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  He turned to the class as a whole, and there was suddenly complete silence. He walked toward the back slowly, letting the sound of his white crocodile-skin boots click precisely until he got behind José and stood next to Sandra. “Your romance,” he said in Spanish, “is over. You hear me?” He turned to everyone in the class and said, “It’s over.”

  He took his son José by the collar of his green Mexican national soccer team jersey, holding the shirt beneath José’s blazer. The boy stood up obediently and bent over, like a little child hoping not to be caned by his father, even though he was about five feet ten. The father pulled José up through the middle of all of the desks until he got to me. I watched the whole rebuke in silence, holding my textbook, trying to think how best to respond to let the father know I was the boss in this room. But get real. He was the boss. So I just stood there silently, obediently, with his two guards at the doorway. “And you,” the father said when he got up to me. He spoke in English to let me know he could tell me what to do in English, too. He had a thick Mexican accent to his English. It made “you” sound more like Jew. “Jew,” he said. “I am going to hold Jew personally responsible for these two. If they ever—ever—do anything together again, I’m going to come kill you. Is that clear?” He paused for a second, as if he realized the way he had just spoken to me in public was too much, a bit outrageous for a school, and then he added, “Look, these two people, they’re from different families. That’s all you need to know. I’m asking you to keep them apart.”

  He took José away, and Sandra sat in the back of the room crying.

  —

  Apart from the tremendous fear I felt from the man threatening me, it was funny that he called me a Jew. Not funny in the way of ha ha, but funny that he made that mistake of pronunciation, because I am a Jew. I’m a secular Jew, maybe even an atheist Jew, meaning that I grew up as a Jew in Chicago, and my parents sent me to temple, but I don’t believe in God. But I do feel an extreme sense of ease in a temple, so it was with great surprise, when I came down to Mexico eight years ago, that I discovered there was a large group of Jews living in Mexico City. The thought that there could be Jews in Mexico had simply never occurred to me. Mexico was a place of tamales and tacos, mariachi bands and guacamole. What would a bunch of Jews be doing in a place like that?

  When I first arrived in Mexico City, with a backpack, with no real plan other than to find some eventual work, a friend of mine who worked for the U.S. embassy let me stay in her apartment in the neighborhood of Polanco. The first day I arrived in the city, I walked outside to get some groceries. I wandered around the upscale neighborhood. It was a Friday, and around evening I saw all these men walking with black fedora hats and long black jackets toward who knows where. At first I just saw one or two, who stood out oddly against the other people walking to a nearby mall, where there are stores like El Palacio de Hierro, which is like Saks Fifth Avenue. The men looked like they’d been Photoshopped into the scene from Brooklyn or Jerusalem. The few Orthodox men I saw grew into somewhat larger groups as they walked into the distance, to the end of the sidewalk.

  When I got home to the apartment I was staying in, I asked my friend what these Jews were doing in the neighborhood. “Oh, there are lots of Jews here,” she said. “Maybe forty thousand of them.” My friend was from El Paso, Texas, and she’d definitely been raised Catholic: hence she used the “them,” which is the way even I thought of the Jews, as “them.” We were a “them.” Always had been, since the days when the Jews first went to Egypt. Even as a nonreligious Jew, it was part of my identity that I was a “them.”

  The next week, when Friday came around, I followed the men to temple. I was clearly not dressed appropriately to enter. I stood at the door, watching the men go in, feeling like I should stay outside. But curiosity got the better of me, and I asked one of the men, in broken Spanish, if he had a yarmulke I could borrow. He looked at me suspiciously, at first. He eyed my corduroy pants and white button-down shirt. It wasn’t a suit, but it was the best I had in my backpack, and I’d ironed my clothes neatly, and he must have seen the good intentions in the crisp creases because he nodded slightly toward the door and let me in. He gave me a tallit, he found me a yarmulke, and he took me inside the main temple, and in the center of the room I saw the scrolls of the Torah eventually revealed, with handles gleaming so brightly that even in the dim light of the temple they shined like silvery moons.

  I returned to the temple the next week, and while the women were separated from the men, and while I still didn’t believe in God, and while I fumbled through some Hebrew as the other men recited together in unison, I was dragged to a Shabbat dinner afterward, in the basement of the temple, where candles were lit, and where I first set my eyes on Sara.

  She had soft freckles and her cheeks were a bit pink and upwardly round, her eyes were a turquoise that pulled me into her gaze. She wore a long black skirt and plain black shoes with stockings, as was required for an Orthodox woman to be considered modest.

  What can I tell you about the walks we took throughout the city the next six weeks? They were the kind of ambles where the sun feels warm and perfect on the skin and on the brow. They were the kind of walks where birds seem to constantly sing. We wandered through the Parque Lincoln, where all the trendy restaurants are located. We saw the people eating their meals happily, laughing, raising glasses of wine and seeing people like us as passersby. We watched the dogs play in the park, leaping for balls thrown by their masters. We walked by the beautiful fountains in the Bosque de Chapultepec. We walked to the ice cream store called La Michoacana, where they served us mango and guava sorbets.

