It's a Whole Spiel

by It's a Whole Spiel- Love, Latkes

“Whoa,” Adam says. “This is whoa.” The crowd jostles us closer to each other, and instinctively I reach out to grab his hand just like I would with Rachel. I’m embarrassed and go to drop it immediately, but he squeezes mine and tugs me closer. The pads of his fingers are the slightest bit rough, maybe from the ukulele strings.

  We keep moving farther down the Mall. It’s another cold day, but Adam’s hand is warm, and the upside of people packed around us is that they block out the wind. The crowd kicks up a chant, “Gun reform now! Gun reform now!” And Adam and I join in. It feels a bit weird at first, silly, like What am I even doing here? Do I even know enough about all of this to belong?

  But as the voices join around us, and as I think of my cousin and all the other kids out there scared to go to school, I feel this swell of emotion, pride, and hope, and I think it’s not always about knowing the most but about showing up when it counts.

  I chant louder: “Gun reform now! Gun reform now!”

  We walk and chant for at least half an hour, and eventually the crowd thins a bit, everyone finding their own breathing room, and Adam’s hand slips from mine as he draws both up to the ukulele and begins fiddling. “I’m glad we did this,” he says, looking at the strings, not me. “It feels important…it feels right. Like I’m supposed to be here.”

  He then meets my eyes, and I get this swooping feeling in my stomach. “Same,” I say.

  He plucks the ukulele strings. “And it’s nice to get away for a little. Yesterday was a lot, the convention, all these new faces. It’s not that I don’t like people, but I just never know if they like me, and so then I’m awkward.”

  “You’re awkward?” I ask. “You’ve been with Zeke’s group all weekend. I’m the awkward one hovering around it.”

  “I am…awkward. Yesterday I went to give Zeke a high five, but he didn’t high-five me back. I don’t know, maybe he just thought I was stretching or something? So I failed a high five. I’m fail-a-high-five awkward.” Adam glances at me, grins, and shakes his head. “And I hover too. That’s why I brought the ukulele. So it looks like I’m just too busy playing music to talk to anyone. Seriously, I can only play, like, three songs.”

  I snort.

  “What?” Adam asks.

  I shake my head. “Nothing, promise.” My stomach twinges with hunger. I glance at my phone and realize we’ve already been out here for two hours. I catch Adam’s eye.

  “Should we…,” he starts.

  I grin. “Yeah, let’s head back.”

  We turn around and start threading back through the crowd. It’s overwhelming at first, pushing against the people, but we keep going until we’re off on a narrow and relatively open pathway closer to the street. I reach out both arms and touch nothing but open air, then give a deep sigh of relief.

  Adam laughs. “Same,” he says.

  I look back at the mass of people we just came from, and I swell with pride, because I did that. I showed up and made this movement one person louder.

  We’re stepping off the grass onto the sidewalk when I spot a familiar face. “No freaking way,” I say.

  “What?” Adam asks.

  “That’s Senator Burnham.” I squint my eyes. “Yeah, that’s him. One of my Georgia senators.” He’s probably one of three politicians I could recognize. Hard to forget that giant mustache and those bushy eyebrows. “I wonder…” The flyer Brit handed me yesterday sits folded in my pocket.

  “You wonder what?” Adam asks.

  I take the flyer and show it to him. “There’s a script here for talking to your representatives. We’re supposed to use it to call their offices or write letters, but…”

  “But he’s right there.”

  “He’s right there.”

  My thoughts had already wandered back to my hotel room, lounged out on the bed, watching HGTV, impressed with myself for sneaking back without notice. I did the thing, and now I get my reward of delicious introvert solitude.

  But even though I did do the thing, here’s a chance to take it a step further, a chance to talk face to face with a living, breathing politician who will actually vote on these laws.

  “I can’t believe he’s just standing around like that,” I say. He’s waiting for an order from a food truck. We’re a few blocks away from the protest now, but still, it seems risky. He could be open to conversation with a concerned citizen.

  My heart races hard at just the thought of going up and talking to him. “What are you going to do?” Adam asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. He’s paying for his order now and stepping off to the side to wait. I should talk to him, but what if he’s angry? Or worse, what if he’s an active listener and engages in the conversation and then realizes I’m awkward and bumbling.

  “Go on, Naomi.” Adam nudges me. “Be brave and all.”

  “Be brave and all.” I grin at him. “Okay, here I go.”

  “Good luck!” Adam calls.

  I stride toward Senator Burnham just as he’s being handed his food. “Excuse me!” The words squeak out. “Senator Burnham.” He doesn’t turn around, just picks up his food and begins to walk away. I raise my voice. “Excuse me, Senator Burnham. I live in Georgia!”

  This time a few people on the street stop, including him. He turns around, face in a grimace, muttering something about “…aide was sick, and I just had to have my falafel….” Then he plasters on a smile. “Always nice to meet a constituent. I’m sorry, but I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  I rush the last few steps up to him and say, “Just one quick thing, um—” I look down at the flyer. My hands shake, but I force myself to read the full script. When I’m done, I look up at him, heart pounding.

