How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (19 page)

We learned the dreidel game and played it with pennies; somehow, Jonah figured out how to twist the dreidel, or turn it, so it landed on
gimel
and he always won. He exulted, perhaps not unlike Judah the Maccabee.

“I am Jonah the Maccabee, king of dreidels!” he proclaimed.

We talked about the oil. “What if your Nintendo was losing its charge,” we suggested, “but it kept going. And going. For days. It still worked.”

He stared at us; he was listening.

We spent a night rolling candles made from strips of beeswax. Jonah and Maia stood still at the table, watching the flames. There was an appealing pyromaniacal aspect to Chanukah. There was one flame, then two, then three. There was something basic and mesmerizing about the flames, something so superior, we felt, to the gaudy ornamentation of a Christmas tree. The simple spectacle of the row of light. We did not necessarily feel a connection to anything miraculous but, instead, a sort of breathlessness, the understanding that the Maccabees, whoever they were, had watched flames just like this in a ruined temple twenty-two hundred years ago.

The fifth night, Jonah asked if he could light the candles.

“He can,” said his grandmother, and we looked at her, aghast—a seven-year-old armed with a
shamash,
a tiny torch? But Jonah looked as though his own miraculousness had finally been acknowledged. We lit a candle and handed it to him.

We said the prayer, and Jonah slowly, carefully, lit each candle.

“Let's turn off the lights!” Jonah suggested.

We did. The candles glowed in the darkness.

“Let's watch them melt,” he said.

We were quiet. The flames rose up, watery, pale, in the dark kitchen. We watched them melt.

Then our son told us the Chanukah story. He told about the Greeks who told the Jews they would have to worship the Greek gods. “They said,
You can't worship any gods but ours!
” he said with gusto, clenching his fist. He described how the great Temple was ruined and how, when the Maccabees entered it, they had only one night of oil. He knew it all. He told the story of what had happened thousands of years ago slowly, like a miniature rabbi. The way he told it, it was a good story. It was the fifth night of Chanukah. He was seven years old. We sat in the darkness, the light on our faces, and listened to him.

LAURA DAVE

Eight Nights

Night One

T
HE FIRST
C
HANUKAH THAT YOU REMEMBER CLEARLY IS SPENT AT YOUR GRANDPARENTS' GARDEN APARTMENT IN
B
ROOKLYN,
N
EW
Y
ORK.
N
EAR THE COLLEGE THAT STARTS WITH A
B
.
N
EAR AN AVENUE THAT STARTS WITH THE LETTER
R
.
Y
OU ARE THREE AND A HALF YEARS OLD.
L
ETTERS ARE A VERY BIG DEAL.

There are steps leading out to the garden and your grandparents have strewn blue and gold lights along the railing, like little beams. And your gifts are lined up, like promises, on the kitchen table. It doesn't occur to you to open them—what could be inside that is as good as the pretty pink paper? The lacy ribbons? Your grandfather swoops you on his lap (because you lose him young, he will always be this to you: all arms and laughter and smiles). The two of you sit quietly while your grandma works on the crossword puzzle. It is Sunday. She works quickly and seriously. You like watching the way her hand moves with the pen. And when you reach out to touch her, knocking the pen, she smiles at you.

Night Two

In the white-brick Hebrew school—in the back of the white-brick temple—you sit in a circle with the rest of the class and someone—not the head teacher but the teacher's assistant, the one you get to call by his first name, the one you call Peter or Paul or Gilligan—explains to you why it is important to light the candles, why it is important to do it a certain way. He explains that putting the menorah by the window has everything to do with lighting the outside world, as opposed to just illuminating your own house. It has everything to do with sharing the miracle of Chanukah.

Someone snickers at the word
miracle.
You are a classroom full of fifth graders. Someone is always snickering at the world
miracle.

You all head to the windowsill, where the menorah will stay, and you hold out your hand and wait for your turn to light one. You care that you do it well, but you are also aware of Sara and Jennifer whispering on the other side of the circle. You wish they were whispering to you too. Which makes you think you shouldn't be worrying so much about the candles. You should worry about other things instead—things that girls your age worry about. What are those things? Boys? No. They scare you, now that they might actually try to kiss you. Nail polish? Basketball? You aren't sure. It is one of your first reminders that you aren't always very good at being you.

