Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2005 Like Love: Stories Samantha Brooke Levy Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] 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.