By the time she’d moved to San Jose to staff the Mission House, Elizabeth Amelia Shepard Taylor was already interested in the Equal Rights Amendment. That was extraordinary, because none of the women in her life—her mother and aunts, her teachers and her girlfriends’ mothers—had a single kind word to say about the ERA.
They actually threw Phyllis Schlafly–watching parties at each other’s houses, making an occasion of it with Jell-O salads and green bean casseroles. For many years, all that Elizabeth knew was that the ERA was wrong, wrong, wrong. She couldn’t say what was wrong about it, but she knew it was bad. Something about tearing down God’s calling for women to be mothers, which would lead them to neglect their families and break down the natural roles of men and women in the family.
Her first inkling that this might not be the whole picture came just a week after she moved into the Mission House in San Jose. It was a hurry-up-and-wait kind of assignment. Half her time was spent bailing out the Elders who were away from their mothers for the first time and were struggling to master the basics of laundry, cooking, hygiene, and managing interpersonal conflict (because she was the eldest of eleven, this kind of surrogate mothering came naturally to her). The other half of the time, she was alone in the Mission House, with nothing to do and no one to talk to.
Elizabeth Taylor was not a girl who would sit idle. She’d helped her mother with her prizewinning rose garden back in SLC, and the Mission House had a neglected bramble of old and thorny rosebushes, so she determined to rehabilitate them and so bring a riot of beauty into the Church’s outpost in San Jose.
It was as she worked at this labor with tough gloves and a giant pair of shears that she’d sharpened to a guillotine’s edge that she met her neighbor, a trim, well-turned-out young blond man with the tidiest mustache she’d ever seen. He called out to her over the fence.
“Oh, thank goodness someone is doing something about those poor roses! It was a form of abuse, really. I was ready to call the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Angiosperms!”
Elizabeth had gotten an A+ in AP biology and knew that “angiosperm” was the scientific name for a flowering plant, but she blushed anyway.
“I’m doing my best,” she said, with a game smile. “Please don’t call the authorities on me just yet!”
He smiled—he had a great pair of dimples on the left side—and winked and said, “I’ll give you two weeks, but after that I’ll have to think of the flowers. I’m Zion William Menn, by the way. Your neighbor.”
“Elizabeth,” she said, shucking her glove and shaking his hand. He had nails so perfect they might as well have been manicured.
“Did you just get here?” he said. “I mean, to this—” He waved his hand at the Mission House. “The religious commune or whatever.” Now he blushed. “Sorry,” he said. “No offense. I just don’t know much about—”
“That’s okay,” she said, sensing an opportunity. “I’d be happy to send one of the Elders to explain it if you’d like.”
She could tell he wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea. It was a feeling she was still getting used to. Back in SLC, she’d been in the majority, and Gentiles had been a curiosity. In her imagination, going on a mission—being in the minority for the first time—would be a contradictory mix of being persecuted for her faith (as years of Sunday school had insisted she was and ever would be) and also being welcomed as a redeemer amid the ignorant and damned.
The reality was different: the secular world wasn’t hostile to her faith—it was indifferent. To the extent that Gentiles recoiled from missionary overtures, it was because the prospect of being lectured to by a teenager about God’s will was profoundly boring and faintly embarrassing. They were embarrassed on her behalf. She’d have preferred to be the target of hurled curses and rocks.
“Sure,” he said, “that would be nice.” He was a well-brought-up young man, and with his faint southern accent, she could almost believe he wasn’t lying to spare her feelings.
She gave a mighty hack at one tough rose branch and it came away clean. “There,” she said, pretending away the awkwardness. “Got you!”
“I admire your zeal,” he said.
“Well,” she said, straightening and arching her back and arming sweat off her forehead, “I just got here and I’m still getting settled in. I thought I should make my mark on the place first thing, so the boys here know who’s in charge.”
“With those shears, they’ll never doubt it,” he said, and smiled. “Did you come from Utah?”
