I met Mickey Mouse on that trip. He was surprisingly tall.
He towered over me, a white-gloved hand extended in my direction, his face permanently molded into an open-mouthed smile, black ears blocking out the sun. He scared me. I hid behind my mom. Mickey turned to my sister, Rachel. She was twelve and thought she was too cool for this kind of thing. Physically unable to stop smiling, Mickey waved his white-gloved hand at Rachel; she rolled her eyes and offered a single pathetic wave in return, muttering, “Yeah, hi,” as if she saw Mickey Mouse on the school bus every morning and couldn’t wait to be rid of him.
But we were not rid of Mickey for long. He popped up around every corner at Walt Disney World—Mickey or one of his friends, all of whom were unexpectedly large and scary, their friendly expressions notwithstanding.
“I want to ride Space Mountain,” I told my dad.
“We just ate lunch, Benjamin,” he said. “Maybe later.”
“I want to go now,” I insisted.
He turned to my sister. “Rachel, do you want to take your brother on the roller coaster?”
She did not. She didn’t want to be there, with any relatives or cartoon characters or fabulous rides, at all.
“No way,” she said.
My father shrugged as if to say, “I tried.”
“Sid, you two go,” my mother told my father. “Rachel and I are going to look in the shops.”
Shopping. The one interest my mother and sister shared.
We were off, my dad and I, to Space Mountain. Just us guys, in silence. My mom and I argued a lot but we were never at a loss for words; it was different with my dad. We weren’t uncomfortable together, but we didn’t usually talk much, so once we were alone, he appeared as unsure as I was about what to say without my mother to keep the conversation going. We were quiet, me pulling him by the hand through the crowd.
It was a relief, this quiet. Rachel hadn’t had anything pleasant to say for months; Mom said it was just part of being twelve and she’d grow out of it. Mostly she ignored Dad and me; she sniped at Mom constantly.
But Mom wasn’t fighting back this week. She was sullen and atypically silent. This Florida trip had been planned around Grandpa Jack’s unveiling. When he died the previous summer of a heart attack, Mom went to Florida alone, while Dad took care of Rachel and me; the news of his death was shocking enough and they didn’t think we could handle the funeral. This year, my parents planned a week in Florida for the whole family right before school started: a few days with Grandma in her Delray Beach condo, during which time we had the ceremony unveiling Grandpa’s tombstone at the Magen David Memorial Grounds, followed by a few days in Orlando visiting the Magic Kingdom and Epcot Center. It was an odd combination—a cemetery and a theme park—but I wasn’t bothered. I was at Disney for the first time, headed for my first roller coaster, and nothing else mattered.
“Do you miss Grandpa Jack?” my father asked me while we stood on line, under the sign that said “Sixty-minute Wait from This Point.”
I did. I missed the times he took me to the playground when he visited, and the corny jokes he saved up to tell me, and the orange Tic Tacs he always had stashed in his pants pocket. He never treated me like I was Rachel’s little brother, the way my parents and teachers sometimes did; he treated me like I was my own person. But I didn’t really want to talk about that with my dad. I thought I might cry, and he didn’t like it when I cried.
“Yeah,” I said, looking down at my feet. “I guess.”
“You know, Grandma is still going to come visit us, and maybe we can come down here again to see her,” he said. “Go to the beach next time, or maybe Sea World.”
“Okay,” I said, inching forward toward the people in front of us.
“You were lucky to know Grandpa Jack,” he said. “You never knew your other grandfather, my father. But that’s not entirely a bad thing. He was a real SOB. Not like Jack.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. I’d heard stories, mostly from my mother.
“I never knew either of my grandfathers,” he continued. “My mom’s parents stayed behind in Russia, and my dad’s dad died before I was born.”
“Mm-hmm,” I mumbled. “How much longer till it’s our turn?”
My father shook his head for a second. “I don’t know, Benjamin, it could be another hour. Do you want to come back later?”
“No, I’ll wait.”
