Sweet Like Sugar (23 page)

Authors: Wayne Hoffman

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #General, #Jewish Men, #Male Friendship, #Rabbis, #Jewish, #Religion, #Jewish Gay Men, #Judaism

BOOK: Sweet Like Sugar

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“Remember, Zisel was the baby of the family, the only one born in this country. So his father thought this was his last chance to get things right, and apparently I was not the right type of girl. He forbade us to see each other. Zisel wasn't allowed to come into the shop, or to contact me at all. And at the end of the year, his father pulled him out of public school and sent him to a yeshiva in Brooklyn, which was basically a whole world awayâZisel's mother came to tell me. I cried and I cried, but there was nothing I could do. It was over. I thought I'd never see him again.”

She paused for a sip of tea.

“But it wasn't over, apparently,” I said. “You did see him again.”

“Yes, dear, but not for a long time. I went to college and became a schoolteacher, and I married my husband Harold and we lived in New Jersey and raised three children. And Zisel became a rabbi and got married and opened the bookstore . . . well, this part I think you know.”

I nodded.

“For sixty years, we didn't see each other. But when Harold died three years ago, I sold the house in New Jersey and moved down to Miami Beach. And who should be living upstairs?”

“Rabbi Zuckerman,” I said.

“Exactly. And do you know why? Because it's
bashert
. Do you know what that means?”

“Fate.”

“So you do know some Yiddish,” Irene said. “Fate brought us together after all these years. Of course, he never believed anything was
bashert.
”

I didn't tell her that the rabbi apparently did now believe itâbecause he'd used that word to describe meeting Sophie. And I didn't know if Sophie was a subject I should avoid bringing up.

“Listen to me, rattling on like a crazy old woman,” she said. “You tell me, Benji, isn't it fate that brings people together?”

“I'm beginning to think so,” I said.

I met Donnie when I was in tenth grade. We were both dancers.

I had always wanted to dance. When I was little, too little to know exactly what boys were and weren't supposed to do, I'd watch with envy when Rachel took classes in ballet or tap. Dance had everything: music, costumes, hand motions. I asked my parents if I could take tap. They signed me up for pee-wee soccer instead. Needless to say, I was rotten, and the coach was as happy as I was when I didn't return for a second year.

Once I was old enough to realize that boys who dance only set themselves up for ridicule, I resigned myself to the fact that my dance career would probably consist of doing the Macarena in my bedroom alone.

That equation changed when I reached high school. The idea of undressing in a locker room for gym class terrified meâor, rather, terrified and excited me in roughly equal measureâand our school had a strict gym requirement. There was only one way out: Take an accredited class outside school. I looked around for options and found a folk dance class at the Jewish Community Center in Rockville.

Chances of anyone besides my guidance counselor ever finding out about the class were slim to none; the jocks and meatheads who dominated my school didn't keep up on the folk dance scene, so I wasn't too worried about their taunts. I figured I'd finally found a way to get out of gym. And my parents were so happy that I'd be taking a class at the JCC, they didn't care if it was dance or ceramics or gunsmithingâit was something Jewish, a sign that their child who'd stopped going to synagogue wasn't giving up on their faith altogether.

I wasn't bad. At the end of ninth grade, the teacher asked me to join the JCC's teen dance troupe, which I didâsince it still counted toward my gym requirement. And, because the girls outnumbered the boys in the troupe fourteen to one, I got parts in pretty much every single routine we did.

Our performances were mostly small affairs. We danced in the lobby of a retirement center for a dozen hard-of-hearing Jewish seniors. We did a five-minute routine as part of a Hanukkah celebration at the JCC.

By the spring, though, we were ready to participate in the Salute to Israel, an outdoor festival marking Israeli Independence Day that drew hundreds of spectators and included musicians, comedians, and dancers of all ages. We even had another teenage dance troupe coming in from Rochester to perform with us.

The kids in our troupe agreed to house the kids from Rochester, and since I was the only boy in our troupe, I hosted the only boy from Rochester: Donnie.

We set him up in Rachel's room, since it was empty now that she was off at college.

The van from Rochester arrived at the JCC while we were rehearsing. We stopped for a round of introductions, matching up hosts with guests. And when Donnie and I stood side-by-side, all eyes seemed to widen. It was like we were twins.

We both wore black high-top sneakers, baggy jeans, and Old Navy T-shirts. Our glasses matched, our haircuts matched. Our builds were similar, although he was slightly bigger.

“I'm seeing double,” one of the girls in my troupe teased.

We both blushed and shook hands. “It's like looking in a mirror,” Donnie said.

I had never met anyone who reminded me of myself. At school, I had my circle of friends, but what we mostly had in common was that we were all misfits in some wayâand even in this group of guys, I had started to feel less secure as the rest of my friends started to date girls. When I was dancing, I was the only boy; while the girls never made me feel left out, I was never really part of their clique. But here was Donnie, two years older, confident, comfortable in his skin. He was a month away from graduation, getting ready to head to Stanford. This would be his last performance with his troupe, after three years.

Sitting across from each other on Rachel's bed, we stayed up all night talking. And not about our dance routines.

Donnie was gay. He was only out to a few of his friends in Rochesterânot his parents, not the other members of his troupeâbut it wasn't a total secret anymore.

“And once I'm away from Mom and Dad next fall,” he said, “I can finally do what I want.”

