Leggy Blonde: A Memoir (13 page)

I was having lunch with friends at Fred’s restaurant in the basement at Barneys weeping and weeping about Paul. But really, it was
everything: Jonathan, my own behavior, guilt, shame, embarrassment, residual pain about the surgery, and that horrible feeling that I didn’t know what I was doing or why I was behaving like this.

“Losing Paul is like losing my right arm,” I cried.

“What did he say when he broke up with you?” asked my friend Kelly.

“He didn’t want to be the rebound guy,” I said. “Which makes no sense. He doesn’t even play basketball!”

Blonde moment number 4,328. I didn’t know what a rebound relationship was. It was like the time in fourth grade when a boy asked me if I knew what a blow job was and I said, “Oh, yeah, I always get a blow job after a haircut.”

I could claim “young and stupid” only to a point. I’d hurt others, and myself, in what I came to think of as the Pruning Year. I didn’t always think things through, or imagine beyond the moment when I brought out the sheers to cut back. I certainly hadn’t counted on the pain I experienced and caused. Having elective surgery and calling off the wedding were both drastic amputations, and the right decisions to make. At my low moments in the aftermath, I hoped that the pruning of broken parts and relationship would clear the way for new things to grow.

M
y father was born Jewish. My mother was born Lutheran. Neither was observant. We always decorated a Christmas tree growing up, but it wasn’t Christian or Jewish. We never went to church or temple. I didn’t have a bat mitzvah at thirteen. The extent of my religious upbringing was to say, “Oh, my God!” when we got good news, and to say, “Holy shit!” when we got bad news. We took a sort of spiritual journey (to hell) that month in India with Sai Baba. His cult was nondenominational. He welcomed gullible people of all faiths.

Religion hadn’t played an important part—any part, really—in my life. So it might seem strange that in the aftermath of the Jonathan/Paul debacle, I became obsessed with a rebbitzin—the wife of a rabbi—and started going to Torah classes a couple of times a week.

I was a bit lost, and wide open to direction. Jennifer’s mom, Cheryl, had taken the Torah class and loved it. I joined her one
evening at the Jewish Center on Seventy-fourth Street and West End Avenue. The rebbitzin looked like Tammy Faye Baker, but prettier. She had the fake eyelashes and a short blond wig. (FYI: Many religious Jewish married women wear wigs.) She was tiny and well dressed with perfectly wrapped, long manicured nails. At the lesson, a nice group of secular Jews would sit around and hang on the rebbitzin’s every word.

It was way better than Sai Baba.

The rebbitzin—Reb—explained the Jewish Bible and laws in a way that made total sense to me. Something clicked. I found myself nodding along, liking what I heard. Religion could be a part of my life. It should be. Being connected to traditions, history, and something larger than myself would fill a hole inside that I didn’t know existed, until I felt it being filled up. I started going to classes twice a week, three times.

Although I was very single, I’d been thinking a lot about my future kids. Coming from a mixed, nutty household, I wanted to prove the opposite to my children. My husband and I would share values and common faith, and give them a steady, unified family life. A half-and-half agnostic, I would have to pick a side of the fence to come down on. All of my friends were Jewish. I lived in New York. If I were leaning toward Judaism, Reb’s classes sealed the deal.

I learned the history, traditions, and observations. Some of the practices fit my lifestyle, like keeping my legs covered. Some didn’t. According to Jewish law, a woman is not allowed to have sex during her period. I kind of got that one, as sexist as it sounded (menstruating women being unclean, etc.). A five-day break once a month could create a little mystery and build anticipation, two things missing in long-term relationships. The practice wasn’t necessarily for me, but I could see how it could work. Same thing with keeping kosher. It was
really like any restrictive diet. When you sat down at a restaurant, you could look at a menu and know right away what you could and couldn’t eat. In the right light, it was just a good way to simplify your life.

The Torah classes brought in all kinds of people of different ages, races, and genders. I met a man there, an Iranian Jew named Ricky. (Yes, there are Jews in Iran, and China, and Africa. The diaspora covered the globe. You could find at least one Jew just about anywhere—even Texas.) How many gentile girls went to Torah classes and wound up falling in love with a Persian man? What were the odds? About the same as getting your foot stuck in a barn cleaner.

