“One-to-ten is done,” they added. “We’re switching to a five-star system.”
The note stayed up for weeks, but the man who did my highlights never came back. I thought about calling him up, but I didn’t want stars. That would make me feel like a restaurant.
—
MY BREASTS got an eight. That was a surprise, considering their average buoyancy. I wondered if one of my raters was getting soft on me. Maybe he was into me now, the speed at which my appendages shipped, the re-taped box, the packing peanuts. Maybe he just liked nipple hair. I like it. We have to stay sentimental about one flaw, coddle our attachment to something, so we can do extreme violence to the rest. It’s like how the president has a dog.
—
“ARE YOU CRAZY?” asked my mother.
“I have to live my life,” I said.
“Rate your life,” said my mother. She left messages saying she was just calling to say hi, but when I called back, it was always more than that.
—
MY NIPPLES came back bruised. Someone had been gnawing on them.
I held for an operator while an automated voice asked me to rate my call so far. The operator, when I reached her, said that she would strive to address my concerns to the best of her abilities. I told her my concerns. The operator said that Rate Me could not be held responsible for damages incurred during the shipping process. Also, might I consider electrolysis on my nipples? They had a guy. He was very good.
“Packages don’t bite nipples,” I said. “And don’t women over there do anything besides answer phones? Women have broken into electrolysis in the non-rating world.”
The operator assured me that she had many job responsibilities, then asked if I wanted the truth about my ass. I didn’t want it yet. An ass rating meant new skirts to hide flaws, or to show off the ass you didn’t even know you were hiding. I had already let the Rate My Wardrobe people into my closet. They let women do the closet, or at least hold the trash bag.
“You could be an operator-rater,” I said to the operator. “You could rate voices. Voices are underrated.”
“Silence, too,” she said. “I’m going to need you to hold for just a moment while I fetch a supervisor.”
“No, wait, Linda, don’t bother. I’m terminating my membership, effective immediately.”
I had no idea if her name was Linda, but saying “effective immediately” made me feel strong. I had quit dating sites with the same terminology. I had stopped wilderness catalogs from coming to my home.
“Rate Me is sorry to see you go,” she said. “We thought parts of you had potential.”
World Trade Date
SHE WENT ON DATES with guys who’d been there. They seemed to be doing a lot of dating, the ones who’d escaped, and claimed to be humbled, but they were usually as humble as guys who hadn’t been there. The only ones humbled were the ones who hadn’t escaped, maybe, but they were out of the dating pool. She felt sorry for her dates, regardless. It seemed sad that to sit in a bar with her was what you did when you got your life back.
You also moved to Brooklyn. You got your life back in Brooklyn. Guys who had designed web pages in or near there left to design web pages in Brooklyn. One of them showed her his pages. He had designed for a bakery, a congressional aide, an aunt. They looked at his pages for two hours, then had intercourse.
“I had a really nice time,” he said.
She and another guy got a ticket for trespassing by the river to watch the sun set over what was no longer there.
“I would have never done this before,” said the guy, as they climbed through a hole in a fence about to be gentrified out of having holes.
She was grateful to the cop for interrupting the sunset, any requirements it might have had. The guy told the cop there should be a sign. The cop sighed. He handed them each a summons and pointed to the fence.
“In New York State,” he said, “your fence is your sign.”
Had the cop been there? If he’d been there, he probably wouldn’t be here, explaining their summonses.
“You take the morning off from work and go to this address,” said the cop. “Just tell the judge you were watching the sunset with your friend. Maybe he’s having a good day. I respect that it’s a beautiful night, but after what happened, we can’t take any chances. If you don’t go to this address by December first, you could be arrested at a later date. You could have been arrested right now.”
“Thank you,” they said.
The cop got back in his cop car, rolled away, alive.
“Prick,” said the guy.
—
SHE WASN’T some trauma groupie. She attended no vigils, contributed to no quilts. She wasn’t looking for it, but if a friend said, “I have a friend. He was there. He just moved to Brooklyn,” she would give her friend permission to let the guy put her number into his device. Then bar, sunset, web pages, intercourse.
