And again, she touched it. The tabletop. No alarms. No sirens. No one to wrestle her to the ground.

  “Do you … work here?” Sally asked.

  “Volunteer. I’d say it’s altruistic but it’s business. The peo­ple who come to see this, sometimes they turn into my cus­tomers. Dealers or collectors. It’s just smart.”

  Sally looked at her. She had a face that seemed at once taut and wrinkled, like someone who had spent a whole lot of time outside, under a weak sun, getting blown around in the cold. Not a speck of makeup. Not a piece of jewelry. She was, in her way, as plain as the furniture.

  “You mean, some of this belongs to you?” Sally heard a note of eagerness in her own voice. I could buy it, she was thinking. She had been born to wealth, raised in wealth, and yet she had never felt this way about an object. How much could it all cost? A table? A chair?

  “Oh no.” The woman laughed, this time without restraint. “No, no. I appreciate it, but I’m not stupid. You don’t hold on to Shaker just ’cause it’s pretty. I sold that”—she pointed at the long table—­“to a dealer called Russell, in Westchester. And that”—she gestured across the room, to a rocking chair or a smaller, square table, Sally couldn’t tell—“to a lady up in Boston. There’s not that many people who specialize in Shaker, and they know all the collectors. Shaker’s a very par­ticular commitment. Not something your average Joe would just make up their mind to buy, on the spur of the moment.”

  “Because it’s expensive?” Sally asked, feeling like an idiot.

  “You could say!” The woman laughed again. “Not some­thing a college student could afford,” she added, almost comfortingly.

  This college student could, Sally thought, but she only nod­ded, and held out her hand.

  “My name is Sally,” she said.

  15

  Wonder of Wonders

  In which Lewyn Oppenheimer introduces a group of muscular Christians to the Seder ritual

  Room 308 in Clara Dickson Hall might have lacked a beer can pyramid or a miasma of cannabis, but apart from that it was pretty typical for the temporary living space of two randomly selected college-­aged boys. Jonas, for example, had stuck a poster on the wall during move-­in and then forgot­ten about it as it puckered and drooped and folded forward. Lewyn had brought home a plant on a whim, declined to water it, and failed to notice when it died. They both put their stuff down on the floor when they were finished with it—­that was what the floor was for—­and neither of them saw the overflow of their shared trash bin as a cue to empty it. It was true that Jonas made his bed every morning—that was a mission thing, he’d once explained—but the sheets on both beds were dingy and slippery, and there was a film of grime over every surface. They lived, in other words, inside a tableau of discarded clothing, candy wrappers, and shoes that were often parted from their mates and bearing spring mud. Back in November, Jonas had met a very pretty girl named Lauren, from Arizona, and though he refrained from overnighting at Kappa Delta, Lauren’s sorority, he came back later and later at night as the winter term wore on, sometimes slipping into the long bed opposite Lewyn’s far nearer to the next day than the day before. When Lewyn woke at his nor­mal time to get himself to art history, Jonas would be there: face to the wall, forearm protruding from the strange long underwear he wore. (For months Lewyn had been under the impression that this sartorial item was an ordinary under­shirt, paired with some style of long undershorts favored by people from the rustic lands of the West. The true nature of the thing had been revealed in one of their conversations on Mormonism, ancillary to that first one, in which such top­ics as evangelism, cosmology, handcarts, and sacred garments had all been touched upon.)

  Squalor aside, Lewyn did feel fortunate to be living with Jonas, and on those (increasingly rare) occasions they were both in the room—Jonas cramming for his bovine anatomy midterm, say, and Lewyn drafting an art history paper—they fell easily into their way of being together. After that first magical narrative in the fall it had taken weeks for Lewyn to stop thinking of his roommate as some kind of mystic, an ecstatic possessed of occult knowledge and a personal rela­tionship with angels, but gradually he had managed to draw a kind of curtain around the topic of spirituality in general, and Jonas’s religion in particular, and move on into the quo­tidian business of cohabitation. He and Jonas might repre­sent different political inclinations, different prospects (both career and celestial), and opposite ends of the country, but they were both polite people who spoke kindly to each other as a rule, especially in the morning when they were most often in the same place at the same time. Not infrequently, they even went for breakfast together at North Star, where they were sometimes joined by Jonas’s vet school friends and new fraternity brothers.

