Sweet Like Sugar

by Wayne Hoffman

  “Bagel boy?”

  “I’m just teasing you,” he said.

  “Well, stop it,” I said. “It’s kind of gross.”

  Was I being oversensitive? Wasn’t that also part of Jewish guys’ personalities—a part that was less than sexy?

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Don’t be so touchy, I told myself. I figured kissing him was a good way to shut him up before he called me something else that could be construed as borderline offensive. His little matzoh ball. His potato knish. His fiddler on the roof.

  It worked. But each time I closed my eyes, I could see the rabbi’s face, spitting mad, telling me to get out of his house.

  “Should we go into the bedroom?” Ed asked.

  “Actually, I’m sleeping on the sofa.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not my apartment,” I said. “It’s a friend’s.”

  “But you’re here alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why do you have to sleep on the couch?”

  “My friend asked me to.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s kind of weird, don’t you think?”

  “Not if you knew my friend.”

  Ed looked around the apartment again. And this time, instead of noticing the garish wallpaper or the brass menorah, he noticed the shelves of dusty books, the doilies under the lamps, the jar of Metamucil on the table.

  “Is this your grandparents’ place?”

  “No, I told you, it’s my friend’s place.”

  “How old is your friend?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe eighty. Or eighty-five.”

  Ed squinted at me. “Is this a joke?”

  “My friend’s a rabbi.”

  Ed looked at me, waiting for the punch line.

  “I’m serious,” I said, turning on a lamp and showing him some of the rabbi’s books in Hebrew.

  “You came down for the White Party and you’re staying in your rabbi’s apartment?”

  “He’s not my rabbi,” I said. As if this made any difference to anyone but me.

  Ed contemplated the situation as his eyes scanned the place.

  “I don’t think I can do this after all,” he said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. It feels really weird to be doing this in a rabbi’s apartment.”

  I felt the same way, but not for the same reason.

  “Strange,” I said, “I’d think that if you’re into Jewish guys, then a rabbi would be the ultimate turn-on.”

  He didn’t get it. So much for Jewish humor.

  “I should go,” he said.

  Apparently, he liked everything about Jewish guys except their actual Judaism.

  Ed turned around and walked out quickly but quietly, shutting the door behind him.

  I only had a moment to process it all before I heard a knock at the door.

  I looked around the condo, wondering what Ed might have left behind: cell phone, keys, a wristwatch. I didn’t see anything.

  As I walked toward the front door, the knock came again. And with it, a woman’s voice, asking tentatively: “Zisel?”

  She couldn’t have been more than four foot ten, thin and gray-haired and on the verge of tears.

  “Zisel?” she asked again, looking at me with confusion and dread.

  “You must have the wrong apartment,” I said.

  Her tears now flowed freely.

  “Where is Zisel?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know who you’re looking for,” I said. “This is Rabbi Zuckerman’s apartment.”

  “I know,” she said. “And who are you?”

  “Benji Steiner,” I said. “I’m a friend of his.”

  “And where is he?”

  “He is in Maryland,” I said. “At home.”

  “So he is all right?”

  “As far as I know.”

  She wiped the tears away. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “I was so worried. I haven’t had news from him in so long, and then I heard someone upstairs and saw the lights go on during Shabbat and I didn’t know what to think.”

  I would have invited her in, but it wasn’t necessary; she simply walked past me into the living room.

  “I thought—kenahora—that he might have passed away, and you had bought his condo,” she said, taking the glasses on her granny chain and fixing them on her face. “But now I see nothing has changed. It’s still Zisel’s apartment.”

  She sat on the couch and made herself at home.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but who are you?”

  “Oh, no, I’m sorry, I thought you knew,” she said. “I thought he’d have told you. I’m Irene Faber. I live downstairs.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “Can I ask you a stupid question? Who’s Zisel?”

  She looked at me with a crooked smile. “Rabbi Zuckerman, sweetheart.”

