by Melissa Bank
I heard the man say, “Am I right, or am I right?” and then my father noticed me and excused himself from their conversation.
In a low voice, he said, “How’s it going?”
“Bad,” I told him. “Very bad.”
He stood up and put his arm around my shoulders; he walked me away from the table and said, “Want to dance?”
The band was playing “The Impossible Dream”; I said, “This one’s kind of schmaltzy.”
He said, “Do you know what schmaltz is?”
“I thought I did.”
“Chicken fat,” he said. He told me that people spread it on bread, and we needed to go to a Jewish restaurant so I could try some.
I said, “Could we go right now?”
He took my hand, and I let him move me around to the chicken-fatty music.
Back at the table, he told me to take his chair and went off to find another, leaving me between Mr. Am-I-Right? and the actress my mother had become.
“Hel-lo,” she said, with the two-beat singsong of a doorbell. To the table, she said, “This is my daughter, Sophie.”
“Hi,” I said.
My mother said, “Are you having a good time?”
I said, “I am having a great time,” and then just loud enough for her: “Everyone is more dressed up than I am.”
Her smile disappeared, my goal.
She didn’t realize that I was kidding until I suggested we drive around and look for tights.
My dad pulled up a chair, and he and I sat very close.
I asked if he was finished with his lunch.
He said, “Go ahead, sweetheart.”
I snuck what was left of my father’s chicken into a napkin when Aunt Nora came to the table and got everyone’s attention: Did anyone want to dance “The Hokey Pokey”? My mother did. She and Aunt Nora walked off with their arms linked.
I spotted them with Rebecca on the dance floor as I made my getaway. The bandleader was singing, “Put your right foot in, and shake it all about,” and the three of them did it along with everyone else, without thinking, as I did, Why? Why would you put your right foot in and shake it all about?
In the parking lot, I let Albert out of the station wagon and poured water into his bowl. “You’re feeling sorry for yourself,” I said, feeding him the leftover chicken, “but you don’t know how lucky you are.”
I was fastening his leash when I heard a voice say, “Hey.”
It was the boy who looked like Eric Green.
I said, “Hi.”
“I’m Danny,” he said. “You don’t have a cigarette, do you?”
“Oh,” I said. A bunch of girls in my grade had tried smoking at a Girl Scout overnight, but I never had. I looked around the parking lot; we were alone. I said, “There might be a pack in the glove compartment.” There was. “I don’t see any matches, though.”
“I have matches,” he said. I handed him two cigarettes, and he held one and put the other behind his ear like a pencil.
He walked with me and Albert past the cars and along the grassy edge of the parking lot. He ran his hand along the bushes. I thought of the one afternoon Eric Green had walked me home from school, his finger through my back belt loop.
Now, Danny said, “Poodles are really smart, right?”
“I can’t speak for the whole breed,” I said, “but Albert is a genius.”
“Can he do tricks?”
“Tricks are beneath him.” I said that he’d been named for both Albert Einstein (Robert’s hero) and Albert Camus (Jack’s).
The sun was glinting off the cars, and in the bright light I saw that this boy looked less like Eric Green than I’d thought. It occurred to me that Danny was older, and I was right.
He told me that he was in eighth grade and his private school had already started. It always started early, he said bitterly, adding that he’d had to miss the last day of hockey camp.
I almost said, That’s too bad, but it sounded like gloating.
As we walked, the bushes thinned out, and you could see a field on the other side. At a large gap, there was a path and Danny said, “You want to . . . ?” and I said, “Okay.”
He took Albert’s leash and cut through first. Then he reached his hand out for me. I took it, and he steadied me so I wouldn’t slide down the hill, which was more mud than grass.
He said, “You okay?”
I nodded.
He seemed reluctant to let go of my hand, and when he looked at me, everything tingled—not the tiny on-and-off sparks of a foot falling asleep but single and continuous like flying in a dream.
The grass had been mashed down into a path. What had looked like a beautiful field turned out to be a vacant lot; a ratty blanket and rusted beer cans surrounded the ashes and burned sticks of an old campfire. Even so, the sun was lighting up the trees and weeds and flowers. There was the buzzing hum of insects in unison, loud and then quiet.
Danny lit his cigarette and said, “I can’t believe summer’s over,” and I heard in his voice what I knew I’d feel in another week when my school started; it made summer seem less real now.
Danny blew a smoke ring. “Are you going out with anybody?”
I thought again about Eric Green, who had stopped talking to me. “Not at the moment.”
At my feet, Albert was sniffing at what looked like a big finger of the flesh-colored gloves Jack wore while dissecting sharks in the basement.
I could feel Danny’s eyes on me, and though we were in the shade, I thought of Robert saying that my dress was see-through in the sun. I suddenly felt queasy and nervous. “We should get back.”
He didn’t move; maybe he was hoping I’d change my mind. He used his first cigarette to light his second.
I got my voice to sound normal, but I felt the quiver underneath when I said, “Come on,” to Albert.
