“Now chew,” she said.
“Mmmm.”
“What do you taste?”
“It’s a miracle,” I said. “A real simultaneous chicken-and-egg situation. It’s like, what came first? Neither!”
“Yes.” She laughed. “And?”
“I mean, the way the noodle is hugging both of them at the same time.”
“I know,” she said. “Now swallow.”
I swallowed.
Proudly, she made another bite for herself. As she brought it to her lips, she stared at me with those ice-blue eyes. Fuck, I thought. I might love this girl.
Beside her, the pu pu platter was still burning. It was a big wooden bowl with a gun-metal grate in the center that released a steady blue flame. The blue was rimmed in red.
I stared at the fire. I squinted at it until it became two flames, twins. Then I blinked, and it became one again. I could see something in there burning, a little charred thing, probably a piece of an egg roll skin. But the longer I stared, the more the thing looked alive—like a tiny figure being incinerated. It had a torso and a neck. It had a skull. I hoped the figure wasn’t a bad omen.
Just an egg roll crumb, I said to myself. You’re drunk.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the figure was a person, a symbol of something foreboding. Was the figure me? Was I being burned up in the fire? I felt dissociated, separate from myself. All my thoughts and beliefs, my little machinations and schemes, what were they? To calm myself, I tried to add up numbers in my head: 365 and 780 and 1,250 and 195. I could not remember how to do math. I couldn’t add up anything. My certainty of what was what—it was turning to ash.
I felt a strange and terrifying loneliness in the midst of that crowded restaurant. I wanted to stand, to run to the bathroom, to try and puke everything up. But my legs were trembling. So I stayed sitting down.
I put my elbows on the table and took deep breaths. I held my hands up to my eyes. I could still see the flames in the spaces between my fingers. I counted eight.
“Are you all right?” asked Miriam.
“I’m a menorah,” I said.
She laughed. I laughed too. Then I was more okay. I hadn’t turned to cinders. I felt safer.
At the banquette next to us, I saw the set designers eating from big plates of noodles, talking animatedly. I felt a swell of tenderness for them. I liked their talking. I liked their noodles. At the table of Chassidic men, one man stood up to give a toast. Everybody clinked their glasses with their spoons. I also liked the men. I could hear music playing on a speaker overhead. The music sounded beautiful to me. I wondered if it was Beethoven or Mozart or something. I laughed when I realized it was an instrumental pan flute version of Santana’s “Smooth.”
The toasting man called out, “L’Chaim!” The table of men chanted, “L’Chaim!” The gold dragon blew another round of smoke. The pan flute swelled.
“Hey,” said Miriam. “Did you have enough?”
I considered her question for a moment.
Then I said, “Yes. I did.”
CHAPTER 26
As we walked down the street from the Golden Dragon to the movie theater, Miriam cracked open her fortune cookie. It was dark out now, but the sidewalk was lit up with streetlamps.
“ ‘You know how to handle all situations,’ ” she said, reading hers aloud.
“Is that true?” I asked.
“Don’t doubt it,” she said, crunching down on the cookie, creating a downpour of crumbs on her breasts. “The cookie doesn’t lie.”
“Anyone who’s seen you in action when Yo!Good gets crowded would never contest that.”
“Oh, I’ve had far more intense jobs than Yo!Good,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Camp counselor. Five summers.”
“Overnight?”
“Day camp. Camp Shimshon in Beverly Grove. Youngest bunk. Arts and crafts, basketball. I’m great on defense.”
There were creases in her dress from where her stomach folded over when we were sitting down at the restaurant. As we walked, some of the fortune cookie crumbs floated down from her breasts and landed in the creases. I tried to picture her playing basketball.
“Parachute games, swimming,” she continued. “Twice I had to save those little runts from drowning.”
“Wow!”
“Yeah. Open your cookie,” she said.
I obliged, cracking open the cookie and reading my fortune out loud.
