by Miriam Cohen
She listens to her mother tell Charles that they live in New Jersey. That she is married. That she has three daughters, of whom Elizabeth is the oldest. That she teaches.
Maybe Elizabeth would like to have piano lessons in New York City, Charles says. That way, she can also get in some more Broadway shows. He winks at Elizabeth. She winks back, ruins it.
“No way,” Elizabeth’s father says, when they return home. “No way am I letting that fag anywhere near my daughter.”
Elizabeth has heard the word on TV, but never actually live in her house. She hadn’t realized Charles was gay. She’s so stupid. She’d thought he used to be her mother’s boyfriend. That maybe he was the man who should have been her father.
“She’s getting the lessons,” her mother says, and that’s it. Once a week they go into the City, just the two of them.
And of course, Elizabeth understands now, she was right before about Charles. He might even have been the love of her mother’s short, shitty little life. Because just over a year from then, her mother would be dead.
Elizabeth tells the sewing teacher, yes, she does need help, and watches his beautiful fingers as he handles her needle and thread so effortlessly.
Andrew is waiting for her at the house. Philip rushes into her arms for a hug and she breathes in his soft skin like it’s air. She’s an animal around him. She loves him so much it’s all she can do to stop herself from eating him.
“I didn’t realize Sophie was here,” Andrew says. “She answered the door.”
“She’s having a hard time of it,” Elizabeth says. It takes her a second to realize she’s quoting her father.
“She told me she’s having a baby that’s not her baby?”
“She’s not making good choices.”
There’s also the mental hospital stay they’re not talking about. They hold the knowledge of it between them, though, carefully, like a plate of eggs.
“I didn’t have any idea,” Elizabeth says. “I just invited her, and.”
Philip is at her legs like a little cat. He’s at both of their legs, wandering between them like they’re a jungle created just for him.
“You were lonely,” Andrew says.
She’s so relieved it almost hurts. “Come home,” she says.
Andrew says he knows how hard things can be, with Sophie.
“I’ll stay the night,” he says.
Sophie isn’t having it.
While Elizabeth sets four places for dinner, Sophie sits at the table, berating her. “You said you two were getting divorced,” she says. “You’re such a stupid hypocrite.”
“I thought you liked Andrew,” Elizabeth says. “You’ve always liked Andrew.”
“So you’ll just stay unhappy? You hate it here. You told me you hated it here.”
“You’re just in a little hippo mood,” Elizabeth says. “It’ll pass.”
The little hippo mood is a holdover from their childhood. It’s what their mother used to say when they threw tantrums that didn’t upset her. Elizabeth can remember being so mad, the kind of mad that lived in her whole body, but mostly the stomach, spine and throat, saying, I hate you, Mommy. And her mother laughing, saying, There’s that little hippo mood.
“It’s not fair that nothing bad ever happens to you,” Sophie says.
Elizabeth touches Sophie’s hair. It’s as soft as Philip’s. “It’s so hard to be a little hippo.”
Elizabeth’s father calls her. He just wants to check in, he says. She doesn’t need to tell Sophie he’s calling. Maybe, actually, it’s better if Elizabeth doesn’t. But it’s important that she get Sophie out of the house, all right?
Elizabeth tells Sophie she’s coming to sewing class with her. “It’s non-negotiable,” she says.
Sophie fills up her cheeks with air, blows out a steady stream. “Fine,” she says.
Sophie wears a tight shirt, and it startles Elizabeth, though she knows it shouldn’t, to see that her baby sister is showing. She’s actually pregnant. Elizabeth is glad, sort of, that the baby isn’t Sophie’s. The idea of Sophie as someone’s mother is too much. Elizabeth a little bit hopes, even though it’s terrible, that Sophie never becomes anyone’s mother. How else can she stay Elizabeth’s baby?