Are you ready, Gilligan asks you, handing over a candle. He says it in a way that indicates that it isn't the first time he is asking you. Somehow you have missed it.

You look at Jennifer. I hope so, you say.

Night Three

A snowstorm, three months after your brother has left for his freshman year of college. You aren't supposed to miss him—certainly haven't planned on such a thing—but something has switched between you in his absence. He calls you on the telephone, like it is something that you do. He asks you what you did that day—asks about junior high school, your teachers there. He knows their names. It is your first Chanukah without him.

Since your mother is away too, it feels like ample evidence that the candles don't need to be lit. You are thirteen years old. You are always looking for evidence that you don't need to do something.

When you present your case to your dad, you can tell he is apt to agree (he is a lawyer; he likes evidence too) but he tells you that your mom would want you two to light them, so you follow him (or maybe he follows you) into the dining room—with its long table and formal place settings. In your entire life, you have spent approximately one hour in the dining room with the long table and formal place settings.

You are wearing your ripped Duke sweatshirt and no socks. You are surprised that the dining room doesn't throw you out.

After the candles are lit, your father puts your present on the table between you. It is wrapped in blue and is pliable. Too pliable to be a box. You open it quickly. A book. A book of essays about California.

You love California, he says.

You aren't good at hiding your disappointment.

Little do you know that it will become your favorite book—your favorite possession, really—one that you will carry to college and graduate school and a second graduate school and five different cities and nine different apartments. One that you can recite by memory if someone asks, or even if they don't.

Little do you know that later that very night, you will begin reading this book of essays in your bed, by flashlight, and have one of your first thoughts—as clear and polished as your mom's dining room—that if you could ever create something half as good as this book, you would be a happy person. It will come right before you go to sleep, and so you'll almost miss it. But it is too sure of itself. Bumped against your absolutely unsure thirteen-year-old self. This is what you want your life to become.

Night Four

You pretend not to hear your mother calling. Even though. You don't care that you are keeping her waiting, your entire family waiting—your parents and brother and aunts and uncles and cousins. Everyone in the kitchen together, in from their various towns and cities for this holiday. Everyone waiting for you to light the candles, so they can begin the type of southern feast only your mom is capable of producing: candied apples and roasted turkey, spiced cashews, spinach salad with walnuts, cream-cheese brownie pie.

Not that you care. You are almost seventeen years old, and you are lying on your fluffy white pillows, telephone pasted to your ear, running your fingers through your hair, feeling all grown up in the way you often feel at almost-seventeen: when you are still certain of things, when you still get to be this certain.

On the other end of the phone, Christopher. Your first real boyfriend. You are certain of him. Even though he is too tall and sad and says things that are like warning signs from after-school specials.
Only I'll ever love you this much.
It doesn't matter. You believe him. He is your entire world.

And now he is telling you something important. Something too important for you to hang up, for now, and join your family in the kitchen. Something about a doughnut, you think.

Your mother calls your name again. In another minute, she will either give up or come to your bedroom to get you. She will look at you with disappointment in her eyes.

You hold your hair in your hands, and wait for it.

Night Five

A dorm room. Chilly, dry. You have put several posters on the wall, including one that says
L
IVE JUICY
.
Are you living juicy? This is a question you will ask yourself far too many times during your freshman year—your strongest indication that you are not living anything close. You get the candles from someone at Hillel (or you think it is someone at Hillel) who is handing them out on the quad and on Locust Walk. He is also handing out copies of the Adam Sandler Chanukah song on cassette. You think the song is funny, still.

You are waiting for the phone to ring. Does it matter who you are waiting for? Sara G. from down the hall, the silent lacrosse player from your silent-movies seminar? The high school (ex-) boyfriend now in Oregon? (He barely ever calls when he promises to, and barely ever promises to in the first place.)

You strike your first match. You've made it a ritual to light the candles each night—sometimes with Sara G. from down the hall, tonight by yourself. It feels important to light them, even if by yourself. You watch the lights, as if watching a beehive, feeling incredibly aware of their presence—of how shiny they look—and of something else you are afraid to name. Something that, only later, you can call loneliness.

When the phone rings, you won't hear it.

