Eighteen
Tovah
“THIS PLACE HASN’T CHANGED AT all,” Adina says as we get our skates. Size eight for me, six and a half for her. When we were younger, I teased her about her baby feet. She whined that I was being mean, but I think she secretly loved her dainty shoe size.
After much convincing that she could afford to take a break from her relentless practicing—which at home she does only with her door closed—she agreed to come to Great Skate with me as long as I wouldn’t mention Huntington’s disease. I can do that. Our fragile peace is a sheet of ice over a newly frozen pond. Easily breakable.
Adi sniffs the skate before putting it on her foot. “It smells like someone peed in this.”
“They spray them with antifungal . . . spray,” I offer, and she heaves a dramatic sigh.
“And did they have to cover the whole place in Christmas decorations?”
There’s a tree in one corner, stockings mounted on the walls, and a cardboard cutout Santa you can take a picture with.
“You want to put up a menorah? Scatter a few dreidels around?” I’m being facetious. It bothers me too, the assumption this time of year that everyone celebrates Christmas. That it’s an “American holiday” that means exactly nothing to my American family. As a kid, I couldn’t stand it when people said “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.” It’s easy to be inclusive, and yet most people just don’t care.
“That’s not the point,” Adina says, huffing as we step onto the rink.
Truthfully, I’m on edge too. It’s the first day of winter break, and I haven’t heard from Johns Hopkins. My obsessive e-mail checking got my phone confiscated in AP Calculus last week. A few classmates stifled giggles—Tovah Siegel had never had anything confiscated before.
Clearly out of practice and uncertain on her skates, Adina clings to the walls. I skate backward in front of her as she pushes off, gliding a few feet on her own.
“You got it!” I tell her, and for a brief moment a real grin flashes across her face. She’s proud of herself.
Then she skids and the smile vanishes and her face scrunches back up like she’s concentrating very, very hard.
This is the magic of roller-skating: take anyone who has an atom of confidence and watch them struggle. Even Zack, who most of the time exudes bravery, wobbled on his skates on my birthday. I haven’t seen him outside of school since our movie date, and he’s visiting family in Portland over winter break. Every day this past week, though, he sat next to me at lunch. He always sits with our group, but suddenly it felt deliberate, the way he chose the chair closest to mine and sometimes knocked my foot with his and one time draped his arm across the back of my chair.
“What’s this music?” Adina asks, pulling me out of my Zack trance.
“Something from the eighties. Duran Duran, I think? It’s kind of charmingly bad, right?”
“More like grating, obnoxious, and lacking in creativity.”
I set my jaw. She doesn’t have to insult everything.
“Look,” I say because it can’t just be Great Skate bothering Adina, “I know things have been hard for you and you don’t have a lot of people to talk to. . . .”
She drags her toe to stop abruptly. “You said we wouldn’t talk about it.”
I phrased it wrong. “I know. I know. I was wondering if you wanted to hang out with Lindsay and me sometime. Maybe with Zack and Troy, too?”
“Zack,” Adina repeats.
“Yeah. Zack. Troy’s friend.”
“The way you said his name.” She smirks. “Is he maybe not just Troy’s friend?”
I stare down at my battered skates. “We’re . . . hanging out.”
“So you’re letting yourself date.”
“What?” A flash of panic, as though I’ve been found out.
“You haven’t dated anyone before, and now you are. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that you started doing it right after we took the test.”
“It’s . . . not,” I say flatly. There’s no point lying about it. “It’s not a coincidence. And I thought you didn’t want to talk about—”
“I don’t!” she says, her voice rising. Cracking—along with our tentative peace. “But that’s the thing. It infects every fucking part of our lives. It’s impossible to have a conversation without it.”
“I’m going to take a break,” I say, because if I stay here, I’m going to lash out at her, and I can’t let that happen. I skate off the rink without looking back at her. Let her fall and rip her tights. Let her look ridiculous. So far this night has confirmed what happened at the hotel was a fluke: something to do because we had nothing else to do.
I slump into a chair near where we stowed our shoes and pull out my phone, hoping for a text from Zack.
Instead, there’s an e-mail from Johns Hopkins University.
My lungs tighten. It’s about to happen. After all these years, it’s finally about to happen. When I got into Johns Hopkins, I’ll tell people, I was at Great Skate watching a bunch of little kids skate to “The Safety Dance.” We’ll all laugh about it.
Forcing out a deep breath, I open the e-mail.
Dear Tovah,
We have completed our initial review of your application and have decided to hold it for further consideration in March. Please do not be discouraged by this. We had a record number of applicants this year, and the majority of students who applied early decision were deferred. . . .
I read it again.
Deferred. The word is foreign. Not part of my vocabulary. I hold it in the center of my tongue. Taste it. Deferred. Right now all it means is “not accepted.”
