Me: “Fuck you. My couch is amazing.”
Roy: “It’s amazing for a nursing home.”
Me: “Is this why you called me? To talk shit about my couch?”
Roy: “Merav is pregnant.”
Me: “Holy shit.”
Roy: “And we’re getting married.”
Me: “Holy shit. Are you serious?!”
I couldn’t fucking believe it. I knew that after he returned from New York, they had started talking again, but I hadn’t realized they got back together. I said, “What happened? You saw what a mess my life was and figured, ‘Fuck it, maybe the grass isn’t actually greener on the other side’?”
Roy: “Pretty much. Anyway, you better get your sorry ass here for the wedding. It’s in three months.”
Me: “Three months!? Oh my God. I can’t believe this.”
Roy: “Well believe it. And be there.”
Me: “I promise you, I will definitely, definitely be there, no matter what. I’m ready for an adventure!”
9
Everything Is Perfect
Moving day.
Because I had given Noam the vast majority of what we had gathered after a decade together, I had very little to be moved by way of furniture. He had moved into a bare apartment and needed furniture more than I did but beyond that, I hadn’t really wanted any of it. It was too painful to look at it. And now I was pretty happy about it because I got to buy all new stuff and it was a lot easier to move when you hardly had anything to move. The only thing I was taking with me from grandmother’s apartment was the pink couch, which was still covered in plastic. I just couldn’t bear to part with it.
Upon hearing I was taking the couch, Uncle Bark, who had said in no uncertain terms that “anything you want is yours,” started to hem and haw that now maybe he wanted it. I was like, “Uncle Bark, you live in a five-bedroom furnished home and you’re constantly complaining that you have no room as it is. What in the world are you going to do with this couch?”
He relented. My mother, on the other hand, having seen my new apartment, was less amenable to this idea. I brought her and my father over before I actually moved in to the apartment to show it to them. I thought they would be as excited as I was. My father, upon seeing the neighborhood, said, “Well, I guess you won’t have a problem getting Chinese food.”
My mother, upon entering the whorehouse-like hallway and seeing all the garbage bags lined up against the walls, was like, “Oh my God! Is it legal to store garbage here? This could be a real fire hazard.”
Me: “Really, Mommy? How the fuck is this a fire hazard, exactly?”
My mother: “Peri, do you really need to use such language! It’s dangerous to have so much garbage in the entrance of a building. Not to mention unsanitary.”
Me: “Uh, Mommy, in case you haven’t noticed, you’re in Chinatown. The owners of this building are Chinese. Have you ever been to China? I have, and believe me, being sanitary isn’t one of their strong points.”
My mother: “Well, I think this is disgusting. I don’t know how you’re going to live like this.” She turned to my father. “Michael, can you believe this? How is she going to live like this?”
My father ignored her. When my mother starts on one of her rants, my father usually ignores her. My father, of course, could have cared less either way. He was happy I wasn’t doing anything “illegal” anymore and really just wanted the same thing he usually wanted—for me and my mother to shut up and stop arguing.
My mother went on, “Are there rats here? There could be an infestation of rats here, with all this garbage. How do you know there are no rats here? Peri, did you ask the landlord if there are rats in this building?”
I looked at my father for help. He looked back at me, as though to say, “I’ve got nothing for ya, kid.”
Me: “Yeah, Mommy, right before I signed the lease, I asked Jonny if there were rats—”
My mother, interrupting me: “Your landlord’s name is Jonny? I thought you said your landlord was Chinese.”
Me: “He is Chinese!”
My mother, turning to my father: “Michael, have you ever heard of a Chinese man’s name being Jonny? Why is his name Jonny?”
My father continued to ignore my mother. I, like a moron, engaged her.
Me: “I don’t know why his name is Jonny! Why is your name Eve? Who gives a shit why his name is Jonny!”
This all really happened. My mother really asked these questions. My mother really asked questions like these all the time and actually expected answers. And she could just keep going on and on. No one else even needed to be in the room. She’d go on for hours.
My mother: “So he said there were no rats?”
Me: “No, Mommy, he told me the place was infested.”
My mother: “I’m glad you think this is funny. Rats carry all sorts of horrible diseases.”
My father, speaking for the first time: “Maybe they cook them in the bakery next door.” And then he started cracking up.
After we got past the rats, my mother, who is an interior designer and thinks she is the only person in the entire world who knows anything about what furniture and apartments and houses should look like, went bananas when I told her I was taking Grandma’s couch. She was like, “Oh, Peri, don’t. It’s so ugly.”
Me: “It is not ugly! It’s cool.”
My mother: “Oh, yeah, very cool. Especially the plastic. That’s my favorite part.”
Me: “It just needs to be reupholstered.”
My mother: “Oh, sure! I forgot how wealthy you are and that you know all about furniture! Do you have any idea how much it costs to reupholster a couch? And besides, that couch is going to look ridiculous in here. It’s going to make the rest of the apartment look even more miniature than it does already!”
I can always count on my mother to say exactly what I don’t want to hear. I thought the apartment was a relatively nice size. Granted it was the size of a very wealthy person’s walk-in closet, but still.