  He pulls his bag of falafel closer to him and says, “Thank you for voicing your concerns. Good day.”

  And then he turns and speed-walks so fast it’s basically a run.

  Good day? Really?

  “Good day to you, sir!” I shout back.

  Someone taps me from behind, and I almost yelp. It’s Adam, hovering over me with a smile. “How’d it go?” he asks.

  “A disaster.” But I feel another swell of pride. “I did it, though!”

  “Heck yeah you did!” Adam says. He lifts his hand for a high five, but the flyer is still in my right hand, and in the second I use to put it in my pocket, he starts lowering his hand, looking unsure and uncomfortable.

  “Oh my God,” I say.

  I grab his hand with both of mine and lift it back into the air, and we high-five.

  He smiles. “Brave and all.”

  I smile wider. “Totally freaking brave and all.”

  NEILAH

  BY HANNAH MOSKOWITZ

  My zipper’s stuck.

  No. It’s not stuck. The dress is too small. I haven’t worn this dress since my high school graduation, and I thought it fit then, but maybe I’m remembering wrong. Maybe it didn’t zip then, either. I probably looked ridiculous in it. Probably everyone was looking at me and thinking that my dress was too small.

  I don’t know what else I can wear if this dress won’t zip. Mira said I’m supposed to wear white. I pretended like I already knew that. I should have already known that, just like I should have known that at Kol Nidre last night, people weren’t pronouncing “breakfast” strangely when they were talking about the break fast tonight.

  Those are things that good Jews know.

  And these are dresses that good girls are supposed to fit into.

  I’ve lost weight since I last wore this dress. It should fit now. But it won’t zip, and it’s my fault, and I’m too big, and—

  The zipper clicks, tilts, edges into place, and glides smoothly the rest of the way up.

  The zipper was stuck.

  * * *

  ***

  My family, if you couldn’t tell, never did Yo
m Kippur. It’s kind of the antithesis of everything my family did do with Judaism: basically, food or nothing. We have Passover seders, where my dad makes sure to throw in asides that there’s no historical evidence that the Jews were ever slaves. We fry latkes on Hanukkah. My aunts compare the calorie counts of applesauce versus sour cream, ignoring that either way, it’s fried potatoes.

  We talk and sing and yell over each other, and I blend in and breathe and feel a little safer than usual, and they shove plate after plate on me and compliment me on how thin I’ve gotten in a way that sounds like worry, but not enough for them to ever actually do anything.

  My ex-boyfriend was the same way. It was about the only thing he had in common with my Jewish family. He’d run his hands over my body and say all the right things about how he was concerned and liked me at whatever weight and it didn’t matter to him, and then he’d sink his fingers into the gaps of my hip bones like he wouldn’t know how to hold on to me if they weren’t there.

  We dated for two years, and he was vibrant and sweet with me but awkward and unnatural with my family, uncomfortable with the noise and the jokes, telling me his ears were sore after a night with my cousins, and my dad would give me looks behind his back: Seriously, this is the guy?

  I was hardly ever invited to his house, but whenever I was, I dressed up and sat at his manicured dining room table in a room so quiet you could hear the ticking of their expensive, imported clock and ate small, organized portions with his small, organized parents.

  * * *

  ***

  There’s a knock on my dorm room door, and Mira pokes her head in, curls spilling over her shoulders. She smiles at me. “You look nice,” she says. She looks like a nymph with her white dress and button nose, without a straight line on her whole body. She crosses over to me and stands on her tiptoes to kiss me—on the cheek; you can’t brush your teeth on Yom Kippur, I found out from Google three days ago.

  “How are you holding up?” she asks.

  Mira doesn’t know that going without food for twenty-five hours is no more than a light stretch away from my usual routine. Normally I might have eaten a granola bar from the box under my bed for dinner last night, but that’s about it. She doesn’t know that. I try to eat in front of her.

  We’ve been dating for two and a half weeks. I’ve never dated a girl before. We’re going slow in a lot of ways, which has been my excuse for keeping the food thing to myself. By the time we’re at a place where keeping something this big from her would count as a lie, I’ll be finished, I decided last week, though I’m not exactly sure what “finished” means, and I try not to think about it. Any definition feels too big for me.

  So I say, “Going without water is a bitch.”

  “Only ten more hours! The second day is always the easiest.” She takes my hand and smiles at me. “Ready to go?”

  “Yeah. Thank you for inviting me.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m so psyched you’re coming.”

  My first morning Yom Kippur service ever.

  * * *

  ***

  “Do you really even count as Jewish?” my ex asked me once, in his car. “You don’t keep kosher or anything. You didn’t even have a bat mitzvah.”

  “It’s not about that stuff,” I said, trying to be casual, trying to act like there wasn’t a voice inside me going FAKE FAKE FAKE every second I’d ever breathed. “Well, it’s not all about that.”

  “I read that you’re not even Jewish if your mom isn’t Jewish,” he said, and I felt all the that’s not trues and why is it your businesses and who the fuck are you to tell mes rolling around in my mouth, but I didn’t let them out, because…because. He was a boy and I was a girl. He was a guy and I was a lady.

