Hello My Name Is…

“So,” said Steven’s father. “Are you planning on becoming a Shaklan?”

I shot Steven a look across the table. He responded by shoving a forkful of General Tso’s Chicken into his mouth.

“It’s not really clear yet,” I said.

We were sitting around the dining room table a few months before Steven and I were to exchange vows. I had been wrestling with the question of changing my name for almost the entire year since we’d become engaged, and now that the wedding loomed I was no closer to coming to a decision. My entire life I had maintained that I would never change my name. But now that the moment had actually arrived I wasn’t so sure. There were a lot of factors to weigh.

For starters, my maiden name wasn’t so great. Schank. It’s not only hard on the ears, but it’s the name of a bone, or the result of a bad golf swing. People mispronounce it all the time; I get called Skank a lot. And people misspell it too: Shank, Shenk, Shenck.

Even worse, it’s a made-up name. The original name was something along the lines of the mellifluous Schenkolowsky, which just trips off the tongue. My great-grandfather swiftly chopped it down to Schenk when he arrived in Ellis Island from Poland. A few decades later, my grandfather, in an attempt to sound more American, changed the spelling from Schenk to Schank. Unbeknownst to either my of my paternal ancestors, Schenk and Schank are both German names. In fact, there is a large family of what I imagine to be robust-looking Schanks in Wisconsin who occasionally make their presence known in the form of emails to me or other members of my family inquiring after long lost relatives who couldn’t possibly be related to us. I like to think of them as the “real” Schanks, as their claim to the name probably stretches back to the Huns or the Visigoths or some such group. Every so often I’ll get an email asking if I ever knew an Otto Schank who lived in Eau Claire, or a Mary Schank from Arcadia who liked to weave her own baskets and ran the town hardware store. What I’d like to email back is something explaining that we’re Jews who have accidentally appropriated their name, although part of me wishes that I could say, of course! Mary Schank! She used to help my tie my knots when I went fly-fishing. She baked the best peach pies!

If I’d had the opportunity to trade up to a really good name through marriage I probably would have jumped on it. I liked to imagine other names I might have married into: Hana Rothschild, for example. Hana Astor was another good one. Sometimes I combined them. Hana Rothschild-Astor. Now that is a name. Unfortunately, neither of those names belonged to the man I was about to marry. Instead, his name was Shaklan, which had the added disadvantage of including almost all of the letters of my last name in a different order, as well as being equally unpronounceable and unspellable. And worst of all, he too had a made up name. The Shaklan story is shorter than the Schank story, but equally gripping:

There were two Shakman brothers who had trucks in Newark, New Jersey in the 1930’s. To differentiate between the two trucks, one brother changed his name to Shaklan. I asked Steven’s father why one brother got the keep the name while the other brother, the one who would become Steven’s grandfather, had to invent a new one. “No idea,” he said. “Maybe he was shorter.” In Steven’s family, where the women top off at 5 feet and many of the men dream of reaching 5’8, being shorter is the generally accepted explanation for many of life’s injustices. This was the name I had the option of claiming as my own.

Aside from keeping my own name or taking Steven’s there were a lot of options. I could hyphenate. I could take Steven’s last name and keep mine as a middle name. Some couples even create their own names, which for some reason always tend to be something like Morningstar or Baby’s Breath. My father kept asking why Steven couldn’t just take my name.

“Schank is a better name anyway,” he’d huff.

“No it’s not,” I always maintained. “It’s not even a real name.”

“Oh, what, you’d rather have a name that came from a truck?”

He had a point.

Nonetheless, a few weeks after our wedding I found myself at the social security office. When I got up to the front desk I plopped down a book’s worth of paperwork testifying to my existence: my birth certificate, my passport, pay stubs, immunization forms, anything I could scrounge up to prove that I was who I said I was.

The social security lady looked at my stack of papers and sighed.

“Can I help you?”

“I’d like to change my name,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be asked why I wanted to do such a thing, and the question gave me a little electric shock, as though there was some cosmic force telling me that perhaps I should think harder about the issue. The fact was that even though I was there, at the social security office, I still hadn’t really decided that I wanted to change my name. I was just going through the motions to see what would happen.

So what was the right answer to her question? Because that was what people did when they got married? Because I wanted to show my slightly overbearing family that I was now also part of a new family? Because I wanted to show myself that this was a new phase in my life and that I was beginning it with a new name?

“I got married,” I finally said.

