“The women you know don’t eat?” I asked, playing totally dumb.
“Not the actresses on Breathers. I think they exist on charcoal lemonade.”
Oh, the fucking naïveté of this asshole. Did he really think the average woman could be skinny enough for TV and also eat? Whenever an actress in InStyle or Marie Claire or People said, “I have fries every day,” we all knew she was fucking lying. I wondered what Jace would think of Miriam if he saw her.
“Well, their job is to play the dead,” I said.
“The undead,” he corrected me.
“What exactly are the undead?”
“You don’t watch the show?”
“I do,” I lied. “I just want to hear your perspective.”
“Wow. Well, my take is kind of out there.”
“That’s fine.”
“Okay. So, traditionally, a zombie is a bad dude. He’s back from the grave, he’s empty, and he wants to eat your brains—”
“Like Frankenstein.”
“No, not at all,” he said very seriously. “Frankenstein is not a zombie. He’s a monster.”
“Oh.”
“But what’s so special about Breathers is that the zombies are, like, less dead than the three main characters. It’s like the zombies reflect the emptiness of our culture. They’re forcing us to wake up from it. They still want to eat our brains, but they’re giving us a gift, because with the threat of death, they’re making us become more alive than ever. That’s the emotional reality I’m trying to bring to Liam.”
I watched him finish the hot dog with gusto, his strong jaw pumping up and down. He squinted every time he took a bite, and I wondered if that was a studied move—something he’d learned in acting class. He was using the hot dog like a prop. I felt a sudden urge to knock it out of his hands.
CHAPTER 31
In the morning I woke up with a microwave pizza in bed next to me, half-eaten. I was acidic, burping sour. I shoved down a handful of Frosted Flakes from a box on my nightstand.
On my way home from hot dogs with Jace, I’d stopped at 7-Eleven and bought a bunch of junk. I was only going to give myself until midnight to eat everything. I didn’t want the food to permeate another day. But at 12:02 a.m., I was still chewing, so I’d decided to give myself another full 24 hours of limitless consumption. Maybe if I ate for 24 hours straight it would cure me of my bingeing problem.
I had 18 hours and 34 minutes left. Anything I wanted for breakfast could be mine. I decided I would stop and get a dozen donuts on my way to work, keep them hidden in my car. Throughout the day, I could sneak out to the garage and gradually eat the whole dozen. I would also buy an extra box for the office. Everyone would love that.
At Dunkin’ Donuts, I selected two Boston cream, two chocolate glazed, two chocolate crème-filled, a cruller, a blueberry, two chocolate frosted, a plain cake donut, and a cinnamon for my box. For the office dozen, I told them just to pick out a variety, what normal office people ate. I only managed to gag down two and a half of my donuts on the drive in: the blueberry, the cruller, and the pudding from the Boston cream, which I dug out with my hand and licked in traffic. The rest of my box I shoved under the seat.
Everyone was excited to see the donuts. As with all office food, they went quickly. Only a pink iced donut and a coffee cake thingy remained. Around 11:30, I made my way into the kitchen to snatch up the pink. When Ana came in, I felt like I’d been caught masturbating.
“The receptionist just left,” she said. “Her kid ate a fun-size Snickers. Peanut allergy. Now I’m answering the phones alone all day.”
I was glad her focus was on a deadly Snickers and not my donut.
“At least it wasn’t king-size,” I said. “She’d be out the whole week.”
“These allergies seem a little too trendy,” she said. “Before 9/11, I don’t remember a peanut ever hurting anybody.”
“Jace Evans came to my show last night,” I said.
I hadn’t planned on telling her. But now that it was out, I wanted her to be impressed.
“To see you perform?”
“No. He just happened to be there. But he said he liked my set.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Then he asked me to go get dinner with him after. I didn’t go.”
“Good,” said Ana, washing her hands in the sink. “You’ll be the only woman this side of the 405 he doesn’t sleep with.”
