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Part Three: Resolutions

Chapter One: Deborah, Summer, 1995


Her niece, Michelle, was in Israel, and was visiting with her baby sister, Reina. Deborah knew this only peripherally—through off hand phone conversations that she still held from time to time with her sister, Donna. “Oh, Michelle is headed to Israel to visit with Doran and Kathleen next week,” she had said nonchalantly the last time that they had talked, though Deborah Davidson knew that her sister, Donna, was feeling anything other than nonchalant. Murderous, perhaps. Ashamed of—whatever it had been, which had propelled her into taking this course of action, and Deborah sure as hell was not going to ask her about any more of a detailed description.

The mention of Israel, however, evoked in Deborah even more varied feelings than remembrance of her baby sister, Kathleen’s, flight there just four years prior to now. Deborah remembered when Reina was 5—when Kathleen was 5, rather, long before she even became Reina—back when Deborah went to visit her, or rather, went to visit their mother, Gerdie, way back in 1975, about something harrowing, which she did not understand—something having to do with the strange land of Israel, and something having to do with her beloved Women’s Movement, and something having to do with the sickly feeling of betrayal, which was just starting to line her stomach at the time, and which had now followed her around for twenty years.

And now, old, frayed and ashamed, she could admit to it. That she allowed this—one, marginal event, and this one random association to completely drain her of a lifetime’s worth of goals and convictions.

She closed her eyes as she felt groggy and was imagining her own mutation, the slow and horrible shift from being a passionate, young feminist, the very person whom she had vowed to become on her 13th birthday, into this quiet and simpering woman who could barely act as a peacemaker while her sister, Donna, once the famed observer of the family, raged against her daughter and sister’s lack of academic drive. She was surviving on low paying temp jobs, barely making enough cash to foot her rent, and she was utterly alone and yet starved for company—any sort of companionship, either platonic or romantic, even if it came from a man.

Hers was no longer the esteemed life of a feminist. Hers was not so much nobler than getting up each morning to put on a faded house dress and serve your husband his morning breakfast, like Deborah’s mother, Gerdie, had done during most of the days of her life. Deborah could not even bear to look at herself dead on in the mirror sometimes. Some days, she simply rolled out of bed, and went straight to work, and wished that it—all of it, and all of the vagueness of life and “it”—could be over already. And then she would chuckle sardonically to herself. If only her old rallying buddies could see her now.

She was 43 years old when her niece, Michelle, went to Israel to visit her sister, Reina. The concept stuck in her mind for a long time, continuously even, as she fetched her newspaper from the hallway outside of her apartment, and fixed herself pot of coffee. She brought the liquid to her lips and suddenly, it was again no longer 1995, but 20 years earlier, in 1975, in that office and watching her friend, Susan, break down after the New Mexico conference. And she was on the precipice of something, she could feel it, and the coffee mug rattled dangerously in her hands. Hastily, she dropped it to the table and ran for her phone book.

She had not spoken to Susan Ross in… she could not even remember how many years it had been. The divide between their two situations—Susan moving forwards to Jewish activism, and Deborah… just staying stuck at wherever the International Women’s Decade had deposited her tore a rift between the two of them so very long ago. And yet, with her mother, Gerdie, gone, and her stringently secular sister, Donna’s, kid in Israel, Deborah suddenly found her fingers fumbling through the yellow pages for Susan’s last name.

She read over it twice, then picked up the phone in one hand, then looked at the number again, and finally dialed while continually checking it. The phone rang three times, droning into Deborah’s skull, and she wondered with increasing dread, what idiocy had possessed her to take this melodramatic and out of the blue step off the beaten path of her life.

Finally, a voice sounded on the other line. “Hello?” it asked, scratching along with both friendliness and distance.

Deborah took a deep breath, calling forth her inner feminist, however rusty after so much disuse—that college girl she once was who used to make calls for donations for marches and rallies. “Yes, hi,” she said briskly. “Is Susan—Ross at home?” She turned her head, cursing herself nearly immediately, wondering all too late if perhaps this was the wrong Ross, wondering if perhaps her friend, Susan, was married by now.

“This is she,” the disembodied voice on the other line said.

With her identity established, Deborah was suddenly at a loss. She sucked in her breath, all of her formal presence of mind having gone from her. “This is—“ she stammered. “This is Deb. Deborah Davidson.”