“Salt Lake City,” she said. “My first time out of state.”
“Well, let me know if I can give you any tips. I’m an old California hand.”
“Have you been here long?”
He showed her that double dimple again. “Three weeks,” he said, and laughed.
“Another greenhorn,” she said. “It’s nice to know I’m not the only one. Where’d you come from?”
“Florida,” he said, and put on a funny voice: “You know, where they grow Miss Anita’s beautiful fruits.” He laughed, and so did she, though she didn’t get the joke right away.
Flustered, she blurted out, “Isn’t Anita Bryant from Florida? We love her.”
His look of shock and hurt only lasted for an eyeblink, and then his face became a mask of treacly sweetness. “Isn’t that nice. Well, nice talking to you, hon.” He turned to go.
“Wait!” she said. “Wait, please. What is it? I’m sorry, whatever it is—”
He turned back to face her, lips skinned back from his teeth, eyes dark and furious.
“Zion,” she said, and it came out in a gasp. “Zion, I’m sorry. What did I say?”
He gave her a flat look that went on and on. “You didn’t say anything. It’s fine.”
“No,” she said. “Zion, I promise I’m not kidding. If I said something—”
“Look,” he said, “you seem like a nice person, but Anita Bryant says people like me deserve to die of AIDS. If you love her, you want me to die. There’s other ways I could say it, but that’s the plain truth. I don’t have any space in my life for nice people who want me dead.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” Something fluttered in her stomach, the place she thought of as her “moral center,” whenever the subject came up in Sunday school. “Zion, I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I said that. I don’t love Anita Bryant. I don’t even like her.” And though she’d never let herself think that unthinkable thought, much less say those unsayable words, they were true. They rang with truth in the warm California air, perfumed by her sweat and the sap oozing out of the severed rosebush branches.
Zion couldn’t hear the truth, evidently. He gave her a skeptical look. “Sure,” he said. “No offense taken.” He turned away again, starting for his house.
“Wait,” she said. “Please.” He turned around. He looked older now, or maybe it was just that he looked less open, less trusting. “Zion, I’m sorry for what I said. Where I come from—” She closed her mouth. She’d been about to say something about her family, her faith, her city, three things she loved and believed in more than anything else in the world.
Where had that come from? She shook her head, started over. “There are a lot of people—good people—who hear their own beliefs about the role of men and women in Mrs. Bryant’s message. I want to be a good mother and a good daughter, and a very good Mormon, but I never liked the way Mrs. Bryant put it. It’s just not something I was encouraged to talk about.” Or think about.
He cocked his head. “Elizabeth, I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t think you’ve heard me. Yes, that Bryant woman has awful, disgusting ideas about women, but those filthy notions of hers are positively civilized compared to the things they have to say about men like me.” He looked at her significantly. “You know,” he said, with a sour smile. “Faggots.”
His tone made her wince, but faggot actually made her flinch. “Oh,” she said, again. “Oh.” Again. “Zion, I’m so sorry. It’s just that—Well, it’s just that I’ve never met a homosexual befo—”
He laughed and she knew he was laughing at her. She didn’t like how that felt. She would have shut down and said her goodbyes but for what he said next. “Oh, honey,” he said. “I guarantee I’m not the first homo you’ve met. I’m just the first one you know about.”
And that about blew her mind.
*
Zion worked in real estate and played tennis. He baked zucchini bread and thought her Jell-O salads were simultaneously hilarious, disgusting, and delicious. He didn’t have a boyfriend, but he was dating a couple of nice guys and he thought one of them might be boyfriend material. He was raised Methodist but now he thought he was spiritual, which he eventually admitted meant that he might believe in God but found church boring.
But also, he spent his Sundays visiting sick friends. He had a lot of sick friends. And all of his friends had a lot of sick friends, too. Their parents had disowned them, and their coworkers wouldn’t visit them. The nurses wouldn’t touch them. Sometimes the doctors, too.