I figured that she meant this as a compliment. She was saying I was strong, sharp, not easily fooled. But it didn’t feel like a compliment, not entirely. It was a reminder that I wasn’t special. She was saying he flirted with everybody. I should not consider myself a prize just because he’d paid attention to me.
I wanted more acknowledgment from her. I wanted her to say, Of course he was into you. Of course he was, my beautiful daughter. My thin and beautiful daughter. My funny, thin, beautiful, smart, and talented daughter.
“I don’t think he would have tried anything with me,” I said. “He probably knows I’d get in trouble if I hooked up with a client.”
Now I was trying to change the tone of the story—from braggy to skeptical—as if to say, I knew all along he didn’t want me.
“I don’t see what the big deal is about him,” I went on. “He’s not even that good-looking.”
“Oh, he’s good-looking,” said Ana, turning off the sink. “At least until he starts talking.”
CHAPTER 32
At lunchtime, I went over to Yo!Good to see if Miriam might be working. There was no way I could eat any yogurt, or any more food at all. I realized that this meant I was only going there to see her.
“Hi,” she said. “I was wondering if I was going to see you again.”
“Hi.” I grinned.
“Do you want me to make you something special?”
“No,” I said. “I just came here to see you.”
“Ah,” she said, smiling and tapping a plastic spoon against the counter.
I couldn’t tell if this was a nervous gesture or if she was drumming out a celebratory beat—tap tap, tap tap! I am glad you have come to see me Rachel! Here is my staccato indication of that! And what did glad even mean? There was such a wide range of glads, from platonic amusement to amorous hysteria. Would I ever decipher the precise timbre of her gladness, the origin from which it sprang, whether it was an I think you’re cool, or, if I were blessed, an I want you so bad? I felt like I would die if I didn’t find out soon. I also wasn’t sure what I would do if I did find out. I knew that I wanted to be around her—a lot. I knew that I wanted to taste each of her moles: the caramel one on her cheek, the dark chocolate drop on her Adam’s apple, the two milk chocolate drops on the left.
“What song is that?” I asked her.
“What?”
“The spoon,” I said.
“Oh.”
She hadn’t known she was drumming. She put the spoon down on the counter. Then she picked it up and threw it in the trash. The store was empty except for the two of us.
“I’d love a smoke,” she said. “Want to go out back for a clove?”
I nodded.
She squinted in the sun as she tried to light her cigarette. I offered her my sunglasses, and she accepted them. They were Ray-Bans, Blues Brothers–style, and they looked ridiculous on her. She looked like she was in a wedding band. She handed me the clove she had lit, then she lit one for herself, inhaling deeply. When she exhaled, it looked like she was blowing loop-de-loops. They were beautiful, actually, a series of perfect circles in a ray of sun.
“You blow rings?” I asked her.
“What?”
“Smoke rings,” I said.
I held up my hand and poked through the center of one of the rings. But just as I made contact, the ring dissipated into a lazy cloud. She laughed at me from behind the sunglasses. They were too boxy on her, and I tried to imagine what kind of sunglasses would look better. I pictured her in round, mirrored shades. They would match the sha
pe of her face and also lend her a bohemian air: Miriam as Mama Cass, Miriam as goddess of the canyon. Or she could go pure early ’60s nostalgia—Hollywood beehive Miriam with a cat-eye frame in white or checkerboard or cherry red. I decided that I would definitely buy her a pair and bring them to her as a present. Then she could smoke in the sun whenever she wanted—in style.
I wanted to buy her all kinds of gifts. I pretended that my generosity came from gratitude, fondness, but there was definitely a deeper motivation behind my desire to give. I wanted to “improve her” like a project, make her more fashionable. It was not so much about goodwill as it was about my own fear.
People in LA were always recommending things that were more about themselves than the recipient. They recommended obsessively—films, Netflix series—as though their association with a piece of media imbued them with sex appeal, intelligence, an irresistible whimsy. When I felt a recommendation coming on, I’d lie and say I’d already seen the thing: just so I didn’t have to hear the plot explained. Did anyone genuinely like anything? So much art was bad. I preferred the work of dead people. At least the dead weren’t on Twitter.
