The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  “Why?” Rachel asked.

  “Well, I think my grandfather was mad at her,” I began. I wasn’t sure of the whole story myself. I wasn’t sure who was still mad at who or who had done what when or for how long. It was confusing, and I was figuring it out myself, as I told it to Rachel.

  “At who?” she asked.

  “At his sister, the old lady who was sitting with us, remember? The kind of ugly lady?”

  Rachel nodded. “So why?”

  I tried to explain. “When my grandfather wanted to marry my grandmother, his whole family was against it. So against it, that my grandfather’s father threatened to cut him off from the business and all their family money.”

  “They had family money? What’s that mean?”

  “I’m not sure…but I think my grandfather’s family was really rich. They owned some big store in New York. You know, like Bloomingdale’s…but not quite. They had been in America a long time. They lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but my grandmother’s family was still really poor.”

  I had already known that. Sometimes my nana would tell me stories about when she was little, but I never thought much of them. They were more like fairy tales, like Hansel and Gretel or Sleeping Beauty. Something you’d read in a book. Or see in a movie.

  I went on. “So my grandmother’s parents were both born in Europe somewhere so they still spoke Yiddish and kept kosher, stuff like that I guess. My grandfather’s family told him if he married my nana, they would cut him off completely.”

  “But he married her anyway, didn’t he?” Rachel said. “That’s so romantic.”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  It was romantic, not that I could imagine my grandparents that way. I could only see them in their big giant bed, with me in the middle. My nana doing her needlepoint, my poppy watching comedy shows on TV.

  “I guess my nana’s family was an embarrassment to my grandfather’s family,” I said. “They thought she was too Jewish. I heard my mother say that.”

  Rachel was Jewish. She was even having her bat mitzvah this year. So even though I did absolutely nothing Jewish at all, I liked that this little story connected us in a way. A little Jewishness between us, separated at birth.

  At the same exact time but without saying so, we both lay back on my bed and looked up. A long time ago, my mom and I had cut circles from sticky shelf paper and stuck them on my ceiling. Now I had a solar system of purple and pink and red I could disappear into. I could float around and think about things without going too far.

  “Can you believe that?” I asked Rachel. “Too Jewish.”

  “No,” she said. “What does that mean? Too Jewish?”

  I didn’t know, but it made me think of the time Rachel’s mom asked my mom if I was going to have a bat mitzvah. It was over a year ago. She was just starting to plan Rachel’s—finding the right place, picking the date. She wanted to make sure there were no conflicts, that my family could all be there.

  “We wouldn’t miss it for the world,” my mother said. “That’s a great weekend for us.”

  That’s when Rachel’s mother asked, “Amy, do you ever think of having one for Caroline?”

  They were having coffee while Rachel and I were working on a school project together in the other room.

  “Of course not,” my mother answered.

  I thought my mother said that a little too quickly. I had just happened to walk into the kitchen, looking for scissors. I decided to linger by the “everything drawer,” where we kept everything we didn’t know what else to do with. The scissors weren’t supposed to be in there, since they did have a place, but they didn’t happen to be in it at the time. I poked around and listened.

  “Well, she is Jewish,” Rachel’s mom said. “Technically, since you’re Jewish. I just thought you might have thought about a bat mitzvah for Caroline. Considered it.”

  “It would be hypocritical at this point,” my mother said. “Besides, bar and bat mitzvahs have become so Americanized. Commercialized. With all the theme parties, the DJs and dancers.”

  I remember my mom had to call Rachel’s mom that night and apologize.

  Now Rachel and I lay on my bed and stared up into my ceiling, and in less than three months Rachel was going to have her bat mitzvah, or become a bat mitzvah, which was how she put it. She had a band and a caterer. She had invitations and yarmulkes with her name on them. Her whole family was coming; even her cousins from Israel were flying in.

  We were best friends and Rachel had included me in everything and anything I wanted. I even helped her with the decision on the food for the kids’ menu and the color of her tablecloths, lavender and navy blue. But then again, I didn’t have to go to Hebrew school two days a week and on Sundays. I didn’t have to learn a whole other language, and when Rachel showed me what she had to sing in Hebrew, I was so glad it wasn’t me. At the same time, I kind of felt like maybe it should be me.

  Or at least, it could be.

  Nana, how could you be too Jewish when I am barely Jewish at all?

  4

  I Would Have Been Nicer

  Had I known my last visit with my grandmother was going to be my last, I think I would have been different. I would have tried to remember everything, set it in my brain, and held on to it.

  I would have remembered to thank my grandmother for the terrific lunch at Gold’s Deli because, for one thing, a chocolate egg cream is the most delicious drink in the whole wide world. It is sweet and milky and has the bite of soda all in one. The top is frothy and the bottom is thick with the unstirred syrup. And it comes in a big, tall glass, so full they bring it to you with a little plate underneath.

  I would have asked her about her family. I would have listened better to her stories. I would have asked her about her mother. About her father, about where he was from. What did he do for a job? And what about all her brothers and sisters?

  Maybe I would have asked her about Poppy.

