“What?”
“It’s the way she moves. Her motions aren’t distinct. If you saw Audrey’s shadow—if you just could see a silhouette moving—you’d know immediately that it was her. But it’s not the same with Bette. Bette Davis, the way she moves, she could be so many women.”
She exhaled hard and handed me the cigarette. Her exhales weren’t coming out in any magical shapes, at least as far as I could see. Now they were just exhales.
“What about kissing?” I blurted out.
“Their kissing styles?”
“No,” I said, taking a drag of the cigarette. “I mean what about Orthodox girls kissing other girls? Is that allowed?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “I mean I kiss my girl friends on the cheek sometimes. And Ayala and my mother. So yeah, that’s okay.”
“No, I mean on the mouth,” I said. “What about girls kissing each other on the mouth? Is that okay?”
A shadow crossed her face. She looked scared.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Interesting,” I said, taking a final drag of the cigarette. “Interesting.”
I flicked the cigarette to the ground and stamped it out underneath my foot. Then, without another sound, I put my hands on her shoulders and brought her in close to me. She was breathing deeply, and her eyes widened, but she didn’t pull back.
I put my hand on the back of her head and moved her face into mine. I kissed her softly: first on the upper lip, then the lower. I didn’t bring her into the moisture of my mouth, but stayed on the soft surface. I felt so much in each of her lips, like I could dwell there forever, tracing her cupid’s bow, the plumpness.
She pulled away. I opened my eyes, but hers were still closed. Then she kissed me, and I was shocked to have her initiate it. I introduced my tongue into her mouth and felt her whole body shudder. Now it was clear. We sucked at each other hungrily, mouths wet and pressed hard together. I knew this could not be mistaken for any kind of kiss between friends.
I wanted to fuck her right there, our tongues in each other’s mouths. I wanted to ride her every last shudder, and as though she could feel what I wanted, she pulled away again. This time she did not come back.
“No,” she said. “We are not allowed to kiss other girls. At least, not like that.”
She took a step backward, then pulled out another cigarette and lit it. We were both silent.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She shook her head as if to say, No, no, no, it’s my fault, and waved her hand in the air to dismiss me, the cigarette making loops of smoke around itself.
I wanted to say, But did you like it?
The way her body shook suggested that she did.
I wanted to say, If you weren’t Orthodox, then would you want to continue kissing me? Oh, Miriam, maybe that was enough, just that you wanted to. I wondered if you wanted me, and you did!
But I didn’t say another word. I had already said and done too much. I’d crossed a line—multiple lines. Now she looked upset.
“I should go home,” she said. “It’s late.”
“Okay,” I said. “Where are you parked? Do you want me to walk you to your car?”
“No,” she said suddenly and loudly. “That’s fine. You should just go home too. Goodbye, Rachel.”
“Bye,” I said, still standing there as she turned and walked away.
CHAPTER 47
On the way to work, I made a detour to Bed Bath & Beyond so I could use one of their scales and get an accurate assessment of what was happening to me—at least from a numerical perspective.
In the bathroom accessories aisle, I took out three scales—two digitals and an analog—and arranged them on the floor. I took off my shoes for accuracy. A bald man with a toilet plunger and a StackEms T-Shirt Organizing System in his cart cleared his throat as he tried to get by. I glared at him, like, What? until he was forced to back up and use the next aisle. Then I took a deep breath and stepped onto the first scale: a chrome one, sleek, one of the digitals.
The scale took a second to think, then delivered me the news in red digits. I had gained 13.5 pounds. I felt a cold sweat rise to the surface of my skin. I stepped off the scale, then got back on again. 13.5 pounds—still the same. The numbers were so absolute, so certain and unyielding.
I moved over to scale number two, another digital. This one was black and cheaper than the first one, and I liked it better immediately. I inched my foot out and tapped the scale ever so slightly, letting the numbers go to zero. Then I stepped on.
