The Night Starts Here: Part I
Title: The Night Starts Here
Author: noahjz
Rating: PG-13, for some cursing
Pairing/Characters: Rachel/Quinn, some Finn/Rachel, Rachel's dads, Judy Fabray, Puck
Length: ~8000
Spoilers: Up to 2x09
Summary: Quinn discovers that her mother was Jewish before she married her father. She asks Rachel for help understanding the religion.
A/N: Apologies if I messed up some of the Jewish customs. I haven't been to synagogue since I was 10. I didn't even have a Bar Mitzvah. So this is based on what I remember, plus some helpful contributions from the Internet.
A/N 2: I stole the title from "The Night Starts Here" by Stars.
A/N 3: Split into two parts because LJ couldn't handle the whole thing.
DECEMBER 2010
The Fabray family usually puts up its Christmas decorations on the first of December, always the brightest lights laid out on the roof in swirling patterns that almost look like letters. Always animatronic reindeer grazing on their grass. Always an elaborate manger scene populated by waist-high wooden statues that her father repaints every year while listening to a scratched CD of Christmas hymns. Always he curses at the disc when it skips.
Quinn doesn't expect this year to be much different, though she will probably be taking up the task of beautifying the figurines, as her mother will most likely be too drunk to keep everything within the lines. They store the lights and the ornaments and the other festivities in the attic, and every year Russell insists on taking them down himself because “I don't want any of you pretty girls to break any of your pretty nails.” Maybe she and her mother will take down the boxes themselves. Maybe Judy will be sober enough. Maybe she'll accept that there are some things Quinn just can't forgive.
But all of Quinn's holiday plans are halted when she sees her mother in the living room, staring out at the darkened street, a tarnished silver menorah in front of her. The candles have been burned so many times they've turned into stubs, the once shiny metal of the base brown and crackly. Judy stares at the central spot, the one candle that's flickering in the empty space. There's a packet of matches resting on the sill, no alcohol. Judy's hands shake.
“Mom?” Quinn steps onto the hardwood, almost slipping in her socks.
Judy stiffly inhales as if trying to breath in all of Judaism through the single flame. “My parents. Your grandparents, who died before they were born. I was raised Jewish, Quinnie, but I...I was rebellious. I hated my parents. They wanted me to marry a nice Jewish boy; therefore, I didn't. Your father was romantic, and he was Catholic. I converted to show my parents how much I resented them. But now...” Judy sniffs, warding off tears. “Well, I just wonder if maybe they were right after all.”
“So I'm Jewish?” That's the only thing Quinn gets out of that story, and it gives her so much hope. The Christian God has always been so vengeful, wrathful, repressive; maybe the Jewish God will show a little more leniency in the gray areas. Maybe the Jewish God will love her.
The look on Judy's face conveys that she's never considered that before. “Yes, well, I suppose you are.”
~
The next day at school, Quinn asks Rachel to teach her how to be a Jew. Rachel thinks this is a joke. Quinn assures her that it's not, and offers to play piano while she rehearses as a trade-off. Rachel accepts, but only because she's lonely without Finn and she hates singing to karaoke CDs.
~
It takes Quinn and Rachel twenty minutes of arguing to finally agree on a schedule both for during their sessions and the sessions themselves. Thursday becomes their day. Rachel writes it down on every Thursday in her planner for the next six months.
“I don't want to spend six months with you, short skirts,” Quinn snaps.
“Judaism is a very complex religion, Quinn,” Rachel explains, only slightly acidic. She's been this way because of the Finn breakup debacle, and she knows that if she were a better person, she'd be able to control it. “We don't just have a Bible. We have the Torah, the Tanakh, the Talmud, the Kabbalah...we have lots of texts.” Rachel doesn't bother to say that she's never personally read any of these and hasn't been to synagogue since she was ten except for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; her fathers only ever believed in the unifying power Judaism had amongst its community, never in Yahweh himself.
Quinn lets her fingers skid across the keys in a very dirty jazz version of “The Entertainer.” It took Rachel all of twenty seconds to recognize the cheerleader's proficiency on the instrument, but she hasn't bothered saying anything about that either. “I don't need to be an expert. I just want to understand why people have faith in it.”
Rachel makes the last note in her datebook and snorts. “Jews follow their religion for the same reason everybody else follows theirs.” Rachel lets that hang, and Quinn doesn't have the audacity to ask what she means by that, doesn't want to admit that that's the exact thing she's searching for.
“Here.” Rachel places sheet music on the piano, waits patiently for Quinn to flip through the pages. Quinn doesn't know it - “Heaven Help My Heart,” from some musical called Chess. It sounds like the type of song Rachel would pick, melancholy and therefore reflective of her mood. But Quinn knows music well enough to sound out the piano part in her mind, so she's not totally opposed to the song: it looks beautiful.