“ ‘Road work ahead. Expect delays,’ ” I read. “Great, of course I get the one about traffic.”
“Oy.”
“It’s really the perfect LA fortune, when you think about it. Avoid the 405 and have a nice life! That’s my fortune.”
She laughed.
“Steer clear of the 10 East between five and eight p.m.”
I put the two pieces of the cookie together and began making them talk, as though they were a bird’s beak, opening and closing.
“You think you can just glide down Santa Monica on a Thursday morning?” asked the bird. “Ain’t happening. And don’t even think about taking Wilshire. Enjoy your future.”
She laughed harder.
“Stop,” she said, sniffling and wiping her face. “Do I have lipstick all over me?”
“No,” I said, eating my cookie. “You licked it all off at dinner.”
“Oh,” she said. “I want to redo it.”
We stopped under the awning of a furniture store, closed but lit from the inside with one glowing light. She pulled the lipstick out of her purse, a small turquoise leather Coach bag, something an old lady might own.
“Can you put it on me again?” she asked. “I’m terrible.”
“Sure,” I said.
I moved closer to her in the yellow light. I was so near to her that I could smell the soy sauce and garlic and sweet liquor on her breath. She stifled a burp, and we both giggled. I wanted to say, It’s okay, don’t be embarrassed, let it out, I like you, the air inside you, all of you. Instead, I said nothing in that yellow light.
There was an awning above us, a palm tree hanging over the awning, as though it were some kind of double chuppa, the California god issuing its blessings, the California god saying, Yes, my daughters. I thought about kissing her, right there on the street, licking the bow of her upper lip, sucking on her underlip, that word echoing in my mind, daughters daughters daughters daughters. Instead, I did her lipstick. I did it quickly, then stepped away, out of the light, and said, “There.”
CHAPTER 27
“Twizzlers are kosher,” Miriam said as we stood in line to buy our candy at the movie theater. “M&M’s too, though they’re dairy, so technically I should wait an hour after dinner to eat them, because we had meat, but I won’t.”
“I’m sure god will forgive you. God loves M&M’s.”
We’d reached the front of the line, and we were at the counter.
“What’s god’s favorite flavor of M&M?” I asked the boy who was helping us. He looked about twelve, and very confused.
“Uh?”
“Pretzel,” I said.
“Obviously,” said Miriam, giggling.
“We don’t have pretzel,” he said. “Only peanut and plain.”
“Well, darn,” I said.
“It’ll have to be peanut, then,” said Miriam. “And an extra-large Cherry Coke.”
“So, this is what it’s like to be an adult?” I asked her as I collected the candy from the counter.
“What do you mean?”
“Just, like, you can do whatever you want?”
She picked up the gigantic soda, wrapped her wild mouth around the straw.
“Well, yeah,” she said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Oh.”
“Why? Don’t you do what you want?”
She was so cute standing there, Cupid’s buxom sister, all pinks and creams and honeys and golds, pure and indecent.
“No,” I said. “Not
often.”
As we watched the movie, I ruminated on a question, and the question was: Did I want to fuck Audrey Hepburn? I realized I didn’t. I coveted her black mesh veil, the red suit, the white trench. But I had no desire to kiss those lips. When I imagined her tiny titties, I thought, Okay, if requested, I would lick them. I’d give the nipples a little flick. And if I put my face between those concave thighs and stuck my mouth in her little pussy with the black hair, straight like an arrow, it could be nice—a Givenchy fuck, swank and lovely. But compared to Miriam, it would be nothing.
When the movie was over, Miriam and I stood together in the lobby of the theater by the exit doors. We were both silent, looking down at the blue rug, which was covered in a pattern of shooting stars and popcorn clusters. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, if I was supposed to do anything at all, but I knew I wanted to stay in Miriam’s presence as long as possible. I kept opening my mouth to speak and then closing it again.
“Well,” she said, breaking the silence.
“Well?”
