Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (6 page)

B
anks are eating up all the real estate in my neighborhood. I live on a basically residential street, and within three and a half short blocks of my house are eight banks: two Chase, one Wells Fargo, one Citibank, one HSBC, one Bank of America, one Sovereign, and one Capital One. Go two more blocks and there are ten banks (one more Chase and one more Citibank).

Why are the banks paying only 0.4 percent interest on a savings account if they can afford to open offices on every other block in Greenwich Village?

The other day I was catching up on balancing my account and realized that, for the last six months, I had
earned about $4 in interest but had been charged $35 a month for service.

I went to the bank at the corner (the southwest corner). “This is insane,” I said.

The banker explained that I had a service charge because I didn’t maintain a high enough balance.

“At this rate I will have no balance. Besides, what about my CD? I have a CD here.”

“Oh,” he said, looking it up on the computer. “Someone forgot to bundle that in.”

“Reverse the charges,” I said, and he said that they could reverse three months but not six. To get all six reversed I had to go to my originating branch.

“This is my originating branch,” I said.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. I opened my account here. I live down the block.”

“Sorry. You have to go to your originating branch at 79th and Broadway.”

Now, I had shut down an account on the Upper West Side about a decade ago and, after a six-year break, opened a new one when I moved downtown. But even if there was some justification for their confusion, that wasn’t the point.

“There are three branches within walking distance,
but I have to take two subways to reverse my charges? That is insane.”

Insane is what I said, but actually it was fishy.

“Call them and tell them to reverse the charges,” I said.

“You have to do it in person.”

At that point I threatened to withdraw my meager savings from the bank. The bank manager appeared, reversed the charges for all six months, and gave me his card. “Let us invest for you,” he said.

“Why would I let you do that?”

“Because you’re not earning anything on your money.”

Not the next day, but practically, my husband went to his bank’s ATM at the corner (the southeast corner) to withdraw money from his business account, and his card, which he hadn’t used for a while, was rejected. He went into his bank.

“You’re not on the account,” he was told.

“Who is?”

“No one,” said the banker.

“But how is that possible?” said my husband. “I’ve had this account for thirty years. You won’t even open an account without a signatory.”

“The computer must have lost your name.”

“How?”

After pressing a few buttons on her keyboard and scrolling around, she gave up and speculated that this must have happened when Wells Fargo ate Wachovia. “You have to prove that the company is yours,” she said. “Until then, you can deposit money but you can’t withdraw.”

Proving it involved a call to his lawyer, who had to locate my husband’s articles of incorporation in storage, and a bill for $145, which—after my husband threatened to withdraw his money—the bank agreed to pay.

“This is insane,” he told them, but later pointed out that actually, from the bank’s point of view, it was brilliant: a bank where you can only deposit.

Which perhaps explains what all these new branches are for. Since no one needs to go into a bank to withdraw money, simply to the ATM, the banks must be in the business of taking our money but not in the business of giving it back.

I don’t have credit card debt because Suze Orman advises against it, but I was having lunch with a friend the other day who was a wreck because her bank charges 18 percent interest. There was no way she could ever pay down her credit card debt. So I was thinking that all of us earning 0.4 percent could instead loan money to our
friends at 0.5 percent. It was a bit odd thinking of myself as a benevolent loan shark, but, hey, my friend would get out of debt, I would earn $5 a month instead of $4, and the banks would make so much less money that they would have to close half their branches and give us our city back.

I mentioned the idea to my accountant, who told me it was insane. “You can’t trust your friends,” he said.

O
ne Friday evening, my dog, Honey, was taking a walk with her dog walker, Lauren, when she was clipped by a car.

Honey bolted, yanking the leash out of Lauren’s hand—apparently dogs get a huge surge of adrenaline after being hit by cars. If they survive, they take off, running even on broken legs, ruptured insides, whatever.

Several people chased after her and after the car, which slowed for a moment and then sped off down Seventh Avenue. A total stranger named David Zeh photographed the license plate. Then he flagged a cab and got Honey, Lauren, and Ayana (another dog walker, who managed to capture Honey) to the Fifth Avenue
Veterinary Specialists—a twenty-four-hour emergency hospital with an amazing trauma team. The second night, she was able to lift her head. Two weeks later, she was home on bed rest recovering with several cracked ribs and leg wounds.

