Banana Rose

  “Edith,” he gasped, “our Nell is leaving us.”

  “Wait, I have a tissue.” My mother opened the gold clasp of her small beaded purse and pulled out a white linen hanky, embroidered with a purple pansy. Mascara ran down her face. My father blew his nose as we all watched. They broke down into another spasm. Gauguin looked at me. I shrugged and turned my palms heavenward in supplication. My sister, Rita, bit the side of her lip. Gauguin’s parents had never seen anything like this.

  “Hey, judge, you’re marrying the wrong couple,” Rip cracked out of the side of his mouth. “The show’s over here!” He nodded at my parents, who forced themselves to laugh and tried to control their hysterics for the next ten minutes.

  It was a simple ceremony. We didn’t mention God. Mostly we weren’t sure who God was. Was He Jewish or Episcopalian? I actually believed “He” was a She. And what about Buddha? Our parents wouldn’t like Buddha. The day before the wedding, Gauguin and I had quickly written up what the judge would say. It was about love. That was firm ground. We were sure we loved each other.

  As the judge spoke, a bluejay alighted on a branch of a poplar behind his head. My eye caught it and I missed some of what the judge was saying. I came back when I heard, “Nell, do you take this man to be your beloved husband?”

  I snapped to. “Yes,” I said.

  The judge turned to Gauguin. “Do you take this woman to be your cherished wife?”

  “I do,” Gauguin said clearly.

  Secretly, I wanted the marriage certificate to say, “Banana Rose and Gauguin were married on a July day.” Instead, it read, “Nell Schwartz and George Howard.” That startled me. Even Alice and Rip called him Gauguin. I’d known somewhere vaguely that Gauguin’s given name was George Howard. I had asked him once what it was when we were in a hammock in Talpa, but seeing it written I couldn’t connect it with the man I knew. Gauguin was always Gauguin, first and last. If you had wanted him to have a last name, it would have been Gauguin-Gauguin, as if to repeat the same name intensified his existence.

  As soon as the ceremony was over, my parents fell into each other’s arms, crying again. When my father grabbed me for congratulations, he knocked out the fresh white gardenia I’d carefully pinned in my hair that morning.

  In a photo of Rip and Gauguin taken the morning of the wedding, they are both facing the mirror and Rip’s arms are around his son’s neck. He is showing Gauguin how to knot a tie. You can see Rip’s freckled wrist reaching out of his blazer. Gauguin is concentrating very hard and Rip is smiling.

  At the reception we ate fried chicken and potato salad that Alice had prepared. We had a three-tier chocolate wedding cake in my honor. There is a photo of Gauguin’s face close to the cake, licking the pinky that he’d just stuck in the chocolate icing. I am standing behind him, wanting my share.

  In the middle of the reception, Gauguin and I snuck away for a short walk down the suburban street.

  “You know your mother is really kind. She looks around to make sure everyone is comfortable,” he said to me. It felt as though we were both glittering. After all, this was our wedding day.

  “Naa. She’s just nervous. She’s never been with so many non-Jews.” We laughed and put our arms around each other.

  When we returned, there was a commotion on the patio. Rita had disappeared with the drummer from the four-piece band. My father found them behind the garage, passing a joint back and forth.

  “How could you do such a thing? And at your sister’s wedding!” My father was beside himself. My mother was wringing her hands behind him.

  Rita sauntered back onto the dance floor and began snapping her fingers, doing a wild, provocative dance to a Rolling Stones song the band played. All the wedding guests gathered around her to watch.

  First my father was bug-eyed and furious, but then he relaxed when he saw that everyone was admiring her. “She sure can dance,” he said, proudly.

  In the early evening, my parents asked me to call a cab. I went to the phone in Rip’s bedroom, and my mother followed.

  “Now, Nell, please remember to eat well. Make him matzo ball soup. He’ll learn to like it. A capon is good. Go to a butcher.” She spoke to me as I sat on the bed and talked to the Yellow Cab dispatcher.

  “Ma, I don’t know how to make matzo balls.” I hung up the phone receiver.

  My mother gasped just as my father walked in. “Edith, what’s wrong?”

