Page 8 of One of Them

When the band started playing a slow song, she tried to pull Duane back onto the dance floor, but he stayed where he was.

“I need some air,” he said. “Let’s go outside.

” Anne didn’t especially want to do that, but being alone with Duane seemed preferable to having to talk to Peggy or, even worse, be confronted by Elizabeth.

She allowed him to steer her away from the music, the press of people, and lead her into the night.

She too was overheated from the dancing, and she didn’t feel the cold at first. Then the flask glinted as Duane swigged from it.

When he’d finished, he thrust it in her direction. “Are you sure you don’t want some?”

This time Anne took the flask and brought it to her lips; the alcohol was almost tasteless, but left an unpleasant burning sensation behind; should she risk going back inside for water or punch?

Before she could decide, Duane pulled her head down and kissed her, his tongue—fat, slippery, repulsive—an alien thing in her mouth. She jerked away.

“You’re a little tease, that’s what you are.

An ice queen and a tease.” Out came the flask again—was there anything even left in there?

—and this time, when he’d finished, he shook the thing at her, the last colorless drops splattering the front of her dress, and stalked off.

Shivering now, Anne brushed off the drops of alcohol, and then she spat, lavishly, to rid herself of his taste.

To think this had been her first kiss—revolting.

But chilled as she was, she waited until she was sure Duane was gone before she went back into the gym to find her coat and leave the building.

The bus that had brought them here was waiting not far from where Anne stood.

She went over and saw that it was empty; the door yielded to her gentle pressure.

She climbed aboard, walked to the very back, and took a seat.

Alone in the dark, she tried to calm herself.

Duane, that boor, wasn’t the real source of her agitation.

More pressing—and alarming—was the way her past, which she had forced to the periphery of her life, was now pushing forward again, insistent and demanding.

Peggy was right—she did know Elizabeth Hunnewell, though back then she’d been Lizzie, and Anne had been Mimi.

MimiandLizzie, LizzieandMimi —everyone said their names together.

They had been a unit, a pair, best friends in school and out.

Mrs. Hunnewell had become a kind of second mother to Anne.

She’d been close to all of them, really: Lizzie’s father, often comically distracted but always affable, and her two older sisters, glamorous Genevieve and high-spirited Maud.

Their black Standard Poodle, Lady, with her long, graceful legs and intelligent expression.

Even Opal, the maid, fussed over her when she was there.

Yet despite all the dinners Miriam had eaten at their table and the nights spent in Lizzie’s room, there had always been a way in which she felt herself at some remove, not just from the Hunnewells but from the other girls at school too.

The source of this feeling was simple but inexorable: it was because she was Jewish.

It felt like she’d always known that her friends seemed to pity her, just a little bit, because there was no Christmas tree in her apartment, no joining them for caroling on the cold winter evenings when crystals of glistening snow turned the ordinary gray sidewalks into something almost magical, no frenzy of tearing paper and ribbons from the pile of boxes the next morning.

And they pitied her exclusion from the mad race to find the hidden eggs on Easter Sunday.

For Anne, there had been no excelsior-filled baskets in which chocolate bunnies and lambs nestled, no proud walk to the church on Park Avenue in a new pastel spring coat and matching hat.

Back then, being Christian had seemed like more than a religion; it was the fabric of life itself, rich and glowing, the holidays touchstones for everyone but her.

It wasn’t as if she and her father didn’t have any celebrations.

He always lit a menorah and gave her little gifts—chocolate coins, a handkerchief, new hair ribbons—each night of Hanukkah.

She liked the ritual, and the game with the dreidel they played, but how could any of this compete with Christmas—the store windows with their fabulous displays, the fragrant wreaths and trees, the way everyone seemed to be swept up in the grand tide of the season?

It was the exclusion that grated on her, never glaring but always there.

The summer after seventh grade, Lizzie was getting ready to go off to Camp Oneida in Maine.

Excitedly, she showed Mimi the dress outfit the campers wore every Sunday: crisp white shorts, white socks, and white sneakers, topped with a red blazer that had a turtle—the camp mascot—embroidered on the pocket.

