Anyway, Uncle Hersh had had it wrong. Danny was going on fourteen. If he’d been going to have a bar mitzvah, he would have had to start preparing more than a year ago.
It was the kids in Annamae’s grade who were preparing for theirs. They talked about their themes. One boy was having a baseball-themed bar mitzvah, another had the theme of a pool party. A girl whose theme was candy said she was having her portrait done by an artist who worked exclusively in M&M’s. Another girl’s theme was making a hundred loaves of challah to donate to a soup kitchen.
“Can I have a bar mitzvah?” asked Annamae.
“No,” said Danny.
“I wasn’t talking to you, jerkwad.”
“Annamae!” Their mother sounded legitimately shocked.
“Sorry.”
They were having leftover lentil soup, leftover eggplant pizza, and leftover chicken thighs with olives. It was “clean out the fridge” night. Outside the kitchen window, snow was falling in a cone lit by the streetlamp.
“‘Jerkwad,’” their mother repeated. “‘Jerkwad.’ What does that even mean?” Now she sounded more professionally interested.
“I don’t know.”
“‘Jerkwad.’”
“Mom.” This was Danny.
“What?”
“Stop. It’s embarrassing when you say it.”
“Mom.” This was Annamae. “Can I? Have a bar mitzvah?”
“No,” said Danny, sliding the last slice of pizza onto his plate. “Bar mitzvahs are for boys. You mean can you have a bat mitzvah.”
“Fine, can I have a bat mitzvah?”
“Why do you want one?” asked their mother, reaching over to Danny’s plate, cutting the last slice down the middle, and removing half onto her own plate.
“I just do.”
She had been to Gershom’s and she had been to Shayna’s. Gershom’s she didn’t remember at all. Of Shayna’s, all she remembered was there had been a dolphin sculpted out of ice. And she had tasted shrimp for the first time. And spit it out into a lavender paper napkin decorated with Shayna’s name in purple.
But no, that was not all.
She remembered sitting in synagogue, with its heavy, ugly stained-glass windows, and the smell of furs, and the Mary Janes that pinched her feet but also pleased her with their shininess. She remembered the fake diamond glued to the toe of each shoe. And this one particular moment out of the long, boring ceremony, when someone—the rabbi?—had said, “Shayna is a very special girl,” and Shayna had cried and Aunt Marni, standing up at the front of the synagogue with her, had cried, and Annamae had thought with awe and jealousy, Shayna is a very special girl.
Shayna, whose hair shone like the grooves in a record album.
Am I? she’d wondered with a sick sinking feeling. She’d looked down at her fake diamond toes. Will anyone ever say that about me?
Now in the kitchen with the snow falling outside the window and Danny laughing silently at her across the picnic table, she speared a leftover olive with her fork and repeated, “I just do.”