The Promise of a Normal Life


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Copyright © 2023 by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson
 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
 First Edition
 This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
 Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].
 Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.
 Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.
 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022943205
 Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
 Cover illustration: © ByM/Getty Images
 ISBN: 978-1-956763-33-1
 Ebook ISBN: 978-1-956763-61-4
 Printed in the United States of America
 
 Also by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson
 Girl as Birch
 Opinel
 To those who understand more than they know
 All, says Buckminster Fuller, is angle and incidence.
 —Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination
 CONTENTS
 PART ONE
 1967
 wait
 1958
 pistachios
 dry ice
 lip print
 sex ed
 to keep from scratching
 best friend
 beaux
 1960
 Passover
 downstairs, upstairs
 “the silent person”
 1967
 hoodwinked
 righteous indignation
 no time to run
 1967
 hashish?
 talcum powder
 the Black Russian
 PART TWO
 1968
 eyes like blue crystal 101
 seen
 inadequate
 tell me what to do
 hypnotized
 why wait?
 extractions
 blue
 safe by association
 parade
 1970
 self-congratulation
 the ease with which I might
 a hole to fish through
 1974
 a paradise, sort of
 my own rabbi
 hints of heat
 outrage
 1983
 desire to flaunt
 meanwhile …
 be fair now
 what to say
 not out of concern
 equity
 secrets, jobs
 mine
 PART THREE
 1984
 love him?
 motion pictures
 snow
 balancing (the checkbooks)
 synchronicity
 how could it be wrong?
 1986
 telos
 oh!
 telos
 ready
 speaking up
 ah ha
 PART ONE
 
 1967
 
 wait
 There’s a picture of me, at eighteen, on the boat to Israel. I’m wearing a white-ribbed wool dress and looking really thin and tan. I’m gesturing to my companions at the table. They all seem to be listening to me! Alice, the French girl, is next to me, and Devora, with her wide Israeli face and black hair, who was going to be a lawyer, is across from us.
 I had just finished my junior year in England. On the last day of the term, the lowering gray sky had suddenly cleared to a light fresh rain, and then sun. The University of Sussex blossomed with students and faculty carrying transistor radios and listening intently to the news in Israel. It turned out to be a war that lasted only six days. I was walking down a gravel path to my dorm room, listening to the damp crunch of each step of my blue shoes and enjoying the bright rim of clouds around the first sunset in days, when I saw Professor Schiff striding dramatically toward me. Professor Schiff was American, a friend of my uncle, married to a British woman. They had once invited me for tea, and I had walked timidly around their house full of miniature American carousels with hand-painted ponies and full-sized gumball machines equipped with early American candies. Schiff looked and acted like Leonard Bernstein. His long gray coat swooped from side to side with each step, without apology. He was larger than life and handsome. So when the dazzling Schiff approached and asked me, by name, and in a slightly challenging and matter-of-fact voice, if I’d be going to Israel now that the war was won and the holidays started, I answered, “Yes,” just because he’d acted as if I was there, a real person, a grown Jew. Just because I could not think, suddenly, of any reason not to; it seemed such an adventure, so stirring, so like what someone should do. After all, I had just started to read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the first book I’d ever read from my own point of view, a young woman’s. I expected my parents to forbid me to go to a war zone, though I’d been to Israel years before at a summer camp with my sister, and I was surprised when they didn’t. Their voices on the scratchy international line seemed very far away.
 I flew to Paris, then took the train down to Marseille, equipped with a map and Doris Lessing. From the day my father had driven me to college in the Midwest two years before, I felt as if I’d sailed out from under a brooding cloud that had always draped me.
 Then I was spending mornings at the American Express office in Marseille trying to get passage to Israel. It was just a matter of waiting, and I quickly adapted to the day’s order. Eventually, a ship would have room for me if I kept returning and waiting in line. The harbor sparkled in the morning. Sometimes, I even got letters sent through the American Express office. One from Joyce told me that our parents were fighting, that they’d played a good game of tennis the day before.
 Another letter arrived from a young man I’d met through a cousin the year before, when I was working at an ad agency in New York for the summer. Ben was also going to Israel after the Six-Day War. He was going to stay with relatives. I wrote back that I was trying to get there too. I wrote back more because I was proud to have a destination than because I cared about Ben. Especially