“Beat the egg whites until they are light and fluffy,” I said, reading from Nigella Lawson’s cookbook. “Mom, do you think my egg whites are fluffy enough?”
I turned to my mother who stood by the stove in our micro Manhattan kitchen. “What?” I asked, noticing Mom giving me a strange look.
“Why do you stand like that?” she asked.
“Like what?” I asked, knowing exactly what she meant.
“You know, with your hand on your hip.”
I looked down, as if noticing my stance for the first time, with one hand resting on my hip while I held Nigella’s cookbook up in the other. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I like being like a tea pot. ‘Here is my handle, here is my spout, tip me over, and pour me out.’”
Mom gave me a dubious look, obviously a little concerned about why her seventeen-year-old son was singing the tea pot song.
I knew what she was thinking. I also knew that she was too scared to ask the question that was on her mind.
Are you gay?
It’s the question she’d been wanting to ask ever since I met Sam, and he had become my best friend, my best everything, really. But despite Mom’s oh-so-liberal, Upper West Side values, I could see the terror on her face as she tried to fathom the sexuality of her son.
Mom took a knife from the drawer.
“Na-ah,” I said, taking the knife from her. “That’s for meat.” I put the knife back in the cutlery drawer reserved for meat utensils. “We’re having cheese soufflé for dinner,” I said, “so you need one of these.” I handed her a knife from the drawer containing the cutlery for use with dairy meals.
My mother sighed. “Do you honestly think God cares what knives and forks we use?”
My mother was a self-proclaimed Bagel Jew, unused to the dietary restrictions I had imposed at home since I became a born-again, a ba’al teshuva.
“It’s a hevdel,” I said.
“A hevdel?”
“A separation.”
My mother gave me a mystified look.
“Okay,” I began. “You remember how I used to love a bacon cheeseburger with fries?”
“Sure. It was your big treat.”
“I still love that combination. Just thinking about it makes my mouth water. But I resist because the Torah teaches us,” I paused, pulling out of my pocket a volume of the Mishnah, the principal compilation of rabbinic legal discourse, “that if we can...
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