Her eyes narrowed a bit. “He’s cute, right?”
“He’s cute,” I said. “Cute and straight. And he’s obviously into you, going to meet your family. Guys don’t take that kind of thing lightly. I should know—I’m a guy, remember?”
She picked at her sandwich, which was getting cold.
“I’m sure he’ll apologize,” I said. “Once you start taking his calls.” She had turned off her cell phone to avoid talking to him.
“And then what? That’s it?”
“And then you forgive him,” I said.
“Why should I?”
“Because forgiveness is what the High Holidays are all about.”
She pursed her lips.
“You’ve been spending too much time with that rabbi,” she said.
On Rosh Hashanah, my whole family planned to go to services together. Rachel and Richard had flown in the day before; they were staying with my parents in Rockville, despite the fact that my folks didn’t much care for their son-in-law.
I drove over in the morning, singing along with the radio as I cruised up Rockville Pike, the eight-lane main drag where I spent most of my free time in high school. Some of the stores in the back-to-back strip malls had changed—a cell phone dealer where Blockbuster used to be, a Payless instead of a Fayva, an enormous new Barnes & Noble—but the basics were the same as they’d been for years: multiplex movie theaters, fast-food joints, Old Navy and Einstein’s Bagels and three branches of Starbucks. “Everything you could ever want is right here. I don’t know why anyone would ever need to go into the city,” my mother used to say—and I used to agree with her.
While it was only a few blocks off the Pike, my parents’ development was much quieter. Two-story colonial houses lined curved streets and shaded cul-de-sacs. Wide front yards were neatly mowed, the shutters neatly painted. The long white driveways revealed what type of people lived in these homes: While the occasional minivan or SUV, and even the odd sporty coupe, could be spotted, the bulk of the cars were the kind that middle-class families everywhere drive—neither bottom of the line nor top of the line, valued for their roominess and gas mileage and safety record, but with a hint of imported style. Camrys, Accords, Jettas, as well as a handful of Volvo hatchbacks, in muted blues and reds.
I pulled in behind my parents’ new Altima and walked across the front yard, past the flowerbeds my mother now had professionally tended.
My sister met me at the door with a one-armed hug. Even though we’d grown closer as adults, after we’d both left home, we were never the type for fawning kisses and extravagant affection. “You look nice,” she said. I shrugged; I was wearing my only suit, the same one I’d had since college, the same one I wore every Rosh Hashanah.
Richard, the warmer of the two, hugged me harder and said, “Man, it’s good to see you.” I surmised that their visit wasn’t going well.
“We’re going with Benji, we’ll meet you there!” Rachel called upstairs, where my parents were still getting dressed. And off we went.
On the drive to synagogue, they griped about my parents, who never quite understood what Richard’s job as a consultant for tech companies entailed; they kept asking when he was planning on getting a “real” job and how they’d ever start a family if he was “out of work.” He explained that compared to most people with full-time jobs, he was bringing in more money and working fewer hours, which actually left him with more time for a family, but they didn’t get it. They badgered my sister about having children—in quips that were only half-kidding. She was almost thirty. If she waited much longer, they told her at every opportunity, she’d miss her chance. (“You can always go back to your little gardening job later,” my mother would tell her, referring to my sister’s job managing a plant nursery. “But you won’t be able to have children forever.”)
I was lucky, I realized. My parents and I mostly got along. They’d never complained about my work—they were even largely supportive when I opened my own office—and they never pressured me about relationships or kids. Aside from my mom’s occasional peevish lecture, they stayed off my back. “That’s because you’re the favorite,” said Rachel, who’d never quite gotten past her childhood resentments, despite our adult detente. “Their only son. And their baby.” I usually tried to avoid dredging up our prepubescent tensions, so I told her it wasn’t true. But it was, partly.
