In Case We're Separated (10 page)

I believed not in heaven, but in the poems I'd read and written in college, in my love for my children—not that I found anything, that long winter, to comfort me for the loss of somebody else's child. I planned to visit his parents but only sent a note, not just out of cowardice. With a magazine to put out and without Tibby's help—we didn't replace him—I worked late most nights.

 

A
s an adult, I never went near a synagogue, I didn't do anything identifiably Jewish, but on every holy day I knew just when sundown decreed candlelighting and the end of work. I knew what I would have been doing if I had been observant. The religion I didn't practice was not my cousins' comfortable, up-to-date compromise but some unforgiving orthodoxy, the Jewishness that takes over life: defiantly, I did not follow law after law. I didn't follow them so thoroughly that my son grew up apparently unmindful of religion, but somehow my daughter, Laura, learned how to be slightly Jewish, and unlike me, was serenely comfortable as she cheerfully lit the odd Hanukkah candle, attended services now and then, or sent Jewish New Year and Passover cards to my parents, who received them happily. My mother steadfastly cooked on holidays, my daughter was grateful, and both would ignore me when I'd demand “How could God allow Hitler?” looking left and right over my matzo ball soup. But my mother was getting old, and even the matzo ball soup had been omitted lately. The year Tibby died, Laura phoned me early in March to ask, “Is Grandma making a Seder?”

“When did Grandma ever make a Seder?” Soup wasn't a Seder.

“Once, she did.” Once, when Laura was about eight, she had. An uncle had read the prayers and the long Exodus story. Other years, the children and I had sometimes been invited to Seders at the houses of the cousins. We took turns reading aloud, we swallowed bits of matzo spread with this and that.

That March I wasn't doing well. Grief for Tibby had dulled but not lessened. I hadn't known him well enough to mourn properly. I didn't miss him, in truth. He'd been in my life so briefly; he was gone and things were as before. I knew no one else who knew him, except Eric, who didn't speak of him. But I didn't feel better. Sometimes I didn't remember why I felt bad. I rarely saw my lover, but had no inclination to spend more time with him, or break up. Later we lived together, then did break up—but that was all to come.

“Do you think you could put on a Seder?” Laura now wanted to know.

“Good God, no.”

“I mean the two of us, but in your apartment.” Laura was a junior at Brandeis, outside Boston, living in an apartment with several roommates. Brandeis was founded by Jews, and it closes for a week at Passover. “I don't want to feel abandoned,” she said. Some of her friends were traveling home to Seders. “I don't want to go out for pizza that night.”

“I'm sorry, honey,” I said.

I hung up the phone and looked at the calendar. Passover was in three weeks. I'd heard from no cousins. I couldn't be expected to think about Passover because I was grieving for Tibby, the boy with the yo-yo. Then, of course, I called Laura back—my own child, the child who was safe—and agreed to put on a Seder. The next time we spoke, I asked her, “But who'll conduct it? Who'll be the uncle? Who'll be the Jew?”

“I've been to Seders, and so have some of my friends.”

“Doesn't someone have to take charge?” I had already invited my friend Annie, but she wasn't Jewish and didn't believe in anything. So I invited Eric. “You're the Jew,” I told him. “The believer.”

“I'm the Jew.”

“I'll meet the bad man,” said Annie on the phone.

“Oh, he's not bad.”

The Seder was work. Laura had papers to write and no car, so I bought Haggadahs, the books we had to read. I bought what had to go on the Seder plate. I bought matzo and lots of parsley. I bought groceries to Laura's specifications: this was also a dinner party. She promised to cook, along with her friends, and when I came home from work the day of the Seder, three girls were in the apartment, and potfuls of food had been prepared: chicken, rice.

Laura followed me into my bedroom and closed the door. One friend had told her that rice wasn't allowed on Passover, while the other had brought a cake—not a Passover cake, just a chocolate cake.

“If you're going to worry about rules, I'm leaving now,” I said. I had brought plenty of wine—not Passover wine, just wine—and in my socks I went back to the kitchen and poured a glass for myself. Laura clutched at her light curls, a habit since babyhood, as she tried to organize my inadequate plates and silverware while her friends washed vegetables. “You're right, the food will be fine,” she said then, smiling at me.