Zion visited sick friends with food, and Elizabeth joined him and sometimes they brought Jell-O salad and sometimes they brought zucchini bread, and sometimes Zion would bake some skunky marijuana from his back garden into it, just to help with his sick friends’ appetites.
Elizabeth had a lot of sickbed experience: her four grandparents had forty-six siblings among them, and there had always been someone on the verge of dying when she was growing up. Those sickrooms had been hushed and sorrowful and reverent, the silence broken by hissed arguments between her aunts and uncles about some quack remedy that someone insisted was just the thing for cancer.
Zion’s friends had their share of quack remedies—sweetgrass and crystals featured heavily, as did macrobiotics—but that was where the resemblance ended. These skinny men with their facial lesions had beautiful laughs and told wicked jokes, and it was impossible to be offended by the crudity when it came out of the mouth of a dying man, wasn’t it?
It was in these sickrooms that Elizabeth got exposed to gender politics for the first time, and while these men weren’t above calling each other “bitches” and “whores”—always with a smile, mind—they also had a lot to tell her about the politics of sexuality, and that led her to the politics of sex, and that led her to the library, where she was as at home as she was at any old place, because when you’re the eldest of eleven, the public library is more private than any room in your actual home.
And that was how she came to have a discussion with the local bishop about the Church’s opposition to the ERA. That discussion turned into a shouting match (he started it, but she was not going to back down, because she’d been exposed to horrors that made a bishop’s wrath seem tame by comparison).
After that, Elizabeth Amelia Shepard Taylor never had quite the same relationship with her God, her faith, or her church.
*
The burrito filled my belly in a way that nothing else I’d ever eaten had managed. It stuck to my ribs and filled my crannies. Sometime in the middle of puberty, maybe around the age of fifteen, I’d grown hungry in a way that no meal had ever quite managed to sate. The simple Mission burrito, the size and shape of a bazooka shell, finally filled the gap.
It was coming up on 4:30 p.m. when I rang the doorbell at the front of the old Plaza theater. Elizabeth Taylor—I would never get used to that, but “Elizabeth Ameila Shepard Taylor” was such a genealogical mouthful—answered, looking pleasantly surprised to see me.
She let me use her desk phone to call Art and arrange to meet him at Alfie’s in the Castro at seven. Her desk was full of binders and of page proofs, marked up with highlighter and notes written in a looping, neat handwriting in blue ballpoint. I glanced at them a few times while I was on the phone with Art, then kept reading after I put the phone down. It was automatic, and I didn’t even realize I was doing it until Liz cleared her throat.
I looked up and found her giving me a bemused look.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just pretty good reading, is all.”
She cocked her head. “You’re not joking, are you?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I taught myself everything I know about computers, mostly from reading documentation.” I gestured at the paperwork before me. “I wish it had been half as clear as this.”
It was clearly the right thing to say. She beamed. “Well, you are clearly a very perceptive fellow, Martin Hench. When I got to Fidelity Computing, there was practically no documentation at all. I think the Reverend Sirs were worried that if they explained how everything worked, it would become clear how everything was also deliberately broken.
“But I was selling to these Mormon bishoprics filled with hardworking people who were just like my own family, and they were spending money they couldn’t afford to get these machines, after seeing flashy demonstrations and hearing all kinds of promises from our reps, who were people they trusted, people they’d known all their lives.
“As soon as they got their computers, well, the reality sunk in. But none of these good people wanted to admit they’d been tricked, especially not by someone they trusted, so they blamed themselves, assuming they just weren’t reading the instructions correctly. Eventually, they’d hit a wall and they’d call Fidelity Computing and some patient girl in the phone bank would have to explain things to them.
“A lot of those calls landed on my desk, because I understood things better than most of the girls, and then I started to type up my notes so that everyone would have a set of instructions they could use when it was their turn to get a call, just to get some of that work off my shoulders. The notes got passed around, and people would scribble on them and photocopy them and pass them around again. Eventually they’d land back on my desk and I’d incorporate all those notes into a new draft, based on the real problems our users had phoned in about and the difficulties the previous draft hadn’t been able to solve.
