by Amy Sohn
“I just want to feel it,” I said, getting down on my knees and reaching for his buckle. “I won’t even put the whole thing in. I’ll just…pick.”
“Maybe I want to connect with you,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders and pushing me back. “A man can’t live through his pud every minute of every day.”
“Sure he can!” I cried. I knew I was making a fool of myself but the less he wanted it the more I wanted to convince him. I was trying to apply the rules of doing well in school to my love life, like formulating a clear argument, showing real stick-to-itiveness, and focusing hard on a task at hand, yet it didn’t work as well for Powell as it did for my grades.
“Rachel,” Powell said. “It’s good not to do it sometimes. It means I respect you.”
“Couldn’t you respect me just a little bit less?” I wailed.
“What’s going on with you?” he said, lifting me up and plopping me down next to him. He had a hint of bite to his voice, which I didn’t like.
“Don’t you think I look good? Didn’t you like my boots?”
“I love them,” he said. “I wasn’t prepared for you tonight. We’ll have a rain check.”
“I don’t want a rain check,” I whined.
“You can’t get everything you want all a the time.”
“You’re the only thing in my life that’s good. I don’t see why I can’t have you when I want you.”
“I’m not a mollusk,” he said. “I’m an octopus.” I realized in a way it would be good if it didn’t work out between Powell and me; I wouldn’t have to figure out what to put on his grave. “What I mean is, I got obligations that predate you.”
“I don’t want you to predate me. I want you to date me.”
“I should a seen that one coming,” he said. I rose to my feet. A girl can only take so much humiliation before she rings her own gong.
He stood with the exaggerated effort of an exhausted fat old man and walked me to the door. “I’ll call you, OK?” he said, with a sigh.
I nodded but my throat was tight and spastic. It was a dangerous sign, the sigh. The sighs are the beginning of the end. I wished I could inhale it out of the air but it had already flitted away.
The Elana Complex
ACOUPLE days later my mom left me a message to remind me about her first Koffee Klatsch. I wasn’t going to go because I thought it would be too torturous, but by eight o’clock my guilt mechanism kicked in and I decided to go. In the living room I found a group that resembled the cast of Mixed Nuts. There was a fat Latino guy who looked about thirty, a short, nervous-seeming Semitic woman in her fifties wearing a shmatte, a couple of spacey-looking folkie men—slightly paunchy but oblivious to their decline, and Nina, who seemed delighted to be one of the coolest people around.
The only semi-cute guy was a biker-style guy in his thirties with long greasy hair in a ponytail, the kind who felt the need to touch it way too often. They were all holding decorative paper coffee cups in their hands, the kind with attached handles that fold up from the cup. The Latino guy had an electric-blue barbell in his hand and he was saying, “The author of Flatland proposed that time was the fourth dimension. If the first dimension is a line, the second a plane, and the third a cube, then the fourth is a hypercube, or time.”
“What does that look like?” said Shmatte Woman.
“That’s the thing,” he said. “We don’t have the framework to conceptualize it.”
He passed her the barbell. “I think the meaning of time changes over time,” she said. “When you’re a child it passes very slowly and then when you get older it passes more quickly.”
She passed the barbell to Greasy Hair. “What about the notion that time is cyclical?” he asked. “Why do we say ‘I feel like I’ve known you forever’ when we meet someone we could love?”
“That’s such an interesting question, Ray,” my mom said.
“Is it possible that we have met that person in another life? When I was fifteen a girl was transferred into my school whom I was convinced I’d known before. We gravitated toward each other at recess, like there was a magnet between us, and she told me that she was the reincarnated spirit of a thirteenth-century Egyptian princess and that I was the spirit of her first love, a soldier who had died on the battlefield.” Everyone giggled. “I know it sounds strange but I believed her. We stayed friends for the rest of our lives and we still keep in touch.”
