Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish

by Shana Liebman

  The day of the party, Mom laid out bagels, rolls, coffee cake and fancy cream cheeses. I folded slices of deli meat onto a big plate and refilled the ice trays three times each. There were bowls of pickles, herring and chopped liver. My best friend Yael came over an hour before everyone else and we put on blue eyeliner. I was so nervous I poked myself in the eye. Lisa Grossman was the first guest to arrive. She came with her mom and they were wearing matching stirrup pants. Matt Hirschorn was next. He brought a coffee cake and I told him we already had one, but my mom said that I should be more gracious and she put it out on the table anyway. Then Andy and David K. showed up. Alissa and Sue came together. Pretty soon, the backyard was full. Mr. Moss and Mr. Moock stood by the barbecue and Mrs. Turner buzzed between the kitchen and the porch, bringing people sodas.

  And then Rabbi Sirkman arrived. When he came into the backyard I grabbed Yael and told her I needed some air and to come with me for a walk. We sat on the rusty swingset down by the woodpile and dug our sneakers into the soft dirt.

  “Ew, watch out,” said Yael, pointing to a pile of dog poop.

  “My stupid sister was supposed to pick it up but she didn’t,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “It looks like chopped liver.”

  “But it probably tastes better.”

  “Yeah, right?”

  “Yael…” I thought I was going to break into a thousand little pieces. There was so much I wanted to say about this year, about what was supposed to happen after graduation, about my hidden love. This is what I did say:

  “What if we tried to convince Rabbi Sirkman that it was chopped liver?”

  “You mean like put it on a plate?”

  “Sure, or even on a roll!”

  Yael agreed to go along with my hastily conceived plot. I was in charge of grabbing the bread from the basket. She would get the plate and a plastic knife. We would meet back at the swingset in 10 minutes and try not to draw any attention from the crowd. Keeping discreet was actually very easy to do. Everyone there between the ages of 15 and 16 was trying not to look at each other. We wanted desperately for no one to notice our pimples, our fluorescent belts and layered socks, our gleaming braces with slick rubber bands. Yael stood in front of me while I crouched down and smoothed the poop onto the Kaiser roll. The bread was warm from the afternoon sun. Yael handed me a pickle for garnish.

  “Perfect,” she declared, as I dug a hole and buried the knife in the ground. Then I put the plate behind my back as we climbed up the rocky path and walked toward the porch.

  Rabbi Sirkman was busy telling Mrs. Grossman a story. I watched her honey-colored perm shake while she laughed. I wondered if she had feelings for the rabbi too. Finally, she moved back toward the snack table. Yael pulled me forward.

  “Yes, ladies?” Rabbi Sirkman asked, turning in our direction.

  “Could we maybe talk to you in private?”

  “Sure.”

  Yael led us both behind the bushes where we kept the sprinkler.

  “What’s going on, you two?”

  “Well, we noticed you weren’t eating much so we made you a sandwich,” she said as we both giggled. I pushed the plate toward him. The smell was intense.

  “Thank you, girls,” he said slowly. He took the plate and studied the sandwich carefully, his eyebrows pulled together. Yael grabbed my hand and squeezed.

  “Are you sure this is for me?” he asked. He tried to lift part of his face into a smile, but the rest of his mouth wouldn’t follow. And then our eyes locked. His were wide and watery. They were not amused. I had to turn away. It felt like someone was pressing on my ribs, squeezing out my insides. This was not going as planned. There was nothing funny in this moment at all.

  “Go ahead. It’s chopped liver,” I heard Yael say, but I was already running, running up the porch, past Mr. Moock in between Andy and Peter G. into the house. “Excuse me!” I yelped at Alissa and Tara as I pushed past them and grabbed for the bathroom door, slamming it behind me and bolting it shut. I dropped to my knees and felt my mouth fill up with saliva. I wanted to throw up, but it was all stuck in my chest, this knot of nausea and aching sadness. It was all wrong. I hadn’t meant to hurt him. I needed to explain. I wanted to tell him that we thought it would be funny, or at least charming. Couldn’t he see that we were honoring him by giving him this hilarious gift? Couldn’t he tell from my eyes that I adored him and I wanted only to make him laugh? And then I became terrified that maybe he could see my true intent, maybe he could tell I was hopelessly in love with him and that wasn’t funny at all.

