Rye was doubly caught off guard, as that was the very temple he’d lied to Josh about belonging to for almost six years. For the first time, Rye thought there might be a God. One who enjoyed messing with people. Like him. “Um, oh wow,” he said, trying not to throw up into the phone. “I think I…Yeah, I maybe did, but— Oh, right, yeah, now that sounds— Yeah. I think I did.”
“He’s really good. You have to come hear him sometime.”
“For sure, yeah,” Rye said. He didn’t know how he’d been picturing Dara’s dad, but it certainly wasn’t as a rabbi. He did not realize rabbis could be Star Wars freaks.
Either way, the jig was up. Keeping up his charade for a couple of ordinary everyday Jewish parents he could handle, but for a rabbi? That was like trying to fool a Jewish superhero. There was no way.
The problem was Rye had never liked a girl even half as much as he liked Dara.
He would have to push forward.
And really, how much would he have to interact with her parents, anyway?
This strategy worked well enough for a few weeks. When Dara invited Rye over for dinner, he unfortunately already had plans with his own family. When she invited him again the next week, he had to help his brother, Cliff, with his algebra homework. (This made no sense on multiple levels. Rye was terrible at algebra.)
After the second refusal, Dara seemed slightly skeptical but was kind enough not to push him on it. But then, days later, she invited Rye to her house again. For a Hanukkah party.
“We’ve been doing it since I was a baby,” she explained. “It’s always really fun. And my dad’s latkes are amazing.”
Rye immediately understood how much Dara wanted him to come. He also understood that refusing this would be the third strike. He’d be out.
But this rabbi-hosted celebration would very likely expose him as the imposter Jew he was, and once that happened, he might be out, anyway.
“Uh…”
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. Or if you’re busy again or whatever.”
“No, no, it’s not that…,” Rye said, stalling for time, working through the various permutations of how the party could play out, trying to identify the best-case scenario, which was probably wowing Dara’s rabbi dad with his Chewbacca impression early on and not having to speak the rest of the night.
“Lemme guess,” Dara said. “You have to help your sister with her geography homework.”
“I don’t have a sister,” Rye said.
“Exactly.”
Rye laughed nervously. “Good one. But actually, it’s that…” He wanted to tell her. He knew he should probably tell her. “I’m very bad at dreidel spinning,” he deadpanned instead.
Dara laughed. “Well, that is a problem, but we can work through it together.”
So there it was. He’d be taking his nice-Jewish-boy act on the road.
* * *
***
When the fourth night of Hanukkah arrived, Rye felt as prepped as he possibly could be. He’d done thorough research, both on the Internet and using Josh as a primary source. The Temple Beth Shalom rabbi? Sheila Lipkin, beloved by all. The cantor? Ross Kramer, very nice man with terrible pitch. Rye walked into his girlfriend’s house, a list in his head of the imaginary presents he’d so far received, ready to do his new impression for his biggest audience yet.
“You must be Rye,” a shorter, older version of Dara said, appearing in the foyer of the house and shaking his hand. “I’m Robin. We’ve heard so much about you.”
“Oh, hi,” Rye said, wondering if he seemed Jewish enough, if he was already failing some unspoken test. “Same. It’s really nice to meet you.” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the din of chatter.
“You’re so sweet!” Dara’s mom gestured to the yellow tulips in Rye’s left hand, the ones his mom had forced him to bring.
“Hanukkah tulips,” he said, handing them to her.
Dara’s mom laughed. “That’s cute. Thank you.” Maybe it was that easy: Rye only had to add the word “Hanukkah” to whatever he said, and he could charm his way through the entire party.
“Dara’s around here somewhere. Follow me.” Rye involuntarily held his breath as they walked into a well-furnished family room filled with people of all ages, including four kids taking turns chasing each other with a Swiffer. “She’s probably in the kitchen.” Dara’s mom barreled forward, but Rye was cut off mid-stride by a clean-shaven man wearing a white button-down shirt, thick glasses, and a blue yarmulke made of yarn.
“Hello,” the man said, extending his hand. “I’m Shelly.”
