Eat the Damn Cake

I lose everything. Stamps, especially. I know I have enough stamps to last a lifetime, but they’re tucked away somewhere secret, somewhere clever that felt self-explanatory at the time. I lost my little proof of service slip from jury duty, and then I got another jury duty notice, but in Brooklyn this time, because Brooklyn and Manhattan don’t really talk, they just wave casually at each other across the water and go on with their day.

Last time, three apartments ago, when I was on the Upper West Side, I wanted to get picked for jury duty, like a good little homeschooler, to see how the court worked. The case settled out of court, and all I learned was that the halls were full of stereotypical looking Jewish lawyers walking alongside defendants who appeared to be exclusively young, black, and male. Sometimes they were talking with quiet intensity. One of the young men glanced up and smiled at me for a split second—his face was ridiculously sweet, his eyes unguarded.

I’ve changed since then—it’s that sneaky, horrible process of becoming more jaded and less curious, of thinking that your time is more valuable and of being able to more clearly picture any commute. I called the Manhattan county clerk about twenty times, trying to get evidence that I’d showed up. No one answered. Finally, on my fifth call of the day, a man picked up the phone.

“Hi!” I said, “I’m trying to get proof of service, since I already went to jury duty, but then I moved to Brooklyn and now I need to prove that I went in Manhattan, and I’m hoping that I can, because I went three years ago, and I think you don’t have to go again for six years or something like that?”

“When you’re given proof of service, it is a very important document,” he informed me sternly. “It is not something you can just put down and forget about. You need to be more responsible.” Obviously, he was not in a good mood. He had dealt with a lot of irresponsible people like me. He had dealt with them all day long.

And this is when my voice changed. “I understand,” I said in a breathier, higher, more excitable voice. “It’s just that I’ve moved a lot.”

“There really isn’t an excuse,” he countered.

“Okay,” I said, repentant and slightly childish. “But can you help me out and send me a new one?” My tone went beseeching. It was wringing its delicate hands. It was wearing a little pink dress.

(let’s say…this one. source)

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For some reason, all I want to do is watch documentaries about relationships. I’d probably read those books with titles like “The Three Love Types: What Who You Fall In Love With Says About Your Type ” if someone left them lying around. I watched Daniel Gilbert’s documentary about happiness, which was mostly about relationships, and a couple days later I watched one of Michael Apted’s documentaries in the “Married in America” series, and then I watched some random documentaries about being married that had narrators who were like, “So now we go to the labs at UC Davis to discover the MEANING OF LOVE AND LUST!” but when you get there it’s just some awkward scientist feeding a couple of confused-looking monkeys.

I got married without reading up too much on the whole thing. We were busy. We wrote our vows the day before. We were engaged after six months, married about a year after meeting. We said things in our vows like “you’re really hot…” Bear jokes around that I married him for his body. Which is, of course, true. There were other things, too, though. Something to do with his brain…I can’t remember…

Kidding.

We didn’t talk a lot about marriage before we did it. There are couples like us in the documentaries I watched, but things are never going great for them. They’re like, “We rushed into it, you know? We should have given it more time…We didn’t even know each other when we got married…”

Disembodied voice of documentarian: “And would you say that’s made things hard?”

Couple, looking at each other sadly, then back at camera: “Yeah…It’s made things really hard… Hard is putting it lightly…” (sad little chuckle)

That is what people say about marriage. It’s hard. It’s harder than you expect. You go in all innocent and rosy-cheeked and skipping and a year later, there you are, worn down on the front stoop, your hair unwashed, eating Doritos by the handful as you stare blankly into space.

(before)

(after)

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Rosh Hashanah is over.

