by Miriam Cohen
Sophie, for her part, was blotting out the oil on a latke.
Yael tried now to remember what Daniel Ethan Schwartzberg had said. Had he laughed? Coughed into his fist and looked away? Put his hand on the small of Libby Silberstein’s back? Wormed the hand down to her butt? Surely there must have been some sign of what was to come, even if it had seemed hidden at the time. But all she could remember was Libby Silberstein’s stupid engagement ring, the way it winked in the light when Libby flipped her glossy, keratin-straightened hair over her shoulder.
The main thing that came out of the party was an idea for a new number in the musical, about pussies. The cat kind, but with the option of a pun to read into. My pussy is alone/by the telephone, that kind of thing. They never got very far with that song, probably because it didn’t feature any dogs.
On Law and Order: SVU, another girl was getting raped. This time, it was in a college dorm room. She was passed out drunk, and the man who was raping her was blond and handsome; he wore a school ring, and his name was Chad. It was a story ripped from the headlines.
The goals—the showing of their faces, the yoga, in Sophie’s case, the deodorant—were hard to keep up. The dog run was probably Yael and Sophie’s most social activity. They aimed for once a day. For Frank Sinatra, it was all about the squirrels. He’d sit on the bench watching them like it was TV. Sometimes, he’d try to go after them with a slow lion’s prowl, as if that was fooling anyone. The squirrels were jerks, though. They’d dance around the edge of the fence, racing off at the last second, leaving Frank Sinatra to howl out his despair at the futility of it all.
Today was a howling day.
Scarecrow Lady staggered over with a scowl. “Someone,” she said to the air above their heads, “needs to get that dog under control.”
Like the dates, the people at the dog run also were without real names. Scarecrow Lady was either anorexic or had a syndrome. Whatever it was, she was terrifying, and she never shared her tennis balls. She had elbows pointy enough to take an eye out.
The other regulars were: the weird man; the perfect couple; George Clooney. The only ones with real names were the dogs. The weird man’s dog was Isabella. The perfect couple had Leo—a cocker spaniel who as a puppy had seemed cuter than Frank Sinatra, but now that he was grown, had proven unfortunate. Scarecrow Lady’s dogs were Snowflake and Snowball, which was no surprise. Whatever sense of humor or originality she might have had in her life, it was sucked out of her now. That was a woman to avoid becoming. George Clooney’s dog was Gatsby, also no surprise: George Clooney was perfect. You didn’t even need to look at his left hand to know he was married; Gatsby was a golden retriever. If a man had a golden retriever, you could bet he was married, almost definitely with children. Small dogs on a man meant gay, married, or in a serious relationship. Pitt bulls were what you were going to get if you were looking for a single, straight man. A hipster might have a dog missing a leg or an eye.
The hipster Yael had gone out with had the trifecta: a pit bull without eyes who was also dead. She was the sweetest dog in the world, he told her—she had been, anyway. It made Yael vomit in her mouth even to remember. The guy, more than the dog. He had a garden on his roof, he’d told her. He grew life-affirming plants because the city air was too toxic for vegetables. He was also making a DIY record. Records had a purer sound, he explained. That was a man who wouldn’t raise a hand to a woman, right? But that was exactly what everyone would say about him if he did. That was basically every episode of SVU. If you were playing a neighbor on SVU, that was your line. That was what all the articles were saying about Daniel Ethan Schwartzberg.
Barbra Streisand hopped up on the bench, growling at the other dogs from the safety of her perch. She was neurotic and antisocial. It would be hard for her not to be, with Yael as her main role model. But she would never hurt another dog. She couldn’t, was the thing. She was too small.
The setting is a single girl’s apartment. She lies on the couch, a small dog at her feet. The glow from the TV illuminates her face. There’s a knock at the door. She leaps into a pirouette to answer the door.
It’s her date, arriving with slicked-back hair and flowers. “My darling,” he says. “I also have chocolate.”
There’s a waltz.
The girl sings, “He’s brought me gifts, kisses/I’ll be his Mrs.” Instead of a microphone, she sings into a hairbrush. “Here’s to life!/I’ll be a wife/goodbye to strife.”