Miriam envied that blazer, just like she envied everything else Lizzie described—nature walks, arts and crafts, archery, and swimming.

“Tell your father you want to come too,” Lizzie had said.

“My mother knows the director. I’m sure she can find a place for you. ”

But it turned out the camp was restricted, and so no, Miriam wouldn’t be going after all. She wasn’t allowed . In her humiliation she’d gone to her father; surely he could fix it. “What difference does it make that we’re Jewish?” she’d asked.

“It doesn’t,” he said. “Not in any real sense. In fact, some of these bigoted people forget that Jesus himself was a Jew. The differences they see as crucial aren’t truly differences at all.

We’re from the same tradition. We have the same foundation—we both rejected the pagan world and all its childish, spiteful gods. ”

Miriam was used to her father answering her this way; he never patronized or talked down to her but acted as if her intellect deserved nothing less than his most serious and thoughtful response. Yet she still didn’t understand. “If that’s true, why can’t I go to camp with Lizzie?”

“I wish I could answer that,” he said.

Then something else occurred to her. “Why do we have to be Jewish, anyway? Why do we have to be anything at all?”

“If only it were that simple,” her father said. “In the eyes of the world, once a Jew, always a Jew. Besides, a Jew is what I am, it’s what made me who I am.”

“But you changed your name. Our name. Wasn’t that because you didn’t want to be Jewish?”

“No. I didn’t want to appear to be Jewish, at least with people who didn’t know me—it was getting in the way of my getting ahead in my career.

But as for being Jewish, well, I can’t be anything else.

And neither can you.” The way he said it, with such finality, made Miriam wilt inside.

It was as if he were delivering a life sentence.

The idea that she was bound by who her parents and their parents had been seemed so unfair.

Lizzie sent her postcards from camp, and when she returned, she presented Miriam with a friendship bracelet she had made for her.

Miriam looked at the tightly woven network of beads: orange, white, green, blue, and black.

“It’s very nice,” she said. “Thank you.” But she still burned for the blazer, and for the entitled status that would have allowed her to have made her own bracelet, one that she would have given to Lizzie.

Then, in the spring of her senior year at Nightingale, there came another of those snubs, arguably the worst, the culmination of all the others.

Elizabeth’s mother—she was Elizabeth now, having discarded Lizzie as too babyish—had invited a small group of girls to the Colony Club on Park Avenue for lunch.

The Colony was the premier all-women’s club in the city, and Mrs. Hunnewell said it would be a nice way to introduce them, in case they wanted to join when they were a bit older.

Miriam was familiar with the exterior of the building on Sixty-Second Street—red brick, marble base, marble trim, columns supporting the upper floors—but she had never been inside and so had only heard about the lounges, dining rooms, and bedrooms as well as the two-story ballroom, the basement swimming pool and spa that connected via an express elevator to a gym nasium on the fifth floor, the squash courts, servants’ rooms, and kennel, where members could leave their pets.

The girls were abuzz with excitement, and the Colony was all they talked about.

That the war in Europe had just ended—all the boys and young men would be coming home!

No more ration cards!—only fueled their mood; the entire city felt jubilant.

They chattered endlessly about what they would wear, eat, do.

They envisioned starched white tablecloths, lace-edged napkins, dainty finger sandwiches, cucumber soup, strawberry shortcake, rosebuds densely packed into small crystal vases.

Naturally, they had to dress up—their school uniforms wouldn’t do at all.

Elizabeth decided on a black taffeta skirt and pale-pink silk blouse.

Astrid’s mother promised to lend her a strand of pearls, and a pearl brooch to adorn the deep purple dress she planned to wear; Willa, who was Astrid’s best friend, went with her mother to Saks, and came away with a smart checked suit—her first—and peaked cap with a feather on the side.

Miriam studied her own wardrobe and decided that nothing she owned was sophisticated enough, but she knew her father would allow her to go shopping—maybe Bonwit Teller?

—to buy a dress and a pair of pumps too.

And new gloves—she definitely needed new white cotton gloves.