I was like, “Thank you, Mommy, for all of your valuable input. I’m sure the couch will fit perfectly.”
“And,” my mother added, “I don’t know how in the world you are going to manage with those stairs. They’re insane.”
The movers, upon arriving at my new den of iniquity, agreed with my mother. I could tell by the looks on their faces that they were less than pleased when they saw the stairs. They complained, but ultimately they brought all the boxes up the stairs pretty easily. The couch, on the other hand, was proving to be a bit of a problem. After about forty minutes of futzing with it, they gave up. One of them, the taller, bald one, Dennis, was like, “Sorry, lady.”
I hate it when people call me “lady.” I was like, “What do you mean, ‘sorry’?”
Dennis: “It don’t fit.”
Me: “What do you mean, ‘it don’t fit’?”
Dennis shrugged his shoulders, like he couldn’t have cared less, which was probably very much the case. He repeated, “The couch. It don’t fit through the door.”
Me: “Well, what do you propose to do about that?”
Dennis: “Ain’t much I can do.”
This incensed me. I was like, “I’m not sure what ‘ain’t much I can do’ means. I’m pretty sure that you’re not doing me a personal favor. I mean I’m fairly certain that your job—and by job, I mean, specifically what I hired to you to do, in fact, quite literally, what I am paying you to do—is to move my shit. I could shrug my shoulders my fucking self.”
Dennis stared at me like I was a patient in a mental ward. I continued, “Couches are built to be in apartments, right?”
I waited for an answer to this rhetorical question.
Dennis: “Yeah, I guess.”
Me: “So then the couch should fit through the door.”
He pulled
his tape measure out and shook it at me. “Maybe it should fit, but it don’t fit. You got any ideas how to make it fit?”
With minor exception, most people are lazy. They don’t want to do more than is absolutely necessary. And so, because almost everyone’s first answer is almost always no as a general rule, I usually ignore people’s first answer.
I looked at Dennis and started talking to him like a small child. “You’re telling me that the couch doesn’t fit because it’s too wide to fit through the door, right?”
Dennis wasn’t sure where I was going with this. He looked at me like, That’s what I just said, isn’t it? “Uh, yeah.”
So I said, “Well, why don’t you try taking the door off?”
Dennis started to say something but thought better of it.
I broke it down. I was like, “Listen, Dennis, I know that you’re hot and you’re tired and those stairs are a bitch, but you and I both know that no one is going anywhere until you get that couch into my apartment, so let’s try to keep the bullshit to a minimum. The sooner you get it in, the sooner you get out of here.”
I laid a hundred-dollar bill on the table.
Dennis walked into the hallway, where the other mover was standing with the couch. I don’t know what he said to him but within fifteen minutes the couch miraculously made its way through the front door.
Suddenly, this couch, which moments earlier didn’t fit into the apartment, was sitting in the middle of my living room. Suddenly, as quickly as the hundred dollars materialized, this couch, which moments earlier was too big, too wide, too whatever, to fit through the door, miraculously shrank, or the doorway became larger. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea. They didn’t have to take the door off its hinges, or do anything but exert a tiny bit of fucking effort.
This couch, which had taken on all sorts of meaning in my life, was finally mine. It had so much history. My grandmother, who had it for more than half a century, thought it was so precious that she actually had the plastic cover custom-made for it. And then she spent so many years sitting in the same place that there was a spot in the corner where it was worn in the shape of her butt. This was the couch on which I had languished for nine long months, on which I had cried my eyes out and eaten boxes upon boxes of frozen pizza and watched hundreds, if not thousands, of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
This was the couch the fat, hairy Canadian Jew had ejaculated on. It was the couch on which I kissed Nico for the first time. And it was the couch on which I had laid as I nursed my heart and my soul back to emotional health. I had become so obsessed with this fucking couch that I had actually paid the movers an extra hundred dollars just so it could be part of my new life.
The moment had finally arrived.
Success!
I was triumphant, once again.
And God continued to have a wonderful sense of humor. While I was busy telling Dennis how to do his job, God was apparently kicked back on a cushy white cloud, laughing his ass off. The second the couch was actually in my apartment, the only thing I could think of was how I was going to get it out. It was a complete albatross. It looked like a normal-size couch at my grandmother’s, because my grandmother lived in a normal-size apartment. My new apartment was miniscule, so it literally took up half the living room and looked like a piece of furniture from Pee-wee’s Playhouse or Alice in Wonderland.
But I was too elated to care. That night I slept on a mattress on the floor in the bedroom. Because I didn’t have curtains or blinds yet, I woke up at like five in the morning, sweltering hot. The sun was shining so brightly and the apartment was so small that the entire place was lit up. Even though I felt like I had sun blisters all over my face, I felt like a giant weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It suddenly occurred to me how unhealthy it had been for me to live at my grandmother’s and for the first time in a very long time, I finally felt like me again.
