by Beth Miller
‘Oh! But I thought she was staying for a sleepover, that’s what she and Macy have arranged.’
The little swine!
‘She doesn’t have any of her things…’ I say, knowing I’ve been outmanoeuvred by my daughter.
‘Oh, we’ve got spare everything. Toothbrush, pants, pyjamas. We’ll drop her at yours tomorrow morning. Macy’s had such a lousy week at school with that awful Mrs Bedford, she’s really got it in for her. I’m so glad for her to spend time with Leah and put it out of her mind.’
I know when I’m beat. I thank Adina, get into the car, hold on to the steering wheel, and burst into tears.
Eliza’s list of food for Alex
Proper chicken soup with kneidlach (these are white dumplings). No one makes this like my mum, but I will give it a try. Can you get kosher boiling fowls in Brixton??
Matzo-brei. This is a Pesach (Passover) breakfast dish, a kind of omelette made with matzo crackers. The only thing my dad ever cooked. Stodgy and comforting.
Chopped liver on bagels.
Onion platzels (Zaida’s favourite).
Salt-beef.
Pickled herring.
Gefilte fish, an acquired taste. Lots of Jews don’t like it.
Honey cake.
Roast lamb and roast potatoes. Not a traditional Jewish dish; I just really like it.
Fourteen
Spring 2000
‘The best bacon sandwich in London,’ Alex said – information which I hitherto had no interest in, and actually still didn’t – ‘is at Kev’s Cabin.’
We were finally at the last, and worst, item on the food list.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Following the success of the cheeseburger, we worked our way through Alex’s other lists. We spent nights cuddled together on the sofa watching films: Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, Chinatown, and Singin’ in the Rain (my favourite). We both sobbed through Bambi, though I felt my eyelash resemblance to the little fawn had been rather overstated. And I enjoyed Snow White, and was amused by Alex referring to me as Snow White afterwards. She ended up with a typical Orthodox family, Alex said, loads of kids, wife does all the housework.
London was our playground. We went to art galleries, museums, and the theatre. I tried my first gin and tonic in Alex’s favourite café, the Roundhouse, and it became my favourite place too, for Marlene, the motherly waitress, and the cappuccinos (I didn’t think much of their gin and tonics, though). We visited a theme park and I went on a rollercoaster and absolutely loved it, screaming as we hurtled down from a great height as though we were about to die. We tried out a few items on the ‘sexy things’ list, and I screamed as we hurtled down from a great height there, too.
We also worked on non-list parts of my life; specifically about me going back to work. It turned out I’d need further training to be a teacher in a secular school, but they said I could be a TA, a teaching assistant. Alex helped with my applications and I was taken on by a small primary school up the road, part-time, to start after Easter.
It all felt exciting and positive, and it wasn’t until we had our first proper argument, over sushi, that I started to question the choice I’d made.
I’d never even heard of sushi, till Alex mentioned it. He said it was quite new in Britain, but now there were Japanese restaurants springing up everywhere. In March we went to a place with exclamation marks in its name, the food trundling round a little train track. I was nervous initially of taking a plate off the track in case I dropped it, or caught my hair in the rails and got dragged round the restaurant against my will. But seeing that some young children near us could manage it unscathed, I tried it. Funny-looking food, it was, a tiny sliver of raw fish on a spoonful of rice, not enough to feed a canary, and ‘California rolls’, also rice, wrapped in an unpleasant-looking black casing. I could hear Deborah laughing at the tiny, ugly portions. The raw salmon actually tasted quite nice, and was not much different from smoked salmon. I avoided any prohibited seafood such as shrimp and eel.
The only unpleasant incident – until the argument – was when I mistook wasabi for avocado and put a large spoonful into my mouth. I spat most of it into a napkin but it was several minutes before my eyes stopped watering. Alex kindly didn’t laugh, but fussed round with water and tissues to dab my eyes with.
When I’d recovered I tasted the miso soup Alex had ordered, which he claimed was ‘like chicken soup’.
‘This is literally nothing like chicken soup,’ I told him, ‘other than it being soup.’
‘Isn’t it? It’s salty, and tangy.’
