My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  “So how are you?” he asked weightily, like I had dropped out because I’d gone insane instead of because I’d chosen to. He was holding a jumbo bag of Pampers under one arm.

  “Fine, fine,” I said. “What are you doing in my neighborhood?”

  “I was just visiting some residents over at the Cobble Hill nursing home, for Prof Dev.” Prof Dev was Professional Development, a hands-on training course we had to take every year in order to graduate. “They’re so brave, those old folks. They’ve got so much ruach.” Ruach meant spirit and it was one of those words that the teacher’s pets all loved to say with an exaggerated Hebrew accent.

  “Really?” I said. “Every time I pass by and look down in the window they seem kind of catatonic.”

  “Oh no,” he said. “They’re filled with life.” Stu was the kind of guy who had to ennoble everything he did. He shifted the diapers from one arm to the other and said, “Shoshanna just called to tell me to pick these up. She’s down to one diaper and she goes a little batty when she gets so low.”

  “How is Zev anyway?” All the rabbis that had kids gave them biblical names even though they themselves had assimilationist ones like Randy or Mitchell.

  “Oh, he’s a terror. Eighteen months and getting into everything. What are you buying?”

  “Cold medication,” I said, shoving the box up into my armpit. He nodded and then surveyed the wall, which, in addition to condoms, held hemorrhoid ointment, suppositories, and diaphragm jelly.

  He cleared his throat, swallowed, and said, “So is it true that you’re a bartender? Sharon Margolis thought she saw you through a window but said you were dressed so provocatively she was convinced it was someone else.”

  I debated my options. I could tell him I was a contract killer or Jew for Jesus but all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. “That was me,” I said.

  “That’s a shift, huh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you spend all your time with misfits.”

  “It’s actually not that different from being a rabbi,” I said tersely. “I mean, people ask for advice. I provide counseling.”

  “So why’d you drop out? I heard one of your patients died while you were sitting with him and you completely freaked out. Is that why?”

  “I think my reasons for dropping out are between me and God, Stu.”

  He stared at me coldly—annoyed I wasn’t giving him any good dish to report back to his friends, even though gossip was against Jewish law—and then he sighed and said, “You know, I should probably thank you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I won a hundred bucks because of you.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “A few of us had a pool going on how long you were going to last.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, wanting to belt him.

  “I had you leaving in the second semester, Sharon had you leaving second year, and Joe Slotnick must have had a lot of faith in you because he thought you were going to make it to ordination.”

  I wanted to take out one of the rubbers and slingshot it into his pimpled face. “And why are you telling me this?”

  “I thought you’d get a kick out of it,” he said.

  “How sweet of you,” I said. “It’s nice to know my colleagues had faith in me.”

  “Rabbinical school really isn’t about having faith in each other,” he said. “It’s about having faith in HaShem.” He pointed to the sky. “It was obvious to me from day one that your faith was shaky.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You were always looking out the window during services and you seemed to pray without ruach.” There was that word again. “Plus you wear clothes that look like they’re from flea markets.” He eyed my tan trench coat and the bright print peeking out from underneath it.

  “It’s called vintage!” I snapped.

  “You always struck me as more of an art school student. I knew you were hoping to revitalize the rabbinate but somehow I could never picture you on a pulpit.”

  I took in his oily hair and side part, his paunch riding over his high-hiked pants, his smudged glasses. He was the putz calling the kettle black. It was people like him who caused the declining rate of American Jewish affiliation. Who could entrust their soul to a rabbi who couldn’t even take care of his own skin? I wanted to tell him it was better that I’d left than stayed on like morons like him, who were in it for the power and the narcissistic high, who had no creative thinking capacity whatsoever. I wanted to tell him that if he’d chosen the internship at Memorial instead of the cushy one up at Temple Shaaray Tefila working with nursery school kids, he might have had an opportunity to do some soul-searching himself. But Stu was a third-generation rabbi with a messiah complex. Arguing with him about anything was a waste of breath.