The room got hushed and they all glanced at each other nervously, waiting to see the others’ reactions. The Spanish guy put his hands by his face and moved them in waves like in Wayne’s World, and everyone burst out laughing.
“Before we go on,” my mom said, “I want to introduce you all to my daughter, Rachel.” Her face was glowing and excited, like she was proud that I had come, that I had taken an interest in what she was doing.
Then there were a few utterances of “I didn’t know you had a daughter” and “You two look so much alike,” which was the worst thing anyone could say to a mother-daughter combination.
“Did you want to add anything?” my mom asked.
“I just want to know what the barbell’s for,” I said.
“You missed the beginning,” she said with a hint of annoyance. “It’s the talking stick. It’s a Native American tradition, to insure that everyone gets equal speaking time.”
Greasy Hair passed it along to Nina, who launched into a monologue about her love for Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. The meeting went on another forty-five minutes but for some reason time seemed to move much more slowly.
At the end of the meeting everyone milled around and chatted, coming up to my mom and telling her how great she was and how glad they were that she’d started the group. She ate it up, throwing her head back and laughing too hard at their jokes, nodding so vigorously it was like she was teaching six-year-olds. She was trading my father in for a bunch of loony tunes.
Shmatte Woman spotted me staring and said, “That’s so great that Sue’s your mom.”
“Yeah,” I nodded.
“I was just thinking how much the neighborhood needed something like this and then I saw your mom’s sign in Cobble Hill Park. She’s a real visionary.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far.” She frowned as though not sure how someone as nice as my mother could have possibly birthed a bitch like me, and moved away.
You don’t get it! I wanted to shout. She’s keeping my father out of the house by doing all this and he started boning my former best friend! Normally I’d be much more supportive but in light of what’s going on it’s a little hard to root for her newfound interests! but instead I just went into the kitchen to see what was in the fridge.
By the time all the guests had gone it was nine-thirty. I helped my mom clear up the cups and food. She was so high from it all it seemed like she was on speed. She kept clucking and replaying the highlights of the conversation, like she’d just had some amazing first date. When we finally collapsed on the couch she clapped her hands together and said, “I can’t believe how well it went!”
“Me neither,” I said.
“I had no idea we’d get that kind of turnout. It’s so strange, all those people in the living room. It reminded me of when Dad and I used to entertain more. I like this house full.” She got a sentimental, nostalgic face.
“Are you having a hot flash?” I said.
“No,” she said, annoyed. “I was just thinking about what different choices you and I made in our lives.”
“What do you mean?” I said, waiting for her to lay in on me for dropping out of school.
“When you graduated college you worked, you supported yourself. You applied to rabbinical school. I got married at twenty-one and by the time I was your age I’d already had you.”
“Yeah, but then you went back to teaching. It’s not like you were a housewife.”
“It’s just that sometimes I feel like I have to make up for lost time. I wish I’d done more. Sometimes I eve
n wish I’d stayed single longer.”
This was not what I needed to hear. “No you don’t,” I said. “Singlehood is overrated.”
“But look what a wonderful time you’re having! You’re dating a celebrity!”
“He’s not a—”
“Sure he is. I never dated anyone important. Dad was the only guy I ever—you know.”
“Why did you just tell me that?” I asked belligerently.
“So you know how lucky you are.”
“Are you thinking of leaving Dad?”
“No!”
“Did you ever want to leave him,” I said, “like when I was a teenager and you guys used to fight all the time?”
“Those were not good days,” she said, and her eyes clouded over. When I was fourteen I came home from a friend’s birthday party in the Village to find my dad fuming in the living room about some computer problem, and my mom in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet with a Kleenex in her hand. She had obviously been sobbing from the fight but when I asked if she was OK she tried to pretend nothing was wrong, just wiped her face and said, “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“What did he do to you?” I had asked.
“It’s really not your concern,” she had said gruffly, and I had walked out feeling doubly slapped. You can’t stick your nose into the business of your parents’ marriage because neither one will be grateful for your assistance. Their bond trumps yours with each, their privacy trumps their need to cry on someone’s shoulder.
