by Ilana Masad
“What?” Iris tensed, wide awake in an instant, as if someone had put ice at the base of her spine.
Abe heaved a sigh and rolled onto his back, away from her. She turned over onto her stomach, her head facing him, ashamed all at once of her nakedness in the face of what she suspected was coming.
“I can’t do this, Iris. I don’t know how else to say it. I can’t do this hiding around thing, this seeing you a few times a year and wishing you were nearby for the rest of it. I want this to be real, for you to meet my son, for me to meet your kids.”
“Oh, Abe . . .”
“You sound like you’re disappointed with me,” he said, sitting up and crossing his legs in front of him like an overlarge child in a preschool reading circle.
“To be perfectly honest, I am,” she said. She got up and began putting on her clothes quickly.
“Damn it, don’t do that,” Abe protested, darting forward to grab away her shirt. She yanked it out of his hands. “I told you from the beginning that I never wanted this to be something that weighed on you. It was never supposed to be something that would hurt you. And I told you also that I would never marry you, and never move in with you.” She was pissed, and she knew she sounded it too, but she’d long ago decided to replace the sadness of rejection and endings with anger. She didn’t know if it was the wiser emotion or merely the easier one, but she knew that she had it in spades. Anger, rage, suppressed for years when Shlomo was hurting her, dismissing her, belittling her, and turned into self-loathing and self-condemnation. She refused to feel these things any longer. She knew that Abe wasn’t trying to make her feel lesser—he was just being vulnerable with her. He was trying to tell her what he wanted. What he needed. But she had never said she could give him anything beyond what she’d laid out at the very beginning—sex, occasional company, friendship, care, the trappings of love that could at times veer into the real thing. And nothing more.
“So that’s it? No compromise? No conversation, even?” He sounded angry too. A petulant child, Iris thought unkindly.
“What exactly do you think I’m going to compromise over? I told you about my situation, my marriage, right at the beginning. To avoid exactly this.”
“But it’s been five years, Irey! Has nothing changed? Don’t you care for me at all?” He stood before her now, naked still, the scattered hair on his chest and pubis coarse and, she noticed, beginning to go gray. He wasn’t embarrassed by his bony body, his chest just concave enough to give his stomach the illusion of sticking out in a gentle mound, his legs narrowing so much at the calves and heels that she sometimes got chills when she realized they were only a shade thicker than his bones. She knew his comfort in his own skin was hard-earned. And of course she cared for him. She cared so much that it hurt.
But that didn’t change a thing. “Would it be easier for you if I said I didn’t?” she asked. He looked like she’d punched him.
“No, of course not.” He began wringing his hands the way he did when he was nervous. “I want the truth.”
“The truth? The truth is that I can’t give you more than this, Abe. I will never leave Peter, and I will never break up the family he and I made together. My children will never know about you, and I will never meet your son. That’s the truth. I care about you deeply, I’ve told you that many times, but this is all you get. Take it or leave it.”
His eyes were turning red and his bottom lip shook. She’d made him cry. She wished she could take it back, and the searing pain beneath her breastbone was gathering itself from all over her body, making her feel weak and exhausted with the first symptoms of grief. Abe began to gather his clothes and put them back on, so Iris let herself sink into the couch and look down at her feet to avoid seeing him as he tried to collect himself.
“Okay, Iris. You’re right,” he said, dressed and shod, as he sat beside her on the couch, leaving a couple of feet between their hips. “You never said you could give me more. Hey,” he put his hand on the back of her neck gently, “look at me. Please?”
She did so, wishing, not for the first time, that crying came more easily to her. He wouldn’t be able to see on her face that she was sad. He would see only the lines around her mouth hardening and her deeply furrowed eyebrows. Whenever she was like this at home, Peter would put a finger to her brows and slowly massage them until she realized she had her face clenched, as he called it, and made her muscles relax. Abe didn’t do this, though. He cupped her cheek and ran a thumb across her thin lips. “I’m sorry, Abe,” she said.
