My father asked, “What does he do?”
“He’s a flight attendant,” I said. I imagined his disappointment; I’m sure he’d have preferred something like doctor or lawyer or civil servant.
“That’s okay,” was all he said.
I looked at my mother, who was conspicuously silent.
“And yes, he’s Jewish,” I said. This was true. Or half-true. Or true enough for me, anyway. I figured that’d satisfy her.
Instead, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “I didn’t say a thing.”
Despite my parents’ misgivings, I developed a new routine with the rabbi. Once a week, I’d visit after work to discuss Judaism.
We started with Pirkei Avot, with more Hillel: “He who does not increase his knowledge, decreases it.” The rabbi intended this as a motivational slogan, something to prod my further studies. I rose to his challenge.
Occasionally, we’d touch on a related subject that would send the rabbi to his bookshelves to find another book, something else to discuss. Sometimes it was a story I remembered from my childhood book of Bible stories, other times a verse from the Talmud or rabbinical commentary that he deemed relevant.
Once in a while, I’d come to him with a seemingly random question about a holiday tradition or a custom that I didn’t understand. Why is it a woman’s responsibility to light Shabbat candles? What does cheesecake have to do with Shavuot? Why is fish considered pareve? These were usually questions that Jamie had asked me that I couldn’t answer on my own; I’d pose them again to the rabbi as if they were my own questions and he’d answer them. Then I’d report his remarks back to Jamie, as if the rabbi were the Oracle of Glenbrook.
These were elementary discussions, I knew—things the rabbi had probably talked about sixty or seventy years ago. But he never talked down to me or treated my questions as too obvious to warrant a response. He was a good teacher; his years as a yeshiva instructor in Brooklyn proved useful. Usually, I left these sessions with a new book from his shelves, something to pore over for a few days before our next meeting.
The rabbi, too, asked me questions. About being gay.
“I am afraid I do not even know what to ask,” he said tentatively, at one of our first meetings. “About your . . . life.”
I remembered a story from the Passover Haggadah about four sons: a wise son, a simple son, a contrary son, and a son who does not even know how to ask a question. “As for the son who does not even know how to ask a question,” I said to the rabbi, quoting from my family’s Haggadah, “you must begin for him.” He nodded at the reference; I began for him, telling him about how I realized I was gay.
Eventually, he came up with his own questions: How was I so sure that I was that way? Did I ever try to change? Why did I feel the need to talk about it, to label myself? His questions were always general, and while he avoided using the word “abomination,” he still couldn’t bring himself to use the word “gay.” My answers were similarly broad and I never spoke specifically about sex. But we understood each other.
The rabbi’s questions about being gay were surely as elementary as my questions about being Jewish; I’d answered them all years before. But like him, I never spoke down to him or treated his questions as too obvious to warrant a response. It was the questions that mattered. I knew I’d never change his mind. But I tried to help him understand—to “get over it,” as Irene might say.
Irene was delighted that I was visiting again, even if it wasn’t every day. “He always looks forward to seeing you,” she told me one day in my office. “He talks about it all week.”
“That’s because I always bring honey cake,” I joked.
“Well, that doesn’t hurt, either,” she joked back. “The way to that man’s heart is through his sweet tooth.”
Mrs. Goldfarb admitted to being a bit surprised at the turn my visits to the rabbi had taken. “It’s like you’ve come back to Hebrew school after all these years,” she said with some disbelief when I saw her at the sandwich shop one day at lunch.
“He who does not increase his knowledge, decreases it,” I told her. “That’s Hillel.”
She was somewhat stunned, but quickly came up with a retort: “I suppose your teachers must have planted those seeds of curiosity many years ago.”
I didn’t tell her that the rabbi was more patient than she’d been when I was her second-grade student. I just said, “A good teacher, you never forget,” and left it at that. Let her think what she wants.
