Afterparty(70)

Megan sighs, “Your dad doesn’t want you upstairs because your dad is a raging atheist.”

“What?”

“My mom says. Although my mom thinks Cardinal Mahony is a secret atheist. Why don’t you just take him at face value that he doesn’t want to impose religion on you? Not because he doesn’t think you’re good enough. Aren’t you supposed to want to impose religion on people who aren’t good enough?”

“I think Dylan might have noticed that I wasn’t good enough.”

“This is classic depressed thinking,” Megan says.

I wave her away and duck deeper into the back of the food supply.

This time, it’s Rabbi Pam who finds me behind the cheese.

“Come on,” she says, “let’s go upstairs.” I freeze for a second, and she says, “I understand that your dad doesn’t want you within ten miles of a prayer. I promise I’ll respect that.”

So there I am in Rabbi Pam’s office. Just barely inside the door of Rabbi Pam’s office. She is gazing at me with a whole poor-motherless-girl-let-me-make-you-a-sandwich look, which is alarming. Also, there isn’t a single object in her office without a Star of David, a Hebrew letter, or a picture of a Torah on it. Even the plant pot has Hebrew lettering. The whole place freaks me out, possibly because I haven’t been allowed anywhere near anyplace like it for sixteen years.

She says, “Would you rather take a walk?”

I wouldn’t rather take a walk. I’d rather run out the door and get an In-N-Out burger. But I don’t want to insult her, so I follow her across the parking lot.

“You haven’t been your usual cheerful self for a while,” she says.

I’m somewhere between a state of kill-me-now and just wanting to talk to someone who doesn’t know me well enough to disapprove of me. And as long as I’ve got a person with a graduate degree in morality, no doubt a lot more familiar with the Word of God than I am, standing in the parking lot with me, and because I want to change the subject, I say, “What’s unforgivable in Judaism?”

She runs her hand through her hair. She says, “Not much, if you’re sorry and you try to fix it.” We are walking down toward Hollywood Boulevard. She says, “Do you want to get some soda? We got rid of the soda machines, and I’m craving a Coke.”

Which gives me hope that this might be an actual conversation and not just rabbinical probing for teen angst.

I say, “You want to go to In-N-Out?”

We head down the block. She looks a lot more like a normal person when you get her away from the ten-foot-tall religious symbols and the massive stacks of prayer books.

She says, “You do know that the holiest day of the year is about atonement and forgiveness? Which includes forgiving yourself.”

“Not that I’ve ever been in a temple for Yom Kippur, but yeah. ‘We have committed evil, we have acted abominable, we have totally gone astray.’&?”

A lady passing us on the sidewalk gives me a look as if I’m a guy with a sign that says the world is ending, with the biblical location of the chapter and verse to prove it.

“Close. Your dad’s not big on candy-coating, is he? But you don’t think you’ve personally gone totally astray, do you?” She gives me an appraising look, but “yes” isn’t the answer she’s going for, and who lies to a rabbi who’s taking her to In-N-Out? “Remember, ‘This is the gate of the Eternal. Enter into it, you who have fed the hungry’?”

I say, “Don’t even. It’s not like I can bag beans twice a week and that makes me a good person.”

Rabbi Pam says, “You don’t experience yourself as a good person?”

“Sometimes it feels like the world would be a better place if I’d stay in my closet.”

“Is that what was going on when you stopped coming a while back?” Even though I’m looking straight ahead, I can feel her eyes scanning my face.

“That wasn’t completely my choice.” In the spirit of total honesty because she’s a rabbi, even if she does want to be called Pam, I say, “Although probably my fault. Overboard in the breaking-of-rules department.”

“What kinds of rules are we talking about?” We are paused, standing just outside of a shoe repair shop with cracked leather handbags and old boots hanging in the window, and she’s half blocking my path, as if she can tell that the harder I’m trying to tell her the absolute truth, the more I want to run.

“Rules,” I say. “Honor your father. Tell the truth occasionally. Stop on red. Go on green. Thou shalt not murder.” Her facial expression suggests that hyperbole was a poor choice. “Not that I murdered anyone.”

Which is kind of a bad example, anyway, in the forgiving-yourself-because-you-tried-to-fix-things department. Because, seriously, how do you un-murder someone? How do you un-hurt people and undo months of unwise choices and take back conversations you wish you’d never had, but you had them, and now you’re stuck with them?

So what if you’ve tried to cobble things back together, made restitution, cleaned up your act, chatted with a friendly rabbi who’s racking her brain to make you feel better without any real understanding of what you’ve done?

“Maybe just asking the questions puts you on the right track,” Rabbi Pam says. She smiles, but her attempt at good cheer is betrayed by her eyes. “And there’s your conscience.”