Over and over I read the e-mail, as though I’m expecting it to tell me something different on my twenty-ninth time through it. The words blur and my thumb smudges the phone screen because of all the scrolling I’m doing and something deep in my chest winds itself into a tight, tight ball.
My phone blinks with a new message, and I half believe it’s another e-mail from Johns Hopkins telling me they made a mistake, that they’re proud to welcome me into next year’s freshman class and they’re so sorry for the confusion. But it’s spam. Sexy singles in my area want to meet me.
I’ve molded myself into exactly the kind of person Johns Hopkins should want, and I don’t understand what it means that they haven’t given me a yes or no yet. I’ve always planned ahead—but the problem now is that I suddenly can’t think past today. My mind spins with too many questions I can’t answer. What happens next and what do I do and there is still a sliver of a chance, but what if I wait and wait and wait and they reject me in the spring anyway and early decision was binding and I haven’t applied anywhere else but now I need to and, and, and . . .
Two child-size skates appear in my line of vision, and I follow them up to my sister’s face.
“What’s going on?” she asks, pointing to my phone. “Is it something with Ima?”
“No.” I shove the phone back into my pocket.
“Then what is it?”
Maybe if I rip it off fast, it won’t hurt. “I got deferred from Johns Hopkins.” I grit my teeth. It sounds even worse out loud.
“Oh.” Adina furrows her brows. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means I didn’t get in early decision. My application’s been moved to the pool with everyone else who applied regular decision.” I wince, steeling myself for another verbal attack.
Instead my sister’s expression softens. “I’m sorry,” she says, and the genuineness in her voice surprises me. Then again, she knows how much this school means to me. She understands passion. Ambition. “Do you want to go home and wallow about it?”
Maybe she’s being kind because of what she did to sabotage me sophomore year. Maybe she realizes this could be her fault.
I push those thoughts away. We’re getting along: that’s more important right now.
“A little, yeah. Is that okay?”
“God, yes. We can get ice cream on the way home and find a shitty movie to watch. I think Mystic Harbor is on Netflix.”
The tension in my chest eases slightly. My sister is back, for now.
We stop at the organic market near our house and spend way too much on three flavors of ice cream, hot fudge, and a jar of maraschino cherries. When we get home, I kiss my fingers and touch the mezuzah, but Adina doesn’t. I wonder if she forgot.
We rearrange the pillows on my bed and position my laptop on the edge of my desk. My bed isn’t big, but our bodies don’t touch, like there’s an invisible line down the middle neither of us is ready to cross yet.
“The rink was pretty bad,” I admit between bites of mint chocolate chip, “down to the Christmas decorations.”
“Thank you.” She aims her spoon at my laptop screen. “I forgot how much I love this movie. What is it about bad movies that makes them so much better than good movies?”
“It’s more fun to talk about how shitty something is than about how good it is,” I say, making a mental note to introduce her to The Room later.
Halfway into the movie, my attention wanders, flicking between the screen and my phone. On Facebook, Emma Martinez from student council and Henry Zukowski from AP Bio and Raleigh Jones from AP Calculus are celebrating early acceptances to Brown, Swarthmore, Wesleyan. Jealousy turns me manic. I open my essay, wondering if there’s any way I submitted the wrong version, or if my recommendation letters weren’t as glowing as they could have been, or if something was missing from my résumé. . . .
“Are you on your phone?” Adi asks.
I scan my essay. “Maybe I had some typos on my application essay? Or I somehow sent the wrong file? Maybe there was a mistake.”
I need a reason. A why. I need this to make as much sense as aerobic respiration or photosynthesis. Was I deferred because of that B-plus in Introduction to Drawing, the only flaw on my record? Because I took six AP classes this year, not seven, though my non-AP is student council, and don’t schools want to see leadership experience? Because my application didn’t stand out enough?
Because of what Adina did?
Adina smashes down the pause button, freezing the Mystic Harbor actors before their first passionate, rain-soaked kiss. “What the hell, Tovah?”
“I’m sorry,” I say automatically. Her words stir up fresh guilt. My problems are not in the same country as hers and Ima’s. They’re not on the same map. Does that make them less valid? At any given time there are millions of people legitimately suffering in the world; my privileged problems pale in comparison. I know that. But my sister is suffering right next to me. I can’t reconcile all these feelings. “I’m just trying to understand what happened.”
She hops off the bed. Doesn’t tidy up the messy blankets. “I felt bad for you at the rink, really, but you’re being ridiculous. You expected to get in, and you can’t accept that you still probably will; you just have to wait a little longer? I’m so sorry you don’t get everything you want exactly when you want it. Poor Tovah.”
I did expect to get in early. But I also worked really fucking hard for it.
I scramble to my feet too, and it’s then that I notice a chocolate ice cream splotch staining the pillow Adina was lounging on. “I hope you’re planning to clean that up later.”