Work kept coming at a steady but reasonable pace through the winter. More ads for Paradise. More online work, thanks to referrals from my website launch the previous fall. I even picked up a bit of work for the bookstore, when Mrs. Goldfarb asked me to design the store’s advertisements for the Jewish Week. (“Keep it clean, Benjamin,” she told me, “no boys with their shirts off.”)
In my spare time, I worked on a little project I was doing for free: designing invitations for Michelle and Dan’s wedding. Here, too, I kept it clean.
Through it all, Jamie and I continued to grow closer. His work required him to leave town every few days—San Francisco, Lima, Detroit, Panama City—but he always came back to me.
We spent New Year’s Eve at a great party at a disco downtown, on a double date with Phil and Sammy—still seeing each other, and still unwilling to visit the suburbs—with one of the hottest DJs from New York spinning. We left at a quarter after midnight so we could go home and be alone instead.
We spent a whole weekend in February doing door-to-door canvassing for Obama—my T-shirt said “Change” while his said “Hope”—and celebrated with champagne when he swept the primaries in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington.
We did Valentine’s Day like a couple of giddy goofballs, exchanging heart-shaped balloons and heart-shaped candies and matching boxer shorts covered with hearts. I was hooked.
One day in the middle of March, Jamie came to my office to meet me for lunch.
“When’s Purim?” he asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“The bookstore has a big window display,” he said. “Just seemed so funny when everyone else’s windows are full of shamrocks and leprechauns for Saint Patrick’s Day.”
“Welcome to Glenbrook.”
“Right,” he said. “So what’s Purim again? Isn’t that the holiday with the noisemakers and the big cookies?”
I knew there was more to it than that, but I also knew that I’d probably have described it the same way. “Hamantashen,” I said. “The cookies are called hamantashen.”
“Did your mom make them when you were a kid?”
I laughed. “My mother didn’t bake much. She was more of an Entenmann’s mom.”
“Better than mine,” Jamie said. “She used to bake these awful little Swedish cookies. Dry as dust, and they tasted like almonds and sand.”
“Poor thing,” I offered. “Sounds like child abuse. Or at least neglect.”
“Want to make hamantashen tonight?” he asked.
“I’ve never done it,” I said.
“Me, either,” he said. “So we’ll figure it out together. How hard can it be?”
Truth be told, it was pretty hard. Our first batch unfolded in the oven, leaving prune filling spilling out across the cookie sheet. The next batch burned on the bottom, and the one after that burned on the top after we’d moved the baking rack up too high. By the time we got a dozen decent hamantashen, our hands were blistered from the rolling pin and my kitchen floor was covered in flour.
But they were good. Even Dan and Michelle thought so; when they came home from a movie, they devoured five between them, standing in the kitchen doorway.
“Dude, that’s good shit,” said Dan.
“That’s high praise,” I told Jamie, translating.
“Thank you,” Jamie told me, “but I know what he meant. I speak Dude.”
“Hold on to this one,” Michelle told me, gesturing toward Jamie. “He knows his way around a kitchen.”
&nb
sp; “You didn’t see the first fifty,” I said.
“You ate fifty of them?” she asked.
“No, they’re in the garbage,” I said.
Dan opened the lid of the garbage can and reached toward the burned cookies. “What’s wrong with these? They’re just a little burnt.”
Michelle slapped his hand. “You’re not eating those,” she scolded. Taking Dan by the arm, she said, “Good night, you fabulous baker boys.” And then she dragged him off to her room.
Jamie looked pleased. “We still have a few left,” he said.
“I can’t eat another one. I’m all pruned out.”
“You could take them to the rabbi,” he suggested.
“I can’t,” I said. “They’re not kosher.”
“Why? There’s nothing in them but butter and sugar and flour. Prunes are kosher, aren’t they? It’s not like we filled them with ham and cheese.”
“All right,” I said. “They’re kosher. But they’re not kosher enough.”