“I don’t know who first sent a set to a customer, but I got a call from my dad one day to say he’d just gotten a very blurry set, like an eleventh-generation Xerox, and he wanted to know if I could send him a new set. Of course, by then I’d shared my notes with the Catholic and Jewish sides, and they’d been translated into Spanish and Hebrew and Yiddish and were doing the rounds there, too.
“The Reverend Sirs didn’t take the news well, not at first, anyway. They always started from the proposition that anything their people did without asking them was a part of a plot to sabotage the company or take it over. They banned us from using those manuals and made providing a copy to any customer a firing offense. Managers used to walk around the bullpen, confiscating any copies they found and docking the girls’ pay in punishment.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “That’s insane.”
She cocked her head. “I guess so, but honestly, it’s not that unusual as bad boss stuff goes. I’ve seen a lot worse.”
That made me squirm. “I haven’t had much experience,” I admitted. “The only real job I ever had was working for a doomed software company back east, where my boss was this hereditary shitbird whose daddy bankrolled the company. He was a terrible boss, but I assumed that was about his personal failings, not bossdom more generally. Since coming out here I’ve only worked short-term contracts, so I guess I missed the worst of it.”
“You’re lucky. There’s plenty of worse boss stuff that’s par for the course, and there’s plenty more that’s even worse that the Reverend Sirs get up to all the time.” She sighed.
“So that was it for the manuals at Fidelity Computing?”
She smiled. “Oh no, not at all. Those manuals had become the lifeblood of the company. When customers had good documentation, they didn’t need to call us all the time to solve their problems. When we had manuals, we could solve problems for the customers who didn’t have them. It only took two weeks before the Reverend Sirs reversed course and gave us all our manuals back and put a guy in charge of producing an official manual, printed and spiral-bound, that they could sell at an additional charge. I wasn’t allowed near the project.” She sniffed.
“When we started CF, we knew we’d have to produce good manuals, because we just don’t have the people to hold everyone’s hands when they run into trouble.”
“How’d you start CF? I mean, it must have been a pretty momentous occasion.”
She looked at her watch. “I can only give you the short version now. The long version is . . . well, it’s long. And messy. But the short version is, I wrote those original manuals, and that meant that I had to be able to understand the thinking that went into the computers and the software that Fidelity Computing was selling. I had to figure that out without their cooperation. I didn’t know the phrase ‘reverse engineering’ back then, but that’s what I was doing.
“So I always had these ideas, about how I’d do it if I was in charge, what I could make that would undo all the bad stuff they’d done. Some of it was just mistakes and some of it was downright malicious, but either way, I could always imagine a way to fix what they’d left broken. I guess I just wanted to get out of the documentation business—to make a better system, one that worked so well you didn’t even need a manual.”
I gestured at the papers on her desk. “I guess you’ve got a way to go.”
She giggled. “It’s a work in progress. But you’d be amazed at how little hand-holding people need when their computers are designed to be easy to use instead of easy to make money from.”
“I’m sure,” I said. There was an awkward pause. I became uncomfortably aware that she was an attractive woman and that I was a fundamentally lonely young man. I wondered if she was still religious, and if so, whether that meant that she wouldn’t date a Gentile. Then I wondered about the professional ethics of asking a client out on a date. I had never worked for a woman, so it had never come up. I knew that Art sometimes dated guys from the companies he freelanced for, but that seemed different, somehow.
Then I remembered that she wasn’t my client. I didn’t work for CF. I just wanted to. I really wanted to.
“Do you guys, uh, need an accountant?” It was almost as awkward as asking her on a date.
“Maybe,” she said. “We’ve got a girl who does the books, but she’s a bookkeeper, not an accountant. We need to build out some projections and get our payroll under control and get ready for tax season. Last year we were so small, we just used a tax-prep service out of a storefront on Mission. This year I think we probably need something a little more intense.”
