Part Two: Change
Chapter Two: Donna: Summer, 1971
The first time Donna met Simon, long before the time he became “Mr. X,” or Michelle’s phantom father, she was 17, a freshman new to college, and tipsy at a welcoming party. In retrospect, she would say that was why she fell for him in the first place—she was not herself that night. She had never had a can of beer before in her life. Sometimes, those last few New Years’ after she hit high school, she’d indulged in a glass of champagne with her parents, as they watched the pulsing ball drop down the sparkly TV screen. But she had never had friends before—not the kind who would abandon the lab and their chemicals for a kegger, anyway.
Her new school apparently did not know this, as they placed her in a room with Jean Riverspoon and Betty Roberts. Both being vivacious but misdirected girls with no plans for their futures, they cajoled their bookish roommate away from her casual reading on isotopes and towards the first party of the year.
Donna had hesitated. Classes had not yet begun, but spending an evening, socially amongst peers, was strange to her. She was used to space—dusty space, in large, quiet rooms, with her books spread out in front of her. A party consisted of… heat. And noise, and bodies pressed together, clumsily so, as the minds within grew more and more intoxicated. But this, she reminded herself, was college now. She was no longer bound to her loitering family, instead, for the first time that she could remember, she herself felt the wanderer. And as such, she was unnerved, out of balance, on the edge. Without clear boundaries, she nodded her head, agreeing to the trap, sidling into the mass of bodies with a drink in her hand in order to quell her anxiety. And as she finally felt comfortable enough to try and gather her bearings, there stood Simon.
“You are looking a lot how I am feeling,” he said with a chuckle.
Donna jumped slightly, her beer sloshing dangerously. A tall, thin gangly looking boy was surveying her from under dirty blonde locks and thick, discolored glasses. Donna bit her lip, unused to being observed. She was usually the observer herself, quiet, indistinct from the vagueness of background, and powerful. She long ago learned that those who “watched” had ultimate control. She had watched her sister, Deborah, struggle for such control, rally for it, grasp for it with her loud convictions of being a feminist, but never actually obtain it. Putting oneself forward, Donna therefore found, allowing others to see you, that garnered the exact opposite of control. That made you the object, the prey. Donna had vowed to never become that person, to never become Deborah.
And here, now, without even at first noticing it, this boy had taken that power from her. Donna’s mind reeled; she felt for the wall behind her, and she wished that she could go home.
“Hey, whoa.” Simon’s hands went around her shoulders, steadying her gently. “Are you OK, there?” His voice was laced with concern. Donna relaxed slightly, his somewhat emotional response opening a window through which she could observe him as well. “You need me to find your friends, or something?” he was saying.
Donna could smile weakly now. “No, I’m fine. How do you know that I am here with friends?” she challenged.
Simon chuckled again, removing his own distance by pushing his hair behind his ears, though his eyes were still downcast. “What, a pretty girl like you, here at this sort of establishment on your own?” he asked.
“Oh, is that the best pick-up line that you have?” Donna angled her head in an inquiring way, but deep down, her heart was beating faster. Nobody had ever taken such an interest in her. Well, that was a lie, really. Like most of youth, at least the youth with which she was acquainted from suburban New York, her high school social experiences were a blur of different crushes back and forth, as if burgeoning adolescents were atoms, passing electrons back and forth between them. She had never actually known a boy to be actively interested in her, to flirt with her. Her mind felt disconnected from her body, one part trying to take in the information analytically, the other reacting to it, by instinct.
Simon raised his eyebrow, responding to Donna’s inquiry with amusement. “I figured that I should not walk up to strange girls, sprouting clichéd poetry. Not that you are strange, of course,” he quickly added, “you are just new. To me.” He paused, as he finally brought his blue eyes up to meet Donna’s brown ones. They were wide and boyish and idealistic, which Donna would later claim she mistook for striving and direction in life.
He was introducing himself now. “I’m Simon,” he said nonchalantly, reaching out his hand.
Donna hesitated for a brief second, as was her custom before engaging in new and unknown situations. Hypothesis tentatively formed, she responded in kind. “Donna Davidson,” she said briskly, as she shook his hand with vigor.
His fumbling and clichéd beginnings had Donna convinced that he was a fellow science major, like herself, but actually, Simon proved to have a personal sustained interest in the arts. And literature. And music. Donna was once again caught on the ropes. She had never known such a blatantly—humanities oriented—person before. Her own experiences had taught her nothing of looking at the lens of analyzing such things. Analyzing was for chemicals, molecular structures, the reactions of different elements. Stories, on the other hand, were intangible, indistinct from the fog—frivolities at their worst.
