In my creative-writing class a young man has written a romance. He is a charming young man, with a sweet, candid smile that passes for honesty as well as anything else does in this class. It is not a class in which people criticize each other’s work severely. Everyone likes everything that everybody writes, and everybody likes this romance.

We also like the young man, Jody, whose mother has come to class to hear him read his romance. And we are charmed with Jody’s mother who has beautiful long black hair, and who, when Jody reads, swings her crossed leg nervously. Jody’s mother does not mean this to be seductive, but it is.

It is a curious story, this romance. It takes place in a shtetl (“small town”: Jody explains this to the class) and it concerns a young bride, Malka, her elderly husband, Itzhak, and her young lover, Stefan, who, through a combination of rape and seduction, relieves Malka of the virginity her husband has been unable to capture, and makes her pregnant. It is considered by the townsfolk to be a miracle.

The story requires a glossary. The rabbi studies Gemara, but the hazzan studies Kabbalah. A torchlight parade accompanies Malka to the mikveh. (“Purifying bath,” explains Jody.) Stefan, Malka’s blond giant of a lover, mad with passion at Malka’s impending marriage to Itzhak, rampages through the local brothel. There he is offered food by the kindhearted madam, but Stefan turns it away. He does not eat treyf, only kosher. And so on.

The teacher wants to know what this story reminds us of. Dinesen, we say. Hardy. Singer.

Jody smiles sweetly at his mother. “I just wanted to write something Jewish,” he says.

A voice from the back of the classroom: “Is there a market for such a story?”

It is going to be difficult, we agree. Maybe, because it is sexy, Playboy. Maybe, because it is Jewish, COMMENTARY.

The bell rings, the class breaks up. A group forms around Jody, who is radiant. Another around the teacher. Lottie, who sits next to me in class, tugs at my sleeve. Her hand trembles a little. “That story upsets me,” she says. “You want to have a cup of coffee, a glass of wine? Do you have to go home?”

I look at my watch. It is a quarter to ten. When classes are over the streets vibrate with students, the bars fill, the Village pulses. “I never feel like going home,” I tell Lottie.

Lottie is not really a writer. She is a Holocaust survivor who is writing her memories. When the Nazis came into Hungary Lottie was hidden in the household of a brave priest. She cleaned and cooked and pretended to learn to be a Christian. When the triumphant Russians marched into the town she rushed into the street with the other women and threw flowers at them. Free! Free!

They were all raped.

“Not because I was Jewish, you understand,” says Lottie. “Because I was Hungarian.”

“Some honor,” I mutter through my teeth.

In ’56, when the Hungarians had their revolution, she said to herself, “Lottie, maybe enough is already enough,” and she walked out.

Lottie has almost no accent. Her hair is white and symmetrically waved on both sides of her face, like a movie star of the 1930’s. She is serious and studious and she wears only black clothes. She is trying to write truthfully of her life, but editors send her rejection slips. “Sorry, no personal memoirs or survivor stories, please. We have too many of them.”

Lottie and I head for Barley’s. It’s going to be noisy, but the food is good enough. We take a booth in the back and before we are settled in, Stella, who is in our class, joins us, and then Bonita. Stella is a retired history teacher. She has enormously wide hips and she squeezes in next to me. Bonita sits next to Lottie. We study the menu for calories.

“Are you going to have French fries again?” Bonita asks Stella. There is such wistfulness in her voice that we all crack up.

“Who cares?” says Stella. “You know what old means? It means never having to count calories.”

But Bonita, who comes in from Cedarhurst in tight worn-out jeans (after stopping in the ladies room of the Long Island Railroad to pin her diamond ring inside her bra), orders raw clams. She has a big behind and fat thighs, she informs us, as though we can’t see them. Lottie drinks black coffee and eats pastry. She never gets fat.

Bonita is writing a novel about a suburban housewife, a woman from Great Neck, who comes into the city once a week in search of the perfect orgy. But every time she finds one something goes wrong with it. One orgiast has a birthmark on his stomach. It turns her off. Another has a colostomy. Or she can’t find the bathroom. Or she thinks she glimpses, beneath a tangle of squirming bodies, her brother. Or her husband’s boss. And so on. The class can hardly wait for the next chapter.