In the parking lot, on my way into the synagogue, I stopped to talk to some congregants and I was being all professional and grown up and they were asking if this service would be very different from the one the day before, and I was explaining how we were doing a participatory Torah study and it should be very engaging and fun and then a bug landed on my shirt and everyone saw it and went “Oh!” I played it cool and laughed like it didn’t even matter because bugs don’t scare me because I’m too professional for that. I nonchalantly brushed it, which caused it to fall down my shirt, into the place where my bra was trying its very best but still mostly failing to give me some cleavage. The bug had lots of little legs, and wings, and they were all moving at once.

“Oh no!” everyone said. And then they paused politely.

“It should be really nice,” I said. “We’re chanting the morning blessings to this lovely new melody.”

“It just went down your shirt,” said a kind, stately gentleman.

“I know,” I said, smiling brightly. “Um.”

I turned around and leaned over and pulled my shirt down, and I prayed that no one was looking out of any of the sanctuary windows at that moment, because they would’ve seen a lot of cantorial bra.

God.

(the traditional Rosh Hashanah treat, no bugs allowed. source)

It made me grin, thinking about it in the middle of the silent amidah, where you can pray to yourself or read the traditional text (I never read the text, I still have no idea what it says, even though I’ve seen it hundreds and hundreds of times) midway through the service. I almost laughed aloud.

I get nervous about performing these services, even though I’ve been doing them for years. I hate that I get nervous. I think I should be more confident. I should revel in it. I should love the feel of everyone’s eyes on me. I should throw back my head and sing with my whole heart. I should lean into the mic. I should improvise with some little twirly things, like Christina Aguilera. I should probably lift my hands up and start gesturing.

I do, I do. I throw my head back sometimes. But sometimes I’m thinking, shit shit shit, you missed a word, what is wrong with you?? You should know this whole thing by memory already! Don’t mess up again! Oh god, here comes that long part with all the weird consonants. If you mess this up, you’ll probably just stop, and then there will be this really long, horrible silence, and everyone will be looking at you and thinking that you’re an idiot who can’t do your job and the board will already be thinking about holding auditions for a better cantor and you will ALWAYS ALWAYS remember this day as the worst, most humiliating day of your life. Shit shit shit.

I reminded myself that my friend just had her second baby. Yeah, second. She has two kids now. OK, so we don’t talk that much anymore. She’s way too busy. But I think about her a lot, like a dork, and how different from mine her life is. And how I can’t imagine being her, but I’m sort of jealous. And how she just had a BABY and I’m getting nervous about singing some Hebrew.

“You looked so grown up up there,” said my dad, after. He looked a little teary.

“I told him you’re still pretty immature,” said my mom, cracking herself up.

“True,” I said. “It’s all an illusion.”

But it’s not. I’m an adult now. I know. Not because of my job where I lead the congregation. Not because of my breasts which have reached their apologetic-looking but final stage of development. But because of something I just caught myself doing for the first time, over Rosh Hashanah: talking to kids like a lame grownup.

Yup. I did the thing that all grownups do. This is how it went:

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The restaurant where I met Bear for our first date has closed. In the three years that I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I saw restaurants wink out like dying bulbs on every block. I saw new ones burst into the old spaces. There was a quick current, a constant cycle. Only the fantastically innovative or legendary or totally necessary remain. And ours was never that. It was always only pretty good.

But still, it seems a little sad that New York has taken away our table, by the wall in the back. And that the entryway where I stood waiting to see him for the first time is now chipped and forlorn. In the city, life moves impatiently on and on. There isn’t time or money to maintain all of these nostalgic spots. The next thing is supposed to be better.

I met Bear for the first time three years ago, this week. He was bigger in person than I’d expected. But then, I hadn’t really tried to picture him. His nose was surprisingly delicate, and upturned. It made him look boyish and vulnerable. I always notice noses. A self-conscious habit, born of worrying about mine. I always vaguely thought that I would end up with a man whose nose would dwarf mine, so that mine would finally feel feminine and fine. Sort of like my friends would sometimes say that they would only marry a guy over 6’2″. So tall! (The one who insisted on this the most vehemently has been with a man who is a good several inches shorter than her for, what? Four years now?)

