We Are Gathered
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The malformed and the moth-eaten
To be a king, you have to be born a prince
The world is big for those who can imagine
Come in
The fucked-up nipple
Mushrooms
A slice of leftover cake (with raspberry filling)
True love
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2018 by Jamie Weisman
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Weisman, Jamie, author.
Title: We are gathered / Jamie Weisman.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017056987 (print) | LCCN 2017046218 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328793270 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328793294 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Jewish women—Fiction. | Weddings—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Jewish. |FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Love & Romance. | GSAFD: Humorous fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3623.E45 (print) | LCC PS3623.E45 W4 2018 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056987
Cover design by Martha Kennedy
Cover photographs © Heavenlyphoto/Getty Images (lawn) and BeylaBalla/Getty Images (card)
Author photo © Victor Balaban
eISBN 9781328793270
v1.0518
To Victor
The malformed and the moth-eaten
There is no justice in this world, and you can start with the simple fact that some people look like Elizabeth Gottlieb. That some people have high cheekbones, wide eyes, long lashes, and look better than the rest of us even after they’ve just come back from running the six miles that they claim exhilarates them. That those people will never sit alone at snack time, will always have a partner for the art project, will turn down at least two dates for prom before going with the person they really want to go with, that they will be given the option of extra credit if they fare poorly on chemistry exams, will be invited to parties, will have youthful flings with movie stars and at least one semifamous drummer in a band, and then marry a good-looking guy who wants nothing more than to provide for her into her old age. No justice. None.
Stories since the first image was scratched onto the side of a cave have started with the beauty of women and the courage of men. No amount of surgery, gym time, makeup, or designer clothing could ever make me look like my friend Elizabeth, and although you might argue that I contribute to the world in different ways, even more important ways because my SAT scores are higher and the screenplay I will someday write will teach the world about the tragedies of American imperialism or create a radical empathy for the mentally ill, Elizabeth doesn’t have to hit the books, study poetry, save orphans—in other words, all she has to do to match my contributions is raise me one eyelash, and I’d have to fold. She is better in all ways than I, and there is nothing I can do to change that simple fact.
But let me start at the beginning, before we got to this, Elizabeth’s wedding day, when guests are streaming up the driveway, friends of the Gottlieb family in pastel dresses and suits, all too warm for what will be summer weather in springtime. How fitting, though, for spring to bend to summer in honor of the bride, the summer’s day that Elizabeth can be compared to and be found more lovely and more temperate. The scene is not sullied by the sudden honk of a beige van snorting up the driveway and forcing guests onto the freshly cut grass. Rather, the guests float aside and the van chuffs to a stop, a gentle giant, come to bow his knee to the princess.
The van door opens and Elizabeth’s grandma, Bubbie Ida, steps out. She was always the prettiest grandmother, and I see she is rocking a periwinkle suit and a diamond brooch. She steps forward to receive a kiss from a guest. Bubbie Ida told us to sit with our ankles crossed, not our thighs, to prevent varicose veins. She also said to cover half our plate with a piece of bread and eat only what we could see. That would keep us from getting fat. The side of the van opens, and there is that beeping sound that trucks make backing up as a man in a wheelchair is lowered to the ground on a hydraulic ledge. Ida takes the reins of the chair to push. Propped in the chair is what is left of Elizabeth’s once fearsome and terrifying zayde, Albert Gottlieb, once one of the richest men in Atlanta before he was far eclipsed by the founders of Home Depot. Bubbie Ida is stopped every few inches by well-wishers. Then she comes face-to-face with Zayde Albert’s doppelgänger, a tiny thread of a boy curled into a wheelchair, whom I at first take for Stephen Hawking before recognizing Jeffrey Wolf, who I did not know was still alive.