‘Give me that book!’
He’d brought the Re-education book with us so he could tick sushi off. I grabbed it and made a new list in the back, of the foods I’d grown up with that he had to try, chicken soup at the top. But he read it and said, ‘Tick, tick, tick. Done ’em.’
‘No, you haven’t.’
‘Well, except gefilte fish. I’ve seen it, though. Josh had it at his wedding. It smelled gross.’
Josh was Alex’s token Jewish friend (apart from me). They’d shared a flat at university, and even though Josh’s Reform, watered-down version was as similar to my Judaism as it was to Hinduism, he was regularly wheeled out as an arbiter of Jewish culture. On the one hand, I was grateful to Josh. It was because of him that Alex knew more about Jewish things than the average person. But on the other hand, I was getting tired of hearing about Josh, who luckily now lived a long way away in New York, and who often got things wrong.
‘OK, but you can’t have had matzo-brei,’ I said. ‘Unless Josh cooked it for you. It’s not a restaurant dish, or a wedding food. It’s home food, comfort food. It’s matzo crackers, fried with egg.’
Alex looked sheepish, and I expected him to say that he hadn’t, of course, eaten this, but instead he said, ‘Did I ever mention Rachel, my ex?’
I gazed at the food trundling past us on the track, round and round. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You only mentioned Emily.’ Sexy Emily. ‘On the rag’ Emily. I followed the progress of one plate in particular, a blue one containing what looked like an orange spider on a lump of rice. Surely no one would pick that up?
‘Rachel was Jewish,’ Alex said. ‘Still is, I guess. I haven’t seen her for years. We lived together when I was in my early twenties.’
All the plates were different colours. Green, blue, pink and white. I realised that the different colours meant different prices. There was a chart on the wall behind us explaining this. Pink was the dearest. We hadn’t had any of those. I wondered what was on a pink plate that made it so special; the food looked no different from the others.
‘Rachel made matzo-brei for me one Passover,’ Alex said.
I tried to calculate what our six blue dishes and four green ones would add up to. What was six times £2.80, added to four times £3.40?
‘Your silence is unnerving me. Please say something, Eliza!’
She made it one Passover? How many Passovers were there? Did you say you were living together?
‘I didn’t know you had a Jewish girlfriend,’ I said. The blue spider-plate came back past, and I picked it up off the conveyor belt so no one would have to eat it. ‘I didn’t know you lived with someone.’
‘God, it was ages ago. I just hadn’t got round to mentioning it yet. There’s still quite a lot we don’t know about each other.’
‘No, there isn’t, Alex.’ He looked at me, his expression anxious, the quotation marks visible between his eyes. ‘There’s a lot that I don’t know about you. But you know pretty much everything about me. There is, after all, very little to know.’
I opened the culture notebook and showed him how many pages he had filled in for me: lots. Then I showed him mine: a page on Jewish customs and festivals, a list of my siblings to help him remember them, and half a page of foods I wanted to introduce him to. Foods he’d already had, anyway, with Josh. And Rachel.
‘That’s not true, Eliza. You are large and contain multitudes.’
He went to put his arms round me, and I moved away. ‘You don’t like me quoting Walt Whitman?’
‘I don’t like you doing that.’
‘Hugging you?’
‘Hugging me in public.’
How could he not know by now that public displays of affection made me uncomfortable? Maybe he was right; maybe he didn’t know that much about me. Not facts and figures and lists, but feelings. Did he think it took just a few months to change your personality so much that you were ready to be groped in a Japanese restaurant?
‘Have you had enough food?’ Alex asked. ‘I’m done. This stuff is small but it’s high protein.’
‘Where did you live with Rachel?’
‘Oh.’ He became very busy inspecting the food on the tracks. He picked up a pink plate, then put it back down. ‘In, er, in our flat.’
‘The flat we live in now?’
‘Yes. I, er, well, I bought it with her in 1993, and when we split up I bought her out.’
‘You chose it together?’
‘Uh, yes. I’m sorry. I was going to tell you.’
‘It would have been nice to know I was living in someone else’s flat.’
