“Of course you’re not,” came a voice. “Nobody brings flowers to a Jewish funeral.”
It was Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel. He was standing inside a tall, white calla lily, the one calla lily amongst all the other regular lilies, which thrust skyward like an upturned trumpet.
“Hi Rabbi,” I said, wiping pollen off my lower lip.
“Hello, Rachel,” he said, his long beard hanging over the edge of the flower, as though he were Rapunzel. “Nice to see you noshing. It’s a mitzvah, you know.”
“They’re delicious.”
“That’s what I’m told. I abstain. Not kosher. I can only do the calla lilies.”
“Oh.”
“Which is interesting, because, if you’ll notice, the lilies of the field are shaped like the Star of David. But god has a sense of humor.”
“Totally,” I said, now biting into the stem of my lily. “Okay if I eat this in front of you?”
“Please, go ahead,” he said, waving his hand. “I don’t want to interrupt your nosh. I just came to let you know that it’s nice to see you trusting your kishkas.”
“My kishkas?”
“Your guts! Your intuition.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” I asked.
“You are!” he said. “You did it. I mean, you didn’t do it do it… with Miriam, which would also be a mitzvah, by the way, but you were right about one thing. She likes you.”
I heard a loud buzzing sound. It was like the end-of-period buzzer in a basketball game, except it was coming from above.
“God really enjoys basketball,” said the rabbi, laughing.
But he looked scared. Then the buzzer sounded again. The rabbi’s eyes widened. I had a terrible feeling that this was it. This was the end of the game. I had poisoned myself after all. The buzzer was letting me know I would soon be dead.
I opened my eyes and blinked. I saw the clock. It said 1:15. There was still 1 minute and 15 seconds left of the game. Then I realized I was in my apartment. What I was hearing was not the buzz of death. It was the buzzer on my intercom. I was scared. I ignored the buzzer and inched down farther under my blanket. Then it rang again—this time a little longer.
I threw the blankets off, got up, slipping and sliding around the floor in my wool socks, and made my way to the intercom.
“Hello?” I said, annoyed.
“It’s Miriam. Hi.”
Had I summoned her?
“One second!” I said.
I fixed my socks and raced down the hallway. Then I had a better idea. I made a U-turn and went back into my apartment. Kishkas. I pressed the intercom again.
“Want to just come upstairs?” I asked.
CHAPTER 51
When Miriam came to the door of my apartment, she was crying. There was a teardrop welling in her left eye and one on her right cheek. They reminded me of the water droplets from the lilies.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You okay?”
I saw her struggle with words, unsure of what to say. I hated seeing her weeping, and I felt the urge to wipe her tears and comfort her.
“I don’t know,” she said finally, wiping her dripping eyelids. “I’m a faucet.”
“Do you want to come inside and have something to drink?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Do you want me to just stand in the doorway with you for a while?”
“All right,” she said, laughing.
She moved her hands up the doorframe. I reached out and touched her left hand with my right hand. Then I brought her hand down and held it with both of my hands.
This could be enough, I thought. Just hold the fucking lily.
But I found myself leading her inside, closing the door quietly and gently behind her. I didn’t want to frighten her with any loud sounds or sudden movements that might imply I was expecting anything. I went to the sofa and sat down. She followed and sat beside me.
“So,” I said.
Then I took her hand in mine again and gently tickled the inside of her palm, just as she had allowed me to do at the movies. This time, we weren’t in the dark, so I could watch her reaction to everything I was doing. Her face grew flushed, and I noticed a sheen of perspiration on her forehead and dotted on her upper lip. I went even slower, gentler.
“You can smoke in here if you want,” I said.
“I’m out of cigarettes,” she said.
“I’ve got some nicotine gum we can burn.”
She laughed with a noise that sounded like a sob. Then she put her other hand on my other hand.
“Well,” she said. “Maybe we can kiss.”
I moved closer to her, our lips almost touching. I could feel her warmth, and I stayed there for what felt like a very long time. Her breath smelled sweet. I kissed her. She made an “oh” sound into my mouth as she took a breath, then slowly introduced her tongue. I sucked it like a piece of liver she was kind enough to feed me. She moaned into my mouth. Her throat clicked a little, and I drank up all the sounds.
Gently, I kissed her lower lip, the side of her mouth, her chin, and then the plump white area under her chin. I began to suck on her there, not hard, just enough to nurse for a moment like a calf drinking of its mother. Then I moved my mouth to where her Adam’s apple was, just underneath all that flesh, and sucked there for a while. I was hungry to taste each of her moles, but I took it slow and teased myself like I was just beginning a big feast.
I moved first to the milk chocolate drops on the side of her neck, then made my way to the dark chocolate drop, right at the center of her throat. She made new sounds as I tongued at them, as though they each mapped a different locus of pleasure on her body. As I sucked, it was as though they were the phantom moles cut from my body years ago, and I was sucking myself. Only instead of my inner arm, they resonated in my pleasure points: my throat, my chest, my pussy.
