by Miriam Cohen
There would be legalities involved. Sexual harassment—sexual assault, wasn’t it, really?—in the workplace was a delicate issue. Women today, the dean assured Sophie, had more rights than they used to have. Women were believed now more often than they used to be. The dean believed Sophie. Women in the workplace had to stick together. The dean reached across her desk and touched Sophie’s hand. A shiver of pleasure ran all the way up to Sophie’s shoulder. She was the wronged party, the innocent. She was a victim of sexual harassment in the workplace!
She had not thought of what would happen, inevitably, to Sandy.
She watched him leave for the night, bundled in a parka that might also have suited a little boy, the fringes of his scarf waving like fingers in the wind. He and the old department chair used to walk out together: two suits, two briefcases, a pair of men. But now he was alone, the cold already fogging up his glasses, too wide, always, for his face. He did not look back at her, though she was just behind him.
If he had, though, she knew her explanation would never be one he could understand. He hadn’t done anything wrong, exactly, or threatening. And they were friends—or something close to that, now that he was without his real friend, the old chair, who use to advise her on ethics, and who had returned from the summer break with his suits bagging where his body should have been. But Sandy made her feel so afraid. He had taken something from her that she had not meant to give. And (she tried not to think it, but there it was) he also made her feel something else. It was the feeling she got at a rollercoaster’s first dip, the horrible and wonderful buzzing on the base of her spine, that smooth, untouched plain where the cheerleaderish among her students stamped themselves as tramps.
ATTACHMENTS
Sophie was getting married with flowers in her hair. She had planned for this, and here it was: Carnations. Perfect. Yael was the maid-of-honor, the best friend. Sophie’s father called Yael “my daughter” so many times the photographer got confused, and everyone laughed. Not the daughter! Not the sister! No. But just beautiful, just marvelous, her turn was next; why shouldn’t it be? Yael didn’t bring her boyfriend to the wedding because he didn’t know how to talk to people. Her boyfriend. She called him her boyfriend because he called her his girlfriend. He wasn’t really her boyfriend. He was some guy. He was younger than she was. It was fine when people were his age, in the middle of their twenties, and unformed, not really people themselves. But when they were Yael’s age it was another thing. If you didn’t talk at a party, people wondered: A stroke?
Not really a stroke.
For god’s sake, her boyfriend was always telling her, she was only thirty-seven! She was thirty-two, but this wasn’t something he always remembered.
One of Sophie’s friends from work, Noreen, had sidled up to Yael at the buffet, and was now saying Yael was quite the cougar, wasn’t she. Sophie had surely told Noreen this information in confidence, both of their voices low with glee. Yael understood—at a job like Sophie’s, at a community college, sometimes you had to be hateful. Sometimes you had to gossip, but it was better to outsource. No use stirring up trouble locally. So no harm done. And anyway, Noreen, if Sophie was to be believed, was an idiot. No one, if Sophie was to be believed, liked Noreen. But Noreen was also thin, pretty, married. She had a child—so how come she was so thin?
Yael said she guessed maybe she was a cougar, wasn’t that funny.
“I can’t say I don’t envy you!” Noreen said. “I’m just boring-boring.” She pointed at her perfect, perky breasts, shimmers like trailing stars across the bodice of her otherwise just-black, so simple-I-didn’t-try dress. “I can’t believe I’m somebody’s mom,” she told Yael.
She made a face like somebody was torturing her, if being tortured was something that made her also coy and happy. “Do you have children?” Noreen asked, shaking her head to save Yael the trouble.
Yael said no, not at the moment. This was also what she said when the boyfriend’s friends asked if she wanted any pot.
“Lucky you!” Noreen said, her voice high with the strain of lying.
She had an improbably earnest husband. “It’s so wonderful to meet you,” he said, shaking Yael’s hand slowly, as if overcome with gladness and awe. And what did she do, he wanted to know.
Yael was a professional stranger. She’d left New York for Madison, a college town where jobs like this were not only possible, but plentiful.
“Madison?” Noreen asked. “The avenue?”
