The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah (3 page)

It's My Birthright to Play Hooky

Tomorrow, according to Rachel, is Yom Kippur.

I found out this particular bit of information on the phone. I wanted to borrow a book she had for a report I needed to do in social studies.

“Sorry, Caroline. I'm not going to school tomorrow,” Rachel told me.

“You're not?”

“No, remember? I told you. It's a holiday.”

“Oh, right,” I said.

But hadn't there been a Jewish holiday just last week? While I was still on the phone with Rachel, I was already imagining her empty chair in homeroom. And then I suppose, Danny and Kate would be absent from math and English, respectively. Because they were Jewish too.

But so was I, wasn't I?

Rachel's mother said I was Jewish because my mother was
Jewish, and my mother was Jewish because my grandmother was, my nana. I suspected that went on and on, backward, for a very long time. And so just because my mother was throwing the whole thing away didn't mean I wanted to.

Besides, I could use a day off from school.

We were having a chapter test in math.

Thinking about my grandmother still hurt, like a sharp pain in my throat I had to will away if I didn't want to cry. Sometimes it would come to me like a sense, like a memory—not of her, exactly, but the feel of her hugging me or taking my hand. The smell of her perfume, hanging in the air.

“I won't even be able to call you afterward,” Rachel was telling me on the phone. “We have to drive out to New Jersey to eat. We won't be back till late.”

“Okay. Well, have fun,” I said, which sounded so lame but I didn't know what else to say. I had no idea what Yom Kippur was or what you were supposed to do, but I felt stupid asking Rachel. I didn't want her to know how much I really didn't know.

 

I didn't sleep well that night, which turned out to be the best thing because I looked terrible in the morning.

 

“What do you mean, you're not feeling well?” my dad was asking me.

My mother had already left for work. It was Wednesday, so she had early office hours. My dad was putting out cereal and juice. He was already showered and ready to drive Sam to school and head to work himself. He and his partner, Jason, owned a promotional advertising company. They were the ones who thought up those
giveaways and contests you see on the inside of bottletops and on bags of chips.

“You do look pretty bad,” Sam said. He was practically standing on his chair, leaning half his body over the table and reaching for the box of Cheerios.

“I think I'm sick,” I said.

Wednesday was our busiest morning, so I knew my dad would give in pretty quickly. The more stressed he was, the easier this would be. That's when Sam tipped over his entire glass of orange juice.

I couldn't have planned it better.

“Oh, Sam,” my dad said.

“Sorry,” my brother said. He slid down from his chair. “Sorry, Daddy.”

“I'll get it,” I said. “You get yourself ready, Dad. Take Sammy to school. I got this.”

My dad was about to thank me profusely but stopped when he looked up and saw me. “Caroline, you're still in your pajamas. The bus comes in”—he looked at his watch—“five minutes.”

“Dad, I think I have a fever.”

That was a mistake.

“A fever?”

“I mean, I'm fine. I'll be fine,” I said. I started sopping up the juice with a paper napkin, with three paper napkins. If my mother were here, she'd tell me to get a sponge, but my dad didn't notice. “I just need a rest, a little rest today,” I said.

My dad paused for a moment, like he was frozen, thinking. It was probably a combination of worrying about me not feeling well, trying to remember how old I was and if I could be left home alone, and wondering what would mom do in this situation.

“Dad, I'm almost thirteen,” I said.

“Yeah, Dad,” Sam added. “She's practically a whole grown-up. She's even got little boobies.”

My dad looked at Sam and then to me, and then quickly back to Sam.

But that had done the trick.

I was off for the day.

Oh, Yeah, She Must Be Jewish

I sat outside after watching back-to-back episodes of
Real World
that I had already seen before, and two hours of the Game Show Channel. The leaves were only beginning to turn colors. They brushed against one another in the wind, just the tiniest bit louder, the tiniest bit closer to drying out, turning brown, and falling to the ground. I let the sun touch my face.

So this is Yom Kippur?

I wondered what Rachel was doing at this moment, but I really had no idea other than that she was going to New Jersey to eat. Funny that I never asked her. I never thought about it before. Did my grandparents in New York do anything on this day? Did everybody that was Jewish know what to do?

I had lost track of time but it was probably after one o'clock. I would be in gym right now. We were square dancing this semester, to coincide with our colonial unit in social studies. I can't say I liked square dancing, but it was better than volleyball
and I was pretty good at it. And best yet, the last two classes, Mrs. Danower had used me for her demonstration.

Me and Ryan Berk, who for years had ridden my bus, but I'd never noticed him before that first class.

We had to do-si-do and then do a quick promenade. Ryan's grip was a little sweaty but I didn't mind. I tried to make it look like my hand was just passing by my leg—I didn't want him to see me wipe my hand off on my jeans as we walked back to our group.