“I just certified on California tax prep,” I said. I’d had a client who needed it. “I have most of it in a Lotus sheet with a bunch of formulas. Just need to tweak it for your specifics and plug in the values. I can give you copies of the sheet on floppies so you can ballpark your tax bill for next year whenever you’re thinking about stuff.”
She nodded. “I like you, Martin Hench. I have to talk it over with my partners, but yeah, I think we could use some of your time. I’ll talk to my partners about how many hours we’re looking at per month and maybe you can give us a quote.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s great. I’m sure I can give you guys a rate that’ll work. I, uh, I really like what you’re doing here and I want to work with you.”
She laughed. “I hope you’re a better accountant than you’re a negotiator.”
I shrugged. “I’m a great accountant.” I thought of my conversation with Shlomo. “And I can be a hard case when the occasion calls for it. I don’t get the impression that you’d take advantage of me, though.”
“Don’t be so sure,” she said. “We’re pretty hard-nosed ourselves.”
*
Alfie’s was a crazy scene, just crammed with guys dancing and laughing and making out in the corners, but every now and then I’d turn around and catch sight of a guy comforting a crying friend. Art brought a couple of buddies along, guys I’d met around the apartment. They were all in a cruisey mood but they were solicitous of my comfort, checking in with me between dances to make sure I was doing okay before spinning back off into the maelstrom of the dance floor.
Somehow, in the throb of the music and the wild energy of the guys around me, I found a spot of calm, as the events of the past couple of days, my conversation with Liz that afternoon, and the horny guys pairing up all around me swirled together in my thoughts and made me realize how adrift and lonely I had been since coming out west. It left me a little melancholy, but also determined. I was going to have to start dating, somehow, and I was going to have to make a niche for myself at CF. I was twenty-one years old. It was time I figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up. As soon as I had the thought, I realized I’d heard it in my father’s voice.
*
We reeled and stumbled out of Alfie’s at 1 a.m., when the bartender turned on the lights and the bouncer started shouting things about not having to go home but not being able to stay here. I had been nursing slow beers all night, while Art and his buddies had been pounding shots and disappearing into the gents’ and reappearing with conspicuous sniffles, so I was obviously going to be the one driving Art’s van back down to Menlo Park.
All the clubs were spilling out into the Castro when we reached it, and the street had a carnival atmosphere as hundreds—maybe thousands—of revelers thronged the sidewalk and then the curb lanes of Castro Street itself, forcing traffic to a crawl as people darted across the street to give friends sloppy hugs.
My own little group was pretty bombed, and I rode herd on them, keeping them together as we inched our way toward the van. I was looking back over my shoulder to make sure Art and his buddy Rog were still with us when I collided with someone else.
“Oh!” I said, catching the young woman I’d just nearly knocked over and steadying her. “Oh, I’m so sorry, honestly! Are you okay?”
It was only then that I registered whose shoulder I was holding—who I had just nearly knocked on her butt: Rivka Goldman, her face ashen with terror.
*
When she was growing up, Rivka’s mother and father were relieved and delighted that she never got into trouble with boys, and not for lack of trying on the boys’ part. When the yeshivas let out for the day and the boys spilled onto the streets of Montreal’s Outremont, they would egg each other on to saying the most disgusting things to any girls they found on their own, mixing French, Yiddish, and Hebrew to come up with trilingual sexual remarks that were inappropriate in ways that transcended each language’s own range of obscenity.
Other girls would pretend shock at these calls and stop to scold the boys, gathering into quarreling knots of teenagers whose performance of hostility was a smoke screen against passersby who might accuse them of impropriety.
Not Rivka. She never rose to the bait, never got into arguments with the boys, never had time for the boys at all. She got all the conversations with men that she needed at home, thanks to her father and her two older brothers and the cousins and uncles she saw at Shabbos dinners.