One guy, Steve, took her to breakfast the next day. They walked blocks and blocks, holding hands in a determined way. He told her he had gotten back with his girlfriend after it happened. He was still back with his girlfriend.
Steve’s breakfast place had teddy bears for sadness. One of the teddy bears was wearing a fireman slicker, holding a hose. It was a hero. It was rescuing Eggs Benedict. She ordered the Florentine. There was sort of an altar for these bears. People left flowers for the bears, candy for the bears, bears for the bears.
She didn’t want to be remembered. People said you lived on in memory, but she knew that being remembered definitely meant you were dead. Steve finished his toast. He told her that he’d had a really nice time.
—
WHY WERE THEY all having such a nice time? Weren’t they supposed to not call her again? They were all calling again. The ticket guy wanted to go to court with her. Web Pages wanted to take her to his aunt’s bakery. The bakery was having a sale on flag marzipan. They would make your loved one’s missing poster into a cake.
No, she canceled. She was sick, she was busy, she was really sick and busy. It was one thing to go on a blind date, quite another to go when you had actually seen the person. She’d pay the fine herself, get her cupcakes somewhere unaffiliated.
But everywhere was affiliated. If not bears, it was collages. If not collages, it was handprint murals from kindergarten classes in states that would be boring to attack. Her office rented a therapist, even though everybody already had their own therapist. The subway told her it was okay to get help, even if you weren’t there when it happened, even if you were in Machu Picchu when it happened. She couldn’t pass a corner without a shrine, a fence that wasn’t tricked out with Xeroxes of the dead. Bears got wet in the rain. The dead looked deader Xeroxed.
She asked her dates if they knew anybody on the fences. They never did.
“Different company,” they’d sputter. “Different floor.”
“But maybe you saw them in the elevator, in the lobby, by the snack machine?”
“Our company had its own snack machine.”
—
HER COMPANY didn’t have a snack machine. Her company locked its bathroom “for security reasons” and left the keys in the receptionist’s mug. The mug had a picture of the receptionist’s grandson on it, graduating from something. She went to the bathroom a lot at work. The keys were sometimes a little warm, a little wet. Once she forgot the keys in the bathroom, and the receptionist had to call security to unlock what had locked behind her. Nobody would bomb the bathroom, she felt certain. It was too big a hassle.
Other offices made you wear a laminated ID tag, and some guys would forget to take off their laminated ID tags when they arrived to meet her at street corners, or on museum steps. The museum was a creative date, and a poor idea. She liked to be on a barstool, perched and ready to judge. She’d look from a guy’s face to the face hanging from his neck, a face that could be on a fence, but wasn’t.
Another Cake
THEY CAME EVERY DAY with their prayer books and coconut
candies. Every day they came, careful not to slip on the driveway—it’s icy—offering cold cheeks for a kiss. My aunts took their coats, their cakes. I took their sorries, then hid in my old room. There wasn’t much to look at: mirror shrouded in a bath towel, a poster of the Beatles crossing the street, bits of Fun-Tak where sunflowers and revolutionaries had been, blue bits like mold on the white wall. The bookshelf was half empty, just a French-English dictionary and some young adult paperbacks. I reread the one about the gawky girl who loses her virginity to the paraplegic genius, the one about the southern toughie who’s beaten by her step-dad and rubs herself against a pillow imagining she’s on fire. The southern one was listed as a finalist for a major award, but I had dog-eared the rubbing pages and forgotten the rest of the story. This was not the South. This was New Jersey and there were people downstairs, clustered around fruit baskets.
The people made noises. Doorbell noises. Flushing noises.
“Sloan Kettering,” they whispered, the way they whispered “Harvard.”
“Stage four,” they said, like an SAT score.
