by Ilana Masad
After Iris’s father told her what his wife had lost and why, Iris became more suspicious of the world around her. It seemed capable of evil, dangerous, in a way she hadn’t quite understood before. And when it came to dating, she simply couldn’t handle all the goyische brown-haired and blond boys with blue eyes that some of her friends went gaga over. She’d look at them with the understanding that there was only a thin veil between their kindly behavior and the ability to follow orders. And so when she’d met Shlomo, she saw an appealingly haughty Jew who was secure in his faith and his place in the world, a third-generation American, the rebel son of Haredi Jews in Flatbush who saw the Reform movement breach his community’s neighborhoods and decided he liked their approach. He wanted to make Judaism more accessible, not less, so he left his parents and siblings and community behind and turned to what he perceived as the intellectually superior, not to mention modern, Reform Judaism, and lived with the conviction that he was doing the right thing, the honorable thing, in the eyes of God. Iris fell for him and his conviction. Both of them were working at the Jewish camp Iris had once attended, she as a girls’ counselor and he as a boys’. They were also both in school, though he was older, studying to become a rabbi at Yeshiva University, while she was getting a degree in education at Hunter College, what people called the Jewish girls’ Radcliffe, at her parents’ insistence. She had no idea what she wanted to do, but they believed teaching was both a noble profession and always in demand. She and Shlomo had gotten along splendidly, mostly because she thought he was one of the smartest men she’d ever met, able to tell her for hours about various texts, philosophies, prophets and scholars of yore, while also expounding on music and movies and theater, much of which he was severely critical of.
It would be years before she understood that memorization and specialized knowledge didn’t automatically equal great intelligence, though she continued to be attracted to obsessives of one kind or another.
On April 2, 1977, a few months after Iris had uprooted her life to move cross-country with Shlomo for his new job—he was hired to train under Rabbi Brodsky in LA with the aim of eventually replacing him—she left their apartment in Sherman Oaks and parked near the newsagent’s a few blocks away and did what she always did—perused the foreign newspapers as well as picking up the usual Los Angeles Times for herself and the Jewish Press from New York for Shlomo, who liked keeping up with the goings-on in their old city. She couldn’t read any other language, but she liked the look of foreign words. She loved the lettering of the Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers, the Cyrillic alphabet of the Russian ones, the varying curling shapes of headlines from as far apart as India and Egypt, the characters she couldn’t distinguish that belonged to Chinese and Japanese and Korean newspapers. Seeing the world in one shop this way was the only kind of tourism she figured she’d ever be able to afford—well, that and books—and she was grateful for it.
Sometimes, Iris would buy a British or Australian or South African paper along with her LA Times. She felt reassured learning that local human-interest stories looked pretty much the same everywhere, while on the other hand found it fascinating to see other countries covering American affairs. During the Vietnam War, she noticed there was a clear difference in coverage among various countries, and it didn’t always make the front page elsewhere. Of course, those newspapers were often a day or two old, but that was okay.
“Hello, Mrs. Epstein,” James, the clerk, greeted her. She suspected he was also the owner, because he was there more often than any of the others who manned the counter, mostly young and bored high school kids with long hair and exhausted expressions chewing gum and reading magazines. She always wondered whether James was the man’s given name or the one he used with Americans so they wouldn’t butcher the pronunciation of his real name, but she never asked him about it. He spoke deliberately, and she knew English wasn’t his first language only because he’d told her. “We have a special rush delivery of the Guardian,” he said. “They have a wonderful travel section this week.” His eyes narrowed with mirth as she picked up the British paper and brought it to the counter. Iris was glad that she could be as chatty in LA as she’d been in New York—she was sure her mother wouldn’t be happy about that, since she’d always worried about Iris’s penchant for befriending strangers.
