I Was Told There'd Be Cake Read online

  On birthdays, “Blow the candles out!” was not a euphemism for “Make a wish!” It was said in the same tone puberty-pumped boys use to tell their mothers to get out of their rooms at inopportune moments. A “blow the fucking candles out,” if you will. And I did. Once I came home from a birthday party down the block, regaling my parents with tapered tales of sparklers and trendy birthday accoutrements called “trick candles.” I figured if sparklers were good enough for the Horowitzes, if singing candles didn’t engulf their kitchen cabinets with life-destroying flames…

  “This is me hinting,” I clarified.

  “At what?” said my mother. “That you want to be a pyromaniac when you grow up?”

  I was taught that candles are like house cats—domesticated versions of something wild and dangerous. There’s no way to know how much of that killer instinct lurks in the darkness. I used to think the house-burning paranoia was the result of some upper-middle-class fear regarding the potential destruction of a half-million-dollar Westchester house the size of a matchbox. But then I realized the fear stemmed from something far less complex: we’re not used to fire. Candles are a staple of Judaic existence and, like many suburban residents before us, we’re pretty bad Jews.

  Over the years, Judaism has become less of an ethic and more of a vaccination for our family. Aside from the biannual fireplace usage, candles only come out for Hanukah or to represent the dead. As a child, and even now if I’m home for it, a real gloom descends as we light the candles and everyone is silently reminded of how religiously inadequate we are during the rest of the year. Candles intimidate us. This makes us depressed, which makes us resent our depression, which only makes us feel more guilty. Which is its own typically Jewish experience.

  I am currently in possession of my grandmother’s menorah and imagine I will stay in possession of it for as long as I’d like. In my family, where the Hanukah prayer was said at Alvin and the Chipmunks speed, it’s like saying I have my grandmother’s shoehorn.

  But taking Hanukah lightly is not really what makes us bad Jews. I don’t think God even actually knows when Hanukah starts. I’m pretty sure we rent Him out to the Catholics for the month of December and retrieve him for Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, and other celebrations not based on milk chocolate and fluorescent wax. What makes us bad Jews is that we had a humongous Christmas tree throughout my formative years. It was our first real step into the latter side of Judeo-Christianity. When I tell people now that we had a Christmas tree, they ask me if both my parents are Jewish. Yes, both. “Okay then, did you ever consider the Hanukah bush?” Clearly these people have never met my father, whose own religious philosophy went something like: Why borrow a holiday when you can steal it?

  And steal it he did. But in the only way he knew how: meticulously. Growing up, any project conducted under my father’s watch was done with a simultaneous grand vision and attention to detail that bordered on the insane. In third grade I had to make a diorama about the Inuit. I showed up to school with a Plexiglas case that housed an igloo made from nail-filed sugar cubes and a battery-powered fan that created dry ice. It was difficult to claim I had created a functioning arctic biosphere on my own, given that long division was a struggle. So imagine then, if you will, the kind of Christmas tree we’re talking about. One year, my father managed to defile a tree to the point of wrapping two whole packages of lights around the trunk.

  It wasn’t always that way. Both my parents’ parents were Jewish. None more so than my father’s mother. She raised her boys in Brighton Beach. Before that, she lived on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she was proposed to by Zero Mostel. She was a socialist. She loved The Golden Girls. Ed Koch came to her funeral. When she died, she insisted on being buried in red, the logic being that God would make her an exception among the Jews—if she was going to Hell, she at least wanted to be dressed for it.

  It wasn’t until high school that I realized my grandmother wasn’t actually “Jewish Jewish” at all, at least not by the time I came into existence. Apparently, in a parallel universe on the other side of town, a private school was being conducted called Solomon Schechter. Most of these kids merged into public school after eighth grade. They were fluent in Hebrew. They had been bar mitzvahed. I couldn’t drink Manischewitz without throwing up.

  Here, at the tender age of fourteen, I was about to find out the difference between being a religious Jew and a “lax” Jew.

