Milk Fed
Page 20
“You have half an hour to get your things and go.”
I felt humiliated. Tears filled my eyes. I stood up to leave.
“I really believed in your vision,” said Ofer.
Then I almost laughed. What vision was it, exactly, that he had believed in? I hadn’t even had a vision!
I wanted to say, Way to uphold a hegemonic power structure within the matrix of fame privilege and the feminization of poverty, Ofer.
Instead, I said, “I’m sorry.”
CHAPTER 76
I called Jace from inside a stall in the office bathroom. He picked up his phone on the first ring.
“Asshole!” I said. “You must’ve known I would lose my job.”
“Rachel. I can explain.”
“You’re worse than TMZ.”
“Listen to me,” he said. “When Ofer called, it was like eight this morning. I’d just woken up. I thought he was calling about the commercial I’m doing for American Express. I break character to charge a Taser—anyway, he asked me flat-out if we had slept together.”
“He called you to ask if we slept together?”
“Yes! I was confused. I panicked. I figured you’d told him and that I was in trouble. So I told the truth.”
“Why would I tell him we slept together?”
“I don’t know. But he knew, so I just figured. Then, after I said yes, he said he hadn’t talked to you yet and I was like, Oh, shit.”
“So some member of your asshole posse spilled the beans.”
“No! I didn’t tell anyone.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted by his discretion or grateful for it. But I knew he was telling the truth. First of all, he wasn’t that good of an actor. It was me who had been the dishonest one. I’d used him to elevate my status in the eyes of strangers, to prove to Ana that I was desirable. I’d gossiped to her about fucking him.
Then I realized. It was Ana who had told Ofer.
CHAPTER 77
Ana was on the phone with a client’s assistant when I stopped by her desk. I was carrying a box with my cacti, my mugs, and the puffer jacket. I set the box down on the floor next to me and cleared my throat. But she didn’t look up.
“They rescheduled the shoot for the twenty-seventh so it works with her schedule,” she said. “Two thirty p.m., I’ll send the call sheet.”
I took a step closer to her.
“Full makeup and hair. But she should arrive prewashed, no product. There will be three parking passes—one for her, one for you, and one for the publicist. Everyone should bring ID.”
I took another step closer.
“And they received the rider. Craft services will make sure to provide at least two keto options for lunch.”
I took another step closer. I was practically in her lap. Finally, she looked up at me.
“I’m swamped,” she whispered. “Can you come back later?”
“You fucking told him,” I said.
CHAPTER 78
It was day 53 of the detox when I broke down and called my mother.
I wondered if there was something significant about the number 53. I googled 53 Jewish number meaning and found nothing, only information for the number 36:
The number 36 is a holy number, because it is twice the number 18. In Jewish numerology, the number 18 means chai or life. The number 36 is holy, because it is two lives.
Great, had god wanted me to call my mother at 36 days?
My mother’s phone rang until her voice mail picked up. It was after midnight on the East Coast, and I knew she would be asleep. I didn’t tell her I’d been fired that day. I didn’t tell her that my heart hurt. I didn’t address the detox either.
I simply said, “Hi, it’s your daughter. Just calling to say hello. I’ll be around tomorrow.”
Then I hung up.
Then I cried. More than anything, all I’d ever wanted was a total embrace, the embrace of an infinite mother, absolute and divine. I wanted to lose the edges of myself and blend with a woman, enter the amniotic sac and melt away. I wanted a love that was bottomless, unconditional, with zero repercussions. I wanted an infinite yogurt, a mystical and maternal yogurt, something of which I could have unlimited quantities that would not hurt me.
But nothing was unlimited. Every cup had a bottom. Miriam and I were done. Certainly, my time in the womb had ended, harsh and abrupt in the cold hospital, bright light, a stranger’s pair of hands, searing consciousness. The woman who had carried me inside her for nine months had become a stranger. Even those women whose mothers loved them unconditionally, that love too had an end.
Still I wanted it. I wanted a love contingent on nothing finite. I wanted a love without end. Everyone was always saying you had to give it to yourself. Self-love, self-love. What did that even mean?
Dr. Mahjoub said it all the time: Mother yourself, parent yourself.
It seemed impossible. I had no idea how to be a mom, let alone my own mother. But what about daughterhood? Was it possible that I could be my own daughter?