But the news was even worse: I’d gained 14 pounds.
“What the fuck?” I said out loud.
I stepped off and let the numbers disappear, then stepped back on.
14.5 pounds!
I got on the analog scale. Its wheel spun and shook, struggling to decide my fate. But the analog scale said I’d lost 28 pounds.
I began moving from scale to scale, doing a kind of body dysmorphic waltz. 13.5 pounds. 14 pounds. 13.5 pounds. 13.5 pounds. 14.5 pounds. 13.5 pounds. A woman deliberating over a fake-gold vanity set looked at me strangely. She had her toddler and a Shark Lift-Away vacuum cleaner in her cart. I thought about my mother’s coupons. They had expired.
What was I expecting the scales would say? Did I think all that food was just going to vanish like poof? This was science! From now on there would be a very strict regime: no breakfast for me, two protein bars for lunch, and then we would see about dinner. I might even have to start doing laxatives again, or at least that herbal dieter’s tea that made you shit.
I didn’t know how I would face the day, living inside my body, a conscious being. I only wanted to sleep until all the weight came off. It was Friday; just one more day of work and then I could try to sleep through the weekend—or some combination of gym and sleep—a bare-bones death march. It was what I deserved. I felt disgusting.
Driving to work, I pressed the gas pedal down as hard as it would go, taking out my anger and disappointment on the car. On the side streets, I swerved back and forth from side to side. So what if I crashed? At least I’d get to be unconscious.
I lingered in the parking garage, walking up and down the aisles, not wanting to face anybody at the office. I timed myself as I walked, trying to get up to ten minutes of exercise. I prayed some kind of truck would come zooming around a turn and just take me away, right there, one hit, so I wouldn’t have to feel. All of this suffering over a 13.5-pound weight gain! If Miriam had kept kissing me, I wouldn’t have weighed myself at all.
It was better that things had ended between us now, not some unknown time in the future when I would wake up suddenly and find my body blown up big as hell, orbiting the Earth like a wild balloon, my mind all the way out there too, no longer of this planet, no longer able to decipher the real from the not-real. I didn’t want to reach that point, did I? I needed to cut the thought of her out of me completely—cut me out of me too—chunks of my thighs and hips and arms and the rest of my exploding body.
I pulled out my phone and googled How to kill a golem.
In some tales, the creature has the word emet carved on its head. Emet means truth. In order to kill the Golem, its creator removes the e from emet so that the word spells met. Met means dead. This is how the golem dies.
It was strange that truth and death were so close to each other.
I pulled up Dr. Mahjoub’s number.
I need to see you, I wrote.
CHAPTER 48
The following afternoon at Mahjoub’s office, I noticed she’d acquired a new elephant: a three-foot rust-colored wire statue thing by the door. I was grateful that she was willing to see me on a Saturday, but the fact that she could fit me in so quickly made me suspicious of her skills, as usual.
“I’m sorry, Rachel,” she said, flipping through my file. “I used the last of the Theraputticals for some trauma work with another patient last week. But it should be easy enough for you to order online. Or maybe you want to consider taking ceramics
classes—”
“Whatever,” I said. “You should just know that your little art therapy exercise has totally destroyed my life.”
“Do you want to talk about how or why you feel that it has been… less than beneficial?”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing how many binges deep I was. This was what she’d wanted, right? I wondered if she could see it on me: 13.5 pounds of challah and egg rolls and cholent and noodles. We stared at each other silently.
Finally, I blurted out: “I was doing such a good job with my mother! I’m still doing a good job. It’s been thirty-seven days of total boundary holding.”
My mother’s texts had stopped entirely. If she was trying to smoke me out, it was working. The absence of contact made me want to reach out to her more than when she stalked me every day. I was scared she’d given up on me. All I’d ever wanted was to be left alone. Now I wanted to reach out and say, Wait!
“That’s amazing,” said Dr. Mahjoub. “I’m so pleased.”
