Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

“Hey,” I say. “Hey, you guys.” They look at me. “Have you guys heard about Weird Al Yankovic?” Blank stares all around. “You know, Weird Al? Weird Al! Remember him?”

“Yeah,” Batya says, finally, grudgingly. I feel triumphant for some reason, elated to have evidence that we all come from the same place: watching television in our pajamas in the early eighties. “What about him?”

“Yeah,” I say. “So Weird Al has been kind of off the radar for a while now, hasn’t he?” They don’t trust me. “He has! He has! So, you know why he’s been off the radar lately?” Nothing. “Seriously, do you know why ?”

“No, Miri,” Batya says finally, deadpan. “Why has Weird Al been off the radar?”

“Because.” I pause. “Because…” I give them the old eyeball sweep. “Drumroll…He’s ba’al tshuva ! I’m serious! He lives in the West Bank and he’s got like eight kids and he studies Torah all day long!” I turn to Ra-chel. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that.” The truth is I have no idea why Weird Al’s career is in the toilet. This just struck me suddenly as a totally believable and timely urban legend to start.

“Is that true?” Chava asks the others. They shrug but look intrigued.

I grab a massively shell-titted waitress passing by. “What can I have that’s nice and fruity and frothy and girly?” This is, lest we forget, a bachelorette party.

She thinks hard for a moment. “A Cool Breeze…?”

I make eye contact with Batya and pretend to contemplate deeply before turning back to the waitress. “Does it have pork in it?”

“Um, I don’t think so,” she says, looking around for someone with seniority.

“Fabulous,” I say. “Bring me one of those!”

The woman of the hour, meanwhile, looks miserable. I offer a small smile, fluff her veil. Her hair is long, thick, and bouncy as a shampoo commercial. She used to do disgusting things to it: mayonnaise, beer, raw eggs. And suddenly I can see what they mean about modesty or whatever, because I can hardly stand the sight of her familiar, beseeching face framed by that proliferate hair.

I grab her by the shoulders and lay a hard, loud smooch against her cheek.

She rolls her eyes and giggles. “You’re wasted.”

I forget for a second that I am, in fact, intoxicated, and take her statement to mean: I am a wasted soul, a free-floating neshama, an areligious husk of no use to my people.

“Yup.” I am, I suppose, wasted. I stand up slowly when the waitress comes back with my drink. “Where is the restroom, por favor ?” She points to the back corner of the room and I curtsy, offer the girls a salute.

The room is fluid as I make my way toward the Ladies, like walking on a waterbed. Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers, something something something.

Peeing is cathartic, a relief, and when I’m done I feel calmed, heightened, a clarity of consciousness that comes close to revelation but doesn’t quite touch it. A- ha ! Urination-as-religion. I sit directly on the toilet seat (a confirmation, if one was lacking, of my inebriation), relishing my empty bladder, the disgusting bar bathroom smells, the graffiti on the walls. Some people have these feelings of utter aliveness when they’ve reached the summit of a mountain, given birth, found religion, but they’ve got nothing on the first, overdue pee of a long, alcohol-fueled evening. I consider this as I peruse the chaos of “Ally is an a-hole,” “I like cocks,” “Eat me,” “Love is the answer!” Close to the back wall is one in small capital letters, in a straight, un-bar-bathroom-like line: NO JESUS, NO PEACE, KNOW JESUS, KNOW PEACE. How would it feel to embrace this statement wholly? Could I walk back out into the bar a believer?

I try and I try, but the longer I stare at the words, willing them to make some sort of a dent, the less sense they make. After a while the lines and curves of the letters look completely foreign, and there’s some chick banging on the door, asking did I fall in.

I linger, though, thinking about the time in elementary school when Rachel conspired to have me catch her chicken pox so we could stay home, watching TV and lounging in oatmeal baths together. She breathed in my face, licked my utensils, pressed her red-flecked arms against me, kissed me on the lips. But it didn’t work; I turned out to be immune or something and had to go to school without her for a week that felt like a month.

In the salon, I decide to take a new tack, reframe things: this is like some sort of a reality makeover show, and we’re its stars. I intone voice-over in my head: Watch Rachel Hassek become Ra-chel! Watch her prepare for a new life in which she fulfills the Covenant and learns to be true to her heritage! This is all postmodern fun and games, damn it. God damn it. When we’re done playing out this nutty scenario we’ll go back to being ourselves.

“Rachel?” A guy with a nipple ring poking through his black mesh muscle tee.

“Ra-chel,” she says to him, nodding, before standing up. He could give a shit about her newfound pronunciation, but I figure she’s got to be insistent for her own sake. When you adopt a radical identity change, it’s not just other people you have to remind, right? I gather up our bags and a few magazines from the rack and we follow him through the salon to the last in a row of swivel chairs in front of back-lit mirrors.

“Nikki will be with you shortly.” The guy pivots theatrically and walks away.

Rachel-cum-Ra-chel plops down into the chair and begins to swivel to and fro. I look through my pile of magazines. A Glamour, a Vanity Fair, and a super cheesy salon-trade magazine called Hairdooz.

“Thanks for coming with,” she says, her voice small under the dull roar of hairdryers and techno. I’m really, really trying to go with the flow here.

“Sure.”

“It means a lot to me that you’re supporting me,” she says. This is kind of like she’s talking to a six-year-old. Using persuasive preemption while the kid holds a scissors and eyes the dog: I’m so glad you’re not going to use that scissors to cut off the dog’s tail! I myself am quite familiar with this tack, having spent like the entire twelfth grade baby-sitting.

I grin at her. “Want me to do mine in solidarity?”

She’s looking at herself in the mirror, trying, if I had to guess, to memorize the sight of herself in this soon-to-be former incarnation.

“Remember when we were little,” she says dreamily, “and we used to look at ourselves in my mom’s bathroom mirror? The one with the row of lights on the top?”

I nod. “Dorks.” Mrs. Hassek would let us play with her makeup and jewelry, and we’d do ourselves up, as only drag queens and little girls can, in feathers and pearls, bright red lips and cheeks, aquamarine eyelids, penciled-on beauty marks.

“Yeah,” she says, staring into space. She turns back toward the mirror. “I used to squint at myself and, like, blur my vision? So I couldn’t really see myself? And I thought if I squinted hard enough I would be able to see what I would look like when I grew up.”

“And?” I remember thinking twenty was about as old as I’d ever get. And I guess I sort of still feel that way. Which is to say that now I’m all of twenty-four and I have no idea what happens from here on in.

“And what?”

“Do you look like you thought you’d look?”

She snaps out of it, sighs. “Dude,” she says, “I was being philosophical.”

“Dude,” I say, emphasis on the first part of the one syllable.

“Dude,” she repeats, emphasis on the middle. This is our way of communicating without real words, borne of many an afternoon spent together in a stoned haze, giggling at everything, nothing, whatever.