Afterparty(9)

Overlooking the fact that every Friday night, he makes Shabbat dinner. I light candles, he blesses me, and we eat an exact replica of the giant Moroccan Sabbath meal my grandma Bella—whom I barely remember—no doubt cooks each week in C?te Saint-Luc, just north of Montreal. During which he drills me with the tenets of Judaism he approves of, his favorite being tikkun olam, repairing the world, into which feeding the hungry falls. And somewhat lashon hara, which boils down to no mean gossip, his free pass to establish a vast list of important topics that he won’t discuss.

All of which we pretend never happened because, in another never-to-be-discussed fact of Lazar family life, my dad is off organized Judaism, religion in general, and all members of the Lazar family (religious or not) in Montreal. Which is so far from an approved topic for dinnertime chatter that you have to wonder if my dad ever thinks about it anymore.

When we are driving home from the food bank, I go, “Dad, so if Rabbi Pam asks what religion I am, what do I say?”

He says, “She asked you that?”

“No, but the thing is, we’re bagging groceries in a temple.”

“Would you prefer a church?” He sounds flustered, as if he’s beating himself up for committing a child-rearing blunder. “I could find you a church.”

Not find us a church, find me one. Raising the question of whether he thinks of me as the same religion as the rest of the Lazar clan, or, for example, as him.

I say, “No! Dad! This is fine. I like Beth Boob Job.”

“Ems!”

“Don’t look at me. I’m not the one who made the inappropriate comment in front of my impressionable kid.”

My dad fake-slaps at my jeans. He says, “Enough. You’re a good kid, but enough.”

But before long, when you add up the number of hours I spend as a paragon of virtue in the basement of that temple, it turns out to be the exact number of hours I feel as if I can still claim the title of Emma the Good, figuring out how many cans of tuna I can give people, whether there are enough boxes of dried mac and cheese to go around.

? ? ?

Siobhan says, “You spend every Sunday sorting rice and beans? You can’t come with me once?”

Siobhan spends her non-lacrosse Sundays at her stepfather’s country club, flirting with Wade, the junior tennis pro, who goes to UCLA. This drives her mom up a wall as apparently her one and only rule for Siobhan is No Older Guys. Her strategy when driven up a wall is to try to distract Siobhan by taking her shopping and burying her under the entire contents of Kitson.

“Win-win-win,” Siobhan says, cracking open her uniform blouse to reveal a new black camisole. The blouses are the thickness of plastic picnic tablecloths. The black doesn’t show through.

She says, “I still don’t get it. Why doesn’t your dad write your food place a check and just be done with it?”

? ? ?

Megan Donnelly says, “He offered to find you a church? Maybe he’s giving you a choice. Unlikely, but consider. If my parents gave me anything resembling a religious choice, I’d throw a party.”

We’re sitting on Megan’s bed, eating my dad’s fudge brownies that I had to sneak in because her mom thinks pastries are a public health menace.

I say, “Or maybe he just doesn’t want the spawn of Satan in his club.”

I’m talking about my mom, and Megan knows it.

Megan says, “She wasn’t Satan! My dad says your dad was so in love with her, he couldn’t even think.”

“Meaning he was thinking with . . . you know.”

Megan, who is the nicest, but not the most experienced, person you could ever meet (even compared to me), says, “No, thinking with what?”

I say, “Nothing.”

Seriously, would Emma the Good corrupt Megan Donnelly? Every time we go over there, Megan’s parents, my dad’s friends since medical school, make him look like an irresponsible, anything goes–type parent. Before we escaped to Megan’s room with the contraband chocolate, the dinner table talk involved how her mom spends her nights in the ER, cleaning up the alcohol-poisoned, bloodied, car-wrecked, controlled-substance-ingesting teen wreckage of other parents’ failure to recognize the dangers of urban life. Then we listened to her dad complain about how minors can get condoms at twenty-four-hour drugstores.

On the drive home, my dad says, “There’s a revelation! Compared to Edgar Donnelly, I’m the groovy dad.”

I am practicing driving my dad’s car through the winding streets near the base of Griffith Park. Which is why all I’m thinking about is not hitting other cars. I say, “I hate to tell you, but you can’t say ‘groovy.’ Were you even born when people said that?”

If I’d been looking at him instead of the road, I would have stopped there.

I say, “Also. You’re the total despot dad. Edgar is just a whack job.”

“I’m a what?”

“Sorry! That was a completely bad joke. Sorry!” I accidentally slightly swerve the car across the dotted line that runs down the middle of the street.

He says, “Pull over.” Which I do.

He says, “A despot? Is that what you think?”

I have made my dad miserable again. I say, “Of course not! We’ve been at the Donnellys’ too long! I’m the one who’s allowed to joke around. Megan is the totally oppressed one who will no doubt run away and go to stripper school if you don’t make Edgar see reason.”