  By the time I came out of the bathroom, my mother was waiting for me. “Young lady, you have some explaining to do,” she commanded. “But first you are going to go out there and apologize.” She lifted a single finger toward the back door.

  Mrs. Turner was collecting empty plates and cups. A lot of people had gone home. Rabbi Sirkman was in the same corner talking with Mr. Moock. And then he was in front of me, just standing there. It felt like there was so much space between the two of us. I stared at my feet and whispered, “I’m sorry.” I knew sorry was too small a word for the weight of this moment. I was sorry that I had tried to make him eat a dog poop sandwich, but I was also sorry that I didn’t realize it could never be fun or funny to watch a grown man whom you loved and admired with a plate of feces. Most of all, I was sorry that I loved and admired him so much. He had given me a sense of time and space and made me believe that I was somehow different, special, but now it was over. I was confirmed as an adult in the eyes of the congregation. It was time for me to act like one. The SATs were three weeks away. Any day now I’d get my period. There were old wars and new religions cropping up in all corners of the globe, beginnings and endings even in this one moment.

  “I know you are,” he said, kindly.

  As Time Went By

  By Michael Green

  I’LL JUST COME RIGHT OUT AND SAY IT: No, I have never seen Casablanca.

  Which is a shame for anyone, but specific blasphemy for a screenwriter. The paradigmatic depiction of love on film, and I have no idea what it’s all about. Some guy in a hat. Some girl with an accent. Someone named Sam who plays things again if you ask nicely.

  I thought my excuse was a good one—solidly idealistic—at least as romantic as everyone claims the movie is, anyway: I made a promise to the first woman I ever loved. And I kept it.

  She was a much older woman. Or at least what seemed much older at the time. She was 34, my age today.

  It was the kind of romance that if you scripted, lit and shot it with any elegance, it would be a sumptuous surprise summer hit—Kate Winslet would be heartbreaking as the lead. Horndog preadolescent boys would leave the theater with wonderful unrealistic expectations of what lay ahead once they started shaving. But if I just gave you the basic plot, it could come off a mite creepy.

  She was introduced to me as Mrs. Girard, although I quickly came to call her Karin. She was an SAT tutor recommended by my neighbor, who swore that Karin was the reason her dull daughter got into Penn. There are few more saleable statistics in Jewish suburbia.

  We worked in her house full of books—all with well-broken spines—where she lived alone. Karin was midway through a divorce. My first thought on meeting her was that she couldn’t possibly live alone for long. Long dark hair, almond-shaped eyes a shocking Kryptonite green. She had a voice like warm maple syrup. When she told you not to worry, you stopped worrying. I stared at her a lot.

  Unlike my high school teachers, she made you want to work hard for her—which I did. Which in turn earned me the right to crack a distracting amount of jokes while we were supposed to be working. She shared with me a cat’s sense of humor: The torment of others was funny.

  Because of all this—and because she was often just inches to my left, huddled with me over vocabulary lists—I fell for her, utterly besotted. And at some point I slipped and said so.

  And then she told me, irresponsibly, truthfully—impossibly—that she had fe
elings for me right back. She was wearing a pale blue sweater, loose at the neck. Her dark hair fell forward. We kissed.

  I told no one. I had that much sense.

  In the weeks that followed I had few thoughts that didn’t include her. She wrote me beautiful letters on the thin blue paper used for overseas mail. We talked on the phone for hours.

  And then there were the movies.

  Before Karin, my taste in film was pitiful, even for a kid raised in the ’80s. I had an Atari-inspired aversion to anything black-and-white, preferring RoboCop to The African Queen, John Hughes to Howard Hawks.