A couple of short months later, I had managed to turn the apartment into an adorable little nest for myself. In creating a home, I had figuratively and literally rebuilt my life. Noam and I were on speaking terms but it was infrequent and while it was friendly, we were both very guarded. I had even seen Nico a couple of times for work and while I had been civil, I still kind of hated him. But mostly I was really happy about my new apartment and I was totally preoccupied with my upcoming trip to Israel. I hadn’t been there in fifteen years and I was literally giddy with excitement. It felt like I was going home again.
All in all, things were looking up.
Even Hanna seemed to be pulling her shit together. She had finally gotten rid of Dan after she found an ad he had put online. She discovered that he didn’t actually have a girlfriend. He had, like, ten. And, as it turned out, he was also a sex addict. Granted she found the ad while she was looking for a hookup herself but that’s beside the point. Plus, she said, it was all in her past now. While I was packing for my trip to Israel she came over and told me she was planning a trip of her own. She said, “I think I’m going to go to India for a spiritual retreat. It’s four hours of yoga a day and a one-hour lecture every evening. What do you think?”
Me: “I think it sounds like the best idea you have ever had.”
Hanna: “My mother is going to kill me.”
Me: “What do you mean, your mother is going to kill you?”
Hanna: “If I’m not actively searching for a husband, she thinks everything I do is a waste of time.”
Spiritual enrichment, personal fulfillment—a waste of time? Brilliant. With a mother who says things like that, with a mother who thinks a trip to India is a waste of time, it’s a miracle Hanna isn’t more fucked-up than she is. It’s no wonder she has some idiotic notion that the “perfect guy,” a “nice Jewish boy,” is lurking out there just waiting for her to find him. Her mother and all her coaches had brainwashed her to think that if she just looks hard enough, she’s going to find him. I have told her time and time again that this is not how life works. Things rarely work out the way you expect them to. And thank fucking God.
Me, screaming: “Shakespeare, Hanna, Shakespeare! ‘To thine own self be true!’ For the love of God, for once go do something positive for yourself! Go to India.”
Hanna: “I think I’m going to.”
Me: “And another thing. I just wanted to thank you. You really helped me out of my hole and I really appreciate it. I think you’re brilliant and wonderful and I’m sorry if I was harsh on you. And I love you.”
As we said good-bye, she hugged me extra tight and said, “I hope you have an amazing time in Israel.”
I winked at her on her way out and said, “I have every intention to.”
10
Guy Is Here
I really did have every intention of having an amazing time in Israel, and I was already off to a good start. One of my best friends worked for the airlines and had arranged a standby ticket for me. Some people hate flying standby, but I love it. I have always thrived on doing things last-minute and you can change standby tickets around at no charge whenever you want. I had booked my flight a few days in advance of the wedding so as to give myself a couple of days’ wiggle room and this way I figured I’d be fine in case I got bumped off. I also loved flying standby because it was a fraction of the cost of a regular ticket and if you got lucky, you got to sit in first class. I was flying low season so I was pretty sure I was in good shape. Plus, I made sure to fly on a day that the plane looked relatively empty. Of course, one never really knew until the very last minute if you would make it on the flight and things could change from minute to minute, but I was okay with that. If there wasn’t room and I got bumped, I’d just relist myself on the next flight. So while it was kind of a crapshoot, it was more than worth it and I’d never had a problem before.
As I had predicted, the flight went off without a hitch, and I was as happy as a pig in shit. I landed ten hours later a
nd was greeted with love, affection, and a giant bottle of araq. Araq is the Middle Eastern version of pastis, which was suddenly my new favorite thing on the planet. It’s anise-flavored liquor and you drink it straight, with lots of ice cubes. It tastes so good that you forget there’s alcohol in it, which is obviously very dangerous. The party had officially begun. And it started the second I arrived.
It so happened that Talma and Yochanan, my surrogate parents, had just sold their house and with it, naturally, the garden that I had loved so very much as a child. My timing was impeccable. Had I not arrived when I did, I would never have seen that house again. In fact, had I not arrived when I did, many things wouldn’t have happened. I wish I remembered more about the actual wedding but the only thing I know is that at the end of the night no one could find me. It would be Talma who finally discovered me sitting in the corner with a yarmulke on my head and tahini all over my face, devouring a giant pita filled with falafel.
The day after the wedding I was so hungover I wanted to die, but the festivities continued. The Israelis are a lively bunch. Because the political situation is so explosive and the threat of death is such a big part of their everyday lives, they really appreciate life for all it’s worth. They’re constantly drinking and smoking and laughing and eating and any cause is a cause to celebrate. Marriage, in particular, is a big deal. Israel may be the most modern country in the Middle East, but it’s still traditional in many ways and it’s extremely family and community-oriented and everyone is always together. Long term, this would probably make me want to put my face through a pane of glass. Short term, it was really fun.
The day after the wedding, we were at Talma and Yochanan’s house in the kitchen, planning for another party there that night when Yochanan started screaming, “Where are my figs? Who took my figs?”
His twelve-year-old granddaughter, Mika, who was accustomed to his shenanigans, said, “I did.”
Yochanan continued screaming, “Why did you take my figs! Who gave you permission to take my figs? Were they yours? Did they belong to you?”
On My Knees Page 11