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“My dad’s Jewish, but Judaism is passed down through the mother’s side, so if my mom were Jewish, I’d be, well, fully Jewish.” It’s definitely the most times I’ve said the word “Jewish” in a single sentence.
It hits me that I’ve never had to explain all this about myself to anyone before. Sophie has always known.
“In elementary school,” I continue, “we were doing this unit on world religions. And when we started talking about Judaism, the teacher asked what we knew about it. One kid raised his hand and said, ‘My dad told me Jews are kind of greedy.’?”
“You’re fucking kidding.”
I shake my head. “And then another kid said, ‘They
have bigger noses than other religions, right?’ and the teacher was absolutely mortified at this point. But I called out that those were stereotypes and they weren’t true, and the first kid told me, ‘Peter, you’re only half.’ As though it meant I should have been offended half as much or something. Or I didn’t have the right to be offended.”
That was when I realized some people didn’t like people like my dad or me just because of what we are. There were people who’d hate me despite never having met me. A crash course in anti-Semitism for a nine-year-old.
“You have the right, trust me. Those kids sound like assholes.”
“Do I, though? I’m still trying to figure that out. Do I have the right even though I haven’t had a bar mitzvah? And what does it say about me that I’ve known about those stereotypes for as long as I can remember, but I don’t know a word of Hebrew besides ‘shalom’? Isn’t that messed up, that that’s all I know? I’ve even spent more time in churches than in synagogues. All my piano recitals took place in churches.” They were nice places, sure, but it felt like I wasn’t entirely supposed to be there. Like I wasn’t welcome, though my mom was raised Christian. There was something about being half Jewish in a church that felt wrong. I had a strange inkling it would’ve felt different in a synagogue.
Chase is quiet for a moment. Then: “Being half of something can be kind of a mindfuck. My dad was from Argentina, but he moved to the US when he was a kid. He grew up speaking more English than Spanish, so I don’t know the language.”
I’m stuck on the “was,” though.
“My dad passed away when I was nine,” he continues. “Stage-four lung cancer. He wasn’t a smoker—life was just cruel.”
“Chase. I had no idea.” My sympathy compels me to reach a hand out, to graze his sleeve. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you,” he says graciously. “We’re okay, though. They caught it so late, and he didn’t suffer for very long. We’ve had a lot of time to cope. And therapy, too. People say it’s not something you ever get over—and yeah, I’d love to have my dad come to one of our shows, but my mom and sisters and I are doing fine.”
“How many sisters do you have?”
“Three. Two older, and one younger. So it’s my super-white mom, her three half-Argentinian daughters, and me. That was the worst part. Of—of losing my dad.” He rubs a hand over his face. “There’s this whole side I don’t know at all. I want to go to Córdoba one day—that’s where he was born. I feel like if I could get there, I’d have this sudden epiphany. . . . That probably sounds stupid.”
“It doesn’t.”
A sad smile. “You don’t have siblings, do you?”
“I used to want one,” I say, shaking my head. “My parents got me a chinchilla instead.”
Chase laughs. He’s unselfconscious about his laughs, surrendering completely to them. “Right. You mentioned that at the diner last week. I hope this isn’t too personal of a question,” he continues, “and tell me if it is. But—are you basically cured now? Now that you’ve had the transplant? ‘Cured’ is the wrong word, I know. I’ve been doing some research, but I’m still not sure I understand.”
He did research.
To learn more about me, my condition, my history.
For a few moments I’m so overwhelmed I can’t speak. “I can’t believe you did research,” I finally manage to say.
He shrugs it off. “I was curious, and I would have felt like a jerk asking a hundred questions.”
“It’s not a cure, no. I still have kidney disease. I have to take immunosuppressants—anti-rejection meds—for as long as I have this kidney. They trick my body into believing the new organ isn’t foreign so it doesn’t attack Sophie’s kidney.”
“It’s yours now, though. Not Sophie’s.”
“Right,” I say, though I haven’t been able to think of it that way yet. “Right. And a donor kidney . . . Sometimes it only functions for ten or fifteen years. Twenty if I’m lucky.”
“That’s what I was reading,” he says softly. “Shit.”
I nod. “I’ve already lived so much of my life convinced I was going to die young. So I can’t think about that now. My . . . mortality or anything. I can’t think about being back on the transplant list one day, being back on dialysis. I can only think about now.”
He scoots closer to me on the floor, so close that his shoe settles against mine. Our shoes have gotten very well acquainted lately. “I still can’t believe what you went through. I’m not even fully sure what a kidney does. I’m picturing this bean-shaped . . . thing. That does . . . something.”