And then he unhinges her limbs, one by one.
It made no sense.
If anyone was going to kill you, it would be the substitute dog walker. That was a headline that made sense—“Dog Walker of Doom.” It was the perfect setup for a killer: keys to an apartment, dogs so domesticated they had winter parkas, guileless girls. Still, Yael and Sophie said sure, thanks, of course when their regular dog walker, Annie, said she’d be going on vacation and was leaving them in the capable hands of Paul.
Annie was something of an artisanal dog walker; she left them progress reports on each dog in separate, labeled notebooks. She was disgustingly professional. The only mistake they’d caught her in, the singular time she’d revealed herself as human, was when she’d accidently left a big straw hat in their apartment. She’d texted: Did I leave a big straw hat in your apartment? It was maddening. Couldn’t she at least clog a toilet or something, just once?
Paul’s qualifications were both his parents were vets. Why he had the flexibility in his schedule to be a substitute dog walker was not addressed. The two of them, Annie and Paul, hovered in the doorway, crouched to dog level. They looked like they were part of an indie rock group. Even though it was the summer, Annie was wearing ripped tights, boots, and a flowing white dress. He was wearing a T-shirt with a silk-screened slice of pizza on it, a fringed denim vest, and elf shoes.
Because Paul and Annie wouldn’t sit at the table and accept tap water in mismatched, chipped mugs like normal guests, Yael and Sophie hovered in the doorway also.
“So, you’ve walked dogs before?” Yael said.
“My parents are vets,” said Paul. “Both of them.”
It wasn’t an issue to press.
Yael handed over the keys. Sure, stranger, come up to the apartment when I’m not there. Take the dogs, bring them back. Leave the jewelry. I trust you. And the terrible thing was, after everything, she did trust him. Of course he wouldn’t kill her. That kind of thing would never happen in real life. Not to her.
“But a little raping, right? That wouldn’t be so bad,” Sophie said, after Paul and Annie left. “Sometimes a girl just needs to get herself a little raped.”
“Girls Just Wanna Get Raped,” Yael said. “We should put it in the musical.”
Yael rarely pitched article ideas. She took what she got and said, Super! I’ve always actually wondered about the safety of car seats. Her editor, who liked to call himself her office dad, was chronically disappointed in her. He valued her and her “can-do” attitude, but she seemed unhappy, he told her almost weekly. He wanted her to be happy.
So when she asked him if he might be interested in hearing her pitch, he all but hugged her. One problem he had was getting too close.
Her pitch was a human-interest story on Daniel Ethan Schwartzberg. She would speak to his mother.
Her editor again looked like he might hug her. “Grief is very hard,” he said.
He loved her initiative—that was really, really great, and good for her; keep it up—but maybe she should keep thinking. It took some imagination on her part, yes, he understood, because she was still single, so, obviously, childless, but maybe she could call up a married friend, pick her brain a little. See if there were any mommy trends that might interest Yael. Those he would love to hear her pitch.
In the meantime, how about if he called in a grief counselor? How would that sound? He knew someone personally, who was renowned, and a real mensch.
She understood his hesitancy, she said. But—and here she leaned forward, close enough
to smell his lox breath, “What would happen if people didn’t write about the Holocaust? The deaths of six million. Even with the living testimonies, we have deniers.” She looked solemnly at her hands. “My grandmother was in Auschwitz,” she lied.
He gave her his blessing.
Finding Daniel Ethan Schwartzberg’s mother was nothing. All Yael had to do was Google around until she found out her name, and, bam, there was an address, a phone number, an e-mail, she could take her pick. She chose the address.
She showed up right at Daniel Ethan Schwartzberg’s mother’s doorstep like a Mormon. Getting turned away was not a risk she could take. She had to get to the bottom of it, figure out what made him different from everyone else—from all the guys who wouldn’t hack you to bits.