Elizabeth had thought, when Philip was born, that she’d be able to let go of being Sophie’s mother. But having Philip only made her Sophie’s mother even more. Because the guilt had been impossible. Holding Philip, loving Philip, changing his endless diapers, all made her think of poor, abandoned, motherless baby Sophie. Sometimes she felt—feels—like she hates Sophie. And this only makes Elizabeth love her more. More even, maybe, than she loves Philip, her own, actual child. When he doesn’t listen, when he throws himself down on the floor and screams, and won’t stop screaming, or vomits in the middle of the night, she feels that hatred turn on him. And then, immediately, bounce back on her.
I love you, I love you, I love you, she tells Philip.
The class is emptier than ever. Sister Josephine seems to have had her fill of sewing, because she isn’t there. There’s only Margaret, in her usual seat with the perfect Violet.
“My sister,” Elizabeth says, touching Sophie’s shoulder. “I hope it’s okay that I brought her.”
“Of course,” says the sewing teacher. “The class is open to the community.”
He always looks like he’s worried about her. Like he thinks she’s just on the edge. But it’s not true at all. He’s mistaken, and it bothers her.
“How nice that you’ve brought your sister,” Margaret says.
Elizabeth can see how Margaret glances at Sophie’s belly and then quickly away, calculating. She must think she understands Elizabeth. She’s probably revising her opinion from last week, making space for sympathy. Elizabeth, she must think, is a poor, childless woman made to endure the indignity and sorrow of a clearly-younger sister whose fertility cannot be denied. Who’s so clearly having a happy life.
“Sophie’s a surrogate,” Elizabeth says. “Isn’t that generous of her?”
When the teacher asks if anyone needs help, Elizabeth’s is the first hand raised.
“You have a crush on the teacher,” Sophie says, back at home. It’s the first thing she’s said all evening. She just sat there, the whole class. It was embarrassing, frankly.
“Is that what you think?” Elizabeth says. She laughs.
“I do think that,” Sophie says. “That’s why I said it.”
Her voice is very thin. It always gets this way right before Sophie cries. Elizabeth doesn’t want to see her cry. She hates to see Sophie cry.
“I only want you to be happy,” Elizabeth says.
“I’m not,” says Sophie. “It’s not fair.”
“I hate to see you sad,” Elizabeth says.
“I don’t think that’s true,” says Sophie. “I think you do like it.”
“It’s the hormones,” Elizabeth says. “I got like that too, with Philip.”
“That’s you. You’re the one. I feel sorry for you.”
“There’s that little hippo mood,” Elizabeth says.
“Shut up,” says Sophie. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
Elizabeth looks up at the ceiling. The ceiling is unevenly painted. It reminds her of whipped frosting. She’ll tell this to Philip. We live in a gingerbread house, she’ll say.
“Say something,” Sophie says.
She steps closer to Elizabeth. They’re so close now Elizabeth can feel Sophie’s breath against her face. Elizabeth used to have a game called Baby Bird where she’d feed Sophie food from her own mouth. Baby bird, take your worm! They played this game until Elizabeth left for college. Until Sophie was thirteen.
Sophie slaps her. First one cheek, and then the other. “Look at what you’re making me do,” she says. She punches Elizabeth in the stomach.
And this makes Elizabeth want to punch her back, also in the stomach. Let her miscarry. How about that? Let her go back to the couple who are expecting her to
keep their baby safe and tell them sorry, she couldn’t do even that.
“Well, I love you,” Elizabeth says.
Sophie’s so angry now. Angry, she looks exactly like she did when she was a child. A little snorting bull.
“I fucking hate you,” Sophie says. She’s crying.
Elizabeth isn’t crying. “You don’t really mean that,” she says, and leaves the room.
Elizabeth calls Lucille. They never speak. Lucille just does her own thing. She always has, really. But Elizabeth needs to talk to her. Andrew is no use. He wasn’t there, in their house, when they were children together, when they were three sisters, a house full of girls.
“Sophie said you got an abortion?” Elizabeth asks. She has to know.
“Hello yourself,” Lucille says.
“The weather’s really something here. Is it really something there?” Elizabeth says.
“There you go,” says Lucille.
“So?”
“I did, yeah. But a while ago.”
“You didn’t want to tell me?”
“No, Elizabeth, I didn’t want to tell you. Isn’t that funny of me?”
