Elisa Albert - After Birth

We were both living in terrible apartments, working our first “real” jobs. She had a two-hundred-square-foot basement studio in the East Village; I had a random roommate from Jew camp in Cobble Hill. Corpulent girl a year ahead of me who blew-dry her gel-stiff curls every morning at seven with a diffuser attachment the size of her head, then marched off to her administrative assistant job at NYU Hillel. She was not a bad girl, my roommate, just uninteresting. Almost interestingly uninteresting. Her big rebellion was in refusing to have her hair chemically straightened. She wore a shitload of perfume, whatever designer paperweight they were shilling at the department store that year. Her dad was paying her rent. As was mine, but it was different, because I did not diffuse my hair or wear perfume! Because I was not on the husband hunt! Because I was fucking anonymous men in bar bathrooms and doing any drug offered me and generally Living Life to the Fullest!! The excess of perfume made my skull throb. I wasn’t very nice to her.

Molly was fetching coffee on the set of a terrible TV show, but she dreamt of doing stand-up, becoming Tina Fey.

Her parents were career Jews, big machers in the suburban DC Jewish community, confounded by her sensibility.

My “alternative lifestyle,” she said, rolling those pretty gray eyes. Meaning disinclination to go to social work school and/or find a husband — any husband! Strike that: any rich Jewish husband! — ASAP.

Also there was the issue of her intermittent breakdowns, her abiding fondness for her shrink, her string of barely paying jobs. She confounded those machers . In theory they were supportive of her stand-up dreams, but she never let them come see her perform in the tiny comedy clubs where she got the worst time slots.

I was fetching coffee for a film producer, meanwhile. He’d had some success in the eighties with a blockbuster romantic comedy about a goofy guy who builds himself a clumsy, malfunctioning robot girlfriend. There were three (and counting) sequels. Straight-to-video stuff, but vast foreign markets were dying for more.

Maybe I’ll sleep with your boss so he’ll produce my one-woman show.

Is that how it works?

That, my friend, is precisely how it works.

My favorite bit she did was this one where the refrain was omigod thanks daddy am I right? First a description of some scrape she’d gotten into, your basic wacky sluttery in the big shitty — genital warts from a one-night stand with an investment banker, kicked out of her apartment for hosting a party during which someone OD’d in the hallway, fired from her job for talking shit about her boss in monitored email — and describe the way her semi-clueless dad had gotten her out of it while keeping it secret from her mom. The subtext was amazing — she was a hopeless daddy’s girl, and there was no way any other man could ever begin to compete. Hence the lovelorn angle. She had endless ways of changing up the lilt and intonation of it.

Omigod. Thanks daddy. Am I right? Ohhhhhhhhhmigod. Thanksdaddyami right? Omigodthanksdaddyamiright?

You’re so good , I’d say. She didn’t believe me.

People dismissed her as a Sarah Silverman rip-off, but she was funny in her own right. More descendant than rip-off, to be sure.

Silverman’s a talentless cunt , she’d say. Fucked her way up. Which was a sort of funny critique, as Molly was concurrently inviting the terrible talk-show host over Sunday nights to spank her and do some blow.

It’s not as if there’s only room for one adorable fucked-up Jewish girl comedian in the world , I reminded her.

She’d get up there looking so pretty, so wholesome, so sweet and doe-eyed, you wanted to hold her hand and run through a field of wildflowers. There would be genuine fear in her eyes, she made no effort to disguise it, so you just loved her all the more. Proverbial deer in headlights. Then she’d say, I’m so much happier with my appearance since I had my beard removed.

Or Even if my ex-boyfriend hadn’t raped me, I’d probably say he did ’cause then you’d feel all bad for me. And when people feel bad for you, they’re really sweet and then they seriously leave you so very alone, no one bugs you at all. If you want some privacy, just get super depressed and wounded, it’s amazing, people just immediately drop you altogether and you can get some phenomenal peace and quiet… in which to contemplate how best to off yourself.

We were miserable, but miserable together. There were drinks and dinners, there were gatherings on weekends. There were friends of friends throwing parties, connections at fun restaurants and bars. There were shows and excursions. Brunch and brunch and brunch. There were lovers and love interests and a guy from the other night, no, no, the other other night, in endless supply.

But the years were not kind.

Her old cohort began to send out save-the-dates, plotted elaborate showers. Our twenties were on the wane, and it was assumed that after the stand-up silliness she’d find a nice (rich, Jewish) husband online and come back home to plan a wedding with her mom and have some babies. She owned her twenties, went the unspoken deal; they owned her after that. She loathed her mother and on occasion had no trouble telling her mother where to shove those vapid projections, but Daddy she couldn’t disappoint. She couldn’t break Daddy’s heart. She hated herself for being conventional, but the life-on-her-terms clock was running out. Tapped for bridesmaid duty by one after another of the cohort.

I applied to grad school and got in. Impressed with myself for kicking theoretical feminist ass, and on a fellowship to boot. I started hanging out with Marianne.

Molly began to watch the comics with whom she’d started out get somewhere, one an assistant in the writers’ room at Saturday Night Live , another opening on a huge college tour, a third recently cast in the ensemble of a new TV show.

I took up with Paul; Molly switched to a new antidepressant cocktail on which she was forbidden to drink. She drank anyway. She’d fuck someone and be depressed for days when he didn’t call. She’d pore over the Sunday Times wedding announcements and threaten suicide whenever one of her former classmates turned up. She couldn’t manage to finish the spec script she needed to land a proper entry-level writing gig, and so she floundered in the shitty gopher pool as a fresh new wave of people showed up from the Ivy League. She drank and drank. She was broke. Her parents wanted her to go to grad school. It didn’t matter what kind. They wanted her to pick a kind of grad school and go to it. There she’d meet her husband. And turn into her mother, who did not stop talking for literally five minutes the first time I met her. Daddy was quiet, charged with power and authority. Kind of hot.

She called weeping over the wedding announcements one June Sunday.

It’s never going to happen for me.

What is never going to happen for you, honey?

Paul was naked in my sheets, casually holding my right foot in his armpit while he read the automotive section. Never before or since have I seen anyone read the automotive section.

Molly whimpered.

Look , I said. Way past bored. It’s your life, babe. Do what you want or do what they want, but don’t torture yourself. I had been repeating some version of this for months. The depressed are such a bore!

I pulled away, I guess. Guilty. I ignored her calls. She’d whine about her parents and the latest insulting bridal shower and the inferior comic who sold a script and the other inferior comic who had a show in development and the current destination-wedding invitation and the guy who didn’t call when he said he’d call.