ESSAYS
Spreading Christmas Cheer Is What Little Jewish Girls Are Here ForLOS ANGELES 15 October 2007 |
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When I was in middle school, I was part of the chorus.
See, what happened was, my mother lied to me and told me I had a beautiful singing voice.
“Oh, Lenore! You sound like an angel!” she used to tell me.
Yeah. An angel with cancer of the esophagus.
Anyway, she’d been lying to me about my singing voice ever since I was a young girl.
In grade school, in the talent show, I screeched out “Castle on a Cloud” from Les Miserables. I also sang a song about how mean adults are to kids from a movie called “The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr. T,” which was originally a Dr. Seuss book.
During this age, I identified heavily with anything boasting an abused child as its protagonist. Must have had something to do with my dirty, conniving, lying mother.
In any event, all this singing and all the false praise I received for it encouraged me to join the chorus in middle school.
Part of our duties as crappy middle school singers was to go around town to old folks homes and sing Christmas songs in December.
A school bus would take us through the cold city. I loved the way Champaign looked when it was cold outside.
At the nursing homes, the staff would wheel all of the melting, decrepit old people into the room with the television. There’s always a room with a tiny, busted television in old people facilities. Some of the old people are in there for twenty hours a day. Longer, sometimes, if the staff forgets to bring them to bed. Old people have trouble moving and they can watch television for longer periods of time than any other demographic.
Our chorus would shuffle into the room, which was always cramped and suffocating, and position ourselves in two rehearsed rows.
The old people would sit there, some of them excited about the deviation in their usual routine, some of them completely unaware of our presence.
Their eyes looked like they were bleeding pus. When they blinked, and they did often, it looked painful. They wiggled their dry lips. Their tongues seeped from their mouths, dragging across those cracked lips in an attempt to wet them, but there was never any saliva.
There were flies. In the middle of the fucking winter in Illinois, there were still flies. Perhaps I hallucinated them. There were flies, nonetheless.
Then we’d explode into Christmas songs, cheery and cheesy, belting them out at the top of our lungs, as the old people cried pus-filled, emotional tears.
It all made me want to vomit.
But I couldn’t, because I had a solo. I had to step forward, closer to the decaying elderly, and sing a special Christmas solo while I stood there, a repulsed Jew.
I smiled so big while I sang. No one knew. No one knew I wanted to euthanize these miserable old creatures. Singing to them seemed ridiculous. As though a Christmas song was what they needed. As though a Christmas song would make them forget about the oxygen masks affixed to their faces and the colostomy bags screwed into their sides.
For Christ’s sake.
The rest of the chorus wasn’t so bothered. They all had grandparents. I suppose they’d grown accustomed to seeing old people melt away in a pus puddle. I did not have grandparents playing any kind of significant role in my life, and old people looked like they belonged to another species through my eyes. I did not, and still fail to see the point in living to such an age.
When my mother’s mother moved to my hometown to die, I remember watching a male nurse pull her pants and underwear down to her knees while supporting her slumped over body on his shoulder, and then lift her to the toilet, revealing her bruised and bedsore-covered backside. I decided then that I would die before I was ever in that position.
So I hated going to the nursing homes. But at the same time, I didn’t have to be in school if I went to the nursing homes, and all of my friends were in chorus with me. So I went.
Then, one day, we had a field trip to sing at another facility.
They told us it was not a nursing home, as we sat in the idling bus outside of the busted looking building.
And they told us nothing else.
Bundled up in puffy coats and scarves, we trickled out of the school bus.
When we were all inside the building, the staff began to bring in our audience. And this is when it became clear to us that we were singing to a collection of people suffering from serious genetic diseases, deformities and retardation. The cast away secrets of otherwise “normal” families.
Until that moment, I didn’t know places like this existed. Places for the kids who weren’t perfect enough to secure a spot in the families they were born into. People who didn’t want abortions, but didn’t want the end product either. Those people put their deformed and retarded children into group homes like this, signing over custody to the state, washing their hands of their big, imperfect secret.
The kids in my chorus took one look at their audience, and began to shake. They began to cry. They were so frightened by the oversized heads and the undersized appendages and the eyes rolling back into skulls. I don’t blame them. We were in middle school, and we weren’t warned. We were just shoved into a room with people whose lives were infinitely more terrifying than our own. No one else knew these places existed, either. And suddenly, we were singing to a crowd of people we thought were urban legends.
I looked at these people and felt the opposite of what I felt at the elderly homes. I felt among friends. Misfits, all of them.
Just like me and my friends.
I wasn’t cast away by my family. Far from it. But I felt alone in many regards, despite their unconditional love. And these people were alone, too. And they always would be. There was no sugarcoating that.
The chorus wept while they sang. They cried because they were haunted.
I sang better than I ever did in my life.
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