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2005 Like Love: Stories Samantha Brooke Levy

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

LIKE LOVE: STORIES

By

SAMANTHA BROOKE LEVY

A thesis submitted to the Department of English In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2005

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Samantha Brooke Levy defended on 08 June 2005.

______Sheila Ortiz-Taylor Professor Directing Thesis

______Julianna Baggott Committee Member

______Elizabeth Stuckey-French Committee Member

Approved:

______Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English

______Donald J. Foss, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii

For Poppy

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all those involved in the creation of this thesis: Elizabeth Stuckey-French for your patience while trying to find my voice; Julianna Baggott for being my role model, mentor, and all around funny gal; and Sheila Ortiz-Taylor – for every conversation we’ve had that has supported and assured me over the last year – you mean so very much to me. Thanks to my friends and peers for their unending encouragement, especially Ginger Assadi, Stacy Brand, Sarah Fryett, Matt Hobson, Nikki Lewis, and Brandy Wilson. Thank you to Jennifer Wolford for being my crutch, workshop buddy, confidant, and fellow “sane” person in the department. I definitely wouldn’t have survived the past two years without you. Lastly, thank you to my parents. To my father, for reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull to me every night as a child, instilling in me a love of the written word, and my mother, who is my best friend and loves me the mostest.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………….……..vi

Nice Jewish Boys……………………………………..…………………………...………1

Presenting Sarit Saferstein, For Better or Worse……………………………….………..15

Let It Ride…………………………………………………………………….………….29

Like Love………………………………………………………………….……………..41

A Cherry Hill Tale……………………………………………………………………….51

Biographical Sketch…………………………………………………..………………….68

v ABSTRACT

This creative thesis is a collection of stories that deal with issues surrounding the controlling question: “Who is the modern woman?” There is no singular, all- encompassing answer; however, these stories attempt to uncover possible answers. They also explore questions of gender, culture, and identity, examining them through a disruption of existing stereotypes. Questions such as: Why do we, in fact, struggle under this burden of stereotypes? How significant are aspects of heritage / culture? To what degree does upbringing influence our lives today? What role does sexual orientation play into all of the above? It is not so much that these questions are answered here, but I want my writing to raise them – in order to create a new awareness.

vi NICE JEWISH BOYS

My mother torments me. She tortures me. She kvetches at me. For example, there was the time when I was 12, and she took me shopping for a new bra at Wanamakers, where she used to work and still got a 25 percent discount. We ran in to her friend Anna in the undergarment section, and my mother yanked down the collar of my shirt, chafing the back of my neck, to show Anna my newly enlarged, bare tee-tahs. Then, Anna reached inside my shirt and felt me up, in the middle of the department store, and said, “Good Jewish boobs. She’ll catch herself a nice Jewish boy.” My mother reached in for the other breast, gave it a tug, and nodded her head. “A nice doctor or dentist, for sure,” my mother said. “Maybe even a Rabbi!” Then, the two women huddled in the corner and whispered back and forth, leaving me - feeling completely violated and humiliated - in front of the cashier who was doing her best to keep a straight face. A few years later, when I was walking across the stage of my high school auditorium to accept a scholarship on awards night (in front of the entire senior class, the faculty, and parents), my mother stood up and screamed from the bleachers, “Suck in your tummy, bubbalah! And smile!” Next to my yearbook picture, some bastard on the yearbook staff wrote, “Galit ‘The Bubbalah’ Horowitz.” Nowadays, my mother says she suffers from having a 30-year-old single daughter and worse, not having a grandchild. I say people who suffer should be put out of their misery, like an old dog dying of cancer or a racehorse that broke it’s leg. One quick bullet to the head or gulp of rat poison could take care of her suffering, quickly and painlessly. Whenever I suggest these alternatives, my mother laughs and says, “That won’t help. All that will do is send me to the grave a suffering old lady. I’ll never be at peace. You want your poor mother to die not at peace?” So, she calls me every morning, right before I leave for work, and goes on and on about her suffering. Jewish guilt forces me to answer the phone. “Galit,” she says, “When are you going to get married? Settle down. Start a family?” “I’m late for work, Mother,” I say. She continues anyway. “Hannah’s daughter is married with children. So are Lia’s and Brenda’s. They always ask about you, too. They wonder.”

1 “Why do you care so much what people think?” “Don’t you care what I think?” Mother has a habit of answering a question with a question. I rush her off the phone, grab my bag, and walk to work. I bartend at the Olive Garden in Times Square during weekday lunch shifts: pouring wine, filling out gift cards, making Bloody Marys and so on. Since the restaurant is three floors, the staff is huge with well over two hundred employees, making their tip-outs at least twice as large. Occasionally my mother wanders in (she takes a cab over from her Upper East Side condo, which is in between some Broadway producer’s flat and an apartment owned by that dark haired actor who made it big doing reality television). She sits at the bar sipping a cocktail in the middle of the afternoon, and points to, what she considers to be, a good looking man. I say he doesn’t look Jewish because his nose is too small or his hair is too blonde, and I can usually get her to agree. She changes her mind about him and scans the dining room for someone else. Although Mother has the façade of being a deeply religious woman, our family has always been “holiday Jews.” Every year, she starts the Seder or breaks the fast by saying, “We fought. We died. Lets eat.” Yet, to me, she rambles on about tradition, tradition, tradition. Tradition! After cleaning up the first floor bar for the night staff – wiping down rows of liquor bottles, cutting wedges of limes and oranges and pineapples – I usually take the subway over to the JCC on 76th and Amsterdam to workout for an hour or two before heading back to my very, very tiny apartment in Hells Kitchen. I pop a Lean Cuisine into the microwave, and like she has a hidden camera somewhere among the pile of three-week-old dishes in the sink, my mother calls the second the microwave beeps off. Today is no different. “How was your day?” she asks as soon as I pick up the telephone. Her Israeli accent never faded even though she’s lived in America for almost forty years. “Fine,” I say. “Did you meet anyone?” “Did you?” My father’s been dead for twelve years now, and for twelve years, my mother has been sitting shiva. The only thing she’s been remotely involved with is a bottle of Ketel One.

2 Naturally, she changes the subject. My mother likes to meddle in my life. She’s been doing it for as long as I can remember; it’s her job. She embellishes stories about me so she can brag to her girlfriends about how wonderful her daughter is. Even though her and I both know I bartend because it’s easy money and I am too lazy to find a “real” job, she insists on telling anyone, even a complete stranger standing outside Bloomingdale’s smoking a cigarette (but that’s only happened a few times), that I am a songwriter who is in negotiations with Atlantic Records. My current job allows me nights and weekends off to record, so she says. This means come Yom Kippur or Pesach services, when she drags me to temple and sits me in the back row amongst her friends who gossip too loudly and pass sugar-free hard candies back and forth, I fib about the progress of my record deal; the record deal that I have apparently been negotiating since I graduated from college almost a decade ago. How my mother accounts for that, I’ll never know. “You will never guess who called me today,” Mother says. “Not in a million years.” “I don’t know. Who?” “You just won’t believe it. I almost can’t believe it.” I can hear the ice clanking against the glass of scotch or vodka or gin she has prepared for herself. “It was such a shock.” “Alright, already. Who called you?” “Who do you think called me? Mark of course,” she says. “Mark called you? Why did he call you?” I haven’t thought about him in months. It feels surreal to even hear his name said out loud, as if I murdered him and a detective is curious as to where I stashed the body. “He called to wish me a gut yuntif, of course. He’s a good man. A nice Jewish man, looking out for poor, lonely me.” “I doubt that’s all he’s looking out for,” I say. “You know, we got around to talking about you, Galit.” “Let me guess. You told him I’m engaged to an orthopedic surgeon who has a vacation home in the Hamptons.” “Don’t be foolish,” she says, and I hear her take a loud sip from the drink. “He misses you, bubbalah. And you know that I don’t like to get involved or tell you what to do.” Mother pauses, and I can picture her sitting on her white valor ottoman, legs crossed at the ankle. “But

3 you should call him.” “I don’t think so.” My eyes scan the room, and I watch my cat in the corner chasing her tail round and round. “I told him you’d meet him for a drink tomorrow night.” “What!” I scream. “No, you can’t do things like this anymore. No, mother. Just no.” “My zeezah mumala,” she says, purposely using my father’s Yiddish pet name for me. Her voice becomes sweet, almost angelic. “It’s not like you’ve even been on a date since he moved out. For heaven’s sake, just meet him for a drink.” “I have plans tomorrow night.” “I know,” Mother says. “To go out with Mark.” “No. I have other plans.” “Don’t you dare make a liar out of me, Galit.” I can hear her gulp the rest of the drink and smack the glass on a table. “Don’t you dare.” I stare out the window and can see the Empire State Building all lit up in the distance; the phone slowly falls down my body and nestles by my side. I can hear my mother calling my name but the music blasting from the bar on the corner drowns her out, and my foot begins to tap the beat. The cat jumps up onto my lap and purrs, glaring at the uneaten microwaveable lasagna sitting on the table. I reach over and take a bite. It’s cold. ::: Mark was my first love. We dated for almost a week before he moved in with me. Anything concerning Mark happened or moved or went fast, like we were always just a few minutes too late for the party. Dinners quickly turned into late nights on my couch, which turned into mornings in my bedroom. He kept at me all the time, either with his hands or his mouth. He said he couldn’t help himself. We would make love in the morning and at night, in the shower and, once or twice or who can keep count, in a stairwell or public restroom. Wherever. He said he had no control, that my beauty brought out the love-beast within him. And he had this charming way of convincing himself he was whatever he wanted to be at any given moment. He would pretend he was a cowboy or pirate or ghost buster. One night, he got naked and strapped a leather holster, grabbed a cowboy hat, and flounced back and forth in front of me lying on the bed, wrapped between the green cotton sheets.

4 “Howdy there, ma’am. I’m gonna go out there and shoot me some rabbit. You might could be interested?” Mark’s Long Island accent didn’t transform well in to a southern one. “You’re nuts,” I said, hiding my face in a pillow to mask my amusement. “Well. Bless your little heart,” he said. “But that’s crazy talk!” And he danced back and forth in front of me, doing a cross between the Macarena and an Irish jig. His head bobbed down and up; his hair flying every which way. Then, he belly-flopped on the bed and started to nibble on my neck, sending tingles all the way down my spine. Of course, Mother adored Mark. Adored! He was the perfect Jewish boy for her Jewish daughter with the nice Jewish boobs, someone who I could settle down with to start the perfect extended Jewish family. He would feed her all the right lines at all the right moments, wear his keepah during services, weddings, funerals and the like, and speak a word or two of Hebrew just to amuse her (he actually bought a Hebrew-English dictionary for all this). Sometimes, he’d call her cell when he knew she’d be knee deep in whatever mid-day cocktail she had concocted for herself, just to say “shalom.” She started sending catalogs to the apartment with princess-cut diamond engagement rings circled and post-it notes attached written entirely in Hebrew. Mark couldn’t read the actual Hebrew alphabet, and he never bothered to ask what the notes said. I never offered to translate. And I dug Mark. With a big, old shovel. And maybe if we didn’t go to The Village Idiot, he and I would still be together. Or maybe not. It all happened about ten months ago when I came home from work early. There was a picnic blanket thrown across the floor (the coffee table was moved out of the way, two candles burned on top of it and an assortment of Chinese food containers were strategically arranged. Mark was sitting on the blanket wearing white brief underwear and my knee-high green and yellow striped socks that I bought for a Halloween costume a few years back. “Hello,” he said, trying to conquer a Chinese accent. “You order Chinese food?” His green eyes almost twinkled against the candle light, and a huge, goofy smile spread across his face. “You’re an idiot,” I said, biting my cheeks and covering my mouth with my hand. “Yes. I the village idiot. In fact, tonight, I take you to where all the idiots are. New, how you say, hot spot. Drink vodka there. You will like.”

5 And that’s exactly what we did. After dinner (complete with a Lady and the Tramp spaghetti scene using lo mein), Mark got dressed, and we took a cab over to west 14th, the Meat Packing District. “See. I tell you. Village Idiot,” he said, pointing to the sign above the building. Sure enough, the bar was called The Village Idiot, and sure enough, it was filled with them. Inside the bar, country music blasted from the speakers, and there were tons of people tightly packed on stools or at tables. Some were dancing in a back room (actual line dancing!) while others were making out against a wall covered with cowboy paraphernalia. Bras hung from the ceiling and on the walls, presumably once owned by girls who danced on the bar, like the one who was up there when we walked in, two-stepping to men shouting, “Take it off! Take it off!” Four or six cosmos later, I was about ready to get up on that bar. Mark was standing next to me, his hand on my backside, his fingers spider-walking around, eventually tugging on the back of my thong, staring at the two women up there. They were dancing face to face, with slow, erotic movements (well, as slow and erotic as you can dance to country music). “Yo,” he grabbed my arm and pulled me close. “They’re gonna kiss. Look.” Mark put his hand on my face and scrunched my cheeks together. My eyes shifted over just as the taller of the two, a blonde with a nice figure in a schoolgirl outfit (with thigh highs and stilettos to boot), pulled the brunette in close. They pressed their lips together, their hands going up and down the other’s back. The blonde’s tongue traced the brunette’s lips before slowly moving down her neck and nibbling at her ear. My gaze shifted from them to Mark, whose mouth was wide open; he didn’t blink or move. I looked up and watched them kiss again. Mark’s hand was now rubbing the small of my back and his fingers were edging down the back of my jeans. “Get me another drink,” I said and shoved my empty glass into his chest. “I have to use the bathroom.” I walked towards the ladies room, stopping every few steps to look back at the women. By the time I navigated my way to the back of the building, only the brunette remained up on the bar, dancing and laughing, running her hands down then up her body. In the restroom, I had a hard time zipping my jeans, and I bumped into the stall door,

6 swinging it open. I leaned up against the wall, my hands out in front of me, trying to catch my balance. “You okay?” I looked up and the schoolgirl attired blonde was in the bathroom washing her hands. She was watching me in the mirror. “Yeah,” I said. She grabbed a paper towel and turned around. “You sure?” She stepped a bit closer. “Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks.” I said, but, to be honest, I think I may have slurred. “Great shirt.” She reached over to feel the silky material. “Where’d you get it?” “Macy’s I think.” She turned to throw the towel into the trash. “Well, feel better.” She started to walk out of the bathroom. I reached my arm out and touched her shoulder. “Wait. Can you wait a second?” I know it wasn’t the alcohol, but something inside me desired her to stay. Curiosity, most likely. Or maybe, simply, attraction. She turned back around and smiled. “I’m Rachel,” she said, and held out her hand for me to shake. “Galit.” I reached over. Her hand was soft and smooth; she had a ring on each finger. I inched closer and closer until I was so close I could feel her breathing on my face. “That was, that was…” I pointed at the door, where back at the bar Mark was probably waiting for me with another cosmopolitan while he watched whoever was shaking her body at the moment on top of the bar. Rachel looked down at me and smiled. That’s when I closed my eyes, stood on my toes, and kissed her. Her lips were moist, and I could taste her fruity lip-gloss. It was a short, sweet kiss, like a farewell peck that lingers a few seconds too long. I backed away and frowned, not sure what I just did. Or why. The room started to spin a little, and I started to teeter backwards. Rachel grabbed hold of me, pushing me against the wall for security. “Do you want my number?” she whispered, and leaned in to kiss me again. This one a real kiss. The kind of kiss that would make all the men in the bar explode in applause. ::: Around eleven o’clock, give or take a few minutes, Rachel brings over my favorite bottle

7 of red wine and a single daisy (my favorite flower). She throws her overnight bag onto the bed and plops down next to me on the couch. The lasagna is still sitting on the table, uneaten, and she reaches over to take a bite. “Don’t bother,” I say. “It’s been sitting there for hours.” Rachel yawns and stretches her body out, placing her feet on top of the table. I shift around and place my head in her lap. She plays with my hair, twirling it around and around. “I’m beat,” she says. “How was work?” “A total zoo.” She yawns again. “Packed. Kids, parents. Even dogs. It was unbelievable. What’s with bringing your little dog everywhere with you. That can’t be sanitary.” I laugh and shift to the side to wrap my arms around her body. “How was your day?” she asks. “Fine,” I say. “Mother called, like, ten times.” “Oh yeah.” “I guess Mark called her or something.” “Really. Did he call you, too?” “Nah,” I say and squeeze her tight. “Although Mother apparently told him I’d get drinks with him tomorrow night. Which I’m not, of course.” Rachel stops playing with my hair and swings her legs around; my head flounders back and I get a crink in my neck. She sighs. “When are you going to tell her, Galit?” I roll over and sit up on my knees, facing her. Rachel is beautiful, with tan, flawless skin, large brown eyes, and a dimple on her right cheek. Her hair is short, naturally blonde, and she usually wears it spiky like Sharon Stone. “I’ll tell her,” I say and reach over to grab her hand, but she stands up instead. “You’ve been saying that for months,” she says, staring down at me, crinkling her nose the way she does when she is upset. (What’s coming next is the same argument we’ve had for almost as long as we have been together.) “Are you that ashamed of us?” She crosses her arms over her chest. “Are you that ashamed of me?”

