902 41st St, APT C9

I hesitate to say I live in Sunset Park because 9th Ave is the proper border of Boro Park, and I’m on the other side of 9th Ave, so I live in Boro Park. But I am, after all, closer to the Chinese neighborhood, which spans 8th Ave and 7th Ave. 9th Ave is a borderland. They’re building a yeshiva across the street from me, a few doors down, and there’s a girl’s school on the eastern corner of the block. It’s called בנזפ מרגליא (Bnos Margulia). When I moved in I biked here, and saw the girls getting off the bus, and had to carefully scoot through a gap in the line of girls. The idea of a girl’s school is so foreign to me, anathema to my personal way of life, which has involved being surrounded by boys. And after I biked here, I biked back to 144 Kenilworth Pl to help clean up the apartment and take out trash. On the way back there, I read my first coherent Hebrew word in the wild; ישיבה (Yeshivah). Last night I read my first coherent Yiddish word in the wild, on my receipt from Satmar Meats: פלייש, or fleysh.

Kosher meat is very expensive, so I tend to buy chicken bones, and sometimes turkey. I also went to two different grocery stores and a bakery, Taam Eden, where I bought rugelach and an apple turnover and a slice of cheesecake. There were lots of strollers in the grocery stores, women would put their items on the conveyor belt and step aside with their strollers such that there was no discernible line. I wore a long dress and a long-sleeved summer shirt over it, so I might have looked a bit less foreign.

At one grocery store I decided to buy two pints of kosher gelato made in Lakewood, NJ. So I walked home straightaway without wandering. I read on the gelato container that it was “non gebrokts,” which means that there are no leavened grains in the product—no wheat, barley, spelt, oats, or rye that has come into contact with water. There is a “pesach crumble” in the strawberry gelato made of potato and tapioca starch instead, so this dessert is Passover friendly. The other gelato was a vanilla one. I have tried the strawberry and it is excellent, with a very vibrant and clean-tasting strawberry swirl. The vanilla is also very good, and I enjoy its simplicity, and its specks of seeds.

I wonder if there is something empty or emptying about my fascination with frum Jewish life. Will I ever be frum, and is there something sad about my fascination, given that I am not part of the community, and that, in particular, I can’t imagine having lots of children? That might be the one thing that keeps me from really becoming Jewish. But now that I live alone, a few avenues away from 13th Ave, will I become some weird sort of bachelor woman who lights candles 18 minutes before sunset on a Friday evening and eats cholent? I made cholent yesterday using beef stew meat specifically labeled as “for cholent,” so I guess I’m not that far off. It wouldn’t be particularly difficult to buy and light candles. I guess I really am not very far off at all.

I know Adam doesn’t want me to stay overnight with him these days, so I’ve stopped wishing for it. It’s slightly more exciting to be alone on Friday nights now that I have my own place, but it’s still somehow morally abhorrent to me to spend Friday nights alone. And because I am rejected by him on the regular, I might as well become an observant single Jewess. The reality is that I have been spending my Friday nights fishing with Jerry, whom I reconnected with because now we’re near-neighbors.

I was in so much distress when the idea of seeing Jerry again came to mind. I found it so morally abhorrent to be sent home on Friday nights because the man I think of as my partner wants to be alone. He tried to let me stay over, but when he did he would cry and would be unable to sleep. He fucked me once or twice, but otherwise used only his fingers. Adam didn’t trust me after what had happened, after I had left his house one morning to fuck Jed, after I had left his house at night to see a string of one-night stands or dates whom I’d never speak to again, between July and August of last year. It made sense, his resistance, but I wanted to prove to Adam that I was someone different now. Nevertheless, I thought of Jerry, the only person I know who really explores Brooklyn, the only person I’m actually intellectually drawn to outside of Adam. I thought I might do well to reconnect with him as a South Brooklyn “playmate.”

