My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  “Not really,” I said, “but until I figure it out I have to have a shit job and I’d rather sling brews than anything else.”

  “You’re twenty-six years old!” my dad shouted. “You do shit work when you’re twenty-one!”

  “Not true!” I exclaimed. “Haven’t you heard of the quarterlife crisis?”

  “I saw that book on the Staff Picks shelf at Bookcourt the other day,” my mom chirped, as though the brutal diagnosis for my generation was secondary to the fact that we had a shared reference point. “The flap copy was very intriguing.”

  “What are you talking about?” my dad asked. He hated to be in the dark about anything.

  “The quarterlife crisis is like the midlife crisis,” I said, “only cooler. Like countless Gen Xers I went into the career I’d always dreamed of, only to realize that first choice might not have been the right one.” They were staring at me skeptically, the way Neil Roth had. If I could convince them my job flux was not something to be ashamed of but part of a bona fide national trend, maybe they’d get off my back. “So now I’m standing at a crowded intersection trying to hail a cab. But they all keep passing me by. It’s a shift change and they all have their off-duty lights on. I don’t want to walk all the way home, but suddenly I’m having to face that prospect, daunted by the notion of what a long and tiresome road I have ahea—”

  “All right!” he said. “I get it!”

  “Don’t dismiss,” I said. “The quarterlife crisis has been severely underresearched and underappreciated. Yet it’s just as common as the midlife, if not more so.”

  “You can have a quarterlife crisis without becoming Carla on Cheers,” he said.

  “Carla was the waitress,” said my mom. “Sam was the bartender.”

  He glared at her but before “Family Court” could continue the waiter came over and asked my parents if they wanted any drinks. My dad got Scotch and soda. My mom said what she always says: “Just water to start with.” She has this principled resistance to saying yes on the first ask.

  “So you wanna come away with us this weekend?” my dad said. They had a place up in the Berkshires, and they always tried to get me to go up with them.

  “I don’t think we’re going,” my mom told him. “I have too much schoolwork.”

  “You can do it there!” he whined. He hated it when she wouldn’t go because then he couldn’t. He didn’t know how to drive and they rented a car every weekend. “You’ve got to come, Rach! You can drive me.”

  “I work Saturdays,” I said. “And besides, I’m going to the theater on Sunday.”

  “Whatcha seeing?” my mom asked.

  “The History of the Pencil.”

  “Oh, Rachel,” she said, like I’d told her someone was dead.

  “What?”

  “Dad and I walked out at intermission. I wouldn’t recommend it at all.” Strike one for the Rachster. It did not bode well for a future with Powell to find that my parents had gone exeunt on his work.

  “Come on,” I said, eyeing them warily. “Was it really that bad?”

  “A train wreck,” said my dad. “Long, self-important, and hard to follow.”

  “Why’d you go in the first place?”

  “We subscribe.”

  I wanted to tell myself they were being overcritical but they’d been going to the theater for thirty years, all the way back since the early seventies when they’d second-act whatever Broadway shows they could. They knew this arena better than I did. “Well, I’m going to see it anyway,” I said, unfolding my napkin. “I’m kind of a fan of Hank Powell’s.”

  “He’s written other stuff?” asked my dad. “That play was so catastrophic I assumed it was a freshman effort.”

  “No,” said my mom. “Remember, Richard, in the Playbill it said he was a screenwriter.”

  “That hack got people to finance a film?”

  “Nine films!” I shot. “And he’s not a hack. Didn’t you guys see Leon and Ruth? Julia Roberts was in it after Mystic Pizza and before Steel Magnolias. Remember when she won her Oscar a couple years ago how she said, ‘I owe my career to Hank Powell’?”

  My mom jolted to attention and snapped her fingers. “That’s right,” she said. “He was her gay theater teacher!”

  “No, that was Tom Hanks.”

  “Tom Hanks is gay?” my dad said. I put my head in my hands. Talking to them about popular culture was like teaching retarded kids to swim.

  “What are his other movies?” my mom asked.