I tried to pretend I wasn’t hurrying, but I was, and Danny followed. Then we weren’t on the path anymore; there wasn’t a path. I was stomping down weeds. Pricker bushes were scratching my legs. Finally, I caught sight of the parking lot through the weeds. We’d wound up behind the synagogue, where only a catering truck and a maintenance van were parked.
I slowed down a little then; we walked side by side. In the distance, I could see guests leaving. A few wild children were running around while their parents talked. Rebecca’s father, carrying a tutu centerpiece, was helping her grandmother into a sedan. I saw my father then; he was smoking near the station wagon.
On reflex, I crouched down behind a Cadillac, and Danny crouched with me. “That’s my father,” I said.
After a few minutes, Danny said, “You want me to see if he’s still there?” He stood up. “What does he look like?”
“Tall,” I said. “He’s wearing a dark gray suit.”
“I don’t know.”
I stood up. We were safe.
At the station wagon, I noticed that Albert’s paws were muddy, and I wiped them with a rag.
Danny took the rag and wiped the mud off my sandals and pulled a blade of grass out from between my toes.
When he opened the door to the synagogue for me, I thought he was going to ask for my address so he could write to me, but all he said was, “Thanks for the cigarettes.”
I was relieved and then disappointed.
In the hall, Alyssa rushed up to him and said, “My dad’s here.” She glared at me. I wondered if she was his girlfriend, or wanted to be; it was one or the other.
Danny didn’t seem to care that she was angry. He said, “See ya,” to me, and followed her out to the parking lot.
Downstairs, in the pink palace, Robert and Jack were sitting with my father at a table that had been cleared of everything, including the centerpiece.
My father said, “Let your mother know we’re going, please,” and I walked over to where she stood with a woman wearing a big-brimmed straw hat with a beige ribbon.
“This is my daughter, Sophie,” my mom said, in her fakest voice of the day.<
br />
The woman said, “And how old are you?”
“Twelve,” I said.
She cooed at this impressive accomplishment. “And when is your bat mitzvah?”
I was about to say that I wasn’t having one when my mother cut in and said, “We’re just planning it now.”
I was shocked to hear my mother lie, but I didn’t give her away. I remembered a cliché that seemed to fit: “Rebecca will be a hard act to follow.”
The woman tittered, and said, “She’s darling.”
. . . . .
At the car, my mother told me to sit up front and didn’t speak again until we were on the highway. “Where were you?”
“Walking Albert,” I said.
“She was walking Albert,” Robert repeated, in my defense.
Without turning around, my mother said, “I’m talking to Sophie, Robert.” To me, she said, “You were gone for over an hour.”
I was wondering what she suspected, and then I realized that she didn’t suspect anything, she was just angry that I’d disappeared. “It wasn’t like anyone missed my company,” I said. “No one at my table would even talk to me.”
She said, “That’s not the point.”
We passed three exits before she told me what her point was. I was a guest, she said; I was a member of this family. She kept talking, but whatever she was angry about wasn’t making it into her lecture.
I knew that eventually I would have to say I was sorry, even if I didn’t know why I should be and wasn’t. Until I said it, my mother would go on talking and get angrier until she became tired and hurt, at which point my father would take over.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
My mother kissed me. “I know you are.”
It felt a little less crowded up front then. My mother said what a wonderful job Rebecca had done and then, almost to herself, said she hadn’t even started to plan my bat mitzvah.
I looked at my mother. I looked at my dad. It had all been decided. I couldn’t argue; I was supposed to be remorseful.
At a gas station, I climbed into the way back with Albert, where I closed my eyes and thought about Danny. I didn’t remember being queasy or afraid. I remembered him taking my hand. I thought of him saying, “I can’t believe summer’s over,” which I heard now as a declaration of love.
. . . . .
I came home from my first day of getting lost at Flynn Junior High to the news that I had been enrolled in the Hebrew class required of the bat-mitzvah bound. My mother was relieved; she’d been afraid we were too late, but there was room for me after all.
The topic that night at dinner was varsity football. Jack wanted to join the team. We were all surprised. He took photographs and painted pictures; he wrote stories and acted in plays; he’d played soccer, but only intramurally.
My parents objected—he would be too busy applying to college, they said—but Jack argued with reason and passion. For example, he said that joining the football team would demonstrate that he was well-rounded, etc., and might even strengthen his applications.
My father seemed glad to give in, and I thought now might be the right time to discuss the bat mitzvah I did not want to have. But his good mood shone down on Robert; my father suggested they hit at the public courts after dinner.
Robert got so excited that he jumped up from the table to change and was on the stairs when my mother said, “Robert?”
He stopped. “May I please be excused?”
My mother said, “Yes,” and took this opportunity to ask me to get their cigarettes. She didn’t like to ask in front of Robert, who regularly talked to my parents about their imminent smoking-related deaths.
They were supposedly limiting themselves to three cigarettes a day, the best and last of which they smoked together after dinner, with their coffee. They’d switched to Carlton 100s so they’d enjoy smoking less. And they kept them in the basement; the inconvenience was supposed to make them more aware of each cigarette, but I didn’t see how, since the inconvenience was all mine.
