“Yes, Tara?”
“Do I have to believe in God to have my bat mitzvah?”
“It’s not a requirement, no,” Rabbi said gently. “Do you want to talk it out?”
That was a relief. Somehow not having to decide on the spot made me more willing to give it a chance. I had a thousand more questions, but I sat helpless, unable to put them into words. Rabbi seemed to sense my problem.
“Find comfort in your doubts, Tara,” he said. “Only the weak are absolutely sure of everything.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
It was an interesting idea. But was it true? I mean, I was absolutely sure that two plus two made four. That wasn’t weakness. And how was something as big and scary as not knowing if I believed in God supposed to be comforting?
“This is what you meant about dialectics, isn’t it?” I said slowly. “That doubts are like questions.”
“Precisely, my dear.”
“Hmm,” I said.
So it was okay to have questions, even about something so important. That was reassuring, I guess. It didn’t make me any less good, or strong. It didn’t make me any less Jewish. I didn’t have to know everything. I just had to keep my heart and mind open. I could do that.
Maybe I did believe—or could. I wanted to. I could try. And maybe that was good enough. For a while.
ara,” Mum called. “Telephone, for you.”
I’d heard it ring a moment earlier, but I figured it had to be for Mum or Daddy or, more likely, was a telemarketer.
Or, as it turned out—Sheila Rosenberg. Who, as Ben-o would say, kept turning up like a bad penny. I had no idea what to say to her.
“Hey, Sheila,” I said, putting some fake enthusiasm into it, mostly because Mum thought Sheila was “lovely” and because I’d promised Rebecca I would continue to “try.” It had been over two weeks since her bat mitzvah.
“What’s new?” I asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to be calling me.
“I was wondering, would you and Rebecca like to come for a sleepover tomorrow?”
Me and Rebecca?
I was about to tell her she’d have to ask Rebecca herself, when she laughed and said, “Actually, Rebecca already said yes, this morning. But I wanted to ask you personally.”
“Wh-why me?” I said, sounding rude to my own ears. “I mean, thanks and all, but—”
“I know you and I haven’t always gotten along,” Sheila said hurriedly, “but I like you, and I was happy you came to my bat mitzvah … and now that we share a best friend, I thought …”
I literally bit my tongue. I know, I know, I told myself. I had no right to be jealous. After all, I had two best friends, or at least I used to. Lately I felt like I was on the verge of losing them both.
But I was jealous. I still couldn’t believe Rebecca had been besting it up with Sheila Rosenberg for so long, right under my nose. How had I not seen it? Now they were walking to school together, just the two of them, because Rebecca’s block was “on Sheila’s way.” Whatever that meant. I was on the way, too, but I got the feeling Rebecca had been trying to keep us apart on purpose. Separate. Orderly. I should have been grateful to Sheila for reaching out, but I didn’t trust her. Was she genuinely being nice to me or just doing this to get closer to Rebecca?
My two best friends, and their other best friends—it was starting to get crowded. I pondered which was worse—being the third wheel at a sleepover involving my own best friend or staying home imagining all the meaningful bonding they were doing without me. I knew I would be unhappy if I went and unhappy if I didn’t.
In fact, I pondered it for so long, Sheila cleared her throat and asked if I was still there.
“Okay,” I said.
“You’ll come? Cool!” Sheila said. “We’ll go to my house right after Hebrew school. My dad’s making burgers out on the patio.” She said this as if it was the height of sophistication, this rule-breaking barbecue in the winter.
“I’ll be there,” I said. “And, Sheila?”
“What?”
“Thanks.”
“See you tomorrow,” she said.
“On a school night?” Mum asked when I told her at dinner.
“No school Friday. Teacher workshops, remember?”
“Right,” she said. “Well, I don’t see why not! Sheila is a lovely girl.”
“So you’ve mentioned.”
At school the next day, Sheila was wearing a red-and-white-striped shirt and a cute new bracelet with tiny red and white crystals, like little diamonds.
“When’d you get that?” Rebecca asked at lunch, touching the crystal bracelet.
