by Roan Parrish
“Since I need an introductory word that I can imbue with equal parts rebuke, awe, and casual interest. Which requires a long vowel and a slangy cultural context. You want to talk about it some more?”
“Just say whatever you’re going to say and then leave me to die in peace.”
At the word die, Alex was flooded with memories of the look on Corbin’s face when he’d described his aunts’ deaths. A kind of blank confusion, even all these years later.
“As I was going to say: Dude, he really likes you. Staring at you constantly like you might disappear at any moment, smelling you when you get close, always arranging himself so he’s facing you, likes you. Plus he made you a challah and you both wanted to murder me for eating it.”
“Was rude,” Alex muttered, but he pulled himself to sit up because, while Gareth was occasionally very irritating—especially when feeling unconfident as he currently did—he was also the most socially astute observer of people that Alex had ever known.
Gareth smirked at him, recognizing that his bait had been taken.
“You think so?” Alex said. “Sometimes he’s just so remote, and I can’t tell if he’s even paying attention.”
“Well, do I think he’s a complete weirdo? Without a doubt. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t also pretty deeply into you.”
“Don’t call him that.”
Gareth’s eyes widened and his mouth quirked up. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head and shot Alex an eyebrow raise. “Wow. Okay, then.”
They sat in silence for a while. Gareth flipped on the television to the Food Channel, where it now stayed. “Listen, I’m gonna take off for a while. Go camping. I miss it, and it’ll be good timing. Why don’t you invite him over? Try out some of those Chanukah recipes you want to use for the shop over the holidays. Just, bring him here instead of only awkwardly hanging out at And Son, okay? Christ, I hate that stupid name,” he muttered.
He bit at his thumbnail, a strange expression coming over his face.
“And for the love of god, don’t go back to that house until you’re ready to fuck the kid within an inch of his life, because I swear there’s something going on there.”
“Going on? Care to elaborate?”
“No. Just, the vibe is all . . . something, I don’t know. Not bad, just really tense. Didn’t you feel it? Like we were being watched?”
“Nope. I was drunk. And distracted.”
“No kidding. I’ll leave in a couple days. No way I’m trying to buy gear today because everything will be swamped in the aftermath of your favorite holiday.”
Alex made a face, but was too hungover to properly express his disgust at people celebrating Thanksgiving. Gareth had heard it all before, anyway.
Alex almost didn’t hear Corbin’s knock, and smiled as he made his way to the door, because of course Corbin would knock instead of ringing the bell.
There was snow in his crow-black hair, like a dusting of sugar, and Alex drew him inside.
He hung Corbin’s coat and said, “C’mere,” leading him to the kitchen and drying off his hair with a clean tea towel. The dampness clumped Corbin’s hair together like one of the comic book characters from Alex’s youth. He was wearing ugly brown corduroys with sprung knees and another wool sweater, this one navy and cream, with unraveling cuffs, and Alex was flooded with fondness for him.
As Alex made tea, Corbin shifted his weight from foot to foot.
“Where’s Gareth.” His voice was cautious.
“He’s camping. Up near Saginaw Bay.”
Corbin cocked his head, his version of a question. “It’s cold.”
“Yeah, but Gareth’s from Vermont. When he was a kid, he and his brothers would go winter camping, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing. His dad was big on that whole outdoorsy self-sufficiency. I know he hated it as a kid, but it was one of the first things we realized we had in common in New York. How both of us missed being able to just take off and be in nature. Nature without a view of skyscrapers, that is.”
“New York City.” Corbin spoke like he was tasting the words. “I don’t think I would like it there. That’s a lot of people. A lot of . . . stimulation.”
“It is. I loved it some days. That feeling of excitement, in the air—almost magic. It was like anything could happen.”
Corbin’s eyes were sharp. “Magic,” he whispered.
Alex poured them both tea and smiled.