I longed to take off Miriam’s shirt and enjoy those heavy breasts of hers. I wanted to lick her down her belly, all the way to her cunt, taste all of her. But I didn’t dare go past that center mole, no lower, although I was wet, then wetter, and my pulse beat hard. I felt queasy with desire, weakened by it. But I could also keep going. I kept my mouth on her neck, slowly moved my hands to her breasts, cupping all that I could over her shirt. She was in my hands and spilling out. It was touch heaven.
She was an infinite planet with so many different territories on which to set up camp and play. If I had eons, I’d still never finish exploring her. I sensed that I could feel what she was feeling. She shivered at my every touch, and I wanted to make her feel even more. I wanted us both to go even higher.
Without removing any clothing, I pinched her nipples through the fabric and squeezed her breasts harder, circling my fingers around her areolae, gently milking her with my hands. I swore that I could smell her pussy now, earthy and creamy, like a cool basement, wafting up from between her thighs. Then, suddenly, she pulled away.
“It’s getting late,” she said, my spit still on her upper lip. “I’m going to have to go.”
I wanted to say, Stay! Sleep over!
But instead I kissed her on the forehead and on each of her eyelids.
“You’re going to come back, aren’t you?” I asked.
“Oh, Rachel,” she said in a way that sounded sad.
She paused for a moment.
“Yes,” she said finally. “I will come back.”
“When?” I asked. “Tomorrow! Come back tomorrow!”
Her face lit up at the possibility.
“Yes!” she said. “I guess I could come back tomorrow!”
“Good,” I said, stroking her hair.
I walked her to the door and put my mouth on her mouth a final time.
I love you, I mouthed silently into her mouth.
If I did not love Miriam, if it was purely attraction, then I felt that I would never know what love was—and I did not care to know. And when she left, I got down on my knees and touched my face to the ground.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I said to who knew what.
I wasn’t even sure if Jews prayed on their knees. But I was so grateful.
CHAPTER 52
I was drinking Lipton in the office kitchen, because Ana hadn’t offered me Harney & Sons. The Lipton was fucking good. I’d forgotten how much I loved Lipton.
“You seem happy,” she said suspiciously, blowing on her tea.
“Oh god, that’s a terrible thing to say to a person,” I said.
“I’m serious.”
But it was true. I couldn’t hide my joy. The change was obvious. I was putting milk in my Lipton with regular sugar, lots of it, stirring it into a sort of milkshake-type concoction with a jaunty yet circular motion. There were some leftover shortbread cookies from a meeting that had taken place earlier in the day. I picked one up, dunked it in the tea, and bit it.
“Are those good?” Ana asked me, scrunching her nose.
“They aren’t bad,” I said.
“You’re happy,” she said. “Now tell me why.”
“No real reason,” I said.
“Oh, come on. This wouldn’t have to do with a certain someone?”
“Jace?” I whispered. “No, I haven’t seen him.”
She looked disappointed.
I was afraid to say a word about Miriam. I had never told her that I liked women. I suspected that she wouldn’t take it well. She would laugh and say I was just going through a phase. She might even say mean things about Miriam. But I wished I could tell her what was happening. I wanted her to know me.
My mother had never known me either, though it wasn’t because I hadn’t given her a chance. I’d given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn’t seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn’t even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.
There was total silence now on my mother’s end, no communication. Still, I carried her inside me: her voice, her feelings, her fears, her ideas of food, bodies, the world, women and men. She had long ago implanted herself in me at the cellular level, spread into my organs—my brain, my heart—until what was hers and what was mine were indistinguishable.
I wondered whether there was a deadline for when a person had to finally stop blaming her mother for her own thoughts. I thought I’d hit that age, then hit it again. At nineteen, twenty, I decided: Okay, this is enough. You are a grown-up. Time to take responsibility for your own mind. At twenty-one, I am over it. At twenty-two, I understand why she did what she did. At twenty-three, I forgive. At twenty-four, this imposed silence. But now what?
Declaring myself liberated was one thing. Putting freedom into action was another. Even the idea of freedom made me feel nauseous, spun out, vertiginous, lost in a vast limitlessness, zero walls. I was scared to just float, free but alone. My mathematics, no matter how isolating, had given me companionship. In that restricted life I had rules, a border, a system for certainty—even if the very idea of human certitude, within the boundless mystery of existence, was, itself, false. I wanted walls. I wanted them soft and womblike, but I settled for a frigid vault. My mother had helped me build the vault. But now it was my own.
CHAPTER 53
I wanted to look effortlessly pretty for Miriam. I put on a little black skirt and tank top, blotted makeup, no shoes, as though I were just lounging casually in my apartment after work. I shrouded my lust in softer feelings of romance, giddiness, which made me feel less guilty about wanting her. At its core, though, the feeling was undeniably lust. It was all wet.
I still didn’t know exactly how to be the seducer, the one who moves assertively toward another person or teases them fearlessly to the point of action. In my seduction fantasy of Ana, it had been so easy. She was a ghost, and ghosts were static. It was much scarier to be confident when engaging with the warm, vacillating body of another human being who could reject me at any moment.
