Page 33 of Best Woman

Mom and Randy are explaining to the twins why they are not allowed to bring their pet snake inside the synagogue, so I leave them in the car and make my way inside alone.

The parking lot is nearly empty—Mom wanted to stop for a Diet Coke so we left early and arrived twenty minutes before the wedding rehearsal was due to start.

When I attended Hebrew school here the parking lot was always packed to the brim with Audis and Lexuses that clashed with Randy’s huge, hulking white Suburban.

The sanctuary doors are closed when I step inside the lobby, and I consider waiting out here for the rest of the wedding party to arrive, but I haven’t been here in so long and can’t resist the opportunity to take a look inside while it’s empty and quiet.

I might not be religious, but I’ve always appreciated the sheer aesthetic beauty of the sanctuary: the stained glass windows and red velvet auditorium seats, the heavy silence that comes with being somewhere you know is meant to be connected to the divine.

The dark carpet masks the sound of my feet as I approach the bimah.

I experience a weird sense of doubling as I remember taking these steps dozens of times as a teenager before I decided Hebrew school wasn’t really for me.

To be bar or bat mitzvahed, you had to attend fifty hours of services.

We were never a very religious family, so Mom would drop me off alone on Friday nights.

The other kids in my year would sit together in the mezzanine, whispering and laughing together during the service, but I always sat below at the back of the room, hiding my Game Boy in my siddur and gazing longingly at Rabbi Hoffman during his sermons.

I stop at the bimah and gaze out at the empty pews.

I remember, vaguely, my mother’s concerned face as I ascended to this very spot the August after I turned thirteen.

I was a summer baby, so everyone in my year had already had their bar or bat mitzvah.

I’d attended one of them almost every weekend that year, invited not because they were my friends, but because my mother knew their parents and it was expected I’d be invited.

They’d all seemed to handle it so easily, but I’d struggled to learn my haftarah portion, which required additional time with my tutor that my mother paid for not necessarily because she was concerned that I didn’t learn quickly enough, but because it wouldn’t be good if I embarrassed her.

She’d still been worried about me embarrassing her that morning, it was clear on her face from where I now stood.

But I’d leaned over the Torah and recited the Hebrew words I’d memorized over long, frustrating afternoons, words I realize with a jolt I still half remember.

And yet I need three separate phone alarms to remind me to inject estrogen every other week.

I turn to look at the ark behind me, its huge wooden doors protecting the collected teachings of my people, passed down through generations. What would they think of me standing here, in my mascara and thong gaff and spiritual apathy?

“Shalom.”

I whip around and forget all about my ancestors because Kim is walking toward me, looking sleek and sexy in a dark suit. Watching her walk down the aisle my future sister-in-law would be walking down tomorrow to get married makes me feel kind of psycho, but in a good way.

“I like your dress,” she says. “Didn’t Hannah G wear that in Vogue last month?”

How River hasn’t been fired yet is beyond me. “I really don’t like that you know that,” I say, preening a bit.

The dress is a deep red so vivid I immediately vetoed it when River pulled it out—I have a very pink undertone!

—but once they’d bullied me into trying it on, I couldn’t deny the color was striking.

It’s skintight, with exaggerated boning making me very hesitant to eat anything at dinner.

The bodice is so snug it’s difficult to breathe, but my breasts have never looked better and the silhouette makes me longer and leaner than I actually am, as do the pointy platform heels I’m wearing, which weigh about ten pounds each.

I won’t deny it: I look hot. I’m not sure I’ve ever looked hotter, including the summer I got strep throat and lost fifteen pounds. I might hate myself, but I’d also hate fuck myself.

Kim joins me at the bimah, lays her hand on my shoulder, and kisses me. It’s not as hungry as our kisses last night, but still pointed. Claiming.

“Don’t,” I whine. “We’re in a temple .”

She slides her hand around to squeeze my ass.

“My mother could walk in any second.”

“Is that supposed to dissuade me? She’s kind of a MILF.” She shakes her head as if remembering something. “Has it been OK with her this week?”

Goose bumps erupt on my arms and I can’t blame it on the air-conditioning.

In this sacred space, standing on the very spot where I’d once become a man in the eyes of God, I feel the real weight of my deception, which I’ve been rationalizing as a white lie, a harmless twisting of the truth to endear myself to a hot girl I’d wanted to make out with for over a decade.