“It felt that way. But the flip side of the magic was all that damn static. What felt like fun and possibility could also feel oppressive. Everything was so hard there, from getting around to buying groceries.”
Corbin sipped his tea, nodding. “Things are . . . really hard sometimes. Just regular things. Here too, they’re hard.”
If that was true, and Alex was sure it was, Corbin was right that he wouldn’t like New York. Wouldn’t like the lack of fresh air to soothe his senses, or being bumped walking down the street, jostled on the subway.
“I never quite fit in with people there. Especially people who’d grown up in the city. It was all normal to them, and they didn’t want to spend hours getting out of the city with me to go hiking or fish on a lake. We’d walk through a park, or go to the botanical gardens and they’d say, ‘Here, some nature for you.’ But it wasn’t the same.”
“I’ve never lived anywhere but here. Never been anywhere but here.”
“Do you want to?” Alex studied Corbin’s face, so much more expressive than his voice. He was gazing into his tea, but his eyes were sharp and present.
“No. Not really. I don’t need to go somewhere different. I can make here be different any time I want.”
“By imagining it?”
Corbin’s gaze snapped to his like Alex had seen something he wasn’t supposed to. Then Corbin relaxed and gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Yeah.”
“You have an amazing imagination,” Alex said. He wondered if it extended beyond the pages of Corbin’s notebook, and the sudden flush of Corbin’s cheeks told him that it did.
What would it be like, to dance with that imagination without barriers, without walls?
At Corbin’s clear discomfort, Alex forced himself to take a step backward and a deep breath.
“So, I want to do Chanukah specials at the bakery. Some traditional things, like sufganiyot, but I also want to experiment. I want things people will get excited about. You want to help?”
Corbin nodded. “But I don’t know what that is. And I don’t really know anything about Chanukah.”
“No problem. Sufganiyot are doughnuts. Jelly-filled doughnuts. But we could do some interesting flavors. I want to do a babka—that’s a sweet yeast loaf filled with chocolate or cinnamon that you twist around and bake in a loaf pan so you can see all the lines of filling when you cut into it. I also like the idea of doing some sweet/savory and savory things. Have you had kugel?”
Corbin shook his head and Alex, thinking back to the kitchen and Corbin’s description of the irregularly balanced meals of his childhood, imagined he hadn’t tried a lot of things.
Alex wanted to make them all for him.
“Kugel is a casserole made with egg noodles and a mix of sour cream and cottage cheese and butter. It’s lightly sweetened with sugar, or sometimes raisins, but it’s not dessert sweet. It bakes up like a lasagna and you cut it into squares. But I thought we could do miniature kugels in muffin cups.”
Corbin bit his lip. “That doesn’t sound . . . very good.”
Alex grinned. “I’ll make it for you and you can see. But I think people will be into it. Your choice, then. Do you want to make kugel tonight, or sufganiyot?”
“Sufganiyot,” Corbin said immediately.
“Okay, but I’m going to get you to try kugel eventually,” Alex threatened.
Alex showed Corbin how to make the yeasted dough, and when they put it aside to rise, they sat in the living room.
“Do you celebrate the holidays?” Alex asked.
“No. My aunts celebrated the
solstices, but not Christmas. Or Chanukah. I should know about it, but I don’t.”
“Do you want me to tell you?”
Corbin nodded, and drew his knees up, settling in like he wanted a story.
“Over two thousand years ago, Israel was ruled by Antiochus, the king of Syria. He wanted to unify his kingdom through a shared religion, so he suppressed Jewish traditions, outlawed rituals, and subjected elders of the temples to great dishonor. One respected rabbi was told he must eat pork, going against his Jewish dietary laws. He refused and was put to death. Soon, the fighting began, with small Jewish factions rising up to destroy the altars that were being built in the ashes of their temples.”
Corbin’s eyes were wide and intent. When Alex paused, he nodded for him to go on.