‘Hey, Snow White,’ he said, touching my arm, ‘this isn’t like you.’
I shook him off. ‘Perhaps you don’t know what I’m like,’ I said, the heat rising in my face. ‘For instance, you still don’t seem to know that I don’t like being touched when I’m bleeding.’
‘I didn’t know you were bleeding.’
‘I told you. It started this morning.’ As I said it, I realised I hadn’t actually told him – only planned the words I’d use to explain why I wasn’t ready to share a bed yet while bleeding.
‘Ooh, you know what that means?’ Alex said, his eyes brightening. ‘This is the third one of our marriage, and you said we could share a bed this time…’
‘I didn’t say that, Alex! I said three or four months, maybe more. When I’ve got used to the idea of touching you while bleeding.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Can’t you call it your period? Every time you say you’re bleeding I’m ready to call an ambulance.’
‘It’s bad enough I can’t go to the mikvah any more, without you trampling all over my feelings.’
‘I thought you did your cleaning rituals in the bath. You’re certainly in there long enough.’
‘It’s not the same! For a start, I can barely get the whole of me under the water. It’s not exactly a big bath.’
‘Is the secret to our married happiness for me to buy you a bigger bath?’
‘Well, it would be nice not to have to use Rachel’s bath.’ The words were out before I could stop them.
We looked at each other. Then he shook his head. ‘Well, you’re not going to like this, but I might as well put everything on the table now, while you’re already pissed off with me. It’s not really Rachel’s bath; the last woman who owned it before you was called Helena.’
‘Who’s Helena?’ My voice was more of a screech than usual.
‘My girlfriend after Rachel. The one before you.’
‘And she lived in our flat with you too?’
‘Yes. Look, I know it sounds awful.’
The weird food sat heavy in my stomach. ‘Can we get the bill? Can we just go, please?’
He signalled to the waitress. ‘But look, Eliza, I’m thirty years old. This number of partners isn’t unusual, in the Real World.’
‘Really? Because I feel like I’m married to some kind of International Playboy.’
‘I come with baggage. I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do to change it.’
‘I’m sorry too, that I am so hilariously unencumbered by baggage.’
I realised that I didn’t know, after all, what the secret to our married happiness was. A bigger bath wasn’t going to do it. In the story of Snow White, she fell in love, got married and lived happily ever after. But after only a few months, my list of dissatisfactions was growing. It wasn’t a list to write down in Alex’s book, but it was a list, all the same.
The waitress put the bill down, just as Alex said, ‘Eliza, you are the one I love.’ He didn’t care that the waitress lingered, listening. ‘You’re the one I waited for. You’re the one I want to be with for the rest of my life.’
‘I don’t know what you see in me. I have no experience. I have nothing.’
Alex put his arms round me, and though this made me feel tense, I didn’t protest. He whispered lovely things until I stopped feeling sorry for myself. I apologised, told him I was probably feeling lousy because of bleeding, sorry, because of my period. And because I still hadn’t heard from anyone, despite my letters to Deborah, and Dov, and Mum. I didn’t tell Alex I’d even written to Dad, asking for forgiveness, which showed how crazy I was. Was Zaida missing me? Was Mum crying for me? Would Dov, or any of my other brothers and sisters ever forgive me?
‘I’m sorry, too, Eliza,’ Alex said, releasing me at last. ‘I promise I’ll try gefilte fish, and I’ll tell you all about my ex-girlfriends, none of whom, I hardly need to say, should cause you a moment’s concern.’
‘Why don’t you write them down in chronological order,’ I joked, handing him his culture book.
He took me seriously. ‘Blimey,’ he said, picking up a pen, ‘this’ll take a while.’
April, and we arrived at curry. Homemade curry was best, Alex announced, and no one made it better than his brother. So for the first time since January, I had to see Vicky again. Kim had visited us a few times on his own, which was lovely, but after the way Vicky had been at our wedding, I’d managed to make it clear to Alex, without spelling it out, that I’d rather not spend time with her if I didn’t have to. Oh yes, my dear Hus Band might think of me as a naïve and sheltered girl from the backwaters of Lithuania-in-Hackney, but I could spot a predatory woman a mile off. Was Vicky the same when Alex was with Rachel, I wondered? Or Emily? Or Helena, or Joanne – either of the Joannes? Or Nina, or any of the others on Alex’s shockingly long list of ex-girlfriends?