This seemed more doable. I wondered if the universe, in its roundness, somehow already contained my daughterness. Perhaps I’d been being held there, a daughter all along, until I woke up to it. If I could not be my own mother—or at least not the kind of mother worth having—then maybe I could be my own daughter.
“Daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter,” I heard myself saying, roughly from a place in my throat just below my Adam’s apple.
“Daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter,” I said again, and found that I had put my arms around myself.
I sat down on the wood floor and began to rock myself. Then I moved over to the sofa, because it was softer, and rocked myself there.
“I’m so sorry, daughter,” I said, tears in my eyes. “I’m sorry that you felt I had abandoned you.”
“That is okay, Mother,” I said. “You were always here. I just didn’t know how to find you.”
I heard myself talking to myself. I wondered if I had finally lost it.
“Daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter,” I said.
“Yes, Mother,” I said. “Promise me you will never disappear from me again. Show me how I can always know you’re here. Show me how to share my joy with you, that you will be happy to receive it.”
“Oh, my daughter,” I said. “You will forget that I am here. This is the way of human beings, to forget. But you found your way back to me once and so can find your way back again, because I am always here. The world will hurt you again and again. You will hurt yourself again and again. And when it does, and when you do, you will remember me again and again. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.”
CHAPTER 79
I saw Miriam one more time, three years later. I was walking down Fairfax, eating an ice-cream cone of all things—mint chocolate chip, no toppings—when I saw her coming toward me. She was pushing a double-wide stroller with two babies inside—twins, it looked like. Her hair was up under a beret.
It’s not her, I thought. You are hallucinating.
But the closer we came, I realized it could be no one except her. I recognized the precise constellation of moles on her neck, unchanged. I knew them so well, first from my own body and then from hers. I would always know them.
Miriam recognized me too, of course. Our eyes met and locked on one another. When she stared for a moment, I felt tears spring to mine. Then my lips curled into a smile, and she smiled too. She nodded at me, not like a person she had known, but like someone who was a friendly passerby—looking at her and her babies in admiration. Neither of us stopped.
I wondered if Miriam had kept the clay figure, or if she’d thrown it away. I wondered who she was married to, if her parents had rushed to quickly find her a match because of what happened. But I also felt it wasn’t part of our story for me to know. Maybe I was only supposed to know that she had two little ones and was happy to mother them, regardless
of whether she loved the man she was with.
It was a warm day for fall, even in Los Angeles. I had gigs coming up all over the East Coast, and my mother would be coming to see my set in New York. She didn’t like my hair, which was still short, but she was being quiet about my weight. I told her I would keep any mother jokes at bay.
Since Miriam, I’d dated one man and one woman. The man was a comic and the woman a minister at a Unitarian church in Pasadena. I’d told my mother about both of them. She was disappointed that the man had not worked out.
That night, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel came to me in a dream. I hadn’t seen him in three years, and I told him I still didn’t always know what was real—or wasn’t. He said that the word golem, in English, means shapeless mass. But in Hebrew, it means unfinished substance.
“What ever happened to your golem?” I asked. “The famous one.”
“Ah! For a little love, you pay all your life.” He laughed. “The last I heard, he followed a woman to New York and into the Yiddish theater.”
I asked the rabbi where I could find him again when I needed his wisdom. He reminded me that I was his creator.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Love and thanks to Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, a real macher; to Tamar McCollom for editorial chutzpah, Nan Graham, Kara Watson, Jaya Miceli, Katie Monaghan, Brianna Yamashita, Zoey Cole, Sabrina Pyun, and the whole Scribner mishpocha; to Alexis Kirschbaum and Bloombsury UK, and to Clément Ribes; to Petra Collins and Karah Preiss; to the shtarkers at Lighthouse and UTA; to Ruth and Stan Harris and Eve and Lou Broder; to my parents and sister; and to the mensch of mensches, chavrusa of chavrusas, Nicholas.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© PETRA COLLINS
MELISSA BRODER is the author of the novel The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today, and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. She has written for the New York Times, Elle.com, Vice, Vogue Italia, and New York magazine’s The Cut. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Iowa Review, Tin House, and Guernica, and she is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry. She lives in Los Angeles.
www.melissabroder.com
@melissabroder + @sosadtoday
@realmelissabroder
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Melissa-Broder
@ScribnerBooks
ALSO BY MELISSA BRODER
The Pisces
So Sad Today
Last Sext
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