Oh my liver!

She was Jewish like all my good friends in grammar school and lived in East Gloucester right across from the beach.  Two minutes to have your bare feet on the wooden bridge and another minute to reach the sand.  Sharon had curly red hair and blue, blue eyes and a laugh that would bubble out of her chest with a gasp if you said something even halfway clever. 

"Oh my liver," was her elaborate response whether she found something interesting or amusing.  She would throw her head back for dramatic effect, and then she would always, always laugh joyously.  I had never met anyone who liked me back as much, so I developed a girl crush on her and her family.

Her mother had hair like mine, shiny with streaks of blond in the summer.  She would stroke my hair affectionately and tell me how pretty I was.  Mrs. Lobel let Sharon have parties on Saturdays whenever she wanted to have one.   One of five, a part of me pitied Sharon as an only child, but she seemed to have everything she wanted.  If I had not liked her so much, I would have been jealous. 

There was no organization at her weekend events, just lots of laughing and horseplay and they included mixed company.  The boys were our friends at school as well, but Glenn was my favorite.  He had this really mature sense of humor and made us all laugh at ourselves.   Although we were extroverts, Sharon and I were still studious girls who took our academic achievement seriously.  We also shared a height of 5'8" and towered above everyone except Peter.  He was frightfully skinny and so self-conscious he was often bending himself in half to appear less conspicuous.

I found it amazing that Sharon's mother trusted her so completely.  We were even allowed to walk over and play on the beach without chaperones.  Oh, I had been doing this on my own from the age of eight or nine at Lighthouse Beach, but this was Good Harbor.  I knew better than to disclose this to my parents, as my party days would have been over.  There was no chance of being found out, as my parents didn't socialize with anyone but their own crowd.  I had gotten my first period six months before, and any freedom I had enjoyed was immediately curtailed.  I was being allowed to go to friends' houses, but even this was approved of only tentatively.

Then again, I was a shiksa,  my mother reminded me.

"Jews only marry Jews," she had said knowingly.  "Even if a boy likes you, his entire family will gang up and make sure he never marries you.  It's not like you can convert, as you have to be Jewish on your mother's side for it to count."

"Do you think your mother's father might have been Jewish?"

"Of course not!"

"But I thought nobody knows who he was?  Maybe they hid the truth because he was Jewish."

"Don't be so stupid!  My grandmother would never have had sex with anyone but a Catholic!"

"But how do you know?"

"I just do, that's all.  And don't ever say something like that again.  My poor mother would turn over in her Irish grave.  Why I'd be a quarter Jewish and you know that's ridiculous."

"But people think you look Jewish and your name is Leah.  Isn't that an old Jewish name?"

"I am French, perhaps a bit of the Mediterranean got in there somehow, but my mother had red hair.  Anyway, how do you come up with these things?  Leah is a biblical name.  Don't you know that Catholics read the bible too?  Besides it was my aunt's name and she died before I was even born."

"Lots of Jewish people name their children after their ancestors, Mom.  Maybe we should try to find out from your aunts and uncles.  I bet they know something and would tell you.  You know, now that you're all grown up."

"If I wanted to know I would have asked.  My mother was not Jewish.  That much I know."

"Mom, why are you so upset?  Jewish people are so nice.  I'd love to be Jewish.

"You'd like to be an Indian too, and you'd like to be French.  You are mostly English and, boring as that is, that's your heritage."

"Dad said your dad is a French Canuck so that makes me at least a quarter Canuck."

She slapped my cheek.

"Don't use that word.  Your father thinks he's funny, but it is rude.  My grandparents were from a very good family in Quebec.  They had money and prestige and just because my grandfather decided to be a bootlegger when he moved to Maine, that doesn't make us anything less.  I even had a great uncle who was a Bishop in France.  Do you think just anybody gets to be a bishop?"

No one believed her about the bishop, nor could she supply a name, but my mother loved her family myths.  Any reference to the bishop, however, made my father snicker and guffaw.

"But would you let me marry someone Jewish?  What if I didn't know and accidentally fell in love?"

"Real love isn't like falling off a roof.  Besides, it wouldn't be up to your father and me.  Of course, we wouldn't like it, but it would be up to his family.  I can tell you from experience, they would stop you from getting married.  All those Jews are like a tribe that won't let any foreigners join.  Look at Israel."

"Why not?  What is wrong with people who aren't Jewish?"

"It's the bloodlines.  They think they're the chosen people."

"Well, don't Catholics too?"

"It's complicated and not the same.  My first boyfriend in college was Jewish, which I never told my father of course.  My mother thought it was incredibly romantic, though.  She wanted me to tell her every detail. It was embarrassing."  This memory made her laugh before she continued. 

"'He looks Irish,' I told her.  What did I know then?  Anyway, it didn't matter because he died." 

Her eyes watered up, as I knew they would.  This was the same boyfriend she had spoken of many times before.  When she shared these things it signaled she had been drinking before dinner, but all I thought about was how beautifu and tragic a figure she could be.  I romantically imagined what she had felt and my heart ached with compassion.  Still I loved my father and pitied that even if only in her fantasy?  He had been cuckholded just the same.

Of course, I would learn later from experience that a first love often involves an insane sort of worship.  Its purpose?  Who knows but I like to think that it solidifies one's future ability to love another.  That summer I was still an impressionable child and believed everything my parents told me.  Seeing through the prejudices and lies was a skill I had yet to develop.

