A Cool Kid turns around in his pew, scans the rows behind him, and locks eyes with Erin. He’s a head taller than the others, looks like a delinquent, a kid held back, just about ready to procreate. The kid smiles, a smirk, no teeth exposure. Here, Erin thinks, are all the elements: the same prayer melodies, velvet-covered Torah being passed like an infant symbolically down through the generations (up on the bima, Alex’s mother hands it over to Dana, who almost drops it before safely depositing it in Dorit’s waiting, steady, pink arms), the cluster of bored pubescents yielding up one specific boy in spotlight, someone for whom to truss up later en route to the reception. So why can’t she remember her parsha? What’s in there, where this central memory might otherwise be? Her sick mother. The Thompson Twins, blaring from archaic free-standing speakers while her friends slow-danced. A beige check from her great-aunt Myrna for an unprecedented $180. An oppressed Soviet Jewish “twin”—Olga? Marianna? — denied the freedom of slow-dancing and checks, her photograph blown up and carted around like the earliest of themes, but it might as well have been a faux-mitzvah before its time, for the total vacuum where her Torah portion should be.
The Cool Kid — a man by now, probably, Jewishly and otherwise — turns around again, cocky and truthfully rather hot — makes Erin’s head go a little dizzy. He could be my child, she thinks, and then remembers that she is, actually, someone’s mother. Gertie. How completely bizarre that is. How completely fucking awful. She is in no position. Just yesterday she herself was free, a bat mitzvah girl, so many drugs and boys and adventures still ahead! She winks at the kid jauntily; I’m a Cool Adult code.
“In my parsha,” Dorit says, beginning the big speech, owning it with her emphasis as if Dana and Nadiv had purchased it in her honor, the Dorit Arad Torah Portion, “God reveals himself to Abraham.” The program reads “G-d,” like an expletive; that motherf-king a-hole. “And I’ve been thinking a lot about how God reveals himself all the time, and if we can even recognize him. I think sometimes we can’t.”
She’s obviously been practicing this before the mirror for weeks, shifting the inflections, imagining her audience, relishing the profundity of it all. Erin looks down at herself, at the baby-weight belly pooch and her foreshortened thighs. At the blue veins fanning out under the thinning skin on the backsides of her hands, at her little diamond chip from Alex. “But Abraham isn’t too impressed with God to offer his hospitality to strangers who come to see him. He knows that God is not more important than his fellow people. And that’s something really good to remember, for all of us.” No way she did this on her own, Erin somehow stops herself from whispering to Alex, who’s beaming.
“But those strangers are actually God’s messengers,” Dorit continues. “And one of them tells Abraham’s wife, Sarah, who’s like a hundred years old, that she’s going to have a baby in a year. But Sarah laughs in his face — Sarah laughs because she’s like a hundred!” Everyone has a good chuckle at this, especially the Cool Kids. Oh ho ho, a fertile old lady, what a gas!
Again Erin takes a deep breath in an attempt to focus, reconnect with her memory, which she can sense is waiting, whole and hard, like a whitehead, just under the surface of the intervening years. Bat mitzvah, yes, okay; stiff Torah parchment and lilting trope, of course: yes. Braces, control top, lip gloss — check, check, check. Watered-down moral teachings extrapolated from Old Testament, yes. She concentrates hard, mental masturbation, yes, yes, yes, trying to reach the taken-for-granted orgasm right around the corner.
“Be right back,” Erin says quietly to an unresponsive Alex. She waits a beat, boring imaginary holes into the side of his face, ones that ooze and hurt. Finally he turns toward her, meeting her eyes for a fraction of a second, raising his eyebrows, turning away again. Where are you going? He might have asked. Are you okay? He might’ve followed her out, locked them both in a bathroom stall, thrust his dick into her mouth for the first time since God knows when, giggled madly with her when they returned to the sanctuary.
She pads down the plushly carpeted aisle, out into the marble lobby and down a hallway lined with rows of high school confirmation class portraits, extending along the wall in reverse chronological order. She starts at 2003, feeling impossibly old and fat and over — her life is over! Her tits are deflated! — and proceeds, back, back, back, past the women’s room door, to, ah yes, here we go, back when things made sense: ’88, ’87, ’86…Here we are: low-heeled pumps and blunt, asymmetrical haircuts; Dep and hairspray and Clearasil and Wet’n’Wild and shoulder pads and braces. And they say you can’t go home again. She locates Alex easily, can’t help but smile at his rope tie, his patterned blazer with shoulder pads and the tapered sleeves pushed halfway up his arms. His boyish, unmeasured smile. He had been cute once, before she knew him. Such a perfect candidate, on paper. Jewish, a dentist, well traveled, well read. The kind of assumed confidence that comes from having screwed one’s way unthinkingly straight through adolescence. She’d loved these things about him.
“You in one of these?”
The Cool Kid, next to her, reeks of CK One. She smells it at the same instant he speaks; springy and slimy, eau de teenage boy. It’s the first question she’s been asked about herself in a very long time.
“No,” she tells him, smiling. “You?”
“Nah,” he says. “Couple more years. If my mom makes me.”
“I’m Dorit’s aunt,” Erin says.
“I’m Zac,” says the kid. He stands there. She puts out her hand to shake, and he grabs it, hard. Someone has told him about the importance of a firm handshake.
“You a friend of Dorit’s?” No, Erin, you moron, he’s a party crasher.
“Sort of. Everyone has to invite everyone in the class. They made a rule.”
“Did you already have yours?”
“Yup,” he says. “In March.”
“Get anything good?”
“Like four thousand bucks.”
“Jesus,” she says.
“Yup.”
“Wow. Times have changed.” She loves that she just said this. Fucking loves .
“I guess.”
After the service there are cookies and plastic shot glasses full of thick, sweet wine, and a photo op with the mottled silver kiddush cup Alex’s grandfather had carted (barefoot, six thousand miles uphill both ways in the dead of winter) from Russia. Gertie has bonded with a small red-haired boy in shorts and suspenders, and they occupy themselves on the Henry and Rosalyn Biener Jungle Gym under the watchful eyes of Dorit’s friends.
“Mwah!” Dana says loudly in the receiving line, pressing her cheek to Erin’s. “How nice to see you, hon.” It’s the “hon” that plucks on the electric harp of Erin’s nerves.
“Good to see you,” Nadiv says, clasping her hand in both of his. “Great to see you. Good to see you.” He claps Alex on the back with a hairy paw and Alex reciprocates, a violent, manly hug in which only upper limbs touch. Never the torso. G-d forbid the torso. Or the hips, Lord Almighty.