Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

I hold the magazine up so Rachel-cum-Ra-chel can see it, a complete and not entirely unhappy farewell. “‘So Long!’” I say, pointing, but she’s not paying attention to me. She’s looking at herself in the mirror, transfixed, taking in her strange, shocking lack of hair. This is the most irrevocable of her many changes. She could grow it all back if she wanted to, but it would take a long time.

On their way to temple, Alex will not shut up. “My Torah portion was Toldot, ” he says. It’s 10:30. They’re late. “Jacob and Esau.”

In the back Gertie is strapped into her car seat and is staring, brow knit, out the window. Erin checks her watch. Services started at 9:45.

“Is Dorit going whole hog with this? Like, actually reading from the Torah?” Dorit, bat mitzvah girl, is Alex’s niece, daughter of his only sister, Dana. Alex ignores the question, tinged as it is with Erin’s well-worn superiority and sarcasm: an overt comment on poor Dorit’s intelligence and general worth, a covert attack on her doltish mother, Alex’s beloved big sister. Dana. Alex looks at his watch.

“We’re late,” he sighs.

“No shit.”

They’re late because Gertie had refused to be dressed in her temple outfit, an itchy green velvet number with matching barrettes. The green ensemble had mysteriously brought forth dramatic screeches of protest and vehement, back-and-forth head whips. Gertie had ducked out of reach, shrank from the dress like a soul from the light.

“They grow up so quickly, don’t they?” Erin said when finally they’d managed to wrangle her into the car at 10:15 after plying her with bribes and promises of future bribes, late, late, late. Alex blames Erin for these mishaps. As a mother, little things throw her completely. More than a year and a half in, even, she feels wholly unprepared for and amateurish at it, embarrassed that something like a temper tantrum over a dress could so derail them from the course of their daily lives. It wasn’t normal to be forty-five minutes late because your toddler had refused to acquiesce to your choice of outfit for her, was it? Or did most people simply wrench their child into the dress, throw their child into the car, and show up only slightly harried at, say, 10:00?

“Jacob and Esau,” Alex keeps saying, over and over, like a rap, absentmindedly drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel as he waits to turn left at a green light. He inches forward into the intersection, thumb-drumming in time with the click-clack! of the left turn signal. He glances at Gertie in the rearview to see if she’s up for a sing-along. Erin watches him, irritated that he doesn’t seem to care that she’s watching him, does not turn to look at her, does not acknowledge her gaze. It makes her want to dig her nails into his eye sockets, rake them down his face with all the force she can muster, hold his eyes open like in a torture chamber or laser eye surgery, make him Look At Her. She’s heard about his bar mitzvah a hundred times, heard him laugh exclusively at his own memories of the kid he’d been. Some girl had given him head in the bathroom at the synagogue during his party. “I became a man that day,” he’d say, guffawing (yes, truly: guffawing), rolling his eyes for the benefit of anyone who’d heard the story before (Erin had!); he was a narcissistic motherfucker, but it would be terrible to appear unselfconsciously so. This Erin had mistaken for acute self-awareness and good humor when they’d first met and for way ( way! ) too long afterward.

“I have no idea what mine was,” Erin tells him, though he didn’t ask and most certainly wasn’t going to. At Erin’s bat mitzvah her mother had been fighting the first of three rounds with cancer (“female trouble,” she had called it, with rueful cheer) and wore a terrible, off-color wig. In all the pictures Sheila and Erin both look like sideshow wax dummies of themselves: Erin at thirteen with acne and temporarily lopsided features; Sheila with her reproductive organs newly evacuated and that slick greenish-white chemo sheen, which was only exacerbated by the orange tint to what was supposed to have been a brunette wig. The photos themselves were practically radioactive with indignity and ugliness. Erin had hauled out the albums in Phoenix after the funeral: Nothing like a funeral for nostalgia and fucking. Though of course there’d been no fucking; Alex had barely touched her since even before Gertie, and acted all put out and harassed whenever she tried to initiate. A big letdown after shiva each night, truth be told. It had occurred to Erin, immediately after the eulogies and kaddish and burial and Yes, thank you, I know, Me too s, that this terrible thing, the loss of her mom, might actually, finally, get her laid. But no.

“Jacob and Esau,” Alex says again, and now Erin is intent on recalling her own bat mitzvah parsha. Those heinous posed pictures are clear as crystal (her older brother, Jonathan, with his feathered eighties mullet and lingering baby fat, her younger sister, Julie, in a sea green puffy dress with shoulder pads), but the real issue of the day, the Torah portion she’d memorized phonetically with the help of a then-state-of-the-art Walkman and on which she’d composed a two-page single-spaced speech, is nowhere to be found.

“Jesus,” she says, squinting. “What the fuck was mine?”

Alex looks toward her sharply. “Hey,” he says. He juts his head toward the backseat, where Gertie sits, miserable and impervious, in her green dress. They have a deal about swearing in front of Gertie. A convoluted system of perfunctory favors and chores invented when Gertie had first started talking and had echoed some perverse one-off.

Erin rubs her forehead, squeezes her eyes shut, skipping stones on the lake of memory. The brown industrial carpeting of the synagogue, her first manicure (a beige-pink called “Poundcake”), a run in those horribly elastic flesh-colored panty hose, noticed only after she’d chanted the haftorah.

“Why can’t I remember what my stupid fucking parsha was?”

Alex offers a shadow of a shrug, thumbs-drumming in time with, Erin imagines, his self-satisfied internal repetition of Jacob and Esau, Jacob and Esau, Jacob and Esau.

It’s 10:32 and they’re still sitting in the middle of the intersection a few blocks from the synagogue, waiting to turn left. The light turns yellow, finally, and an advancing truck seems unsure whether or not to go for it. Alex assumes not and takes his foot off the brake, only to slam it back down again as the truck keeps coming at them. Then, when the truck driver slows, motions for them to go ahead, Alex, afraid that it’s a limited-time-only offer, slams on the gas, hurtling them through the turn so they all get pinned to their seats with centrifugal force, like on a roller coaster. There is a small squeal of burnt rubber. Gertie lets out what from another kid might be a simple giggle, but from her is a throaty, one-note “Heh.” Erin glares at him.

“Sor-ry,” Alex says softly, to neither of them. He’s the king of such apologies: sincere enough but directed aimlessly out into the universe, impossible to forgive.

They deposit Gertie in the nursery with the nice old lady who’s been watching kids at the synagogue at least since Alex had been one. “I don’t get how she’s still alive,” Alex always says.

“I don’t get how she’s still alive,” Alex says. Guffaws.

The Donald and Leslie Milstein Sanctuary is gigantic and soaring, every last piece of it identified for its benefactor. Dorit, in a pink suit and matching pillbox hat, is standing on the Fred and Henrietta Beamer bima in between the cantor and the rabbi. Her hair is done in a lovely flip. But for her unfortunate hatchet face (a few more years and then, surely, there would be the compulsory nose job), she’s Jackie O.