Fleishig or milchig?" It is 1995. A middle-aged Hasidic antiques dealer on Second Avenue opens a splintering mahogany box and removes a tarnished silver serving set: a knife, a fork, a spoon. We stand face-to-face in our respective uniforms: me, in pais- ley Doc Martens boots and a pilling, mauve Benetton sweater with broad, rounded shoulder pads that make me look like a fullback. He, in sober black pants, black vest, black shoes, black suede yarmulke, and a white-on-white chain-patterned shirt stained with the sweat of devotion, his tzitzit--the fringes of his prayer shawl--dangling beneath his fingers. A plume of graying black hair cascades up and out of his collar. "It''s very nice," he says, holding the fork up to the light streaming in through the windows, "but I see this pattern a lot. It''s from the Kennedys." After dating for five months, my parents married in 1962.

My father was sure he had found the love of his life, and his future; my mother was sure she had found a way out of her parents'' house, and her future. They were both right, and they were both wrong. I was born nine months later, almost to the day. My father tells me this story for years, from the time I am old enough to understand what the words mean, and probably even before: that I was conceived on their wedding night, hours after their cere- mony was presided over by Rabbi Charles Kahane--father of Jewish Defense League founder and crackpot firebrand Meir, murdered in 1990--and the kosher reception held at Terrace on the Park, overlooking the sinkhole that was Flushing Meadows, site of the World''s Fair two years later. "It all happened very fast," my father explains. Before he married my mother, my father was engaged five times, each time to a woman his family deemed unacceptable. "Treyf," his mother said to me as she recounted the story, tipping her chin in the air and rolling her eyes: one was too big, another too short, another cross-eyed, another crazy, another not Jewish. Treyf : According to Leviticus, unkosher and prohibited , like lobster, shrimp, pork, fish without scales, the mixing of meat and dairy.

But also, according to my grandmother, imperfect, intolerable, offensive, undesirable, unclean, improper, filthy, broken, forbidden, illicit, rule-breaking . A person can eat treyf; a person can be treyf. "And then," my grandmother said, "he met your mother." She folded her arms across her ample breast and heaved a long sigh. My mother. My tall, blond, fur model, television singer mother who I watched men trip over themselves to get to at the 1960s and 1970s Queens, New York parties of my childhood. When she met my father, a sack-suited, wing-tipped ad man specializing in postwar Long Island real estate, she had recently ended a relationship with the composer Bernie Wayne. Somewhere between Bernie and my father, there was someone I will call Thomas, a tall, Jewish, French-speaking, Sorbonne-educated beatnik who had purportedly once lived with Nina Simone, and whose diamond-dealer father had been knighted by the king of Belgium.

When I was ten, my parents brought me along to one of Thomas''s legendary Saturday night Upper East Side cocktail parties, where I careened around the crowded apartment from table to table like a pinball, narrowly dodging the suede-patched elbows and lit Gitanes of the other guests. Invisible and unsu- pervised, I managed, just as the party was getting under way, to eat an entire block of p'té de campagne, a bowl of cornichons, and a round of stinking, oozing Époisses. An hour later, I writhed on Thomas''s bathroom floor like a snake and was comforted by some of the other guests while my parents went to get the car: the Hollywood Squares comedian David Brenner, who lived across the hall, rubbed my back; two hookers wearing matching black vinyl thigh-high platform boots and crushed purple velvet hot pants sang me a folk song with a cheap nylon-string guitar that one of them had brought along; and a long-haired man who claimed to be the drummer for Chicago scratched my head like I was a puppy. Forty years later, I can see the black-and-white octag- onal tiles on Thomas''s bathroom floor, and I can feel the stiff nylon weave of the polyester shag rug burning my neck. "Treyf," my mother''s mother, Gaga, whispered to me as she mopped my forehead the next morning, while my parents slept soundly in their bedroom across the hall. After their wedding ceremony, after the blessings were made by my paternal Grandpa Henry, a fire-and-brimstone Orthodox cantor, after the chopped liver was eaten, the gefilte loaf sliced, the Manischewitz Heavy Malaga poured and the hora danced, my parents drove to their honeymoon at the most modern of the upstate New York kosher borscht belt hotels, the Nevele, with their silver serving set locked in the trunk of their rental car. They had made it; they were finally legitimate. They had stepped on the glass, jumped the broom, leapt the chasm between freedom and confor- mity, adolescence and adulthood; they had done exactly what was expected of them.

