the year of the bat mitzvah

jonathan mendelsohn

War may be hell, but the year of my bar mitzvah…well, the Jews don’t believe in hell, but there is a kind of netherworld mentioned in different parts of the Bible, a place where “the deceased”, according to MyJewishLearning.com, “… cut off from God and humankind, live on in some shadowy state of existence.”

That was me.

In grade seven.

Pudgy, fairly miserable and most assuredly cut off from God and humankind both, in a shadowy state of existence.

The invitation rules seemed set before anyone had even been called to the Bima. Once January of 1989 hit and the first kids in our grade turned thirteen, these were things understood, never to be questioned. Like mixing milk and meat or asking Bram Riegel if he wanted to come over when it had long since been established that Bram wasn’t ever coming for a sleepover again. Bram was one of the popular kids now, one of the five guys (there were six girls) everyone agreed on. He ate lunch in the best circles. We were at that age where lunches were eaten in circles. And where most boys weren’t rushing outside to play Whip Ball or Red Ass anymore. Because there were girls now. As if all of a sudden.

The cardinal rule was you invited everyone in your class. Only close friends from the other two classes required invites. Close friends and perhaps the cool kids. On the spectrum of popularity never discussed but forever obsessed about, I wasn’t Terry Feigenbaum (thank God), but I was no Andrew Damlin either–if good looks plus money were a surefire inclusion into the highest echelons of popular powerdom at HHDS, it never hurt to have an anglicized and not remotely Jewish-sounding name: Damlin was king of the popular boys. In a school that cost way more than any social worker of a single mom could ever hope to afford (there were subsidies for people like us), the invite rules were about as fair as things got.

That is until Tamar Klein sent out her invitations.

Tamar was second in popularity, girl-wise, to Courtney Kalich of the flowing blonde hair and the goyishe snub nose, which is to say she didn’t “look Jewish”; she looked like the people on TV. Which is of course who we all wanted to be. Tamar, meantime, was pretty enough, for a brunette, but she did have the best boobs in the grade and a don’t-fuck-with-me-attitude that she could pull on pretty much anyone but Courtney. Anyway, Tamar flagrantly ignored every invite rule there was, leaving out nearly her entire class. To her March 25th bat mitzvah, she only invited the nine most popular kids in the grade. And me. And I wasn’t even in her class.

For perspective, Zane Ladner hadn’t made the list, and he regularly lunched with these people. A real tragedy. Zane Ladner, the guy who mooed at the fat girl, in our case, Mandy Gottlieb, when she passed in the hall. The kind of mediocre athlete who went out and bought a Franklin white leather batting glove. As if he didn’t suck the bag at hitting—he was that kind of shmuck. The kind that yelled out at you from second base when you dropped the ball. “Benji, you dumbass!” Zane Ladner was destined to rise up, stepping as he did atop all the poor souls he squashed on his way to get there. But not this time. Not for this bat mitzvah at any rate.

Zane caught me outside the boys’ bathroom, by the water fountain, one recess. I spent a hell of a lot of time that year walking back and forth from our class to that water fountain–what else was I supposed to do? Too much time to kill and no one to kill it with. I wasn’t a cool kid, but I wasn’t a try-hard kiss-ass either, which left me in this in-between—dare I say nether—world that had no designated circle to lunch with. When Zane came up to me, he had two wannabe-popular guys with him: Manny Sloman and Saul Galinsky. Manny was too thin to be cool; Saul was too vacant. But both, especially Manny, could laugh hyena-like when Zane tore some kid a part for, say, dropping a baseball in left field. When there was no one better to eat lunch with, Zane settled for Manny and Saul. Zane wasn’t likely to do much alone in his lifetime.

“Green, z’it true? Did you get invited?”

When I admitted I had he turned to his cronies. “See, Galinsky!”

Saul turned to me. “Why were you invited?”

I told them in the most yellow-bellied, couldn’t-look-him-in-the-eye sort of way, that I had no idea.

