“Unless I’m very much mistaken,” Evie said, “that’s Hebrew. Shall we begin?”
Evie cast one final look over the table to ensure that everything was in place. Her glance lingered lovingly on her silver seder plate, inherited from her bubbe. It was of the type with indentations, one for each of the night’s symbolic foods. She didn’t want to leave any of the little hollows empty, it would ruin the effect, but she ran into a roadblock when it came to the roasted shank bone.
The bone was mere eye candy on the seder plate, a representation of the pre-Exodus paschal sacrifice. It wasn’t meant to be chawed on. But its mere fleshy presence risked offending Evie’s abstainer guests, so she tried to come up with an effective skeletal surrogate. Evie rooted around in her kitchen junk-drawer for inspiration. She tried out and rejected a freezer marker, a chopstick, and an Allen wrench. In the end, she went the literal route and bought a doggie chew toy, a rubber bone that mimicked the object she was after. At the store it had looked just right, but now that her proxy sat on the plate, it somehow looked more like a dildo. She hoped the resemblance was all in her mind.
After a few false starts, they fell into an easy rhythm. Those linguists among them who could manage the aleph-bet read off their cluster of lines slowly and clearly, and then the next person round the table recited the corresponding English translation. It went off so seamlessly that Evie’s non-Hebrew-speaking guests were visited by the same illusion that they experienced while watching a Bergman movie with subtitles; they felt like they could actually understand the Swedish. There was a bit of a kafuffle, though, when they reached the Four Questions.
“Okay, so who’s youngest?” Dizzy asked.
“I’m safely out of that competition, grâce à dieu,” said Jean-Gabriel, holding up his hands palms forward in a leave-me-out-of-this gesture.
“Does it have to be a guy or can a woman do it?” Judy demanded to know, but she wasn’t sure to whom she should address her question since they had decided at the outset to do away with the master of the house, a phallic piece of Haggadah phraseology that rankled many in attendance. It did mean, however, that the seder was rudderless.
“I’ve never had a chance to do it,” Moshe piped up. “I was always on the high end of the age scale at our seders. What do you say I give it a try?”
“Ooh, an actual volunteer for the fir kashes. A historical first.”
“Take it away Mosh.”
“Andale, andale baby.”
They gratefully left the field open to their resident baker who never so much as glanced down at the page. The notes wafted from Moshe’s lips in a masterful, resonant baritone that sucked the residual side-chatter right out of his tablemates. The chant was familiar to all of them save one, the notes etched onto one of their brain’s dustier wax cylinders since it only plopped down into playing position two days a year. Never had the melody sounded so stately. In their collective memory it was sung shakily, often under protest, by the youngest boychik in their respective families. Not that it didn’t have its own childlike charm, but Moshe’s rendition was cantorial. It peaked, it dipped, it paused with utter assurance. The silence when he finished clung to the table. Jean-Gabriel broke the spell by clapping, a slow, rhythmic ovation. The seder neophyte sensed it was a faux pas; he wasn’t at the Met, but after that virtuoso performance, he couldn’t hold himself back. And once he set the ball rolling, the rest of the crew joined in, plumping out the applause with bravos and the assorted whoops, whistles, and blats that they normally trotted out for the Habs. Josh, in the next seat over from the blushing Moshe, rescued the soloist from the spotlight by rushing in to deliver an English translation so dry and unleavened they all booed.
On all other fronts, Jean-Gabriel had excellent guest instincts. He recited from the Haggadah with a depth of expression the others lacked, bringing to the fore all his acting gifts. But since he couldn’t participate fully in the proceedings, Hebrew-challenged as he was, he took it upon himself to be in charge of the wine. He was determined to hold up his end. Once the ritual splish-splashing for the plagues was over, he kept everyone’s goblet brimming, pouring as if he were paid by the glass. ManU tried to explain to Jean-Gabriel that the amount of wine consumed during a seder was dictated by the Haggadah, limited to only two glassfuls before the meal, but such oenophilic parsimony on a festive occasion was a difficult concept for Jean-Gabriel to absorb and he unconsciously continued to pour wine whenever he spotted a needy glass. Not wanting to insult the outsider in their midst, the courteous Yidn at Evie’s table gave in to his topping off tendencies. Besides, Evie had invested in a few superior cases of Passover wine at the SAQ. No cough syrup tonight. This wine knocked back so smoothly that even the level in Eliahu’s cup seemed to go down as the night went on.
