Elisa Albert: How This Night Is Different: Stories

“The mother is always upset,” the mohel said quietly. He giggled. “If God had asked Abraham to remove some skin from his knee and the knees of all the males in his household, it would be probably not so difficult.”

Mark pondered this for a moment. The mother, always upset. Hormones, whatever: This was how it would be now. It was a warning; it was a heads-up. He would file this information away alongside cautionary tales of men twisted up in jealousy of their sons’ commandeering of breasts and motherly attention, alongside Rich-given wisdom about the merits of anal sex postchildbirth.

“Babe, the mohel is here. It’s time to start.” His voice was teetering upward desperately. For a split second he thought he might just break the goddamn door down and be done with it. A burst of pure hatred for her (for having been the one to bear this boy and for keeping him behind this door and for keeping him from this rite that connected him directly back to the beginning of Jewish fucking time) shot into his heart as if from a syringe.

“Allow me,” said the mohel. He stepped up to the door as if it were a podium of some kind, a pulpit. “Hello, Beth. This is Rabbi Trager. I would like very much to speak to you for a few moments, please.” He said “Beth” like “bet.”

And sure enough, after a beat, there was a click, the swoosh of opening, and the mohel was gone, swallowed up in the room. The door clicked shut again behind him. As easy as that. Like what he’d once upon a time imagined birth to be. Mark stood in the hall, alone again under the fixture with the dead bulb. In the living room, he heard his cousin Michael saying good-bye, explaining to Shirley about the meeting in the valley at ten, then clapping Rich on the back and saying something about not really wanting to see the poor little dude get his johnson cut anyhow. Mark wondered what was happening in the nursery, what the mohel could possibly be saying to his angry and sleep-deprived wife to make her relax her grip on their son and offer him up to the gaping maw of a tradition that excluded her.

Shirley appeared wild eyed in the hall. “People are leaving!” she said. “What’s going on?”

Mark didn’t respond. He pressed the back of his skull into the wall and kept his eyes resolutely shut. Beth despised Shirley, had nicknamed her AstroGlide and tried often to joke with Mark about what a desperately hypersexual sixty-five-year-old skank she was. This took the form of many pointed “your mother” jokes, which Beth found utterly hilarious.

“Mark!”

“Mom.”

”Mark!!”

“Mom.”

Shirley seemed then miraculously to understand that Mark was not in charge, had no way of making happen what was supposed to happen. That he needed to close his eyes and lean against the wall in that dark spot of the hallway, as close as he could get to his wife, his child. She left him there and went back out into the living room. He never loved her more in all his life.

“A few minutes, everyone,” she said. “They just need a few more minutes.”

When the mohel emerged from the nursery with baby Lucas/Lev in his arms, Mark started awake. Had it been a minute? An hour?

“The mother is of course upset, but she understands that it is important,” the mohel said. “She says she cannot watch it, and she apologizes for making a problem.”

The baby fidgeted a little and closed his eyes. Oh, Beth. He was such a selfish prick.

“The mother is always upset,” said the mohel. “It is normal.”

Mark looked at the mohel. “Really? It’s normal?”

The mohel chuckled, cradling the baby expertly. “Yes. Always. Always.”

This was an incredible relief, really. Mark stood there under the dark fixture with the mohel, gazing at Lucas. Like a little family, the three of them.

They had put a framed picture of Lou on the table, with a shit-eating grin, huge seventies glasses frames, and a faded orangey tint. He looked like a big man up there, Mark thought, pleased as punch with the way life had carried on without him, with his new namesake and his plum VIP spot for watching this little latter-day Lev be welcomed into the covenant.

Per the mohel’s instructions, Mark dipped his index finger into the sticky-sweet red wine and then put it gently into Lucas’s mouth. Rich ambled up to the front of the room and took his place next to Mark, hands folded over his crotch like a mafioso. A hush fell over the crowd. No one seemed to miss Beth. It was perfectly acceptable somehow that this baby boy had sprung forth from Mark alone, from the smiling picture of Lou, from Rich, from flavor-of-the-month Henry in his ridiculous cowboy hat, from the old man addressing them all.

“The orlah, ” the mohel began, “or foreskin, is a metaphor for any barrier in the heart of a man which would prevent him from hearing God, understanding God.” Kimberly, standing with Lynda at the back of the room, could be heard loudly expelling air from her nostrils. Metaphor, my ass.

Shirley had wanted someone to speak about Lou, about the kind and generous man he had been, about how these qualities would hopefully be passed down to his grandson along with his name. So Mark, with the baby asleep in his arms, moved to the front of the table.

“My father was a special man,” he began. “A very special man.” Someone coughed. “And we wanted to honor him by giving Lucas his name.” For what he could remember of his father and a dollar, Mark could probably get a soda.

Mark placed his son gently into Rich’s arms (oh, God, man, pretend he’s a football, and please don’t fucking drop him). And then the onesie was being peeled off, the diaper removed to reveal those insanely huge infant balls and the perky little penis nub that looked so foreign (not for long) to Mark.

There was more talk, a blessing or two. Mark concentrated on breathing, on not passing out. “Behold!” the mohel read from a book. “A man loves no one better than his son, and yet he circumcises him!”

And then there was a flurry of metal, the snip, a beat, a gut-wrenching wail from Lucas, and a chorus of “Mazel tov!”s that went up like flame around the room. Easy as that.

“Ouch,” said Rich, staring intently at the fascinating source of Lucas’s pain.

Before he left, the mohel handed Mark a folded cloth napkin, a little pouch.

“Bury it,” he said. “In your yard. As soon as possible.”

So when everyone had finally gone home—“No more visitors for the child today,” ordered the mohel — and the baby had been given a bottle and fallen asleep in his crib—“Quickest-forgotten pain in the world,” said Shirley, Henry leading her out the door with his hand on her ass — Mark went out to the yard with a shovel he found in the garage and dug a hole. It didn’t need to be too deep, he figured, just so long as a neighborhood dog wouldn’t come sniffing around and dig the thing up for a snack in the next few days. He dropped the napkin in, covered it over with dirt, and patted it down. He imagined briefly that he would have a hard time forgetting this spot, even after lots and lots of time had passed. It was like a grave, or, no: It was like the opposite of a grave. His hands were dirty when he was done, and he liked the way it felt. He was conscious of feeling, somehow, absurdly, like a man. Then he went back inside to clean up.

Once everything was more or less back in place, the folding chairs folded, the lipstick-ringed paper napkins trashed, Mark knocked softly on the bedroom door and entered without a word. Beth was curled up on her side of the bed, facing away from him. Was she sleeping? Should he wake her? How could he upset her least? He stood looking at her back for a long moment, terrified of doing or saying the wrong thing, afraid even of his own breath, which escaped anyway. But he supposed he knew the score now, knew that it didn’t much matter what he did or said or didn’t do or didn’t say. He sat down on the bed.