Night Six

This is your last week in London. And you spend tonight the way you spend every other night this week—lamenting the fact that this is your last week in London.

You have gone out and bought a real menorah for the holiday—because you do everything real here. It feels easy to, right to, which you've come to understand has everything to do with starting to feel right within yourself.

But this isn't the beginning of the thing. The beginning comes months earlier, shortly after you arrive in London for a junior year abroad. When you go with your friend Leigh to her grandparents' home in Manchester, England, for Rosh Hashanah. It is your first time in Manchester—and your first time at an Orthodox temple. The two of you sit with the other women upstairs; the men sit downstairs. Many people—though not you—are wearing very big hats. And someone, maybe the temple president, brings up Chanukah. You remember thinking, That is so long from now. It feels so long from now. My whole life can change by then. (And, months later, you aren't wrong—are you? Not in the ways that matter most.)

But just then, you look over at the seventy-year-old woman wearing the craziest hat of them all: black and white, full of feathers and a bright pink bow.

When she catches your stare, she smiles and gives you a wink.

And you wink back, as if it is possible that this, too, is something you can still learn to do.

Night Seven

It is your first winter in western Massachusetts—in the converted schoolhouse you moved to in order to try to become a writer. Is this something someone can become? Sometimes it feels like a fantasy, like another kind of excuse to hold something like a real life at bay. And still, being here is better than the alternative—better than those difficult months after graduation. The constant throbbing in your head at the Internet company each day. You have picked the wrong life.

Today is twelve degrees below zero, and it is only early December. You have four months of this ahead. You trudge down Main Street to the market to buy some candles. On your way home, you see a billboard advertisement for a local real estate agent. The sign shows a colonial house with a red
SOLD
sticker across the center, and it reads:
IS THIS WHAT IT MEANS TO KNOW WHAT YOU NEED?

You don't know what that means.

But you are having friends over for dinner, are planning to cook salmon and couscous for them—and to make a warm chocolate sponge cake—in your kitchen that is shaped like a boat.

Your windows are twelve feet wide and you have the menorah all set up, all ready to sit in the window closest to your desk, which you keep slightly ajar. You have Joni Mitchell playing in the background, and the food simmering on the stove, and you say the prayer for the seventh night.

Twenty minutes later your doorbell rings, and you race to answer it. And something happens in that moment—you racing, the wind blowing against the windowpane—and for a second, it looks like the menorah is going to tilt, fall in slow motion, right to the floor. Spill all over the carpet, burn the wall on its way down.

You don't consider yourself very religious, but this—you know—cannot be a good sign. Only then, at the last second—when you realize you can't do anything to stop it—the menorah rights itself.

And this does feel like a sign of something. But maybe it is something simpler than what you are looking for then—which has to do with answering the question on the sign you saw that day. Maybe it has something to do with learning to close the windows tightly in bad weather.

Night Eight

Home again. You recently moved back to New York, recently moved into an apartment four blocks away from where you lived the first time you lived here. It is a quieter apartment—a quieter life, for you—and this time the city doesn't feel wrong, or scary.

And, tonight, you get on the 6:03 train to Westchester, headed to your childhood home, and go to see your parents for the holiday. It is a last-minute trip—and you make it at the last minute; you are out of breath on the train—and close your eyes, trying to catch it.

It has been a long day, and tomorrow will be that way too. But, still, you want to go home tonight. You can see how the whole evening will go—even with your eyes closed, even though you are waiting for it to happen. You will take a nap in your childhood bedroom and drink too much wine at dinner—and then have too much coffee and cake after dinner—and you will look around your family's table, where there are no wrapped gifts waiting this time but where you are reminded of your real gifts: a family who you get to come home to, who have seen you through all these nights, a life you like getting back to.

And, after dinner, after loading up on their toilet paper and fresh apples and AA batteries (the things you apparently cannot find in New York City), you will get a ride back to the train station from you dad. You will get ready to go back to your new home. Your second one, the one you are beginning to make for yourself.

But as your dad pulls out of the driveway, you will have a moment in which you remember all the nights that came before. Maybe it will come out of nowhere, or maybe it will happen only after you catch sight of it. The Chanukah lights in the window—shining, like eight simple stories—in the night sky.