The End of Sleepovers

It started with sleepovers.

Kaylee and I would have ballet class or piano lessons, and afterwards one of us would ask our mother to let us have a sleepover. Our moms, who were friends ever since they first met in a Mommy and Me class, always said yes. At age five, sleepovers meant playing with our dolls or brewing dirt and pebble potions in the yard until it grew dark. Then we’d huddle on the floor in our sleeping bags and exchange ghost stories until the moon rose to hush us.

Our moms traded hosting duties each month. Sometimes we slept on my living room floor, and sometimes we slept in Kaylee’s bedroom. Kaylee lived with just her mom – her parents separated when she was four, and her mom moved around a lot for work, so Kaylee didn’t see her dad often. I loved when they lived in an old farmhouse best. Kaylee shared the attic with her big sister. It was magical, with sloped ceilings and a staircase instead of a door; it reminded me of the rooms at the top of towers where princesses were hidden away. After my first sleepover at the farmhouse, I asked my parents why I couldn’t share a room with my big sister too. They rolled their eyes while my sister asked for a door lock to be installed.

By age eight, we had graduated from dirt and pebble potions to acting out our favorite scenes from musicals. We came up with our own dance routines and bonded over our shared love of the stage. Our talents were unequally distributed: Kaylee was a better singer and dancer and piano player than me because she got all that from her mom, but I was the superior actress. We conspired to go to Julliard together: she was going to sing; I was going to act.

Then one day during a sleepover at my house, I reached for the top shelf of my bookcase, grasping at a school acting award I had wanted to show off to Kaylee, when I tipped the whole case over. Kaylee managed to pull me from the wreckage. Kaylee’s mother insisted, after seeing my bruises, that all sleepovers thereafter had to be at her house. Mom resented that, but she couldn’t tear Kaylee and me apart if she tried. We were inseparable, friends since diapers, and we were convinced nothing would ever change that.

Shortly after we moved all of our sleepovers to Kaylee’s, her family moved out of the old farmhouse and into a practical, ranch-style home. Our after-school Friday night sleepovers moved to Saturdays. Fridays wouldn’t work anymore, Kaylee’s mom said, though she never explained why.

Switching to Saturday sleepovers meant we couldn’t sleep in on Sunday mornings, because Kaylee and her family went to church every week. That first Saturday night, they invited me to join them. Church made me uneasy, but that felt rude to say. I asked if they could drop me at home on the way there.

Sorry Ruth, but there’s no time, her mom said. But you can come to church with us if your parents want to sleep in.

And suddenly, I became the only Jew attending Kaylee’s Sunday School.

—

Kaylee’s family knew we were Jewish. So when they invited me to church each Sunday I slept over, I didn’t know how to feel. They told me not to worry because their church was a welcoming place for everyone. I didn’t need to be Christian to attend.

Mom asked me why I wanted to go. I explained it was the only way to spend time with Kaylee. She pursed her lips at that but didn’t want to press it with Dad right there, smiling at the idea that his side of their cold war over religion might win out. I figured if she cared more about me going, she’d get up early and pick me up. But all she said was, If Kaylee means that much to you, go to church so you can see her. What do I care?

Mom did all the stuff Jewish kids did in the ‘60s on Long Island. She had dinner with her parents every Friday night, she ate Ashkenazi dishes of liverwurst and gefilte fish, she respected her bubbe, she went to summer camp in the Catskills. She still knows all the Hebrew prayers and will chant them in a thick New York accent whenever she overhears them.

Except for respecting our grandparents, my sister and I did none of this. For one, we didn’t live near Mom’s family in New York; we lived further South, in Delaware, near Dad’s family. There weren’t many Jews where we grew up. But also, I think Mom didn’t want to fight with Dad over how to raise us religiously. She was a secular Jew who didn’t believe in God. My dad was a Christian who quietly did. It was easiest just to leave religion up to my sister and me to figure out on our own at a later date. Neither of us had ever set foot in a synagogue or church.

No matter what we believed about God, Mom made it very clear from a young age that we were Jewish. She tried explaining that while Judaism is the religion of the Jews, the Jews are also a people. This is your ethnicity, she said. We were born Jewish and we would die Jewish.

This confused me a lot growing up since we didn’t live near or know many Jews. My school never taught us what ethnicity meant either.

Sometimes Mom put it more bluntly: Hitler would’ve killed you no matter what you believed.

—

Church seemed cool because they had a rock band that Kaylee’s mom sang in. They even had a big tub they’d wheel out on stage for adults getting baptized for the first time. It reminded me of a dunk tank. I didn’t get to see much of the services because kids spent most of the time there in Sunday school. We sang songs and read stories. To make sure we were paying attention, the Sunday school teachers had us answer questions about the stories to receive angel bucks, play money that we could spend at the end-of-year Christmas market.