“‘The Island of San Serriffe,’” she read aloud. For a long moment she glanced at the headlines of the articles about the island and looked at the advertisement from the Kodak Company asking for photos from any tourists who’d been there. How could they run a whole travel section without pictures? It didn’t make any sense. Then she understood—it was an April Fool’s joke, and so clever, too, to trick an entire country of readers, at least for a little while. “Oh, James, this is wonderful! I bet Shlomo will take longer than me.”
“I think so too,” James said, and rang up the papers. She paid him and went back out to the car, humming.
At the synagogue, she parked near the small door that led directly into the back corridor and the office. “Shlomy,” she called as she walked in, holding the papers. “I got you the paper, and you must look at the Guardian, they have a . . .”
She trailed off. The office was a mess, open boxes lying everywhere, drawers open with their contents half falling out, cupboards looking thoroughly rummaged. Shlomo was sitting at the desk pounding on the typewriter keys.
“What happened in here?” she asked.
“I couldn’t find the cockdamned tape,” he said. He always used the word “cock” instead of “god” in swearwords. Iris could remember a time when she’d found this funny, even endearing. At the moment, she wanted to yell at him. He’d made a sty of this room and just left it for her to clean up. She knew this was her job, just like she knew that when he left towels and socks and underwear and sweat-soaked shirts on the floor of their apartment, it was her job to pick those up and deal with them. It wasn’t that Shlomo hadn’t heard of women’s lib—but he argued, and she usually conceded, that since Iris wasn’t making any money yet, she needed to do the housework so he could focus on his very important, not to mention sacred, career opportunity. Iris didn’t like to mention that she was also his de facto unpaid secretary at the shul; he was stressed, she knew, and he’d be hiring someone once he moved to the top position, but this was a transitional time.
“You made a mess,” she said. She didn’t quite dare ask if he was going to help her clean up, but she hoped he’d understand that this was what she meant. Instead, he did something he’d never done, but that from this point he began to do with increasing frequency. He got up from behind the typewriter, walked around the desk, and got very, very close to her. He gripped her with both hands and shook her, and though Iris had heard that it was bad to shake babies, she had never realized just how painful a good, hard bone-rattle could be.
Then he pulled away and grabbed just her face with his right hand, squishing her flesh and making her jaw ache. No longer pinned, she should have—as she’d think later, over and over again—pushed him away, shoved herself out of his clutches, but she couldn’t move. Her arms hung stupidly by her sides, limp, and she tasted blood in her mouth from where her teeth were involuntarily biting into her tongue. “Are you just going to nag or are you actually going to help me run this place?” He didn’t yell, which was part of what made it so scary. He didn’t wait for an answer, just shoved her face and head back and let go, making her lose her balance. She fell, ungainly, right over one of the open boxes, making it break beneath her, scattering the mess of books and papers even further. By the time she caught her breath and noted her splayed legs, how her skirt had ridden up, and the fact that her head had narrowly avoided the corner of a low bookcase, Shlomo was back at the typewriter.
She wanted to ask, Did you just do that? She wanted to ask, Did you just go crazy? She wanted to say, What if I hadn’t gotten my period and I was pregnant and you made me fall? She wanted to say many things, but instead, s
he got up, and without a word she began tidying the mess. When she finished, Shlomo read aloud the letter of introduction he’d written from both of them, and asked her eagerly what she thought. She wasn’t sure she could speak yet, so she just nodded, which he took to mean she liked it. He then handed it to her and told her to go and make enough copies to send out to the entire congregation.
She didn’t tell him there was a typo, and he never noticed, but it wasn’t much of a revenge.
She also started taking her birth control pills again.
AUGUST 25, 2017
Maggie badly miscalculated. She could have sworn Google Maps said it was a three-hour drive, but that remains the time estimate when she exits the LA area and keeps going south. She watches the clock tick closer to five p.m., which she assumes is when most post offices close. She races through the last hour of road, watching her speedometer climb to ninety, keeping a lookout for traffic cams and police cars hidden in plain sight.
