Steph’s dad invited me to lunch, and Steph was not to know we were meeting. Specific instructions from Michael. Which struck me as weird, but whatever. Michael was not the kind of cat that welcomed whys. I took a half day at work and, as soon as 11 hit, skedaddled south on 95. It was Wednesday, and we were doing Passover at Steph’s parents’ over the weekend. What could Michael have to say to me now that he couldn’t say to me then? Last year was my first Passover with Steph’s extended. My being there was not as big a deal as I expected it to be. Steph’s mom plopped a yarmulke onto the back of my head as I found my place between the kids’ end and an unpopular aunt, and when it was my turn to read from the Passover book, I flubbed some of the Hebrew and Michael got miffed. Heaved a big fed-up sigh like it was totally bonkers that I didn’t know how to say the word maggid. Steph whispered the correct pronunciation in my ear—long e in the second syllable—then said, “Cool it, Dad.” I shoved a forkful of cold cinnamon apples in my mouth and finished my passage about the plagues. Overall, I thought I’d done well. But now I felt uneasy. Michael’s text had come out of the blue, with directions to the restaurant like I hadn’t lived in Miami my whole life.
The restaurant was called Tina’s. Plush red booths, and the waiters were all older Cuban dudes in long black vests and bowties, but really it was a hospitality group–owned chain cosplaying as a classic Miami steakhouse that had been a staple of the community for forever. I was early, and the hostess pointed me toward a high top by the bar. I didn’t need to look at the menu to know that there wasn’t a thing on it that I could eat.
On the other side of the bar, a shadow darkened the latticed paper room divider like a ballistic missile blipping onto a radar screen. Michael. He scoped me and plowed over to the table. I stood up and gave him a firm one.
“Nice to see you, Michael.”
“I wouldn’t say that quite yet,” he said.
“Ha,” I said.
We sat down. Michael snagged a waiter. He wanted a Coors Light. No Coors on the menu though. Groan. The waiter started in on his script about the comparable beers he might find satisfactory, but Michael waved the guy’s mouth shut. “Just bring me something light,” he said. And when the thing was bubbling in front of him and he brought it to his lips: “That’s not a light beer.”
I held up my mug of ice water. I would’ve gotten a beer, too, but I didn’t know any of the beers on the menu to be vegan, and with Michael’s eyes on me, there was no way I was gonna pull out my phone to Google which ones contained fish bladder collagen and which ones contained gelatinized pig bones and which ones I wouldn’t have a moral problem drinking.
“Well, cheers,” I said.
Michael took another begrudging sip of his beer. My glass hung there pathetically.
“Bad luck,” he said.
“Oh, right.”
Michael was a majestic, powerful fat-ass with a law firm. Big conservative-editorial-reading mitts, five-iron forearms, thick black chest hairs blooming proudly from the crevasse of his half-unbuttoned button-down. We’d never exactly vibed. He’d always seemed a little perturbed that I wasn’t making my bread selling crypto or condos to moneyed foreign nationals like most Miami men in my age bracket. I also don’t think he understood sarcasm. The few times I’d made jokes at my own expense in his presence, he’d scrunched up his nose as if self-deprecating words smelled bad. And then there was his pride. He was a proud motherfucker: proud of himself, his career, and especially his two overachieving daughters. He was the complete opposite of my dad. Michael typified a model of masculinity that I hadn’t grown up with and that I certainly didn’t fulfill and that I therefore glorified, sort of hated, wanted approval from all at the same time.
He stacked his arms like Lincoln Logs and set them on the table.
“Dan,” he said. “Do you have any ambitions in life?”
“What was that?” I said, but I’d heard him just fine. Caught me a little off guard, but it wasn’t a gotcha question. It was earnest. I think.
“Ambitions,” Michael said. “Do you have any ambitions for your life? I’d like to know what your plans are going forward.”
Going forward. That was his email autofill patois, the only way he’d ever talked to me. I’d never even heard him swear. It was almost as if Michael purposefully picked his words to communicate to me a certain subtext, namely: You and I are not chums. We will never sit together on Adirondack chairs ripping cigars, we will never talk ball; we will diligently eschew male camaraderie in all forms.
“You’ve been dating Steph now four years,” he said. “Which means I’ve known you four years. And I don’t have any idea what you’ve been doing in that time. So help me understand, please. Where is this going?”
“Well,” I said, “I love Steph.” I felt gross giving Michael access to my deep-down emotions like that. But I did love Steph. Our relationship was a friends-first kinda deal. We met freshman year on the strip-mall campus of Florida International University before she transferred to a different school out west. I don’t think either of us thought we’d work as a romantic unit. But when she came back home to start law school (I was floundering in the gig economy and lying on my résumé about having finished my degree), we both had the feeling that we belonged together anyway.
