Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

Harris had been a regular at the Near Miss, Joanna’s coffee shop in Berkeley. She worked afternoons to closing. He ran a recording studio nearby, she found out later, and would stumble in at noon, read the paper, go to work at two or three.

“Is he Jewish?” Naturally, Marilyn’s first question.

“From one of the lost tribes, I think,” Joanna had replied. “Kind of like a Jew for Jesus, but minus the Jew part.”

“Oh, Joanna.” Marilyn cared obsessively about Jewish boyfriends (and husbands and grandkiddies, natch); Joanna cared about unbroken inherited china. Two sides of the same coin, it did not escape Joanna’s perception, but they stared at each other in willful mutual incomprehension nonetheless. “Bess is turning over in her grave.” Grandma of the Shattered Plate: patron Jew of guilt and shame.

“How can she dislike me when she doesn’t even know me?” Harris would ask, genuinely hurt and confused.

“Nobody dislikes you,” Joanna would explain. “Jews are just a little defensive about blood thinning. It’s been a rough couple of thousand years.” His family treated Joanna with a healthy mixture of skepticism (borne of an inkling that there existed sentiment in Joanna’s family that Harris was somehow not good enough for her) and welcoming openness, manifested in their eagerness to add a red-papered box with her name on it under their massive Christmas tree, their placement of a framed picture of her and Harris to their already overcrowded mantel.

“Your very first seder,” Joanna told him upstairs in her childhood bedroom, trying on varieties of outfits that would not further harsh her crotch. The Monistat wasn’t so very stat, after all — it would take at least a day until she’d feel any relief. She’d have to go commando, no question. Let it breathe. Marilyn used to say that, an admonishment never to wear underwear to bed. Your vagina needs to breathe, Joanna, covers pulled to her chin, could recall hearing in lieu of a bedtime story. A pretty disconcerting image for a little girl, needless to say — she had feared for years that she was smothering her vagina under clothes all day, that the beast of it (teeth and all) was gasping for air under her jeans. She’d taken fastidiously in high school to a pair of deliciously ratty, paint-splattered denim overalls, roomy in the crotch, which she still wore. Roomy in the crotch had come to be, in fact, a central tenet of Joanna’s fashion sense.

“I’ve been to a seder before,” Harris said, mock outraged, though no, of course he hadn’t. He’d bought out their neighborhood bookstore of Harold Kushner, stopped mixing dairy and meat, started peppering his speech with Yiddishisms, expressed huge retroactive gratitude for the perfunctory circumcision performed on multitudes of male infants born in urban hospitals in the early seventies. “The retelling of our emancipation from slavery gets me all farklempt every time.” He wiped away a faux tear. The absurdity of finding a philosemite here, in her life! She had suggested that they simply skip Passover, stay in Berkeley, go out for Indian, what did she care? But noooo, Harris wanted to “experience” it, home-style.

“It’s the longest, most boring holiday ever,” she’d told him. “It’s the worst. You get constipated, you get sick on bad wine, you talk biblical mythology until everyone nods off in their bone-dry matzo cake. I promise, it sucks!” He wouldn’t hear any of it.

“I want to show you that I’m amenable to Judaism,” he’d said.

“I believe that’s the official motto of post — World War II Europe, honey,” she’d retorted. And here they were.

“I’m not feeling so hot,” she said, forgoing the notion of pants entirely. She stepped into a red silk skirt, then back out of it when she remembered she’d be wearing no underwear. Then back into it when she realized who gave a fuck. A cool breeze fanned the flame of her womanhood. She relished the air.

Harris opened his messenger bag, removed a bottle of Coke. “You look ravishing.” He took a swig. “Not a winner,” he sighed, glancing at the underside of the cap.

“Fuck, Harris, I don’t think Coke is kosher for Passover.” But neither was she at the moment, with yeast multiplying exponentially in her crotch, maybe enough by now to bake a loaf or two of forbidden bread. Though she was half afraid to explain this particular aspect of the ailment, unsure she wouldn’t be sold out by gung-ho Harris and then hunted down with candle and feather by Marilyn, ejected immediately and unceremoniously from the house: revealed to be very, very unkosher for Passover.

He froze, mid sip, looked left and right. “Um. What do we do?”

“Just give it to me. Here.” She screwed the top back on and then put the bottle in the cabinet below the sink in her bathroom, with crusted hair defrizz and twelve-year-old sunblock.

“I’m sorry! Should I, like, shower or something?” He seemed to really want to be part of this thing, this random set of rules with no connection to him whatsoever.

“I think you’re okay, babe.”

“Or brush my teeth?”

“Harris. No one has to know. It’s fine. We’ll just keep this between us.”

“But I’ll know.”

She held her hand up in front of his face and waved it around a couple of times. “There, now I’ve absolved you. That’s how it works. You’re clean.” She crossed herself, did some half-recalled sign language from when that deaf lady with the perm guest-starred on Sesame Street, and flipped him the bird.

“I love you,” he said. They stretched out on her old trundle bed with white aluminum curlicue frame. He was huge, a bear. He enveloped her entirely, radiating warmth like clothes fresh from the dryer.

“Don’t,” she told him when he slid his hand from between her knees up under the skirt. “Problem in my pants.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “I forgot. Sorry. Me too.” He amiably directed her hand to his hard-on.

They lay there together, breathing slowly, listening to the doorbell ring and to Ron shouting “Elijah” and to Marilyn speciously chirping, “Hel- lo ! Come in!” After a few minutes, Joanna untangled herself halfway to grab a felt-tip pen and illustrate Ron’s place cards. When she was satisfied with her appropriation and representations of blood (Aunt Barbi), frogs (Stacey), vermin (Kevin), wild beasts (Uncle Larry), pestilence (Jason), boils (Aunt Jackie), hail (Bob), locusts (Uncle Steve), darkness (Ron), and slaying of the firstborn (Marilyn), she reconstituted herself into Harris’s embrace and softly gnawed his thumb pad. There weren’t enough plagues to go around, and since Harris was a newbie and she herself was currently afflicted with one even the fucking Egyptians had been spared, Joanna had just drawn little fat balloon hearts on Harris’s place card and a little personified grinning sun on her own.

“Ready to face the enemy?”

He scowled. “My ancestors could’ve blood-libeled yours into oblivion.”

“Let’s go,” she said, opening her bedroom door. “We’re gonna get totally shit-faced on Manischewitz. It’s, like, mandated.”

Harris followed her down the stairs and into the living room.

“Here she is…,” boomed Ron, the opening of “Miss America.”

And there they all were, sitting or leaning on the beige L-shaped sofa: the sum total of Joanna’s familial relations. Marilyn was an only child, so that line dead-ended with Joanna. Ron’s three siblings, Barbi, Steve, and Jackie, were, respectively: a type-A bitch on wheels, a sociopathic loner, and a chronically ill codependent. And the next generation? Kevin and Jason, MIT grads who always referred to Joanna’s forte as “arts and crafts” and pretended to forget the name of the state school she’d attended; and Stacey, a developmentally disabled mama’s girl, living at home, thrilled to death at thirty-five with the possibility of getting licensed to do nails. Ten pairs of eyes fixed on Harris.