As early as Dayenu, the crowd was well and truly tanked. Dizzy attempted to decode for the benefit of Jean-Gabriel the significance of the song. “The refrain, dayenu, translates into it would have been enough for us. It’s meant to thank God for all the different things He’s done for the Jews since, well, since forever. So like even if He had only brought us out of Egypt and then dumped us like a hot potato, it would have been enough for us. Even if He had only divided the sea for us to scram dryshod and never done us any other fancy tricks from up in his lifeguard chair, it would have been enough for us. Even if he only had given us manna to nosh on in the desert and never served us any other tapas again, it would have been enough for us. Dayenu. Get it? You’ll pick up the tune soon enough. It goes on forever. It’s a song for slow learners. So when it comes time for day-day-enu, join right in, okay?” The seder singers gave it all they had. In Evie’s dining room that night the lusty dayenus caromed off the walls and shot up to the belfry of the convent chapel where they gave the defrocked bells a playful potch.
The festival meal came around before anyone even had the chance to hanker for it, a first for all the expats at Evie’s table who were into the printed proceedings as they never had been at their own family seders. Normally the Passover meal hunkered out there in the eternal distance like the horizon. Its refusal to come any closer had an edge to it, the same pissy recalcitrance of a tax refund. You knew it was scheduled to arrive sometime in your life span, but deep down you didn’t believe it.
Evie disappeared into the kitchen and came out with her tureen. “Pesach food, the mother of all oxymorons,” she announced in a pre-emptive effort to dis her own contribution, but her matzo ball soup was hailed by all present as a triumph. The remaining courses were rolled out to similar acclaim since everyone’s taste buds had already booked off on their annual Passover cruise to the Caribbean. And so it came to pass that despite the absence of almost any redeeming ingredients, despite the double deprivation of leaven and meat, Evie’s seder meal was toasted as the best they’d ever eaten.
Though there were no kids in attendance, Evie hid the afikoman all the same. Why, she decided, should she chuck the sole element of the seder that she had genuinely enjoyed when she was growing up? At the appointed time, she declared the whole apartment fair game and her guests bounded out of their seats to search for the concealed scrap of matzo as if they were contestants in a hot musical chairs competition. Moshe made a beeline for Evie’s bedroom to check it out more thoroughly than he had when he’d deposited his cake. He’d had a snootful thanks to Jean-Gabriel’s ministrations or he wouldn’t have had the nerve to go back in there, even if it was a wholly legitimate opportunity to do a little undercover work.
While they did live in the same building, Evie’s social life was a mystery to Moshe. Beyond Friday nights, their paths seldom crossed, Moshe’s baker’s schedule at odds with Evie’s more traditional business hours. He wasn’t privy to her night-time comings and goings and so hadn’t been able to determine if she was attached or not. Besides, his past history had shown him to be weak in picking up the signs. He could have just asked her out to settle the whole matter, but he was one of t
hose guys who had to work his way up to that, and he was a slow worker-upper. First he liked to be assured that the coast was clear. This was because Moshe was also a slow bouncer-backer. Once shot down, howsoever kindly, clawing his way back to vertical was a lengthy proposition.
He found himself all alone in his chosen neck of the woods. Everyone else was focusing on the living room which was more traditional afikoman turf. He worked quickly, scanning the surfaces for the obvious; birth control pills, Trojan boxes, telltale photos. Zilch. Moshe restrained himself from opening bureau drawers or reaching into the pockets of Evie’s robe, a silky kimono affair that was hanging from a hook on the back of the closet door. Fuzzy he might have been, but his technique was still smooth, gleaned from Philip Marlowe. Surely Evie would disapprove of his affinity for pulp, inherited from his father. He couldn’t help it if his reading preferences were down in the banana boat while Evie’s floated past on Cleopatra’s barge. Actually both parents influenced his sleuthing approach. “Touch with your eyes,” little Moshe’s mother used to repeat when she pushed his stroller through the aisles at Cumberland Drug and his fingers reached out towards every shiny trinket. “Touch with your eyes.” Little did she suspect way back then that she was training her cherub for a career in boudoir reconnaissance.
