Sweet Like Sugar

by Wayne Hoffman

  There was one Hanukkah that had been particularly memorable, though, a decade earlier, during my senior year in high school.

  Rachel was home from college for the first few days of her winter break. And she’d brought her boyfriend with her.

  Even though Rachel and Richard went to school in the same city—he was studying computers at Northeastern, only a mile or two from Boston University, where she was majoring in history—they had met halfway around the world when they both spent their junior years in Israel. Their Middle Eastern fling had turned into a full-fledged American relationship and now she’d brought him home to meet the folks.

  My parents were cordial. And why not? Richard seemed nice enough. Smart. Directed. Jewish.

  We lit Hanukkah candles and sang “Maoz Tsur.” Richard knew the words by heart. My parents nodded their approval.

  But it wouldn’t last. At dinner, we had barely finished the matzoh ball soup when Rachel decided she couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Richard and I have something to tell you,” she announced. “We’re getting married.”

  My mother nearly dropped the Pyrex platter of turkey she was bringing to the table. My father stopped breathing.

  It was up to me to respond: “Uh, when?”

  “Next June,” said Rachel. “Right after we both graduate.”

  My mother, still standing, leaned on the table for support.

  “I know, it’s not much time to plan a wedding,” Rachel said, seemingly oblivious to her parents’ impending twin aneurysms. “But we don’t really want a big wedding. We’ll just have a small ceremony up in Boston, before we move.”

  My mother slowly sat down.

  “Move?” My father had finally managed to get one word out.

  Richard took over: “To Seattle,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of job offers already. That’s why we’re going there this weekend—I’ve got some interviews lined up.”

  “Seattle?” My father again, in disbelief.

  “I know it’s far away,” said Richard. “But it’s the hottest spot for computer jobs these days. What they’re offering me, I really couldn’t make anywhere else.”

  My father looked at my mother. She looked at Richard, and in an instant I could see her turn against him. Her eyes hardened and her lips tightened. He’d blown it with her forever, I already knew.

  She couldn’t even speak to him at that point, so she spoke to Rachel: “But you don’t even know yet where you’ll be going for law school.”

  Rachel took a breath, looked to Richard, then back to Mom. “Actually, Mom, I don’t think I’m going to law school.”

  My mother’s head fell into her hands. “Oh my God.”

  “I mean, I’m not going right now,” Rachel clarified. “I can always go later on. After we’ve gotten settled.”

  My father slammed his hands on the table. “This is nonsense!” he said. “You think you’re in love? Fine. So what difference will a few years make? Rachel can go to law school—find one in Seattle, for all I care—and when she’s passed the bar, if you still want to get married, great. We’ll throw you a beautiful wedding. But this is nonsense. You are too young to get married and too young to throw your future away.”

  “I’m not throwing my future away, Daddy,” said Rachel. “And I’m old enough to know what I want.”

  My mother looked up and said, “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not pregnant,” Rachel said.

  “So what’s the rush?”

  “What are you talking about?” said Rachel. “By next June, we’ll have been together for more than a year and a half. That’s not rushing.”

  “It’s too soon,” said Mom.

  “It’s longer than you and Daddy knew each other when you got married,” said Rachel.

  “That’s true,” I blurted out. I wasn’t trying to defend Rachel—I was just noting that she’d made a good point. My parents both shot me a sour look and I shut my mouth.

  Rachel was starting to sob, so Richard took her hand and spoke calmly: “Mr. and Mrs. Steiner, I’m sorry that this all comes as a surprise to you, and I’m sorry that you’re disappointed that Rachel’s not going to law school right away. But we’ve already made up our minds. We’re getting married in June. We hope that you’ll come to the wedding.”

  My mother stood up, still not making eye contact with him, and said, “I need to lie down.” She went upstairs and my father got up, without a word, and followed her.

  We ate the rest of dinner quickly and while I cleaned up, Rachel and Richard went for a drive.

  While they were gone, my mother came downstairs and told me that Richard would be sleeping on the trundle bed in my room—not with Rachel in her double bed, as they’d originally agreed. “This is still my house and I still make the rules,” she said angrily, as her way of implicitly announcing that the rules could be changed at any time depending on her mood. “They can do whatever they do up in Boston. I don’t want to know about it. In my house, unmarried people sleep in separate beds.”

  She made up two plates of food from the leftovers in the fridge and took them up to my parents’ room.

  When Rachel and Richard got home, I told them about the sleeping arrangements. Rachel rolled her eyes. Richard told her that my parents had already been through a lot that night and they shouldn’t provoke them just for the sake of provoking them. “I’ll sleep in your brother’s room,” he said. “It’s just for a couple of nights.”

  In my room, Richard and I had our first chance to have a one-on-one conversation. And I liked him right away. He talked about his year in Israel and how much the situation there had deteriorated since my trip just two years before: it seemed like buses were blowing up every other day for a while after Rabin was assassinated. He told me about how he and Rachel met in a Tel Aviv disco—and how he started talking to her in Hebrew before he realized she was American. They’d done a lot of traveling together over there—the Sinai, Eilat, a weekend in Istanbul; Rachel had never told me these stories. He told me about the jobs he’d be interviewing for the next week. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about, but it all sounded pretty cool to me: creating new software, everything from accounting programs to video games.

