Lido sent me a little smile I recognized. Back off, Sis, I’m coping.
I shrugged and got down to eating.
Bubbie reached across the table and patted my hand. “He’s a nice boy. Thank you for bringing him.”
I looked at her, thinking of all the secrets Lido and I were bringing into the house. I suddenly wondered what secrets Marc had, and why the hairs were lifting off my arms, and why my hand tingled where Bubbie had patted it.
All in all, it looked like the start of a long evening.
After dinner I saw Marc dragoon Lido into bringing dirty dishes into the kitchen. I would have gone in to help, but Bubbie made me stay at the table, where the aunts were already pouring more wine.
“Thank you for bringing him,” Bubbie said again.
“He’s gay,” I said. There went one of Lido’s secrets, just flying out of my mouth. Why had I bothered to come if I was gonna blow his cover like that?
“But besodich. In the closet.” Bubbie nodded. “Poor little guy.”
I thought of telling her Lido was over three hundred years old, but didn’t. Right now he was my kid brother. I could see him through the kitchen door, snapping a dishtowel at Marc, then helping him wipe jelly off the face of a four-year-old.
“I don’t want him to get hurt,” I said.
Bubbie nodded. “He’s full of troyer, that one. So much grief. Marc will fix that.”
“God, I hope so,” I said.
“But you,” Bubbie said, turning her eagle eye on me. “You have a sex demon of your own, eh?”
My mouth fell open.
“I see you have power. It is only just awakening, you poor baby, and you’re in love, and you don’t know if you should love it or be scared shitless, nu?” She cackled.
I shut my mouth.
“Is he a nice boy like this one?”
She really expected an answer to that. “How do you know all that?” I said, giving away my own secrets for a change.
Bubbie leaned toward me and refilled my glass. “Because I’m in the same business,” she said in her low, gravelly voice. And she winked at me.
My eye rolled around the room at the family, so normal, laughing, talking, full of good food.
“No, no, they’re just a nice family, aren’t they?”
“Very nice,” I said with a dry mouth.
“It’s not good to live in isolation. Marc will help that.”
“Lido doesn’t live alone,” I said.
Bubbie eyed me. “So your young man shares a room with him?”
I clamped my lips shut. Holy crap, she could just drag stuff out of me.
She put her head on one side as if wondering what shattering question to ask me next.
Down the table, one of the aunts lit up a cigarette.
Reena immediately complained.
Bubbie said to me, “Be a good girl and flick that switch over there, on the wall next to piano? Thanks.”
I looked around. All the aunts were lighting up. Bubbie reached for her clutch bag. I got up and flicked the switch, and heard a fan switch on. As I returned to the hot seat beside Bubbie, I saw the cigarette smoke swirling up, getting sucked away into the ceiling.
“That’s better,” Bubbie said, as if daring Reena to complain again.
Reena sniffed and went back to talking to the aunts.
“So,” Bubbie said to me decisively, “what’s worrying you?”
And, just like that, I was nailed to my chair again.
I swallowed. I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t even want to think about it. But the words came up in my throat and fell out. “He doesn’t want to…I dunno…talk. He won’t tell me stuff. He says he has to protect me, but that means he has to break up with me, and I know he doesn’t want to. I know it’s for real, because we’ve been friends for two years and he never dates anyone more than one night. We’ve been together a couple of times. More, kind of. He cares. I know he does.”
Bubbie nodded and blew smoke.
“Lido taught him a spell to make women forget him. It doesn’t work on me,” I added triumphantly.
Bubbie smiled. “Good! You got spirit! What have you done about it?”
I squinted at the ceiling, watching the cigarette smoke get sucked away into the vent. “I made a love potion out of a chocolate mousse.”
Bubbie’s smile got broader.
“I wanted him so much, he zapped into my kitchen naked. He said he did it because he heard me calling, but I think maybe I did it,” I said, realizing this for the first time.
I turned my fearful gaze on this woman, who was in the same business as Lido. How could that be? “What’s happening to me? I feel crazy.”
“You’re possessed,” she said. “Don’t look like that, everyone in love is possessed. It’s part of the way love is. Only with us,” she pointed her cigarette at me, and her fourth finger at herself, at the same time, “it’s more complicated.”
She flicked ash off her cigarette onto the tablecloth. I felt my eyes bug out in shock. If Reena saw—but the ash vanished before it hit the cloth.
So that must have been how I got to be sitting over here, so Marc could sit next to Lido. She did it. Bubbie.
She really was a sex demon, maybe. Or something.
“Do they all know?” I said, sending my eyes around the room.
“Of course. They don’t watch us work,” Bubbie added. “That would be impolite.”
A half laugh fell out of me.
“Do you want him? Really?” Bubbie said suddenly, and I found myself considering the question.
“Not the way he is,” I admitted. “That sounds awful, doesn’t it? I can’t think about anything but him, and my body is—woo, I feel just crazy. I’m obsessed. I need him. I crave him. But he just sits on his butt, tending bar and goofing off. He could do so much better.”
For the first time, I dared to picture being Archie’s girl for real.
Here’s me, watching him go home with some other girl every night.
