TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 23

[Tobie Shapiro]

October 8, 20000000006

Dear Me, We Must Move,

	I've been busy packing, going through closets and separating 
the wheat from the chaff, and tossing clothing to the Goodwill.  It 
seems like a moving task that will never be done, but I know it will 
be.  Now if I could only get the key to the new place, and all those 
phone calls I must make.  Oh dear me.

	Tobie


 
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Homestead, Florida

	Dweller and I decided to get married after we'd lived 
together for about a year.  Now, looking back, I think a year and 
some is not enough time to know someone well enough to get married, 
but neither is twenty years, so what the hell.  I asked Dweller if we 
were going to get married, and he said that he was waiting until he 
got his master's degree, then he was going to ask me.  That bothered 
me, and I told him.  I wanted the decision to get married to be a 
moment of passion, a sudden burst of love, an act of desperate 
ecstasy brought on by an epiphany, not just a slow mulling over the 
facts and then a slump shouldered admittance that it was about time. 
Essentially, I didn't want reason to have a lot to do with it, and 
that says a lot about who I was when I was twenty one.

	So we decided to get married, and the wheels were set in 
motion.  Dweller already knew my family and they liked and accepted 
him more than they liked and accepted me.  Dweller wanted me to come 
meet his parents who were travelling the country with their trailer. 
At the time, they were in Homestead, Florida, a place outside Miami. 
We made reservations to fly back there and planned that on the way 
back we would visit New Orleans, a place neither of us had been.  I 
was very excited to be heading back east, a whole three thousand 
miles, to meet my sweetheart's parents.  I thought family was very 
important, and I wanted to have a terrific relationship with them.  I 
pictured myself the eager, respectful, willing daughter-in-law, a 
little off-beat, special, specially nice, and making their eldest son 
so happy.

	They were there in the airport, standing together at the gate 
when we walked off the plane.  Dweller introduced me and I stepped 
forward to give his father and mother a hug.  The reception I 
received was cold.  His father stiffened and stepped back.  His 
mother smiled thinly but did not return my embrace.  They ushered us 
to the baggage claim and went to get the car.  I told Dweller in 
their absence that they seemed not to like me, and he said that his 
father was rather cool, and maybe his mother was flustered.  This 
coolth and flusteration continued.  They barely spoke to me, instead 
speaking to Dweller and having him be the bearer of  messages.  I was 
beside myself, but being in love sustained me.

	We slept in the trailer, me on a window seat and Dweller on 
the floor nearby.  During the day, they took us to meet some 
relatives who lived to the west about fifty miles.  We drove through 
marshy territory where people sat at the edge of the water fishing. 
The groups of fishers were all segregated by choice: the white 
fishers here and the black fishers there.  We saw an African American 
man running alongside the road, his shirt off, sweating in the 
Florida sun.  Dweller's mother commented, "Just look at that young 
buck."  Dweller felt me wriggle in my seat, driven to respond to the 
racism, and he quieted me.  Make nice.  I thought considering the bad 
foot we'd gotten off on, it might be best to shut up, even though my 
ethics dictated otherwise.  And then there was the love of my future 
husband to consider.  In honour of his desires, best to keep quiet. 
I kept quiet with difficulty.  The visit with the relatives was more 
pleasant than the times alone with his parents, but not by much, and 
evidently they had something to say about my conduct, because when we 
got back to Homestead, they took Dweller into the trailer to speak to 
him while I walked around the perimeter of a small reservoir.

	When I got back to the trailer, I walked in and the whole 
house went suddenly silent as death.  Dweller said, "Let's go for a 
walk," as he swept past me, took my arm and led us outside where we 
repeated the steps I'd just finished taking around the reservoir.  He 
was serious, and disheartened.  I could see it in his face.  No.  It 
was more than that.  He was crying.

	"What happened?" I asked.  He was searching for words, but 
couldn't find them.  Something dawned on me as the only possibility 
and I drifted it out to him.