  “Lewyn, my roommate,” Jonas always said. He said it the first time he introduced them, and the fourth.

  Lewyn wondered if a few of these guys might also be Mormons. He didn’t yet possess the expertise he later would, to tell such a thing without asking. He did recognize that they were all some version of Christ-follower, but the distinctions among even the commonplace denominations were a terrible blur. (The Walden School had indoctrinated him with the no­tion that spirituality was a matter of self-definition, and apart from one wildly out-of-place guest speaker the previous fall, no Walden teacher had ever attempted to impart the actual beliefs of actual Christian people. As a result, Lewyn could barely have distinguished a Baptist from a Catholic. Besides, for all of its vaunted “diversity,” Walden students and faculty were overwhelmingly Jewish.) With Jonas’s friends he began to observe, if not exactly understand, the commonalities and the distinctions among them. One boy said grace before con­suming his breakfast pastry; another did not. One boy was enjoying robust relationships with several willing girls while another had allowed himself only “side hugs” with his long­time girlfriend and presumptive future wife back in Virginia. Several of Jonas’s fraternity brothers were heavy drinkers, and one, an ice hockey player from Milwaukee, was so clearly compromised that his fraternity brothers had already (and unsuccessfully) attempted an intervention.

  But they were nice enough to Lewyn, and as the weeks passed they began to present an almost uniform interest in him, or at least in one aspect of him. Not one of them, it had become clear, had ever had occasion to talk—­that is, really talk—­with a representative of his people.

  “So, like,” said the Virginian, whose name was Mark, “I can’t help but notice that you’re eating bacon there, Lewyn. Isn’t that, like, against the rules?”

  Lewyn explained that his family was not Orthodox, nor even particularly observant. “We’re more cultural Jews.” What he meant was: dutiful observation of a couple of hol­idays, correctly sliced Nova from Russ & Daughters, and an extremely broad interpretation of Tikkun olam. But what he actually said was: “There are all different kinds of Judaism, you know.”

  Of course they didn’t know, and unfortunately they were all ears. So he had to give them the basics:

  Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist. Also nothing at all, but still Jewish.

  And how could you still be Jewish but also nothing at all?

  Lewyn, by now mentally exhausted, merely shrugged. You just could. People just were. It wasn’t like you turned in a card or something. “A lot of the families I grew up with were Jewish but they also had Christmas trees.”

  This the boys absolutely could not process.

  “Are you serious? Christmas is Jesus Christ’s birthday.”

  Lewyn very much doubted this to be true, or at any rate the whole truth of the matter, but things had been going pretty well so far, and it was nice to be in a group of guys, pounding smoothies and shooting the breeze.

  “Okay, but it’s also peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” (At Walden the lyric had actually been changed to “goodwill toward people.”) You didn’t have to be a Christian to appre­ciate that.

  “But dude! O Holy Night! Like, you have your own holy night, right? Passover?”

  Lewyn shrugged. “Jesus’s last supper was a Passover Seder, you know.”

  From the look of them, they did not know.

  “You guys.” Jonas was shaking his head. “You should have gone on a mission. What the heck did you learn in Sunday school?”

  “Whole lot of Antichrist,” said Jim. “And how I was going to hell if I was ‘unnatural.’ Nothing about Jewish Passover being the Last Supper.”

  “Hey, can we go with you?” the Virginian said. “It’s soon, right?”

  Lewyn looked at him. There were so many things wrong with this question. He didn’t know where to begin.

  Passover, he realized, probably was imminent. It had a way of moving around the calendar which Lewyn had never really understood, but it was (duh!) always close to Easter, and Easter was soon—­the following Sunday, he was pretty sure. He’d had no intention of attending a Seder at Cornell. As a family they’d always gone to his mother’s sister on the Upper East Side for a massive catered do. Still, none of the Oppenheimer triplets, he was quite sure, knew the words to “Dayenu” beyond the word “Dayenu” itself (which, come to think of it, Lewyn could only vaguely define). He hadn’t been near any of the Jewish organizations on campus and had never once considered muscling in on one of the Seders that were surely being planned for Cornell’s many Jewish students. Was he supposed to invite himself now? And with four or five muscular Christians in tow, to boot?

  “I wasn’t planning on going,” he stalled.

  “Why not?” Jonas said. He looked kind of excited. “You should go! It would be so cool. We’d love to come.”