8 “Christ, of course not. It’s just not that simple. You don’t know what she’s like.” Rachel stands there for a moment or two, pouting her lips out and her eyes narrow. She sighs again. “No really, it is that simple,” she says. “You are ashamed of me, aren’t you?” “You’re starting to sound like her, you know.” “Well, maybe if you told her, we’d both get off your back.” The apartment suddenly feels blizzard-cold even though the air isn’t on. Rachel rolls her eyes and walks towards the bathroom. The door slams, and I hear the shower turn on. And I’m left sitting on the couch, still on my knees, my hands behind my head rubbing my neck. ::: Three months after our trip to The Village Idiot, Mark was standing in front of the television with his arms crossed, his face bright red. I sat on the couch, Indian style, looking down at the floor, my fingers massaging my temples. I told him, everything. And in three months, a lot can happen. “This is just a phase, Galit. Don’t do this,” he said, pacing back and forth. “Don’t make this any harder then it has to be.” Mark started to shout. “But she’s a she! What the fuck?” “Mark, please now. Calm down.” I said, like I was some sort of counselor trying to mediate a dispute between school children, but he cut me off; his arms flew into the air, hands balled up. For the first time in a long time, he was using his own accent. “Another man, okay. I could understand that. At least another man has, you know, the right stuff. But a woman? Do you know how crazy that sounds?” “I told you Mark. I just want to see what happens.” There was a minute or two of silence. Mark was staring down at his feet, breathing hard. He looked like he was about to cry. Finally, “Are you a dyke? Like, how long have you been a goddamn dyke?” I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what the answer was anyway. I just kept looking at him, trying to decide if saying something cheesy about birds flying back after letting them go would make this easier on him. “Don’t do this, Galit. Please don’t do this.” His voice was low and quiet, his head still

9 hanging down, but he lifted his eyes up to meet mine. “Please,” he said again. “Just for a little while, Mark. Let’s just see what happens. I need to do this.” ::: Ten minutes later, Rachel comes out of the bathroom wearing my Victoria’s Secret terrycloth robe, and I snuggle up to her. I whisper that I promise to tell my mother about her tomorrow and nibble on her ear. I kiss her and say, “I love you.” It is a passionate, long kiss that lasts until morning. We wake up around noon and go over to Starbucks for coffee and low fat blueberry muffins. Rachel reads the latest New York Times best seller, and I think of the right way to tell my mother that I love a woman. ::: Five o’clock that afternoon, I’m sitting on the couch flipping through the latest issue of People, and the lock to my front door turns open slowly. My mother walks in wearing a red dress and black fur wrap. Her frosted blonde hair is up in a French twist, presumably via some useless contraption she bought off the Home Shopping Network. She looks more like 40 than 60; she is petite, a little over five feet tall, with naturally bronze, smooth skin. Her lips are full, just like mine, and her nose is finally perfect after three surgeries. She wears Gucci and Prada and Louis because she did what all good Jewish girls do – marry rich so she can spend her days gossiping with the other women at the JCC, while eating the daily bagels and lox lunch, about his kid who got in to Harvard and can you believe her daughter is marrying a goy (which is something you always say in a whisper, like it is some sort of epidemic that will spread to your family, too. Tradition!). “What time are you meeting Mark,” she says, and walks right towards the kitchen, grabs a glass and the vodka from the freezer, and pours herself a drink. “Do you have any lemons?” “The lemons are in the fridge,” I say, getting up from the couch and stretching. “Pour me one too, will you.” “So, what time are you meeting him?” She says loudly, like I can’t hear her with the refrigerator door open. She turns around and looks me down and up, shaking her head in disapproval. “Look at you. Go put some makeup on, will you.”

10 “I’m not meeting him, Mother. I told you I have plans.” Her eyes narrow. “What do you mean you’re not meeting him?” “I have plans tonight. A date.” “A date? A date with whom?” She says like she doesn’t believe me, laughing and shaking her head. “Why must you meddle?” “That’s what I thought.” She begins to slice a lemon. “I can always tell when you’re lying to me, Galit. Where’s the portable. I’ll call him right now.” I scream. “Goddamnit mother. Stop. Just stop right now.” I am standing on the other side of the counter, and I am staring at the physically older version of myself. She starts to frown, and I know what is going to happen in a few. She will trap me. She will tell me that I act like I don’t love her. I’ll say I do love her. She will tell me that other people think I am an awful daughter. I’ll say that she shouldn’t care what other people think. She will start sobbing about being lonely and getting old, desperately wanting a grandchild to spoil. I’ll tell her I am only 30; there is time for all that. She will ask me, again, to go meet up with Mark, for her sake, just this once. Her olive eyes will be glazed over with tears, and she will sit on the couch and start muttering to herself in Hebrew that there is no reason to live; daughters are supposed to bring happiness and joy to mothers, not this. She will rock back and forth, her arms hugging her body. I will feel awful and call Mark. We’ll go get some drinks, and I will go home with him, sleep with him, marry him. I will make her happy because that is what Jewish girls are supposed to do for their mothers. It is my job. I am her daughter. And I am right. She starts to frown and her eyes become glossy. “I have something to tell you,” I say, actually making eye contact with her, thinking it’s now or never. “I do have a date tonight, like I told you.” “Is this a first date,” she asks quietly, cocking her head to the right. “No, it isn’t.” “Bubbalah!” She screams and claps her hands together. “How long has it been? When can I meet him?” She starts walking towards me, then abruptly stops and frowns again. “Wait. Why haven’t you told me about him? My own daughter can’t even tell me things! What, are

11 you ashamed of me?” “Of course I’m ashamed of you.” Her lips are pressed together but they start to turn upward and she laughs. I take a deep breath. “I’ve been seeing her for a while now, Mother.” “Well, how long then?” she asks again. But then her eyes begin to squint. We stand like this for seconds upon seconds; her nostrils flare every time she exhales. Finally, she speaks in a hush. “Her? Did you say her? What do you mean her?” She picks up the vodka and drinks it like a shot, all in one gulp, and slams the glass down on the counter. “What does that mean?” “Rachel. Her name is Rachel.” “I don’t understand,” my mother says and pours herself another drink. “What do you mean, a date?” “A date. You know, dinner or a movie or whatever.” My mother looks down at her refilled glass. “What do you think, I’m stupid? Of course I know what a date is.” She drinks the second cocktail faster than the first and walks over to the couch to sit down, crossing her legs at the ankles like she has tried to get me to do for years now. She fidgets a bit with her hair and pats her nose with the handkerchief she keeps up her sleeve. Finally, looking over at me, she pats the seat next to her, motioning me to come over. I obey. “What are you thinking?” I ask, unable to look at her, instead focusing on her hands. They are identical to mine, just a little smaller and bit more weathered. She hesitates for a long time. “If you go on a date with a woman, to the movies let’s say, who pays?” I look up quickly. My mother starts laughing like I’ve never seen her laugh before. It is such a hard, vigorous laugh that no noise comes out of her mouth, and she starts rocking back and forth. Her eyes are closed. A tear drips down her cheek. After a minute or two of all this, she leans back on the sofa and takes a deep breath. “So, does this mean you’re a lesbo?” she says and starts to laugh again, but abruptly stops and gives me another severe look. “Does it?” Her voice rises. “I don’t know what it means,” I say. My mother sits there for a moment with a blank, static expression. Then, the tears well up. “Oy Gutinew. What will people think? What will they say?” She talks to herself in a loud murmur, loud enough for me to hear, of course. She talks slow and deliberate to ensure that no

12 word gets lost in her accent. “Did you hear that Pnina Horowitz’s daughter is a big lesbo? Oh god, why does she do this to me? Why does she spite me like this? She was supposed to marry a nice Jewish boy. A doctor! A Rabbi! What did I do wrong? Where did I go wrong?” My mother’s head is against the wall; her eyes are still closed. She sighs. Then, the Hebrew version of all this starts, too fast for me to follow. “Did you ever stop to think that this isn’t about you, Mother?” I don’t expect an answer. I get up and go into the kitchen to pour another drink. “Bring the bottle in here,” she says, sitting up straight and smoothing out her dress. I return to the couch. The cat jumps onto my mother’s lap and purrs. “Well, are you?” she says. “Am I what? A lesbian? How the hell should I know? It just is what it is.” “No. Happy. Are you happy?” “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I am.” “You love this girl?” She pets the cat, starting at her head and moving across her body until the end of her tail, and then starts over again. “I do.” “How long has this been going on for?” she says. “About ten months.” “But you only left Mark seven months ago.” “I know,” I say. “Oh,” she says. My mother wipes her face, gets up and grabs her purse, opens the front door, and she slams it shut. ::: An hour or so later, I am almost ready to go meet Rachel for dinner. My mother flutters back in to the apartment. Her face is freshly powdered, and she is wearing a nude shade of lipstick. She walks straight over to me and wraps her arms around my neck. She squeezes hard. She smells of vodka and cigarette smoke. “So, my bubbalah is in love. How nice.” She smiles what appears to be a genuine smile

13 and takes a step back. “Come, let’s go out and celebrate.” “What?” I say, dumbfounded. “Go on and call your lady friend. I’d like to meet her.” “Mother, you’re tanked!” “No, I am not. I’m perfectly fine,” she says. “I just needed to go out and walk around a bit. Get my head straight.” “And drink an entire bottle of Grey Goose?” I say. “I had one drink at the bar down the block. Martinis help me think. Come, let’s go celebrate.” “You’re okay with all this?” I ask. “No.” She says it quickly and pauses for a long time. She looks confused and upset yet somehow peaceful at the same time. I start to question if I made the right decision by telling her. She continues. “No, I am not okay with my only child being a gay.” She sighs and looks around the room like she has never seen it before. Her eyes shift from the disheveled kitchen to the even messier living room, and they finally look over to meet mine. “But it is what it is. Yes?” I smile. “Yes, mother. It is what it is.” Her voice changes and she takes a step closer to me. “I just have one question.” “What now?” I say this too callously and roll my eyes. My mother licks her lips. “Is your girlfriend Jewish?”

14 PRESENTING SARIT SAFERSTEIN, FOR BETTER OR WORSE

Sarit Saferstein. She’s my ex-girlfriend. My only girlfriend, actually. The last time I saw her she was frenzied – passionate but caged, like Northeast Philly girls back in the early ‘90s, crammed in to row homes with their extended families all on the same city street, having no place to go but the corner store, starving for adventure and excitement and sex. But that wasn’t my Sarit. Well, not completely. She may be impossible to explain. She was wild, audacious. She came into some insurance money in her early twenties, something about her parents’ deaths, a car accident, and forty-three yards of beige-carpet, and she said she’d never have to work a day in her life but volunteered at a non-profit because, “That’s just what you do when you have money. Plus, it’s a mitzvah.” She lived in a condo in south Jersey that was modern and clean and red. The sheets on her bed were made of crushed velvet. Sarit was a self-proclaimed anarchist, obsessed with British culture, and often spoke in code when she was inebriated, saying things like, “The lion abroad is bloody thirsty which means that at high tide the moon will be over head.” During the summer, she’d take long car rides in the middle of the night, wearing nothing but thigh-highs and curlers, in her convertible – top down – just to see if anyone would notice she was naked. And she was convinced you could only be an alcoholic if you drank every day of the week, so she reserved Saturdays for marijuana. She’d go to temple stoned and pretend to be a practicing Jew, wearing the rag-looking thing on her head and all. It’s what her parents would have wanted, she’d always say, and then, Baruch Atah Adonai, because those were the only three Hebrew words she knew. Exotic looking, too. In an American sort of way. Her features were dark and mysterious, eyes and hair and aura. Her nose was hooked and her frame narrow. Sometimes she looked too frail, too gaunt, but then she would order enough Chinese food for three people and finish it all in one sitting. Several times, Sarit won the Wing Bowl, an all-you-can-eat buffalo wing eating contests put on by the local sports radio station a few times each year. I wouldn’t

15 have believed that except I saw her do it once, up against 300-pound men too. After she won, Sarit chugged a beer and smashed the can against her forehead, something she eventually taught me to do. She became known around the sports radio circuit as Bulldog, and she would call their morning show daily to give her opinion on the Eagles’ chances at a Super Bowl appearance. She’d be at the local sports bar for every football game, drinking beer and playing darts during the commercials, and she liked to watch NASCAR and golf on television. Occasionally I thought she was born the wrong gender. But then I’d turn around and she’d be in a dress, nails painted, hair done up, asking why hadn’t I brought her flowers. She was strange and romantic, impossible and hopelessly alive. And crazy, she was definitely crazy. But at the time, I wasn’t familiar with the inner workings of crazy, so I thought it was all incredibly amusing. When I found Sarit, I was cocktailing at Caesar’s and she was winning big at black jack. At first, as I brought her glass after glass of rum and coke, I thought she was your typical Jersey girl – a manly sort of woman who had big hair, funky-colored mascara on her lashes, and burped in public as loud as possible. She was cursing a lot, and she seemed to start every sentence with ‘yo.’ More than once, I heard her scream to the dealer, “Yo, can you deal me a blackjack.” Then, “Fucking A, man,” after she got her cards. She had long – albeit nappy – hair, and she was funky and animated. Watching her was like being at a Madonna concert and doing a Richard Simmons workout at the same time. Before that night, before I decided to dabble in women, I had gone to five different colleges finally earning a degree in horticulture much to my parents’ condemnation. College was useless, I was certain, and so was dirt for that matter. I spent most of my college days like those in high school, drugged and hazy, except I graduated from hallucinogenics to things one snorts up one’s nose. For a while there, I was very serious about becoming the next Baywatch star and concentrated on eating nothing but grapes, sleeping with as many men as possible, and inhaling anything I could crush. Sometimes, I’d do all this at the library because it made me feel more studious. But after graduation, all I had was an old Honda and a few bucks, so I had no choice but to enter the real world. I worked for a while as a temp, then as a waitress for a corporate chain that makes their employees wear nametags, say made-up Italian words, and do wine presentations to the

16 overweight, underpaying customers who leave ten percent tips and aren’t going to order wine anyway. After unjustly getting fired for giving a two dollar tip (on a fifty dollar check) back to a guest – I still firmly believe she needed the two dollars far more than I did – I dated an older, semi-balding but stinking-rich man named Henry who liked to diddle himself while I was in the shower. I learned early on that money meant survival, and older, semi-balding men named Henry usually had what I needed, and I what they desired. So, despite his urges to frequently self-induce pleasure, Henry was good for nice dinners and expensive bottles of champagne. But when I met Sarit, all that I knew became foreign. I don’t think I knew anything at all. Hours later, Sarit had a mound of chips in front of her. I was getting ready to clock out for the night, and as I passed her table on the way to fetch my purse, she grabbed my arm and said, “Come help me cash these in, beautiful.” “Excuse me,” I said. But Sarit shimmied closer to me and put her hand in mine. “Come on,” she said. We walked towards the cashier booth, and I was stunned. A chick was trying to pick me up. A soft looking thing with breasts and curves. Sure, I did the three-way thing in college, smooched a girlfriend or two to amuse the boys at the bar. But this was very different. This was for real. We exchanged names and glances, and I silently inspected Sarit as if she were a diamond, appraising her to find bumps and nicks, discover her value, her worth. “Let’s go outside,” Sarit said after she cashed in. It was summer and breezy on the Atlantic City boardwalk, and I had goose bumps all over my body. Sarit motioned for me to follow her to a bench. “So what’s your story, Jeannie?” she asked and put her hand on my knee. I stiffened my body and felt a little funny. “Story?” “Yes, you look like someone who has a story, a past. History. Some kind of extravagant history marked with memories of cherry flavored condoms and damp basement floors.” I cocked my head. “What?” “And a sea of men who have whisked you away to Puerto Rico or Cancun for romantic holidays and bought you golden trinkets along the way.”

