Love You a Latke

Chapter 13

13

I realized that trust in Seth was entirely misplaced when he told me we were going to a stand-up comedy night. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell me until we were outside the building, which made it a lot harder for me to run away. “No way, no, no, hell no,” I told him, having to raise my voice to be heard above the music thrumming all down this street of restaurants and clubs and the chatter of the crowds spilling through their doors. “Stand-up comedy is the worst. Nobody is funny, but you feel like you have to laugh or they look at you with those big sad eyes and it’s so awkward.”

“How much experience do you have with stand-up comics?” Seth asked, then his eyes widened. “Let me guess: you’re a former stand-up comic. Performing to night after night of snarky crowds is what embittered you on life.”

I snorted. “I couldn’t think of anything less appealing than getting up in front of a crowd and trying to make them laugh.”

That hadn’t been the case for Connor, though. Before moving up to Vermont, he’d tried his hand at multiple comedy clubs. As his girlfriend, I was always expected to sit up front and laugh heartily every time he paused, which, honestly, should have been the first sign that we weren’t compatible. I’d never been good at faking laughter. One time he told me it looked like I was being electrocuted, and I’d never been able to get that out of my head, so I’d just stopped trying.

“This one will be different,” Seth said, opening the door and gesturing me inside with a bow that was almost courtly. I eyed the dark entryway with unease. “And if I’m wrong and you hate it after fifteen minutes, we’ll leave.”

“You promise?”

“I promise,” he said. Okay. Even if it was terrible, I could do anything for fifteen minutes, as I’d learned at the dentist. So, with still a fair amount of trepidation, I crossed the threshold.

The main room wasn’t as deep and dark as the entryway would suggest. After climbing down a set of steep, narrow stairs, we emerged into a big space that, despite its low ceiling, was brightly lit and cozy with colorful cushions scattered over chairs and benches. A stage was set up on one end of the room; I eyed the standing mic uneasily.

We took a seat at a table close enough to the stage where we’d be able to see everything but far enough where hopefully the comic wouldn’t be able to make easy eye contact. The show still had a bit of time before it went on; people were still trickling in, appearing to be in no hurry as they shrugged off coats and unwound scarves. “So what’s the deal with this place?” I asked. “Is one of your friends performing or something? Or, don’t tell me, you’re the former stand-up comic.” I stopped and considered for a moment. “I could see it.”

He snorted. “No, I don’t have the intestinal fortitude necessary for getting up onstage and bombing in front of a crowd.”

“Then what—” I stopped as a waiter materialized to hand us menus. I’d drank enough last night where I didn’t particularly want to drink again, so I gave the alcohol menu only a cursory scan before moving on to the food. “Hey, wait.”

“Cool, right?” Seth said so smugly it made me hope just a little bit that he’d give himself a paper cut.

It was cool, though, I had to grudgingly admit. The menu was full of foods that felt like home to me, but that also had a flair of originality. Brisket and matzo balls in a hearty bowl of ramen. Lox bowls with nori and crispy rice. Savory potato kugel and boureka pastries with hummus and fried artichokes with kibbeh. Knishes with kimchi and potato filling and a gochujang aioli. “This menu is so…Jewish.”

“So Jewish,” Seth agreed. “And make sure you’re saving room for dessert. The rugelach is unreal, and the rainbow cookies are”—he looked around, then lowered his voice—“better than my mom’s.”

One of the things I actually missed about living in New York was seeing all the fun twists people put on Jewish and Israeli food at restaurants and in delis. Nobody was doing that in Vermont.

Maybe you could do that in Vermont , something whispered in my head. I was used to just pushing that voice away, but, for once, I let myself pause and consider it. Would it be that crazy to sell babka at my café? I bet people would love a thick, tender slice of the sweet bread braided with chocolate or cinnamon sugar or even something savory with their coffee. I could experiment with fun fillings, have a daily special. Or I could rotate shakshuka or sabich sandwiches on the brunch specials menu, since they both involved eggs. My regulars might see eggs poached in spicy tomato sauce and pitas stuffed with fried eggplant, eggs, and all the salad fixings as breaths of fresh air.

“Abby?” Seth said in a tone of voice that suggested this was the third or fourth time he had said my name.

I blinked. “What?”

He gestured at the menu. “Have you decided what you’re going to get? Do you want to share a few things?”

“Sure,” I said. And then, because he’d been so supportive when I’d raised the idea of my specialty coffees, I asked him what he thought about my idea.

His eyes lit up. “I think that sounds amazing . I’ll be first in line every morning.”

