My Last Innocent Year(2)
It occurred to me then, as Zev squeezed my breast a little too hard, that I wasn’t sure what I was doing there. I’d come to Zev’s bedroom more out of curiosity and boredom than desire, because the library, where we’d bumped into each other, was closing early and I didn’t feel like going back to my room yet, and because, despite my strong opinions vis-à-vis windchill, it was pretty fucking cold out. In short, I’d wandered into this encounter the way you wander into a dark room: with one hand outstretched, feeling your way as you go, unable to see what’s on the walls or how exactly you might get out.
* * *
IT WAS STRANGE to think I’d known Zev longer than almost anyone at Wilder, longer even than Debra and Kelsey. We met on the first Friday of freshman year at a Shabbat dinner at Hillel House, the small beige building on the edge of campus where Wilder’s skeletal collection of Jews gathered. Like many elite colleges, Wilder had a long history of institutional anti-Semitism, as well as a more recent scandal involving fraternity brothers forcing a group of barefoot pledges in striped pajamas to carry heavy stones across the green. The Holocaust imagery was undeniable, and the incident attracted national attention. But things had settled down and, a few years back, a group of Jewish alumni raised the money to establish a Hillel House on campus, so Jewish parents were finally comfortable sending their children to Wilder. My father had had no such qualms; I’d spent my whole life around Jews and he wanted me to go to Wilder precisely so I could get away from them.
I went to the dinner with Sally Steinberg, of the Bethesda Steinbergs, whom I’d met earlier that week in a step aerobics class. Sally was the coddled only child of older parents who’d met at Brandeis, where they desperately wanted her to go, but Sally had insisted on Wilder. Her parents relented, as they did with everything, and as a prerequisite to enrollment, they’d made her promise to attend weekly Shabbat dinners.
Zev was there when we arrived, sitting at the long dining table. The rabbi, a young man wearing a Boston Red Sox yarmulke, introduced us, and Zev held out his hand. This was something people at Wilder did, I’d discovered, they shook hands, something I’d only ever done with adults, and rarely. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, taking Sally’s hand and then mine. His grip was strong, his fingers stained yellow at the tips.
“Let me guess where you’re from,” he said to me as girls in long skirts fluttered around us carrying handfuls of plastic silverware and jugs of grape juice. “New York.”
“How’d you know?”
He pointed at my scuffed Doc Martens. “But you’re not an uptown girl. Not West Side either. Downtown?”
“Impressive. Lower East Side.” He asked what my father did for a living—something else people at Wilder did—and I told him he owned an appetizing store.
“An appetizing store? Really? Wow. I didn’t know Jews like you still existed.”
“Jews like what?”
“Jews who sell smoked fish and seeded ryes. I thought all those stores were gone.”
“A lot of them are gone, but there are still a few.” I named them—Guss’ Pickles, Yonah Shimmel knishes, Kossar’s bialys, Russ & Daughters.
“Cute,” Zev said. “Like something out of a Malamud novel.” He reached for a piece of challah. “So, what? Your father pinned all his hopes on you? Sent you here to fulfill his dream of upward mobility?”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d never heard my father’s ambitions summed up so succinctly, or so crassly. Zev was looking at me like I was a unicorn but I couldn’t tell if it was wonder in his eyes or if he wanted to lure me closer to cut off my horn. Before I could answer, the rabbi began reciting the prayers welcoming in Shabbat.
Dinner was chaotic and long. There were many courses, each one interrupted by more prayers and candle lighting. The long-skirted girls, one of whom was the rabbi’s wife, cleared plates and poured seltzer while the rabbi’s two young sons ran around dressed like miniature actuaries. I hadn’t been around so many Jews since I got to Wilder; not that there were a lot of us—the room felt crowded mostly on account of it being small. Sprung loose from Scarsdale and Great Neck, the Jews of Wilder had to stick together. During dinner, I found out Zev was a freshman like me, but older because he’d spent those two years in the army. He was short and stocky with close-cropped black hair, and a nose that looked like it had been punched in. He’d been born in Iran, he told me, but moved to Israel as a child after the revolution. He smelled like cigarettes and body spray. We bonded mainly over our mutual disdain of everyone else, including Sally, who announced, loudly, that she’d come to the dinner because her mother told her it would be a good place to find a husband. (She would go home that night with the boy seated to her left, Gabe Feldman, whom she would indeed eventually marry.) Over the years, I would discover that Zev’s disdain for people extended to most everyone at Wilder, perhaps even to people in general, but that night, making fun of the people at Hillel House was the most fun I’d had since I arrived.
As the meal came to a close, one of the girls who was clearing dropped a stack of dirty plates. “Mazel tov!” Gabe shouted. Sally laughed. The girl looked like she was about to cry. I felt an instant kinship with her and moved to help, but Zev grabbed my wrist.
“Don’t,” he said. “Let them do it. Stay and talk to me some more.” His grip was strong, but I liked it, the press of it, the force. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had looked at me with such intensity, or if anyone ever had. I sat back down and talked to him for the rest of the night.