  But after six weeks, one afternoon after I’d taken Sara home, as I stood outside of her apartment under her second-story balcony—not going upstairs because I knew her father was very strictly Orthodox and didn’t approve of me—she stood on the balcony waving at me below, and then the screen door opened and her father came out and he stood tall with his black pants and black jacket and white shirt, and with the fringes of his tallit just poking from under his shirt, and he looked down at me with the beard on his face looking heavy, with the weight of gray crowding out the rest of his once-brown beard, and he raised his hand like a hammer, banging it in the air, and he said in Spanish, “You. You sir. You! Go away. You are not good for my daughter. You are not a real Jew. You! That’s enough. I don’t want to see you around here anymore.”

  —

  After school, I coach one of the girls’ basketball teams at the New Hampshire School. It’s part of my contract. I have to coach a sport. It’s part of the motto of the New Hampshire School that students will excel not only in the mind and in the heart but also on the field. Growing up, I used to love to watch the Chicago Bulls play basketball. I marveled at Michael Jordan flying through the air and reverse-dunking the ball. It was like he had escaped the bounds of this earth and the bounds of his background in the ’hood.

  I was never a natural-born basketball player, myself. I’m too short, only five feet eight. But I’m pretty quick with my hands, so I could always play as a guard.

  I remember on one of those early dates with Sara, as we walked through the Parque Lincoln, I saw some kids shooting hoops in a made-up basketball court. A ball came rolling over to me, and I picked it up and dribbled for a few seconds. I thought of throwing the ball from the distance to show Sara I could make a long shot, but then I thought that would look like showing off, so I decided to throw the ball to her, instead, and when the ball came into her chest, where I expected her to grab it, she didn’t know how to fully raise her hands properly, to spread them wide to catch the ball, so it went straight into her chest, hitting against her plain white shirt, smashing her breasts.

  She gave me this look of betrayal, like I had just intentionally hurt her. I went running up to her as she sucked in air, looking at the smudge of dirt on her shirt. “Why did you do that?” she said.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. But I was more than sorry.
I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to go out anymore. I was afraid the distance between us might be too great. While I’d been growing up watching TV, and Jordan hit the hoops, she’d been wearing long, modest clothes, and occasionally playing jump rope. Attraction is one thing: turquoise eyes, a beautiful smile. But maybe there was too much to overcome.

  I thought about that moment with Sara—it was years ago, before we’d gotten married—as I watched Sandra come out to play on the basketball team. She wasn’t very good as a student in class, and she may have spent hours combing her hair in perfect curls, but on the court she was an aggressive tiger, wearing her hair back in a long ponytail.

  You might think that after the incident with José’s father, earlier in the day, Sandra would have gone straight home, but I think, like me, she must have been terrified of deviating in any way from the normal routine.

  So, there she was in her basketball shorts and white court shoes trying to go through the motions of shooting hoops from the three-point range. Usually, she was a good shooter. Usually, the ball went in with a nice swish, her hands following through in a delicate downward dip after the shot. But she was missing them all, today, and I saw her shoot even an outright air ball.

  I called Sandra over while the other girls continued throwing hoops.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “You have no idea what it feels like to have him take José away like that. It’s none of his business,” she said.

  “Excuse me,” I said, trying to be genuinely polite, “I know it’s not my place to ask. But what did you and José do together that got him so mad?”

  “We’ve just been hanging out,” she said. She looked at her shoes. She chewed her gum a little, dejectedly. She knew gum was forbidden during practice.

  “Just hanging out?”

  “His father and my father— They don’t get along. They’re from the same business. They compete against each other, and whenever one gets the upper hand they get furious at each other.”

  “And what business is that?” I asked. But I already had more than an inkling of the answer. I’d heard the same rumors all the kids in the school had heard. The rumor was the fathers were both in drug cartels, high up.

  “Just a business,” she said. “A very lucrative business. So sometimes they get pissed off at each other.”

  She looked at me stone-faced, as if wanting to let me know she didn’t appreciate me asking that kind of question. “So if José comes back to class,” she said, “what are you going to do? Are you going to make him sit apart from me? Are you going to tell the principal and make us stay apart?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said, and I meant it. I didn’t have a clue what to do. There was the very real possibility I could get involved in something violent if I didn’t do what José’s father said. There was the very real possibility that José and Sandra had been making love in some motel, somewhere in the city, and that I shouldn’t be encouraging their sex at that young an age. There was the very real possibility I should just shut up and go about my business teaching and pretend this day had never happened. But beneath all those clear, rational ideas was the vision of Sara’s dad yelling down at me from the balcony telling me I wasn’t a real Jew, that I had no right to be with Sara, even though we knew we wanted to be together.

  —

  Later that night, I asked Sara if she remembered our wedding day.

  “Of course I do,” she said. “Why must you bring up something so bitter?”

  “Well, do you think your father was right?” I said. I genuinely wanted to know. I truly needed to know.