Silence reigned for a moment between the two women, divided by much more than a telephone line, as time slipped backwards. “Deb?” Susan repeated, almost as if in a daze. “Deborah Davidson, from the clinic?”

Deborah smiled, even as she knew Susan could not see her. “Yes, that is me.”

“Good grief!” Deborah winced as her old friend’s voice hit a high pitch. “What a blast from the past! How are you, girl?”

“Oh, you know…” Deborah said vaguely, resorting to vague clichés of her own. “Life is life. Same ol’ same ol’. How are you? Are you still involved with that—Jewish group—“

“The Women’s Zionist Organization?” Susan chuckled. “Yes, I still am involved with them—if only marginally. I am on their mailing list.” She paused, a slight tension seeping through. “Did you—ever join one of those groups? I know with—the UN conferences—“ she let her voice taper, a twenty year struggle simply being too huge of a gap.

Deborah took comfort in the fact that her old friend, Susan, could not see her face as she tried to grapple for composure. “Actually,” she chuckled, as if about to disclose something extremely funny, “my sister did that. Well, sort of. She married an Orthodox Israeli a couple of years back. Our young neice is visiting with her and her husband right now, in fact; she is the first of our family to do that.”

“Really?” Susan’s voice sounded like a cross between shock and cheer. “Well, mazal tov! Congratulations!”

Deborah accepted the foreign congratulatory phrase gingerly. “Thank you,” she said, though she had no idea what she was being gracious about. Watching a sister go off to Israel and leave almost all of her familial and cultural connections behind? Having almost nothing to do with the entire affair—no sweeping speeches, nor familial sentiment? If anything, Reina’s angry escape to Israel was nothing short of her biggest failure as an eldest sister. She suddenly strove to say something more real to her friend.

“I—want to learn more about this Jewish heritage, really.” It was a strange admittance to sweep off of her tongue, and as strangely intimate as all of those talks she had shared with her mother, Gerdie, on the subject. “I—do not really want my sister’s life as it is—too traditional and too patriarchal, but I was wondering—given your involvement in the Women’s Movement—“ she bit her tongue then, as it had already run too fast away from her.

“You came to me for help?” Susan was asking. Deborah found herself grateful that could not determine her tone. “After all of these years?”

Deborah slowly twisted the phone chord around her middle finger. “I did not know where else to go, really,” she admitted bashfully. “I have been floundering, Sus.” She chuckled to relieve tension, “and that is the honest truth.”

“Well, Deb,” Susan said, and Deborah thought that her tone might now be sincere. “I can not begin to tell you—this is so flattering, really,” Deborah sucked in her breath, flushing red as her old friend continued. “I always feel honored to provide what help and counsel I can to others. That is why we became feminists, is it not? In order to give silenced women a voice?”

Old feelings, still sharp from the remembrance of passionate emotion attached, even after all of these years, streaked through Deborah briefly, like a marathon being run across her chest. “Yes,” she said rather nostalgically, “I suppose that was the reason.”

“Oh, Deb,” Susan was giggling in the present, drawing Deborah back to it. “You should come to my apartment this Saturday night; that’s when my Rosh Chodesh group is meeting.”

“They have religious womens’ groups?” Deborah was astounded. Religion was always something that she saw as excluding women. It was the main reason that she so long ago chose the Movement as her creed, and Betty Freidan’s “The Feminine Mystique” as her bible. The only way in which she believed you could feel both spiritual and empowered as a woman was to forge out on your own.

“Of course!” Susan laughed as a segue into making a joke. “You must know that the Women’s Movement was good for something. So many institutions in this day and age are asking themselves about how they can incorporate the female experience into their general practices.”

Deborah slowly closed her mouth. Her skin was tingling with more fervor now; she was still on the brink of something, but this time, she could almost reach out and grasp it. The feeling was old, yet foreign to her, like an old shirt she had just found in the back of her closet. Tentatively, she tried the emotion on, feeling it’s musty warmth begin to envelop her. She took a deep breath.

“OK,” she said both clearly and determinedly. “I’ll see you Saturday.”
***

Deborah ended up catching a taxi to Susan’s apartment in Brooklyn at the start of the new Jewish month of Elul. She wore a matronly outfit—a tailored suit, the only thing she figured was close enough to formal clothes to pass for such an occasion, as she wanted to make a good impression on these people, after all. But she shuffled uncomfortably as she got out of the cab, as she was unused to such stifling apparel, and wondered if she had perhaps made the wrong decision for herself. However was she going to be able to handle meeting this group of women whom she had hoped would be kind and compassionate Jewish women if she could not even be herself when being introduced to them?

