Mrs. Schwebel served a one-dish lunch, cholent, a stew of warm beef, carrots, beans, and potatoes that had been simmering on the stove all night. I thought of all the parts of the stew as I ate it: the carrots, the onions, the beef, the gravy. I imagined the vegetables growing in the ground. I imagined the cows grazing. Each element was nourishing in its own right, but even juicier and better when they came together as a whole. It was meant to be savored. Life could be savored. I was surprised to think for a moment that if there was a god, this could be god’s wish for us.
Later that day, when the sun finally went down, I didn’t want to leave and go back to my real life. Forget work, I didn’t even want to go back to my apartment. No one was kicking me out, but I didn’t want to overstay. I kept testing them, making sure they weren’t sick of me yet. But each time I would say, “Okay, I’m gonna be leaving soon,” they would all say, “No! Rachel, stay! Stay until sundown at least!”
When I finally got in my car, it seemed strange to be inside it, alone. I couldn’t believe it was the same car or that it belonged to me. I looked at my hands and they didn’t even look like my hands. I felt in that moment that I did not know myself at all, that the Schwebels, who knew nothing about me, somehow knew more about me than I did. What was a person supposed to do with herself in life? Maybe we did need spiritual guidance. No wonder I’d turned to the elliptical machine.
Miriam had traveled fewer places than I had. She still lived with her family and had no grand plans for any kind of career. Yet somehow, she seemed to be moving forward more freely than I was, or if not forward, then deeper and higher, in a series of infinite crescendos. While I was aggressively pedaling nowhere, she was orbiting peacefully.
I had thought that I was the sculptor and she was the golem. But now I considered that she might be the sculptor, the maestro, the creatrix, expanding and improving me, giving life to my dead parts, laughter to my breath. Maybe she was remaking me in her image. Maybe we were remaking each other.
CHAPTER 39
I wanted to text my mother and tell her about Shabbat, how happy my grandparents would have been that I was there. Instead, I went to 7-Eleven.
I bought a container of nachos that I microwaved right in the store and ate in line, plus a bag of Swedish Fish, a package of Hostess cupcakes, four little tubs of rice pudding, a box of Golden Grahams, and a jug of milk. This was how it was done. This was me taking care of myself the best I could. On another day, maybe tomorrow, I would assess the carnage and figure out exactly how I was going to live. But for the moment, life was between 7-Eleven and my intestinal tract.
That night, with my belly stuffed, I dreamt I was walking on a long, grassy path, like the one beside Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. As I walked, I saw, to the left and the right of me, two sets of trees. On the left were evergreens, fluffy and emerald green, a small forest growing up in peaks. On the right was a row of palms, tall and elegant, with fronds that billowed lightly in the sunlight. When I’d moved to Los Angeles, I couldn’t get over the presence of the palm trees, the way people were just living their lives against such an exotic backdrop. But in the dream, I found both sets of trees absolutely delicious.
Squirrels and chipmunks flitted around in the grass. They were having a feast, eating tons of nuts. I wasn’t sure if someone had fed them the nuts or if they had dropped from the trees, but there were so many nuts—more nuts than I had ever seen in one place. I saw peanuts, almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, acorns, and pistachios. It was like the grass was nature’s infinite toppings bar of nuts.
But even though there were plenty of nuts to go around, more than the animals could possibly eat, the squirrels kept stealing the chipmunks’ nuts right out of their hands. The chipmunks were bigger than the squirrels. They could have easily retaliated. But none of them seemed to get angry or upset by the theft. When a squirrel snuck up behind a chipmunk and grabbed a nut, the chipmunk would simply surrender the nut—then go pick up another nut off the ground and nibble through its shell.
Under the evergreens I saw one chipmunk that looked a lot like Miriam. The chipmunk had three white spots on its brown, furry neck. A shower of nuts rained down gently on its head, as though it were in a cartoon and being followed by a nut cloud. When I looked up to see where the nuts were coming from, I saw a gigantic wood-carved elephant—as tall as the tops of the evergreens—towering over the chipmunk. Seated on the elephant’s back, tossing out nuts from a blue-and-yellow cloth bag, was Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel.
