The Oy of Sex

by Marcie Scheiner

  They all seem to come from somewhere else: Newark, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, primarily South Africa. Older residents speak Afrikaans or Yiddish among themselves, while their children learn Hebrew. Even the least linguistically agile among us memorized the Hebrew prayers delivered in temple, especially the gracings at bar and bat mitz-vahs and at the highest holy days: Rosh Hashanah, Passover, Chanukah. The majority of adults have an “M.D.” or a “Ph.D.” following their names, earned at prestigious institutions in the Northeast. The Protestants are mostly chemical engineers or corporate lawyers.

  Though there is a tendency to form cliques, mingling is not shunned. Crossing religious lines became popular among the social, the liberal, and the curious during the early seventies. In Meyercurve, the pervading intellectual leaning contributed to inter-religious friendships, occasionally even marriage. The atmosphere nurtured assimilation and discouraged isolation by any particular constituency. In-grouping exists, and may always, but few failed to transcend it.

  When we were teenagers, I doubt that any of us gave Meyercurve’s social dynamics much thought, unless a straggling parent forbade inter-religious dating or warned against the allegedly insurmountable obstacles such a marriage would harbor. Most of us shrugged off these admonitions with a roll of our eyes or sarcastic laughter. We considered these forebodings prejudiced, old-school, and foolish.

  Then I entered my junior year at Bellcreek High School, a public magnet school for the arts. Ms. Carlton taught history and politics to the advanced-placement crowd. The first day of school, she told us to sit anywhere we pleased, that seating was not assigned. I had not foreseen such luxury happening before college.

  Ms. Carlton then instructed us to look around at our neighbors. She asked what we noticed. No one cared enough to notice anything except that, for the first time, we were sitting next to whomever we pleased.

  She crushed our newly acquired “self-initiative” like a used-up cigarette.

  “How many of you are Protestants?” Seven people sitting close together raised their hands shyly.

  “Catholic?” Three.

  The Blacks and Asians seated in their two areas began to look at one another.

  “Drama students?” All five sat next to and across from each other; they raised their arms sheepishly.

  “Who’s Jewish?” she asked, the point already made. Nearly fifteen of us sat close together. She nodded at us sagely as the blood rose to our faces.

  “This exemplifies de facto segregation,” she began. We listened halfheartedly, humiliated “gifted” students who thought of ourselves as beyond what we had clearly just demonstrated. A fog of naïveté and indignance settled in the classroom. She had blown the ashes down the neat aisles, point made and taken. She’d attended Bellcreek herself, and she taught history and politics as much from personal experience as from books and lectures. And that was how we learned them.

  Tuesday we sat randomly. We still knew our neighbors, and we liked them, but we could not restrain ourselves from cutting our eyes toward familiars. Still, though Ms. Carlton had exposed us, we refused to drop our ideology. We’d blast into Room 304 as if it were a cocktail party each day after the bell sounded and make straight for the person who was in some way different from ourselves. Our vehemence faded, and awkwardness quickly followed. But soon we paid little attention to who was sitting next to whom. That class became my fondest memory of high school, but I have never forgotten that first Monday’s revelation, that well-deserved backhand. I doubt that any of us will.

  Our mental acrobatics and gray-matter graffiti came to fruition in that room. Lessons in history and politics became secondary or supplementary instruction; a chasm separates good intentions from their realization. By the time we began studying for the SAT, we had fashioned a bridge: sloppy and risky it may have been, but the bonds held. We began learning what really counted, and how only a few things count at all. Exploring ourselves and one another quickly took priority over the Princeton Review and the International Baccalaureate exams.

  After that first week of frantic posturing, Dirkyon Patrick began making an effort to sit next to me. If Jason Addler or David Saul sat beside me, Dirk always sat behind Jay or Dave. I knew Dirk was looking at me. I’d wonder if my dress tag had turned up or if a bra strap was showing. I was careful not to touch the back of my hair; I didn’t want Dirk to know that I might possibly care about how I looked from his vantage point.

