How I Saved Hanukkah (5 page)

“I just don’t get the snowflakes and snowmen everywhere,” Lucy said. “It’s eighty degrees today!”

“Santa must get awfully sweaty when he hits California,” I agreed.

Lucy wound up a music box and it plinked out “Jingle Bells.” “See? ‘Dashing through the
snow
.’” Then she asked me if Hanukkah has weather.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” I said.

“We’ll ask your mom,” Lucy said.

“My mom,” I said, “won’t know.”

*    *    *

Every time a salesperson said, “Merry Christmas” to us, Lucy said, “Happy Hanukkah.”

Lucy asked the card store lady if she had any Hanukkah decorations. “No? Any music boxes that play Hanukkah tunes? How about Hanukkah wrapping paper?”

“Cut it out,” I told her.

“Cut what out?”

“All this Hanukkah stuff,” I said. “You’re embarrassing everyone.”

“Everyone who? The saleslady?” Lucy laughed.

I didn’t want to say “everyone me,” so I laughed too.

I was getting a little afraid that Lucy had traded away her Christmas with her family thinking Hanukkah was going to be an equal hoot.

*    *    *

When Lucy and I came into the kitchen that evening we found my mom grating up potatoes while talking long-distance to Bubbi. “No,” she said, “I do not have a
Cuisinart
, I’ve got this razor-sharp metal thing with holes. Isn’t my blood and the flesh from my knuckles supposed to give latkes that special flavor?”

“Gross, Mom!” I said.

When she hung up the phone, she turned to Lucy and me and announced, “Hanukkah Performance Art.” Then she began dropping globs of the ground-up potato goo into the sizzling frying pan.

She burnt herself on spattering oil about fifty times. With each burn she winced and reminded us that she had never done this before.

“I hope you appreciate this, Marla,” she said, “because you are my inspiration.”

And I hadn’t even asked for latkes! Yet.

“This is Hanukkah food, right?” Lucy asked.

“It says so in the song,” my mom said.

“What song?” asked Lucy. “Does it have snow?”

Mom looked confused. “Snow?”

I stood by my mom at the stove and she and I sang “Oh Hanukkah” for Lucy. Ned shrieked along with us, leaping around the kitchen like a tree frog. I thought about my dad’s deep singing voice, but I didn’t mention it.

“Hey! I bet it’s because latkes are cooked in oil!” I said, suddenly getting it.

“What is?”

“You know, like the
Miracle of Oil
? So we eat oily stuff on Hanukkah?” I said.

“Sounds good to me,” said my mom.

When we finally sat down to eat, Mom said, “The real miracle of oil is how fabulous it makes a potato taste, cardiovascular disaster or no.” And she was right. They were great.

“What was Hanukkah like when you were a kid?” Lucy asked my mom.

“Well, we hitched our old plow horse, Ruby, up to the cart, bundled ourselves up in blankets, and headed off through the snows of Michigan to Auntie Eva’s cabin in the woods . . . .” Mom said.

Ned asked, “You had a horse?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” my mom said.

“Come on, Mom,” I said, “tell us for real.”

“Hanukkah when I was a kid . . . ” she said.

Lucy and I looked at each other while my mom sat staring at her fork. Then Mom said, “It was a madhouse. There were so many of us, Uncle Larry and me, and Bubbi and Poppa . . . ”

“That’s my mom’s brother,” I told Lucy, “and my grandparents.”

“And there were all the aunts . . . Marla, do you remember Auntie Eva? Actually she would have been your great-aunt. Oh. You were too young. In fact, you weren’t born . . . .”

My mom stared at nothing some more and Ned got fidgety.

“Mom!” I said after a while. “Are you going to tell us or not?”

My mom looked at me and Lucy and Ned as if she didn’t know who we were, and then she laughed.

“Right. Hanukkah when I was little. It was wild. There were, let me see, Auntie Eva had four kids,
Selma had three . . . Rusty and Bernice each had two. How many cousins is that? And a bunch of uncles, and . . . ”

“You all had horses?” Ned asked.

“No, baby,” my mom said, “Fords and Chevys. It was Detroit, after all.”

I was afraid Mom would fade out again so I said, “And . . . ”

“And . . . ” my mom continued, “we’d all cram into Auntie Eva’s apartment. A two-bedroom walk-up. And there was always the big debate about whose latkes were better. I liked them thin and crisp, but my cousin Andrea liked the fat, fall-apart kind.

“All the aunts brought their latkes on trays to heat up in the oven, except for Auntie Eva, who was frying them fresh in her teeny kitchen, with all four burners going.

“Cousins Robert and Alan would chase each other around, slugging it out, knocking over lamps. And Auntie Eva’s mean little yippy dog would be frantic . . . . The uncles would smoke cigars. Cousins Laurie and Susie would poke through the grab-bag gifts calling dibs . . . . Babies were put down to sleep on
the pile of coats on the bed . . . and their mothers would try to hush us . . . .”

My mom’s voice drifted away again. She sat hooking a hank of her hair behind her ear, only for it to unhook immediately and need hooking again. I bet she doesn’t even know she does that a million times a day.

By this time Ned had wandered off to play with his trucks. Lucy and I got up and started clearing the table and loading the dishwasher.