  They stared at me cluelessly as I rattled off the titles. “Lydia’s Chest Wound; Knock for Greenberg; Difficult Women; Kid First, Then Husband; Love Is a Sad-Eyed Bassett Hound, which won an Independent Spirit Award—”

  My dad nodded eagerly and said, “I loved that film!” but when he started reminiscing it turned out he was thinking of Love and Death on Long Island.

  I hated what I had to do next but I needed to restore some cachet. “Did either of you see Flash Flood?”

  “Yeah!” my dad exclaimed, as my mom frowned, unsure.

  “What was it about?” my mom said.

  “Helen Hunt and Jeff Goldblum are vacationing in the Bahamas one summer with their kids when—”

  “Oh yeah!”

  “He wrote that too. It grossed a hundred million dollars and that was all the way back in 1994.”

  “Dad saw it at Cobble Hill Cinemas in the dead of winter,” my mom said. “The heating system was broken and we had to sit there shivering in our coats the whole movie. I got bronchitis the next day. It was one of the worst experiences of my life.”

  Just as I was about to strangle myself with my napkin I heard someone at the door shout, “Racheleh!”

  It was my upstairs neighbor, Liz Kaminsky. Liz was the Jewish Mae West. She had curly blond hair down to her shoulders, ice-blue eyes, and high-C breasts. She did four and a half miles on the StairMaster of New York Sports Club on Boerum Place every day and I had never seen her eat anything but salad. Her wardrobe was Britney Spears chic—low-cut scoopnecks, yeast infection pants, and white glittery eye makeup—and just to the left of her lip she had a small brown mole that, she admitted to me one drunken night in her apartment, was actually a tattoo she’d gotten at sixteen in an overzealous Cindy Crawford phase.

  She had moved into the apartment above me in April, a few weeks before I left RCRJ, and immediately made her presence known to the building. Night after night I’d be awakened to her shouting, “That’s right, honey! Fuck my hairy Lou Reed!” For weeks I tried to figure out why she called her vagina Lou Reed—Was she saying Lou’s head hair looked pubic? Did she consider her genitalia the Velvet Underground?—but the reference was so obscure I was stumped.

  One night I was writing a paper on Rashi’s use of the grammatical plural as a way of emphasizing the principle of fairness when I heard her screaming extra loudly. I was so curious to find out once and for all what she was saying that I climbed on top of my bed, put a glass to the ceiling, and realized she was saying “Fuck my hairy Jew beav!”

  I didn’t mind her erotic use of a self-hating pejorative but I had to finish my paper, so after the shouting subsided I put on my slippers and knocked on her door. She opened it in a ratty white bathrobe. Her makeup was a mess, half on, half off, and her hair stuck out wildly.

  “Hi,” I said. “I live below you and I was wondering if your hairy Jew beav could shtup a little more quietly.”

  “Are you Jewish?” she said.

  I nodded. “How’d you know?”

  “You said shtup. I hope I didn’t offend you with my language.”

  “On the contrary. I call my own vagina Miriam’s Well.”

  “Who is det?” said an accented voice in the background.

  “Go back to sleep, Bashir,” she said. She stepped out into the hallway, propping the door open with her foot, and whispered, “He’s Lebanese.” I must have raised my eyebrows because she added, “Christian. The good kind, not the bad. He works at the Laundromat on t
he corner. I was trying to explain what ‘gentle’ meant and one thing led to another. Sorry about the noise. I used to only have sex with the lights out and come completely silently but now that I’ve worked through it in analysis I sometimes go overboard.”

  “Well, maybe you could put a rug under your bed, or some eggshell on the wall,” I said.

  “I’ll look into it,” she said, as I started down the stairs. “Hey! I didn’t catch your name!”

  “Rachel.”

  “Well, Rachel,” she said. “Any girl who would ask me to quiet my fucking has got to be my new friend.” And from that moment on I was.

