“Now do-si-do and allemande your partner,” Mrs. Danower shouted out. Everyone started moving at once in their circle, turning the wrong way and bumping into each other. Only Ryan and I had it right. It wasn’t exactly Dancing with the Stars but it was pretty cool.
Ryan didn’t look at me while we were dancing. He looked just about everywhere else, but the next gym class, he asked if I wanted to be his partner again.
I realized I kind of had two lies going today. One, that I was sick, and two, that I was Jewish, but if I sat here on my porch steps any longer I’d get a tan, and that would be hard to explain either way.
Still, I didn’t want to move. I closed my eyes, wondering if I cared whether or not Ryan Berk liked me.
Liked me that way.
I went inside, into my bedroom, and took out the necklace my grandfather had given me. Maybe if I put it on, something Jewish would come to me. I had wrapped it in tissue and stuck it in the corner of my top dresser drawer. No one at school was going to notice I wasn’t there anyway. And if they did, it’s not like they were going to wonder if I was absent because I was celebrating Yom Kippur. Is that the right word? Do people celebrate Yom Kippur? I didn’t even know.
It’s not like they were going to think, Oh, yeah. Caroline Weeks isn’t here today. She must be Jewish.
I pushed my top drawer closed without taking out the necklace. Maybe I should have gone to school. If I hadn’t stayed home, I could be half sashaying with Ryan Berk right at this very moment.
This whole skipping school was a stupid idea. I was stupid. And worse, I was bored.
I was so bored I lay on my bed and fell asleep.
8
Everyone Needs Something to Hold On To
You know when you fall asleep but you’re not really tired because it’s the middle of the day? You just fall asleep because there’s nothing else to do.
And you start to dream but you know you’re dreaming?
That’s what happened to me.
I am swimming.
Swimming and swimming but not getting anywhere, like my legs are stuck in mud, or tangled, twisted in the blankets. Now I am in the deep ocean and I am pretty far out from shore, too far. And when I realize I am not getting anywhere no matter how hard I paddle and move my arms around, I begin to panic. I am terrified, desperate for something to grab on to.
I am flailing my arms around but there is no one.
I am going to drown. My body is like lead. I can feel the water on my face.
I can feel tears springing into my eyes. I am so scared. I want a ladder, a rope. Something to grab on to. Someone to reach out, pull me in. I can feel the water in my nose.
Then suddenly I am not drowning.
I’m crying. I am crying and crying, half-asleep and half-awake. I can feel the wetness on my pillow and my mind is telling me to wake up. I am only dreaming. It’s the middle of the afternoon, I tell myself.
Wake up. Wake up. Open your eyes.
I try to will myself awake. I force my eyes open.
Open.
Now there is no ocean. No water. It’s Wednesday, remember? Square dancing. I skipped school, remember?
I am home sick.
And I’m probably going to get in trouble for skipping school, but a part of me is just so relieved not to be drowning. Then just before I wake up completely, I think I feel my grandmother with me. It is so real and so strong. And it’s not just the awareness, it’s the feeling of being loved. Of being a part of someone, connected without touching. Like perfume lingering in the air.
Nana? I whisper. And then just like that, it is gone.
But not entirely.
9
The Zelkowitz Affair
Really, the most Jewish thing I’d ever done was lighting a candle at a bar mitzvah. And ironically, it was my dad’s friend. It was the bar mitzvah of his business partner’s son, Matthew Zelkowitz.
We had known them for years. We had Thanksgiving with them a few times. We even went away with them on vacations when Sam and I were younger, when the year’s difference between me and Matthew, and the two years between Sammy and Matt’s little sister, Brittney, didn’t matter. We didn’t see them as much anymore but we knew our whole family would be invited to his bar mitzvah.
Still, nobody warned us this was going to happen, that we were going to be called up—to the tune of “You’ve Got to Have Friends”—to light a candle. My family and I were just minding our own business, sitting at our seats.