“One small group, called the Maccabees, was seen as particularly threatening, and Antiochus sent an expedition to destroy them. The Maccabees defeated the expedition, so the king sent another, which they also defeated. Finally, he sent an army of more than forty thousand. After many battles, the Maccabees defeated them as well, and went on to liberate Jerusalem. They entered the temple and swept away all the idols that vandals had left there, and built a new altar.
“The temple’s golden menorah had been stolen, so they made another one, from whatever metal they could find. When they went to light the menorah, though, they only found one small jug of olive oil that had been blessed. It was only enough to light the menorah for one day.”
Alex paused and Corbin leaned in.
“But, by a miracle, the oil burned for eight days, until more oil could be found. That’s why we celebrate Chanukah for eight days, and why traditional Chanukah foods are cooked in oil. To celebrate the miracle that confirmed the Jews’ right to practice their religion and keep their traditions despite the attempt to stamp them out.”
Corbin’s eyes had widened at mention of the miracle.
“That’s the story. We celebrate Chanukah starting on the day of the rededication of the temple. It’s on the Jewish calendar, though, so that’s why it’s a different time every year. It’s also called the Festival of Lights, and my mom always said that she liked celebrating the idea that when they were cleaning up the vandalized temple by the light of the menorah, people were so joyous to be allowed to connect with their god again that it was a celebration. That joy has the power to do remarkable things. Joy can drive out the darkness. Even though we were never religious, she and my dad had a Chanukah party every year because they wanted to celebrate joy. Celebrate the way we can come together and be more powerful than the things that threaten us.”
Alex remembered the smells and sounds of those parties, the house overheated from cooking and light and the press of bodies. The tang of oil and potato in the air, the endless games of dreidel, the whisper of snow from the windows thrown open against the heat the guests had created.
His mom had stopped throwing them after his dad died. The last one was the day after Alex came out to his parents. It had seemed a good time. Home from college for winter break, smitten with his first boyfriend, and enough removed from high school not to feel attached anymore to the person he’d been then.
His mom had grinned—he suspected she’d had an inkling already—and his dad had cried happy tears that he’d felt he could tell them. And maybe a few less happy ones that it had taken him years. They’d hugged him and smothered him in questions, and he’d gotten grumpy about answering them all and left to go for a walk, but the next morning they’d still been smiling when he came downstairs for breakfast.
He thought of that moment whenever he smelled latkes, the oil from the party that night mingling in his memory with his father’s happy smile and his mother’s twinkling eyes when she asked for details about his boyfriend.
“A miracle,” Corbin murmured now, eyes fixed on a spot over Alex’s head.
“Well. If you believe in that sort of thing. Call it a metaphor for faith, if you like. Okay, should we make some doughnuts?”
Alex reached out a hand and when Corbin took it automatically, he pulled the smaller man to his feet. A look of confusion crossed Corbin’s face, and he took his hand away like he couldn’t quite understand how it had gotten in Alex’s.
They cut out circles of dough and covered them to rest again.
“Do you have a party now?”
“Hmm? Oh, a Chanukah party. No, I never have. When I moved to New York, I was dating this guy who loved Christmas. He loved the tree and the music and the parties, and I liked celebrating with him. It was nice to get swept up in everything. Chanukah . . . most people don’t even think about it unless they’re Jewish, so it tends to disappear. It was easier for a little while to just go with the Christmas flow.”
Corbin pushed his hair back, leaving a streak of flour in the black strands, and it tugged at something in Alex’s stomach.
“Also, I think . . . after my dad died, Chanukah didn’t seem as festive. I didn’t want to have my own Chanukah parties when I knew he wouldn’t be there to fry the latkes, or to wrap all the presents in newspaper. He always picked relevant stories for each present.”
Alex smiled to remember the year he was fourteen and he first realized that his father’s thoughtfulness actually meant that it was pretty easy to guess what would be inside the wrapping. He’d never told his father that the big “surprise” of a box full of dozens of comics and graphic novels he’d asked for had revealed itself by being wrapped in the comics section of the newspaper.