I stopped by the bakery the next evening and brought store-bought hamantashen to the rabbi’s house, instead of the usual honey cake. I didn’t mention my own baking adventure.
“So, Purim is coming,” he said, biting off a corner of one of the triangular pastries. “You know the cookies. But do you know the story?”
“I know it’s about Queen Esther,” I said, opting not to tell him about my traumatic Esther masquerade as a young boy.
“And what else do you remember?”
“Haman,” I added, pointing to the remaining hamantashen, which were supposed to represent his three-cornered hat. “Haman wanted to kill the Jews, but Queen Esther saved them.”
The rabbi peered at me over his glasses, as if to say, “Is that all?” But instead, he said, “That is true. But there is much more. Maybe even a lesson for today. For you.”
He recounted the story of Purim, details that I’d long forgotten. About Esther’s cousin Mordechai’s refusal to bow down before Haman, the king’s righthand man. About Haman’s plan to take revenge not just on Mordechai, but on all the Jews in Persia. About Esther’s secret Jewish identity and the banquet where she revealed herself as a Jew to the king—risking her own life to save her people.
“It’s like a suspense thriller,” I said, nibbling on a cookie, thinking that the ones I’d baked were better. “All the politics and evil plots and secret identities.”
The rabbi wasn’t amused. “It’s a serious story, Benji,” he said. “About the importance of keeping your faith. Esther had power and wealth and could have given up on being Jewish.”
“But being Jewish was too important to her,” I interjected.
“Quite the opposite,” the rabbi said. “That’s why this is a good story for you. There is no evidence that being Jewish was important to Esther. She married a non-Jewish man, King Ahasuerus. She wasn’t observant, or it would have been obvious that she was Jewish. We can assume that she didn’t go to synagogue or keep kosher. Sound like anyone you know?”
“Go on,” I said, one eyebrow raised.
“But when push came to shove,” he continued, “she realized that her faith, and her family, was still a part of her. She risked everything for her faith, for her community. Even though she was not, on a practical level, part of the community. She could not completely leave that piece of her behind. Again, perhaps, like someone we both know.”
“Yes, I get it,” I said.
“Esther is a hero,” he said. “Not because she observed every law or prayed every day. But she saved her people. And I don’t think any rabbi anywhere would say she wasn’t a good Jew.”
He took another cookie and waited for my reaction.
“I think there is another lesson here,” I said.
He chewed slowly.
“You asked me once why it was so important to come out, to tell the whole world about my quote-unquote private life,” I said. “Purim is all about the importance of coming out.”
He started to turn red.
“As a Jew,” I clarified, before he could say anything. “Religion is what some people would consider a private matter. What you believe in your heart is your own business, but you don’t have to run around telling everyone else about it. Of course, with some people it’s obvious. Men wear yarmulkes, or they have payes, and that tells the whole world they’re Jewish. But for most Jews, as long as they don’t say anything, they can basically stay in the closet and nobody has to know. That’s what Esther did. She stayed in the closet. And she was pretty happy in there for a while. She was rich and powerful and it seems like she had everything that anyone could ever want.”
The rabbi’s color had returned to normal, so I continued: “Her community needed her. As long as she stayed in the closet, she was safe, but the rest of her community was in danger. And that’s when she realized that her own safety was an illusion, too. If she hadn’t spoken up, she’d have been complicit in her community’s murder. And she’d have lived in constant fear of exposure herself. Her closet would have become a trap.”
He nodded. A good sign.
“Esther took a chance and came out,” I said. “And once the king realized that his own wife was Jewish, he understood that the plot against the Jews was wrong. Because he realized that she was one of them and they were just like her. It’s hard to hate a whole group of people when you realize you already care about one of them.”
“A very interesting interpretation,” he said finally, brushing sticky crumbs off his shirt. “I suppose I am your King Ahasuerus?”
“In this particular case, yes,” I said. “And I guess I’m your queen.”
