What could they say? She was right. And simultaneously she was involving herself with religious ritual. Genius. This was all going to make for a freaking amazing Gender Studies final paper, and I was even beginning to realize that maybe I could seek out double credit from Judaic Studies, maybe even combine the two to create my own major. I would go to office hours with my beloved TA, sit on her couch, tell her all.
“Fasting, Lexi, is not an option for you this year.” My mother’s tone betrayed a helplessness she’d been working hard to deny since forever. “You know that. We discussed it with Dr. Clayman.”
No one seemed too concerned about the possibility of my fasting. I helped myself to seconds of tofu steak and refilled my glass, my appetite giving way not even a little. I had never, ever been hungrier. I couldn’t get enough. The potatoes were warm and buttery, soft but not insubstantial; the extrafirm tofu had been marinated in teriyaki sauce, which gave it a nice tangy edge; the salad was fresh and crisp and dressed just enough (but not too much) in a light and cool tahini; there was a beautiful loaf of crusty French bread that had enjoyed a perfect few minutes in the oven. The medley of it all, rolling joyously around in my mouth and sliding still warm down my throat, made me forget, if only fleetingly, my unrelenting ache, the toxic sludge in heavy jumbo pad number three, and cramps so consistent I did not believe I’d ever be without them again.
Lexi had apparently struck some sort of deal with Dr. Clayman and our parents, stipulating a food minimum she was required to digest at every meal. I watched her carefully cut off a quarter of the tofu steak, cut that quarter into quarters, and then shave thin sheets off each piece, which she ate directly off the knife. Her focus was kind of beautiful, and I stopped shoveling food into my face for a moment to admire her for it.
“Five minutes,” my father said, scraping plates into the disposal and then putting on his suit jacket. He refused to look at me, said my eyebrow ring made him sick to his stomach, said he couldn’t stop imagining something catching on it and ripping it off my face.
Lexi visibly relaxed, another forced mealtime over, a long, blessed day of religiously mandated foodlessness wide open ahead of her.
It had been — I was 89 percent sure — my orientation leader, Peter, with the uncircumcised penis and ironic T-shirt collection and thick-framed glasses that served almost no ophthalmologic purpose. He knew Pulp Fiction by heart, and the oeuvre of the Coen brothers, and most of The Simpsons, too; whenever I’d had no clue what the hell he was talking about in any given situation I quickly learned to assume he was quoting. This meant that I was always adrift in conversation, clinging all alone to my immediate unfolding reality in a sea of arcane, nonsensical references.
“You don’t win friends with salad!” I might hear in the dining hall. Or: “That Hanoi pit of hell,” as we left the crowded mailroom. “Money can be exchanged for goods and services!” as we bought popcorn at the movies. “When Bonnie goes shopping she buys shit,” while we strolled the aisles at Shaw’s. “I’m the Dude!” pretty much whenever. Then, invariably, he would high-five someone. I had learned to giggle knowingly and proffer my own hand high up in the air.
He was a nice enough guy, a perfectly okay guy, but I was sick to death of him and the quotes by the end of September, right around the time I began to realize I wasn’t menstruating, which happened, in the manner of all cataclysmic realizations, slowly and then all at once.
“My mighty heart is breaking,” Peter said when I told him I didn’t want us to get any more serious, that I wanted, I think I said, to be friends. “I’ll be in the Humvee.”
“What?” I said, and then remembered that that we weren’t actually having the same conversation. A week or two later, when I finally gave in to my insistent, shitty, unavoidable realization and bought an EPT, Peter had moved on to a sophomore from the next dorm cluster over and wouldn’t speak to me, his mighty heart ostensibly broken, whatever that meant.
So I didn’t tell him. And now it was over and I was home with my family, bleeding. And not the usual dainty crimson bullshit, either.
Kol Nidre was its usual blur of the best in fall fashions available from Banana Republic. A mob scene. They had opened up the sanctuary via removable walls to the giant function hall, which was lined with rows and rows of folding chairs. Lexi wandered off into the fray as soon as we got inside.
“Amanda,” my mother said to me. “Please keep an eye on her and make sure she eats. Daddy and I are completely exhausted. You have no idea what it’s been like for us.”
Lexi had never been one for role-playing along with any of my half-assed attempts to big-sister her. She dated guys older than I was. She’d had sex before me. She’d laughed in my face when I got my license and offered to drive her to the mall. She knew things I didn’t. I was no kind of big sister at all. I had an overwhelming instinct to tell her about the sludge and the cramps and ask her if it was normal, if I would be okay. Surely she had already been through this.
The ache, temporarily assuaged by dinner, was back in full force, so I paid more attention to the liturgy in my machzor than usual, flipping through the High Holiday prayer book to find something applicable to myself, to the jumbo pads, the ache. I sat with my parents and followed along, trying to be what my friend Jen called “present.” College had done this to me: I was hyperaware of a subjective reality everywhere, empowered by my newfound liberal arts curriculum to claim for myself, as my own, whatever the fuck I felt like. It wasn’t, I suppose, all that different from Peter’s quoting. I flipped curiously through my machzor the way Peter watched movies: essentially just looking for good lines.
“Where we have transgressed, let us openly confess: ‘We have sinned!’” was a good one. And “Even the admission that we have done wrong does not come easily. How, then, dare we enter Your house, O Lord, Knowing that our failings are so many,” was nice. And if I could imagine it coming somewhat sarcastically from the line-drawn mouth of Homer Simpson, all the better.
But in the machzor everything was stated collectively. We this and we that. We have sinned knowingly and unknowingly, willingly and unwillingly, publicly and privately. What a pansy-ass acknowledgment. There wasn’t an “I” to be found. Not a single one. We have sinned without thinking, intentionally and unintentionally. Vague and broad and collective: What a load of crap. Nothing specific, nothing that directly addressed me, the sins I had committed willingly and unwillingly, intentionally and unintelligently, without thinking, my ache, my exponential jumbo pad sludge, alas. There certainly wasn’t any we about it. We have trespassed? We have sinned? No: It had been me. My parents and Lexi, wherever she’d gone, had their own. The man swaying across the aisle, the one who used to give Lexi and me candy from his tallis bag during services, certainly had his own. There was, in fact, no simple we about it.
Outside the clinic there had been an old white guy in a rainbow lawn chair wearing a windbreaker and holding up a sign with a Bible chapter/verse number and a Jesus-fish-symbol thing (which couldn’t help but remind me of Peter’s penis). I had bestowed upon him the Indian name of Rainbow Lawn Chair. He didn’t say anything, just sat propping his sign up with one hand and reading a Bible he held with the other, eating potato chips. I would have preferred that he scream at me, block my path with gruesome pictures of fetuses, call me vicious names. But he didn’t look up from his Bible and chips, even when I paused briefly by the front door of the clinic, waiting for his tirade, wanting it, even, ready and willing to hear verses from his Bible pulled from context and hurled at me like Frisbees, one after another until he was plumb out and I could go. What was wrong with this guy? How was I to be dissuaded by something as simple and meaningless as “Exodus 21:22”?