  When did they meet? How did they fall in love? Did she know about his family? How they disapproved? Did she know my new aunt Gert?

  And after our lunch, after Poppy and Sam went back to the apartment and I went with Nana to her doctor’s appointment, I wouldn’t have done what I did. I never would have done what I did if I had known how sick she was.

  Even though she told me later she wasn’t mad at me.

  I would never have hurt her feelings the way I did.

  The appointment had taken a long time. It was hot in the waiting room and they had boring magazines. It was good to be in the fresh air, even if it was New York City. It was only a few blocks’ walk back to my grandparents’ apartment. My nana said it would do her good. She wanted to take my hand, but I didn’t feel like it. I was a little jumpy. I looked up at the tall buildings, and at the sidewalk and all the people I didn’t know.

  And suddenly, I just wanted to try it out.

  I wanted to walk without my grandmother in the streets of New York, on Lexington Avenue, so people would think I was by myself. I wanted to look like I was old enough to be alone. I wanted to see what it felt like to be a grown-up, just for a little bit, in a little way. So I stopped walking, quietly, before my nana could notice, and before I knew it she was almost a half a block ahead of me. For a second I got scared. She was too far away. What if she turned the corner and I couldn’t see which way she went?

  “Why are you back there, Caroline?” My nana turned and looked at me.

  But I didn’t even answer her.

  I couldn’t respond to a perfect stranger, could I?

  “Caroline?” she called out again, and then, I guess, she gave up. I followed behind her, far enough to look like we weren’t together at all.

  Here I was, just walking by myself down the block. People passed me in both directions, couples and single woman, and a man walking his dog. Two teenagers smoking cigarettes.

  And me, Caroline Weeks, whoever that was.

  5

  Half and Half

 
; In my house, we are both, I like to say. I’m half-Jewish, half-Christian, whenever someone asks. I guess to be honest it was a little more half and half when I was younger, when I first started nursery school and first met Rachel. We both went to the Jewish Community Center. Not because my mother wanted to introduce more religion into our lives. She didn’t. My mother is not a big believer in things she cannot see or hear or prescribe medicine for.

  My going to the JCC had more to do with how close it was to our house.

  But we still had Christmas every year. My dad bought a tree and we hung stockings on the mantel by the fireplace. We had eggnog, which my mother said was too fattening but Sam and I loved. We left cookies for Santa, and we could barely sleep Christmas Eve.

  But we also had Hanukkah. I made decorations in class at the JCC and my mother hung them up around the house. I learned what the letters on a dreidel meant. Of course, it helped when Hanukkah and Christmas came around the same time, but I remember one year when Hanukkah came right after Thanksgiving.

  “It’s tonight,” I told my mother.

  “No, it can’t be,” she said.

  I was in public school by then. Rachel and I were in different classes that year, so it must have been second grade. There were only two Jewish kids in my room, Kate Nemerofsky and Danny Schiffman. They had been talking about it all day, talking about what presents they were getting. What they were going to eat. The teacher let them go to the front of the room and explain the Hanukkah story to the whole class.

  I may have been only seven, but I still thought they were making way too big a deal out of it. Lighting candles and eating latkas—even spinning a dreidel was nothing compared to going to bed, too excited to even lie down, then somehow falling asleep, waking up way before you were supposed to, and running downstairs in your pajamas to a magical pile of presents that hadn’t been there the night before.

  But still, being half and half, I should have at least known it was Hanukkah.

  “No, Mom.” I insisted. “It’s tonight. Tonight is the first night.”

  My mother is a doctor and she’s not home a lot. She works all week and some weekends she’s on call, so she’s not home then, either. She works really hard and she saves people’s lives, so I didn’t blame her. Hanukkah just kind of crept up on us that year. She checked the Hadassah calendar we get every year because my parents give them money. I was right. It was tonight.

  “Okay. Well, I’ll get the menorah down from the attic,” she said. But she looked tired. It was after eight o’clock and she had just gotten home from the hospital. She hadn’t even eaten dinner yet.

  “It’s okay, Mom. There are seven more nights,” I said.

  Sam was just a baby then. He didn’t even notice. I think we lit the menorah three, maybe four nights that year, and that’s probably when Hanukkah started to peter out in our house. Half and half became seventy-five/twenty-five. Then more like eighty/twenty.

  But the truth was, what I had really meant to say was, It’s okay, Mom. There’s seven more nights. As long as you don’t forget Christmas.

  But how could anyone forget Christmas?

  It was all around us, everywhere, and it began early. The local stores had red and green decorations up so early, it was almost as if they had never come down from the year before. TV commercials with Santa Claus and Christmas trees started pretty much right after Halloween. At the grocery store and the pharmacy and everywhere you went, people said “Merry Christmas” instead of good-bye. So if you didn’t want to correct everyone every time, you just got used to it.

  The principal at our school played holiday music over the announcements in the morning for the entire month of December. They weren’t religious, but everyone knew they were Christmas songs. The tinsel was so sparkly and the lights were so pretty. My favorites were the houses with one single white light in every window.

  But most of all, everyone celebrated it, talked about it, waited for it.

