Elisa Albert: How This Night Is Different: Stories

“Sweetie, sure. It’s fine. Don’t worry. We can do whatever you want.” Hormones, hormones, right.

She had gesticulated wildly at the tapestry, the IKEA bookshelves. “It’s like a fucking dorm room in here. This is totally insane. We can’t bring a person into the world. What the fuck, Mark?” She’d buried her face in a pillow, impervious to Mark’s attempts to soothe her. Hormones, hormones, hormones.

Sandee Stern (graduate of Stanford, resident of Silverlake, school social worker, wife of Stew, and Mark’s favorite of the group because of her entirely alliterated life), was sitting on their bed, breast-feeding one-month-old Sophie.

“Hi, Daddy!” she said, before he could duck back out into the hall. The perversity of anyone really calling him this, even in jest, gave him fucking chills, actual chills, shooting up and down his spine. “Has the deed been done?”

“No,” he told her. “Not yet. We’re missing a key player.”

At the end of the hall, the door to the nursery (until three months before, the “office”) was closed. Bingo.

“Beth?” He knocked twice. Nothing.

From the living room, Shirley: “Yesterday! I could swear Mark’s bris was yesterday. Where does the time go? I know! And now I’m a grandma !” He could well picture her expression as she did this bit; eyes wide, painted lips stretched tight around laser-whitened teeth. Henry would be next to her, his arm around her waist just lasciviously enough to look off, fingers brushing against the top of her ribs and the bottom of her tits under the too-tight shirt. “Not the most well-endowed,” Shirley had confided in Mark a few weeks earlier, “but he’s very tender with me in bed.”

“Mom,” he’d begged. “Please. Please.”

Mark pressed his fingertips against the hollow plywood door, his forehead against the rough, unpainted surface of it. The lightbulb in the fixture overhead had gone out a few days earlier, but changing it had not exactly been high on either Mark or Beth’s list of priorities. It was not an entirely terrible place to take a nap. He let himself close his eyes briefly, just to experience the sheer ecstasy of it. What a gift to flip the switch of that one measly sense.

“Beth?” he found the energy to ask thinly. “Hey. Sweetie?”

He tried the knob. Locked.

“Everything is okay?” The mohel, behind him. Pronounced moil by Shirley, like foil, soil, boil, recoil. He was eighty if he was a day, but came highly recommended by the temple sisterhood as the foreskin obliterator in town. A fourth-generation mohel, according to Shirley. This, apparently, was like the Eastern European equivalent of being a Kennedy.

Mark turned around, nodded slightly. “Yes, fine.” Not having had a father for most of his life had made Mark sort of nervous around older men; a combination of amazement that any man should actually live past forty, disgust that they might want to screw his mom, and longing for a game of catch in the yard, company on an imagined, retroactive pre — bar mitzvah trip to a brothel.

“The baby is okay?”

“I — yes. We’ll start soon, sir.” He did this around men old enough to be his father: stood up straight, patted down his figurative cowlicks. The way orphans behave in foster care, hopeful that clean fingernails and good manners will earn them a permanent home.

“I have this for you,” the mohel said, producing from a folder a few stapled pages. “After Care,” read the top sheet. There were bullets, bold type, a small diagram. Mark tasted bile. He folded the packet decisively in half.

“Thank you.”

“You will call me if you have any questions, yes? My phone number is on the top.”

”Yes,” Mark said. “Thank you.”

The mohel smiled, followed Mark’s gaze toward the closed door. “The mother is upset?”

“I don’t know,” Mark whispered.

“It is not unusual,” the mohel said. “It is very common.”

Mark nodded.

“Do you want for me to speak with her?”

Yes, he thought. “No, it’s okay. Everything is fine.”

Rich came down the hallway and stepped into the bathroom. He looked at the mohel, Mark, the door.

“Probably giving him a pep talk,” he said, leering out against the doorframe. He made a minimegaphone out of his hands and hollered into it. “Be brave, little man!”

“Shut up, you dick!” Mark said, with more force than he thought he could muster. The word “dick” hung in the air, an apropos pejorative. “My brother,” he added, apologetically, when Rich had closed the door.

“Yes,” said the mohel. “He is the sandak ?” The honored relative who was to hold the baby during the ceremony. Usually a grandfather, but in this case, given the dearth of multigenerational males in the Roth family, yes, sadly, Rich.

“The baby is named for our father,” Mark said, nodding. “Lev.”

“Ah,” said the old man, beaming. He put his hand to his chest. “Heart. A beautiful name.”

Why had they named him in both English and Hebrew? Lucas seemed suddenly like the most superfluous, strange name Mark had ever heard. Almost as strange right then as Lou, that mysterious, shadowy figure. A guy so nice they named him twice, Mark singsonged to himself, swaying and senseless, exhausted.

Endless streams of overwrought baby announcements had been arriving constantly from Beth and Mark’s starter yuppie friends over the past few years. And oh, Christ, the names ! What were people thinking? They’d laughed maliciously at the repetitive Jacobs and Emmas, the trashy Skylars, the ludicrous Dakotas. You could tell a lot about people from their name choices. Their class aspirations, their delusions. The people they themselves had wanted to be but failed.

“How many ways,” Beth would wonder aloud, fingering heavy Italian paper threaded intricately with either pink or blue ribbon, “could there possibly be to euphemize this?” Oh, Boy — Molly has a brother! Jamie would like to announce the arrival of his parents! Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice, Twice: Samantha and Stacey have arrived! She’d fantasized about one that would say: Beth and Mark, who like to do it doggie-style, somehow replicated themselves in a Brand New Person (!), who was born shortly after 7 a.m. on August 18, after Beth, in a kind of pain she can best try to describe in interpretive dance, was forced to abandon her birth plan of squatting in a whirlpool and eschewing the horrid medicalization thrust so often upon innocent, healthy women in delivery, was heavily anesthetized and had her genitalia ripped to shreds while Mark stood by and said things like, “You’re doing great, honey.” And with yellow ribbon, definitely, or green or purple, for fuck’s sake; none of that archaic gender color-ghettoizing for their little schmoopie-woopie-head.

“I don’t know if that’ll go over so well with the nice folks who’ve been buying us stuff off our baby registry, darlingest,” Mark had said. They’d ended up doing one that said, simply: Lucas Wein-Roth (Mark had won the extremely heated coin toss — two out of three — and therefore gotten Roth last) printed in large type, with the relevant pound/ounce/date info below, and for delighted contrarian effect, a footnoted “No gendered gifts, please.” Lev was nowhere to be seen, because why transliterate it? And why confuse people unfamiliar with the Hebrew?

The mohel stood in silence by the door for a few seconds. Mark knocked again, inspired to take further action, however futile, if only for the mohel’s benefit. “Beth. Honey, I know this is upsetting. Please open up.” He looked at the mohel for a thumbs-up or something.