“Hi. I’m Rye.” Shelly’s handshake felt like a threat, extra firm and vigorous.
“Short for Uriah?” That was new. Usually people asked if it was short for Ryan.
“No. Just Rye.”
“Huh. You’re Jewish?”
Rye nodded.
“Interesting. You don’t hear of many Jews named Rye.” Shelly smiled disingenuously. “Your parents must love a good corned-beef sandwich, huh?”
Rye tried not to wince. The irony of his parents inadvertently naming him after a Jewish deli staple (while trying to name him after one of their favorite novels) was not something he enjoyed.
“Like rye bread,” Shelly added.
“Yeah.” Rye made a sound he hoped resembled a laugh right before his legs got whacked by the tail end of the Swiffer, more startling than painful.
“Elijah,” Shelly said sharply to the ten-year-oldish boy who’d swiffed him. “You have to be careful with that.” Shelly shook his head, then gestured a hand in Rye’s direction. “What brings you here?”
“Um, I’m Dara’s…friend.”
He wasn’t sure why he’d said friend instead of boyfriend. Probably because he didn’t trust Shelly.
“Oh, wonderful,” Shelly said, no longer smiling. “My son Matthew is also a friend of Dara’s.” Shelly called out across the room, where a group of guys were in conversation.
“What?” Matthew said, looking over with a peeved expression. He was Rye’s age, maybe a year or two older.
“Come over here.”
Matthew had light hair and broad shoulders and wore, like his father, a crisp white button-down and a yarn yarmulke, except his was orange and blue.
“Matthew, this is Rye,” Shelly said. “He’s friends with Dara.”
In a heartbeat, Matthew’s eyes shifted from disinterested to magnetic, and a chill bounced down Rye’s spine. “Nice to meet you,” Matthew said, not unkindly. “How do you know Dara?”
Rye searched the room behind Shelly and Matthew, wishing he was not in this conversation. “We met at an open mic night. At Temple Beth Shalom.”
“Is that your temple?” Matthew asked, and for the second time in five minutes, Rye felt like he was being subtly threatened.
He tried to seem confident, to believe the lie before he said it. “Yup. It’s a, you know, it’s a great place. Cantor Kramer is…very nice.”
Rye was unimpressed with his own performance, but Matthew and Shelly seemed to buy it.
“Sorry, gentlemen,” Dara’s mom said, mercifully poking her head among them. “But Rye’s been requested in the kitchen.”
“Oh,” Shelly said, eyebrows raised. “Well then.”
Rye finally exhaled as he left Matthew and Shelly and entered the kitchen, which was even more of a scene than the family room, people flitting around an island in the center of the room, arranging platters, shouting things. A lanky man in an apron stood in front of the stove, flipping potato latkes. Dara was next to him, also aproned, holding the plate that served as the latke landing pad.
“Yay!” she said as she spotted Rye, breaking out in a huge smile that made his heart inflate. “You’re here!”
“I am!” he said.
�
��The famous Rye,” the aproned man said, turning from the potato pancakes to look right at him, inciting a wave of nausea. “The Rye man. Rye guy. Pleasure to finally meet you. I’m Jake. But you can call me Rabbi Goldfarb.”
“Dad!”
“Okay, fine, I guess you can call me Jake.” He smiled at Rye, who was charmed and taken aback by this joker of a rabbi. His name was Jake? Rye would have thought men named Jake wouldn’t qualify to be rabbis. Only Mordecais and Bens and Levs.
“Here,” Dara’s mom said, taking the plate out of Dara’s hands, “let me take over and you can show Rye around.”
Dara passed her apron to her mother and took Rye’s hand, leading him into another room. As her fingers intertwined with his, Rye felt something unwind within him. “How’s it going? I hope nobody pressured you to spin a dreidel.”
Rye laughed. “No, not yet. I did get cornered by Shelly and Matthew, though.”
“Ugh.” Dara rolled her eyes. “Sorry. They’re family friends. I mean, also Matthew and I were dating for a little while, but it’s not a big deal.”
