Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Erin snorts as they settle into a pew in the back. The “fucking,” she knows, is overkill. She throws it in for pure effect, for the unadulterated pleasure of it; without Gertie around she is entitled to live, goddammit.

“Her theme is ‘Great Women from History,’” Alex informs Erin tersely, affixing a pink Nu Suede kippah with a bobby pin to the crown of his head. Imprinted on the underside in silver foil are the words “Bat Mitzvah of,” and, in slightly bigger type, “Dorit Arad.” Say something derisive about the pink kippot, Erin silently begs him. She opens a siddur to a random page and rests it in her lap. Please, she prays, say something harmlessly sardonic about the theme. What would actually be the harm in his rolling his eyes with her in tandem at this heinous display of Diaspora largesse? The theme, for fuck’s sake!

Nadiv Arad had come to the states after serving in the Sixty-Seven War, gotten into some sort of business (no one seemed to truly have a handle on what exactly it was he did; “Property!” he would boom in his thick, charming Israeli accent when asked, but he never elaborated and was never pressed) and thereafter supplied Dana and Dorit with the biggest, least subdued home and life new money could buy, complete with eight-tone doorbell and gray marble floors throughout, two black BMWs parked around the fountain in the driveway, and the sure-to-be monstrous bat mitzvah party still to come. They’re the kind of people who have no books in their house, Erin tells her friends by way of explanation. She hates them so much, and with such free-floating intensity, that she often finds herself thinking things like: It’s just like them to have only had one child.

“You’re a negative person,” Alex spat at her when they began therapy a few months ago. To which there had been no suitable reply. I am not too elementary school; ditto So what if I am? so Erin tried to be witty and deadpan—“Go fuck yourself”—thinking the therapist would catch the irony and that Erin’s sparkling, bitter wit — she was being ironic! — would thus triumph over Alex’s petty self-seriousness, and they would all share a laugh. But no.

“There’s your sister,” Erin says acidly. Nadiv and Dana are sitting front and center in the Arnie and Mildred Pearl Pew, flanked by the grandparents. They watch Dorit a little, but mostly, instead, pursue a ravenous sanctuary stocktaking. “Hi,” Dana mouths exaggeratedly at Alex, winking, kissy face. She nods slightly at Erin as her head continues on its rotating axis, eyes widening in welcome when they alight on someone else.

Dorit looks to be doing not much more than following along with the rabbi, managing to look smug and clueless at once, white tallit draped over narrow shoulders. Her friends, Erin can plainly see, are the Cool Kids. Boys with their hair gelled smartly, girls thin and clear-skinned, straight hair to a one, thermal reconditioning perhaps their reward for all the phonetic Hebrew memorizing. They’re clustered off to one side of the chapel, so obviously the in-crowd, badass eighth graders who’ve spent this entire year of weekends at bar and bat mitzvah parties, living it up. Erin has read an article recently about even non-Jewish kids having what they’d dubbed faux -mitzvahs, a party, a challah, Everything But the Torah. This had been the title of the article. A mother with a name like McAdams had weighed in on her daughter’s keen sense of injustice: All her friends are having them!

The programs, pink engraved Fabriano, are tucked into the backs of the pews, one per seat. Welcome to My Bat Mitzvah! Underneath her name and the date (July 30, 5765—screw the post-Christ crap) is a swirling, graceful three-dimensional ribbon (pink!) on a printed gift box. At its center is a small — the word that pops into Erin’s head in the midst of this grotesqueness is actually “tasteful”—rhinestone.

This is such a special day for my family and I! Today, I am a Jewish adult! Today, I take on the responsibility of the Covenant! I’m so glad you could join my family and I on this very sacred day!

“What the hell was my Torah portion?” Erin whispers to Alex, increasingly frustrated by its absence from her memory. Dorit’s, according to page 2, is Vayeira. Vayeira is about strong women. And I wanted to honor women throughout history who are strong role models, which is fitting, since today I am a woman!

“I don’t know what the ‘hell’ your Torah portion was,” he whispers back absently, looking at his program. “Mine was Toldot. ”

“Oh! Jacob and Esau?”

Alex turns a page unhurriedly, involves himself with Dorit’s (or, more likely, Erin thinks, some hard-up and handsomely compensated rabbinical student’s) explication of the superspecialty of this day. In the Cool Kids section, there is a short giggle burst followed by a prolonged Shhhh. Erin wishes she could go sit with them, reclaim herself at her peak. She’d been a Cool Kid, the belle of all her own bat mitzvah season’s balls, her mother’s simultaneous mortal illness notwithstanding. Sheila’s cancer had proved, actually, quite a boon to Erin’s social life. The chemo pot had been top-notch.

A Cool Kid turns around in his pew, scans the rows behind him, and locks eyes with Erin. He’s a head taller than the others, looks like a delinquent, a kid held back, just about ready to procreate. The kid smiles, a smirk, no teeth exposure. Here, Erin thinks, are all the elements: the same prayer melodies, velvet-covered Torah being passed like an infant symbolically down through the generations (up on the bima, Alex’s mother hands it over to Dana, who almost drops it before safely depositing it in Dorit’s waiting, steady, pink arms), the cluster of bored pubescents yielding up one specific boy in spotlight, someone for whom to truss up later en route to the reception. So why can’t she remember her parsha ? What’s in there, where this central memory might otherwise be? Her sick mother. The Thompson Twins, blaring from archaic free-standing speakers while her friends slow-danced. A beige check from her great-aunt Myrna for an unprecedented $180. An oppressed Soviet Jewish “twin”—Olga? Marianna? — denied the freedom of slow-dancing and checks, her photograph blown up and carted around like the earliest of themes, but it might as well have been a faux -mitzvah before its time, for the total vacuum where her Torah portion should be.

The Cool Kid — a man by now, probably, Jewishly and otherwise — turns around again, cocky and truthfully rather hot — makes Erin’s head go a little dizzy. He could be my child, she thinks, and then remembers that she is, actually, someone’s mother. Gertie. How completely bizarre that is. How completely fucking awful. She is in no position. Just yesterday she herself was free, a bat mitzvah girl, so many drugs and boys and adventures still ahead! She winks at the kid jauntily; I’m a Cool Adult code.

“In my parsha, ” Dorit says, beginning the big speech, owning it with her emphasis as if Dana and Nadiv had purchased it in her honor, the Dorit Arad Torah Portion, “God reveals himself to Abraham.” The program reads “G-d,” like an expletive; that motherf-king a-hole. “And I’ve been thinking a lot about how God reveals himself all the time, and if we can even recognize him. I think sometimes we can’t.”

She’s obviously been practicing this before the mirror for weeks, shifting the inflections, imagining her audience, relishing the profundity of it all. Erin looks down at herself, at the baby-weight belly pooch and her foreshortened thighs. At the blue veins fanning out under the thinning skin on the backsides of her hands, at her little diamond chip from Alex. “But Abraham isn’t too impressed with God to offer his hospitality to strangers who come to see him. He knows that God is not more important than his fellow people. And that’s something really good to remember, for all of us.” No way she did this on her own, Erin somehow stops herself from whispering to Alex, who’s beaming.