“Shalom!” called the rabbi.
His beard was long and gray like in the picture I’d seen online, and he was wearing a flowy robe. The robe was made out of the comforter from the Schwebels’ basement.
“Shalom,” I said.
“Care for a nut?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Would it kill you to have a cashew?” he asked, smiling.
“It might,” I said, smiling back.
“Little Rachel,” he said. “Tell me. How are your roots feeling? Have you been going deep?”
He tossed a pistachio my way.
“To be honest, Rabbi, I feel scared,” I said, catching it.
“What’s to be scared of?” he asked.
I opened the pistachio like a tiny door. But it was empty, no nut, just a shell. I tossed the shell onto the grass.
“Spreading,” I said. “Not so much vertically but horizontally.”
“What’s so scary about the horizontal?” he asked, chucking me another pistachio.
I caught it and opened it, like a second door. This one was empty too. Now I really wanted a pistachio.
“I don’t want to spread out into some crazy far outer reaches,” I said. “What if I can’t get back?”
“Eh,” he said. “What’s to get back to?”
It was a good question. I didn’t know what to say.
The rabbi, clearly pleased with himself, winked and tossed me a third pistachio. This shell was tighter than the first two, and I had to open it with my teeth, like a squirrel or a chipmunk might. When I cracked open the shell, I found, inside, a lovely nut—perfectly ovular, glowing green, almost chartreuse. I put the nut on my tongue and sucked. It was creamy, salty, exquisite. I chewed it up and swallowed.
“Just because it feels good doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” said the rabbi.
CHAPTER 40
Monday at work felt like hell. I’d packed my gym bag and my breakfast: the yogurt and the low-calorie muffin, though it all seemed futile now. My pants were tight on my ass and dug into my butt crack. They rubbed a pink ring around my stomach. I craved an alternate universe, to be some other Rachel who only wore clothing with elastic waistbands, sweatpants and parachute pants. In that world, I could inhale and exhale freely. In that world, I would cut my hair short, wear red Air Jordans and custom gold Air Force 1s, hooded sweatshirts, blazers and skinny ties, backward baseball caps. I would reflect casual confidence and power, a bit of nastiness, still Jewy. I’d be like a Beastie Boy circa 1989.
At noon, I looked up from an Internet image search of King Ad-Rock and was surprised to see Jace Evans walking toward my desk.
“What are you doing?” asked Jace, touching the floof part of his hair and then scratching the skinhead part, a one-two aesthetic check.
“Working,” I said. “You?”
“I need to talk to Ofer about some problems I’m having with the writers of the show. They want to put Liam in a coma.”
“Oh,” I said.
Across from me, NPR Andrew was pretending to code Ofer’s client newsletter—this week’s topic: Auditions and Toxic Masculinity. I could see him peeping out from behind his computer. Jace was too commercial for NPR Andrew’s tastes, but fame was fame. Jace’s attention had to make me more intriguing in Andrew’s eyes.
I still disliked NPR Andrew and his eyes. But they were eyes. Any gaze that increased in its esteem of me made me feel validated: like I was earning my existence. What I didn�
�t want was for Ofer to see Jace and me talking.
“I had a burger the other day at Cassell’s,” said Jace. “Best one I’ve had in LA. It’s a definite must for late night after This Show Sucks.”
Did Jace want to be my pal? I didn’t need a pal. Maybe he just felt sorry for me, seeing me once again in my inferior position, the assistant, “the help.” Our power differential was fucking with his Ohio value system. He had to pretend we were on equal footing, that we really had something in common. And it seemed the thing he thought we had in common was beef.
“I found it rather intriguing that he came to your desk,” said Ana at teatime. “It’s interested behavior.”
I couldn’t tell if she was fucking with me. Her words had become confusing. She’d started gossiping to me again, but I felt paranoid that the things she said had a double edge—as though they were also directed at me. When she called Kayla “fat and blundering,” I wasn’t sure if she was really talking about Kayla or about me. Sometimes I felt like she was laughing at me right to my face, like she and herself had become the “us” and I was the “them,” and the joke was that I didn’t know who was who. I figured that her comment was some kind of setup. She was trying to get me excited so she could deflate me again.