“Now do-si-do and allemande your partner,” Mrs. Danower shouted out. Everyone started moving at once in their circle, turning the wrong way and bumping into each other. Only Ryan and I had it right. It wasn't exactly
Dancing with the Stars
but it was pretty cool.

Ryan didn't look at me while we were dancing. He looked just about everywhere else, but the next gym class, he asked if I wanted to be his partner again.

 

I realized I kind of had two lies going today. One, that I was sick, and two, that I was Jewish, but if I sat here on my porch steps any longer I'd get a tan, and that would be hard to explain either way.

Still, I didn't want to move. I closed my eyes, wondering if I cared whether or not Ryan Berk liked me.

Liked me
that
way.

I went inside, into my bedroom, and took out the necklace my grandfather had given me. Maybe if I put it on, something Jewish would come to me. I had wrapped it in tissue and stuck it in the corner of my top dresser drawer. No one at school was going to notice I wasn't there anyway. And if they did, it's not
like they were going to wonder if I was absent because I was celebrating Yom Kippur. Is that the right word? Do people
celebrate
Yom Kippur? I didn't even know.

It's not like they were going to think,
Oh, yeah. Caroline Weeks isn't here today. She must be Jewish.

I pushed my top drawer closed without taking out the necklace. Maybe I should have gone to school. If I hadn't stayed home, I could be half sashaying with Ryan Berk right at this very moment.

This whole skipping school was a stupid idea. I was stupid. And worse, I was bored.

I was so bored I lay on my bed and fell asleep.

Everyone Needs Something to Hold On To

You know when you fall asleep but you're not really tired because it's the middle of the day? You just fall asleep because there's nothing else to do.

And you start to dream but you
know
you're dreaming?

That's what happened to me.

 

I am swimming.

Swimming and swimming but not getting anywhere, like my legs are stuck in mud, or tangled, twisted in the blankets. Now I am in the deep ocean and I am pretty far out from shore, too far. And when I realize I am not getting anywhere no matter how hard I paddle and move my arms around, I begin to panic. I am terrified, desperate for something to grab on to.

I am flailing my arms around but there is no one.

I am going to drown. My body is like lead. I can feel the water on my face.

I can feel tears springing into my eyes. I am so scared. I want a ladder, a rope. Something to grab on to. Someone to reach out, pull me in. I can feel the water in my nose.

Then suddenly I am not drowning.

I'm crying. I am crying and crying, half-asleep and half-awake. I can feel the wetness on my pillow and my mind is telling me to wake up. I am only dreaming.
It's the middle of the afternoon,
I tell myself.

Wake up. Wake up. Open your eyes.

I try to will myself awake. I force my eyes open.

Open.

Now there is no ocean. No water.
It's Wednesday, remember? Square dancing. I skipped school, remember?

I am home sick.

And I'm probably going to get in trouble for skipping school, but a part of me is just so relieved not to be drowning. Then just before I wake up completely, I think I feel my grandmother with me. It is so real and so strong. And it's not just the awareness, it's the feeling of being loved. Of being a part of someone, connected without touching. Like perfume lingering in the air.

Nana?
I whisper. And then just like that, it is gone.

But not entirely.

The Zelkowitz Affair

Really, the most Jewish thing I'd ever done was lighting a candle at a bar mitzvah. And ironically, it was my dad's friend. It was the bar mitzvah of his business partner's son, Matthew Zelkowitz.

We had known them for years. We had Thanksgiving with them a few times. We even went away with them on vacations when Sam and I were younger, when the year's difference between me and Matthew, and the two years between Sammy and Matt's little sister, Brittney, didn't matter. We didn't see them as much anymore but we knew our whole family would be invited to his bar mitzvah.

Still, nobody warned us this was going to happen, that we were going to be called up—to the tune of “You've Got to Have Friends”—to light a candle. My family and I were just minding our own business, sitting at our seats.

Not that finding our seats had been an easy thing to do. All
the place cards were set up on a table outside the main room of the hotel in alphabetical order and there were hundreds of them, perfectly lined up paper pup tents. After an hour of what I thought was the main meal but turned out to be appetizers, a woman in a tuxedo wandered around with a little bell and told everyone to go inside and find their seats.

“What does this mean?” Sammy said. He had found our names and grabbed the cards right off the table, sending the neat, straight rows into jagged disorder, but it didn't matter because pretty much right after he did that, everyone started grabbing for theirs.

“What?” my dad asked.

Sammy had three place cards in his hands. He was reading the inside of his.

“Water Works,” he read. “What does that mean?”

I took my card from my brother's hand and opened it up. “Electric company,” I said out loud.