Every member of my father''s family had the same set of silver--a Gorham service in the Etruscan Greek Key pattern--as if it was a shining periapt acknowledging their validity and confirming their eternal place in the clan. As a young child, I was regularly seated on a beige vinyl kitchen stool near the sink, while Gaga methodically polished the pieces; the process hypnotized me, and I watched without blinking how she tied a silk paisley kerchief around her nose and mouth like a bandit on Bonanza , poured the thick pink Noxon onto a soft rag and massaged each utensil until it shone, silver and glowing and bright as a pearl. I was mesmerized by the pattern''s simplicity, and would hold the tarnished spoon on my lap and trace the design with my tiny index finger: it was nothing more than a straight line that flowed forward, then reticently coiled back on itself. It turned and moved forward again, repeating over and over without end. My father''s family didn''t arrive at Ellis Island from the old country with a family crest, and so we adopted the Greek Key as our own; it became ubiquitous, gracing everything from the edges of our linen tablecloths to our bath towels to the border around the hood of the English Balmoral pram my parents pushed me around the Upper East Side in when I was an infant. A gift to my parents from my father''s sister and her husband and his sisters--Gaga called them fancy people ; there was no love lost in either direction--the family silver bore witness to every tribal event that took place in our home from the early 1960s into the 1970s: tense Mother''s Day brunches and prim Thanks- givings. Funeral luncheons and birthday parties crackling with rage. It graced a decade of sweet Rosh Hashanah tables, prawn- filled cocktail parties, solemn shivas when well-meaning Catholic neighbors carried in trays of cheese-stuffed shells floating in meat sauce; holiday parties where bacon-wrapped water chestnuts and party franks were served with potato latkes; and Yom Kippur break fasts where we set upon platters of sable and lox like a drowning man grabs for a life preserver.

When the parties were over, the only things remaining were invisible coils of gossip, and the ancient family furies--the confidences breached, the grudges held, the forbidden flaunted and waved like a victory flag--that were spoken of in hushed tones and hung in the air like crepe paper streamers. Gaga waited until the last guest departed, plunked me down on the stool next to her, dumped the silver into the sink, and I watched in silence as she scoured away any trace of what had been eaten and what had been whispered, rendering it perfect and clean and kosher for the next occasion. "So nu ," the Hasidic man says to me again, pushing his black plastic glasses up the bridge of his nose: "Do you know? Fleishig or milchig?" Meat or dairy? If I can assure him that the silver had been used in a devout home, where separate sets of plates and silverware are restricted for dairy and meat dishes, he won''t have to go to the trouble of koshering it for a Jewish customer wanting to buy it. He won''t have to put the set through the lengthy process of hag''alah --boiling the pieces while keeping them from touching each other so that every bit of the silver is exposed to the cleansing promise of the water, like baptism in a river. I don''t know what to say, given all the years of meat lasagnas and pork dumplings and shrimp cocktails that the silver has served during my parents'' ill-fated marriage. After sixteen years, their relationship ended in the late 1970s, not in a modern Manhattan divorce court like in Kramer vs. Kramer , but in front of a beth din --a quorum of three Orthodox rabbis--who agreed, after some Talmudic debate, to grant them a get , a kosher document of mar- riage severance from husband to wife dating back to the days of Deuteronomy, and without which even the most assimilated Jew- ish couple, having gone through an American divorce court, is still considered married according to Talmudic law. "Aha," he gasps, holding up the knife, flecked with a tiny, hardened drop of dark red jam.

He removes his glasses, holds his jeweler''s loupe up to his eye, and confirms it with a combination of Talmudic reasoning and authority: "We don''t eat jam unless it''s with blintzes and blintzes are dairy. Therefore," he proclaims triumphantly, "milchig!" The last time I saw my parents'' silver serving pieces in use was when I was ten, the night of my father''s fiftieth birthday in 1973 during an ice storm-- the ice storm; the Rick Moody-Ang Lee ice storm when New York.