  Her father had refused to attend the wedding until the end of the ceremony, and just after I broke the glass beneath my foot, indicating that I hoped for a life of happiness together with Sara even as we remembered that joy must always be tempered, her father came into the temple and yelled it was an abomination that we had just married. He stood like a prophet foretelling doom, shaking his hands in the air, yelling against us with so much force that drops of his spit seemed to fly out like bullets, caught in the shaft of light coming down from the highest window of the temple. He was a well-respected man in the Orthodox community, so no one tried to shut him up, but there were a couple of men who walked up to him, put their arms around his shoulders, and tried to give him comfort. The question I wanted to know was whether Sara felt I had been an impostor that day, dressing up for a Jewish wedding when she knew I did not believe in God? And I wanted to know if she thought her father had been right, that the divide between us was too big to overcome? Sara had certainly paid the price in marrying me. We had married in a temple different from the one where she grew up. We had married in a Conservative, but not an Orthodox, temple. There is no such thing as Reformed Judaism down in Mexico City. You are either a Jew or not a Jew. The shades of gray, as found in the U.S., don’t exist.

  Her father had never spoken to Sara again, after our wedding. In the end, during the last words he said to her, he stood frozen like a statue as he yelled in the temple, shouting out to his daughter, “Sara, how could you do this to me? You, who were always my favorite daughter.”

  There was probably nothing crueler I could have asked Sara after she’d made such a sacrifice of her father in order to marry me. But I felt, following the events of the day with Sandra and José, I wanted to know after eight years whether she was happy with her decision, or with our decision.

  We had just eaten some tacos from around the corner—I had ordered some pork tinga tacos and she had her usual beef. She rarely went to temple now, and we didn’t keep kosher at home, but she still never ate pork.

  “I will always feel, in some ways, that a piece of me was cut out that day,” Sara said, looking at me with the same intensity she’d looked at me the day the basketball flew into her chest. “I will always feel sad that my father couldn’t understand that a good man is a good man whether he is Muslim, Asian, or whatever. You’re a good man. That’s why I married you. But if I could have married you and kept him happy at the same time, I would have done that. My father used to tell me to never burn any bridges. He used to tell me you never know when you will have to walk back over a bridge you have left behind. I miss the community sometimes. Of course I do. But I don’t miss the irrational exclusivity that keeps people in and out. It felt like a prison. That’s why I left. And you already know all this, so why are you bringing the subject up?”

  I felt, after dragging her into the muck of our marriage, that I owed her an explanation for what had brought the thoughts of our marriage day back to me. The night before our wedding day, her father had come to me where I lived in the south of the city, far away from his neighborhood of Polanco. I was living alone then. Sara stayed residing with her family until our wedding day.

  Her father came to my apartment building. Like Sara, I lived on the second floor, and like Sara, I had a balcony, though not nearly as nice, or as big, of one as the apartment where she lived. Her father had come all the way to the south of the city, but he didn’t want to get too close to me, so he didn’t knock on the door—at least that’s why I think he didn’t knock. Maybe he thought somehow I could infect him if we came too close—me an atheistic, secular Jew, him a pure man who studied the Torah into the wee hours of the night. So instead I heard a small rock tap against the window of my balcony door. I went out onto the balcony, and I looked around. I couldn’t see anyone, at first. I only heard the sound of a forlorn whistle, the haunting wail like a steam train of a camote wagon, which roasts bananas and sweet potatoes. I thought maybe I had heard a tap that wasn’t really a tap, from the stone. But just as I was about to go back in, the form of a black fedora hat and a black jacket, and the silent, bluish-white glow of his shirt became clearer, below me.

  “I have tried with warnings,” Sara’s father said. “I have tried with reason. Reason is what the Torah teaches us. Two things that are different should not be joined together. But if you will not listen to reason, then I will ask
you as a humble man who loves his daughter. Please. Please! I’m begging you. Don’t do this to an old man. Don’t make me die before my time. Let my Sara marry someone worthy of her. Don’t let me lose her.”

  He was not such an old man. He was no older than sixty-five. His pleading was haunting, touching, and certainly I felt for him. I asked him if he wanted to come upstairs to talk to me. I asked him, couldn’t he come upstairs so I could convince him I was worthy of his daughter? But he just shook his head in the moonlight, bending down on one knee, praying as if he could no longer hear me. I went downstairs and opened the door and walked up to speak to him, and when he saw me coming he told me the only way I could redeem myself was to not show up at the wedding tomorrow. “Better not to come. Better to break her heart than to ruin her life,” he said.

  “Me, ruin her life?” I said. “Haven’t you already ruined it? Look at you. Just look at your pale, wrinkled face. You quiver and worry, wringing your hands like some kind of medieval caricature of a Jew in the shtetl. You claim you’re the only person who knows right, that there is only one way to live, and that I’m not a real Jew, that I’m a dirty atheist. You negate life itself, wrapping yourself in a small bubble of virtue, blind to everything outside your community, fearful of it, cursing it, and demanding your daughter do the same.”

  I could no longer hold my tongue. I no longer felt the impulse to try to placate him. Who was he to tell me I shouldn’t show up at my wedding tomorrow? It was Sara’s and my decision to make alone. I told him so. He put his hands up, against his ears, to block the sound of my voice, and then he ran off.

  He disappeared within the shadows of the curvy streets of the night like a chimney sweep, darker than coal. “It’s not my fault, it’s yours,” I whispered after him, as he ran away.