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8. Passover
- Rutgers University Press
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8 Passover I’ll Be Home for Pesach In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, at twilight, there shall be a Passover offering to the Eternal, and on the fifteenth day of that month the Eternal’s Feast of Unleavened Bread. You shall eat unleavened bread for seven days. —Leviticus 23:5–6 Why Is This Phone Call Different? In the days before Caller ID, I relied solely on the hairs on my neck to tell me that my mother was calling. Halfmast meant a reasonable chance at a ten-minute nontoxic conversation. On this particular day, my hair stood at full attention as the telephone’s ring elicited its Pavlovian response. “We’re making arrangements,” she stated. Arrangements . My mind reeled at this choice of words. “Arrangements” conjured images of random family funerals. I envisioned open caskets with slut-red lipstick applied to the otherwise chaste elderly deceased, prompting distant relatives to say, “She looks so lovely, doesn’t she?” My mother didn’t even make “arrangements” when pets died. After seven to twelve years of dutiful service, a beloved furry companion’s remains always received the same final disposition. It was quickly mummified in one of 109 110 Passover her “good” towels. Egyptian cotton was frequently chosen, both for its religious symbolism and for its high thread count. For Lucky, our morbidly obese housecat, death came quietly as she sprawled in the morning sunlight. In life, Lucky had looked like a toothless miniature Holstein cow. In death, she looked much the same. Despite the chill of death, the sun had kept her warm all day. This, in turn, kept us from noticing her demise. By the time my mother came home from work and noticed the dead cat on her bed, rigor mortis had set in. She lifted the body, and it looked like a furry manhole cover, limbs akimbo. This called for a larger towel. No expense was spared as my mother wrapped the oblate body in her jacquard holiday finest and then slipped it into a garbage pail a few doors down the block. What “arrangements,” then, could my mother possibly have in store for me? “The spring holidays are coming, and we want to make plans to fly you home.” I breathed a sigh of relief that neither I, nor anyone else I knew, was being interred. “Spring holidays” was a surprisingly sensitive interfaith phrase. My mother knew that her almost Jewish daughter was not going to come home from Jerusalem for Easter. The Questionable Child I had always had fond memories of Easter. Others in my family relished the delights of Easter lamb and ham, but, as a little girl, I preferred the chocolate bunnies, in a very speci fic way. Each year, on the night before Easter, I crept into the dining room where the chocolate bunnies were stacked. Pyramids of leporine confections, still in their boxes, beckoned . I stealthily approached my quarry. Using a thumbnail that I had grown and sharpened for the occasion, I ritually [34.205.246.61] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:48 GMT) I’ll Be Home for Pesach 111 removed the hard candy eyes of each bunny and tucked them into the pocket of my little terry robe. Then, I returned the blinded bunnies to their boxes and neatly restacked them. Except for the missing eyes, they looked entirely untouched. I tiptoed back to my room and piled the candy eyes on the bed in front of me. I devoured them and went to sleep: an angelic blonde, blue-eyed child with visions of candy eyeballs dancing through her head. The next morning, I would awaken to the sound of screams. The first year, the screams were followed by my mother’s indignant declaration “I’m taking these back to the store!” The second year, it was “Which one of you psychos got into the bunnies?” By the third year, they had found out. It must have been the chocolate stains on my bathrobe that gave me away. The screams were replaced by the hushed acknowledgment “Look, she did it again.” Perhaps it was the fear of having raised a child capable of making chocolate Easter bunnies look as though they had just seen the contents of the Ark of the Covenant, but my parents never confronted me. And now they wanted me home for the spring holidays. Maybe they knew that, this time, the bunnies were safe. Affliction Is...