  “Your sister’s really excited about moving out west,” he said.

  “Yeah, as far from my parents as possible,” I said.

  “After tonight, I think they’d probably buy us the plane tickets,” he said. “One way.”

  I told him that my parents weren’t so bad—they weren’t hippies who rolled joints with their kids, but they weren’t strict drill sergeants, either. If their demands weren’t flexible, they were at least reasonable most of the time. “They’re just not used to anyone else getting their way,” I explained. “Rachel and I would never stand up to them the way you did.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not like they’d hit us or anything,” I said. “But we’d just feel too guilty.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been trying to help Rachel with that,” he said. “She’s getting better.”

  He made it sound like we had an illness, when I thought we were just being good kids. But maybe after a certain point, there’s not much difference.

  “Benji, you’ll be going off to college next year, right?”

  I’d already gotten into Maryland, with a partial scholarship.

  “You won’t be far from home, but you’ll still be on your own,” he said. “You’ll need to take care of yourself and think about what you want, not what they want. You can’t spend your whole life trying to make them happy. You’ve got to do what makes you happy and hope that they eventually get behind you. They can’t get behind you if you don’t get out in front and be your own person.”

  There was nothing specific in what Richard was saying, yet I felt like he was talking directly to me, like he knew exactly how I felt, like he saw me when other people looked right through me.

  “Once you’re out of here, you won�
��t need to worry about what they think,” he said. “You won’t need to be their ‘good little boy’ anymore. You can be who you want to be.”

  It was time.

  “I’m gay,” I said. No preface. Right to the point.

  I’d never told anyone before. But after knowing him for just a few hours, I was comfortable enough to tell Richard. Or maybe he was perfect because I hadn’t known him for long; if he rejected me, it wouldn’t much matter.

  The silence stretched for one second. Two seconds. Three.

  “I know,” he said.

  I started to sweat.

  “How can you know? I’ve never told anyone. Rachel doesn’t even know.”

  “She knows, too,” he said. “She figured it out a while ago. She’s been waiting for you to tell her yourself.”

  My face flushed.

  “I don’t get it.”

  Richard explained that they both had gay friends in Israel, and in Boston, and Rachel had talked to them about her suspicions: Why doesn’t Benji ever go out with girls? Why is Benji interested in dancing but not sports? Why does Benji listen to Erasure and watch every film Johnny Depp makes? As their gay friends asked more and more questions in return, they started to piece things together. It was nothing definite, nothing more than a hunch. But Rachel had a feeling they were right.

  Richard had set me up, prodding me. But I wasn’t angry. I was relieved.

  Richard told me that things would be better in college and that moving out of my parents’ house would open up a world of possibilities. “Someday you’ll come out to them, too,” he said. “And they’ll be fine. Eventually.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m never telling them. I’m the golden child, now that Rachel’s on their shit list.”

  “They’ll get over that, too,” he said. I wasn’t so sure. But he said, “Trust me,” and I did.

  Then Richard hugged me. This, too, was something out of the ordinary in my family.

  “If they don’t get over it by next summer,” I said, “I’ll come to your wedding without them.”

  The Hanukkah party wasn’t a complete disaster.

  True, the DJ played crappy pop music that was nearly a year out of date, and the few lights set up in the synagogue social hall were pretty lame, and the table of soggy latkes and chocolate gelt and Manischewitz wine—meant to be kitcshy, I assumed—was closer to tragic. But there was one thing that salvaged the night, and his name was David.

  I found him fairly quickly: I saw him spitting half a latke into a paper napkin and he smiled when he realized he was being watched. He waved an embarrassed hello and I introduced myself. We were two of the youngest people in the room and two of only perhaps a dozen who had come solo. We soon realized that we’d probably have a better time if we stuck together.

  David was from Boston originally—Newton, to be exact—and had gone to school at Brandeis. He’d moved to Washington for law school, and had been working at a small firm for a few years since he’d passed the bar. His hair was curly and dark brown, his eyes intense and the same dark brown. He had a firm handshake and very straight teeth and he looked like someone who would have been more comfortable in a suit than he was in jeans.

  We chatted in the hallway by the water fountain, about the presidential race that was about to kick into gear—specifically our mixed feelings regarding Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and our first impressions of Barack Obama.

  “I like him, at least what I’ve seen so far,” I said.

  He agreed, but wasn’t ready to abandon Hillary: “He’s still too green,” he said, “but maybe he’ll be her running mate.”

  “Or vice versa,” I offered.

  “I wouldn’t count your chickens quite yet,” he said. “The primaries haven’t even started.”

  A Madonna song came on—something from a few albums ago, but it was something—so I took him by the hand and led him back inside. We danced for a few minutes between a middle-aged lesbian couple and a gay male couple with matching moustaches, and when the song ended, we sat down on the edge of the dance floor to talk some more.