“I know! But you had to push it. You had to push it with the body stuff. I told you I was well enough. What does it even mean to be well anyway? Is there some plateau of wellness—some place we are supposed to get to where we are, like, fine forever? Because to me that sounds like death!”
“Well—”
“Is death the best we can aim for? I’m starting to think it might be.”
I was feeling reckless. I wanted to fuck with her. But also, I was curious.
“Rachel, if you’re thinking of harming yourself or someone else, I’m required by law to report it. Are you thinking of harming yourself or someone else?”
I thought about how I wanted to take a knife and cut myself out of me. I thought about how I’d been praying for a truck to just hit me. I thought about death and truth and how, in some languages, they were just one letter apart. I wanted to ask her if she knew that.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not thinking of harming myself or someone else.”
CHAPTER 49
When I got home that night, I pulled up to the curb of my apartment building and there was Miriam standing out front on the small, dirty lawn. I had told her I lived in the building with the fake-stone front across from Doughy’s Bagels, one of her favorite bagel shops, on the other side of Pico. I had not expected that she would materialize.
“Uh, hi?” I called out from the car.
She stood there not smiling, Coach bag over her shoulder, and gave a little wave.
“Shit,” I muttered, and put the car in reverse and parked.
Was she here seeking an apology for the way I had behaved? Now she was looking down at the ground, as though there were something fascinating happening there. As I got out of the car and walked toward her, I noticed that she had clasped her hands in front of her and they were trembling. It was not the trembling of a supernatural creature, but the trembling of a human being. This made me very uncomfortable.
“Hello,” I said, swallowing dryly.
“Hello,” she said, still looking down at the ground.
“Went to Doughy’s?”
“No,” she said. “I came… to say I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” I asked, surprised. “Why are you sorry?”
“Because I didn’t tell you the whole truth,” she said.
It felt like my lungs had forgotten what to do, that my inhalations were no longer automatic, and I had to force myself to breathe intentionally. To distract myself from my impending suffocation, I came up with a movie plot. Miriam was about to confess to me that we were living in some surreal Jewish fable. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel was being played by Uncle Lavie’s wife’s dead great-uncle, an actor from the Yiddish theater. The rabbi and Miriam had both been sent by my dead grandparents to instill in me some Zionist pride, by way of clove cigarettes, hot cholent, and a stolen kiss. I was Cary Grant and Miriam was Eva Marie Saint, the honey trap—or, in this case, the milk-and-honey trap.
“When you asked if girls could kiss, I knew what you were saying,” she continued. “And when we were talking about whether or not I’d ever kissed anyone, I guess I wasn’t completely honest.”
“Oh?”
“There was a girl in my high school named Bluma Sternberg. We were good friends, actually, for a long time, since elementary school. In high school we would sneak out to the movies because her parents were more strict than mine and she wasn’t supposed to be watching films that weren’t religious. But I got her into the classic movies, and she was hooked.”
“Uh-huh…” I said.
“I used to go over to her house, because she wasn’t allowed to come over to mine. Her parents were afraid we weren’t kosher enough—that something might slip in terms of our dishes, brisket in the milchik bowl, I honestly don’t know. Maybe they thought we were unclean.”
“Bastards. As though your mother isn’t running an impeccable household.”
“I know! Anyway, so I would always be at her house. I would sneak over a bottle of something from my parents’ house, something they would never notice was missing, crappy wine. She loved to drink! Or at least, she learned to drink with me and seemed to really love it. In fact, she may have even liked it more than she liked me. She didn’t really have many other friends at the high school, because it wasn’t the most religious one in the city. I’m really not even sure why her parents sent her there. But anyway, I would hang out in her room and we would drink there together. One time she asked me if I would want to do some romantic things like we saw in the movies. If we would maybe want to practice for when we were married.”
“Whoa!”
