Sweet Affliction

by Anna Leventhal

  In Alex’s room, Marcus saw that Oates had pushed all of his wood chips up against one side of his cage. He was crouched atop the beige heap, his disproportionately large balls pressed up against the wire. His sides pulsed minutely as he breathed. Marcus stuck a finger through the cage and touched his nose. Oates didn’t move. Marcus squatted down so he was level with Oates’ snouty face. He reached around and poked the rodent’s bald sack with a fingernail.

  “Neep,” went Oates.

  “Neep,” went Marcus.

  He opened the cage and reached in for the small white form, withdrew his hand, careful not to press too hard against the throbbing sides. In the warmth left by the rat’s body he put a note, next to which he would lay poor Oates when it was over and the rats were joined again:

  Cast a cold Eye

  On Life, on Death.

  Horseman, pass by!

  But that was so long ago.

  Maitland

  Yes, Frieda had met Maitland before. Or she knew his name. He was one of those men who was always called by his last name, probably even as an adolescent. In some cases this is done out of respect, in others out of condescension; occasionally the name just seems to fit. His first name was something forgettable and childish, like Kevin or Matt. So he was Maitland.

  His two-year-old daughter straddled his neck, playing with his tufty black hair. He was plump and squinted, his hair receding but not thinning. A decent-looking man, one who would never run the risk of ugliness or beauty with some strong, striking facial feature. He would pass gently into middle and old age, Frieda thought, his round, somewhat sly face a reassurance to his wife and friends, who would always see the Maitland they knew in it.

  He had spoken directly to Frieda only once during the Seder, to make a comparison between the afikoman, which is split in two, and the holy trinity, which is split in three but still indivisible.

  “See, what my family did,” Frieda said, “our tradition was for the kids to hide the matzah and the parents to look for it.” This as Maitland’s son Maurice was being coached to find the hidden afikoman with cries of “warm… warmer… warmer… cold! Freezing cold!”

  “And every year we’d spend ages finding the perfect hiding spot. Once we wrapped it in a sandwich baggie and put it in the toilet tank. I can’t remember where else,” Frieda said. “Anyway, every year the same thing happened, which was that when it came time for them to look for the afikoman, our parents would just pay us off to go find it for them.” A round of clapping and cheers went up as Maurice tentatively grasped the edge of the cloth that held the afikoman, which was poking out from under a sofa cushion.

  “I just thought it was funny,” Frieda said, “that every year we acted like this time really for real the parents were going to look for it, even though we had absolutely no evidence they would.”

  “Such is the nature of belief,” Rachel said.

  “Right,” said Frieda, “though I think we just liked to imagine them looking for it.”

  Maitland was the best friend of Rachel’s husband, Laurent. Frieda and Rachel had been friends in university, and Frieda still thought well of Rachel but they had drifted, as university friends do. Once or twice a year they saw each other at some social event: a wedding, a weekend at Laurent’s family cabin in St. Adele, a Passover Seder or Hanukkah party. Laurent was a friendly bear of a man, seemingly destined to be a patriarch, but thus far he and Rachel had not produced.

  “We’ve been trying,” Rachel confided to Frieda, “but so far nothing’s taken.” Frieda wondered to herself what “trying” meant. It meant having sex, right? There was a time when she would have said this to Rachel, but now she just nodded.

  Instead it was Maitland and his wife, Sylvie, who showed up at each gathering with multiplying evidence of their fertility. Sylvie was currently pregnant with her third; her body seemed completely given over to reproduction. She was cushiony and comfortable to look at. A Québecoise Madonna, Frieda thought. Hips wide and soft, breast ample, an organic habitat for the young. Tiny baggies of Cheerios and crackers appeared from her pockets like so many loaves and fishes and her fingers dangled toys, pacifiers.

  Frieda herself had once become pregnant, quite without trying. When she told the guy, he seemed unconvinced. “How do you know?” he said.

  “A woman knows,” Frieda replied.

  “Really?”

  “No, I peed on the stick.”

  “Oh.”

