My mother squirted honey into her tea and shook some Wheat Thins onto a yellow plate. “You’d probably sit at the kids’ table, with Tyler and his friends, and his sister, um . . .”
“Ruth,” I said. My tone made it clear that my family, my biological family, Bruce’s side of the family, was also none of her business. But either she didn’t catch my dirty look or she decided to ignore it.
“Ruth. Right. It might be fun,” she said in a perfectly neutral voice.
I shrugged again and arranged the pieces of the invitation in a neat stack.
My mom looked at me. “You know that your invitations won’t be quite as . . .” She paused, and I could tell she was picking out her next word carefully. “Elaborate as Tyler’s,” she finished.
I shrugged. “Tyler’s kind of a geek.”
“Well, it’s up to you. Just let me know.” Her voice was still neutral, but I could tell from the look on her face that she was pleased, as if I’d passed some kind of test. I wished I’d told her that I wanted to go, that what I wanted more than anything was to be a part of Bruce’s normal family.
I braced myself, waiting for her to say something or ask me what I was thinking. But she surprised me and managed to restrain herself, leaving me in the kitchen as she carried her tea into the office. After a minute, I heard the familiar sound of her fingers rattling across the keyboard.
I looked down at the invitation, then slid all of the pieces except for the reply card back into the oversize envelope, which I left on top of the recycling bin, where my mother would be sure to see it. I stuck the reply card in my back pocket. After dinner, when my mom was watching one of her reality-TV shows and my father was editing some medical-journal article, I pulled it out and carefully wrote, Miss Joy Shapiro Krushelevansky will be pleased to attend. Then I slipped the card underneath a stack of underwear in my top dresser drawer, thinking, Maybe. Maybe not.
SEVEN
“All right!” I said as we piled out of the minivan, doing my best to sound upbeat and cheerful, as opposed to desperate and panicky. “Who wants to start?” It was a sunny March morning, the weather warming, the sky a clear blue, the air soft and scented with honeysuckle. The trees were beginning to bud, and the path along Forbidden Drive was only slightly muddy. My plan was to go for a family hike—two miles up, then two miles back, with a stop to feed the ducks in between. Then we’d drive to Manayunk for brunch and hammer out the plans for Joy’s bat mitzvah along the way.
My daughter slammed her car door and stood in her familiar posture: chin tucked against her chest, shoulders drawn up toward her ears. Her long legs were encased in tight jeans that she’d topped with a fleece jacket that matched her bright blue fleece headband. Frenchelle’s leash was wrapped around her right wrist, and her left hand was shoved into her pocket, presumably beside the fleece hat I’d made her take (I’d also told her she might want to bring a scarf, but she’d glared at me as if I’d proposed she wear a petticoat, so I’d just wrapped an extra around my own neck).
While Peter rummaged in the glove compartment for the energy bar he was certain he’d left there, Joy started walking, head down, fists clenched, looking like she expected to find gates reading ARBEIT MACHT FREI at the top of the path, instead of a stand that sells sports drinks and ice-cream bars in the summertime. I resisted the urge to chase her, to run up the path and walk with her until she tells me what is wrong.
“Joy,” I called. She didn’t turn. “Joy!” I said.
She stopped ten yards ahead of us. Her entire body seemed to sigh as she let me catch up.
“Joy,” I said, panting slightly. “Slow your roll. Bat mitzvah. Ideas.”
She shrugged. “Well, I guess I’m having one, right?”
I bit back the half-dozen replies that instantly occurred to me. “Yes,” I said pleasantly to my daughter’s back. “You’re having a bat mitzvah. A fate worse than death, I know, but somehow you’ll have to endure. Your father and I were thinking about a Saturday-morning service and a luncheon afterward.”
This earned me another shrug, coupled with a contemptuous look at my hiking gear: sweatpants, sneakers, a long-sleeved T-shirt with a short-sleeved V-neck on top. Was that so bad? Judging from her face, it was. Probably the two scarves, I thought.
“Well, if you’ve already decided, what do you need me for?” Joy asked.