  He was from Amsterdam, so he spoke perfect English by the time he immigrated to the United States at fifteen. Dirk was popular and his peers tended to glamorize him. He was the only one among us who was European. His parents were Black Irish. He had very white skin, absurdly blue eyes beneath heavy lashes, and shiny black hair cut evenly above his wide jawline. He was Catholic.

  Each Friday we seated ourselves in a circle to discuss the week’s current events, clipped and noted in the proper binder. Before our second week’s exams were returned, Dirk had fallen into the habit of maneuvering himself next to me at the end of each week, casually setting his backpack on the side of his chair opposite mine and scooting his desk closer. Once he brushed his thigh against my knee and quickly crossed his ankles: apparently a mistake. I concentrated intensely on Ms. Carlton’s mediation of a debate con-cerning Oliver North and fished for an insightful sentence. She averaged participation into our GPA.

  I saw Dirk at parties or at Meyercurve Mall, but I seldom spoke with him outside of Room 304. Whenever we did speak, he was friendly and focused our conversation on reviewing for finals or acquiring citizenship. Dirk never invited me to his house to study, but he continued his ill-disguised flirting each Friday. His lunch began during the first half of the fourth period. Mine ended when the bell rang out the beginning of that period. Only time for an exchange of smiles in the hall.

  Our senior year, Dirk and I shared two classes: advanced placement English and an amusingly contrived and outdated anthropology elective. In college, I would learn that Mr. Serrell’s lectures were essentially nineteenth-century parlor tales. But he had aced everyone for twelve years, and seniors scrambled to enroll. By the middle of the second week, we knew that this was not only an easy A but a divergent fifty-minute science-fiction flick. Several students resented him for blatantly lying, a few others hated his caustic discipline techniques (gum chewing, note passing, chatting—even an overly zealous challenge to his authori-ty—could result in the two or three F’s and D’s he distributed at the end of every semester), but most of us felt a certain pity, if not empathy, for this aging high school teacher who apparently refused to read the exams we turned in. We took our As and enjoyed his theatrical posturing and graduated with the legitimate points intact, carefully sifted from the debris. Dirkyon Patrick and Jennifer Shapiro. I ended up looking at the back of his head the entire year, our English course included.

  Ms. Thompson began each inquisition with “In terms of the literature you read last night…” She’d ignore every raised hand until she had finished staring down the unprepared. Then she’d select the student least likely to respond intelligently to her question. Since I sat behind Dirk, I anguished over the expression on his face as Ms. Thompson dissected my answers. Not one of us was ever “right.” But I received an A average, despite her red marks scattered throughout my every essay. “Verbosity!” she first declared. I looked up the word that evening in my parents’ OED. Then she accused me of imitating Hemingway. But the A’s kept coming, so I whittled every essay to fewer than four pages and avoided adjectives. Dirk and I would exchange glances as we left and occasionally brief each other on our grades.

  Dirk and I graduated in May with only these scattered encounters. But our overall GPAs plus our SAT scores qualified us both for acceptance into the University of Texas at Austin. We snatched our scholarships and headed inland. Only a few of us didn’t sink into debt for an education.

  Only one of my friends, Stephanie, also went to U.T. We made the most of it those first few months. I was so bogged down wit
h fifteen hours of dull required courses (calculus, symbolic logic, more French) and other freshman courses (sociology, English, trigonometry, history and government 301), that I had time for only one friend.

  Not that I didn’t meet people. I reviewed for psychology midterms with Michael, whose girlfriend had just left him for another guy My flirtations were politely disregarded. He seldom washed his hair or shaved, and he wore Goodwill pants cut off jaggedly above the knee. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Michael’s style was no more original than his name. By the end of my first year, half the guys on campus dressed like he did and used rent money to get black designs tattooed on the backs of their calves or around their biceps. Along with the disintegration of my attraction to these clones, I began to notice that I was no longer in the majority: Jewish law forbids tattoos. A person cannot even be buried in a Jewish cemetery if she has any. I know a Jewish dancer who now has five tattoos. Her parents beg her to let them pay for skin grafts.