“He’s an actor,” I said. “He always looks interested.”
“Well, why wouldn’t he be interested in you?” she asked, giving me a gentle knock on my shoulder and giggling. “You’re interesting.”
The giggle was ambiguous. She could just as easily be showing girly camaraderie as making fun of me. But the shoulder knock was sportsmanlike: celebratory and chummy. It made me feel like we were on the same team. She seemed to earnestly be commending me. But for what exactly?
Ana always made it appear like she looked down on actors, the whole Hollywood scene. She earned money working in the industry, but otherwise declared that she was far above it intellectually. She may have been idealistic long ago, but when her husband left her, she’d abandoned any investment in Hollywood mythology so she could write the whole thing off as “stupid.”
I hadn’t considered that underneath her bravado was a feeling of weakness, loss, the fear that she was less than. I never imagined she might still be secretly smitten with celebrity. She was rejecting that world before it rejected her again. But that didn’t mean she didn’t secretly want to live there.
CHAPTER 41
After work, I had no energy for the gym. I chewed two pieces of nicotine gum at once and went anyway. When I changed into my workout clothes, I discovered that my spandex shorts were now so tight they gave me cameltoe—chronic cameltoe. Every time I fixed the toe, it emerged again, somehow deeper.
On the elliptical machine, I let the shorts rub against me, feeling horny. It was some new kind of horniness, or maybe a very old kind, raw lust, like when I first discovered masturbation and indulged in it daily. The horniness felt like hunger itself. I was fully famished, and I didn’t know whether it was food or sex I wanted. Maybe I wanted both. All of this eating seemed to have made me more sexually charged, awake. But what was waking up, exactly: my pussy or my soul? I was scared of my soul. What if my soul was monstrous? If a person had a monstrous soul, should she still follow it?
I switched to the stationary bike. As I pedaled, my pussy rubbed against the black leather seat, and I felt a delicious warmth spread throughout my pelvis. The front of the bike seat was horn-shaped. It poked out in front of me like a cock. I took to this right away, having my own thick cock. I wanted to make the cock come alive, to say a blessing over it—Frankencock!—a bike-seat dick. I began reciting quietly any Hebrew I could remember.
“Nun, gimmel, hay, shin, nun, gimmel, hay, shin,” I whispered, intoning the letters on the dreidel to the rhythm of my pedaling.
“Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu,” I sang to myself, using the old tune I knew. But I felt guilty using my grandmother’s favorite song to animate a penis.
Etz chayim hi lamachazikim ba, vetomecheha me’ushar! I crooned internally, delivering a captivating performance of the tree of life song.
Suddenly, I felt incredibly powerful—as though my cock were really coming alive. I imagined, as I pedaled, that Ana was sucking me. For the first time, I felt no hesitance in fantasizing about her sexually. It was as though the cock protected me from judgment.
I had total power over Ana. She looked up at me as I teased her face. She begged me to let her lick it. When I finally let her have it, grunting, “All right, suck,” I acted like I was doing her a favor. She licked and sucked me, and I felt stimulated by two things: her mouth and my newfound dominance. I felt like another kind of creature altogether—some new being I had invoked. If I was a woman, I was not me as I’d known myself, but a woman with more courage than I thought I’d had. I was a woman of impulse, a woman of instinct. I was a woman of pleasure and a woman of confidence. I was a woman of appetites, a growling beast. I was a person.
I continued to pedal, closing my eyes, rubbing against the seat. I imagined Ana sliding my cock between her tits, rubbing me on her nipples, gasping, as though she could come from that contact alone. It was like her nipples were two clits. I whipped her nipples with my dick, then whipped her face with it. Her expression grew serious, ardent. She begged me to put it inside her.
At this point in the fantasy, I hit something of a choose-your-own-adventure. One choice was to lick her pussy. I wanted to taste her so badly. Another was to deprive her. I didn’t want to give her any help in getting wet. I wanted to know that her wetness was effortless, spontaneous, a reaction to the sight and feel of me. I wanted her to be so intoxicated by my presence that she became a river.