“All right,” Michael said. “That’s good to know at least.”
He cupped a paw around his glass of not-light-enough beer and eyed the menu.
“You getting anything?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh, right.”
He set the menu down.
“What I don’t get is,” he said, “the lion eats the gazelle. The human eats the cow. That’s why the cow’s there.”
I was used to this sort of thing. But what was I supposed to do? I didn’t have it in me to get all debatelord with him.
“I already ate,” I said.
Michael raised his eyebrows.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “And anyway. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
He pulled up short, searching for … what, tact?
“Steph has told me that you’ve been through some not so easy stuff,” he said.
Oh. He was likely referring to my big idiot dad, who’d lost all his money—our money, I guess—trying to launch a company that sold shoes with adjustable widths (you literally had to crank them with an Allen wrench). After which he had a kind of mental falling-apart, which led to my parents splitting, which led to the current state of affairs, wherein my dad is living in a guest room on his brother’s pot farm in Oregon, and my mom is married to some private equity guy from D.C.
“And therefore,” Michael said, “I thought maybe I owed it to you to give you a boot in the ass. For example: What are you thinking about your career?”
A slight change in register: He’d said ass. As to his question—I wasn’t thinking much about my career. ’Cause why should I?
“I like my job,” I said. Which was true. It was a pretty okay gig, working as a PE teacher. Sure, it wasn’t the most prestigious placement—my school was a middling, slightly messianic Christian charter school—nor was it all that lucrative. But at the very least, it wasn’t straight up evil. It’s not like I was a private equity ghoul, or a McKinsey dweeb, or a lawyer who finds legal loopholes for developers looking to knock over historically protected hotels and put up townhouses in the Everglades. Which is exactly what Steph’s dad did.
“If you like working with kids so much,” Michael said, “why don’t you get your master’s? Principal at a nice school, private tutor, something like that. Miami is full of rich parents who pay a lot of money for their kids’ educations.”
Slimy idea, Michael, I wanted to say—going into education not for the greater good but to help the spawns of the managerial class get into Yale. He wasn’t wrong, though. I probably could make a ton of money as some kind of specialist at a swish private school. Miami is an anarcho-capitalist wet dream.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I still have student loans from undergrad.”
Michael slapped his palms on the high top. “Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll pay. I’ll pay for you to get your master’s. I’ll even help you pay off your student debt. How’s that?”
Someone behind the bar turned the sound system up. Stupid Frank Sinatra began screaming at me from a great height.
“I couldn’t accept that,” I said.
“Bullshit,” Michael said.
I took a hit of water.
“Why the hell not?”
Another good question, Michael. For one? Because it seems like the offer you’re making me has strings attached directly to your insecurity, your shame. Your daughter is building a life with a man that’s not much of one in your eyes. You don’t care about my career trajectory. You’re just vain.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Michael had gotten me all turned around. Maybe I did need a boot in the ass. Maybe I did need to achieve, to succeed. And not succeed in the relativistic witchy way where I’m happy with a cat, a good relationship, a job that nobody envies, and a bread-baking habit; maybe what I need is some normie success, man success, the kind of success that nets you a clean, big-windowed house overlooking a shallow bay. So yes, Michael, I’d love to take your 130K and get me a fancy-ass master’s degree. It’s a great offer. A tempting offer. And now I definitely feel inadequate enough to consider it.
“I’m not asking you to be Josh,” Michael said. Josh was husband to Michelle, Steph’s older sister. He’d been fixing blips and blops on Amazon’s back end since the early aughts and was therefore very wealthy. “I’m not a psychologist either,” Michael went on. “But I think you’ve got to get your life going. Take on some responsibility.”
“I wanna marry Steph,” I said. A complete blurt. A blurt to make Michael think that I did in fact have plans for my life. Steph and I had only come at the marriage topic obliquely, and always with that subjunctive if. As in: “If I ever get married, I’d want a rabbi to be the officiant …” I chugged my water.
“Great,” Michael said flatly. He pushed his beer to the side of the table. “If that’s the case, you really need to consider my offer.”
I nodded.
“And it’d be important for you to convert. I don’t know if you’re religious or not. But we’re a pretty traditional Jewish family.”
My right heel came off the floor, and my toes began pulsing 32nd notes into the stool. I’d always been a vague atheist. That was one of the few things I’d gotten from my dad. He’d given me nothing on manners, cars, stock buybacks, relationships, sports, personal finance, perseverance, or knots. But on the regular, he’d get high and start moaning about the fundies trying to outlaw sex ed.