I stopped walking, frozen in place on the damp dirt of the path, staring at my daughter and imagining my hands on her shoulders, digging into the fleece and the flesh underneath as I gave her the brisk, corrective shake that she so desperately deserved. Last year at this time, before her jeans got tight and her grades and attitude got rotten, she’d have been delighted to spend an afternoon with Peter and me on an adventure: a hike or a bike ride or a trip to the antique shops in Lancaster. We’d done this same walk a dozen times with my sister or Samantha or my mom, and Joy had never objected, never behaved like this. I gave Peter what was quickly becoming my own patented look of desperation: the I can’t talk to her; you take it from here. Maybe it was being older, or a man, that made him so patient. Or maybe, I’d think sometimes, and instantly feel guilty for thinking it, it was because she wasn’t really his. He was less invested; he could afford to keep his cool.
“How about colors?” Peter asked Joy, catching up with us effortlessly. “Is pink still your favorite?”
“Pink,” Joy said icily, “was never my favorite.”
Peter looked back at me. I shrugged. Pink had definitely been her favorite when she was eight years old. We’d spent a whole afternoon at the paint store, and we’d brushed patches of the three different shades we’d chosen on her bedroom wall and observed them in the morning, afternoon, and evening light to determine the perfect pink.
“Do you want favors?” Peter continued. “We could have a photo booth, like Tamsin and Todd did.”
Shrug. “Whatever.”
“Monogrammed clamshells?” I inquired, unable to keep from sounding frustrated. “Fake gold bling? Do you need me to get implants ahead of time? Because, sweetheart, if that’s important to you—”
“Like anyone would ever give you implants,” Joy said, her tone matching mine.
“Joy, did I ever show you my bar mitzvah party pictures?” Peter asked. His face was calm and his voice untroubled enough to suggest that we’d been having a cordial conversation.
Joy shrugged, but it was a slightly less hostile shrug than what we’d previously enjoyed.
“We partied at the Pound Ridge Country Club,” said Peter. “My theme was Star Wars. Cocktail hour featured a Death Star constructed entirely from chopped liver.”
The faintest smile flickered across Joy’s face. “No way.”
“Way. Did you ever see pictures of my grandfather? By the time he was ninety, the man was a dead ringer for Yoda. Wise he was,” Peter said, shaking his head sadly.
I gave him a grateful look, knowing that he was lying: Star Wars wouldn’t have come out until after Peter’s bar mitzvah; the senior Krushelevanskys hadn’t been what you’d call whimsical folks; and his grandfather Irv hadn’t even slightly resembled Yoda.
“We had inflatable light sabers for favors,” Peter continued.
“Even the girls?” Joy asked.
“Hmm,” Peter rumbled. “Maybe they got something different.” He walked, lanky and loose-limbed in his khakis and sweatshirt. “Fake Princess Leia hair?”
“Ha ha ha,” said Joy.
“I remember that my uncle Herman made the kiddush, and after he was done with the blessing, he told all my friends to stand up and reach under their seats. He’d taped dollar bills under every seat at the kids’ table—”
“A dollar was a lot of money in those days,” I interjected, which earned me, inevitably, another eye roll from Joy.
“And he said,” Peter continued, “that the most important lesson of adulthood he could give us was ‘Get off your ass and you’ll make a buck.’”
I laughed. Joy’s mouth lifted slightly.
“Do I know Uncle Herman?” she asked.
“He’s gone to the great Borscht Belt in the sky,” Peter said.
“But he was at your father’s bar mitzvah, and that was important. Having family there . . . making memories . . .” I said.
Joy muttered something under her breath that sounded like Oh, please.
“Have you thought about what you want?” Peter prompted her.
“How about Grease?” Joy said.
“How about no?” I snapped. The two of them stared at me. I shrugged. “Well, what’s Grease about? High school delinquents. Unplanned pregnancy. Cliques. Smoking!”
“Smoking,” Peter mused, his voice filled with ersatz sorrow. I gave him a look of Back me up here, please. He nodded soberly. Only someone who’d known him as long as I had could have understood how hard he was struggling not to laugh.
“What did you have, a Sound of Music theme?” Joy asked me, her lips curling as she named my all-time favorite musical (needless to say, she hated it, refused to watch it with me, and had referred to it more than once as “that thing about the Nazis”). “Was there, like, yodeling?”