“Sure,” Adina says with a snort, tossing her curls over one shoulder. “I’ll add it to my list of priorities along with deciding whether I want to start any experimental medications and wondering when I won’t be able to pick up the viola anymore.”
There goes our peace, and I’m falling through the ice.
“So that’s how it’s going to go,” I say. “You win every argument from here until the end of our lives?”
“Until the end of mine, at least.”
I gnash my teeth. “I’m allowed to be upset too. Everything I’ve done these past few years has been for that school.”
“Lucky for you,” she says as she heads for the door, “you still have plenty of choices. You could get rejected from every school in the country, and you’d still have more options than I do.”
“It’s not like you don’t have choices,” I snap. The rage bubbling inside me feels even better than the warmth I felt holding hands with Zack. “You want to talk about moping? You’ve been moping ever since we got the results, and you don’t seem to realize that you have options too. Counseling, support groups, experimental meds. This sucks for you, it really fucking sucks, but do you think Ima spent all her time acting the way you do?”
“You don’t know how Ima feels,” Adina fires back.
“I don’t. You’re right.” Because I’m not part of the special club they have. I march over to where she’s standing in my doorway and try to edge her out. “I’m going to bed, so I can lie awake all night thinking about my choices.”
Adina puts her palm on the door, shoving back against it to hold it open. “Shut up! God, sometimes it’s like you don’t even care about Ima. If it’s not about school, it’s not on your radar.”
“Is that seriously what you think?” This is why I can’t let the guilt fully take over. When she says things like this, it’s clear she doesn’t understand me at all. I worry about our mother too. Sometimes it’s too much to be in the same room with her for long.
“It’s not what I think. It’s the truth.”
I heave all my weight on the door, as though if I can just—close—it, then I can shut out everything she’s saying, too. But Adina sticks her foot inside.
“What are you doing?” I say, voice climbing to a shriek as I bounce the door against her foot, trying to get her to move. “Get out of my room!”
We’re ten-year-olds throwing tantrums.
“I’m not done talking to you!” Her face is red and her eyes are slits. “You never let me finish a conversation with you.”
“This is a conversation? Really? I thought it was you telling me everything I’m doing wrong.” I heave my back against the door, crushing her in the space between it and the frame.
Footsteps pound up the stairs, and Ima marches down the hall toward us. “What the hell is going on in here?” she asks, following it up with a string of Hebrew curse words.
I step back from the door, freeing Adina, who’s still pushing on it so hard that she stumbles.
“It’s nothing,” she says quickly.
“Do you have any idea how late it is? Do you? Or are you both so . . . so self-absorbed that you didn’t think some people in this house, on this block, are trying to sleep right now?” Her words are razor-sharp. She kicks my door. Hard. “This is unacceptable behavior from both of you.”
I shrink deeper into my room, Ima’s words snipping several inches off my height. This is one of her mood swings. This isn’t her. Still, part of me thinks we deserved it. We’ve disturbed our mother with our venom for each other.
“Ani miztaeret,” Adina apologizes, and I echo her.
Ima crosses her arms over her chest. “Both of you . . . you . . . you need to figure this shit out. You can’t scream at each other like children.”
As Ima turns to head back downstairs, Adina races to her room and shuts the door, leaving me with a poisonous mix of rage and guilt and shame. There’s nothing like hearing your mother swear at you. It makes me wonder what her classroom is like these days. What happens if she loses her temper in front of those kids?
Her words echo in my head even as I close my own door and melt into bed, my cheek on the ice-cream-stained pillow.
The last time Ima was this furious with me, I was nine. Adi had borrowed, then broken, a rock tumbler that I’d gotten for our birthday. I went to Ima’s room and through my tears I said, “I hate her. I hate Adi.”
Ima yanked my wrist a little too hard.
“Ouch!”
“You don’t hate Adi,” she said. “Do you know what that word means? ‘Hate’?”
“It means I don’t like her. I don’t want her to be my sister anymore.”
Ima shook her head and sat me down on her bed. And then she told me all about what hate means to the Jews. About the Holocaust.
I spent the next few years consumed by Holocaust literature. Consumed by trying to find a why somewhere in all that history, heartbroken when I couldn’t. You can spend lifetimes searching tragedies for reasons why.
It was after that conversation with Ima that I realized two things, one about my religion and one about my sister. Being Jewish, being half Israeli—that would always make us—me—different. Not just in a please-say-Happy-Holidays-not-Merry-Christmas kind of way. It went deeper than that. It was a connection to something more. Centuries of suffering and hardship and being told we didn’t belong.
Over the next couple years, I began my own Torah study, and everything took on new meaning: my bat mitzvah, keeping kosher, observing Shabbat.
The second thing I realized was that I didn’t hate Adina. She might frustrate and infuriate me, embarrass and humiliate me, but I didn’t hate her. I never could.
But tonight I came close.