I thought of this tonight and every night I went down the basement stairs and into what we still called the playroom even though we never played anything in there anymore except the rare game of PingPong. The net was still up, but the table’s identity was otherwise concealed beneath the junk that overwhelmed the rest of the playroom.
The cigarettes were stored in the refrigerator of my cardboard kitchen, and to get there I had to step over Jack’s barbells and around boxes and books crowned with such unstackable items as an old telephone with its cord cut. Only my kitchen was left uncluttered and intact, which made me wonder if my mother hoped that one day I’d go back to whipping up imaginary cakes and pies for her and my father.
Upstairs, everyone was out on the porch, my parents on a chaise apiece and my brothers in the love seat, leaving an armless chair for me. None of the porch furniture was comfortable, though; it was metal, and when we stood up its diamond pattern was imprinted on the backs of our thighs like fishnet stockings.
Robert had changed into whites, but the excitement he’d had about playing tennis was gone; he sat silent and grim, all of his attention on the two cigarettes I’d put on the table between my parents.
When my father reached for his, Robert closed his eyes and said, “I can’t watch this.” His voice was matter-of-fact, as it always was, even when he discussed his future as an orphan.
My mother said a sympathetic, “Would you like to be excused?”
He nodded and rose, leaving his chocolate pudding behind in protest, and Albert followed him inside.
My father lit my mother’s cigarette and then his. As though in reverie, he held the burned match a moment before putting it in the clamshell that served as an ashtray. I watched him take another puff, and then I began. I said, “I’ve decided not to have a bat mitzvah.”
My father turned to look at me, one hand behind his head in a futile attempt at comfort. He was used to people pleading their cases before him, and he waited for me to plead mine.
Jack seemed amused, so I tried to pretend he wasn’t there. He’d become a less reliable ally over the summer, when he’d begun to see himself less as a camper than a counselor, less the oldest child than the youngest parent.
My mother glanced from me to my father. I’d been fighting with her lately as I never had before—twice that week I’d sent her down to the cardboard refrigerator—and though she’d told my father, he had yet to witness this behavior himself. It occurred to me that she hoped he would now.
I kept my voice calm. “The only reason I’d do it would be for material gain.” With a pang, I thought of the stereo my parents had given Jack for his bar mitzvah. “In conclusion,” I said, “this seems wrong.”
My father nodded for me to go on.
I thought, Did you not hear my “in conclusion”? But I nodded myself, as though deciding which of my many powerful points to voice next. “I don’t know what I believe in,” I said. “So I don’t think I should go up on a stage and act like I do.”
Robert’s voice came from behind the screen door: Softly, less to us than himself, he said, “Beema.” He knew the correct term for the stage in a synagogue because, unlike Jack and me, Robert had gone to Hebrew school since kindergarten. He loved it. The only reason he wasn’t going this year was that he’d been chosen to tutor fifth-graders less brilliant than himself.
We all turned to look at him, a small figure in white.
He said, “Do you know what cilia are?”
My father sighed. “We’re having a conversation here, honey.”
Robert had written to the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association for help, and often quoted from the brochures they’d sent. “Cilia are little hairs that keep your lungs clean,” he said now. “When you smoke, you paralyze them.”
My mother said, “Why don’t you come out and finish your pudding?”
“Did you hear what I said?” Robert asked.
“We heard, honey,�
� my father said and turned back to me, my cue to continue. I thought of saying, Having a bat mitzvah represents everything I stand against. But I knew my father would say, For instance? and I hadn’t prepared examples. I was working up the courage to say, My decision is final, when my mother spoke.
If she’d wanted my father to witness my defiance a moment earlier, I could see that she didn’t now. “You used to love Hebrew school,” she said.
I said, “That was in first grade.” It was true that I’d loved my teacher, Miss Bell, and songs like “Let My People Go,” and stories about jealousy; but it was also true that I’d been so little that when Miss Bell had talked about God as Our Father, I’d pictured mine.
The four of us were looking at my father now. All that was left was for him to deliver his verdict. I didn’t know what he would say. He could surprise you, because he really was fair.
He said, “I’d like to talk to Sophie alone,” and Jack and my mother got up and followed Robert inside.
My father’s cigarette was down to the filter now, and he took the last possible puff. In his face I saw that he was sorry about that; maybe he was already thinking of all the hours that separated him from his next cigarette.
He said, “You seem to have made up your mind.”
I barely managed to say, “I’ve given it a lot of thought.”
“Have you?” he said. “It’s a big decision to make on your own.”
I said, “I can understand that,” which didn’t sound right, and I realized that I’d just repeated a phrase he often used during discussions.
He looked right at me and said, “Having a bat mitzvah is an important part of being Jewish.”
In his voice I heard the unexpected magnitude of my decision: It separated me not just from my mother but from him, too, and maybe even from my brothers. I thought of the story of Moses parting the Red Sea for the Jews, and I saw my family safe on the far shore, waving as I drowned with Pharaoh’s soldiers in the unparting sea.
As though underwater, I could barely hear my father’s words.
He said that a bat mitzvah was a rite of passage into adulthood. “I still remember mine. I didn’t like studying for it,” he said. “No one does.”