The social security lady stared at me as though this wasn’t really a good enough answer for her. I supposed it wasn’t. After all, most women in my position, which is to say women who are over thirty, have already established themselves in their careers, women who view themselves as independent and who don’t want to buy into the whole patriarchal system blah blah blah, one of those women, of which I was certain I was, didn’t change her name.

“I want to have the same name as my husband and my kids,” I explained. “My hypothetical kids.” The social security lady turned to her computer and began typing. It occurred to me that perhaps she hadn’t really been waiting for a more detailed explanation as to why I wanted to subjugate myself to the patriarchy. A few minutes later I walked out the door with a slip of paper promising that my new social security card would be mailed to me in six weeks time. And it was as simple as that. I was now Hana Schank Shaklan.

The first person to call me Mrs. Shaklan was a telemarketer.

“Is Mr. Shaklan there?” asked the voice on the phone.

“No,” I replied.

“Is this Mrs. Shaklan?”

“Yes,” I said. I felt my face redden, as though I had told a massive lie. Me? Mrs. Shaklan? Are you kidding me? Who the hell was Mrs. Shaklan? I imagined that she wore reading glasses on a chain around her neck and didn’t take shit from anyone. Mrs. Shaklan liked people to be polite and respectful around her. Mrs. Shaklan was 50 years old and possibly a librarian.

Later that day I Googled my new name. Nothing came up. Hana Shaklan didn’t exist. She was nobody. Just to reassure myself I Googled Hana Schank and was rewarded with a brief history of my life. There were my race results from the charity meet I swam in ten years ago, posts to a list serv on a computer design problem I had been working on five years ago, an article about my father that mentioned my name, my wedding photos, the guest list from my ten-year college reunion. Hana Schank had a history. She had activities and interests and a job. Hana Shaklan had nothing.

About a month later I learned a little bit more about Mrs. Shaklan. Steven and I were in India for our honeymoon, and had arrived at a hotel on the edge of the Great Thar Desert only to find that the travel agency we’d paid to arrange our accommodations had instead taken our money and done nothing. Worse, it was New Year’s Eve and the hotel was booked up. After some struggle the hotel managed to rustle up a room for us, and the rest of our stay in the little desert town was spent on the phone with the travel agency trying to get our money back. Steven had been doing all of the talking for the first day or so, at which point I couldn’t take it any more and demanded the phone.

“This is Mrs. Shaklan,” Mrs. Shaklan snapped into to receiver.

“Well, Mrs. Shaklan, maybe I can explain to you what I have been trying to explain to your husband,” came a weary voice on the other end of the line.

“Yes,” Mrs. Shaklan said curtly. “I’d like you to explain it to me, and I’d also like you to know that this is my honeymoon and you’re ruining it. I’d like an explanation as to why there was no reservation for us at this hotel and why you still have our money. And most of all, I’d like an explanation as to why this whole process has taken us three days.”

Wow. Mrs. Shaklan was a bitch.

After India I didn’t see much of Mrs. Shaklan. Occasionally she got mail. Mostly magazine subscriptions and junk mail. Sometimes letters or cards came from my grandmother or other assorted relatives addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Steven Shaklan, as though I had ceased to exist entirely.

In the year that followed things only became more complicated. When I called the cable company or the cell phone company or the dentist and they asked for my name I always had to say “Schank, or Shaklan, try both,” which of course only completely confused whomever was at the other end of the line. Sometimes people saw the two names side by side and slid them into one name. “May I please speak to Hana Schanklan?” occasionally came from a bewildered telemarketer.

Amidst all the confusion about my name, there was one person who didn’t even remotely understand why I’d changed it in the first place: my husband.

“You know,” he said after I came home brandishing my new driver’s license. “I’m flattered and all, but I think it’s kind of weird.”

I shrugged. “Don’t you want us to have the same name and, like, be the same family and stuff?”

“It’s nice,” he said. “But I mean, when you introduce yourself at a party or something, what will you introduce yourself as?”

“Hana Shaklan,” I said.

“But the name of your company is Hana Schank Consulting. Don’t you think that’s confusing?”

The fact was that I kind of liked the confusion. It was like being a superhero with a secret identity. By day, Hana Schank makes business deals and decides the fate of nations. At night she puts on slippers and sweat pants and cooks dinner as her alter ego, Hana Shaklan. In some way the two identities helped me to reconcile the two parts of my life: working woman and wife. As long as I kept them distinct I was in no danger of having one of them take me over completely.

Steven and I celebrated our first anniversary a few months ago. Since then I’ve found myself using Shaklan less and less. Maybe I’ll change my name back. Maybe not. But sometimes at night I take out my social security card and look at it, and I like to imagine who Hana Shaklan might become.