  “I don’t know. I don’t even, like, think of you as Jewish,” he said, which didn’t explain why he found my uncles’ personalities too big and my cousin’s naming ceremony too long.

  I spend a lot of days in front of the mirror, counting and pointing and touching and thinking, Do you even really count as having an eating disorder? You’re not even underweight. It’s not like people know when they look at you.

  FAKE FAKE FAKE

  * * *

  ***

  Rhode Island is cold already, and campus is quiet this early on a Saturday as Mira and I walk to the other end toward the Hillel. She goes every Shabbat; I’ve only been for Rosh Hashanah and Kol Nidre last night and a mixer near the beginning of the semester, where we met.

  “When I was a kid, I always used to hope I’d get sick on Yom Kippur,” Mira says.

  “Why?”

  She laughs. “It’s a mitzvah to eat if you’re sick, just like it’s a mitzvah to fast if you’re not. I was always looking for that loophole.”

  I smile at her.

  “It’s so weird,” she says. “Doing the holidays without my family.”

  This is her holiday season. It’s supposed to be mine, and I learned that from Jewish Tumblr, not from anything I actually experienced. “Holidays” for me means December, like some gentile.

  Except it does mean Hebrew blessings, candle lighting, hot oil, my aunt’s voice gliding over the “amen,” pronounced our way.

  Mira has never asked me to apologize for not being Jewish enough. She knows I didn’t have a bat mitzvah. She knows I flip to the transliteration when we go to services together and still get lost.

  “Do you miss your family?” she asks lightly.

  “I do, yeah.” I hadn’t really realized until this moment.

  I wish I knew how to read Hebrew. I wish I were Mira instead of me in more ways than I could possibly count.

  But I don’t want to have to forget my stupid, assimilated memories to be a good Jew. I really love our Christmas tree, and pretending I don’t is getting so exhausting.

  We walk through the doors of the Hillel. Weirdly, I feel hungry.

  * * *

  ***

  The Hillel lobby buzzes with people picking out prayer books and volunteers directing them down hallways for each service. Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist. Mira and I go to Reform.

  The cantor, a junior who’s in one of my big lecture classes, is already singing, and the girl who’s up front with her to lead the service looks nervous as she goes through her notes. The rabbi will be in later to give a talk after the prayers—to be honest, that’s the only part that means much to me, since Hebrew is just sounds as far as I’m concerned—but the lead-up is all student-led. I don’t know if that’s all the branches or just a Reform thing. It doesn’t seem like I’m supposed to ask.

  I don’t know if Mira and I as a couple would be welcome in the other rooms, together. I don’t think I’m supposed to ask that, either.

  We sit near the back, and she takes my hand as we find our places in the prayer books. Her hair waterfalls over the back of her chair, free.

  * * *

  ***

  “At ‘avinu malkeinu,’ ” the student leader says, “when we say it in English, you can say ‘our father, our king,’ or you can keep saying it in Hebrew, or you can say ‘my mother,’ or ‘spirit,’ or ‘nature’…whatever feels right to you.”

  I like that, but I end up mumbling “our father, our king” because it’s what everyone else does.

  The Hebrew service doesn’t mean much to me. It’s just sounds. I pray that I won’t die this year, and I like the part where we hit ourselves.

  * * *

  ***

  I never would have guessed that I’d get involved with religious stuff in college. This is supposed to be where you pull away, isn’t it? Where the kids who were raised religious start experimenting, breaking rules, not that I know much about religious people outside of reading books about falling in love with the preacher’s son or something when I was a kid.

  Mira. I know Mira. She doesn’t come to mind when I think about
religious people, because when people say it…they mean a preacher’s son.

  It actually still counts as religious when it’s Jewish, too.

  It counts.

  I don’t understand what all this Hebrew means, but I still feel a certain kind of floaty and dizzy. But maybe that’s just because I’m hungry.

  That wouldn’t make sense.

  * * *

  ***

  My great-grandparents were religious. They were immigrants, and back then clinging to Judaism meant clinging to religion more than it does now, I think. Both sets of my grandparents raised their kids significantly less religious, and my father raised me with horror stories about how boring Hebrew school was, how he had to get up early on Saturdays, how lucky I was that they didn’t make me do that.

  I’m not saying I wish I had gone, necessarily, but it would be nice to not be told how I feel about it.

  I just feel like I’ve been folded up for a long time, for a gentile boy with a nice smile, and secular parents with nice jobs, and a curvy body with a nice face. If you fold up small enough, you’ll fit into all of it. And I’m just wondering when I stopped feeling hungry.

  And why I feel hungry today.

  * * *

  ***

  I didn’t ever really care about being skinny.

  I just wanted to be categorically, unarguably, definitely something.

  * * *

  ***

  The rabbi comes in with his little girl balanced on his hip. She has a juice box, and we’re all trying very hard to look like we don’t want to lunge at her. He walks up and down the aisle as he speaks, bouncing his daughter slightly.

  “G’mar chatimah tovah,” he says, and we repeat it back to him. “I have a story for you.” His steps are steady, slow, like a metronome. “In 1718, a boy named Zusha was born into a Jewish family.”