Dinner had yet to be served. The dancing wouldn’t start till later. The adults were mostly at their tables, a few men lingered at the bar, eating plain potato chips while waiting for beers or gin and tonics. Phil Collins crooned quietly away in the background while the band tuned up on stage. The guys from my school were in the kids’ room. Well, all but one of them were—I was still parked at table fourteen, on the edge of the shiny wooden square in the middle of the hall that was the dance floor. Holding down the fort, you know, picking at the closer of the two bread baskets, steadily breaking off more and more of one of those long thin sesame cracker things that jut out of overflowing bread baskets. I was eating out of boredom and because it made me look busy; this was necessary considering  I didn’t really feel like being looked at doing nothing while occupying a table surrounded by nine empty seats. Also, the crunchy, salty cracker complemented my Coke Classic. And because eating was good company when you were alone. Which is what made me chubby. Which of course made me all the more unhappy. The fat kid cycle. Waiter, another Coke please.

When Bram and the cool guys from my grade had gotten up to leave the banquet hall to get to the kids’ room, they hadn’t asked me to join. I could have followed, but I hated that. Bram did look back, as if to almost invite me. But he didn’t have the balls and I loathed him for it. Jesse Handler pulled Bram in close as they were crossing the dance floor to leave the room. I heard him not quietly ask, “Why was he invited? What about Zane?” It was a good question. What about Zane? I shouldn’t have been here. I knew that. These weren’t my friends, Bram included. I couldn’t help questioning the sincerity of my invitation.  What had I done wrong to deserve this? Was it because my mom and I didn’t have enough money? Was it my lack of suit? I was the one loser without one. Instead, I had on my Polo shirt, the only one I owned in the world (a fake my Aunt Lou had brought back from Thailand) and it was blue and clean and tucked into khakis. I’d thought I looked good until we started going to b’nai mitzvahs every weekend, and I saw the boys in their fancy suits and they saw me, Saturday after Saturday, in the same dumb, faded shirt. The girls wore pricey dresses and very red lipstick. Some even wore jewelry. A few of the girls had stayed at the table a little longer after the boys left. Mandy Gottlieb was one of them.

“Green,” she said in her aggressive, tomboy way. “You coming?”

“Yeah. No. I will in a minute.”

Gottlieb got invited because she’d been best friends with Courtney Kalich since birth, practically. It was the only reason that made sense. Because she was kind of fat. The only fat girl in the cool world. She was actually pretty cool, though I was never as nice to her as I could have been, which is to say I was only nice to her when no one else was around. In my defence, she had this weird habit of looking over at me in class or wherever a lot. When she did that I felt like she was on the verge of making fun of me. It made me nervous. Still, I never mooed at her when I passed her in the hall. Then again, I wasn’t exactly sporting a six-pack myself. But a chubby boy was one thing. If you were a fat girl you were fucked.

At least Mandy had a reason to be here. I honestly couldn’t figure out what mine was and was starting to wish I’d never shown up.

The kids’ room was just another party room kind of space. I’d passed it before entering the banquet hall. It was filled with balloons and streamers and the music was too loud (Tone Loc’s “Funky Cold Medina” when I first went by). There were bowls of nerds and skittles and whole packs of Big League Chew you could take. There was a cotton candy machine in the room and a bored looking girl serving up the stuff. The Kleins had also paid for the skills of a pot-bellied, middle-aged guy with red cheeks and slicked back almost-platinum-blonde hair to sit on a small stool all night, drawing caricatures of us. He seemed OK with it. We’d seen that guy before, though, at Alan Schwartz’s bar-mitzvah in February. There’d also been a three flavour slushee machine at Alan’s. So to top this—because of course it had to be topped—Mr. Klein, Tamar’s father, had invested in a karaoke machine. “Sing Your Heart Out” it said in calligraphic writing on the side. You got a tape of it after.

It was all fine, I argued to myself, breaking off more cracker, sipping the last of my second Coke. The band had come on. They were playing soft jazzy stuff for the adults to talk over. I wouldn’t have minded that, someone to talk to. Mandy aside, the only conversation I’d engaged in was saying hi to Courtney and a few others at the coat check when we’d arrived an hour earlier. Courtney had said hi back. They all had. It felt very good, their saying hi back. Courtney in particular. I was in love with her, like every other boy in our grade. The hellos were almost as good as conversation. But, again, that was nearly an hour earlier.