The idea of that didn’t even provoke the specter of my usual Category 3. In fact, I hadn’t experienced a headache like that around him this whole trip. Maybe it was something in the New York air. Probably smog. Right, fresh clean mountain air was totally known for making headaches worse.

When the waiter came back around, we ordered a few different dishes to share, and then the room quieted to a dull buzz. I glanced over at the stage to find the night’s first comic setting up the mic—a twentysomething guy with a thin frame and an abundance of dark curly hair. I sighed through my nose, readying myself for some tired speech about adulting or jabs at an imaginary wife.

Instead, the comic said, “Good god, I haven’t had this many people staring at me onstage since my bar mitzvah. Are you going to pelt me with candy again? I don’t even have a Torah stand to hide behind.”

A surprised laugh bubbled up from my throat. What the comic had said wasn’t even that funny, but it struck pangs of familiarity inside me that I hadn’t felt in years. I was right back there, age twelve and thirteen, hurling fruit gems as hard as I could at the heads of my Hebrew school classmates as they finished their haftarah, then pretending I was too cool to scurry up to the bima afterward with the littler kids to gather them up, no matter how much I wanted to. It was a memory of my childhood that didn’t have anything to do with my parents.

I’d spent a lot of time at synagogue without them, actually. I’d almost forgotten.

The guy continued to be not-that-funny, but he kept bringing up things that sent me tumbling back down memory lane. Not like I was trapped in a car with a speeding driver, but like I’d boarded a roller coaster I was really excited about trying out. It was a little scary, but also thrilling to remember things like reading the freaky parts of the Tanakh during a boring Shabbat morning service, or substituting other words for the Hebrew in Adon Olam. Apparently, my friends and I weren’t the only people to take l’ayt na-ah-sa and turn it into I ate my socks .

By the time the guy gave an ironic little bow and stepped down from the stage, something inside me had melted a bit. I didn’t want to analyze it, or I might do something terrible, like cry. So I was relieved when the food showed up and I could devote all my attention to how delicious it was rather than how glad, how grateful, I was to be back in a space like this.

The rest of the night went on much like that. All of the comics didn’t necessarily bring back good childhood memories, but as they regaled us with anecdotes about how people always felt the need to ask them what they thought about Israel before befriending them and jokes about how all of our holidays followed the general structure of “they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat” and tales about how our generational trauma from the Holocaust sometimes manifested in the impromptu running of marathons (okay, so that one was less relatable), I just felt…I don’t know, like I was back in the club again. Like I’d been reminded that, like it or not, I wasn’t a lone wolf out there; I was part of a pack.

And all while eating what were, however much I hated to admit Seth was right, the most delicious rainbow cookies I’d ever had. They were so beautiful I almost didn’t want to eat them; while many rainbow cookies had only a few different layers, these literally were striped with every color of the rainbow. I kind of wanted to see if each layer actually tasted different or if they were differentiated only by food coloring, but the thought of tearing one apart felt like throwing tomatoes at a masterful painting. “Plot twist,” I said, closing my eyes as I savored the chocolate edge of one cookie and debated taking another. “The guest baker tonight is your mom’s nemesis, Eva Hallac.”

Seth snorted. “It’s the melting of the ice caps all over again. No, the guest chef tonight is some famous TV chef who has a Jewish restaurant nearby. We walked by it the other day, and you thought it looked good, remember? I heard she’s taking leave from the restaurant because she just had a baby, but she can’t stay away from the kitchen altogether.”

Maybe she’d want to help out at the Hanukkah festival, I thought with a burst of inspiration that, just as quickly, fell flat. Seth had already said I couldn’t afford her. “I understand that,” I said. Understandable that someone might take a break from something to focus on another thing, and then come back to it once they remembered how much they loved it. How much they missed it over the years, how good it felt to finally come home again.

I was just talking about the chef. Obviously.

“Hey, do you want to hear a secret?” Seth leaned in, eyes sparkling. A pink crumb was clinging to his beard. I had to stop my hand in midair when I realized I was going to brush it away. What was I thinking? “Something I’ve never told anyone before.”

I tucked my traitorous hand under my thigh to keep it in check. “Sounds like great blackmail material.”

“Okay, if we’ve reached the point where people are willing to pay money for my secrets, I think that means I’ve made it.”

“I don’t think that’s what blackmail means.”

Seth flashed me a brilliant smile. “Well, I give you permission to blackmail me with it, if you really want to.”

“That takes all the fun out of blackmail.”