Not that finding our seats had been an easy thing to do. All the place cards were set up on a table outside the main room of the hotel in alphabetical order and there were hundreds of them, perfectly lined up paper pup tents. After an hour of what I thought was the main meal but turned out to be appetizers, a woman in a tuxedo wandered around with a little bell and told everyone to go inside and find their seats.
“What does this mean?” Sammy said. He had found our names and grabbed the cards right off the table, sending the neat, straight rows into jagged disorder, but it didn’t matter because pretty much right after he did that, everyone started grabbing for theirs.
“What?” my dad asked.
Sammy had three place cards in his hands. He was reading the inside of his.
“Water Works,” he read. “What does that mean?”
I took my card from my brother’s hand and opened it up. “Electric company,” I said out loud.
I didn’t know anyone at this party. I knew my dad’s partner, Jason, and his wife, Marcia. And I knew their kids, Matthew and Brittney, but not very well anymore and certainly not their friends, so I had been forced to hang out with my parents and my little brother. The service had been long and mostly in Hebrew. People stood up and sat down constantly and there was a lot of singing. I looked over at my mom to see if she knew the words. Her lips never opened.
“We are on Tennessee Avenue,” my dad announced when he read his place card. “My favorite.”
“Oh, it’s Monopoly!” Sam said suddenly, very pleased with himself.
“Monopoly what?” I asked.
My mother folded her card and slipped it into the jacket of her suit. “It’s the theme,” she explained. Then she looked at me. “Don’t ask,” she said, rolling her eyes.
When we walked into the party room, I understood. Every table had a sign on it, a blowup of a property on the Monopoly game board. There was New York Avenue in orange, St. Charles Place in purple. Vermont Avenue was light blue, Atlantic and Ventnor, yellow. That’s when I realized we weren’t sitting together. The grown-ups had street properties; the kids must have the utilities. I wasn’t even sitting with Sam.
“Mom?” I looked at her. My dad was good with sensitive things, but my mom was better at negotiations. My dad would tell me I could handle it. My mom would move chairs around.
The music was blasting as we looked around for our table. There was a full band on a large platform toward one end of the room, with a woman singer in a long slinky dress crooning into her microphone. But there was also what looked like a DJ setup and four or five young men and women dressed in black-and-gold spandex moving slowly to the music, as if they were not quite yet aware of all the guests now pouring into the room. It took me a moment to realize they were entertainers, just waiting to perform.
All around the room huge television sets were suspended from the ceiling. They hung down at an angle, and I just realized, it was so you could watch the whole party. As it was happening!
Sure enough, my mom managed to get us all sitting at the same table. She explained to one of the thousand waiters standing around that her children would prefer to sit with their parents than at either the kids’ table or the teenagers’ table, and within half a minute new chairs and place settings were arranged.
Now we were all sitting together on Tennessee Avenue. Mr. Monopoly, with his shiny top hat and handlebar moustache greeted us. Beside each salad plate was a miniature canvas bag, tied at the top and stamped with a money sign.
Sammy already had his opened and was counting the fake bills inside.
“Don’t, Sam. You’re not supposed to touch that,” I said to him.
“I can. Why not?” But he wasn’t sure. He looked around to see if anyone else was opening their bag of money.
“It’s okay,” I told Sam.
I think the sensory overload was getting to me. The music was loud. There were too many people, too much movement, too many plates and pieces of silverware and glasses at the table. Instead of a centerpiece of flowers like I had seen before at weddings, there was a huge crystal bowl in the middle of the table. It was stuffed with what looked like, yes…over-size Chance cards and giant Community Chest cards, and sticking out of the top were all the different Monopoly tokens. Not the little metal ones that come with the game but large replicas made of plastic or Styrofoam. The terrier, the top hat, the shoe, the wheelbarrow, the race car. They were all there, and as I looked around me, every table had the same thing.
