The students were uniformly clad in some variation of jeans and sweatshirts, about half the robin’s egg blue of Cornell Hillel, the rest displaying a broad array of Cornelliana and the Ugg boots that now seemed to cover every female ankle and calf on campus. Institutional tables were set with paper plates, paper cups, and paper towels, and punctuated by bottles of classic Manischewitz.
“Is that wine?” said one of the AGR brothers. His name was Sawyer. He had an Irish last name. O’Something.
“I wouldn’t get too excited,” Lewyn told them, shouting above the din. “More likely to make you sick than get you drunk.” He spoke from painful experience. Once, Harrison had dared him to drink a juice glass full of the stuff, resulting in a blast of syrupy purple vomit all over his aunt’s guest bathroom. One of so many warm fraternal memories he cherished. Also: Harrison always found the afikomen.
“Hey, let’s sit,” O’Something said. “Before we get split up.”
It seemed no worse an idea than remaining where they were. The five of them took the nearest end of the nearest table, with Lewyn, to his great embarrassment, at the head. He hoped the position came with no added responsibilities.
“I kind of thought it would be fancier,” said Jonas, who had picked up the Haggadah on his paper plate and was thumbing through it.
“What is that?” said Mark. He was staring, in some horror, at the Seder plate.
The half-roasted lamb bone did look particularly anatomical, but it was the charoset Mark seemed to be looking at. It emitted a strong, oversweet smell and appeared to have been made far in advance of the occasion, or in considerable bulk, or both. There was an ice-cream scoop of it in a plastic bowl every five feet or so along the table. Lewyn did his best to explain.
“We don’t need to eat it, though, do we?”
“Not if you don’t want.” He didn’t really want to, himself. “Maybe pretend to eat a bite. It’s part of the ritual.”
At the use of this word, Mark looked shocked, as if someone had just drawn a pentacle before him on the paper tablecloth. In blood.
“It’s like … everything means something,” he finally said. “Everything on the table. And then some things mean even more than one thing. Like … I guess, Easter. The lamb. And … the egg,” he managed, hoping he wasn’t being offensive. The lamb? The egg? “So, the lamb represents the sacrifice to God from back in the days of the Temple. The egg is rebirth. The horseradish is the bitterness of slavery. The parsley is the renewal of spring. This stuff,” he pointed to the charoset, “it represents the mortar the slaves had to make in Egypt. Also the sweetness of life.”
“What about the orange?” Jonas wanted to know.
Lewyn frowned. Each Chinet Seder plate did indeed have an orange in addition to the usual suspects.
“Haven’t the faintest idea,” he admitted.
“So this is like a program?” said Jonas. He was turning through the stapled pages.
“Oh, you read it backwards,” Lewyn told him.
All five of them turned to him.
“Just … how it’s done.”
And he turned over his own to demonstrate. On the back of the pages, handwritten in black Sharpie, were the words: “Welcome to our Coalition for Mutual Respect Seder!”
Jesus Christ, he thought, before he could stop himself.
To his right, Mark was already laughing.
“Don’t,” Lewyn heard Jonas hiss at him, but he was laughing, too.
Well, he hadn’t promised them a rose garden. What had he promised them?
“Welcome, welcome,” said a woman at the far end of the room. She had a cordless microphone, and spoke, initially, in Hebrew, the only words of which Lewyn recognized were Shalom and Pesach. Then her mic went out and someone brought her a new one. “Such a lovely boy,” said the re-amplified rabbi, patting this boy’s yarmulke with a tiny hand. “Electrical engineer! Single!” The room laughed.