I heard that Elizabeth’s grandfather had had a stroke. I was always scared of Zayde Albert growing up. They had an overly chlorinated swimming pool, the only one we had access to before the neighborhood ones opened up, so we would congregate there in May and swim until our eyes turned red. Bubbie Ida had installed a slide, obviously for the use of children, and she made us sandwiches with the crusts cut off, but if you dripped water into the house or splashed the plants in the planters, Zayde Albert would yell. Now he is confined to a wheelchair, his skin ashen and his eyes bruised. I feel pity for him and want to look away, and with the quick drop of my head, eyes shifted to the side with a sudden fascination for something on the ground, I recognize a move people have made in response to my appearance.
My mother once called him a small-time despot who ruled over the synagogue and his business—I actually never knew what business he had, just that he was a businessman and rich. Now look at him, boneless, almost skinless, he should be wrapped in cellophane and Styrofoam, and put in a refrigerated case. So sad and pathetic, the remains of him. I feel pity, and a bit of revulsion and fascination, but then the light flashes off the white stubble of his beard and it glistens like spun glass. There is a silk spiderweb line of drool from the corner of his mouth to his shoulder. He is magnificent, this empty conch of a man, fossilized, museumworthy, propped in a wheelchair that should be a marble stand. Move over Michelangelo’s David, I give you Decrepitude.
Let me run into the house now, find a bathroom and a mirror. Stare at my own face and title it Not Decrepitude. Let me think. Is there an equally weighty word for “not quite right”? Not so obviously wrong as a human being with three eyes or one, not a cyclopean monster but a mistake. I give you Abnormality. Anomaly. Deviance. Oddity.
Portrait of the artist as a high school loser. I had a port-wine stain covering half of my left cheek, encircling my left eye like a claw, extending down my neck, and, no, to all the people who have asked or imagined, not touching the breast. Because of the port-wine stain, I had a limp. The blood vessels erupting on my face were buried in my leg, but they made the right leg fatter and longer than the left. It was corrected in childhood with a surgery that involved breaking and fusing my femur. I spent the summer between first and second grade recovering from the surgery. The legs are the same length now, but the limp is incurable. Despite years of braces and orthopedic shoes, it cannot be fixed. Since infancy, I have worn glasses, though they have corrective lenses for the right eye only. The veins have smudged my vision in that eye, though my parents reminded me it could be worse. The first specialists told them I would be blind and have seizures and perhaps mental retardation. It was a good thing my father wa
s a doctor. He took me to Boston Children’s, and we met Dr. Lloyd Hartman. He should have been a cardiologist with that name, my dad never tired of saying. Dr. Hartman told my parents I would not be retarded and I would not be blind, but there was no fixing the port-wine stain. It went too deep.
My baby pictures are hideous. I was a fat, multicolored gargoyle with an eye patch and a swollen cheek. One day, I tore the pictures out of the photo album, ripped them to shreds, and threw them away. When my mother found them, she showed the confetti to my father, and my father knocked softly on my open door and came into my room. I was ten years old. I was reading a book, book reading being the refuge of many of the deformed and untouchable. He put his hand on my cheek. He said, beauty is as beauty does. He told me I was beautiful and that one day everyone else in the world would see what he could see. For his sake, I did not cry. I stared at the pages of my book. Marcia Brady is the pretty one. Cindy is cute. Everyone finds Jan, with her glasses and big teeth, annoying. At ten, I knew how the world worked.
In middle school, seventh grade to be exact, Sheila Bradford, who took ballet and was obsessed with all things dance—she had ballet slippers on her backpack, her lunch box; she walked like a penguin with her toes permanently askew—had the sudden revelation that the port-wine stain made her classmate—the author, me—look like a harlequin. Look, she said, pulling out a notebook with a picture of a black-and-white harlequin face on it. It’s you. From seventh grade on, that was my nickname, the Harlequin, and I embraced it, the character who could be both jester and victim, comedia and tragedia, laughing on the outside and crying on the inside. I hated the nickname, so I exulted in it, introduced myself that way, used it as my moniker in the yearbook.