“Don’t be.” Then he amended, “Well, you can be a little bit sorry.” She laughed. “Goodbye, Irey,” he said. He kissed her forehead like a patriarch would and left the room. The door shut behind him with the softest of clicks, almost as if he hadn’t left at all.
* * *
• • •
HOURS LATER, AFTER she’d ordered pizza to her room and eaten six out of the eight slices, and after she’d gotten an ice cream bar from the vending machine in the basement and devoured it, she lay on the bed in her underwear and a raggedy old T-shirt of Peter’s, watching The Simpsons. Homer didn’t fix a leak at home, which opened up a cavern underneath Springfield, and when the ground collapsed, Marge drove right into the hole. Iris could never complain like Marge could. Peter got everything fixed. She never drove into any pits he created. He would never let her sink into so much as a puddle if he could help it. She’d made the right decision, and she knew it, but it didn’t make losing Abe less painful.
Still, it was Peter’s voice she wanted to hear more than anything. But when he’d called an hour ago, she’d let the phone ring itself out. Now she checked her voice mail, and sure enough, there he was, sounding warm and sleepy, telling her he hoped she was doing okay and taking care of herself, telling her about the strange sculptures and the delicious brunch and how lovely Maggie’s new girlfriend was.
“Girlfriend?” Iris said aloud, her head tensing and then banging back against the headboard. “Ouch.” She was glad he couldn’t hear her. He would think she was reacting to Maggie, not the pain. Peter rarely got mad at Iris, but her fervid wish for Maggie not to be gay was something they’d fought about more than once. She didn’t know how to explain it to him again. She didn’t know how he didn’t fear his daughter being different, standing out, making herself a target to the hateful people of the world. She didn’t understand how anyone could choose that identity—she knew she wouldn’t have chosen to be Jewish, for instance, if she hadn’t been raised by her parents, no matter how ingrained it was in her now. And yes, Maggie said she was born this way and Iris could concede that this was a possibility, but she wasn’t utterly convinced that Maggie wasn’t at least partially trying to rebel, that she might still meet a man who would make her happy.
But a girlfriend! No wonder Maggie had been angry at her earlier, disappointed last night. Iris had misunderstood—Willfully? she wondered—had really thought that Maggie was meeting a friend, hadn’t realized how big a deal this was, or was supposed to be. Iris had never met anyone Maggie was seeing, had never been offered the chance. And now she’d screwed up again, and Maggie probably thought she was purposefully denying her sexuality, that she’d avoided meeting this woman out of disapproval.
Iris didn’t know how to fix this. She’d ask Peter tomorrow, she decided, as she listened to his message a couple more times, focusing on his parting words, “I love you, I love you, good night.” She let herself slip back into being a happily married mother of two incredible if sometimes infuriating children, and by the time she went to sleep, she was feeling a little better. Look on the bright side, she told herself—at least now the Bad Day had a new association that was, if not positive, at least less nauseating than her memories of her ex-husband.
AUGUST 24, 2017
Instead of making dinner awkward, Maggie decides to stuff her face and listen to Abe and his son talk. And they have plenty to talk about. From
issues with Junior’s team—“Coach is slacking on the relief pitcher, and that just isn’t right, Dad”—to Abe telling a long and apparently oft-repeated story, if Junior’s glazed look is anything to go by, about his grandmother’s daily routine back in Nigeria, before she immigrated to the United States with her then-young daughter, Abe’s mother, the lesson of which seems to be that Junior should be grateful that he’s on a baseball team at all—“She used to walk seven miles just to stand outside the boys’ school and listen to their lessons, and here we are complaining about your retired Dodgers coach!”—to the two of them bantering about some reality TV show whose premise, as far as she can tell, is exposing imposters to the real people they’re dating on the internet.
“But why pop their bubble?” she asks. Junior grunts, but he’s just taken a huge bite. He chews quickly, forcing the food down his throat in a visible lump that makes Maggie look away.