Isn’t it funny how we set these little rules for ourselves? Not the kind that matter enormously if they’re broken. But still, rules. I will never wear yellow. If I don’t get a book published that means I’ll have failed at life. I won’t gain any more weight. My eventual partner has to be really musical. 

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This post is a part of the Little Victories series. 

I love to drive.

I mean, obviously. I grew up in the suburbs where everything was a half an hour away, and there was no way in the world to get to your boyfriend’s house unless your mom drove you there or you walked all night alongside the road and almost stepped on a lot of bloody possums and risked your life at the hands of the men who your parents were pretty sure drove around late at night in NJ suburbs, waiting to steal a girl.

I got my license on my seventeenth birthday. It was sleeting and I had already aced the written exam. I drove around the course with a very serious gentleman who I hoped desperately to impress with my ability to brake fully at the stop sign.  I passed. The parallel parking gods smiled upon me. Just that once (later that year, in the minivan I borrowed constantly from my mom, they would cruelly punish me again and again).

(this was the car my mom had. A Toyota Previa. Amazingly ugly. Incredibly difficult to parallel park. source)

And then I was free! I was blaring Smashmouth, or whatever I listened to back then, and swinging around breathtaking corners and tearing off into the openness of the world.

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Last weekend I was at my parents’ house. My mom threw my brother a college graduation party. He went to conservatory for classical flute so he performed at the party, and it was really awesome. I am so proud of that kid.

Later that night, Bear and I were chilling in my childhood room, and suddenly, in a burst of inspiration/fearlessness, I decided to go through a few of my old journals, which are stacked in a big wooden trunk in the far corner.

It was a mistake, of course.

Who knows what I was thinking at any point between the ages of 13 and 22. Not me. Not my journal. But the whole time, it’s obvious I think I’m being very profound. Very, very profound. I make lots of observations about the way the light falls through the branches of the trees outside my window. And how this relates to the fleeting nature of existence. And then I go on to say  that so-and-so definitely still has a crush on me. I know, because he called and he said so. And the fact that I am bad at math is constantly making me cry. Also, oh my god, the color lavender is AMAZING. It is the BEST color. I am so depressed. Why do I have to be so mature in a world full of immature people?! Is my piano teacher mad at me for not practicing enough? Here is a list of all of my friends and their hair colors and their heights.

Two (related) themes that I didn’t expect and definitely didn’t remember emerged in my journals.

1. Outer space

2. Carl Sagan

Apparently, as a fourteen-year-old, I was obsessed with the idea of eventually ending up exploring outer space. I wrote all of these melodramatic things about how earth was too small for me, and I felt constrained by humanity, and the galaxy was swathed in mystery and my mom was being a pain and making me take this stupid class and it was all too much and I longed to be pushing the boundaries of human experience and knowledge, in space.

And a lot of this was probably because I was in love with Carl Sagan.

Yes. Carl Sagan.

(source)

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There are lots of rules about marriage. Some are big and self-explanatory, like don’t cheat, don’t keep destructive secrets, and don’t always eat the last bite of the buffalo chicken salad. That stuff is amazing, but marriage is about sharing.

It’s not about sharing your house with your friend who needs a place to stay, though.

That’s one of the smaller rules.

Along with remind your partner to call their mom and don’t constantly mix up their friends and then crack yourself up trying to sort them out.

My friend from college needed a place to stay for about a month, in between apartments. Automatically, I said she should stay with us. There’s enough space, so it felt weird not to offer. I mentioned it to Bear. “Of course,” he said. Which was what I expected. I thought it would be weird if he said no.

My friend moved in.

And then everyone else was like, “Oh my god! Are you okay with that?! What about Bear? It’s his home! He must be so upset! Are you guys okay?”

Everyone said that at the same time. They hadn’t even met my friend. Or they had, and they liked her, but they couldn’t believe that this was happening. That I’d allowed this whole other person to move into my home, while I was in it. With my husband. All of us. Together.

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