  I was sitting outside the psychology building, watching the Austin boys sun themselves on the lawn, when Dirk walked up behind me.

  “Hey, Jennifer. How are finals coming?”

  “French stinks.”

  “I placed out of it. Spanish, German, and Italian too.”

  “So no more language credits for you.”

  “Nope,” he smiled. “After a French literature course, my language requirements will be filled and the Spanish, German, and Italian credits will count as electives. The school considers English my second language, so I was free to pay my forty dollars for each test. Cheaper than a semester of any class.”

  “They know you’re Dutch,” I protested.

  “So I couldn’t take a placement test for it if one existed.”

  “No. I mean they know you’ve been speaking all those languages for years.” Most Hollanders are, by commercial necessity, multilingual.

  “Yeah, but they have too many of us to shuffle through to make exceptions for Mexican Americans who have spent five years in Japan or freshmen from European ports.”

  “You must feel lucky to have begun studying so many languages when you were in elementary school,” I said, attempting to hide my envy.

  “It was a regimen,” he said.

  I’d be nodding through geology class in about fifteen minutes. Three years of casual flirting suddenly struck me as a drag. “Why not come over and help me? S’il vous plait?”

  Dirk laughed, his smile swerving across his face in pleasure and amusement. “Not the library?”

  “Too sterile.”

  “In Amsterdam, we always go out in groups,” he stammered.

  “Really, I replied, hoping to sound sage.

  “Dating,” he continued, “is reserved among Europeans for serious relationships.”

  “Dating is two people hanging out alone?”

  “Right.”

  Paranoia swarmed through my head. Had I proposed marriage?

  “But since I’m now an American, and we seem to be living in the States, I think a date would be appropriate.” Never before had I set up a date with a guy who acknowledged the socialization as anything except “hanging out.” A date. How endearing.

  I couldn’t help myself. “Have you ever been on a date?”

  He began tightening the laces on his Converse All Stars unnecessarily “Of course, “he answered nonchalantly.

  I knew I may as well have asked whether he’d ever fucked a girl up the ass. “See you at my place at nine.”

  “Where do you live?

  “I’m listed,” I called as I hurried across campus to Pharish Hall.

  Dirk rapped on my door and stood under the porch light the way people stand in elevators. We exchanged mandatory greetings, I brewed coffee, and we spread the French books across the table.

  “Do you know any other languages?” he asked.

  “Hebrew, some Yiddish.”

  “Yiddish and German. Let’s go.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t be closed-minded. Just try this.”

  I had no idea what I was trying or why, but I didn’t want him to think I was unadventurous. “You go first,” I insisted.

  “Auslander.”

  “Oyslender,” I responded.

  “See what I’m getting at?” Dirk asked, waiting for some revelation from me. So we’d translated foreigner from German to Yiddish. I was taking French. “Try one,” he com-manded, as if this were more than a game. Was this the way Europeans got to know each other?

  “Okay,” I agreed. It had been a while since I’d run into anyone who spoke Yiddish, so coming up with a word almost stumped me. I paused, and then almost shouted, “Loybn.” To praise. Couldn’t have gotten by without that one.

  “Loben,” he answered. Then, “Gelehrte.

  “Gelernter,” I answered. He knew I’d know scholar. “Well. We’ve got Yiddish/German cognates.” I tried not to sound exasperated.

  “And English is about seventy percent French and thirty percent German. The German derivative is reserved for the crude while the French one tends to be brought out for polite occasions. Take cows in the pasture: kuh in German. After beef is placed on the dining-room table: boeuf in French. So knowing English as well as having exposure to a language as similar to German as Yiddish should make the vocabulary rather easy.”

  He stood and looked at the unopened books. “I’d better be leaving.”

  “You have an appointment?”

  Dirk’s face deepened several levels in ruddiness; then he started to laugh. He giggled at first, then looked at me until I started to smile and eventually laughed with him. He collapsed on the sofa. “You don’t want me to leave. I mean, I thought after a brief lesson, it would only be polite, all things considered, for me to leave.”

