Goodbye Without Leaving Read Free

the constant suspicion that I was not in fact a graduate student but an indeterminate person walking around a university campus dressed as a graduate student, I was suddenly an authentic thing.
    To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.
    Yes, I was myself. I was not black, I was not from the South, I was not funky and I was not engaged to my high school boyfriend, who was now in the Marine Corps. I was not a Ph.D. candidate and I didn’t care. I was a Shakette, and I knew my time had come.

4
    Every week, in order to perform my imitation of a good daughter, I wrote my parents a respectful, generally untruthful letter from wherever we happened to be: Demopolis, Alabama. Dear Mother and Daddy. What an interesting part of the world this is. Last night the band was invited to an authentic barbecue. I noticed squirrel on the menu of the local restaurant, with eggs and grits. A journalist from some national magazine is traveling with us, but don’t worry—he did not bring a photographer. I am very happy and very well. I do love traveling and I do miss you.
    In reality, traveling involved looking out the window at a thruway, and these are all the same, probably the world over. I was happy and well, and a guy from a magazine had been on the bus one day but it was unclear if he was going to write about Ruby or go off with Martha and the Vandellas, who were enjoying a string of hits. I did not miss my parents one whit.
    Once a month I called my father at his office to check in. A normal person would do this, I felt.
    â€œHi, Daddy! I’m in Lansing, Michigan.”
    â€œYour mother is very worried about you.”
    â€œI’m fine, Daddy, I’m having a lovely time.”
    â€œShe worries about drugs.”
    â€œOh, drugs,” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about. Vernon doesn’t allow them. Besides, these people are straight as arrows. They go to church every Sunday.”
    Strangely enough, this was not a lie. Every Sunday morning Ruby, Vernon, Grace, Ivy and some of the band went to the local Baptist church, wherever that happened to be. Donald “Doo-Wah” Banks, the band’s saxophonist, was an Episcopalian, and said his mother was very High Church—she was from Trinidad and liked a good deal of incense in her service.
    Once in a while out of sheer loneliness I went along, and in many of these places I was the only white face. It never failed but that hymn singing brought tears to my eyes.
    My parents were relentlessly secular. They believed that to be American was quite enough. Ethnic identity was slightly vulgar in my mother’s eyes, or, at best, a kind of colorful peasant tradition.
    I had no church to go to. My father’s mother had been a Jew from an old family that had intermarried until there was nothing much of anything left except a tree at Christmas time. We had some aunts on my mother’s side—this side was of a Judaism so reformed that it was indistinguishable from, say, the Girl Scouts—who held the traditional Passover meal, but no one in living memory celebrated anything silly like Hanukkah. On the High Holy Days my mother dragged my father off to the local reformed synagogue, where the rabbi had a phony English accent and repeatedly intoned in his sermons that Jews were really nothing more than good Americans.
    I was sent to Sunday school at this place, where I learned to shoot spitballs and crack gum. I also learned how to make the bus transfer machine go berserk and spew transfers out all over the place. The real purpose of my attending Sunday school was that it made me eligible to attend the Inter-Suburban Dance Society, to which all really nice girls and boys from cultivated Jewish families belonged. Here we were taught the ballroom dancing thought to be useful for our future, since, it was believed, we would