by Liz Astrof
I offered to help Jesse fill the tank. Todd told me to go to yoga. How could I go to yoga and leave him with this mess? Especially since it was my fault. Going to yoga would be selfish.
But also, necessary. For all our sakes. Obviously, I went.
• • •
LATER, WHEN I got home, Jesse and Phoebe met me at the door, excited to show me the turtles in their tank. Todd had gotten it all set up and functioning.
They led me to the playroom where two tiny baby turtles swam around, happily. I had to admit, they were pretty cute.
Jesse wrapped his arms around me and thanked me for letting them get the turtles. I told him to thank his dad. He’s the one who did all the work.
“But I did say you could have them, so you’re welcome.” I kissed his head.
“We waited for you to get home,” Phoebe squealed excitedly. “It’s time for them to eat!”
As I looked around for the baggie of pellets, the kids rushed Todd, who stuck his hand into a plastic bag with reddish brown mushy stuff in the bottom. Pulling out a fistful, he held his hand over the tank and released it into the water. Instantly, the mush dissipated into dozens of opaque red threads, which started squirming as the turtles dove for them, sucking them up like spaghetti. Squirming and twisting up in knots, some fell to the bottom and others moved in place. The kids cheered, as I wondered what the hell I was looking at. “Is this, like, live seaweed, or someth—”
“They’re bloodworms, Mom!” Jesse said, like he didn’t know me at all. Like he didn’t know about my revulsion toward insects. And my even bigger revulsion toward mushy things being eaten by slimy things.
My toes curled, my face made that deep frown all the beauty experts say is the most-aging facial expression and then, remembering this, I quickly smiled. But my smile was a lie. This was a scene from one of those nature shows Jesse plays on a loop. Whenever I enter the family room, I run the risk of glimpsing a fly’s seven hundred eyeballs close up or a wildebeest being eaten by a hyena. I cover my eyes and shout at him to shut it off or else he’ll be punished.
And now, live and in person, I watched as one of the turtles—one of our turtles—swam around an aquarium big as a small piano with a piece of disembodied worm hanging from his turtle lips. National Geographic, in my house. There was no changing the channel—to say nothing of turning off the lights.
“Their pale skin allows their hemoglobin to show through,” Jesse announced, and pointed. “If you look closely you can see the antennae—the small fleshy projections running down their bodies—”
“Jesse, it’s not nice to tell me that,” I snapped, and turned to Todd, pointing at the mushy bag of nightmares. “Do we keep them in the garage?”
“The refrigerator,” Todd said, sending more worms to their deaths. “They need to be kept cold.”
That was the moment—the trifecta of Todd’s anger, Jesse’s mania, and my contemplating keeping those death-worms in the same fridge where I stored bottled water—when I started to realize the enormity of what I’d done.
For the first time in ages, I insisted that night on putting the kids to bed—their rooms were the farthest ones in the house from the ecosystem wriggling and munching downstairs. Once the kids were asleep, I walked past the “turtle room.” The door was closed, a green glow from their lamps escaping the doorframe, like in a horror movie. One thin door separated me from live bloodworms and turtles that were growing bigger by the second.
What about when the turtles got bigger? What would they eat then—snakes? What if the worms got out? What if they ended up slithering all over the place? What if Crash ate them and shit them out on the carpet?
What if I ate them? What if, on one of my Ambien binges, I went into the fridge and grabbed the worms instead of the week-old ziti?!
No. No way. I could not take that risk. Bloodworms, it turns out, is where I draw the line.
I found Todd relaxing on the couch in the family room, drinking a beer.
“We need to get rid of those turtles,” I said, frantic. “For all our sakes—we can’t have them in the house.”
“Liz—”
“Can you kill them? Make it look like an accident?”
“No.”
“I’m serious, Todd . . . When does the ‘territorial’ thing happen? Can they eat each other? Is there a scenario where they both wind up dead?”