So I went to the American Veterans Memorial pier in Bay Ridge with him on Sunday and that was our first time seeing each other since Feburary. There was a pair of Hasidic Jewish men fishing there and I watched them before he arrived. Jerry noticed them and told me that they must’ve come for me, and I laughed, glad to be recognized by Jerry for who I am. I told him I was scared to see him, because I had wanted to prove to Adam my monogamous ways, and knew that I’d be tempted to sleep with him if I saw him again. I realized then that my hesitation was extremely on the nose, because Jerry was someone I find absolutely adorable, irresistibly cute and nice. The thought of him makes me want to go to bed, so I can lose consciousness as the blood rushes to the bottom of my body, or as it flows back to the brain as I dream.

Eventually, Jerry caught a fish, and I hit its head, and gutted it, scaled it, and cooked it. It was a young “weakfish,” which is in the croaker family. It had big egg sacs which were so tender and clean, the flesh itself was very white and soft. When we took it out again I noticed it slightly bent, contorted in its death throes, its muscles tense.

I started to miss Adam after two weeks of immersion with Jerry, and it led to another night of crying and talking on the phone. After spending some time with him on Friday afternoon I took the ferry home, crying all the way. I took the ferry to Bay Ridge so I wouldn’t have to wait for the ferry to Sunset Park, which led to me hanging out with Jerry for a while as he set up his fishing rods that evening. I cried for an hour while Jerry stood by. He gave me a lychee and said a few words, and I tried to say a few words, until I decided to bike home, knowing that the only thing that would help would be to call Adam. Jerry said it made him sad to see him sad, which seemed true.

I ate some leftover lamb stew. I called Adam. He said something about how he didn’t want to continue making me unhappy, and that things seemed to remain as they had been, with respect to our impasse. Not long into the call, he asked, “Do you want to get married?” There was some silence, and he clarified that he wasn’t proposing. I said that I wanted to, or more precisely, that I hadn’t thought about it very carefully, but I’d like to get married to him. He was silent for a while and began to cry, and I imagined that he was moved by the reversal of my stance, and I myself was moved by the question.

He hadn’t been proposing, but he had asked it as if it were a proposal. He hadn’t chosen to contextualize the proposal by saying “I’m not proposing” first. So it was effectively the proposal to consider the idea of marriage. And it became evident that the question was an essential one for him to ask, as he had felt that he couldn’t allow me into his life in the ways I wanted because he didn’t think that we could get married, based on how I had acted, when I had been insistent on sleeping with the other men.

I started to offer a few words about how I believed we would have been quite nice together had we met each other as very young adults and chosen to get married at an earlier time, and about how I had met him at a strange time, when I was both so young and still old enough to engage in perverse experiments. I think his mind was elsewhere as I said this, I suppose he was wondering if it was possible to move past the great wound of what I had done last summer. I went to bed with the dark thought in mind, that maybe he’d never be able to think of me the right way. And also with the stranger thought of what would happen if we did get married, and if I did so wanting to affirm something, but not knowing what it really meant to be married. I was sure that this would be the only time I’d truly consider the question, that it was either marriage with Adam or with nobody at all, or that any future thoughts or marriage would refer back to this particular moment in my life and everything that had led me to arrive there.

Was Kafka the first Jew I knew, and was his biography the first context in which I saw Hebrew letters? I refer to Robert Crumb’s illustrated biography of Kafka, Introducing Kafka. This was the first setting in which I witnessed something of the Jewish notion of marriage. Kafka crumbles under the weight of knowing how he disappoints his father and Jewish law when he fails to marry any of the women he desires. I was fascinated by the luridness of this graphic novel as a child, with its thickly lined sexual content and the gruesomeness of the father. The despotic father that Crumb drew was too much like my mother. But on the topic of marriage our lives could not be less alike. My father repeatedly told me that marriage should be avoided, as it limits one’s freedom, and I felt grateful for his sage advice, and out of respect for him, I swore I’d never get married. I considered the possibility that the right one might come along, briefly.

Later I found my dad’s copy of Kafka’s Blue Octavo notebooks. The annotations seemed to highlight whatever pessimism or bitterness he could find in Kafka’s remarks, but now that I think of it, Kafka’s pessimism or bitterness were colored immensely by his desire to get married in order to fulfill the mitzvah of marriage.

I believe my father had bought and read the book during a time when he was considering getting married to my mom, based on a receipt that still lives within its pages. Kafka and marriage somehow seem inseparable, given this association.

