Post 70: Cinderella on Chanukah

Cinderella on Chanukah

Chanukah did not start festively at all for me this year. Unemployed, no car, no boyfriend. I even lost my friend with benefits who started to see someone else and suggested we return to being “just friends”. The timing could not be worse in Israel. Winter is the season when it’s colder inside than it is outside. To warm up, I sleep with 4 blankets, 3 stuffed animals and a partridge in a pear tree ….ooops, wrong religion…

Back to Chanukah. It started with a medical procedure that took a whole morning, drugged me out and left me completely exhausted for the entire evening. I insisted that my son go to accept his father’s invitation to light the first candle and sleep overnight. As Murphy law has it, my bed stays empty when my son is away, which is why this blog is called No Sex in the City. It just doesn’t happen when you want it to happen.

In this case, partially dehydrated and partially stoned with valium (can you be stoned with valium or only with hashish? I don’t know because I am a good girl and law-abiding person, who always stayed away from drugs except for the occasional glass of wine). I did once have laughing gas for a tooth extract. It just occurred to me that there may be some religious people taking a look at this blog, and I promised that it was “clean” with no pornography, so how did I allow drugs to creep in here?

But then again Gilit may be my pen name, but she is allowed to do things that I have not. In fact, when someone recently reminded me about Boris in Russia, I forgot that he was real. It seems that when he told me that he would no longer write to me and shut me out of his life, I wrote about him and committed him to fiction as well. Wow, he was real? He really did say that he loved me, even though my definition of love (stay tuned for a post about the meaning of love) is quite different from his. If you really love someone, you are not going to forget them even if they do not love you back.

I’ve strayed away from Chanukah, so let me go back to that first night. There I was alone, tired, dehydrated, and generally mixed up. My adoptive mother was dying in a Tel Aviv hospital (from cancer) and I knew it was a matter of days before the inevitable phone call. At 10:30 am the next morning, my cellphone rang. Now everyone knows that I am either hiking or asleep on a Saturday morning. Or else I have religious friends who don’t use the phone on Shabbat in any case. Therefore, I knew exactly why the phone was ringing. This time it wasn’t the valium or a dream, but the real thing. “Mom is gone”, Dafna announced, in a matter of fact voice.

And so began my Chanukah. I helped Dafna put up the death notices in her neighborhood. It’s good to know that the municipality gives out scotch tape together with the signs. That’s one less thing to buy before a funeral, I guess. I didn’t cry much that day and neither did Dafna. I guess we thought that her mother was still in the hospital and we’d see her soon. Or maybe in the shower. Or sneaking another cigarette in the kitchen before joining us for a cup of coffee.

On Monday I had to sign into the unemployment bureau and then meet my son on the bus on the way to the cemetery. Nice day for a funeral. Dafna’s mother was a former school principal and didn’t want children to miss school on her behalf. So she died during a school holiday. My son was not impressed. Last year he ate up all the latkes she had made and he promised to bake a batch himself to bring to the Passover seder. This year, none of us baked latkes. Dafna lit Chanukah candles and a memorial candle. Instead of buying a plant to bring to the family dinner at her house, I brought a plant to her graveside. I wanted to sing James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” at the funeral, but there was no way I would be able to get the words out. Instead the rain spoke for itself from the sky (but spared us at the funeral) and the fire came from the candles which I continued to light each night.

Since I wasn’t sitting shiva, I was determined to find a glimmer of hope during the holiday. On Wednesday, I got another rejection from a job interview, but I wasn’t sad. Now it was all clear to me. The funeral was over. The shiva was almost over. And now I had no excuse but to get on with my life. Land that job. Find a boyfriend. Buy a new car (or get a leased one from work).

So I braved a sandstorm and met a friend in Tel Aviv who was studying makeup and used me as a guinea pig. Actually, I trusted her completely and she created a Cinderella. Even though my train got stuck (Israeli trains are NOT Swiss trains) and I had to get out of the train and take a bus home, I was determined to forget about the funeral, my unemployment, and my lack of boyfriend, and get NOTICED at a Chanukah party.

And so I did. It was unbelievable. Men who didn’t give me the time of day were asking me to dance. Women who forgot my name came across the room to talk to me. No one seemed to remember me from the year before. It didn’t matter that I was unemployed, had just been at a funeral, or didn’t have a car. What mattered was that I was now almost a blonde and that I had a personal makeup artist turn me into another person.

It felt a bit like the old days when I was an amateur actress. I was in the limelight (even literally, as I was wearing a green dress) for the evening, but at the end of the day, when the audience went home, my theatrical mask got removed and it was only me. At the end of the night, no Prince Charming rescued my slipper.

Perhaps because this writer was wearing boots.