“It’s the blessing of firsts, I guess,” she says. “For special moments. When you feel the miracle of life and are grateful for having reached this day.” Clearly she’s been coached in the answer to that one.
“Oh,” I say. I am trying to be happy for her, I am trying to be happy for her, I am trying to be happy for her. But do I want only her happiness? Or do I want her to stay as she was, as she’s always been, with me? And if she isn’t unchanged, if she’s no longer mine, do I care about her happiness at all?
“I just want to be true to my heritage,” she told me when she got back from that first, influential retreat. “I just want to find out what it means to be Jewish. I just want to live my life to its fullest potential.”
“Cool,” I’d said. “But why can’t you just go take a Landmark Forum life-skills seminar like everybody else?”
Now I smile broadly at her. That I sit here and hold her hand and say nothing while she blesses her choices is not too much to ask, is it? No, it is not. I’m a fucking bitch, is the truth. “Bring it.”
She reaches over for my hand, and I catch Nikki averting her gaze. “Baruch ata Adonai,” Ra-chel begins, and that part I recognize from my family’s once-a-year visits to temple, but the rest is fuzzy and fast and doesn’t really register. At the end she opens her eyes and squeezes my hand.
“Amen,” I say, using up what feels like the last of my breath, hoping I don’t invalidate her prayer, cancel her out.
Nikki has finished combing out Ra-chel’s hair and is brandishing a shiny pair of scissors. “You sure about this?”
It’s that speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace moment, but I let it pass, looking at Rachel’s reflection in the mirror, committing her to memory.
Then, amid all the other shedding and casting off and walking away redone, Nikki holds out a ponytail of Ra-chel’s hair, opens gaping scissors around it maybe four or five inches from her head, and works them closed like a gnawing animal.
The big clump of hair flops to the ground around our feet, and I gather it into a plastic bag for some unlucky kid with cancer. Then Nikki begins to snip away, with a smaller scissors now, fashioning a cute shag that will never see the light of day. I continue looking through Hairdooz, Nero fiddling, with an insouciance I have to work hard to maintain. On the last page is one that makes my heart skitter: a picture of a faceless woman with extraordinarily long hair. It falls like water past her shoulders, down her arched back, past her waist and out of the frame. “So Long!” it says blithely. Never say good-bye, I’ve heard; good-bye is final. Say “So long” instead, and hope to meet again.
I hold the magazine up so Rachel-cum-Ra-chel can see it, a complete and not entirely unhappy farewell. “‘So Long!’” I say, pointing, but she’s not paying attention to me. She’s looking at herself in the mirror, transfixed, taking in her strange, shocking lack of hair. This is the most irrevocable of her many changes. She could grow it all back if she wanted to, but it would take a long time.
Everything But
On their way to temple, Alex will not shut up. “My Torah portion was Toldot,” he says. It’s 10:30. They’re late. “Jacob and Esau.”
In the back Gertie is strapped into her car seat and is staring, brow knit, out the window. Erin checks her watch. Services started at 9:45.
“Is Dorit going whole hog with this? Like, actually reading from the Torah?” Dorit, bat mitzvah girl, is Alex’s niece, daughter of his only sister, Dana. Alex ignores the question, tinged as it is with Erin’s well-worn superiority and sarcasm: an overt comment on poor Dorit’s intelligence and general worth, a covert attack on her doltish mother, Alex’s beloved big sister. Dana. Alex looks at his watch.
“We’re late,” he sighs.
“No shit.”
They’re late because Gertie had refused to be dressed in her temple outfit, an itchy green velvet number with matching barrettes. The green ensemble had mysteriously brought forth dramatic screeches of protest and vehement, back-and-forth head whips. Gertie had ducked out of reach, shrank from the dress like a soul from the light.
“They grow up so quickly, don’t they?” Erin said when finally they’d managed to wrangle her into the car at 10:15 after plying her with bribes and promises of future bribes, late, late, late. Alex blames Erin for these mishaps. As a mother, little things throw her completely. More than a year and a half in, even, she feels wholly unprepared for and amateurish at it, embarrassed that something like a temper tantrum over a dress could so derail them from the course of their daily lives. It wasn’t normal to be forty-five minutes late because your toddler had refused to acquiesce to your choice of outfit for her, was it? Or did most people simply wrench their child into the dress, throw their child into the car, and show up only slightly harried at, say, 10:00?
“Jacob and Esau,” Alex keeps saying, over and over, like a rap, absentmindedly drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel as he waits to turn left at a green light. He inches forward into the intersection, thumb-drumming in time with the click-clack! of the left turn signal. He glances at Gertie in the rearview to see if she’s up for a sing-along. Erin watches him, irritated that he doesn’t seem to care that she’s watching him, does not turn to look at her, does not acknowledge her gaze. It makes her want to dig her nails into his eye sockets, rake them down his face with all the force she can muster, hold his eyes open like in a torture chamber or laser eye surgery, make him Look At Her. She’s heard about his bar mitzvah a hundred times, heard him laugh exclusively at his own memories of the kid he’d been. Some girl had given him head in the bathroom at the synagogue during his party. “I became a man that day,” he’d say, guffawing (yes, truly: guffawing), rolling his eyes for the benefit of anyone who’d heard the story before (Erin had!); he was a narcissistic motherfucker, but it would be terrible to appear unselfconsciously so. This Erin had mistaken for acute self-awareness and good humor when they’d first met and for way (way!) too long afterward.
“I have no idea what mine was,” Erin tells him, though he didn’t ask and most certainly wasn’t going to. At Erin’s bat mitzvah her mother had been fighting the first of three rounds with cancer (“female trouble,” she had called it, with rueful cheer) and wore a terrible, off-color wig. In all the pictures Sheila and Erin both look like sideshow wax dummies of themselves: Erin at thirteen with acne and temporarily lopsided features; Sheila with her reproductive organs newly evacuated and that slick greenish-white chemo sheen, which was only exacerbated by the orange tint to what was supposed to have been a brunette wig. The photos themselves were practically radioactive with indignity and ugliness. Erin had hauled out the albums in Phoenix after the funeraclass="underline" Nothing like a funeral for nostalgia and fucking. Though of course there’d been no fucking; Alex had barely touched her since even before Gertie, and acted all put out and harassed whenever she tried to initiate. A big letdown after shiva each night, truth be told. It had occurred to Erin, immediately after the eulogies and kaddish and burial and Yes, thank you, I know, Me toos, that this terrible thing, the loss of her mom, might actually, finally, get her laid. But no.
“Jacob and Esau,” Alex says again, and now Erin is intent on recalling her own bat mitzvah parsha. Those heinous posed pictures are clear as crystal (her older brother, Jonathan, with his feathered eighties mullet and lingering baby fat, her younger sister, Julie, in a sea green puffy dress with shoulder pads), but the real issue of the day, the Torah portion she’d memorized phonetically with the help of a then-state-of-the-art Walkman and on which she’d composed a two-page single-spaced speech, is nowhere to be found.