  Being a “lax” Jew used to refer to the distance between one’s beliefs and one’s diligence in practicing those beliefs. It was defined by a lack of fervor. But even now, at social gatherings, I effortlessly define myself as a “lax Jew,” as if the “lax” carries as much official weight as the “Jew.” In a way it does. Like Religious Reaganomics, Lax Judaism is a trickle-down faith in its own right and upon closer examination is actually a misnomer. You can’t fall away from something if you were never there in the first place. It’s the difference between jumping off a cliff and passing out where you stand. For the lax Jew, it’s not a personal soul-dividing betrayal to eat on Yom Kippur. No one expects you to be able to spell “yarmulke.” I played the flute for exactly one day in fourth grade, so the logic behind me being a “lax” Jew would also have me being a lax flute player. For better or worse, this phenomenon seems to be ours and ours alone. Never do we see a man with only two wives and say: lax Mormon.

  The Schecter kids were hard-core Jews and I was fascinated by them the same way I would later be fascinated by the Choate-and Exeter-raised students at college. I had certain ideas about private school people. I thought they were good in everything they did. I thought they ate right and woke up before their alarm clocks went off and played the viola. I was legitimately confused to find they were delinquents-in-training like the rest of us. Perhaps they had always planned to drink and smoke up and blare gangsta rap from their Jettas. It started to occur to me that maybe religious practice was like tennis practice. You play up, depending on who’s on the other side of the net. Which meant that we were dragging these kids down.

  Meanwhile, I was hardly playing up myself. My new religious friends were surprised that I didn’t attend Hebrew school but they were flat-out shocked that I had never gone to a Jewish-themed summer camp. “Jew camp,” as it was unfortunately dubbed, was huge. I have no idea how Jewish these camps get, but since we’re talking about Westchester, they’re probably more intense than those in North Dakota. But how? Making kosher s’mores? Crafting dreidels out of Fimo? Dropping both skis and walking on water? It remains a mystery to me.

  For eight consecutive years, I spent my summers all but forgetting I was ever Jewish. I went to a camp that was not only in New England but a place where we sang the Lord’s Prayer before breakfast. Having never said—and certainly never sung—the prayer before or since, just humming the tune reminds me of the sound of 120 girls in a mess hall. I can still hear them clinking their spoons into bowls of Rice Krispies. I can still see them armed with bottles of strawberry Quik and miniature plastic steins of powdered lemonade, the loot of freshly opened care packages. I have subsequently discovered that my parents had no idea it was a Christian-based camp. Only a few states away, camp was defining their daughter’s religious beliefs and they didn’t have a clue. It wasn’t Bible camp but it was closer than it had any right to be.

  It is important to understand how steeped in bizarre tradition summer camp is, so that when Jesus slips in there, he goes almost unnoticed. Think of a zany romantic comedy in which a woman mistakenly swallows her engagement ring because it was cleverly tucked in her chocolate soufflé. This is how I swallowed Christianity. My summer camp inspired the kind of intense psychotic loyalty and bonding normally catalyzed by negative experiences—plane crashes, hostage situations, concentration camps. It was an idyllic lakeside compound in rural New Hampshire, and I bawled my eyes out at the end of each summer when I had to leave it. Those girls and I were in the shit together. When I was twelve, I wrote in a journal that I did n
ot want to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Instead I wanted to be cremated, my ashes scattered in the stream that ran through the grounds.

  It’s not that we didn’t do normal camp things: I learned archery, sailing, poison ivy identification, what it feels like to get your front tooth knocked out by a tether ball. But behind this summertime merriment was a society of malleable little girls learning a bizarre series of hymnals and faux Native American chants. Not uncommon for the region, the camp’s theme was Native American—the cabins had Native American names, the dining hall had Native American decorations, and we wore feathers in our braids and painted our faces for capture the flag. It was about as decent a tribute to a culture as a Hanukah bush. But mimicking Native American tradition was only one piece of it. We also folded the American flag military-style every night, tied the rope a certain way, and wore uniforms from the army-navy surplus store while calling our counselors “Miss.” It was a clusterfuck of ritual.

