Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

The ache, temporarily assuaged by dinner, was back in full force, so I paid more attention to the liturgy in my machzor than usual, flipping through the High Holiday prayer book to find something applicable to myself, to the jumbo pads, the ache. I sat with my parents and followed along, trying to be what my friend Jen called “present.” College had done this to me: I was hyperaware of a subjective reality everywhere, empowered by my newfound liberal arts curriculum to claim for myself, as my own, whatever the fuck I felt like. It wasn’t, I suppose, all that different from Peter’s quoting. I flipped curiously through my machzor the way Peter watched movies: essentially just looking for good lines.

“Where we have transgressed, let us openly confess: ‘We have sinned!’” was a good one. And “Even the admission that we have done wrong does not come easily. How, then, dare we enter Your house, O Lord, Knowing that our failings are so many,” was nice. And if I could imagine it coming somewhat sarcastically from the line-drawn mouth of Homer Simpson, all the better.

But in the machzor everything was stated collectively. We this and we that. We have sinned knowingly and unknowingly, willingly and unwillingly, publicly and privately. What a pansy-ass acknowledgment. There wasn’t an “I” to be found. Not a single one. We have sinned without thinking, intentionally and unintentionally. Vague and broad and collective: What a load of crap. Nothing specific, nothing that directly addressed me, the sins I had committed willingly and unwillingly, intentionally and unintelligently, without thinking, my ache, my exponential jumbo pad sludge, alas. There certainly wasn’t any we about it. We have trespassed? We have sinned? No: It had been me. My parents and Lexi, wherever she’d gone, had their own. The man swaying across the aisle, the one who used to give Lexi and me candy from his tallis bag during services, certainly had his own. There was, in fact, no simple we about it.

Outside the clinic there had been an old white guy in a rainbow lawn chair wearing a windbreaker and holding up a sign with a Bible chapter/verse number and a Jesus-fish-symbol thing (which couldn’t help but remind me of Peter’s penis). I had bestowed upon him the Indian name of Rainbow Lawn Chair. He didn’t say anything, just sat propping his sign up with one hand and reading a Bible he held with the other, eating potato chips. I would have preferred that he scream at me, block my path with gruesome pictures of fetuses, call me vicious names. But he didn’t look up from his Bible and chips, even when I paused briefly by the front door of the clinic, waiting for his tirade, wanting it, even, ready and willing to hear verses from his Bible pulled from context and hurled at me like Frisbees, one after another until he was plumb out and I could go. What was wrong with this guy? How was I to be dissuaded by something as simple and meaningless as “Exodus 21:22”?

I had, in the days following the clinic, been experiencing a constant hum of sorry underneath the waves of physical ache. And now here were these ineffectual, scripted we s, laid out in this machzor with our name and address stamped inside the front cover so I could conveniently exonerate myself via the universality of my sins. Not quite what I’d been looking for. It was a steady stream of sorry that no rote we was ever going to dam.

Next to me my father and mother were staring down at a machzor and off into space, respectively. There was a seemingly endless lot of standing and sitting then standing and sitting some more, and each time I had to delicately maneuver myself so as not to pass out from the scope of the ache and the vertigo of the sorry cadence rolling along underneath it.

I wasn’t sure where these sorrys were directed. At Peter? At Rainbow Lawn Chair? At the whatchamacallit, an ovulation-gone-wrong, my itty-bitty swamp thing? It had taken on mythic significance, my own personal golem, a partially formed magic sprouted bean, an unknowable implanted as if by some sort of sorcery within me. When I saw Peter around it seemed impossible that he had had an actual part in the creation of the bean, my golem, my teensy swamp thing. That it was, most likely, his bean, too. Peter, wearing a T-shirt that read “Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck,” high-fiving his new girlfriend on the steps in front of the administration building: It was his magic bean, too.

Could the bean forgive? Because according to the machzor (and why couldn’t this also have been John Travolta and Uma Thurman sitting in a retro diner, shooting the shit about Scripture?): “For transgressions between a human being and God, repentance on Yom Kippur brings atonement. For transgressions between one human being and another, Yom Kippur brings no atonement until the injured party is reconciled.”

Right-o:

Lexi, I’m sorry I somehow always seem to know less than you do when I’m supposed to be your guide, shining my big-sister light on the path before you.

Peter, I’m sorry that I mocked your ironic T-shirt collection and that I told my roommate about that thing you like me to do and that you’ll never have any clue about the existence and eradication of the bean.

Dad, I’m sorry I don’t shave my legs and that I wear jewelry in my face and that all around I’m probably not what you envisioned when you thought about having yourself a little girl.

Mom. Mom, I’m…actually, Mom, you are a really checked-out fucking bitch of a mother, and if you were nicer in any regard maybe your daughters wouldn’t have turned out to be, respectively, a filthy whore and a snotty anorectic head case. Okay, now : Mom, I’m sorry for having verbalized the above. Please forgive me!

Easy enough.

Magic bean, I’m sorry — well, here I choked on it. Here I fell back into sorrysorrysorry. The bean fell between the cracks — it was not God, so it did not automatically forgive me, and it was not a person, so it could not be asked. I was fucked in regard to the bean, and I knew it in a way even Rainbow Lawn Chair couldn’t have anticipated but would certainly have appreciated greatly.

You had to ask only three times. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. So why then were the sorries not stopping?

This was how I came to understand concretely that I would, most definitely, need to fast on this particular Yom Kippur.

It hadn’t even occurred to me until just then that I could fast, that I might want to fast, that fasting was exactly what I needed! Why, I couldn’t recall another instance wherein my needs and the dictates of my religious faith had coincided like this! It was totally the thing to do, and incidentally would add yet another dimension to what was shaping up now to be a pretty freaking awesome multidisciplinary term paper. Fasting was the only way. The bean was not God, and it was not a person.

And who knew more about fasting, not only about what it took to fast, what it felt like to really, really fast, but also about what fasting could do for you, where it could get you, how it could edify and fortify you and somehow empty you of everything at the same time?

I checked the two giant couches in the quaint and abandoned Bride’s Room, forever the go-to spot for everyone under the age of forty on the run from services, but Lexi was not among the Kol Nidre exiles lounging on either of them.

Ephraim, the rabbi’s son, however, was home from Wesleyan, playing gin with someone in the corner. Remember how I said I was 89 percent sure it had been Peter? Well. Ephraim, or E, as everyone called him (as much for his first initial as for his passionate relationship with Ecstasy) and I had had a sweet good-bye-and-good-luck-in-college bodily fluid exchange at the end of the summer.