“Sorry,” Seth said, not sounding sorry at all. “Anyway. I may have lied to you before.”

“Please tell me you lied about what’s under your beard,” I said. “I knew you were a face tattoo kind of guy.”

“I actually have a second beard tattooed under the first beard,” he said. “Just in case.”

“Just in case what? Just in case your face catches fire, but only in the beard region?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Seth said. “Any fire in the beard region would also burn my skin, rendering any tattoos pointless.”

“I see.”

“Anyway,” said Seth. “I may have lied about doing stand-up. In that I actually may have tried stand-up before.”

Somehow, it didn’t strike me as a wild idea. I could see it in my mind, Seth doing his absolute best to make people laugh. “I just can’t believe you lied to me. Didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Honestly, I forgot about it until just now,” Seth admitted. He popped the last half of rainbow cookie into his mouth without asking if I wanted it. “It was right after college, when I thought I was the coolest guy ever. Which has never been true, by the way.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Rude. Anyway, Dan was trying to make it as a stand-up comic, and he asked me if I would go on with him one night as moral support, so I signed up to go on right after him. Which worked out well, actually, because he totally bombed, so I figured I couldn’t do worse than that.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It was a huge success and you left the crowd in hysterics.”

“If only,” Seth said somberly. “No, I tanked, too. It just wasn’t as bad because Dan laid the groundwork beforehand.”

I snorted. “If I could go back in time, I would attend that comedy night just so I could cringe at how bad you were.”

“Again, rude,” Seth said. “And also, if you could travel back in time, wouldn’t you want to do something like, I don’t know, kill Hitler?”

I snorted again. “Someone else would just have taken his place.”

“That was a joke.”

“Was it? Maybe that’s why you bombed your stand-up.”

He stood abruptly. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said, and walked off. I was left watching him, blinking at how suddenly he’d left. Had I genuinely insulted him? I thought we’d been joking around.

Ugh. This meant I’d have to apologize if I wanted to keep things the way they were. Which I did. Because things were really nice right now.

Ugh, again.

Watching a terrible comic alone is way less fun when you don’t have someone next to you to snicker with or roll your eyes at (one-sidedly, since Seth was way too nice to do such things when the comic could potentially see him do it if they squinted really hard). So I pulled out my phone and scrolled mindlessly through photos of old friends taking hikes and hugging babies and posing wistfully in front of flower walls and that’s why I didn’t realize what was happening until I heard Seth say into the microphone, “Shalom, everybody.”

My head popped up so fast I heard something in my neck crack. Okay, that would have to be looked at later. But for now, my eyes zeroed in on Seth, who was standing on the stage, his smile so bright it eclipsed the lights above. The mic only reached his chest, like it had been adjusted for the shorter person before him and he couldn’t figure out how to raise it. “How’s everybody doing tonight?” he said, scanning the room.

Nobody responded. He took it in stride. “So, gefilte fish, huh? What’s up with that stuff?”

What the hell was he doing ?

Again, nobody answered him, but the wattage of his smile didn’t dim even the slightest bit. “I mean, how do we even know it’s fish? It could be anything in there. Like they say with hot dogs. Pig snouts. Well, that wouldn’t exactly be kosher. In more ways than one.”

I hadn’t realized somebody could cringe with their entire body. It was really not helping whatever had cracked in my neck.

He went on, either oblivious to how little the crowd was laughing or in spite of it. “And pickled herring? Which word makes it sound less appealing?”

Still no laughter. I watched his smile fade a single watt.

I don’t know how to explain what happened next. All I know is that seeing his smile fade stirred something in me. And it wasn’t glee, the way it probably would have been back in Vermont. Whatever it was, it made me want to do something, anything, to make that (irritating) (obnoxious) (dazzling) smile return to its former brightness.

So that’s how I found myself onstage next to him. I don’t remember getting up and walking over there and clambering up the low edge of the stage; my memory just blinks and it’s like I teleported from my seat to the spotlight. It was shocking, but not as shocking as my appearance seemed to be for Seth. He just gaped at me, apparently forgetting how to speak.

Giving me the opportunity to take over. “I met his mother for the first time recently,” I said. “And she managed to wriggle the mention of Jewish grandchildren into our very first conversation.”

No reaction from the audience. Maybe I should have set the scene more. Worked in context. Isn’t that what they said about comedy? That it’s all in the context? Or maybe that was just my panicked brain throwing up smoke signals for rescue.

Seth seemed to pick them up. “To be fair, we’d make beautiful babies.”