In the interests of harmony, I put on a show of enthusiastic agreement about seeing Vicky and Kim. I guess this was what Mum meant when she told me that marriage was made up of endless compromises. Mind you, one of the times I remember her saying that was shortly after Dad had smacked her across the room. Young as I was, I didn’t feel that compromise was quite the right word.
So I was back at Vicky’s house for the first time since that awful Christmas dinner. While she poured drinks and fluttered her eyelashes at Alex, Kim beckoned me into the kitchen. He closed the door behind us and whispered conspiratorially, ‘I wanted to let you know that the lamb is kosher.’
‘Seriously, Kim? That’s amazing! But how come?’
‘I bought it in Golders Green. Blimey, kosher meat’s not cheap, is it?’
‘No,’ I laughed. ‘But why did you?’
‘Look, I know what my brother’s like. He gets these ideas. I think you’re very patient with his little education programme, but personally, I think mixing meat and milk is enough of a rule to break at a time.’
‘Oh, Kim. You are wonderful.’
I didn’t tell him I’d already leaped across the meat and milk barrier with the Valentine’s Day cheeseburger. I was so grateful for him considering my feelings and going to effort and expense for me that I could cry. Instead, I did something I’d never done before, something that wasn’t on the ‘New Experiences’ list, but should have been: I put my arms round a man who was not my husband or a blood relation. Kim wasn’t to know that this was even more of a departure for me than eating un-kosher lamb. He hugged me tightly back, and when I moved out of his embrace I saw something fleeting on his face that made me blush up to my hairline. The bit of his face I could see between the beard and the glasses was red too, as red as my own. We smiled awkwardly at each other. I hoped I didn’t look like some kind of bored married floozy in my short blue skirt and short-sleeved shirt. Then Vicky came in, giggling and clinging on to Alex’s arm, and
I realised I was not the married floozy in the house. She was wearing a sheer blouse with six buttons, few of which were done up. Her skirt was half the length of mine. How I longed to be able to turn and wink at Deborah, who would whisper something cheeky in my ear.
Vicky gave me one of her fake smiles. ‘You two look like you’ve been snogging. Caught ya! Nice to see her arms for once, isn’t it, Kim?’
Alex jumped in quickly. ‘Vicky’s been telling me your brilliant news, Kim,’ he said, hugging him. ‘A little brother or sister for Holly! Congratulations, man.’
Kim said, ‘I thought we weren’t telling anyone yet, Vicky.’ To me, he said, ‘It’s early days.’
‘Family, innit?’ Vicky waggled her bosom in Alex’s direction. ‘Anyway, I thought it might give these two ideas. Not getting any younger, are you, Ally-boy? You’re going to want to get on with it.’
‘We’re still in the honeymoon stage,’ Alex said, slipping his arm round my waist, making me jump. ‘But it really is wonderful news.’
‘Not that wonderful getting all fat again, though, is it, when I’ve only just lost the baby weight from last time?’ Vicky stroked her flat stomach with a superior smile. ‘You won’t fancy me any more in a few months when I’m blown up, Ally. I told him, Kim, get your dirty hands off me, but he can’t help himself.’
I could feel myself smiling stiffly. I deliberately avoided Kim’s eye; I didn’t want to see him looking embarrassed.
The curry was lovely. You couldn’t tell there was yoghurt in it at all, you could just taste the melt-in-the-mouth lamb. Alex asked if the meat was organic, and Kim and I exchanged another smile, not so awkward this time. Vicky drank a great deal of wine, and somehow there seemed to be even more undone buttons on her blouse. She turned her whole body towards Alex when she talked to him, behaving as if Kim and I weren’t in the room.
Alex got us out of there as quickly as he decently could; I didn’t even need to say anything. I hadn’t completely finished eating my dessert (sorbet) when he looked at his watch and said, ‘God, sorry, Kimbo, we’ve got a thing, we had better run.’