  But I didn’t invite you, Lewyn thought.

  Obviously they didn’t understand that you couldn’t just walk into a Seder. There were memberships and wait-lists and fees and probably approvals of some kind. Or wait … was that even true? Maybe it was only true of Manhattan, where you had to join a temple, get a ticket for High Holy Days, join a standby list. The Oppenheimers were members of Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, but they had never, you know, gone, apart from that. “I haven’t made any arrange­ments,” he shrugged.

  “Well, make ’em, dude,” said Jim, who was looking a lot better after his smoothie and breakfast sandwich. “My mom is going to have a total fit when I tell her I’m going to a Passover. You should have heard her about all the Jews up here. She wanted me to go to Michigan. I said, Yo, there’s lots of Jews at Michigan, too. Cornell’s the fucking Ivy League!” He laughed. The others, to their credit, looked uncomfort­able. A moment later they took their trays and departed, leaving Lewyn in a not entirely unpleasant state of excite­ment. I mean: Why not?

  He thought of what Harrison might say. He thought of what Sally might say. But really, where was the harm? Would it be so terrible to actually go out and join a club that he kind of already belonged to? No one back in Brooklyn had called to ask whether he was planning to come home for the Oppenheimer Seder. And anyway, wasn’t he here, at college, to partake of that wondrous cross-cultural diversity he’d been raised to revere, indoctrinated to revere at Walden Upper (and Middle, and Lower)? What could be more cross-­culturally fecund than bringing a gaggle of Christian frat bros to an ancient ritual delineating the “special rela­tionship” between God and His Chosen? It was almost, when you thought about it, a chance for a bit of Tikkun olam. And how hard could it really be to find an adventur­ous and open-­minded congregation on campus with a few Haggadahs to spare?

  Not hard at all, it turned out. A belated look through the spiritual (subset: Jewish) offerings on the Cornell web­site revealed three separate imminent Seders, one each for the Conservative and Orthodox groups (sure to be as alien to Lewyn as to his new pals) and a combined third for the Reconstructionist and Reform groups. When he left an apol­ogetic message for the Center for Jewish Life, a girl named Rochelle called him back on the room phone and said that everyone was welcome the following Wednesday evening at six. All she needed to know was: How many vegetarian and how many gluten-free?

  Jonas and his friends dressed for the occasion in sport jackets and khakis and combed back their hair. They looked eager and uncomfortable in equal parts when they appeared in the doorway, and Lewyn figured he should probably up­grade his own clothes. Turning his back to them, he shrugged off his detectably funky T-shirt and put on a button-down and the blue jacket his mother had made him bring to col­lege. Then they set out together.

  The combined Reform and Reconstructionist Jews of Cornell were gathered in Anabel Taylor Hall, the mid-century appendage to Myron Taylor Hall, a faux-­gothic building of Ithaca stone opposite the Engineering Quadrangle. Lewyn and his goyish party stood for an addled moment in the doorway: five believing Christians and one nonbelieving Jew, taking in the extent of their own overdress.

  The students were uniformly clad in some variation of jeans and sweatshirts, about half the robin’s egg blue of Cornell Hillel, the rest displaying a broad array of Cornelliana and the Ugg boots that now seemed to cover every female ankle and calf on campus. Institutional tables were set with paper plates, paper cups, and paper towels, and punctuated by bottles of classic Manischewitz.

  “Is that wine?” said one of the AGR brothers. His name was Sawyer. He had an Irish last name. O’Something.

  “I wouldn’t get too excited,” Lewyn told them, shouting above the din. “More likely to make you sick than get you drunk.” He spoke from painful experience. Once, Harrison had dared him to drink a juice glass full of the stuff, re­sulting in a blast of syrupy purple vomit all over his aunt’s guest bathroom. One of so many warm fraternal memories he cherished. Also: Harrison always found the afikomen.

  “Hey, let’s sit,” O’Something said. “Before we get split up.”

  It seemed no worse an idea than remaining where they were. The five of them took the nearest end of the nearest table, with Lewyn, to his great embarrassment, at the head. He hoped the position came with no added responsibilities.

  “I kind of thought it would be fancier,” said Jonas, who had picked up the Haggadah on his paper plate and was thumbing through it.

  “What is that?” said Mark. He was staring, in some hor­ror, at the Seder plate.

