TREYF (22 page)

Treyf,
my father mutters under his breath, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. Phyllis gives him a smug, apologetic smile and shrugs with phony contrition; she thinks he's talking about poor dead Pessie the gatecrasher.

We leave the rocks; we pat the tombstones. We say goodbye, we get into our cars, we drive away in a single tidy, ordered line, to begin the seven-day period of mourning.

•   •   •

T
he deliveries arrive almost immediately: there are kosher deli platters of tongue and turkey and corned beef and pastrami; there is lox and whitefish and sable and tomato and onion. There are piles of still-warm miniature knishes that someone sent from the Knish Nosh, around the corner from The Marseilles: there's potato and kasha and spinach and liver, which no one eats. There are baskets of bagels and loaves of rye bread, unseeded because my father and Aunt Sylvia and at least two cousins have diverticulitis. There are containers of cream cheese, both vegetable and plain, Gulden's mustard, and jars of half-sour pickles. Every ten minutes, the doorbell rings, and there's more, first from a local bakery: there are small, square rainbow cakes, miniature black-and-white cookies, almond horns, rugelach of three types, a box of mandelbrodt.
Federal Express arrives with two separate fruit towers from Harry & David; someone in the living room shouts to me:
Make sure it's kosher before you put that
out.

Ten folding chairs emerge from the basement for the shiva minyan and are organized in a circle near the small settee where Aunt Sylvia sits, facing the piano and the metronome; ten men plus the rabbi arrive from the local synagogue, carrying a small borrowed Torah scroll sheathed in velvet. The service is held; the rabbi reads, Kaddish is said, the Torah is covered.

My father stands with these men he doesn't know; they are mostly older than he is, a few of them gray-bearded and black-hatted but most of them not. They face east, towards the Long Island Expressway and beyond that, eastern Long Island and the wealthy towns of East Hampton and Amagansett and Montauk, where prosperous Jewish families have summered for decades, navigating the ancient quotas and silent restrictions, finally surrounded by and sucked into the Gentile world around them. They assimilated and assimilated and assimilated again, until they themselves—the thing that made them who they were—were gone and lost to history.

My father and the rabbi and the shiva minyan stand and daven together, bending stiffly at the waist and the knee, mumbling ancient prayers in a deep monotone that sounds like a dull, passing highway rumble. My response is visceral and sudden and uncontrollable; it startles and frightens me, and comes up from my belly, from a place so deep and old that I barely know it. Waves of grief rise and rise again and I hiccup like a baby, gasping for air.
This is who I am,
I think;
this is all I will ever be.

With Uncle Lee gone, my father is now the oldest man in the family, the last patriarch, our closest link to the past. Alongside the old men, he chants the prayers quietly with his bar mitzvah prayer book in his right hand while I stand next to him, weak-kneed and woozy. I slip my arm through his and he doesn't look up; tears roll down his face and onto the pages of his siddur. When it's over, he touches it to the velvet-cloaked Torah, and then to his lips.

M
y wife, ten years my senior, is Catholic, from New England; kind, gray-green eyes the color of autumn moss, the map of Ireland on her freckled face.

When I introduce Susan to my father and Shirley at their condominium, shortly after we meet, my father takes a few giant steps backwards into the living room and falls, as if in slow motion, into his deep wing chair as though he's been dropped into it from the heavens. He groans as he lands and sinks down deeply into the seat, and I recognize the sound of release from my childhood: it's a collapse of exhaustion and finality. Shirley sits on the end of the couch and smiles and cries.

Susan quietly offers my father a drink from his own bar, as though he's a guest in his own home; he grins and says, “Yes. A Gibson.” She makes the drink and methodically and slowly walks
it over to him, taking care not to spill any of it on the cream broadloom.

“This is the best,” he says to her, sipping the clear liquid from the top of the glass, and pulling the pickled onion off the little plastic cocktail sword Susan used as a skewer. He licks his lips to get every last drop and looks at Susan with a combination of surprise and reticent approval, and nods to me with no words, although I know what he means: he didn't know about Julie—nobody did—and I was alone for so long after her, and although I dated men before her, I never brought one person, male or female, out to meet them, or as a guest to Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lee's holiday parties. It would have been instantly assumed that I was
with
the person, and that person would be subject to a sort of social inspection, a kind of simian allogrooming over thick slices of coffeecake.
Where are your people from? What do you do? Have you considered becoming a physician?

After it's over, Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lee would have sat my father down over cups of Swee-Touch-Nee tea, and instructed him sternly:
Not for her. She needs to find someone else.
The way my father himself had to, five times, before he married my mother.