I cracked a smile, and after a moment, the rabbi’s initial grimace turned to a reluctant, pursed grin.
Jamie and Michelle became fast friends. They shared certain passions—Britney gossip, Desperate Housewives, Major League Baseball—that left me cold, so they always had plenty to chat about whenever Jamie came over. And she constantly joked about having a tiny little crush on him.
“If he weren’t gay . . .” Michelle said to me one evening after he left.
“Then he wouldn’t be a very good boyfriend,” I said.
“Maybe not for you,” she said, winking.
“And you’d have to give Dan back his ring.”
“Damn!” she said, snapping her fingers. “There’s always a catch!”
Phil also approved. We didn’t see each other as much, now that we were both “involved” and spending less time at the bars. But after all the evenings we’d hung out together over the years, I felt almost like he was my big brother. So even if we weren’t together as often as before, we still e-mailed each other to keep in touch, and once in a while the four of us would meet for a drink.
“This one’s different,” Phil whispered to me one night at Paradise.
“How so?” I asked, having learned to trust Phil’s intuition about these things.
“With the other guys you dated, I could only picture you together right there at that moment,” he said. “When I look at you with Jamie, I can imagine entire photo albums of things that haven’t even happened yet.”
But my friends were the easy part. I wanted my parents to meet Jamie; I’d never dated anyone long enough to get to this phase, so I wasn’t sure how to handle it. My mother didn’t see anything complicated about the situation. “So bring him for Passover,” she suggested.
Jamie had never been to a Passover seder before, so I prepped him on the basics. In my family, the seder wasn’t a huge affair; since all my grandparents were dead, and Rachel and Richard held their own seder in Seattle, there were only three Steiners around the table every Passover. But others usually joined us: my parents’ old friends the Frishmans; my second cousin on my mother’s side, Nate, who was an undergrad at American University in the District, far from his parents’ home in Chicago; and my Uncle Larry and his second wife, Linda, who lived outside Baltimore. Most of these people I only saw on Passover, so I wasn’t too concerned about what
they all thought of Jamie. But he was a social guy—he basically made small talk for a living—so the social aspect wasn’t what had me worried. It was the seder itself.
We weren’t a formal bunch, hung up on reading every single word of the Haggadah. But we did sing most of the songs and recite all the blessings, in Hebrew. Jamie didn’t know any of this stuff and he’d forgotten what little Hebrew he’d learned in Sunday school as a child. He was worried that he’d look like an idiot.
So I went to the bookstore and bought a copy of the same Haggadah that we used in my parents’ house and transliterated all the songs we’d have to sing together, spelling out all the Hebrew words phonetically in English. I shrank it down on a photocopier so Jamie could hide the cheat sheet inside his Haggadah. Then I taught him the melodies.
“It’s a great plan,” he said, “but I don’t just want to fudge my way through this. I want to know what the seder is actually about.”
For two weeks before Passover, we practiced the songs together—often over the phone, long-distance—and read through the Haggadah itself. He asked questions about the Passover story, and about how the seder was structured; I answered whatever I could and asked the rabbi about the rest.
By the time Passover came, he was prepared. And I knew more about Passover than I ever had.
I’d been worried about how my parents would introduce Jamie: Would they use the word “boyfriend”—which is what I was calling him by that point—or the more ambiguous term “friend,” whose meaning depends on how long the vowels are stretched and how high the eyebrows are raised when it’s said aloud?
I needn’t have worried. When my mother introduced him to the others, she said simply, “And this is Jamie Cohen.” Let them connect the dots.
Jamie was nervous at first and so was I, maybe more so. After all, if the seder was a complete disaster, he could walk away from my family relatively unscathed; I’d have to come back and face them alone.
But it wasn’t a disaster. Jamie was well rehearsed. I led the seder and Jamie joined in all the songs, peering at his cheat sheet discreetly. Nobody would have guessed that it was his first time.
Sweet Like Sugar Page 25