This is the phrase that sears through me as I stare at the rabbi who’s been hired to preside over my cousin’s small, graveside funeral. Minus the gray hair, he looks exactly the same as he did two decades ago, when he wasn’t a rabbi and we lay together partially clothed one late summer night in a neighborhood playground that I had loved as a child.
“Give me head,” he had said after about 20 minutes of making out in the playground’s sand pit unde...
“You want me to give you head?” I was a barely 19-year-old, conflicted Orthodox Jewish girl, the type who wore long skirts for synagogue and short ones for drinking at bars that let me get away with my fake ID. I was also a virgin who hadn’t yet solved the problem of branching out sexually while keeping what I would later recognize to be a rather idiosyncratic covenant with God.
He undid his belt, clearly disregarding the question mark at the end of my sentence. “That would be nice.”
When my husband and I arrive at the cemetery for my cousin’s funeral, my mother greets me by brandishing a pamphlet with Jewish prayers and pointing out the rabbi’s name listed at the bottom. Though she knew nothing about the playground, she clearly remembers the guy waiting on her driveway for her daughter, who always zoomed out of the house without introducing him to her parents. And look at him now, a pillar of the Jewish community!
I give my mother a “wow, that’s so crazy!” facial expression before sitting down next to my husband, who sits quietly in his seat and behaves with the solemnity that one expects from funeral-goers. It’s really not the time to tell him that this rabbi who stands before us somber and dignified in his dark suit was the same person who initiated me into the art and science of the blow job. Feeling way too giddy and distracted to do things like lovingly remember my cousin and contemplate mortality, I instead think funereally inappropriate thoughts such as: Does the rabbi recognize me and does he think I still look good and does he remember or even realize that he broke my heart?
I should back up: The summer before my second year of college, I moved back home to take a job as a performing arts counselor at a suburban, Southern California Jewish day camp. During the counselors’ orientation, we all sat around in one of those big get-to-know-you circles and I had immediately zeroed in on the head counselor. He was two years older than me, with sexy wire-rimmed glasses, a lean runner’s body, a piercing intelligence, a mischievous smile and a gift for charming females of all ages. Having had prior experience with Camp Casanovas I fancied myself wise and cynical. No way was I going to like that guy!
For about two weeks, I couldn’t stop staring at him when I thought he wasn’t looking. At the early morning counselor-only meetings, he would demonstrate his leadership skills and I stuffed my face with doughnuts while trying to avoid direct eye contact. When we would pass each other in the hallways, he would squeeze my shoulder or brush his arm against my waist and smile at me in ways that made me feel completely transparent. So I tried to think thoughts of resistance. You don’t think I see your game? I’m no sucker!
Famous last words, as they say.
Finally, he showed up at my house uninvited one day after work. Did I want to go for a run? I wasn’t a runner but I said yes and he waited several miles, until I was sweaty and out-of-breath, to kiss me on the lips and tell me that I’m pretty.
The service begins and the rabbi recites several Hebrew prayers. I marvel at his pronunciation and how once upon a time, I spoke better Hebrew than he did. I decide to stare at the surrounding graves in the cemetery, figuring this will keep me focused on the fact that I came here to mourn the passing of my cousin. It’s hard not to look directly at him, though, so when I do, I am 19 years old, lying in that playground with an aching jaw and wondering why my hair feels so sticky, as if coated with raw egg.
“Too much teeth.” This is all he said as he zipped up his fly.
“Oh, sorry.” I could do nothing but finger my stiff strands of hair, wondering how long I’m going to have to spend in the shower.
“It’s late. We should go.”
Too much teeth. The words lingered as he drove me home in silence, forming the genesis of a mantra that would frequently misguide me as I transformed myself into an Everything But Girl. Everything But Girls figured they could still qualify as good Orthodox Jews as long as they waited to have vaginal intercourse with the type of guys who would eventually marry them.
If you do not give good head, then you do not deserve to be held in bed. The mantra made a catchy little song-and-dance number that I performed in front of bathroom mirrors during my early 20s, where I applied mascara and lipstick and made other preparations to hang out with the kind of boys I would never marry.
The able-bodied among us at the funeral take turns shoveling dirt over my cousin’s grave. When it’s my turn, I feel awkward and clumsy in my high-heeled sandals. I look at the rabbi who stands ceremoniously off to the side. It irritates me, this wanting him to realize who I am, even though it’s been almost 20 years and I’m well aware that I might not have played as formative a role in his psycho-sexual development as he did in mine. But I’m dying to know what he remembers. Does he remember how he dumped me after the night on the playground, asking for a ride home after work and saying he just wanted to be friends? Does he remember how people stopped whispering when I walked by them at work, greeting me with knowing smirks? Does he remember the end-of-camp pizza party for counselors, when everyone received a parting gift and mine was a purple lace G-string? How one of his friends, amid the hoots and whistles, said, “Dude, she must be a really good Orthodox Jew.”