  I was about to head out of the store when something strange happened. I thought about the way I’d let Stu walk all over me, and I imagined Powell being in this situation. What Would Powell Do? Before I was completely aware of what was happening, I pulled out the LifeStyles and said, “Great running into you, Stu, but I gotta get going. I have some fucking to do.”

  “What?” Stu gasped.

  “I said, ‘I have some fucking to do.’ ” He reddened and looked as though he was about to combust. “Great seeing you. Listen, come by the bar sometime. Roxy, on Bergen and Smith. Have you heard that Yiddish saying? ‘If you’re at odds with your rabbi make peace with your bartender.’ ” He gaped at me and I bounded up the stairs.

  THE first thing Powell said when I came in was, “Ya late.”

  I looked at my watch. “Only five minutes,” I said.

  “If I had been in a different mood,” he said, “I wouldn’t have let you up. I consider tardiness the worst of all sins. Ya lucky the trickster isn’t more active in me right now.”

  “I thought the trickster was active in you,” I said.

  “I said the devil’s active. The devil and the trickster are two very different symbols. The devil seeks evil; the trickster seeks play.”

  This wasn’t the most romantic opener. Then again, I had arrived without underwear; it wasn’t exactly candles and incense to begin with.

  “I brought you something,” I said, and handed him the bag from the store. He looked inside, pulled out the condom box, regarded it as though it was a small dead animal, and deposited it on the mail table by the door.

  “Let me take ya coat,” he said. He hung it up in the closet and gave me a once-over. “You cut a fine swath,” he said.

  “They’re different decades but I feel they work together.”

  He took the hem of the dress in both hands and lifted it slowly up above my waist. I felt like I was being unwrapped on Christmas morning. “Very good,” he said when he saw. “You obeyed.”

  He kissed me and I went liquid in his arms. I imagined a war going on outside, explosions and catastrophes, and us still kissing with the world swirling around. I didn’t think about his paunch or the flabbiness in his upper arms. He was a 1950s stud and I was a Tennessee Williams heroine who always had trouble breathing.

  I felt him kicking the back of my leg. I wasn’t sure what he was trying to do so I resisted and stood firm. He pushed his foot into the back of my knee and I realized he was cuing me to kneel. I wished he had just said it. I sunk down, banging my right knee against the floor as I did.

  He stood in front of me and as though on pornographic autopilot I unbuckled his pants. It was terrifying and pale. I took it in my mouth and squeezed the base. He seemed to sense my inner blow slut. He patted the side of my face and said, “Good girl,” and right away I got crazy inside. I sucked him deeper and then I reached up under my skirt and started playing with myself. I wasn’t sure if he could see and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to. I hoped he wouldn’t think it was too Gen X.

  When I looked up he was watching my hand. I stopped, ashamed. “Keep going,” he said. He patted my hair and let me control the force. He kept saying “That’s
right” and “You’re my little hoo-ah,” and this time I didn’t laugh.

  He was gazing down at me so meanly, like one of those huge talking trees from The Wizard of Oz. I thought about his sternness, how he knew me, and how we were animus and anima, meant to be together. I felt that if I could just be with him like this every day, dress up and come over in the broad daylight, then it wouldn’t matter what I did for a living or how long it took me to get a real job. He would be the most important thing and all the other stuff would be meaningless. His eyes were so knowing, so slanted. It was as though he understood everything about me even though he hardly knew me, and his cool knowledge made me so moved that I came.

  “I came,” I said. I am a very demure comer and if I don’t make noise they just don’t know.

  “That’s it,” he said, like he was patting a good horse’s flank.

  He pushed me down onto the floor on my stomach and lifted my dress and after fumbling around for a few seconds, he was in.

  “What about the box?” I asked lamely.

  “We’ll just do it like this for a minute,” he said.

  He moved in me and made his savage sigh. I found myself angling my pelvis up toward him. It was risky and stupid but we had passed the prophylactic point of no return, the point at which you feel that if you were going to get pregnant you already are, in which case all the other sex is icing.