“I’ll have clams too,” I say, “and a carafe of white wine. Maybe two is better.”

“Two carafes,” we tell the waitress.

Then we call her back. “One white and one red.”

_____________

 

Lottie cannot wait to talk. “Tell me,” she says, “what kind of a story is that? Kallehs and mikvehs and davening and shaitels and talesim and nobody in the story is really Jewish. A bunch of pagans. Why does he write such a story? For his mother?”

“Lottie,” says Stella, laughing, “what’s Jewish?”

Lottie’s eyes are glistening. Her rimless glasses make her look tremulous. “Dearest Stella,” she says, “in Hungary if you did not know what was Jewish the Hungarians were happy to tell you. And if not the Hungarians, the Germans. And if not the Germans, the Russians. I know what’s Jewish. Not that story.”

The wine has arrived and we are drinking it. “My God,” says Bonita, “they raped you.” She shudders.

“Let’s talk about Jody’s story,” I say. I have a long trip home and rape makes me nervous.

“A brothel,” says Lottie. “Whoever heard of a brothel in a shtetl? With unkosher food. I never heard of such a thing.”

Stella’s laugh is so loud you can hear it above the juke box, which is playing “You Really Got Me,” by The Kinks. “There’s a Yiddish word for prostitute, Lottie. Nafkeh. So there must have been prostitutes or they wouldn’t need a word.”

“They weren’t Jewish.”

“I thought we were going to talk about the story,” I say.

“We’re talking about the story,” says Bonita. “We are also talking about life.”

“It’s a very literary story,” I say. “It’s derivative.”

“You said you liked it,” accuses Bonita. “Why weren’t you honest?”

My feelings are hurt. “I was honest,” I say. “I did like it. I said it reminded me of Turgenev.”

We laugh. The wine is having its effect.

“Next week, when I read my story,” says Stella, “you can say it reminds you of Chekhov.”

“No,” I say, “Maupassant, maybe, not Chekhov.”

“Stella,” says Bonita, a raw clam hanging from her fork, “will you trade me a French fry for a clam?”

Stella holds out her plate and we each take a French fry. Bonita takes two.

“It’s a bizarre story,” says Lottie. “The people are bizarre.”

“I met some bizarre Jews in Greece last summer,” says Stella. “A whole family.”

I signal the waitress. “Maybe you could turn down the volume,” I say, “we’re talking.” She is a young waitress, very pretty, probably an actress. She shrugs elaborately, as if I’m crazy. “I’ll find out,” she says.

“On a tour bus,” says Stella, “one of those day tours from Athens to Delphi. A mother, a father, and two teen-aged sons. I called them ‘the family from Scarsdale.’ ”

Stella is funny. “Your classes must have loved you,” I say. “I bet you were a great teacher.”

“Not bad,” she says modestly.

“What about the family from Scarsdale?” says Bonita.

“The boys were gorgeous. Curly hair, muscular thighs, perfect bronze bodies, high-school wrestler types. They wore denim shorts, the kind that are all frazzled around the edges, like you can’t afford a needle and thread. And that’s all. No shirts. No shoes.”

“No shoes?” says Lottie, scandalized. “In a bus? I’d have made them wear shoes if I were their mother.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Bonita says darkly, raiding Stella’s French fries.

“What about the mother and father?” I say.

“She looked too young to be their mother. Too perfect. Every once in a while one of the sons would turn around and berate her, ‘If it wasn’t for you we could be getting a suntan,’ and she would cast her eyes up to heaven. Then the sons would cast their eyes up to imitate her and she would laugh as if she were used to being treated contemptuously.”

“And the father?” says Lottie.

“The father! He sat in a different part of the bus. He didn’t talk to any of them. He had one of those hair-stylist haircuts, with little drops of brilliantine, or something, and he carried a pocket-book. I think he was coming out of the closet.”

We are silent. “Stella,” I say after a while, “you’re making this up. It’s next week’s story.”

“No,” says Stella, “there were all kinds of characters on that bus. Behind me were two men who argued about everything, complicated, legalistic arguments. I called them ‘the disbarred lawyer and the defrocked rabbi.’ And in front of me were two girls.”