“I didn’t really have a party,” I said shortly. I didn’t have a party because my father was crazy, I didn’t add. Crazy and cheap and something of a hypocrite. As the only son of an upper-middle-class family, he’d had a big bar mitzvah—a few hundred people at a black-tie dinner in the synagogue, with Super 8 movies to prove it. But by the time his kids reached the age of Jewish adulthood it was the eighties, and the bar and bat mitzvah bashes were starting to get seriously out of hand. We’d attended four of my cousins’ fetes in Ohio before my thirteenth birthday. Each one had been grander than the last (one, I remember, had a circus theme, complete with a troupe of performers on stilts and fire-eaters between courses). On the long car rides back to Pennsylvania, with my mother sitting silently beside him, my father had complained bitterly about the ostentation, the expense, the superficiality, the conspicuous consumption, the way my mother’s sister and her husband—a hapless accountant named Phil—had used a religious occasion to spend thousands of dollars to impress friends and relations with the fact that they had thousands of dollars to spend, how none of it had anything to do with God.
So, unlike my Cleveland cousins and my Hebrew-school classmates, I hadn’t had a catered luncheon at the country club or a dinner with dancing on a Saturday night. No disc jockey, no hired entertainers, no fancy favors with my name embossed on a T-shirt or stitched onto a baseball cap. I’d been bat mitzvahed on a Friday night in a ruffled, flounced Gunne Sax dress that my mother had bought off the clearance rack at Marshall’s. Two months before the big day, my father had presented me with a box of stationery and his Mont Blanc pen; he’d given me a speech about how the invitations would mean more if they came from me, personally. Every night when I finished my homework, I wrote out invitations: to grandparents and great-grandparents; aunts and uncles and cousins; the three friends I had at the time, inviting them to join me as I became a daughter of the Commandments.
My mother’s mother, full of head shakes and disapproving looks but too cowed by my dad’s temper to say anything, had come a week early and spent seven days making rugelach and mandel bread and delicate, scallop-edged butter cookies, so we’d at least have fancy baked goods at the oneg, the reception after Shabbat services. Sprinkling the dough with nuts and sweet wine, my grandmother regaled Elle and Josh and me with details of my cousins’ receptions, as if we hadn’t been there to witness each blowout: the bands and the food and the favors, how the pastry chef had spelled out our cousins’ names in icing on the petit fours.
So on a Friday night I celebrated with a slightly amplified post-Shabbat reception in the synagogue’s social hall. There was no music, no dancing, and no professional photographer, which was probably a good thing, given how awful I’d looked in my ruffled, beribboned dress that I’d realized, too late, looked much better on the models in Seventeen, or my pretty cousins, than it ever would on me. At thirteen, I was all boobs and braces, a too big nose and too short hair. Fifty people came: the Friday-night regulars, my friends, a dozen relatives. My mother told me she loved me. My father kissed my cheek and said that he was proud. My grandmother snapped pictures with her little Instamatic and cried.
But it hadn’t been a disaster. I’d wound up feeling perversely good about my low-budget DIY affair, believing, as my father had instructed, that I was participating in a ceremony that meant something, instead of just an excuse for a big show-off party. After I’d finished my Torah portion with hardly a stumble, I’d bent to touch the spine of my prayer book to the scroll, then lifted it to my lips. My father’s hand was a heavy, warm weight on my shoulder. I’m proud of you, he’d said, his voice rumbling through me, his brown eyes soft behind his glasses—and at that minute, standing on the bimah in my all-wrong dress, I felt proud of myself. I felt smart, radiant, even a little bit pretty. I felt vastly superior to my cousins from Ohio, with their fancy parties and the same photographer who’d always made all of the boys stand in a row and pretend to gape at a Playboy centerfold for their picture.
More than anything, I wanted Joy to have that feeling: of pride, of accomplishment, of actually having done something more than mouthing a little Hebrew and having an over-the-top bash as a reward. There was so much I couldn’t give her: my love of books, for one thing; a normal first-comes-love, then-comes-marriage story of her own birth, for another. I just wanted her to feel what I’d felt in front of the congregation at that moment: that she knew who she was, and that it pleased her. I took a deep breath and quickened my pace until I was close enough to hear Frenchelle panting. I reached out my hand for her leash, and Joy handed it over without meeting my eyes.