I didn't know anyone at this party. I knew my dad's partner, Jason, and his wife, Marcia. And I knew their kids, Matthew and Brittney, but not very well anymore and certainly not
their
friends, so I had been forced to hang out with my parents and my little brother. The service had been long and mostly in Hebrew. People stood up and sat down constantly and there was a lot of singing. I looked over at my mom to see if she knew the words. Her lips never opened.

“We are on Tennessee Avenue,” my dad announced when he read his place card. “My favorite.”

“Oh, it's Monopoly!” Sam said suddenly, very pleased with himself.

“Monopoly what?” I asked.

My mother folded her card and slipped it into the jacket of her suit. “It's the theme,” she explained. Then she looked at me. “Don't ask,” she said, rolling her eyes.

When we walked into the party room, I understood. Every table had a sign on it, a blowup of a property on the Monopoly game board. There was New York Avenue in orange, St. Charles Place in purple. Vermont Avenue was light blue, Atlantic and Ventnor, yellow. That's when I realized we weren't sitting together. The grown-ups had street properties; the kids must have the utilities. I wasn't even sitting with Sam.

“Mom?” I looked at her. My dad was good with sensitive things, but my mom was better at negotiations. My dad would tell me I could handle it. My mom would move chairs around.

The music was blasting as we looked around for our table. There was a full band on a large platform toward one end of the room, with a woman singer in a long slinky dress crooning into her microphone. But there was also what looked like a DJ setup and four or five young men and women dressed in black-and-gold spandex moving slowly to the music, as if they were not quite yet aware of all the guests now pouring into the room. It took me a moment to realize they were entertainers, just waiting to perform.

All around the room huge television sets were suspended from the ceiling. They hung down at an angle, and I just realized, it was so you could watch the whole party. As it was happening!

Sure enough, my mom managed to get us all sitting at the same table. She explained to one of the thousand waiters standing around that her children would prefer to sit with their parents than at either the kids' table or the teenagers' table, and
within half a minute new chairs and place settings were arranged.

Now we were all sitting together on Tennessee Avenue. Mr. Monopoly, with his shiny top hat and handlebar moustache greeted us. Beside each salad plate was a miniature canvas bag, tied at the top and stamped with a money sign.

Sammy already had his opened and was counting the fake bills inside.

“Don't, Sam. You're not supposed to touch that,” I said to him.

“I can. Why not?” But he wasn't sure. He looked around to see if anyone else was opening their bag of money.

“It's okay,” I told Sam.

I think the sensory overload was getting to me. The music was loud. There were too many people, too much movement, too many plates and pieces of silverware and glasses at the table. Instead of a centerpiece of flowers like I had seen before at weddings, there was a huge crystal bowl in the middle of the table. It was stuffed with what looked like, yes…over-size Chance cards and giant Community Chest cards, and sticking out of the top were all the different Monopoly tokens. Not the little metal ones that come with the game but large replicas made of plastic or Styrofoam. The terrier, the top hat, the shoe, the wheelbarrow, the race car. They were all there, and as I looked around me, every table had the same thing.

A bunch of the kids were gathered around the back of the room, and I figured out there were blackjack tables set up there. Against the wall was a giant roulette wheel. Sammy did some scouting and reported back to me.

“They have a guy who will take your picture and put it on the
cover of any magazine you want. Like
People
. Or
Time
. Or
Sports Illustrated
.”

“No, thanks,” I said.

Matthew Zelkowitz didn't look anything like a man to me. He didn't look much older than my brother, but I knew he was. Still, he had stood on the stage in the synagogue and nearly without crying recited a very long song in Hebrew.

Now he was standing in the front of this whole crowd of guests, a complete orchestra all quietly holding their instruments, the dancers, the hip-hop DJ, the really tall MC with the big mouth (who had somehow silenced the entire room), an enormous waitstaff looking bored but ready, and three separate photographers (one standing on a ladder) and one video guy.

Someone handed Matthew his own microphone. Someone else wheeled out a table with a huge, flat birthday cake, its entire perimeter staked out with tall, skinny white candles. One by one he called up his family and close friends to light them. It took me a while to figure out that the DJ played a different song each time, something that related to the guest who had been called up. It was pretty cool. The cake was nearly on fire by the time he got to candle number eleven.

“It may be business but you've been like family. Sammy, Caroline, Amy, and Randall—come on up and light my eleventh candle!”

That was us!

It was my family. My dad and mom, and even me and Sammy. We all sat looking at one another for a moment. Then I saw my mom had this big smile on her face. My dad, too. They stood up and motioned for us to do the same. Watching everyone else go up there and stand next to Matthew had been fun,
but this was exciting. I remember thinking this is really important, an honor. He had chosen my dad and us because we meant something to him. Because we had shared memories and we were connected no matter how old we got or how little we might see one another. Because he cared about us.

In the picture that Marcia Zelkowitz sent us a couple of months later I am smiling so big I think my cheeks will split.