But when she arrives at the tiny building with its blue mailbox standing outside like an R2-D2 with tiny legs, she knows that even though it’s a few minutes to five, she’s likely too late. The place looks deserted. She parks anyway, badly, and exits the car at a run, leaving the driver’s side door open, hoping for the kind of movie ending such a scene deserves—that is, she’s hoping there will be a kindly elderly person just locking up inside who will see her desperate face and the grief in her eyes and will let her in and tell her where to find Harold Lake Brooks. That’s the trouble with there being only a PO box number on this letter: she doesn’t know where Harold actually lives. But she assumes—or hopes—that in the kind of community where people pick up their mail at the post office, everyone knows everyone.
Whether she’s correct or not won’t matter today. The post office, as she sees once she reaches the door, closed at one. She never had a chance of reaching it on time.
“Fucking great.” She has a raging desire to kick the door but kicks the mailbox instead and then regrets it immediately as the thing actually moves, shifting momentarily onto two legs before slamming back to all four. She didn’t think she had that kind of strength. Then again, the box might just be incredibly empty. Shouldn’t it be nailed down?
She gets back in the car. Lucia hasn’t texted her back yet. Stop thinking about that, she commands herself, and figure out what to do next. She can’t drive home now—funny how quickly her parents’ place gets called “home” again in her mind—and she still has to find this Harold. LA, where two other letters are addressed, is a long drive too, and she’s tired and hungry. The closest motels, she finds on her phone, are somewhere called East Blythe. There is the usual assortment: Motel 6, Super 8, then another Motel 6 down the road a few miles from the first. She chooses another one, a Knights Inn, because the name is charming and she’s never been to one of those. The coloring of the logo, a bluish purple, makes her think of a certain kind of camp—like the way the purple Teletubby was accused of being gay by that conservative nutjob, which only cemented its gay icon status. When she gets to the motel, though, its exterior looks distinctly Californian, with the terra-cotta roof tiles and that particular shade of wall that she associates with the Spanish-style homes from the last century that are found everywhere in the state. The inside is bleak, the walls stained with watermarks and the carpet threadbare, and it smells of clean laundry that has been sitting damply in the drier for too long. She feels itchy inside, her nerves tingling still from the rushed drive and the waste it was.
She checks in, pleased with how cheap it is, and asks the long-haired and startlingly beautiful woman working the desk whether there’s anywhere to eat nearby.
“There’s a Del Taco down the road that way, and a grocery,” the woman says. She flings her hair back and Maggie sees her badge reads NELLY. “And there’s a really good Indian place that’s like seriously right across the highway, maybe two hundred yards that way.”
“Oh, I love Indian,” Maggie says, twitching the strap of her bag so it sits more securely on her shoulder.
“Indian Indian,” Nelly clarifies, and at first Maggie isn’t sure what she means. “Like, from India. Not Quechan like me.” She laughs, and Maggie smiles at her, wishing she could call this woman her friend, for no other reason than to be able to hear this laugh again.
“Hey,” she says impetuously. “When do you finish your shift here?”
“When no one else comes through,” Nelly says, shrugging. “So, like, probably ten? Why?”
“Let’s get a drink,” Maggie says. She puts both hands on the desk and leans forward, grinning. “I’m in dire need of a good time.”
Nelly’s face closes up for a moment, as if sizing up the offer. She grabs a pad of paper and a pen from beside her and passes it to Maggie. “Write your number,” she says. “I’ll text you when I’m done.”
“Rad,” Maggie says, aware she’s flirting like a surfer dude. Then she waves and heads back out of the lobby. The doors to the rooms are all on the outside. Maggie’s is on the second floor, so she climbs the staircase to the walkway, and finds her room all the way to the end. It’s bigger than she expected it to be—it has two queen-size beds and a couch to boot—and she wonders whether Nelly gave her an upgrade. Could she have been flirting first?
