concourse and a new downtown light-rail corridor. And the Fairmont built a twenty-story hotel on Market Street. It was San Jose’s tallest building. Twenty stories, salmon pink, with an open-air swimming pool on its fourth-floor patio. After the graduation ceremony from middle school, Herbert Hoover Middle School, the dare was to sneak into the Fairmont Hotel and go for a swim. Except no one would admit to knowing what county bus line would get us from our graduation ceremony at the Rose Garden over to Market Street, because familiarity with the county bus lines was shameful. So instead we all walked over to the Rosicrucian Museum, twenty or thirty of us, in our navy blue vinyl graduation gowns. And we kicked each other with the chlorinated water from the fountain surrounding the Rosicrucian statue of the hippopotamus god. And then we went home and felt exquisitely desolate and waited for high school to start.
This is San Jose. This is where I am from.
MITCHELL and SUSAN GREEN explain about the bat mitzvah (early August 2000):
M: She complained and complained, and we relented.
S: You relented. I never needed any convincing. She said, “I don’t believe in Torah, you don’t believe in Torah, what’s the point?” And I said, “Look, you’re missing the chance to have a big party and make some money.” She said, “I’ll get a job if I need money.” And I thought, What more can you ask from an eleven-year-old? Jennica is very sensible when she needs to be.
M: But can we say we would have let Gabe quit? Would we have let him, as a boy, at age eleven, drop out of his Hebrew classes? We tried very hard to be evenhanded, but would we have let Gabe quit?
S: Well, Gabe never complained, so it was never an issue. But Jennica hated those classes. And I can’t say I blame her. She never became friends with a single one of the girls at that synagogue. Nor did Gabe, I might add, with the boys. And, the mothers. These women were just so … Asking me wasn’t I anxious about keeping the kids in public school. Good riddance. I told Jennica, You may not marry any right-wing evangelicals; otherwise, as far as religion, do what you want to do.
M: It’s more than that. She should marry a Jew.
S: Mitchell has some opinions about this.
M: I don’t have some opinions, I have one opinion. Jennica should marry a Jew. I had the same opinion about Gabe, and his wife is Jewish. And it’s just my opinion. I’ll let the fiancé know my opinion, and then I’ll keep my mouth shut.
S: And Jennica did get a job, when she finally did need money. Not just in college, but very early on in high school. She wanted to join the Los Gatos Rowing Club, but Mitchell put his foot down about the fees, which were very high. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars, to join a rowing club. So Jennica got a job at Yogurt U.S.A. and paid her own way for three years. Because she wanted to be on a rowing team.
M: She said that there was no point in being Jewish in California. Remember this? “Why won’t the Green family admit that there is no point in being Jewish in California? We aren’t wandering in the desert.” And then she joins a rowing club.
JENNICA GREEN succumbs to nostalgia; the uptown No. 6 train, forget it (early August 2000):
All of which is background for why it was so … poignant to get a letter from Nadine about her brother.
I said Nadine was cosmopolitan. Which … fine, caveats … but sophistication is always relative. What I mean is, by the time Nadine and I became close, in high school, she had tastes and some opinions. She was nearly through with her parents and was buying herself a used car, with her own savings, she said. And she was making her own arrangements with a city, on terms she seemed to be negotiating for herself. Which was impressive to me. It was like she was the sole proprietor of her own flea market. All these curiosities, these five-and-dime thrills. She would always be chewing on hard candies with indecipherable Asian wrappers. Licorice? Sesame? Taffy from, like, Korea? Or Thailand? She wouldn’t tell me unless I put one in my mouth. She bought them at Vietnamese and Salvadoran groceries, and she wore such a straight face as she defied me to eat them that I would laugh until I choked, practically, out of anxiety about how rancid they would taste. Her car radio was incessantly tuned to this one schizophrenic station, KFJC, that never played any song you knew, so riding in her car there was always some unrecognizable noise happening in the background. I would be like:
“Who listens to this?” And Nadine would be indignant:
“Who cares who listens to it? The point of music isn’t to be able to tell other people that you listen to the same things they do.”
“The point of music also isn’t to be able to tell other people that you don’t listen to what they do.”
“How about the point of music is enjoying yourself?”
“How about I only enjoy myself if I actually recognize what’s playing once in a while?”
“So listen to KFJC more often.”
When she was fourteen, Nadine had lied about her age and gotten a job at a Subway Sandwich, so that by the time we were sixteen, when I was earning $4.25 at the yogurt place, Nadine was already working at the artsy movie house in Los Gatos for, like, $6.85 an hour, which seemed like a fortune in 1988. But which in retrospect … it should have been obvious that Nadine’s finances didn’t really make sense.
She shopped secondhand, of course, which was a revelation to me. I mean, how did she know about the Salvation Army in Redwood City? I guess it was a revelation to me in general, how much one could know about a city. Every Goodwill or Savers in Santa Clara Valley, Nadine had been there and knew what they had. Nadine was the first one to start wearing vintage T-shirts. Like, faded blue, child-sized Garfield T-shirts. She squeezed into them by cutting off the collars. This one Garfield shirt that she wore, when my brother saw it, he was like:
“Garfield?” And Nadine said:
“Garfield’s cool.” And my brother was bewildered. He couldn’t tell if she was kidding. And then there was Nadine’s Peugeot.
GABRIEL GREEN tells us about Nadine’s Peugeot (early August 2000):
I have these conversations with my sister that I don’t have with anyone else. And one theory is that it’s because she’s my sister, but another theory is that it’s because in Santa Cruz I don’t meet a lot of people who lead the kind of life Jennica leads in New York City.
Take how Jennica eats.
Rachel and I have visited Jennica in Greenwich Village a couple times, and there are definitely some pretty good grocery stores near her, but the food is so expensive. Five dollars for a pint of supposedly organic strawberries. Two-fifty for one bunch of kale, and they don’t even have lacinato kale out there, or purple kale, or rainbow chard, or even red Swiss chard, so Jennica’s basically eating monoculture greens. She buys “mixed salad greens” for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get this stuff home, which is only two blocks away from the grocery store, Jennica throws all of it into plastic bags. There is a husk on her corn, corn that Jennica’s store sells in April … there is a rind on her grapefruit, grapefruit that gets flown in from Florida … but still, Jennica puts the corn and the citrus into plastic bags. Her supposedly organic red peppers, which cost six dollars a pound, come in a foam tray under shrinkwrap, but she puts them in a plastic bag. And then the checkout girl puts all of Jennica’s little plastic parcels into two or three more big white plastic bags, and then Jennica walks the two blocks home, where she unpacks all the bags and then throws them in the same trash bin where her corn-husks and citrus rinds go, because they don’t do compost in New York City.
The last time we were out there, Rachel and I gave Jennica a whole set of hemp shopping nets as a present, to use instead of plastic bags. Jennica was like, “They won’t let me use these! Not in New York!” Instead she hung the nets up on her bedroom doorknob, and now she uses them to dry out her dirty gym clothes.
I mean, Jennica drinks