Just as I was finally willing myself to go check out the kids’ room, someone’s grandmother approached my table. She was wearing too much lipstick, but I nearly cried when she put her hand on my shoulder. It was the kindness in her smile. She was that sweet. With old people, if they’re good,  you see it right away.

“Where did your friends go, darling?”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Why aren’t you with them?”

I lied and said I wasn’t feeling well, which also gave me the excuse to back out of the only real conversation I’d had. I just couldn’t stand to be around someone so nice. It made my misery too obvious, reflecting it so blazingly real back at me. I excused myself and crossed the dance floor. I found the bathroom and made myself pee, though I didn’t really need to. I washed my hands for a long time, looking at myself in the mirror, hating the chubby I was forced to see. Hating everything about that kid.

I don’t think I was gone five minutes. When I returned to the hall I had a hard time crossing the dance floor. There was this old couple dancing on it. Dinner was being served, but the old couple was clearly rekindling the sparks of their earlier romance and so felt the need to swoop, twirl and get dizzy across every inch of the wooden square of dance space. I kept getting blocked every way I tried and had to actually go round the perimeter of the floor to get back to my table. Everyone was already digging into their baskets of chicken fingers and fries. This was the standard caterer’s fare for the kid meal. We pretty much always got chicken fingers and fries. Except there was no basket of fried food at my place. There was instead a big piece of grilled fish over yellow rice with bits of nuts and raisins and other forageable things that a squirrel might get excited for. I’d been given the adults’ meal.

Maybe when I was forty I’d find this delicious. But not at Tamar Klein’s bat mitzvah, not when I was twelve and anything deep-fried that went well with ketchup was the closest to any guarantee of happiness my lard-ass could dream. That wasn’t the real issue, though, of course. The real issue was that the whole thing was obviously a joke at my expense. The guys—all of them, even Bram—were laughing into their hands when I sat. Someone had obviously told one of the servers not to give me the kids’ meal. Suddenly it clicked. I knew why I was there. I was the entertainment, yet another dumb thing to amuse the children of the bored and the beautiful. At least Courtney hadn’t laughed. She was actually the one who ordered the guys to stop being mean. The strange part is, I wasn’t all that happy about it because I wasn’t totally sure what Courtney’s intentions were—if she was doing it for me or because she liked putting her power on display.

“Do you want the fish, Benjamin?” Courtney asked me. The table went mostly silent, though Jesse Handler was still fighting the giggles.           

In front of the whole table I had no choice but to answer. Granted, I couldn’t look at anyone. “No,” I said, like a little kid talking to his mom in front of all. “I just want what you guys got.”

The boys at the table lost it when I said that. I noticed Mandy looking at me with the saddest goddamned eyes in the universe. Like a puppy’s frown. That was the worst. The last thing I wanted was for someone to feel sorry for me.

“Jesse,” Courtney said. She had to call him again; he was busy laughing it up with his buddies. “Would you get Benjamin a plate of chicken fingers, please?”

“What? Why can’t he get them?”      

“Jesse!” Courtney warned.

Jesse sighed but he didn’t rush to move. Didn’t have to. I’d already stood up. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll get it.” I was looking at no one in particular, especially not in Mandy’s sympathetic direction. I did catch Courtney’s eyes before I left. She too looked almost sympathetic for a second. My heart went crazy over that flutter of humanity that I looked so hard to find in her.

I walked straight past the kitchen doors, to the back of the room, where they were setting up the dessert table. The centerpiece was a large ice sculpture of a duck. It was in my throat now and I had to move fast, round the tables on the other side of the room on route to the exit. A balding man in his fifties was sitting way back from his table, a leg crossed over his knee, his chair back against the wall. “Bush knows what he’s doing,” he was saying in the kind of booming voice meant for the whole room to stop and hear. “I’m sure this new Secretary of Defense, this Cheney fella, will be a good thing.” He was blocking my path completely, totally unaware I was standing behind him. I hadn’t asked him to move, afraid I might lose it right then. His wife finally noticed, getting stern with her husband to let the “young man” go by. I rushed past, making it out the big banquet room and down the hall. I got my ski jacket from the coat check and went out through the sliding glass doors. It was snowing outside, but I barely noticed. I swallowed several times to make it go down, the same way you can stop yourself from puking. I held it back. I didn’t cry.