“How come you didn’t have a real party?” asked Joy.
I decided to keep it simple. “My parents didn’t really believe in them. They wanted my bat mitzvah to be more about religion than having a big party with a theme. They wanted it to be about religion, and meaning, and adulthood. Growing up.”
“Huh.” I stopped while Frenchie squatted over a clump of ferns.
“We want your bat mitzvah to be meaningful, too,” I said. “Have you thought about your mitzvah project?”
Joy shrugged. Even surly and miserable, she was still so lovely, with her honey-colored hair and her coltish figure. “Maybe something with kids,” she said. “Or pets.”
Okay, Miss America. “What kind of thing?” I prompted. Another shrug. “Which kids?” I asked. This time she didn’t even bother shrugging. She just snatched Frenchelle’s leash away from me and started up the path again. “Never mind,” Peter said, giving my hand a squeeze. “We’ve got all morning.” I shook my head, staring at my daughter’s back as she marched away, head held high, widening the gap with each step.
• • •
At the sunny café on Main Street, in Manayunk, Joy drank black coffee and poked at her huevos rancheros, moving beans and eggs and tortillas around the plate without eating much. However, she agreed to step up her search for a mitzvah project that would mean something to her.
In turn, we agreed to a party with music and dancing, and that I wouldn’t make her hand-write sixty invitations (nor would I agree to bake platters of sweets for the party). Joy grudgingly consented to the elegant but relatively inexpensive invitations I’d found online, and agreed that a photo booth was a good idea.
“And I want to invite everyone in my Hebrew-school class,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to feel left out.”
“That’s really nice,” I said, swallowing hard. Here was my good girl, my sweet, serious, considerate Joy who’d tried to give the goldfish crackers left over from her nursery-school lunch to the homeless people we’d pass on our way home from the park. When I smiled at her, she didn’t smile back, but she didn’t turn away, either. I leaned forward eagerly, thinking this was progress. I could get her talking, get her excited about her bat mitzvah, get past the coldness in her eyes.
I
looked around the restaurant—the yellow walls hung with paintings, the dark wood tables—and breathed in the good smells of coffee and bacon and corn bread. “You know, I used to take you here all the time when you were little,” I said. “We used to do Mommy and Me yoga right across the street with—”
“Emmett and Zack and Jack,” Joy said in a bored voice. “And then we’d go to Whole Foods, and you would get me chickpeas and tofu from the salad bar, because chickpeas and tofu were my favorites.”
“Right,” I said. I guessed she’d heard that story once or twice be fore. When she was little, she’d liked nothing better than to hear me tell stories about when she was a baby, a toddler, the first time she’d said the word “Nifkin,” the time I’d put her in her baby backpack and taken her for a walk in the snow. “You always liked that stuff. You ate—”
“—like I was born in the parking lot at a Grateful Dead show,” Joy said in that same bored voice. She raised her eyes and glared at me with such a smoking look of fury that I almost gasped. Then it was gone, and it was just Joy again, her lovely face, her look of bored disdain. “Maybe I got that from my father.”
Beside me, I imagined I could feel Peter flinch. Joy didn’t mention Bruce to me too often, and she hardly ever mentioned him in front of Peter. “I don’t think you got that much from him,” I said. It was equal parts statement and prayer. Please, God, I thought, let the only thing she got from him be her good looks and not his predilection for parental handouts and pot.
“Is he invited?” Joy asked.
I scooped a stack of sugar packets, desperate to have something to do with my hands. “Bruce? Of course Bruce is invited.”
“Good.” She pushed herself away from the table, stuck her thumbs in the pockets of her jeans, and sauntered off toward the bathroom with her hips and ponytail swinging, drawing appreciative glances from the busboys in her wake.
I looked at Peter helplessly. “What did I do?” I asked, spreading my hands, palms to the sky. “Did I run over her dog? Steal her boyfriend? My God. Did you see the way she looked at me? It was like”—I gulped—“like she hates me.”
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