Waiting for my parents in Congregation Beth Shalom’s parking lot, we saw a lot of familiar faces, people Rachel or I had gone to Hebrew school with, or friends of our parents. We both got a lot of attention—Rachel because she lived thousands of miles away, so seeing her was a rarity, and me because I might as well have lived thousands of miles away considering how infrequently I showed up at synagogue.
We saw the Siegels, who lived around the corner from my parents and used to invite us over for barbecues when we were little. And Mrs. Horowitz, whose son Dean dated Rachel in tenth grade; he was living on Long Island, we already knew, doing something that made him very wealthy, and living in a very big house with a wife and kids. And Miriam Goldstein, who went to Hebrew school with me, walking in with Howie Goldstein, who was also in our class and was now, since that spring, her husband. (“I wonder if she thinks she’s using her maiden name or her married name,” I whispered to Rachel. “Or maybe she hyphenates: Miriam Goldstein-Goldstein.”) Plus a random collection of people who knew us well enough to gossip about us, but not well enough to remember any of the actual, relevant details of our lives.
Each of the conversations went something like this:
“Rachel Steiner, is that you?”
“It’s Rachel Silber now, but yes, it’s me.”
“Oh, it’s so nice to see you! You look just wonderful. And I remember your husband . . .”
“Richard.”
“Of course, Richard. We met last year. How’s life out in . . .”
“Seattle.”
“Right, Seattle.”
“It’s great. I’m still working at the nursery, and Richard’s still working with tech companies.”
“Microsoft?”
“Well, he’s a consultant, so he works for himself.”
“Oh.”
Richard would pipe in: “Microsoft is one of my clients.”
“How nice. And little Benjamin, my goodness, I hardly even recognize you. It seems like your bar mitzvah was just yesterday. How have you been?”
“Fine,” I’d say.
“Still no ring on that finger?”
“Nope.”
“Well, you’re still young, probably dating a different girl every night of the week. Am I right? They’re probably knocking down your door, you’re so handsome.”
This was one of the many reasons I didn’t like to go to my old synagogue. I’d come out years before, when I was in college. All of my friends knew, my family knew, and even most of my parents’ friends knew. My parents were fine about having a gay son, for the most part. But they were still a bit uncomfortable telling “everyone”—meaning, they were fine telling people privately that their son was gay, but they weren’t ready to come out publicly. In my world, I did what I wanted and everyone knew I was gay; but Congregation Beth Shalom was their world, not mine, and I deferred to their sense of what was appropriate. I didn’t exactly lie, but I kept my mouth shut. So when I was faced with questions about why I hadn’t gotten married yet, I’d answer with something like this:
“I just haven’t met the right person yet.”
I hated it.
My parents arrived and we filed inside. We had assigned seats for the holidays—the expensive seats, not the folding chairs lined up in the back of the room—and it took us a while to find them. My father sat on one end, next to my mother, who sat next to Rachel so the two of them could pass judgment on every other woman’s outfit. Richard sat next to my sister, and I sat on the other side of him, because I honestly didn’t mind my brother-in-law a bit.
I spotted Mrs. Goldfarb across the room, sitting al
one. I nodded at her and she gave me a little wave.
The service was endless, just as I remembered it. Stand up, sit down. Pray silently, sing together. Read responsively in English, sing responsively in Hebrew. For hours and hours. And I was trapped, sitting against the wall. I couldn’t sneak out without climbing over my entire family, and if I’d tried, my mother would have shot me a look that would have stopped me in my tracks. So I sat there, noticing how the men—wearing dark suits and conservative ties, traditional prayer shawls and unremarkable shoes—expressed their individuality through their yarmulkes: blue-and-white crocheted with a star of David, shiny crimson satin probably from someone’s wedding, chic gray suede, burgundy and gold with a Washington Redskins design. I wondered how many of these designs Mrs. Goldfarb sold in the bookstore. It would surely have been more interesting than selling black yarmulke after black yarmulke to customers from B’nai Tikvah.