And when Rachel starts singing a moment later, it sounds beautiful, too.
~
“Tanakh,” Rachel says for the twenty-third time. It's the third Thursday, over winter break, Christmas Eve being the next day. Quinn put up the Christmas tree all by herself that year, all of the lights. They were so white, so bland, this time around. Her mother didn't stop her, but she didn't help her either. The menorah still stands in the window.
Quinn scrunches up her nose, concentrating hard. “Tan-ack.”
“Are you sure you're Jewish?”
“Yes!” Quinn exclaims so confidently, so desperately, that Rachel can't find it in her to dispute it. She's beginning to suspect that there's more to this than Quinn wanting to figure out her heritage.
Because Rachel's a good Jew (sort of) and because she's a good person (sort of) and because she really can't stand the thought of being wholly alone (completely), she puts on a smile and just repeats, “Tanakh.”
~
Rachel texts Quinn on Christmas, wishing her a merry one. But Quinn's not in much of a merry mood: her mother has no family, at least none that she speaks with, so it's just the two of them. Judy eats the chicken pot pie Quinn spent all morning cooking and washes it down with a glass of gin.
Quinn really can't be bothered with Rachel right now.
~
On the 28th, Rachel calls to cancel next Thursday's session.
Quinn retorts that it's New Year's and she has way more awesome things to be doing than studying the Tanakh and singing Disney songs with Rachel. Then she hangs up.
~
Puck hosts a New Year's party at his house, complete with kegs and every member of New Directions. He's so into glee club that he doesn't even bother with the football players or the Cheerios. Or at least that's what he says. Everyone knows he's just doing it to make Quinn comfortable, to pretend to be sweet, to get into her pants. Again. Because last time turned out so well. Quinn's feeling nostalgic, musing on how this time last year she didn't have a house, didn't have a family, didn't have a god. With a whole year, a complete 360 spun around, she only has one and a half of those things. The party will be loud and Puck will be there and so will Finn and so, probably, will Rachel.
Quinn decides that studying the laws of kashrut - commonly known as kosher - will be more beneficial to her evening.
At midnight, Quinn watches the ball drop on TV, her mind filled with images of dead birds being drained of their blood.
JANUARY 2011
Rachel wakes up with a hangover, as well as to a beeping that's not from her alarm clock. Her hand groggily slaps around for her phone and she answers the call without even looking at it.
“Hello?”
“Berry?”
If Rachel's head hurt less and she could think more clearly, she probably would put the phone down. “What do you want?”
“I've been studying.”
“What?”
“Are you OK? You sound...out of it.” Quinn tries to be as nonchalant as possible. But she needs Rachel now. To teach her Judaism, of course. Not for any other reason.
“Puck's party. Why weren't you there?”
“You know what happened the last time I went to one of those.”
Rachel chuckles. Honestly chuckles. Then she groans and rubs her head. “What did you do instead?”
“I studied. Kashrut. Jewish dietary laws.”
“I know what kashrut is,” Rachel snaps quickly. Quinn skipped out on their last meeting, not her. Well, sort of. It was Quinn's fault Rachel had to cancel, at any rate.
Quinn sighs. “I'm serious about learning this, Rachel. I'm going to be in the choir room on Thursday after school. So are you.” Then she hangs up.
It's biting and commanding and she doesn't apologize for anything, but Quinn said Rachel, so maybe there's hope.
~
Rachel tells Quinn what she can expect as a Jew, in the afterlife. It's different than the Heaven Quinn's used to hearing about: no promises of eternal freedom and being able to stuff her face with cake without ever getting fat, just a forever of living with God. That's all it promises and, right now, that's what Quinn needs to hear. It's also pretty comforting that there's no fire-and-brimstone hell, either, just a lot of some purgatory-like place where she'll have to examine her life. And that's fine. Quinn plans on doing a lot of Torah study and charity work, which Rachel says is the best way to fully experience the Jewish version of heaven. It has a name (Olam Habah), but Quinn, per usual, has trouble with the pronunciation.
For the music today, Rachel has selected “Out Here on My Own” from Fame, which Quinn knows because her mother loves the old version. Quinn wants to assure Rachel that she's not alone, that she has a blonde cheerleader Christian-Jew hybrid to depend on, but that would be a lie. They can't depend on each other; they're not friends.
At least, not yet.
~
Finn asks Rachel out on January 14th, because he's trying to be romantic, but forgets that Valentine's Day is in February. It's a cute enough gesture to make Rachel overlook how hypocritical and horrible he was to her after Sectionals. Besides, she's alone. Quinn is...well, Quinn is Quinn, and Rachel foolishly hoped that she would manage to be something more.