“Women,” says Bonita.

“Women. Young women. They were talking about the problems of women traveling alone, so I listened. The one next to the window I couldn’t see, of course, but the one on the aisle had a big oily nose and a shapeless kind of shape. I called her Golda.

“Golda was saying Israeli men were the worst, if you didn’t count the Egyptians. Her friend said no, the Italians were the worst. In Italy, she said, if you have one leg, some bozo runs after you on the street to tell you that even the Madonna doesn’t have such a beautiful leg. They giggled over that and the one next to the window leaned forward and I saw freckles and hair the color of marmalade.

“But not the Greeks, they agreed. Greeks treat women with respect.”

“They do?” says Bonita. “I never heard that.”

“Greeks never pay any attention to women,” says Stella. “They’re always in the cafés, talking politics and dancing with each other. Once in a while a Greek woman comes tearing out of her house, raises her fists to heaven, and shouts, ‘Women! Daughters! Never marry a Greek!’ ”

“That’s what Socrates’ wife did,” I say.

“Anyway, these two young women were talking, comparing their experiences, and pretty soon I realized that they didn’t really know each other, they just happened to be sitting together. Golda, it turned out, was from Canton, Ohio, and the redhead was Canadian. So they started to compare American men and Canadians.”

“What’s the difference?” Bonita asks.

“Turns out not much. Canadians say ‘aboot.’ But then Golda started to laugh in a very surprised way. It was a special kind of laugh, deliberately rippling and cultivated, full of astonishment.”

“A chairperson laugh,” I suggest.

“Yes. She kept saying, ‘You’re not. Oh, I can’t believe it. Really, I never would have guessed.’ ”

“The other girl said she was Jewish,” says Lottie.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Golda was giving her a compliment,” says Lottie. “That’s what Americans always say, ‘You don’t look Jewish.’ It’s supposed to be something wonderful.”

“You look like a New England schoolteacher, Lottie,” I say.

“The priest could never have saved me if I didn’t.”

A pause. “Where is that waitress?” I say. “I want her to turn that damned thing down.”

But the waitress is not in sight and Stella continues her story.

_____________

 

“Well, the bus finally got to Delphi. Have you ever been to Greece in July? The heat sits on you. I got out of the bus and lugged myself up the mountainside, tripping over all kinds of sanctified rubble, and there on the ruins are the boys from Scarsdale, one of them posing, eyes closed, with his face to the sun, and the other one turns to the mother, who isn’t even sweating in her linen sundress, and says spitefully, ‘Now, are you satisfied? It’s just a bunch of rocks.’ ”

“Imagine,” says Bonita.

“He was right. You make this pilgrimage in a rinky-dink bus and the guide is snotty and the air conditioning doesn’t work. And then there are those stark crags against that blue sky and the olive groves stretching like a green sea at your feet. If you had any breath left the beauty of that place would take it away. But the sanctuary is nothing but a pile of broken rocks.”

“You’re supposed to be able to visualize it, Stella,” I say, “the way it used to be. You’re a historian.”

“I tried,” says Stella, “I shlepped my fat legs up the Sacred Way, and thought about all those ancient people who used to do the same thing, just so they could ask a crazy old lady how they should run their lives. They didn’t even have buses.”

“I wonder what they asked her,” Lottie says.

“The usual things,” says Stella. “What should I do about my son who doesn’t listen to me? How can I find the bracelet my husband gave me before he discovers I lost it? Cure me of cancer. Tell me how to live a meritorious life. The same things we ask.”

“The Oracle knew all that?” asks Lottie.

“She went into a trembling ecstasy and talked in gibberish and the priest interpreted what she had said. If you were a woman, of course, you couldn’t go near her.”

“Sounds like my psychiatrist,” Bonita says.

“It must have worked pretty well,” says Stella. “They did it for about a thousand years.”

The white wine is finished, so we start on the red. “Did you ever find out if the Canadian girl was Jewish?” I ask Stella.

