“Good,” Joanna replied, like a nine-year-old. She had expected more of a fight, and didn’t know what to do with her reserve of belligerence. Her crotch burned.
“Maybe your friend Harris can do it,” said Marilyn. “That would be appropriate, don’t you think?” At which the doorbell rang.
“Elijah!” Ron yelled from the den, where he was doing roughly ten times the necessary Seder prep: cutting and pasting readings from eight different Haggadot, making place cards (which he would any minute ask Joanna to illustrate “because you’re the talented artist, Jo-Jo”), assigning roles in the skit wherein Moses asks pharaoh to pretty please Let [His] People Go. Sweet Ron got such immense pleasure from the claim that anyone at the door on Passover was, in fact, Elijah. It never got old. For the rest of the evening, whenever the doorbell rang, he would invariably pause, straight faced, dopey, joyful, before making the joke anew.
“I expect you to wear long sleeves to the table, Joanna,” Marilyn said, her parting shot. “Please don’t make everyone uncomfortable.”
“Yeah, sure, why not?”
Joanna opened the front door, and Harris—Oh, Harris! — held out the urgently requested box of Monistat 7 and a pretty bunch of yellow tulips. “Hell-o,” he said too brightly, doing a little bow as if they were meeting for the first time. Behind him the afternoon was ending, and the light was prismatic and warm, like in a well-taken photograph on specifically appropriate film. Joanna felt a little joy hiccup bubble up her center. Her very own bass-and-drums-playing borderline-hippie college football champion. The Gentle Giant, Joanna’s friends called him. He had gifted her with a painstakingly compiled homemade CD mix on their second date, full of all sorts of hidden, funny references to things they had talked about on their first, some of which she was still decoding. He was perfect in bed: ravenous, unshockable, but not the slightest bit sleazy. Did such men really exist?
“Why, thank you,” she said, taking the tulips and the Monistat (which effected, downstairs, an anticipatory wave of relief) with a ladylike curtsy.
He raked a hand through his hair (sand colored, shaggy, lovely) and stepped over the threshold. “Do I look okay?” Brown Hush Puppies, khakis, an untucked periwinkle blue shirt unbuttoned to reveal the white T-shirt underneath. Joanna, at five ten, came up to his chest, which was, for a tall girl, a sexual intoxicant like no other. He could have worn Italian slides and Lycra, it didn’t matter. She could not have been more attracted to him. It was like a sickness.
“Perfect,” she told him. “Beautiful. Don’t be nervous.”
“Who’s nervous?” He shrugged, pretended to look over his shoulder, wrapped his arms around her. When he kissed her she felt that thing—that thing she might have identified as love, as happiness, had she any concrete previous experience with either to which she could yoke it.
After Josh “the Warthog” Weinstein, there had been a whole string of schmucks, Nice Jewish Narcissists all. All these guys were the same: lionized beyond repair by doltish, worshipful mothers, interested ultimately in doltish, worshipful girlfriends-cum-wives. These boys invariably rejected the hell out of her (being, as she was, neither doltish nor particularly worshipful), and in return, she developed a steaming, pulsating, wholly unwieldy contempt for the summer-camp-whoring lot of them. Joanna had shed actual tears in a therapist’s office when she was twenty-eight, after yet another disastrous go at homoethnic dating. “I’m an anti-Semite,” she’d sobbed in response to the standard “Why are you here?” “I hate Jews.” The therapist had recommended both Women Who Love Too Much and Portnoy’s Complaint and sent Joanna on her way.
Harris had been a regular at the Near Miss, Joanna’s coffee shop in Berkeley. She worked afternoons to closing. He ran a recording studio nearby, she found out later, and would stumble in at noon, read the paper, go to work at two or three.
“Is he Jewish?” Naturally, Marilyn’s first question.
“From one of the lost tribes, I think,” Joanna had replied. “Kind of like a Jew for Jesus, but minus the Jew part.”
“Oh, Joanna.” Marilyn cared obsessively about Jewish boyfriends (and husbands and grandkiddies, natch); Joanna cared about unbroken inherited china. Two sides of the same coin, it did not escape Joanna’s perception, but they stared at each other in willful mutual incomprehension nonetheless. “Bess is turning over in her grave.” Grandma of the Shattered Plate: patron Jew of guilt and shame.
“How can she dislike me when she doesn’t even know me?” Harris would ask, genuinely hurt and confused.
“Nobody dislikes you,” Joanna would explain. “Jews are just a little defensive about blood thinning. It’s been a rough couple of thousand years.” His family treated Joanna with a healthy mixture of skepticism (borne of an inkling that there existed sentiment in Joanna’s family that Harris was somehow not good enough for her) and welcoming openness, manifested in their eagerness to add a red-papered box with her name on it under their massive Christmas tree, their placement of a framed picture of her and Harris to their already overcrowded mantel.
“Your very first seder,” Joanna told him upstairs in her childhood bedroom, trying on varieties of outfits that would not further harsh her crotch. The Monistat wasn’t so very stat, after all — it would take at least a day until she’d feel any relief. She’d have to go commando, no question. Let it breathe. Marilyn used to say that, an admonishment never to wear underwear to bed. Your vagina needs to breathe, Joanna, covers pulled to her chin, could recall hearing in lieu of a bedtime story. A pretty disconcerting image for a little girl, needless to say — she had feared for years that she was smothering her vagina under clothes all day, that the beast of it (teeth and all) was gasping for air under her jeans. She’d taken fastidiously in high school to a pair of deliciously ratty, paint-splattered denim overalls, roomy in the crotch, which she still wore. Roomy in the crotch had come to be, in fact, a central tenet of Joanna’s fashion sense.
“I’ve been to a seder before,” Harris said, mock outraged, though no, of course he hadn’t. He’d bought out their neighborhood bookstore of Harold Kushner, stopped mixing dairy and meat, started peppering his speech with Yiddishisms, expressed huge retroactive gratitude for the perfunctory circumcision performed on multitudes of male infants born in urban hospitals in the early seventies. “The retelling of our emancipation from slavery gets me all farklempt every time.” He wiped away a faux tear. The absurdity of finding a philosemite here, in her life! She had suggested that they simply skip Passover, stay in Berkeley, go out for Indian, what did she care? But noooo, Harris wanted to “experience” it, home-style.
“It’s the longest, most boring holiday ever,” she’d told him. “It’s the worst. You get constipated, you get sick on bad wine, you talk biblical mythology until everyone nods off in their bone-dry matzo cake. I promise, it sucks!” He wouldn’t hear any of it.
“I want to show you that I’m amenable to Judaism,” he’d said.
“I believe that’s the official motto of post — World War II Europe, honey,” she’d retorted. And here they were.
“I’m not feeling so hot,” she said, forgoing the notion of pants entirely. She stepped into a red silk skirt, then back out of it when she remembered she’d be wearing no underwear. Then back into it when she realized who gave a fuck. A cool breeze fanned the flame of her womanhood. She relished the air.