Girls, on the other hand . . . Well, not all girls. The boy-crazy ones were so boring and predictable, like they were staging private revivals of Fiddler on the Roof: “Matchmaker, matchmaker.”
But some of the girls, the serious girls, well, they were excellent company. Rivka could spend hours with her best girlfriends, girls like Bina and Malka and Simchah, doing their homework or telling jokes or just sitting quietly and thinking, in companionable silence. They told each other secrets, they cooked with each other, they brushed each other’s hair.
And then Rivka’s mother came into her room and found her with Simchah.
Her mother’s face went so white it was almost green, and she let out a yelp that was like the sound she made once when she burned her hand on the stove, burned it so badly she had to go to the hospital and then wear a bandage for a month.
“Mameh,” Rivka gasped. Simchah gasped, too, and pulled the sheet up to cover herself.
“Get dressed, Simchah,” Rivka’s mother said. “Then go home.” Simchah was frozen, eyes so big the whites showed all the way around them. “Now!” her mother said. If Rivka hadn’t watched her mother’s mouth open, she wouldn’t have believed that it was her mother’s voice she was hearing. Her mother, who was ever the calm eye of the whirling chaos of their household, making that sound of terror and rage? Never.
Simchah jumped and turned her back and dressed in haste, jamming her feet into her shoes without even putting her stockings back on. She left the room in silence and a moment later the front door slammed.
“Rivka—” her mother said, but she couldn’t find any words to say after that. The look she gave Rivka said enough. Disgust. Disappointment. Hate, even. The silence was worse than anything she could have said. She closed the door and left Rivka on her own, her world contracting to a pinprick so small and dark she couldn’t see a thing through it.
*
Rivka tried. She cut off Simchah, which meant she had to cut off Bina and Malka, too, which felt like she had cut off her arm, or maybe cut out her heart. She tried to fill that void with the Fiddler on the Roof girls, the unserious girls, and she joined them in their boy-teasing. The fact that she had no interest in those boys, none at all, ever, made her so much better at flirting than any of the unserious girls.
She got a reputation, and when her father sat her down to warn her that he’d heard things and he was very disappointed, it was all she could do not to smile. It was working. Then her mother gave her a long, long hug, just out of sight of her father, and she knew she was on the right path.
She’d have been overjoyed, if not for one problem: she was miserable. The girl in the mirror wasn’t anyone she recognized, let alone anyone she’d want to sit and talk with. The girls she did sit and talk with were no true friends to her, and she never showed them who she really was, and had no interest in learning who they really were. Bina and Malka gave her awful, hateful looks when she saw them at school or synagogue. Simchah refused to look at her at all. That was the worst part of it.
Inevitably, there was a boy. Moshe Pupa—the boys called him Moshe Pupik and then so did everyone—came from a good family and had nice manners and Rivka’s father did business with Moshe’s father. The Pupas came to Shabbos dinner and then the Goldmans went to the Pupas for Shabbos dinner and there were many broad hints dropped by Moshe’s parents and Rivka’s parents.
After one Shabbos dinner, on a nice warm night, the adults announced that everyone should go out and have a walk, because it was such a beautiful night and winter would be here before anyone knew it, and they arranged to walk far enough behind Moshe and Rivka that they were almost walking on their own, a little privacy for the two young people who were not so young that they shouldn’t at least be thinking about their futures and who they’d spend them with.
“I’m sorry about this,” Moshe said. He looked absolutely mortified, his long face even longer, his big mobile mouth drawn down like a sad clown mask.
“It’s okay,” Rivka said. “I don’t mind, honestly.”
“That’s nice of you to say,” he said.
“I mean it,” she said.
“Good,” he said.
“Though,” she said, “it would be less of a burden if we had a conversation about something more interesting than this.”
That got a smile out of him, and then he asked a question that got a smile out of her: “So tell me what you’re interested in, Rivka Goldman?”
They talked so much that night that their parents had to pry them apart so the Pupas could get home and go to bed.