Moshe was trying to draw coherent conclusions from the disparate array of tchotchkes on Evie’s dresser when Jean-Gabriel wandered into the room. The two men faced each other across the bed. Moshe felt possessive of the territory, but for all he knew, Jean-Gabriel was more intimately acquainted with the surroundings. The playwright was new to afikoman searching and felt none of Moshe’s hesitation or délicatesse. He didn’t understand that a hunt for matzo wasn’t conducted like prison guards tossing a cell. He patted down Evie’s pillows and prowled around under her mattress with an outstretched arm. If not for the cake inconsiderately anchoring down the blankets he would probably have stripped the bed clear down to the springs. When he came up empty, Jean-Gabriel moved on to the closet. Its closed door didn’t give off the same out-of-bounds signals to him as it had to Moshe and he flung it wide open. He stood with his hands on his hips for a moment to size up the space and determine his plan of action. He started with Evie’s shoes, shaking them out in the manner of a jungle old timer wary of scorpions. No matzo revealed itself. He moved on to the shelves next with their purses, albums, and hat boxes filled with who-knows-what, terrain rife with afikominial potential. Moshe, on slo-mo, was gearing up to take him in hand, ready to offer Jean-Gabriel the gentility of an Easter egg hunt as an appropriate analogy when they heard a call from Dizzy out in the living room, “found it” and they had to abandon their search.
“It was behind the dictionary in the bookcase.” She held her matzo aloft.
“My mother always hid it behind the couch cushions.” Evie said. “I was trying to be original. The bookcases and the hutch were always off limits, too much precious Delft for little hands to break.”
“At my house it was the opposite,” Shira volunteered. “My mum kept the kids corralled in the dining room. She didn’t want them touching her beloved slip covers with horseradishy fingers, God forbid.”
Dizzy passed out the pieces of her afikoman and they settled themselves back into their seats to nibble while they continued with the ceremony, but everyone jumped up just a few pages later to go open the door for Eliahu.
“What, we have to get up again?” groused Jean-Gabriel who was packed into a corner between Evie and the formidable Dany. Extracting himself was a tricky business.
“For Eliahu.”
“Who? I thought it was just us regulars coming. Besides, isn’t it kind of late for someone to show up now?”
“The prophet Eliahu. Elijah in English. In French you call him Élie, I think. We have to see if he came to the door. That’s his cup of wine there in the middle of the table, the only one tonight that you haven’t had to top off.” They all angled out of their chairs and trooped to the front door. In deference to her hostess-ship, Evie was the one to open up though she was last getting to the door. They all peered out, but she knew it was unlikely Eliahu would pop by. In all the Pesach tumult she’d forgotten to give him the condo’s entry code.
“What’s with him?” Moshe wondered aloud. “He never calls, he never writes.”
“He got lost maybe.”
“What, nobody ever told him about Google maps?”
“Maybe it’s because you forgot to put out the milk and cookies,” Jean-Gabriel suggested, searching among his own cultural references for a logical explanation as they trailed back to their places. They picked up the Haggadahs they’d left open and face down on the table and resumed the recitative. A goodly chunk of pages beyond Eliahu Dany chanted the blessing over the fourth cup of wine, which was in fact closer to the tenth by Evie’s reckoning, but then who was keeping score? She polished off her glass at a gulp, nursing her annual resentment over the prophet’s no-show. As a child she always took his absence personally, like somehow the Troy household didn’t rate. She deduced that if Eliahu didn’t stop at her house, it was because he had preferred someone else’s, someone who was kinder, smarter, friendlier, more charitable, more kosher, a more frequent flosser, who knew? There were no guidelines. It was all very murky. Jean-Gabriel was probably right. At least with Santa you knew where you stood. You behaved, he showed. You acted up, he didn’t. And if he did plop down the chimney you plied him with food. That last bit sounded very Jewish to Evie. Maybe it was Irving Berlin who invented that goyishe custom. It would have been just like him.
