The Last Jewish Virgin

Chapter 5

19 5 T he rest of my first day at Bennett was a blur. I had one other class, English, with a mahogany-haired poet, Ms. Ginsburg—Jewish. In fact, her earnest demeanor and sensible shoes reminded me a lot of my mother. I sat quietly in her classroom, dutifully writing down the names of the books we’d be reading during the semester, some of whose titles I recognized from my mother’s bookcases at home. But all I could really think about was the enigmatic Mr. Rock—Jewish? Non-Jewish? Pro-feminist mensch? Machiavellian pervert?—and his white skin, onyx hair, and bedazzling smile. I was grateful when class ended, because that meant I was free to leave Bennett. Departing the building, I passed numerous young women coming and going, some with edgy tattoos and nose rings, others with the elegant sophistication of runway models . I wondered anew at why Mr. Rock had singled me out . . . Or had he? Was he, at that very moment, offering a so-called “job” to someone else? I pondered these questions as I rode the subway uptown to the narrow, perpetually jammed 72nd street station. When I finally stepped outside, the earlier breeze had turned into a fullfledged wind, and my velvet vampire cape offered scant protection. Hunching my shoulders against the cold, I was grateful when I 20 The Last Jewish Virgin reached the small brick building, dwarfed by the numerous high rises on the block, where my mother and I had lived together ever since the death from leukemia of my Mexican-born father, Ibrahim Zeremba, back when I was an infant in diapers. My mother and my father had met in graduate school, and she still described his heavily-accented voice as “deep and attractive.” A Sephardic Jew, his ancestors had fled to Mexico during the Inquisition . When I was very little, my mother and I went to Mexico City a few times to visit his parents, mis abuelos, who spoke Spanish and Hebrew, but only a few words of English. They’d both died when I was in grade school. We never went back after that, although I had an uncle and aunt there, and more than a few cousins. “There are no hard feelings,” my mother assured me, “but sometimes time erases memories.” But she never ceased missing my father, who’d been her soulmate . Like her, he’d been determined not to leave the fold, but rather to try to change things from within, to update traditional Judaism for our feminist, multi-culti times. Together they recited original blessings at Shabbat, which included prayers in Ladino, poems celebrating the femininity of the moon, and language that reflected a gender-fluid and deeply empathic G-d. “Our marriage was bashert,” my mother had told me many times, her eyes glowing , and I believed her. As usual, the steps of our building were littered with cigarette butts tossed there by the elderly Russian super’s wife, a nervous chain-smoker who walked in and out of the building countless times a day. Trying not to think about Mr. Rock, I rode up to our fifth floor apartment in the tiny elevator that groaned and lurched the whole way up, as if it had arthritis. When I opened the door, I saw my mother sitting cross-legged in the living room, on the scratchy hemp rug she’d bought on sale the year before. Her curly auburn hair was tucked behind her ears, and she wore a shapeless olive green jumper with a neckline just low enough to show the classic, silver Star of David that my father had given to her shortly before he got sick. She also wore a pair of beat up, high-top sneak- Janice Eidus 21 ers. She looked like a Girl Scout leader about to give a stern talk to her charges. She sat between her best friend, Molly, whose skin was cocoacolored , and whose dark eyes were enormous, and Mike, who was only the second man she’d had a serious relationship with since my father’s death. The first had been a member of a nostalgic folk music act. He and I used to sing “If I Had A Hammer” together at top volume. I ‘d liked him a lot, but when I was eight, he moved to San Francisco to join his bandmates, and he and my mother...