It made sense now. The vaguely threatening handshake, the flip from apathy to intense interest. Dara already had dated a nice Jewish boy. And Rye’s high-wire act this evening would now be that much more challenging to pull off.
“Hey, Becs,” Dara said as they crossed paths with a teenage girl even taller than Dara. She wore huge clear-rimmed glasses. “This is Rye.”
“Oh,” Becs said, barely looking at him. “Hi.”
“This is my sister, Rebecca,” Dara said. She’d often mentioned how awesome her older sister was, so Rye was thrown to learn that Rebecca’s awesomeness didn’t seem to extend to making her sister’s new boyfriend feel welcome.
“Do you know where more candles are?” Rebecca asked Dara.
“Like, Hanukkah candles?”
“Duh.”
“I don’t know. Maybe in the bathroom linen closet?”
Rebecca sighed and walked past them.
“She gets really stressed when we host parties,” Dara said.
She pulled Rye back to the family room, toward a folding table covered with a blue-and-white paper tablecloth, a pattern of lit menorahs, dreidels, and Stars of David peppering its edges. Rye was struck by how similar the table’s spread—cheese, vegetable crudités, and crackers next to some kind of spread, probably whitefish salad—was to the kind his mother would put out while hosting.
“My mom’s friend Rhonda made the whitefish salad,” Dara said, cutting herself a piece of cheese. “I don’t do smoked fish, but everyone says it’s incredible.”
“My mom’s obsessed with whitefish salad,” Rye said, noticing Matthew out of the corner of his eye, kneeling on the floor with a bunch of kids, guiding them through a game of dreidel. He’s like the Jewish Pied Piper, Rye thought to himself. He hadn’t clocked Matthew’s boyish good looks earlier, but he definitely did now.
“Oh well, you got nun,” Matthew told one of the kids. “So none for you!”
Rye’s stomach dropped.
In all of his extensive preparation, he’d been so focused on Temple Beth Shalom that he’d forgotten to do any research on Hanukkah. It was a huge oversight. Sure, he knew how to spin a dreidel, but he always forgot the names of the Hebrew letters. And what they meant. Nun means none, he mentally noted now, trying to soak up whatever he could on the fly.
“Are you okay?” Dara asked. “You seem kinda…nervous. You don’t actually have to play dreidel.”
“No, I know,” Rye said, dipping a celery stick. “I, uh, I just…you know, meeting your parents for the first time and everything.”
“Aww, that’s so endearing. I think they really like you.” Even though they’d literally met him within the past half hour, Rye was comforted to hear that.
“Agh!” one of the kids shouted as Matthew wrestled him to the floor.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Matthew sooner,” Dara said, probably noticing the forlorn look on Rye’s face. “It’s so not a big deal, which is why it didn’t even occur to me.”
“He seems like a good Jew,” Rye said, almost involuntarily.
“What?” Dara asked.
“Just, you know,” Rye said, “that he wears a yarmulke and knows a lot about dreidel and stuff.”
Dara stared at Rye as if he’d just explained he was part guinea pig and was wondering if she had a wheel he could run on for a while.
As if out of nowhere, Dara’s mom appeared with four other women, descending upon the table and clearing away all of the apps in under a minute.
“You need help, Mom?” Dara asked.
“We got it, we got it,” she said, balancing three separate serving dishes in her arms.
“Here,” Matthew said, swooping in and grabbing two of the serving dishes before Robin reached the kitchen. Dammit. It was like page 1 of the How to Be a Nice Jewish Boy handbook.
When Dara’s mom and her entourage came out of the kitchen again—this time carrying steaming platters of brisket, noodle pudding, potato latkes, and carrot soufflé—Rye was ready. “Here,” he said, intercepting Robin a moment before Matthew could. “I’ll take that.”
“Oh, that’s sweet,” she said as she passed him a platter piled high with latkes, so many latkes.
“No problem!” Rye said. The platter smelled amazing, though it was heavier than he’d expected. Don’t drop them, he thought, taking slow steps toward the table. Don’t drop them.
“Ya got that?” Dara asked.