I had no one to sit with at lunch, so I ate a sandwich in a far corner of the library since food was not allowed among the sacred plastic-covered books. The librarian, Mrs. Coolick, was perfectly aware that I was eating lunch and pitied me. Watch as the artist wipes the crumbs of her sandwich into her hands and pours them back into the plastic bag and takes them home to be thrown away. If there was justice in the world—justice, a concept no less magical than immortality and human flight—those crumbs would blossom into a miraculous plant that would cure the cursed beast, or better yet, would turn into a giant dandelion. When the artist blows on it, all the frothy seeds snow over the land and turn everyone they touch into a harlequin like her. She runs outside and witnesses the transformation, a land of beasts, equality. A far shot: the cursed princess extends her arms out and lifts her chin to the sky. Someone takes her right hand, then her left; the beasts join together into a ring and dance. Cut to: Tokyo, under a pagoda, Japanese beasts. London, Big Ben; Russia, the onion domes in Red Square; Paris, the Eiffel Tower; a Masai village on the Serengeti—all transformed in her image.
I limped down the hall clutching my books to my chest. I was very smart. I was valedictorian. I applied to all the Ivies and blamed the port-wine stain when the big three rejected me. I was sure I saw Ms. Naomi Carlton, the admissions director at Yale, wince, stare, then recompose herself to act as if she had never noticed the purple carpet on my face. Naomi Carlton: I cast you as the wicked witch, stick a wart with a dark hair on your nose. Of course, having reached the ripe old age of twenty-eight now, I might remove poor Ms. Carlton’s wart and let her defend herself. No one from Mansfield got into Yale the year I applied, a fact my guidance counselor blamed on the unprecedented acceptance of four Mansfield students the prior year. But still, I saw the look on her face. Keep the wart, Ms. Carlton. Have people ask you what’s on your nose and try to pluck it away.
I was accepted to my fourth choice, the University of Pennsylvania, and had to inform people back in Atlanta that it was not a state school despite its name. When I got the courage to ask Evan Elkins, baseball star and four-year unrequited crush, to sign my yearbook, he said his pen was out of ink, laughed, turned away, signed someone else’s yearbook. There was a graduation party. I was not invited. Everyone in the school except for me and the three other bottom-rung students (Roger Petrovniak, calculus genius and victim of cystic acne; Henrietta Schlossberg, who is later diagnosed with schizophrenia so the Mansfield High students who called her crazy were right in a way; and morbidly obese Paula Godwin) was invited. In the movie, Roger, Henrietta, Paula, and I would throw an alternative party. The audience’s sympathy starts in act one as the four of us spend graduation night eating greasy popcorn and watching an old movie, let’s say, Dr. Strangelove. In act three, a decade has passed. The world has become a dangerous place. Nuclear war with North Korea and Russia has left most of the country uninhabitable. Our future rests in the hands of one man and one woman, Roger Petrovniak, who has discovered a new planet with blue seas and grassy plains, and Carla Lefkowitz, the only one who has been able to decode the language of the planet’s seemingly friendly, albeit wary, inhabitants. The Mansfield High ten-year reunion is held underground in a dimly lit bunker with plastic flowers rescued from the last surviving Walmart for decorations. Henrietta has become a warrior woman. Paula, having lost all her excess weight through the meager rations we are allowed, is now stunning and unrecognizable in the skintight gray jumpsuit that everyone wears in the apocalyptic future. Evan Elkins, not looking so handsome without a tan, gets up the nerve to ask Paula to dance. He says, “Did you go to Mansfield? I don’t know how I wouldn’t remember someone as beautiful as you.” Suddenly, the whole room shakes. Paula stumbles into Evan’s chest. Roger pulls Henrietta and me out of the crowd. Bare lightbulbs swing. Circuits fizzle and pop. There are screams and bodies litter the floor, frothing at the mouth, bleeding. Another attack, the big one we have feared. Roger has a spaceship. It can hold only four people plus a hundred million test tubes of DNA that will be used to turn this new planet into a replica of Earth. Paula pushes Evan away from her, runs into Roger’s arms. We step into a glass tube while the rest of Mansfield’s desperate alumni throw themselves up against the exterior, their nails tear off as they try to claw their way in. As the tube rises, they drop away like bugs. The last thing we see, from the safety of our spaceship, is the blindingly bright explosion of what was Earth. We are not blinded. Roger has given us protective eyewear.