If the country club hadn’t been a good couple kilometers north of the nearest city bus stop I would have taken a bus. I swear to God I would have. I still had an hour and a half before my mom was coming to pick me up.  

I watched my breath smoking in the March cold. I tried to blow rings, but you need a cigarette for that. I was under the entrance thing where smokers would have huddled if there’d been any out there. But there was no one. There was nothing but the sound of snow falling, which is no sound at all, which is so good when you can’t handle the world. It was coming down in those magical fat flakes that drop, each one, in their own time. I looked out at one of the lamps over the parking lot, watching the snow fall under the orange light and onto the fancy rich people cars lined up in front of the club.

I pulled out the pack of fruit Mentos I had in my pocket, a kind of necessary crutch I needed for these long and lonely Saturday nights. I always got a fresh pack in preparation. I popped an orange one in my mouth and chewed it down in about two seconds. I walked out to the top of the five shallow steps that led to the parking lot. I stood out there to be in the soft white world of it, to be enveloped by it, sticking my tongue out to catch a shimmering glimmer of it. But I wasn’t seven, so that didn’t last very long.

Why had I been invited? For a while, like when you stand in front of a mirror and convince yourself you really are this handsome devil, I’d thought that maybe it was some secret hidden cool I liked to think I possessed and that they were only now—finally—starting to acknowledge. But alone in the cold, the wind, it was hard to believe that. A chill went up my spine, nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with feeling sorry for myself. I needed to go back inside and get warm, but I really didn’t want to. I kicked some snow around. Ate another two Mentos. I walked up to the edge of the parking lot, looked up at the sky to watch the snowfall like an endless shower of stars. It was pretty, but it was also cold. I had no choice. I went back inside.

“Benji.”

I could tell you every time Courtney Kalich said my name that year. I could probably tell you every time she said my name over all of elementary school. I was that obsessed with her.

Courtney Kalich had come to find me. On her own. Me.

“Were you just outside?”

Standing stupid in my jacket now covered in snow, I had to admit I was.

She asked why, and I gave some vague reply. I looked around. There was no one else out in the hall. It was just me and the prettiest girl in our whole school, just standing there, by the glass door that led to the indoor tennis courts you could see one floor below (the door was locked; we’d all tried). 

I took off my jacket and asked Courtney why she was there.  

“Actually,” she said, standing so tall, her chest pushed out. “I came with a message for you, Benjamin.”

“Really?” I said, not knowing where to look. Her chest. Her beautiful eyes. “For me?” I said it to her shoes.

“Yes. Someone here has a crush on you. Do you want to know who?”

I nodded, too stunned to speak.

“Ok. Just go back outside and wait. The girl who likes you will come out.”

With that she spun round on her heels and was gone.

Back outside, under the snow, I considered the possibilities. I couldn’t really think who it could be. There was the bat mitzvah girl herself but we hardly knew each other, so it wasn’t Tamar. The hardest part was realizing it wouldn’t be Courtney. She wouldn’t have brought the message if she was. Or could it be a kind of double trick? The human brain’s dumb-ass ability to endlessly fool itself back to convince itself of whatever it most wants. I had no idea who it was. It wasn’t Courtney. I wanted it to be Courtney. It wouldn’t be Courtney, who was I kidding. Whoever it was, I suddenly thought of a good reason for why I was there. What if each girl Tamar invited was allowed to invite the one boy they liked? Did girls play games like that?

The snow seemed to be coming down harder, though no faster. There was just more of it. Over a foot had landed now; you could measure it off the cars in the parking lot and the handrails on either side of the stairs. You could see it weighing down the pine trees. I kept turning round to see if someone was coming. I wondered what was taking so long. I pulled out my Mentos, the next available one was Strawberry, my lucky flavour. Then I put the pack away, as if I wasn’t going to eat another one in like eight seconds. I think I managed a whole minute before popping another in my mouth. Still, no one had come down the hall. The glass doors never opened. Courtney wasn’t coming. Tamar Klein wasn’t coming. No one was coming. It was another joke. Grade seven, remember? Let’s invite the loner. Just for kicks. I got another spinal shudder realizing it was almost certainly Courtney herself who had set the whole thing up. I walked round the building into the shadows beyond the range of the parking lot’s orange lamps.

