Freshly Squeezed

Lisa Samson

I was eight years old. I was sitting next to my Dad on a flight to Mexico when I asked him how the pilots could see. Out my window it was all murky grey clouds. It seemed like we were flying through dirty cotton balls.

“They can’t see any more than you can,” my Dad said.

I panicked.

“They use radar to fly the plane,” he said.

I certainly wouldn’t have gotten on the plane if I had known the pilots couldn’t see.

“What did you think?” my Dad asked.

It was July 5th, 2000, and we were on our final approach to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The clear blue sky and glittering lake made the city look welcoming. Mike, my husband, and I had landed there literally hundreds of times. Without fail, every time, a voice from the cockpit came over the loudspeaker and told us that he appreciated our flying the friendly skies. He told us that we would be on the ground shortly and that the cabin crew should prepare for landing. This time, however, the announcement had a twist. Thankfully, there was no malfunction, no emergency to report. But this captain, flying a non-stop flight from Tokyo’s Narita airport, decided to give a history lesson. He told the passengers, mostly Japanese tourists and business people, that O’Hare International Airport was named after the brilliant aviator Butch O’Hare, a World War II hero who was given the Congressional Medal of Honor for defending an American ship, the USS Lexington, against the Japanese enemy.

“O’Hare,” the pilot informed us, “single-handedly destroyed five Japanese planes as they prepared to attack the U.S. carrier.” Having given a brief overview of O’Hare’s valor, the pilot continued, “It is important to salute the bravery and patriotism of such a man around the Fourth of July.”

Mike and I cringed. Few have more reason to sympathize with such anti-axis sentiment than I do, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, but it seemed inhospitable that this pilot chose that way to welcome his passengers, primarily Japanese citizens, to the United States. Our discomfort, a gut reaction, was not shared by the Japanese visitors who either did not understand a word the pilot said, or chose to ignore him. The captain said nothing for the duration of the flight and the crew omitted the almost obligatory, “Let me be the first to welcome you to Chicago.”

Mike and I traveled incessantly. We would hike through Greenland for ten days, return to Chicago for a week, and then fly to London for a three-day weekend. Any time our respective offices were closed – I worked for a Fortune 500 company and Mike was a corporate lawyer – we boarded a plane. Veterans Day, Martin Luther King Day, Presidents Day all called for a trip. What had started out as romantic and exciting years ago, now seemed increasingly pathetic to me. Mike didn’t think so. I thought that we were always gone because we had no reason to be home. Translation: we did not have a child. Whereas I had once thought it great to go to restaurants and the theater, I now thought that we were filling time. I looked at the tables around me and saw young couples flirting and older couples discussing their grandchildren. I was completely certain that everyone our age, in their early forties, was home with their children.

At least going to Japan was heading in a different direction. We crossed the Pacific Ocean instead of the Atlantic, like we usually did. Mike had asked me to get tickets to London for the Fourth of July weekend, and I had procrastinated. Whereas I had once pored over my extensive collection of clippings highlighting travel destinations with actual longing, I was beginning to think that planning trips was a tedious hassle. So, when I finally called the airlines, the fares were outrageous. I checked the computer. The fares were still outrageous. I told Mike the price of the tickets, and his behavior was even more outrageous. We didn’t speak for three days. On the morning of our fourth day-of-silence, I was sitting at my desk drinking an extra-large Dunkin Donuts coffee when I got an e-mail from United Airlines listing last minute deals. Tokyo was on sale. I emailed Mike at work.

“What do you think of Japan for five days? The airfare is cheap.”

“Fine,” he replied, “But you probably aren’t competent enough to really pull it off.”

Mike and I had been gallivanting around together for six years. We had been married for three years, all of which time I had been trying to get pregnant. By the time Japan was in the offing, our marriage and my fertility were declining at the same rate. A graph of either would be a decreasing line with a very steep slope.