A bunch of the kids were gathered around the back of the room, and I figured out there were blackjack tables set up there. Against the wall was a giant roulette wheel. Sammy did some scouting and reported back to me.
“They have a guy who will take your picture and put it on the cover of any magazine you want. Like People. Or Time. Or Sports Illustrated.”
“No, thanks,” I said.
Matthew Zelkowitz didn’t look anything like a man to me. He didn’t look much older than my brother, but I knew he was. Still, he had stood on the stage in the synagogue and nearly without crying recited a very long song in Hebrew.
Now he was standing in the front of this whole crowd of guests, a complete orchestra all quietly holding their instruments, the dancers, the hip-hop DJ, the really tall MC with the big mouth (who had somehow silenced the entire room), an enormous waitstaff looking bored but ready, and three separate photographers (one standing on a ladder) and one video guy.
Someone handed Matthew his own microphone. Someone else wheeled out a table with a huge, flat birthday cake, its entire perimeter staked out with tall, skinny white candles. One by one he called up his family and close friends to light them. It took me a while to figure out that the DJ played a different song each time, something that related to the guest who had been called up. It was pretty cool. The cake was nearly on fire by the time he got to candle number eleven.
“It may be business but you’ve been like family. Sammy, Caroline, Amy, and Randall—come on up and light my eleventh candle!”
That was us!
It was my family. My dad and mom, and even me and Sammy. We all sat looking at one another for a moment. Then I saw my mom had this big smile on her face. My dad, too. They stood up and motioned for us to do the same. Watching everyone else go up there and stand next to Matthew had been fun, but this was exciting. I remember thinking this is really important, an honor. He had chosen my dad and us because we meant something to him. Because we had shared memories and we were connected no matter how old we got or how little we might see one another. Because he cared about us.
In the picture that Marcia Zelkowitz sent us a couple of months later I am smiling so big I think my cheeks will split.
10
Girls Like Who?
I was right about Yom Kippur. Nobody at school put it together. Nobody came up to me and said, “Oh, cool, Caroline, I didn’t know you were Jewish.” Rachel didn’t even ask, because, of course, she didn’t know I wasn’t in school yesterday.
I didn’t feel like bringing it up to her. I felt silly. It was Thursday. I’d missed a math test, that’s all, and now I had to make it up before the end of the week. Nothing had changed for me, but apparently Ryan had found a new square-dancing partner in my absence because she came up and told me about it.
“Oh, hey, Caroline. We missed you in gym yesterday. But it’s okay. I filled in for you.”
It was the new girl, Lauren Chase. Rachel and I still called her “the new girl” even though she had been here since the end of sixth grade last year. She showed up around April as the new girl from Virginia. Richmond, Virginia. She was in my science class this year, which is where I was headed right now.
“We did a lot of square dancing at my old school,” Lauren informed me.
I responded with my old tried and true, “What was that?” which is meant to buy time until I can think of something more clever but never works. So I suppose, in reality, it is only tried but not true.
Lauren laughed, showing her white teeth. She did that a lot. “It was fun. Ryan’s got really nice moves,” she said.
Nice moves?
Who says something like that? Maybe you just need the Southern accent to pull it off. Lauren walked into the science room ahead of me.
No, I thought. “Nice moves” sounded stupid any way you said it.
I followed her in.
Then just as class was about to start, Lauren leaned as far over her desk as possible. “Hey, Caroline. By the way, I’m having a sleepover in two weeks. For my birthday. Do you want to come?”
Now, Lauren was one of those popularity enigmas. Most of us had to pay our dues. We had to suffer through second-tier seating in the cafeteria, last-place picks for gym teams, and a lack of invitations to certain “popular girl” birthday parties. It was work just to get a halfway decent status position in the middle school—not at the top, but not at the very bottom, either.
But Lauren Chase had somehow skipped all those steps.
She came onto the scene popular.