  At a karaoke bar Frieda sang Loretta Lynn’s “One’s On the Way,” trying to be funny; the guy choked on a swig of beer and had to be pounded on the back by the bartender. He stuck around long enough to drive her home from the clinic, then moved to Calgary. Frieda thought he had maybe gone into the oil biz.

  On Frieda’s left was Sophie, a coworker of Rachel’s. Sophie leaned over the gefilte fish and took a sniff, then turned down the corners of her mouth. “Mais, c’est quoi ça?” she said.

  “Pickled fish,” Frieda said. She heaped hot pink, toxic-looking horseradish on her own slice, then quartered it.

  “I don’t understand how you can eat that.”

  “It’s kind of an acquired taste,” Rachel said.

  “Not for me,” said Frieda, mouth full. “I was born with a piece of schmaltz herring in my mouth.” There was a rim of pink-tinted brine on her plate.

  Sophie shook her head. “Degueulasse,” she said. She was a pretty, delicate-faced girl in an asymetrical shirt, the kind you found at a boutique stocked with local designers who use a lot of gingham and paisley. She would be the target audience for these boutiques, Frieda thought—middle-class quirky, retro without the mildew and pit-stains. Nostalgic for the accoutrements of pre–Quiet Revolution days. A lover of ornamental buttons.

  Frieda herself was wearing a hot, itchy wool dress that had been her mother’s. As a teenager she had defiled it, cutting off the cowl-neck with pinking shears and stitching a sloppy neckline into the weave. The sleeves were long and flared at the wrists. She thought it made her look vaguely nunnish, in a way that positively accented her somewhat severe Russian features.

  She took another look at Maitland. He was telling a story about how a park by his and Sylvie’s house was closed to visitors because someone had been illicitly tapping the maple trees. “But is it homeless squeegee kids or neighbourhood yuppie locavores? No one knows.”

  “He’s joking,” Sophie said. “Are you joking?”

  What know one there knew was that Frieda had known Maitland years ago, if only by name. When she was nineteen Frieda had a best friend, a brilliant, ascerbic girl named Dori. Dori had met Maitland in a human anatomy class she was taking as an advanced undergrad and they became friends. Through Dori Frieda heard about this guy, this older med student with a funny name. He was a joker, charming, possibly less smart than Dori but a dedicated worker and problem solver. She admired him, that was clear; she said he had a bright future.

  One night at a party Dori got drunk and fell asleep in the host’s bedroom. She woke up to find Maitland’s hand under her dress, inside her leggings. There was some confusion, and then they rejoined the party. All this Dori told to Frieda the next morning. She was calm, in a way that Frieda had learned to be wary of.

  A week later a letter came for Dori. A typewritten false apology: The temptation… your beauty… my inebriated state. I hope you won’t… Signed, Maitland.

  Dori’s response was scathing. She systematically demolished each sentence of his letter, ending with the sentiment that the idea of him becoming a doctor made her sick to her stomach. Never talk to me again, she concluded. Go to hell. Dori. She deposited the letter in the school’s internal mail system, dry-eyed. Then she wept, bitterly, for hours, while Frieda rubbed her back in slow circles and tried to be soothing.

  “What an ass. He’s the one that looks bad, not you.”

  “No one’s ever called me beauti
ful before,” Dori said between sobs.

  Two weeks later Dori wasn’t sleeping. She was acting erratic—dancing at after-hours clubs till 7:00 a.m., eating nothing but cereal. Plucking her eyebrows completely out so she looked like a gaunt baby. Frieda suggested she go to the university. “You have to tell someone,” she said. “He should be expelled. Or, hey, I know. We can make posters of his face that say WANTED FOR RAPE and put them up around campus. Really, you know, make his life shitty.”

  But Dori refused. “I was drunk,” she said. “You think anyone’s going to say I wasn’t asking for it?” She stayed quiet, avoided Maitland. By the end of the semester she was back to her usual self, and finished the year with top marks, as everyone knew she would.

  What Frieda couldn’t figure out was what Maitland was doing in her life now, and what she was meant to do about it. Dori—Dori was probably over it. A psychiatrist at a free downtown clinic, she counselled abused women, homeless teens, people with traumas like open wounds. She had other things to worry about. When Frieda saw her she seemed taut, focused, her laugh a spray of gunfire. But Frieda hardly saw her.