“My mom never finishes her stories about back then,” I told Lucy. “She either starts crying, remembering dead people, or she just zones out into space like that.”

*    *    *

When Dad called, I let Ned shriek into the phone awhile. Then I grabbed it away from him and said, “Dad, you won’t believe this, but Mom made latkes tonight!”

There was a big noise. Then my dad said, “That sound was me falling off my chair!”

“We saved you some of the latke stuff. You can have it when you get home tomorrow,” I told him.

“I’m sorry, sweetpea,” he said. “I’d give anything to see Mommy making latkes, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it tomorrow. Marla? Marla, are you there?”

I gave the phone to my mom.

6

T
he last day of school! And only a half a day! Lucy and I agreed that no matter what dumb “fun” Mrs. Guyer came up with, we could get through a half a day. And we did.

When we got home, Ned was acting weird, the way he does when my dad has been gone too long. I mean, he acts plenty weird always, but he gets even worse. He was half weepy and clingy, and half mean and violent. A truly annoying combination.

My mom told us that Ned was driving her nuts and she had a ton of work to do, so Lucy said we’d be
glad
to take him out for a while.

“I can’t believe you said that!” I hissed.

“We promised your mom that we’d help . . . ” Lucy said.

When I made a face at her, she said, “It’ll be fun!”

“Fun?” I scowled at Lucy, thinking, Sure, as “fun”
as making blue-and-white decorations. Baby-sitting Ned was precisely how I did not want to begin my vacation.

My mom raised her eyebrows and looked from me to Lucy and back again. I feared a helpful lecture, so I said, “Fine. We’ll take him, but Lucy is watching him. Not me!”

“It will be my pleasure,” Lucy told my mom in her goody-goody voice.

About the only place close enough to walk with Ned is the library two blocks away. I did not want to go to the library. But Lucy said she did, and Ned was wildly excited.

They acted stupid on the way there. They thought they were so funny, walking like elephants, then apes, and making animal noises. What if someone saw us? I started walking faster and Lucy told me that I was being an old poop. Ned thought that was hilarious.

I walked even faster and got to the library first. I was inside, looking at some books, when I saw them SWIM through the door like fish.

I couldn’t believe I’d thought of that girl as my best friend! It made me totally ill to think I’d be stuck
with her twenty-four hours a day for three more days.

I hid from them behind the stacks. Then I sneaked up to Ms. Mindy’s desk.

“Do you have any books on Hanukkah?” I asked in a whisper.

“Oh, yes,” she whispered back.

She led me around to a shelf. “Well, here’s one, sort of,” she said. “At least there must be something about Hanukkah in here . . . .” It was a short book on Jewish holidays. “Teachers check them out this time of year,” Ms. Mindy apologized.

“Well, how about music?” I asked. “Jewish music, like for horas?”

Ms. Mindy brightened up. “We do have that!”

I checked out the cassette and the book and slipped out of the library without Lucy or Ned spotting me.

I was in my room, listening to the tape on my Walkman and trying to guess how to do the hora, when my mom came in.

“Where’s Ned?” she asked, instantly worried about her precious baby.

“Who knows and who cares,” I said.

“I do, so tell,” she said. “Now.”

“He’s at the library. With Lucy,” I said. “All right?”

“Not all right,” she said. “You march right back to that library this instant, Miss Marla, and get your brother—”

But just then we heard the front door open and Ned and Lucy came in. My mom shot me a look, then turned and walked out of my room. She forgot to close the door behind her, so I did—SLAM.

Even I know the hora is a circle dance and not something you do alone, so I turned off the music and read a little. I wrote in my diary about Lucy being such a traitor. I polished my nails, and looked in the mirror for pimples. Then I was bored. Then I was really bored. Then really, really bored.

I heard my mom tell Ned to get in the car to go to the market with her.

He said, “No.”

She said, “Yes.”

He said, “No.”

She said, “I’ll buy you a cookie.”

I heard the car pull out of the driveway, and then I heard nothing at all.

There was a lot of silence. I wondered if Lucy had gone to the store too. I opened my door a sliver to hear
better and there was Lucy, fist raised, about to knock. We both jumped back, surprised. I don’t know which of us laughed first. Me or my best friend.

*    *    *

When we went into the kitchen at dinnertime, my mom said she’d been cleaning the grease from the stove for hours, so we could forget a latke encore. “Anyway, the leftover potato stuff turned creepy-looking in the fridge,” she said.

We made tuna sandwiches, lit the candles, and sang our song. Then I told everyone I had a surprise.

“Menorah music!” Ned said.

“Hora music,” Lucy corrected him. “Ms. Mindy told us.”

“She tattled?” I asked. “Ms. Mindy?”

“Well, I guess I went up to her right after you did,” Lucy said, “and we both asked for books on Hanukkah, and she knows we’re best friends . . . .”

I decided not to be mad.

“Hora music, eh?” my mom muttered, shaking her head.

We all looked at her. She shrugged and said, “If we must, we must.”

As we trooped into the living room, my mom said, “I’m going to have to dig pretty deep to remember this. I probably haven’t danced the hora since Uncle Larry’s wedding, so bear with me.”