Heat crept up my neck. I was aware that I should be responding, but all my words seemed to have temporarily fled.

Seth added hastily, “Not that we’re going to. My mom can comment all she wants.”

The heat didn’t recede. My neck and ears had to be bright red by now. “But maybe we will,” I said, nudging him as if to say, Fake relationship, remember? “Either way, it’s not her business. Anybody else get pressured by their Jewish mothers for grandchildren? It’s a stereotype for a reason, right?”

I’d hoped that would get at least one exasperated kid to raise their hand, but nope, nada, nothing. The humiliation was acute, kept my ears and throat burning, but somehow it didn’t feel as heavy as I would have expected. Maybe because Seth and I were going through it together. “Tough crowd,” I said. Why didn’t comedy still have a giant cane that came out of the wings to yank people who were bombing offstage? “So, anyway, gefilte fish?”

I have no memory of the rest of our set. For all I know, Seth and I could have stood up there and recited the ABC’s over and over until the painful silence made us pass out from the embarrassment and somebody was finally kind enough to drag us offstage and dump us in a pile in front of the building. Outside, in air cold enough to chill some of the scorching humiliation from my cheeks, I started, “Well, that was—”

“Amazing, right?” Seth finished, which had actually been nothing near what I was going to say, unless maybe I’d decided to go with amazingly terrible , or amazingly dreadful . “I haven’t had a rush like that since college.”

“You’re joking, right?” I said. I began walking away from the comedy club in a random direction, not caring where I was going as long as it was away. “We bombed up there. It was horrible.”

My back was to him, so I couldn’t see his expression, only the crowds of people dressed in far too few clothes for the weather and the cars rolling through puddles of slush in the road, but I imagined him looking bashful and unassuming as he spoke. “So what if we bombed? It was still exciting to be up there. Sometimes you have to try new things.”

“Is that why you went up there? To try new things? To see if maybe somehow you’d gotten good at stand-up comedy?”

“Oh, no, I knew I’d be terrible, and I was indeed correct when I said I didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to bomb in front of a crowd, because I feel a little like I want to throw up,” he said cheerfully. “But my date said that she’d rather go back in time to see my first bomb than go back in time to kill Hitler, and I figured a desire that strong couldn’t be left unmet.”

This time, no amount of chilly breeze or frozen sleet dripping from the eaves of restaurants could be enough to soothe the fire in my cheeks. “Well, who wouldn’t make that choice?” I mumbled. Maybe he couldn’t hear me over the sound of all these people going to restaurants and bars and clubs, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak up. “A chance to see an extremely annoying person humiliate himself in front of a crowd, or getting all bloody and gross?” I paused. “Also, of course I would kill Hitler if I had the chance.”

He continued on as if I hadn’t spoken. Which in his mind maybe I hadn’t, because he hadn’t heard me. I was kind of relieved—I hadn’t meant to call him annoying.

Not that he wasn’t. Of course he was.

Anyway, he said, “I couldn’t believe that you came up and joined me. Why did you come up there? I thought you, and I quote, ‘couldn’t think of anything less appealing than getting up in front of a crowd and trying to make them laugh.’?” He paused and considered. “To be fair, I guess we didn’t actually make anybody laugh.”

This was the first time I really got to think hard about why I’d done it. I’d looked up there at Seth bombing, at the crowd wincing at how bad he was, and I’d imagined how it would feel for that to be me. I’d be shrinking with humiliation, paralyzed with it, especially going through it alone.

And I hadn’t wanted Seth to go through it alone.

I sighed. “I guess I…care about your feelings or something? And I didn’t want you to suffer up there by yourself?”

We stopped at a crosswalk. It was getting quieter around us now, the streets of restaurants and bars transforming into streets of stately brownstones twinkling with classy red and green and white lights. “Wow,” Seth mused. “I’m so touched. For what it’s worth, I’m really glad you’re my friend, Abby.”

Wait. Not all of the brownstones were twinkling with Christmas lights. In the middle of the block, one beautiful building hung heavy with strings of blue and white. We stopped in front of it to see in the window a gleaming bronze menorah, its four candles flickering low.

I was glad he was my friend, too. Not that I would ever say it aloud.

But, because he was my friend, he knew not to try to make me. He slung his arm over my shoulders. Instinctively, I leaned into him, and we stood there like that for a second, drinking in each other’s warmth.

It was normal, for a fake relationship. We were performing the image of a loving boyfriend and girlfriend for anybody who happened to be around.

I chose not to think about how there wasn’t anybody else there.