How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (7 page)

Fact: Most of us turned out not to be any good, which is why I was invited to write this story and not to do some blow off Kate Moss's naked ass.

C
OCK-MAN KEPT THE
choir through all of our afternoon classes to rehearse, and spent a good deal of time on the “Maoz Tzur,” so that Tara and I could work it out. It shouldn't have been difficult for me, since my part was the same melody line I'd been singing with the group, but now, no longer able to disappear into the collective voice of the choir, my voice sounded thin and shaky to me, and singing out loud felt like the dream where you show up to school without your pants. Also, Tara's part was in a minor key a few steps higher, and when she sang I was at risk of falling off the precarious perch of my own key. Standing there beside Tara, I was overwhelmed by a potent combination of stage fright and lust, and my chest quivered every time I opened my mouth.

When Cock-man dismissed the choir, he asked if Tara and I would stay behind to practice a little more. He was concerned with our timing, with the blending of our voices. He was concerned that I might suck.

“I can stay,” Tara said, looking hopefully at me. She didn't know me well, probably didn't know much more than my name and that I was a seventh grader who lived about a mile away from her, where the houses got bigger, but when she turned those big eyes on me, I would have sworn she knew everything there was to know about me. It was December, when night falls shortly after lunchtime, and staying late would mean walking the six long, uphill blocks to the city bus stop with Tara, alone in the dark, just the two of us, basking in the green-and-amber glow of the Christmas lights wrapped around trees and lining the roofs of houses throughout the neighborhood. We would no doubt get to talking, and she would see that I was a good guy, funny and sincere, quietly cool. Maybe our elbows would bump lightly as we walked, and we would shiver instinctively against each other for warmth. Maybe she would talk about how mortified she'd been when Joey ruined their solo, maybe even crying again at the recollection, and I would pull my glove off to tenderly brush away her tears with my fingers before they froze on her pale, freckled skin. After that, I'd never again be the insignificant seventh grader, just a part of the random human clutter of her day school experience. I'd be the guy she sang a solo with, who wiped her tears away and made her laugh on a cold December evening.

“I can stay,” I said.

Tara smiled, and inside me cymbals clashed as the marching band strutted triumphantly down Main Street.

And so we stayed, for an extra hour, and in the privacy of the empty stage my confidence grew. I sang along with more authority, easily staying on key, and every time Tara smiled her approval, I felt a warm tremor in my loins. During a break, when Cock-man left to make a call, I sat down at the piano and absently started to play “Heart and Soul,” and after a minute she sat down beside me to play the high part, doing a bluesy little improvisation on the black keys.

“You're good,” she said, giggling as I changed tempo.

“So are you,” I said.

“I'm doing the easy part.”

Her thigh was pressed against mine on the piano bench, our shoulders brushing lightly as we played, and I could smell her scents, lavender, coconut, and wild cherry Bubble Yum. I kept waiting for her to get bored and stop, but she kept right on playing, matching my tempo changes, leaning against me when she giggled. When I jokingly started playing too fast for her, she grabbed my hands with her own and held them prisoner for a second or two, and our heads bumped lightly. I know now that that was the moment I should have kissed her, that that was my window, and it closed as quickly as it had opened, like so many more windows would open and close with other girls in the coming years. But back then, all I knew was that I didn't want the moment to end, and for the twenty minutes or so that we were alone at that piano, Tara Wahlberg was mine, and mine alone. Then Cock-man came back to take us through it one more time, and we stopped abruptly, right in the middle, because everyone knows how to play “Heart and Soul,” but no one really knows how to end it.

When we stepped outside it had started to snow, like in a Christmas movie, which meant our walk up to the bus stop would be slower and even more romantic, but then Cock-man pulled up in his battered, puke-green Nova and told us he would drive us home. The car stank of Cock-man's imported body odor. Tara sat up front with him, and when he dropped her off, she called over her shoulder to me, “See you tomorrow,” and disappeared into the gathering snow, leaving me desolate and deflated in the back of the reeking Nova. Adding insult to injury, Cock-man made me sing my part for the duration of the drive.

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON,
right after lunch, we boarded the school bus that would take us to P.S. 141. I thought that maybe I'd save a seat for Tara, but by the time I got on she was already sitting in the back with a group of eighth-grade girls, and even though I looked back there repeatedly on the short ride, we never made eye contact.

The auditorium at P.S. 141 was the real deal. It was at least three times the size of the one at our school, which was really just a gym with a stage when you got right down to it, and it had theater seats on an incline and a professional sound system. By the time we arrived, the place was already filled to noisy capacity with an endless array of long-haired kids in jeans and T-shirts, two wardrobe items expressly forbidden in our school's dress code. Girls were sitting on boys' laps, kids were chewing gum and being rowdy and running down the aisles, and up on that giant stage, in our blue-and-white outfits and with our private school sensibilities, it felt no different to us than playing a gig at Folsom Prison. I was instantly self-conscious about my blue day school yarmulke, my parochial education, and my pleated navy pants.

When the time came for me to step forward and join Tara at the solo mikes, about halfway through the show, I was on the verge of a minor nervous breakdown. As I looked out at the crowd, I could feel my left thigh shaking uncontrollably, the small network of muscles in my cheeks twitching nervously, and I imagined that every soul in that cavernous room could see it too. And then the choir fell silent and next to me Tara took a deep breath and opened her mouth.

I don't remember very much after that. I don't exactly recall singing, but I remember hearing my voice floating back across the auditorium at me from the overhead speaker, thin and hollow and much too flat, not at all how I heard it in my head. I wondered if something might be wrong with the sound system. Tara swayed delicately beside me, staring heavenward as she sang, and I remember feeling intimately connected to her. And the last thing I remember, after our solo was over, was watching Tara slip back into the alto section with nary a look back at me, to be swallowed up into the blue-and-white tapestry of the choir.

I never sang another solo after that. And I never again spent any time with Tara. The social currents of junior high school swept us out to sea on our separate, preordained tides, and while I always kept an eye out for her, and she always said hi to me at choir practice, that was pretty much it. She graduated at the end of the year, and I never saw her again. In the words of the immortal Bruce Springsteen: Love's like that, sure it is.

E
VERY YEAR NOW,
I still light the candles on Chanukah, which makes me, if nothing else, a Jewish day school success story. And when I light them, I can't help but think of Tara Wahlberg. I wonder what became of her, if she still lights Chanukah candles wherever she is, and if, maybe, she remembers me when she does. The miracle of Chanukah was that a paltry amount of oil in a darkened temple burned in the menorah for eight days. For me, twenty minutes of a winter night in an empty room of a darkened school, sharing a piano bench with a pretty girl, has lasted twenty-five years. There are miracles and there are miracles. Love's like that, sure it is.

I still play a pretty mean “Heart and Soul,” by the way. And I still have yet to figure out how it ends.