The Golden Bridge

“Israel,” my father said. He was an oral surgeon. It was December
and I was getting a Hanukkah present. “Two whole weeks!” my
mother added. She was a mother. She packed my bags: a two-month
supply of tampons stashed in Ziplocs and tucked into my shoes, yards
upon yards of floss, a pepper-spray key chain, and a family-pack of
Dove soap, which, she always said, was pH-balanced for my vagina. I
was sixteen. I knew by this time in my life that she did not mean my
vagina, but a whole community of vaginas in need of balanced cleans-
ing, to which, by virtue of my own parts, I apparently belonged.
It was 1986. It was New Jersey. I had Madonna posters on my
bedroom walls, though I distrusted Madonna; she was loud and crass
and seemed, well, fake. I was embarrassed by the particular way she
put her hands on herself in her videos. But I’d needed something
to replace the Kristy McNichol posters I’d had on my walls since
the seventies. Kristy McNichol had always struck me as trustworthy:
she skateboarded and had played someone named Buddy on TV, and
her pain struck me as the real deal. Once, when I was in elementary
school, I’d sent her a letter telling her to be careful, since I’d seen
some of the kids who had to have dental work done in my dad’s office
after they fell off their skateboards, and she sent me a 3-D poster of
herself on a skateboard and cellophane glasses I could use to look at
her from my bed. But Kristy McNichol was old news. And though I was without doubt a weird kid, I wasn’t stupid or developmentally
out of whack or anything. I knew how to masturbate, hypothetically,
and even had a name for my vagina. My friend Sarah and I had come
up with it in middle school, when we realized that the three girls
in our grade named Jodi with an “i” (there were none with a “y”)
were totally alike: they all wore frilly clothes, they were all dog-faced,
and all the boys liked them and chased them around at bar mitzvah
parties. “Just like a vagina,” I’d said, and so Sarah said “Like your
vagina,” which is how mine got the name. Jodi.
I’d always liked nicknames. Madonna was not a nickname, but
Buddy was—and I thought it was a pretty good nickname, as long
as it was attached to a girl. While this is not necessarily true now,
at the time, whenever I thought about nicknames, I thought about
vaginas. Maybe it was Sarah’s fault, though Sarah had stopped hang-
ing out with me sometime around the start of eighth grade. By then
I’d learned the difference between a vagina and the other parts, so I
also named my other part: Heidi Clitowitz. I’d chosen a nickname for
myself, too. It was Misha. Misha was a Russian bear from the Moscow
Olympics, an exclusive bit of knowledge I’d picked up from a girl in
the neighborhood who’d been to Tel Aviv when American televisions
had banned the games, but they’d been broadcast in Israel over the
Jordanian station. I’d never seen Misha; I just liked the sound of it.
The problem with nicknames, at least as far as I understood them at
the time, was that someone else had to make them up for you—you
couldn’t give one to yourself. So, as with the bear, no one knew about
my nickname. Everyone called me Michelle.
It was 1986, almost 1987, and I was going on a two-week winter-
break trip to Israel with a whole bunch of other Jewish kids from the
Tri-State Region. Somebody was bound to know somebody, though
when I waited in line to check my bags at the El Al counter, I didn’t
recognize anyone. I found my parents in the waiting area, where they
were sitting side by side in a row of those airport chairs that had coin-
operated televisions on the armrests. My mom and dad still had their
puffy coats on, and they were wedged into their seats so tightly they
were more or less immobile from the necks down. Once my parents
snagged their seats, they really liked to keep them. When I got closer I saw they were both nodding at a woman in a fur coat who sat across
from them on a regular old plastic bench. She needed the space: she
was big, and the coat made her bigger.
“Michelle, this is Rhonda Seligson,” my mother said, gesturing
with her head towards the fur-coat lady.
“No, Carol, it’s Lowenthal now,” the woman corrected. She lifted
her hand and wiggled a few fingers in my direction.
“To us you’ll always be a Seligson,” my mother insisted. To me
she said, “Your father and I know Rhonda from camp. Her brother
Danny was my wonderful swim instructor for five summers.”
My father’s eyes had wandered to the newsstand just beyond the
woman formerly known as Seligson, where a skinny blond girl my age
walked her fingers along a row of glossy magazines. She wore a tie-
dyed tank top stretched over a chest that wasn’t so skinny, and jeans
that were more hole than denim, billowing out from her bare legs as
if a big wind were blowing through them, somehow, in that airless
terminal. Rhonda née Seligson looked over her shoulder and then
stood up suddenly, excusing herself.
“That’s Rhonda’s girl, Jodi,” my mother said. “She’s going on the
teen tour too.”
Rhonda yanked a magazine out of Jodi’s hands and stuck it in the
wrong place on the rack.
I didn’t know for sure then, but I pretty much figured this Jodi
came with an “i.” What I imagined saying at that moment was, Jodi’s
going on the teen tour too. I imagined jutting my crotch out a bit
when I said it, a move that was more Elvis than Madonna. Or maybe
I thought of all that later. Regardless, I wasn’t going to do anything
of the sort. What I actually said was, “Jodi’s a babe.”
“Michelle!” my mother scolded, freeing one arm to point at me
over the mini-television. “Women don’t say things like that.”
Like most of my mother’s pronouncements at the time, this struck
me as both very true and oddly unimportant. But the real truth was
that even before she’d complained, I’d felt myself backing down, as if I
needed to offer an explanation. “I mean, she’s lucky, she’s really thin.”
“But her mother turned out zaftig,” my father contributed.
“I see Shlomo!” my mother exclaimed, struggling out of her seat.