This time there was no one to hide from, no one to come up the stairs and disturb us, now we had all the time in the world to frolic in each other’s arms. For days we stayed in bed, days and days and days, until I said, “Evie, mamela, we have to eat,” and we stopped what we was doing to order in Chinese food and then got back in bed to feed each other with chopsticks, with our fingers, licking chow mein off each other, laughing all the time. At first I was shy with Evie, a blushing bride I wasn’t no more, the flesh and the ground was having a meeting, you know what I’m saying, I wasn’t no spring chicken, but Evie told me shah.
“You’re beautiful, Ruthie, just like I remembered.” And I remembered, too. My hand remembered her breast, my mouth remembered her thigh. Two widows we were, two grown-up ladies with grown-up children yet, it’s hard for you to imagine, but oh, such a time we had, Evie and me, such noises that came out from our throats, our bodies bucking up and down so, I was only afraid we wouldn’t break the bed and they’d find us there all in a tangle, two old ladies who couldn’t utz themselves up from the floor.
You, you’re young yet, you think you know from sex, but just wait, and boy did I wait, for over thirty years I waited to put my hands on her, my Evie, to lick her breasts, her belly, to drown once more in her smile, her eyes. Did we rock, did we roll, did we shriek, I’m surprised the house we didn’t burn down, so hot for each other we were. It’s a well-kept secret darling, but you should know, old ladies do know from such pleasures, believe me, you’ll see, you think you got it good now, just you wait, you know, like they say, the best is yet to come.
I don’t even regret the years we spent apart, Evie and I, God has his reasons after all, and I’m not even mad no more on my mother, may she rest in peace, she only did what she thought was best, she and Evie’s mother, too. Evie and I had fourteen good years together until God looked down one day and said why should Ruthie Epstein have it so good, such a gorgeous maideleh she has, it’s enough already, and God put up his hand and said to Evie, come, and so she did, so sweet she was, so good, God took a look and decided He wanted her all for Himself. All right, Evie and me, we’ve been sepa-rated before, God wants me down here and her up there, nu, who am I to complain, fourteen years we had, and boy did we make up for lost time, believe me, I’m telling you.
So that’s all there is, there ain’t no more, you can turn off your robot there, I told you enough, a secret I keep close to my heart that I never told nobody before, even my own children didn’t know, why should I tell them? They thought it was so nice, a roommate I had, I shouldn’t be so lonely, and when they came to visit, Evie slept in another bedroom, the house was big, we had plenty room. I’ll tell you something, even when the children wasn’t visiting, sometimes she slept in another room, when you’re old sometimes you want to spread out, you got a little gas maybe, you need a night to yourself.
All right, I’m tired now, so much talking, talking, talking, but I hope you got what you wanted, I hope you get an A in your women’s history class—all right, history, herstory, whatever, this is my story, it’s a mystery, nu, why I was so lucky, so blessed, you should only be so lucky, may God shine such good fortune down on you. Believe me, God has his ways, nu, you think it’s a coincidence that out of all the old ladies in this joint here, you picked me to interview, you came into my room? You and me, we ve got something in common, we’re cut from the same cloth, darling, nu, I can tell, and listen, mamela, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, maybe your mother don’t like it, your father, whoever, give them time, it’s a different world today, they’ll come around. You’re young, you’re a beautiful girl even with the purple eyebrows, nu. you should only live and be well and find your own Evie, God willing, and may she live and be well and have a long, happy life together with you.
Bagels and Bialeys
Gayle Brandeis
It all started when Toby Horwitz confessed to his wife that once, as a teenager, he had jacked off using a bagel.
“You did not!” Rachel tried to sound indignant, but she couldn’t stop laughing, her black, curly hair spilling into her eyes. She shook her head and picked up an Everything from the platter that sat between them on the table, piled with bagels and bialeys from a deli on Fairfax. She turned it slowly around in her hand to inspect its sexual potential.
“Wasn’t the hole a bit big?” she put her hand through the bagel so it dangled around her wrist like a bracelet.
“What? Are you disparaging my manhood?” Toby smacked Rachel playfully with a rolled up Calendar section from the Los Angeles Times. “You don’t think I could fill up a bagel hole?”
“No, really,” Rachel shook the bagel back onto her plate. Poppy and sesame seeds still clung to her arm, along with a few oily brown shreds of onion. “You know I think your manhood is lovely. But bagel holes are a bit—roomy, I guess you’d say? These are, at least. Then there are some you can’t even stick your pinky through.”
“The holes in the Sam Deli bagels were just the perfect size, honey,” Toby stuck his tongue out at Rachel through a cranberry bagel and waggled it around.
“Wasn’t it kind of rough?” Rachel was in her inquisitor mode, leaning back in her chair, arms folded over her chest.
“I slathered the inside of the hole with cream cheese,” he grinned.
Rachel cocked an eyebrow.
“The ingenuity of the young and horny.” Toby shrugged and dipped his finger into the whipped low-fat sun-dried tomato pesto cream cheese they both loved, and slid it into Rachel’s mouth. She sucked it off distractedly.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never looked at a bialey that way,” said Toby, as if all women lusted after bread products.