  On Sunday nights we had vespers, where we lit candles and sang folk songs with titles like “The Lord Loves a Strong Swimmer” and “All God’s Critters Got a Place in the Choir,” a banjo going full-country speed in the background. “All God’s Critters” was a song with such complexity that to sing it was to congratulate yourself on knowing the words. Much like “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which I had never mastered back in the real world. It even had Grease-like matching hand motions.

  All God’s critters got a place in the choir

  Some sing low, some sing higher

  Some sing out loud on the telephone wire

  And some just clap their hands, or paws

  Or anything they got now

  Listen to the bass, it’s the one on the bottom

  Where the bullfrog croaks and the hippopotamus

  Moans and groans with a big to-do

  The old cow just goes “Moo”

  MOOOOO

  The dog and the cat pick up the middle

  While the honeybee hums and the cricket fiddles

  The donkey brays and the pony neighs

  And the old coyote howls

  And we’d all “Howwwl” and go to sleep, unconsciousness being the only acceptable break from song. The next morning, awoken by a bugle recording over the loudspeaker, we’d sing ABBA’s altered-for-your-girlhood “I Have a Dream.” Instead of:

  I believe in angels

  When I know the time is right for me

  I’ll cross the stream—have a dream

  We sang:

  I believe in Wa-klo

  ’Cause I know the place is right for me

  In woods and streams—I’ve found my dreams.

  And then we’d pray. We were brainwashed and we loved it. Every Saturday night the entire camp marched into a clearing in the woods, where we lit a gigantic bonfire. Four girls were selected each week to dip torches into the crackling fireball. Each torch represented a moral category at which we aimed to excel: Friendship, Cleanliness, Sportsmanship, and Love. What they really were were long sticks we’d find in the woods the evening before. We’d wrap the ends in extra-large overnight maxi pads and roast them in the flames as we said our prayers. Then we’d hold them above our heads, imagining how embarrassing it would be to explain that one’s death—or worse, one’s disfigurement—came from a flaming maxi pad to the face.

  Looking back, this seems like a self-hating ritual for an all-girls camp. Bras, okay, they have a political history. But maxi pads? Alas, we were caught in the moment, incinerating the practical evidence of being women in order to stay girls forever. Despite an upbringing that didn’t allow for much flaming outdoor ritual, I was soon torching feminine products with the best of them.

  Meanwhile, the incorporation of Jesus and Native American folktales seemed more normal with each passing year. Sometimes I wondered if Jesus lived, and during those times I came to believe that he was God’s son. I decided to keep my newfound revelation from my parents. Here were these people who would gather me at the end of each summer, impervious to my hysterics about leaving camp and preoccupied with the coming school year. They wouldn’t “get” Jesus. I had found him and they weren’t even looking for him.

  I thought perhaps I was mistakenly born into the Jews anyway. I don’t look especially Jewish. This is always an awkward social observation. No one in his or her right mind would ever tell a biracial girl, “Funny, you don’t look black.” And here I am, one hundred percent Jewish, and people say: Really?

  And I say: Really.

  And they say: You don’t look Jewish at all.

  At which point I usually clap my hands and rub them together, like I’m off to man the grill, and say, “Great! Guess that means I would have had a decent shot at surviving the Holocaust!”

  But that’s now. At camp, I accepted this comment as a compliment. This was very dangerous for a kid like me, who was hanging on to her Judaism by a tzit-tzit thread as it was. I had no rituals that resembled “religious” at home. I had patterns—walking the dog, brushing my teeth, flushing my sister’s bite plate down the toilet. And I had talismans—stuffed animals, tie-dyed slouch socks, an awesome sticker collection. But never did they overlap.

  I came close to building my own theological infrastructure at the ripe age of seven, when I memorized a series of words: Sky, Blankey, Speech, Kim. I said them over and over again, like a mantra. I would say them under my breath when I was frightened or rendered dizzy by a Tilt-a-Whirl. Skyblankeyspeechkim.