“There’s three left,” she said, handing me the bag of Twizzlers and grinning. “You take them. Okay. Bye.”
“Bye,” I said.
She walked out the doors.
As I drove home, I felt high.
“Wasn’t that a beautiful rug in the lobby?” I said out loud. “In all my life, I don’t think I’ve seen such a beautiful rug, Miri. Can I call you that? Oh, Miri. Miri, Miri, Miri.”
I kept touching the almost-empty bag she had given me and smiling. At a stoplight, I took out the last remaining Twizzlers and whipped them gently over my eyes.
CHAPTER 28
My mother had stopped calling. She was no longer sending family emissaries, weather warnings, or a narrative history of my upbringing. Now what I received daily was a lone text. The text simply said: Hi.
On Friday it was: Hi.
Saturday: Hi.
Sunday: Hi.
Monday: I mailed you two coupons for Bed Bath & Beyond. 20% off WHOLE PURCHASE and 20% off one item!! Use in good health and prosperity!!!
Tuesday: Please make sure you use coupons fpr big item. Maybe a vacuum?? Do you have a cacuum??
Wednesday: Hi.
The Hi was alluring. I wanted desperately to respond to the Hi. What was wrong with writing back a little How are you? or Hey or even I miss you? The Hi was so simple, so casual. The Hi made it seem like I could have an easy relationship with my mother—as though it were not a trapdoor to an emotional onslaught, a bombardment, a PowerPoint presentation of guilt—as though my mother and I were friends, great friends, as though I were one of those daughters who said, Oh yeah, my mother is my best friend. Those women were upsetting.
Mothers who doted on their baby daughters also killed me. I couldn’t be involved in their attempts to get me to cosign a child’s cuteness. I’d see a mother walking down the street with her little toddler, the toddler babbling on about something or other, the mother smiling at the toddler, then looking at me, expecting me to celebrate her precious little one. I couldn’t smile back.
When I met Ana for teatime the day after the movies, I felt like weeping.
“I’m sorry,” I wanted to say as she handed me my hot cup of Harney & Sons, our fingers touching. “I’m sorry,” and also, “Please help me.”
I couldn’t not want it: the approval, that feeling at afternoon teas past when my stomach rumbled and I was proud of its rumbling, when I knew exactly what was in me. It seemed now that in those calculated hollows there had been total security, even though I knew I was never really safe. The hollows staved off another kind of emptiness, thick with terror and mystery. Now the unknown was sitting on me.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“About what?” I grinned.
I was hoping we were about to evaluate Andrew’s new haircut. The indie-rocker shag had sprouted bangs overnight.
“The tea,” she said. “Darjeeling. I usually do Earl Grey.”
I noticed that she said I and not We. I blew on the cup and took a sip, letting the warm liquid melt the piece of nicotine gum I had parked between my molar and my cheek.
“Great,” I said.
It was going to have to be me who initiated the shit-talk.
“So,” I said. “Having carefully read Ofer’s e-mail on internalized misogyny and safe spaces, I’ve reached the conclusion that no space is safe… from him.”
“Didn’t read it,” she said. “I saw sensitivity in the first line and deleted immediately.”
“Do you think it was your internalized misogyny that did the deleting?”
“It was my internalized something.”
“He’s become a real bro-choice activist,” I said.
“Mmmm.”
Was I losing her? Did she no longer like me? I could never tell how other people saw me. Most of the time I felt like I was riding around in a car with a fogged windshield that made it difficult to decipher the perceptions of others. They were all just kind of pantomiming outside, grunting, while I ran the wipers over and over. No matter how fast I wiped, I couldn’t clear the fog.
Still, I was pretty sure there was something about me that Ana was now rejecting. I was on the way out, no longer a fit for inclusion in her joyful exclusion of others. A them-ing had happened to our us. She could sense that I was becoming—what?
