TREYF (3 page)

O
n a sunny Saturday morning in the late spring of 1974, Candy Feinblatt became a woman.

She stood on the gold-carpeted bimah in front of friends and family at the Forest Hills Jewish Center, her long, deep-parted sun-dappled blond hair cascading forward, hippie-style, over her shoulders and down to her waist. On that day, with Nixon not yet out of office and
The Streak
blaring out of open car windows cruising up and down Queens Boulevard, my best friend was called to the Torah dressed in a special bat mitzvah outfit chosen by her mother: a blue-and-red-flecked Huk-A-Poo blouse, black peep-toe Carber sandals, and a tan suede miniskirt under which she wore suntan panty hose. Candy's tomboy days of stiff, rolled-up Wranglers and flannel shirts were officially over; I was on my own.

Candy, suddenly statuesque in her wedgies, chanted in perfect phonetic Hebrew, holding the heavily ornate silver
yad
—the
pointer; touching the Torah is considered ritual defilement under Jewish law—in her right hand. She chewed nervously on her lower lip when she lost her place in the scroll; the cantor, his face beet red from the heat, sidled up to her and offered help, his soft brown kiltie loafers squeaking as though they'd been soaked in water. Everything that day was damp with humidity: the pages of my prayer book, the scalp beneath my blond frizzy afro, the armpits of my tight rayon blouse and the entire lower half of my body, which was encased like a salami in a narrow ladies' denim maxi skirt festooned with butterfly appliqué and dime-sized silver studs, bought for me by my mother at her favorite boutique and hemmed eight inches by our local tailor before I could wear it. It was a point of pride that once I hit eleven years old, she bought all of my outfits where she bought her own; my friends were still wearing clothes purchased for them by their parents in the kids' department at Bloomingdale's and Macy's, while I was dressed up like a smaller version of my 1970s New York City mother, in long skirts and transparent voile blouses and elasticized tube tops that clung precariously to my suggestion of a chest.

When Candy finished her haftorah and everyone mumbled amen, she looked out from her place on the bimah and scanned the congregation. We all stared back in silent awe. Her mother, Marion, sat in the first pew, directly in front of me and my parents and Gaga; she wore a flat-topped chapeau bedecked with pastel flowers and more suitable for a Mississippi funeral than a bat mitzvah in Queens. Candy's father, Eugene, president of the synagogue, sat behind his daughter up on the bimah, perched on an immense oak and burgundy velvet throne. He uncoiled his tall,
lanky frame, stood up, loped over to give his daughter a hug and nervously patted the royal blue crushed velvet yarmulke bobby-pinned to his jet-black comb-over.

Rabbi Schneiderman clapped Eugene hard on the back, and then put his hands on Candy's narrow shoulders.

“Today, Candy,” bellowed the rabbi, “you have become an adult in the eyes of this community, your friends, and your family. You are a woman now, and you will be expected to carry out the rules and commandments handed down to the people Israel from Hashem, Blessed Be He, all the days of your life.”

He kissed Candy on both cheeks, the way they did in the French movies my parents dragged me to see in the city. She stood stiffly, her hands dangling by her sides like a rag doll, and then floated down from the bimah to sit next to Marion, who was quietly weeping with pride.

“Now,” announced Rabbi Schneiderman, “the Feinblatt family would like to extend a cordial invitation to join them in a luncheon in honor of their young lady, directly across the street at the Tung Shing House. Please join us first in the
oneg
room for coffee and tea. Thank you all for coming, and
Gut Shabbos
.”

It was May, and the shul was stifling; beads of sweat dotted my father's brow as we stood to leave the sanctuary. He pulled at his gold paisley tie to loosen the wide Windsor knot and when we stepped out into the lobby, he removed his prayer shawl—striped in white and blue and darkly yellowed around the neck from his boyhood days in a hot Brooklyn synagogue where his cantor father led one hundred clinically depressed Orthodox
immigrants in ancient prayer—and tucked it into its blue velvet pouch. He zipped it closed and stepped outside for a cigarette.