Though that was not entirely true to Donna’s experience either. Her mother’s stories were not frivolities. Uncommon and threadbare, they were valuable links to an important epoch in history. It was the time when Nazi Germany erupted into mass genocide and desperate refugees, like the Schreibers, poured into the Lower East Side of immigrant America. These events could be studied objectively, the effects of pharmaceuticals to treat human illness concurrent to Gerdie’s struggle, as one German Jew of many, to find clemency in a new home. Such events were simply fact to her, indisputable and pure.
Simon’s stories were shockwaves of passion. He was King Lear, raving against a forceful storm, Wagner pounding out a symphony, or the gods who condemned men in mythology, in Milton, in Dante. At first, Donna just sat on the edge of it, wary of this new information, this new set of rules. She learned to weed out what she could not stand—religion, for example, was something that she would always see as frivolous. Passion, however, was more addicting, was something she could sink her teeth into, viscerally, like when they made love for the first time that October. Donna had no desire to hold onto her virginity—that barrier, which separated her from experience, but having sex with Simon was like his experience transferred over, spilled into her, mutating her. She was expecting sex to be pristine, to be concise, to be the transfer of bodily fluids from one vessel to another. He brought in his noise and his lust and his song (or at least his cry, whenever he came.) And she took it, like a mirror, and reflected it back, even though it was not hers, or if it was, nothing she ever remembered experiencing before.
Her family’s reaction to Simon was much as she anticipated—highly negative. Her father and sister, she had decided, were like neutral atoms, so opposed to one another that they cancelled each other out.
“English?” Jack chocked when Donna explained his major. “What does he want to do after graduation—be a bum? A nancy boy, perhaps? Living off of the government and the tax payer’s dollar?”
“Wouldn’t that just make him like every other man?” Deborah challenged scornfully from her place at the table. “Waiting to be served by everyone else?”
Donna took it as her cue to leave the dinner table as the shouting match began. It was winter break of her freshman year, December of 1971, and she could suddenly not wait to get back to campus. Not that this was startling to her… though the sudden, flaring desire to see Simon certainly was. She slammed her door, not out of anger, but to perhaps jar her out of these alien feelings.
It was not her own action, however, but an unexpected knock, which jarred Donna out of her thoughts. Confused, she crossed the floor of the childhood room she had shared with Deborah. Gerdie stood on the threshold with quiet, baby Kathleen plastered to her hip. Kathleen was too young to have an opinion on Simon—at least at this time. Gerdie, on the other hand, was glowing.
“I, for one, think this is a great development,” she whispered conspiratorially, sidling in. “Your first boyfriend! How exciting.”
“Mom,” Donna chuckled, embarrassed. She closed her door, lest her warring sister and father could overhear. She scuffed her toe. “This is hardly the event to get sentimental over.”
“Not sentimental over this?” Gerdie repeated, incredulous. She sat on her daughter’s bed, staring up at her with wide eyes. “I would have thought that this was exactly the occasion for such a reaction.”
“Yeah, but…” Donna allowed herself to sink down beside them. One hand went out to stroke her sister’s warm cheek. “I’m still me. Still Donna Davidson, quiet chemistry major. That isn’t going to change.”
Gerdie shook her head slowly, her eyes still locked to her daughter’s. “Dee,” she said seriously, “a man changes everything.” And she shifted Kathleen onto her shoulder.
Donna pulled her hand away, as if burned. For the first time that night, she took in her mother’s appearance, really took her in. Her housedress was worn and rumpled, her graying hair was falling out of its bun. She was uneducated, and in her late 30s, with two daughters off away at college, yet at the same time, attending to a near infant. Kathleen had turned 1 years old that past September.
“Oh, sweetheart!” Gerdie exclaimed empathetically at her expression. She pulled her daughter close, resting her on the other shoulder. “I don’t mean in a bad way.”
Donna breathed in the smell of cooking grease and baby oil. She sighed. “I know.” She closed her eyes as she realized that for the first time since she could remember, she did not really know much of anything.
Three years later they were still dating discreetly and were recently out of college. He was working as a journalist for a local newspaper, she was employed in a hospital lab. Though their relationship persisted, it was encapsulated in an unorthodox form. They did not lice together, they hardly even saw each other. He had moved back in with his parents, and she had a small, little apartment. They talked on the phone roughly once a week, and saw each other roughly once a month. Their relationship, once so new and undefined, was well worn now, routines etched through their young adult lives. Usually, Donna could forget that Simon existed. She went to work, she paid her bills, she began researching grad school programs in the area. It was only in the moments, which were so quintessentially him that her skin flushed dangerously with suppressed emotion. It was when he brought a record of Pachabell Canon to hum softly in the background while they made love, when he mentioned the nuances of a play he had reviewed for the Gazette, his eyes sparkling in nostalgia, or when he dug out old photographs from parties, with their friends, their roommates, a forgotten blur around their smiling faces. Simon was to her, Donna realized one night, holding him close as he slept, what Germany and the Lower East Side must be for her mother. Shared history, old memories. A sense of a pulse, a heartbeat, of self.
