Sweet Like Sugar (32 page)

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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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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.”
“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.
We had both relaxed when it came time for the festival meal, in the middle of the seder. My father cleared the table—putting the Haggadahs and the matzoh and the seder plate on the credenza—while my mother brought out her usual feast. This was the heart of the seder in the Steiner house, the part that really matters most.
“So I assume you're rooting for Barack
Hussein
Obama, like Benji is?” my mother asked Jamie. I recognized this as a gentle prod rather than a serious provocation. But it was Jamie's first time dealing with my mother and he was caught off-guard.
“Uh, well,” he started. “Yeah, I guess.”
“We're Hillary supporters,” my mother said.
“Us, too,” said Mrs. Frishman. Uncle Larry and Linda nodded along.
“Of course you are,” I said, teasing, with a gesture toward my mother. “You're her core constituency: Jewish seniors.”
“I am not a senior citizen,” she shot back, feigning offense.
“Old enough for AARP, old enough for Hillary,” I said. My father laughed.
Realizing this wasn't going to be a nasty fight, Jamie chimed in: “I just feel like it's time for a change. The Clintons had their time in office already.”
“A pretty good time for this country,” said my father.
“I'm not voting for ‘pretty good,' ” I said. “I'm voting for something better.”
“And you trust this guy?” Uncle Larry asked.
Cousin Nate answered: “He's my senator and I trust him.”
“I want to get out of Iraq and I want health care reform,” said Jamie. “I don't think Hillary's the person to do it. I think Obama's the only chance we've got.”
“I agree,” said Nate. “But, you know, his stance on gay marriage isn't any better than Hillary's.”
I looked at Jamie. “That's not an urgent issue just yet.”
There was a moment of uneasy silence as the unspoken was made perfectly clear, but my mother quickly broke it: “I don't like that preacher of his, Jeremiah . . . what's-his-name.”

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