And with the most energy and excitement I’d seen in him since his precious Ohio State Buckeyes won the national championship, Todd sprang to his feet and told me the turtles weren’t going anywhere. He had done too much work, busted his ass too hard to get everything set up. There was no way we were getting rid of them now.
“They are staying,” said my beloved husband who didn’t even have time for a measly affair. “For forty to seventy years.”
“Then I’m going to kill myself,” I said.
And with the most energy and excitement I’d seen in him since he told me the turtles were staying for forty to seventy years, he told me I was also staying. If he had to watch over me twenty-four hours a day to insure my safety, he would do that.
He would take care of us. All of us. Of me.
It was his job. He liked it.
But nowhere near as much as I loved him. And our crazy, wild life together.
I’ve offered the kids a kitten if they let me “find a new home” for the turtles.
They refused.
Todd doesn’t know.
But I don’t know how long I can keep it a secret that Phoebe really wants a kitten. And obviously I’m not going to say no.
Happy New Year
* * *
It’s been years since the brother I knew was replaced by the religious doppelgänger bearing a strong resemblance to Jeff. I may not accept it, but I tolerate it—much as he no doubt tolerates some of my less pleasant quirks. And while I tend to avoid him when he’s in the grips of—let’s call it “religious behavior”—for the sake of maintaining a close relationship and fostering one between our children, once in a while Todd and I accept an invitation to spend a holiday with him and his family.
Like lunch at his house one recent Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah is the first of the High Holy Days—the one where the Lord decides who will get to live another year and who won’t—so I didn’t think it would hurt for us to put in a little face time there. Another reason for us going was that my dad and Cathy had come up to visit and would also be there—no doubt trying to earn another turn around the sun themselves. I could kill two birds with one stone. That might even be a biblical slogan.
Even though in theory Dad and Cathy had recently moved from Long Island to Nevada to be closer to us, we rarely saw them. Which meant they were happy. So, I was happy. They were caught up in a very demanding social life in Las Vegas and, I suspected, some pretty weird shit as well. My suspicions were reinforced by Mitzy, their Maltipoo and favorite child, whom they had smothered into insanity with their artisanal cocktail of affection, control, and ambient terror.
Mitzy is about as unstable a dog as I’ve ever known, and Jeff, my sister-in-law Stephanie, Todd, and I were all of the same opinion that she was forever trying to kill herself. The countless times she ran directly into oncoming traffic despite rigorous training against the behavior was an early indicator. As was her constant picking fights with dogs large enough to swallow her whole. And her going out of her way to eat sharp objects and chocolate, which is notoriously poisonous to dogs. Mitzy had no doubt ridden up with Dad and Cathy from Vegas, strapped into her car seat—a legitimate car seat—and in two days they would depart as usual because according to Cathy, Mitzy didn’t like to be away from home for longer than that.
Todd and I had been pretty lax in the religion department when it came to the kids and we’d recently begun thinking maybe we should start educating them on the faith they were born into before they started having really hard questions. One of the things Todd and I had bonded on early in our relationshi
p was that we both hated Hebrew school to the point of faking our own near-deaths to get out of it (my thing was spontaneous coma, his was aneurism), and neither one of us wanted to put Jesse and Phoebe through that.
But Jesse was six and Phoebe was four, and it was time they understood a little about their faith heritage. And at least they’ll know where their neurosis comes from. And so, during our car ride over to lunch—an hour late to avoid the prayer portion of the festivities—it fell to me to deliver the bad news to our children that even though it was New Year’s, it was the Jewish kind of new year, one that didn’t come with confetti or ball dropping or staying up until midnight, but instead came with praying and bad food. “Because Jews like to be miserable,” I explained.
Todd threw me that look that says he’s wondering why I have to be me. I thought I was doing pretty well, myself.
“So, you’re Jewish, guys,” I continued. “Got it?”
“Not Christmas?” Phoebe asked.
“No. You’re Hanukkah,” I said.
“I think she was asking if we were Christians,” Jesse said.
“You’re not that, either,” I told him.