“I wouldn’t have judged you,” Elizabeth says, but of course she’s lying, and of course Lucille knows she’s lying.
“I didn’t want it,” says Lucille. “Not everyone wants to be a mother.”
“I know that,” Elizabeth says.
“Right,” Lucille says.
“Lucille,” Elizabeth says. Their mother used to, sometimes, call her Lucy-Face, Lucy-Goosey, Lucky-Luce, but Elizabeth never has.
“I’m going to go,” Lucille says.
And then she’s gone. There’s just Elizabeth, holding a phone that’s started to beep. Now a woman’s voice comes on the line. Please hang up. There appears to be a receiver off the hook. The woman repeats herself until Elizabeth listens to her.
But Lucille is wrong about what Elizabeth knows.
She remembers being in the car with her mother on the way to Charles. They are crossing the bridge into the City, where the sky seems so much wider, where even the buildings sparkle. New Jersey, across the water, is shrunken and stupid, the houses all in rows like obedient, boring children. Later for all that, Elizabeth’s mother says. She opens the windows, turns on the radio. She wears sunglasses to drive. Elizabeth wants to say something, but her mother is untouchable in her happiness.
A GIRL OF A CERTAIN AGE
A girl in Yael’s office had been killed. It was all over the papers. It was all over the office, too, in whispers and the tsk-ing of tongues, the occasional, theatrical sob. The girl had known her killer. She’d been engaged to him. And he came at her with a knife. It was hard to know if he’d also raped her, because of the fiancé thing. Probably he had. That was how it usually went on TV. His name was Daniel Ethan Schwartzberg. When you killed someone, the newspapers called you by all of your names. He was sick, it turned out—a man didn’t do something like that if he were well. But Yael had met him, and he’d seemed fine. Which was what was pretty terrifying. The men Yael herself dated didn’t seem fine, but here she was, still alive. Of all things, the girl who’d managed to get engaged was dead. (But she couldn’t really be called a girl, could she? Now that she was dead? When you were thirty-one and alive, you got to be a girl. A dead thirty-one-year-old, though: that was a woman.)
What was the message in all this?
She asked her roommate, Sophie, what it was she was supposed to do.
“Nothing,” Sophie said. “Nothing, and then maybe a card.”
She and Sophie were watching TV. They were always watching TV. As long as it was bad, they were watching it, but mostly they watched Law and Order: SVU. There were days when they left the house only to walk the dogs—Sophie’s cocker spaniel, Frank Sinatra, and Yael’s Yorkie, Barbra Streisand—and maybe pick up some frozen dinners from CVS.
“But can you believe it?” Yael said. “Of all things?”
“At least she got engaged. That’s better than us.”
It was better. Another terrible thing.
The men Yael and Sophie dated were like action figures. Instead of names, they came with titles: the hipster, the balding Jew, the enormously fat man. They all came from online. Yael went out more than Sophie did, but that was because Yael went out with anyone. So long as there was a pulse, ha ha.
“We should come up with goals,” Yael said.
“We really should,” said Sophie.
Number one on the list: Find a boyfriend. Sophie already had a wedding guest list prepared. Yael was going to skip having a wedding. This would be her revenge for years of being forced to be a guest at disgustingly lavish, self-congratulatory affairs. When her turn came, she’d get them with her modesty. Oh, the non-guests would say. Yael is so good. And they would wince at the memories of their bloated, frilly monster-cruise-ship weddings. She would just show them.
The other goals were boring: Get out more. Right? That was the ticket? Show your face somewhere, and it’ll just work out? Do yoga. Eat more kale. Sophie decided she’d start wearing deodorant—but only if it was really necessary. There were chemicals in it that could kill you, she explained, and also she was lazy. Sophie was getting a PhD in literature, so it wasn’t like she lived in the real world where people cared how you smelled. Yael was a little jealous of that.
And then they came up with puns involving dogs and Law and Order: SVU: petophilia, pawpetrator, ruffhousing, sodogmy, cocanine. Now all they needed was a plot.
