Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

“What was yours?” Erin asks her.

“Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice,” she says, folding her hands in her lap and batting her eyelashes prettily.

“Ha,” says Erin. “And yours?” she nods at the other girl.

“Gardening.” She fairly lights up, recalling it. “It was so cool. Each table was a different herb or something, and everyone at the table got some seeds to plant…. It was actually really cool.”

“It actually was,” Zac says, holding smoke. He coughs it out, and they laugh and laugh. Everything slows down, unravels: calm, linear, cloudless.

“What about you?” Erin sighs, flushed from all the laughing. She nudges Zac flirtatiously with her foot, which she’s slipped out of her terribly outmoded black mules. The girls both have on these adorable ballet flats; the first’s are covered with glitter and the second’s are metallic gold.

“Basketball.”

They all mull this for a moment. Into the empty space creeps Erin’s awareness that she’s in her late thirties with a crappy marriage and small child and dead mother and vanished central memory of having been these kids’ age, and she gives it the finger, closes her eyes, opens them again.

“I can remember everything about mine except my parsha, ” Erin says softly. “I had a Soviet twin and everything.” When no one responds — did they hear her? — she wonders whether she spoke out loud. “Cute shoes!” she tells the girls. “Where’d you get them?”

“Oh,” girl one says, looking at her feet. “Thanks. Fred Segal.” Erin can’t afford Fred Segal, not by a long shot.

“I love Fred Segal. Maybe if my fucking husband opened his own practice, I’d be able to shop there.” She shakes her head, giggles, makes eye contact with girl two. “He’s a dumb-fuck.” Erin thinks about this, giggles some more. “Our marriage is totally, like, over.” No one says anything. “We haven’t had sex in like a year.” The girls look at the floor.

“That sucks,” someone says.

“Yeah,” Erin says. “Omigod, did you guys see Dana? Do you believe what a complete idiot that woman is?”

“Who’s Dana?” Zac relights the dwindling joint, sucks on it hard, flicks the lighter a few times.

“We should get back,” girl one says.

“No!” Erin pleads. “Let’s stay in here!” These are her friends. She likes it in here with them, the shiny surfaces and cool tile and expensive scented candle smell mixed with sweet weed, this inner, ageless sanctum. But they’re getting up, looking in the mirror. Girl two takes a lip gloss out of her bra and touches up.

“Nah, we should really go back,” Zac says.

“Pussies!” Erin blurts. They look at each other nervously.

When they open the door she can hear the beat of the Electric Slide. They’re leaving her, the assholes. She watches them helplessly from her perch on the toilet. She thought they were her pals. She has nobody.

“See you in there?” Cute Zac lingers briefly.

“Yeah.”

“’Kay. See ya!”

When the door slams shut behind them, she gets up and relocks herself in, locks the strains of the Electric Slide out. Then she sits down on the floor where girl one had been, hugs her knees into her chest, and then rolls onto her side and curls up fetal.

She tries not to go back to wanting to remember her Torah portion, but the wanting is just there, unbidden. What was it, goddammit? Which one? The harder she tries to remember the less she’ll be open to remembering, so she tries to avoid the wanting. The wanting is the problem, has always been the problem, will always be the problem. This, if she were sober, might inspire her to take a new tack with Alex. But she isn’t sober, so it doesn’t occur to her that way, and won’t: not ever. She stretches out on the floor, on her back now, legs splayed. She thinks about tearing Alex a new asshole re: Toldot. She thinks about telling him, on the way home, everything she learned on Chabad.org, about claiming it that way for herself, as her own. But even what she read today has slipped away: Jacob and Esau, a birthright, deception, fighting, whatever. She tries to ignore the music from the ballroom, tries to avoid imaginings of the DJ dancing lamely, the leis and Glow Sticks and confetti circus of it all, the girls with socks slipped on over their hosiery for dancing. Thriller, the YMCA, Dana protesting speciously as they lift her up overhead in a chair.

She reaches up her dress and into her underwear, searching for a fantasy, a hook, running through the roster of what she’s known: her bat mitzvah — era crushes, her high school boyfriend, her college love, strings of meaningless hookups, Alex, the specter of teamgangbang vs. some unfortunate wench, cute Zac — waiting for the wanting to alight on something worthwhile, something concrete enough to comprise a fantasy, something identifiably hers. But almost immediately she can feel that it’s futile, that she has no orgasm in her, nothing to provoke the basis for an orgasm, nothing to hold on to and celebrate in that way, no memory good enough to help her get there, nothing to reach back for that would even get her close.

Iam useful in situations like these. Someone has died, and we are all gathered here, flies on shit, eating and talking, mindful to keep our voices low and somber. My mother is standing by a tray of cold cuts, shaking her head, her face full of sadness. My mother is good at this. Later she will tell me: “Brenda is not dealing properly. She needs to face reality sooner or later. I’ll bring over some soup next week.” But right now my mother is shaking her head and speaking softly to Brenda, the widow, her closest friend and once-upon-a-time sorority sister. Brenda seems like she’s wondering what’s happened, looking around her living room at all these familiar faces, until it rushes back and hits her squarely in the chest, a heavy, sticky awareness that spreads like syrup: Her husband, Howard, is dead.

My mother sort of knows this drill, sort of knows about the dead weight in Brenda’s chest, sort of knows about trays and trays of cold cuts and bagels and pastries, about disbelief. My father left us when I was six, before I could form a lasting impression of him. All I have are blurry images of his black wingtips coming home from work, the feeling of his facial stubble against my chubby cheeks when he kissed me, vestiges of his funky-rancid smell after a set of push-ups on their bedroom floor on Sundays. We are closed off, my mother and I, and we do not discuss my father, whose name was Neil. He didn’t die, but he’s still gone, and I like to pretend he is dead. It’s a lot simpler that way.

I wonder what I would have been like at six, in a similar roomful of sad and sympathetic people. Inappropriate, I bet, talking and laughing loudly, disturbing the reverie of people missing Neil. A six-year-old is a six-year-old, death in the family or no. Now that I’m older, I wish that I could really experience the loss of Neil. This time he would really be dead, and I would really feel it.

My mother comes over to me, ever helpful, exactly who you’d want at your dead husband’s shiva, to ask if I wouldn’t mind taking Tulip for a walk. Tulip is lying in the corner of the room, and she lifts a bored eyebrow at the sound of her name, but makes no movement. I don’t know what kind of dog she is, but she always seems depressed and a little bit sick, with crusty eye boogers and a kind of socky smell. “She hasn’t been walked since it happened,” my mother tells me. “Danny’s too upset to have to think about this now. It would be such a help, Jilly, please?” Like I said: I am useful in situations like these. Appropriate, on call.