But I now see it as the gross manipulation it really is, and I hate myself for it.

But it hadn’t gone too far yet. I could come clean right now and atone.

Every year on Yom Kippur I’d stood at the man-made pond behind this very building, stomach clenching in hunger as I shredded challah into small pieces and tossed them into the water, one for each of my sins.

Here is the chance to do that for real, to clear the air and maybe see if this thing between us could be more than just a wedding fling.

“Julia!” It was my mother, walking through the now-open doors of the sanctuary flanked by the twins, Randy trailing behind. “You couldn’t have waited for us?”

Kim’s lip twists in a sneer, and her arm moves around my waist to pull me close, almost behind her.

I think about the fleeting references she’d made to her own mother, the way she’d softened toward me over the past few weeks, the teenager I’d once been who never stood a chance with a girl who liked other girls.

“It’s fine,” I muttered in Kim’s ear. “It’ll be over soon.” Even in six-inch heels, I’d never felt so small.

…

Rabbi Hoffman is somehow even more handsome than I remember, tall and tan and solid with a salt-and-pepper beard, curly grown-out hair pushed out of his kind eyes, and hands I used to fantasize about spanking me as punishment for getting the Mourner’s Kaddish wrong.

“Hello, Julia,” he says with a big, friendly smile.

This man has been, without fail, the most reliable tool in my orgasm arsenal for most of my life, waiting patiently in my spank bank until I needed him to help make it through a lackluster sexual encounter or lonely night with nothing but my Hitachi Magic Wand.

Seeing him in the flesh and having him look so good and be so nice is excruciating .

Kim gives me a wicked smile from her place opposite me, clearly reading my mind. We’re standing where the chuppah will be tomorrow—they’re getting it out of some storage closet right now—Aiden and Rachel between us, ready for what I’ve been assured will be a quick run-through.

I’d like to be run through, I think, gazing at Rabbi Hoffman’s hairy forearms.

“Most of what happens tomorrow will be just like what you’ve seen in the movies,” Rabbi Hoffman tells the wedding party. “Aiden will wait here with his groomspeople”—no awkward pause, damn he’s good—“and Rachel will be escorted down the aisle by her father.”

“It’s gonna be so hard to give my baby away,” says Rachel’s dad, a mousy little man I’ve spoken to only a handful of times.

“We don’t like to think of it as giving away, ” says Rabbi Hoffman, soft but stern. “This is a union, not an exchange.”

I get it, Kim mouths at me, nodding at the rabbi. Having the biggest crushes of my formative years—aside from my AP world history teacher and Gina Gershon in Bound —in one room is dizzying.

We move quickly through the ceremony, and at the end Aiden and Rachel make out disgustingly enough to have me worried about what the real thing will look like tomorrow.

Everyone is in their finery for tonight’s rehearsal dinner.

Rachel’s dress is black and surprisingly chic, Aiden’s navy suit fits him perfectly. This is really happening.

“How am I gonna survive a night without you, baby,” Rachel whines, loud enough for most of us to hear it and groan.

After the actual rehearsal, we mingle outside the synagogue. The rehearsal dinner won’t start for another forty minutes and is only ten minutes away—Boca problems!—so everyone is taking their time.

Kim and I are loitering by the water fountain. I want to bend over and take a sip but my dress is so tight I’m not sure it’s worth it.

“You look really good, if I didn’t already say it,” she says.

“You didn’t really,” I say, shuffling closer. “But I could kinda tell.”

She laughs, surprised. Kim has such a beautiful smile, a little crooked on one side, big and broad with perfect white teeth.

I want to lean in and just sniff her so bad, shove my face into her armpit and slobber all over it.

That’s probably not appropriate in public, let alone a place of worship with my entire nuclear family ten feet away.

And getting closer.

“Hello, ladies, ” Mom says, drawing close to us.

Kim’s suspicious look returns at the emphasis on ladies, which I know is my mom trying to be cute, or to do the annoying supportive cis woman thing and constantly reaffirm a trans person’s gender, but to Kim’s ears I’m sure it sounds mocking, downright hostile.

“I don’t think we’ve had a chance to be properly introduced, I’m Aiden’s mother. ”

“And Julia’s,” Kim says, hostility clear in her tone. Mom, usually blithely unaware of social cues, seems to hear it nonetheless.

“Well yes, of course.” She laughs awkwardly. “And you’re the maid of honor?”