But the trip to Japan proved to be a needed respite. Not only did I manage to pull it off, I pulled it off in style. Japan was hot, but back then the weather was not my fault. That would come much later when every time it would rain on vacation, Mike would accuse me of not doing enough research on our destination’s climate or worse yet, of cheaping out and not having us travel in high season. But back in 2000 traveling was easier. I was not responsible for the weather and terrorism had yet to infiltrate my, and the nation’s, thoughts, every time we entered an airport.

We jetted around with ease, albeit at considerable cost. You can buy a lot of souvenirs when you aren’t buying diapers or saving for a college education. On this trip to Japan we stayed at the Tokyo Park Hyatt before it became a movie star thanks to Sophia Coppola’s movie “Lost in Translation.” In Kyoto we stayed at a ryokan, a traditional Japanese Inn that Fodor’s guidebook called the ultimate Japanese experience. As we always did when we traveled, we saw the sights, ate the food, and lugged home mementos with abandon.

Our living room was filled with the African carvings that would grace the pages of the Pottery Barn catalog five years later. Our shelves displayed ceramic tagine pots from Morocco before Williams Sonoma featured such items. And I cooked with nutmeg purchased in Zanzibar and honey from Turkey before Zabar’s carried either of them. Our kitchen was filled with liquors and sauces from around the world. It was before liquids were banned from carry-on baggage. It was before the world changed.

As Mike and I danced around the world collecting things and memories, our adventures sort of came to define us. I was lucky. I traveled with my parents from a young age and lived in a house crammed with art. I was continuing a long family tradition of traveling and collecting that my father’s grandparents in Germany had so enjoyed and that probably began long before them. This was all new and different for Mike. He did not get on an airplane or eat in a restaurant until he was eighteen. His mother never took an airplane until her husband died, some thirty-three years after Mike boarded his first plane. His father would not fly because, as he said, “I was on a lot of planes in World War II. We spent too much time in line on the tarmac. I know how it is. I don’t want to wait in those lines.”

Mike never even tried to tell him that the world of aviation had changed in the intervening sixty years. He never had much use for his father and spoke admiringly of him about only one thing.

“My dad put a flagpole in our back yard. I don’t know why. He wasn’t especially patriotic, and he never flew a flag. But when he got drunk he grabbed the flag pole and held his body straight out so that he was parallel to the ground. Now that is hard to do.”

I don’t know if Mike was officially poor growing up, but he felt deprived from the get-go. He has consistently held a job since he was ten years old. He delivered papers, pumped gas, cleaned vomit from the Elks Club toilets on Sunday mornings after people in his small northern Wisconsin town overdid it on Saturday nights. He drove buses and dusted library books. Yet despite a father who I surmise hit a few people now and then, Mike left the world of small towns and menial jobs behind. He was impressed by his new life: impressed that he lived in a doorman building overlooking Lake Michigan, impressed that he took a taxi to a desk every day. I don’t say that with any ill intent. Quite the opposite, I say it with the utmost respect. He was not impressed by the things he had, he was impressed that he could pay for a lifestyle that as a child he never even knew existed. And yet in spite of his accomplishments, early in our relationship Mike said, “I never want to be compared to your father. No one can look good compared to him.” And he is right. It is one thing to leave a blue-collar existence for a white-collar life. It is an entirely different thing to survive one of history’s most brutal chapters and thrive.

On our trip to Japan, my most important souvenir was a fertility symbol I got at a Tokyo shrine. I still carry it in my wallet. We were beginning our fourth year of infertility treatments by that time. I joked that I had undergone a procedure to help me have a baby in every time zone within the continental U.S. It was really no joke. By the time we traveled to Japan I had tried drugs and acupuncture in my attempts to get pregnant, and therapy in an attempt to save my marriage.

The therapy ended after my second session. I chose a male therapist because I thought that he would give me insight into why Mike and I were coping with the issue of infertility so differently. Unlike most women of my demographic, I had never been to a therapist before. During our second meeting the therapist told me that I was suppressing my emotions.

“I am here,” I said, “because my husband thinks that my emotions have overtaken me.”

Suddenly it dawned on me. “You want me to sit here and cry, don’t you?”

“That may be useful,” he said calmly.

