Exodus: A memoir (15 page)

A woman named Melissa introduced herself to me, her voice a slow, melodic drawl. I looked at her face, which seemed unnatural, with permanently arched eyebrows, hard cheekbones, and a mouth that created no lines when it smiled. Her hair was a deep red color that only came out of an expensive bottle; it fell in fat, loose waves around her shoulders, which were draped in a pricey-looking silk scarf.

After she had moved on to make small talk with the person on my right, Heather came over to me and whispered in my ear, “Twenty plastic surgeries at least,” and nodded toward Melissa. I shook my head in disbelief. “Nose, boobs . . .” Heather rattled off the cosmetically altered features on ten fingers. I felt sorry for the
woman, who had clearly felt that everything about her had to be fixed. She was beautiful now, but in a way that left you convinced she had been even more gorgeous before she invited a surgeon to take a knife to her.

After making the rounds of introductions, Heather facilitating excitedly at my side, I was steered to the buffet, at the center of which rested a gigantic platter of jumbo shrimp. In the middle of the tray was a deep dish filled with bright red cocktail sauce, bloodier in color and thicker in texture than ketchup, but reminding me of said condiment nonetheless. I’d never had shrimp before. Bacon was my big sin; after that I figured I had pretty much checked the whole nonkosher thing off my list. But shrimp was an equally enormous transgression, and I was curious.

I heard myself admitting it out loud: “I’ve never tasted shrimp before.”

The ladies gasped theatrically. A woman wearing her hair in a chignon speared a shrimp with a fork and handed it to me.

“Go ahead,” she urged, “dip it in some cocktail sauce. You’ll see; it’s delicious.” Her eyes were wide in anticipation, and she leaned in to get a good look at my first bite. The other ladies edged ever so slightly toward me, and there was a dramatic pause in the conversation as they watched for my reaction. I slowly brought the speared shrimp toward my mouth, feeling uneasy as the cold, wet sea-bug loomed before me, and lurched forward for a quick bite, just a small one off the tip. There was a spontaneous cheering and clapping as I chewed slowly, trying to get past the spiny and rubbery texture to some sort of pleasantness underneath. The faces around me were so hopeful that I couldn’t help but smile sheepishly and nod. “It’s good,” I said, but it came out more like a question than a statement. Satisfied, the crowd dispersed. A few
attacked the baked brie and strawberries nearby, while others headed for the champagne. It started to feel like a party.

At some point, when I was drunk enough not to remember people’s names anymore, one of the women came over to me and whispered in my ear. “Darlin’, do you know,” she crooned, “I mean, do you
know
, that Jesus has opened a door for you? Isn’t it amazing that a young woman like you, coming from where you’re from, ends up all the way over here? Honey, all you have to do is walk on through. You just walk on through that door to Jesus.”

All I could see were her enormous fake eyelashes, caked with mascara. Her face was very close to mine, and I felt at a loss for words, so I did my usual routine of smile and nod.

Heather drove us home in her father’s pickup truck, and I passed out happily in a king-sized bed. I didn’t dream, and this seemed the most striking thing about being away from home for the first time. It was as if the massive canvas of the desert had wiped my subconscious into a blank slate.

Before leaving for the airport, we went to visit Leann’s friend Patsy, who distributed a line of women’s clothing from her home. Heather needed a spring wardrobe to take back with her to New York.

Patsy’s husband, Mark, was a lawyer working in tandem with several thriving local industries and clearly supported his family quite comfortably, but there was a marked difference in the couple’s lifestyle compared with that of Heather’s family. Their house was much smaller and less ornate, with cheaper terra-cotta floors and tacky Southwestern decor. Heather’s mother had decorated
their large and opulent house with the best of designer furnishings and fabrics, and I guess I had expected similar decor to be the standard for the rest of the local homes. But Patsy’s lawn was dry and had brown patches on it, and the trees sagged tragically, seeming near death. It must take a lot of water to keep a garden healthy in this dry, scalding region, and I assumed most people couldn’t afford the extra expense.

Still, Patsy had the manner I was coming to expect from a Southern woman—incredibly bubbly and sociable, with an indefatigably cheerful attitude toward life. She also reminded me of the yenta stereotype; she was curious to the point of being nosy, and her eyes roved shamelessly over your face, as if trying to guess your thoughts. She insisted that I try on clothes even though I said I had no money to spend, and then asked me which was my favorite item.

“The green shorts?” I said.

She turned to her computer and typed something quickly. “Done,” she announced. “Green shorts, size six, shipped to Heather’s address in New York. She can give them to you when they arrive.”

I was at a loss for words. I thanked her shyly and wandered out to explore the house while Heather finished selecting her wardrobe. In the kitchen I met Mark, who had come out of his office in search of a snack. He was a quiet, mellow man, in sharp contrast to his blond, bubble gum–popping wife, and a welcome relief from the constant chattiness I had been overwhelmed by since my arrival. However, like so many of his neighbors, he asked me the now-familiar question: “Have you accepted Jesus into your heart?”