“Are we going to the
oneg
?” I asked my mother, following her into the bathroom, where she began to reapply her makeup, which the humidity had melted during the service. Black eyeliner dripped down her face as though she had been crying.
It's just the heat
, she sighed to another woman who gently touched her arm with concern.

“You go ahead—I'll meet you downstairs. Gaga is already there,” my mother said to my reflection in the mirror while she rifled around in her suede fringed purse. She pulled out my black rubber afro pick and handed it to me.

“Fix your hair before you go outside—just a little touch-up.”

I scowled and gave it back to her.

“There might be a boy, honey. You always have to be
ready
—”

I ran the pick over my head, left it on the edge of the sink, and went to look for Candy, who I found standing in front of a dented silver coffee urn with a black spigot, surrounded by a throng of well-wishers as though she had just been married.

•   •   •

M
y father used to say that you could always tell a Jewish neighborhood by the location of its Chinese restaurant. The Tung Shing House sat at the very heart of our town, at the convergence of two major arteries: overcrowded, congested Yellowstone Boulevard and the pulsing, aortic Queens Boulevard, the eight-lane thoroughfare of doom that split Forest Hills in
half from east to west and connected travelers to glamorous Manhattan on one end and opulent Long Island on the other, assuming they weren't killed along the way. The boulevard was infamous for its number of monthly vehicular deaths so regular that local dress shops kept extra bolts of cheap fabric on hand for covering up the bodies until the ambulances could arrive.

The Tung Shing House stood in the middle of Forest Hills like a bull's-eye and was the site of feasts large and small, celebratory and mundane; walk in on any given Saturday, and you might be interrupting a bat mitzvah luncheon like Candy's. Walk in on a Sunday night, and every Jewish family in town, mine included, was lined up, waiting to order platters of shrimp in lobster sauce.

At the end of every weekend, my parents and I would gather up Gaga and stroll the half mile down Austin Street and around the corner onto Yellowstone, past my junior high school, which, in the early 1970s had become newsworthy for the regular fights that took place in the second-floor girls' bathroom, and for Mr. Nedling, the school's quaalude-addled gym teacher who had a history of looking the other way just as his students sailed over the pummel horse. Every Sunday night, we stood for an hour in the restaurant foyer, waiting for a table, scanning the three-columned menu handed to us by the same brusque Chinese waiter wearing a short gold jacket with black brocade epaulets. And every Sunday night, we ordered the same things: the Polynesian pupu platter—sticky, ruby red–glazed spareribs, fried dumplings, steamed dumplings, fried egg rolls, fried shrimp toast—delivered to our table on a black enameled lazy Susan, the dishes arranged around a live blue alcohol flame that emitted a kerosene stink and utterly
terrorized me. There were heavy bowls of salty, MSG-infused wonton soup laden with flaccid, dark green bok choy that floated on the surface like sea kelp; there was Gaga's favorite chicken chow mein, thick with clear glop, and into which she stirred half a cup of soy sauce; mucusy shrimp in lobster sauce that my father loved and shoveled onto great piles of burnished fried rice speckled with tiny cubes of red meat the color of blood.

During those Sunday suppers in our local Chinese restaurant, my father ate silently, carnally, hunched over his bowl of soup dumplings stuffed with meat of unknown provenance. My mother poked tentatively at the segregated piles on her plate while he gnawed on the crimson spareribs like a hyena after a kill, the glaze smearing his lips and cheeks until all that was left were the bare bones. He ate like a starving, voracious child, ravenous with hunger and need, never once looking up or stopping to breathe until his plate was clean. It fascinated and thrilled me; I loved the fanfare, the otherwise forbidden eating with our hands, the tearing of meat from bone, and the belly-patting grunts that my father emitted as he paid the bill and we stood to leave, running into other Jewish neighbors waiting for our table to open up when we stepped outside.