17 “What are you talking about?” “Am I right?” Sarit rubbed my knee. “I’m clairvoyant, I think. I’m trying to hone my skills.” I wanted to keep up with her but was having a hard time following. “Am I even a little right?” she asked again and winked. In that moment I had an inkling that Sarit wasn’t like any of the other men who came in to the casino and flirted with me. And it had nothing to do with her gender. “Yes. You’re right. Absolutely.” “Oh, Jeannie, you’re a person with a past. How fabulous. I have a past, too, you know. A murky and peculiar one. Full of dodgy monsters in the closet and such. Pasts are a wonderful thing to have; they’re the wave of the future.” I nodded. “The wave of the future,” I said. “I like you, you know. I’ve seen you cocktailing before. I’ve tried to sit at the table you’re assigned to, but it’s never worked out quite as well as it did tonight. I can read the future, and I predict that we’re going to get married and have lots of sex and babies. Do you like babies?” “I have a boyfriend,” I said quickly and looked down at my feet. I had never been faithful to Henry, or anyone for that matter, but I just kind of blurted it out, and it was too late to take it back. But then she asked, “Well, why don’t you at least try a fag?” I bit my cheeks to keep from laughing but then glanced over at her, and she was holding a makeshift pack of cigarettes, kind of shaking it in the air. “I make them myself. I get the tobacco imported from England. Try one,” she said and handed me what looked like a pregnant joint. It was a joint, and I got deliciously stoned. Sarit said she knew of a little hole in the wall in Margate, so we got in to her car and drove to Maloney’s. It was a small biker bar right near Lucy the Elephant. Everyone inside seemed to know who Sarit was. A group of men with leather vests and long, greasy hair cheered when we walked in the door. The bartender with a patch over his eye pointed towards us and shouted, “Yo, babe! Fuckin’ A, it’s a party now!” He twisted two beers open and threw them at us. Sarit caught both, one right after the other, and

18 laughed. “Here ya go,” she said and handed me one. Then she put her arm around my shoulder and led me to a table full of bikers. “Yo dawg,” Sarit said and shook hands with a meaty looking guy who had pasta sauce stains all down his shirt. “This is Jeannie. She’s cool.” I smiled. “Where’s Meg tonight?” another guy, this one with dread locks and tattoos everywhere, asked. “Meg who?” Sarit shrugged and drained her beer. “Like I said, boys, this here is Jeannie, and she is cool.” We played a few games of pool, and Sarit kicked my ass each time. I didn’t really know how to hold the stick, and I think she got off on showing me the right way. We drank, too. And a lot. After I sunk a ball in to a pocket, my first one of the night, I turned around and clapped for myself, and Sarit was standing almost on top of me. She pulled me close and pressed her lips against mine. Like one of those soft, gentle goodbye kisses you see in the movies, where the he character takes the she character in his arms and gently brushes her face with his lips, finally locking his on hers moments before one of them boards a plane that is about to crash in the next scene. The only difference was this was a she and a she, and the plane I was boarding was just taxiing down the runway, ready to lift off. I backed away, and Sarit asked me if I had been with women before, her hands holding my face in a tilt like she was positioning me for a ballet move. “Not exactly,” I said. “You want to come back to my place?” “Okay.” “Let’s get out of here.” She said good-bye to the big men and called to the bartender, “put it on my tab,” and took my hand and led me to her car. We decided to leave my car at the employee lot, and Sarit sped home on the A.C. Expressway, frequently weaving between lanes although there were hardly any other cars on the road. It was three in the morning and she was also wearing sunglasses. She put on some retro- punk CD and sang along, making up words for the parts she didn’t know.

19 Sarit’s condo was huge – if I knew anything about square feet I would give a good estimate. There were multiple bedrooms and guestrooms and bathrooms. It was handsome and spotless and smelled of lilac, and she had a stove that had plastic-looking burners, marble counters, and floor to ceiling windows with plush, velvety drapes. I was afraid to touch anything; it was like a museum of expensive things. Henry’s place – a split level with a double car garage – was nothing in comparison. Sarit held my hand and led me up a spiral staircase to the loft where her bedroom was. We draped ourselves across her bed, feet dangling off the edge, and talked for a while in the dark. I asked her about her family, how her parents died, did she have siblings, what did she do for a living? Her answers were short, direct, to the point, “They died tragically; I have no siblings; I don’t do much of anything, but on occasion I like to go to the Franklin Institute, walk around, and try to come up with an invention.” She fired similar questions my way, and I felt that I should be vague too, answering her with yeses and nos and I don’t knows. The conversation was painful and awkward, nothing like how we were at the boardwalk or in the bar, and – even though I was scared to do so – I just wanted to kiss her again anyway so I reached out for her face and brought it close. “I was waiting for you to make the first move,” she said, and I could tell she was smiling but my eyes were already closed. She kissed me quietly, first on my lips then neck then ears. Her hands navigated here then there, and we began to get sweaty and clammy against each other. My heart raced like it was my first time being intimate with someone. It felt that way too because I had no idea what I was doing, what I was supposed to be doing. It didn’t take me long to figure it out. Not that night though. That night, Sarit told me to relax and not move, lay still and absorb the velvet sheets, her touch, her breath. The next morning, I decided Henry didn’t exist anymore. I was convinced of it after a week of these romantic rendezvouses in Sarit’s bedroom. I left him a long, dramatic message on his answering machine explaining my mother was dying of some rare disease, and I had to move to Indiana to care for her.

20 During the weeks that followed, Sarit’s home slowly became mine, too. It started with a toothbrush and change of clothes, but after she visited my gloomy apartment one afternoon, she insisted on giving me a key to her place. “I think I see rat poop over there. You can’t stay here another minute,” she said. “I just won’t have it.” Sarit was waiting for me in the living room when I walked through the door one night after work. She was spread across the couch on her belly, legs dangling in the air, and she was wearing a bright yellow evening gown and black strappy sandals. It was two in the morning. “Jeannie dear,” she started and shifted upright, crossed her legs, and picked up a martini. “Come sit.” She patted the seat next to her. “We need to get the ground rules straight if you’re going to be living here part time.” It was at that point I realized Sarit was talking with a British accent. “Ground rules?” I sat down and she handed me the martini. “Yes, ground rules. Rule number one. I need affection in the morning and at night. And usually sometimes in between. That’s very important.” I smiled. “Okay.” “Rule number two. If you break rule number one, then there is no telling what may happen. I may go a little crazy or I may not. It all depends.” I nodded. Sarit moved closer and put one leg over mine. “I think that’s it,” she said in her own voice. “Oh wait, rule number three. Cocktail hour is from five to seven every night except Saturdays.” I looked at her and she appeared so innocent, almost naive. Sarit’s eyes were big and chestnut, and the tune of Brown Eyed Girl popped into my head because I had one, right there in front of me. But I wasn’t completely convinced I was ready for one, for her. But I was ready for the passion. For the sex. It was new and exciting and different – different body parts and positions and emotions. It was like watching your favorite movie, the one you can watch over and over again and still enjoy, still learn new things, discover different meanings.

21 Sarit could be sweet and tender and kinky and rough all in the same heartbeat. She liked to be different, mix things up. She had costumes, gadgets, and gizmos stored in a chest in her closet. The first time she showed it to me, I fished through the contents – blindfolds, handcuffs, dildos, lotions – and picked out an extraordinarily large strap-on and thought, Oh shit, I’ve never even seen one this big in real life. “You’re not ready for that yet,” she said and put it back in the box. “How ‘bout this?” She reached in and pulled out a bottle of oil and a blindfold and her crooked smile seemed mischievous and endearing, and I pulled her up and led her to the bed. Sex, Sarit had told me, wasn’t just meant to be done in bedrooms or in showers or other normal places. It was meant for dressing rooms at the Gap, swimming pools belonging to other people, and under the boardwalk on a hot beach day. Once we drove in to Philly in the middle of the night, parked at the art museum, ran up the steps like Rocky, and did it near the entrance by that statue of a man on a horse. It was the wildest night of my life. Sarit and I had made a fort out of her apartment, our own, private hideaway. A bungalow where we could do anything we pleased and be anybody we wanted. Nothing else seemed to matter or exist. It felt safe, secure. No one knew where I was, no one cared where I was, and I liked it that way. We ordered take-out almost every night of the week, and except for me going to work or her volunteering somewhere, we spent every waking minute together. Sarit said we were “U-hauls,” whatever that meant. Once, she dressed up as a fortune teller and looked in to a crystal ball for answers. She said, “You know, I see that you’re like a tiger, Jeannie. You like to roam the wilderness and conquer mice to eat their flesh. You want to suck the blood out of their tails like a vampire would, and throw their carcasses in a shrine you’ve made to honor your victims. And then you lick, clean your paws and go on the hunt again. Yes?” “Yes, mice. Definitely,” I said. “They taste like chicken.” Sarit frowned. “Am I a mouse, too?” she asked. “No. You’re an anorexic hippopotamus who thunders in and saves the mice from the mean, wicked tiger.”

22 Then, Sarit rushed over and tackled me on the sofa and kissed my lips. “Hungry hippo,” she said. And then she tickled me and we rolled around laughing and touching until we were both shaking and screaming, sweaty and trembling. Being with Sarit was like being free. I could feel myself becoming more and more like her with each passing day, doing things I’d never dreamed of doing. She convinced me once that dressing up as a man would be liberating, so she got me to put on a pair of large Levi’s, a flannel shirt and a baseball cap, and we walked around the mall with Sarit shouting, “Hey Larry, let’s go in this store,” or “You’re a big, bad boy, aren’t you,” and slapping my behind. I didn’t care what people thought or said when I was with her. It was like time had halted still and it was just her and I floating through space. After a month of all this fun, carefree nonsense, Sarit had the brilliant idea to expand our horizons and venture out in to the city. “It’ll be fun,” Sarit said. “Plus, it’s a lesbian club. You won’t feel out of place.” It was the word lesbian that got me first, quickly followed by the idea of being in a crowded, stuffy place. But it was mostly just the word lesbian. Hearing it said out loud made it seem real, and I wasn’t ready for reality. “I’m not really into clubs. Let’s just order Chinese and pay-per-view.” “No.” Sarit crossed her arms over her chest and tapped her bare, slender foot rapidly against the wood floor. I had never seen her angry before. “You’ve never even met my friends. It’s Saturday night. We’re going out.” “But why to a gay club? Why not to a regular bar?” Sarit raised her voice, “Because we’re gay.” I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t a lesbian. This was just a phase. “No,” I said. “You’re gay. I’m just me.” Sarit turned around and walked into the kitchen. I heard her fiddle around in a drawer, and she came back out with a lit joint, puffing away. She handed it to me and said, “If you’re not gay, then what are you doing here? What are you doing with me?” I took a long drag, inhaling as much as I could. I needed my mental health to be altered, drastically. “Do I have to be gay to be with you?” I asked.

23 “Yes.” “Yes?” “Yes, you do. I’ve done the straight girl thing before, Jeannie. It’s not worth it. They think ‘Hey, a vagina, something different.’ They play with the idea for awhile, think that maybe pussy’s their thing, but in the end, it’s not. And they knew it all along.” Sarit looked right in my eyes as she spoke. The speech seemed rehearsed, like she had preformed it before. I inched closer to her and honest-to-god was telling the truth. “I’m just confused. This is the most stable relationship I’ve ever had, and it’s the most unfamiliar too. I just need time.” I tried to hold her hand but she stepped backwards. “You don’t need time, Jeannie. You already know.” And I suppose I did. I had already cheated on her once with a bartenders at Caesar’s. We didn’t have intercourse or anything, but I let him feel me up in the employee bathroom and gave him a blow job that made him whelp like he just won the lotto. Maybe it happened more than once, actually. And maybe we did have intercourse. But I just needed to get it out of my system is all. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go to the club.” Sarit looked at me cross-eyed. “Don’t just say that ‘cause you want to make me happy.” “No really. Let’s go. I’ll change.” And so we went to Sisters, Philly’s most popular lesbian club. It was packed with women when we arrived and a few men in tight turtle necks or see-through black shirts. And just like at Maloney’s, everyone seemed to know who Sarit was. The girls singing karaoke shrieked her name as soon as they saw her, and a crowd immediately formed around us. We were like a celebrity couple at a movie premier. Everyone wanted to know who I was, and Sarit kept her arm around my waist and said, “This is my girl, Jeannie.” A few women in baggy jeans and polo type shirts brought us over beers, and they seemed mesmerized as Sarit told a slightly different version of how we met: “Well,” she started. “Jeannie was like a mermaid that got washed ashore. She just didn’t belong there, on land, dry. I can sense out these types of situations, you know, I’m a psychic. So, it’s just like that Disney movie, you see, except instead

24 of Prince Charming, she got Princess Fabulous.” And everyone laughed and nodded and slapped my back like I had won some sort of contest. “You’re so lucky,” one girl with a long braid down her back said. “Sarit’s quite the catch.” A few times that night, I heard people inquire about Meg. “What happened with you and Meg?” a girl clad in a tight leather dress asked. Sarit shrugged. “Meg who?” The girl giggled and put her hands on her hips. “Duh,” she said. “I think she’s coming tonight.” Sarit ignored her and pulled me closer. “Jeannie here works at Caesar’s. Wears one of those cute cocktailing uniforms. You should see her shake that ass.” And with that, she pinched my bottom and pulled me upstairs to the dance floor. Everything was blurry and dark; a strobe light pulsed and the music roared. Everyone seemed to follow us and we all got sweaty dancing to hip hop tunes and drinking beer. And we danced and drank until the room started to spin, and I felt like I was going to pass out. I told Sarit that I needed to sit down for a minute, and I went over to the bar and got a glass of water. I was sticky all over, and my hair was damp and clung to my neck. Sarit looked wild out on the dance floor. All the other girls forced their way towards her and flailed around, running their hands down her legs and across her body. She seemed to be soaking it up, grinding with them and laughing. I felt slightly proud, like something that belonged to me was getting a rave review at the auction house and the bids were climbing higher and higher. I was about ready to dance again when I saw a pretty blonde thing make her way towards Sarit. She was tall and slender, with narrow shoulders and dressed in a funky, colorful outfit. It was like she was Moses parting the Red Sea because as she approached Sarit, everyone seemed to instinctively move out of the way and form a tight circle around them. I started to inch closer to the circle, but the music was blaring and it was hard to make out what they were saying. Finally, I pushed my way through to the middle in time to hear Sarit call the girl a fucking slut. “You know that’s not true,” the girl said and grabbed hold of Sarit’s shoulders. “You know that’s not true, and you know you still love me.”