The day after my phone conversation with Adam, I went to the Hudson River Wetlab to look at the native fauna grown in the wondrously murky water harvested from the Hudson River. I had gone for the first time roughly a year ago, with Adam. This time I went alone. I looked carefully at the diamondback terrapins, the sea horses and the pipefish, the oyster toadfish, the eels, and the other more traditional-looking fish whose names I don’t remember. Then I walked to Adam and asked him a long sequence of questions. I asked about the meaning of marriage: inextricable from Jewishness.

I asked more sidelong questions that were nevertheless quite direct. I asked if his parents had family friends, and whatever he said seemed to suggest that there was something warm and stimulating in the Jewish community, or the inter-family friendships he saw growing up. I asked him what Hebrew school was like for him, and he had some good things to say about certain classes he was able to take through it. Finally, I recall asking him about his mother’s experience of Judaism, given that she converted, and that he said that she did well with it, that she was quite knowledgable, so although he is ethnically half Jewish, he didn’t feel that way. Maybe it had something to do with how distant she was from her family, but he felt fully Jewish.

In turn, I said some words about my ambivalent interest in having a family in order to fulfill the demand, requirement, or law of a community. I spoke about my mother’s participation in some Chinese choirs, and how she’d socialize with other families through this, but that when she came home she mostly had critical things to say about the others. My family never had consistent family friends, it seemed. I circled back to my interest in the Jewish life, structured around family, but said that I sometimes worried my interest in following laws was too abstract of a reason to have a family.

I bought a piece of baby kolichel meat from Certo Market, and cooked it today; it’s a beautiful cut of meat, long and sinewy with some beautiful connective tissue covering the muscle. Kolichel is some Yiddish word whose etymology I still can’t figure out. Once again, I cooked it with beans and onions, as if I were making cholent for Shabbos, but it was a Wednesday when I made it. I am getting rather uninterested in the question of marriage and far more interested in reciting the Siddur.

I have started to practice my Hebrew by typing the words of the Siddur into Google Translate, thereby forcing myself to sound the words out before I get the reward of a transliteration, and an actual pronunciation of a word or phrase or sentence. I am also doing this with a Modern Hebrew textbook, which begins with little conversations in which someone asks someone else their name and how they’re doing. It’s an absorbing activity, learning a new language specifically in order to pray in it, and I find that in the Shacharit there is plenty of stuff that I find aesthetically or intellectually rewarding, like the fact that מודה (modeh) means not just “thanks” but “to admit” or “surrender.” I like the first prayer, which involves thanking אדני for returning our souls to our bodies when we wake up each morning. You’re supposed to recite it before getting out of bed, which I’ve never done. I also like very much the framing of אלו דברים שׁאים להם שׁעור (eilu d’varim she-ein lahem shiur), “these are precepts for which no fixed measure is prescribed”, which includes “leaving the corner of a field unharvested, the offering of first fruits, the appearance-offering, performing deeds of kindness, and the study of Torah.” In other words, things which one cannot do too much of, I guess.

Adam declared that we need to take a break, that there needs to be a cleaner separation between us. So I will have to remove my remaining belongings from his house and give him back his keys. It is unbearable that I have not listened to him enough, that I have violated his life, that I have brought to him so much confusion and hurt. No way forward but a break, a pause, an absence. And he needs to exert his agency for once.

I can’t really imagine a life without him, and I don’t want to change. I don’t want to let go of the feelings of adoration and affection I have for him, I don’t want to return to a life in which I don’t adore him in particular. I want to respect his desire that I give him a break, and I hope that this is a first step in us reconnecting differently in the future.

My feelings are much more intense, destructive, and infantile than this, of course. I want to die, but I also know that I love him more than death. I would like to sleep in order to maintain myself, in order to be what I am now, as insane as it is to want to preserve the difficulties of the current reality, I’d rather preserve it than let go of it.

I found his name in the Siddur this morning, in the form of the word שׁאדם, ( שׁ is a conjunction meaning “that”) which apparently comes from the verb דמם (damim), to be red, to grow red, to redden, to cause to blush, to put to shame.