  I rolled my eyes and tried to quit laughing. “What’s that supposed to mean? ‘All things considered’?”

  ‘Nothing. It’s just that, you are Jewish, right? Shapiro?”

  “I’m Jewish,” I replied, wanting to sound calm. No one had ever asked me if I was Jewish. No one had ever excused himself because of my religion. He was still laughing, though, so I kept smiling.

  “I can stay?”

  “Why couldn’t you?”

  “Because I’m Catholic.”

  “Are you a priest?”

  “I just thought that you’d want me to go after we studied.”

  “Because I’m Jewish?”

  “Yeah,” he said flatly. I laughed until I started to hiccup.

  “My parents didn’t let me hang out with Jews,” Dirk said lamely. “As a matter of course, they insisted that they weren’t racist. They never established friendships with Catholics who weren’t prejudiced. But we aren’t all like that.”

  “Obviously not.” He was here. Who was I to hold his parents against him? My grandparents wouldn’t have goyim in the house. Both my grandmothers bled their own meat to make it fit for human consumption and admonished my mother for trusting the kosher deli.

  “So.” I tried to sound casual. “Your impressions of us?”

  He turned his head and answered, “The stereotypical Jewish nose gets me hard.”

  Jesus. If only my Jewish girlfriends who’d had rhinoplasty the day they turned sixteen could hear this. Of those who had “stereotypical” Jewish noses, over half had splurged on surgery. Stephanie had the procedure performed twice. It was sort of a status symbol. Unlike my mother or my brothers, I have a long, elegant nose, thin and perfectly straight: my father’s nose. He would never have paid for a nose job, and he d threatened when I was only thirteen to disinherit me if I ever so much as asked.

  “Do I have a ‘stereotypical’ Jewish nose?” I pressed. I could see his cock twitching beneath his jeans.

  “Yeah.” Dirk crossed his legs uncomfortably.

  “What else?”

  “I envy a lot of Jewish values—like preserving a cultural tradition thousands of years old.”

  “Any culture’s sustenance relies on obs
erving its traditions,” I conceded, “but we aren’t museum curators; the culture is dynamic.” I felt like a professor.

  “Take the emphasis on education,” he continued. I did sound like a professor. “Most Jews I’ve met have struck me as intelligent, and that knowledge has the flavor of effort to it.”

  I couldn’t argue. I knew some exceptions, but very few. Most of our grandfathers had worked menial jobs while our grandmothers vigilantly checked their children’s homework so that our parents could attend the best colleges, become the sort of sons and daughters whom their parents could boast about to their friends. My own father was an anesthesiologist and my mother was a prosecutor. I had received a merit scholarship, but I still felt the crushing pressure to make something of myself.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “Aren’t most Jews politically liberal?”

  “Groups that have been oppressed swing left, don’t they?”

  “Yes.” Dirk clearly didn’t want to discuss racism or genocide. I didn’t either; I’d held out against the Jewish suffering for twenty years, witnessed the constant anxiety that could render my grandparents hysterical, let slide my mother’s worried litany of watch-outs and what-ifs. I would not bang my head against the Wailing Wall.

  “So you like my nose?”

  it’s gorgeous. Like your hair and your skin.” My hair is straight, shiny, and black. Very thick. My skin is olive-toned. I realized that I must seem extraordinarily exotic to a man who’d spent most of his life in Holland. “You know I’ve had a thing for you for years,” he said, suddenly bold.

  It was my turn to blush. “I know.”

  “Can I have something to drink?” Dirk asked nervously.

  “Right this way.” He followed me into the kitchen, the room I constantly explained to Christians or defended to Jews. The latter had seen their escape into academia as the perfect time to disregard the kosher dietary laws. They claimed the rules inhibited and repressed them. But how could observing the regulations of a religion suffocate a person if she had chosen to observe them? After all, I had only to declare myself an atheist or convert to some other religion to eat all the Cordon Bleu I could hold.