  Our Siamese cat, who we loved so much he survived on mass affection and insulin injections until I was twenty-five, was called Skyler. Skyler used to curl up in my pink blankey, which I still have. When I started middle school, my mother began encouraging me to get rid of it. What are you going to do, take that thing to college? When I started college, she said, What are you going to do, have it in bed with you and your husband one day? Meanwhile, “speech” was when I’d line my stuffed animals up after my parents had tucked me in and talk to them about the day’s events. Skyler would be invited to these sophisticated salons as well and I’d scratch his ears and ponder running away from home, love, sex, death, and how cool it would be if I was a spy or mermaid or both and came to school as a spy-maid one morning.

  Then there was Kim, the closest thing I had to God before I went to camp and discovered Jesus. Kim was my invisible friend. Except that she wasn’t. I never spoke to her, never talked about her to anyone. All I did was name her and decide she was there. I forgot her at home or at school. If she had been a Tamagotchi, her little electronic soul would have died of neglect. I have no idea what she looked like. What I did know was that little kids were supposed to have invisible friends. The abnormal action of relating to the invisible was so encouraged by child psychologists that I felt abnormal not having one of my own.

  So there we were: the Cat, the Blankey, and the Invisible Spirit.

  I hadn’t thought of any of this until a year ago when I was on a flight and the complimentary blanket was called a “sky blanket.” I said it involuntarily: Sky, Blankey, Speech, Kim. I had almost forgotten. It’s so clear to me now: the memorizing of a fake prayer, the symbolization of objects, the struggle to relate to the invisible—I needed a religion. I was lost. I was in a remote Native American–themed chick commune in New Hampshire. I was in danger.

  The pinnacle of said danger came during the last week of July. That’s when we had “Christmas” and I—a nine-year-old Jew—found myself catching the Christmastime spirit. We had Hanukah, too, of course—the camp directors lit a menorah for eight nights and put it on their table in the mess hall, which was called Cracker Barrel. Years later, when I discovered that there was a national restaurant chain by the same name, I became highly irritated that a piece of my cultish sanctuary was available to every trucker on I-95. If you ask my fellow ex-campers, I’d bet good money they had the same reaction. That’s the kind of place this was.

  Just like in real time, Hanukah began a week or so before Christmas. And, just like in real time, it s
erved as more of a signifier that Christmas was coming than as a holiday unto itself. The camp’s directors put a couple of electronic menorahs—the Jewish equivalent to a string of Budweiser cans—in the dining hall. Still, they were easy to miss. One of the bigger mistakes the Jews ever made was having these skinny candles represent Hanukah. Because that’s what happened. It became a thin holiday, while Christmas has a whole glazed ham on its bones. Technically we have more of a right to our candles than, say, a Douglas fir—dressed in drag and humiliated with fairy lights—represents the birth of Christ. There is a direct correlation with the story of Hanukah and the long-burning oil (I think Eastern Mountain Sports sells it to campers now). Yet, was there a giant pine tree in the middle of the desert on Jesus’s birthday? “Here, Jesus,” says Joseph, “I saw this and thought of you.”

  But oh, to have Christmas in July! We lived all summer for it. Christmas consisted of seven days of Secret Santa (during which I invariably got the smelly kid who loved to give “crafts” or had to give to one of the European girls who lacked the palate for Fun Dip). The week ended with the Christmas play that Sunday. The play told the story of the life of Christ, complete with hay from the horse stables, bunnies from the barn, and fake blood from Halloween in June. We were allowed to forgo our uniforms and come to the play in flannel pajamas and Totes Toasties socks. Afterward we sang Lord-praising carols and lit more candles than usual, which should have made me extremely nervous. All those brown pine needles and birch benches…But it didn’t. I figured Jesus would protect me.

  Then we drank hot chocolate and exchanged our final gifts, purchased during rare excursions into civilization. These would be matching pajama sets or clever coffee mugs filled with candy and pencils. Across the bustling room, a profoundly good-natured teenager from Madrid gave her own Game Boy and a bottle of Chanel Number 5 as her final gift. I accepted my pipe cleaner anklet as graciously as possible. It was the Christian thing to do.