	"It's because I'm Jewish, isn't it?"  I said softly.  He 
nodded his head.  He had been told by his parents that they were the 
last of the progressive open minded people, a breed of compassionate, 
sentient Americans, and he'd believed them.  It all came out now.  He 
was suffering from having his world view crushed.  He was putting 
things together and recognizing what he'd refused to recognize 
before.  Yes, what about that argument he'd had with his father when 
his parents were managing the Motel 6, over his policy not to rent to 
black people?  What was his reason for not renting them rooms?  What 
about the use of sayings like, "Nigger toes," for Brazil nuts?  What 
about, "To Jew a guy down," or, "Going at it like two Jews in a junk 
yard"?  Why hadn't he taken note?  Why was this a surprise?  Then, he 
revealed the content of his conversation with them in the trailer. 
They wondered what hold I had on him.  They told him he had to make a 
choice.  It was, ". . . either her or us".  Aside from the fact that 
that's a stupid threat to toss at a twenty six year old in love, it 
was abominable.  Why had they let me come there at all?  He didn't 
know.

	When we'd circled the reservoir and had come back to the 
trailer, his mother and father were standing on a little grassy 
mound.  His mother was frowning, her head down, and his father was 
ripping up handfuls of grass and tossing them back down on the 
ground.  His mother began.

	"We want to talk to you about the intermarriage between a Jew 
and a gentile."

	"What I see is an intermarriage between Dweller and Tobie," I said.

	She went on that his friends would reject me because I was 
Jewish, and my friends would reject him because he was not.

	"But we already have friends," we answered, "and nobody is 
rejecting anybody."

	This didn't help.  What does help a bigot see the light?  A 
nice Jewish girl?  A pile of reason?

	She continued, and was warming up.  "It was terrible what 
happened to the Jews in Germany during the war, but then they came 
over here in droves and treated us like lackeys."

	Dweller was trying to keep me quiet, subdued, polite, but I 
couldn't listen to that.

	"First of all, there is no, 'but', to the terrible things 
that happened to my people during the war.  Secondly, there were no 
droves left to come over here.  And if, there were or weren't, God 
forbid that anybody should treat a white man like a lackey."

	This was met with outrage.  I had been terribly rude.  They 
were insulted.  They were insulted.

	The rest of the visit went downhill from there.  The next 
day, they put us in the back seat of their car, and took us to Miami 
Beach.  Oh arbiter of taste, and exempla gregia of haute culture, 
Miami Beach, we hail thee.  When we were stopped at a crosswalk, the 
citizens of Miami crossed in front of us, and Mrs. Cliff, the sweet 
and loving mother of my beaux pointed out to us, "He's Jewish.  She 
isn't.  Jewish.  Jewish.  Not Jewish.  Jewish.  They're both Jewish. 
That one's not. . . "  I said I saw people, and they berated me. 
"Don't tell us you can't see the difference."  Dweller squeezed my 
hand to try to calm me, keep me from crossing them.  Let's make this 
as nice as possible.  But how nice could it be?  Only with layers of 
energetic lies could this scene be entertained as being acceptable.

	It got worse.  Now, whenever I rose from a chair, Dweller's 
father would saunter over with a clean rag and wipe the seat off so 
that my Jewish touchas would not be infecting the chair, ruining it 
for some other respectable, untarnished butt.  I had never been 
treated this way before.  I had never even witnessed anyone else 
being treated this way.  On the third day, Dweller agreed that this 
was no vacation.  We changed our reservations to return earlier, and 
we skipped New Orleans.  We had a bad taste in our mouths; we needed 
to be home.

	They told us to plan our wedding for whenever we wanted 
because they wouldn't be there.  We planned our wedding for July 
20th, 1969, the day the little men landed on the great big shiny 
moon, and we sent Dweller's parents an invitation.  They called, 
furious, because we'd planned our wedding purposefully for a time 
when they couldn't come.

	In the years that we were married, Dweller wrote doggedly to 
his parents, trying to win back their favour, explaining and 
explaining and explaining, to no avail.  Dweller chose to marry a 
Jewgirl, and he was being punished for that.  If you marry the 
Jewgirl, we won't love you any more.  They may have been bigots, but 
they weren't going to be dishonest.  I think of my poor husband, 
Dweller, trying to earn his parents' favour back, endlessly, with 
reason and a measure of begging.  Eventually, it was the 
intermarriage between Dweller and Tobie that caused the marriage to 
sink.

	I still remember having the chair wiped clean after I stood 
up and removed my bottom from it.  My bottom was never so powerful as 
it was in those few days in Florida.  I hate Florida.

 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net