“My breasts are my own business,” I said. “In what sense are you a Christian? Do you go to church?”
“Yes.” He brought his big face close to mine.
“Why haven’t they thrown you out for thinking about sex all day long?”
“Sex is part of God’s creation,” said Eric.
Tibby turned from the copying machine and said, “I’m half Jewish.”
“Do Jews believe in original sin?” said Eric, now turning the other way.
“I was raised Episcopalian. My mother’s Episcopalian.”
It turned out that Tibby’s mother went to Eric’s church. “Anglo-Catholic,” Eric explained to me. “High Church. Bells and smells.”
“Do they know life is complicated?” I said. “I never found a synagogue where they knew life is complicated.”
“That’s the main thing Jews know,” said Eric. “How hard did you look?”
“I’m not respectable enough for organized religion,” I said.
“What an angry lady,” said Eric. “Not enough sex. That guy from New York doesn’t show up often enough. Or you’re resisting him.”
“That’s a boring assumption,” I said. “I’m angry, so it must be sex. Isn’t that a Christian idea? Sex is evil? Jews don’t think like that.”
“Oh, everyone thinks like that,” said Eric, disappearing into his office. Then he stuck his head out and called, “Except me.” The door closed again.
“Hey, Ruth,” Tibby said, pausing at my desk, his arms laden with light, hot pages from the copier, his eyes bright. “Did your parents think sex is evil?”
“No,” I said. “They thought it was foolish. But what are we doing to your young mind, sonny?”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Tibby, and carried off his pile of copies. When Eric next emerged, Tibby hurried to stand just opposite him, raised an index finger, and in the dazzled tone in which Eric himself proposed story ideas, said, “ ‘What Do Walruses Think About Sex?’ ” He paused. “ ‘What Do Fish Think About Sex?’ ” Another pause. “ ‘What Do Algae Think About Sex?’ ”
“Write ’em up, I’ll print ’em,” said Eric, and clapped Tibby’s thin shoulder.
Tibby took that opportunity to ask for a week off without pay. His grandmother had not died after all, and he wanted to visit his friends in Florida, to see the dolphins. “I’ll find out everything you want to know, Eric,” he said. “If I write a story about dolphins, will you pay my plane fare?”
“You’re always talking about writing stories. How do I know you’ll even come back?”
“I’ll come back.”
The office was quiet without Tibby, and though I had to do my own filing and copying, I could concentrate more easily without his ebullience and his yo-yo. The day he was to return I came to work a little late. Eric was sitting at the metal table, his head down, and he pointed wordlessly at the answering machine, then stood up, making a strange, alarmed noise, and took me in his arms as I stepped toward it. Tibby had drowned in Florida, swimming in calm water off the end of a friend’s boat. The message, which I finally made myself listen to, was from his sister.
Eric and I did slipshod work that week. We hugged often, stopped making jokes and talking about sex. I dreamed about Eric and Tibby and me as if we were a family—the three of us in a car, the three of us walking on a windy sidewalk. Tibby’s funeral, in Eric’s church, was attended by heartbreaking crowds of young people who looked as if they hardly ever got that dressed up or entered such a building. I looked for the ones who’d come to the office. It turned out Tibby’s real name was Theobald.
I didn’t like the funeral. I felt rage at the priest, who seemed to think that putting on brightly colored vestments and executing stylized movements made a difference, rage at the young people who’d missed seeing Tibby disappear, rage at myself. I could have protested when he asked to go. Our gathering, miles from the scene of Tibby’s death, indoors with closed doors, felt misguided, irrelevant, maybe heartless—as if our presence on the shore might have saved him, as if staring out at Eric’s complicated ocean could have rescued Tibby.
Eric and I sat close to the front of the church, in a side section. When it was time for Communion, he squeezed my shoulder and stood to join the slow procession toward the altar. Suddenly alone, I watched him advance. He looked dignified because he seemed to let himself look foolish—or, rather, unprotected. He let himself be seen doing what he wanted to do. I was reminded of something and then realized, with a smile I couldn’t suppress, that it was of the way a good, serious, middle-aged man—like my New York lover—moves toward you when he’s decided to take off his clothes and make love to you: dignified in the acknowledgment of the self.