The house had a wraparound porch, a mown lawn, a garden out front with burst-open flowers in the bright colors of bridesmaid dresses. There were three cars in the driveway, all sparkling. On SVU, this would all add up to: rich, WASP. There wasn’t much room for nuance on SVU; if you were a Jew on SVU, you were a lecherous Hasid with a thick, wrong accent and Shirley Temple side curls.
Yael slammed her knuckles against the door. She liked the sound it made. Much more satisfying than the dainty ringing of a bell.
She was writing an article, she said when the killer’s mother answered the door. The tone would be sympathetic. She was from Modern Mama. “Libby’s—”
“Yes,” the killer’s mother said. “Of course. Libby’s magazine.”
She looked right into Yael’s eyes, said Libby’s name like it was ordinary.
“Call me Gloria,” she said. She seemed relieved, as if she’d been waiting for Yael to show up. She opened the door all the way and let Yael in.
Everything inside the house was arranged just exactly so: a cluster of tasseled throw pillows on the sofa fanned like an open deck of cards; tiny, purposeless vases lining a windowsill. It was like walking into a page in a magazine. It seemed like the kind of house where you wouldn’t be allowed to wear shoes, but the killer’s mother didn’t say anything to Yael, and it wasn’t like Yael was going to volunteer to walk around in socks. But she felt a little awful. She knew she was surely tracking dirt into the house.
The killer’s mother didn’t offer Yael cookies or a drink or anything. She just started talking. She started talking so immediately, so breathlessly, it was impossible to turn on the tape recorder. It would be too awkward.
“I loved Libby. She was like a daughter. And that’s rare, to get along so well. He loved her. He’s so sorry. You can’t imagine. He wants to talk to a reporter, he asked me, he said, ‘Mom, I want to talk to a reporter.’ To explain his side of the story, how much he loved her.”
Yael didn’t want to hear that story.
“There’s a culture of shame in our country when it comes to mental illness,” Yael said, but too quickly. It came out like one word: There’s-a-culture-of-shame-in-our-country-when-it comes-to-mental-illness. It was the kind of awkward exposition that never really worked on SVU. “There must have been …?”
“Schizophrenia? That’s what I’m reading on the Internet.”
“Voices,” Yael said. She nodded sagely.
“It wasn’t schizophrenia. That’s something I would’ve known about, don’t you think? It was something, but I don’t know what he was thinking, because it wasn’t him. He doesn’t know what he was thinking. That’s what he says to me, ‘Mom, I don’t know what I was thinking.’”
She leaned forward, touched Yael’s arm. This move was an old standby of the men she dated. They’d say her name, touch her arm, think that meant they were entitled now to sex.
“Does that make sense?” the killer’s mother asked. “Have you ever had a moment, you know, where you just lost it?”
As a child—as a college student, actually, terribly, when physical fighting should’ve gone the way of Barbies—Yael had come very close to strangling her mother. She couldn’t remember what the fight was about, but she did remember how her mother had become bug-eyed, her mouth opening in a little O, the tendons in her neck as delicate as fish bones, as easily crushable. And Yael’s hand felt enormous. She’d felt so powerful, she had to stop right then. She had to stop because she’d wanted to continue.
Yael put on her most sympathetic smile. It could also double as a wince. “I’m sure,” she said, “there must be people out there who have.”
On her way out, she found some neighbors who said just what they should: We would never have imagined! He’s the last person we would have thought! They rattled off their lines so well, they might have come from SVU—really. She could’ve sworn she’d heard them before.
Yael wasn’t going to write the article. She got as far as the headline—“A Killer in Their Midst” by Yael Berman—and then she couldn’t keep going. The TV was on, an SVU rerun playing in the background like spa music. Sophie was also working; she was writing a paper called “Who’s Afraid of Crying Woolf.” Sophie’s paper wasn’t about Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee, or the Aesop’s fable. She just needed to figure that part out, she explained.
Yael thought it best not to touch that.
What they both needed, Yael said, was a break. They’d been working long enough. It was time to focus on the musical. The hacking-to-bits scene, in particular, needed some fleshing out.
Sophie was on board immediately. “It could turn into a duet,” she said.
