How I Saved Hanukkah (7 page)

“Superman won’t come?” Ned asked.

“Superman is sleeping,” I said, “like Daddy.” Ned
snuggled up with me and was snoring in no time.

“See?” Lucy whispered. “No one ever comes to me with their lizards and gizzards.”

“You’d be a wonderful big sister,” I said.

“Shhhhh!” she said. “You’ll wake him.”

8

O
n Christmas morning Lucy and I packed a picnic and told my mom we’d take Ned with us to the park if she promised to come and get him in one hour
exactly
.

We took turns pulling him in the wagon. When Ned waved and said, “Hi, Daddy,” to a jet passing overhead, Lucy looked sorry for him.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “Ned does that even when my dad is standing right next to him.”

We had taken down all our glitter-litter the day before, but when we got back to our secret tree we did find one stray Barbie shoe.

Lucy and I were being twin sisters in the jungle and Ned was our pet lion cub. We were hunting for bugs and snakes to eat. Ned was roaring at the joggers and other jungle creatures, as lion cubs do.

When he roared at one guy who was walking a huge gray dog, the dog lunged, barking furiously, and scared the bejeebees out of Ned. He started to cry and scream.

Luckily my mom kept her promise and showed up just then. After they were gone, Lucy and I lay down on a blanket to watch clouds.

Lucy seemed her old self again, but I said, “Is my mom right that you miss your family more than you usually would because it’s Christmas?”

“Hmmmm,” Lucy said.

“Remember last year when my dad started going to Washington for the Raisins, and he didn’t make it home for my birthday?” I asked. “Is it like that?”

Lucy rolled over and looked at me. “You never told me that you were mad or sad or anything,” she said.

“I was.”

Lucy rolled back over and we watched three little wispy clouds blend into each other.

“You better be careful not to make Hanukkah too good,” Lucy said, “or you’ll miss it when you can’t have it.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Maybe we should make sure we always have a really bad time doing everything, so we never miss anything.”

“Sounds fun,” Lucy giggled.

*    *    *

When we got home, my mom was on the phone inviting people to the party. First she invited the few Jewish people she knows here. Then she said, “What the heck,” and invited the rest of the people she knows.

Lucy and I could hear her from my room, where we were drawing pictures.

“Queen Marla,” we heard her say, “has decreed that we gather to celebrate the Festival of Lights.” On another call she said, “On behalf of our own Miss Marla, I summon you to honor the rededication of the Temple of the Maccabees.”

I was just about to say that I thought my mom was terminally embarrassing when Lucy said, “Your mom is the greatest.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I asked.

Lucy and I stared at each other, our faces a mirror image of amazement with her blue eyes as stumped as my brown ones.

“But
your
mom is so normal!” I said.

“You mean boring,” Lucy said.

We thought about it awhile, then agreed that if we mushed the two moms together into one, everything would be better.

“Like if I could have your long hair,” Lucy said. I tried to picture my heavy dark hair on her.

“But your blue eyes, and Yaz’s everything . . . ” I said. Then, looking over at Lucy’s drawing of a horse, I added, “And your artistic talent.”

“Plus your Rollerblading,” she said, “and your bedroom, and—”

I interrupted her. “My bedroom? It’s just totally boring white, like every other room in this dumb house. Your room has all that ancient, dark, probably haunted furniture. I have the world’s dullest venetian blinds—white, of course. Your room has those heavy curtains like in a castle.”

“You forgot one other thing my room has,” Lucy said. “KATE!”

“But it must be a blast sharing with her!” I said, imagining one lifelong sleep-over. “I mean, when she’s not being a porcupine.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Lucy said. And there we were, mirrors of amazement again.

“Lucy?” I said, suddenly getting up my nerve. “Can I tell you something really terrible?”

“What?” she asked.

“Do you promise not to hate me?” I asked, feeling my face heat up.

“Of course I won’t hate you,” said Lucy.

I decided to get it over with really fast. “Last year I stole an ornament off your mom’s Christmas tree and threw it out,” I blurted.

Lucy laughed. “No wonder we’re best friends!”

“Why are you laughing?” I said.