Wrapping her arms around herself, she made her way to the elevator and hit the button for Susan’s floor. She sucked her breath in, wondering what type of people would find solace within such a group. Her own brain raced, protesting herself as was it’s frequent custom of late, along with over analyzing her decisions, of course, as if that would give her any answers to her life altering queries. She knew better than that, she did. Over analyzing and extensive examination was much more in her sister, Donna’s department than it was in hers—or at least that was the way it used to be back in the days when the two of them were more sure of themselves. And back in the days when Deborah was more fond of taking action than anything else.

The elevator dinged shrilly, jarring Deborah out of her thoughts as it reached her designated floor and opened up with a lurch. Deborah stepped out of it tentatively, seeking her friend’s address number on the doors in front of her. Finding it, she took a deep breath and knocked at the smooth, peach colored door.

She could hear the murmur of voices within, though they did quiet slightly as she pounded once. Crisp footsteps were heard, and then Susan flung the door open, as if inviting her old friend into the soft light within her apartment.

“Deborah!” she said cheerfully. She was dressed much more casually than Deb was, having donned khakis and a loose shirt, with her hair tied into a make shift bun—and Deborah plucked at her suit self consciously. “I am so glad that you could join us,” Susan was saying, stepping to the side. “Please, do, do come inside!”

Deborah smiled in what she hoped was a graceful manner, and then stepped inside. A few women who were loitering in the hallway with drinks in hand smiled and she smiled back at them. She was looking around Susan’s apartment, at the thickly painted walls and the shining silver mirrors mounted one to each side, as she tried to get a feel of her old friend’s personality. She took a deep breath upon hearing the larger concentration of noise in the living room but under the influence of Susan’s guiding hand, she took a deep breath and slowly entered.

The talking ceased as Susan placed her hands on Deborah’s shoulders. Women of various ages between their young adult years and middle ages, wearing everything from casual t-shirts and jeans to semi formal summer dresses, which made Deb’s tailor made suiut look mundane in comparison, were sitting in groups of two or three on couches across the room—most of them sporting a drink in one hand, and all holding a pen and a slip of paper. Deborah attempted to keep smiling at them and recalled the sudden memory where she introduced herself to her old feminist group, Adam’s Rib, while she was a freshman entering into undergraduate school.

“Ladies,” Susan was saying as her fingers clutched into Deborah’s shoulders excitedly. “Allow me to introduce you to my old friend. She was my most dedicated coworker back at the clinic I ran in the seventies—she was young and bright eyed and always eager to help someone who was her or himself in need.”

Deborah blushed, and ducked her head briefly. She felt as though it had been many years since she had held an impact like that over anybody other than her coffee provider; she must have employed the means to keep them singlehandedly in business, after all. Soothed by her own silliness, she looked up at the crowd just in time for Susan to complete her introduction.

“So please,” she was saying, “do join me in giving a warm welcome, courtesy of the Rosh Chodesh group, to my old friend, Deborah Davidson.”

Some whoops and hollers of welcome errupted from the ladies and Deborah calmed as she sunk gracefully back into formalities. “Oh, thank you,” she said. “I really am thrilled and honored to be here amongst you all.” Glancing about, she took a seat on one of Susan’s couches, between a woman who looked about her age, who was wearing a simple lilac dress, and one who was slightly older and wearing jeans with a tailored shirt. Both of them smiled and introduced themselves to her.

“Deborah,” Susan said once the women had all finished with their introductions. “Might you like a glass of champagne?”

“Champagne would be lovely, thank you, Sus,” said Deb, whose ends of her lips were quirking into a nostalgic grin. The last time she had met with a group of women like this, after all, was when everyone was young enough to solely enjoy beer, or at least wine being the most formal drink. Susan came back with a glass for her friend—it was circular, but nothing too fancy—and Deborah took a sip, tasting the upper-crustness of the occasion, and of her age. She swallowed it down, ready to endure anything, which might bring her back to a time long ago when she could actually feel.

“Jaqueline, might you get Deborah one of our scraps of paper and a pen?” Susan was asking the young girl on Deb’s left. She nodded and rose to receive them from a stack on a coffee table nearby. Deborah held them in her lap once she received them, the red and blue lines on the college ruled paper reminding her suddenly of grade school.

