Helen Bar-Lev
Helen Bar-Lev was born in New York City in 1942. She has lived in Israel for 36 years. Since 1976 Helen has devoted herself to art: painting, teaching and writing poetry. From 1989 - 2001 she was a member of the Safad Artists’ Colony where she had her own gallery. To date Bar-Lev has had 80 exhibitions, including 30 one-person shows. Her poems and paintings have appeared in numerous online journals and print anthologies. ‘Cyclamens and Swords’ with poems of Israel by Helen and Johnmichael Simon and Helen’s paintings has been published by Ibbetson Press, Boston, Mass. Helen is Editor-in-Chief of the Voices Israel annual Anthology.
The following work is copyright © 2008. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
The Woman Who Had Four Names
She had four names – they’re on her birth certificate – and she hated all four of them. Her parents thought they were being original (no one else in their circle of friends had a child with four names) and also respectful: Fanny, for her mother, Sandy for his father (Sidney), Evelyn for his grandmother, and the last name, Okon (thoughtfully shortened by immigration authorities from Okonoff when her grandparents arrived in the United States).
Sandy was the name of a neighbor’s dog. Evelyn she might have liked better if she had heard it pronounced by the French, as she did in Paris many years later. Okon sounded obscene to her ears. You can guess what the children at school did with Fanny – so as soon as she could, about fifth grade, she went up quietly to the teacher on the first day of school and requested that she be addressed as Fay. And so emerged Fay Okon.
She attended college and became a bookkeeper and decided that, as none of her names suited her, she would invent a new one. That was before the days of computers and Big Brother and she could be as many people as she liked. She called herself Faith Anomys. It’s an interesting name and you might think she’d do something creative with it, like become a writer, but no, she liked being a bookkeeper and had no further ambitions. Once, when she took a second job in the evening she gave her name as Arlene Black. She opened a bank account in that name and deposited her paychecks there. She did like playing around with names, it was fun and added a mystique of which only she was aware.
Fanny/Faith/Arlene was petite, her hair blonde and straight, ending uneventfully at the shoulders. Her favorite color was turquoise and her favorite shops were second hand clothing stores where she purchased only items with famous brand name labels. She carried an address book with the names and locations of all these stores in Manhattan and one or two in the Bronx, where she worked. She lived in a modest brownstone on East 77th Street, a tiny two-room apartment on the fifth floor, no elevator. She couldn’t adjust the heating nor open the windows in the winter for some reason so sometimes she would come home, strip naked and sit in front of the open refrigerator door. She dated rich men.
One day she met Wally, who was Solly then. She was on Fire Island for the weekend with some women friends. She and Solly hit it off right away, not least because he hired a white limousine to take her here and there and spent money as though he were a millionaire. Solly Evans (thoughtfully shortened by immigration authorities from Ivanoff when his grandparents arrived in the United States) was short, a bit obese around the tummy, wore a black toupee. She had trouble with the name Solly, and after a gentle discussion, he agreed that Wally suited him better and so from then on he was Wally (short for Wallace, which was more sophisticated) Evans. Evans was a name she could handle, though it was not as glamorous as she would like. Wally and Faith. Faith and Wally.
After a three-year courtship during which time they traveled around the world in luxurious compatibility, they were married. They moved into an apartment on East 73rd Street which was also two rooms but these were large rooms and white-gloved attendants distributed the mail to the door and buzzed people in and out. It was the protection one needs in Manhattan, and glamorous besides. She kept her last name, Anomys, but sometimes hyphenated it with Evans, especially when they were in Europe.
The only drawback was that Wally didn’t like the color turquoise, so she wore it when he was out of town and didn’t make a big fuss about it. Wally went bankrupt from time-to-time – he owned iron and steel firms – it wasn’t his fault that sometimes they were building skyscrapers and sometimes not. Once or twice he even went back to his mother. Faith would moan – I’m going to kill myself, but then got over it and dated other men until Wally decided to return. Sometimes they lived only from her earnings as a bookkeeper. It was not a millionaire’s life but they pretended it was and lived accordingly, eating three meals out a day, the kitchen stove being a storage receptacle for shopping bags as Faith did not have a knack for cooking. She continued to buy her clothing from second hand shops, designer labels only of course, never revealing her source to Wally.
One day, after about seventeen years of marriage, Wally died. Faith was inconsolable. Suddenly Anomys disappeared and she was Faith Evans. Or Mrs. Wally Evans. She changed her name on her credit cards, in the bank, in the post office, on the answering service of her telephone. But after a year or so she began dating again and Faith Anomys started to slip imperceptibly back into her persona. She resumed wearing turquoise, continued to wear her hair at shoulder length, but now the blond was platinum and from her hairdresser’s bottle. She started to have Botox shots, first to her forehead, then the rest of the face. Nearly sixty, her face looked thirty while the rest of her crinkled into wrinkles and continued to age most inconsiderately.
She dated Herbert Hank, an insurance agent who hated his work, but his mustache repelled her and anyhow he wasn’t Wally. Then Frankie Byrnes, an Irish technical writer, who was a cheapskate; enough said. A few others whose names blur in unimportance. Dating became too complicated – she found herself confusing one name with the other and calling them all Wally at inappropriate intimate moments. So she stopped dating, spent her spare time with women friends. One relaxing weekend at Fire Island, after a soothing sauna, she was knocked down by a white limousine and killed instantly.
Her sister Lisa, her two brothers Eli and Jonathan, and the rest of her surviving family, chipped in to buy her tombstone, as she had left virtually no money in her bank account. Much discussion ensued as to which names should be engraved on the stone. The stonemason declared that he couldn’t possibly fit Fanny, Sandy, Evelyn, Okon and Evans, never mind Faith Anomys, onto one small piece of marble. The family squabbled. To this day Lisa and Jonathan are not speaking because of this incident. Eli spoke up. Fanny Okon, he declared.
And so, the woman who endeavored all her life to be rid of the birth names which had caused her such childhood discomfort, lies buried beneath the one she disliked most.