  She watched Maitland. He seemed a man at peace with himself, padded by the accoutrements of domestic life. Family man, provider, surgeon, drinker of cocktails, lover of Al Green. She had the impression not of a brittle shell of armour but of thick durable layers of hide that she could never hope to pierce. A whale-man, blubbered over, happily sucking krill. How happily, she didn’t know.

  Sylvie hoisted her daughter onto her lap and began to croon to her. This lap, though wide, was running out of surface area as her belly pushed out; soon Christine would have to straddle her hip. The sadness of the middle child. Sylvie thought of her own sisters, Maude and Catherine. Maude, the eldest, aloof and precocious. And coddled Catherine, Princess Katerina, whose ears and toes the whole family exclaimed over: So pink! So plump! So perfect! “Soon you will be a big sister,” she whispered to Christine, “and that means you have a very important job to do. You must learn to adore, because it is through adoration that we reach our highest selves.”

  Christine yawned and touched her ears. This was a habit she’d developed lately, when she was tired or nervous—placing cupped hands over her ears like a monkey that hears no evil.

  The first time Maurice took the school bus home he cried because of the noise. “It hurts my ears. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

  Sylvie was sympathetic but unyielding and now Maurice rode the bus with striped earmuffs on, whatever the weather. Maitland told him they were made out of a magic substance that would not only shield his eardrums from pain but could allow him to hear people’s thoughts. “But only nice thoughts,” Sylvie said. “Nothing scary or mean.”

  Christine’s eyes were drooping and Sylvie wondered when they would leave. Laurent had his guitar out and he and Maitland were trying to set the Jewish prayers to a Bob Marley tune. The heavy, oily food sat in her gut, pressed against her womb. Everything was a variation on beige: the chicken, the casserole, the fish, the baked carrots, the symbolic flatbread smeared with apple-nut paste. The Festival of Beige, it should be called. Tomorrow she would make Maitland and the children something light and colourful, a salad with pear and blueberry and mango, a slice of ham blushing like a newlywed.

  She felt Christine go heavy as she dropped into sleep, while at the same time the creature in her womb stirred. They were on opposite schedules, the fetus waking only when the older two were settled down, like it knew something. Sylvie felt languidly aroused. Pregnancy made her at home in her body in a way she had never experienced before, made her crave Maitland’s attention like she had only felt previously in the early days of their courtship. He was like a child himself, her Maitland, his short bouncy cock like a toy he wanted her to appreciate. When he pressed himself into the flesh of her rear (both of them on their sides, since her growing belly made any other iteration uncomfortable) and she adjusted her hips so he could enter her, she felt a pure and uncomplicated joy entirely untainted by lust. “This is fun,” he’d say. “I like you.” “I like you too,” she would say. Sylvie checked her watch again. Perhaps if they left within the hour they would have ten minutes to spare before Maitland fell asleep.

  Rachel looked thin, Sylvie thought. Her head seemed huge on her neck, a cartoon head, or a toddler’s. She did not have that dry, brittle look that childless women get at a certain age, but if she didn’t hurry up it would catch her. She was thin-skinned, prone to crow’s feet. You worried about a person like Rachel, a genuinely kind girl who people took advantage of. Like Frieda. Her oval face and kinky hair, parted in the centre and pulled back in a barrette. A perpetually dissatisfied girl, a whiner, a loudmouth. You never felt at home around her, but if you left her out you’d never hear the end of it. Sylvie had tried to engage her in conversation earlier but Frieda had only cackled and waved her hand, saying something that was both self-effacing and condescending. Sylvie watched her stuff a piece of buttered cracker in her mouth, crumbs catching on her black dress.

  Sylvie thought that she would never wish for the power of Maurice’s earmuffs, never in a thousand years.

  They had bumped into each other in the hallway outside the bathroom, Sylvie emerging and Frieda going in.

