How I Saved Hanukkah Read online

  * * *

  I love going to Lucy’s house. It is totally different than mine. All the furniture is dark and there are no baby toys around. Her two big sisters have makeup and other teenage stuff in the bathroom. Their dad doesn’t have much in the way of knickknacks, but their mom collects everything—teacups, thimbles, little cat statues displayed in glass cases like a museum. Lucy’s grandma lives there too and has old clocks that make noise. Three or four of them chimed just as I walked in.

  “Hi!” Lucy said, then whispered, “Ready for the you-know-what?”

  “The moon is full,” I whispered in return.

  We needed a private spot for our séance. A spot where no one would know that we had matches.

  We took that blue-and-white candle I’d made at school, and some matches from Lucy’s dad’s desk, up to Lucy’s room, but Kate was there, in one of her porcupine moods. It’s supposed to be half Lucy’s room, but it isn’t really, at least not when Kate is like that. We tried her oldest sister Yaz’s room, but we couldn’t go in there either because she was on the phone with the door closed. And we aren’t allowed in Lucy’s parents’ room or her grandma’s—ever.

  Downstairs Lucy’s father was reading the paper in the living room and her grandma was watching TV in the den.

  “I’ll bet you a million bucks your mom’s in the kitchen,” I said. “Why is she always in there anyway? My mom’s never in the kitchen.”

  “I think she’s under a spell,” Lucy said, “doing dishes for eternity.”

  We looked in the kitchen, and sure enough, there was Mrs. Doyle with her dish towel, humming along with the Christmas carols on the radio. Lucy and I both started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” Lucy’s mom smiled, ready to laugh with us.

  So we bolted from the kitchen into the tiny bathroom next to the pantry. I was laughing so hard, I had to pee.

  We locked the bathroom door, and lit the blue-and-white candle. It’s a good thing that Lucy had insisted on keeping that candle when I wanted to throw it out, because it was just right for a séance.

  We turned off the light. In the dark with the candle between us on the floor, I instantly started feeling spooked. My arm hairs tingled. My toes curled in my sandals.

  “What should we ask?” I whispered.

  We could hear “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” playing on Lucy’s mom’s radio.

  “Let’s call the spirit of the guy who wrote that song,” Lucy said. “I want to know if Rudolph forgave Prancer and Dancer and those other bullies for being so mean to him.”

  Lucy put on a scary low voice and said, “Whoever you are, dead songwriter . . . I wish we knew his name . . . ”

  “Cut it out!” I said. “You’re blowing out the candle!”

  “I am not! You are!” Lucy said, and we both started screaming. The candle went out and we couldn’t find the light switch, so we screamed louder. Someone started pounding on the bathroom door, and they were yelling pretty loud too.

  When we finally found the light and the doorknob and came out of the bathroom, Lucy’s entire family was lined up in the hallway, a whole row of curly blond heads. Everyone in the row had angry blue eyes except Yaz, who was smiling. I want to be Yaz when I am a teenager.

  Lucy’s father said he was sending me straight home for playing with matches.

  But he didn’t.

  We promised to be very quiet the rest of the night.

  But we weren’t.

  * * *

  In bed later I asked Lucy what she would do if she was Rudolph and everyone was picking on her for having a shiny nose.

  “I know,” she said. “When Santa asked me to guide his sleigh, I’d tell him to fire all the other reindeer and hire elephants or something.”

  “And make Prancer and Dancer take turns sweeping up after them, like the guy at the circus!” I said.

  Kate told us we were silly, infantile, obnoxious, and a few other things. Then she took her blanket and pillow into Yaz’s room.

  But actually my question was kind of serious. Poor old Rudolph . . . it wasn’t easy being different.

  CHAPTER

  3

  By the time Lucy and I dragged ourselves out of bed, everyone else was awake. Mrs. Doyle was in the kitchen, of course, and Lucy’s grandma and sisters were putting up Christmas decorations in the living room.

  Mrs. Doyle’s ornament collection is famous around here. She has zillions. Lucy and I decided to help decorate.

  “You can start on those,” said Yaz.

  Inside the big boxes that Yaz had pointed to were littler boxes. As Lucy and I unwrapped each ornament, it was like opening a tiny present. They were all different. All so pretty.