I’d worn the skirt and tank on purpose, because I knew that I looked thin in the outfit. I wanted to accentuate this feature, to remind Miriam of what I was and what she was in that old competition between women. I felt more comfortable seducing from this place. If I was going to be vulnerable, express that I wanted her, then I needed to already be some kind of victor. I needed to win elsewhere in order to be vulnerable here.
But when Miriam walked into my apartment and told me that I looked “really good,” I regretted my little competition. I felt admiration for her then, for the courage it took her to say that. I’d wanted to hurt her with my body, with our differences. Now I just wanted to help her feel comfortable.
I offered her some kosher wine, something called Baron Herzog California chardonnay, which the tag at the wine store said was “sure to titillate.” Then we sat side by side on my sofa and she told me about her day at Yo!Good.
“It was slow. I spent most of the time out back smoking cloves,” she said. “Oh, but of course we ran out of s’mores yogurt because the schlemiel cousin forgot to place the order.”
“You’re a s’more,” I said, kissing her on the cheek.
I felt strangely protective of her—motherly, even.
She surprised me by taking my face in both of her hands and kissing me on the lips. She looked me in the eyes just before she did it. We kissed slowly, making tiny smacking sounds. I let my tongue wander into her mouth, heard her swallow. Then her hands drifted from my face to the back of my head. She pulled me to her harder, and I felt like I was now the daughter—protected—and she was the mother. No, we were both daughters, equals, and I liked being equals. Together we had power. I felt that our kissing could sustain the ritual of women loving women for eons to come.
I went to her breasts and rubbed my face over her blouse, firmly, so she could really feel me. Her nipples hardened beneath the cotton. She didn’t stop me when I unbuttoned the top button, then the next and the next until her blouse was open and I could see her body, full of gravity, pale and momentous. Her bra, a modest beige, strained to contain her breasts. Below that rolled the waves of her belly, her navel wide and deep, moving up and down with her breath. I was so grateful for everything I got to see, that she was letting me gaze at her like this.
I hugged her and we swayed a little. Then I climbed on her lap so that I was straddling her, my legs spread wide, feeling strong and powerful in my thighs as I kissed her wet mouth, unhooked her bra from behind. I took off her bra slowly, and her breasts spilled out: magnificent, weighty pendulums, nothing like mine. Her nipples were as big as silver dollars, tinted the palest pink. Beneath her areolae were a network of veins, blue and purple, bringing forth the blood that sustained her.
I sucked on one nipple, tickling, squeezing, and giving little pinches to the other, wishing I had two mouths with which to suck her. No, I wished I had more than that: one for each breast, one for her neck, one for her navel, her mouth, her pussy, her eyelids. At any moment I thought that something wondrous might come out, deeply sweet: butterscotch topping, warm caramel, honey. I moved to her other nipple, kissed it, then lapped there ever so gently, as though it were her clit. I got overexcited and nibbled a little, and she gave a squeal. But when I looked at her face, she was smiling.
Everything was pink. I slid down and came face-to-face with her belly, kissing her there all over, gentle little kisses, tiny soft love bites. There were three rolls of fat, and I covered all of them with kisses, imagining the rolls as big lips, my upper lip falling between two of them at a time, my tongue extended just enough to taste what was inside. Then the space between her rolls became like pussies to me, and I thought, How incredible, she has so many pussies, so many places to explore.
She moaned, giving off deep sighs with quickened breath, no self-consciousness, as though she knew each part of her was worthy of pleasure. I wa
nted to hump her calf, right between my legs, but I was scared to rub against her, so I rubbed against the air in front of her, imagining feeling her leg between my thighs, fucking her psychically.
She reached down and put her hands on my chest, rubbing my sternum and clavicle, the way Ava Gardner might do to Clark Gable. She did not touch my breasts, only stroked the bones above them. I tried to move up, so my breasts were in her hands, but she stayed at my chest, then migrated to my shoulders.
“Strong,” she said.
“Not really,” I said.
“Do you want me to do anything to your tummy?” she asked suddenly.
“My tummy?”
“Kiss it? Like you did mine.”
“Okay,” I said, laughing.
“Lie down on the sofa,” she said.
We switched positions, and I lay down on the sofa and closed my eyes.
She lifted up my tank a little, exposing only my stomach. My abdominals were no longer flat, but I still had muscle. She kissed me there, up and down. Then she nuzzled me in a circle, nipping the top of my skirt, the sweetest torture. My pelvis jerked. Her kisses slowed. My nipples got hard. I put my hand on hers, guided it to my breast. She moved away quickly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Was that too much?”
Of course, I knew that it was.
CHAPTER 54
I was afraid that Miriam would stay away from me, that I wouldn’t hear from her again. I imagined I would have to go to Yo!Good and beg her to come over between bites of strawberry sundae flecked with Heath bar pieces, standing out back in a puff of clove smoke by the dumpster. But she returned the following night, and every night that week: the seven nights of Miriam.
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