Eric reached the front of the line and knelt to receive the bread. A moment before he had to, he opened his mouth, and I saw his lips and tongue. I watched him receive comfort from the priest, a man his own age. They were like two businessmen conferring, except for one man’s clothing, except for their postures, except for what they did with their bodies, one feeding the other like a parent and a baby, like a bird and a baby.
Without discussion we walked a block or two in the cold. I thought we were venting emotion through aimless roaming, but Eric steered me into a Starbucks. Maybe he always went there after church. “Or we could keep going and find a synagogue,” he said as we sat down.
“A synagogue?”
“Tibby was half Jewish. We should pray at a synagogue, too. Would that help?”
“Help Tibby? Or help me?”
“Tibby’s dead, and I don’t see any Jews but you around. The man at the counter doesn’t look Jewish.”
“It wouldn’t help me,” I said. Without further remarks, Eric went to the counter and returned with two cups of coffee and a handful of sugar packets. We both drank the coffee black, without sugar, and I arranged and rearranged the sugar packets as we sat in silence.
“Do you believe in heaven?” Eric asked then.
“No.”
“That would make it harder.”
“Do you? Do you believe in heaven?” I didn’t know anybody believed in heaven. The optimism of it stunned me.
“Of course it’s impossible to imagine heaven,” he said. “I think of clean water, but what does that mean? I would like to believe in heaven.”
He spoke so quietly and seriously that I didn’t say, “Like to! Well, like to!” and indeed he continued, “And maybe I do.”
I believed not in heaven, but in the poems I’d read and written in college, in my love for my children—not that I found anything, that long winter, to comfort me for the loss of somebody else’s child. I planned to visit his parents but only sent a note, not just out of cowardice. With a magazine to put out and without Tibby’s help—we didn’t replace him—I worked late most nights.
As an adult, I never went near a synagogue, I didn’t do anything identifiably Jewish, but on every holy day I knew just when sundown decreed candlelighting and the end of work. I knew what I would have been doing if I had been observant. The religion I didn’t practice was not my cousins’ comfortable, up-to-date compromise but some unforgiving orthodoxy, the Jewishness that takes over life: defiantly, I did not follow law after law. I didn’t follow them so thoroughly that my son grew up apparently unmindful of religion, but somehow my daughter, Laura, learned how to be slightly Jewish, and unlike me, was serenely comfortable as she cheerfully lit the odd Hanukkah candle, attended services now and then, or sent Jewish New Year and Passover cards to my parents, who received them happily. My mother steadfastly cooked on holidays, my daughter was grateful, and both would ignore me when I’d demand “How could God allow Hitler?” looking left and right over my matzo ball soup. But my mother was getting old, and even the matzo ball soup had been omitted lately. The year Tibby died, Laura phoned me early in March to ask, “Is Grandma making a Seder?”
“When did Grandma ever make a Seder?” Soup wasn’t a Seder.
“Once, she did.” Once, when Laura was about eight
, she had. An uncle had read the prayers and the long Exodus story. Other years, the children and I had sometimes been invited to Seders at the houses of the cousins. We took turns reading aloud, we swallowed bits of matzo spread with this and that.
That March I wasn’t doing well. Grief for Tibby had dulled but not lessened. I hadn’t known him well enough to mourn properly. I didn’t miss him, in truth. He’d been in my life so briefly; he was gone and things were as before. I knew no one else who knew him, except Eric, who didn’t speak of him. But I didn’t feel better. Sometimes I didn’t remember why I felt bad. I rarely saw my lover, but had no inclination to spend more time with him, or break up. Later we lived together, then did break up—but that was all to come.
“Do you think you could put on a Seder?” Laura now wanted to know.
“Good God, no.”
“I mean the two of us, but in your apartment.” Laura was a junior at Brandeis, outside Boston, living in an apartment with several roommates. Brandeis was founded by Jews, and it closes for a week at Passover. “I don’t want to feel abandoned,” she said. Some of her friends were traveling home to Seders. “I don’t want to go out for pizza that night.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said.