25 Sarit pushed her back. “I’m not in the business of loving a whore, Meg.” I immediately felt sick again after hearing her name. Meg laughed and shook her head. “Come on, baby. You knew I’d be here tonight. That’s why you came, isn’t it?” The room went silent. Even the D.J. stopped the music. An imaginary spotlight seemed to pour down on Sarit and Meg, and I was in the dark corner, surrounded by perspiring, drunk women, afraid to move or speak or even breathe. I thought Sarit was going to punch this girl in the face. She was taking deep breaths and sweat dribbled down her forehead. But instead, I watched her grab the back of Meg’s head and pull her face close. They kissed in a way that made all the women around me hoot and holler and cheer. “No,” I screamed. Sarit and Meg stopped kissing and stared at me. Everyone else shut up, too. “What are you doing?” “Shit,” Sarit said softly. “Who the fuck are you?” Meg crossed her arms over her chest. “Who the fuck is this, Sarit?” “I’m her fucking girlfriend! I’m a lesbian and her fucking girlfriend. Who the fuck are you?” At that moment, everything felt clumsy, surreal. The room was spinning, and it was humid like the middle of summer on a hot beach day. I was acting completely out of character. I never shout. I don’t get mad. And I certainly don’t get cheated on. I’m the one who cheats. I call the shots in a relationship. “Let’s get out of here, Sarit,” Meg said and grabbed at her hand. “Come on.” Sarit took Meg’s hand but didn’t move. Her head was down and she used her other hand to wipe her nose. The crowd of girls began whispering back and forth, and I heard one of the only men in the room say, “Nuh-uh. Girlfriend smokin’ crack over there if she thinks she’s gonna one up Meg.” The D.J. put the music back on and people slowly started to move away and go towards the bar or downstairs. But the three of us stood in the middle of the dance floor, Meg glaring at me and me glaring at Sarit. A deadlock. I said, “I’m leaving Sarit. Are you coming with me or not.” “She’s not,” Meg answered for her.

26 And I felt deflated and was ready to turn around and give up when Sarit said, “Wait. Do you really mean that. Are you really a lesbian?” I paused for a moment, then stammered something generic, surely I did, but I had time to cool off at that point. My heart wasn’t racing as fast as it had before, and I had time to think, to be rational. And I was scared to say it again, like saying it might make it come true. I sighed and looked up in to Sarit’s eyes, and she was staring at me hard. It was like she was reading my palm through my eyes and gaging the truth. But Meg wasn’t waiting any longer. She marched over to Sarit and kissed her again. I could hear their lips smack together and tongues flicker. Sarit’s hands covered Meg’s back, moving up and down. So I turned quietly and made my way down the stairs and hailed a cab, leaving Sarit and this Meg person making out on the dance floor. And what happened next? I made a quick stop at Sarit’s place to grab some belongings, left my key on the kitchen table, and went back to my apartment. I swept away the rat poop and adopted a kitten incase any other rodents decided to drop by. I called Henry a few days later and told him my mother was miraculously cured from her disease, and he offered to take me to dinner at Le Bec-Fin to celebrate. I assume he still diddles away while I’m in the shower. I still wander around the casino at Caesar’s serving cocktails, but it just isn’t the same anymore. It seemed like part of me was hauled away when I left Sarit Saferstein that night. The part of me that wanted to be more alive, more carefree and dangerous. The girl who smashes beer cans against her forehead and knows everyone there is to know. But as much as I wanted that to be me, tried as hard as I could, I knew it would never happen. It took me awhile to realize it, but Sarit was a better past than a present. A tiny, secret compartment, tucked safely away beneath other fond memories, that I can or cannot share with others. And I’m like Sarit said, even though she may not have known it true at the time: a tigress on the prowl. I’ll never settle down or stay in one place too long. I suppose it’s just not in my nature. Commitment and I are like horseradish and lox - just not meant to be together. And even though I loved Sarit,

27 desperately so even, there would always be a bartender in the bathroom or some ex-flame trying to steal her back. I called Sarit once, a few months after that night at Sisters. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I instinctively dialed her number and waited. She answered the phone and said, “Madam Clarice at your service,” in one of her accents. Jamaican, I think. I didn’t say anything. I tried, but no words came out. I was sweating and my heart pounded. I couldn’t even squeak out a hello. “Madam Clarice is very busy,” she said after half a minute of silence. “Please call back later,” and hung up. I sat there for awhile, the phone still pressed against my ear. Eventually it started to obnoxiously beep, and I put it back on the receiver. And for the first time, I felt okay with the way things played out because I knew that Sarit – vibrant, sugary Sarit – would be okay too.

28 LET IT RIDE

Cal Puglia is doing an open house in Margate, and he still has to stop at his place to get a change of clothes, he alleges, and he’s running late. On the balcony of her beachfront condo, as the sun slowly moves across the cloudless horizon, Gwen Greenberg sits in a yellow folding chair blowing on her morning tea, wearing a white terrycloth bathrobe and sequined white flip flops that – she thinks – make her legs look pudgy, along with the latest issue of In Style draped across her lap. Her dyed red hair hangs around her face, damp and wavy. The patio door is ajar, and she hears the television humming from the living room – one of those exercise equipment infomercials – and the front door slam as Cal leaves. She looks out at the Atlantic and sees a sailboat to her left and a schooner straight ahead; some boys dressed in wetsuits are out in the waves with their surfboards. When she heard the alarm go off at 6:30 this morning, Gwen wrapped her arms around Cal and begged him to go to work late. “Make love to me,” she whispered. He took her hand and pulled her out of bed, leading her towards the shower. Now, she hears him start his jeep and back out of the parking lot. She puts down the mug and walks over to the edge of the second floor balcony, gripping the top of the silver railing. It feels cold against her sweaty palms. Cal honks twice and waves, partially sticking his head out of the window. “Be back around three,” he says smiling, then drives down the road and turns on Atlantic Avenue. Gwen contemplates calling him on his cell, asking him to come back. She’d learned yesterday that her father died and she is pregnant – neither of which she has told him. The pee- test from the kit she bought at the drugstore confirmed it. There was a line. A line means pregnant. She knows that from when this happened before – back in college, back before she knew Cal. She could tell him that he needs to take her to the clinic today. Last time she went by herself – she wasn’t sure who the father was and thought if she told a girlfriend it would be all over campus – and trying to maneuver past the picketers was like walking through a brick wall. Or, she thinks, she could tell him she wants to attend the funeral and would like him to come

29 along. Instead, she goes inside and sits on the sofa, slipping off her shoes and putting her feet on the glass coffee table. She fumbles with the remote, trying to find a channel that is playing something other than infomercials or the news. She finds a rerun of Gilligan’s Island and settles on that. She wants to fall back asleep, but the pills keep her awake. There are pills that make her drowsy too, but if she mixes them she is afraid they will cancel each other out and neither will work. Plus, she had done this before and had a migraine for a week. She looks at the clock on the cable box. 7:48. Her appointment isn’t until ten. By then, her father will be buried at Shalom Memorial Park in Philadelphia according to the hysterical woman – apparently his girlfriend – who called her yesterday afternoon. Gwen regarded the lady, but refused to contribute to the funeral costs. She picks up the portable telephone and starts to dial her father’s number. She snaps the phone off, then on again, and instead dials 1-800- PSYCHIC for her daily astrological reading. Yesterday’s reading said the Moon was in her sign and emotional intelligence should come before intellectual intelligence, which is why she called in sick and scheduled an appointment for today, and went to the drugstore on a hunch last night. “Capricorns,” the automated voice says, “press 1.” She does. Another recording. “Today is Friday, August tenth,” a different automated voice says, “and you need to pamper yourself for a change. You and a lover may be on opposing wavelengths, but you will still make headway in the relationship if you put your thoughts into action. Let them know what your intentions are. Don't beat around the bush; state your case in plain and simple terms. Direct your energy wisely today. Insurance pay outs, tax rebates, or just plain luck is in your future. You could come into extra cash. Take risks. Let it ride.” Gwen shakes her head in agreement with the voice’s comments. Let it ride, she thinks. She hangs up the phone and walks to the kitchen, putting more water in the kettle. She gets a new teabag out of the cupboard as the water boils and makes a fresh cup of tea. Two scoops of sugar and a little cream. And a swish or two of Bailey’s for kick. She goes back out on the patio and sits in the folding chair. The sun blazes directly onto her olive skin and sweat gathers around her forehead. She uses her hand as a visor and looks at the beach. The salty air stings her eyes. She crosses her legs; they feel sore from this morning.

30 Her arms and wrists hurt too from trying to balance herself against the slick shower. Cal knows it’s not comfortable for her to do it in there, and he did his best to support her, gripping her around the waist for security. She thinks about the last time she saw her father, four years ago at her college graduation. She hadn’t seen him in ten years prior to that – he was in jail upstate – and before his incarceration, she saw him once after her parents divorced when she was seven. He took her to an Eagles game – never bothering to ask if she even liked football – and barely spoke to her during the six or so hours they were together. Her mother died right around the time of his sentencing, so Gwen was forced into the foster care system until she was eighteen. She graduated from her father’s alma mater with a degree in history. Same as him. He came up to her after the ceremony with a red rose and a card. He was grinning so hard it looked like his face hurt. She barely recognized him – he was bald and dressed in 70s style plaid and walked with a cane. He handed her the card and put his arm around her shoulder. “Gonna go to law school like your old man, too?” “So I can get disbarred and imprisoned for embezzlement?” she said and shimmied out from his touch. “Doubtful.” He spoke softly. “You look beautiful. Just like your mother.” Gwen didn’t say anything, but she opened the card – signed “Love, Dad” – and removed fifty dollars. “Thanks Dad. This’ll really help pay back all those student loans.” She dangled the money in front of his face and released it, letting it fall to the floor. “You’ve never done anything for me before. Why start now?” Her father looked down at his feet. “I’ve thought about you every day,” he said. Gwen shook her head and walked away. She was so angry with him; every time she gave him the benefit of the doubt – after he’d call from prison inquiring about her grades and such, saying how much he missed her – it would be months or even years before a follow up call was made. He never stayed, so she never looked back. Now, a surfer falls off of his board, and they both wash ashore. Gwen watches him stumble out of the ocean, falling twice. She smiles at this. The other boys shout something at

31 him, but she’s too far away to make it out. She hears the television again, another episode of Gilligan’s Island. Gwen walks inside and unties her robe, letting it slip off her shoulders and fall to the floor. She stops in front of the full-length mirrored wall to examine her body. Her breasts, she thinks, are round and perky and beautiful, but her thighs are too chunky and her arms too flabby. She steps closer so that her face is inches from the mirror and pulls at her cheeks. Her skin feels soft, and she smiles because the Retinol is working. She heads toward the bathroom and turns on the shower. She steps in and lets cold water spill over her head and down her body. Goosebumps. ::: Gwen sits on the patio for awhile after her shower, robe slightly open and legs resting on the railing. She looks at In Style’s “100 Fall Fashion Musts” – eyeing the clothes and the models. Male or female, black or white or brown – Gwen is never one to discriminate. She gets up and the surfing boys, who are now walking up the beach toward the boardwalk, start hooting and hollering, arms flailing in the air, cheering at her. She hears them shout, “yeah baby” and “lets see some skin.” Gwen flips her hair and laughs, enjoying the attention, and lets the robe drop from her shoulders and fall to the ground as she turns to walk inside. The ocean breeze feels good against her naked body. The alarm clock in the bedroom reads 9:17. She throws on white linen pants and a black halter top. No bra. No panties. She applies a coat of mascara and lip-gloss, pops another pill – just in case – and grabs her bag and the keys. ::: Gwen is stuck in traffic on Atlantic Avenue. Each time the light up ahead turns green, no cars move. She doesn’t understand why. A few moments later, she’s able to inch forward – finally – and she sees a family crossing the street. The man carries beach chairs and a cooler, the woman has a bright pink beach bag hanging off her shoulder, and a little girl with a long braid down her back holds a pail and shovel. Gwen brings her hand to her belly and rubs. She and Cal are always so careful. She’s been on the pill since three weeks after the last incident, and there is a large box of condoms by

32 the bed, too. Unless they are in the shower or a car – or some other public place – Cal almost always wears one. It goes along with the agreement she insisted they make when they first got involved about a year ago. No rings and no kids. Cal was her realtor when she came to Atlantic City from Philadelphia after she was promoted to the campus director of Stockton’s chapter of the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group. He dragged Gwen all over town showing her apartment after apartment. At first, she thought he was a younger version of Tony Soprano. He was around her age with greased back dark hair, tan skin, a foul mouth, and a tattoo of a rose on his forearm and an Italian flag on his calf. He was short and muscular with a tiny pouch of a gut that he’d suck in whenever she walked into the room. She thought that was charming. One day while visiting a condo at Margate Villas, she excused herself to use the bathroom and came out naked. From then on, they started having sex on sofas or beds each time he showed her a listing, and twice in his office – with the blinds shut – during business hours. After a month of searching, she put a bid in for a condo in a nicer section of Atlantic City, and a few weeks later, she was able to move in. Cal schlepped all the furniture and trash bags full of clothes up the stairs by himself; he was wearing a loose wife-beater and sweat trickled down his neck. Gwen got a cold washcloth and handed it to him. Then, she led him to the bedroom, and they spent the rest of the day christening the apartment. She’s never dated anyone for this long before, and he is the only one she hasn’t cheated on. Flirting and smooching and light petting doesn’t count. After finally crossing the congested intersection, it takes her five minutes to get to the free clinic. She pulls into the parking lot and spots the mob of picketers by the entrance wearing white t-shirts with hand-written ugly messages scrawled across their backs. She looks at her watch – 9:49. It’ll take me eleven minutes to even get past them, she thinks. She gets out of the car and hugs herself. The flock races over faster than a squirrel running up a tree and encircles around her. They are nice at first. “Let us help you,” they shout. “There are other alternatives.” Then, “we can give you money and find a home for the baby. We’ll take care of you.” Gwen stares at the entrance and pushes through the crowd, purposely scratching someone with her fingernails along the way. Clinic workers wearing bright orange

33 tops – the logo “We Believe In Freedom” is printed across the front – hurry out of the door and sprint towards her. A tall, skinny man with a large bald spot in the middle of his head steps directly in front of Gwen. She thinks he looks like her father. “Jesus Christ, our lord and savior, died for your sins. He wouldn’t want you to burn in hell for murdering a life. It’s not too late to turn around,” he says in the deepest voice she’s ever heard. She stops and looks up at the man, fingering the chia that hangs from her neck. She puts her hands on her hips and pauses for a moment. “And we killed him,” she says. “So, according to you, I’m going there anyways.” Gwen clears her throat and spits at the man’s face. “Get out of my way.” The women in the orange shirts make their way to Gwen and form a kind of fence around her, holding hands that somehow get Gwen into the clinic and mute the nasty words and cheap shots the picketers scream. Once inside, one of the orange shirts says, “We have a spitter – damn, she did good” and rubs Gwen on the back. The receptionist behind the desk smiles, waves a clipboard and little cup in the air, and motions her over. “Here you go, dear. Have a seat and fill this out, then go in the bathroom and fill this up.” Gwen does as she’s told. While waiting, she looks around the office. T-shirts that say, “I just had an abortion and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” are displayed on the walls with signs under them reading “$19.95 – Proceeds Go To Planned Parenthood.” At quarter after ten, a plump, middle-aged woman in need of a touchup and wearing a lab coat walks into the lobby. “Gwen Greenberg. You can come back now.” Gwen gets up and the woman reaches for her hand. “I’m Doctor Morris, but you can call me Christine. Follow me,” she says and smiles warmly. “I know the routine,” Gwen says before she even gets comfortable in Christine’s office. “You can save the schpeel and just tell me where to sign.” Christine puts on glasses and folds her hands. “You’ve had an abortion before,” she says as she glances down at Gwen’s forms. Her voice is soothing and sweet – matronly.

