by Miriam Cohen
“Fine,” he said. “Okay.”
“To the rent?”
“He can come over. That’s fine.”
“Oh, good,” she said. “That’s very grown-up of you. And he has a baby. Maybe you could watch the baby?”
“I’m high,” he pointed out. “If you could have just told me a little sooner, I mean.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s hard being you, right?”
“It is hard,” he said. “Dr. Melinda—”
“I need to close up all the outlets,” she said. “And I think you should go to your room.”
“Our room,” he said.
What was wrong with her? “Our room,” she said. “Sorry. And bring Barbra Streisand. Jews are afraid of dogs.” “Aren’t you a Jew?” he said.
He seemed legitimately confused, as though maybe all this time he’d misunderstood and she, of the curly hair and Hebraic name, was actually Catholic. She didn’t understand how someone who was technically an adult could be so stupid.
“Some Jews,” she said. All right? Some Jews are afraid of dogs.”
She picked up Barbra Streisand, held her on her hip, where she fit so nicely. She let Barbra Streisand lick inside her nostril. It was disgusting, but not really that disgusting. Or not more disgusting than anything else. “Be good,” she said.
“I will,” Brian said, and she couldn’t bear to tell him she’d meant the dog.
The doorbell rang exactly as the minute hand on her watch inched onto the six and it became 5:30. On the dot. She finally understood the expression.
Aaron brought a Hebrew workbook. No wine or anything, just the workbook. Which was fine. She had the boyfriend. The desk was in her bedroom, she explained, and that was where the boyfriend also was, so they’d have to work at the kitchen table. Was that okay?
“Of course,” he said. “It’s good your boyfriend’s here. Otherwise, it really wouldn’t be so proper for me to be here, and then I’d ask if we could keep the door open. It’s a law, actually. A man can’t be alone with a woman who’s not his wife. It’s for the woman, the law. It’s so a woman should be safe.”
Yael understood how hard it was to talk about Jewish law, especially if you were a man, without apologizing. What he’d neglected to mention was that a woman who was not a man’s wife included his own siblings and, according to most rabbis, adopted children.
“We’ll start at the beginning,” he said.
“A very good place to start,” she sang.
“What?”
“When you read you begin with A, B, C.”
He looked around, as if to find the answer in the floating dust particles she really should have done a better job getting rid of.
Now she was getting nervous. “When you sing, you begin with Do, Re, Mi?”
Nothing.
“The Sound of Music,” she said. “Never mind.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m familiar, but Jewish, Orthodox, I mean, Orthodox men refrain from hearing women singing.”
He kept speaking, explaining the origin of the law, its attendant disputes, but Yael was tired of listening. She knew all about this law. It made it so Yael and her mother always went to musicals alone when she was a kid, her father left at home. The idea was men might get too attracted to the women singing—and what? Leap onto the stage and rape them? Yael and her mother used to come home and sing all the lyrics at the top of their lungs. Yael’s father was allowed to hear them sing, because the law allowed him to find his wife attractive and it assumed the best when it came to father-daughter incest. After her parents’ divorce, Yael and her mother still went to musicals, but never with the same amount of glee. They retired to their separate showers to sing.
“That’s so interesting,” she said.
“It might seem a little misogynistic, at first, but you understand, it’s really about respecting women.”
“How nice,” she said.
“And that’s what Orthodox Judaism is all about.”
“Where’s Baruch?” she said.
He looked surprised. “You’re very good with the ‘ch’ sound.”
She shrugged in a way she hoped came off as modest. “I guess I’m a quick-study. But it’s hit or miss, really.”
Aaron nodded. “You’ll get better.”
“And the baby’s…?”
“I got a sitter.”
“Good,” she said. It wouldn’t be nice to tell him she was disappointed. It wasn’t especially normal to be disappointed.
He opened the book. “Now, with Hebrew, it’s a little different, because it’s left to right.”
They went through some letters and sounds, Yael making sure to stumble often, to sigh and rake back her hair with her hand, gamely laughing at her mistakes, ever-ready to give it another try.