  “What are your stories about?” Sylvie had asked, sensing Frieda’s awkwardness. She had heard something of these stories from Rachel, that Frieda wrote them, even published them sometimes.

  “Oh,” Frieda had laughed, snorted almost. “Nothing.”

  “They must be about something.”

  Frieda made a serious face and folded her fingers. “The unspeakable futility of the search for ethics in an unethical world.” Then she laughed again. Sylvie laughed too, in sympathy rather than amusement.

  They got to the Ten Plagues.

  “This is my favourite part,” Frieda whispered to no one in particular.

  “Daddy, what means pestilence?” Maurice said.

  “Boils,” said Maitland. “Remember when you had the chicken pox?”

  “Ick,” said Sophie.

  “No,” Frieda said. “Boils is boils. Pestilence is something different.”

  “Either way,” Maitland said, “Bad news for the Egyptians!”

  They counted ten drops from their wine glasses, dotting their napkins or plates, while Frieda and Rachel recited in blundering Hebrew. When they got to death of the firstborn Frieda couldn’t help glancing at Maitland, to see if he was affected by the callousness of the Hebrew god. He made waggly fingers at Maurice. “Watch out! The God of Israel’s gonna getcha!” His hands were hairy and vital, like well-fed animals. Maurice squealed and ducked under the table.

  “This reminds me of something,” Frieda said, indicating her wine-spotted napkin, “but at the moment I can’t seem to think of what.” She looked at Sylvie, who was holding her open-mouthed toddler on her lap with one hand and resting the other on the back of Maitland’s chair. Her glasses caught the light in such a way that she seemed to have no eyes. Eyeless in Gaza, Frieda thought. That was from what? Samson Agonistes. The brutal strongman with only two weaknesses: his hair, and his love of women. She bit down on a piece of celery and looked again at Sylvie.

  The children were asleep. All the wine and most of the food was gone, and the guests were trudging through the last few songs and prayers.

  “I just think it’s ironic,” said another guest, a girl called Sharon, “how the Jews were once oppressed, and now they’re the oppressors.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” said Frieda, and took a large gulp from her glass. “So very ironic. Thank you for pointing that out.”

  “Time will make monkeys of us all,” said Maitland.

  “Fools, cheri,” said Sylvie. “Time will make fools of us all.”

  “Please,” said Laurent, “Let’s not talk politics at the table.”

  “Where else should we talk about them?” said
Sharon.

  “I agree,” said Frieda. “’Tis the season!” She felt a bit much right then, flushed and giddy, and was ready to get into it.

  “I mean,” said Sharon, “here we are enjoying Rachel’s delicious dinner, and meanwhile on the Left Bank children are starving because of Israeli occupation.” Rachel nodded, her chin trembling.

  “It’s a shame,” Sophie said.

  “The Left Bank?” said Frieda.

  “Look, I spilled my ten drops,” Laurent said, “and I think we all understand that our joy always comes at the cost of someone else’s sorrow. Right?”

  “Hear hear,” said Maitland.

  “So let’s just put all that aside for a bit, shall we? We’re not going to fix the world’s problems tonight, so we may as well try to enjoy each other’s company.” He put his arm around Rachel, who was now openly crying. She held her spotted napkin to her face and her shoulders heaved.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Sophie said. “Don’t cry. It’s okay.”

  “B’seder,” Frieda said.

  “What?” said Sylvie.

  “B’seder—it means ‘it’s okay.’ The literal meaning is ‘in order,’ which is why this is called a seder—because we do it in order. But colloquially it means ‘fine, good, a-okay.’”

  “So this would be a b’seder seder?” Maitland said. Rachel laughed, not a real laugh but the kind of laugh that signalled she was ready to stop crying.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Really. B’seder.” Laurent picked up an empty wine bottle, peering at the bottom optimistically. He overturned it, and a trickle of red dampened the tablecloth. “Whoopsie,” he said.

  “What now?” said Maitland.

  “Well,” said Frieda, “since Passover is about telling stories, and revisiting the past, I have a story I’d like to tell.” She felt the twin weights of Sylvie’s pale eyes on her.

  “Go on,” said Sharon.