Eric, in jacket and tie, was the only man at the Seder. Laura had invited her flute teacher, who met Annie on the front porch. They came upstairs together, looking pleased and expectant, which made me feel like a fraud. As we gathered around the table, I imagined Eric looking at this roomful of women. He'd picture us bare-breasted, I decided. The image in my mind—our varied breasts (and Annie had had a mastectomy) above the mismatched plates—was wholesome, not erotic. Laura lit the candles. She knew the prayer in English.

Crowded around the table, we looked in the book and explained to one another what to do. Laura was bossy but happy. She began the reading, and then we all took turns, joining in for the responses in earnest chorus. I kept forgetting to start at the back of the book and proceed forward. Some of the Jewishness felt odd, some surprisingly familiar, and I tried to count up just how many Seders the cousins had lured me to. Eric participated loudly and confidently. We blessed the wine and he drained his first glass, while the rest of us sipped. We ate parsley, we broke matzo. The flute teacher—a black woman with long hair coiled behind her head and elegant pewter jewelry—beamed, saying she'd always hoped to attend a Seder. “This is great,” said Annie more than once. She, Eric, and the flute teacher seemed like benevolent parents at a school play.

One of Laura's friends wanted to ask the Four Questions. She knew the beginning in Hebrew. I could see my quick-moving, hair-clutching daughter mind that, and mind the fact that she didn't know a word of Hebrew, which made me briefly regret my life. “Sorry, Jen, it's my house,” Laura said then, though it wasn't her house, and she asked the questions in English.

Seders like ours were apparently not unforeseen by whoever thought up the idea. The ceremony itself was in part about not understanding it. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” asked Laura, who might well ask. It turned out there were no more questions, just elaborations of the first question. “On all other nights we eat vegetables and herbs of all kinds, while on this night we must eat bitter herbs.” Children were supposed to ask these questions, though at Seders I'd attended, self-satisfied children knew more than anyone else present.

Before long the book described more questioning children, the wise son and the wicked son, the good Jew and the bad. The wicked son asked, “What is the meaning of this Passover service which God commanded you?” It was my turn to read, and I read that the wicked son was to be abandoned to his wickedness. “You,” he says, not “us.” The others were to tell him that God had led them out of Egypt. Presumably the wicked son had been elsewhere when this happened, leading his interesting secular life.

“I want to defend the wicked son,” Eric announced. “The wicked son's failure is a failure of imagination, nothing more.”

“What's worse than a failure of imagination?” I asked. I would never change—I would always be the wicked son—but I would not deny my wickedness. We continued with the simple son and the naive son, and then came the story itself: the Israelites in Egypt, Moses, God. The ten plagues.

“The ten plagues are barbarous,” I said. “I don't like God.”

“A nice God wouldn't last a week in
this
universe,” Eric said from across the table. “That's why the wicked son belongs in the family.” He was sitting right at the corner, straddling a leg, and the corner poked into his belly. His napkin was stuck into his belt though we weren't going to get our dinner for several more pages. He smiled benevolently as if he were God's consultant in the matter of hardening Pharaoh's heart so as to require the ten plagues.

“But it's His universe,” said the flute teacher. “Couldn't He provide any universe He wanted?”

Eric said, “We picked this one, and we go on preferring it.”

“I don't prefer it,” I said, thinking of Tibby.

“You wouldn't like a namby-pamby universe,” Eric said. “Eve tells the snake, ‘No thanks'—we get a boring world.”

“Hasn't our taste just been spoiled by the world we've got?” said the flutist, but her question was unanswered. Laura and her friends were shouting the ten plagues.

To express our moderate sorrow over the sufferings of the Egyptians, we were to dip a finger in our glasses of wine at the mention of each plague—blood, frogs, lice, boils . . . and shake a drop on our plates. Eric stuck all his fingers in, one after another, and flicked extravagant drops, then licked wine off his fingers. “I
extend
my pleasure over the sufferings of the Egyptians.”