  “But his name is Jacob.”

  “And nobody has ever given you a name that did not appear on your birth certificate?”

  I never was big on nicknames, and the ones I was given—notably Barfy Steiner, which lasted through much of seventh grade after an unfortunate incident in Spanish class—were ones I’d just as soon have forgotten. But I got the point. Then I remembered the letter the rabbi had snatched from my hands when he was in the hospital. Don’t be a snoop! And suddenly things started to click.

  “You sent the rabbi a letter this summer addressed to Zisel,” I said.

  “I’ve sent him many letters, dear. And they’re all addressed to Zisel,” she said. “To me, he was Zisel long before he was ever a rabbi.”

  “How long have you known him?” I asked.

  “More than sixty years,” she said. “How long have you known him?”

  “Just a few months.”

  “Ah, now I understand,” she said. “Tell me, Benji Steiner, are you shomer shabbes?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Then make me a cup of tea and we can fill in each other’s blanks.”

  “We both grew up in Jersey City,” Irene told me, “although my family lived uptown and his lived downtown. My uncle owned a five-and-dime on Newark Avenue, not far from where the Zuckermans lived, and when I was in high school, I used to help out in his shop on Sundays. Jacob’s mother would send him out every Sunday to buy a few things at the bakery and the greengrocer, and he’d come into our shop to spend a little of his change on candy. Just one or two pieces—licorice, or chocolate, or hard candies, or chewing gum. He couldn’t buy more, or his mother would notice the money missing. But he always bought something. That boy had some sweet tooth, I remember.”

  An image of the rabbi sucking on hard candy flashed in my mind.

  “I used to tease him about it,” she continued, “how it was no coincidence that a boy with a name like Zuckerman—‘zucker’ means sugar, you know—had such a sweet tooth. He’d just laugh. Until one day, we must have been about sixteen, he told me that the candy wasn’t the only sweet thing in that shop. Can you believe it?”

  I couldn’t picture the rabbi flirting with a shop clerk. Or picture him as a smooth-talking teenage boy. But from the look on Irene’s face, I could tell she could picture it still.

  She saw my disbelief. “You’ll have to trust me when I say that I was quite a pretty girl all those years ago. Long brown hair and quite a figure. Jacob wasn’t the only boy who looked at me, if you get my meaning.”

  “I have no doubt,” I said.

  “Anyway, my uncle saw what was happening, and he thought that Jacob seemed like a nice young man, so he’d let me take a few minutes away from the counter on Sunday afternoons and Jacob and I would go for a walk in Van Vorst Park, maybe buy an ice cream or a soda. Let me tell you, he was one handsome devil. And always so polite. We’d see each other every week, only for a little while. But I guess you could say I fell for him. I thought he was just the cat’s pajamas. And I told him
one night that he was so sweet, even a name like ‘sugar man’ wasn’t enough to describe him. I told him he was twice as sweet as any other boy. So I called him Zisel Zuckerman.”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “ ‘Zisel’ is Yiddish, dear,” she clarified. “Do you speak Yiddish?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you don’t. Young people just never learned it, did they? Zisel means ‘sweet little thing.’ So you see, to me, he was sweet like sugar from beginning to end, from Zisel to Zuckerman.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “He hated it. ‘Zisel is what a mother calls her baby,’ he’d say. ‘Or what a man calls his sweetheart.’ And I suppose he was right—it’s what my grandmother called me when I was a little girl. It’d be like calling a grown man ‘Sweetie.’ He probably wouldn’t like that much, either. But to me, he was always Zisel.”

  “That sounds romantic.”

  “It was,” she said. “And besides, he had to have some kind of nickname. My father’s name was Jacob, so there was no way I was going to go out with a boy and call him by my father’s name. Imagine kissing your father! Well, I’m sorry, I haven’t met your father, but still, you take my point.”

