It happened again this week. I started with a new psychotherapist. She has acceptable blond hair and wears perfectly serviceable clothing. Her mouth is like a hyphen, and everything she says comes out small. Her face doesn’t move very much (it’s not Botoxed, either, I can tell), she has zero affect. Her mien is “just this side of” nice. No warmth; she doesn’t laugh, and smiles are rare, and wan ones at that. If I imitated her talking you would have to move several feet in, closer to me, to hear me. It’s as if the front of her personality has been rubbed off with an eraser, leaving just faint gray loops and lines and slight indentations behind. A hyphen-mouthed eraser smudge of a woman.

I guess I am spending so much time describing her because this whole story is about looks. And how they can deceive!

The lady psychotherapist asked me a bunch of banal questions about me, to “get to know me.” Where did you grow up? What did you study in school? How many siblings?

She found out I had a master’s degree in German. Are you German? She asked. I have German ancestry, yes, I responded.

Then she looked down at her pen, and jotted something, then looked up, then back down at her pen. Without looking back up she hesitantly said these words:

“And, um, do you have… any… Holocaust… in your family?”

I was thrown for a couple seconds. Then I said, “You assumed I’m Jewish, didn’t you?” She looked confidently at me and said in her small hyphen voice, “Yes, I did.” I shook my head no. Then the gravity of the faux-pas caught up with her, and she apologized. But then she added, as though it were a logical thing, “The last name Shrake, it’s confusing.” Cringe. The last name bias? Really? You can do better than that.

Her shame-faced next question was, of course, what I in fact “was.” I answered, “You will be happy to know, as a therapist, that we will still have plenty to work on! I am the ultimate walking contradiction, religiously speaking: Baptized and first-communioned half-Catholic and birth-right/by-convincement half-Quaker.”

That was too many hyphens for Dr. Hyphen Mouth. Her look of confusion got a little bit sharper, but she knew enough not to follow up with another question.

_____

When I lived in Germany during college, I thought it would be funny to try to “look more German” by dying my hair blond. They told me I looked ugly. So I kept it for the rest of the year.

I’ve been mistaken for Jewish a lot over the course of my days. I’m told I “look” Jewish (I always think of my many short and tall, blond, brunette, and redhaired Jewish friends and wonder just what Jewish “looks” like), but I think it’s something else. I think it’s my… expressiveness. My hand gesticulations. I think people are confusing gayness for Judaism (the reverse happens to a lot of my straight male Jewish friends). Or maybe it’s the fact that I flip through magazines backwards (last page first, then right page, left page, right page, left page).

I don’t feel offended at all when someone thinks I’m Jewish. I feel neutral about it. But I feel like SOMEONE should be offended.

_____

At the Eastern Market in Southeast D.C. one sunny Saturday morning a few years ago. I was in the process of buying a sweet potato pie from a kindly, portly, jive-talkitty, apparently chair-bound, dreadlocked, older African-American woman. Think Toni Morrison, but bigger and with more bling on.

I like to B.S. with shopkeepers and clerks and such, it’s a habit I picked up from my dad. So I had a deeply felt, animated conversation with “Pie-monger Toni” about the surprising existence, surprising to me anyway, of squash pie. Never heard of that! Is it sweet? Uh-huh, okay. That’s really different! Oh, okay.

The final hand gesticulation I made was to pull my wallet out with a flourish to pay for my pie. That’s when she leaned toward me, winked and said with a side-to-side sweep of her hand: “All these crusts are kosher, by the way.” For once I didn’t know what to say. I just nodded. Now I knew what being profiled feels like.

_____

I was at a bar in Detroit about five years ago, looking in the big mirror over the sink, checking my look. (Perfection.) That’s when I heard a voice on my left. “Excuse me, but I could use some input from a stranger.” Don’t say things like that in the bathroom, I thought. I just kept staring straight ahead at my beautiful reflection. The voice continued talking. “See, an old ex of mine is here tonight, and I am wondering, you know, just… how I look!” He chuckled abashedly. Oh, okay, I thought. I turned and looked at him.

Grown-out, unstyled Borics “men’s haircut,” no real thought put into it. Totally average face — for Michigan, I mean. Mustache. Plain-colored sweater. Bit of a spare tire around the midsection. Think a younger, chubbier, non-cartoon Ned Flanders with no glasses.

“On a scale of 1 to 10,000,” he added to his request, with a sweeping motion of the hands. I had had a few drinks, and I’m easily confused (I’ve had to have “mortgages” and “diabetes” explained to me dozens of times and I am still not clear on how they work). Time was running out to deliver my answer. I felt rushed. The inchoate thought in my head was that even though he was an obvious dumpwad I would flatter him and then get the hell out of there. I’m empathic that way.

“A hundred?” I offered brightly, then waited for the approving nod. If 1 was the pinnacle of ten thousand points, then 100 was a pretty good score, right? So close to the top, but cooler, not overdetermined. A good white lie!

But it turns out 1 wasn’t the best, 10,000 was. Like “a perfect 10” but to the 1,000th power. A little joke on the guy’s part. Oh, okay.

He frowned, said “Fuck you, Jew bitch,” and left the men’s room.

Just to remind you: I’m not Jewish. Not even part-Jewish. I am a gentile who had just been the victim of anti-Semitism. I went back out to the bar and told my friends what just happened, and we all gave in to amazed laughter at the outrageousness of the bathroom guy. “Whatever!”

But the next day I had a sick emotional aftershock. A victimish feeling inside. Maybe it was the “bitch” part. It had to be that, right?

Tags: anti-Semitism, Borics, Detroit, District of Columbia, Eastern Market, German, Holocaust, Jewish, Ned Flanders, Toni Morrison