When the foam china crate was empty, though, and there were only eleven delicate red poppies flowering within thick navy blue borders ringed with gold leaf evenly spaced around the table, Joanna felt defeated. The twelfth plate, she fully recalled, had been broken during a raucous party she had hosted in eleventh grade. Josh Weinstein, her first love, had raided the pantry looking for snacks. Joanna had been completely, blessedly stoned, and, needless to say, pretty hungry herself, so she’d just let out a spacey giggle when Josh emerged onto the patio with a Grandma Bess Passover plate instead, palming the red poppy like an affected French waiter. “Zees ees niiiice,” he’d said, making ridiculous faces at Joanna. (They’d dated all through high school and into college, but he’d ended up being a total fucker; cheated on her for months, left her at the end of freshman year with a parting gift of genital warts.)
Jay Taubman, from a couple dozen feet away, had clapped his gigantic pubescent paws and held them out—“Dude! Right here!”—and Josh had tossed the blue-rimmed artifact as if it were a Frisbee. It had sailed for what seemed like hours, spinning gracefully through the air toward Jay.
“Wait,” Joanna had said weakly. “Don’t.” But then there had been a shatter, the onomatopoeic pleasure of which reverberated sharply in the ganja-tinged pit of her stomach. She remembered having giggled in spite of herself. Crash! Tee-hee.
“Mom,” she said, slouching into the kitchen, “Grandma Bess’s Passover china only has eleven plates.”
“Where’s the twelfth?” Marilyn, wrist deep in a bowl of nuts and cinnamon and finely chopped apples for charoset, raised an eyebrow.
Joanna shrugged, looked at the floor. “I have no idea.” Usually they went to Aunt Barbi and Uncle Larry’s for Passover.
“So just use a plate from another set,” Marilyn said, furiously mixing. “The pink flowers one. Honestly, Joanna. Things break. It’s not the end of the world.”
“Who said anything about it breaking?” Joanna’s voice veered dangerously into the realm of shrill. She had expected her mother to be more upset. Grandma Bess had died before Joanna’s birth — had not lived to see her first grandchild — and Joanna always felt it was a huge deal when things broke. The end of the world, even. Marilyn kept on mixing. “Why would I have any idea what happened to the freaking plate?” Marilyn said nothing. “What the hell? I don’t even live here. Jesus.”
Joanna’s emotional susceptibility was aggravated by the raw, itchy, extraordinarily uncomfortable state of her genitalia: a yeast infection, for sure, noticed the day before in its earliest stages and blossomed to full, awful effect today. It was driving her insane; she wanted to rip into her vagina with an ax, to tear it apart and revel in the ecstasy of the itch relieved. She had a Problem in her Pants, as the girls in her co-op in college used to say. There were proliferate Problems in their Pants back in the day: UTIs, various and sundry STDs, yeast. “Curse the motherfucking Pill,” her friend Claire would moan, knocking back shots of not-from-concentrate cranberry juice at the kitchen table. “Sexual liberation comes with a hefty price tag indeed, ladies.”
“That china was Grandma’s dowry when she married your grandpa Jack,” Marilyn said after a moment, like amusing, disconnected trivia. Grandpa Jack was, naturally, even longer gone than his blushing bride. There was a picture of them, fingers intertwined, sepia cheeks pressed delightedly together, dressed to the nines, about to leave on their honeymoon, front and center on top of the baby grand in the living room. It was as disquieting an image as any flayed and emaciated Catholic Jesus-on-the-
cross: They had died for Joanna’s sins.
Marilyn briefly consulted her recipe, pulled nutmeg off the spice rack, and added two decisive shakes to the bowl. Charoset was Joanna’s favorite part of Passover by far. More even than the little individual dipping bowls of saltwater meant to approximate tears.
“I’m sorry, Mom!” she said suddenly, attempting, in an off-center hug, to bury her face in Marilyn’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry!” It seemed to Joanna that the missing twelfth plate should somehow exacerbate her mother’s old mother-loss wound, twist and wring her psyche, and dredge up all the pain of losing one’s mother — being, in fact, an orphan — might entail. Joanna couldn’t imagine it: God dead. Marilyn gave her a friendly little shove.
“Would you please spare us the drama and finish setting the table? Fifty people are going to be here in a half hour and You. Are. Not. Helping. Me.” This was punctuated by the shaking of her hands over the mixing bowl, as though the bits of spiced apples and nuts sticking to her fingers were themselves being selfish. When she was expecting company, Marilyn tended toward hyperbole and (dare we?) hysteria. The Renaissance painters had missed a sprawling goldmine when they’d neglected to portray the Martyrdom of the Put-Upon Passover Seder Hostess. There were exactly twelve people coming: Aunt Barbi and the axis of asshole (Uncle Larry and cousins Kevin and Jason), sad-sack still-single Uncle Steve, Aunt Jackie and her silent, obese boyfriend Bob, studying-for-about-six-years-now-to-become-a-
beautician cousin Stacey, Joanna, Marilyn, and Ron. And Harris. Joanna’s boyfriend of almost a year. A non-Jew. (“I don’t like to be defined by what I’m not,” he would mock bristle at that. “I’m also a nonmidget. A non-Hispanic. A nonfemale.” “And a nonnonagenarian,” Joanna would point out, because, like her, Harris had a dumb sense of humor. “Ha,” he’d respond. “You said ‘nonnonagenarian.’” Then they would talk about other things.)
So Joanna reluctantly got out a plate from the grotesque second-tier Passover set — ceramic yellow with pretty pink daisies. It looked obscene, a monstrosity among all of Grandma Bess’s serene, expensive red poppies. Like a hooker at high tea. She set it at her own place, disgusted by the awful aesthetic of it, then allowed herself a quick, feral itching interlude, hand down the waist of her jeans, facing the corner of the dining room, hunched over like a pervert jerking off in public. The reprieve was borderline orgasmic — she saw rainbows, she saw stars — with a nice little thread of pain sliced through like gold leaf. She let out a small involuntary sigh and examined her fingers: white, pasty, not altogether too heinous smelling, considering.
In the kitchen Marilyn was racing around like Julia Child on crack.
“All right,” Joanna told her. “The table is set. Can I be excused?” Instantly she regretted the sarcasm in her voice. Marilyn made a big show of rinsing her hands off and drying them on a dishtowel, which she then folded decisively in quarters and set down next to the sink. Joanna leaned against the counter, arms crossed, directly in her mother’s path. “I really hope you’re not expecting me to say the Four Questions, because I’m fucking thirty-one years old and it’s not happening.”
“I know how old you are.” This with a defeated tone, in which Joanna could hear each and every one of her mother’s many harbored disappointments: an only child, unmarried, dating a goy, spectacularly unaccomplished in her chosen craft, living far away, tattooed, still accepting the occasional bailout check from Daddy. The list went on. Breaker of plates, eschewer of intergenerational cultural responsibility, what else?