Here’s me, waiting for it to be my turn.
Here’s me, going over to the lair with homemade brownies and cleaning supplies.
I heard my own voice in my head. Hell, no.
Would he ever give up working for the Regional Office?
Would he move out of the lair and into my frilly apartment?
I felt my lips tighten.
Then I thought about losing him, him saying “it’s over” and “I can’t” and “we have to talk,” and my whole body tightened, my heart squeezed, and suddenly the cigarette smoke was too much for me. I couldn’t breathe.
Bubbie patted my arm again. “That’s love,” she said. “You don’t really have a choice. It’s just a matter of how much grace you bring to your suffering.”
I felt awful. I felt as if she’d pulled the curtain away from this fragrant, sparkly, overpowering magic of whatever this was between me and Archie and shown me the mess it was going to be in a little while.
He’d already tried to whammy me once. I told her more about that, hiding nothing.
She nodded. “It works if it works. Trouble is, you know too much. Even if you weren’t coming into your own power.”
“I don’t feel powerful,” I mumbled.
She drew smoke and squinted at me. “He does like to stay in control, doesn’t he? The fool. They’re all fools. They’d rather stay in control and crash and burn than let go of control, admit that love is running the show, and behave with grace.” She studied me a long moment and then pulled a business card out of her purse. “Here.” She took out a pen and scratched something on the back of the card. “Take it.”
I took it. “Tsvicha…”
“Don’t read it aloud until you want to use it. It’s an exorcism.”
“What?”
“I told you, you’re possessed. He’s in you. When we love, our lover is inside of us. We are invaded. The lover seems to move in, taking what’s inside of us into himself and putting himself inside of us. If the
love is mutual, then you both feel like that. It’s an illusion, but a very powerful one.”
I said, “I know when he’s in me and when he isn’t,” and blushed.
“Good for you. Most women don’t. So maybe you won’t need this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a way to get him out, when…if…you decide you don’t want him in you.”
I looked at the card. The words were nonsense, but they seemed pronounceable. A cold, dead feeling stole over me. Every man I’d ever dated had dumped me, every single one, and now Archie had done it, and it was the hardest fall of all.
Somehow this conversation made it even harder.
I folded my fingers around the card and put it in my pocket.
Bubbie nodded. “I hope you won’t need it.”
“I hope so, too.”
I escaped to a bathroom nearly as frou-frou as mine and shut myself in.
Holy crap, Bubbie scared me. I felt resentful, too. She’d totally demystified the part of love I like the most, the bit at the beginning before you figure out he’s just like all the others and is about to dump you.
Too late.
I remembered Archie saying, It’s over. I can’t. We have to talk. I can’t protect you. I’m sorry.
I loved you.
Part of me wanted to fight. Surely I still had some leverage. He was scared brainless of this Aphrodite, and I guessed if she could give him all these powers and make him live more than two millennia with a single pissed-off gesture, she had some chops.
You’re coming into your power, Bubbie had said. What power? The power to float around the bedroom with my sex demon? The power to bring him naked into my kitchen when I went into a cooking frenzy?
Against the eternal male determination to get the woman off his neck, these seemed more like liabilities than powers.
And yet he’d seemed not too surprised when I showed up at Cheaters and busted him.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. I hoped to heck I could drive after all this syrupy wine.
“Reena thinks I’m showing you my model airplanes. Not.” That was Marc’s voice in the hall outside the bathroom door.
“Nice Sopwith Camel,” Lido said.
I froze. This was becoming a habit. If they walked in on me, I would expire with embarrassment.
I stole to the bathroom door and locked it.
Marc’s voice lowered. “I’ll show you my Fokker.”
They moved into a room. A door shut. I reached for the bathroom doorknob, hoping to escape.
Then Marc’s voice came again, even closer. I realized he was in the room next door. This time the vent was in the floor. I stifled a giggle. I’d have to start carrying a recorder so I could sell this stuff.
“Do you know what I’m going to do to you in here?” Marc said.
I held my breath.
“Do they know?” Lido said after a pause.
“They know everything,” Marc said.
Another long pause. My heart leaped for Lido. Maybe he would let Marc seduce him. Well, finish seducing him. This whole evening had been a seduction, I realized. A magic spell, with ritual and emotion and letting go and the whole ball of wax.
Except I didn’t think Marc was ready to let go quite yet.
I wanted it for Lido so bad.
“Wait,” I heard Lido say breathlessly. “You don’t know everything.”
“Sure I do.”
“Maybe not.”
I couldn’t keep listening. I sneaked open the lock on the bathroom door as silently as I could and sneaked out and down the carpeted stairs, my face burning.
Bubbie met me in the hall. “All clear?” she said.
I choked, wondering if she could hear them breathing heavy in there, as I imagined I could.
“The bathroom?” she added.
“Bathroom’s all yours,” I said, and fled the house.
Outside, in the slutmobile, I shut the doors and rolled up the windows.
I could still hear them.
“Whoa, it’s a jungle in here,” Marc murmured.
I covered my ears.
A little later, Lido gasped, “Oh, God.”
I clapped my hands over my eyes. I remembered Bubbie saying, You’re coming into your powers.