“I’d have to ask Steph about that,” I said.
Michael curled his lips.
“I know that’s what she’d want,” he said. “Her Judaism is important to her. Besides, converting would be good for you. Think about it.”
“I will,” I said, not convinced he was inviting me to think about anything. Go to grad school, insinuate yourself into the c-suite of some tutoring agency Ponzi scheme, renounce your goyhood, and then and only then may you marry my daughter. And if you do that, Dan, I’ll cease being Steph’s dad, or Mr. Klein, or even Michael. Then I’ll just be Dad. It was feudal. Primitive. Maybe not such a bad deal.
Michael muscled the last gulp of beer down his gullet.
“I’ll pay,” he said, looking around for the waiter. “You just had water anyway. Get out of here.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He shooed me towards the exit. I stood up. Lunch had been foodless, and it’d only lasted 12 minutes.
“I’ll see you at Passover,” he said.
Nonconsensual yarmulke notwithstanding, last year’s Passover had actually been pretty fine. Now, though, headed to Steph’s parents’ for Passover 2, I wasn’t feeling so hunky-dory. Especially about the yarmulke. I asked Steph if she thought I was gonna have to wear it again.
“Probably,” she said from the driver’s seat.
“I don’t think I’m comfortable with that,” I said. In the few days since lunch with Michael, the yarmulke had taken on a serious symbolic weight. Last year it was just a skullcap. This year it was a skullcap tied to a string of demands.
Eye roll from Steph.
“It’s really not that big of a deal,” she said.
“But I’m not Jewish.”
“I’m aware.”
“And you know how I feel about religion.”
Steph’s mouth was a tight disbelieving smile.
“You didn’t have a problem with it last year.”
“I’ve thought about it since then.”
“But it’s just a stupid little hat.”
She slammed on the brakes. Red light. We were lodged in a grid of massive Mediterranean revivals with e-cars charging in the front drives. The girl whispering a true-crime podcast through the Bluetooth box stopped for an ad break.
“Light’s green,” I said. Steph shot the Audi around a traffic circle, in the center of which stood a pair of big bronze shoes on a raised stone dais.
“It’s a tiny bone to throw my parents,” Steph said. She shook her head, and the silver alligators clamped to her earlobes wagged. “So what, you’re not gonna wear it?”
“No,” I said. I was happy with my job, my debts, my dad.
“Fine,” she said. “When my parents ask, you can tell them why you’re conscientiously objecting.” She slid the car across the double yellows to avoid smushing an iguana, a browning long-tailed big boy chilling on the edge of the street. Another red. Steph turned her head slowly to the side and fixed me in a stare for a single calming breath.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “If there’s something bothering you, say it.”
The lunch I’d had with her dad was bothering me. The attempted bribery. The unsubtle suggestion that I, Dan, as currently constructed, was not good enough for you, Steph, his daughter. And the fact that I thought he was onto something—that was definitely bothering me.
“Do you want me to convert to Judaism?” I said.
“Uhhhh,” Steph said. “What?”
“I just want to make sure it’s okay with you that I’m not a Jew,” I said.
“You’re a nutjob,” Steph said.
Steering with her left, she threw her right hand into her purse and started digging for her vape. A thick stream of Juul smoke bounced against the windshield.
“It’s not funny,” I said.
“I don’t know babe, I sorta think it is,” she said. “And where is this even coming from?”
“You didn’t answer the question,” I said.
The car slowed, came to a stop, and powered down. Steph’s parents lived in a brutalist glass botch job set along an inlet that fed into Biscayne Bay. The house was built way up on stilts like it was eagerly anticipating a hundred-year storm surge.
“If I was only interested in dating Jews,” she said, “I would’ve been like Michelle and gone on J-Swipe or whatever.”
She blew a stray hair out of the corner of her eye.
“You and your dad aren’t exactly on the same page, then,” I said. “He wants me to convert. If we get married, I mean, he’d want me to convert.”
Steph’s forehead wrinkled and her eyebrows came down. With a quick movement of her fingers, she silenced the true-crime pod still coming quietly through the smart-car speakers.
“You talked to my dad? About marriage?”
I unbuckled my seatbelt. The car chirped at me to put it back on.
“We had lunch,” I said.
“I’m confused,” Steph said. Her mouth became a sharp em-dash as her big blue eyes swept over my face. “We’ve barely even talked about marriage.”
I looked at the map on the glowing console screen. The GPS had us clocked at 25.6920 degrees north by 80.2841 degrees west. We were 10 feet above sea level, and the humidity was 79 percent.
“It just came up,” I said. “He also wants to pay for me to go to grad school. And get a better job. The marriage thing was sort of contingent on that, too.”
