I spoke about slavery as it related to genealogy; I talked about European feudalism, primogeniture, and the divine right of kings.
“This is American history,” one student said. “There are no kings in America.”
“That’s true,” I answered. “But if we knew how the colonists felt about kings, specifically about King George of England, we’d understand a lot about American history. We’d understand the separation of powers and the struggle for the Bill of Rights. We’d know why the Articles of Confederation were ratified and why they lasted only a few years.”
I instituted a section on oral history, because, I told my students, history wouldn’t make sense unless we personalized it. They would talk about their lives and relate them to their studies. I assigned memoirs and personal correspondence. I told my students to read The Diary of Anne Frank.
“Anne Frank was Dutch,” a student said. “Why are we learning about her in this class?”
“American and European histories are intimately related,” I answered. In college, I told my students, interdisciplinary studies were the rage. “Boundaries are breaking down. Everything is being cross-referenced.”
“So what?” said the student. “This isn’t college. Why can’t we just be in high school for now?”
“Be patient. I promise you’ll enjoy this experiment.”
At the end of the week, I told my students I had an announcement. “Something important has happened to me. I’m adopted, and recently, for the first time, I met my birth mother.”
The students looked uncomfortable. What had happened to the rigid guy in a suit, who made them memorize every secretary of state, not to mention every president and vice-president, who refused to say whether he was married or had a girlfriend, because it had nothing to do with American history?
“Ben’s being weird,” one student said. “He’s having an identity crisis.”
“I’m not having an identity crisis.”
But was I? I had a student named Paul who’d been adopted as an infant; his mother, concerned about his work at school, had told me this. Paul had never been one of my favorites. He was intelligent, but his grades were mediocre. He sat in class and looked out the window. Sometimes he composed limericks on the back of the school newspaper. His sole ambition, he told me once, was to play guitar with Courtney Love. Between classes, I would find him sitting in the student lounge, staring straight ahead, with his shoes off.
Now, however, I started to take a greater interest in him. He was the reason I’d chosen this class for my experiment. Sometimes after school I’d sit next to him while he played his guitar, doing my best to sing along. He was adopted, and so was I. Aside from Jonathan, I’d never had an adopted friend. I would do my best to befriend Paul. I wanted him to know that I understood him.
May came, and with it the flowers in the rose gardens in Berkeley and along the bike paths of Golden Gate Park. The stores were filled with lilies and tulips, nature conspiring to remind everyone that Mother’s Day was soon.
“This feels like a crucible,” I told Jenny.
I’d seen Susan once more, and things hadn’t gone especially well. She’d had an extra ticket to a sneak preview of Apollo 13 and had asked me to come along.
I sat with her in the theater for two and a half hours, offering her popcorn and sips of my soda. I felt the shock of electricity as I brushed against her sweater and quickly pulled away.
She liked the movie, and I didn’t.
“It’s because you’re too young,” she said. “If you were older, you’d understand what the country was going through at the time. Everyone was scared. Nobody turned off their televisions.”
“I wouldn’t have liked the movie any better even if I was older than you. I don’t like suspense movies. And I’m not interested in movies about space. I never even saw Star Wars.”
“What about Tom Hanks? Didn’t you see Philadelphia?”
I had. But I knew we weren’t going to agree. We had different taste in movies.
“Well?”
“Yes, I know. Everyone loved Philadelphia.”
“Did you?”
“I thought it was a little manipulative.”
“Manipulative? Maybe you didn’t like it because the people in it were gay.”
“Susan,” I said, “my brother’s gay.”
“He is?”
Hadn’t I told her? I was tempted to say that her private detective had been loafing on the job. She appeared to be reevaluating everything about me. But she said nothing more about Jonathan’s being gay—not then, and not after.
“I went with Jonathan and his boyfriend,” I said, “and none of us especially liked it.”
Already I could see that nothing would be simple between us. Everything would take on greater meaning. I liked this movie, and you didn’t. Are we really compatible? Are we meant to be together? I didn’t want to fight with her. I’ve gone to many movies I didn’t expect to like. It isn’t a huge concession.
“If you don’t like suspense movies or movies about space, why did you come along?”
“Because you invited me.”
“I could have gone with someone else.”
“Okay, do you want me to spell it out? It didn’t matter to me what the movie was. I came because I wanted to be with you.”
Now, a week before Mother’s Day, I wasn’t sure what to do.
“Call Susan up,” Jenny said, “and wish her Happy Mother’s Day. Or send her a card. She’s only been here for two months. It’s not like you owe her more than that.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t call her at all.” It seemed a betrayal of my mother to acknowledge Susan in this way. “It’s like adultery,” I told Jenny.
“Come on. What did you do when your grandmothers were alive? Didn’t you call them on Mother’s Day?”
“That was different.”
“I say ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ to people at work. If that’s your idea of adultery, then I’m the most promiscuous person you know.”