Maybe, maybe not. Maggie rarely trusts her gaydar when she’s sober, too nervous to assume things about people unless she witnesses them actually saying or doing something she can confidently read as queer. Then again, when she’s high or drunk, she tends to think she has a shot with everyone. And, generally, she’s found straight-identifying women are curious enough about her soft masculinity and slight swagger to take a chance on making out with her. Not that this has ever led to the most satisfying of experiences, she has to admit, but there it is.
It isn’t until she’s on the toilet in the bathroom, which is very small and on which her butt fits uncomfortably, that she realizes that she’s actively sought out a date for tonight. She can convince herself all she wants that Nelly is straight and probably won’t want to make out with her, but the fact that she needs to at all means that however it turns out, she went into this interaction wanting it to be a date.
The image of her mother meeting Abe surreptitiously while Maggie was having an overnight dorm visit at the college they were looking at makes her shudder. She tries to shake off the dirty feeling crawling over her, the way she’s thinking about what Nelly’s behind might look like rather than remembering Lucia’s. Maggie pulls her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans, pooled around her ankles. Still nothing. It was only last night that she was aching for Lucia’s touch. How has today been so long already? How did it go astray in such a short amount of time?
Nelly probably won’t even text, she tries to console herself, but the disappointment that rears up at that thought doesn’t help.
Food might fix things, she decides.
* * *
• • •
THE INDIAN RESTAURANT is small but packed from the moment Maggie arrives until she leaves. The early diners are locals, most of them white, old, and dressed in well-worn jeans and T-shirts. They give her—with her nose stud, short hair, and black clothes—surreptitious but disapproving looks. Still, the naan is fresh and warm when it arrives at her table and the tandoori chicken is delicious, just below the level of spice she can’t handle. With its heat in her stomach, she agrees to her server’s recommendation of a cooling mango sweet lassi as dessert.
From her table in the corner, she witnesses the elderly crowd leave and the slightly younger, later set arrives, ordering more alcohol, talking more exuberantly. The place seems to be family owned and staffed, at least two of the servers sharing a crook in their nose that appears similar to that of the older man who greeted her at the door. She tries to imagine what it would be like, working with her family. There’s nothing that all four of them were ever passionate about together, except maybe the first seaso
n of the eventually awful crime show about twenty-four hours spent largely in and around Los Angeles, and sitting down to an episode of TV together once a week barely counts as an interest, even. Not that Maggie has ever really had a passion that has lasted for longer than a few weeks, when it got too hard to play the guitar or too boring to keep knitting. Not like Lucia and her art, or Allison and sex education, or Gina and sea-life preservation, or Sarah and cross-country running.
When they first started spending time together, Lucia seemed a little baffled by this. She didn’t seem to know anyone—including her family—who didn’t have some consistent, long-standing passion project that was always in the works. “I guess I’m just boring,” Maggie had said as they stood outside of the Crack Fox, smoking, on one of the first really warm evenings in spring. But Lucia said this was patently ridiculous. A couple of months later, officially girlfriends, Maggie had asked Lucia, “Does it bother you? That I’m not, like, artistic? That I just have a regular job and no garage band?” Lucia had laughed, and Maggie, who was spooning her, could feel the vibration where her sternum pressed against Lucia’s back.
“No, Mags,” Lucia said. “I’ve been with plenty of artists.” She turned around so she was facing Maggie in bed. “And let me tell you, we’re overrated.” Maggie smiled, relieved, and Lucia kissed her cheek. “I like how stable you are, you know? Like, not just the job,” she clarified, “but in who you are. You’re living your damn life, you know? Without trying to always prove something to everyone you meet. It’s refreshing, honestly.” Lucia turned over again and nestled her body into Maggie’s. “Plus, you let me be the little spoon. You make me feel safe.”
Remembering this, Maggie can’t help but wonder. What’s to say that Lucia won’t decide that without stability—which is very much lacking right now—Maggie is dull, passionless, not worth putting the effort into?