“Whose idea was this? The lunch, I mean.”
“Your dad’s.”
Steph snatched her vape out of its USB port and brought it to her mouth in a clenched fist. The menthol liquid crackled.
“So like, do you want to marry me? And what the hell man, you’re just telling me this now?”
I knew that question was coming. I’d been balking at it for a while now, floating through the relationship without coming up with answers to any of those adult questions, like: Where is this going? What do we want? How will we be happy?
“I feel like your dad might be right,” I said. “Like I’m not in a position to be marrying anyone right now.”
“You’re so annoying.”
She got out of the car and slammed the door. I climbed out, too. There were several other luxury cars parked in the drive. Steph leaned against the driver’s side door. I went over to her. She looked beautiful in the Instagrammable neon blue hues of the landscaping lights.
“You were a barista when we first started dating.”
That was true. I’d been drawing milk circles in lattes while Steph started law school—University of Miami, just like Michael.
“I’m a PE teacher now,” I said.
Steph crossed her arms over her baggy black overshirt.
“So? If you’re happy with it, you’re happy with it. If you’re not, you’re not.”
“I thought I was happy with it,” I said. “But your dad fucked my head up.”
“My dad is a friggin fascist,” Steph said.
“He made me feel like a real piece of shit.”
“That’s what he does. He’s a fascist and a yenta. Imagine growing up with that.”
“What’s a yenta?”
“It means he meddles. And has a big-ass mouth.”
Steph dropped her vape into her purse.
“I really do wanna marry you,” I said.
She stared hard at the ground around my feet, looking like she was trying to make sense of a statute described in one of her legal texts. Thunderheads were purpling over the bay, and the breeze flicked salt into my mouth. Steph’s head snapped up.
“Good,” she said. “Let’s go in. I’m getting one of those barometric migraines.”
We climbed the steel steps that led up to the house, my legs and insides feeling gooey. Steph’s mom pulled open the door. The stench of Jo Malone rushed into my nostrils. Smooch, hug, smooch, hug. Inside, the same crew from last year: the gallery of University of Miami cousins around the kitchen island, the hard-of-hearing grandparents posted on an old-timey psychoanalytic couch in the corner, Steph’s sister and bro-in-law fawning over their precocious 15-month-old, and then the miscellany of aunts and uncles, lawyers, business school profs, Coconut Grove real estate sellers, the men vaguely plump, the women skinny and yogic, all tan, busy, cheery, buzzed.
Steph faced the family.
“You all remember Dan.”
I got a volley of head nods and did a big arcing wave in return. Steph scooped the baby off the floor and hoisted it above her head. Behind me a door opened. Michael.
“Do any thinking?”
“A bit,” I said.
“Good man.” One of his prodigious palms landed on my shoulder. He put a beer in my hand. Coors Light. I wasn’t sure if Coors was vegan or not. I twisted it open.
“Cheers,” Michael said.
“Cheers,” I said.
Clink.
A rolled-up Passover book made a thwack on the butcher’s block island. Aunt Peggy was glaring at us.
“Dinner, people. Let’s go, let’s go.”
“We’ll talk more later,” Michael said.
I turned to the dinner table. Steph was taking a seat next to down-from-Delray Uncle David. Michael grabbed me by my shirt collar and pulled me back.
“Here,” he said. He reached into his back pocket and produced a piece of blue fabric. “You need this.”
He pressed the yarmulke into my hand and took his place at the head of the table. I sat down next to Steph and swatted the skullcap against my thigh. Relatives were opening their Passover books. The Haggadah—that’s what it’s called. You read it backwards. The same spartan foods I remembered from last year were laid out on the table: a stack of unleavened bread, a pile of lettuce, a bowl of horseradish. In the big open concept kitchen was the real spread, the stuff everyone was looking forward to—the beef brisket and lamb, the fish, the noodles covered in dairy and the bone-broth soup.
Michael moved some mucus around in his chest. He was sorta gross. But the table got quiet, and the women looked at him with tenderness, and the men looked at him with respect, and his wife and daughters and granddaughter were healthy, and his brain must not have held a single neurotic or self-doubting synapse. Rain started to fleck soundlessly against the floor-to-ceiling windows. I’d once overheard Michael telling his son-in-law about those windows. An F-5 tornado, a global-warming-charged superstorm would be nothing against those puppies.
Michael looked over to me. I turned the yarmulke over in my hands.
“Dan,” he said. “You care to start?”
“Sure,” I said.
I mushed the yarmulke onto the top of my head. Steph squeezed my thigh and shot me a smile. I leaned over the Haggadah and opened to the first/last page. Michael nodded for me to start, and I did.
