I said, Why are you crying?
She said, “I am sad and worried.”
I said, Why are you sad and worried?
She said, “Because what if you die?”
What was wrong with everybody?
I told her, I won’t.
And then it made me sad and worried because what if she died? People died all the time, and what if June died? What would happen then? I was sitting there, across from her, and it was so much better than before when I wasn’t, when I was only thinking of her. And before, at least, I knew I’d soon sit across from her. If I couldn’t even walk around knowing that, though… If I knew that I could never see her again, I would have to go crazy. Time would pass and June would become like Hashem’s revelation at Sinai, like manna, like the parting of the sea, and I’d have to suspect that maybe there never really was a June I knew, let alone a June I loved, that she was only a person I once longed to believe and failed to fully believe had ever existed. I’d tell myself lies and believe my own lies, or else I’d have to go an even worse kind of crazy.
“I was sketching,” she said. She let go of my hand and took a sketchbook out of her lap. Then she stopped sitting cowboy-style so she could face me with her whole body. I looked at the picture in the sketchbook. It was a picture of a boy in the center of a large room kneeling on the chest of another boy in a way that made it look like he was trying to pull the second boy’s face off, but neither boy had a face.
I said, The boys have no faces.
She said, “It’s a sketch. I don’t know who they are yet.”
June wasn’t crying anymore and she touched her face with her arm to get the tears off. The tears got trapped in the overcoat fibers. They didn’t smear. They shivered like raindrops on a windshield on a highway when she set her arm down on the table. She said to me, “So do you like the drawing?”
I said, I don’t know.
June said, “Good.”
I said, Good?
“If you don’t know,” she said, “it is bad to pretend like you do.”
I didn’t say anything
She said, “Everyone is a liar.”
I didn’t say anything.
She said, “You are a liar.”
I didn’t say anything.
She said, “I’m a liar, too, but it doesn’t matter if we’re liars, as long as we lie about the same things.” She said, “What do you have to show me?”
I couldn’t remember which wrist had the י on it, so I pushed both her sleeves back and turned her hands over so the soft sides of her wrists were facing the ceiling. They both had a י.
That’s amazing, I said.
“What?” June said.
I pushed her wrists right next to each other so they were touching.
I rubbed the backs of my thumbs on my jeans til my skin burned. The makeup came off and I put my fists on the table, pinky-sides down. She saw myייs.
She looked a little freaked out.
I said, Are you freaked out?
“It’s weird,” she said.
Do you know what it says? I said.
“What what says?” she said.
The letters.
“They’re letters?”
They’re an abbreviation of Adonai’s best written name. It’s such a good name, most people can’t even pronounce it.
“Whose name?” she said.
God’s name, I said.
“He has another name?”
He has a lot of names, I said. I said, Don’t you go to Hebrew school?
She said, “I’m Unitarian.”
I said, What’s that?
“I don’t know,” she said. “We don’t go to Hebrew school.”
But you’re an Israelite, I said.
“No,” she said.
Come on, I said, you know what I mean — a Jew. You’re a Jew, right?
“I’m not,” she said.
I started to get up to get on the stage, to swing a rocking horse at a teddybear-head and snap the head off at the neck and then smash the rocking horse against the floor of the stage and chew on the head of the bear. It was all very clear in my mind what I would do.
Then June was standing up. She was hugging herself while I climbed over the table to go up the stage-steps to smash the prop monsters. I was walking up the steps and she said, “You don’t like me anymore.”
I was on the stage and I had a rocking horse by the nose ring. I held the nose ring in both hands and I dropkicked the horse in the front of the chest and its nose broke off. I hit the floor on my back while the rocking horse’s body flew back to the back of the stage and crashed into a teddybear. The teddybear fell. I was laying there, holding the nose ring. June came up the steps of the stage.
I said, I’m in love with you. It’s everything else — these fucked-up props.
June dragged a teddybear to the back of the stage and laid it on a slant against the rocking horse I’d dropkicked. She jumped on the teddybear and it snapped in two. The jump jarred her hoods. The outer one was off completely, and mine hung onto her ponytail’s cinched part. She pulled it back on and I hid my eyes, pressing my forehead into the stagefloor.
Then June was standing next to my body.
I said, I want to marry you. Do you want to marry me?
June said, “I do.”
I rolled onto my back. I said, But you’re not an Israelite. It’s impossible.
She laid down next to me.
“You’re so dark,” she said. “You don’t have to be so dark. I’ll convert.”
I said, But what about the Unit god? I mean the Unity god? I mean what about your parents? Won’t you be scared of the wrath of the Unit or the Unity or Unitary god that will come down on your head for betraying your parents?
She said, “My parents don’t care and their god has no wrath.”
What kind of God has no wrath? I said.
“Tell me,” she said.
Your parents’ god is nothing, I said. There’s only one.
June said, “Okay.”
What does that mean? I said.
She said, “I’m an Israelite.”
You still have to convert, I said.
“So convert me,” she said.
Could I convert her? There was a ceremony that couldn’t be performed there, on the stage — that is true. You needed a mikvah to perform the ceremony; there wasn’t any mikvah anywhere in sight. Even if we had a mikvah on the stage, though, I wouldn’t be allowed to perform the ceremony, but the ceremony, in the end, was mundane. In the end, when it came to Israelites, converts or otherwise, you’d either been one all along or you hadn’t. The conversion ceremony was more for the benefit of the Israelite community than it was for the convert; it announced to other Israelites that, all along, this person who was being ceremonied, despite not having an Israelite mother, was born with the soul of an Israelite, and no one worth listening to disagreed about that. That’s why calling it “conversion” was bad English. Because to convert something means to change it, and to convert an Israelite does not change that Israelite. To convert an Israelite means only that you recognize that all along, regardless of who their mother is or how she raised them, the Israelite has been an Israelite, and that they will continue forever to be one.
I thought: June is an Israelite.
Then I counted off silently to seven, waiting for the No! of Adonai, the paralysis. He did not say No! and I was not paralyzed, but then I worried that maybe He couldn’t read my face, so I said it out loud in Hebrew.
I said, June is an Israelite, Adonai. I said, I will recognize that she is an Israelite.
I gave Him another seven-count, and again, there was no No! or paralysis.
I said to June, You’re an Israelite.
And it was true.