  We went out for coffee at Bagel World the next day and I asked her about Bashir. Before I knew it she was telling me all about her G-spot, her toy collection, her porno movies, and the joys of female ejaculation. I told her I’d never squirted and a few days after our conversation a messenger arrived with a brown package that had a San Francisco return address. When I opened it I found a video called How to Female Ejaculate. I watched it with a hand over my mouth, wincing, but even though the women in it were lesbianic and unattractive, they were inspiring, and afterward I spent an hour on the floor of the bathroom trying (unsuccessfully) to join the club. I went to bed frustrated by my own genital limitations but moved by Liz’s gesture. She seemed to take an interest in educating a part of me that, despite my attendance at the Berkeley of the East, hadn’t ever really gotten the schooling it deserved.

  As soon as she got to our table she gave me a moist kiss on the cheek. I was about to introduce her to my parents when she extended her hand and said, “Liz Kaminsky. You two must be the parental extremities of this lovely creature.”

  “That we are,” said my dad.

  “You look familiar,” said my mom. “Have I seen you in the neighborhood?”

  “It’s quite possible,” said Liz. “After all, I walk the streets.” My mom beckoned the waiter over and said she’d have a Chardonnay after all.

  “Liz lives in the Martha Washington too,” I said. I called my building that because out of twelve units, eleven were occupied by single women. The twelfth tenant was a guy named T. Russell who stayed inside all day smoking pot, judging by the fumes that regularly emerged from his door.

  “Well, I hope you girls look out for each other,” said my dad. Liz was standing at the head of the table, between my dad and me, and I noticed her breasts were about five inches from his eyes. She was wearing a light blue, deep v-necked cashmere shirt—the kind that leaves nothing to the imagination. My dad was leaning his head back all the way to avoid contact with the twin peaks, but I was pissed at her for standing so close. Liz was the kind of person who flirts with everyone, regardless of gender or age. She was the stink bomb of sex bombs. You couldn’t run for cover.

  “We certainly do look out for each other,” said Liz. “I take very good care of Racheleh.” She used the Yiddish derivation of my name a lot and I never knew if it was a maternal thing, a Jew-pride thing, or both.

  “How did you two meet?” my dad asked.

  “We had some noise issues,” she said.

  “You mean music?” my dad said.

  “I’m afraid the noise was coming from my end,” she said. “Literally.” Before my parents could react she put her arm around me and her right boob bumped into my eye, which made my contact slide up into the lid. I’d been so worried about my dad being in the danger zone I hadn’t realized I was.

  I blinked hard and raised my hand to my eye. “Uh-oh,” said Liz. “Did your contact pop out because of our contact?” My dad laughed way too loudly.

  “Let me look,” said my mom. She leaned across the table and stabbed at my eye like a deranged serial killer.

  “Get away,” I said, jerking my face back. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

  “I’ll help you,” said my mom.

  “Why?” I said.

  “It could be hard to find.”

  Inside the bathroom I stared in the mirror while my mom stood behind me and said helpfully, “Look under the lid.” She had just switched from hard contacts to soft and considered herself an amateur ophthalmologist.

  “Your friend is something else,” she said as I hunted.

  “Yeah, she’s sort of a provocateur.” I spotted the lens protruding near the corner. Just as it popped onto my finger I felt my underwear get wet. “Did you get it back in?” my mom said.

  I placed the lens on my eyeball and blinked a few times until it settled. “Yeah, but I think I just got my period. Can I have a tampon?”

  I reached for her bag but she held on to it like I was a mugger and said, “I don’t have any.”

  “Why not?” My mom could manage a small Eastern European army with the contents of her pocketbook.

  Her face got tight, delicate but determined. “Because…I don’t need those anymore.”

  “What?” I said, feeling queasy. “When did this happen?”

  “It’s gradual, but it stopped for good about six months ago.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “I’m not dying, Rachel,” she said. “It’s normal, you know.”

  I knew it was normal but it was still strange. I’d never thought of her as old before. She was only fifty-three. This wasn’t supposed to happen till she was a grandmother. And God knew when that was going to be.

  “You want me to go out there and ask your friend if she has any?”

  “No, Liz is such a control freak I don’t think she has a period. I’ll just use some toilet paper.” I opened the door and pushed her out.

  When I got back to the table Liz was sitting in my seat, telling my parents about a synagogue scholarship she had created through Young Friends of the JCC–Manhattan. She was in a doctoral program in women’s studies at Columbia but on the side she worked for many causes—cancer, the library, her people.

