Sophisticated Lady

When I was young, a major character flaw was that I wanted to seem sophisticated. Perhaps that's the natural reaction of a small-town person learning to live in the larger world: you never want to appear to be someone who Doesn't Know.

 

To prove my sophistication, I read the Sunday New York Times from cover to cover and I subscribed to the New Yorker (and not just for the cartoons, thank you very much). My vast head-knowledge of The Way To Be contrasted interestingly with my lack of real-life experience.

 

When we lived in Lawrence, Kansas, we made the acquaintance of another couple who had children the same ages as ours—two girls and a boy, like ours. The husband, Joel, taught math at the University of Kansas and was also a concert pianist. They were Orthodox Jews from New York City, and they were the first practicing Jews I had ever met. To me they were both exotic and sophisticated.

 

Joel made a monthly trip from Lawrence to Kansas City to stock up on kosher goods and deli food, and one day he asked if he could bring back something for us. I said, "Bring us half a dozen bagels. I just love bagels."

 

Well, wasn't THAT a lie! I had never in my life tasted a bagel and didn't know how to eat one. But I did know that bagels were sophisticated. I knew that New Yorkers ate lox and cream cheese and bagels on Sunday mornings as they read the New York Times. Here was my opportunity to learn how to eat bagels the Right Way. I would be eating Orthodox-sanctioned bagels. I couldn't wait to take this next step on the steep climb to sophistication.

 

When Joel arrived at our house in the late afternoon with a bag of bagels, I was the only one home. I paid him and thanked him and then offered him a coffee. He suggested that, since I had been so eager to obtain these bagels, I might want to eat one while it was still nice and fresh. I had been hoping to wait until Joel had left and my husband was around to offer his opinion on how to eat a bagel. But no. I was cornered into eating my first bagel—which of course no one knew was my first—in front of Joel. Joel undoubtedly assumed, from all my big talk, that I was an experienced nosher of bagels. More likely, it never occurred to him that eating a bagel was something that had to be learned.

 

I sat on the sofa under the window. Joel sat on a chair across the room. He drank his coffee, and I held the cold, plain, unsliced bagel in my hand. How was I supposed to eat it? Like a doughnut? I nibbled a first bite. The bagel was so big that I couldn't take a larger bite. It was bread, all right. And although the outside crust was slightly sweet, it was certainly nothing like a doughnut. The bagel was dense and dry, and I couldn't help feeling that there was a better way to eat it than dry, cold, and out of hand. It was not exactly what I had been expecting, and it was hard for me to see why it was so popular. But I was stuck with the situation I had created.

 

"How's the bagel?" asked Joel.

 

"Delicious," I lied.

 

I sat there under Joel's eye nibbling at this very large, very dry bagel, and I knew that my embarrassment was all my own fault. I vowed yet again to stop trying to seem more sophisticated than I was. I vowed to admit my ignorance and acknowledge my lack of experience.

 

And sure enough, within some thirty or forty years, I was able to stop pretending to be someone I wasn't. Of course, by then I was fully sophisticated.

 

 

 Copyright 2011 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com