Swimming Across the Hudson (13 page)

I sat with her in the theater for two and a half hours, offering her popcorn and sips of my soda. I felt the shock of electricity as I brushed against her sweater and quickly pulled away.

She liked the movie, and I didn't.

“It's because you're too young,” she said. “If you were older, you'd understand what the country was going through at the time. Everyone was scared. Nobody turned off their televisions.”

“I wouldn't have liked the movie any better even if I was older than you. I don't like suspense movies. And I'm not interested in movies about space. I never even saw
Star Wars
.”

“What about Tom Hanks? Didn't you see
Philadelphia
?”

I had. But I knew we weren't going to agree. We had different taste in movies.

“Well?”

“Yes, I know. Everyone loved
Philadelphia
.”

“Did you?”

“I thought it was a little manipulative.”

“Manipulative? Maybe you didn't like it because the people in it were gay.”

“Susan,” I said, “my brother's gay.”

“He is?”

Hadn't I told her? I was tempted to say that her private detective had been loafing on the job. She appeared to be reevaluating everything about me. But she said nothing more about Jonathan's being gay—not then, and not after.

“I went with Jonathan and his boyfriend,” I said, “and none of us especially liked it.”

Already I could see that nothing would be simple between us. Everything would take on greater meaning. I liked this movie, and you didn't. Are we really compatible? Are we meant to be together? I didn't want to fight with her. I've gone to many movies I didn't expect to like. It isn't a huge concession.

“If you don't like suspense movies or movies about space, why did you come along?”

“Because you invited me.”

“I could have gone with someone else.”

“Okay, do you want me to spell it out? It didn't matter to me what the movie was. I came because I wanted to be with you.”

Now, a week before Mother's Day, I wasn't sure what to do.

“Call Susan up,” Jenny said, “and wish her Happy Mother's Day. Or send her a card. She's only been here for two months. It's not like you owe her more than that.”

“Maybe I shouldn't call her at all.” It seemed a betrayal of my mother to acknowledge Susan in this way. “It's like adultery,” I told Jenny.

“Come on. What did you do when your grandmothers were alive? Didn't you call them on Mother's Day?”

“That was different.”

“I say ‘Happy Mother's Day' to people at work. If that's your idea of adultery, then I'm the most promiscuous person you know.”

I felt some obligation to Susan, if only because her other son had
died. So on the Wednesday before Mother's Day, I bought her a card with the words “Happy Mother's Day” on the front and added the following note:

Dear Susan,

I'm glad I've gotten the chance to meet you. I don't know how much longer you'll be staying in San Francisco or how much time we'll spend together. Things may not be easy between us. But I'm grateful that you made the effort to find me and that we've started some kind of relationship. I hope you have a happy Mother's Day.

Affectionately,

Ben
                   

Then I went shopping for my mother. I was compensating, spending more money on gifts than I ever had before. I bought her a maroon-and-gray silk scarf because those were the Vassar colors and she was a loyal alumna. I sent her
A Way in the World
by V. S. Naipaul because she liked reading him in
The New York Review of Books
, and
None to Accompany Me
by Nadine Gordimer because she had enjoyed
Burger's Daughter
years before and was interested in South African politics. I went to the florist and ordered a huge bouquet of flowers: red, yellow, and white roses; irises, orchids, tulips, lilies.

At school, I spoke about evolving conceptions of motherhood during the course of American history. I discussed maternity leave, glass ceilings, and the case of a woman who sued her boss because she'd been fired for nursing on the job. I asked my students what they were planning to do for Mother's Day.

“I'll make my bed,” said one. “That will be my gift to my mother.”

“I don't believe in Mother's Day,” another student said. He had been reading
The Communist Manifesto
and had come to see everything
through the eyes of Karl Marx. “It's a creation of the Hallmark industry, and as such, it's a capitalist tool.”

“
You're
a tool,” said a girl he'd berated for shopping at Benetton. “You celebrate Valentine's Day, don't you?”

“That's different.”

“Only because you want to get laid.”

“All right,” I said. “Enough.”

“Why are we talking about Mother's Day?” one student asked. “We're not in second grade. Are you going to give us crayons and ask us to make cards?”

“I'm not trying to treat you like children,” I said. “I just think it's an interesting subject to discuss.”

“You think it's a subject?”

“It
is
a subject. Mother's Day as an American phenomenon—what it says about our economy and our culture.”

But what I really wanted to talk about was myself. I told my students about my Mother's Day dilemma and how I'd tried to solve it.

“Why do you keep telling us about your life?” asked one student.

“Because it touches on larger issues.” Somewhere in my mind, somewhere small and receding, I realized I was talking in earnest. I'd lost my sense of humor. “For a while you guys were obsessed with my life. Don't you remember what you asked me at the beginning of the year? ‘Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend?' ”

“We don't want to know about your life,” a student said. “We only want to know about your sex life.”

“That's right,” a voice called out. This was Paul. “We only want to know about your birth mother if you're having sex with her.”