They don’t prepare you, in politically liberal environments, for the possibility of meeting a devout Christian who’s not ignorant, sexist, racist, and the usual host of other insults I was accustomed
to hearing lobbed. They don’t tell you how to make sense of a man with a kind face and an earnest manner who’s clearly concerned for your emotional and spiritual well-being and can’t bear the thought that you could be missing out on the peace he’s feeling, the peace he claims is right in front of you.

I was learning that Christians who smell a potential inductee have a universal method of seduction. They look at you like they’re reading a crystal ball and say, “You’re clearly chosen by God.” Man, you sure are special, they say. Why, it would be the greatest shame ever if someone as special as you had to miss out on salvation.

I listened patiently to Mark, until he started to sound eerily similar to the people I had heard preaching the prosperity gospel. He believed he was taken care of financially simply because he believed in Jesus. Look around, he said, this is a wealthy community, and we all believe. Coincidence? he seemed to be asking. I was more than a little horrified. Heather had driven me through the other side of town; poor Hispanic neighborhoods abounded in this region. Did Mark mean to say that they just didn’t believe in Jesus as heartily as those who lived in rich white neighborhoods?

I didn’t vocalize my thoughts, but I was disturbed. Just then, Heather came out of the other room with a satisfied smile on her face.

“Found everything you needed?” I asked.

She nodded happily.

As we prepared to leave, Patsy pulled me aside with an urgent whisper. “Listen,” she said, “I hate to bother you, but—well, you’re
from New York City, and you’re Jewish, so I just figured—I need you to find someone for me.”

I was incredulous.

“My best friend’s son gone and done converted to Judaism—and she being the pastor of their church and everything. He hasn’t spoken to his family since, and they’re so worried.”

“Patsy, New York is a really big place. And Jews don’t all know each other!”

“Would you just try? Please?”

“Sure,” I heard myself say, without confidence.

It would have been very funny except that I did find him, easily. He had picked one of the most generic Jewish names in the book: Jacob Weissman. Of all the Jacob Weissmans I found on Facebook,
this
Jacob Weissman’s profile picture was a dead giveaway—none of the others had the homebred good looks of a small-town superstar. It may be possible to erase a name like Colt Cayson, but it’s more difficult to blot out the linebacker shoulders that come with it, the Gallic cheekbones and strong jaw. For an instant, looking at his picture, I felt sorry for him. That would never be a Jewish nose, I thought. Then I clicked the blue button and requested his friendship.

My message was innocent. We had a mutual acquaintance. I was fascinated by his story, and as I was newly transformed myself, I thought our paths should intersect. He wrote back immediately, eagerly, and we arranged to meet.

Colt’s parents are prominent clergy members in the Baptist
community. They live in the deepest part of the Deep South, and they have never been to New York City. I think this is why I wanted to meet Colt, because he had lived a life that I had once romanticized as exotic and foreign. But somewhere along the way, he had broken from his life, as painfully and completely as I had mine, and chosen the world I came from instead. Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect.

Any preconceptions I might have had, however, disappeared the moment I looked up from my perch on a stoop in front of a vegetarian café in East Harlem, feeling a shadow loom over me. Jacob was so tall and broad that he literally blocked out the sun. He had a deep, crooked dimple in his left cheek, but otherwise I had never seen so many square angles in one person. It was like you could fold him in half and everything would line up perfectly.

I was twenty-three years old, but in many ways still thirteen. I saw a Prince Charming with an inconvenient yarmulke. A knight in Jewish, if not shining, armor.

So naturally I craved the old Colt, the man I would have gotten to meet had I been around five years earlier. While Jacob offered me a brief biography, he was more excited to talk about who he was now. He was clearly exhilarated by his own Jewishness and even more excited about my own, because my Jewishness felt more real to him than his. There was nothing more real than the Satmar brand of Judaism, he thought, because they were the most intense version of Jewishness around in the present-day era.

“That’s not true! The Satmars are a fundamentalist group that broke off from the rest of the Jewish world, isolating themselves,” I argued. “In the process, they became extremist, and their original views were distorted. Yet people still continue to romanticize
the Hasidic community as a nostalgic preservation of times long gone! In some ways, I think the Satmars encourage this. It certainly portrays them sympathetically.”

If Jacob had had the option, he might have become a Satmar, he speculated. I realized that I often made my own mistaken assumptions about different brands of Christianity, so I tried to be understanding, but we both knew that the Satmars did not accept converts. They didn’t even accept repentant Jews. So in a way, Jacob had only settled for ultra-Orthodoxy, because it was the highest of echelons in which he could earn acceptance. I tried to warn him that even there he might never be considered one of the gang, but his eyes were still starry and he waved off my concerns. He believed he was a full part of the community.