He kept her at it for an hour, and then he told her she was doing very well for a beginner and closed the book. She asked him if he wanted water—was water kosher?—and he gave her a look that let her know she’d gone too far. “Joking!” she said.
He said yes, but in a plastic cup, please. She gave him the water. He cleared his throat. “I’m just going to recite the blessing now.”
Yael nodded with her lips together, eyes open wide. It was Cricket’s nod, meant to convey polite respect, but only thinly coating a feeling of vast superiority. To the uninitiated, it might appear to be a look of simple, unadulterated terror.
“So what brought you to Wisconsin?” Yael said, once he’d finished the routine and taken a theatrically loud gulp of water. “Not a lot of Jews here, right?”
Now he became excited, standing up, swaying a little from side to side, as though in prayer. The word for what he was doing existed only in Yiddish. He was shuckling. He clapped his hands together. “That’s why I’m here. Have you heard of Chabad?”
His job, he explained, was to build Jewish community. For all Jews. Even for Jews who were unaffiliated, like her. Especially for Jews like her, even.
He invited her for a Shabbat dinner. He said Shabbat, with a hard “t”, carefully, for her benefit. In real life, she knew, he pronounced it Shabbos, with a snake hiss of an “s”. She’d grown up with Shabbos, disdainful of the less-real Modern Orthodox Jews who insisted on the “t”. Had she remained Orthodox, she would have had a Bas Mitzvah, and at twelve, instead of the Bat Mitzvah her mother threw for her at thirteen.
“I’d love to,” she said. “That’s the one with the Hallah bread, right?”
“Challah,” he said, gently. “But yes, that’s exactly it. See? You know more than you think.”
One thing Yael was excellent at was making herself blush on cue.
After Aaron was gone, Brian came out of the room, Barbra Streisand rushing ahead, barking, triple-axeling with joy at her and Yael’s reunion.
“I thought you knew all that,” Brian said.
“I do,” she said. “That was really weird of me.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Do you want me to order dinner?”
“Are you still high?”
He told her he was, a little.
“Then order a lot,” she said.
Yael’s mother called. This happened every day, dysfunctionally and best not ever admitted to Cricket. Cricket, with her cardigans and pearls, probably only spoke to her own mother on a biannual basis, in a country club, the two of them laughing lightly over Jell-O molds. For Yael, though, speaking to her mother was like turning off the lights before going to bed—it was just something you did. It would be hard to fall asleep if you didn’t.
Her mother wanted to know how things were.
“Things” took on various meanings, depending on the phone call. It could mean dating a man who wasn’t Brian, getting a job that wasn’t the one she had with Cricket, moving to a place that wasn’t Wisconsin, which could be New York, Boston, D.C., Yael’s pick.
“Things are fine,” Yael said. Although…” She waited a drumroll of a few beats, and then, with a delicious flourish, “I met a Chabadnik.”<
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“Huh,” her mother said.
“He’s cute, also. Even with the beard. Actually, especially with the beard.”
“So this is instead of that boy?”
For a moment, Yael thought her mother might be talking about the baby.
“Brian,” Yael said. “You know what his name is. And he’s not a boy.” Though she couldn’t quite bring herself to say he was a man.
“You’re not still living together, are you?”
“We are still living together. But now I also have the Chabadnik. He’s been teaching me quite a bit.”
“Is that right?” her mother said.
“Mmm-hmm. Quite a bit about my heritage. It’s more beautiful than I ever even imagined. And he’s graciously invited me to his home so that I might experience Shabbos.”
“He has a wife, I imagine.”
“The wife’s dead,” Yael said. She wasn’t going to mention the baby.
“Huh. What does your boy have to say about that?”
“My Brian doesn’t even know I’m going.”
Yael imagined herself as a sexy double-agent: woman with child-boyfriend by day, woman with widower and his child by night. The image that summoned, though, wasn’t actually at all sexy. She gave her fantasy self a dash of red lipstick and a trench coat. Better.