“With your advice,” I said, through laughter, “I won’t have a husband or a child. I think buying a cashmere sweater would make me feel better than spending the same money talking to you.”

Therapy didn’t help. Acupuncture was futile and the hormone drugs made me crazy but not pregnant. Still, I was determined to have a baby.

At the Buddhist shrine in Tokyo where I bought the fertility symbol, I did what the poorly translated signs told me to do for my prayer to come true. I performed the ritual, not as a spiritual believer, but as someone desperate and willing to try anything. I can still see myself in the long shapeless navy-blue polyester shirt I bought for $5.00 at a Columbus Avenue street festival with my fancy navy blue Italian tennis shoes. I wrote on a wooden plaque that they sold by the thousands, that I wanted to have a baby more than anything in the world. Then I hung it on a wall crammed with other people’s hopes and pleas for their future. I had never been so open about my longing, but there, among all the signs in Japanese, where few would ever understand what I had written, it seemed safe to openly hang my plaque.

I have never been a believer in anything other than science, but I was willing to try anything for a child, even religion. During one IVF cycle over Easter weekend in New York City I ducked into St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue. Again, anonymously, but this time amidst burning candles instead of sticks of incense, I prayed, “If there is a God, let this be successful.”

In retrospect, it is funny that the religion I never tried was my own. It never occurred to me. To this day, saying, “my own religion” and “Judaism” in the same sentence feels funny. To write this, I had to look up the spelling of Judaism, having omitted the “a” on my first try. I am Jewish because I was born that way. My parents are Jewish because their parents were. I never denied being Jewish, but I never advertised it either, as my father was forced to do in Germany during Hitler’s reign. Like all other Jews he had to wear a yellow star of David on his coat and add the name Israel to his given name Werner. I never did anything Jewish. I visited a synagogue for the first time as a guest at a friend’s bar mitzvah, the Jewish coming of age ritual. I went to the temple in much the same vein my family entered churches in Europe and Central America, as a sightseer. I have blonde hair, and my father used to call me his Teutonic princess. Both of us, at various times, have been accused of being anti-Semitic.

I have always been close to my parents, some would say unnaturally so. When I travel now, I call my parents as soon as my plane lands on the runway. The summer Mike and I returned from Japan was before cell phones became permanent fixtures on everyone’s hands. I had to wait until I got home to call my parents. I vividly remember talking to my mother while lying on our kitchen floor. I still see the deep colors of the Oriental rug I was lying on and the hand-made maple table leg with its stainless steel band, added to match our appliances, that I was staring at. I talked on and on. I described the sugary taste of the yakitori and the women walking on the Ginza holding parasols to shield themselves from the sun. I told her about the blue and white pottery I bought in Kyoto and how the ryokan was just as it was when she and I stayed there together fifteen years earlier. I told her about the boat ride around Tokyo and the cotton kimono I bought to use as a bathrobe.

“Sie hat Quazzle Wasser getrunken,” my father would have said. Literally translated from German that means, “She drank fizzy water.” When my father said it to me, he usually meant, “Why doesn’t she just shut up?” At the end of my monologue my mother said,

“I have something to tell you.”

My stomach tightened. The tone of her voice told me something horrible had happened.

“Ilse died while you were gone.”

My first thought was that I had been a total idiot going on and on about the most minute aspects of our trip. Ilse is my grandmother, my father’s mother. By the time I learned she was dead, she was also buried. There was no need to go home to Seattle for a funeral.

I hung up and threw myself on my bed. I buried my face in my pillow and sobbed inconsolably. Mike came into the room and asked what was wrong.

“Ilse died,” I gasped through tears. “She fled Germany, my dad survived a concentration camp, and the Samson line is going to end because I can’t have a baby.”

I expected sympathy, I expected to be stroked and embraced. Instead, Mike said,

“Your grandmother just died, and you aren’t sorry for her. All you can do is think about yourself.”

I got up, threw on my running clothes and, for the only time ever, slammed the door of our home behind me as I left. I ran for miles and miles along the lake shore, tears streaming down my face.