I’m shoveling dirt on my cousin’s grave, humbled by the fact that these memories have the power to strip away the years of my life; to reduce me to that conflicted 19-year-old girl who hurled the G-string into a pitcher of Coke and stalked out of the pizza party. I hand the shovel to someone else. Soon, the rabbi will say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Yitgaddal veyitkaddash shmeh rabba. His Hebrew, though spoken in an Americanized accent, is flawless.
“It’s just a joke.” He had followed me out of the party, having retrieved the Coke-soaked G-string. “Everyone’s just having fun.”
I had turned my back on him and walked away, but I also took the G-string home and hid it in my underwear drawer. I would ruminate over this particular piece of lingerie two months later when I sat in synagogue for Yom Kippur services, beating my chest for all the sins I had personally and collectively committed. Within the liturgy, I tried to find the stanzas closest to my state of affairs and came up with: For the sin of a confused heart. Because there were no stanzas that declared: For the sin of being branded the camp slut. For the sin of falling hard for some guy where you could predict the ending and he made your jaw ache anyway. For the sin of using too much teeth.
After the funeral, I watch the rabbi head toward the hearse-like vehicle parked near the gravesite. Meanwhile my mother watches me watch the rabbi. “Are you going to talk to him?”
“Mom …” I bat away her question, feeling for the umpteenth time today 19 years old.
But I knew that if I didn’t say hello I would regret it so I sprinted over just as he opened the door to the car.
I tap him ever so briefly on his shoulder. “Hiiiiiiiiii.”
“Hi.” His smile is equal parts friendly and totally puzzled. “You look really familiar.”
I say my name and note the look in his eye; it’s an unmistakable glimmer of recognition but of what narrative exactly I do not know. Has he now zoomed back to the early 1990s, inwardly wincing at the way I had grazed him? Or is he remembering how we hooked up again two years later in Israel, when I studied abroad in Jerusalem and he had begun his first year of rabbinical school? How he made me dinner one night in his apartment before getting out a condom, which I dismissed in favor of proving to him just how toothless I could be? Or what about the last time we saw each other in Los Angeles, some three years after that night on the playground, when I diligently swallowed and asked, “What are we anyway? What is this?”
He gives me a brief hug and asks if we can hug again. He says, “Wow, it’s definitely you,” and I’m flattered by his soft, seemingly nostalgic tone, as if the sight of me has caused him to time travel in the exact same giddy, unhinged way I find myself visiting the past.
We talk for about 10 minutes, an exchange otherwise known as: Prove How Successful and Together You’ve Become to Someone Who Knew You Then. Almost immediately, he pulls out his phone to show me pictures of his wife and children. I point out my husband standing in the distance, talking to my relatives. He tells me he has his own congregation that just spent millions of dollars renovating a historic building. I tell him I’m a writer and he says, “Good for you!” in the manner of a distant relative who used to pinch my cheeks when I was 6. But then he says, “You will be Googled,” and his tone transports me to the hallways of the summer camp building, where he once whispered in my ear that “there were things he would like to do with me.”
Really? Are you actually flirting with me at my cousin’s funeral? Or is it impossible for me to truthfully interact with the person you are now?
I’m smiling politely at this middle-aged man with a family who had apparently channeled his inner Casanova into service as a congregational rabbi. But all I see is that charismatic boy who seduced me with a few choice compliments and his aura of ultimate unavailability. And I see that existentially tormented girl who struggled to locate her true self while trying to hang onto her Orthodox Jewish upbringing. Looking at him, I feel that girl’s shame in botching a sex act and getting dumped and believing she’s a whore. But what really gets me is that I can still feel her exhilaration at having attracted this guy in the first place; at how she felt the first time he told her she was pretty.
He gives me his business card and we each say we’ll look the other up on Facebook. (We don’t.) We say goodbye and already I’m cataloging all the things we didn’t say. I didn’t tell him, for example, that I might have paid him some sort of homage in losing my virginity to a guy who got his Ph.D. in Jewish history before deciding he wanted to be a rabbi. Or that I made the difficult decision to no longer be an Orthodox Jew at the age of 26 after breaking up with a boyfriend who liked to criticize my increasingly lax synagogue attendance. Or that I married a man who didn’t fit my pattern of bad boys and dysfunctional relationships that often revolved around religion or how I came to understand that I wasn’t a whore but merely a girl terrified to decide how best to grow up.
I walk over to my husband, who now waits for me by our car. He knows all the things I didn’t say to the rabbi and then some. I remember this as we leave the cemetery.
Shares