Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

And Erin probably is a terrible mother. This is not to say that she doesn’t love Gertie; that’s hardwired — can’t help loving the little munchkin. But there is the feeling, the guilty, shameful, secret feeling, that she’s stuck with her, that she would give her back in a heartbeat if she could, or at least leave her permanently in the care of someone else; someone competent and capable and trustworthy. Lately Erin is seized almost daily with the urge to live out of a van. In Texas, or Nashville, New Mexico; somewhere earthy and warm, somewhere unexpected. She wants to become a massage therapist, live in a converted barn, become a vegetarian, try sleeping with women, learn the acoustic guitar and start a band called Sarah Laughs or Everything But the Torah.

One of Dorit’s contemporaries bounds up. “Omigod,” she says. “Your little girl is so cute!” She’s lanky and pretty and wearing too much lip liner.

“I know,” says a second, an ill-fitting push-up bra cutting her breast buds diagonally in half. “What a cutie!” Newly pubescent girls always do this: one-up their not-so-distant playing of house by fetishizing real live small children.

“What’s her name?” The first.

“Gertie.”

“I love little kids with old-lady names! Hi, cutie!” she calls at the bottom of the slide, holding out her arms to Gertie, who eyes her suspiciously, chubby hands holding the railing tight.

The rabbi, holding a plastic cup of sweet wine and about five cookies stacked in his palm, comes over smiling. “Very cute little girl.”

“Thanks,” Erin says.

“How old?” He swallows a cookie practically whole.

“Sixteen months. Eighteen months. Sorry.”

He chortles (indeed, with another whole cookie in his mouth; chortles). “Easy to lose track, huh?” Over in the receiving line Dana is Mwah, mwah, mwah -ing away, Dorit repeating “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”, Nadiv lapsing into fast, loud Hebrew chatter with his relatives.

“Yeah,” Erin replies, meaning it. She leans in. “I’m — was wondering,” she says, impossibly meek and not wanting anyone to overhear. “Can you tell me what the Torah portion for the beginning of February would be? Or some portions from around then?”

“Oh,” the rabbi says, third cookie inserted whole into the hole. “Well.” This sounds like Wow, because of the cookie. She’s holding her breath, she realizes, and slowly exhales, small increments of air, one at a time. “The Hebrew calendar doesn’t work that way, you know; it doesn’t correspond with the English calendar that way.”

“Shit,” she says, letting all the remaining air escape at once.

The rabbi laughs, jolly bastard. “What exactly do you want to know? I mean, what do you need to know?” He shoves another cookie into his face.

She looks over his shoulder, past his ear, which is sprouting little black hairs all along its rim. Alex is swinging Gertie in circles now, by her ankles, showing off for the girls. She’ll puke, Erin thinks, or at the very least get all riled up and be impossible to put down for her nap. So be it, though: She will not play bad cop here, not in front of the rabbi and Dana and the Cool Kids, not on your life. Is this what makes her a bad mother? The willingness to let her munchkin throw up so she can win a probably half-invented power struggle with her fucking prick of a husband? Well, this is what happened when things deteriorated thusly. This would be the least of Gertie’s suffering the consequences of Erin’s idiotic choices. The rabbi is giving her that nice-rabbi look, that patient, rotund, hirsute learned-guy look.

“I guess it was like nineteen eighty-four…,” she trails off. Gertie is laughing hysterically, the kind of laughter that will, in about fifteen seconds, turn to sobs.

“Nineteen eighty-four?”

“My bat mitzvah,” she tells him. And then — it feels kind of good to lay this down for him—“I forgot my parsha. I don’t know what my parsha was.”

“Ah,” he says, fifth and final cookie disappearing into the hole. Is there a trace of disapproval there? There might be. There should be, she feels. But the rabbi just munches on his cookie, sanguine, nods.

“And,” she adds, inexplicably, “my mother died last year.”

Sure enough there comes at that moment an earth-shattering wail from Gertie. Erin, exhilarated, darts over and snatches her up, away from Alex, cradling her, whispering, “Shhhh” and “S’okay, little munchkin,” smiling beatifically at concerned onlookers.

On the way home Gertie snores softly in the back, green dress rumpled, face covered with crumbs and chocolate from the remnants of a cookie she’s still holding. The car has gotten extremely hot in the parking-lot sun, and Erin enjoys watching Alex sweat, enjoys watching him desperately futz with the AC.

“The rabbi said that there’s tons of info about parshas on the Web,” Erin says. “I gotta go online and figure out what mine was.”

“Mmmm,” Alex says after a second.

“It’s just so weird that that memory’s just gone, you know? Where did it go, you know?” She hates reaching out to him like this, but he’s who’s here.

“Mine was Toldot. ”

There is no getting around, at moments like this, the enormity of the deadness between them.

“I know.” She looks out the window, watches as they pass a restaurant they’d eaten at once a few years ago and then never again. “What was Toldot about, anyway?”

Alex has both hands on the wheel, at ten o’clock and two o’clock, like they teach in drivers’ ed. “Jacob and Esau,” he says. His ever-expanding forehead is beaded grotesquely with sweat.

“No, I know,” Erin says, attempting a playful slap on his arm. It’s less playful than she intends. “But, really, I mean. What’s it about ? Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember.”

“So?”

“Jacob and Esau!”

“But what about Jacob and Esau?” she asks. He puts his hand over the vent, tries to turn to the AC knob higher than high. She starts to laugh. “You have no idea, do you? You dick.” She should refrain from name-calling; it’ll only get stockpiled in Alex’s arsenal of therapy ammunition, only get hauled out for Goodkiss on Wednesday, but it’s utterly worth it to her right now. The word, filling her mouth like a blunt object: dick. She laughs hard, from the gut. Wonderful, extended laughter.

“Leave me alone, Erin.”

After careful deliberation Erin chooses a black jersey wraparound dress with three-quarter sleeves for the party. She’d worn it last to Sheila’s funeral, and it still had, if she looked closely, pinholes from the small swatch of torn fabric they’d safety-pinned on to distinguish her as a mourner. She wishes she still had that ripped fabric, she wishes she could keep it pinned on, pass it off as nouveau fashion.

The dress deliberation is mostly an invented exercise; she has no other remotely appropriate party clothes that fit. Once upon a time she’d been a size eight; now, on the best of days, she’s a twelve. She runs her hands over other dresses, old dresses, dresses she had worked once upon a time, but Jesus, what a baby did to the body! It was undoable. You had to be lithe and taut to live with another chick in a converted barn, waitressing between band practices, didn’t you? You had to look cool not wearing a bra and not caring that you so happened to look hot. She is ineligible, now, she knows, for all of it. No matter, though; she’ll wear her push-up bra and look somewhat okay at least from the waist up. The waist down is another matter entirely, and one she can do nothing about. The light would be soft and there’d be no Gertie and maybe she’d have a drink or two, maybe she’d dance.