I slipped my father’s old LPs onto the turntable: “Let It Be,” “Desire.” I made weeping noises. The guests chomped cheddar cheese. On day three, I took a shovel to the driveway to break up the ice. Someone, my mother said, could fracture a hip and sue. I gripped the shovel with my father’s enormous gloves, then swung it in circles over my head before bringing it down on what could become litigation. Those driving by might have mistaken me for a midget dad gone berserk. He’d had it with mortgage installments and the Temple Brotherhood. Take that, frozen water. Only my father hadn’t joined the Brotherhood. We weren’t big on joining. He refused to sign me up for Brownies, though I wanted more than anything to march through the cafeteria with those brown shirts. I wanted a badge.
Maybe if he had been a Temple Brother, we wouldn’t have had such a hard time finding a rabbi to officiate the funeral. Years before, on one of my parents’ evening walks, my father had mentioned to my mother that he wanted to be cremated when he died. He didn’t like the idea of his body rotting underground.
My mother listened, though she had assumed they would be laid to rest alongside each other, in the final conjugal bed.
“I worry about being cold,” she said.
“You won’t feel it.”
Plates were scraped, tomato sauce slid into garbage bags. I inserted the quadratic formula while my parents circled the subdivision on foot. Where did they go? What did people in cars think? We didn’t even have the pretense of a dog. Then off to college—Nietzsche, penetration.
“Daddy said he wanted cremation. What do you think?”
Suddenly, my mother and I were married. Husband’s dead? Meet your new husband. Standing tall at five foot two, your new husband is majoring in Cultural Studies and has recently become sexually active. What did I think?
We had him cremated, against Jewish law, and somehow I was put in charge of convincing a rabbi to not bury him. I made phone calls. I hoisted the Bergen County Yellow Pages onto the kitchen counter. I argued that I had been bat mitzvahed at Temple Beth Fill-In-the-Blank, that I had danced with my father at Fill-In, that my father had taken my bony wrists and spun me out and back in front of laughing, clapping friends of the family.
No rabbi found this story moving. No rabbi would touch it. They were all too afraid of the Board, the unseen uglies behind the temple throne, just waiting for a kashrut scandal or an opportunity to give out pens. Finally, we imported a guy from Westchester County, and at this point I don’t know why we bothered, because he was obviously some kind of third-rate rabbi, and he smiled waxily when he met me, grateful to have the gig.
—
THE FUNERAL HOME DIRECTOR told my mother, my aunts, and me to wait in the back office of Diforio Memorial. We would be called out when everyone was seated. Rows of brown metal chairs stood stacked against one wall, and behind them someone had hung a sheet over a giant cross. The outline of the cross was still visible, the hiding perfunctory, as though the funeral home director had applied the “If the Deceased Is Jewish” section from the mortician’s instruction manual. I stared at my father’s sisters as they asked the rabbi pointless logistical questions, a frenzy in black suits. How did they know to own them? Nothing could stop them from putting on pantyhose or a gold bracelet, not even death.
That morning, my aunt Susan had reached into the bottom of her divorcée suitcase, past balls of stockings and cream-colored underwear, and tossed me a pair of tights. Sternly, like she was trying to teach me a lesson. The underwear chilled me, with its connotations of the aunt’s lonely crotch, underserved by the male divorcés in her area. I wondered if the rabbi was single. Maybe she could date him. The rabbi had thick lips, and a tie the color of lox. All morning, I kept thinking about eating the tie. Maybe we would get to have lox after we had returned to the house, where everything would smell like onions and cleaning fluid. Oh, there would be lox. Some woman would make it appear, and then she would disappear, so the lox would appear to have appeared on its own.
“The best thing about being Jewish,” the rabbi kidded us, “is that we keep our funerals short.”
Aunt Susan laughed conspiratorially, like you wouldn’t believe what her Taoist friends had put her through.
I turned to eye-roll with my mother, who had always complained that Susan was a flirt. But my mother was staring at me.
“What?” I said.
I knew what. My nipples were poking at my dress. There’s not much to do about pokey nipples, to be honest, except try to warm them so they flatten. But if you rub them, they might get pokier.