  Karin would not abide. She was, after all, my tutor.

  So we developed a routine: I’d tell my parents I was going to Ari Weinberger’s house and go to hers instead, stopping on the way to buy candy. She would pick the movies.

  We watched, in reverse order, every Best Picture winner from 1950 to 1970, more often than not making it to the end of the movie before we’d attack each other, break a few commandments, then eat the candy.

  I was surprised at how watchable the classics were.

  “Just wait till we get to Billy Wilder,” she teased.

  “Who?”

  “So funny. So romantic. And—oh—there may never come a better way to tell someone how you feel than Bergman did in Casablanca. ‘I was lonely, I had nothing, not even hope. And then I met you.’ God.”

  I admitted I’d never seen Casablanca.

  Karin’s eyes went wide as MoonPies. “You simply must. Right away.”

  “Then I will. I’ll rent it tonight and watch it at home.”

  A rare flash of disapproval from the Kryptonite eyes. “You can’t watch Casablanca for the first time by yourself. Let me show it to you. Promise you won’t ever watch it without me.”

  It was an easy promise to make. We arranged to watch it together the coming Sunday.

  But events, as they do, overtook the first round of plans. And the second.

  The SATs came soon after (I did well, thanks to her) followed by summer. I assured her I’d keep my promise until we found the time. I’d wait as long as it took.

  At the start of my senior year, Karin moved away—just far enough so that the effort highlighted the inappropriateness of any plans we might make. Convenience accounts for much of sin.

  We called less and less often. I began hooking up with a girl my age, something Karin encouraged. I think she was coming to regret the indulgence of caprice.

  When I went off to college a year later, it was without a call. I wondered if she’d forgotten I was leaving at all until a package arrived for me at my dorm. It contained a number of well-chosen books, a dozen windup bath toys, a VHS copy of Casablanca and a note: “Winter break then.”

  When my sophomore year roommate, Josh, an encyclopedia of film trivia, asked to borrow my Casablanca tape to watch with the girl he currently needed to be with, he was surprised to find it was still in the plastic.

  “You haven’t seen it?” Josh looked angry. “Come watch it with me and Ginny. See how it makes her love me.”

  “Sorry. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I promised someone I’d wait for her.”

  “People break promises. If you’d seen Casablanca, you’d already know that.”

  They watched it in the common lounge while I stayed in our room and wrote a paper on Romantic poetry. By the time the movie was over, Ginny was nuzzled tight under Josh’s arm. They dated the rest of the year.

  It’s been over a decade now. Karin and I have long since lost touch. Much to my surprise, I am now an actual adult with a mortgage, a career and strange hairs growing out of the tops of my ears I pick at absently while reading.

  There is another development. Her name is Amber.

  Amber: She’s funny and smart and filthy and pretty and her goddamn hair sheds everywhere. Sometimes in the kitchen she’ll pirouette badly, and some mornings she’ll wake me up so I can help pick out her underwear for the day. I love her the way I always wanted to love somebody.

  In fact the only time I ever felt anything other than comfort with her was the day she told me her favorite movie is Casablanca.

  She asked me what I thought of it. I didn’t lie. I told her about Karin.

  Surprisingly, she completely understood. All she asked was: “Do you want to see it?”

  Would I wait forever? I’d never thought of it that way. The truth is, I’d become sort of proud of not having seen Casablanca. The blank spot in my edification was a mark of pride, an original sacrifice on the altar of idealized love. As long as I avoided it I could prove my reverence.

  On the other hand, I’d been accused of being emotionally withholding by more than one girlfriend, and here was an experience that I was quite literally withholding, reserving for someone all but imaginary by now. I’d squint at a girl asleep in my bed and think, “Sure, she likes to read, and hates shuls that use bongos… but is she someone I’d watch Casablanca with?”