Yael was pretty sure it was an attempt at a joke. Or maybe it was an insult.
Anyway, Yael explained, in Madison, Wisconsin—not at all New York, but yes, New York was of course the best place to be—she worked for a psychologist who studied infant-attachment issues. The psychologist’s name was Ellen, but what she insisted upon was Cricket. It was a WASP thing, as best as Yael could make out. Yael’s job was to come into a room after the infant’s mother had left. She would walk over to the baby, or not walk over. Smile, or not smile. Yael’s ultimate career goal was to get to the bottom of why some men thought it was okay for them to kill their wives, but infant psychology was a start. If you looked at it through the right lens and also maybe squinted.
She switched jobs too often, her own mother thought. Thought and said out loud, often, unprompted. Her mother had liked it better when she was a journalist. (“Journalist” was her mother’s word. Yael had been a glorified PR person.) Her mother liked it better when Yael lived in New York. What was so wrong with New York? she was always asking.
“How marvelous,” said Noreen’s husband now.
Noreen put her hand on her husband’s shoulder. “And him?” she said. “He’s a house-husband.”
Noreen’s husband grinned. “She wanted a wife,” he said, his hand on his heart like a little boy pledging his allegiance to the country in which he’d been fortunate enough to be born.
“Don’t we all?” Noreen said.
And Yael laughed. But she wanted a husband. She would be the wife, chicken and potatoes nestled in her oven, lace satchels of potpourri in the drawers. She herself sagging and sallow and busy, too tired always, resentment husking her voice and elongating her vowels. She’d created this image in her early twenties to frighten herself, but it had turned into something she wanted.
There was dancing, but Yael didn’t really dance. She didn’t have the boyfriend with whom to dance. The appetizer was beautiful and complicated, little sailboats of lettuce into which bright beads of caviar were stowed, garnished with root vegetables shaved into ribbons. She didn’t eat the appetizer, but she did eat the fish, when it came, separating each pink scale, studying the silver underbelly revealed. She was on a diet she’d made up herself. The rules of the game were she could eat anything she wanted so long as it tasted terrible to her.
And then the wedding was over, and even though she hadn’t really danced, blisters rose up on the backs of her heels, eager as dogs for her to notice them. Sophie appeared from the throngs who loved her, the flowers still in her hair, the bobby pins holding firm. She smelled of perfume and the sweat that was specifically Sophie’s, what Yael thought of as Sophie-sweat. Sophie looked as if happiness were a thing—an expensive cream, a spectacular light—that had been poured into her. “I love you,” she told Yael, and she hugged her.
They had always joked they’d grow old together, fill a house with incontinent strays, dogs and cats both.
“I love you more,” Yael said.
Sophie smiled, her lace like feathers lifting her as she laughed and moved to kiss her aunt, who was standing next to Yael, and then on to her sister, her other sister, now a friend Yael had never met, lost into all the well-wishers who had come to celebrate how much and how well she had figured out how to be loved.
The boyfriend, Brian, was waiting for Yael when she got back from New York. Madison always looked shrunken after she’d been away, the buildings laughably squat, the sky too close. Brian and Yael were living together, but only because he was, as he put it,
between places. The apartment, which was really an attic divided in half, had been advertised as charming. It was the only place that would rent to her because of her dog, Barbra Streisand. In college towns, it turned out, kids routinely left their dogs to die when they graduated, a mess for the landlords. It made Yael cry to think about. She cared about dogs more than she’d ever care about people. All the children around the world starving and left to die, showing up in commercials pleading for her dollar-a-day to keep them alive? Not her problem.
Everything in the apartment, minus the books and clothing, was rented by a company that thought of everything: beds and sofas and tables, obviously, but also a decorative lamp, placemats to set a table for four, fake houseplants. It was a life ordered to go. Most people who used the company were visiting scholars who couldn’t be bothered to furnish a home for the months or so they were to be in residence. But Yael wasn’t a visiting scholar; she was just a person who needed to furnish her house, but could not think of how. So she was living the life of someone from a catalogue, who dressed in sweaters that came in colors like oatmeal and ash.
