ON THE MORNING OF MY THIRTY-SECOND birthday, my phone rings early. I feel around for it on the nightstand. “Hello?”
I hear muffled breathing, a grunt that sounds like something heavy is being lifted. For a moment I think it’s some kind of crank call. Then my parents’ voices: “Happy Birthday to you—dun-da-da-dun! Happy Birthday to you—dun-da-da-dun! Happy Biiiiiirthday, dear Alison—dun-da-da-dun! Happy Birthday to you!”
My father punctuates the end of the song with tuba noises in the style of an Eastern European oompahpah band, true to his heritage, so the whole performance takes several minutes. I sit up in bed, lean my back against the headboard. Beside me, Degan pulls a pillow over his eyes.
“So?” Dad asks brightly. “How are you liking Toronto?”
“Wait until you get a taste of the cost of it!”
“Thanks for the welcome,” I tease.
“The economy is crashing! Are you following the real estate news?”
“Dad,” I say. “Take some deep breaths.”
He mocks a heavy exhale.
There’s more muffled kerfuffle in the background, more grunting. Then he says abruptly, “I’d better go. I have to walk the dog,” and hangs up.
By the time I’m done on the phone, I hear the shower running. Degan comes out with a blue towel wrapped around his waist. “Happy Birthday, babe,” he says.
“Am I getting old?”
“Kind of.”
“I’m an old lady.”
“You’re five years younger than me.”
“Always,” I say.
He towels off his hair, buttons his shirt. Grabs a pair of pants from the back of the chair.
“Any big plans today?” he asks.
Good question.
“I might do some reading about Judaism,” I say.
“Don’t go crazy or anything.”
“Ha ha.”
His face goes serious and he nods. I’ve told him about meeting Rabbi Klein at the Griffin, about her comment “What a happy story.”
“I’ve always thought,” he starts to say, but he is distracted, checking his phone, pulling a comb through his hair.
“You’ve always thought what?”
“I don’t know. You and your family history. The secrecy. But you’ve always seemed kind of … Jewish.”
“Really? What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure,” he says. “It’s just a feeling.”
There’s a crash from down on the street, a garbage can being knocked over.
“I’m late,” he says. “We’ll talk tonight. And celebrate your birthday.”
“Okay, good luck today. Hope it goes well.”
He kisses me and runs to catch the streetcar.
When he’s gone, I wander through our rooms in my pyjamas, picking things up and putting them back down. I check Facebook, where I click on a raft of birthday messages. I notice my Jewish friends are also wishing each other a Happy New Year. It must be Rosh Hashanah. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know where to mark it, or how, or who with. Instead, I spend the day on the rumpled futon sheet reading Help Me by Eli Bloomberg, a young Jewish writer struggling with his Hasidic upbringing. I enjoy the read. There is comfort in the knowledge that Judaism is confusing for someone else, too, even for someone born and raised as a Jew. I Google him and see he’ll be interviewing another writer at the International Festival of Authors here in Toronto on the coming weekend. I decide to go hear him.
The event takes place on Sunday afternoon. I leave the house without telling Degan where I’m going. The bus down to the waterfront is packed full of old Italian men in undershirts, women with strollers, teenagers in flip-flops snapping their gum. By the time I change buses and find my way to the theatre, the interview has already started. Eli Bloomberg sits onstage in an armchair opposite his subject. He seems immediately familiar. Not that I actually recognize him, but I have a strange sense of understanding what he’s about. He’s wearing a green blazer and his hair looks purposefully dishevelled.
Something about him reminds me of Kramer from Seinfeld. A smarter, more attractive Kramer.
I listen intently, take some notes. His questions are perceptive. When the interview wraps up, though, I collect my things and hurry toward the exit. Judaism draws me, repels me, draws me back. I’m exhausted just from sitting in the audience, a supposedly passive observer. All I can think about is getting home and crashing. And Degan will be wondering where I am.
Just as I’ve reached the door, I glance back and see Eli looking at me. He’s been talking to a petite brunette, but he walks away from her, leaving her with her mouth open, literally mid-sentence.
“I know you from somewhere,” he says to me.
I shrug and step back into the building; the door sighs heavily on its hinges.
“Really?”
He nods.
“I thought you seemed familiar, too.”
Up close, his eyes are a deep shade of green, his skin almost olive.
We run through our hometowns, our childhood friends, our schools, but find no common ground. “I just read Help Me,” I say. “So maybe that’s why. You’re pretty much the way I imagined you on the page.”
He brings a hand to his face, and I recognize the look other writers get when they’re wondering what you thought of their book.
“I liked it,” I assure him. “Would you sign it for me?”
“They’re not selling it here.” He shrugs, gesturing behind him to the festival’s bookstore.
“I brought my own copy.” I pull it from my purse.
“Oh,” he says, his face brightening. “Sure.”
He bends over my book to sign it, his shirt pulling up to show the smooth, hairless skin on his lower back. I see the brand name on the back pocket of his jeans. I try, but cannot picture him in the black Orthodox garb he must have grown up wearing. The woman he was talking with earlier has been waiting patiently to finish her sentence, but she now realizes Eli is done with her. “Anyway,” she says to him, “I’ll catch you later?”
He doesn’t look at her. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “So long.”
He passes me the signed book, holds my eye for half a second too long.
Next morning there’s an email: “Dear Alison, Nice to meet you briefly yesterday. I can’t believe how familiar you seemed. Maybe I’ve heard you read? Are you working on anything? Publishing? Reading anything good lately? E.”
I write back right away: “Good to meet you, too! My new book of poems is coming out in the spring. I’m working on a novel around the Holocaust, so I’ve been focusing my reading in that direction. What do you think I’d like?”
“I don’t know you well enough to say,” he answers. “Yet. How about dinner?”