Part One: Beginnings
Chapter Two: Donna, April, 1967
They were supposed to take a trip out to the park, the four of them. Gerdie figured that her science loving daughter would like to poke around the vegetation there and Donna did not have the heart to explain to her the difference between exploring animate objects and exploring chemicals in a lab with Mr. Jenson after school. “You are the first girl I have come across who has shown an interest in my work,” he said and Donna nodded, pleased with herself.
But just last Friday, Jack had come home with the news that put a crack in their plans. “I am working for the duration of this weekend,” he said, shrugging off his coat. “The boss has a shipment due out Monday.”
“But Jack,” Gerdie exclaimed softly, bringing his coat to the closet. “Sunday is—Donna’s birthday. We have plans.”
Their father paused, and Donna heard Deb snort beside her. “Well, doesn’t this all feel familiar.”
“I am sorry, sweetheart.” He reached over to ruffle his younger daughter’s hair before turning to glare at Deborah. “And you, do watch your mouth, young lady.”
Donna felt her sister reaching for the peas and was pretty sure she was rolling her eyes. “Well, if Dad’s getting a one way ticket out of this shindig, might I meet up with some friends instead?” Donna tried to hide the tensing of her muscles but her sister noticed anyway. “Oh come on, Dee, it is not like you even want me there.”
“But this whole day—was supposed to be about family.” Gerdie had just returned to set a new platter in front of her loved ones.
Deborah shrugged. “What about some mommy and daughter bonding? Would not that just be a hoot?”
Jack slammed his hands down onto the table, and Donna jolted slightly. “You will be spending the day with your mother and sister,” he warned his eldest child darkly.
Deborah reddened, and opened her mouth, but then she felt Gerdie lay a hand on her arm. Donna watched, transfixed, as her sister gave their mother a furtive glance before returning her attention to her plate. Deb had been growing increasingly more volatile with their father in the past year. Since starting high school, she had run with a crowd who wore dirty jeans, questioned authority obsessively, and smoked behind the football bleachers. Deborah’s behavior had changed from mildly irritated at her suburban life to full out against it. So why was it, Donna wondered, did she show deference to the one person who seemed submissive and pliant in such a life?
“Yes,” Deborah said now, “of course,” and Donna dared to copy her sister in rolling her eyes. She knew that, with her father out of the picture, her sister would do just as she pleased. And perhaps that was for the best anyway. If Donna had her choice between spending time with her verbose and opinionated sister, or her quiet, self sacrificing mother, she would certainly go for the latter.
But she found herself, on her birthday, sacrificing her own personal preferences in order to find herself alone with her mother, walking around the Lower East Side. Though Gerdie had insisted that they could still go to the park Donna, feeling like somehow she needed to escape from herself, chose to tour her mother’s childhood home instead.
Gerdie always behaved differently when they made their way into the city. Donna watched, fascinated, as her mother walked with a new step, as if breathing in the nostalgic air of the past. Deborah spoke of suburbia always working to suppress a woman but Donna thought of time more cyclically, like if Gerdie was being brutally shoved down in their suburban home, then she could easily spring right back up in Manhattan.
“Oh my,” Gerdie smiled as her feet clicked down the pavement. “Today is a lovely day, isn’t it? It seems that spring is finally here.” She paused, as if unsure. “Shall we stop at an outdoor café?”
Donna raised her eyebrow at the thought of her mother splurging on coffee and pastries with her husband’s money so, but then again, it was her birthday, after all. She nodded before remembering to say “sure” and allowed herself to be led to the nearest establishment.
“Hello,” Gerdie smiled at the waiter, gesturing to herself and her daughter in turn. “Ah… decaf coffee for me, please, and… what do you say, root beer float, Dee?”
Donna shifted and nodded once, feeling alien in this strange environment. People were everywhere and the smells—they weren’t the crisp ones like chemicals in the lab, which were, after all, imbued with a sense of purpose, but this odor was rather, the stuff of human extravagance. She closed her eyes, trying to attune herself to it’s nuances.
“What, honey?” Gerdie touched her arm, a gesture physical enough to startle Donna out of her mediations. “Do you not like it here?”
Donna just stared at her mother, trying to juxtapose the image of her now with the image of her at home.
Gerdie sighed, moving her hand away. As the waiter handed her the coffee, she laughed. “I used to dream about this, you know,” she said, “having a drink at such a glitzy establishment. Of course, my parents couldn’t really afford it.” She turned away, as if looking at something only she could see. “I figure they were embarrassed to show their faces in a… white collar setting.”
Donna nodded yet again, familiar with the stories, uncomfortable with her fascination of them. It was hard to imagine her mother as a child—a German immigrant child—whose parents worked at drudgery jobs in order to put food on the table. She had never met her grandparents to confirm such a story—that a lower class outsider could, in less than 20 years, become a “drone of American suburbia,” as Deborah would say. But sitting here with her mother in this bustling metropolis, she could not help but know that it was true.
Science, she found, dealt in trying to understand absolutes. Gerdie Schreiber Davidson was anything but. And yet, Donna was drawn to her, due to more, perhaps, than electrons traveling across brain lengths, signifying emotion, or psychological pressures of society to feel about these sorts of things. She would like to believe that there was a part of her that got her mother in some sort of way that even Deborah—with all of her sympathy for suburban mothers and wives, could not touch. Was the Holocaust a way to connect to her mother, Gerdie, in a way that was unique to mother and daughter alone? In a broader sense, was it a way to connect to history, to the very fabric of time? Donna did not usually care for the frivolities attached with such emotion. But yet, she found herself hanging on to these little nuggets, as she grasped at something, which was smoke and vapor, moist, but unclenchable.
“Dee? You haven’t touched your float,” Gerdie said gently, hesitantly. “Don’t you like it?”
Donna abandoned her nods for a shake of the head and touched the straw to her lips. The mixture was a bit too sweet for her palette but unlike her sister, she felt it best to endure her parents’ fantasies for now. Until such a time came, of course, when her own virtues could move her life in a direction she more desired. Now that she was 13, perhaps she should take it upon herself to more independently work towards that end. Removing her mouth from the drink, she clasped her hands under the table, as if performing a strange cross between a birthday resolution and a prayer.
Gerdie, immediately placated when her daughter went for the drink, suddenly broke into a grin. “Do you see the pastries over there?” she asked excitedly, pointing to the glass case by the cashier’s. “Let us go and see if we can order one.”