“’Cause people deserve the truth,” he growls once he’s swallowed, and shoots a look at his father. Her presence must not have been explained to his satisfaction. Abe said only that she was the daughter of an old friend of his, because apparently his son didn’t know about Iris, just like Maggie didn’t know about Abe. “How would you feel if the person you thought you loved was someone totally different? Like a super fat guy with chin pubes?”
Maggie wants to tell him he’s being fatphobic, but she’s not sure it’s her place to tell him anything. She just nods and brings her spork back to her plate.
“Wait,” Junior says and to Maggie’s surprise plucks the spork out of her hand. “Dad! Why did you give her my spork?”
“I didn’t notice I had. Please give the utensil back to her.” His voice changes whenever he gives his son a command, Maggie notices, becoming lower and vibrating a bit, as if he’s swallowed a handful of gravel. It’s one of the most dad-like things she’s ever witnessed and she has to suck on the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling.
Junior tosses over the spork, and it lands on her plate with enough force to spray sauce drops on the table, her face, and Abe’s arm. Abe stands up, thunderous, his chair scraping across the floor. “You may be excused!” he barks.
“Whatever,” Junior mutters. He takes his plate and fork and leaves the table. His door slams again.
“I should probably—” Maggie starts getting up too. She can’t blame the kid, really—she threw plenty of tantrums as a teenager, and only an hour ago she was having to restrain herself from throwing that beer bottle at the wall. But she doesn’t want to make this night harder on Abe, or on herself for that matter, and is prepared to get her bags and go if that’s what’s best.
“No, please, stay, eat, it’s fine. I’ll talk to him later.” He looks depleted when he sits back down himself, and though Maggie takes another few tentative bites, it doesn’t look like Abe is going to finish his plate. “I’m sorry about that,” he says finally, leaning back in his chair. “He’s very emotionally attached to some of his childhood things. My shrink thinks it’s because of the divorce.” He gestures at the spork. “We’ve had that since he was about three or four, along with this plate with dinosaurs on it from an old animated movie.”
“The Land Before Time?” Maggie guesses.
“Yes, yes, that one.”
“I used to love it so much. I barely remember the plot, just that I cried a lot.” She’s doing that thing where she chatters when she’s nervous, when people are upset or mad.
“He had a dinosaur phase,” Abe says, smiling a little at the memory. “Good?” he asks suddenly, seeing Maggie run a finger around the edge of her plate. She stops, embarrassed at the almost unconscious move, and he laughs. “Your mom used to do that too. She finished everything on her plate, every time. She said it was—”
“Second-generation Holocaust syndrome, I know,” Maggie finishes. She smiles at him. He can’t be so bad if he still remembers details about her mother. She can’t blame him for her mother’s actions or choices, anyway; Iris is the one responsible for this betrayal, not Abe. “Thank you for this,” she says, and she means the food, yes, and the guest room, but also something more that she can’t articulate.
He tells her to leave her plate, that he’ll make Junior do the dishes in a minute, and then gets her a towel and shows her how the knob in the shower is marked as if hot comes out if you turn right and cold if you turn left, but that it’s really opposite, “like most showers,” he says with great seriousness. She thinks he’s kind of cute in a delicate, pretty way, though his boniness and masculinity don’t appeal to her even a little. But she can recognize why her mother would think he was attractive—not that it’s any excuse.
She showers quickly, trying to wash the bitterness away in the hot water, and when that doesn’t work, she asks Abe if she can smoke outside. He nods her toward the back of the house where she finds a door to a small yard bordered by tall hedges separating it from the neighbors all around.
It’s breezy, so she kneels with her back to the house to use her body as a shield and rolls a joint deftly between her fingers. She isn’t usually shy about her pot habit, but she doesn’t want to get anyone in trouble, and even though it’s recently become legal, Abe looks like a square and she doesn’t think he’d want her smoking around his son.
Which is why she jumps nearly out of her skin when she gets up and sees Junior, wearing a stony expression, leaning on the sill of an open window that looks out onto the yard, lowering a vape pen from his mouth. “You too?” he asks, gesturing at her hand cupped around the joint as if it needs her protection.