•   •   •

I
s this
chicken
?” I asked my father at Candy's bat mitzvah luncheon, as the waiter dropped a pot overflowing with tea between us. I pointed at the familiar narrow shred of meat on my porcelain soup spoon. It was gray and tipped with a bright red splotch, like a matchstick.

“Just eat it,” he murmured quietly, and slurped his soup while his black plastic aviators fogged up.

“
Is
it?” I asked again, my voice getting whiny and high. I tapped my spoon on my water glass. Then I tapped my bowl and then my water glass and then my mother's wineglass, which she moved to the other side of her plate. I wanted my father's attention, but I didn't want to go overboard; if I accidentally spilled my mother's wine, I'd spend the rest of the meal banished to the damp tile floor of the restaurant basement, which housed the ladies' and men's bathrooms and an old black pay phone hanging from the wall, and where a cloud of industrial cleaners and ammonia overtook the smell of frying egg rolls and chow mein. If I misbehaved at the table, this is where I would wind up, memorizing the tile pattern and waiting until my father came back downstairs to get me.

“Not
now
,” my father repeated through clenched teeth. He frowned at me over the top of his glasses and sucked the greens off his spoon. “Just eat your soup
.
”

“But—” I said, tapping my bowl harder.

“EAT YOUR SOUP, dammit—”

“BUT—”

“I will tell you
later
,” my father growled, shoving a bowl of crunchy fried noodles at me while my mother and Gaga watched, silently.

So I ate. And so did my father and Gaga and my mother, who delicately dipped the tip of a crunchy noodle into the little wooden dish of duck sauce and then into mustard before nibbling at it like a gerbil. All of Candy's family and other friends slurped away,
chattering, unconcerned about the contents of their bowls. Twerpy Marcus Goldberg, who, at twelve, wore a too-small hand-me-down madras blazer that choked his armpits and who only came up to the underside of my recently acquired bosom; Lisa Epstein, whose mother made her walk around their apartment balancing books on her head so that she could become a Ford model; damp-handed Stuart Steinman, who at nine had sprouted the beginnings of a mustache and by eleven was trying to nail any girl with a pulse: all of us, our parents, and the Feinblatts gorged that day without any concern about what we were eating. It would be years before I learned that the Chinese soup dumplings my father had told me were identical to the kreplach that his mother often fed me on our trips to Brooklyn were actually stuffed with ground pork and scallions, and the red-tipped gray meat bobbing beneath the soup greens were the restaurant's leftovers from hong shao rou—barbecued pork—that every Cantonese-style commercial kitchen roasted by the truckload.

•   •   •

N
ineteen seventy-four was the Year of the Mitzvah, Bar and Bat. Three years before Son of Sam terrorized our neighborhood and Candy lost her virginity to a boy named Pedro, 1974 would be a ceaseless string of celebrations that ran the gamut from joyful to mawkish, eccentric to staid. Suddenly, every one of my friends was being called to the bimah; even my not-so-religious friends paid the altar an abridged visit, like the
Reader's Digest
version, while I watched alongside my parents in synagogues all over Queens. Even my half-Jewish friends like Neil Taub, whose
mother was a French-Canadian Catholic with a tiny windup porcelain model of a bug-eyed Singing Nun that twirled in circles like a dervish on her nightstand while playing
Dominique
—even
they
were bar mitzvahed.

For the devout, like the Feinblatts, there were Tung Shing House luncheons that followed long, formal religious ceremonies. For the less pious, there were truncated services that took place everywhere from vinyl-slipcovered living rooms overlooking the Grand Central Parkway to the Oasis Middle Eastern Restaurant, where a stout, hirsute belly dancer with a plastic sapphire in her navel left the boys in my class panting with lust. These more secular events were often punctuated by bowling parties at Hollywood Lanes, softball games in nearby Kissena Park, and in my case, a clown named Sid, at the Spaghetti Factoria in Manhattan, on Fifty-Ninth Street just off Madison Avenue.