“Did you ever think of cheating on him?”
“Rachel!”
“It’s a fair question.”
“It’s not my style,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I’m in it for the long haul.” She said it with such resign I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad.
“Have you ever worried that he might?”
“Dad?” She laughed so hard and threw her head back so violently I thought she was going to topple the couch. “He’d have to find someone to cheat with.” Just as I’d feared. My mother’s lack of faith in my dad’s prowess would be her own undoing.
“Where is he anyway?” I said, looking for signs of suspicion in her eyes.
“Fixing somebody’s computer. I told him he’s going to have to start hauling in some more income so all the financial responsibility doesn’t fall on me. This week alone he got three jobs on different PCs in the neighborhood.” He was definitely working a few PCs all right, but not the ones she was thinking about.
As much as I felt like she deserved to know the truth, how could I tell her? If my mom found out it would all fall apart. You can’t mess around on your wife when she’s in a conversation group; she’s too amenable to change. They’d have a Koffee Klatsch on infidelity and with the help of Fat Spanish Guy and Shmatte Woman she’d weigh the pros and cons of divorce, and once she left him she’d change their Koffee Klatsch into group therapy so she could cry on their shoulders week after week.
Right around this time the Pacific Street Bum would die and my dad would replace him as the bearded fattie on the corner smoking cigs and begging for change. I’d try to forget he was ever related to me as Powell and I stepped over him each night on the way to my apartment. To cope with the strain on my soul I’d resort to spending more and more time with Powell, and sink into an S&M thing with him so dark and evil it would be a miracle if he didn’t kill me.
“Why all these questions all of a sudden?” she asked, squinting at me.
“No reason.”
“Are you having problems with Hank?”
“No.” I hadn’t confided in her about my love life since I was a teenager. Somewhere along the way I just stopped trusting her, needing her, and though I sensed her hurt at this, there was nothing I could do.
“So when can we meet him?” she asked perkily. “I mean officially? Do you want to invite him for Rosh Hashanah dinner?”
How could I tell her I wasn’t even sure I’d see him again? Or that even if I did, the chance of Hank Powell being up for a family sit-down on the Jewish New Year was about as great as him writing a screenplay about a happy marriage?
I wanted Powell to be the kind of guy who was interested in where I came from but I also knew that the whole reason I’d been drawn to him in the first place was because he wasn’t.
“He’s NJ,” I said.
“So? He can still eat with us. What—is he allergic to brisket?”
“I’ll ask him if he’s free,” I said, but as we looked at each other we both knew I wouldn’t.
ON my way back home I bumped into my father. I didn’t recognize him at first even though he was coming right toward me, so when he stopped in front of me with a big grin I leapt back like he was a mugger.
“That’s right!” he sang, touching his face. “You haven’t seen my beard! Whaddaya think?”
“I dunno,” I said. He probably did it as soon as he got home from Shtup Number One. Liz put her hand on his mildly retarded postcoital face and said, “You’d look so much better clean-shaven, Mr. B.” He went home like some sort of brainwashed Stepford Wife and took out the clipper, the stench of Liz all over his hands.
He was wearing a batik T-shirt with a print of an empty squash court and two racquets in the air and he had on headphones, his CD player tucked into his shorts. I could hear something thrumming softly from inside them.
The music was energetic and enormously catchy and as it continued I realized it sounded familiar. “What are you listening to?” I said, as he slipped his headphones over my head.
The vocalist had a hoarse voice and poor diction, and he was singing through a filter something about walking out a door. I yanked the headphones off and threw them back at him. “You’re listening to the Strokes?”
“I love them,” he said. “I’ve been playing this nonstop.”
They had to be fucking. There was no other way.
“How do you know about the Strokes?” I said.