“Do you want my jacket?” she said. She started to take it off.
“I don’t want it, it’s ugly.”
“Are you sure? It’s freezing in there.”
“Ma, okay, it’s about to start.”
My mother, my aunts, and I marched past the other mourners like we were getting our diplomas. All eyes pitied me, the only child. Well, I pitied them—the couples inching their minivans through frozen streets, the husbands grim at the wheel, the wives gym-thin and pissed, with a casserole sliding around in the backseat. The same guests would probably watch me walk down the aisle at my wedding, except they would be transformed, yarmulkes white instead of black, wrinkles powdered over, earrings stretching earlobes scrotal, lipstick that they would reapply publicly and often—whipping out compacts, holding the mirror level with their teeth.
Now my aunts were mouthing “Thank you for coming” to the guests, who were mouthing “I’m sorry” back to them. Coral mouths in motion. Hands rubbed the slack skin beneath chins. The room was a chorus of “tsk”s. I wanted to announce that my father hated it when people spoke without sound, hated the gentle clicks of tongues, the almost imperceptible suction of lips coming apart.
“Dr. Alan Jacobs was a gentle man who loved to cook,” the rabbi boomed.
My aunt Sharon had bragged to the rabbi that my father had been a doctor, not realizing that the rabbi was going to use my father’s full title throughout the eulogy.
“Dr. Alan Jacobs valued family and life’s simple pleasures.
“Dr. Alan Jacobs worked to strengthen his community.
“Dr. Alan Jacobs was good at his work, but he knew that the real work began when he came home from the hospital.
“I never met Dr. Alan Jacobs, but I can feel his warmth in the room on this cold, snowy day.”
My mother pulled tissue after tissue out of her pocketbook like a magician. She handed the damp ones to me, until I hissed, “Stop.” My aunts sat with their hands clasped for Dr. Alan Jacobs, while the rabbi broke his own rule about brevity. Clearly, they all preferred the capitalized version of the man—Brother, Husband, Reader of Newspapers. But my father had undermined their efforts by refusing to leave behind solid evidence. There was no coffin at the front of the chapel, no lacquered death box with a tallis draped over it. The rabbi was lecturing about the air.
As I sat on the br
own cushioned bench in Diforio Memorial, clutching my mother’s soggy tissues, I started to miss college. At college, there were joints to roll and a part-time bisexual with an encyclopedic mind who came over to roll the joints and fuck. He had taken my virginity. He had memorized my mother’s maiden name; he had memorized the maiden names of the mothers of the two boys he had deflowered, in addition to me. Schatz and Ducille. My mother was Tieman. Harriet Tieman, rhymes with semen.
“Are you going to tell Harriet Tieman I’m your boyfriend?” he would ask.
“You’re my fake boyfriend,” I said. I tried not to feel proprietary. He wasn’t even in the closet. Someone had nicknamed him “Big Gay Rob.” But sitting on the brown bench in Diforio Memorial, my mind wandered. Maybe the fake boyfriend was fucking someone else while I was away at my father’s funeral. Maybe the fake boyfriend was fucking a boy. Without a condom.
Except, after the service, I saw him standing in the lobby with the other mourners. He was wearing a suit, and he didn’t look sad enough.
“I made amazing time,” he said. “Just under three hours.” He named a series of highways I hadn’t heard of. He handed me a sympathy card from a group of girls who lived with me. The card was actually a picture of the girls themselves, with me Photoshopped into it, and “We miss you!” scrawled over all of us.
“Are you surprised I came?” he said.
“No, I had a feeling you’d be here,” I said, pretending to be psychic. I had no feeling.
—
LATER, AT THE SHIVA, the aunts shoved sponge cake at the fake boyfriend.
“We have too much cake,” they said. “Eat it, eat it. There’s too much.”
They liked that he was a large man. They needed another man around, with their only brother now a box of ashes next to the stereo.
“What’s your name again?” Aunt Sharon clawed his shoulder. He tried to shrug it off, but she held her grip.
The Bed Moved Page 7