“Pretty, right?” said Sheila. “It’s new.”
“But it’s not your birthday or anything.”
“And it’s not purple,” I added.
Sheila shrugged.
Later, after Hebrew school, she ducked into the girls’ bathroom with a small duffel bag. When she came out, she was wearing a different top, purple with small white flowers.
“Why’d you change?” I asked.
“No reason,” she said, zipping up her coat. “Let’s go. I’m starving.”
Sheila lived in a brownstone, which was like a town house. It was only three blocks away from my building, but I hadn’t been there since her birthday party sleepover in third grade, when Missy Abrams had an asthma attack and peed the bed all in the same night. A hundred years ago, the whole house belonged to one family, but now it was separated into small apartments. The Rosenbergs had the ground floor and the basement and the little garden out back, where Mrs. Rosenberg grew runty tomatoes and herbs like basil and parsley. Mum once gave her a cutting of cilantro from our kitchen window, so she used to grow that, too—except Sheila had that genetic thing where cilantro tastes like rusty soap to her, so Mrs. Rosenberg got rid of it. I kind of felt sorry for Sheila about that, because cilantro is delicious and nothing like rust or soap. She was also allergic to peanuts. Meena Auntie says only Americans can afford to have food allergies, and that’s why no one in India is allergic to wheat or corn or peanuts or cilantro.
“We’re home!” Sheila called, kicking the duffel bag into the back of the hall closet.
“Back here,” her father called from the yard, where he was standing over the grill in a bulky sweater and wool cap, the kind Aravind Uncle would still be wearing in May.
“Is he barbecuing?” Rebecca asked, incredulous. “It’s practically snowing.”
“He always makes burgers on the grill. All year. It’s kind of a family tradition.”
“Where’s your mom?” I asked.
“Away,” Sheila said. “Visiting my aunt Julie for the week. It’s her birthday. They’re having a girls’ weekend at the spa.” The way she said it was more like “spaaahh,” like she was making fun of them. Like she felt hurt being left out.
“How do you girls like your burgers?” Mr. Rosenberg called through the kitchen window.
With mango pickle on top, I thought, but I doubted he’d know what I was talking about.
“Medium,” Rebecca called back.
“Medium rare for me, please, Mr. Rosenberg,” I said.
“Medium rare is ready now, so just grab yourself a plate, Tara. You, too, Rebecca—yours’ll be up in a minute.” I noticed he didn’t say, Call me Avery.
“Make mine well-done,” Sheila reminded him.
“One burnt offering, coming up,” Mr. Rosenberg joked. Sheila rolled her eyes.
The phone rang and Sheila ran to answer it. It was Mrs. Rosenberg. I saw Sheila slip off the red crystal bracelet and slide it into her pocket. “I have friends over for dinner,” I heard her say. “The girls from Hebrew school—Rebecca and Tara.”
“Feinstein,” she said quietly, after a pause.
“You’re up, Sheels,” Mr. Rosenberg called. Sheila handed him the phone through the window, and he handed her a plate. She sat down at the kitchen table with us and folded her hands to say a bl
essing. I was halfway through my burger already, but I put it down and stopped chewing while she said it. I swallowed and joined in on the “Amen.” What’s weird was that there were no adults at the table making her do it. It was like she wanted to. Her dad was still outside talking on the phone.
Sheila took the bracelet out of her pocket. “You wanna wear it?” she asked Rebecca.
“Okay,” Rebecca said. She slipped it on her wrist to admire it, then slipped it off and handed it back to her. “It’s pretty.”
“You can have it.”
“No, thanks,” Rebecca said, seeming surprised by the offer.
Sheila shrugged and put it back in her pocket before her dad came back inside with the tray piled high with more burgers and veggie kabobs.
After dinner, Mr. Rosenberg excused Sheila from doing the dishes, but she did have to take out the garbage. Then we went downstairs to Sheila’s room, which was—surprise—purple. Purple walls, purple carpet, purple overstuffed armchair, purple bedspread, purple lampshade. The only not-purple things in the whole room were six roller-ball pens, the nice kind, from Japan, laid out neatly on her desk.