Since this happened, two people have told me that their feet were run over by taxicabs and a third that a cab took off while she was getting out of it, tossing her onto the sidewalk. But this isn’t about taxis. I mention this only because I am astonished that it was not a cab that hit Honey, given the maniac drivers and the endless telephone talking that they do even though it’s illegal. This is about how nice everyone in this city is: the New Yorkers who chased the car and my dog, the Good Samaritan, Mr. Zeh, the couple in the waiting room whose pit bull had broken out in hives and needed a shot of Benadryl, the animal hospital staffed with surgeons who didn’t become surgeons because they hate to speak to people. And my apartment building, too.

Word traveled quickly, and all the dog lovers in the building asked about Honey. In most cases I know their dogs’ names, not theirs—Moki, Biscuit, Jack, Maisie—and they know Honey’s name, not mine, because the thing about apartment living is that neighbors are friendly but not friends. An apartment building provides a comfort
zone, a bit of padding between you and the city, a reminder when it counts that the city is not about the driver who hit Honey and kept going, but about folks who care about what happens to your dog.

An apartment building is a little like Facebook. It seemed a bit crazy to me that I posted news of Honey’s accident on my Wall, but her photo is on my Wall. Her photo is where my photo is supposed to be. Many Facebook friends (most of whom I have never met) posted good wishes, and I was grateful. No one wrote,
I hope your dog dies, dude.
But then, I’m not a teenager. I suppose Facebook is a kind of Internet apartment building, providing a bit of padding between you and whatever might pop up about you on the Web.

I called 311 to find out if hitting a dog was a crime and was referred to the 6th Precinct. According to a dog owner working there, the police would not arrest the driver. Dogs are property (hence the term “dog owner”). The offense was, I assume, civil, not criminal. And therefore that driver can go on hitting dogs and getting away with it.

T
his question occurred to me when my publisher asked if I wanted to be on the JBC circuit.

I had never heard of it.

My publisher explained. The Jewish Book Council sponsors book festivals in cities around the country. The festivals—usually from the middle of October to the middle of November—feature Jewish authors or authors who have written on Jewish subjects.

I have never thought of myself as a Jewish author. I am an author who happens to be Jewish. I have never written a Jewish heroine, for instance. Although I have written a few who were half Jewish, none of them were practicing Jews.

My publisher explained how the JBC circuit works. You have to try out. “Pitch yourself.” Then, if they like you—“they” being the people who run these festivals—they will invite you to give a talk. If the audience enjoys your talk, they presumably will buy your book, which will be for sale afterward.

To sum up: You pitch yourself to win the honor of pitching yourself. It seemed demeaning.

However, I love my book. All authors do. My book is my baby, and I am a helicopter parent, certain that without constant supervision/support/interfering/flag-waving/cheerleading/tweeting/Facebooking, my book doesn’t stand a chance in this cruel, cold, increasingly short-attention-span world. I also know this because my publisher says so.

Pitching to the JBC is the least I can do for my baby.

My publisher kindly filled out the application form for me and paid the $365 entry fee. The JBC charges for the right to pitch to win the honor of pitching.

I then started receiving JBC e-mails and phone calls with instructions. I would have exactly two minutes to sell myself. If I went over, they would cut me off. Someone would hold up a sign at one minute and again at thirty seconds. No speaking from notes. One famous
writer read his pitch off an iPad, the JBC representative told me, and no one wanted him.

A few weeks later, by appointment, a woman called to screen my pitch. I passed—no surprise, having been trained at the Ephron dinner table, where every time I said something funny, my dad shouted, “That’s a great line, write it down.”

Over the course of two days in June, the woman explained, four groups of sixty (that’s 240 Jewish writers) would gather at the Hebrew Union College to compete. A Jewish Hunger Games, I suppose. The last time I was part of a group pitch, I was a junior at Beverly Hills High School, hoping to become an exchange student in Brazil. Thank God I didn’t get it. I was sure that I would have to sweep a floor, and my mother told me never to learn to housekeep because someone might ask me to do it.

Which brings me to my mother.

My mother was violently opposed to organized religion. “Religion is the cause of all wars,” she declared regularly. It wasn’t true, but it sounded true. She was prescient, however, because these days it is true.

Beverly Hills, where I grew up (1950s and 1960s), was primarily Jewish. On Jewish holidays I was the only kid in class except for my friend Stephanie, who was
Catholic. Until eighth grade, when boys had their Bar Mitzvahs, I never entered a temple. Many Bar Mitzvahs were awesomely long. I learned to skip the first hour and a half and sneak in for the last forty minutes or so. When I grew up and moved to New York City, I knew that Yom Kippur (the holy day of atonement) was the best day to get a hard-to-score dinner reservation. More than once I have said, “It’s Yom Kippur, we can get in anywhere.”