  “How could we have let her marry? She can’t cook!” She turned to her husband and began to weep. “She’s just a little girl.”

  They were in each other’s arms again.

  My father broke down, too. “Do you remember when she was born? Our little Nell.”

  “Mom, Dad, please.” I was wringing my hands.

  Rip was at the door. “Hey, they’re at it again.”

  Gauguin, Alice, and several of the guests crowded the doorway.

  My father looked up, let out a chuckle, and said to my mother, “Edith, we’re being watched,” as he wiped tears from his cheeks.

  My mother fluttered her hanky in the direction of the door. “Well, you caught us again. We tried to wait till we got back to the hotel.”

  Everyone spilled into the bedroom. “Someone here must know how to make good matzo ball soup? Please teach Nell.” My mother looked beseechingly around the room. “I can’t believe her grandmother let her go away to college without knowing.”

  Alice stepped forward. “Don’t worry. If it’s in a cookbook, I’ll figure it out.”

  “Oh, thank you, Alice.” My mother hugged her. “Now I know I’m leaving Nell in good hands.”

  The doorbell rang. Someone in the hall called, “Cab’s here!”

  There was a flurry of activity as my mother’s shawl and purse, my father’s pipe and jacket were gathered up.

  We all stood at the front door. “Take care of each other,” my father called out the open window of the departing taxi.

  We all waved wildly.

  I went back into the house and over to the food table. I nibbled at Alice’s chicken. I had been too nervous earlier in the day to eat anything. “Alice, you are a wonderful cook.” She was standing nearby, and I hugged her.

  She stiffened. She hadn’t seemed to when my mother hugged her.

  “Your parents are adorable. How long have they been together? They seem so compatible.”

  “Oh, forever,” I said, licking my ringers and then reaching for a green grape. “No one in my family ever divorces.” Then I realized what I’d said. I looked at Alice. Her head was bent over, counting forks. “Alice.” I took her arm. “I’m sorry.”

  She looked up and bit her lip.

  “It’s okay,” she said, and just then I could see the lines under her eyes. I looked past her shoulder out to the patio where Rip was dancing with Caroline, one of Gauguin’s friends, who wore a low red dress.

  “Thank you for all the wonderful food you made.” I attempted to hug her again, but she reached for the bread basket across the table.

  33

  TEN DAYS AFTER THE wedding, Gauguin and I drove to New York for a reception at my parents’ home. We didn’t leave Minneapolis until nine in the evening and drove singing at 2 A.M. through Chicago. At four in the morning we rented a hotel room in Indiana. This was the first time we’d ever been in a hotel together. Once while we were in Taos, we’d driven to New Orleans to hear jazz, but we slept outside at truck stops, in sleeping bags, in the shade of vast semis, and in the smell of oil and gas. The hotel off the expressway in Indiana cost thirty-five dollars a night. We couldn’t believe it was so expensive.

  We were tired, but I insisted that we make love. I didn’t want to waste the hotel room. After a little effort, lovemaking broke open in us. The anonymity of the hotel room gave us a new freedom. Our bodies felt like bronze bells, and we sang out together over the grain elevators, slaughterhouses, and steel mills we had seen as we drove through the Midwest. We climaxed at the same time and were loud about it. Then we l
eaned back into the long hotel pillows and fell into a hard sleep as the gray light of dawn crept across the sky.

  The next morning we drove on through the hills of Pennsylvania to the northern tip of New Jersey, land of beefsteak tomatoes. We were exhausted when we reached Brooklyn late at night and collapsed in my childhood bedroom at the back of the apartment.

  We woke late the next day. I lay in bed, looking at the blue-and yellow-print wallpaper and the hearts I had drawn on it above my head in pencil when I was sixteen. I heard a lot of activity down the hall. I looked at the Big Ben windup clock on my old bureau and jerked up to a sitting position.

  I shook Gauguin. “It’s one o’clock! Get up—the reception’s in an hour.”

  My grandmother knocked at the door. “Nell, Nell, do you want breakfast? I’m sure your husband is starving.”