34 “Yes. About five and half years ago.” “How old were you then?” “Almost twenty.” “And how did you feel afterward? Any regrets?” “Nope, none,” Gwen says quickly. “What makes you so sure it’s the right decision this time?” Gwen sighs. “Look, I’m on the pill, and we use condoms. This wasn’t supposed to happen.” “We? So you have a steady partner?” Gwen’s lips are pressed together, and she shakes her head ‘yes.’ “Have you discussed this with him yet?” “No, not yet. But it’s my decision, right?” Christine nods and gets up, walks to the front of her desk, and she perches herself on top of it. She spends twenty minutes talking about the procedure, as well as other options, and gives Gwen pamphlets and brochures. She says there is a 24-hour waiting period that is required by law, but if Gwen still wants to go through with the procedure, she should call tomorrow and schedule another appointment. She thanks Christine and gets up to leave. “Oh, one more thing,” Christine says. “If you do decide to come back, make sure you bring someone with you. Clinic policy. We won’t let you leave unless you have a ride.” Gwen shakes her head. “Oh, that’s okay. I can take a cab.” “Not an option. I need to speak with your ride before and after the procedure.” On her way out, Gwen purchases one of the shirts hanging from the wall. ::: Gwen sits on the patio drinking a mandarin cosmopolitan and reads an article about shades of blush in In Style. She hears the front door open and Cal call, “Hey, babe.” She gets up and stands by the frame of the doorway, one arm stretched up playing with wind chimes that dangle from the roof. Cal’s backside is in the air; he rummages through the fridge. “I’m starved,” he says. “Wanna order Chinese tonight?”

35 “Sure,” she says. “Any bids today?” He grabs a beer and turns around and walks towards her. “Not official. But one couple moving up from Baltimore seemed real interested.” He opens the can and kisses her on the lips. “How was playing hooky?” he asks and grabs a fistful of her T-shirt, bringing her inches from his face. “I bought a shirt.” “That’s my girl. She knows how to spend money.” He nibbles on her ear. “The astrologer told me to pamper myself today,” she says and tries to push him away. He pulls her closer and whispers, “I’ll pamper you.” Cal picks her up and cradles her like newlyweds entering a house and walks into the bedroom. He places her on the bed, fiddles underneath it, and holds up a pair of furry handcuffs. Gwen covers her face with her hands, then lets him secure them to the bedpost. Forty minutes later, Gwen is only wearing the T-shirt and he’s in boxers. Cal fixes two gin and tonics and hands her one. They sit on the sofa, and she’s cross-legged facing him. He plays with the remote and turns on ESPN. “I can’t believe you haven’t noticed yet,” she says. “Noticed what?” he says but doesn’t look at her. He squints at the television set and turns the volume up. “Look,” Gwen says and holds the end of her shirt – the one she bought at the clinic – out flat. Cal cocks his head to the side and narrows his eyes. He forgot to put his contacts in this morning, she thinks. He laughs. “That’s great. Where’d you find it? Spencer’s?” “No.” He scratches his nose. “I don’t get it.” “What’s there to get?” she asks, then gets up, walks out on the patio, and plops down in the folding chair. He follows her and leans against the railing. He is breathing heavily and looks down at his feet. “Did you just have an abortion?” “No,” Gwen says. “Not exactly.”

36 Cal fingers his chin and raises his eyes. “Well, do you think you need to have one?” “Yup.” She picks up the magazine and fans through the pages. “Pretty sure.” Cal doesn’t say anything. Gwen tries to focus on the magazine but peeks at his face every few seconds. He stares towards the ocean and picks at the rust on the railing. Little silver specs fly away in the breeze. Finally, he says, “Are you sure that’s what you want to do.” “Yup,” she says and turns the page. “Don’t you even want to talk about this?” She looks up; his face is bright red. “What’s there to talk about, babe? Neither of us are exactly the parental type.” He grips the edge of the railing, and she notices his knuckles turn white. “I think I would be a good father,” he says quietly. She puts the magazine down and skims the beach. In the distance, she sees the casinos – Bally’s and Caesar’s and The Showboat. She stands up and places her hands on his thighs. Her voice softens. “I know you would. I just don’t think I’d be a very good mother.” “Yes you would. You just don’t let anyone in, Gwen. You shut down and push people away. Not everyone wants to abandon you.” He puts his arms around her hips and squeezes gently. “Think about it. We could get a bigger place, move in together, play house. Gwen Puglia,” he says and cocks his head to the side. “I think that sounds nice.” She frowns. “No rings, remember. And no kids.” “I love you, Gwen.” “I know you do.” Cal jumps up and moves her aside, his fingers pull at his hair. “I’m going to go home for a little bit. I’ll come back later or something.” Gwen shrugs. “Okay.” ::: Gwen walks through The Borgata’s automatic revolving glass doors around nine. Cal never came back or called, and she had finished all the gin. She needed to go for a ride, she thought, get out of the condo for a bit. This casino is brand new – not even a year old yet – and

37 it’s the classiest one on the strip – self described as “setting a new standard of luxury for Atlantic City casinos.” No working girls or pimps in purple striped suits or trash from the other side of town congregating at the tables or by the row of machines she likes to play. It is her new favorite hangout – although not the most financially-sound place to be – where she and Cal have spent many nights having cocktails at The Gypsy Bar and losing their paychecks at the tables. He is a craps man. She stands to his side and blows on the dice when it’s his turn to roll. He calls her his lucky charm even though she didn’t understand anything about the game. She pauses in the foyer for a moment looking up at the gigantic, orange glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling. It twinkles in time with the slot machines buzzing as people sitting at them scream, “Yes” or “It’s about damn time.” She walks past the concierge desk and laps around the casino, clicking her heels against the marble floor. It’s pretty crowded, she notices, and all the cheaper tables are full. She goes into The Gypsy Bar and orders a gin and tonic. The bartender stares at her cleavage and doesn’t charge her. She grins and thanks him, leaning over the bar to tuck a tip into his shirt pocket. Gwen shuffles around the floor and watches the Asian men play Pai Gow Poker. Next to that table, a Let It Ride table opens. She inches over, and the card on the table says five dollar minimum. She sits down and places her drink in the holder. “Hi there,” the dealer says. His nametag reads Larry. “Hello,” she says and smiles. She reaches in her purse and pulls out a hundred dollar bill – all she has with her – and lays it on the table. “Small chips please. And can I have change for a five.” Larry bops up and down and sings the refrain to “My Girl,” and she notices him occasionally lift his eyes and glance at her collar bone. He sounds just as she imagines a seagull would if it could sing. She laughs and brings her arms closer to her chest, gently squeezing her breasts together. Gwen puts up the five dollar bets and drums her fingernails against the felt table waiting for her cards. She is dealt a queen and a ten, and Larry shows an ace. She pulls back one bet. Larry flips over a king. She pulls back the second bet and flips her cards over, questioning whether or not she should have let it ride. Then, Larry turns the last card. A queen. A pair pays

38 one-to-one. “Should have let it ride,” he says and clears the table. Gwen laughs. “I’m usually not very lucky,” she says and puts up three more bets. An hour later, Gwen is down to her last fifteen dollars. While losing, she learned Larry’s life story. He is 49, twice divorced, and working on a third. He has five kids – with the three different women – none of whom call him on his birthday. Gwen decides she hates him for being a dead-beat, just like her father. She wonders if Cal would end up being a dead-beat too. By now, the table is full. On one side of her sits a blonde girl who looks barely old enough to be in the casino; her much, much older boyfriend to her left. They tongue-kiss after each hand, and Gwen notices his fingers creeping their way up her skirt looking for trouble. On the other side, two fraternity-type guys in faux-Armani silk shirts put up twenty-five dollars per bet and refer to each other as “dawg.” The one closest to Gwen leans over during each hand and talks about the weather and how beautiful her eyes are. She sits – leaned over – almost facing him and thanks him for the compliment. She is on her fourth gin and tonic. She puts the last of her chips in the appropriate circles, and Larry deals the cards around the table. The boys pick up their cards and, in unison, say, “Hell yeah, dawg.” The blonde looks at hers and rolls her eyes, pouting. Her boyfriend’s palm disappears under her skirt. She stops pouting. Gwen doesn’t pick her cards up. She doesn’t even touch them. Larry looks at her curiously, and she says, “Let it ride.” “You’re not even gonna look?” Larry asks. She shakes her head slowly, left then right, leans back in the chair, picks up the drink, and finishes the rest in one gulp. The frat-boy sitting next to her rubs her arm and slurs, “You got balls, beautiful.” Larry turns over the first card. It’s a three. Everyone except Gwen pulls back a bet. She looks around the casino for a cocktail waitress but doesn’t see one. The second card turns over; a six. She watches the table, and everyone else pulls back the second bet. Gwen closes her eyes. If I win this hand, she thinks, then I’ll keep the baby. She blinks, and Larry flips over a king. Everyone else curses at their cards and throws

39 them towards the middle of the table. Gwen stares at her cards, still faced down, and is afraid to touch them. “Yo. Babe,” the guy next to her says. “Let' see whatchya got.” Gwen stares at him. Then at Larry; he smiles widely – the same smile her father gave her at graduation. She places her hand on her throat and loudly clears it. “I have to go,” she says, and gets up so fast her chair falls backwards. She runs from the table toward the lobby. She hears Larry and the frat-boy calling after her, but she doesn’t look back. Gwen dashes out of the revolving glass doors and picks up her car from the valet. She drives over the causeway towards Cal’s apartment; her palms are clammy, and she feels lightheaded. Damn it, she thinks, what have I done? Gwen fiddles with the radio, trying to find a station that isn’t playing punk rock or classical. She runs a red light but doesn’t care until she sees flashing red lights in her rear view mirror. The cop has her walk a straight line. After two steps, she stumbles on a pebble. She doesn’t put up a fight when he handcuffs her or when he forcefully grabs her shoulders while he places her into his car. At the station, the police take fingerprints and mug shots. She fixes her hair before the photograph and asks if she can put some make-up on first. The officer taking the picture doesn’t look amused and says, “This ain’t Vogue, sweetheart.” He leads her to the holding cell area and places her in front of a telephone. “One call,” he says and walks away. Gwen picks up the receiver and holds it an arm-length away. She feels her cheeks flush and wonders if her father was scared when he was arrested. I’ll never know, she thinks. She dials. The machine picks up immediately after the call goes through, and a distorted version of what she remembers as her father’s voice tells her what number she has called and to leave a message so he can return it as soon as possible. Not any time soon, she thinks. Gwen laughs out loud at this and looks over her shoulder. Two lady officers are in the corner, chewing white Dixie cups and staring at her. She waits for the machine to beep, and when it does, no words come out of her mouth. Finally, Gwen sniffles and takes a deep breath. She whispers, “I’ve thought about you everyday too.”

40 LIKE LOVE

Maybe it’s what they call vocational. It’s 1988. Your parents take you down the shore for the summer. You stay in a third floor condo in Atlantic City that is about the size of footlocker. You sleep on a lumpy sofa in one room and your parents sleep on a double bed in the other. The air conditioner is perpetually broken, and on top of that, you are perpetually sunburned, the sticky and suffocating kind. On the beach, you try desperately hard to sit still on your towel like all the older girls who undo their tops and tan on their stomachs while big men with big muscles massage oil that smells like bananas all over their backs. You dig your toes into the hot sand and ignore your father when he asks if you’d like to build a sand castle. Of course you don’t. You’re 12, almost 13, for Christ’s sake. You’ve had three periods and have mastered the use of a tampon. Even the super flow kind. Sand castles are for children, and you are definitely not a child. You decide to walk down to the life guard stand and watch the boys on boogie boards and the mothers dipping their babies in to the ocean. Spencer, vacationing with his family from Pittsburgh, rides a wave to shore on his belly, and he washes up a few inches from your feet. By the end of that day, you’ve had your first French kiss behind the sand dunes. You spend the week with him, at the beach or playing miniature golf or going to the ice cream parlor for dripping cones of vanilla fudge. You let him touch your breast, once, and you call your best friend Becky every night to tell her about “the love of your life.” When the day his family is leaving comes, you sigh and cry and exchange phone numbers. You promise to call each other daily, and you say you will go to every one of his little league games next spring. You want to call him the minute you see their station wagon turn right on Atlantic Avenue, and you zealously write in your journal that you feel utterly lost without Spencer, and it’s been 4,385 seconds since you last saw him. One day, Spencer calls you. All the way from western Pennsylvania! You are panting, having a hard time catching your breath, and you’ve been practicing saying “hello” for so long, you aren’t sure which one to go with. Whatever you squeak out doesn’t matter because you are

41 too excited to hardly speak more than a few words at a time. You listen to him talk about baseball and how much he likes to fish. You agree with everything he says, even something about putting a worm on a hook. “Me too,” you say excitedly. “Me too.” Before you hang up, Spencer says, “So. Are you, like, my girlfriend?” And you almost die, right then and there. They’ll have to bury you with the receiver glued to your ear because you never want to put it down. But you manage to say, “Yeah. Sure. If you want,” like someone was asking if you wanted pepperoni on your pizza. Spencer calls a few more times, and you talk mainly about fishing and baseball, baseball and fishing. You never call him, though, because all the girl magazines you’ve consulted say not to; it’s best if the ball’s in your court (whatever that means). But then, he stops. Poof. No more. You wait by the phone every day and make up horrible scenarios in your head. He was in an awful car accident where he broke both hands and had to have his mouth sewn shut. Or, while fishing, he fell in to the Schuylkill River and a great big fish mistook his fingers for worms and ate them off. You make Becky call his house everyday for a week. (You don’t call because you don’t want the ball to leave your court.) You are sure his mother isn’t suspicious that someone from Star Search keeps calling about her son. No, she doesn’t know where he is. No, she isn’t sure when he’ll be home. Sure, she’ll tell him Ed McMahon’s secretary has called, again. You ache for months. Outwardly. Emotionally. You tell all your friends, besides Becky, that Spencer’s love was just too much. It was suffocating you. You had to let him down. But you did it gently, of course. Meanwhile, you write long poems in your journal about cats getting mangled in rose bushes and the French revolution, specifically involving Spencer’s head and a rusty guillotine. The next summer, 1989, your family goes back down the shore. You spend every day looking for Spencer. The next summer, 1990, your family goes back down the shore. You spend every day looking for Spencer. ::: Maybe it’s what they call fundamental.