I felt some obligation to Susan, if only because her other son had died. So on the Wednesday before Mother’s Day, I bought her a card with the words “Happy Mother’s Day” on the front and added the following note:
Dear Susan,
I’m glad I’ve gotten the chance to meet you. I don’t know how much longer you’ll be staying in San Francisco or how much time we’ll spend together. Things may not be easy between us. But I’m grateful that you made the effort to find me and that we’ve started some kind of relationship. I hope you have a happy Mother’s Day.
Affectionately,
Ben
Then I went shopping for my mother. I was compensating, spending more money on gifts than I ever had before. I bought her a maroon-and-gray silk scarf because those were the Vassar colors and she was a loyal alumna. I sent her A Way in the World by V. S. Naipaul because she liked reading him in The New York Review of Books, and None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer because she had enjoyed Burger’s Daughter years before and was interested in South African politics. I went to the florist and ordered a huge bouquet of flowers: red, yellow, and white roses; irises, orchids, tulips, lilies.
At school, I spoke about evolving conceptions of motherhood during the course of American history. I discussed maternity leave, glass ceilings, and the case of a woman who sued her boss because she’d been fired for nursing on the job. I asked my students what they were planning to do for Mother’s Day.
“I’ll make my bed,” said one. “That will be my gift to my mother.”
“I don’t believe in Mother’s Day,” another student said. He had been reading The Communist Manifesto and had come to see everything through the eyes of Karl Marx. “It’s a creation of the Hallmark industry, and as such, it’s a capitalist tool.”
“You’re a tool,” said a girl he’d berated for shopping at Benetton. “You celebrate Valentine’s Day, don’t you?”
“That’s different.”
“Only because you want t
o get laid.”
“All right,” I said. “Enough.”
“Why are we talking about Mother’s Day?” one student asked. “We’re not in second grade. Are you going to give us crayons and ask us to make cards?”
“I’m not trying to treat you like children,” I said. “I just think it’s an interesting subject to discuss.”
“You think it’s a subject?”
“It is a subject. Mother’s Day as an American phenomenon—what it says about our economy and our culture.”
But what I really wanted to talk about was myself. I told my students about my Mother’s Day dilemma and how I’d tried to solve it.
“Why do you keep telling us about your life?” asked one student.
“Because it touches on larger issues.” Somewhere in my mind, somewhere small and receding, I realized I was talking in earnest. I’d lost my sense of humor. “For a while you guys were obsessed with my life. Don’t you remember what you asked me at the beginning of the year? ‘Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend?’ ”
“We don’t want to know about your life,” a student said. “We only want to know about your sex life.”
“That’s right,” a voice called out. This was Paul. “We only want to know about your birth mother if you’re having sex with her.”
The room rocked with laughter—at the image of me having sex with my birth mother, or perhaps of me having sex at all, their hopelessly earnest history teacher.
At home that night, I told Jenny I was having trouble getting through to my students.
“They’re teenagers, Ben. You can’t expect them to be interested in this.” She got up from the bed and brought back the chess set. “Here. This will relax you.”
“Chess?”
The first time I’d played, when I was eight, I’d reached across the board and simply taken my father’s pieces—his queen and castles, and then his king. “Beginner’s luck!” I’d said.
“You have to think to play chess,” I told Jenny. “That’s not going to relax me.”
She moved her pawn; then I moved mine. The window was open. A breeze blew across the room, billowing the Venezuelan flag, making it look like a huge life jacket. I raised an earring of Jenny’s to my ear. Maybe Susan would make a pair of earrings for her. Maybe she’d make a pair for my mother. I lay on my back and closed my eyes.
“It’s your turn,” Jenny said.
“You go for me.” I craned my neck, leaning my head off the edge of the bed so I could see the room upside down.
“What are you doing?”
I tried to read the titles on the bookshelves. I made out the name Oliver Sacks and the title An Anthropologist on Mars. Sacks had written about a surgeon with Tourette’s syndrome and a man for whom the world had frozen in the 1960s.
When I sat up, Jenny was bending over the chessboard. Brown curls hung in front of her face. She had a bishop in each hand—one black, one white—contemplating our respective moves.
“Jen,” I said, “there should be a mathematical constant—call it X—that represents the ratio of time I think about Susan to the time I actually spend with her. It would be huge.”
“Call it W,” Jenny said.
“W?”
“For ‘waste of time.’ ”
I could see that the subject was starting to wear on her. She hadn’t bargained for this kind of relationship.
“Call it O,” she said.
“O?”
“For ‘obsessed.’ Or S.”
“S?”
“For ‘self-absorbed.’ ”
True to my prediction, I didn’t return to synagogue services. But I thought about religion more and more. I would flip through the pages of the Bible—reading the verses and the Rashi commentary in the original Hebrew. On Fridays, I sometimes called my parents before the sun went down in New York and had my father bless me.
I introduced Jenny to traditional Jewish foods, such as smoked herring and gefilte fish. I removed my high school yearbook from storage and showed her pictures of me from the basketball team, loping down the court in my Hebrew-lettered uniform, with a monogrammed yarmulke, crocheted by a former girlfriend, bobby-pinned to my hair. I described the plays my high school class had performed—Hebrew versions of The Wizard of Oz, My Fair Lady, Oliver! and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I taught Tara “The Time Warp” in Hebrew.