  Lucy’s grandmother, who thinks we are still babies, said, “Remember, girls, Santa does not bring toys to little girls who break ornaments!”

  “Santa’s taste must be as corny as my mom’s,” whispered Lucy. “Look at that tacky elf.”

  “It’s not tacky,” I said, setting it in a cloud of cotton on the mantel. “It’s cute.”

  “Does your mom collect?” Yaz asked me. “Hanukkah stuff, I mean?”

  I tried to imagine my mom collecting anything. It was an impossible picture. And what would anyone collect for Hanukkah? “Hanukkah’s not like that,” I said. “It’s . . . It’s . . . ”

  The sisters and even Grandma looked at me to explain.

  “It’s at the same time as Christmas, but it’s just nothing like it,” I said.

  “What is it like?” Kate asked.

  “Well,” I said, “Bubbi, that’s my grandma, sends us candles from Michigan. Then we light the menorah and sing a Hanukkah song. Then my parents give me a gift. It’s always something useful, though, never anything great, and almost never wrapped. Then, around the fourth night, we forget to light the candles and by the time anyone remembers, Hanukkah is over. So my brother and I get whatever gifts are left and that’s that.” I shrugged. “Hanukkah.”

  Grandma and the sisters looked at each other. I guess I’d made Hanukkah sound pretty dull.

  Suddenly, SMASH! A huge red ornament lay shattered in countless shiny bits on the floor. Lucy’s mom came running out of the kitchen with her dish towel.

  “Sorry, Mom,” Lucy giggled. “I slipped. Guess there’s no Santa for Marla OR me this year. Right, Grandma?”

  We all looked over at Lucy’s grandmother. She was scowling like an old toad. But at least everyone had stopped expecting me to recite “’Twas the Night Before Hanukkah” or something.

  * * *

  After breakfast at Lucy’s I stumbled home. I must have fallen asleep on the back-porch swing because the next thing I knew, Ned was sticking a leaf up my nose and I was buried under a heap of his stuffed animals.

  “Look at you,” my mom said when I dragged myself into the house. “This is precisely why I hate sleep-overs.”

  I hung out in my room most of the day, coming out only to call Lucy now and then. Kate kept answering the phone and she called me a pest.

  When my stomach said it was dinnertime, I went out to our white kitchen. No mom. Our white living room? Nope. Dining room? Bedrooms? One empty, white room after another. I once heard my mom tell a friend that her first choice would be to decorate strictly with invisible furniture but since that was not an option, white was the next best thing. “Anything else would require making a decision, and I’m tired of making decisions,” she’d said.

  Finally I banged on my mom’s office door. There she was, working at her computer. She is a personal bookkeeper for two rich old men and their rich young wives. My mom pays their bills. She also tells us how much money they spend. This year one couple had a two-thousand-dollar Christmas tree, like the ones in department stores, put up in their house. They didn’t personally hang one single strand of tinsel.

  Anyway, there she was at her desk. Ned was on the floor drawing with markers—on his face mostly, and his clothes and arms and the floor, with just a tiny scribble on his piece
of paper.

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “Oh.” My mom blinked through her bug-eyed reading glasses. “What time is it?”

  “Time to eat,” I said.

  “Well, be a sweetie, Marla, and go to my recipe drawer, please,” my mom said.

  Her “recipe drawer” as she calls it, has never had a recipe in it in its life. That’s where she shoves all the carryout, fast-food menus that collect on our porch.

  My mom calls herself “cooking-impaired” and tells people she’s no good at “kitchen sports.” They think it’s funny. I don’t.

  I dug out a flyer for pizza, and ordered a large, with pineapple. I figured that if I had to do all the work, then I could choose the toppings.

  * * *

  Mom came out to pay the delivery guy and we ate while the pizza was hot.

  Then my dad called from Washington. Ned talked first, as always. When it was my turn, my dad told me he was sticking the six Santa hats on the six baby heads. “Then I just have to make it as heartwarming as possible in editing, and come home.” My mom always talks to my dad last, lovey-dovey stuff. She whispers and giggles. I think it’s gross when old people act like that.