42 It is 1993. You have been going out with Bruce, the gorgeous blonde forward on the basketball team, for almost three months. He’s in your geometry and biology classes, and you let him copy your homework during lunch each day. In return, he drives you to and from school in his father’s convertible and gives you hickeys on the back of your neck so your parents won’t see them. He comes to all your field hockey games and bakes you a cake - from scratch - on your birthday. All your girlfriends want to know Bruce’s story. Is his father really in the mafia? Are his pecs as defined as they seem when he wears that tight gray sweater? And, most importantly, how big is his package? You smile at them and laugh and say something snooty like, “I couldn’t be more satisfied,” but in reality, you haven’t gotten past first base and are dying to know how big his package is, too. One Friday night, after going to a house party and drinking enough beer to make you walk sideways, you tell Bruce to drive to an empty lot by your house. You take his hand and place it on your breast and say, “Bruce. This. This is a. A boob. My boob. Do you want to. You know. Touch it?” And Bruce looks at you kind of funny and says, “I am touching it,” in a way that makes you feel stupid. But you look down and see that you’re holding his hand there. He is involuntarily touching it, and if you were to let go, his hand would drop and that would be that. “Okay then,” you say. “Do you want to see it?” And before he can answer, you tear off your shirt and bra and sit up on your knees, leaning towards him. It is dark, but you can see his face turn a different shade like he is embarrassed for you. “What’s wrong?” you ask. “What’s wrong with me. That. That. That you don’t want to touch me.” Bruce doesn’t say anything, but he starts the car and drives you home. He doesn’t kiss you goodnight. You call him in the morning, your head pounding so hard you feel like you’re at a Rolling Stones concert, and apologize, pleading temporary insanity and swearing you don’t even remember what all happened (even though, of course, you do). He laughs and tells you that you drank some of the football players under the table and asks if you’d like to go on a picnic that afternoon. He takes you to Cooper River Park and brings a basket full of sandwiches and sodas, and you feed the ducks leftover bread. You make out for awhile, and he tells you how much he loves you. Most specifically because one of your ears is slightly larger than the other, but they

43 both taste the same which makes it just the best flaw in the world. You aren’t sure if you should be insulted or flattered, but then he says it again, “I love you,” and all you can do is kiss his lips because the words make your heart swell. Three months of just kissing later and you are hornier than Sally Struthers. You lie to your friends, even Becky, and tell them how manly Bruce is. His father must be in the mafia because his sex drive is animalistic. On a night your parents are down the shore gambling, conveniently Valentine’s Day, you invite Bruce over for a romantic dinner. You order take-out from an Italian place and tell him that you cooked it yourself. Then you lead him up to your room, push him down on your bed, and shut off the lights. “Bruce,” you say. “We’ve been dating for six months. I think it’s time we move things along. Take this to the next level.” You light some candles, take off your dress, and straddle his legs. “Give me your hand,” you say, and he obeys. You place it on top of your panties. And he feels around. Kind of gently at first. When you lean back and unclasp your bra, Bruce says, “I’ve never done this before,” and the light bulb goes on. Everything clicks. He’s just scared is all! No problem! You can fix that. You’re a great teacher. One of the best. You undress him down to his boxers, kissing his chest and stomach. Your hands caress his legs, inches away from the package you’re dying to see, touch, taste. But then he jumps up. “Wait,” he says. “We need music.” And you roll over and smile and think, “My god, could he be any cuter.” You watch him flip through your music selection, and he puts something in and comes back to the bed. He tears off your underwear; his fingers penetrate you. And then, the music comes on: Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome. Im Cabaret, au Cabaret, to Cabaret. And Bruce proceeds to finger you, haphazardly, while singing along, as if he were auditioning for a part to your favorite musical. When he breaks up with you the following week, “I just don’t think this is going to work,” he says, you are crushed and sob on his shoulder. He smells of aftershave and vanilla. Your fingers dig deep in to his back, hopefully leaving a permanent scar. Sure, you suspected the truth. The singing pretty much confirmed it for you. Why did it take you six months to figure it out? Really, how could you not have known? But he loved you! Isn’t that what he said?

44 ::: Maybe it’s what they call beguilement. It is 1997. You’re a senior at a large university in New York City and meet Anthony at a frat party. He is wearing a hat with two beer cans on either side, straws coming out of each, and he reminds you of a hairy Medusa. A few keg stands are followed by some dancing and touching and floating up to his bedroom where you give him a blow job that makes him squeal like a newborn babe. You move in to his room a week later, and a month after that, you both spend most days smoking joints, watching scary movies, and fucking in ways you’ve never imagined possible. In places you’ve never imagined possible. And, you’ll be damned, you devour it all. You inform your parents that commencement ceremonies are a waste of time and boring. Only retards go to those things. Instead, you decide to drive to Cocoa Beach with Anthony, where his dad lives and has lined him up a job at a pool company. The trip takes three days because you are both too stoned to drive remotely close to the speed limit. You take over the attic of his father’s house, and Anthony spends more time inside of you than at work. You’ve had time - lots of time - to notice the ceiling is starting to crack and the spider’s web in the corner seems to grow by the day, being on your back so much and all. Anthony can do things with his fingers that make you enter the astral plane, and when he involves his tongue, forget about it. Anthony going down on you is like winning the lottery, meeting God, and eating fat free, calorie free chocolate frosting all at once. Delicious! And Anthony is a champ. It doesn’t matter what time of day, what time of month, it is his divine mission to satisfy you. You have started referring to him as Jesus Christ, since that’s what you scream when he’s between your legs and because he is a saint for being so willing to please. After a few months of living off Anthony’s father, doing nothing but lounging at the beach or fucking in his jacuzzi, eating his food and drinking his booze, he kicks you both out and has the attic fumigated. You drive back north, practicing your road head techniques and stopping at multiple gas stations for trinkets. Your parents won’t allow Anthony to move in, and his mother refuses you as well. You stand in your driveway with him, teary eyed and exhausted, and you both promise to find jobs and an apartment in Philadelphia. “Two months apart. Max,”

45 he says. And you weep at that thought and hug him tight. You both cry, “I love you” when he backs the car out, and you run to edge of the curb waving frantically as he pulls away. But two months turn in to four months, then six and eight. You realize that without him there physically, without him licking your pussy and transforming into Christ, you have nothing to talk with him about. There’s no reason to call. You meet up with him once in awhile after a waitressing shift, have sex in the backseat of his car or in the bathroom stall at a bar, for old times sake. But then you go back to the real world, to your real life. You are no longer that girl in Florida, watching the spider slip in and out of the ceiling crack, whelping to the heavens, “Jesus. Fucking. Christ.” ::: Maybe it’s what they call inevasible. It is 2000. You go on a blind date with Ben, a twenty-something musician with a certain greasy handsomeness: a stocky build, shaved head, and tattoos all over his arms. When he drops you off, he grabs a fistful of your black shirt and pulls you close, kissing all over your face and neck. When he finally reaches your mouth, he licks your tongue and sucks on your bottom lip. You keep your eyes open and wonder if he thinks such things are sexy. After your second date, playing darts and drinking beer, you sit in Ben’s car and listen to a CD of his band. You smile and say you like the tunes, feeling slightly lopsided from all that Yeungling, when his mouth finds yours. But this time the kiss isn’t slobbery; it is short and tender. And you proceed to climb on top of him and have sex in the middle of the parking lot, your back scraping against the driving wheel, his hands clawing at your tits. Ben tries to push you off him when he ejaculates, partially staining your stomach, but you are not satisfied. Still hungry. You give him a wink, a sign. And you wiggle your bottom on his legs, the ultimate sign. But he wipes his forehead and says, “Thanks babe. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He doesn’t call for three weeks, and by then, you’ve already bought fifteen pregnancy tests. You thought the first one was wrong. A definite mistake. Same with the second and third and seventh. By the last one, you are so used to seeing that little pink line it becomes something expected, like a birthday card from your mother. You sit on top of the toilet seat, each test lined

46 up in a neat row on the counter, and contemplate playing dominoes with them while you stare at the little fleck of green on the wall that you’ve been meaning to paint over. On your third date, dinner and a movie at your place, Ben brings you some flowers and cheap merlot. He apologizes for not calling, “had some gigs and shit,” and he throws you down on the sofa, takes off your pants, and gives you three orgasms in ten minutes. He got a tongue ring last week. Aren’t you glad? When he opens the merlot and pours you a glass, you shake your head and tell him there is much to talk about. You sob during the whole thing, take him by the hand to the bathroom and show him the tests. “Let me go to an ATM machine,” he says. “I’ll pay for half.” “Half of what?” you ask, studying his face which doesn’t seem surprised or upset or even annoyed. Ben grabs his jacket and keys, turns and says casually, “The abortion. I’ll be right back.” You hadn’t thought about abortion. You hadn’t thought about having the baby, either. You were too busy thinking about the white dress and the ring and the party. How you’d have to get married before you started to show. And he would sing to you at the reception, about how it was love at first sight, a song he wrote just for you. On one knee. In a white tux. All the guests would say “awww” in unison. You’d go to the Bahamas or Aruba for the honeymoon. And drink virgin pina coladas and fuck in the pool, at the beach, in the bed, and drink and fuck and drink and fuck until you were both dizzy and shivering, goose bumps running up and down your legs. When Ben does not return that night, or any other for that matter, you bury the white dress in the back of your mind. Same with the Bahamas or Aruba, even the three orgasms in ten minutes. You stand in your bathroom staring at the discarded pregnancy tests at the top of the wastebasket. You get in to the shower and turn on the water, rubbing at your stomach with a rag and soap, rubbing and scrubbing and rubbing some more, because it is permanently stained, no matter what you decide to do. ::: Maybe it’s what they call serendipity.

47 It is fall, 2004. Derek is this tall, rugged looking guy who happens to be the usher that walks you down the aisle at Becky’s wedding. During the ceremony, he winks at you twice and, afterwards while escorting you up the aisle, tells you that you look lovely in that maroon and aqua dress, “even if it’s uglier than shit.” You whisk Becky aside before dinner is served to learn that Derek is her husband’s third cousin twice removed, but she doesn’t know much about him. “He’s damn cute though,” she says. “Go for it.” Throughout the night, you are seated at his table and, strangely, continue talking and laughing as if you and he are the same person: You both don’t know how to swim. You both want to move to England some day. You’re both only children. Derek has to work in the morning, so he declines your invitation to go down the street to some swanky bar you know of with the rest of the bridal party after the reception. “That’s a shame,” you say, “I feel so comfortable talking to you.” You feel your cheeks flush at that ridiculous statement, wishing there was a remote control to mute yourself at times like these, but then Derek says, “I know. It’s like I’ve always known you. Or something.” And you smile and say, “Oh well.” Then you put on your jacket and part, casually dropping him a look that says you wish he would reconsider. When you get to the swanky bar, you feel like a deflated balloon, a ridiculous image of the end of something extravagant, missing this Derek who was never yours to miss in the first place. And then someone brushes up beside you. You clench your purse and martini a bit tighter, but you turn and see it’s Derek wearing a top hat and long peacoat. He came to say he never got your phone number and hands you a pen. You smile so hard you think you might pee your pants. You scribble furiously. When you hand him the paper, Derek bends down to kiss your cheek, but you turn and catch his lips. It is a clumsy kiss, dimpled with tenderness; the kind of kiss that makes everyone in the bar jealous and happy at the same time. He says he’ll call. You nod eagerly. He leaves. And you decide this is it, you’re in love. Yet again. During a New Years Eve gala you attend with Derek, you watch him pour you a flute of champagne, wearing goofy glasses that say 2005, and can’t help but think that maybe tonight’s the night he’s going to say, “I love you.” Sure! Why not? You’ve had a whirlwind, glittery romance these last few months: lavish weekend holidays to New York City, impromptu drives

48 down the Atlantic City Expressway to gamble at The Borgata, quiet evenings in your apartment watching old movies and nibbling Chinese food. And, after all, you two really are like the same person; you’re both democrats who love Broadway and playing craps, margaritas on the rocks and chicken lo mein. And the sex! The sex is like being in a traffic jam just as it starts to clear: fast and slow, exciting and frustrating, all at the same time. And, let’s face it, you were stuck in that jam for almost a year prior to Derek. You’ve both drank quite a bit by the end of the night, as New Years Eve parties usually recommend, and as soon as you unlock the door to your apartment, Derek’s clammy hands make their way around your body, followed by his mouth. When you reach the bed, he throws you down, climbs on top of you, and you rock back and forth, thrust with him, until you are both shaking and screaming and laughing, out of breath and limp. He brushes the hair out of your face and kisses your forehead. A gesture more intimate than anything you can think of! In turn, you wrap your legs around his waist, pull him down close to you, and nibble at his lip. Your eyes are shut but you can feel him smile. And you just want to whisper in his ear, “I love you! Goddamnit, I love you!” But he says he can’t spend the night. He leaves you puddled on your bed, naked, while trying to find his socks and shirt, mumbling something about an early flight to California. For business? You’re not sure. Why hasn’t he told you about the trip before? When will he be back? What if there is someone else? Wait a minute. Stop, please. Even if there is someone else, he’s not your toy. You don’t own him. You can’t control his strings. In that moment, you silently declare that you’re going to relinquish all ties - imaginary or otherwise - to this man. No more surprise early flights across the country. No more doubts about his fidelity. No more being left alone on your cold bed watching him search for his clothing. No. You just won’t have it. You just can’t go through it, again. When he leaves, at first, he will still secretly be yours. You’ll steal him from his world, tuck him inside your purse, let him ride in the car with you, covert and safe, and then, when he doesn’t call you the minute he lands at Philadelphia International Airport, you will let him hide in the bottom of your closest. There, but not so much there. And then weeks later, he won’t return your e-mail or telephone call, and you will just be too busy to return his, too. He will

49 meet someone named Veronica or Lucille, and you will finally go out with that guy Becky works with who she’s been trying to set you up with for months. You will eventually stuff this invisible boyfriend in the bottom of your cedar trunk, underneath old blankets and your grandmother’s quilt, suffocating him until he becomes but a distant memory and smell and image. Then one day, he’ll be gone. Instantaneously. Just like that. Or maybe, not quite so fast. Maybe you will wrap your legs around his waist - a bit tighter this time - and you’ll feel the pressure of his belly as he inhales and exhales. And you will squeeze and squeeze until this man appears before you again - alive - but not quite like any other man you’ve ever known. He’ll kiss your forehead again, gently cupping your face as he does so. And this time you’ll scream. Shout. Sing. I love you! Goddamnit, I love you!