But in my desire to curate Miriam, I’d become just another version of an obsessive recommender. I wanted to show the world how beautiful she was, to present a different type of beauty, and in doing so, to own part of her. I felt that if the world embraced Miriam, I’d be healing something in me—making amends with young Rachel. But I didn’t entirely trust the world to grasp her beauty. So I sweetened the pot with little aesthetic upgrades.
“I know you’re not doing anything for Shabbat,” she said. “You must come over to my family’s house this evening for dinner. I insist. You will love it.”
Now she wanted to introduce me to her family? This seemed very intimate, kind of fast. Or was it just an abundance of platonic friendliness in her, a kind and generous nature, nothing to do with romance? She was doing a mitzvah: reaching out to a fellow Jewish woman who was without family. It was Semitic sympathy, diasporic decorum. It was the right thing to do.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Okay,” I said. “I can.”
“Fabulous.”
She was so cute, exhaling the last of her cigarette, stubbing it out under her foot and clapping her hands together as if to say, That’s that. When she clapped, her left hand cast a shadow inside her right hand. The shadow was ovular. It looked like an eye.
For a moment, I really wondered if I was seeing an eye in the palm of her right hand. The eye winked. I blinked. Then it was gone.
CHAPTER 33
I didn’t know what I was supposed to wear to Shabbat. I didn’t want Miriam’s family to think I was being disrespectful, so I cut out of work early and popped over to Saks Off Fifth, where I bought a long black cotton dress that buttoned at the wrist and came down to my ankles. I had always felt culturally Jewish, even though I wasn’t religious. But now in my ignorance of Orthodox customs I felt like a straight-up WASP. In some ways I liked that feeling: streamlined, self-contained.
I stopped at Schwartz Bakery and picked up a cinnamon ring, then parked my car and walked the rest of the way to Miriam’s house on Formosa. I didn’t want them to know that I was driving on Shabbat, because I knew this was considered work—even though the sun hadn’t yet set. There was something nice about being forced to be done with everything by sunset, to be excused from life. It was like a teacher’s note from the ultimate authority.
The house was one of those large two-story LA mishmashes on a small lot that looked like it had been built before the 1940s, renovated in the ’60s, and then neglected since the ’80s. It was made of stucco and brick and siding and stone, with wrought-iron detailing—some painted black and some painted white. Next to the front door was, of course, a mezuzah, and on the door hung a wooden cutout of an owl that said THE SCHWEBELS. So that was her last name: Miriam Schwebel. I smelled something roasting, some kind of meat, and immediately thought, Turn around Run. The intimacy of it, the smell of another family’s life, was terrifying.
Miriam must have been waiting. Before I even knocked, she opened the door and corralled me inside. I was the guest of honor. She’d lined up most of her family in the entrance. Eitan was fifteen, and Noah was nine—and both of them had payos. Her father had payos too, but I was surprised he didn’t have a beard. I reached out to shake his hand, and he didn’t move. I remembered that he wasn’t allowed to touch me. Miriam had a younger sister, Ayala, three years her junior, who she said was upstairs. There was also a toddler clinging to Miriam’s foot.
“She’s so cute,” I said of the toddler.
“Ezra is a he,” whispered Miriam.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry!”
“It’s fine, of course,” said Miriam’s mother, smiling. “We don’t cut their hair until they are three.”
I liked Mrs. Schwebel for not judging me—and for acting like anyone could easily make that mistake. She looked so much like Miriam. They both had the same roundness: the large belly, the big ass, the plumpness under the chin. Her mother wore no makeup but was more stylish than I imagined. She had on a pretty long black dress and red loafers that looked like they could be Gucci. Her wig was a Rita Hayworth red, shoulder-length, and parted on the side.
“We’ve lived here since I was two,” Miriam explained as she took me on a tour of the house, which was huge, but also a little cruddy.
“Oh,” I said. “Where were you born?”
“Monsey,” she said, as we entered the living room. “New York. My parents came here so my father could get into commercial real estate with my uncle Lavie.”