Of course, this would not happen. Paula, Henrietta, Roger, and I are not friends. The stain of our rejection would only grow brighter in one another’s company. We give one another no solace. If the world ended, we would die alone.
In college, the cold Philadelphia winters allowed me to wear turtlenecks that covered 50 percent of my port-wine stain. I was admired for my writing skills; people fell in love with me before they met me after reading my poems and stories. Some of what my father (who had just been diagnosed with lung cancer despite never smoking) told me seemed to be true. Some people valued intelligence as much as beauty. Though I knew that most of my classmates were as superficial as anyone, they usually edited their impulses to get to a higher level of thought, and they tried to see past the port-wine stain, the awkward gait, the wide-set eyes, the weak chin. I made friends who read one another’s poems and short stories, talked about James Joyce and Flannery O’Connor, who also had a limp. At a visiting writer’s workshop, Toni Morrison singled out one of my stories for its wit and empathy. When she pulled me aside after class to praise the story, I was sure that the famous writer had confused me with someone else until she produced the pages themselves with “by Carla Lefkowitz” at the bottom and the title “The Pun(ishment) of Clara(plegia)” at the top.
Marco Hunter, an aspiring writer himself, watched the exchange and became my first boyfriend. He took me out for coffee and forced me to read his short stories. Because he had curly hair and long eyelashes, and actually seemed to like me, I ignored the fact that Raymond Carver had already written these short stories. I gushed that they were amazing, insightful, the work of a great talent. I praised them and scrawled brilliant in the margins. Marco, of the curly dark hair, the gapped front teeth, the hairless chest. He was a thing to behold. Marco kissed me on the qua
d. When he kissed me, he kissed the red lid of my right eye and told me that the flames of my face ignited my words. He called the mark on my face a gift. When I told him my nickname, he adopted it immediately, lovingly. He called me hermosa arlequín. His mother was from Honduras. He was a bilingual miracle to me. Marco wanted to see all of me. We went back to his room, and I made every effort to keep my clothes on. I obliged him in every way that allowed me to keep my shirt buttoned because I half suspected he just wanted to see if I was purple all the way down, purple breasts, nipples, thighs. I had been asked before—more than once—if I had a purple pussy, and I was certain Marco had imagined this himself. Months passed this way. When we finally made love—my first time, but I didn’t tell him that—all the lights were off. He whispered that my skin was soft and smooth, and I thought I could hear the surprise in his voice—what was he expecting? Jelly? An exoskeleton? When I thought he was sleeping and I tried to sneak into the bathroom, he flipped on his reading lamp to look at me. “It’s only on your face,” he said, and he sounded disappointed. Then I realized, men must have “sleep with freak” on their bucket list, and this was not going to count for Marco.
Inevitably, Marco fell in love with someone else, someone blond with a little nose and perfect skin. We never broke up. He just disappeared. I waited for him outside his senior Victorian literature seminar to ask him what I did wrong, though, of course, I knew the answer. He told me to stop stalking him. In the screenplay, the audience is now hating Marco. In act three, he will get what he deserves. He stupidly goes into the basement when he hears a thump; the deranged woman cuts off his head with an axe. Okay, ten years have passed. I am twenty-eight. Marco can keep his head. First college relationships have a short half-life. I know that now, but it wasn’t as easy for me to replace Marco as it was for him to replace me. After Marco, I had sex several more times. I liked sex, but I never really had another boyfriend. I just thought, Hey, you want to fuck the purple girl, I’m good with that as long as you are okay with extended foreplay.