“Oh, is that cute,” Aunt Barbi held up her plague card, squinting. “Joanna, this must be your handiwork.” Joanna had, for Blood, done a little cartoon Lady Macbeth, furiously attacking her hand, “Out, damned spot,” in a speech bubble.
Harris had been placed across from Joanna, and he smiled at her now over the perfectly laid table, just the two of them, apart and distant from this family. They would start their own. “So talented,” he mouthed at her.
“Well,” said Marilyn. “Welcome to our seder. We’re so glad to have you all here this year.” Barbi reined in a nasty tight-lipped smile.
“We’re so glad to be here, Aunt Marilyn.” Stacey was wearing a dress that made Joanna’s plate cower in floral fever pitch, her nails done in a pattern to match.
“Sit, sit, everyone sit.” Everyone sat. “Some of us have never been to a seder before,” Marilyn continued, nodding overtly at Harris. “So we hope you’ll feel comfortable participating as much or as little as you’d like.” Harris, his face gone pink like a healthy vulva, looked down at his poppy, his thick navy blue band, his evenly spaced flatware. He wore his new kippah, which bore a Hebrew transliteration of his hilariously un-Hebraic name. Ha-reess.
“This is the bread of affliction,” Kevin said, breaking off a corner of matzo and waving it at Harris. “That’s all you have to know, bro. Eat too much and you won’t have a bowel movement for days.” Jason and Larry chuckled, and Harris nodded solemnly. In Joanna’s head, the musical refrain: One of these things is not like the other….
“Good to know, good to know.”
Ron passed around his doctored Haggadot, myriad colorful post-its and inserts poking out from within. “Harris. Will you do us the privilege of reading us the order of the seder on page four?” To Ron’s right, Harris’s eagerness gave him the air of a magician’s assistant. He nodded, cleared his throat.
“One. Recite the kaddish—”
Aunt Barbi giggled. “The kaddish is for the dead. We don’t want to say kaddish anytime soon.”
“Recite the kiddush, sorry. Two. Wash the hands. Three. Eat a green vegetable. Four. Break the middle matzo and hide half of it for the afikomen. Five. Recite the Passover story. Six. Wash the hands before the meal. Seven. Say the hamotzi and the special blessing for the matzo. Eight. Eat the bitter herb. Nine. Eat the bitter herb and the matzo together. Ten. Serve the festival meal. Eleven. Eat the afikomen. Twelve. Say the grace after meals. Thirteen. Recite the hallel. Fourteen. Conclude the seder.”
Joanna watched him as he spoke. From Harris’s mouth, viewed from without, the seder sounded totally foreign even to her, like common cultural phenomena described in purely anthropological terms. A man’s necktie was nothing more than a long thin swatch of fabric, which a man must fold specifically into a knot at his throat if he wishes to be taken seriously in business; the failure to properly do so relegates him to a lower social and economic strata. Who gave a shit in those terms? Who could tie a tie with any measure of importance or seriousness in those terms? Jesus, why bother? Getting a master’s was reduced, simply, to the ritualized study of a specific topic leading up to conferrence of inflated intellectual status by those who have already completed ritualized study; everything was rendered meaningless and pointless from the outside, everything familiar and taken for granted canceled out entirely. So it was. A seder was: Recite the kiddush, wash the hands, eat a green vegetable, break the middle matzo, recite the story, wash the hands, say the blessings, eat the bitter herb, eat the bitter herb and matzo together, serve the festival meal, eat the afikomen, say grace, recite the hallel. That was all. Get too carried away with that line of thinking, however, and one might find oneself wearing the same underwear for three days at a time, dropping out of one’s MFA program, and invalidating one’s semi-beloved family seder with one’s unforgivable, covert, probable unkosherness. Joanna leaned alternately into one hip and then the other to avoid direct pressure on the insistent itch while her ugly plate hurled insults at her. Pussy, it hissed. Cunt.
When he was finished, Harris looked up at her. He was doing this for her. He loved her this much. What did one do with this kind of love? Love that did not bestow broken heirlooms or moot promises or venereal disease? One of these things was most definitely not like the other.
“We searched the house for hametz today,” Ron boomed, winking at Joanna. “Didn’t we, pumpkin?”
“Yes,” added Marilyn, “so you can all rest easy. The house is clean!” There was no end to the inferiority complex wrought by Barbi. Historically they despised each other.
“So on page one,” Ron went on, “we’ll repeat the blessing we said earlier, when we burned the last of the bread. This second time, it’s actually letting us off the hook a little, in case we missed anything when we did our search. Because nobody’s perfect, right?” Again he winked at Joanna. He seemed to wink at her more often in direct proportion to how much older she’d gotten since the last time he’d taken note.
He repeated the blessing for all the hametz they might not have found, a blessing for the blind spot, the things invariably missed. Uncle Steve, obedient and entirely without social skills, read along.
“Any leaven in my possession, which I have or have not seen, which I have or have not removed, shall be as if it does not exist, and as the dust of earth.” It was the second time she’d heard this today, and for the second time Joanna wondered if she wasn’t glowing pink and fluorescent yellow and ultraviolet, if it wasn’t totally obvious to anyone capable of looking, of really looking, that this implicated her in a hundred ways.
Where was the blessing for Unbearable Vulvar Itch? She flipped impatiently through her Hagaddah, squirmed in her seat and squelched the all-but-irresistible urge to grind her fist into her lap, a thousand red ants congregated in her crotch.
They did the kiddush and drank the first of way too many cups of sickly sweet wine, they passed around a big bowl and pitcher and ceremoniously washed their hands. They dipped parsley into salt water and munched like horses. Ron broke the middle matzo and wrapped half in his napkin for the afikomen, making a big show of it and smiling broadly at the “kids”—Joanna and Stacey and Jason and Kevin.
Back in the day, this had been the best thing about Passover. A Jewish equivalent to the Easter egg hunt. “After the meal,” said the old “Pathways to Freedom” Haggadah, “the children search for the half of Matzah which has been hidden. The one who finds it is to be rewarded. When the hidden part is found, the two halves are put back together again. This is a sign that what is broken off is not really lost to our people, so long as our children remember and search.” And on taped-in, blinding orange paper, Ron’s feminist, postmodern, politically relevant addenda: a midrash about soulmates, about two halves of a whole reunited for the order of life to be complete.
The dining room table, so deliberately laid, was beginning to be messed with now, plates pushed an inch this way or that to make room for Uncle Larry’s elbows or Aunt Jackie’s inhaler. There were no children at this Seder; there would be no shouting, giggling, running to find the afikomen when the time came. She and Stacey and Kevin and Jason would be coerced into a mock search for the thing (which Ron will have “hidden” in plain view under the piano) and then be rewarded with something asinine, like a dime.