  Irene may have been little and old, but she was no typical little old lady, I could tell already. She’d been there five minutes and I’d already been forced to imagine the rabbi putting the moves on a teenage girl and my father kissing an octogenarian. I refilled her tea.

  “So, my uncle knew what was going on, and he told my parents, who trusted my uncle to keep an eye on us,” she said. “And Zisel’s mother knew, because he had to explain to her why he was always late coming back with the groceries on Sunday afternoons. She stopped by the store one day to meet me, and to talk with my uncle, and I guess I passed the test, because we kept on seeing each other.

  “But Zisel’s father was another story. He was a horrible, strict man. He had grown up in Poland and never really left the shtetl behind in his mind. Zisel told me that in the house, his father always spoke Yiddish, and was very insistent about Jewish law. Zisel’s mother was a much softer woman, who spoke English with hardly any accent, and listened to all the popular radio programs. Even though she also grew up in Poland, she thought of herself as very American. She convinced her husband to let Zisel attend the local public school, instead of a yeshiva. This wasn’t easy, but she made sure that Zisel observed all the holidays and kept kosher and went to synagogue every week and knew all his prayers. He studied with his father every Shabbes afternoon. That was the only day he wasn’t working in the bakery.

  “But one day, Zisel’s father demanded to know what was happening to his spare change from his Sunday errands, and Zisel told him. He thought his father would be pleased that he had met a nice girl—a Jewish girl. But he wasn’t so excited. It’s hard to explain, but we were from two different Jewish worlds. He lived downtown with all the immigrant families. They were poor, working-class, and Orthodox. They lived in crowded brownstones, a different family on every floor, one on top of another, and they went to Sons of Israel, the Orthodox shul on Grove Street right near City Hall. My family lived uptown. My father was an optician. We had a car and a house of our own and we went to the temple—the big Reform synagogue uptown. And we weren’t immigrants. My parents were born in America. My grandparents were born in America. So Zisel and I were both Jewish, but we weren’t really part of the same community.”

  I thought about the way the congregants from B’nai Tikvah had stared at me when I came to the rabbi’s assistance outside their synagogue and the way my mother always talked about the rabbi like he practiced some other religion.

  “Not much has changed,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Sometimes I still feel like all these frum women down here look at me funny because I’m not as observant as they are. Not that I care anymore. But back then, everyone cared. The divisions were deep, and people viewed each other with suspicion. When Zisel’s father found out he was dating me, it must have seemed like he had been completely betrayed by his wife and his son—they’d promised to maintain Zisel’s Judaism, and now he was going around with this uptown, hoity-toity German Jew. Basically a shiksa, as far as he was concerned.”

  She took a breath.

  “Remember, Zisel was the baby of the family, the only one born in this country. So his father thought this was his last chance to get things right, and apparently I was not the right type of girl. He forbade us to see each other. Zisel wasn’t allowed to come into the shop, or to contact me at all. And at the end of the year, his father pulled him out of public school and sent him to a yeshiva in Brooklyn, which was basically a whole world away—Zisel’s mother came to tell me. I cried and I cried, but there was nothing I could do. It was over. I thought I’d never see him again.”

  She paused for a sip of tea.

  “But it wasn’t over, apparently,” I said. “You did see him again.”

  “Yes, dear, but not for a long time. I went to college and became a schoolteacher, and I married my husband Harold and we lived in New Jersey and raised three children. And Zisel became a rabbi and got married and opened the bookstore . . . well, this part I think you know.”

  I nodded.

  “For sixty years, we didn’t see each other. But when Harold died three years ago, I sold the house in New Jersey and moved down to Miami Beach. And who should be living upstairs?”

  “Rabbi Zuckerman,” I said.

  “Exactly. And do you know why? Because it’s bashert. Do you know what that means?”

  “Fate.”

  “So you do know some Yiddish,” Irene said. “Fate brought us together after all these years. Of course, he never believed anything was bashert.”

