotten up to, say, pour wine or go to the bathroom, since one bit of unusual noise easily masked another. And I had learned to be patient, endlessly patient, since much of what I overheard was dull and some of it wasn’t even comprehensible to me; sometimes all that patience led nowhere, yet sometimes …
“So, Merona, last week you were talking about how you don’t always feel at home in your own house. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said.”
“Really? What have you been thinking?”
“Well,” this speaker continued, “it occurred to me that our homes are a kind of metaphor for where many of us find ourselves as women. We’ve arranged them for everybody but ourselves. For our husbands, our parents, our social circle. In your case, your in-laws.”
“Except in my case I didn’t even do the arranging.”
“More of a metaphor—more of a problem. It’s all part of the same issue. People dictating to us what we should be deciding for ourselves. The covering on a sofa can be just as important, in this sense, as the clothes we wear, the books we read, our ideas. When are we going to say what we really mean, wear—whatever we like? Throw out the old—the old—”
“Bronzes. Miniature Greco-Roman statues that have nothing to do with me. Views of French châteaus—when I’ve never even been to France.”
I did not have to peer into the living room to know what the scene looked like. There were eight women sitting in a circle around our coffee table. I knew about half of them. My mother was likely sitting on a low stool, since it was a house rule, or until recently it had been a house rule, that the more comfortable seats went to guests. Across from her and doing much of the talking was Linda Berg, the most outspoken of these women and, as it happened, the mother of Barrie and Wendy, our almost cousins. Linda had recently cut off all her hair and had traded her skirts and sweaters for jeans and T-shirts—she was the first mother in the canyon to alter her appearance almost overnight. My mother’s change had been more gradual. While it had been some time since she had relaxed the shellacked towers of hair she wore when I was a young child, she recently had begun going down to the Hair Palace on Beverly Boulevard where Bobby (whose tight low-riding jeans and flouncy scarf marked him as an antecedent to Warren Beatty in Shampoo) gave her a regular perm that produced a cascade of tightly whorled ringlets. This, together with the lightening up of her makeup, and the jeans and chambray shirts she had begun wearing, distanced her ever further from my aunt, whose bunned hair, bright lipstick, emphatic beauty mark, and proliferation of jewelry remained as entrenched as ever.
But now the changes in my mother seemed to be about more than her appearance.
“What’s to stop you from getting rid of it all—just clearing out the place in one fell swoop?”
I recognized the voice that asked this question as belonging to Bea Zeiger. Bea and her husband, Irv, lived over the hill from us and had children who were older than we were by half a generation; the kids in that family had helped to radicalize the parents—at least as far as they could be radicalized from the comfort of their rambling midcentury ranch house, which stood up on a flag lot that was unusually large and sunny for the canyon. The Zeigers hosted fundraisers for Daniel Ellsberg and Angela Davis; George McGovern, of course; and Tom Hayden, whose then wife, Jane Fonda, I went to hear speak at their house later on when I was old enough to be invited to such evenings. Bea and Irv had a touch of the wattage of my aunt and uncle, though theirs was of a much more political cast.
A sound of sipping followed as the women waited for my mother to answer. “Honestly, I cannot say,” she said finally. “Habit. Fear of rocking the boat. It’s a very tricky boat we have here …”
“Some women are burning their bras,” said a voice I did not recognize. “You might burn the bric-a-brac. Think how liberating it would feel.”
There was a silence.
“Merona?”
“I was just trying to picture the consequences. None of you can understand what it’s like in this family.”
“Why not try us?” Bea said.
My toes dug into the carpet. My mother, the rabbi’s daughter, had always been so private and discreet, a secret-keeper par excellence, especially when the secrets—or merely the information—concerned the people my aunt referred to as the inner sanctum or the larky sevensome.
“Do you really want to hear all this?”
Please, somebody, say no.
This was my first impulse. But then my curiosity began to kick in. Because if, after all, my mother was going to say these things, I certainly wanted to hear—to overhear—them.
“Of course we do,” Bea said. “Every one of our individual stories has something to teach the rest of us.”
“I don’t know where to begin even.”
“At the beginning, where else?”
“The beginning …” The ping of a bottle against glass, the gurgle of Chablis flowing from one to the other. “I suppose that was when I was thirteen. Yes.” She paused. “I was the first girl in Southern California to be bat mitzvahed—that’s what my father always said, anyway. Shalom was leading the service, naturally. We were in the sanctuary at his synagogue, Temple Sinai in Long Beach, the first Saturday in November, 1945. The place was packed. I hated having all that attention on me. I was so nervous my hands were drenched. Father kept his eye on the back door. The waiting was just awful. We were waiting for my brother Irving, who was late. When he finally walked in, he had a woman on his arm who looked like no one else in that room, no one else I had ever seen—except maybe in the movies. She was dressed from head to toe in emerald green, and her hair was piled up on top of her head, and she had stuck leaves in it. Leaves …”
The woman was my aunt—I had heard this story before. Several times. But I had never heard it offered up like this as a piece of early evidence in support of all that was wrong in my mother’s life.
Hank, sweeping leafily into the room that November, was an expression of nature—a force of nature. Beautiful, exotic, in carriage and appearance so unfamiliar to the people in the sanctuary that the question Shiksa? flew through the audience.
Was she foreign? European? Maybe that explained it. Perhaps she was a refugee from overseas, but obviously not one of the struggling ones who appeared at Friday-night services out of nowhere and stood out with their gaunt faces and deep-set haunted eyes. She was other, that much was agreed on, and widely.
“Friends,” Shalom said. “Come now. Have we never seen a gorgeous woman on my son’s arm?”
“Actually, Rabbi, we haven’t,” someone called out, and there was laughter.
“Father, sorry,” Irving mouthed as he and his date sat down. Shalom gestured at his son: no matter. And the service began.
Afterward the tall beauty joined the line of people congratulating the bat mitzvah girl, my mother, whose legs went weak in the presence of such an impossibly glamorous woman.
“I’m