“Oh. I was trying to climb a path up to the stadium when I met her coming down. She said she had turned back, it was too far. Golda, of course, was still climbing. So we sat down together on a rock overlooking a chasm to rest. She was a pretty young woman, sharp little features and big hazel eyes. Her name was Alison Cohen. She was a laboratory technician.”

“My daughter is in medical school,” says Bonita, running her finger around the edge of the glass to see if it would ring. I cast a sharp eye at her. The last train back to Cedarhurst is at one o’clock and I think she is getting drunk.

“Alison said she wasn’t going back on the bus with us, she was spending the night in Delphi at the hotel. She wanted to go out to the sanctuary at daybreak and feel the presence of the god. So I said, ‘He’s dead, Cookie, he doesn’t live here any more,’ but she said he was a god of peace and reconciliation and she intended to seek him.

“I wasn’t so happy that this kid is going out there all alone at dawn. I figured she might run into one of those Greeks who are so respectful to women, so I gave her a little history lesson. ‘You know, I said, the Pythia—the old woman through whom the Oracle spoke—sent out a final message. She said, “The sanctuary has fallen to the ground and Phoebus Apollo has neither a hut nor a laurel leaf to his name, and even the prophetic waters have been silenced. Everything here is dead.” ’

“But she didn’t listen to me any more than my students did. She asked me did I know that the Pythia sat on a tripod and opened her body to the intoxicating vapors. ‘It was pot,’ she said.

“I told her that’s a discredited theory and she gave me the sweetest smile possible and said, ‘Well, I’m going to believe it anyway.’ I don’t understand what she thought she would find out there. There’s no place more final than where a god has died.”

“What happened to her?” says Lottie.

“I don’t know. The trip she was taking was a bachelor party she was giving herself. She said she was going back to Toronto to get married.”

“My daughter is getting married,” says Bonita. “She’s marrying a doctor.”

Suddenly we drop everything. We are full of gurgles and mazel tovs. A doctor! Bonita’s daughter is marrying a doctor!

“Her daughter will also be a doctor,” Lottie reminds us. “How do you do that on the envelope, doctor and doctor?”

“She’s keeping her own name,” says Bonita. But we don’t want to discuss that, we want to hear about the wedding.

Bonita stares at the ceiling. “I don’t want to talk about the wedding.”

“He isn’t Jewish,” says Lottie.

“Not Jewish?” says Bonita, suddenly awake. “He’s one of those doctors who can’t operate without his yarmulke.”

(“Skull cap,” explains Jody.)

“Your daughter is marrying a Jewish doctor arid you don’t want to talk about the wedding!” I say.

Bonita’s eyes fill with tears. “I have nothing to say about it. They’re planning the whole thing with their guru.”

“A Jewish guru?” says Lottie, uncertainly.

“A rabbi from the West Side of Manhattan. In the eighties. He’s a friend of the groom. They have a group that meets in his apartment. They dance. They sing.”

“So what’s wrong with that?” says Stella.

“The women have to sit separately. I can’t even invite my CR group. There would be a riot.”

(“Consciousness-raising,” explains Jody.)

“And that’s not all. My daughter says I have to lead her seven times around the groom. His mother too.”

“You’re kidding,” says Stella.

Bonita fills her glass to the brim. The carafe is empty. “I told her,” she says, looking into the glass and feeling in her bra to make sure the ring is still there, “that his mother could go around him fourteen times and leave me out of it entirely.” She drains the glass.

“What did she say?”

“She said I don’t have to come to the wedding.”

We sigh. Daughters.

“And that’s not all. You know what the groom is wearing to the wedding?”

We are silent.

“A shroud.”

I look at Lottie. She shrugs. “An old custom,” she says. “It’s a white coat called a kittel. Men wear it at the wedding and then not again until they are buried in it.”

Stella looks stunned. “I never heard of that,” she says.

_____________

 

A few drops of wine are left at the bottom of the carafes. Bonita pours them both, the white and the red, into her glass and swallows. “Rosé” she says, and puts her curly head down on the table. We shake her, but she seems to be asleep.

“What do you think she should do about the wedding?” says Stella.

We think about it.

“Maybe,” says Lottie in her perfect accent, “she could lead the torchlight parade to the mikveh.”

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