Like being praised by Simon Cowell on your first song.
I think it was her blond hair. Her clothes, certainly. And the way she just assumed it. I believe I am popular, therefore I am, and therefore everyone else will believe it as well. As much as I didn’t like her, I wanted so badly to be just like her.
“Well, do you?” Lauren asked again.
I wanted to know if Rachel Miller was invited too. I wanted to tell her I’d get back to her when I found out. Because I wouldn’t go to any party Rachel wasn’t invited to.
Really, I wanted to know why she was inviting me at all.
Did she think I was someone else? I was trying to remember if she had called me by my name or not.
“Look, if you don’t want to…,” Lauren pressed.
“No, I do.”
Then I crossed my legs casually and looked up like I was waiting for the teacher to start class, which I really wasn’t since I just remembered I hadn’t done the homework. “Thanks,” I added, to seal the deal before it was off the table.
Lauren whipped her hair around off her shoulders and leaned back against her seat. “Good,” she said.
At lunch, I was anxious about telling Rachel about Lauren’s invitation.
I waited until we were both sitting down with our lunch trays. It was noisy and crowded and the hot lunch looked awful. I picked at my Beefaroni with my plastic fork while I thought of the right way to phrase what I wanted to say. I knew Rachel’s feelings would be hurt if she hadn’t been invited to Lauren’s party and I was. But if Lauren had asked her, too, then Rachel was probably just as worried about telling me. I needed to say it just right, slowly….
“So Lauren Chase just invited me to her sleepover party,” I finally just blurted out.
“Oh.” Rachel looked up and smiled at me. “I’m so glad,” she said. “I got an invitation too and I was so worried that you didn’t. But now we can both go. Right? I mean, if we want to.”
“Yeah, I guess. Do we want to? We don’t even like her. Do we?”
“No. But oh, who cares.” Rachel laughed. “Maybe it will be fun.”
We talked about who else would probably be going, what we would wear. And could Rachel borrow my brother’s sleeping bag if we needed to bring our own.
Of course.
I was so excited that we had both been invited, it wasn’t until after we finished lunch, brought up our trays, and had each headed off to our fifth-period class that I realized something.
>
Had Rachel said she got an invitation?
Like a paper one? In the mail? But Lauren had just told me about it in school, just a few minutes ago. So maybe I was the afterthought. Maybe someone else couldn’t come to Lauren’s party and I was just a fill-in.
I was trying to figure it all out as I got on the bus and took my seat next to Megan Nichols. Maybe Lauren didn’t want to invite me but she was trying to get in closer with Ryan Berk. Maybe she liked him?
“Hi, Caroline,” Megan said.
Well, there was nothing I could do about it anyway.
“Hi, Megan.” I smiled.
Megan was my school-bus friend. She wasn’t in any of my classes but I really liked her. In school, Megan hardly talked to anyone, and I suppose that was part of the reason she was near the bottom of the middle school social ladder, but I think it had more to do with her clothes (Megan made me look like a fashion model), and maybe how shy she was.
A girl like Lauren would never invite someone like Megan Nichols to her party. I was just lucky to be invited at all.
11
What’s a Knish?
“Glad you’re feeling better today,” my mom said to me that night. She was sitting at the end of my bed.
At first I didn’t even know what she meant. How could she know about Lauren Chase’s birthday party? No, of course she couldn’t. She was talking about yesterday. About Wednesday, about skipping school.
“Oh, yeah. I am,” I said, even though I already knew she knew.
What chance did I have? I mean, my mom’s a doctor. I was caught. I was just not sure of what. For pretending to be Jewish, or for playing hooky? I was getting my big excuse story all ready, but I didn’t need it.
When I looked at my mother, I saw her eyes were filling.
I knew this wasn’t about my missing school. She had cried so much these last weeks, since Nana died. She turned her head but I saw that she was trying to bat her tears away, blinking her eyes like crazy.
The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah Page 3