“Let me,” Marc said.
“Please,” Lido whimpered.
“Let me.”
“Please—”
“Now.”
“Please—”
I turned the radio on. Loud.
Ooooo, love to love you, baby.
I switched the station to thrash metal.
The heavy breathing in my head stopped.
Then I realized something even worse.
If Marc and Lido found I’d gone out to the car, they’d realize I’d heard them. Or maybe they’d think that the Jewish thing had weirded me out and be terminally offended.
If they only knew the truth.
But, according to Bubbie, they all knew.
How could they?
I remembered how my mother had peeped out the front window at my brother’s van, knowing he had his girlfriend out there, my dad and my other brothers making raunchy remarks. And my mother smacking them all on the head and serving the pie.
Growing up at my house could be like going to a kegger with your mom.
I took a deep breath and turned off the radio.
I heard no noises in my head. Evidently the part of me that had the power to eavesdrop at a distance had talked to the part of me that wanted to give Lido his privacy, and they’d come to some kind of detente.
I went back into the house.
The kids were running around screaming again. The uncles had all moved into a den in the basement. The aunts were still at the table, drinking and smoking.
The tone of the party seemed to have loosened up. Reena was telling a story, her arm gesturing across the table, her empty wineglass tilting in her other hand. Her story finished as I walked in. The aunts roared.
This was a kegger with your mom and everybody else’s mom. And they were all high.
Marc’s uncle, the one who had blessed the kids, came thumping up the basement steps. He saw me and smiled. “Can you do us a huge favor? Come turn the game on for us?”
“Sure,” I said. And I did. As I climbed back up the basement stairs, I wondered why I was leaving the guys in their nice, safe man lair to join what was gonna turn out to be, unquestionably, a snake pit full of loaded aunts and realized that it was cultural. Friday nights, the girls had to be with the girls.
I squared my shoulders and dove in.
“There you are,” Reena said. “Have some more wine.”
Things got blurry after that.
“So you use sex to sell booze,” Reena said, bleary, an hour later.
“They’re exploiting you, honey,” rasped an aunt. “They use your beauty to get people to drink that crap.”
I thought this was harsh, considering they were drinking fermented kosher grape syrup. “They pay me.”
“But are they paying enough?” Bubbie said, squinting.
“For now.” I shrugged. “Archie and I entered an in-house marketing contest for the new product. He doesn’t know yet that I sent it in. If we win, I get a promotion.”
“He’s a man, they’ll offer it to him,” grumbled an aunt.
“He’s not an employee and I am. It’s in my name, actually,” I said, remembering suddenly that I’d done exactly what his tutor had, using Archie’s idea and calling it my own. I felt crappy.
“What’s your idea?” said Reena.
I shook my head, seeing double aunts. “I won’t tell. I don’t want to jinx it.” There was a chorus of groans. “But I will tell you the filthy marketing idea Archie came up with for selling a new cranberry martini.”
Lido turned up at my elbow. “We’re going.” He looked tragic and flustered and urgent.
All I felt was relief. “You’ll have to drive. They got me snockered.”
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He hauled me out of my chair.
“Thank you for a lovely, lovely evening,” I said, reeling in Lido’s grasp.
The aunts chorused nice-to-meet-yous.
“Gimme the keys,” he said.
We stumbled down the steps together. Kids and aunts came to the door to wave goodbye.
I was fumbling in my pocket for keys when Marc came out to my car.
“Wait,” Marc said.
Lido grabbed the keys out of my hand, opened the passenger door, thrust me inside, and shut the door on me. Outside, he turned his back to the car and faced Marc.
My ears went into hyper-drive again.
“Listen,” Marc said.
“No, you listen.” Lido sounded desperate. “I’ve been screwing women for money for three hundred years.”
“I’ve been screwing men for God for thirty,” Marc countered, and Lido didn’t answer. “Well, for Goddess.”
“Don’t mock.” Lido sounded like he was straining for lightness. “I. Am. Under. Contract.”
“You really believe that,” Marc said.
There was a long silence. “You understand,” Lido said uncertainly. “I don’t. I can’t.”
I heard Archie in my head, I can’t, I’m sorry, and my heart bled for both of us.
Marc stepped closer. I could see his arm come around Lido’s back. “There was a maiden. In a tower,” Marc whispered. “In a deep, dark forest. Guarded…” The whispering stopped. After a pause, Lido pushed him away. “Guarded by a dragon,” Marc finished calmly.
Lido blundered around my car to the driver’s side and climbed in.
Marc followed. He bent over to look into the car. “When you hear my horse’s hooves, light a candle and put it in the window.”
Lido slammed the car door shut and drove off.
In the car, I remembered something I’d heard at the table through a haze of smoke and wine. “Bubbie is his mother.”
“What?” Lido was on another planet, not a nice one from the sound of his tight, uneven breathing.
“Reena is his sister, not his mother.”
“What?”
I gave up. I wasn’t sure if it mattered anyway.
Chapter Fourteen
WORK. A DEMO FOR Boshy’s Banana Bat Piss again, this time in a grocery store in Naperville.
It's Raining Men Page 18
