Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

“But those strangers are actually God’s messengers,” Dorit continues. “And one of them tells Abraham’s wife, Sarah, who’s like a hundred years old, that she’s going to have a baby in a year. But Sarah laughs in his face — Sarah laughs because she’s like a hundred!” Everyone has a good chuckle at this, especially the Cool Kids. Oh ho ho, a fertile old lady, what a gas!

Again Erin takes a deep breath in an attempt to focus, reconnect with her memory, which she can sense is waiting, whole and hard, like a whitehead, just under the surface of the intervening years. Bat mitzvah, yes, okay; stiff Torah parchment and lilting trope, of course: yes. Braces, control top, lip gloss — check, check, check. Watered-down moral teachings extrapolated from Old Testament, yes. She concentrates hard, mental masturbation, yes, yes, yes, trying to reach the taken-for-granted orgasm right around the corner.

“Be right back,” Erin says quietly to an unresponsive Alex. She waits a beat, boring imaginary holes into the side of his face, ones that ooze and hurt. Finally he turns toward her, meeting her eyes for a fraction of a second, raising his eyebrows, turning away again. Where are you going? He might have asked. Are you okay? He might’ve followed her out, locked them both in a bathroom stall, thrust his dick into her mouth for the first time since God knows when, giggled madly with her when they returned to the sanctuary.

She pads down the plushly carpeted aisle, out into the marble lobby and down a hallway lined with rows of high school confirmation class portraits, extending along the wall in reverse chronological order. She starts at 2003, feeling impossibly old and fat and over — her life is over! Her tits are deflated! — and proceeds, back, back, back, past the women’s room door, to, ah yes, here we go, back when things made sense: ’88, ’87, ’86…Here we are: low-heeled pumps and blunt, asymmetrical haircuts; Dep and hairspray and Clearasil and Wet’n’Wild and shoulder pads and braces. And they say you can’t go home again. She locates Alex easily, can’t help but smile at his rope tie, his patterned blazer with shoulder pads and the tapered sleeves pushed halfway up his arms. His boyish, unmeasured smile. He had been cute once, before she knew him. Such a perfect candidate, on paper. Jewish, a dentist, well traveled, well read. The kind of assumed confidence that comes from having screwed one’s way unthinkingly straight through adolescence. She’d loved these things about him.

“You in one of these?”

The Cool Kid, next to her, reeks of CK One. She smells it at the same instant he speaks; springy and slimy, eau de teenage boy. It’s the first question she’s been asked about herself in a very long time.

“No,” she tells him, smiling. “You?”

“Nah,” he says. “Couple more years. If my mom makes me.”

“I’m Dorit’s aunt,” Erin says.

“I’m Zac,” says the kid. He stands there. She puts out her hand to shake, and he grabs it, hard. Someone has told him about the importance of a firm handshake.

“You a friend of Dorit’s?” No, Erin, you moron, he’s a party crasher.

“Sort of. Everyone has to invite everyone in the class. They made a rule.”

“Did you already have yours?”

“Yup,” he says. “In March.”

“Get anything good?”

“Like four thousand bucks.”

“Jesus,” she says.

“Yup.”

“Wow. Times have changed.” She loves that she just said this. Fucking loves .

“I guess.”

After the service there are cookies and plastic shot glasses full of thick, sweet wine, and a photo op with the mottled silver kiddush cup Alex’s grandfather had carted (barefoot, six thousand miles uphill both ways in the dead of winter) from Russia. Gertie has bonded with a small red-haired boy in shorts and suspenders, and they occupy themselves on the Henry and Rosalyn Biener Jungle Gym under the watchful eyes of Dorit’s friends.

“Mwah!” Dana says loudly in the receiving line, pressing her cheek to Erin’s. “How nice to see you, hon.” It’s the “hon” that plucks on the electric harp of Erin’s nerves.

“ Good to see you,” Nadiv says, clasping her hand in both of his. “ Great to see you. Good to see you.” He claps Alex on the back with a hairy paw and Alex reciprocates, a violent, manly hug in which only upper limbs touch. Never the torso. G-d forbid the torso. Or the hips, Lord Almighty.

“You were late,” Dana says playfully to Alex, looking over his shoulder at the crowd still to be received.

Dorit leans over. “Yeah, Uncle Al — you guys showed up like halfway to the end, I saw you!”

“Gertie had an issue,” Erin chimes in, to the interest of no one.

“I know,” Alex says. “I know. I’m so sorry, Reetie. But we were just in time for your speech! You did such a great job. All that stuff about Abraham treating those strangers as well as he would treat God himself? Good stuff!” He insinuates himself into the receiving line and slings an arm around her. Dorit looks like she’s about to have an aneurysm, resting her pink-pillboxed head against Alex’s chest. Erin wanders away, stands off by herself. An ugly finger painting by little Dorit had adorned Alex’s bachelor-pad fridge when he and Erin first met; she remembers thinking it was “adorable” and “a good sign” that he was so beloved an uncle. He’d tell Erin elaborate stories about his time with his niece—“And so I told her that God made rainbows but he also made bunnies who had to stop living sometimes, which seemed to really sink in, you know, because I want her to understand that life and death are two sides of the same coin, really, and I think she got it”—designed to showcase his highly developed, compassionate Way With Kids. Among Erin’s coterie of husband-hunting girlfriends, this was a badge that ranked only slightly below Medical Degree or Paid Mortgage.

“Mommy! Mom-meeee! Mom! Me!” Gertie is atop the slide, a giant, flapping her arms gleefully like wings, her hands limp at the wrists. “Mommy!” You are my mother, she is saying. You! Are! My! Mother! like an accusation. “Mommy!” People turn, grinning, to look at her, then at Erin. It’s embarrassing, really. An unspeakably intimate, filthy relationship for all to see and think they understand. Erin wants to squirrel Gertie away, tuck her back into the womb where she’d again be a secret, aging in reverse peacefully right out of existence.

“What a shtarker, ” Nadiv booms with a wink. Erin takes this the wrong way, an implication that Gertie’ll be a big fat dyke, someone Nadiv himself wouldn’t want to fuck, wouldn’t want as his trophy wife, a woman who won’t engender the empowering sexual desperation necessary for the purchase of a house with an eight-tone doorbell. Which is simultaneously a compliment and, Erin thinks, given the world we live in, not.

“She’s a terrible mother,” Alex said in therapy the week before (or was it the week before that?), itemizing Erin’s swearing, a stony if efficient response to a door-slammed finger, her (failed!) attempts to initiate sex while Gertie whimpered over the babycom.

Don’t talk about me in the third person, she wanted to say. “My mother recently died,” Erin had explained.

“That’s not a Get Out of Jail Free card,” Alex erupted. “She thinks that’s a Get Out of Jail Free card! Her mother’s been dying for years !” The therapist — her name is, no joke, Good-kiss — had had no clue what to say. She’s a bad therapist, truly, but they’ve been seeing her for more than a year; the thought of starting over with someone new is exhausting and pointless. Which, actually, sums up pretty neatly Erin’s reasons for having gotten married in the first place. Goodkiss just nodded, nodded, looked back and forth at them, nodded some more.