Encore: Chapter 29

Reb Zalman and Mommy had gone off to sleep, and it was very quiet for a moment.

“Okay, guys, come let me show you around,” Shlomo said, feeling awkward, like a real estate agent showing his first house. Shlomo Bass had never had friends come for a sleepover, and he’d never been invited to one either. He remembered that he’d almost made the cut at Bauer’s bar mitzvah.

Lanky Elchanan Bauer had spent the first six months of the year in seventh grade making and remaking the list, actually using a pen and paper and crossing out names before adding them again. Five boys, his parents had told him, he could invite five boys to the mountains for Shabbos. At times, Shlomo Bass was on the list, depending on who was knocked off. In the end, the weeks before the bar mitzvah were socially successful ones for Bauer; he was invited to play baseball on Friday and the Greenberg boy learned with him during night seder and Gutstein was his math partner, so Shlomo Bass was knocked down to number six.

Once, he’d gone on holiday with his cousins in Europe, spending a week at a mansion near the sea, which had been sort of nice, but that wasn’t a sleepover either. He’d shared a room with his father — his parents were still married then, but they said Mommy couldn’t come because she was busy with Savta’s surgery — and most of the day had been spent going for walks or learning. Shlomo imagined that sleepovers involved pillow fights and popcorn, and there had been none of that. There had been singing, though; the British people weren’t like Americans, all silly and lighthearted during songs. They weren’t shy about harmonizing either, and Shlomo had enjoyed that part.