A Complicated Marriage by Janice Van Horne Read Free Book Online Page B

hadn’t stood a chance. I could even understand how they would have been able to eat hearty and rest easy that night. They had disowned me, wiped their hands clean of me. The irony would surface a few years later, when a family tree revealed that the hallowed Plattdeutsch patriarch’s mother was Jewish. From Bohemia, she had brought her fortune and her Biedermeier into the family. Her descendents had selective awareness and memories.
    As for bigotry itself, of course I knew about that. I had grown up in a hotbed of anti-Semitism. In most of Westchester County’s suburbs, and especially in Rye, schools, neighborhoods, country clubs, and social activities were “restricted.” The big, fancy house I grew up in until I was eight was in an area called Green Haven that prohibited owners from selling to Jews. My mother, on her descent into the marginal middle class after her disastrous second marriage, to the Con Man, was one of the first to break the covenant. Not out of principle, but out of need. My high school, Rye Country Day School, under financial pressure, had grudgingly opened its doors to a small quota of Jews. My best friend there was Jewish. My mother suggested that I not see so much of her, because I couldn’t “reciprocate.” Reciprocate what, I didn’t say. Even then, I knew the limits of my mother’s imagination. My friend continued to be my best friend.
    Whatever had gone before, I had been set up that Christmas Eve. Certainly by the Augustins, but by my mother? I suppose it was possible that she knew, to some extent. But, like me, she could not possibly have foreseen the brutal turn the “conversation with Jenny” would take. I had never learned how to defend myself, other than to duck and run. One aftermath was that, overnight, I became super-sensitive to anti-Semitism,
sniffing it out whenever I came within shooting distance. And I have done a lot of shooting. As for that Christmas Eve, the event was soon eclipsed by more compelling experiences.
    On Christmas day I went to bed with Clem for the first time. Wounded from the family wars, I very much needed the closeness with him. But it wasn’t easy. Though I hated to admit it, sex still carried a “bad girl” stigma. Having never been rebellious, my early exploration had been confined to a furtive kiss with my best friend Cissy when I was ten. But oh, how I wondered about it. I had wondered since David, the handsomest boy in my whole thirteen-year-old universe, had kissed me behind the garbage cans at my friend’s country house and told me I had the most beautiful lips he had ever seen and set my stomach lurching for weeks. Thereafter, stomach lurching would be associated with love.
    At least until the day of the “posture pictures.” The ninth-grade girls were taken one by one to a room in the basement of Rye County Day School, and I was told to take off my clothes. I stood on a platform under a bright light while a man took pictures, front and profile. I never saw the pictures, but the feelings lingered: Nakedness = shame = sex. A year later, I did what teenagers did and fell in love with my boyfriend Doug and made much ado about not “doing it.” We necked and petted in the backseat of his best friend’s car until I had orgasms without knowing what they were—all, of course, without going “below the waist.”
    I stood there in front of Clem. My nakedness made me feel ugly. Shame welled up in the depths of me. I wanted to hide. A lover ? How do I do it ? Here was a new, bad-girl role that I wasn’t sure I wanted to play. But I touched his arm, the silk of his arm. This was Clem; this was the real thing. Then I was on the bed, giggly with nerves, wishing “it” would be over as soon as possible. No surprise, I experienced little pleasure and much pain. So much for my mother’s “beautiful moment with the man you love.”
    After the deed was done,