Pug Hill - Alison Pace [11]
I start up the grand sweeping staircase, a Gone with the Wind-type staircase if ever there was one. I wonder, as I climb up one of two graceful, sweeping sides of the staircase, what it is that actually bothers me: The Union Club itself, or the fact that I have been willingly dating for the past six months (which, especially when you’re thirty-one, isn’t a nothing amount of time) someone who belongs to The Union Club. I know that in the end we all must take a certain, if not a complete, measure of responsibility for our actions, and for our circumstances. And I endeavor to do that, I do. For right now, though, I blame Pamela.
I should explain. I need a minute anyway before I head into the library to meet Evan and Brandon and his fiancée.
My friend Pamela told me about a year ago, right after my then-boyfriend Rick had broken up with me (Rick, by the way, was not a great boyfriend, but the man could wear a Barbour jacket like nobody else), that she felt I should get out more.
“You need to embrace being single,” Pamela told me one day. “You need to get out more. You need to date!” she pronounced, captain of the cheerleading squad for single Manhattanites everywhere. Pamela, professionally, is a party planner, and pretty much I’ve always thought of her as a professional dater, too.
“Maybe you should go on JDate,” she suggested. “I do not want to go on JDate,” I told her, and by JDate, just so you know, in the context of the conversation, I swear, I meant JDate, Match.com, Nerve.com, eHarmony, the whole lot of them. I feel it is important to clarify that I was expressing my lack of interest in Internet dating altogether, not a lack of interest in Internet-dating Jewish people.
“You shun your Judaism,” she told me. “This has always bothered me about you.” Shunning my Judaism? I thought that was taking it a bit far.
“I think,” I told her, “that’s taking it a bit far.” “I don’t,” she said, getting her back rather up, taking it, I thought, a little ridiculously personally. “I think most people don’t even know you’re Jewish.”
Pamela had a point with that, but I thought that was more of a factor of my name than of any overt shunning on my part. As my nana has told every single person she has ever introduced me to, I’m the only Jewish girl she’s ever heard of with the name Hope, and the only Jewish girl in the history of the world, she’s sure of it, with the name Hope McNeill. Nana’s also quite fond of explaining that along with my shiksa name, I got the red hair, the fair skin, and the lack of bust from my father’s side of the family.
“I think that’s a really judgmental thing to say,” I said to Pamela, who can at times be very judgmental.
“Well, that’s what I think.” And rather inflexible, too. “Well, Pam-e-la,” I said, exhaling, stretching out her name as a way to point out my displeasure at her condemnation, “As you know, I wasn’t raised Jewish so I don’t really think it’s something you can just come right out and say I shun,” I pointed out.
So right, in addition to being Jewish and Catholic, I’m also kind of neither. After all the grandparents freaked out over the interfaith marriage, or maybe even before, my parents decided they’d raise me and my sister, Darcy, without religion. And I’m sure they thought this was a good idea. I’m sure they thought that this was for the best. It’s just that sometimes, I’m not so sure. I’m not sure if they thought that through, if they realized that being no religion doesn’t erase the fact that you are two. And I’m not sure, since it wasn’t something either of them ever experienced, that they realized what an identity crisis being two religions, and being no religion, could be. Or at least could be for me.
“Well, I don’t think that has anything to do with it,” she said.
“Pamela, it does.”
“Well, I think you