The living room was done in ’60s Flintstones chic, with avocado-green carpeting and furniture, and a faux-stone fireplace. I recognized it as the same faux stone from the exterior of my apartment building. But while this room was filled with what looked to be a whole century’s worth of knickknacks—three shofars, two menorahs, a grandfather clock, a cuckoo clock, a broken Ms. Pac-Man arcade game, a collection of rabbi statuettes—my apartment was newly renovated, painted white, and existed in a timeless vacuum of nothingness. I had only my white Ikea bed, my white Ikea night table, my black Ikea sofa, and that was it. I’d thought about getting a rug, but I couldn’t commit. I felt that committing to a rug would mean I existed on the planet more than I actually wanted to exist.
“When did your family get into yogurt?” I asked Miriam.
“Later. I was twelve when they started with the yogurt.”
“Oh.”
“It was my mother’s idea, actually,” she said, leading me into the dining room, which was older and more antique-looking than the living room, with dark wood paneling and white molding. “If we were still in Monsey, she never would have come up with it probably. Women don’t really work there—or, like, they definitely aren’t supposed to be the ideas people when it comes to business. Both of my parents come from ultra-ultra-Orthodox families. But here we’re just modern Orthodox. Uncle Lavie is barely observant at all. He’s my father’s younger brother. He quit yeshiva to move out here and marry an Israeli woman. They only have two kids. They’re Reform, or something.”
“Who’s Reform?” asked a young woman, entering the dining room. She was beautiful, with dark hair, sleek and shiny, and eyes that were almost black. Her ankles were slim in her flats, her face shaped like a doe’s.
“Uncle Lavie,” said Miriam.
“They’re Conservadox.”
“Oh,” said Miriam. “Conservadox. Rachel, this is my sister, Ayala.”
“Hi,” I said.
Ayala held her hand up coolly in a sort of wave but didn’t say another word. I disliked her immediately. I was glad when she left the room, just as promptly as she had entered. Her beauty was a reminder of the outside world, the type I had considered most valuable. I wished she weren’t there at all.
The kitchen was a ’60s wood-paneling affair, with a linoleum floor, yellow countertops, and every inch of
wall space covered in oak cabinets.
“Can I help you with anything?” I asked Mrs. Schwebel.
“Nisht,” she said. “Everything is done.”
Noah and Ezra were seated at a small kitchen table with a box of Little Debbie honey buns.
“If you’re going to open them, open them now,” said Mrs. Schwebel. “I don’t want to hear a single wrapper crinkling after sunset.”
Then she turned to me to explain, “Opening the wrappers is considered work. Once night falls, that’s it. No opening, no buns.”
She turned her back to the stove. Noah and Ezra began pulling out every bun, opening all the wrappers.
“How many are you opening?” she scolded them playfully, with her back still turned. “At this rate, we’ll need a Shabbos goy.”
“We plan to eat all of them, Mama!” said Ezra.
Hearing Ezra use the word mama made me feel a pang of longing. I was not really longing for my mother, who certainly was no mama. I wanted another mama, a fictional one. I thought about what my dream mama would look and feel like. Would she be like Mrs. Schwebel? Would she be like Ana? If it were possible to create the mama I’d wished for, I wasn’t even sure who she would be. My wish for that mama had always been a response to an absence. I didn’t know how to think about a mama in terms of presence. In my fantasies, I’d cobbled together scraps—fragments of women who’d crossed my path. I’d never come up with a mama from scratch.
“We’re going to help them with these buns,” said Miriam, picking up a honey bun and taking a bite.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Schwebel. “I guess you’re not starting your diet this Shabbos.”
Mrs. Schwebel’s tone was playful, not cruel or accusatory. But I felt sickened by her comment, panicked, like I needed to quarantine Miriam from the word diet, or the word diet from Miriam, lest it contaminate her.
“I am starting a diet,” Miriam said, casually taking another bite. “The cake diet. It’s very hot right now, very popular.”
“A cake diet, really?” asked Mrs. Schwebel.
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