“I love these pens!” said Rebecca. “My mom won’t buy them for me, though, because I’d just lose them.”
“Have one,” said Sheila.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Won’t your mom be upset?” I asked Sheila. “Those are expensive.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sheila said. “She’ll never notice.”
Rebecca suggested that we all get into our pj’s and brush our teeth right away, so we could stay up as late as we wanted and fall asleep whenever. It would never occur to Rebecca to go to bed without brushing her teeth. We started to strip down right in the middle of the room. I stopped midsleeve when Rebecca nudged me, pointing with her chin at Sheila, who was pretending to be really interested in something on her desk. Keeping her back to us, she pulled on a flannel nightgown over her clothes and proceeded to undress backward, unhooking her bra—an honest-to-goodness bra—and pulling it out one sleeve, then wriggling out of her pants. It seemed like an awful lot of work. Why didn’t she just take off her clothes first, like a normal person? I guessed she was self-conscious of her boobs, because she had them and Rebecca and I didn’t. I did catch myself stealing looks in her direction and wondered what it was like to have them. Mainly they just looked uncomfortable. I finished putting on leggings and Daddy’s old Tom Waits T-shirt that reached past my knees. Rebecca looked like she was getting ready to go out for a run instead of to bed, in an expensive-looking athletic jersey and matching track shorts.
“I’ll be right back,” Sheila said.
Rebecca brushed her hair and did ten sit-ups, but Sheila still didn’t come back. We got our toothbrushes from our overnight bags and went to brush our teeth. The bathroom door was slightly open, so we pushed on it, not realizing Sheila was inside. We stood staring with our mouths open for what must have only been a second, but it seemed longer. Sheila had her hair up in a top ponytail and was using a hand mirror with a long plastic handle to see the back of her head reflected in the big mirror over the sink. And here’s the thing—underneath all that black curly hair was a massive bald patch, red and angry, as if it had been scratched raw. Looking into the hand mirror, she reached up and found a few stray strands that she twirled twice around her finger and yanked out, hard, with a sick, ripping sound. There was hair all over the sink.
“What are you doing?” Rebecca shrieked.
Sheila jumped and dropped the hand mirror on the counter, where it clattered a few times but didn’t break. She hastily took down the ponytail. Then she wiped up the hair around the sink with a tissue and buried it deep in the bathroom garbage. She walked out without saying anything, her face red. Rebecca and I brushed our teeth in absolute silence.
When we came back, Sheila was sitting on her bed with her head down and her eyes lowered.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the hair-pulling fight we’d had in the beginning of the school year. I had a terrible thought. I sat down on the bed next to Sheila, trying to work up the nerve to ask.
“Did I do that?” I whispered, finally.
Sheila looked at me in surprise. “What, this? No.” She bit her lip. “I do it to myself.”
“But why?”
“I really don’t know,” she said.
After that, though, she smiled cheerfully and put on a stretchy headband, as if nothing had happened.
“Who wants to tell ghost stories before bedtime?” she said. She grabbed a flashlight and turned it on under her chin and then turned out the overhead lights. She really did look spooky for a second, with that pale skin and black hair and those eyes, but then she started to giggle, and that cracked up Rebecca, and then I started laughing, too, and pretty soon we forgot that we’d just learned that Sheila pulls her own hair out of her head when nobody’s looking. I didn’t know any ghost stories, though, so I listened to Sheila tell a lame one about a woman who always wore a wide velvet ribbon around her neck, which turned out to be because her head wasn’t really attached to her body. On her wedding night, her new husband begged her to take off the ribbon, and when she finally did, her head rolled to the floor and she died for real. Then Rebecca told a camp story about a man named Cropsey, who got away with murdering his whole family and liked to reenact the event once a year by murdering campers and counselors who reminded him of his children and his wife. Rebecca swore it was true, but I pointed out that the camp would have been shut down ages ago, and besides, if everybody knew Cropsey’s name, how come he wasn’t in jail, and why was he allowed to run a camp? Rebecca said I spoiled the story.