They were also collaborating—this was more of a long-term project—on a musical about their lives. The musical also had dogs in it, but instead of sex crimes, there was no sex. The opening number involved the Yael and Sophie composite character waiting by the phone for a date. It was a duet between a single girl and her dog that went, so far: “I am alone in my house and scarf/arf /piz-za./I sit here and chow/ bow-ow./I try to seem aloof/woof/but all I want is a man who’s stark/bark/na-ked.” Their working title was A Girl of a Certain Age.
They were supposed to be writing a musical, but they were watching TV. They were eating French fries. The dogs were getting into everything. The girl on SVU was getting raped in an alleyway.
Yael couldn’t stop Googling. Some Googling, obviously, was acceptable, to be expected, part of the job. She worked for an online magazine geared toward Jewish women. Women, in this case, meant mothers. The magazine was called Modern Mama. It was supposed to be a Yiddish reference—a Fiddler on the Roof kind of mama, but Yael could just bet there were hordes of disappointed porn-seekers visiting the site each day. One day, Yael’s own mother liked to say, Yael too would be a woman. (But first a wife!) She just had to keep trying, maybe lower her standards a little, when did she become so picky? Yael wasn’t, her mother liked to point out, getting any younger. Her mother, who had abandoned Orthodox Judaism in Yael’s youth for this far worse thing: Cultural Judaism. She was just worried, her mother said; she just wanted Yael to be happy; just look at Yael’s cousin—now that was a nice life. Yael’s cousin, a cool five years younger, had it all: a rabbi husband, a baby, another on the way, and an in-process law degree she wouldn’t use.
At Modern Mama, Yael wrote articles with titles like “Behind Every Great Man … Stands His Mother”; “Spice up Your Matzo Balls”; “You Call This a Kitchen?!” She wrote an advice column and answered questions about how long was too long when it came to breastfeeding. (The answer: Never! Do it until the bar/ bat mitzvah, for all she cared. Do it until the chuppah. Some of the men she dated probably went straight home and suckled at their mothers’ teats as soon as she was done with them.) She was working there ironically, she told herself and also anyone who asked what it was that she did. She’d started at the magazine straight out of college, and she found working there was similar to having a heroin addiction; it was a hard thing to come back from.
Also, there was something about the idea of working for gentiles that felt a little unsettling. Gentiles were fine, but there was just something s
uspect about them, like an off brand of cottage cheese you might as well not try. And some of them didn’t get circumcised. Plus—the Holocaust, right? Those were jokes you couldn’t make in a gentile place of work. You couldn’t even call it that. It would just be called a place of work, period.
But Yael wasn’t Googling brisket recipes or fact-checking the dubious gynecological advice she was offering to Concerned in Crown Heights.
She was Googling Daniel Ethan Schwartzberg. The articles were all speculative. She couldn’t find any kind of consensus. It was like a Choose Your Own Adventure story, a Mad Libs fill-in-the-blank: schizophrenia, sociopathy, a particularly nasty strain of bipolar I. It was unclear, from the articles, whether or not the girl from Yael’s office had known about any of this. The articles didn’t really talk about her.
Yael had met him just the once. The girl, Libby Silberstein, brought him to Modern Mama’s Hanukkah party. Yael, for want of an actual date, brought Sophie.
“What are you two, lesbians?” the now-dead girl asked.
She’d been so smug, and now she was dead. It didn’t serve her right. Of course not. No one deserved to die, and definitely not the way she had, hacked to death in her own apartment at the hands of her once-gentle fiancé. He had dismembered her. That was a fact omitted from the email HR had sent around.
But he was pleasant at the party; he passed her a plate of latkes, and she had the thought—that girl doesn’t deserve him. Libby Silberstein had been something of a cunt. A terrible thing to say, now that she was dead. Now that she was dead, obviously, she was the best person who had ever lived. The world was so achingly lucky to have had her in it; she had touched so many lives; if there were anyone in the running to replace God, you can bet it would be her.
“Not lesbians,” Yael said. “Just codependent.”
“Not that there’d be anything wrong with that,” Libby said, and Yael felt like an asshole for not being a lesbian. She felt like she’d been caught voting Republican, with a secret rifle locker at home.