“What are you doing?” Jenny asked.
“I’m teaching Tara the pelvic thrust.”
“In Hebrew?”
“Why not?”
I asked Jenny whether it was all right if we put a mezuzah on our front doorpost. “It would mean something to me, if it’s okay with you.”
A close childhood friend of Jenny’s had grown up in a Conservative Jewish home, and Jenny had helped her nail a mezuzah to her doorpost. Jenny had no objection to our having one, as long as she understood what it meant.
I told her about the end of enslavement in Egypt, when God passed over the houses of the Israelites and killed the Egyptians’ firstborns. That was what the mezuzah symbolized—the protection granted to a Jewish home.
“Except this isn’t a Jewish home,” Jenny said. “Only one of us is Jewish.”
“Which is why I’m asking if it’s all right with you. I won’t do it if you object.”
She didn’t object. But she was less interested in what the Torah said than in what meaning the tradition had for me. Why, now, did I want a mezuzah on my doorpost? “Does it have to do with Susan?”
“That’s part of it. You’d think meeting her would make me feel less Jewish. I could embrace Scottish culture—you know, raise sheep or play the bagpipes. But it’s made me feel more Jewish. I can’t take things for granted anymore.”
There was also, I said, the issue of her.
“Me?”
“Moving in with you, Jen. That makes things more serious between us. It may sound strange, but if you were Jewish, this might not concern me as much.”
“If it doesn’t concern you, then why let it come between us?”
“But it does concern me. That’s what I’m saying.”
She was sitting across from me on the kitchen counter, her legs swinging back and forth. Next to the window hung a mesh basket with onions in it. A piece of onion skin had fallen and settled in her hair. I reached over and brushed it away.
“It’s other things too,” I said. “I miss the ritual. Back in college, I was making a statement by dropping everything. Why follow the laws if you don’t believe in God? But I like the way I was raised. The sabbath, for example. It’s nice to have a day of rest.”
“You want to stop doing work on Saturdays?”
“No. But I wouldn’t mind celebrating the sabbath in some form.”
So Jenny and I agreed to an experiment. We’d have a sabbath dinner. There would be some ritual, but we wouldn’t overdo it—no worrying about the meat’s being kosher or about cooking the food before the sun went down. Although we’d sing songs and maybe make a few blessings, we wouldn’t overemphasize the role of God, since none of us believed in Him.
Tara too was receptive to the experiment, perhaps because these rituals seemed exotic to her. I’d shown her the mezuzah I’d bought, along with the Hebrew text to be inserted in it. She’d pretended to read the Hebrew, babbling in a foreign accent, making nonsense guttural sounds.
I gave Jenny a book about sabbath observance, and explained to her the origins of the sabbath—that the Israelites, when wandering through the desert, were commanded by God to rest on the seventh day, that God Himself had rested on the seventh day after creating the world. The Israelites had worked on the tabernacle in the desert, and the sabbath prohibitions were related to that work. Thirty-nine types of work done in the tabernacle were forbidden to Jews on the sabbath, as were all the corollaries to those types of work.
“What about turning electricity on and off?” Jenny asked. “They didn’t even have electricity back then.”
She was right, I said. Bu
t the prohibition against electricity was part of the larger prohibition against work. I told her it was forbidden to carry anything on public property; you couldn’t even wheel a baby carriage. Some men “wore” their keys by turning them into tie clips. I described the concept of eruv. If you were able to enclose public property—with a wall or even a piece of string—and if that enclosure complied with certain laws, then public property became private. My freshman year at Yale, several Jews had “purchased” Old Campus for a dollar so that they could carry on it. Even the eruv around Manhattan was accepted by some Orthodox Jews. Manhattan was an island, after all. It was surrounded by water.
“That sounds like a loophole,” Jenny said. “What’s the point of observing the sabbath if everyone’s looking for ways to get around it?”
There was the letter of the law, I said, and the spirit of the law. Everything depended on the reason behind it. If you could find a loophole in a law in order more fully to observe the sabbath, then why not use it? My father had put the lights on a timer so that they were on when we were awake and off when we were asleep; that way we wouldn’t have to sit in the dark. But he refused to use a timer for the stereo or TV. “There are loopholes,” I told Jenny, “and then there are loopholes.”
“What about the shabbes goy?” Jenny was fascinated by the idea that Jews could ask non-Jews to do work for them. What was the difference between doing work yourself and having someone else do it for you?
If you had a non-Jew purchase clothes for you, I said, if you had that person turn on the TV or CD player, then you surely weren’t adhering to the spirit of the sabbath. But there were good reasons to use a shabbes goy.
“Like what?”
“To wheel your infant to synagogue.”
“I don’t see the difference,” Jenny said. “If you’re asking someone to do work for you, you might as well do it yourself. And what difference does it make if the person’s not Jewish?”
Swimming Across the Hudson Page 9