“Now,” Susan said, and she sat down in a plush chair of her own, “let us begin with our usual activities, girls.” She inclined her head ever so slightly. “Deb, like I said to you yesterday in the coffee shop, this is our time to write out one or two of our faults of late, secretly, of course, and then to cast them into the fire.” She pointed at the logs blazing in the fire place, which did make Deborah arch her eyebrow in amusement; it certainly was odd to see a blazing fireplace in the middle of the summer.

Susan was continuing with a smile. “And after we do our little ritual, perhaps you can tell us a little about yourself.” She smiled, obviously amused herself, as she knew all about Deb on her own.

Deborah chuckled herself, thinking that Susan surely knew all of the important details of her life after all. It oddly had not changed much when they saw much of each other back in the seventies. That was, in fact, Deborah’s main problems, and one of the reasons that she sought out this group to begin with.

But all she said publicly was to agree with her friend. “Sure,” she said, and “I would love to.”

She had expected this “ceremony” casting off negative energy to be at least a solemn affair, but she found that that most of the women around her talked amicably as they wrote. Deborah was having none of that, however, as she concentrated on her slip of paper, thinking upon Michelle in Israel, and Reina in Israel in order to ground her properly.

A few minutes later, she folded the paper in half and stood. She made her way over to the fireplace and cast it in, and watched it slowly unfurl in the flames, vulnerable and weak against the elements. One by one, the other slips from the other women in the room joined hers.

Around her, the women started to hum and sing at a little tune that Deborah could not understand. She guessed it was Hebrew, as she guessed it was one of the psalms that her friend, Susan, had mentioned the day before—what else could it really be, after all, in a group that was named in the Hebrew language, and was about Hebrew culture, and she bit her lip, wondering if this could somehow be soothing to her, and wondering if Reina found this strange and alien language to be soothing, even when she did not understand it, wondering if she even understood it now, and wondering if, perhaps, at this very moment, she was passing the buck, as it were, to their young niece, Michelle.

The tune ended, dying into a hum, as the embers died in the fireplace, and then the women slowly made their ways back to their seats. Deborah sat down primly, noting that all of the eyes on the room were suddenly traveling towards hers. She bit her tongue and Susan gave her an encouraging nod. So she chucked quietly, trying to find herself in her sudden apprehension.

“This is very odd for me,” she admitted, and then quickly amended. “I mean, not sitting with a group of women and sharing a bit about my life story—though it certainly has been a long time since I have partaken in the act.”

She sucked in a breath, and realized, slowly, as she tasted the air, how cold it was when she inhaled it, and yet how hot it was when she exhaled it. In these moments of bringing her body under some sort of equilibrium, she found her voice, and decided to start at the beginning.
***

The bicentennial anniversary of their mother, Gerdie’s, death was upon them in the fall of that year. It was during this time that Deborah was suddenly made privy to some startling truths about her sister, Donna, about her niece, Michelle, and about the mysterious Mr. X whom she had despised ever since his introduction into their family. She went to Susan’s house early one Saturday morning, before the rest of the Rosh Chodesh group was expected to arrive in time for their Shabbat afternoon tea, and proceeded to pour her heart out to her only remaining friend.

“I just cannot possibly understand how she could do something so life altering,” Deborah said, her face going completely white as she clutched at her mug and afghan, “especially since it did not only deeply impact her own life, or her boyfriend’s life… but also her daughter’s life as well.” Deborah buried her head in her hands, comfortable enough at last to revert to resort to soothing and childlike behaviors.

Susan was patting her on the back, and spoke to her in a soothing tone. “You always—it seemed—considered Donna to be perfect,” she mused, “and now you find that she has this deep and dark secret.”

Deborah chuckled sardonically and lifted her head. “I used to think that my father had this deep and dark secret,” she spit out, “I used to—I still do, almost—think that he must have had a mistress. I could never…” she coughed. “I would have never expected that it would be my sister who would turn out to be so conniving and so cruel.”

“Some things do not come in black and white,” Susan insisted. “Sometimes, monsters appear as angels and angels appear as monsters. To be—cliché about it.” She chuckled, but not long enough to disenfranchise her own point.

“Then how do you know who to blame?” Deborah asked, and of course, a memory suddenly came, unbidden to her. “My mother wanted me to forgive him,” she murmured, as if almost to herself. “She wanted me to forgive my father, that is. That was her one wish for me as she lay dying on her sickbed. That—I would at some day be able to see him for—who he is. Or was.” She set her mug down, and clutched the afghan to her chest.