  The idea of finally seeing the damn thing had gotten so built up—sort of the way sex was built up back when I was 17 and lusting after my tutor. It was something I’d romanticized so long it could only come as a disappointment. Then again, isn’t a promise made with such a racing heart all the more sacred?

  It was the miserable sort of irony Karin would have insisted didn’t meet the strict definition: In order to watch the most romantic movie of all time I would have to negate the most romantic moment of my life.

  I actually considered finding Karin so I could watch it with her. I could tell Amber I was up all night working a deadline—or better, I went to Ari Weinberger’s house.

  But I didn’t. There’s a reason I hadn’t called Karin in 12 years. I was over her. It was time to allow for new most-romantic moments in my life.

  I went to the store, picked out the two-disc collector’s set, declined to renew my Barnes and Noble membership (it seemed wrong to save 10 percent on a rite of passage), made a heap of popcorn, cut up the cheddar cheese I know Amber likes with it… and asked her if she would watch Casablanca with me.

  She slid onto the couch without a word.

  She was wearing a blue zippy, stolen from my closet, over a pink T-shirt with a picture of a churro on it.

  The movie came on.

  For a moment I worried: “What if it sucks?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “That’s what everyone said about Star Wars Episode I and it sucked like crazy and I waited years for that.”

  My concern lifted with the opening mockumentary, which explained the circumstances of those struggling to flee the Third Reich, by way of Lisbon, by way of Casablanca.

  And it didn’t suck. The movie is an impeccable piece of filmmaking, living up to any expectation. The story unfolds like silk. The scenes slide along like stockings over a hardwood floor. Bergman steps into Rick’s Café Américain and is as breathtaking as everyone would have you believe. Sam knew it the moment she walked in; trouble follows a face that perfect.

  “She’s gorgeous,” I whispered.

  “She broke more hearts than butter,” Amber said.

  We got to the scene where Rick sits in the dark drinking angrily and making Sam play “As Time Goes By,” the song he couldn’t bear to hear because it reminded him of his lost Ilsa, and it occurred to me, with some shame, that I’d been avoiding Casablanca the same way.

  Suddenly uncomfortable, I shifted, and Amber eased under my arm in what I realized had become a familiar routine, an act so much more intimate and nourishing than the sex Renault tried to extort out of that desperate Bulgarian hottie. I am in a relationship with an unspoken choreography.

  I saw why the film has been allowed to define love for so long. Love in Casablanca is the kind of thing that destroys a man before it awakens his conscience. To be open to it is to be open to mistakes and bullets, and nobody ends up happy. It left Rick a shell of a club owner, well-dressed and popular, but unable to taste the fine brandies in his cellar. And the
n it made him a hero again, willing to suffer a concentration camp to let the woman he loves live on—with another man.

  Yes, Rick makes that ultimate cinematic sacrifice. He lets the girl go. He walks off into the misty night with Renault, fugitives, finally righteous. We don’t worry he’ll die fighting with the French resistance; we know God protects nobility, even in such a heavy smoker.

  I wondered what love would make of me.

  The movie ends. A beautiful friendship begins. And my promise was broken.

  Amber leaned over, kissed me. “Thanks for letting her go.”

  She might have been talking to Rick.

  FAMILY

  And Baby Makes… Four

  By Caryn Aviv

  I WAS 32 AND THINKING ABOUT HAVING A BABY when Michael gingerly popped the question. “Would you be interested in having a kid with me and Adam?” I thought the earth was moving underneath my car (an emotional earthquake of sorts) as we drove down Divisadero Street in San Francisco.

  Michael and I had met a few years earlier at the gay and lesbian synagogue. I had recently arrived in town to start a new chapter in life after finishing research for a Ph.D. Newly out of the closet and eager to connect with the gay Jewish community, I signed up as a part-time Hebrew-school teacher. Michael had returned from his graduate school research in Moscow, with his husband, Adam, to resume his post as head of the synagogue’s school. We hit it off immediately.