When We Rise Up, When We Fall Down

 

by Rochelle Cashdan

 

 

If I ever paint a picture, I’m going to call it “Grandma Falling” like that French dude who called his picture “Nude Falling Down the Stairs.”

To make a long story short, as my father says, even before Grandma broke her ankle after a party back in Virginia, we weren’t expecting many of the relatives to head west for my Bar Mitzvah.

“We’re too far off Broadway,” I heard Dad say to Mom, the same evening he reported that the principal would tell the soccer coach to let me keep playing even though I was missing practice Tuesdays for my Bar Mitzvah lessons.

When Mom heard that Grandpa would stay home with Grandma, she was furious. I’d never heard her turn on Dad the way she did that night. She said there’d be ding, dong nobody from the sunny south celebrating with us. I even heard her say Grandma had fallen down the stairs on purpose, and after so many years in Roanoke and with all their money, Grandpa didn’t know anybody who could help?

Back in Virginia, the idea of Dad teaching college in Oregon  makes them laugh. “Forgot your lasso, kid?” my uncle says every time we go back to visit. Even Grandma jokes about Cherryville, but then so does the soccer team from Monroe.

Anyway, a week before my big day, even with only Mom’s parents coming and all the uncles and aunts staying home, I felt good and ready.  Not like my brother Rob who got stuck between being the new rabbi’s first and the caterer’s last. I remember how we expected him to do all right on his speech but singing his part, we weren’t so sure.

This time around, even Dad, who has a habit of knocking things, expected the Bar Mitzvah to be easy shmeasy. But we still had to nail down a caterer. It wasn’t easy with Dad wanting a fancy to-do and Mom preferring to keep things simple. Finally one night while she was on the phone I saw her turn her back to him and heard her voice go super firm.

“I don’t want a kiwi bar mitzvah,” she was saying, waving her butt while she said it. As the Virginia cousins would say, she came down right hard on the kiwi. But Mom knew what she was doing. The next day she came up with someone who would even make her family recipe for There’s No Tomorrow chopped liver.

Now Mom could set about the project of getting me a suit. Grandma and Grandpa took care of that for Rob, bought him a pale blue suit that the alterations lady nipped in at the waist. When they came back to the house with it, Mom told me later she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She said Rob looked like Charlie McCarthy, explaining who Charlie was. Rob was a little shrimp back then.

Mom took me to all three stores downtown—she pretends she’s never heard of the mall—but the stores were either sold out for Easter or never bought suits for twelve year old boys in the first place. So two weeks before the Bar Mitzvah, she came up to my room and told me to put that book down right away. As soon as I did, we were on the way up the interstate.

Mom was driving with a heavy foot, as fast as she could without a cop waving us down. She knew exactly how long the trip took and what time Youthwear closed. If we did everything right, we would have fifteen minutes to shoot a suit, she said.

When we went through the door, the salesman dragged toward us. Mom got to work right away, “We’re here to buy a suit. Even if you only have ten minutes left,” she told him. The guy wasn’t very old, looked like he could have been Eastered or Bar Mitzvahed a few years ago himself.

Mom rifled though the suits as if we went shopping for one every day. When she came  to a light brown one with pinstripes, she looked over at me. “What about this?”

I went in the fitting room. The suit wasn’t six inches too long like the ones back in Cherryville. I looked, well, like I’d never looked before, like Mr. Man. When I tried it on again in our living room, Dad jumped right in the act, joking about my “suitable attire.” Rob buys his own clothes at St. Vincent de Paul now so he just walked by us and out the door to see his friends.

So now we were on skedooly, as my grandpa, the one who’s coming, says. I knew my part, I was the right size for my suit, and the other main thing, we’d have food to grow on. Rob had already explained to me how important the food and wine would be, not just because of what they are, but in case "The Worst happened." He knew about "The Worst", it had happened to him. There he was, standing on the bimah in his pale blue suit ready to give his speech but holding his paper upside down. For a long minute, Rob was like a pale blue windmill. He kept turning the paper every which way while the rest of us froze, until at last Dad jumped up there and turned the page the way it belonged. That’s why when Rob told me about food and wine fixing anything I believed him.

 

Bar Mitzvah morning we drove to the synagogue through the gentle rain that falls from heaven. I didn’t make that up, Dad passed it on from Shakespeare. Before going in, Mom and the other ladies stood at the door, shaking out their umbrellas. 

I went through all my parts like they were the Monroe defense. I wasn’t rattled one bit by seeing my friends Steff and Don out there in front with all the Baums, Epsteins, and Laskys: they were my friends, that’s why they were there.

My sheet of paper stayed right side up. My parents and Rob did fine with their aliyahs. People in the congregation rose up and sat down just when they should have, right on cue.  

Shakespeare could have called wine rain from heaven too. After the closing hymn had come and gone, I held my glass up right along with the rabbi. After soccer season, Bar Mitzvah practice, suit safaris and seventh grade all in one year, I was ready to sip that little glass of wine. Then I started in on the serious eating, lots of chopped liver, yellow colored rice salad, everything else Ellen Porter had fixed for us.

With all the scary stuff done with, I was mainly having a good time eating and horsing around with Steff and Don, only taking time out when people came over to tell me how well I’d done. Then after chowing down on Ellen’s food, I went on offense toward the lox and bagels. Dad’s friends from the college were practically making a Berlin Wall around the plate but I went snaking through. Then, woe is me, I started thinking about snagging some of the schnapps Dad had brought for the old men.

With everybody busy talking or saying goodbye, this was the chance to have a taste.  

Steff was pouring himself a second glass, when Don started making an idiot of himself right in the middle of the social hall. It wasn’t the first stupid thing he’d done, he kicked the ball into the wrong goal when we were playing North Cherryville. Now Don was down to his underpants right in the sight of everybody, waving a bottle of schnapps he couldn’t even hold onto anymore. When the bottle smashed against the floor, Steff and I laughed our heads off, but that stopped mighty fast. My parents were racing over like fiends from hell. Grandma had her hand on Grandpa’s arm so he wouldn’t come over too.

If Mom and Dad were paying attention, they would have seen me staring in every direction except at the mess on the floor, hoping for a set of stairs to fall down one by one so I could break both ankles.

When my parents closed in, they put their force into talking loud and clear, and not to Don. I was the one who’d broken all Ten Commandments or maybe more. Then my dad, shaking his head, went out and came back with a mop and dustpan. 

After that, I lost track.

 

At home when Mom and Grandma were snoozing upstairs and the rest of us had all calmed down, Dad came into the TV room to schmooze. Winking at me, he said, “A real Jewish occasion. One son already a mensch, the other maybe a rabbi.”

Then he gave a little laugh. “May we be so lucky, next time we hear glass breaking, we’ll be at a wedding.” He was still laughing when he headed back to the living room to watch Rob and Grandpa playing chess.

Rochelle Cashdan, whose father was a rabbi, has published poetry and speculative fiction on the internet and in print. After many years in the Pacific Northwest, she now lives in Guanajuato, Mexico. Another northwest story with a Jewish twist appears in the current issue of Salt River Review, www.poetserv.org.