The choir, a bunch of old ladies selected more for their spare time than their musical talent, added a note of atonality to the proceedings. And the man blowing the shofar looked like he was about to keel over from the strain; he was red and sweaty and short on breath. It was not what you’d call a lively service.
But the low point was the sermon. It was the only time of the year when Rabbi Adler, who had led the congregation for some thirty years and was making noises about retirement, had pretty much the entire synagogue as a captive audience, upwards of a thousand people. He could have talked about so many things: the war in Iraq, peace in the Middle East, global warming, the following year’s presidential race that was already kicking into high gear. He even could have stuck specifically to religion, talking about the crumbling wall separating church and state in America, or interfaith dialogue with Muslims and Christians.
Instead, Rabbi Adler took this rare opportunity to exhort his congregation to come to synagogue more often. A guilt trip, aimed squarely at the people who had skipped services since the previous High Holidays. And Rabbi Adler wasn’t the greatest speaker in the first place; my mother could have given a better guilt trip in five minutes and had plenty of time left over to talk about real issues while the sisterhood handed out grape juice and petit fours.
My parents had been talking a great deal about how the Conservative movement was changing. It was about time, as far as I was concerned; my father liked to talk about how the Conservative movement played a key role in the civil rights struggles of the sixties and helped redefine women’s role in Judaism in the eighties, but all I saw was a stagnant movement that hadn’t kept up with the changing times for as long as I could remember. My father said they finally had some new faces leading the movement and policies around gay issues in particular—marriage, ordaining rabbis—had started to shift.
So the movement was changing. That didn’t mean Rabbi Adler was any more enlightened as an individual. I had heard his opinions on gay issues several years earlier.
Everyone preparing for a bar or bat mitzvah at Congregation Beth Shalom was required to attend Saturday morning services regularly, to learn the prayers. So I sat there every week with my parents, wearing my brown loafers and my red tie and my blue blazer, listening to Rabbi Adler.
Before long, I learned the service pretty much by heart, and I took my cues from each page number Rabbi Adler announced.
Page 128: Beginning of the Torah service. Close the prayer book and pick up the Chumash, which contains all the Torah portions along with translations and commentary. Flip pages until you find something interesting to read—either a familiar Bible story or an incredibly arcane commandment that has apparently generated centuries of rabbinical philosophizing.
Page 139: The Amidah. Stand silently for ten minutes, rocking back and forth, bending occasionally at the knee. Look around the sanctuary to see who else isn’t really reading the prayer.
And so on. Very little changed from week to week, other than the sermon.
Oftentimes, Rabbi Adler would pull a lesson out of the Torah portion and spin it into a speech. Other times, he’d focus on a less ancient subject by plucking something from the week’s headlines: peace talks in Israel, universal health care, the Redskins’ playoff hopes. He tried, given his limited skills as an orator, to keep things interesting.
But one October morning, he gave a sermon I’d never forget—about homosexuality. Here, the Bible and the Washington Post were in synch: The Torah portion that week was from Genesis, and included the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. And that week in the Post, the debate over gays in the military had made headlines on the front page and the editorial page.
Rabbi Adler wasn’t some crazed right-winger ranting about sodomites. No, he spoke calmly about “homosexuals” and the ways they were trying to undermine traditional institutions, from the family to the military, the schools to our houses of worship. He spoke of a “homosexual agenda,” and the general decaying of moral standards in America. He said he had compassion for homosexuals’ sad plight—he meant AIDS, although this went without saying—but did not believe in giving them “special rights.”
“If you want to see what happens to a society where our codes of morality are turned upside down, where perversion is treated as a reasonable choice, you need look no further than today’s Torah portion. The Jewish community does not turn away people struggling with sin, whether they are homosexuals or adulterers, drug abusers or common criminals. But neither can we pretend that their sins are not sins. On this question, when it comes to homosexuality, the Torah says there is but one answer.”
Not yet thirteen years old, I wasn’t out of the closet. I wasn’t even sure that I was in any closet yet. But I did have an inkling that Rabbi Adler was talking about me.
