Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

I walk on and imagine Danny looking for Tulip, wanting some silent, supportive canine company, Danny finding Tulip gone, Danny freaking out, throwing platters of cookies at startled guests, Danny losing father and dog all at once, death upon death, like a mathematical problem: loss squared. My mother will wonder why she didn’t just leave me by the coffeepot and butter cookies, why she insisted on making me useful. Brenda will stand by the window with a nervous-oblivious smile on her face and her eyes immutable and think: It’s such a nice day outside, somebody ought to take Tulip for a walk.

After halfheartedly helping her mother clean, sweep, launder, and dust ritually with a feather and a candle borrowed from the emergency earthquake kit, Joanna congregated with her parents on the patio. They stood around a mop bucket and beamed at her.

“Jo-Jo,” her father said, the same way he’d said it when she was eight. “Show us what you found.”

Joanna held up the hametz : a quartered piece of white bread Ron had “hidden” for her to “find” (smack in the middle of the dining room table, on top of the microwave, on top of the washing machine, and by the kitchen sink, respectively). He nodded approvingly and flipped through the Haggadah for the appropriate blessing. He read it first in Hebrew and then in English.

“Any leaven in my possession, which I have not seen or removed, shall be as if it does not exist, and as the dust of earth. ” To this last part, “the dust of earth, ” Ron added a sinister and dramatic flourish, so it sounded almost as if he was promising, when he found you, to suck your blood.

The quartered bread sat soggy and rejected in Joanna’s sweaty open palm. On the inside of her left forearm the tattooed words “why” and “not” unfolded in small blue-black Times New Roman italics, followed by an outsize question mark. The words had been meaningful to her when she’d gotten them at twenty-three but had long since ceased to mean whatever they had meant, and had had no choice, then, but to assume new meanings as she grew ever older looking at them every day. She saw her mother try not to stare. Usually Joanna made a point of long sleeves in the presence of the ’rents, to spare them all the torment.

“An Orthodox guy in Pico-Robertson accidentally set himself on fire doing this last year,” Joanna informed them. Then she dropped the bread into the bucket and Marilyn lit a match. For a little while they watched the flame do its worst, until the stench of burned toast forced them back inside. The bucket remained out on the patio all day, blackened quarters disintegrated at the bottom.

Joanna was home for the sedarim so, of course, the task of setting the table fell to her. Wasn’t it a given for adult children to fall immediately back into their preordained roles within the family upon returning home? And look at that: “home”! Still, forever, she found herself referring to her parents’ house — a place she’d left decisively at seventeen — as home.

Once upon a time there had been no greater pleasure than in her imagined grownup responsibility of making the table “look pretty,” but she was a ripe thirty-one now, a ways away from eleven. And as she unpacked her grandma Bess’s ancient, precious Passover china from its musty foam crate, she smiled at the memory of her mother’s sly manipulation: It’s your job to make the table look pretty, Jo-Jo! Once upon a time she had relished the assignment. She would fuss about the precise angle and distance of the wine glass from plate and knife, feel betrayed when guests actually sat down to eat, messed up her perfect settings, ringed the crystal with lipstick.

After a couple of rocky periods in her twenties (a few particularly bad breakups, a pinch of credit card debt, unceremonious abandonment of a master’s in painting, enforced leaving — okay, so she was fucking her boss — of a plum graphic design job, bridges thoroughly charred), Joanna seemed now to have her “shit” more or less “together,” as they say, and her proficiency in making the table look pretty seemed proof enough. She set each plate so that the stem of its centered red poppy extended downward. This, she recalled from Marilyn’s formative instruction, was an important detail: gravity applied in the aesthetic of fine china. She cared considerably less these days about place-setting precision, but she would not betray the girl she had been. Evenly spaced flatware was the other crucial thing.

When the foam china crate was empty, though, and there were only eleven delicate red poppies flowering within thick navy blue borders ringed with gold leaf evenly spaced around the table, Joanna felt defeated. The twelfth plate, she fully recalled, had been broken during a raucous party she had hosted in eleventh grade. Josh Weinstein, her first love, had raided the pantry looking for snacks. Joanna had been completely, blessedly stoned, and, needless to say, pretty hungry herself, so she’d just let out a spacey giggle when Josh emerged onto the patio with a Grandma Bess Passover plate instead, palming the red poppy like an affected French waiter. “Zees ees niiiice,” he’d said, making ridiculous faces at Joanna. (They’d dated all through high school and into college, but he’d ended up being a total fucker; cheated on her for months, left her at the end of freshman year with a parting gift of genital warts.)

Jay Taubman, from a couple dozen feet away, had clapped his gigantic pubescent paws and held them out—“Dude! Right here!”—and Josh had tossed the blue-rimmed artifact as if it were a Frisbee. It had sailed for what seemed like hours, spinning gracefully through the air toward Jay.

“Wait,” Joanna had said weakly. “Don’t.” But then there had been a shatter, the onomatopoeic pleasure of which reverberated sharply in the ganja-tinged pit of her stomach. She remembered having giggled in spite of herself. Crash! Tee-hee.

“Mom,” she said, slouching into the kitchen, “Grandma Bess’s Passover china only has eleven plates.”

“Where’s the twelfth?” Marilyn, wrist deep in a bowl of nuts and cinnamon and finely chopped apples for charoset, raised an eyebrow.

Joanna shrugged, looked at the floor. “I have no idea.” Usually they went to Aunt Barbi and Uncle Larry’s for Passover.

“So just use a plate from another set,” Marilyn said, furiously mixing. “The pink flowers one. Honestly, Joanna. Things break. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Who said anything about it breaking?” Joanna’s voice veered dangerously into the realm of shrill. She had expected her mother to be more upset. Grandma Bess had died before Joanna’s birth — had not lived to see her first grandchild — and Joanna always felt it was a huge deal when things broke. The end of the world, even. Marilyn kept on mixing. “Why would I have any idea what happened to the freaking plate?” Marilyn said nothing. “What the hell? I don’t even live here. Je sus.”

Joanna’s emotional susceptibility was aggravated by the raw, itchy, extraordinarily uncomfortable state of her genitalia: a yeast infection, for sure, noticed the day before in its earliest stages and blossomed to full, awful effect today. It was driving her insane; she wanted to rip into her vagina with an ax, to tear it apart and revel in the ecstasy of the itch relieved. She had a Problem in her Pants, as the girls in her co-op in college used to say. There were proliferate Problems in their Pants back in the day: UTIs, various and sundry STDs, yeast. “Curse the motherfucking Pill,” her friend Claire would moan, knocking back shots of not-from-concentrate cranberry juice at the kitchen table. “Sexual liberation comes with a hefty price tag indeed, ladies.”