Lucy laughed some more, then said, “Want to hear mine?”

“Hear your what?” I asked.

“When Ned was a baby and I wanted a baby in my house so badly—and you guys had all those sweet little things . . . tiny booties and soft little crib toys and all, remember?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I took a rattle with a yellow lamb on it.”

“You’re kidding!” I said, feeling happier than I’d been in a year. “Do you still have it?”

“I was so afraid you’d see it in my drawer that after a while, I threw it away too!” Lucy shrieked.

And we both flew into hysterics.

Before we lit the candles for the seventh night, Mom said, “I thought making Hanukkah was an old-lady thing. Bubbi made Hanukkah, Auntie Eva made Hanukkah. But I just did the math, and those old ladies were slinging latkes when they were younger than I am now. So either I’m an old lady or they weren’t.”

*    *    *

Later that night my dad called to say he really, really, really was on his way home, but there were some problems with connecting flights or something. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I only knew he wasn’t home.

“Ned isn’t going to like it one bit if my dad misses the party,” I told Lucy.

It was Lucy’s and my last night together. We looked through that library book on the Jewish holidays and read the Hanukkah part.

“Yeech!” I said. “I’m glad we didn’t live back then. I wouldn’t have the courage to hide in caves and fight the army and stuff.”

“I bet you would,” Lucy said. “The story would be ‘Marla Feinstein and the Maccabees.’”

“Would you come with me?” I asked. “Into the caves?”

“You bet!” Lucy said.

9

W
hen I woke up the next morning my dad was home, asleep in bed. I couldn’t keep Ned from pounding him awake. Actually I didn’t really try. My dad was zonked, he said, “from swimming upstream like a salmon” to get home to us. He swooped me up in his arms as if I were as small as Ned, and he gave me one big, scratchy kiss for each day he had been gone. He needed a shave.

Dad opened his eyes wide. “Red-eye, see?” he said to Ned. “Like Cookie the rat.” Then he went back to bed. It was okay that he was asleep—he was home.

We all tiptoed out of the house, me, Lucy, my mom, and Ned, and went to the market to buy the stuff for our party. I knew that probably no one in the store thought Lucy and I were twin sisters, but I also knew it was my last chance to feel like we were.

Lucy’s family came to pick her up just before
lunch. She squeezed into the car with them as I watched from the porch. It wasn’t like she was
leaving
leaving. They were just going four-and-a-half blocks away, so why was I sad?

Lucy poked her head out the car window and yelled: “We’ll all be back later for the party!” So I guessed she’d invited them first thing, after hello. Lots of hands came shooting out of the windows to wave, and they sped off.

*    *    *

My mom spent hours cleaning the toilets and hissing at us whenever we touched
anything
. She couldn’t really yell or she’d wake my dad.

“Daddy’s home,” Ned would announce every few minutes to me or my mom, as if we didn’t know. I heard him tell his stuffed animals too.

In the car on our way back to the market my mom said, “You know, the light of the oil lamp was never supposed to go out once it was lit. But folks were so busy redecorating the Temple and washing the toilets, it took eight days to remember to buy more oil.”

I made a face at her.

“No, you’re right, maybe the grocery store was an eight-day, round-trip, donkey ride from the Temple.”

“MOM!”

“Well, Miss Marla, why do you think it had to last eight days? To give them time to dig an oil well?”

“Maybe it took that long to squeeze enough oil out of the olives, or something,” I said.

“We will look it up,” my mom said, “next Hanukkah.”

“Daddy’s home?” Ned asked, looking scared.

“Yup. He’s home,” my mom said, taking her hand off the steering wheel to pat Ned’s foot in the car-seat.

*    *    *

She unpacked the groceries from our second trip to the market, then called her friend Sue to pick up sour cream on her way over.

“Good thing it’s not a long donkey ride to the store,” I said.

Ned and I made Hanukkah decorations for the windows as best we could without making my mom totally hysterical about the mess. Ned isn’t much of an artist. He called one scribble a dreidel and one a latke, but they looked pretty much the same to me. I cut out a menorah and carefully colored each candle in a different
pattern. It wasn’t as nice as Lucy would have made it, but it was pretty darn good.