The opposite of a bookish pale New York Jewish neb type, Ricky was tall, dark, virile, and muscular. I wasn’t a Rob Lowe or Michael J. Fox kind of girl. I liked men big and strong—and hairy. Ricky was all that. He was older than me, and seemed to have his life together. He came from a successful real estate family (I know, I know; another one), and worked in the business. His exotic looks were a plus, but he could have been as white bread as I was. We had intense chemistry. We would have found each other from opposite ends of Yankee Stadium.

We started having coffee after class. Coffee. Not a drink. He was straitlaced. He told me more about his family. His parents were born in Iran and moved to the North Shore of Long Island with many members of their extended family. Ricky was born in America, but he was rooted in his family’s ancient Persian culture. He lived a double life, in a way: Persian with his family in Great Neck, and a New Yorker in the city.

As attracted as we were, we couldn’t have a future unless I became an official Jew. Despite being 50 percent Jewish, according to their law, I was 100 percent gentile. Mom wasn’t a member of the tribe.
That meant I wasn’t either. (Why does Jewishness come down only on the maternal line? When these laws were written thousands of years ago, paternity couldn’t be proven. If you were born of a Jewish mother, however, you were sure to have her genes.) Ricky’s family was very religious. Marrying an American was even a stretch. A non-Jew? Forget it.

I didn’t convert for Ricky, but he was an important part in the decision. The process wasn’t going to be easy. I couldn’t just say, “Shalom! I’m a Jew! Let’s nosh.” For me to become a Jew, I had to study the Torah and go through a process that included a ritual “mikvah” submersion. It’s sort of like a baptism for adults—but naked, with bagels and lox after. If you’ve heard of a mikvah, it’s probably in the context of a bath women take after they finish their periods. It represented a cleansing before the husband and wife can have sex again. The same tub was used for conversions as well. (Don’t worry—there is a lot of chlorine in the water. Oh, I forgot to put that on my list! I am afraid of chlorine, too. It’s a known carcinogen that we soak in when swimming.)

On the big day, I arrived at the mikvah house and went into a little locker room to put on a plain white cotton robe. Next, I moved into another room, like an office, to be interviewed by three rabbis. We sat in chairs and they asked me a series of questions, such as, “Are you a natural blonde?” and “Is that your real leg?” No, really, the questions were about Jewish law and traditions. (FYI: It went deeper than what I learned watching
The Ten Commandments
with Charlton Heston every Passover on TV.) They challenged me on how serious I was about conversion. Satisfied that I’d done my homework and meant business, the rabbis gave their approval for the next step: submersion into the bath.

Two female members of the congregation brought me into the mikvah room. It looked like a spa with a Jacuzzi. The bath water
wasn’t hot or bubbling. It was just plain warm water, blessed and clean. I took off my robe, and my leg. If you weren’t born with it, it doesn’t go into the bath. You have to be naked of clothes, jewelry, prostheses, and scrubbed clean of makeup and lotions.

The attendants helped me hop up a couple of steps and sink into the bath. I dunked three times, and was given two blessings by the rabbi outside of the room. They spoke loud enough for me to hear him. And that was it. Done. I’d been symbolically reborn. I went into the mikvah a shiksa, and came out a Jew, possibly the tallest and blondest in New York City.

•  •  •

Every Friday night for Shabbat dinner, Ricky went to Great Neck for a multicourse Persian dinner cooked by his doting mother and sisters. The Persian women would spend the entire day making exotic spicy dishes. I heard stories about this epic meal for months before he finally invited me along. The food alone opened the door to Ricky’s culture. I have never had better food in my life—even better than Paris. Rice dishes with raisins and spices, chicken with turmeric, lamb with curry. All of it smelled fantastic, too.

The welcome in Great Neck? A bit chilly. It was a really big deal for Ricky to invite any girlfriend to Friday dinner. And then he showed up with a blond American? I was their worst nightmare. Generally, Iranian Jews did not let their kids marry Americans. When they got a look at me, his family’s eyes bugged out like an alien had just walked in. His parents recovered fairly quickly, though, and treated me nicely. They were too sophisticated and polite not to. The house itself was classically suburban and understated. It was large, with a pool. There were Persian books and art and sculptures everywhere and pistachios on the coffee table.