*
Hanging out with Moshe Pupik was a lot nicer than hanging out with the unserious girls, even if they had to do so with the full chaperonage and supervision of their families. They could still go off a ways and talk about, well . . . everything.
Moshe was interested in history and he knew so much, things that weren’t in the Torah, even things that contradicted the Torah, and the way he talked about the past made her feel like the two of them were being transported to a distant land. Best of all was the way Moshe could talk about those long-ago people as if they were real people, the same as the people all around them, but also different, both recognizable as part of the great human family and also completely foreign, with values and beliefs and experiences she would never fully understand.
Moshe didn’t just talk, he listened. Rivka’s father’s office had sent him home with a terminal so he could log in to the insurance company mainframe and he’d taught Rivka to use it, and ever since, she and it had been inseparable. She was teaching herself Fortran and BASIC out of books from the library. Moshe listened to her describe the worlds unfolding for her, the mistakes she’d made and then figured out, and even if he couldn’t program computers, Rivka was a good explainer, and he was such a good listener and he thrilled along with her tales of technological conquest.
Gradually, their parents began to give them freer rein, letting them sit in the backyard while everyone else sat inside having cake and coffee, even sending them to the market together to do the shopping. The intimacy of their privacy made their bond even deeper. It was almost as good as the friendships she’d had with Bina and Malka, and Simchah of course. Almost. Some days, she didn’t even feel the loss of them.
So it came that one day, Moshe Pupik asked Rivka to marry him. Not asked her asked her, not one knee and a ring asked her, but rather, warmed up to the subject. “If our parents say it’s all right, if you say it’s all right, then I think it’s all right, and maybe it would be all right for all of us and—”
The feeling that overcame her then was even bigger than the feeling she’d had when her mother had caught her with Simchah. Shame, of course, because she didn’t love him that way and never could, but shame also because she did love him, in a different way, and she had let him make the perfectly reasonable assumption that she was who she appeared to be. She had lied to him with every deed and every word, lied to someone she loved, even if she didn’t love him like that.
The tears came and wouldn’t stop and he stood so awkwardly there in the backyard, amid the rows of her father’s vegetable plot. And then he pulled her into a shadow and he did something he wasn’t supposed to do: he hugged her. He hugged her and hugged her and hugged her. Not in a bad way, either—not in a way that made her think he was being forward, or presuming that she was the person he had every right to think that she was.
She loved him so fiercely then that she decided that maybe she could be the person he had every right to think she was. So she dried her tears and explained them away and disentangled herself and said that it was a lovely thing to ask and she felt honored that he had, and they should talk some more about it.
Her father came to the door then and called them in to say their goodbyes to the Pupas.
*
Moshe Pupik wasn’t a fool. He knew her well. He was a studious boy and only had a few close friends, and she was the closest of them.
“I know you told me we should talk some more about it—” he began, the next time they stood among the vegetable garden beds. “And before you say anything, I have something I want to say.”
She made herself hold his gaze, because if he was going to profess his undying romantic love, she was going to be a good best friend and a good woman and a good wife and look him in the eye when he did it.
“Rivka,” he said, and looked away. “Rivka, you aren’t like anyone I’ve ever met. You’re different from everyone around here.” A cold feeling stole over her. He knew. Somehow, he knew. She’d been so careful. A powerful urge to run inside the house seized her and it took everything she had to resist it.
“I mean,” Moshe Pupik went on, “Rivka, I think maybe, you’re a little like me?”
Her thigh muscles trembled with the effort of not running, even as her knees turned to jelly with surprise. Like me? She teetered. He steadied her.
“Like you, Moshe? What do you mean?”
He stared squarely in her eyes. “I don’t believe in God,” he said. “I haven’t believed since I was a little boy.” He swallowed. “I think maybe you don’t believe in God, either.”
She gasped, then, to her surprise, she giggled. “No,” she blurted. “I believe in God, Moshe. That’s not what makes me different.”