Our community had a one-track mind each December. Our Brownies Girl Scout troop took us caroling on Christmas Eve. I sang Christmas carols all through school choir and played Christmas songs that Kaylee’s mom taught me on the piano. In 4th grade, our teacher had Kaylee and I solve math problems to figure out where to glue certain pieces of Santa’s beard on a piece of paper. No one at school knew I was Jewish, and no one ever thought to ask. The kids who celebrated Christmas thought everyone celebrated Christmas.

I didn’t want to collect angel bucks that first Sunday because I wouldn’t be at the Christmas market. Kaylee and I only had sleepovers once a month. Even if I answered two questions right each time I went to church with Kaylee, at most I was looking at six angel bucks by December. I tried explaining this to Kaylee as I passed her the first angel buck I earned, but she told me to keep it. She said she thought I’d come more often than once a month if I wanted to be in the Christmas pageant.

Given my dreams of Broadway, a role in a pageant certainly caught my attention. A Christmas pageant was an unexpected opportunity, but I figured if I sang Christmas carols in the school choir anyway, what’s the difference? What harm could come from a few additional Sunday school sessions if it not only meant more time with Kaylee, but also that I got to be an actress, a phenomenon, a star?

Three months of rehearsals flipped by like photos in a stack: wanting to be Mary but getting passed over for Kaylee who’d put in her time years prior to earn the coveted role; begging not to be put in a fake beard playing a wise man; telling my mother that she had to make — not buy, make — me an angel costume.

While technically Jews do believe in angels, Mom was not happy, because first of all, she didn’t believe in angels, and second, she liked to joke I was no angel, and third, and most especially, because all the church moms were shocked she didn’t know how to sew.

I convinced myself that this was just another acting role. Singing and acting at the same time would be great practice for Broadway and Julliard. I told myself that playing the part of something I didn’t believe in was especially good acting.

—

Rehearsals for Kaylee’s Christmas pageant always came after Bible study, where we read stories about Noah and the Ark or Joseph and his jealous brothers from what Kaylee called the “Old Testament,” and which my people just call the Torah. I hated that they called the Torah “old.” In Sunday School, the teacher said the Old Testament was called that because it was meant to be replaced by the New Testament of Jesus.

Hearing that sent a chill through me. My people weren’t half-baked. We weren’t waiting to be finished — we were whole already.

The longer I spent in Sunday school, the more I identified with the Jews in the Torah stories. I wasn’t there for Jesus’s stories. I learned who he was. I learned how he flipped the money-lenders’ tables in the Temple, and I still didn’t care. He wasn’t for me.

—

Our sleepovers were soon taken over by Christmas pageant rehearsals and Sunday school. Some weekends, we didn’t even have a sleepover; Kaylee’s mom would just pick me up from my house and take me to church. Mom had politely declined invitations to church in the past when she first met Kaylee’s family. But now that I was going every weekend and the pageant was coming up, the invites picked up again. Mom took to honking her horn when she picked me up so she wouldn’t have to get out and deal with other adults telling her she should join the congregation.

One time, my big sister got roped into coming to church after a sleepover with Kaylee’s sister. She didn’t go to the little kid Bible study, but a different one for older kids. She never told me what happened, but she announced when we got home that she was never going back.

For years, our two families were linked: two mothers the same age, two sets of daughters the same age. Our friendships were tight and convenient until they weren’t. Mom and my sister began spending more time befriending the Rosens, a Jewish mother and daughter they met through my sister’s Girl Scouts troop. By the sleepover before dress rehearsals in December — when Kaylee brought up the Easter pageant — I was the only one of us three holding onto my friendship with Kaylee’s family at all.

—

The night before the pageant, as Kaylee and I played chopsticks on her piano, she started talking about the spring.

We can be in the Easter pageant together then, too. It’s for all the kids from Sunday school taking First Communion. Since you’ve come to all the classes, you can take communion with us, but first, you have to get baptized. You can’t take communion if you’re not baptized.

My hands froze mid-tune. I reminded Kaylee that I wasn’t Christian. I told her, Jews don’t get baptized. Mom fought tooth and nail with Dad’s parents to keep my sister and me from being baptized. No way would I undo her will for the sake of another acting credit. But even worse, Kaylee didn’t seem to realize the magnitude of what she was asking me to do. Communion wasn’t earning angel bucks. It was real religion. Hadn’t the whole point of this pageant been that we could spend more time together, and I could act, even though I didn’t practice her religion?

Kaylee insisted I had to take communion to be in the Easter pageant with her, that it was the culmination of a year of Bible Study, a graduation of sorts from the little kid Sunday school. I stood up and stepped away from the piano. I don’t want to be in your stupid pageant.

I called my mom to pick me up.

There would be no more sleepovers. Not when they left me feeling chipped away inside.

—

Once I blew up at Kaylee, Mom finally decided I was ready to hear what she thought of the whole church thing. While I had been focused on spending time with Kaylee and acting, Mom had been worried something like asking for a baptism would be at stake. She hadn’t wanted to insult Dad by digging up their baptism debate, so she had been keeping all her worries bottled up.