The rest of the time on line, my father didn’t say much. I kept checking the new watch that Grandma Gertie gave me—a digital watch with a bright orange plastic strap that said “Florida” and had a green cartoon alligator on it. The wait didn’t take a full hour.
When it was time to board the roller coaster, I got a seat at the front, sitting close to the bullet-shaped car’s tapered nose. My father sat directly behind me.
“The front is pretty scary,” he said into my ear. “Are you sure you want to sit there?”
I nodded.
“Hold on tight,” he said. “I’m right behind you.” And we shot off into the dark.
The ride was fast but smooth, hurtling through blackness punctuated only by the occasional flashing colored light and the glowing white streaks painted on the sides of other cars, snaking up and down all around us. Screams echoed around the inside of the mountain as we climbed and plummeted, swerved and dipped. My father was right: The front seat was a scary place to be. I tried to turn around to see if he was scared, too, but he shouted, “Face the front, Benjamin, I’m right behind you.” I reached one hand behind my head, hoping he’d grab it, but he didn’t. “Hold on to the bars,” he instructed. “It’s safer.”
I gripped the metal bars on each side of the car so tightly that my fingers went numb. I knew the next fall could be coming any second—no way to prepare, yet no way to pretend it wasn’t coming. I tensed my body and held my breath, darkness all around me, wishing my new watch had a stopwatch so I could count the seconds until this ride ended and I could breathe again.
“That was awesome,” a kid behind me told his friend as we stepped out onto the platform. “Let’s go on again.”
I looked at my father. He was a bit unsteady on his feet, looking pale, sweating. He looked like he could barf.
“I need to sit down for a minute,” he said to me, heading for a bench by the exit. “Don’t go where I can’t see you.”
I turned around and saw Mickey Mouse standing by the doors, Japanese tourists taking his photo. When they dispersed, he spotted me, perhaps remembering me from an earlier hour. He spread his arms, both his hands open. I looked back at my father, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief; he wasn’t watching. I turned around and ran toward Mickey, putting my numb hands in his white-gloved paws for a moment. He squeezed my hands; I felt it. Then I threw my arms around Mickey and pushed my head against his stomach, hugging him tight. And he put his hands on my shoulders and hugged me back.
The following day the rabbi didn’t come to work. I didn’t realize it until the end of the day, when Mrs. Goldfarb knocked on my door as she passed on her way to her car.
“You’ve got the car to yourself today, Benjamin,” she said. “Rabbi Zuckerman stayed home.”
“Is he sick?” I asked. I wondered if he’d caught a cold from the previous day’s downpour. Had I covered him enough with my umbrella?
“He didn’t sound too bad when he called this morning, maybe just a little under the weather,” she said. “I wouldn’t worry. It’s probably better for him to take a day off now and then anyway, at his age. I can run the store just fine without him.”
She left.
Mrs. Goldfarb might not have been concerned about him, but I was. I drove up to his house alone and parked in the driveway. I walked up to the door and rang the bell.
He opened the front door, dressed not in a bathrobe or pajamas, but in the exact same clothes he usually wore to work. Including the hard shoes.
“Benji? What are you doing here?” he asked through the screen door.
“M
rs. Goldfarb told me you were home sick and I wanted to stop by and make sure you were all right.”
He opened the screen door and ushered me in. “You were worried about me?” he asked, perhaps hopeful, perhaps incredulous.
“I thought maybe you might need something from the store, some medicine or some food, if you’re sick,” I said. Then, simply: “Yes, I was worried about you.”
He offered me the wingback chair again and the same dish of old nuts. I accepted this time. “I’ll get you a glass of water,” he said, excusing himself to go to the kitchen for what must have been his automatic response to houseguests.
He returned with two glasses and sat on the sofa across from me.
“So are you sick?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” he said.
I looked at him quizzically.
“My body is fine, old and feeble, but fine,” he said, looking down at his glass. “It’s my heart that is sick. I’ve just been thinking about my Sophie.”
Sure, I thought, ever since yesterday’s awkward visit. But here was my second chance.