The room rocked with laughter—at the image of me having sex with my birth mother, or perhaps of me having sex at all, their hopelessly earnest history teacher.

At home that night, I told Jenny I was having trouble getting through to my students.

“They're teenagers, Ben. You can't expect them to be interested in this.” She got up from the bed and brought back the chess set. “Here. This will relax you.”

“Chess?”

The first time I'd played, when I was eight, I'd reached across the board and simply taken my father's pieces—his queen and castles, and then his king. “Beginner's luck!” I'd said.

“You have to think to play chess,” I told Jenny. “That's not going to relax me.”

She moved her pawn; then I moved mine. The window was open. A breeze blew across the room, billowing the Venezuelan flag, making it look like a huge life jacket. I raised an earring of Jenny's to my ear. Maybe Susan would make a pair of earrings for her. Maybe she'd make a pair for my mother. I lay on my back and closed my eyes.

“It's your turn,” Jenny said.

“You go for me.” I craned my neck, leaning my head off the edge of the bed so I could see the room upside down.

“What are you doing?”

I tried to read the titles on the bookshelves. I made out the name Oliver Sacks and the title
An Anthropologist on Mars
. Sacks had written about a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome and a man for whom the world had frozen in the 1960s.

When I sat up, Jenny was bending over the chessboard. Brown curls hung in front of her face. She had a bishop in each hand—one black, one white—contemplating our respective moves.

“Jen,” I said, “there should be a mathematical constant—call it X—that represents the ratio of time I think about Susan to the time I actually spend with her. It would be huge.”

“Call it W,” Jenny said.

“W?”

“For ‘waste of time.' ”

I could see that the subject was starting to wear on her. She hadn't bargained for this kind of relationship.

“Call it O,” she said.

“O?”

“For ‘obsessed.' Or S.”

“S?”

“For ‘self-absorbed.' ”

 

T
rue to my prediction, I didn't return to synagogue services. But I thought about religion more and more. I would flip through the pages of the Bible—reading the verses and the Rashi commentary in the original Hebrew. On Fridays, I sometimes called my parents before the sun went down in New York and had my father bless me.

I introduced Jenny to traditional Jewish foods, such as smoked herring and gefilte fish. I removed my high school yearbook from storage and showed her pictures of me from the basketball team, loping down the court in my Hebrew-lettered uniform, with a monogrammed yarmulke, crocheted by a former girlfriend, bobby-pinned to my hair. I described the plays my high school class had performed—Hebrew versions of
The Wizard of Oz, My Fair Lady, Oliver!
and
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. I taught Tara “The Time Warp” in Hebrew.

“What are you doing?” Jenny asked.

“I'm teaching Tara the pelvic thrust.”

“In Hebrew?”

“Why not?”

I asked Jenny whether it was all right if we put a mezuzah on our front doorpost. “It would mean something to me, if it's okay with you.”

A close childhood friend of Jenny's had grown up in a Conservative Jewish home, and Jenny had helped her nail a mezuzah to her
doorpost. Jenny had no objection to our having one, as long as she understood what it meant.

I told her about the end of enslavement in Egypt, when God passed over the houses of the Israelites and killed the Egyptians' firstborns. That was what the mezuzah symbolized—the protection granted to a Jewish home.

“Except this isn't a Jewish home,” Jenny said. “Only one of us is Jewish.”

“Which is why I'm asking if it's all right with you. I won't do it if you object.”

She didn't object. But she was less interested in what the Torah said than in what meaning the tradition had for me. Why, now, did I want a mezuzah on my doorpost? “Does it have to do with Susan?”

“That's part of it. You'd think meeting her would make me feel less Jewish. I could embrace Scottish culture—you know, raise sheep or play the bagpipes. But it's made me feel more Jewish. I can't take things for granted anymore.”

There was also, I said, the issue of her.

“Me?”

“Moving in with you, Jen. That makes things more serious between us. It may sound strange, but if you were Jewish, this might not concern me as much.”

“If it doesn't concern you, then why let it come between us?”

“But it does concern me. That's what I'm saying.”

She was sitting across from me on the kitchen counter, her legs swinging back and forth. Next to the window hung a mesh basket with onions in it. A piece of onion skin had fallen and settled in her hair. I reached over and brushed it away.

“It's other things too,” I said. “I miss the ritual. Back in college, I was making a statement by dropping everything. Why follow the laws if you don't believe in God? But I like the way I was raised. The sabbath, for example. It's nice to have a day of rest.”

“You want to stop doing work on Saturdays?”

“No. But I wouldn't mind celebrating the sabbath in some form.”

So Jenny and I agreed to an experiment. We'd have a sabbath dinner. There would be some ritual, but we wouldn't overdo it—no worrying about the meat's being kosher or about cooking the food before the sun went down. Although we'd sing songs and maybe make a few blessings, we wouldn't overemphasize the role of God, since none of us believed in Him.