Susan nodded and she brought her hand down to Deborah’s chin and she tipped it, so that she could look straight into her old friend’s eyes. “And… who was he? Who was your father, Jack Davidson?”

Deborah closed her eyes and exhaled a shuddering breath. “Jack Davidson…” she whispered. She was a child again, sitting at his dining room table. But no, she was not, she was an adult, and he had been dead for years. “Jack Davidson…” she whispered again, “was a man.”

Tears sprang to her eyes, and she suddenly yanked her chin from Susan’s grasp. “I accused him of being power hungry,” she said, and she was suddenly horrified with herself. “I accused him of trying to take everything from us—when in reality, I gave him everything. I gave him my anger. And I gave him my contempt. And I gave him all of his fucking power.” Her words burned her, and her breathing was ragged. She blinked rapidly, and massages her temples, no longer comfortable enough with herself to hide as a child might hide.

Susan was not to be deterred, as her hands slowly went around Deborah’s neck, and she hugged her friend close. Deborah leaned into her, and imagined her as a mother for a moment, as she missed her mother’s touch, suddenly, even after all of these years. Susan smelled like perfume.

“You know what this means, do you not?” Susan asked her friend softly as she stroked her cropped and curly hair. “You still have the power to take that away from him—you have the power to do that right now.”

Deborah laughed bitterly, and shook her head from side to side. “But he is dead, Susan.”

“No, no he is not,” Susan insisted firmly. “He is not dead to you… or else you would not feel the sting of what it is that he did to your family as strongly as you do, even now, in the present day.”

Deborah closed her eyes as something inside of her unlocked and she remembered a vague snippet of her familial history, her strongest memory of her father, Jack, which she strove, usually, to try and ignore. It was in the late fifties, and her father was talking to the phone with a friend and she, as a young child, was waiting impatiently out in the hallway, eager to show him her first grade report card. She leaned into the door in order to hear his conversation, and in order to track it’s end so that she could share with him her wonderful news.

“I just do not see what the fuck you think you have to complain about, Roy,” Jack was saying. “I mean, at least the boy will go out hunting with you. Father and son bonding; do you know how I miss that? Hell, my first born is a girl. All I can do for her is to organize tea parties and wait until she gets married and out of my hair and bank account.”

He laughed. And on the other side of the door, Deborah Davidson dropped her report card. Dread began to fill her stomach—it was a vast and empty feeling that she could not pin down. She took a couple of shuddering breaths, her vision blurring into a haze, and she turned from the door and she ran. And since that time, she never looked back.

But now, in the fall of 1995, with her promise to her mother aged at one decade old, she spoke words that were from an earlier time, that were from a secret time, not even shared between father and daughter, but between daughter and father’s bigotry. “He did not want me,” Deborah whispered, and the tears, which were warm and cold at the same time, seeped down her cheeks. “I loved him once. But I know… he never loved me.”

Susan’s hands had never left her neck. They rubbed her soothingly, they rubbed her like Gerdie might have, so very long ago. Deborah felt broken into, vandalized by her own admission, and empty of her only security. And yet Susan continued to soothe.

“Then let him go,” she said softly, her breath tickling her friend’s ear. “Live up to the promise you made the one parent who was there for you. Do not lose yourself to—burning passion or miring lethargy. Do not give him that power.”

This was not a place of significance, where Deborah was sitting, wrapped in an afghan and her friend’s arms. It was a simple apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Her childhood home was long gone to the Davidson. Gerdie’s childhood home was once barred to their entire people, somewhere in Germany. Deborah Davidson was a wanderer, as she had always been a wanderer, since the day she had turned from that door.

She reached for the mug behind her, which had long ago turned cold by this point. She took a sip of the liquids inside, though she was unable to taste anything but her own, throbbing pulse. She took a deep breath. She remembered her most fundamental beliefs—back when she began to be a feminist, back when she was a teenager, and was 13 years old. Everything, every change… starts small. She took a deep breath.

“Goodbye, Jack Davidson,” she whispered to her phantom father. “I… forgive you.”

There was no change in the wind. There was no swell from the orchestra. But sometimes, as Deborah Davidson well knew, the act of saying words aloud was a way of validating them, and was a way of moving towards a lasting peace.


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