“Who?”
“You mean you really don’t know?”
I shrugged. “Deserving people, whoever they happen to be?”
“Huh! Were it not for AA, the white males would get all the places. They’d rule!”
Her voice had acquired sarcastic undertones. She was kidding. She, too, was on the stand-up stage with me, playing my straight man. How could she not? The most intellectual, articulate, engaging person I’d met in America, the one woman with whom I could talk for hours, couldn’t be serious, saying one of the nastiest things I’d ever heard, on par with pejorative zhid for a Jew in the Soviet Union. It had to be a joke.
But when I looked around the company and back at Celeste, I realized she wasn’t kidding. Margo-Margie grimaced in disgust. Everyone else looked at me with varying degrees of loathing. Celeste turned to go back inside the living room, shouting, “You know nothing, nothing. White males, they’d swallow you alive.”
Her husband, Harvey, smiled meekly as if she’d just patted his head. He was white and he was male, but, somehow, he was acting as though Celeste was speaking about Martians, not him. It dawned on me that this group of friends had been on the forefront of so many fights that they could no longer feel the sting of what Celeste just said. They’d probably thought it mundane, an obvious attitude a conscientious person had to adapt. And just our luck—we’d managed to escape the frying pan in time to land on the edge of a fire. At first, the heat had been far away, but now it was getting too close to ignore it.
I was wearing an amber choker, which began to sear itself into my neck. The edges of my V-neck top scorched my skin, and the hooks of my gold earrings felt as if they were melting inside the holes of my earlobes.
Straining to maintain composure, I walked in and placed my wineglass on the cocktail table. I wanted to scream at Celeste and her friends. White males swallowing you alive? How dare you judge a human not by what he does but by the group he belongs to. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Celeste, with this bit of bad news,” I said, measuring my words, “but both my husband and my son are white males.” I turned to Vitya—his face seemed a fair rendition of The Scream by Munch. A few uncomfortable moments passed. We didn’t move, paralyzed by indecision.
And then another voice rang in my mind, that of the ancient Thou Shalt Not. I couldn’t remember a specific exhortation, but now it felt terribly wrong to share a meal with Celeste and her friends, their normalcy seeming just a cover.
The company began to regain its liveliness and even looked at us casually. Yet if they disagreed with us so vehemently, how could they sit with us, break bread, and drink wine?
The room felt like a jailhouse, and I had to get out. I grabbed my purse. Vitya sent me a thank you with his eyes. We were on the same page. We were on the same side.
I feigned a sudden but severe migraine, necessitating our polite, but quick departure. During our descent we spoke in scraps and snatches. “Are we not people? Is white the new bad?”
When we drove away and turned on Collins in our direction, the image of Celeste’s two sons floated in my mind. I’d seen their photos—nice-looking white men in their prime. They could probably make good husbands and great fathers. But they’d chosen a different path. I suspected that, with all the other problems and tragedies they’d lived through, hearing their mother and her circle belittle white males didn’t encourage them to create more of the same. Why bother if they were so evil.
The light changed to green, but Vitya wasn’t taking his foot off the brake, lost in thought.
“Nu…” I nudged him.
“Who needs suicide bombers,” he said, “when we have Celeste. We’re doing a pretty good job ourselves.”
“We are not her. God, with friends like that, who needs enemies?”
Lexuses, Mercedes, a Rolls Royce skirted around us. The palms at the entrance of the Bal Harbor Mall were lit up with myriads of tiny lights. For whom? There were no people on the sidewalks. Vitya came back to life and drove on the empty road through Haulover Beach Park and entered the town of Sunny Isles.
Kids in khaki shorts and flip-flops were waiting to cross the road. Orthodox Jewish men in kippot and knotted fringes hanging down their waists promenaded, surrounded by boys who mimicked their fathers’ dignified gait. Women were pushing strollers. Little girls pulled their parents’ hands, their curly hair bouncing; their tanned and freckled faces animated and lit up, their lithe bodies twisting into pretzels.
We seemed to be out of the extinction junction, so we exhaled, turned the CD on, and tamed our unease, singing along to Yellow Submarine all the way home.