  After my mom hung up, she got the menorah and lit the shammes. Ned and I each lit one candle for the second night of Hanukkah and we sang the song again.

  When we got to the “a dreidel to play with” part, I looked at the hollow, green, plastic one that Bubbi had sent to us. The gold foil candy coins that came inside it were long gone. We had gobbled them up the second the dreidel had come in the mail.

  “It doesn’t spin,” I said.

  “Well, they are supposed to be made of clay,” my mom said, “or wood or something.”

  When I asked her how to play, she said, “It’s gambling, for chocolate gelt. ‘Gelt’ is money. One of these Hebrew letters on it is a gimel, as in ‘gimmie a gimel and some gelt.’”

  “You don’t have a clue how to play, do you?” I asked her.

  “Not a clue,” she agreed. “But we can make up a game.”

  I did not want to make up a game. Here we were not able to have Christmas lights because being Jewish was so very important and we didn’t do the hora and my mom didn’t even know which letter was the GIMEL!

  I went to my room. A long time later my mom knocked and came in. She left my present at the foot of my bed, kissed the top of my head, and said, “Happy Hanukkah.”

  She forgot to close my door behind her.

  CHAPTER

  4

  After breakfast the next morning I took a shower. My hair is so thick that it takes forever to dry and the back of my shirt gets soaked. I was twirling in the front yard letting the sun dry it, getting dizzy, and thinking I should just cut my hair short like Lucy’s, when she came zipping around the corner on her bike, Lemonade.

  Lucy’s sister Kate had named it Lemonade when it was new and bright-yellow. It wasn’t bright-yellow anymore. Ever since it was handed down to Lucy, she has tried to change its name, but none of the new names stick.

  Lucy parked Lemonade next to Misty. Misty is my pale blue-gray bike, the color of fog. Misty and Lemonade are, needless to say, best friends.

  As soon as Lucy pulled off her helmet, the expression on her face made me panic.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “MAAAARLA!” Lucy wailed, “I have to go to Texas! Tomorrow! For five whole days!”

  “WHAT?” I shrieked. “WHY?”

  “Some great-aunt I’ve never even met is really sick. She is Grandma’s eighty-one-year-old baby sister, and Grandma’s afraid to travel all the way to Texas alone—and she really wants to see her before she dies—I’m sure Grandma’s sister is a very nice old lady and I’m sorry she’s so sick and all—but—”

  I could hardly hear what Lucy was saying. My mind kept picturing the endless days without her.

  “So my mom is going to take Grandma to Texas to see this sick aunt, and my dad thinks me and my sisters will love Texas, and so—” Lucy’s face scrunched up and I could tell she was about to cry.

  “But we have so much planned!” I said. Actually we had nothing at all planned, and we’d really been looking forward to our nothing.

  Then I got an idea. “I know!” I said. “What if you stayed at my house?”

  Lucy lit up for the first time. Then she dimmed down. “Nah, it’s Christmas. My parents will want us all together.”

  “But last year Kate went skiing over the holiday recess,” I said. “And didn’t Yaz leave town too one year?”

  We agreed that it was worth a try, and so we went to find my mom in her office.

  “FOUR sleep-overs in a row?” my mom gasped.

  Lucy and I begged.

  My mom made us promise we’d clean up my entire room, including the stuff under my bed. We swore we would be nice to Ned and quiet at night. We’d cheerfully do laundry, dishes, and vacuuming. We’d be helpful, helpful, helpful and never complain about anything. That was when she said, “Fine.”

  We knew she’d be easy. The tricky one was going to be Lucy’s mother.

  We tried to coach my mom about what to say. “They’ll save oodles of money on not buying me a plane ticket,” Lucy said.

  “And the hotel,” I added, “one less bed.”

  “Plus I’d miss school!” Lucy said. “I can’t miss school!”

  “That’s right!” I said, “There’s still Monday and Tuesday! And we always do really, really important stuff right before vacation!” I rolled my eyes at Lucy, but she kept a perfectly straight face.

  My mom insisted she could handle it herself and made us leave the room while she called Lucy’s mother.

  We huddled outside my mom’s office door. Lucy’s fingers dug into my arm. My fingers were probably digging into hers.