  The floor was cold against my face. I felt some drool trickle out of my mouth and form a small puddle by my lip and I moaned gutturally like a little retarded girl. I felt raw and weak and low-IQ. I noticed a coin on the floor under the couch and as I was trying to determine whether it was a penny or a nickel I heard a triumphant roar and felt a warm mess on my back.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, and went into the bathroom. I stood up, brushed myself off, and wandered over to the window. Three boys were playing hockey in the street and I wondered if they would grow up to be as ruthless as Powell.

  He came in, picked up his pants, and started putting them on. I walked into the bathroom silently to wash my butt and then I went to the sink and threw some water on my face. My hair was a mess and my eyelids droopy and worn. As I dried my face I saw that the collar of my beautiful dress had ripped along the neck. I wondered what would be left of me when he was through, if I would just be a pile of scabs and ratty threads. He had kicked me out of his apartment on the first date and fucked me on the floor on the second. It wasn’t exactly an upward curve.

  I wanted to sleep over, to meet his kid. I wanted to have sex on the bed again, to move up in his life, not down.

  When I came back Powell was sitting on the couch fully dressed, listening to bossa nova and sipping from a glass of wine. There was an empty glass on the table, and next to it an open bottle of red. “You all cleaned up?” he said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  He pointed to the empty glass and said, “You want some?” I nodded and he poured me some. It was Côtes du Rhône, and there was a tag on it that said $17.99. It looked like a new bottle, that he’d opened just for us, not one he’d had lying around. Maybe I was making too big a deal of the floor thing. At least it was hardwood. It could have been parquet.

  I drank the wine and we sat there quietly in the evening light. But as I watched him aerate it seemed like his face had turned frosty. I heard Liz saying, “How come when we make them come, they like us less?” and it was like a negative mantra hovering over us, mingling with the smell of our sex. Was Powell like those guys who hated women as soon as they had them, or was he old enough to know that a woman you could have was the best kind there was?

  “Look what you did to my collar,” I said. He held it by the corner and flopped it up and down like a child with a light switch. “What should I do about it?”

  “What do you mean what should you do?”

  “Do you have a needle and thread?”

  “You should leave it like that. It looks good.”

  “But I’m going to my mother’s book group.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “You’ll give ’em something to be nostalgic about.”

  MY parents’ brownstone was on Warren Street, between Clinton and Court. It was a modest building painted dark red and came off more heimish than stately. They’d been renting the ground and first floors since 1975. Even after the neighborhood got more gentrified, they continued to rent, and although they only paid a rent-stabilized grand a month, these days they kicked themselves for never having bought.

  As I came up the stoop I saw my mom and her friends through the window. There were five of them scattered around, on the couch and on floor pillows, chatting and laughing in pastel Eileen Fisher, like the cast of a General Foods International Coffee ad. “I’m so glad you made it!” she said, greeting me in the entrance hallway. “Did you finish the book?”

  “Uh—almost,” I said. “So are you nervous about leading?”

  “I’m used to it. I did The Corrections and Things Fall Apart and they were two of our most heated discussions.”

  “Where’s Dad?” I said as we came in the door.

  “In his office. I told him he was banished until I gave him the signal he could come up.” We started to head into the living room but she pulled me back. “Listen. He told me he told you about his job situation. Don’t mention anything about it in front of my friends. He’s very self-conscious about the whole thing.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “How are you doing about it?”

  “Fine,” she shrugged. “I don’t like having him around all the time, but I don’t have much choice.”

  As soon as I walked into the living room I was greeted by a loud chorus of “Racheleh!” My mom had been friends with the same group of women for the past thirty years. They all had kids around the same age—in the early seventies they had a rotating playgroup at different women’s houses—and since then they’d stayed close, getting together regularly to gossip and kvell, and starting the book group a couple years back, when they became empty-nesters.

