“I GOT IT,” Lily said. She sat on the end of her bed. “I got it.” She shook her head with disbelief.
I put my book down. I’d been reading since Mrs. Virgil left. And thinking about the new book I was going to write. And putting off starting it. I could begin with Minerva’s mother telling her she was an outside child or maybe her just finding out, or maybe some kids telling her in a mean way. There were so many ways to go. I thought about the look on Minerva’s face. I thought of her walking by her father’s house and seeing his “real” children (my father’s little brothers) playing in the front yard.
“I got it,” Lily said again in a near whisper.
“You got hired?”
“They don’t know I’m colored,” Lily went on. “Mrs. Singer, the owner, had spoken to someone who was supposed to come for an interview. Someone who was the neighbor of someone who goes to Mrs. Singer’s cousin’s temple. Someone Jewish. But she didn’t remember the person’s name. I guess that person just changed her mind and didn’t show up. Somehow she thought I was her. Can you believe it? What luck!”
Lily sat up a little straighter. “They think I’m the Jewish person.” Her eyes widened at the thought. She leaned over to check herself in the vanity mirror. She pushed her hair back, swiveling her head from side to side, but kept her eyes focused on her face.
“You don’t look Jewish, to me,” I said, thinking of Melissa Miller in sixth grade. Melissa was olive skinned with long lashes and straight dark eyebrows like Audrey Hepburn’s. When I thought Jewish, she was the person who came to mind. Melissa with her cheeks dusted with fine, pale brown hairs that could be seen only in the light of the sun. I was fascinated by this and searched for the same tiny hairs on my own face. But mine was smooth and bald as an apple.
“You could get into trouble,” I added.
Lily looked at me for a couple of beats. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I could.”
“And what if your friends come in to see you?”
“It’s a free country. White people can have colored friends.” She piled her hair on top of her head and lifted her chin. She squinted at her reflection and took a long, thoughtful breath. “I might lighten my hair some more. You know what? The owner, Mrs. Singer—she even asked which temple I attend. I only know the one on La Cienega Boulevard, Temple Beth Am. So I told her that and she seemed pleased.”
I gasped. “You shouldn’t have done that, Lily.”
“Why not? I can just read up on some stuff, learn about the religion, I guess.”
“You can’t pretend to be a religion you’re not.”
“Why not?”
“I think that would be a sin.”
“Oh, you’re so serious.” She trotted over and gave me one of her triumphant hugs.
“Don’t be silly.” She turned toward the mirror again and ran both hands through her hair. She angled her face this way and that. “I think if you look at me really fast, I could look Jewish.”
But what did Jewish look like? I thought about Melissa Miller again. She looked way different from Michael Foxman, who was also Jewish and had red hair and red eyelashes. He was in love with Melissa Miller. In sixth grade he told me glumly, as we stood in line in front of the auditorium door, waiting to go in for Friday square dancing, that I was plain.
It was startling to me. To be summed up like that. “Now, Melissa is pretty,” he went on. A few days later, I studied her while we washed paintbrushes in the janitor’s room. I studied her and all that made her pretty because I agreed with Michael Foxman. He had a keen eye.
We were also in the janitor’s room rinsing paintbrushes the next Friday when Melissa told me how a woman got pregnant. It was the grossest thing I’d ever heard, and I didn’t believe it for a second. Grandma Nanny, my mother’s mother who lived in North Carolina, had nine children! She would have never done such a thing nine times, nor my mother two times. I was pretty certain of that. I didn’t take this new information to my mother or even to Lily. I just continued to feel comfortable in the way I saw things. I knew Melissa was wrong.
Of course, she turned out to be right.
“Maybe I’ll even start wearing a Star of David,” Lily said.
“If you do that, that’s like making fun of a person’s religion. Like you’re just using the religion.”
“You’re so serious,” she said again. “How’d you get so serious? I’m only joking.”
I didn’t believe her. It would be like the time Lily pretended to be Catholic because this boy she liked was Catholic and she thought maybe she could see him if she went to his church. She dragged me with her.
Lily did everything just like the Catholics, especially when she spotted him walking up the church’s steps between his mother and father behind us. She’d read up on what to do, so when I tried to pull open that big, tall, heavy door to the actual church part, she yanked me back to do the sign of the cross with the holy water. Then she stepped ahead of me to lead the way. I watched her kneel on one leg at the end of the pew, and she nodded for me to do the same. She crossed her chest with such a solemn look on her face, I thought she might be suddenly sincere.
When it came time for Communion—when you had to stand and go to the place up front to kneel and receive the wafer—Lily stood, bowed her head, and, with her hands clasped at her chest, walked up the aisle in a line with all the other real Catholics. I held my breath. She knelt down as if there was nothing wrong with it, then opened her mouth to get that wafer put on her tongue like everyone else. Then she stood and walked back, making her face look just like that of an angel, which got my heart beating fast with fear. My sister would surely be going to hell for making fun of someone else’s religion—all to make a boy notice her.
And now she would be making fun of the Jewish religion by pretending to be Jewish and saying she was a member of Temple Beth Am on La Cienega. And she didn’t seem the least bit worried about it.
“I’m not going to pretend to be Jewish,” she said later. “I’m just not going to say I’m not.”