“Jesus,” she says, squinting. “What the fuck was mine?”
Alex looks toward her sharply. “Hey,” he says. He juts his head toward the backseat, where Gertie sits, miserable and impervious, in her green dress. They have a deal about swearing in front of Gertie. A convoluted system of perfunctory favors and chores invented when Gertie had first started talking and had echoed some perverse one-off.
Erin rubs her forehead, squeezes her eyes shut, skipping stones on the lake of memory. The brown industrial carpeting of the synagogue, her first manicure (a beige-pink called “Poundcake”), a run in those horribly elastic flesh-colored panty hose, noticed only after she’d chanted the haftorah.
“Why can’t I remember what my stupid fucking parsha was?”
Alex offers a shadow of a shrug, thumbs-drumming in time with, Erin imagines, his self-satisfied internal repetition of Jacob and Esau, Jacob and Esau, Jacob and Esau.
It’s 10:32 and they’re still sitting in the middle of the intersection a few blocks from the synagogue, waiting to turn left. The light turns yellow, finally, and an advancing truck seems unsure whether or not to go for it. Alex assumes not and takes his foot off the brake, only to slam it back down again as the truck keeps coming at them. Then, when the truck driver slows, motions for them to go ahead, Alex, afraid that it’s a limited-time-only offer, slams on the gas, hurtling them through the turn so they all get pinned to their seats with centrifugal force, like on a roller coaster. There is a small squeal of burnt rubber. Gertie lets out what from another kid might be a simple giggle, but from her is a throaty, one-note “Heh.” Erin glares at him.
“Sor-ry,” Alex says softly, to neither of them. He’s the king of such apologies: sincere enough but directed aimlessly out into the universe, impossible to forgive.
They deposit Gertie in the nursery with the nice old lady who’s been watching kids at the synagogue at least since Alex had been one. “I don’t get how she’s still alive,” Alex always says.
“I don’t get how she’s still alive,” Alex says. Guffaws.
The Donald and Leslie Milstein Sanctuary is gigantic and soaring, every last piece of it identified for its benefactor. Dorit, in a pink suit and matching pillbox hat, is standing on the Fred and Henrietta Beamer bima in between the cantor and the rabbi. Her hair is done in a lovely flip. But for her unfortunate hatchet face (a few more years and then, surely, there would be the compulsory nose job), she’s Jackie O.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Erin snorts as they settle into a pew in the back. The “fucking,” she knows, is overkill. She throws it in for pure effect, for the unadulterated pleasure of it; without Gertie around she is entitled to live, goddammit.
“Her theme is ‘Great Women from History,’” Alex informs Erin tersely, affixing a pink Nu Suede kippah with a bobby pin to the crown of his head. Imprinted on the underside in silver foil are the words “Bat Mitzvah of,” and, in slightly bigger type, “Dorit Arad.” Say something derisive about the pink kippot, Erin silently begs him. She opens a siddur to a random page and rests it in her lap. Please, she prays, say something harmlessly sardonic about the theme. What would actually be the harm in his rolling his eyes with her in tandem at this heinous display of Diaspora largesse? The theme, for fuck’s sake!
Nadiv Arad had come to the states after serving in the Sixty-Seven War, gotten into some sort of business (no one seemed to truly have a handle on what exactly it was he did; “Property!” he would boom in his thick, charming Israeli accent when asked, but he never elaborated and was never pressed) and thereafter supplied Dana and Dorit with the biggest, least subdued home and life new money could buy, complete with eight-tone doorbell and gray marble floors throughout, two black BMWs parked around the fountain in the driveway, and the sure-to-be monstrous bat mitzvah party still to come. They’re the kind of people who have no books in their house, Erin tells her friends by way of explanation. She hates them so much, and with such free-floating intensity, that she often finds herself thinking things like: It’s just like them to have only had one child.
“You’re a negative person,” Alex spat at her when they began therapy a few months ago. To which there had been no suitable reply. I am not too elementary school; ditto So what if I am? so Erin tried to be witty and deadpan—“Go fuck yourself”—thinking the therapist would catch the irony and that Erin’s sparkling, bitter wit — she was being ironic! — would thus triumph over Alex’s petty self-seriousness, and they would all share a laugh. But no.
“There’s your sister,” Erin says acidly. Nadiv and Dana are sitting front and center in the Arnie and Mildred Pearl Pew, flanked by the grandparents. They watch Dorit a little, but mostly, instead, pursue a ravenous sanctuary stocktaking. “Hi,” Dana mouths exaggeratedly at Alex, winking, kissy face. She nods slightly at Erin as her head continues on its rotating axis, eyes widening in welcome when they alight on someone else.
Dorit looks to be doing not much more than following along with the rabbi, managing to look smug and clueless at once, white tallit draped over narrow shoulders. Her friends, Erin can plainly see, are the Cool Kids. Boys with their hair gelled smartly, girls thin and clear-skinned, straight hair to a one, thermal reconditioning perhaps their reward for all the phonetic Hebrew memorizing. They’re clustered off to one side of the chapel, so obviously the in-crowd, badass eighth graders who’ve spent this entire year of weekends at bar and bat mitzvah parties, living it up. Erin has read an article recently about even non-Jewish kids having what they’d dubbed faux-mitzvahs, a party, a challah, Everything But the Torah. This had been the title of the article. A mother with a name like McAdams had weighed in on her daughter’s keen sense of injustice: All her friends are having them!
The programs, pink engraved Fabriano, are tucked into the backs of the pews, one per seat. Welcome to My Bat Mitzvah! Underneath her name and the date (July 30, 5765—screw the post-Christ crap) is a swirling, graceful three-dimensional ribbon (pink!) on a printed gift box. At its center is a small — the word that pops into Erin’s head in the midst of this grotesqueness is actually “tasteful”—rhinestone.
This is such a special day for my family and I! Today, I am a Jewish adult! Today, I take on the responsibility of the Covenant! I’m so glad you could join my family and I on this very sacred day!
“What the hell was my Torah portion?” Erin whispers to Alex, increasingly frustrated by its absence from her memory. Dorit’s, according to page 2, is Vayeira. Vayeira is about strong women. And I wanted to honor women throughout history who are strong role models, which is fitting, since today I am a woman!
“I don’t know what the ‘hell’ your Torah portion was,” he whispers back absently, looking at his program. “Mine was Toldot.”
“Oh! Jacob and Esau?”
Alex turns a page unhurriedly, involves himself with Dorit’s (or, more likely, Erin thinks, some hard-up and handsomely compensated rabbinical student’s) explication of the superspecialty of this day. In the Cool Kids section, there is a short giggle burst followed by a prolonged Shhhh. Erin wishes she could go sit with them, reclaim herself at her peak. She’d been a Cool Kid, the belle of all her own bat mitzvah season’s balls, her mother’s simultaneous mortal illness notwithstanding. Sheila’s cancer had proved, actually, quite a boon to Erin’s social life. The chemo pot had been top-notch.