There was, growing within me, a great Fuck-You-ness. I didn’t know if this feeling was surrender, freedom, or a total delusion that was ultimately going to hurt me. Miriam had transmitted the feeling to me, like an infusion—or a disease. It was exciting. But at the same time, it scared me.
I googled How to stop the golem.
According to several Jewish tales, a golem came alive out of clay or soil when its creator walked around it reciting a combination of letters from the alphabet and god’s secret name. To stop the golem, its creator must circle it in the opposite direction and recite everything backward.
“Mairim Mairim Mairim Mairim,” I whispered. “Lehcar Lehcar Lehcar Lehcar. Ana Ana Ana Ana. Rehtom Rehtom Rehtom Rehtom.”
I felt no less gone.
CHAPTER 29
“I’m totally down to die in a mudslide,” I said into the microphone. “Like, as long as it kills me instantaneously, I’m available.”
It was Thursday night, and almost-me was up and running with a darker twist to my East Coasters care more about our weather than we do bit.
“Am I emotionally available for a mudslide? No. But if the mudslide is down for a quickie, I’m in.”
The laughter was decent. Then I heard a “woo” from the audience. The voice was familiar. When I looked out into the lights to try and decipher who the woo-er was, I saw Jace Evans.
“Hey, thanks,” I said, pointing to him. “I’ll be here all week.”
When I got offstage, he followed me through the crowd.
“Hey!” he said.
“Oh, hi. Shouldn’t you be in the dystopic future, wrangling zombies?”
“I do exist off camera.”
“I’m just surprised to see you here, that’s all.”
“My friend Paul from Akron is one of the comics.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “The guy who did the whole set about jerking off into a family heirloom. He thinks my shit is too pedestrian.”
“You were really funny. Definitely funnier than Paul.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He fumbled with the beads on his faux rosaries.
“Fred Segal?” I asked.
“What?”
“I was just wondering where you got those.”
“Oh, my grandma gave them to me for luck. She’s super Catholic. I never take them off.”
I was being pelted with religious people.
“Well,” he said. “Except when my fucking stylist makes me.”
“Did your stylist pick out those?” I asked, pointing to his bracelets.
“No,” he said proudly. “Those are all me.”
&nbs
p; I noticed a table of four young women looking at him. They must have been from out of town, because they weren’t trying to hide their staring at all.
I asked myself again if I was attracted to him. The floof, unfortunately, was still floofing. But under the floof he had a pair of very earnest-looking brown eyes, round, like the embarrassed emoji, framed with very long, dark lashes. His voice was soft, something of a murmur, and it made me want to move closer to him. I noticed that I was disproportionately happy when he said I was funny. There were definitely flurries in my stomach. But it wasn’t what I felt when I looked at Miriam, not that lustful trance I had with her at the restaurant. Still, I wanted him to want me. If he didn’t think I was attractive, it negated the fact that he found me funny. I wished it was enough that he found me funny.
“Yo, I’m starving,” he said. “You hungry?”
Of course I was hungry. But that would be taken care of shortly, upon return home to my allotted 150-calorie diet ice cream and 80 calories of cereal.
“Not really,” I said.
“There’s a great hot dog place around here.”
“Hot dogs?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Really good chili dogs and stuff.”
I looked at him, all jaw, so casually trumpeting chili dogs. He was safe from judgment in his body, this naturally skinny, handsome actor. He had an armor to protect him from any consequences to his own hunger. In Miriam, it was different. She wore the fruits of her hunger on her body at all times.
“How good?” I asked.
CHAPTER 30
“You don’t know how nice it is to hang out with a woman who eats,” said Jace, as we downed our second hot dogs. I’d copied his order: one dog with chili and cheese and one dog with ketchup, mustard, relish, and onions. The cashier was a fan of Breathers and gave us the dogs on the house. She’d been the one who suggested onions. The fact that Jace took her up on it made me certain that he liked me as nothing more than a friend. Clearly, he didn’t care what happened to his breath.
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