At home that night, she flips through her phone, trying to find the number of someone who would care about her happy news, or even someone who would chastise her because he or she believes she can do better than Finn. But she ends up with no one.
~
That Saturday Quinn wakes up to a note on the refrigerator that says, “Sorry I'm not here to make pancakes, Quinnie. Gone to synagogue. Love, Mom.” She rips it off the shiny metal, crumples it up in her hand, heaves it into the waste basket. What hurts the most is that Judy never asked her daughter if she would be interested in coming; she had to have noticed that Quinn stopped going to church.
Quinn's thumb hovers over Rachel's name in her phone until it starts to shake with the effort of maintaining that position, and the cell just goes back into Quinn's pocket.
~
“So the Torah is the Hebrew Bible?”
“No.”
“No?” Quinn thinks that the Jews have too many damn books. Why couldn't they just have been simple, like Christians? But then again, Christianity - namely Catholicism - has failed her recently, so maybe complex is better.
Rachel is busy marking up passages of the Torah for Quinn to read. “The Tanakh is the Hebrew Bible, which contains the Torah and two other sections. The Torah is what god gave Moses on Mt. Sinai.”
“I thought you said Jews don't say his name,” Quinn points out.
“They don't,” Rachel replies simply. “I...I'm not really a practicing Jew, but I know about the religion. My dads pushed it on me as a child so I would know what I was giving up. They don't really care about the religious part about it either anymore.” She pauses thoughtfully, unsure of whether or not the next part is too personal to share with someone like Quinn. But she has almost no filter, so it comes out anyway. “I think one of the big things about being Jewish is the community. When I told Finn I wanted raise our children with Judaism, I meant by cooking traditional Jewish meals and observing the big holidays, like Hanukkah and Passover, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.”
“I have no idea what most of those are.”
“That's fine. The point I was trying to make is that I don't want to raise them with a strong sense of faith, but a strong sense of culture.”
FEBRUARY 2011
Quinn breaks up with Sam when he calls her quest for understanding Judaism “stupid.” She calls Rachel, and they talk for three hours while Quinn finishes off a container of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. She doesn't even feel guilty afterward.
But she's terrified when she goes to bed, because she can't hide anymore. There's no boy on her arm to pretend to be straight with. This is where Christian God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary all failed her. Maybe Yahweh will be able to help. Maybe he'll fix her.
She resolves to ask Rachel to teach her some prayers tomorrow.
~
“Prayers?” Rachel looks confused. “Why do you want to know prayers?”
“Because in a religion, people pray,” Quinn explains patiently, annoyed.
Rachel doesn't want to say anything about how she's pretty sure that Quinn's god had that whole “Thou shalt put no other gods before me thing,” but she senses a conversion might be at hand. There's no reason for Quinn to be studying Judaism this intensely if all she wants is to learn a little more about her heritage. That's what Google and Wikipedia are for.
“Alright,” Rachel agrees with a sigh. “But not today. I'm sure one of my dads must have a Siddur around somewhere.”
“Siddur?”
“Jewish prayer book. It's not like the prayers you're used to, Quinn.”
Quinn almost wants to take that as an insult, but she's gotten used to Rachel's way of speaking by now.
The brunette tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and continues, “In Judaism praying is about making yourself better so you can be closer to god. You thank him, of course, but you don't really ask for anything. Even to do the traditional prayers right you have to establish a strong connection with him and be prepared to honor one of his commandments. My grandmother always says that you're supposed to imagine god is in the room with you, holding you in his arms.”
Quinn tries to picture this scenario. She comes up with a tan man (the only Jews she knows are Rachel and Puck), his head shaved, his robes white, his face withered but not old. He's sitting on the edge of her bed, she's sitting on his lap, and she's crying.
~
Rachel gives Quinn her daddy's old Siddur as well as a list of the 613 mitzvot, or commandments, to take home with her. “You're supposed to pray with these in mind. Don't be too intimidated. Just find a prayer that suits your day and a mitzvah to focus on. Then focus on improving yourself. There's also a copy of the Shema in there, too. You need to say that in the morning and at night.”
At dinner, Quinn mutters the blessing of the meal - the regular meal, she learned, not the Sabbath meal - over her food that night. Her mother's too absorbed in the round of Wheel of Fortune on the kitchen's grainy television to notice.
Quinn decides to start out with the first mitzvot on Rachel's list: to know there is a God. She focuses all of her energy on that one idea, every little bit of concentration pouring in to convince herself that there is a God - this God, not the one who abandoned her. With her eyes closed, she sees her room, her bed, and God's sitting on the bed while she's crouching at the windowsill. Slowly, her self in her mind gets up and walks over to the comforter, allowing her body to be enveloped in God's embrace.
Part II this way