“Unless that’s a Juul, then, uh, yeah, me too,” she says, sheepish. His face cracks open and he grins at her. “Damn, girl, you don’t have to be all sneaky about it.”
“So your dad’s okay with it?” she asks. She lights up and pulls deeply.
“If I finish my homework first, yeah. I have insomnia, so.”
“Cool dad.”
“I guess,” he says. “Anyway, how does he know you, really? Are you gonna be my new mom or something?”
So that’s why he’s pissed, Maggie thinks. She’s young enough to be his big sister, and it sounds like Abe isn’t really the type to be forthcoming about his dating life. She wants to tell Junior that it sounds like they were actually going to be stepsiblings if his dad had had his way, but knows it’s not her place. “No, your dad was telling the truth. I’m just the daughter of someone he knew once. She, my mom I mean, she died.”
“Oh shit.” Junior’s face goes slack. “Sorry for your loss,” he says, trying to sound formal.
“Thanks.” A wave of exhaustion hits her. She wants to get on the road early tomorrow since her next destination is all the way back down the state, in LA. If she doesn’t decide to quit and just go home—but she can’t, she realizes, even though the idea seems fetching for a moment. She can’t, because now that she knows about Abe, she has to know about the others, about why and how and when. And besides, all that’s waiting for her at home is a barely functioning dad and a brother she can’t bring herself to be nice to. No, she’s not ready to call it quits yet, though she does think it might be a good idea to check up on them. Home is on the way to LA, after all.
She takes a last puff of the joint and puts it out. “Good night,” she tells Junior. “Thanks for the company. Oh,” she remembers, “and sorry about your spoon, dude. I didn’t know.”
“It’s a spork,” he mutters, and withdraws from the window. She thinks he must be pissed still, but when she gets inside, she hears him call through the door, “G’night.”
In the kitchen, Abe is doing the dishes himself. “He’s a good kid,” Maggie tells him. He nods, asks if she has everything she needs, so she says yes, thanks him, and heads to the bedroom. He doesn’t need her approval, she thinks. He knows he’s raised a good kid. She wonders, as she flops back on the springy double mattress made up in striped blue and silver sheets, if Iris kne
w she was, too. A good kid. All things considered.
As she’s about to fall asleep right there on the covers without taking her clothes or shoes off, her phone buzzes in her back pocket and startles her.
Hey bb how are u? It’s Lucia, finally, and Maggie feels relief wash over her—Lucia hasn’t gotten sick of her yet.
So Maggie types back a long, tired message, full of typos because the phone feels heavy in her hands as she lifts it above her face. When the rectangle of metal and computer falls and a corner hits the tender spot between her eyebrow and eyelid, she sits up, annoyed and awake.
Omg, Lucia writes back. That’s a lot. R u ok? Want me to call?
Its ok, I’m ok enuf, she writes back. Miss u tho.
I miss u too, worried bout u tho bb, its a lot to process, isn’t it? Lucia texts. But Maggie doesn’t want to talk about it, to process it. She wants Lucia. Her body, moments ago so exhausted, feels electric, aching, and she wants Lucia to know it, to feel the strength of Maggie’s desire. She starts telling her girlfriend—and this word is still not entirely comfortable in Maggie’s lexicon, but it’s more acceptable to her than ever before—how much she misses her smell, the goose bumps that rise up on her areolae when Maggie sucks her nipples, the way she can feel the heat gathering up between her legs through her pants. Lucia plays along, telling Maggie she misses pulling her hair, biting her earlobe, running her tongue slowly around her pelvic bones until she squirms.
Maggie switches off the light and puts her bag in front of the door. There’s no lock, but this way if anyone were to come in, she’d at least have a second to gather herself. She strips in the pitch dark—the windows are hidden by blackout curtains—feeling especially naughty to be naked in a house not her own, a house belonging to a man her mother fucked. The tawdriness of it is so appealing that she’s clenching around her own wetness already. She climbs under the sheets and brings the phone screen back up, its light beside her on the pillow her only window to Lucia.