I hung up the phone and looked at the calendar. Passover was in three weeks. I’d heard from no cousins. I couldn’t be expected to think about Passover because I was grieving for Tibby, the boy with the yo-yo. Then, of course, I called Laura back—my own child, the child who was safe—and agreed to put on a Seder. The next time we spoke, I asked her, “But who’ll conduct it? Who’ll be the uncle? Who’ll be the Jew?”
“I’ve been to Seders, and so have some of my friends.”
“Doesn’t someone have to take charge?” I had already invited my friend Annie, but she wasn’t Jewish and didn’t believe in anything. So I invited Eric. “You’re the Jew,” I told him. “The believer.”
“I’m the Jew.”
“I’ll meet the bad man,” said Annie on the phone.
“Oh, he’s not bad.”
The Seder was work. Laura had papers to write and no car, so I bought Haggadahs, the books we had to read. I bought what had to go on the Seder plate. I bought matzo and lots of parsley. I bought groceries to Laura’s specifications: this was also a dinner party. She promised to cook, along with her friends, and when I came home from work the day of the Seder, three girls were in the apartment, and potfuls of food had been prepared: chicken, rice.
Laura followed me into my bedroom and closed the door. One friend had told her that rice wasn’t allowed on Passover, while the other had brought a cake—not a Passover cake, just a chocolate cake.
“If you’re going to worry about rules, I’m leaving now,” I said. I had brought plenty of wine—not Passover wine, just wine—and in my socks I went back to the kitchen and poured a glass for myself. Laura clutched at her light curls, a habit since babyhood, as she tried to organize my inadequate plates and silverware while her friends washed vegetables. “You’re right, the food will be fine,” she said then, smiling at me.
Eric, in jacket and tie, was the only man at the Seder. Laura had invited her flute teacher, who met Annie on the front porch. They came upstairs together, looking pleased and expectant, which made me feel like a fraud. As we gathered around the table, I imagined Eric looking at this roomful of women. He’d picture us bare-breasted, I decided. The image in my mind—our varied breasts (and Annie had had a mastectomy) above the mismatched plates—was wholesome, not erotic. Laura lit the candles. She knew the prayer in English.
Crowded around the table, we looked in the book and explained to one another what to do. Laura was bossy but happy. She began the reading, and then we all took turns, joining in for the responses in earnest chorus. I kept forgetting to start at the back of the book and proceed forward. Some of the Jewishness felt odd, some surprisingly familiar, and I tried to count up just how many Seders the cousins had lured me to. Eric participated loudly and confidently. We blessed the wine and he drained his first glass, while the rest of us sipped. We ate parsley, we broke matzo. The flute teacher—a black woman with long hair coiled behind her head and elegant pewter jewelry—beamed, saying she’d always hoped to attend a Seder. “This is great,” said Annie more than once. She, Eric, and the flute teacher seemed like benevolent parents at a school play.
One of Laura’s friends wanted to ask the Four Questions. She knew the beginning in Hebrew. I could see my quick-moving, hair-clutching daughter mind that, and mind the fact that she didn’t know a word of Hebrew, which made me briefly regret my life. “Sorry, Jen, it’s my house,” Laura said then, though it wasn’t her house, and she asked the questions in English.
Seders like ours were apparently not unforeseen by whoever thought up the idea. The ceremony itself was in part about not understanding it. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” asked Laura, who might well ask. It turned out there were no more questions, just elaborations of the first question. “On all other nights we eat vegetables and herbs of all kinds, while on this night we must eat bitter herbs.” Children were supposed to ask these questions, though at Seders I’d attended, self-satisfied children knew more than anyone else present.
Before long the book described more questioning children, the wise son and the wicked son, the good Jew and the bad. The wicked son asked, “What is the meaning of this Passover service which God commanded you?” It was my turn to read, and I read that the wicked son was to be abandoned to his wickedness. “You,” he says, not “us.” The others were to tell him that God had led them out of Egypt. Presumably the wicked son had been elsewhere when this happened, leading his interesting secular life.