“Can we ever celebrate Christmas?” my son asked, scared.
“No,” I said. More bad news.
“Is there a Santa Claus?” Phoebe asked.
“Yes,” I say only because I don’t want my kids to tell the Catholic kids there’s no Santa Claus and then we’re those assholes. “There is Santa. He just hates Jews.”
The talk had proven pretty easy. So easy, in fact, that I decided to broach another thorny subject.
“So, kids . . .” I started. “You need to know that Mommy and Daddy are gonna die someday.”
That didn’t go over quite as well. Todd shook his head as the kids started crying and said for my ears only, Don’t worry, Mommy’ll go first, which is why he was and remains the island of sanity in our family unit. And why I must go first.
After the kids stopped carrying on about our imminent deaths, we spent the rest of the ride discussing what the kids wanted for Christmas that year. I’d fucked up. It had been a little premature of me to have the “death talk” with my kids, especially when they’d yet to experience death with anything beyond remote controls and the occasional fly.
Which got me wondering how I would have felt at their ages to have learned that I was a twin. Because I had been one.
I didn’t learn about her until I was in high school and happened to take a good look at my birth certificate, where, in the space after “How Many Children Born,” was the handwritten notation “Two Female.” Which fucked me up a little back then, and I was eight years older than Jesse at the time.
Now here I was planting orphan nightmares in my kids’ heads, though to be fair, they bounced back pretty quick when I told them Jewish Santa would probably get them another dog, and we got to Jeff’s without further incident.
The moment we entered the house, we were hit with a burst of hot air that smelled of chicken, root vegetables, and if Jewishness has a smell, that. Before I could close the front door, sealing us in for the day, Mitzy sprinted over, a white cloud of carefully groomed fluff and neuroses, a pink bow tied tightly atop her bug-eyed little head.
“Mitzy!” I heard my dad yell frantically from somewhere. “Get the dog!”
I called that I had her and picked her up just as she was about to make a break for it. Through her open and panting mouth, I caught a flash of something metallic and, checking to make sure she wasn’t chewing a razor, noticed the orthodonture and realized she was wearing braces to correct her underbite. Yes, doggy braces.
As Todd shut the door, I put Mitzy back down, and we went into the dining room, where Jeff was the picture of Orthodoxy in a black suit and hat with a beard, looking less like the comedy writer and dirty joke machine I knew and more like a Hasidic Abraham Lincoln.
Lunch had started, the dining table having been extended halfway across the living room to accommodate what looked like an entire road company of Fiddler on the Roof, who were all eating and talking.
“Mitzy made another run for it,” I said to my brother lightly as a hello. Jeff just smirked and shook his head.
I found his wife Stephanie in the kitchen. More blond and blue-eyed than Cathy (I didn’t think that was possible until I met her) and lovely in that naturally-thin, forgets-to-eat-sometimes, converted-to-Judaism-for-Jeff way. She was standing there, surrounded by women who were challenged in all of those physical departments to varying degrees and who I assumed, deep down, under their layers of skirts and pants, must have hated her.
I apologized to Stephanie for being late. I blamed traffic, but we both knew my strategy. This wasn’t my first time at the High Holy rodeo. She pointed out that my favorite Orthodox friend of theirs was there, too. He had an uncanny resemblance to Tom Cruise, which tells you a lot about the scale I’m using for “normal.”
I sat at the table next to Todd and across from my dad, who was handsome and fit, especially for his age, though he looked older than he had looked back east. His hair was a starker white, and his once strong features had softened like older men’s do. Cathy, all blond and blue and sitting beside him in a red sundress, stood out like a primary-hued Irish Catholic sore thumb, fanning herself with a paper napkin. I asked her why it was so hot in the house. She told me the AC was broken, and because of “Jewish rules,” they couldn’t call the guy to come because no one was allowed to touch the phone on the New Year. Not the fun one, but still.
“Wouldn’t God want us to be cool?” I asked her. We were in a desert after all.