  Gauguin and I looked at each other and giggled at the reference to “husband.”

  “Grandma, come in,” I called. Gauguin looked at me in shock and dove under the covers. Only his head was sticking out.

  “Mamala.” My grandmother swept across the bedroom and took my face in her hands. She kissed me. Then she turned to Gauguin. “Hello, young man. Get dressed, and I’ll make you something to eat. I’ll give you real food before the caterers come in and try to poison you. What does he want?” She turned to me. “Does your husband want a chopped liver sandwich? Bagels and lox?” She saw the expression on my face. “Oh, he doesn’t like that?” She clucked. “Don’t worry. I’ll make you a nice chopped egg sandwich. On rye. You’ll like it.” She smiled at Gauguin and left the room.

  “Nell, was that your famous grandmother? The one who taught you to make grilled cheese sandwiches?” Gauguin was amazed.

  “Yup.” I nodded.

  We got dressed. I wore the peach dress I had worn for the wedding in Minneapolis, but this time I didn’t have a fresh gardenia in my hair. Gauguin wore his tie and jacket, and he was able to tie the knot at his throat now without his father’s help.

  As we sat in the kitchen eating my grandmother’s food, we watched the caterers stream by. The kitchen was attached to a large screened-in back porch, and out the window we could see the trays being placed on tables.

  “Good?” my grandmother asked as she opened the refrigerator.

  Yes, we agreed, our mouths full, nodding our heads.

  Then she scowled at a caterer who accidentally walked in the kitchen. “In my day, we served food at weddings, not cardboard and doilies,” she said to no one in particular. “Your grandfather would turn over in his grave to see what we’re eating at your wedding. He loved you so, Nell.”

  “I wish he were here, Grandma,” I told her. A bite of chopped egg sandwich stuck in my throat.

  The guests swarmed in promptly at two o’clock. There were Uncle Morris, Aunt Ruth, Cousin Sarah, Cousin Saul, Aunt Ann, Aunt Helen, Uncle Harold, Uncle Carl from Miami, Cousin Judy from Asbury Park, and my mother’s old high school friend Pearl from Boston. They all headed down the long hallway to the back porch and the food.

  “Nell, it’s so good to see you!” My aunt Helen let out a whooping yell when she spied me on the porch and ran over. She had a streak of red lipstick across her mouth and dyed orange hair. “I am so happy for you. Marriage is wonderful.” Her husband, Uncle Ted, had died two years earlier of a heart attack.

  My father took moving pictures of the reception with the old eight-millimeter camera that had been used in our family for years. Only twice did he focus the camera on me: One time I was eating chopped liver; the other time I stood with Gauguin, and we held vodka and orange juice in clear tall glasses. Most of the footage at the reception was of my mother. He followed her into the kitchen where she sampled a cheese puff, then he followed her in her violet dress through my aunts and uncles on the porch and paused as she stood, her feet close together, her head arched at an angle, like a sparrow, listening. Someone was telling a joke. You could tell, because everyone was laughing. Then she nodded her head, sipped her scotch on the rocks, and turned to the camera, full faced.

  Gauguin and I stood on the porch most of the time and smiled. We clicked glasses of vodka together and got drunker and drunker. Eventually, we stood tongue-kissing in the middle of the reception.

  My mother walked by and kicked me in the ankle. “Cut it out, Nell,” she stage-whispered from the side of her mouth.

  My sister, Rita, stood with her old high school buddy, Mimi, in a corner of the back yard, eating little kosher hot dog hors d’oeuvres. She had just been in the alley and was stoned on grass.

  The next day, I took Gauguin to Jones Beach. We picked our way through the browning bodies and laid our checkered blanket near a couple eating cheese sandwiches on dark bread and blaring Beethoven on their portable radio. On the other side of us were three high school girls who poured Coppertone on each other every half hour and resembled capons on a rotisserie grill. Their radio blared a rock station.

  Gauguin had never been to New York before. I told him to wait while I stood in line at the concession stand for potato knishes and perfect round scoops of ice cream that you unrolled from cardboard containers into your cone.

  “What’s a knish?” he asked.