“I got really scared when she asked me that. But I was also excited, because, well, I really liked her a lot. So I asked her how we would practice. She said just by hugging for the first week, so that’s what we did, just hugged. Then she said we could also kiss if I wanted, and I said yes I did want to. So we kissed. And then we really started making out.”
I was surprised she knew what making out was. I mean, of course she knew what it was, with all the classic movies and stuff. But still it surprised me to hear her say the words.
“I started going over there more and more often,” Miriam said. “I would always bring something to drink, and we would always make out in her room.”
“Just kiss each other?”
“Yeah mostly,” she said. “And we would rub—you know—we would rub each other’s bodies, but only over our clothes, never underneath. I think we both felt that as long as we had our clothes on then we weren’t doing anything really bad, you know?”
“Right,” I said.
I was jealous of this Bluma Sternberg—jealous that she’d gotten to be with Miriam in this way. It felt like a different jealousy than I’d ever experienced. Usually, I compared myself to a woman and felt jealous of her body or her boyfriend. This was more of an ache—a hard ache in my chest, and also, I noticed, in my groin. I didn’t like that someone else had been with her first. I didn’t like that I hadn’t been the one to uncover this side of her.
“Bluma didn’t have a lock on her bedroom door, which meant we always had to sneak around and be on the alert. At least she had her own bedroom, which is rare in Orthodox families. But her parents must have gotten suspicious, or figured out what was going on, because one day her mother snuck up to the door and just burst in on us.”
“Oh god, what happened?”
“She immediately started beating Bluma. Just—beating her up with her hands. Then I tried to stop her and she hit me too.”
“That’s horrible!”
“She screamed at her—partly in Yiddish, which I couldn’t understand, because my parents didn’t speak it in our house. But the part in English was terrible.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“She called her a slut. She called her a… dyke. And me a dyke too. Her mother threatened that she was going to tell my parents, which terrified me. For days I
waited for that hammer to drop. But she never did.”
“Why do you think she threatened but didn’t say anything?”
“The more people who knew, the more chance there was of gossip spreading. She did not want what had happened to leave that room. But a few days later, after school, she found me and pulled me aside. She said that if I ever went near her daughter again, she would kill me. And then she took Bluma out of my school.”
“Shit!”
“Yeah.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t tell your parents that she beat you.”
“They’d want to know the reason why!”
“You couldn’t tell them?”
“You must be kidding. I would be disowned.”
“Really?”
As the word left my mouth, it sounded judgmental. But I wasn’t judging her at all. I thought of my own mother, not religious, and how terribly she had reacted to my own admission. I had wished, because they seemed so kind, that the Schwebels could be different.
“If they thought I liked a girl, it would be unacceptable,” said Miriam.
“Oh,” I said.
It was getting cold out.
“All of that is to say I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea or anything, but… I was embarrassed to tell you that story. I knew what you were asking about the kiss. I just—anyway, I would like us to stay friends.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like that too.”
So she’d had an experience with a girl. And she’d enjoyed it. Now I was convinced that she’d known what she was doing with me all along, this kosher coquette. Well, I wasn’t about to drag her over any thresholds.
“It’s getting late,” I said. “I should probably go upstairs.”
“Yes, I should go home,” she said.
I wanted to say, Come upstairs with me, please. Just come up with me to my stupid, nothing apartment with its white walls and vacant fridge and bare wood floors and so much emptiness.
Instead, I said, “Good night.”
CHAPTER 50
That night I dreamt about white lilies. I was starving. I was in a field of them, licking rainwater off the petals to try to fill my stomach. As I licked, I had to avoid getting any pollen or petals in my mouth, because the lilies were poisonous. But I was so hungry! At one point, while I sucked the droplets off one of the petals, I found myself biting into the petal itself—chewing that up and sucking out the juice from inside. It felt exciting to be doing something I shouldn’t do. It felt good to be nursing myself on the earthy, vegetal flavor. I ate it all the way to the stem. “I’m not dying,” I said. “I’m not dying.”
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