He knew exactly what he wanted. He had no problem imagining his life as a gay man: he'd have a boyfriend, a fabulous apartment, and maybe a cat, and they'd live in San Francisco. A total escape from his life so far in Rochester, which sounded surprisingly like mine, from Hebrew school to Jewish camp to visiting Grandma in Florida.

He described his future life clearly and concretely, as if he didn't have any doubt that it was possible. He was ready.

Why was he telling me?

Donnie asked me about my plans, but my plans at that point didn't stretch beyond high school. I knew I'd go to college, and I hoped that would offer some respite from my adolescent misery, but I hadn't given much thought to what my life might look like after that. Maybe I'd been afraid to imagine it, afraid that picturing itâthe boyfriend, the cat, everything I could only guess gay life involvedâwould make it too real.

A lot of things that might have happened that night didn't happen. There was no attraction on that level, at least from what I could tell.

And even though I certainly had many opportunities, I didn't tell Donnie that I thought I was gay, too.

But I knew that night that fate had brought Donnie and me together. Talking to him, I felt for the first time like things were going to be okay for me. Meeting him wasn't like looking into a mirror. It was like looking into the future.

Irene stayed and talked until midnightâabout her family, about the rabbi, about the Jewish community in North Beachâwhen she went home to bed.

“I volunteer on Saturdays,” she said. “And if I want to look presentable, I've got to get my beauty rest. At my age, every minute helps.”

She pulled me down to her to kiss me on the cheek and headed downstairs. There was still plenty of time for me to go out, catch one of the pre-White Party parties in South Beach. But I wasn't really in the mood anymore. Instead, I stayed in, snooping around the rabbi's condo, looking for traces of the man Irene had known, the sweet, flirtatious Zisel she had loved.

I didn't find much. Bengay and Sanka and one box of very old raisins. Nothing revealing. I made up the sofa bed and went to sleep.

Saturday morning, North Beach was busy with people headed to their respective shuls. I got a couple of nasty looksâfor wearing shorts, or driving a car on Shabbat, or going anywhere besides services, I'm not exactly sureâbut I ignored them and headed back to South Beach.

An hour or two sunbathing helped me get a bit of a tan to offset the white clothes I'd bought.

An hour or two of shopping around Lincoln Road Mall allowed me to find the perfect shoes and the perfect cap, and the perfect postcardâwith a photo of some serious Miami beefcakeâto make Phil jealous.

An hour or two at the “Heatwave” pool party in the afternoon made me feel completely insecure about my body and made me wish I had another year to work out every day at the gym before that night's big event.

But I didn't have another year, so I made the most of it.

Even in my cutest white outfit, I was a bit apprehensive when I arrived at the White Party, but I exhaled after getting a few approving looks from other people in line. While other circuit parties often got a bad rapâfor combining sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (or, in this case, house music) in such irresponsible waysâthe White Party was another animal entirely. Spread across the grounds of a mansion called Vizcaya, the event included hundreds if not thousands of guests, yet managed to avoid feeling like a tacky, overcrowded club. A string quartet played classical music inside. Acres of gardens stretched back away from the building, with a performance space tucked away in the back, where the city's top caterers offered their food. Throngs of people, in blinding white, danced to big-name DJs. And, to top it off, as an AIDS fund-raiser, it was all for a good cause.

I danced, I ate. I even got to hear Cyndi Lauper singing “True Colors,” which was one of my favorite songs as a kid.

But I just couldn't get into it. After all the time and money I'd spent preparing and shopping, I couldn't seem to relax and enjoy myself. In a sea of beautiful men, the only person I could think about was Irene.

I left the party early and arrived on her doorstep still clad all in white.

She didn't seem the least bit surprised to see me standing there, at ten o'clock on a Saturday night.

“White Party?” she asked, pushing her glasses onto her nose, checking out my outfit.

“How did you . . . ?”

“Sweetheart, I volunteer at the Jewish Museum, smack in the middle of South Beach,” she said. “So I do know a little bit about the scene down here. And I certainly know when the White Party is. It's all anyone in South Beach could talk about today.”

“So you knew . . . ?”

“That you're gay?” she said. “I may need glasses, but I'm not blind.”

“It's funny, Rabbi Zuckerman didn't know.”

“We see what we want to see,” she said. Then she opened the door and showed me into her apartment.

It was easy to see which furniture she'd bought when she moved to Florida (a generically modern, overstuffed beige couch; a small, pine dining room table that had probably come straight from IKEA) and which items had been hers for decades (an antique china hutch filled with gilt-edged dishes, matching table lamps with porcelain bases shaped like Oriental vases).

And there were framed photos on every available shelf or tabletop. Irene walked me around the living room and explained who was in each picture. Her late husband. Her kids. Her grandkidsâat least a dozen different shots. The photos told the story of her family through the decades: vacations, graduations, birthday parties, school portraits.

On top of the television sat a color snapshot, in a Lucite frame. “My son took that picture about two years ago when he came to visit,” she said. In the photograph, Irene stood between Rabbi Zuckerman and Sophie. All three were smiling. The women had their arms around each other's waists and were looking into the camera. The rabbi stood slightly separate, hands at his side, looking at Sophie.

“It's funny seeing the rabbi without his beard,” I said.

“Zisel has a beard now?” she asked.

I nodded.

“He must have grown it when Sophie died,” she said. “I guess he never shaved it off.”

This was the first time Irene had mentioned Sophie by name, so I decided to pursue it.

“Were you and Sophie friends?” I asked.