My dad shushed me sharply, glancing at my brother, his pride and joy. I thought I’d been whispering. My old man kept playing with his napkin, whittling it down obsessively to a tiny spear with his thumb and forefinger. Personally, I would have been more than happy to nominate myself and risk not getting that extra year by offering to call the AC guy. Not fix the AC, mind you—just fucking call someone who could. But my brother had chosen this life of excessive suffering—this was their house, their rules. So instead, I sat there in an ever-growing pool of my own sweat.
After lunch, we all dipped apples in honey and asked the almighty for a sweet new year, Amen, and the kids ran off to play. I think there were a hundred children in that house. Like for Catholics, one of the mandates of being Orthodox is to make more Jews, and this gang was killing it in that department. Jesse and Phoebe went to join them, but not before stopping to pet Mitzy, whom they made the mistake of treating like, oh, a dog. Cathy, obviously rattled, gently extracted their hands from the coat fresh from the groomer blowout.
“Let’s not pet her too hard,” she instructed them, in a singsong tone that bordered on hysterics. “We don’t want her to get overtired.”
The Orthodox wives moved into the kitchen to discuss their nation of children, leaving the menfolk to sit around the table and discuss the state of Israel. I decided to Getanyahu the hell out of the line of fire and retreated to the living room with Todd and the other non-Zionists.
Orthodox Tom Cruise was already there, sitting on the couch and looking for a rock in his shoe. My dad was there, too, cross-legged in a sofa chair, staring into space, still honing his napkin-spear from before. I plopped down on the sofa between Orthodox Tom Cruise and Todd, who flipped through a copy of Jewish Journal—there was literally nothing else on the coffee table.
When it comes to our family, as I’m sure it does with others, this is when the TV usually came on. Ah, TV, that warm box of inoculation against conversation, which always runs the risk of escalating into argument. But in this kosher house, where we couldn’t operate anything more mechanical than the doorknob on the way out, we were trapped for the duration and would now be forced to talk to each other. Which we did, gamely (and quickly) exhausting all the small-talk topics—kids, school, work, Las Vegas, Mitzy’s latest squirrel encounter.
The afternoon heat made the absence of AC even more unbearable. Still we persevered, until w
e all—or at least I—started to get a little woozy and lightheaded. While I pondered just how much carbon monoxide it would take to kill a party our size, in the other sofa chair Cathy was fanning herself and Mitzy, who panted on her lap. The Glamour magazine from 2009 moved from Cathy to Mitzy at intervals, Jennifer Aniston’s face flipping back and forth at me as Cathy cooed her beloved’s name in an attempt to soothe discomforts both real and imaginary.
Had there ever been doubt as to the hierarchy in our family, it was pretty clear at that point that Mitzy was Cathy’s favorite child. Which made that crazy dog the sister I never had—or rather the sister I actually did have who never lived. And since I’d already read all the literature the coffee table had to offer, I decided to broach the subject and turned to my father.
“Hey—did my twin sister have a name before she died?” I asked him.
Orthodox Tom Cruise looked up from his shoe. Todd put down the Jewish Journal he was pretending to read. Cathy fanned faster. My dad stared straight ahead and didn’t answer. I thought he hadn’t heard me, and I started to ask him again, until he cut me off.
“Elizabeth,” he warned, “why ask something like that now?”
I wanted to tell him I was just curious, that I figured it might have been a conversation springboard since we couldn’t watch TV. Instead I just said, “Forget it.” Ours was never the sort of relationship where real talk about life shit or feelings about life shit had ever taken place, and clearly this was neither the topic nor the temperature to change our routine.
I started steering the conversation back to Vegas when Orthodox Tom Cruise interrupted me. Tom Cruises can be so persistent.
“Wait,” he said. “You and Jeff had a sister? Did she have a name?”
I just scrunched up my nose and shook my head in a code that implied that it didn’t matter and we should just drop the subject and stare into space.
“No, she didn’t,” my father suddenly boomed. “She was dead on arrival. Where’s the dog?”