  “You’ll see. Only in New York do they serve them on the beach,” I explained.

  Gauguin burned easily and had to wear a T-shirt most of the afternoon to protect his shoulders. Looking at the field of people on the beach, he said over and over, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  The next day we rode the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I immediately took him to a kosher delicatessen on the Lower East Side. Our waiter was bald and had a heavy New York accent. He took one look at Gauguin and knew he wasn’t a native.

  Gauguin pointed to an item on the menu and asked, “What’s this?”

  The waiter slapped his hand on Gauguin’s shoulder and said, “This all is real gen-u-ine flanken.” He said it in a Texas accent, thinking he was imitating Gauguin. Naturally, Gauguin wasn’t from Texas, but in New York anything that isn’t New York is a slow drawl.

  “You-all might like some chitlins in your chicken soup.” The waiter pronounced this with lots of space between the letters of the words, as though the sound of the language echoed the flat open plains outside of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.

  Gauguin was defensive. “I’m not from the South. I’m from Minnesota.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where’s that?” The waiter had a big smile on his face and he slapped Gauguin again on the shoulder. This time he wanted to help. “Have the brisket,” he said in his regular voice. “It’s good. You’ll like it.”

  I looked over at Gauguin. Confusion swam across his face.

  “Hey, try the pastrami here. You’ll see what I’ve been talking about,” I suggested to help him. He ordered it on rye.

  When the waiter left, Gauguin said, “What the fuck was all that about?” I shrugged and didn’t say anything.

  The waiter returned, this time gallantly. He proudly placed the pastrami sandwich in front of Gauguin. The meat was stacked so high that it fell over.

  “Now there’s a sandwich!” The waiter nodded at it, turned on his heel like El Capitaine, and marched off to the table across the room by the window.

  Gauguin was impressed. “I can’t get my mouth around it!” he exclaimed.

  I loved New York in that moment.

  “Nell, it’s amazing that every Jew in the street doesn’t drop dead from hardening of the arteries. Just like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Right in front of the subway cars and garbage trucks. Help! Pastrami clogged my heart!” Then he pretended he was collapsing from a heart attack.

  When he recovered, he reached for a whole pickle in the metal tub that was placed on the table, bit down hard, and smiled.

  We ate apple strudel for dessert and afterward took the subway uptown to the Museum of Modern Art. A blind beggar singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” reached out his hand as we passed him in the station. Gauguin dug in hi
s pocket for change and then said, “Hell,” took out a dollar bill, and placed it in the man’s cup.

  “Thank you. May God be with you.” The beggar’s voice rang out in the airless underground.

  We came out into daylight and fumbled a bit while our eyes adjusted. Gauguin stretched his neck back as he looked up at the tall Midtown buildings. He was fascinated by the falafel vendors. “They even sell that on the streets!”

  I nodded and laughed. I enjoyed New York with Gauguin. Everything was fresh for him.

  We entered the lobby of the museum. The air conditioning felt good. The city streets were steaming.

  We went upstairs to the permanent collection. A Klee, a Picasso, a Monet, a Bonnard. One after the other.

  Gauguin was stunned. “I can’t believe we’re seeing the real things, not just posters or postcards.”

  Gauguin joined me in front of a painting, then leaned toward the wall to read the card. “ ‘Intérieur a la boîte a violon,’ ” he pronounced in his silliest French. “By Henri Matisse.” He stood back with me again.

  “What does it mean?” I asked. I had taken Spanish in high school.

  “ ‘The inside of a violin box,’ I think.” He scratched his head.

  A black violin case lay open on a pale yellow upholstered chair in the lower left-hand corner of the painting. The inside of the violin case was blue. The chair was by an open door that led out to a balcony overlooking the sea. On the other side of the room was a dressing table with a round mirror. The walls of the room were pale yellow, like the chair but with a swirling pattern.

  “I want to paint like that someday,” I said, mesmerized. “I want that freedom. How he thinks it’s okay to make art out of something that ordinary—I’ve been trying that since Boulder, but look how sure of himself Matisse is.” I pointed to the black strokes that indicated birds out the window. Then I pointed to the sea.