After I was awarded the Sawyer Medal for academics,  I became even more popular with my Jewish friends' parents.  After much badgering, my mother finally agreed I could have a party to celebrate, but the time was never right.  Company was coming over the weekend, she was giving a concert, my father didn't feel well or she needed me to babysit for my younger siblings.  There was always a reason why it couldn't be that next weekend.

Then she confided a party was too expensive now that Dad wasn't working.

"Don't mention it again," she admonished sternly.   She reminded me we were having a family reunion and barbecue on the fourth of July. 

"You can invite two or three friends then," she said.  We both knew everyone in Gloucester would be busy with their own families or have taken off on a family vacation somewhere. 

I began to feel like a poor relation.  The one who eventually stops showing up, as she can never afford to pick up the check.  I did not understand my own vanity or that shame would be toxic to my friendships.  I told my friends that it would not be long before I invited them for a party, but I was vague about when. 

One Saturday after my father dropped me off at Sharon's house,  these feelings of unworthiness began to flavor my behavior. 

"Are you feeling all right," Sharon asked intuitively.

"Oh, yeah.  I'm just tired," I lied.

We were in her front yard playing badminton, when she grandly suggested we run across to the beach for a game of spin the bottle. 

The boys' eyes perked up as one of them said, "We can find a bottle in the creek under the bridge.  People always leave trash there."  All the girls looked horrified at the thought, but Sharon laughed at them.

"Da daaaaa!"  She held up her cream soda bottle and raced across the street.  We soon followed, laughing as we dodged in between a couple of passing cars and tires screeched.  Twenty of us streamed across the wooden bridge with Sharon leading the pack.

Hundreds of tourists and locals mingled not too far from the water's edge, while under their mother's watchful eyes a few small children were playing in the fresh-water creek that led down to the sea.  We followed Sharon to the other side of the bridge, a spot where mothers forbid their children to play.  The creek was only slightly deeper but to a toddler it had proven deadly.

We sat in a circle hidden from the crowds, the boys clustered in clumps together and the girls in their own.  Neither sex actually was touching the other, but the girls had woven their arms around each other as is they were prepping for a game that required great physical prowess or perhaps resistance.

"What happens if a boy spins the bottle and it points to another boy," Glenn asked with one eyebrow raised significantly above the other, forming a highly exaggerated and comical expression.

"Oh my liver!" Sharon exclaimed with glee.  "You can kiss the boys and make them cry if you want to, Glenn, but the rest of us will just spin again."

"Oh my kidney," I said, hoping to be as clever as she, but I wasn't surprised when it fell rather flat.

The game started and the bottle spun around.  First Marcia was kissed by Jon, then Stewie mashed Melissa.  Ruth complained because Max tried to push his tongue in between her teeth, and then it was Peter's turn. 

He looked at me and said, "I hope I get you."  Everyone laughed except me.  I felt my face turn red as the bottle spun, but I was oddly excited.  

"Elizabeth!"  I recognized that voice.  My father had just crossed the bridge and was walking towards us.  "Get in the car."

I don't remember if my friends continued to invite me to parties or not.  If they did, I never accepted.  A week later I started a full-time job babysitting fifty hours a week for a family friend's children.  My father thought it would keep me out of trouble. 

When we all started high school that fall, I had begun working after school and on weekends too, leaving little time for socializing and my college prep studies.  Glenn would accuse me of becoming a snob, but I was too hurt and embarrassed to defend myself.  How could I explain the panic I felt that my future was suddenly in great jeopardy?

"I need to talk to you," my mother had said the day after Sharon's party, which also happened to be my fourteenth birthday. 

There had been another darker development from that innocent game of spin the bottle.  My parents had decided that I was a typical girl after all.  In spite of my claims of ambition and proven academic achievement, they believed I would end up like all the rest. 

"Well, now you've done it," my mother hissed with hostility.   As she washed the dishes, she slammed them into the strainer.  She stopped only long enough to throw a cotton dish towel at me, doubling as emphasis and a demand that I start drying.

I had no idea what she was talking about, which probably never occurred to her.  I waited in stunned silence, inadvertently holding my breath and mentally assembling my recent sins into a list.  

Had she found and read my diary?  Had someone seen me smoking a cigarette with the other kids at the ice cream parlor?  Was it the book I had found hidden in her drawer?  Oh God, I hoped my father didn't know I was reading Lady Chatterly's Lover.  I hadn't done anything else I could remember offhand, but the truth was rarely a consideration within our family dynamics. 

"Your father predicted you would throw your life away as soon as you developed those big breasts.  There will be some fast talker who'll come along he said, and she'll be stupid enough to fall for it.  Probably a Jew or even an Italian.  And with your recent behavior, how could anyone argue the fact?"

Finally she looked at me, her dark eyes filled with fury. 

"Stupid, stupid girl!"  Then she turned away again and banged the pots as she stacked them on top of each other in the kitchen cabinets.

"There's no point wasting money on somebody who's not going to use her education.  That's what your father said, and it's final.   So... if you want to go to college?  You'll have to find a way to do it on your own.  Don't  look at me like that and don't bother to cry, because it's your own damn fault.  After yesterday?  Well, your dad says you're bound to get pregnant.  He said he's decided not to pay to educate any of you girls, that it's just a waste.  I hope you're proud of yourself."

"But, Mom!  You went to college!  Can't you talk to him?  I mean, you almost have your masters now!"

"Well, like he says, I don't make any money.  What good did it do me?"

I took to walking along Lighthouse beach that year, shamed, lonely, mournful and misunderstood.  I never had the desire to go back to Good Harbor until I was older and a tourist myself.  After all, that fateful afternoon I had lost more than a promised kiss.
© 2008 Elizabeth Madrigal