Brian was smoking pot from a pipe that looked like it was made of blown-glass, and which Yael sort of wanted to keep on display. She would line it up on a shelf with other blown-glass objects: a small deer, maybe. A little elephant all the way from India. She couldn’t even find India on a map.
“How was?” he said. Smoke swept gently from his nostrils.
“The appetizer was nice. I ate the fish.”
“Fish sticks,” he said. “Frozen. Now that’s the stuff.”
His eyes were so red it looked like he’d been crying.
“Are you sad I didn’t take you?” she asked, tender as a mother.
“I’m always sad,” he told her.
They hadn’t met in a usual way. Cricket’s Infant Attachment Center was in a suite shared by the student health service center. Brian made thrice weekly visits to the center for therapy with a social worker, Melinda, who was on her determined way to becoming a psychoanalyst. Brian’s sessions ended when Yael’s lunch hour began, so they were always bumping into each other in the hallway. One day he’d asked her how she liked working with Dr. Melinda. (Dr. Melinda was not a doctor; Cricket, who was a doctor, was always fuming on this account.) And Yael told him no, no; she worked down the hall. He nodded a few times. “You should try Dr. Melinda out,” he said. And right away she wanted to know him, because he wasn’t embarrassed, as she would have been. So they went for lunch, and she paid, because he didn’t have any money. “I’m still plugging away at that bachelor’s,” he explained.
Now Yael ran her fingers through his hair, which he liked because, he said, it made him feel like a cat, and which she liked, because he wasn’t balding even at all. “You’re not that sad,” she told him.
He held a lighter to his pipe. “You undermine me,” he said. “Don’t undermine me. Sad is sad. Yes, people are starving in Africa. But that has no, no… bearing on it. I have every right, and it’s valid, and it’s my pain.” He took a deep drag of the pipe, perfect as a professional.
Yael told him Africa was a place she had trouble finding on a map. Meanwhile, he was taking a class called The Ontological Problem of Colonization of the Other in the Modern World: An Overview. “You wouldn’t believe it,” he was always telling her after his class.
He got up now and found a map, unfolded, and pointed. “You are so smart,” Yael told him. “So smart and so sad.”
He puffed with pride like a pelican, or a little boy.
There was a man, Aaron, who came to the clinic weekly with his little boy. Aaron was a widower, his wife having died in childbirth. Yael hadn’t realized that still happened. It was either gruesome or romantic, she couldn’t decide. It could also be biblical, which actually was the descriptor best suited to Aaron because of the yarmulke he wore, bobby pins jammed into thinning patches of hair to keep it in place. He was the only father who came to the clinic—disgusting evidence, Cricket liked to point out, of the sexist world in which they lived. Yael thought it made him seem emasculated, and this made her feel guilty, and also attracted to him.
The clinic was just meant for research, repeat visits were just redundancies, but Aaron didn’t seem to understand that. It was possible that he really was there to see Dr. Melinda, and had simply gotten confused, knocked on the wrong door. But now that he was there, Cricket said she couldn’t in good conscience let him see that lying quack. Why she couldn’t refer him to a non-quack therapist was unclear. He was lonely, was Cricket’s non-explanation. It was the least they could do. So Cricket gave him a standing appointment and the standard twenty dollars for his participation.
Cricket couldn’t quite grasp how much of a Jewish coup this was. Cricket, a WASP, believed cheap Jews existed only in dangerous, outmoded stereotypes. Yael wasn’t cheap, she pointed out. In fact, she was quite generous. Yael couldn’t bear to tell her that her father was supporting her. The life she’d ordered to go appeared monthly on his credit card bill, along with her groceries and manicures.
“Jews also don’t have horns,” Cricket told her now. They were waiting for Aaron to arrive, and had circled back to this conversation.
And then, hesitantly, because this was Wisconsin, “Right?”
“Well, you know how the Orthodox men wear yarmulkes and the women wear wigs?” Yael waggled her eyebrows.
