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My Sweet Boy, My Goy Toy

By on September 3, 2014
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Goy Toy 3
Then her parents came to town. They were flying in on a Monday, flying home on a Thursday night red-eye. They came to visit once a year, to take Chana shopping and to dinner, to visit museums. Chana was nervous; her parents were ambivalent about her graduate work in history, worried that at 27 that she was rapidly aging out of what she bitterly called her “peak market value.” The day before they arrived, I chose to wait until we’d just finished lovemaking to ask if I could meet her parents, still convinced that this religious difference was something we could “work around.” Besides, what could be the harm in meeting her mom and dad? If necessary, I said hopefully, I could “pass” for Jewish.

Tenderly but implacably, Chana shot me down.

Even though her parents stayed in a hotel, she didn’t want to see me during their visit. During TA meetings, she was friendly but brisk, choosing not to sit next to me. Our friends cocked eyebrows and asked questions; my disappointment and anxiety were all too evident on my face. I forced myself not to call, reassuring myself that Friday, when her parents would be gone, I’d hear her flirtatious laugh on the phone again, inviting me over to play. The call didn’t come. I called her. No answer. I left a message, then another – and stupidly, obsessively, another and another.

It was Sunday before she called me back, asking to meet for coffee. The distance in her voice left little mystery about what she was going to tell me. I met her at the Coffee Bean, numbly resigned to the inevitable. Chana looked both more beautiful and chaste than ever; her wild hair pulled back, leather jacket over an uncharacteristically modest turtleneck. She was as kind as she was unflinching. It needed to end now, she explained, before any real damage was done. She hoped we could still be friends, but would leave that ball in my court. There would be no last afternoon of passion, no wistful conversations about what might be, no opportunity to change her mind.

I told her I understood. Chana smiled gently. “I’m not sure you do, sweet boy. I’m not sure you do.” She kissed me on the cheek and walked away.

For the rest of the quarter, we were civil and distant. The next term, Chana left for Turkey to work on Byzantine Jewish texts for six months. I focused on my qualifying exams. By the time she came back to L.A., I was dating the tall, cool WASP woman who would become my second wife. Chana and I waved to each other in the hallways a few more times and then disappeared into our dissertations and our separate lives. Through mutual friends, I learned she got a tenure-track job in the Midwest, and is now married – to a rabbi – with three children.

No one has ever called me “goy toy” – or “sweet boy” – since.

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Hugo Schwyzer is a professor of history and gender studies. Follow Hugo on Twitter at @hugoschwyzer.
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