In the fall of 1981, Simon did something unexpected. He called Donna one day at work.
“What—what are you doing?” Donna was nervous and uncomfortable. She stood up from her swivel chair, and paced as far as the telephone chord would allow her to go. “Are you all right?”
Simon coughed into the phone. “It’s our tenth anniversary.”
Donna froze. A chill made it’s way down her spine. “What?”
“Ten years?” his voice was scratchy. “Since that party, where we were freshmen.” He chuckled. “I know that it’s not our style to commemorate anniversaries, but ten years of our post modern modeled relationship is one hell of an accomplishment, wouldn’t you say?”
Donna shook her head slightly from side to side, wary of anyone looking into the lab. Her voice was a little above a whisper; no one at work even knew who Simon was. “Don’t you go about dropping your old English major terminology; I am busy enough as it is. I should go.” She started trying to untangle herself from the chord.
“No, Donna, wait.” His voice took on its vulnerable edge, and she stopped. “Let me take you out to dinner and a play this Saturday,” he tried again. “”I have to review it anyway, and I have an extra ticket. Plea—just for fun, you know?”
Donna sighed. Her heart seemed to be beating out of her chest, in part due to nerves, in part due to interest, and in part due to—nostalgia. She could not really believe that it had been 10 years since… was her life so circumscribed, so unchanging otherwise? Writing the same notations over the same scientific elements in the same sort of place she had sought solace in since all the way back in junior high school? Did she need Simon and his plays and his—his love to remind her that life was actually a series of movements over constant static? She bit her lip, not liking where this line of questioning was leading her.
And so, “all right,” she consented, sitting back down, the chair firm against her backside. “You can pick me up at five.”
His plan was devious. It involved dinner at her favorite restaurant. He ordered for her before she could get her own words out—chicken cordon bleu, smothered in homemade cheese. She should be protesting, she thought, as she brought the fork to her lips. She could take care of herself; she did not need him. The food was slick, angling down her throat, and wrapped in sinful flavor. She squeezed her legs together as she studied his face for the first time in years—his smooth jaw line, his fair skin, the blue eyes, which would animate delightfully as she talked. He was going to take her to a production of Meyer Levin’s “The Diary of Anne Frank.” She shivered. He knew how connected she felt to the Holocaust.
The theatre was dark with cast shadows. The young woman portraying Anne in this amateur production was caked in make up to make her look younger. She prattled along the stage, tentative and desperate for life, for passion, for love. Simon’s hand was warm on Donna’s thigh. She could still taste the wine from dinner on her tongue. Tears shone out of her eyes and for the first time since she could remember, she was not ashamed of this outward omission, was not mortified in the slightest. He pushed the wisps of her hair gently behind her ear, but she did not know if she needed soothing as much as she needed the spark of electricity, connection, and energy passed between two human beings.
She took him home that night and made love to him. It was slow and languid and unlike anything she could ever remember from their shared history. Her thoughts slipped together in strange patterns—him and her as shy, new, fumbling underclassmen. Gerdie as a Holocaust survivor, Simon as a storyteller, Donna—trapped between science, emotion, lethargy and passion. She jolted around him suddenly, thinking of Anne, connection, survival, life. If her mother was a survivor, Donna thought to herself, mouth opened into a moan, did that make her one too? Was the plight of genocide not removed from her at all, as she had always hoped? Were Simon’s plays, was Simon’s love—not removed from her either? She shut her eyes, barring these thoughts as they climaxed together.
Two weeks later, Donna Davidson walked out of her doctor’s office. She was numb, numb enough to dislodge the fluctuations of nausea she now knew would be with her for a long time. The air was crisp, and she could hear the cars whizzing by the freeway. She closed her eyes. She took small steps in order not to break apart. She carried on.
That night, she called her mother. “So it turns out that I am pregnant,” she said.
There was silence on the other line before Gerdie sucked in her breath. “Will he marry you now?” she asked tentatively.
Fear gripped Donna’s stomach. “I don’t want him to,” she managed to get out.
“What could you possibly mean by that?” Gerdie sounded aghast, all attempts to relate to her daughter thrown down. Donna’s mind slipped back, recalling her mother using that tone whenever she or Deborah would make a mess in the kitchen on the dining room table. It was easier than listening directly, to her mother’s words now. This was much more than a minor fumbling with food.