Cricket looked briefly horrified, but then recovered. She nodded respectfully.
“I’m joking,” Yael said. She wished she didn’t have to say it, but she did have to say it. Otherwise, there might be another Holocaust, and this one would be her fault. It wasn’t that she believed this, actually, but it also wasn’t that she didn’t believe it.
Cricket smiled like someone who’d been asked for directions to a place she’d never heard of, in a language she didn’t understand.
“It’s okay,” Yael said. “My boyfriend also doesn’t think I’m funny.”
Sophie thought she was funny, but Sophie was married now.
Cricket said she had to go prepare some paperwork, leaving Yael to sit alone in the office while she waited for Aaron and his little boy. Aaron arrived exactly on time, as he always did. The only, and so sad, explanation for this was that he came early and waited outside until the minutes perfectly aligned.
Cricket, back from her invented paperwork, took the little boy from Aaron and brought him into the room, sat him alone on a mat with age-appropriate toys that were pretty much the same as dog toys, strewn all around. Cricket left him there, and she and Aaron returned to the office, watching the little boy through a one-way glass window.
And then it was Yael’s turn to shine, starring in her role of stranger. They’d been through this so many times, though, that the little boy had come to recognize Yael, rendering the data useless. He lifted his hands to her, and she plucked him up, settling him onto her hip like a final puzzle piece clicking into place. It sometimes seemed to Yael that they were torturing the little boy, and sometimes like she was his mother-for-rent.
“It’s funny,” Yael said to Aaron, after they’d completed the routine. “It’s been all this time, and I don’t even know your little boy’s name.” For confidentiality purposes, Cricket called him Baby Boy B. It hadn’t occurred to Yael to ask before, but she’d gotten to the point now, after all these weeks, where she felt like she knew this little boy, and she looked forward to him, the soft underside of his chin, the gummy, dolphin smile.
“Brian,” Aaron said.
“Hey, that’s my boyfriend’s name.” And right away she felt she shouldn’t have said that.
“Really, it’s Baruch. Brian’s the legal name. Because it can be hard for people to say the ‘ch’. My wife, I mean, she felt like he should have an English name. So people could say it. But we—I—he’s really Baruch.”
Yael nodded.
“I say this only because, it’s not that I mean to be presumptuous, but your name-tag…”
“Pretty Jew
y, I know,” she said.
“It’s a wonderful name,” he said. “Do you know what it means?”
And then, instead of saying of course she knew what it meant, that she’d been raised Orthodox until she was eight, that her father was still Orthodox, that she had five half-siblings, all the boys in yarmulkes, the girls in skirts, a bewigged stepmother, she said, “Nope. My parents just liked it, I guess.”
She always did this. She didn’t mean to, but whenever someone—a man, let’s be honest—wanted to explain something to her, she let him. It felt easier. It kept a conversation going.
He explained that Yael, from the Book of Judges (she knew it was called the Navi), was actually a very powerful woman, that women in the Torah—the bible, he clarified—were actually very powerful, not subjugated at all, that was a misperception. She had defeated a terrible army general to help save the Jewish people. (This, of course, was the plot of every Jewish story, which had made memorization for tests very easy, back in the day.) Aaron neglected to mention that the biblical Yael had done this by seducing the king and then ramming a stake through his skull, his brains presumably splattering against the walls of her desert tent.
“Wow,” she said. “I never heard that before.”
“I wouldn’t mean to presume,” he said. “But if you’d like, I can teach you. If you’d like to know more, I mean.”
“We’d have to start all the way at the beginning,” she said, for no reason she could understand.
They met in her apartment. Brian was a little jealous when she informed him of the plan, twenty minutes before Aaron was scheduled to arrive.
“I mean, who is this guy?” he said. It was a line he must have heard on TV and was now trying out, a tentative flexing of an only recently discovered muscle.
“It’s not like we’re exclusive,” Yael said.
“We live together,” he said.
“You were in between places,” she said. “Right?”
He shrugged.
“Do you want to start paying rent?”