“Ira played a sample last week on TAL,” he said. Ira was Ira Glass, my father’s idol, and TAL was This American Life, a show my father could not listen to five minutes of without crying. “Did you know their lead singer is John Cassavetes’s son?”
“Casablancas,” I sighed. Some things never changed.
This was horrific. Liz was far more dangerous than I deemed possible. Up until now my dad was totally uneducable in matters of popular culture. He thought Courtney Love was an actress on Friends and was convinced Marilyn Manson was a woman.
I smelled something funny in the air. It was vodka. She was turning him into an indie alkie. My father was morphing into Jack White. “Have you been drinking?” I asked.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. Whenever he lied he did this thing my mom and I had dubbed GHM: Gratuitous Head Motion. Usually it was over something dumb—he’d exaggerate a story someone had told him at work, or say my mom had said something she hadn’t said at all. Usually we got a big laugh out of it—we’d say, “Are you making that up?” and he’d say, “Well, maybe just a little.” But now that he was doing GHM over something grave I wanted to choke him.
“Then why do you reek of vodka?”
“OK, you got me,” he said. “I had a drink at Brawta.”
Liz was using my restaurant suggestions for the purpose of wooing my dad. It didn’t get any more evil. “Mom said you were fixing a PC.”
“I was. This was afterwards. It was the first paying job I’d gotten in weeks so I decided to reward myself. Is that all right with you? Is that OK?”
His eyes were so hostile, and mean. I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and tell him to stop using career advancement as his foil. I wanted to scream at him to get a blow-up doll or better lube, that my mom was a good person even if she was welcoming strangers into our living room, that he should wait it out and think long-term the way he did with his mutual funds.
But when I opened my mouth I just shut it again. They said cheating men never admitted until the wife had concrete evidence. If I confronted him he�
�d just deny it till the end, like the husband in Gaslight, and try to convince me it was all a hallucination. Or what if he said he was glad I knew, he was going to tell me anyway, he was planning to leave my mom and run off with Liz? What if she was already pregnant? It could all be her sick Hurleyesque plot to get herself knocked up before thirty-five.
I tried sending him a subliminal message, “Stop the affair, stop the affair,” because I’d read in Laura Day’s Practical Intuition that that kind of thing could work, but he didn’t seem to be getting my brainwaves.
“What does Mom think about your new look?” I asked.
“She says she doesn’t recognize me but I think that means she likes it.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
“I can’t believe this,” he said. “You’re the only one that’s had anything negative to say about it. Everyone else has been telling me what an improvement it is!”
“It’s not an improvement,” I said. “I barely recognize you.”
“That’s perfectly understandable,” he said, pinching my ear. “But once you get used to it, you won’t remember me the old way at all.”
AT quarter to six on Erev Rosh Hashanah, I was changing into my clothes when I heard Liz blasting Nico’s version of “These Days.” Those horrible triplets that sounded like the goose-stepping anthem of an injured cow.
It was one thing to listen to Nico when you’d been dumped but another when you were tearing apart a family. I knocked on her door but the Nico was so loud she didn’t hear me. I pounded my fist hard several times and then I tried shouting her name. There wasn’t any answer. I went down to the end of the hallway where the window to the fire escape was and wrested it open. Above her fire escape she’d hung a clothesline, with a bunch of bras hanging on it, plus a few Cosabella thongs. This was the contradictory essence of my former New Best Friend: she was an environmentalist JAP.
“Liz!” I hollered, sticking my head out. A few seconds later, her emaciated mug popped out. She looked flushed and bothered. “What?” she said.
“I need to talk to you. Could you open the door, please?” She hesitated a second—I wasn’t sure what she was going to do—then disappeared. When she opened the door her face was even and hard. She was wearing sweats and a Juicy T-shirt, no bra, and no makeup. She turned around and I followed. From her living room window you could only see the top of the tennis bubble and I envied her for getting sky. I scanned the room for signs of my father but the only possible one was a shiny black shoehorn sitting on her desk, which was plausible but not enough to build a case on.