  This time, I told him about the rabbi, and as I got deeper into the story, he gently put his hand on my knee. He listened intently and asked a few prodding questions; he never moved his hand.

  And then, when I decided I’d had enough of light blue crepe paper and last summer’s FM hits, I asked David if we could go somewhere else.

  I suggested a coffeehouse near Dupont Circle and he agreed.

  As I drove across town, I could watch him following me in my rearview mirror. Maybe Michelle was right, I thought: It wasn’t so hard to meet a Jewish guy. Sure, the dance was pretty much a dud, but I did meet someone—someone with a job and a sense of humor and decent rhythm. Someone who was unlikely to dump me for being Jewish, or keep me around simply because I was Jewish. Someone my mother would like. For what that was worth.

  We grabbed a table for two at Java the Hut.

  “I’ve never been here before,” he said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Seriously,” he said. “I live in Georgetown and work downtown. I don’t hang out in Dupont Circle.”

  “Yeah, I’ve never seen you out,” I told him.

  “I don’t go out much,” he said. “I’m not really into the scene.”

  “So of all places, why did you decide to go to this Hanukkah party?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m a member.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the synagogue,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “I’ve never seen you there,” he said.

  “I guess I’m not really into that scene,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “You came to the Hanukkah dance tonight and you spent half an hour telling me about this rabbi you’ve befriended.”

  “To be honest,” I said, “the dance was sort of my roommate’s idea. She thought I should go somewhere to meet a nice Jewish boy.”

  “And you did,” he said, smiling and taking a sip of his latte.

  “So did you,” I replied.

  He tapped his coffee cup against mine.

  “First time I’ve been in a synagogue since the High Holidays,” I said. “And probably the last time until next year’s High Holidays.”

  Now he frowned. “Oh, you just haven’t been to the right synagogue,” he said. “You should really give my synagogue a try.”

  Someone my mother would like.

  He spent the next ten minutes telling about how great the gay synagogue was: same-sex commitment ceremonies, AIDS benefits, a gay rabbi. Parties and mixers where you could meet potential partners outside a bar. And during weekly services, they used a lot of the same tunes I’d recognize from Conservative services growing up, but with better gender politics in the English translations.

  I wasn’t sold. Shabbat services full of gay people weren’t much more appealing to me than Shabbat services full of straight people. He wasn’t any more persuasive about synagogue attendance than my mother had been. Or Rabbi Zuckerman.

  “I used to feel alienated, too,” he said, “I was really active in Hillel at Brandeis, but after college, I didn’t feel any connection to the Jewish community as a single gay man. I tried to find the right synagogue here in Washington, but they were all so family-oriented—you know, Hebrew school and bar mitzvahs, and if you’re not a part of that, then you’re kind of invisible. So I stopped doing anything Jewish at all. I felt like I was drifting away.”

  I nodded. I’d never even been active in Hillel in college; even if it professed to being “liberal” and “open” to gay people, it always seemed like a dating service to me, aimed at helping Jewish boys and Jewish girls hook up. So I’d felt alienated for even longer than he had.

  “But the gay synagogue really pulled me back in,” he continued. “I felt like I found my community again.”

  “What about the gay community?” I asked.

  “I don’t really relate to most of that,” he said. “The b
ars, the gyms, the whole thing. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I’m out and everything. I’ve been out since I was twenty. But I’ve been Jewish my whole life.”

  As we finished our coffee, David explained how exciting it had been for him to realize that he could be a gay man, but still live the Jewish life he’d always expected. He went to synagogue every Saturday. He lit candles every Friday night. He didn’t just observe Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—he celebrated Purim, Sukkot, and a few holidays whose names sounded familiar but whose exact roots and placement on the calendar had long since vanished from my mind. He even kept kosher.

  I listened politely until he was finished.

  “You grew up doing all of this stuff,” he said. “Don’t you miss it?”

  I thought about it for a few seconds, trying to imagine sitting next to David in synagogue, lighting candles together, checking the list of ingredients on everything in the grocery store to make sure it was kosher.

  “Not really,” I said. “I guess I’m just not that kind of Jew.”

  “He was just one guy, Benji,” Michelle said while we waited to be seated for Sunday brunch. “I didn’t say any Jewish guy would solve your problems.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just got my hopes up—I went to that stupid party and met this guy right away. But he wasn’t the right one, either.”

  “There are other Jews in the sea,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe I’m supposed to be single.”

  “Lighten up, will you? It’s your birthday. You’re seriously ruining it.”

  The hostess showed us to our table, a quiet spot in the back; she probably thought we were on a date. We had never been to this restaurant—a trendy bistro on Connecticut Avenue that was out of our normal price range—but Michelle wanted to take me somewhere “special” on my birthday. Just the two of us.

  So, in a way, it was a date.

  “Nobody is supposed to be single,” she said while I studied the menu. “There’s someone out there for everyone.”

  “Now you sound like the rabbi.”

  She didn’t like that much. “What did he call it?”

  “Bashert.”