His mom and sisters played by unspoken rules of conduct about cooking and serving. I picked up on one rule right away. Women had to help in the kitchen from the moment you entered the house until dinner was cleaned up, dishes put away. If I finished one task, I had to immediately ask for another.

His mother would say, “No, nononono. You sit.”

I said, “But I really want to help.”

“If you insist. Go peel those ten pounds of potatoes.”

We did this twenty times a night. If I didn’t push for more work, Ricky’s mom would have forbidden me to come over ever again. They really had this polite fake dance down to a science. It went against my innate no-nonsense character, but I loved Ricky. And I had to win the women in his family over, so I did the dance.

Ricky’s father was the patriarch, the king of the house. To do well in New York real estate, you had to be aggressive and tough—and he was very intimidating. He ruled his big family with a quiet, tight grip. According to their way of life, the men worked and the women cooked. A woman who didn’t cook wasn’t worth her salt, as it were. Even though Ricky knew that I was in law school and respected my independence, he agreed with his dad about the cooking. I was clueless with a skillet. It became an issue.

“I want you to learn to cook like my mother,” he said one day. I was taken aback. His culture might insist that women spend their lives in the kitchen. But I knew another tradition. On the Upper West Side, the only thing Jewish women made for dinner was a reservation. But I was desperately, passionately in love with him, and since it mattered to him, I made the effort. So, on the nights I wasn’t studying law or Torah, I took cooking classes at Peter Kump’s New York cooking school. I made authentic Iranian dinners at my place—I was still at the Kenilworth; the apartment took a while to sell—and brought the
food in containers over to Ricky’s on Seventy-fourth Street and Second Avenue. I actually got pretty good behind the stove.

If I hadn’t been überattracted to him, I would have resented him about the cooking. But I wanted to please him, marry him, and start a family with him. His family had other ideas.

“My father and I had a talk yesterday,” said Ricky over one of those dinners I shopped for, cooked, and catered for him. “He was concerned about what would happen if you ended up in a wheelchair. If we got married and had children, what kind of mother could you be in a wheelchair?”

I’d devoted my life since age six to being a 100 percent functional amputee. I’d been able to do everything anyone else could (well, I wasn’t a triathlete like Ricky; I did love cheering him on during his races, though). I thought he admired my determination and abilities. To hear his—and his father’s—doubts was a real blow.

I couldn’t reply for a few seconds. Then I said, “What if you had a heart attack or got hit by a bus and ended up in a wheelchair? Anyone could. I don’t get why you’re saying this about me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said dismissively.

They’d been talking behind my back, and had decided I was feeble and damaged. I wouldn’t, in their eyes, have the physical capacity to care for Ricky’s children the way a whole and hearty woman would. Ricky’s father saw me as a bad bet. Their culling system reminded me of horse traders, inspecting limbs. Any sign of weakness, they moved on to the next animal.

For me, marriage wasn’t about passing a physical examination, but about joining souls. A husband and wife should be together in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer. I would be there for Ricky if he were in a wheelchair, or if his face burned off. Apparently, he
didn’t feel the same way about me. I think they might’ve accepted me for being American, fair-colored, and a half-blood Jew, but my leg was an insurmountable issue.

It was a real eye-opener, that conversation. I wondered if my leg had been Jonathan’s father’s problem with me, too. Jonathan never cared about it. For that matter, Jonathan never expected me to be his cook, maid, and brood mare. Where was Ricky’s pushback? He didn’t defend me to his father. That had to mean he shared his father’s archaic views of marriage, and my unsuitability to tend to him, his house, and his offspring.

I should have said, “Fuck you,” and walked out of his house that night.

But I didn’t. I was twenty-seven and afflicted by crazy love. I couldn’t leave. In fact, I did just the opposite and clung to Ricky and tried to calm his fears. I swore I was as strong as any other woman, and would prove it to him. I threw myself into cooking, and tried more complicated dishes with expensive ingredients.

“Why are you wasting money on these ingredients? My father thinks you spend too much money on clothes, too,” he said.