  The half-­roasted lamb bone did look particularly anatom­ical, but it was the charoset Mark seemed to be looking at. It emitted a strong, oversweet smell and appeared to have been made far in advance of the occasion, or in considerable bulk, or both. There was an ice-cream scoop of it in a plastic bowl every five feet or so along the table. Lewyn did his best to explain.

  “We don’t need to eat it, though, do we?”

  “Not if you don’t want.” He didn’t really want to, himself. “Maybe pretend to eat a bite. It’s part of the ritual.”

  At the use of this word, Mark looked shocked, as if some­one had just drawn a pentacle before him on the paper ta­blecloth. In blood.

  “It’s like … everything means something,” he finally said. “Everything on the table. And then some things mean even more than one thing. Like … I guess, Easter. The lamb. And … the egg,” he managed, hoping he wasn’t being of­fensive. The lamb? The egg? “So, the lamb represents the sac­rifice to God from back in the days of the Temple. The egg is rebirth. The horseradish is the bitterness of slavery. The parsley is the renewal of spring. This stuff,” he pointed to the charoset, “it represents the mortar the slaves had to make in Egypt. Also the sweetness of life.”

  “What about the orange?” Jonas wanted to know.

  Lewyn frowned. Each Chinet Seder plate did indeed have an orange in addition to the usual suspects.

  “Haven’t the faintest idea,” he admitted.

  “So this is like a program?” said Jonas. He was turning through the stapled pages.

  “Oh, you read it backwards,” Lewyn told him.

  All five of them turned to him.

  “Just … how it’s done.”

  And he turned over his own to demonstrate. On the back of the pages, handwritten in black Sharpie, were the words: “Welcome to our Coalition for Mutual Respect Seder!”

  Jesus Christ, he thought, before he could stop himself.

  To his right, Mark was already laughing.

  “Don’t,” Lewyn heard Jonas hiss at him, but he was laugh­ing, too.

  Well, he hadn’t promised them a rose garden. What had he promised them?

  “Welcome, welcome,” said a woman at the far end of the room. She had a cordless microphone, and spoke, initially, in Hebrew, the only words of which Lewyn recognized were Shalom and Pesach. Then her mic went out and someone brought her a new one. “Such a lovely boy,” said the re-­amplified rabbi, patting this boy’s yarmulke with a tiny hand. “Electrical engineer! Single!” The room laughed.

  “Our Chabad friends and our friends over at Koach have their own traditions when they gather for Pesach here on campus, but for those of us who come to Judaism from the Reform movement, or the Reconstructionist traditions, or are just beginning a spiritual journey in Judaism and feel the need for a more open and, dare I say it, personal experience of the Passover celebration and ritual, you have come to the right place! We want to thank Tamar and Rochelle, and David Grodstein—where are you, David? I haven’t seen you … yes! Shalom, David! Happy Pesach!—all of you, your hard work is so much appreciated by us all. Now, it’s a part of the Seder tradi­tion to welcome the stranger to our table, and to link our story to the larger story we all share. When one suffers, everyone suffers. When one of us is still enslaved, no one is really free. That’s the big moral of the Seder. Of course, we’re Jewish, so we specialize in disagreeing about what things really mean. My mother, for example, used to say, this is what it boils down to: They hated us. They tried to kill us. We’re still here. Now let’s eat!”

  Mark, on Lewyn’s right, exploded in laughter. Lewyn turned to look at him, a little mystified. It hadn’t seemed that funny to him. His own family Seders had been rather joyless, with everyone dressed in uncomfortable “nice” clothes and the table set with special, breakable stuff. There had been long recitations separating the hungry children (he, at least, was always hungry) from the good smells in the kitchen, which would only be served by a uniformed maid once the many speeches and questions and dripping of wine and holding up of green parsley had been completed. His fa­ther and his uncle Bruce Krieger, his aunt Debbie’s husband, had recited in Hebrew, from memory, while he and Sally and Harrison (and, it was reassuring to note, his Krieger cousins, who actually had been bar mitzvahed) all stumbled along with the phonetic version, printed beneath the Hebrew in their matching booklets. (This reminded Lewyn of the tiny possibility that his sister might actually be here, in this room with so many other Jews of Cornell, and he looked around warily, but there was no Sally to be seen.)

 

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