Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

Both Alex and Gertie are fast asleep, she in her crib and he on the couch in front of the TV, both drooling. Erin goes online, searches for “Torah Portion,” and gets dozens upon dozens of sites. She starts with Chabad.org. This week’s portion, it says, is Vayeira. She scrolls through an alphabetized list of every portion in the Torah, scanning them indiscriminately. They look a little familiar, all of them. From her own year of bar/bat mitzvahs all those years ago? From the well of some sort of collective unconscious? Parsha in a Nutshell is offered, then Parsha in Depth. Commentary. Last week was Lech Lecha. Next week it’s Chayei Sarah, and then, what do you know? Toldot. She clicks on Parsha in a Nutshell. Jacob and Esau, indeed. Fighting in Rebecca’s womb for dominance, born into the world at odds. That striking image of wee Jacob gripping Esau’s heel as he follows his brother out of the womb. Bookish Jacob’s deception of old, blind Isaac while his strapping brother, Esau, is out hunting; two nations at odds evermore. It was true about the way people got set in their resentment and fury. Those things never go away, do they? They should make a movie out of this, Erin thinks; narratively it sure don’t get much better.

She looks at a couple more ( Vayikra, Bamidbar, Shoftim —why do they all sound somewhat familiar?) but gets restless pretty quickly. So after furtively getting up and shutting the door against her dozing family, she goes directly to teamgangbang.com, her porno site of choice. A relief to escape from the long list of familiar/foreign Torah portions. Alex’s interest in sex had waned for a long time before dropping off completely to coincide with Gertie’s arrival, and looking back, Erin can see that, of course, the teamgangbang.com began in direct response to the waning. Strange, she thinks, how long it can take for these things, these facts about one’s own life, to take shape and assume a sensible form, incontrivable fact. For a good while, teamgangbang seemed an innocent enough (well, not in and of itself, obviously) substitute. It’s all clear only from this vantage point: her willful blindness in marrying Alex, in settling for someone who doesn’t love her, whom she doesn’t love, her pigheadedness in proceeding, then, to get pregnant, to have the baby. To have the baby before her mother bit it, to have the baby so she wouldn’t be so completely alone in the world. What vacuums these things were designed to fill. And how clear it all is to her now, only now, that they, the things, haven’t succeeded whatsoever in doing so. On the computer screen, with the sound turned off, three gigantic black men pummel away at a bleached blond with two oversized nipple rings and five o’clock shadow pubic hair.

Erin thinks about cute Zac, the boy who’d top her “to do” list were she to be magically transported backward, back into herself as a young bat mitzvah debutante. She crosses her legs, rotates hips in desk chair, wonders if Dorit’s friends are having sex yet. Erin certainly hadn’t been — the dictum over the majority of her pubescence had been “everything but.” Nothing else, nothing “but,” was supposed to have counted.

Sarah arrives promptly at 6:45. Comes into the bathroom where Erin is almost finished applying makeup, perches on the counter. It’s amazing, Erin thinks to herself, blowing on the blush brush, that she remembers how to do this.

Sarah grins. “What up, Erin?”

“Call me Mrs. Abrahms,” Erin scowls, playing.

“Can I call you Ms. Abrahms?”

“Certainly not. ”

“Harrumph,” says Sarah, inspecting an eye shadow as old as she is.

“Hey, Sarah, do you by any chance remember what your Torah portion was?” Erin flips her head over, gives her hair a few sprays, flips back up, looks like a disco queen. She hasn’t gotten done up in forever, and the feeling is pretty nice. She once took this feeling for granted. Unbelievable.

“What, like, at my bat mitzvah?” Sarah is trying to dread her hair, which is blond and curly, but not quite kinky enough, so that a few months into the process it’s still just a huge, smelly knot. Erin could not love her more.

“Yes, like at your bat mitzvah.”

“Um,” she says, following Erin into the living room. “The theme was ‘Places I’ve Been’—which was like, Hawaii and Paris and the Grand Canyon on family vacations and Philadelphia to visit my grandparents and whatever. It was so fucking queer.” She clamps her hand over her mouth, shakes her head, and looks over at Gertie, who’s sitting in her beanbag chair a foot from the TV, enthralled by the Teletubbies. “Baaaaaaaaaa!” says Tinky-Winky.

“But what was your Torah portion? What was your speech about?”

“Um…the Bible? I don’t know.”

Alex is jangling his keys by the front door. “Can we please not be late?”

Disregard for the time of others was yet another therapy topic. Erin can practically see the complaint taking shape, being given its very own brand-new file in Alex’s deliberate little brain. She’s always late; she doesn’t even try to make an effort. It was my niece’s bat mitzvah, and she couldn’t get it together to be on time.

Go fuck yourself, Erin will say, or: My mother just died. Dr. Goodkiss will nod.

Erin kisses an oblivious Gertie, faces the mirror in the entry hall. Beige lip gloss, push-up bra, funeral dress all jazzy. Alex looks at her, says nothing. She waited months to broach the sexlessness with Goodkiss. She finds it deeply, deeply mortifying, has not told even her closest friends. She gazes longingly at Sarah, who’s lying next to Gertie on the floor, doing her best Teletubbies impression for a heh-heh-hehehehe-heh- ing Gertie. Sarah would understand. Erin wants nothing (not even three enormous black dudes at once) so much as she wants to bow out of the bat mitzvah party and order in pizza with Sarah.

But, instead, since they’re magically on time, since she’s wearing a push-up bra, because today’s combination of teamgangbang and parsha.com has filled her with all sorts of strange and familiar wanting, because in her better moments she believes wholeheartedly in the discipline of Fake it ’till you make it, and despite the presence of the empty, terrible car seat, Erin undoes her seat belt and leans over the parking break as Alex turns onto Wilshire.

“Hey,” she whispers in his ear. He flinches as though a fly had grazed him, or a bee with a stinger. He keeps his eyes on the road. He’s a good driver. Tense but pretty good: exactly what he’s like as a lover. Erin kisses his neck. He likes this unequivocally, has always liked this. “Hey,” she whispers again, feeling the jersey dress brush against her exfoliated knees, catching sight as she leans further down of her own shimmering, pushed-up cleavage. She slides a hand up his thigh.

“Erin,” he says. “What are you doing?”

She continues the hand up his thigh, does a lap around his balls. For the life of her, she can’t figure out the sexlessness. She’s tried asking him. Is he cheating on her? Does he masturbate a lot, like she does? Did he just get old and stop caring? Was there a physical problem ? She just wanted to know, she assured him. Whatever it was, it would be okay; she just wanted to know. He’d tried to get Goodkiss to back up the excuse that it was his Prozac, but she’d spoken, for once, these words from on high:

“Antidepressants can make it difficult to reach orgasm, but generally they help with the libido, they don’t hinder it.”