“I want to defend the wicked son,” Eric announced. “The wicked son’s failure is a failure of imagination, nothing more.”
“What’s worse than a failure of imagination?” I asked. I would never change—I would always be the wicked son—but I would not deny my wickedness. We continued with the simple son and the naive son, and then came the story itself: the Israelites in Egypt, Moses, God. The ten plagues.
“The ten plagues are barbarous,” I said. “I don’t like God.”
“A nice God wouldn’t last a week in this universe,” Eric said from across the table. “That’s why the wicked son belongs in the family.” He was sitting right at the corner, straddling a leg, and the corner poked into his belly. His napkin was stuck into his belt though we weren’t going to get our dinner for several more pages. He smiled benevolently as if he were God’s consultant in the matter of hardening Pharaoh’s heart so as to require the ten plagues.
“But it’s His universe,” said the flute teacher. “Couldn’t He provide any universe He wanted?”
Eric said, “We picked this one, and we go on preferring it.”
“I don’t prefer it,” I said, thinking of Tibby.
“You wouldn’t like a namby-pamby universe,” Eric said. “Eve tells the snake, ‘No thanks’—we get a boring world.”
“Hasn’t our taste just been spoiled by the world we’ve got?” said the flutist, but her question was unanswered. Laura and her friends were shouting the ten plagues.
To express our moderate sorrow over the sufferings of the Egyptians, we were to dip a finger in our glasses of wine at the mention of each plague—blood, frogs, lice, boils . . . and shake a drop on our plates. Eric stuck all his fingers in, one after another, and flicked extravagant drops, then licked wine off his fingers. “I extend my pleasure over the sufferings of the Egyptians.”
“You’re a character, aren’t you?” said the flute teacher.
The Hebrews fled in a hurry, with unleavened bread, and the Egyptians followed. The Red Sea parted for the Israelites, but drowned the pursuing Egyptians, and we offered thanks for several pages, then finally ate our dinner, with normal conversation. Then, just when I began to think we wouldn’t return to the final prayers, Laura proclaimed with good-humored fake surprise, “The afikomen is missing!”
Half a piece of matzo had been wrapped in a napkin sometime earlier. Laura had hidden it, and the rest of us were supposed to search.
More ritual felt tedious, not just I think to me, but we stood and followed Eric, who joyfully flung open closet doors and even pulled out drawers and peeked ostentatiously into them. On our third trip through the living room, I noticed a book at an unaccustomed angle, and withdrew the blue-and-white-checked napkin, which was folded around the piece of matzo.
“You took so long!” Laura exulted, like a little girl. “May I have the afikomen, please?”
“No,” I said as the others returned to their places. I was surprised to hear myself. “No, I want something in return.” I suppose I’d half-consciously remembered part of another Seder, because the young people assured us that, indeed, the afikomen is always redeemed.
“I forgot,” said Laura. “I didn’t plan a reward. Does anyone have a reward for my mother?”
“You won’t give me the reward I want,” I blurted out, angry now with the entire evening.
Laura said, “We can’t bring Tibby back!” His name hadn’t been mentioned, but backs straightened and breath was drawn in; everyone knew the story.
“What made that kid an Egyptian?” I said, in tears. “Why didn’t the sea open for him?” I heard myself give a low cry, then lowered the wrapped matzo and crushed it in my folded hands.
The afikomen remained unredeemed. After a while I sat down, feeling foolish, and handed the lumpy package to Laura, who distributed bits of matzo around the table. Now we spoke more quickly, thanking God yet again. Then it was time to fill a glass of wine for the prophet Elijah, and to open the house door so as to let him enter.
“The apartment door will do,” Laura said. I lived in a second-floor apartment in a two-family house. But I wanted cold air on my face, and a moment alone. I opened the apartment door, then walked down the stairs. Halfway down, I heard a heavy tread and turned to see Eric following me. “We still haven’t redeemed the afikomen,” he said. “I thought what to give you.”
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