my baggage in the back seat. He was a big, chubby guy with wild, messy brown hair in baggy jeans and flannel shirt.
“It better be fast,” he said.
“Why? You have someplace to go?” I asked him, thinking that after he dropped me off, he’d probably like to go back twenty years, run over to the student union, lead a peace march and drop some acid.
“Well, no,” he said. “I just don’t feel like stopping.”
I opened the door to get out.
“But I will,” he said.
“Thanks a bunch.”
We sped between the traffic up the avenue.
“You just get back from a trip?” he asked.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Where’d you go?” he asked, stopping the cab at a red light.
Through the window, I watched a man shoving leaflets at passersby.
“Check it out. Check it out,” he said, hoping to entice them into entering the House of Heavenly Delights. I looked up and saw an enlarged color photo of two women having their way with each other, while a man, dressed as the devil, held a pitchfork over their heads.
“Florida,” I said.
“Vacation?”
He was turning out to be pretty chatty, this…I looked to the front seat to see the name on his identification card. Alan Cohen.
“Passover,” I answered. Mom, Henry and I flew down to spend the holiday with Aunt Cookie and Uncle Sy. It had become a new tradition since my aunt and uncle had retired there five years ago. Uncle Sy’s Passover seder was so different from the holiday I remembered as a little girl when Grandpa Lou was still alive. He would recite the whole haggadah in Hebrew. My cousins and I would twist and turn in our seats for what seemed like a century until, finally, we could eat. After the meal, Grandpa Lou would hide the Afikoman, the magic piece of matzoh, and give a quarter to the kid who found it. All of us kids would search the Brooklyn apartment high and low only to find that, once again, our grandfather had hidden it in his suit jacket.
Some years later, after Grandpa Lou had passed on, Sy had stood at the head of his Long Island table and flipped on a small tape recorder. After a series of static sounds, Sy’s voice had filled the room. “Your mission tonight, if you choose to accept, is to skip the formalities and go directly to the Passover meal catered à la Cookie.” Everyone thought it was very funny, except for Grandma Rose, who was missing her husband and the days when “the holidays” meant her house.
“Yeah, Passover. Yeah,” said the cabby with the recognition I expected. “The folks glad to see you?”
“Thrilled.” There seemed no point explaining my folks didn’t really live there.
“Boca?” Alan Cohen asked in shorthand.
“West Palm.”
“Nice.”
Alan Cohen probably had family in Boca, I thought, and wished that he had gone down for Passover to see his parents. They probably lived in a development with two swimming pools, four tennis courts and a clubhouse. Alan would always think he was going to play tennis when he visited, but it never happened. He probably never went to see them much, being the black sheep of the family. Alan had probably had great potential. He was probably the salutatorian of his graduating class at Midwood High School in Brooklyn. His parents had thought he would be a doctor, or at very least, a dentist. But he went away to college, did too many drugs and never got out of the Sixties.
“So…” he said. He was determined to keep the conversation going. “Does your family do a whole seder thing, or do you just eat?”
I pictured Sy standing at the head of the table wearing a blue satin yarmulke on his head, a gold Jewish star around his neck and a yellow-and-white kitchen apron tied behind his waist.
“Why is this night different from all other nights?” he asked. “Because tonight we’re not going to ask the four questions. Every year you ask me the same questions, and for thirty years I’m giving the same answers. So, if you don’t know the answers by now, you’re out of luck.”
“We did a little seder,” I told Alan the interested cabdriver. “You know, the usual stuff.”
Sy was in rare form this year. “Now I want everyone to listen to the instructions on how we will proceed with tonight’s seder. First, this will be an abbreviated version of the abbreviated version we generally have. Only, I will say the blessing over the wine and that’ll be it. There’s no reason for us to go around the table and have everyone say the kiddush. So I will say the blessing and you all say Amen. Are you with me so far?”
“Like what’s your usual?” asked Alan. “How many minutes is yours? Ours were like about fifteen minutes. Me and my cousin, Ricky, always tried to sneak in some decent wine. That Manisohewitz crap is not anybody’s idea of a great vintage year.”
“I know,” I said. “You know what else is funny? They always have the yarmulkes from all the affairs they went to over the years. There were three white velvet ones that said ‘Wedding of Mark and Mindy Sokoloff, May 15, 1982,’ written in gold and nobody knew who the Sokoloffs were!”
“I wonder if anybody still has the ones from my Bar Mitzvah?” Alan Cohen wondered aloud. “Oh. Did you use the coffee books?”
“Yes! What is that about?” This was turning into a fun cab ride. “How appropriate is it that a coffee company publishes the most popular Haggadah! You read this horrific tale of the Jews fleeing Egypt with a picture of a piece of matzoh on the front of the book, and a cup of hot coffee on the back!”
“Well, we as a people like to eat!”
“No kidding,” I said, glimpsing a look at Alan’s back taking up a broad part of the front seat.
“So, what do you do?” he asked me.
“Well, Alan,” I said, feeling it might be a little personal to use his name, but also as if I knew the cloth from which he was cut. “Why don’t you guess?”
“Drugs?”
“That’s it! You got it on the first try. Amazing!”
“Really? You’re kidding.”
“Of course I’m kidding. Do I look like a drug dealer? Look, we’re here,” I said, pointing to the white doorman building on Eighth Avenue. “Stop. I’ll be just a second.” The cab stopped near 52nd Street. I ran in and picked up the yellow manila envelope that said FOR PICKUP—K. KLINE from the doorman.
“What’d you get?” he asked when I got back into the cab.
“I had to pick up a script.”
“An actress!” he said, driving up Eighth Avenue.
I received a last-minute call from a casting director asking me to fill in for an actress who wasn’t going to be able to do the reading. I pulled out the script and started to read. The