On the TV, a rogue detective was punching a tattooed perp.
“Please don’t kill me,” the girl would sing. And he’d harmonize with her, “Kill me,” there’d be a tender, hopeful twilling of a flute, knife raised sensually to her neck, and then, in a booming baritone: “But that would give me nothing but glee/because I’m cra-zy.” There could be a backup chorus: “Hack, hack, hack/Alack.” Dancers with hands slicing at their throats, screeching violins, a frenzied ripple of piano.
They gave the killer’s mother a few lines of dialogue. She wouldn’t be in the room, obviously. But it would be a voice-over, or whatever that was called in a musical. There would be a long silence, long enough for the audience to begin to fidget, and then: “I wouldn’t want to blame the victim.” (Stage direction: a big sigh.) “They were together a long time. There were signs, of course. But she was a single girl of a certain age.”
There. That was a story that made sense. Now all they had to do was throw in a couple of dogs. That was a recipe even the most valium-upped of her Modern Mama readers could follow: just add dogs. Sophie had the idea to call the song “The Grim Raper.”
ODD GOODS
The chair of the department was dead, and Sophie had been promoted. A couple of semesters of half-hearted toil, and here she was, half-arrived. The deal was she’d stay a full-time faculty member with the reflective salary and title, but take on some of the additional administrative responsibilities that would otherwise fall to the chair. She wasn’t the chair, officially, the dean explained. But unofficially, she wasn’t not the chair. Sophie didn’t totally understand it, but the dean assured her everyone was a winner this way. Among her new responsibilities, Sophie now had to read personal statements, and though only a few weeks into the position, she was no longer startled when students cited the school’s easiness as their chief reason for desired matriculation. Most everyone who applied was welcomed with open arms. Warm bodies.
The new official chair (he got the money, the title, but none of the responsibilities) was Dr. Sanford Blake. He was Sandy to his friends, he’d told her. She should call him Sandy. And even though it made her giggle—a girl’s name!—she did. They hadn’t always been friends. Always, before, Sandy had passed his free time with the old department chair, their laughter loud and delighted and private.
Today, in his office, he had an important inquiry for her: why did the female students no longer reveal the points of their nipples under their shirts but dressed instead in concealing layers? Sophie knew what he meant, but pretended not to, so as to seem sophisticated. To edify her
, he googled “girls showing nipples” and came up with a dazzling array of images. Sophie tried to stand in a way that made it seem like this was no big deal. Shoulders straight, but not too straight. Like this wasn’t thrilling. As though she were not viewing pornography at work.
“Want to hear about my latest conquest?” she asked, and Sandy nodded, like she was interesting.
Last night’s date had self-identified as an Artist. She’d found him hunched over a sketchbook when she got to the coffee house (he didn’t want, he’d said, to invest in dinner). His neck, bent to draw, was delicate as though carved from soap, and as white. He was drawing his cellphone. “It’s objects in their environments I’m really interested in exploring,” he told her. “So it’s like, a cellphone. On a coffee table.” He didn’t just do coffee tables, he explained, it could be any environment.
“And any object?” she asked, and he said, “No.” Not any object. And he’d looked at her with very narrowed eyes.
Now, Sandy leaned forward so their faces were close to touching. But maybe it was a hearing issue; maybe a hearing aid had never occurred to him. He was close to forty years older than her.
“Just remember,” he said, “the odds are good.” And then, gesturing toward himself, “But the goods are odd.” He looked again at the computer screen, illuminated.
Sophie’s elective this semester was focused on fairytales, entitled “The Sound and the Fairy.” It didn’t succeed in suggesting the meaning of her course, but no one paid attention to course titles. (And titles, it turned out, were all she had to add to the world of lit. crit. Her personal triumph, for a paper that glancingly mentioned Don Quixote, was “Tender is the Knight.”) She was teaching “Donkey Skin,” a Cinderella variant in which the Cinderella character’s father decided, after his wife’s death, that his daughter might not be such a bad replacement.
The class objected to the storyline: Why did the story have to involve incest?