“Whatever,” I said.
After that, Sheila turned the lights back on and said, “Let’s do manicures,” and I knew it was because she’d gotten spooked by the Cropsey story and didn’t want to be in the dark anymore. So she and Rebecca painted each other’s toe-nails pink. I didn’t feel like it, so I just picked up a book from Sheila’s shelf and started to read, curled up in the purple armchair. Then I closed my eyes and pretended I was asleep. I felt like the intruder, even though Rebecca was my best friend.
Rebecca and Sheila stayed up a while longer, whispering and laughing, but not in a mean way, so I knew they weren’t talking about me or excluding me on purpose, but I still felt lonely.
After they had been quiet for a while, I heard Rebecca whisper, “Why do you do that thing with your hair?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” Sheila said.
“Can I see?” Sheila lifted up her hair in back. Rebecca sucked in her breath. “You shouldn’t do that,” she said.
“I know,” Sheila said quietly. “I can’t help it.”
“Do your parents know?”
“Kind of,” she said. “Not really. Not exactly.”
“Maybe if you put something on it …”
“Like what?”
“Like if you used Vaseline or something. Maybe you couldn’t do it then—too slippery.”
“Let’s try that,” Sheila said.
Opening one eye, I saw her pad to the bathroom and come back with a small jar.
“Yuck,” I heard her say. “That feels gross. Forget it. It’s not like I can go to school with Vaseline all over my head.”
“I’ve never seen you do that in school,” Rebecca said.
But then I remembered how she was always twirling her hair around her finger. Was that what she was really doing? I hoped nobody else noticed. That information could be really embarrassing in the wrong hands. Ryan Berger’s, for example.
After that, it got quiet, because Rebecca fell asleep, so Sheila got up and took the book from my hand and pulled a blanket over me where I lay curled up, her purple teddy bear as my pillow. “Good night, Tara,” she whispered, before she turned out the light and went to bed herself. When I woke up the next morning, I found the book tucked in my overnight bag with a note saying I could borrow it and give it back
to her in school next week. There was even a bookmark holding my page.
Mr. Rosenberg made pancakes and let Sheila have a cup of real coffee, although it was more milk than coffee, judging by the color. I had a hot chocolate, only it was the instant kind with shriveled-up marshmallows that spring to life in hot water, not the real, shaved-chocolate kind that Daddy makes, which is the most delicious thing in the world, like drinking melted candy. Daddy sprinkles a little cinnamon on it, too, or sometimes a dash of chili pepper. We eat everything spicy at home. Nothing was spicy at Sheila’s house, so by the time I got home, I was on a tear for some masala peanuts, devouring half a bag before Mum told me to stop or I was going to spoil my lunch.
Feeling lonely, I called Ben-o.
“How was Casa Rosenberg?” he asked. “Is everything purple inside?”
I laughed. “Yeah, mostly,” I said. I decided not to tell him about Sheila’s hair thing. It was a weird thing to know about somebody, and a weirder thing to gossip about. It would be like making fun of someone for something they can’t help, like the shape of their ears, or a funny birthmark. I knew she wouldn’t do it if she could help it, so I kept quiet, but keeping quiet about it also made me kind of not able to think of anything else to say. Ben-o finally said, “Are you still there?”
“Yeah, just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Nothing. It was fun. Sheila’s dad is really nice. Do you want to hang out at the park?” I said, all in one breath. “Shoot some hoops?”
“Can’t,” Ben-o said. “I’m meeting Jenna for chess practice.”
“Oh,” I said, closing my eyes. Then I had an idea. “Why don’t you play chess in the park?”
“Too cold,” Ben-o said.
He was right—it was way too cold for sitting in the park—but I was annoyed anyway.
“Whatever,” I said. “Have fun.”
“Tara—wait.”
I listened without saying anything, but I didn’t hang up. I could hear him scratching his crew-cut head.
“Do you want to come over later? Watch a movie?”
“Maybe,” I said. Movie night was our Saturday thing.
My Basmati Bat Mitzvah Page 12