  I didn’t tell her that the rabbi apparently did now believe it—because he’d used that word to describe meeting Sophie. And I didn’t know if Sophie was a subject I should avoid bringing up.

  “Listen to me, rattling on like a crazy old woman,” she said. “You tell me, Benji, isn’t it fate that brings people together?”

  “I’m beginning to think so,” I said.

  I met Donnie when I was in tenth grade. We were both dancers.

  I had always wanted to dance. When I was little, too little to know exactly what boys were and weren’t supposed to do, I’d watch with envy when Rachel took classes in ballet or tap. Dance had everything: music, costumes, hand motions. I asked my parents if I could take tap. They signed me up for pee-wee soccer instead. Needless to say, I was rotten, and the coach was as happy as I was when I didn’t return for a second year.

  Once I was old enough to realize that boys who dance only set themselves up for ridicule, I resigned myself to the fact that my dance career would probably consist of doing the Macarena in my bedroom alone.

  That equation changed when I reached high school. The idea of undressing in a locker room for gym class terrified me—or, rather, terrified and excited me in roughly equal measure—and our school had a strict gym requirement. There was only one way out: Take an accredited class outside school. I looked around for options and found a folk dance class at the Jewish Community Center in Rockville.

  Chances of anyone besides my guidance counselor ever finding out about the class were slim to none; the jocks and meatheads who dominated my school didn’t keep up on the folk dance scene, so I wasn’t too worried about their taunts. I figured I’d finally found a way to get out of gym. And my parents were so happy that I’d be taking a class at the JCC, they didn’t care if it was dance or ceramics or gunsmithing—it was something Jewish, a sign that their child who’d stopped going to synagogue wasn’t giving up on their faith altogether.

  I wasn’t bad. At the end of ninth grade, the teacher asked me to join the JCC’s teen dance troupe, which I did—since it still counted toward my gym requirement. And, because the girls outnumbered the boys in the troupe fourteen to one, I got parts in pretty much every single routine we did.

  Our performances were mostly smal
l affairs. We danced in the lobby of a retirement center for a dozen hard-of-hearing Jewish seniors. We did a five-minute routine as part of a Hanukkah celebration at the JCC.

  By the spring, though, we were ready to participate in the Salute to Israel, an outdoor festival marking Israeli Independence Day that drew hundreds of spectators and included musicians, comedians, and dancers of all ages. We even had another teenage dance troupe coming in from Rochester to perform with us.

  The kids in our troupe agreed to house the kids from Rochester, and since I was the only boy in our troupe, I hosted the only boy from Rochester: Donnie.

  We set him up in Rachel’s room, since it was empty now that she was off at college.

  The van from Rochester arrived at the JCC while we were rehearsing. We stopped for a round of introductions, matching up hosts with guests. And when Donnie and I stood side-by-side, all eyes seemed to widen. It was like we were twins.

  We both wore black high-top sneakers, baggy jeans, and Old Navy T-shirts. Our glasses matched, our haircuts matched. Our builds were similar, although he was slightly bigger.

  “I’m seeing double,” one of the girls in my troupe teased.

  We both blushed and shook hands. “It’s like looking in a mirror,” Donnie said.

  I had never met anyone who reminded me of myself. At school, I had my circle of friends, but what we mostly had in common was that we were all misfits in some way—and even in this group of guys, I had started to feel less secure as the rest of my friends started to date girls. When I was dancing, I was the only boy; while the girls never made me feel left out, I was never really part of their clique. But here was Donnie, two years older, confident, comfortable in his skin. He was a month away from graduation, getting ready to head to Stanford. This would be his last performance with his troupe, after three years.

  Sitting across from each other on Rachel’s bed, we stayed up all night talking. And not about our dance routines.

  Donnie was gay. He was only out to a few of his friends in Rochester—not his parents, not the other members of his troupe—but it wasn’t a total secret anymore.

  “And once I’m away from Mom and Dad next fall,” he said, “I can finally do what I want.”