Now he was sagging. He’d told her his secret, a secret that could separate him from his family and his community forever. Exile. He was her best friend. Did she owe him anything less?
“Moshe,” she whispered, “I don’t want to marry a man. Any man. I think I want to . . . marry . . . a woman?” She instantly hated how it came out, especially that question mark. But she’d said those words aloud now. She’d never even formed that feeling into words in her own mind.
He looked confused and took a step back from her, letting go of her arm. She wanted to take the words back. She couldn’t. Because she couldn’t, she decided to give them some more words for company. It was the bravery of a woman in flight, falling from a great height, who couldn’t make things worse.
“I’m sorry if you find that disgusting or terrible, Moshe Pupik, but it’s who I am. It’s how Hashem made me. Remember Hashem? The God you don’t believe in? I do believe in Him. He doesn’t make mistakes, so I am exactly as I should be.” If she said the words fervently enough, she’d believe them.
He said precisely nothing for precisely a hundred years and she died a million times. Then he looked up and looked down and then back at her. “You know, lesbianism was a very common phenomenon in world history. In ancient Greece, it would have been utterly unremarkable.”
Lesbianism made her heart thunder. It was a word she’d never spoken, or heard, or read, but she knew it somehow, the way she knew the other forbidden words. Perhaps she’d been born with the knowledge that the word was treyf. Is that who she was?
“How about not believing in God?” she asked.
That got him to smile a little. “Atheism? Oh, that’s far more forbidden. I’d have been stoned to death, or burned, I’m sure.”
“But not today?”
“Oh, no, not today. I just need to change my haircut, get a new suit of clothes, and walk a mile in any direction and no one will care about my feelings about Hashem.”
“But I can’t do that,” she said. “It seems we were both born in the wrong place, but only I was born in the wrong time.”
He took her hand. “Times change,” he said. “In the meantime, maybe we could keep each other company, here in the wrong place.”
Moshe Pupik was a mensch.
*
Letting it be known that they were engaged to be engaged was a mitzvah beyond Rivka’s wildest imaginings. Overnight, it put a stop to both the disapproving conversations with her mother and awkward conversations with her father, to say nothing of the whispers of the people she met out and about at school and at the market.
But it wasn’t to last. Gradually, a new pressure built: to move from engaged-to-be-engaged to simply engaged. Moshe Pupik was feeling it, too, and they had many long conversations about whether they could marry, and if so, what that would mean. Would Rivka have his babies? Could he be happy living his whole life with a woman who had no interest in being a wife in the biblical sense? Could she be happy in that arrangement?
It was Moshe who found the way out: an advertisement for a job with Fidelity Computing that had circulated at the yeshiva. It promised excitement, professional advancement, a good salary, and it said “Modest, pious women are encouraged to apply.”
Rivka’s father had graduated to a Fidelity PC at home by this point, as had many of his friends and business contacts. Within the community, Fidelity was known as a Haredic success story (little was said about the other two Wise Men and their faith, though if pressed everyone would say that it was wonderful that Rabbi Finkel had found a way to share the bounty with these important shkotzim and their followers).
Moshe had a very serious discussion with her father about his intention to study history at Stanford, where he’d been accepted with a partial scholarship, and how a job at Fidelity Computing would allow him and Rivka to keep up their (chaste!) courtship, averting the risk that his studies would get in the way of the lifelong marriage and family they were both eager to start.
Rivka, meanwhile, worked on her mother, with passionate speeches about the need to follow her betrothed, the importance of having the possibility of work that could help with family finances should they ever fall on hard times (God forbid, but who can know what adversity lurks in the future?), and the excitement of working on Rabbi Finkel’s great Haredic enterprise, Fidelity Computing.
She moved to Colma a month after graduating. Moshe Pupik moved out midsummer. They saw each other once a week for Shabbos dinner, at first, then, after Moshe cut off his sidelocks and started going by “Mark,” they switched to a monthly lunch, so they could work out a common story to tell their parents on their calls back home.