Are insolence and impudence the luxury of only those who grow up with their own biological parents and feel safe lashing out?
When she enters her apartment she hears honking from the street that sends her to the window. Danny is standing by his car. The canvas of the roof is rolled away, and Dominique waves through the opening. Another feminine hand joins the wave, but that second woman remains hidden.
“Come join us for a picnic,” Danny calls to Sharon.
“Bring your bathing suit,” Dominique adds. “It’s warm enough.”
The beautiful Dominique is a reporter for the regional paper; she covers women’s interests, from news on market days to the openings of beauty salons. Her column also offers recipes and beauty tips. Sharon is in awe of the Frenchwoman’s chic.
She is touched by Danny’s efforts to include her. This week he left an Eiffel Tower snow globe on her desk along with a list of places she should visit on her next trip to Paris.
She puts on a bikini, a cotton shift, and a cardigan and runs downstairs. In the bag she uses for food shopping, she has a rolled-up towel. She's thrown in the cake she baked for Rina, a water canister, and two apples, the only fruit left in the bowl; her new roommates devoured everything else.
The day is indeed unseasonably warm. Sharon wants to throw her arms up in the air and let the sun envelop her.
“Meet Rachelle, a colleague of Dominique at La Presse de la Manche,” Danny says, then adds with emphasis, “She’s researching her Jewish family history.”
The small, full-figured woman greets Sharon with la bise—the French double air kisses—and tells Danny, “Don’t start with that nightmare.”
The subject piques Sharon’s interest, but with the Beatles blaring on the radio and then the wind blowing through the car’s open roof, no further conversation is possible.
Danny drives east to a beach cove nestled among massive boulders. There, he opens an umbrella for the fair-skinned Dominique to sit under. The olive-skinned Rachelle slathers her body with tanning oil and stretches out in the sun. Sharon spreads her towel between the two women, her head and shoulders in the shade, her body exposed to the sun. Danny shucks off his clothes down to his bathing trunks and sprints into the sea, his arms aloft as he plunges in.
Unlike Dominique, whose beat for the newspaper takes her out of the office, Rachelle stays inside; she does research and fact-checking. Both women are four years older than Sharon, and she is intimidated by their sophistication.
The two women chat about colleagues, bosses, and male reporters. In her staff role, Rachelle knows about all the plum assignments the men get. Lying between them, her eyes closed, soaking in sun, Sharon breathes in the coconut scent of Rachelle’s suntan oil. The women’s chatter drones on, broken by the screeching of seagulls against the steady rolling of the waves.
The ocean, stretching all the way to Australia, is Alon’s burial place. Sharon sits bolt upright, drawing the women’s curious looks. Their conversation stops.
“Did you get stung by a bee?” Dominique glances about.
Sharon stares ahead to where Danny is bobbing in the water. Judaism doesn’t recognize burial at sea. Somewhere, three thousand miles away in the Mediterranean, Alon’s body is floating inside the iron tomb of his sunken submarine. It’s the same water she’s now looking at, so deceptively calm, with the same silvery froth contouring small waves.
“Did you have a cauchemar?” Rachelle asks. “I got them after I searched records of refugees.”
The comment pulls Sharon back. “What refugees?”
“Before and during the war, you know, thousands of Jews fled Europe right through Cherbourg.” Rachelle waves toward the harbor west of them.
“Danny said that you’re researching your family’s history.”
“My father’s family could afford only one ticket to America, so his father sailed there with the idea that he would send for the rest of them. My grandmother stayed here to wait.” Rachelle makes a sad face. “She’s still waiting.”
Sharon’s skin feels hot. She dares not ask how this man’s wife and children survived once the Nazis broke through the Maginot Line and took over Normandy.
Danny surfaces near the shore, his sleek, military body dripping water. “Come on! Join me,” he calls.
The three women rise. Dominique runs ahead and throws herself into his arms. Laughing, holding on to each other, they stumble into the water. Moments later, their heads and shoulders are pressed together. Sharon wants to shrink back into the towel.
“Let’s go.” Rachelle reaches for her hand, and they run and fall into the water. The cold shock numbs Sharon for a few seconds, then, invigorated, she hurls her body forward. Her arms curve and hit the water as she slices through it, and she and Rachelle swim parallel to the shore. When a high wave threatens to break over them, they duck under it. Sharon’s eyes sting, but she likes the power of her stroke, the rhythmic movements, the exertion of her muscles. Her mind is in a trance, emptied of all other thoughts, focused on pushing forward.
She could swim like this until she reaches Le Havre, she thinks, but then Rachelle signals to her, and the two of them turn ninety degrees to the shore.
When they reach the beach, the umbrella is a far dot against the wall of boulders, and the sky above it pulses bright blue. Their feet scrunch tiny pebbles packed tight by the lapping waves.
“By the way, you have a perfect body for your string bikini,” Rachelle says, her eyes taking in the three front triangles Savta crocheted.
Sharon glances down at Rachelle’s full breasts. “Thanks, but I’m too skinny.”
“I’m too ethnic. My coloring stands out.”
“You’ll fit well in Israel.” Sharon redirects the conversation. “I want to ask whether you know anything about the underground. The people who hid Jewish children during the war?”
“That’s how my father’s younger brother was saved. My grandmother and my father were caught and sent to a transitional labor camp here in France. They were supposed to go to Auschwitz next, but thankfully, a priest issued them faked baptism papers, and they were released. Still, it was years before they reunited with my uncle.”
“Where was he?”
“He got lost. The underground shuffled him around for his safety. Out of fear of discovery, no one wrote anything down. In that system, only one person knew the identity of the next in the chain.”
“Then what happened?”
“At thirteen, when he should have been bar mitzvahed, the family that sheltered him baptized him.” She pauses. “Fortunately, he knew his former name and address. When the war ended, he was fifteen and ran away.”
“Thank God.”
“It wasn’t so simple. It took another two years of heartache before the three of them were united.” Rachelle looks at the sky as if to pluck some facts. “It drives him nuts that he can’t be ‘unbaptized.’ To snub the church, he became a practicing Orthodox Jew.”
“What would happen to a young child who didn’t know his name?” Sharon asks, not expecting an answer. “Such a tenuous chain.”
