Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

“Hi,” he said, like a champ, with a doleful wave it would be impossible not to love, Joanna thought.

“This is Harris,” she said. Everyone nodded politely and took note of Harris, the goy. For shame. And Joanna an only child. And Marilyn an only child. The Jewish people would die out, and whose fault was it? She handed the place cards (“plague cards,” he called them) off to Ron.

Harris didn’t quite get that upon meeting Joanna’s family he would indeed be defined solely by what he was not. He also didn’t get what so depressed Joanna about this gathering, this particular grouping of people. “As if their meager numbers weren’t sad enough…,” she’d explained. “It’s terrible. They’re all such losers, and there are so few of them.”

“This is Joanna’s friend, Harris,” Marilyn said, redundant, and then the whole room finally jumped to life with hello, how nice to finally, welcome, hey there. Kevin and Jason, smirking, caught Joanna’s eye from across the room and shook their heads unhurriedly, side to side, implied tongues clicking.

Joanna had to summon up every iota of social fear and control in her being to keep from reaching down the waist of her skirt and scratching, scratching, scratching some more. She plopped loudly and ungracefully down on the couch, hoping contact would alleviate some of the distress.

Dr. Brooks, her pediatrician, had once stuck a finger all the way up inside her during a routine checkup when she was, who knows, maybe nine.

“Don’t ever let anyone do that to you,” he’d said to her after a brief moment, making her look him in the eyes. “If anyone ever tries to do that to you, you don’t let them. You tell a grownup. Understand?” He kept staring at her, insistent, until she nodded, finally, slowly, mortified. But, she thought later, in the car with Marilyn, confused and still — still! — absolutely mortified, his words ringing in her ears and the feeling of his huge cold finger lingering, he had done it to her. Did that count or didn’t it?

She had sunk into the passenger seat next to her mother that day, blistering shame, positive that there was something different, something noticeable about her that would bring on castigation and exile. She was shocked (and lonely, oddly, a new feeling that threw a net over her and dragged her away from the girl she thought she was) when Marilyn had seemed not to notice a thing, and had only suggested blithely that they go get an ice cream cone.

Aunt Jackie came over and laid a loud smooch on Joanna’s cheek.

“Hey, Aunt Jackie.”

“He seems nice.”

“He is.”

An old painting of Joanna’s hung above them, a Chagall rip-off from grad school.

“Still painting, sweetheart?”

“Not really. Sometimes.”

“That’s a shame. You were so talented.”

“I’m still talented,” Joanna said. “Just not actively.”

“Candles!” Marilyn called. “Ladies.” Joanna and Jackie joined Barbi and Stacey by the buffet and they lit the candles. Jackie sang the blessing in a high-pitched vibrato, doing her best Joni Mitchell on the transliteration Marilyn gave her.

At the table everyone found their place cards and stood behind their chairs awaiting instruction. Joanna’s mismatched setting (so yellow, so overtaken by daisies a shade of pink last seen in the era of punk, so loud and unseemly) languished amid the stately, banded Grandma Bess’s, set her incontrovertibly apart. The travesty of the broken plate and its larger implications of wholeness defiled within the twelve-set dreams of her late grandmother, was further implicated in the raw and extraordinarily uncomfortable state of her genitalia. The maternal line, the whole fertility arena, the way, when Joanna clamped her thighs together, desperate for some friction, everyone else’s red poppies swam together like healthy Georgia O’Keeffe twats in miniature.

“Oh, is that cute,” Aunt Barbi held up her plague card, squinting. “Joanna, this must be your handiwork.” Joanna had, for Blood, done a little cartoon Lady Macbeth, furiously attacking her hand, “Out, damned spot,” in a speech bubble.

Harris had been placed across from Joanna, and he smiled at her now over the perfectly laid table, just the two of them, apart and distant from this family. They would start their own. “So talented,” he mouthed at her.

“Well,” said Marilyn. “Welcome to our seder. We’re so glad to have you all here this year.” Barbi reined in a nasty tight-lipped smile.

“We’re so glad to be here, Aunt Marilyn.” Stacey was wearing a dress that made Joanna’s plate cower in floral fever pitch, her nails done in a pattern to match.

“Sit, sit, everyone sit.” Everyone sat. “Some of us have never been to a seder before,” Marilyn continued, nodding overtly at Harris. “So we hope you’ll feel comfortable participating as much or as little as you’d like.” Harris, his face gone pink like a healthy vulva, looked down at his poppy, his thick navy blue band, his evenly spaced flatware. He wore his new kippah, which bore a Hebrew transliteration of his hilariously un-Hebraic name. Ha-reess.

“ This is the bread of affliction,” Kevin said, breaking off a corner of matzo and waving it at Harris. “That’s all you have to know, bro. Eat too much and you won’t have a bowel movement for days.” Jason and Larry chuckled, and Harris nodded solemnly. In Joanna’s head, the musical refrain: One of these things is not like the other….

“Good to know, good to know.”

Ron passed around his doctored Haggadot, myriad colorful post-its and inserts poking out from within. “Harris. Will you do us the privilege of reading us the order of the seder on page four?” To Ron’s right, Harris’s eagerness gave him the air of a magician’s assistant. He nodded, cleared his throat.

“One. Recite the kaddish—”

Aunt Barbi giggled. “The kaddish is for the dead. We don’t want to say kaddish anytime soon.”

“Recite the kiddush, sorry. Two. Wash the hands. Three. Eat a green vegetable. Four. Break the middle matzo and hide half of it for the afikomen. Five. Recite the Passover story. Six. Wash the hands before the meal. Seven. Say the hamotzi and the special blessing for the matzo. Eight. Eat the bitter herb. Nine. Eat the bitter herb and the matzo together. Ten. Serve the festival meal. Eleven. Eat the afikomen. Twelve. Say the grace after meals. Thirteen. Recite the hallel. Fourteen. Conclude the seder.”

Joanna watched him as he spoke. From Harris’s mouth, viewed from without, the seder sounded totally foreign even to her, like common cultural phenomena described in purely anthropological terms. A man’s necktie was nothing more than a long thin swatch of fabric, which a man must fold specifically into a knot at his throat if he wishes to be taken seriously in business; the failure to properly do so relegates him to a lower social and economic strata. Who gave a shit in those terms? Who could tie a tie with any measure of importance or seriousness in those terms? Jesus, why bother? Getting a master’s was reduced, simply, to the ritualized study of a specific topic leading up to conferrence of inflated intellectual status by those who have already completed ritualized study; everything was rendered meaningless and pointless from the outside, everything familiar and taken for granted canceled out entirely. So it was. A seder was: Recite the kiddush, wash the hands, eat a green vegetable, break the middle matzo, recite the story, wash the hands, say the blessings, eat the bitter herb, eat the bitter herb and matzo together, serve the festival meal, eat the afikomen, say grace, recite the hallel. That was all. Get too carried away with that line of thinking, however, and one might find oneself wearing the same underwear for three days at a time, dropping out of one’s MFA program, and invalidating one’s semi-beloved family seder with one’s unforgivable, covert, probable unkosherness. Joanna leaned alternately into one hip and then the other to avoid direct pressure on the insistent itch while her ugly plate hurled insults at her. Pussy, it hissed. Cunt.