50 A CHERRY HILL TALE

And the story goes like this. The summer she barely graduated from college with a degree in something liberal and unimportant was the same summer Eva Baranski turned twenty- two. On the night of her birthday, after drinking quite a few Ketel One martinis to wash down two or five muscle relaxers at Top Dog Bar, she crashed her fully loaded BMW convertible into a black pickup truck pulled over on the side of Rt. 70 in east Cherry Hill, New Jersey while its owner changed a tire. He was a beast of a man, this pickup truck owner, at least seven feet tall with a bald spot in the middle of his head and a belly so round it seemed as though a midget was lying down, taking a nap inside. His large face was as red as a Coca-Cola can as he shouted profanities at Eva, who was only half conscious and wetting her pants. The giant eventually called 9-1-1, but first he grabbed a baseball bat out of the cab of his truck and took mighty swings at Eva’s car until his hands bled. Luckily, the car was already totaled. After Eva Baranski came to (she had a .326 blood alcohol level, so says Ginny Gold’s daughter who is dating the attending at Kennedy Hospital, so this took some time), she was arrested. She received a D.U.I. and lost her license for, as the judge put it, not less then twelve months. There were a slew of fines too. Astronomical fines at that. Eva’s parents were horrified by the whole situation. After all, they probably thought, what would we all say – at Pages Diner or the country club or in the supermarket behind their backs – about their princess-turned-lush daughter. During dinner at Pages the night after the court hearing, where the Baranskis broke bread three or four nights a week with the rest of us who dined there practically every night – except for Thanksgiving and Passover and Yom Kippur, of course – they told her that the bank was closed. No more help, they said, you made this mess then you pay for it. No more credit cards in our name. No more Teresa (the maid) cleaning your room. “Get a job,” her father said. “Find a rich husband,” her mother said. “Start

51 paying room and board,” they both said. Do something. ::: A week later, we all stopped gossiping about Eva’s joyride because of Michael Lees (it’s rumored he used to play seven minutes in heaven with Eva in his sister’s closet when the two were in the eighth grade together). He was arrested and charged for having relations with a fifteen-year-old boy whom the papers dubbed Lyle. Not to mention the photographs Mike took of their encounters, some at the Hilton on 70, others at his apartment, and a few times even in Lyle’s own bedroom while the boy’s parents were out of town. And you think you know some people. Eva’s parents and her sisters came with their husbands to Pages the night Michael Lees was on the six o’clock news, handcuffed and being led into the Camden County Jail by an extra large, black police officer who contrasted humorously with Mike, who was as short as Eva – 5’5 – and as pale as a powdered donut. We were all sitting at the bar of the restaurant sipping cocktails while Pete, the extra large but jolly bartender, rang in our orders. The men were discussing business and sports and stocks while the women were yapping about the semi-annual sale at Victoria’s Secret. Eva sat on a stool with her legs crossed listening to her oldest sister Danielle drone on about the thong panties and lacey pink bra she bought the other day. Eva’s other sister, Tracy, rolled her eyes as Danielle spoke. Eva laughed. The conversations stopped once Pete put the sound back on the bar’s flat screened television after Mr. Baranski recognized Michael as the son of the owner of that quaint little men’s store a few towns over. “It’s a shame,” her father said once the news clip ended, the T.V. back on mute. “They have good prices at that store. Gonna lose a lot of business, I bet.” “His poor mother,” Mrs. Baranski said. “How could he do this to her?” “Serves him right,” Paul, Danielle’s husband, said. “Fucking fag.” “Paul!” Danielle giggled like a schoolgirl and put her hand on his thigh. We saw Tracy frown at both of them then glance over at Eva, whose legs were now dangling. Her body was rocking back and forth. Ever so slightly. “How awful,” said Vincenzo (also known as Vinnie and/or Enzo), Tracy’s second

52 husband. He’s also the goy of the family – the one Mr. Baranski tries to keep hidden in the background during these types of public functions. And who can blame him? Tradition! Everyone seemed to resume conversation after Pete made a wise crack about the Eagles. He was a Patriots fan, being originally from Boston. And he wonders why his tips stink. Tracy nudged Eva while everyone in the bar got into a heated debate about Andy Reid. “Didn’t you used to date that boy?” Eva nodded. She leaned over and loudly whispered into Tracy’s ear, “This probably isn’t the right time to tell them I’m a lesbian. Tempting, but no.” ::: The Baranskis, by the way, own a slew of car dealerships around the Delaware Valley – they do very, very well – and Mr. Baranski used to make Danielle and Tracy, who are respectively eleven and ten years older then Eva, help out at the main office during summer vacations or holidays when the girls were in high school. Being the baby and all (and we assume a huge accident, although her parents have never admitted that publicly), Eva managed to talk her way out of working there. You should know, first and foremost, that Danielle’s just plain awful. We’ve heard she’s always acted viciously towards Eva and Tracy, saying things like Eva’s real dad was a black man named Leroy just because Eva’s nose is a little flat and her lips a bit large and having relations with almost all of Tracy’s former boyfriends, including her ex-husband. Danielle grew up to be even more pretentious and ignorant than anyone we know. Besides having designer clothes and shoes, getting weekly massages and facials at the most expensive salon in town, and recently getting a new nose and lips compliments of Dr. Nussbaum (her nose was also a little flat and collagen injections are the latest trend), she’s rumored to have called a salesclerk at Strawbridge’s a shvartzah – telling her to get out of her neighborhood and go back to Fish Town – just because she wouldn’t accept Danielle’s outdated coupon, and then there’s the time at her father’s surprise birthday party where she threw her filet straight across the dining room at Café Lamberti because it wasn’t rare enough. Et cetera, et cetera. And it’s always people like that who have the perfect marriage, the perfect body, the perfect life. And she knows it. If you see her on the street, just try to get her to stop talking about herself.

53 Tracy is outspoken and brassy and boisterous, but she would do anything for Eva. And she has. She’s even gone as far as punching some girl Eva used to date right in the face, right in the middle of Blockbuster Video, when the girl marched up to her sister and started screaming “kike dyke” at the top of her lungs. The punch was so hard and so fierce, according to the clerk, that you could actually hear the girl’s nose crack. To this day, her nose is still twice as large as her face; too bad her parents couldn’t afford Dr. Nussbaum, he does excellent work. That kind of impetuous behavior is normal for Tracy; she’s always been the black sheep of the family, of our community really (not counting Rabbi Neulander, of course); she’s the only child with orangey-red, curly hair while her sisters’ are dark and straight, not completing college, spending some time in jail for cocaine possession, and worst of all, marrying the Catholic Italian chef (after divorcing the Jewish lawyer) and choosing not to let her parents help them out financially. But Eva and Tracy have always been close. Eva’s confided things in Tracy that she could never tell her parents or Danielle – like in the eleventh grade when she was caught smoking a joint in the ladies room and got suspended. According to our source, Tracy picked her up and dropped her at the mall for two whole weeks so her parents would never find out. Or when Eva was seventeen and certain she had a thing for girls instead of boys. That was when she was the ultra popular senior, scared to death of what others would think, and off and on dating Mike Lees (kind of ironic if you think about it now). Eva, we assume, thought Tracy would show her how to like boys or at least yell bloody murder and threaten to tell their parents until she promised never to think such thoughts again. Eva was sure Tracy would judge her, think she was disgusting, hate her. But instead, Tracy gave her a fake ID and took her to Sisters, a lesbian bar in Philly. Eva apparently had her first real kiss that night. It’s funny though. When Eva’s around her friends or out and about where have you, she could be Danielle’s twin. Same attitude. Same highfalutin behavior. Same rumors floating about the community. But when she’s with her family, it’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She’s just sweet as her grandma’s Jewish apple cake. So you can see how the Baranski sisters are like a bottle of fine red wine; our gossip mill just can’t get enough.

54 ::: As soon as Eva Baranski walked through The Salmon Grill’s door, she must have smelled burnt eggs, stale home fries, and scrapple. Disgusting. And if you knew what was in scrapple, you would think so too. She glanced around at the few occupied booths. A fat woman with glasses, wearing a leopard-print button down blouse, sitting alone, sipping coffee and reading a romance novel was in the far right corner and a group of high school aged boys were in the smoking section, puffing on Marlboro’s and using spoons to sling-shot scrambled eggs across the dining area. We were sitting in a booth up front, anxious to watch Eva in action on her first day at her first job; and when she saw us, Eva turned styrofoam-cup white. “You’re late, Eva,” said a man behind the register. We hadn’t noticed him standing there watching her. He was too tall and too skinny, with a goatee and colored contacts in. No one has purple eyes; not even if they swear to god they do. It was like looking at a goddamn plum with a cornea. This man was trying too hard to look mid twenties when it was quite obvious he was probably late thirties. Maybe even early forties. We suspected that the gray suit he wore was purchased at the Five and Dime twenty years ago. And then there was his tie with smiley faces all over it. Oy vey. “Sorry.” Eva popped her gum, staring this funny looking man in his funny colored eyes. The man shook his head, his violet lenses making their way down Eva’s body. “I’m Chris. Your manager.” He said this as if he were asking Eva if that was true. Eva shrugged and popped her gum again. Loud. ::: We weren’t there at the end of Eva’s shift, but we heard from some regulars that her hair was disheveled, her mascara was all over her cheeks, and mint chocolate chip ice cream mixed with waffle batter covered her uniform. She smelled like sweat and cheese, and she was complaining of fatigue, pit stains, and calloused feet. Eva said she couldn’t remember how many times she was asked if there was a senior citizen discount. And she wasn’t sure how she was going to pay off all of her fines when people tipped her, on average, ten percent of their checks. A group of five college-aged students dressed in business attire actually left her fifty cents and a pamphlet that was titled “Jesus Christ: He Can Help.”

55 Rosemary, one of the other waitresses, offered to give Eva a lift home in her ancient, yellow Oldsmobile. “It’s all right,” she said, “I live twenty minutes down the road. Five more out of my way ain’t no biggie.” Roe, as she had introduced herself to us earlier that day, was probably in her mid-forties, with a short blonde bob and a potentially nice looking face (she would need to use something to enhance her fair coloring and bring out her blue eyes, we thought, and get rid of all those wrinkles). She was slender and petite and talked just how you’d imagine a south Jersey diner waitress to speak – with a thick accent that was nearly indecipherable because she chewed her gum like a cow would cud. We were able to piece together the car ride from what Meryl Cohen got from her husband, Dr. Bernard Cohen, Eva’s shrink and the best tennis player at our country club, and from Roe while she waited on us the following morning. “So, what’s someone like you doing working at a place like this,” Roe said when they got into the car. Eva was exhausted and stinky; she just wanted to get home and into the tub. “Real world experience or something like that,” Eva said, the side of her face pressed against the window. “Is it always this busy?” “Nah, today was nothing.” Roe put the car into gear and slowly drove out of the lot. “People are down the shore this weekend. Come Monday, there will be a half hour wait to even get a table.” Eva rolled her eyes and rummaged through her purse in search of a cigarette. “You know where you’re going? It’s in Siena.” She found a Marlboro and lit it, using the last of her energy to manually roll the window down. “Yeah. My sister-in-law works for a family that lives in your development. Real nice people, ‘parently. Even nicer house, though. Mansion or something.” “Eh, the houses are all right. Nothing spectacular.” Right about now Eva was wondering if Roe’s sister-in-law was her family’s maid. Roe slowed the car down as they approached a stop sign. She looked over at Eva, almost looking right through her. “Maybe to you they ain’t nothing,” Roe said, almost mouthing the words. “Maybe to you.” :::

56 Before we forget, you need to know who Meredith Feinberg is. Eva’s been trying to get rid of Meri for years, ever since their high school prom where Meri told half the football team that Eva liked to ‘mow the grass’ if you will. But despite masks she may wear on occasion and everything else, Eva is a tender person at heart. So when Meri would call or just show up at Eva’s house, she was never turned away. Eva said to people who questioned their friendship (and that happened a lot), “Meri doesn’t really have any other friends, and besides, she really doesn’t mean any harm. She just doesn’t think before she speaks.” Meri was an ugly version of Julia Roberts, except she was only around five feet tall, her hair was bleached blonde and her lips were larger (if you can believe that). When she pouted, it seemed as though those lips engulfed her whole face. And Meri Feinberg pouted a lot. If she didn’t get her way or if she saw someone wearing a more expensive outfit or even if she was thinking too hard about what time it was, she’d puff out her crimson lips and arch her brows inward. Her eyes would squint shut, and if you looked at just the right moment, it was like a Keebler Elf was standing right there in front of you. Minus the little green booties, of course. Meri proclaimed one night at Top Dog Bar – actually, it was the night of Eva’s birthday and run-in with the giant truck owner – in her throaty I-smoke-three-packs-of-cigarettes-a-day voice, that she pouted because when a boy sees her do so (and, according to Rachel Greenberg’s kid who cocktails at Top Dog, this is a direct quote), “he can’t help but notice my big, luscious lips, and then he thinks about sex because everyone knows that big lipped girls give delicious blow jobs.” Then she took a sip from her frozen umbrella drink, crossed her legs, and laughed from the belly. Meri is also the only Jewish person we know that wears a swastika around her neck. We should add the disclaimer that Meri lives on the west side of town. Right after we all broke the fast last Yom Kippur at the Baranski house and were busy shoveling lox and whitefish down our throats, Meri explained to Mrs. Baranski, who shouted Yiddish at her and did the Fiddler on the Roof “pooh, pooh, pooh” the first time she saw the golden colored, plastic necklace hanging there in her kitchen, that she wears it to reclaim its meaning. “Even though I’m not all that religious, it’s, like, common knowledge that most people hate Jews,” Meri said, trying to sound intellectual and matter-of-factly, gently fingering the

57 swastika. “And by wearing this KKK thingy, it’s like I’m saying a big ‘fuck you’ to all those hateful sorts of people. You know?” Eva’s mother frowned and looked at her daughter, who was sitting at the kitchen table picking at chocolate macaroons. “Eva, dear, can I see you in the dining room for a minute?” She said this in an extraordinarily sweet tone. Before Mrs. Baranski could pull her daughter aside to officially declare that this girl was not allowed to set foot under her roof again (like the rest of us, Mrs. Baranski never liked Meri to begin with), Meri explained to Eva’s mother, right there in her own house – filled with half of our congregation – that the new purple leather couch in the living room wasn’t quite tasteful. “It’s a bit much, don’t you think?” Meri said, pointing towards Mrs. Baranski’s newest and most favorite piece of furniture and flashing a sly smile, all lips. Then, Meri pouted. ::: Let’s get back to the diner. We went there instead of Pages Diner for the rest of that summer to check things out, make sure Eva was doing okay and such. And Roe had been right. On Monday, The Salmon Grill was swamped with customers. Families crowded around the waiting area yelling at children or screaming into cell phones. Tuesday through Friday was the same. Eva couldn’t even get a break to smoke a cigarette during her shift. She was just too busy running eight or nine table stations, dealing with rude, mothball smelling old people and, while working the graveyard shift that Thursday, drunk, blonde cheerleader-type girls flirting with their prick, football player boyfriends. None of whom, we suspect, were Jewish. The following Saturday night, however, the diner was nearly empty. We were in Roe’s section, and Eva had one table: a young couple back in the smoking section holding hands and sharing a chocolate milkshake. The girl’s long auburn hair was parted down the center, hippie style. The boy’s wire-rimmed glasses were too big for his face, making his eyes bug out. They played footsie while the girl innocently giggled at whatever he was talking about. Eva was behind the counter watching them, lighting a cigarette. “How cute,” Roe said, nodding back towards Eva’s table as she walked over to fill empty