“What was she like?” I asked.
He brushed me off. “You don’t want to hear about her.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
He lifted his head to look into my eyes. I nodded, and he began.
“I met her in 1951, when I was teaching at a yeshiva in Brooklyn. She was such a beauty—long brown hair and the most delicate hands, but eyes so sad and far away,” he said. “But after all they had seen . . .”
Sophie had arrived in America only a few years before, the sole member of her extended family to survive the Holocaust. After all the indignities and offenses she had witnessed during the war, she had to suffer still more in peacetime: She couldn’t go home to her village in Poland and instead had to enjoy her so-called freedom in a displaced persons camp in Germany. It was there, in the camp, that she befriended an American soldier, a medic, a Jew who spoke to her in Yiddish. Although she was a beautiful young woman, almost twenty at the time, and the soldier was only seven or eight years older and as handsome as all kind, healthy American soldiers must have seemed, their connection was not romantic.
“They were like brother and sister,” Rabbi Zuckerman explained. “They would talk in Yiddish, but he also began to teach her English words. She would stay near him during the day, watching him work, and keeping up to date on the news of the world. New people arrived at the camp, and others left for Palestine or America, but Sophie had nowhere to go.”
When it was time for the soldier to end his tour of duty and return stateside, he made arrangements with a Jewish aid agency to bring Sophie to America. The soldier’s family took her in as one of their own, essentially adopting her and giving her a whole new set of brothers and sisters and parents, and the soldier set her up to train as a nurse’s aide.
“She was working in the clinic at the girls’ school across the street from my yeshiva, when I first saw her,” the rabbi recalled. “I had spent years at that yeshiva, teaching boys prayers and Torah lessons, and studying with the other rabbis in the evenings. But once I saw Sophie, I couldn’t think about anything else. She was my bashert.”
“Your what?” I asked.
“My bashert,” he repeated. “The one I was destined to meet, to share my life with.”
“You really believe that?” This came out sounding sharper than I’d intended, and the rabbi cocked his head at me, stung.
“I do,” he said. “You’ll see. You’ll meet the right girl one day.”
“I doubt it,” I said, leaving it at that.
“We are all destined to have someone special come into our lives, Benji,” he said gently but with conviction, like a teacher explaining something utterly simple to a particularly dim student. “Even you.”
CHAPTER 4
The rabbi’s words stayed with me for days. Was there really someone I was destined to meet?
Obviously, I hadn’t met my bashert yet. Or maybe I had met him, but didn’t even know it. Maybe I’d already dated him but had cast him aside for some ridiculous reason: he bit his fingernails, he wore the wrong shoes, he didn’t like The Kids in the Hall. Maybe I’d blown my only chance.
Would I know my bashert if I saw him? Would I recognize him?
I sat at my desk on Saturday morning, scanning the photos of a dozen different models the photographer had suggested to be the devil in the Paradise ad. I wasn’t thrilled to be at my office on a weekend, but the bar manager seemed serious about deadlines, and I wanted to impress him—I needed the job. Besides, looking at photos of hot guys wasn’t such a bad way to spend a Saturday morning.
As I flipped through the pictures, I searched for my bashert. Was this him—the curly-haired boy with the dimpled chin and perfect eyebrows? Or this one, a daddy type with a trim goatee and a shaved head? Or the blond one with the blue eyes? I’d always had a thing for blonds; was this because my bashert was blond, or because he was anything but blond— the universe’s churlish way of throwing me off my future husband’s track?
The blonds I’d dated weren’t exactly a parade of winners.
There was Rick, my boyfriend senior year at Maryland. A psych major. Seemed like a catch: funny as hell, well-read, the body of an athlete without any of the actual annoying athletics. We dated most of spring semester before I realized that Rick was studying psychology for a reason—because he was crazy.
Brad lasted half a summer after graduation. He was gaga over me, bringing me flowers and cooking me dinner and giving me massages every night. Too bad I didn’t find him sexually attractive. I mean, I tried, I really tried. But at some point you have to open your eyes. Literally.