In the end, I went with option A: lick it. Why should I rob myself of the taste of her elixir? I ate her dripping-wet pussy, ate it good, but I kept my reaction very self-contained. No reason for her to know how much pleasure it gave me. On the outside, I was a haughty daughter, then an impenetrable soldier just doing her job gruffly. But on the inside, I reveled in Ana’s taste: coppery, like a shipwrecked chalice at the bottom of the ocean.
Now she was crying for my cock. I decided that I would fuck her from behind. I turned her around and bit her gently on the ass, which was ample but saggy with age. The sagginess turned me on even more. I massaged her ass cheeks, opened them like a book, and aimed straight for her pussy hole (a lovely shade of purple: seedless grape). I parked my cock right there at the entrance. She moaned, but not out of pain.
“Please,” she said. “Please.”
When I felt she had begged long enough, I activated Frankencock. She groaned with delight and began moving back and forth on the length of me, so that I barely had to thrust. But I wanted to thrust. I grabbed her hips and steadied her.
“Stop fucking moving,” I said.
Then I used the power of my own hips to thrust deeper into her.
I could go as long as I wanted. But while my phantom cock was made out of a seat, I could still feel all the pleasure in my organ. I felt a surge of tenderness for her as I came.
Do not go there, I said to myself. No heart.
I rode out the orgasm with the pleasure between my legs alone. It felt so good that I gave a little yelp out loud.
I looked over at the man on the bike to my right. He was an older man, maybe seventy, with white hair. He had headphones on and seemed totally absorbed in what he was listening to. I got the feeling it was an audiobook, David Baldacci or Clive Cussler.
I laughed and closed my eyes again. Then I pedaled out the last waves of my orgasm.
CHAPTER 42
I sat in my car in the gym parking garage with the engine on. I put the heat on blast, then turned it off and cranked up the air instead. My vision was blurry, as though there were a veil of water between me and the world, probably from all the exertion. I felt blood pulsing behind my forehead—not a bad sensation at all. I felt high. I thought of the words Variety Pack. I began repeating them in my mind like a mantra to the rhythm of
my pulse: Variety Pack. Variety Pack. Variety Pack. Variety Pack.
I reached for my phone, pulled up my father’s number.
Hi Dad, I typed. Then I deleted it.
I pulled up my mother’s number.
I typed three emojis: llama, tulip, hand wave. Then I deleted them.
I pulled up the number at Miriam’s house. I called it.
CHAPTER 43
Miriam picked up the phone.
“Oh, good, it’s you,” I said. “I didn’t want your family to think I was a stalker. Anyway, I’m just calling to say thank you for such a lovely Shabbat.”
“It’s Ayala,” said the voice on the other end.
“Oops,” I said. “Hi, is Miriam there?”
I didn’t tell her who I was, though of course she knew.
“One second,” she said.
She didn’t say hello or ask how I was doing.
I heard the shuffle of her laying down the receiver, then her voice calling, “Miriam! Phone!”
“Hello?” said Miriam.
“Hi. It’s Rachel,” I said.
“Hi!” she said, sounding happy.
“I wanted to thank you so much for a lovely weekend,” I said. “Please tell your parents I said thank you as well.”
“Of course. It was our pleasure.”
I didn’t know what to say to her next.
“Did you work today?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “But only from two to seven. A cousin covered the morning shift. Dov—he’s a lazy schlemiel, and he should.”
I liked how arrogant she was. Usually, I didn’t like people who always thought they were right, but her belief in her own common sense was endearing.
She didn’t ask about my day, which was a relief because I didn’t feel like talking about it. But there was silence on the line. I wondered if she felt as awkward about it as I did. She probably didn’t. Miriam was most likely fine with leaving moments unfilled, peaceful with silent space, existing in it, letting it exist. I tried to pretend like I was fine with it, as though this was just what everyone did: sat around on the phone in silence. Then I heard people talking in the background.
Milk Fed Page 12