“But after a few years—and after George and I broke up—I got kind of sad that Chanukah was this thing that I didn’t do anything about. So I started getting together with friends intentionally. Not parties, just a dinner or a brunch. Sometimes we’d play dreidel as a drinking game.” At Corbin’s blank expression, Alex explained, “Dreidel. It’s a game with a spinning top. I wanted Chanukah to feel cozy and be about togetherness. I wanted it to have that magic that Christmas has automatically. That’s why it’s important to me to have Chanukah pastries at the bakery.”
Alex poured oil into a pot on the stovetop and clipped a thermometer to the side.
“Why did you break up.”
“George and I?” George, with his white-blond hair and his need for everything to be beautiful, had eventually come to seem more a work of art than a person. “We didn’t have that much in common. So after a while, it just kind of fizzled out. He cared so much about how things looked that he sometimes forgot it was also about what they meant. He was a sweet, kind person, but we weren’t right for each other.”
“How do you know if someone’s right.”
There was a faint line between Corbin’s dark brows, and Alex risked a step toward him.
“You just know, Corbin.” Then shook his head at himself. “At least, I assume so. I don’t think I’ve ever been with the right person.”
Corbin seemed to be struggling with something. “But,” he said sharply. “But how. How would you tell.”
“Well. I think for me I would tell because I would feel comfortable around them after a while, as if I could be myself and they would like me for it. I would think of them first when I wanted to tell someone things that happened. If I were doing something or seeing something amazing and they weren’t there, I would know that it would be better with their presence. I’d want to know everything about them. Even the bad stuff. And I would stand behind them, support them, feel proud that they had chosen me to spend their time with, to trust.”
Alex trailed off, realizing he’d stepped even closer to Corbin.
“And you never felt those things. With those other men.”
Alex shook his head. “No. It was all pale, a shadow of what I think it would feel like. They all wanted me, and I wanted them. But . . .” He ran his fingers through Corbin’s hair, dusting the ground with flour. “They didn’t need me. I didn’t need them.”
Corbin made a choked sound and squeezed his eyes shut. Alex’s heart was pounding with the desire to crush them together, che
st to chest, and hold on fiercely.
But Corbin looked pained. He clasped his hands together like one hand was keeping the other from reaching out, and a muscle jumped in his jaw.
Alex took a deep breath and cleared his throat, his blood like fire and his head light with desire.
He made himself move away from Corbin, and dropped three circles of dough into the oil. “You want to let them come just to golden brown and then flip them.”
He bobbed the dough over in the oil, then scooped out the doughnuts when they’d browned and slid them onto a plate lined with paper towel.
“Here, you try.” He handed Corbin the spider.
Corbin’s hand trembled as he took the implement and stepped up to the stove. He flipped the doughnuts, let them brown, and removed them. Then he added more, and did it again. In a few minutes it was like he’d forgotten Alex was even there.
Then, on the last batch, he seemed to get lost somewhere between his mind and his hand. The spider hovered over the hot oil, but Corbin’s eyes had drifted up and to the side, and Alex watched as the doughnuts turned from golden to brown to black.
Alex snaked a hand in front of Corbin and switched the stovetop off.
“Corbin,” he said softly, and watched as his attention returned.
“I burned them. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it; we have plenty to experiment with.”
“I don’t always . . . I’m not the best with time. It goes such different speeds sometimes.”
Alex nodded. He’d seen the moments when Corbin’s attention caught on something and he rolled inside himself, the way Alex might lose himself watching a movie or reading a book. He’d also seen the moments when Corbin observed every detail with each of his senses, so present and attentive that it would seem as though time had slowed.
Alex was coming to love the way Corbin described how things felt, instead of how they were.
“What were you thinking about?”
“The oil. The . . . miracle. It was like a blessing. A way for their god to say they were getting it right. A sign. The oil was a sign.”