58 salt and pepper shakers. Eva scrunched her face up and exhaled the smoke loudly. “Whatever.” She started examining her fingernails. Roe was quiet for a moment. Then, she placed the shakers down in front of Eva. “Make yourself useful and fill these,” Roe said as she took the Marlboro from Eva’s hand, smashed it out in the ashtray, and turned to walk back into the kitchen. “Excuse me?” Eva’s mouth must have gone dry because it was wide open for a good ten seconds. Roe turned back around and walked right up to Eva, inches from her face. “Look here little girl. Ever since you got here, you done nothing but the bare minimum. And your attitude, well, what can I say about that.” “Who the hell do you think you are!” Eva screamed. That’s about the time that Chris walked up to the two women with an ugly scowl. He said, “Excuse me, ladies. Can I see you both in the kitchen?” and grabbed Roe and Eva by their shoulders and escorted them behind the swinging aluminum doors. Now, since we had become regulars at the diner, Roe told us what happened behind those double doors, and it went something like this. First, Eva looked around the alley of the kitchen – there was food on the floor, the Spanish dishwashers were having a water fight with the hoses by the sink, and the cooks were trying to clean up their areas for the night. It was greasy and hot, and Eva said she wanted to cash out and go home. “What the hell was that all about?” Chris asked. That night, he was wearing an olive green suit, and he was probably standing with his arms crossed, tapping his long, slender foot. We bet he looked like the Jolly Green Giant from those pea commercials a few years back. Eva started to whine, pointing her index finger at Roe and saying something along the lines of “she started it.” Roe’s arms were crossed. She was shaking her head back and forth but didn’t say anything. “Enough.” Chris wiped his forehead with his handkerchief because he is the sort of guy that would carry one around with him. “You know what, just go home, the both of you.” Eva huffed and turned to grab her bag, presumably glad to leave. She almost certainly heard Roe

59 whisper into Chris’s ear something about not wanting to lose her job and she was so sorry. It wouldn’t happen again. “Eva,” Chris said, “get here an hour early tomorrow. You need to clean the salad station.” But Eva pretended she didn’t hear him and bolted for the exit. ::: Uncle Meyer died the following week, and most of us attended his graveside service. Meyer was like an elder in our community, always at temple on Saturdays and at the Jewish Men’s Club meetings on Tuesdays. Apparently he had discovered Viagra and, as Bob Eubanks would have said on The Newlywed Game, was making whoopee right before he closed his eyes for the last time. He was 93-years-old, bald as an infant with ears almost as big as his long, oval head, and he was a self-proclaimed ladies man. His girlfriend, Dorothy, was a hag of a woman who was hefty all over and walked with a limp. She wore deep burgundy lipstick and Eva’s late Aunt Sara’s diamonds. She was in her early 70’s and supposedly had buried three previous boyfriends within the last few years, Eva’s mother had whispered prior to the service beginning. “She’s a slut,” Mrs. Baranski added, nodding her head and blotting her eyes with a Kleenex. “Christ, will you look at her; she probably crushed him.” Eva’s family sat huddled in the first two rows. Mrs. Baranski narrowed her eyes and shook her head ‘no’ when Dorothy tried to sit in the front also. We all knew that Dorothy was getting all of Meyer’s money (and the jewelry), and who could blame Mrs. Baranski for never wanting to see her again. Any woman that could take advantage of her poor, old Uncle Meyer was a gold digging hussy. Enough said. The Rabbi began saying The Mourner’s Kaddish and those of us who knew it chanted along. No one in Eva’s immediate family said a word. “Why is the coffin made of wood?” Vincenzo asked Mr. Baranski as he pointed at the pine box displayed in front of them. “Why didn’t you get him a real coffin?” “God damn, Vinnie. Don’t you know nothing? That’s what you do when you’re Orthodox. Go back to the Earth. For Christ’s sake, Enzo, you should know these things by

60 now.” Everyone always thought it was funny that Vincenzo had all these different names. We all wondered which one he preferred to be called. “Hush,” Eva’s mother leaned over her husband and motioned for Vincenzo to come closer. “He only knew the answer, dear, because he asked the same question when we got here.” Then, she looked at her husband and touched her finger to his lips. “You stop,” she said. Along with Danielle, Tracy, and Eva, we watched all of this from behind our dark sunglasses. “You sure know how to pick ‘em,” Danielle said. “That’s what you get for marrying an uncircumcised immigrant.” You could tell Danielle was pleased with her comment by the way her lips turned inward. Just slightly. We, of course, were very amused since we had no idea about that uncircumcised business. Tracy’s expression was classic, like she was trying to do long division in her head. Her glasses fell to the tip of her nose, and her pupils dilated. Her face started to steam like a boiling kettle of water, and her pale skin slowly turned redder and redder, almost matching the hue of her hair. Out of nowhere, Eva spoke. “Shut up, Danielle,” she said. “You’re rotten, you know that?” Danielle’s mouth dropped. Her eyebrows lifted. Eva had never gotten in the middle of her sisters’ fights before, let alone ever said something like that to Danielle. Tracy smiled at Eva. “Good job, kid,” she said. Then, she looked over at Danielle and stuck out her tongue. ::: Weeks went by. Long, sweltering Jersey summer weeks. The kind of sweltering that if your car had a leather interior and you were wearing shorts, your legs would stick to the seat, burning your thighs as you sat down, and there would be noticeable sweat marks once you stood up. Even if the air conditioner was on full blast, you’d still sweat like an Evian bottle left out in the sun. Those are the kind of weeks that went by. Slowly. And Eva continued to walk up hill to and from work. Even though Roe offer her rides

61 home, Eva never accepted. She’d rather walk, she said, you know, exercise. Over time, Roe got the idea and pretty much stopped talking to Eva all together, except to occasionally tell her that table 25 was waiting to place an order or that so and so sitting at table 54 needed more ketchup for his burger. All the other employees, whom Eva had never really gotten to know in the first place – and gave us terrible service, by the way – never bothered with her either. Eva obviously couldn’t stand Roe. Maybe it was because Roe was incessantly nice to her despite the salt and pepper shaker incident, or how Roe always was – well – there, standing by one of her tables in that ridiculous black and white uniform with a drink tray resting on her hip, chatting with guests about the weather or how her husband got a promotion at Wawa or how her daughter was entering high school this fall. But most of all, Eva hated her job almost as much as we hated the food. The lousy tips and the lousy customers – well, except for us – and the lousy diner, where the coffee was only luke warm at best, and where they served frozen Philly cheese steaks (and if you’re from the area, you know that’s just sacrilegious). Eva never wasted time talking with her tables any more than she had too; the faster she got their food orders out, she told us, the faster they would leave. But it was the first of August now, and Mr. Baranski told Nina Schwartz, who was at the dealership one Saturday looking at new cars for her son, that if Eva finished out the month, he would subsidize the rest of her fines and she could quit the job. He had asked Eva what she would do with her life now that she had finished college and didn’t have to work at The Salmon Grill much longer. Eva winked and said that she didn’t know anything about all that, but what she did know was that she loved her daddy, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing his cheek. Apparently, it worked like a charm. ::: Remember Meri Feinberg? Well, she walked into the Salmon Grill at half past ten on a Sunday evening in late August. She wore Juicy jeans that were too tight causing a little pudge from her stomach to hang over the sides. She had on a black tube top that barely supported her large breasts and her face was all pink and glittery. She had with her a tall, muscular man that was tan and dressed in all black. Johnny Cash and an oompa-loompa, we thought, how very west

62 side. “We’ll sit in the smoking section,” Meri told Chris, who was playing host for the evening. We noticed him do a double take when he saw the swastika. Then we watched Eva run into the kitchen – almost knocking Roe, who was carrying a tray of hot food – over. She swung the aluminum doors open a few minutes later. Her face looked fresh, like she just applied makeup, and her ponytail was pulled tight on the top of her head. Eva hesitantly walked towards Meri’s table carrying a pitcher of water. Her eyes were lowered. “Eva,” Meri said, waving her hand in the air. “Over here.” “What are you doing here?” Eva gnawed on her bottom lip. Meri pouted. “No, no. I think the appropriate question is what are you doing here?” Meri looked from the top of Eva’s head down to her white, orthopedic-like shoes. Then, she glanced over at the man in black, batting her lashes like goddamn Scarlet O’Hara. Eva rolled her eyes at all this. So did we. “This,” Meri dragged out all the syllables of the word as if she couldn’t remember his name and was trying to stall until it came to her, “is Joe. We’re gonna go to Delaware Avenue tonight. You interested?” “I gotta work,” Eva said, and started to pour water in their glasses. “You know what you want?” “I can’t believe the rumors were true. That you actually work in this joint. For Christ’s sake, Eva, look at yourself.” She reached over and touched her apron. “Look at this schmattah. Maybe you’ll start a new trend.” Meri laughed. Then she pouted. Again. “Are you ready to order or not?” “Joe, this is the girl I was telling you about.” Meri said loudly and pointed at Eva, right at her face, like she wasn’t even standing there, like she was invisible. “This is the girl that used to fool around with that sex offender kid back in high school and then turned into a dyke.” Meri looked up and right into Eva’s eyes, cocking her head to the side a bit. “What was his name

63 again sweetie?” Our mouths dropped. Like the other customers around us, we put down our forks and spoons and looked over to where Eva was standing, our stares probably more fierce and burning than that sweltering sun that made your legs stick to your car’s seat. Then, our soft whispering and nudging began. We imagine Eva Baranski couldn’t feel her legs. She gripped the water pitcher tighter, her knuckles turned white. Eva later told us that she wanted to pour the whole lot of it right over Meri’s head and watch it trickle down her face. Eva bet that would get Meri to stop pouting. But before she had a chance to do that, Roe walked up behind her and kneeled down by Meri’s side. “That wasn’t very nice,” Roe said, squatting with a drink tray between her knees. “I could hear you all the way from the kitchen.” Meri’s eyes grew wide and made their way down then up Roe’s body. She snorted and lit a Marlboro, puffed her lips into an oval shape and, with meticulous precision, blew the smoke into Roe’s face. Roe stood up leisurely, coughed, and wiped her nose with her palm. She just stood there for a moment, all the customers’ eyes on her. Eva still hadn’t moved either, but her cheeks were awfully flushed. Then, Roe grabbed the water pitcher out of Eva’s hand and dumped its contents out. Right over Meri’s head. ::: Now, we don’t know for sure what happened when Roe took Eva home that night. We never saw Roe again, and Eva has never talked about it, not even to Dr. Cohen. But from the bits and pieces we have heard from various sources, some reliable and some not so reliable, we’ve somehow come to the consensus that it transpired into the following happy ending. As she sat in Roe’s ancient, yellow Oldsmobile, the car easing its way out of The Salmon Grill’s lot, Eva Baranski pressed her palm against the steamed over window then reached to adjust the air conditioning vent. “Why?” Eva asked. “Why’d you do it? Why’d you stick up for me?” Roe didn’t say

64 anything. Her hands gripped the wheel at ten and two and the car accelerated a bit. Eva started interweaving her fingers and cracked her knuckles. “I’m sorry you got fired.” “Me too,” Roe said and slowed down for a stop sign. “Me too.” For the remainder of the car ride, all you could hear was the sound of the tires thumping along the black road and the crickets singing among the large blades of grassy field they passed. Lightening bugs swam through the dense air, and right as Roe pulled into Eva’s driveway, her car made a funny sound, stalled, then died. She fiddled with the ignition for a minute, but it was fruitless. Eva called Triple A from her cell. While they waited, Roe told Eva how she really wanted to quit The Salmon Grill for some time but needed the money for groceries and such, but right now her husband was doing well at Wawa, so money wouldn’t be an issue for a couple of months. By then, she’d find another job. She was sure of it. Eva listened to Roe. Listened to every word she said. She was sure Roe would find another job, too. About an hour later, Triple A came and towed the car away. As the Oldsmobile disappeared down Eva Baranski’s street, Roe in the front seat of the tow truck, Eva remained on the curb by the mailbox, her legs stretched out and her arms behind her for support. She looked up at the sky, trying to figure out which star was the north one, her fingers playing with the damp grass. She picked a dandelion out of the dirt, put it to her nose for a moment, twirling it round and round, then kissed it goodnight. ::: So, you want to know what really happened to everyone. Even though all investigations would lead to the conclusion that the sex was consensual, Mike Lees name was never cleared. He was always known as that sex offender (his name always said in a whisper), and he never had a meaningful relationship with man or woman because who wants to date someone who supposedly raped a little boy. People always believe what they perceive to be true. Mike threw himself from a balcony (the penthouse one at the Hilton, coincidently) the night before Christmas and a few days before he turned twenty-five. What a waste. We’ve gone back to eating at Pages in lieu of The Salmon Grill. Pete, the bartender there, is still a Patriots fan. Accordingly, his tips still stink.

65 And then there’s Eva, who decided to tell her parents about her girlfriend, April, and their plans to have a commitment ceremony. This was a few years after her employment with The Salmon Grill, but right before she opened a coffee shop on South Street in Philly. Not a place where a large coffee is really a small and a small doesn’t really exist, but a quaint, little shop where customers are known by name and served in oversized, pastel ceramic mugs while they sit in recliner type chairs, reading the newspaper or listening to NPR on headphones, and every Thursday there is an open mic night. Eva’s parents didn’t speak with her for a whole year – starting sometime after her confession but before they realized April wasn’t just a phase. But as soon as her shop began doing tremendously well (The South Jersey Magazine even did a write up on Eva’s success), they changed their minds about the silent treatment. Eva never saw Roe again, either. But we heard from Greta Stein who owns three Wawa’s that she got a job at the one her husband worked at, and the two moved up the ladder – quickly – and now are both regional directors of operation. They moved in to a lovely home in a well-to- do neighborhood and were able to afford to send their daughter to the college of her choice. And a few days after the water incident, Eva wrote Meri Feinberg a seven page e-mail outlining every reason why she hated her (Eva gave a copy to Dr. Cohen who gave it to his wife which is how we stumbled upon it). She concluded the message by telling Meri to take a good, long look in the mirror and reevaluate her life. Just make sure you wear shoes, Eva wrote, so you don’t cut your feet when the mirror breaks. Needless to say, Eva never saw her again either. Although, as a P.S., we did hear that Meri was thrown out of her house after her parents caught her and the man in black doing things they had seen once in a porno they have never admitted to watching. The man in black knocked Meri up a few weeks after that, left her to raise the kid on her own, and supposedly has a one-man show somewhere on the Vegas strip. And we heard from Eva’s mother (who heard from some of the women that lunch at the synagogue after Saturday services), that Dorothy died a slow, miserable death after getting hit on the side of the road by a man driving a black pickup truck that ran a stop sign. She allegedly left all of Uncle Meyer’s money (and the jewelry) to the man she had met the day after her uncle’s funeral – the day of his memorial service at the temple. “I told you she was a slut,” Mrs. Baranski said.

66 Eva and April go to weekly Sunday dinners at Tracy and Vinnie’s (his preferred nickname). Tracy hit it big – jackpot big – in Atlantic City one night at around four in the morning. She gave some of it away to charity, but invested wisely and will probably never have to work again. She was a computer programmer, by the way, and was always being suspended for attitude problems. Go figure. Now a days, she does extensive work with youths addicted to cocaine, pro bono of course, and she opened a seafood restaurant for Vinnie down the shore, which had always been his dream. They split their time between their home in Cherry Hill and a condo in Margate. Danielle and Paul got a divorce right around the time of Tracy’s win. Turned out Paul, who was a mathematics professor at a small college in south Jersey, wasn’t only teaching his female students how to solve for x, y, and z. Danielle milked him for every last cent (before she put flyers all around the college campus with his picture followed by some very ugly words), and she moved back home with her parents, taking over Eva’s old room. She is currently dating Chris, Eva’s former manager, for lack of other options. And she believes that his eyes are really, truly purple.

67 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Samantha Brooke Levy was born and raised in southern New Jersey where she graduated from Rowan University in 2003, cum laude, with a BA in English literature. Levy will earn her Master of Arts from Florida State University in the Fall of 2005 where she will continue working towards a PhD. She currently holds a teaching assistantship, and the performance of her work has been part of the Florida State University Warehouse Reading Series.

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