•   •   •

W
hile Julie went home to her family in Minnesota, I would arrive for holiday dinners and family functions dressed in the conservative costumes I knew everyone in my father's family liked. One Thanksgiving at Aunt Sylvia's house, while we're eating pumpkin pie and drinking our tea and our scotch,
the doorbell rings and a stout, pale older man with a ginger comb-over—he's forty; I'm twenty-five—steps in; my cousins don't know him, and we're all wondering who he is and why he's there. We hear him tell Aunt Sylvia that he can't stay, so he leaves his black, pilling overcoat on. He begins to sweat in the warmth of the house; a Duraflame log burns in the family room. He is dressed in a white business shirt and black tie and bagging black pants and black Velcro loafers that squeak when he walks.

Aunt Sylvia steps back into the dining room.

“Elissa,” she says, “your ride home is here.”

My cousins and I look up from our plates and stare at each other.

“What ride?” I say.

“Come,” she says to me, “let's get your coat.”

I love my cousins and I rarely see them and the party isn't over and I'm still eating and I'm not ready to leave, and I'm not ready to leave with a man nearly twice my age who I've never met before. I glare across the table at my father, who shrugs sheepishly and whispers at me,
I have no idea.

There is no scene; no fighting. There are no raised voices.

I put on my tweed overcoat and walk out with this man to his gold sparkling Datsun 280-Z; he opens the immense passenger door and I have to crouch all the way down to reach the molded black leather racing seat. I crush a half-used box of Kleenex under the weight of my leather skirt–clad ass. He slams the door hard; I reach behind me for my seat belt when the growling begins.

“Don't look at her,” he says, pulling out of Aunt Sylvia's driveway, “or it'll get worse.”

I turn around. There, perched on a damp wee-wee pad set on top of a royal blue velour bath towel, is a geriatric cocker spaniel, baring her toothless gums at me. Her breath, a phlegmy combination of liver and sour milk, fills the car like a noxious gas. My eyes tear. She shakes her ancient caramel head; her long matted ears flap, spittle flies. The man hands me a plastic container of baby wipes, in case I need them.

“I'm a pediatric dentist,” he tells me, looking straight ahead as we drive along the Northern State Parkway.

“I sell cookbooks,” I say, holding the box of wipes on my lap.

We ride the rest of the way, forty-five minutes into Manhattan, in silence. Except for the snarling.

“Do not ambush me again,” I say to Aunt Sylvia on the phone that night, when I call to say I'm home. I am enraged; twenty-five years of familial disapproval bubble up in my throat like bile. I've never spoken this way to her before; I've never put my foot down. I've never said no. There's silence on the other end. She's only trying to help.

“He's the son of my bridge partner,” she says. “He's Orthodox, but I don't think it'd be a problem for you.”

“I don't care if he's the winner of the fucking Nobel Peace Prize,” I say.

Silence.

“You must not be single,” she says, under her voice.

She murmurs something about
being grateful
, and
expectation
, and
dying alone in an apartment with cats
, and she hangs up.

•   •   •

F
or years after Julie, there is no one; there are dates with a few women and one man, a friend from work with whom I have an ongoing flirtation. There is sex that means nothing, an explosion of hormones and need. But I spend my days surrounded by twenty varieties of cured pork, and cookbooks, and the promise of sustenance; I spend my nights out with friends, and no matter what, I always come home alone. I have no idea who I am, and I try on costumes to see if they fit: after
Dirty Dancing
, the baggy, shoulder-padded sweater and tight, acid-washed silver-gray jeans, the long curly hair, the makeup that delights my mother. The suede-fringed Western jacket and pointed cowboy boots and tooled belt the size of a dinner platter, which reminds me of Forest Hills. The black cotton turtleneck and black cotton leggings and black leather boots from Canal Jeans; my neighbor passes me in the hallway and asks if someone's died. There's the white cotton butcher's apron that I stockpile at Dean & Deluca, which I had to wear even though I was rarely handling food: at home, I slip the loop over my head and wrap the ribbons twice around my middle and tie it under my navel, and fold a dish towel into the waistband. I do this the minute I take my coat off, even if no one is coming over for dinner, even if it is just me, which, for years, it is, until I begin to have dinner parties at least once a week, filling my dining room table with hungry colleagues, feeding them, and feeding myself, like the Italian ladies taught me to do near 602.

When I meet Susan, after nine years, I am living in a small studio apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. I left Brooklyn
on a warm April day; the movers arrived and loaded up my boxes of books and cookware and two huge suitcases and the one piece of furniture that I had left from the apartment I shared with Julie—a massive bookcase that covered an entire wall; it had been dismantled and piled up haphazardly like firewood in my grandparents' living room. My apartment is within walking distance of my new job as a cookbook editor, around the corner from Bloomingdale's, steps away from Central Park, a few blocks from a French butcher named Arnaud, a Puerto Rican kosher butcher, and an Italian fish market serving all of the better restaurants in the city. The day I moved in, the unmistakable odor of ancient chicken fat still hung from my coat sleeves like Christmas tinsel.