“You're a character, aren't you?” said the flute teacher.

The Hebrews fled in a hurry, with unleavened bread, and the Egyptians followed. The Red Sea parted for the Israelites, but drowned the pursuing Egyptians, and we offered thanks for several pages, then finally ate our dinner, with normal conversation. Then, just when I began to think we wouldn't return to the final prayers, Laura proclaimed with good-humored fake surprise, “The
afikomen
is missing!” Half a piece of matzo had been wrapped in a napkin sometime earlier. Laura had hidden it, and the rest of us were supposed to search.

More ritual felt tedious, not just I think to me, but we stood and followed Eric, who joyfully flung open closet doors and even pulled out drawers and peeked ostentatiously into them. On our third trip through the living room, I noticed a book at an unaccustomed angle, and withdrew the blue-and-white-checked napkin, which was folded around the piece of matzo.

“You took so long!” Laura exulted, like a little girl. “May I have the
afikomen,
please?”

“No,” I said as the others returned to their places. I was surprised to hear myself. “No, I want something in return.” I suppose I'd half-consciously remembered part of another Seder, because the young people assured us that, indeed, the
afikomen
is always redeemed.

“I forgot,” said Laura. “I didn't plan a reward. Does anyone have a reward for my mother?”

“You won't give me the reward I want,” I blurted out, angry now with the entire evening.

Laura said, “We can't bring Tibby back!” His name hadn't been mentioned, but backs straightened and breath was drawn in; everyone knew the story.

“What made that kid an Egyptian?” I said, in tears. “Why didn't the sea open for him?” I heard myself give a low cry, then lowered the wrapped matzo and crushed it in my folded hands.

The
afikomen
remained unredeemed. After a while I sat down, feeling foolish, and handed the lumpy package to Laura, who distributed bits of matzo around the table. Now we spoke more quickly, thanking God yet again. Then it was time to fill a glass of wine for the prophet Elijah, and to open the house door so as to let him enter.

“The apartment door will do,” Laura said. I lived in a second-floor apartment in a two-family house. But I wanted cold air on my face, and a moment alone. I opened the apartment door, then walked down the stairs. Halfway down, I heard a heavy tread and turned to see Eric following me. “We still haven't redeemed the
afikomen,
” he said. “I thought what to give you.”

“Forget it.” The house was old, and tattered rubber mats were nailed to the stairs. Eric tripped and scrambled, recovering himself, and I took his arm. We made our way down the stairs like an elderly couple, the old parents banished from the happy table for bitterness and sorrow. I opened the front door and we stepped onto the little wooden porch. The air was cold and pleasant. Elijah was visiting at the house across the street, too—or else those people just didn't bother to keep their front door closed.

“You can close it now,” came a voice from upstairs. “Come back!”

But Eric withdrew something from his jacket pocket: Tibby's red yo-yo.

I gave a cry, then said, “Where did you get it?” I grasped it as if it were holy, an object sacred to my people—as if Eric didn't know what he had—and closed my hand around it.

“He left it in the office. I found it, weeks later, under a pile of papers.”

“And you kept it? You carry it around? And you'd give it to me?” I slowly understood that if Eric had it at that moment, he had it all the time.

“Yes.”

I kissed him on the lips. Across the street, the house door was still open. I wanted to see someone come and close it. Waiting, in my mind I found a rough map of Greater Boston, with house doors open here and there. Beyond Boston, all through New England, some people opened a door for Elijah. It was an intrinsically good act, I decided, to open a door, now and then, to Elijah. “Everywhere are Jewish people,” my grandmother used to say. In New York and New Jersey—my mind moved down the coast, omitting and then restoring Long Island—more open doors. If Elijah or anyone else cared to enter, that was temporarily possible. Eric, who stood behind me, flung an arm over my shoulder and across my body, so his elbow collided with my breast and his hand grasped my arm. “Come on,” he said, turning me around. We lingered a moment longer, while the door still stood open to the cold spring air, then climbed the stairs to the noisy dining room, where illicit cake had been served. Eric and I sat down to eat cake and praise God some more—God who could move the ocean aside, but mostly didn't.