Chapter 5
JAKE PASSED HIS WIFE THE STRAWBERRY JAM across the breakfast table. She shmeared enough across her mock Pesach bagel so that her lips wouldn’t eject it like a dud DVD.
“It would have killed them to come to our seder and spend the night with their family?” Marilyn asked.
“Honey, they want to have their own life. They’re adults. Accept it.”
“But to miss a seder. In every other house the kids come. You see the license plates parked up and down the street. Ontario, Massachusetts, Florida even. For Pesach the kids come home to their parents. From thousands of miles away they drive. But not our kids. Our kids couldn’t even be bothered to cross town.” She fumed at the thought. “Joshie would have come if Evie hadn’t invited him to her seder. She’s a bad influence.”
“Mare, Evie’s a good girl. She’s just having an attack of independence. It’ll pass.”
“It’s an awfully long attack if you ask me.”
“You should know.”
Jake seldom threw Marilyn’s escapade, as her mother subsequently dubbed it, in his wife’s face. Why would he? He was proud of the pivotal role she had played in the women’s movement. Never would he have had the guts to embark on such a crusade in his youth, however worthy the goal. It was Marilyn who had all the balls in their family. Whenever his wife ramped up into Caravan mode and commenced to speechify, Jake listened in awe, as if he were married to Emmeline Pankhurst. But Marilyn did have a tendency to play both sides of the fence. Depending on the circumstances she chose to paint herself as either rebel with a cause or dutiful daughter, and he wasn’t about to let her get away with double dipping. Jake knew full well that his wife had missed a family seder in her youth, and it wasn’t just to host one herself as Evie had done. Marilyn got the point and backed off.
Marilyn, April 1970
On Pesach of the year of her twentieth birthday, Marilyn was nowhere near a seder table. As close as she could calculate, looking back, she was probably somewhere on the outskirts of Wildrose, Alberta, although to city girl Marilyn it was hard to distinguish the outskirts from the inskirts. Oh what a hoo-hah her parents kicked up when she phoned them from a gas station along the way. It wasn’t enough that their daughter had lost her mind and set off on this cockamamie adventure, stealing from her father, skipping town, consorting with strangers (at least they were al
l women, thank God), but missing Pesach? At that point in the rant Marilyn’s pocket conveniently ran out of dimes to feed into the coin slot and the call cut out.
In her mind though, Marilyn saw the Caravan as a Passover celebration of sorts. A re-enactment in a way. What was it after all but a trek through the wilderness, leading women out of slavery? For all Marilyn knew, she and Eliahu had crossed paths that first seder night when he was out doing his rounds of Jewish doorways in the Alberta foothills. She just didn’t recognize him in his cowboy hat.
It was only in the fullness of time that this analogy came to Marilyn. Out on the road she was far too busy to give any thought to the Jewish holiday calendar. Whether it was the month of Nissan or the month of Sivan or the month of Brumaire, who knew, who cared?
The roughing-it part Marilyn didn’t mind. It all had a summer campish feel to it. She’d been shipped off to a cabin colony in the Townships enough times as a kid to learn all the backwoodsy skills. She could portage a canoe and braid a lanyard with the best of them. But here the curriculum was more eclectic, branching out into fields of study her old camp had never thought to list in its advertising brochure; anatomy, psychology, elocution, celestial navigation, and tire changing, not to mention passive resistance and posting bond.
The new recruit liked to think she knew her way around a campfire. Her repertoire of spooky stories was vast as befitted a summa cum laude graduate of the Vindow Viper Academy, Lake Massawippi campus. But by her fellow Caravanners she was outclassed. They had melted their s’mores over the bonfires of hell. Their blood-drenched stories were more terrifying than hers could ever be because they were true; tales of women scarred, women damaged, women dead after botched coat-hanger abortions, women turfed out by their families and left on their own to take whatever hara-kiri measures were within their reach.
Evie, the Baby and the Wife Page 6