Rachel shook her head with conviction, Toby’s finger still in her mouth. She didn’t tell him that she herself as a teenager had once committed a minor indiscretion with a kosher dill, a new one, still firm and bright green. The thought that a rabbi had blessed the jar made Rachel feel incredibly dirty afterward. She had difficulty looking at Rabbi Tepper for weeks.
Toby pulled his wet finger back and picked up a bagel and a bialey, one in each hand. “They’re a perfect yoni and lingam, don’t you think, Rache?”
“You know, I doubt they were designed with Indian mythology in mind,” Rachel smiled. They had first met in a Hindu Art class at UCLA twelve years ago, a class that for some reason was teeming with Jews like themselves. The first time Toby asked Rachel out was the day they had learned about those anatomically suggestive stone fertility symbols. “You’re only after my yoni, aren’t you?” Rachel had replied sarcastically, but nevertheless, she had agreed to meet him for dinner that night at the kosher Indian restaurant, Bombay Bubbe’s. She had been more than a little bit curious about his lingam, herself. Twelve years later, she was still curious, for which she was grateful.
“You never know.” Toby now leaned across the table toward her, slowly bringing the bialey close to the bagel, sliding it through the lip of the hole, then drawing it back out again. “Things are often a lot more connected than they seem.”
He started to move the bialey in and out of the bagel, slowly at first, but then faster and faster, until crumbs and seeds and hard garlic pellets were flying all over the place. Finally, Toby and Rachel had no other choice. What could they do but knock aside all the bread products and coffee and orange juice and newspapers? What could they do but make crazy, leavened love right there on the kitchen table, their bodies fitting together as perfectly as any stick and any hole—warm, wet flesh, or bread, or stone.
L’Chaim: A Shiksa’s Story
Carol Queen
I grew up in a house that looked across a valley, a wall of trees reaching up high as the sky, a river running down below. She grew up with canyons made of tall buildings. New York City rising all around. But she wound up on my side of the world, out West to go to school, and after the glass and concrete and brownstone she wanted to see the woods and the ocean. So we drove all over the back roads, up and down hills, looking at the lan
d that was missing from her world—which until recently had looked like that famous NewYorker cover with New York’s familiar streets stretching away, and tiny San Francisco an afterthought in the background. We did go to San Francisco together, but mostly we drove the back roads, pointing out deer and herons to each other, pulling over at scenic lookouts to read the little bronze plaques and learn the place’s history. When the sunset was especially good we pulled over to fuck.
She dated only shiksas then, had as much of a fascination with the blonde, the WASP, or the Scandinavian surname as she did with the wild country settled by Okies. I grew up in the hills we traveled on our weekend road trips, in a town where the most ethnic it ever got was one Basque family (besides, of course, the displaced Indians living sullenly on the outskirts). That I grew up on a dirt road with a dad who raised sheep was a revelation to her; that she grew up wearing white lipstick, the leader of a gang of savvy Brooklyn girls, was more than a revelation to me. When she took me to New York I stared up at the buildings with awe, the hickest of shiksas.
“Come on,” she’d say impatiently, pulling me back into the subway for another trip to see another wonder. When we got out it would be the Brooklyn Bridge or the Carnegie Deli.
When her mother met me she said I had nice skin.
I wondered about it, her dating only shiksas. But she grew up with practically nothing but Jews around her, her old grandparents and their peers, who had never really assimilated, still living so close to Ellis Island, where the immigration man couldn’t spell their last names and simply shortened them. The ghosts of the Lower East Side, so close. It was romantic to me, but not to her. So she fucked shiksas, who appreciated her difference but didn’t know too much about it.
I certainly appreciated it. My other, pale girlfriends turned transparent and vanished in comparison to her; she was lusty and intense, acerbic and funny, she had more personality than I had ever seen packed into one small person, and I adored her.
Until I met her, I had never met anyone who was not afraid of sex. Sex was so much her element that it made everyone else seem disconnected. I wanted to feel that comfortable, that at home in my body, that natural and adventuresome—and eventually I did.
To her it was awesome that I would pack a cooler and get in my van and drive up a mountain, find a place to camp and just sleep there, outside. To me it was awesome that she could masturbate and read the paper at the same time—I always had to concentrate when I did it, while for her it could be as desultory as scratching. She had once counted how many times she could come in one day, and I lost count at fifty-four. So when we made love, because I could come only perhaps twice, once in the morning and once at night, I would have to pace myself against her amazing capacity. But if I came too soon (and, unlike with men, that meant any time before forty-five minutes) she could keep going as long as she wanted by rubbing her clit—her lively, tireless clit—on my thigh or mons. I marveled that coming could be someone’s forte this way, marveled when she came just by making me come. To be this orgasmic, I thought, she must have had an unbelievable head start—and it was true: she had been orgasmic since she was a little girl, and her moth-er had simply whispered to her that she ought to go into her own room for that. I don’t remember what my mother said to me, but whatever it was, it worked: I didn’t try it again till I was fifteen.