“A baby needs two parents,” Gerdie was saying. “You know this. And your father would have it no other way, Donna. He must marry you.”
“Oh please, Mother.” Irritation worked it’s way into her voice, strengthening her. “Let us not pretend this is anything other than your problem with my decision, shall we?”
“No, Dee,” Gerdie said seriously. “This is not my problem. This is yours.”
As a scientist, Donna was used to hypotheses. Precarious and uncertain, hey were constantly being proved wrong. As a scientist, she was taught to expect this, and then to start her theorizing anew. Different factors came into play—begotten through experience.
So she worked it out in her head; the baby would be a replacement factor for Simon. Yes, that’s it, she soothed herself… her life could be as simple as the chemical experiments she conducted in the junior high lab. And that was it, then, the end of Donna Davidson’s relationship with Mr. X. She almost did not expect it to be that easy. She walked warily, expecting for him to be upon her at any moment, to be begging for her to reconsider her assertion that they were over. She moved out of her apartment. She changed her telephone number. But he never did come after her. Donna could almost be insulted. She recalled reading his old school papers, about Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. Ultimately, perhaps he fell prey to the illusion that his fate was out of his hands.
She told herself she was giving him a gift. An undeserved gift, after all, as he should be paying child support. In return for raising her daughter completely on her own, Donna allowed for one—little—white lie. She told her family that he had left her.
Their reactions were much as anticipated. Jack, slowly weakening, contented himself with calling the boy a “fucking pansy” and glaring at his daughter for being “loose.” Deborah was beside herself in fury. She wrote a heated letter to her sister, demanding to know Simon’s address, so she could go on over there and show that “chauvinist pig” just what it entailed to disregard his simple, human duty. Kathleen folded into herself, heartbroken that her childhood heartthrob had abandoned her sister—and therefore herself.
Gerdie did none of these things. She stared at her daughter, calculating shrewdly. Donna bit her lip. She was unused to such direct and critical attention stemming from her mother.
The Davidson family continued to deteriorate. Donna gave birth to a healthy baby girl on June 22, 1982. Her father, Jack, was diagnosed with prostrate cancer in the fall of that year. Gerdie got sick soon thereafter, stumbling through the remaining few years of her life. It was just her and Kathleen in the house, then. Donna was alternating precariously between her duties as a serious chemist, and her duties as—a mother. Deborah was G-d knows where. She did not really care. Her family was at it’s lowest, bound together by nothing more than their ignored strands of DNA.
The last time Donna saw her mother alive was in the fall of 1985. She came to visit her in her bedroom, arms laden with medical journals. Though she knew she would not be giving a lecture, though she knew she would likely not utter a word as Gerdie spoke her own last ones, the bulk of the sturdy bound booklets calmed her. She sat down, ignoring the pill bottles, the smell of their contents little more than a flimsy screen above the earthen scent of slow demise.
Gerdie looked at her dimly, her eyelids fluttering as she adjusted to Donna turning the light on. “Where’s Michelle?” she asked.
Donna licked her lips, feeling empty. “She’s at a neighbor’s apartment.”
Gerdie nodded slightly, accepting this. She turned her head away from her daughter’s.
Donna felt a pang of horror shoot through her. “Mom?” She should have grimaced at her voice, at the desperation and fear laced into it. Perhaps, if her mother were not dying before her, she would have. It all—every bit of it—seemed inconsequential now.
And Gerdie’s words were not kind. She sighed, and shifted, the bed creaking, as if it, too, were dying. She massaged her throat briefly before delivering her one decree.
“You have to tell Michelle, Donna,” she said. “You have to tell Michelle what you did.”
Donna stared at her. She never thought that if she was expecting something, she could be made to felt speechless about it.
“Promise me,” Gerdie whispered. “Promise me, for the sake of your daughter, you will tell.”
Donna swallowed past a lump in her throat. Tears flowed from her eyes; she was unaware of them. “I promise.”
Gerdie Schreiber Davidson died later that week. She carried with her all of her stories—Germany, the Lower East Side, the suburbs of America. Her thoughts on her family. Her love for her family.
Donna stood, numbly next to her sisters, holding her baby daughter in her arms. How clichéd, she thought, to find the weather at her mother’s funeral to be cold. The wind whipped through her thick, woolen dress. Michelle whimpered, but no one else made a sound, save for the Rabbi, chanting in his odd little language.
The Earth hit her mother’s grave. And like the chime of a bell, Donna now knew her fate. She was to become the storyteller.