Yael’s mother sighed theatrically. “I just wish you would find someone nice,” she said. “Just someone who isn’t a goy and isn’t a rabbi.”
“A girl, a goy, and a rabbi. That sounds like a good setup for a joke,” Yael said.
“Keep it as a joke,” her mother said. “You don’t have to ruin your whole life just to show how much you hate me.”
“That’s not that funny.”
“I just love you,” her mother said. “When did that become a crime?”
It was about time to hang up. A few more minutes of this, and Yael would lose her self entirely. Her mother was a magician in this way. She could saw Yael right in half.
“It’s not a crime,” Yael said. “Thank you for caring.”
“I just love you,” her mother said.
“Love you, too,” Yael said. They hung up, and Yael had her self again. There it was, that thing Aaron would call the soul: on the verge of flickering out, but there.
Shabbos began at sundown, 7:29 this week because it was summer, so it was odd that Aaron’s invitation called for her to arrive at 12. It made sense when she got there. There was a vat of risen dough on the table, packets of chicken breasts defrosting on the counter, a loaf of gefilte fish wrapped in wax paper, the bare bones of what would surely turn out to be a noodle kugel. A stack of foil pans. Baruch was napping in a playpen set up in the middle of the living room, sleeping with his little diapered butt in the air, his curls damp with the ferocious sweat of baby dreaming. She kept herself from scooping him up. But she imagined the heft of him in her arms, his hot body to her chest, those damp curls pressed against her cheek, lips pursing in bleary search of a bottle.
“We’re the only ones here,” Aaron said, in lieu of hello. “So we’ll have to keep the door open.”
Yael politely pretended the subtext was not, Lest I rape you. “Sure,” she said.
“I wondered if you might want to help,” Aaron said.
Of course he did.
But she felt sorry for him, standing there in his apron, his oven beeping. “That sounds like a treat,” she said. “I’ve never helped with a Shabbat meal before.”
“Good, good,” he said. “It’s really not that difficult, once you get the hang of it. We’ll just, we can just start with braiding the challah.”
He showed her how to grab the dough, plop it onto a floured baking pan, separate it into three strands, bring those strands together. He was sloppy, but trying. She wondered who had helped him before her.
“It must be hard,” she said.
He stroked the stubble at the sides of his cheeks. “The Torah says, ‘Man is not meant to be alone.’”
But she could see that he might want to say something else, that beneath the quote, which she recognized immediately as belonging to Genesis, he might be saying, It is hard. I feel so alone. My wife is dead and I have to raise this child by myself, and I don’t think I can.
She brushed her braided challah with egg yolk. Maybe she could marry him. She could call up Sophie and say, Guess what?
All she needed him to say was, I was so worried about my son, and I met you, and I wanted so badly for him to be around you. I wanted for you not to be a stranger to him.
She would help him: “Most people don’t visit the Infant Attachment Center every week.”
“Oh?”
Maybe just a small acknowledgment, for now. That would be enough. Just a thank you.
“Because the point of the study is for the infant to come in contact with a stranger. The baby, in Baruch’s case.” The ten-month-old, she didn’t say.
“I didn’t realize,” he said. “I had no idea.”
It was in all their promotional material.
“That’s so funny,” she said. “Because I think you signed a waiver.”
Even a gesture would be enough. A rueful smile. A softly-spreading blush, beginning at the neck, brightening the ears.
“Waivers,” he said. He said it the way her father said, Global warming. Nonsense peddled by the goyim and self-hating liberal Jews, but certainly not actually applicable to him.
Aaron looked deeply into space, addressing an imaginary congregation.
“We braid a challah to symbolize our observance of Shabbos,” he said. “It’s the woman’s job, generally speaking, because the kitchen is her domain.”
Now he looked a little panicked, diving into the old apology, transforming into every rabbi she’d ever met: “But it’s not to say. It’s, what it is is the same way that a man’s domain is studying Torah. It’s not like in the secular world. Women are so much closer to God. Each job is equally important. The woman’s role, really, it’s more important.”