I asked Mom if I could keep my friend and my Jewishness. Kaylee had been my oldest friend, my swing buddy at recess, my first sleepover. But it felt like she only wanted to spend time with me doing church stuff, even when she knew I was Jewish.

Mom’s answer surprised me.

“Honey, I’ve been told I need Christ in my life by more people than I can remember. Even my best friend growing up, Nina, got on her hands and knees and begged me to convert so we could go to heaven together when we die.” When I asked if that bothered her, she said, “Of course, it bothered me. But I also knew that her sister, who wasn’t religious, had just died. And Nina was mourning and she thought she wouldn't get to see her sister in heaven. And we’ve been friends since we were kids, and she thinks of me like a sister, and in her grief, she was just trying to grasp onto something she could do to make it feel like she had a little control. And I couldn’t be mad at her for wanting to hold onto me when she felt she couldn’t hold onto her sister.”

“But you don’t believe in her heaven,” I said.

“I know. But I did believe in our friendship. So I told her we’d talk about it the next day after she calmed down, and we did. And I told her that what she’d said made me feel she didn’t respect me or my choices. I told her we couldn’t be friends if she did it again. And she was so embarrassed when I told her how she made me feel. She apologized, and she never did it again.”

“And she’s still your best friend?”

“And she’s still my best friend.”

“What if I tell Kaylee and it doesn’t fix anything?”

“Well Ruthie, at least you’ll have tried. If you lose a friend either way, wouldn’t you at least want to say you tried?”

—

When I told Kaylee I didn’t want to go to church with her anymore, she asked if that meant no more sleepovers.

I tried to explain I still wanted sleepovers and nights spent whispering ghost stories and days in the backyard acting out our favorite scenes from musicals. I wanted to hold onto it all for as long as we could. I didn’t want this whole church thing to come between us.

I chickened out from telling her how bad it made me feel to think she only wanted to be my friend if she could change me. So instead I asked if she could stay at my house on Fridays again.

She said she’d ask her mom. I don’t know if she ever did. But she stopped asking about sleepovers from then on. For a long time, I thought that was the end of our story.

—

By the end of the year, I quit ballet classes, switched piano teachers, and graduated out of our shared Brownies Girl Scout troop. By the time we moved on to different middle schools, Kaylee and I hardly kept in touch. She invited me to her birthday once, and I tried bonding with her new friends. But I didn’t fit into her life anymore. So we drifted apart.

I made new friends at my middle school. At the start of 6th grade, a popular girl invited me to a group sleepover. She was a dancer, with a smile so bright it hurt. It was early in the year, before we knew each other very well.

At the sleepover, we played with her bunnies and baked cookies and lip-synced to Britney Spears. We all went to bed early, or so I thought. But when they woke me in the night giggling, some deep part of me that was tired, and another deep part of me that was hurt to be left out of their laughter lashed out, yelling at them for waking me. The popular girls looked at me with saucer-wide doe eyes when I spat the word selfish at them. I’ll never know why I felt so self-righteous in that moment. Maybe I was just out of practice having sleepovers. Probably, I was really yelling at Kaylee.

I apologized the next day, blaming it on a nightmare they’d woken me from, but those girls never invited me to sleep over or sit with them at lunch ever again.

—

The last time Kaylee and I spoke was in high school when her father died suddenly of a heart attack.

There was never a question over whether my family would go to the funeral service. Mom wasn’t religious, but her Jewish values were the bedrock of our family, and in Jewish circles, no matter what falling out you’d had with someone, you showed up when it mattered most.

The service was in a church close by. Mom drove. It was my first time seeing an open casket. I approached Kaylee as she looked down on her father. He seemed to be sleeping. I didn’t recognize him; he’d been so absent from Kaylee’s life that I only knew him from pictures when she was a baby.

Kaylee didn’t look at me but I knew she knew I was there and that she trusted me because she started whispering, “He doesn’t even look like him. I just want to see the real him one last time.”

I didn’t know what to say. She’d spent so many years mad at her father, and now she just wanted one more moment with him. He’d been absent in her life; now he was absent in his death. Somehow I knew that despite all her faith in heaven, she didn’t want to hear how happy and at peace her father might be without her. So I reached out my arm and placed it around her. She leaned her head on my shoulder.

I’m sorry I let us lose touch, her weight seemed to sigh into my shoulder.

I’m sorry I couldn’t find the words to say how I really felt, my arms seemed to say as they supported her.

We were two kids trying to grow up, unsure how to enter this new world where relationships changed and people left our lives before we could accept their atonement. But what I realized at that moment was that friendship, like energy, is never created nor destroyed. It just changes form over time.

So we stood there, in silence, facing her father’s open casket. Seeing the difference between the losses we allow because they can be recovered and the ones that are final, which we can never forgive.