  There was Nina Halberstam, a tall go-getter corporate attorney and our across-the-street neighbor; Carol Landsman, a curly-haired social worker; Joan Ibbotson, an ESL teacher with a bad red-hair dye job; and Shelly Katz, a hot divorcée and the only smoker. Nina was pouring red wine into their glasses and I could tell by the tint in their Semitic faces that this wasn’t the first bottle.

  “How’s the waitressing going?” Nina asked, getting up to embrace me.

  “Bartending,” I said.

  “I thought you were a waitress.”

  “Nope, not that classy,” I said. My mom gave me a dirty look as she headed into the kitchen.

  “I bet you get picked up all the time,” Carol said. “I was a waitress at the Caffe Cino in the early seventies and I went home with a different man every night.” She looked out the window nostalgically. “Of course, there wasn’t any AIDS back then.”

  My mom came in from the kitchen with two baskets, one filled with French bread, the other with grapefruits. As she set them down on the table she spotted my collar. “Oh my God,” she said. “What happened?”

  “It must have ripped when I was putting it on this morning,” I said, holding it up. “That’s the problem with vintage. It just doesn’t wear well.”

  “That’s a bad rip,” Carol said, running her finger over it and giving me a dubious look.

  “Why are you serving grapefruit and bread?” I asked.

  “It’s not grapefruit,” my mom said. “It’s blood oranges. And day-old bread.” We all looked at her blankly. “In honor of menopause,” she said, giggling like a mischievous schoolgirl.

  “You are too much, Sue,” said Joan.

  “What? I’m just trying to be theme-driven. We had New England clam chowder for The Perfect Storm, why can’t we have day-old bread for The Silent Passage?”

  “That chowder was delicious,” said Joan. “More memorable than the book.”

  “We’re all here,” my mom said, “so why don’t we get
started?” She grabbed a copy of the book from the coffee table, and a page of typed notes. They all got exuberant eager faces, like this was the highlight of their week, and pulled copies of the book out of their totes. Carol sat on the couch and patted the space next to her. I didn’t want to be in her proximity because she always leered at me like a lez but there weren’t any other seats so I did.

  As I sat down I felt my dress against my ass and remembered I wasn’t wearing underwear. I crossed my legs tightly so I couldn’t flash and held my collar up with my hand to cover the bra. I felt like a trailer-trash ho who’d accidentally wandered into an Anti-Defamation League benefit.

  “Why don’t we start with general comments?” said my mom, leaning back to survey the group. “Gail Sheehy says menopause is about the need to know and the fear of knowing. Reactions?”

  “This goddamn Gail Sheehy made me want to put a hole in my head,” said Nina. “It’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever read in my life. If we go on HRT we’ll die of breast cancer and if we don’t we’ll die of osteoporosis. What are we supposed to do?”

  “I have a problem with the way you categorized HRT, Nina,” Joan jumped in. “I’ve started talking about it with my ob-gyn and he says that given a history of osteoporosis I should stay on the hormones. I know it’s politicized but it’s a personal choice.”

  “You gotta be out of your mind!” Nina snapped. “When the Women’s Health Initiative study came out I knew I would never do it. For years the male medical establishment told us hormones were safe and now we know they were lying to us! Why am I going to take something that could give me not just breast cancer, but heart attacks, strokes, blood clots?” Joan answered back, and then they both started talking at once. They were the middle-aged Jets and the Sharks.

  “Hey!” my mom bellowed. Usually her voice was pretty soft but she had these power-lungs from teaching and once in a while she’d show them off. “No interrupting during Open Comments!”

  “She’s such a good leader,” Carol clucked.

  My mom blushed and looked down at her notes. “I think Sheehy’s best point is that what’s right for one woman isn’t necessarily right for another. And it seems the reason these discussions get so polarized”—Polarized? Had she been taking correspondence courses at Brown?—“is because any discussion of menopause, at bottom, is a discussion of mortality.” They all got hushed and nodded reverentially like black ladies in church.