Gordy was a dog groomer. Sexual attraction was definitely not a problem with him. Men would stop in their tracks and peer over their sunglasses to get a gander at Gordy. “I don’t even notice those other guys,” he’d say. “You’re the only one for me.” I believed that for a solid six weeks, until he gave me a case of something itchy that he assured me were fleas, but turned out to be crabs.
A bunch of blonds. And me, still single, without anyone whose photo belonged in a tacky frame over my fireplace.
Should I have taken the hint? Or kept trying until I found the right blond?
I went over the photos for Paradise again, imagining how each model might look in the ad, trying to see which one could most convincingly represent pure evil. Surprise, surprise: The blond guy—with his coolly mischievous eyes and broad shoulders—turned me on. I took a Magic Marker and drew horns and a tail on his eight-by-ten glossy. It was a good look on him.
Better the devil you know, I thought. I called the photographer and told him the blond was my favorite.
“He’s hot, right?” the photographer said.
“Hot as hell,” I said.
As I pulled my car around to head home, services at B’nai Tikvah were letting out across the parking lot.
Black yarmulke. Black yarmulke. Black yarmulke.
I stopped at the end of a row to see if Rabbi Zuckerman would appear in the doorway. He did, again, lagging behind the other men. As I looked at him, he looked up and met my eyes through the windshield. And then, a second later, his knees gave out and he crumpled to the ground.
One young congregant saw it happen; he turned and ran back to assist Rabbi Zuckerman, calling several other young men to come with him. I pulled into the nearest parking space and raced to the rabbi.
The men had pulled the rabbi to his feet by the time I approached. He was leaning against the wall of the synagogue, his hands trembling, his face pale even for him. One of the young men was using the rabbi’s hat to fan him.
“Rabbi, are you okay?” I asked.
All the black yarmulkes turned and stared. They said nothing; they wouldn’t have known where to begin to engage me in conversation. I was wearing camouflage shorts and a powder blue T-shirt that said “Rehoboth Beach.” No suit, no hat, no yarmulke. I might as well have been naked.
“I’m fine, Benji,” said the rabbi. “Just a little lightheaded.”
If anything could have surprised the congregants more than me rushing to the rabbi’s side, it was finding out that the rabbi knew me by name. Their confusion was evident in their expressions.
“I work right behind his bookstore,” I said to them.
No response, except for fewer raised eyebrows.
“Benjamin Steiner,” the rabbi said to them, gesturing toward me with one shaky hand, to introduce me. And to indicate by mentioning my name that I, too, was a Jew. Not quite one of them, but not quite not, either.
After a minute or two, the rabbi’s color had started to return and his breathing was steady, but he still didn’t look ready to tackle the hill to his house.
“I think I just need to get off my feet for a moment,” he said.
One of the congregants opened the door to B’nai Tikvah, while another took the rabbi’s elbow to lead him back inside the synagogue. A wall of backs turned to me.
“You could lie down on my couch,” I offered to the backs of their heads.
The rabbi stopped. Turned. Nodded at me once.
Had he chosen me over his fellow worshippers? Or merely my cushioned futon over B’nai Tikvah’s wooden benches? The man at the rabbi’s side stepped back and I took the rabbi’s arm, walking him slowly toward my office. The congregants stood for a moment, waiting.
“Thank you very much,” the rabbi said to them without looking back. “Gut Shabbes.” And they dispersed.
Leaning on me for support as we walked across the parking lot, past his closed bookstore, the rabbi had no words for me until we reached my office. Then he spoke.
“You were at work this morning?” he asked while I unlocked the door. “On Saturday?”
I nodded. He shook his head. I opened the door.
“No lights,” he said, holding up his hand to stop me as I reached for the switch. “It’s Shabbat.”
We weren’t stuck in the dark; I simply opened the blinds and let in the daylight. But I quickly realized that “no lights” had other implications: Observing the Sabbath meant no computer, no phone, no writing. No work. What was I supposed to do while he was there lying down?
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