He would give her nothing.
So this was who he was. There was a kind of a pleasure in understanding this, like coming across some old clothing you could box up and definitely throw away, no question. A relief. She wasn’t going to marry him, become a mother to his child, save him, piss her mother off, delight her father. She could just keep on being herself: shitty girlfriend, terrific mother to a dog.
But she did stay with him and help until all the challah was braided, each chicken cutlet braised, the kugel assembled and lovingly baked, cinnamon-specked. She slipped so easily into the role of Orthodox housewife, like some kind of inherited muscle memory. Yael could see how satisfying it was, knowing exactly who it was you were supposed to be and then going right on and becoming that person, the ding ding ding of a row of cherries in a slot machine sliding perfectly into place. And she thought of her mother, who on this Friday night would set her small table for one, the sitcom laugh track in the background coming close enough to company.
WIFE
So he was cheating on her. Karin found them—her husband and Cynthia Lawless—kissing on the street outside her husband’s publishing house, in the shade of some hideous scaffolding. Karin had not been coming to surprise Henry like a devoted, dumb wife from the 1950s. She had been coming to meet him for dinner reservations he’d made. Everything was about the kids these days, he’d said. Let’s take some time for us. And she arranged a babysitter, and pumped for the baby (though maybe, suggested her husband, always the joker, he was getting a little long in the tooth for all that), and put on lipstick.
Cynthia Lawless. Her name was a built-in pun, or maybe it was the punch line.
Henry was Cynthia Lawless’ editor. Or, as Cynthia Lawless put it, she was his writer. Cynthia Lawless was gaunt and childless, and wore little black dresses that were still too big. She wrote exclusively about sex. The plot: A young girl discovers her sexuality. She’s young and afraid and has certain physical flaws like, in the latest novel, bad hair, and sh
e cares about it, but no one else does. That was what the latest novel was called: Bad Hair. It was supposed to make you think, Bad girl.
Cynthia Lawless was herself married. If a woman was married eleven years and had no children, it meant one of two things: she was infertile or a bitch. Karin thought bitch. Women in Cynthia Lawless’ novels never thought of children. They were in their thirties, forties, and children were never around. Not even the minor characters had, or wanted, or even spoke of not wanting, children. It was like science fiction. Cynthia Lawless’ husband was also a writer. A stand-up guy, Henry said. He also liked to write about sex. His plot: a man who doesn’t seem sexy turns out to be sexy. His last novel was called Meow. In the novel, the non-sexy, but actually-sexy man was a cat. It really was science fiction.
Karin was a few minutes early. Maybe if she’d been on time, she would have missed it. It wasn’t her fault, but it was a little bit her fault—that’s what she would have thought that if she were a wife from the 1950s and not a woman with a doctorate who’d just that afternoon lectured about Ophelia from Hamlet. Ophelia was not a zero, even though her name began with O, she told her students. The O was her open vagina. The O was for orgasm. So what about that? She could speak about sex just like Cynthia Lawless and Cynthia Lawless’ husband. She could speak circles around them, pun intended.
She should have walked right up to them. She should have slapped him. She should have slapped Cynthia Lawless right across the face. But instead, she hid and waited, and then, when there was no more chance of catching them in the act, when they had pulled apart and were standing at a respectable distance from one another, only then, as casual as a wife who wasn’t being cheated on, did she walk up to them and say, “Cynthia, how good to see you.”
There wasn’t lipstick on Henry’s face, because Cynthia Lawless didn’t wear lipstick. She was too evolved for makeup. She was fine with looking gaunt and pale and Victorian, swimming in those black dresses from thrift shops that, for all Karin knew, still smelled of must if you got up close.
Cynthia Lawless said, “The natives must be restless these days.”
She meant, of course, the children. The children were theirs—Henry’s and Karin’s—but they really belonged to Karin. She was the mother. But it wasn’t the 1950s. She didn’t sit at home with puffed ankles and bare, calloused feet lined with just-about-bursting veins. She made more than Henry did. Though that was saying pretty much nothing.