I could still see the lot from where I was, but I couldn’t be seen, my back against the scratchy red brick of the building. There were three snow covered pines huddled together directly in front of me, blocking view of the field beyond and the road past that. They didn’t move, those trees. They didn’t make a sound. I envied them, just standing there. It was so quiet. I wished I could have stayed longer, but I couldn’t because, in my most pathetic way, I was still hoping someone would be there. I walked back to the entrance doors. No one was there. I stood a little longer looking out at the weather, feeling sorry for myself. I was a bit lost in it when the sliding doors opened behind me. It was Mandy.

Mandy. Right. Shit.

“Is it you?!” I asked, way more harshly than I should have.

“What? No, you idiot! It’s not me. There’s no one. Don’t you get it? No one. A joke. They just did it because they’re assholes.”

“Who did it? Courtney?”

“Who do you think? Yes, Courtney.”

“So there’s no one.”

Mandy shook her head. “I’m sorry, Benji. I didn’t know they’d do that. Honestly.”

I looked up at her. The tears were coming themselves now, I couldn’t stop them. “Can I ask you something?” I said, my voice somehow almost holding steady. “Why do they have to be so mean?”

Mandy closed her eyes a moment, this amazing face in sympathy and understanding of how mean they could be. She took  a step forward as if to comfort me, but I backed away.

I tried to sniff up the snot coming out my nose.

“Come inside. It’s cold.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’ll stay out here with you.”

“You don’t have to.”

Mandy didn’t make a move to leave. I was a bit worried because I sort of knew what was coming next.

“What would you have said if it had been me?”       

When I didn’t say anything she came in and slugged my arm, hard. “It’s not, OK? I’m just asking.”

I shrugged because what could I say? I’d known she liked me for a long time.

“You still like Courtney, don’t you?”

I’d once told her because she asked.

I shrugged again. “Yeah, maybe.”

Mandy shook her head. “Well now you know who she really is.”

“I thought she was like your best friend.”

“Yeah, not exactly. Not for a long time.” Mandy gave out a laugh that was no laugh at all. “The prettier they are the more bitchy they’re allowed to be, but I’ll bet you anything you still have a crush on her come tomorrow.”

I sniffed up snot more successfully and hard-wiped my face with the back of my fist. I was done crying. “I don’t know,” I said, because that was better than admitting that of course she was right.

“It’s so pathetic. I can’t believe I still like you after all this time.”

“Mandy,” I said. She was the one getting teary now. She didn’t say anything though, and I didn’t know what to say.

I couldn’t look at her. Neither of us was talking. It was still snowing. We looked out at it. Finally, I turned to her and apologized.

It didn’t seem to have an effect so I took her by the hand.

“What are you doing?”

I didn’t answer, and I didn’t let go; I just led her round the side of the building to where the three pines stood. Her cheeks were red and wet, and she actually had a really pretty face when you looked at it up close.

“I can kiss you,” I said.

She didn’t look impressed. “You don’t even want to.”

“Yes I do!” And I meant it when I said it. I wanted to kiss her, for her. To at least leave someone feeling good in all this crap.

So I did. I kissed her. Kissed her like I knew what I was doing. Kissed her like I’d done it a hundred times before. Like she wasn’t the first girl I’d ever kissed. Our bodies were close, and I didn’t want to pull away. And though I did pull away and would so spinelessly, pathetically ignore her when she came down the hallway Monday morning, and every morning after that until the last time I saw her at grade eight graduation, we kissed some more in the shadows before we went back inside to the stupid kids’ room. Jesse Handler and Bram weren’t so much singing as yelling Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” in the Sing-Your-Heart-Out karaoke box.

I looked at my watch to catch the time but it was the date I fixated on.  March 25th. Three more months to summer vacation. Fourteen more Saturdays to go. Fourteen more synagogue mornings. Fourteen more chicken finger dinners. But who was counting.