My family celebrated Christmas. We always bought a tree that was too tall and had to saw off the top. We decorated it on Christmas Eve. My dad always had a swearing fit because the lights were tangled, and my mother was always telling us not to throw tinsel but to hang it. I read my large illustrated copy of
The Night Before Christmas
, the poem by Clement Moore, to tatters and can still recite it by heart. Which isn’t that big a deal. I can also recite “Old Ironsides,” “Casey at the Bat,” and the Gettysburg Address, all of which I had to memorize at El Rodeo, my elementary school.

My family sang carols, too. “O Holy Night” was one of my favorites.

The subject of Christ and the manger, however, never came up, except in song.

On the other hand, in our family,
Volkswagen
was a four-letter word. I was counseled never ever to buy
German. I had nightmares about the Holocaust, especially this thing I heard about there being a line of prisoners and some were sent to the gas chambers and some were not. You live, you die. I had a mouth full of gold fillings and was sure, if I were ever in a concentration camp, all my gold would be extracted without Novocain. I may have been raised in a family of agnostics, but I knew that if the Jews got rounded up again, I would get rounded up, too.

We were secular. Not only did we not practice the Jewish religion, to my memory, we never discussed heaven, hell, faith, the bible, God. The Old Testament did come up once, as I recall. My parents, who were a screenwriting team, told us that in the movie
The Ten Commandment
s, the Red Sea was actually Jell-O. The filmmakers had made the sea part, they said, by pouring the Jell-O in and then running the film backward.

Twice in my life I converted to Christianity. Once by accident. Once because my husband told me, “Just do it, it’s no big deal.”

The first time I was seventeen. The Reverend Billy Graham was having a rally in the Los Angeles Coliseum, and my friend Stephanie and I went out of curiosity. We sat high in the packed bleachers and listened to him preach. We expected to see something out of
Elmer Gantry
, a movie about a charismatic revivalist (con man), featuring stomping, singing, religious faints. We were disappointed. Graham wasn’t charismatic or rabble-rousing. He was ordinary, boring even, matter-of-fact. Flat.

Many of those around us, who felt otherwise, said they had come to hear him many times, and when Graham asked us all to “put a brick in his church”—a phrase that has stuck with me—a large plastic container traveled down the rows, and everyone except us threw in a dollar (which was worth a lot more then).

Stephanie and I hadn’t brought binoculars, and Graham was a mere speck. When he said, “If you believe, come down here,” and people began to pour down the aisles and gather in the bowl of the Coliseum, we decided to join them to get a closer look.

While we were milling around on the grass, still without much of a view because of the crowd, Graham said, “Now that you have given yourself to Christ . . .”

That came as a shock.

I had no idea that simply by leaving my seat I had given myself to Christ.

He continued, “. . . one of our advisors will help you get started on your new life.”

A man grabbed my arm. Another grabbed
Stephanie’s. I realized that many of the folks who’d poured down the aisles were working for the reverend.

“When did you begin to believe?” the man asked me. He sort of boomed the question. Like he was God from above, only he was standing right next to me.

“When did you?” I asked.

I wasn’t being brash. This was more of a panicked defensive move, because I thought he expected some booming back from me. I remember the trapped feeling so clearly, because it was one of those teenage moments when you pull off a goof (which I liked to do now and then) and get way more than you bargained for.

My “advisor” told me about his realization that Christ died on the cross for him, and then he asked my name, address, and phone number. I gave fake ones—the name Annette Sorenson comes to mind (I thought it was Swedish). He handed me a fill-in-the-blank book to get me started on my new life.

He helped me with the first question, which he read aloud. “Who have sinned?” He filled in, “All have sinned.”

I said that my mother was expecting me home, pulled Stephanie away from her advisor, and we left.

My parents loved the story. I told it that night at dinner and got big laughs.

Then in 2010, my husband and I were asked to be godparents. I was already a godparent twice over, one child was half Jewish, the other was Anglican. In those instances, our friends, the parents of our godchildren, never mentioned religion. I assumed that being a godparent meant taking an extra special interest in the child of someone you love, although I also remembered that Jenny Sullivan’s godfather (her parents were friends of my parents) gave her a car for her sweet sixteen. I had no plans to give my godchildren cars.

In this case, however, we were invited to the baptism ceremony in an Episcopal church in Connecticut.

When we arrived, we all gathered near the altar: the parents, our six-month-old godson, Teddy, in an adorable white baptism outfit, my husband and I, and the minister, who was a woman.