  Everyone except Kate Nemerofsky. Danny Schiffman.

  And my best friend, Rachel Miller, who not only celebrated Hanukkah but also Passover, and Rosh Hashanah, and some other holidays I didn’t know anything about.

  6

  It’s My Birthright to Play Hooky

  Tomorrow, according to Rachel, is Yom Kippur.

  I found out this particular bit of information on the phone. I wanted to borrow a book she had for a report I needed to do in social studies.

  “Sorry, Caroline. I’m not going to school tomorrow,” Rachel told me.

  “You’re not?”

  “No, remember? I told you. It’s a holiday.”

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  But hadn’t there been a Jewish holiday just last week? While I was still on the phone with Rachel, I was already imagining her empty chair in homeroom. And then I suppose, Danny and Kate would be absent from math and English, respectively. Because they were Jewish too.

  But so was I, wasn’t I?

  Rachel’s mother said I was Jewish because my mother was Jewish, and my mother was Jewish because my grandmother was, my nana. I suspected that went on and on, backward, for a very long time. And so just because my mother was throwing the whole thing away didn’t mean I wanted to.

  Besides, I could use a day off from school.

  We were having a chapter test in math.

  Thinking about my grandmother still hurt, like a sharp pain in my throat I had to will away if I didn’t want to cry. Sometimes it would come to me like a sense, like a memory—not of her, exactly, but the feel of her hugging me or taking my hand. The smell of her perfume, hanging in the air.

  “I won’t even be able to call you afterward,” Rachel was telling me on the phone. “We have to drive out to New Jersey to eat. We won’t be back till late.”

  “Okay. Well, have fun,” I said, which sounded so lame but I didn’t know what else to say. I had no idea what Yom Kippur was or what you were supposed to do, but I felt stupid asking Rachel. I didn’t want her to know how much I really didn’t know.

  I didn’t sleep well that night, which turned out to be the best thing because I looked terrible in the morning.

  “What do you mean, you’re not feeling well?” my dad was asking me.

  My mother had already left for work. It was Wednesday, so she had early office hours. My dad was putting out cereal and juice. He was already showered and ready to drive Sam to school and head to work himself. He and his partner, Jason, owned a promotional advertising company. They were the ones who thought up those giveaways and contests you see on the inside of bottletops and on bags of chips.

  “You do look pretty bad,” Sam said. He was practically standing on his chair, leaning half his body over the table and reaching for the box of Cheerios.

  “I think I’m sick,” I said.

  Wednesday was our busiest morning, so I knew my dad would give in pretty quickly. The more stressed he was, the easier this would be. That’s when Sam tipped over his entire glass of orange juice.

  I couldn’t have planned it better.

  “Oh, Sam,” my dad said.

  “Sorry,” my brother said. He slid down from his chair. “Sorry, Daddy.”

  “I’ll get it,” I said. “You get yourself ready, Dad. Take Sammy to school. I got this.”

  My dad was about to thank me profusely but stopped when he looked up and saw me. “Caroline, you’re still in your pajamas. The bus comes in”—he looked at his watch—“five minutes.”

  “Dad, I think I have a fever.”

  That was a mistake.

  “A fever?”

  “I mean, I’m fine. I’ll be fine,” I said. I started sopping up the juice with a paper napkin, with three paper napkins. If my mother were here, she’d tell me to get a sponge, but my dad didn’t notice. “I just need a rest, a little rest today,” I said.

  My dad paused for a moment, like he was frozen, thinking. It was probably a combination of worrying about me not feeling well, trying to remember how old I was and if
I could be left home alone, and wondering what would mom do in this situation.

  “Dad, I’m almost thirteen,” I said.

  “Yeah, Dad,” Sam added. “She’s practically a whole grown-up. She’s even got little boobies.”

  My dad looked at Sam and then to me, and then quickly back to Sam.

  But that had done the trick.

  I was off for the day.

  7

  Oh, Yeah, She Must Be Jewish

  I sat outside after watching back-to-back episodes of Real World that I had already seen before, and two hours of the Game Show Channel. The leaves were only beginning to turn colors. They brushed against one another in the wind, just the tiniest bit louder, the tiniest bit closer to drying out, turning brown, and falling to the ground. I let the sun touch my face.

  So this is Yom Kippur?

  I wondered what Rachel was doing at this moment, but I really had no idea other than that she was going to New Jersey to eat. Funny that I never asked her. I never thought about it before. Did my grandparents in New York do anything on this day? Did everybody that was Jewish know what to do?

  I had lost track of time but it was probably after one o’clock. I would be in gym right now. We were square dancing this semester, to coincide with our colonial unit in social studies. I can’t say I liked square dancing, but it was better than volleyball and I was pretty good at it. And best yet, the last two classes, Mrs. Danower had used me for her demonstration.

  Me and Ryan Berk, who for years had ridden my bus, but I’d never noticed him before that first class.

  We had to do-si-do and then do a quick promenade. Ryan’s grip was a little sweaty but I didn’t mind. I tried to make it look like my hand was just passing by my leg—I didn’t want him to see me wipe my hand off on my jeans as we walked back to our group.