She loved to cook, and fixed me wonderful meals, murmuring, “Eat, mamele,” just like her mother and grandmother had said to her. Though this was the 1970s and no one we knew possessed a dildo (or would admit to it), her well-stocked kitchen always contained something to play with if we got tired of fingers—and anyway, “Eat, mamele” could be taken two ways, if you thought about it.
Right before Christmas, with irritating goyische stuff in every shop and public building, we found ourselves in the grocery store looking twice at Santa’s thick, cello-wrapped candy canes, nearly as big around as my wrist.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked, and we rushed home to celebrate the season with the most thrilling-ly naughty dildo imaginable. I hope that helped make up for all the annoying Christmases before and since.
We agreed as we combed the back roads that the West seemed to have no Jews, except recent immigrants like herself. The road trips took us into enemy territory on a regular basis. Shopkeepers at filling stations, the only businesses in towns off the interstate, would look at her suspiciously; she always got nervous when they said, “You’re from New York City, arntcha?” She insisted this was code for “You’re a Jew, huh?” A naive shiksa, I wasn’t sure the hicks I grew up with knew a Jew when they saw one, or how they could connect her with the Trilateral Commission and the international banking conspiracy just by looking—but xenophobic about New Yorkers? You bet.
Still, her concern rubbed off on me, wise as I was in the way of small-minded country people. For that matter, Mr. and Mrs. John Birch Society wouldn’t think much of the fact that we put our faces between each other’s legs every chance we got. But nothing ever happened to us as we roamed through the small towns where people were trapped in small and bigoted lives.
On a trip to Portland I took her to an old and ostentatious deli, which, miraculously enough, she called a find, and after lunch we took a walk, stumbling on a beautiful old synagogue that had been built in the 1860s. If there were no Jews out here, who had built it? We slipped inside and read the plaques that detailed its history, learning together about the diaspora of German Jews that predated the one that brought her great-grandparents here from Russia.
We stayed up all night after we saw Reds, alternately talking and fucking, realizing we had predecessors. I idolized Emma Goldman. I told her about the young Jewish sisters who’d hosted Goldman when she traveled to San Francisco. Fifteen and sixteen years old, they’d headed an anarchist cell and recruited members from their synagogue. We talked about free love, though it was easier to talk about than to get right in the jealousy-plagued real world.
We talked all the time, about everything. She was passionate and opinionated. I was passionate and questioned everything. We stopped talking only when, locked in a savory, wet sixty-nine, we couldn’t talk any more because our lips and tongues were too busy tracing every juicy inch of each other.
I took her to Crater Lake, crawled the van slowly up the mountainside, the elevation rising and the forest getting more and more sparse as we climbed. Up into the snow line my hand snaked into her overalls, found her pussy wet for me—if she could masturbate reading the paper, she could certainly enjoy the view while I drove one-handed. It was so early in the season that no one was there—the road had just been cleared—and the van putt-putted up the ridge in second gear. In my fingertips I felt her getting close, and I slowed, just a little.
“Wait, wait a second!” I swung around the last curve. The van topped the ridge. Out in the wide-open West, a wonder greater than New York ranged out before us: her first sight of Crater Lake, unearthly blue in its vast caldera, ringed by snowy mountains. Her thighs closed tight around my hand as she came hard, came loud, at the sight.
Now whenever I raise a toast, I don’t say “Cheers!” What a noncommittal Brit saying. I say “L’chaim!”—to life—always a little bit in her honor, because she taught me to taste life fully. L’chaim, my love.
By the way, she lives with a nice Jewish girl now, and I can come fifty-four times in one day.
Catholic Boys
Harvest Garfinkel
Nancy thoughtfully chewed her salad, wishing it had blue cheese dressing on it instead of whatever flavorless low-fat substitute she had ordered.
“I just can’t help it. It’s Catholic boys. Always has been. I just love ‘em,” she said.
“Well I think you’re nuts,” Diana shot back. “I know all about them. Catholic boys in the neighborhood. Catholic boys at school. Catholic boys at the store. Catholic boys on every goddamn corner. They’re either afraid of women or contemptuous of us. And they can’t fuck. Well, okay, except maybe the
Italian ones. But they’re all screwed up about sex in one way or another. You’re Jewish. What’s wrong with Jewish guys? I’m crazy about them. All that nice, soft, dark fur—they’re definitely more sensual.”
“I guess you should know, but I’m not feeling analytical right now. I just remember the Catholic boys I used to stare at on the bus in high school. You saw them only on the bus, ’cause they all went to parochial school. ‘Bishop this or that’ on their T-shirts. They had muscles and hard stares,” Nancy said dreamily. “And they were different. You could never know them. There just wasn’t any way. They didn’t live in the neighborhood. And if they were at school they were never in my classes, ’cause you know, they majored in cars or something. Like there was this one guy in my study hall one year before I got out of going to them. Tom, his name was Tom. Jewish boys are never named Tom. And he was Polish, too. Not even Irish or Italian. Blonde hair and blue eyes, of course. Had to be blonde. And if he was in public school he had to be either really poor, or a very bad boy. He seemed like a bad boy. I felt outrageous just for checking him out. I guess I must have stared at him a lot, ’cause he changed his seat.”
The Oy of Sex Page 4