  “So you donated the money for the scholarship yourself?” my dad was saying.

  “No,” said Liz. “I endowed it. I’m very good at raising things.”

  “I’m back,” I said to Liz, hovering above the chair.

  She didn’t move. She just glanced up at me innocently and said, “Did you fish out the offending particle?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Can I have my seat back?”

  “So how long have you lived in the neighborhood?” my dad asked.

  “Three months,” she said. “I was on Amsterdam Avenue before this and let me tell you, I’m never going back. These restaurants on Smith Street are as good as Manhattan, and so much cheaper too!” She often used a cadence that made her sound like a middle-aged Jewish mother. She was half yenta, half korveh.

  “You should have seen this street five years ago,” said my mom, warming up. No conversation topic excites middle-aged women more than gentrification. “When Rachel was little the only time we went to Smith Street was to buy kids’ shoes at Johnnie’s Bootery. It was all”—she lowered her voice—“Puerto Rican drug dealers. A lot of crack.”

  “Well, it’s good the crack dealers are gone now,” said Liz. “I certainly wouldn’t want to live near any.”

  Before I could remind her she was a crack dealer she started waving frantically at the door. “I’m over here, Gordon!” she shouted. A tall, dark-skinned black guy was coming in. One other cause Liz worked very hard for was minority men. The whole two months I’d known her, every guy I’d seen coming or going from her apartment was Arab, Latin, or black. She was a hetero Mapplethorpe, a female De Niro.

  The guy was Tyson Beckford material, with smooth cocoa skin and a shaved head, and he was wearing an Indian cotton long-sleeved shirt that only someone that attractive could get away with. Though I hadn’t met him I knew he said “Fuck yeah!” when he ejaculated.

  His name was Gordon Thompson III and they’d met at the Brooklyn Inn bar. She’d been drinking alone when he galloped up on horseback with some buddies and parked his horse outside. He was a member of the Black Cowboy Federation of America, this group of unbelievably sexy black
men who put on Stetsons and rode shiny horses throughout brownstone Brooklyn at night to call attention to the history of cowboys of color. He checked her out and she told the bartender to send him a black and tan. Instead of getting offended he laughed and drank it, and when his friends disappeared into the pool room he struck up a conversation. Since then they’d been inseparable and some nights I’d come home to find his horse tied to a lamppost.

  She ran from our table, raced over to the door, gave him a long French kiss, and squeezed his ass hard with both hands. He removed them quickly and looked around, embarrassed.

  “Is that her boyfriend?” said my dad.

  “Liz doesn’t have boyfriends.”

  “He looks just like Denzel Washington,” my mom said.

  “He doesn’t look anything like Denzel Washington,” I said.

  Liz took him by the hand and led him to our table. “Gordon, this is my dear friend Rachel Block, and these are her parents Mr. and Mrs. Block.”

  “Call me Richard,” said my dad. He’s such a dork around black men.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Gordon. As they made small talk I found myself inadvertently glancing at the caricature on the wall behind Gordon’s head. My mom, spotting me, turned to look, swallowed, and quickly turned back. My dad, not wanting to be left out of the game, glanced over too. Gordon spun around to see what the commotion was about and when he turned back he didn’t look so good.

  “Vas? Vas?” said Liz, craning her neck. “Oh,” she said when she spotted it. “I asked the owner about that the last time I was here. It’s some mascot for a French chocolate and banana drink. Isn’t it adorable?”

  “No, it’s not adorable,” said Gordon, regarding her as though he was not entirely sure how he wound up in this particular restaurant with this particular girl.

  “It’s meant in fun,” she said. “It’s cute, it’s retro. It’s so Uncle Ben’s!” He stared at her in disbelief. “Minstrel’s back!” she said. “Didn’t you see Bamboozled?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but that movie was a total taking to task of—”

  “Whoa there, cowboy,” she said. “Calm your bad self down.” He opened his mouth to say something, then decided against it, shook his head, and walked slowly to the door. “Gordon!” Liz called. “Would you just—” She ran after him, calling over her shoulder, “Mr. and Mrs. Block, delight to meet you!”