My first night in my apartment, with no chance of Lipshitz slipping a notice of eviction under my door at three in the morning, or the private detective he hired to follow me waiting outside the building every day, or the ghosts of my grandparents and my cousin floating around me wherever I turned, I slept eighteen hours straight, in my clothes, in my tan suede cowboy boots, with the lights on. At eight o'clock, I passed out cold; the bed was unmade, my box of towels and sheets was buried amidst my stacks of cookbooks on a long wall near the small kitchen. I slept so soundly, so peacefully, that when my mother called the next morning to announce that she was coming over with Ben to take me food shopping with the car, I awoke not knowing where I was: I was no longer in Brooklyn, living in my grandparents' apartment. I was no longer in the Chelsea walk-up I shared with Julie. I was in my own home.

The apartment was small and dim, but it was all mine: no Julie, no Lipshitz. My kitchen was a perfect seven-foot square; it
was windowless, and the exact size and shape of Gaga's kitchen in The Brussels, with the stove and the refrigerator in the same place. I moved a small wooden table into it, opposite the refrigerator, and placed the French copper cookware from Villedieu, purchased from the store, on top of the wall-hung cabinets above the small sink. The stove was twenty inches across, the dishwasher, eighteen. For the next decade, I cooked my way through the piles of cookbooks that sat on every shelf and sat stacked in every corner: I threw dinner parties for coworkers, for friends, for my bosses, for people I barely knew. I cooked for them; I cooked for myself; I cooked for Gaga.

The day I moved in, my mother waited for the phone company to turn on the service and the cable to be hooked up while I drove out behind the moving truck. She left behind a loaf of white bread, a container of Diamond Crystal salt, and a box of Domino sugar with a note that said,
Not to be eaten; for good luck ONLY.
The next morning, I broke the rules: I tore into the bread for breakfast and ate it like the sacrament it was, in total silence, sitting on my unmade bed, alone.

•   •   •

M
y father claims, until the day he dies two years later, that Susan made him the finest Gibson he'd ever had. He drank it down quickly and held his glass out to her for another.

Susan makes it and walks it over to him, taking care not to spill any of it.

He drinks it and tries to stand; he topples back into his wing chair.

Susan extends her hand to him and he takes it; she pulls him up.

My father isn't a drinker; he hasn't been one for years—not since the two coronary bypasses and the ileostomy and the prediabetes. Shirley, who is a vegetarian, watches him like a hawk; she allows him a little bit of wine, mostly white, but nothing more. He doesn't ask for alcohol, but tonight, he wants it.

We go out to dinner, to a nearby Italian restaurant, not far from their Long Island condominium; Shirley takes the car keys from the bowl near the front door. My father demands them back. She says no and he says okay, and he doesn't fight her. We eat simply that night: sautéed vegetables and pasta; swordfish; saltimbocca; cannoli. We share an old-fashioned fiasco of white wine. The waiter carries over a tray of Sambuca Romana, and pours out four espressos from an old, battered stovetop moka.

“You're in love,” my father says, when Susan gets up to use the restroom. He's tipsy, and slurring his words. Shirley puts her hand on his arm.

“How do you know that?” I ask, pushing the remains of the cannoli around on my plate. I feel my face flush; I can't look at him.

He has never seen me in love before; he doesn't know what I look like
in love
, and neither do I.

“I can tell,” he says, wagging his finger at me. “I remember Emma.”

But still, I wait for a rebuke: that she's older. That she's not Jewish. That she's a she.

It never comes.

“What will you tell everybody?” I ask.

I worry; I fret. I have been living on my own for years, and still, I crave Uncle Lee and Aunt Sylvia's approval, which will never come; I want to make them happy with me, which they'll never be; I want to fit the uniform, to be on the inside—safe and secure and right next to Sylvia and my cousins, looking out—rather than on the outside looking in. “It's just as easy to marry a Jewish man as a Gentile man,” Sylvia used to say whenever she got the chance. And now I was bringing home a Catholic woman to a family who had never had so much as a Unitarian at their holiday table.

“Vhat's to tell?” my father answers with a Yiddish accent. “It's good.”

I hear Grandpa Henry in his voice. My father suddenly looks older; his cornflower blue eyes are bloodshot and tired. He puts his hand over Shirley's and pats it.

“Luff,” he says, “is very good.”