I knew that I didn’t have any interest in girls. I knew that when I was alone in bed at night, I thought about other guys—guys I had seen in the gym locker room, or on television, or at the mall. I knew that this wasn’t something I should talk about with anyone, not my parents or my sister or my best friends.
And I knew that in several weeks’ time, Rabbi Adler would be on the bimah with me, congratulating me on my bar mitzvah, welcoming me as a full member of the community, even as he had already, proactively, unknowingly cast me out.
Rabbi Adler wrapped up his sermon, and then, as if his pronouncements had been utterly casual, he returned to the service.
Page 157: “Ein Keloheynu.” Such a pretty song. This means the service is almost over—time to get fidgety. Am I really a sinner? I haven’t even done anything yet.
Page 158: The Aleynu. Closer, closer. Stand up, stretch your legs, and don’t forget that funny bow in the middle. So it’s like being a drug addict—maybe there’s a way to quit. Although I haven’t even done anything yet.
Page 162: “Adon Olam.” At last, the end of the service. Cake and coffee to follow in the social hall. I wonder if there’s a way to stop the dreams.
We all filed out of the sanctuary into the social hall, where my parents loaded up their plates with cookies and cake and started chatting with some of their friends. I grabbed a minibagel and walked outside to sit on the steps on the side of the synagogue.
Joanne Gruber was already sitting there. She was in my Hebrew school class, too. And like me, she was a bit of a geek: braces, short frizzy hair, plastic-rimmed glasses. Joanne and I weren’t really buddies, but we got along well enough. We’d known each other for years.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Just waiting for my parents.”
“Are they inside?”
“No, they drop me off and pick me up,” she said. “And they’re usually late.”
As bad as it was being dragged to synagogue with my parents every Saturday—I complained to no end that it was unfair that Rachel, a senior in high school, didn’t have to go—I knew that it’d be even worse if I had to come without them.
“I can’t wait till this bar mitzvah prep is over, so we can stop coming here every week,” I said.
“When’s yours?” she ask
ed me, motioning for me to sit down with her on the steps.
“December,” I said, taking a seat. “Invitations went out yesterday.”
She paused. “Am I invited?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool. You’re invited to mine, too. It’s in January.”
She looked pleased. I offered her half of my minibagel, which she declined.
We talked for a few more minutes, about our eighth-grade teachers, the new Nirvana album, the other kids in our class.
Then Joanne asked me if I had a date for the Homecoming dance at school the next weekend. Of course, I didn’t. Joanne asked me if I wanted to go with her.
I looked at her. She was nice enough, and smart enough. The fact that she wasn’t one of the “pretty” girls in my class didn’t matter much to me, because I didn’t like the pretty girls. I didn’t even like looking at the pretty girls—eyeliner and hair clips and expensive sweaters didn’t draw my eye, and neither did the pretty girls’ chests, which had apparently developed with superhuman speed over the summer.
Joanne wasn’t the problem. I was. Boys at school already called me “gaywad” and “fag” because I sang in the chorus, ran and threw and jumped “like a girl” whenever we played sports during gym, and made the crucial mistake of hanging an ad for the movie Benny and Joon in my locker; I took it down after one day, but the “Benji loves Johnny Depp” taunts had lasted for months. Would showing up at the Homecoming dance with Joanne Gruber make my problems better or worse?
“Forget it,” she said after an awkward moment. “We should just skip the stupid dance. I mean, who cares?”
“No, no, I’ll go,” I said.
Now she looked very pleased.
My father opened the door behind us. “There you are, Benji. We were looking for you. You ready to go?”
I looked back and nodded.
He went inside. I scooted off my step and turned to follow him. But before I did, I leaned down and gave Joanne Gruber a kiss.
She was caught by surprise, but didn’t pull back.
It was the first time I kissed a girl. Right there on the steps of Congregation Beth Shalom. And I felt nothing but the braces on her teeth.
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