The minister prepared us for the ceremony. It would take place during the service in front of the congregation. Among the many questions she was going to ask—which included “Will you renounce Satan?” and “Will you be responsible for seeing that your godson is raised in the Christian faith?”—was this one: “Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior?”

I must have made a strange face, because I saw Teddy’s mom, whom I love, blanch, and I thought,
She is
worried that I am about to wreck the baptism
, which I was. I was thinking,
No way
.

“And you answer, ‘I will,’” said the minister.

“I can’t do this,” I whispered to my husband, who is Jewish but does not take religion seriously in any way. To him it’s all mumbo jumbo.

“Just do it, what does it matter, it’s no big deal, it’s only words,” said Jerry.

“Only words? Words are my life.”

But I did. Sort of. Well, I intended to, but during the ceremony Teddy had a screaming fit. He turned red, he squirmed and kicked, he had to be carried out of the church to calm down. He had never thrown a tantrum like that in his life. When it came to the big question, “Will you turn to Jesus?” no one heard me add a “not” very softly after I said, “I will.” My husband answered, “I will,” so I guess as a result he converted and now we have a mixed marriage.

•  •  •  •

The first time I got married, I married a Gentile. More specifically, a WASP. The ceremony was in a judge’s chambers. I was twenty-five. We had no discussions about faith or going to a church or temple or raising
children in one religion or another. Still, in spite of the lack of interest in religion that we shared, to me his family was foreign. It was, for instance, at his parents’ dinner table that I first heard the expression “gentlemen’s grades.” Which were Cs. A compliment for a C is not in a Jew’s vocabulary.

I felt out of place at his parents’ home, although in truth it wasn’t all that different from ours, except his parents were not alcoholics. I’m sorry to say mine were by this time, having sadly blown on drink what seems to me an amazingly blessed life. Then, perhaps still, alcoholism was associated more with WASPs than Jews (one more way my parents assimilated)—WASPs who drank martinis. I’m generalizing,
ça va sans dire
, but you have only to watch
Seinfeld
—remember Susan’s parents? (Actually you have only to watch
Seinfeld
to know everything. There is a
Seinfeld
episode for every single thing that happens in life, which is a remarkable achievement.)

My first husband’s father served dinner from a silver platter, and when he did, he always said to me, “What can I do you for?” At every dinner I knew it was coming. “What can I do you for?” I began to dread it, an overreaction to the foolish place I found myself by marrying the first man who asked me as a way of avoiding . . .
absolutely everything, from becoming a writer to falling in love. “What can I do you for?”—a joke that not only wasn’t funny but, worse, involved bad grammar. How did this happen?

No question, I had an inbred arrogance about the culture I was raised in, about the worship of books, theater, writing, and brains. My mother often said proudly, “We have books in every room.” Yes, floor-to-ceiling shelves galore crammed with books. There were no artfully placed
objets
on our shelves. Every ounce of space was for the written word. My mother was a grammar fanatic, too. I still remember this sentence she repeatedly used to demonstrate a misplaced modifier. “I saw a man riding a bicycle with a broken leg.”

One Sunday morning when I was at my first husband’s parents’ house, which had few enough bookshelves that I can’t recall them, we had eaten breakfast, were hanging out reading the newspaper, and his mother kept asking, “Where’s the gardening section? Who has the gardening section?” I didn’t answer. I was reading the theater section. Even though I read the
New York Times
every Sunday, I had no idea that, at that time, the last few pages of the Arts and Leisure section, which my family called the theater section, were devoted to
flowers, bulbs, and soil. Calling the theater section the gardening section? I knew from that alone I was in the wrong family.

At the JBC tryouts, there were no authors pitching books about intermarriage, but there were several about leaving orthodoxy. The woman who left, the gay who left, the transsexual who left.

And I must say, while sitting there in the auditorium alphabetized between, I believe, Eisenberg and Feldman, I felt the oppression of religion. Of any organization that gathers us together because we’re one religion and not another. Because what I really think is that there is too much religion these days. Too much “I’m this and you’re that.” Fanatics are everywhere. I read a
New York Times
opinion piece by Frank Bruni about a cadet who left West Point in protest because he was pressured to participate in born-again religious services. Boy, that’s who I want defending my free country, religious zealots. At orthodox Jewish temples, women must sit separately from men, upstairs or on the other side of the room, separated by a partition. That offends me.

While it is great to be part of a Jewish culture that reveres books enough to hold festivals, religion has nothing to do with why or how I choose friends, select
books to read, or decide where to live or whom to vote for or love.