  From the little bits we heard, it sounded like, “poor woman is so sick, so old . . . hospital . . . Lucy is so sensitive, so young . . . upsetting . . . ” And we figured out that my mom meant that Lucy might freak out or be in the way at the hospital, or if the great-aunt died and there was a funeral and stuff. The mothers talked and talked and talked it over.

  It didn’t look entirely hopeless, so Lucy got back on Lemonade and went home to work on her mom from that end. This was a tricky move because if we lost and Lucy had to leave the next day, then we were wasting our last day together being apart. If it worked, though, it would be worth this one day to have five unbroken days in a row.

  The phone frenzy went on and on with one mom calling the other back, three-and-a-half seconds after they’d hung up. I knew Lucy was going just as buggy as me, at her house.

  Mrs. Doyle changed her mind seven or eight times, but at least every now and then it sounded like a YES. During the YES moments between calls, MY mom would threaten to change HER mind too! She said that if I didn’t do this and this and that, she was going to call Lucy’s mother “THIS INSTANT” and cancel the whole thing once and for all.

  * * *

  I sat in our blindingly white kitchen, waiting for the white phone to ring with a Lucy-sleep-over-update. I knew it would help our case if I rinsed the white breakfast dishes that were piled in the white sink, but I just sat at the white kitchen table fiddling with that stupid green plastic dreidel, trying to make it spin. I thought it might work if it wasn’t so light and hollow, so I filled it with Cheerios, but that didn’t help.

  Lucy called and said her mom was taking her out to run errands, and she’d call me later. It had already been the longest day in the history of the world, and it wasn’t even lunchtime!

  The suspense was making me crazy and I had to get out of the house, so I shoved the plastic dreidel into my pocket, grabbed my Rollerblades, and whizzed up to Joe’s Deli.

  I have tons of Jewish relatives back in Michigan, where Mom comes from, but Joe and Joe’s wife at the deli were the only Jewish people I could think of here in California.

  “LOOK WHO’S HERE!” Joe yelled as soon as I rolled in. “IT’S OUR LIT
TLE MARLA!”

  Joe’s wife, whose name, as far as I knew, was “Joe’s Wife,” poked her head up from under the counter. “LITTLE MARLA!” she hollered.

  My dad once told me that Joe and his wife reminded him of a radio he used to have. The control knob was stuck on top volume so it could only BLAST!

  My mom calls Joe and Joe’s Wife “THE LOUD CROWD.” But I like them. I don’t even mind that they always call me “LITTLE.”

  Joe and Joe’s Wife asked me about school and Lucy and my mom and brother and dad, and the sextuplets. They are big fans of the sextuplets. They’ve watched every segment in my dad’s series.

  I wanted to say, “STOP WATCHING!” because as long as people watch one stupid Raisin segment after another, the network will keep sending my dad to Washington. But I didn’t.

  When Joe and Joe’s Wife were done asking me about everyone, and after they’d offered me tastes of salami and free cookies, they asked me what they could do for me, “A NICE RYE?”

  “I’m here for information,” I said. “Hanukkah information.”

  They both crowded closer and peered over the counter.

  “It’s dreidels,” I said.

  “OH! DREIDELS,” yelled Joe’s Wife, clapping her hands like a door slamming. “WE HAVE DREIDELS!” She rummaged around behind the cash register and brought out three wooden dreidels, which she pushed toward me.

  “But how do you play?” I asked. “What are the letters? One is a gimel, right?”

  So Joe and Joe’s Wife gave me a dreidel lesson. I was talking loudly myself by the time I left. Yelling is contagious.

  * * *

  Back home Mom said Lucy had called to say YES! I twitched every time the phone rang, afraid that Lucy’s mom would change her mind again. If we could just get through this night, we’d be safe.

  Meanwhile, it was the third night of Hanukkah. After the candles and the song and dinner, I pulled out my wooden dreidel with a “Taa-daa! Look what Joe’s Wife at the deli gave me!

  “This is a nun,” I said, pointing. “This is a shin, here’s a heh, and this one, Mom, is the gimel! And I know why dreidels go with Hanukkah.”