“Definitely,” Rye said as much to himself as to her. The table was only two feet away now, and he was about to start breathing easy when his foot stepped onto something round and plastic.
The goddamn Swiffer.
It had somehow ended up on the floor right next to the table.
Rye lost his balance as his foot rolled with the Swiffer’s handle, but he was determined not to fall, drawing on every muscle in his body to counter the forces of gravity. He wobbled forward, close enough to the table that he was able to put the platter down.
He felt triumphant. For a moment.
But then he realized with horror that he’d placed it onto a previously unnoticed seam, one side of the table’s surface slightly higher than the other, and as three women pointlessly shouted “Watch out!” Rye observed the platter slide and then topple off the table’s edge. He stuck out his hands at the last moment, blindly fumbling. He caught half a latke.
I dropped them, Rye thought, his vision a blur of potato pancakes and light blue platter shards strewn on the floor. I dropped the rabbi’s latkes. “Sorry, so sorry,” he said.
He looked up for a moment and immediately wished he could unsee Dara’s shocked expression. This was not going the way he had planned. He crouched down, about to start picking up latkes with his bare hands when Dara’s mom swooped in.
“No no,” she said. “Let me.” She cradled each fallen latke in a paper towel as she placed it onto a new platter.
“I’m really sorry,” he said again. “I’d love to— Can I go buy some more potatoes? Or, I could— I’m sorry about the platter. I’ll definitely replace—”
“Oh come on, don’t be silly,” Dara’s mom said. “Mistakes happen.”
He couldn’t help but think of himself as the mistake that had happened to her daughter. The entire party had stopped what they were doing to watch. Rye was crouching next to Dara’s mom as she inspected latkes, placing some on the new platter and others into a garbage bag. He didn’t want to look for Dara, afraid she would wordlessly point a finger at the door: Go.
Instead, he heard her voice in his ear. “You can stand up. It’s okay. And you can stop holding that.” He still had the half of latke.
“Oh.” He gingerly placed it into the garbage bag. “I’m sorry I just, like, ruined everything.”
“You haven’t ruined anything, Drama Queen. Come with me.”
Dara grabbed the hand that wasn’t coated in latke oil and passed Rye a napkin to clean the one that was. She wasn’t done with him yet. Thank God.
She led them through a throng of people, awkwardly brushing by Matthew, and, much to Rye’s immense relief, up a staircase to her bedroom. It had green carpet and smelled like her. “Take a seat,” she said, gesturing to her bed, which had four posts and a canopy above it. “I begged forever to have one like this when I was six, and now I hate it. But I don’t want my parents to know they were right, so I pretend I still like it.”
“I admire that commitment,” Rye laughed, trying to wipe the slate clean, erase the horrifying moment of five minutes ago.
“I admire you,” Dara said, plopping down next to him on the bed. They looked at each other for a moment, the air buzzing. Rye was shocked to realize that not only would he be allowed to stay at the party, but they were about to make out. Dara leaned in.
As Rye placed his hand on her neck, his fingers just below her ear, he felt more like himself than he had all night. Maybe they could stay up here and mess around till the party was over.
Dara started laughing, even as their mouths continued to touch.
“What?” Rye asked, smiling, too.
“Your face when you dropped the latkes,” Dara said, now pulling her head back a few inches. “It was so sweet. Like a scared little puppy.”
“Oh God,” Rye said. “I should probably go home. Learn how to hold latkes on YouTube.”
Dara laughed harder. “I always think of you as being so chill; I never realized how neurotic you are.”
“I mean…,” Rye said. Now was the time to come clean.
“I like it.” Dara smiled. “Jews are supposed to be neurotic. It’s built into our DNA.” She kissed him again, but Rye was so struck by her words he wasn’t able to fully enjoy it.
Dara was right. No matter how he’d been raised, the Judaism was inside him. In his freaking DNA! So he didn’t have to pretend. It was like some odd logic problem: his neurosis about not being Jewish was, in some ways, the very thing that confirmed he was Jewish. He felt simultaneously relieved and proud and was about to start focusing on the kissing when Dara pulled away. “We should probably get back downstairs,” she said.
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