Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

“Of course we’ll be at your parents’,” my mother said, handing Lexi and me each a machzor . “I’m bringing kugel.”

It felt disgusting to have my hand on Alicia like that. Like I was touching something exceedingly confidential, something that shouldn’t be touched by just anyone. I pulled my hand away but too late: I officially had the willies. She was a giant loser. I, her former charge, surely knew much, much more than she did about the world.

Alicia seemed perpetually out of breath; a side effect of pregnancy, I wondered? “I can’t believe you’re in college, Mandy-poo. How did I get so old? Do you have a boyfriend?” She said the word “boyfriend” as if it was “cure for cancer.”

“Yeah,” I said. Lexi and my parents visibly perked up. “His name is Peter. He’s a sophomore.” I smiled serenely at them all. Lies, it turned out, were almost as comforting as cookies.

Our machzors were in a spate of panic: “The gates are closing!” It was enough to incite an emotional stampede. It was now or never. We were up shit creek if we didn’t acknowledge some of our wrongs posthaste. We with our corrupt speech, evil thoughts, licentiousness, foul speech, foolish talk, inclination to evil, fraud and falsehood, bribery, mocking, slander, false pride, idle gossip, wanton glances, haughtiness, effrontery, disrespecting parents, and eating and drinking! And that was just today! And really: That was just me!

Hunger now was indistinguishable from the ache, and my body was staging a weak revolt, a revolt that in spirit brought Rainbow Lawn Chair back to mind: slouched over tiredly, propping up his sign, engrossed in his Bible and his potato chips, not bothering even to lift his head for a fucking second to pass some judgment on me.

I mean, really: Fanatics weren’t what they were cracked up to be. Even Peter, if he’d been a party to my day at the clinic, could surely have been counted upon to bust out with a Samuel L. Jackson — esque “I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers” or two. Or three.

“I don’t feel good,” I whispered to my mother, who was knocking her fist ritually against her chest, parroting along with the hundreds of other people in the sanctuary, the laundry list of trespasses we had committed.

“Don’t be a baby,” she said. “We’re going to the Ackermans’ as soon as this is over.”

We had missed Yizkor, the memorial service, in favor of our naps, and I closed my hand into a fist and knocked it against my chest once, softly, for just that offense.

“So I guess this must have been like your favorite holiday ever,” I said to Lexi while people swarmed around the buffet. I was waiting for an insult or dismissal, but she did the unthinkable and sat down on the couch next to me, tucked her legs up under her, laughed the smallest of laughs.

I was taking my own sweet time before picking up a plate and filling it with food. I needed another few minutes of hunger on my own terms. Not because it was mandated, but because it was over and I wasn’t ready, like when it stops raining and you see people still holding up their umbrellas for a while. Now that the buffet was laid out before me, I could fast endlessly. I didn’t need a bagel now; I could wait another minute. And then a minute after that, too. I could change my pad, I could take a nap, I could wait still longer.

On the Ackermans’ coffee table was an enormous calendar: What Does Our Baby Look Like Today? Alicia’s, bookmarked on day 209, looked pretty much like a baby, but I flipped the pages back to earlier, reptilian stages.

“Pretty freaky,” Lexi said, looking over my shoulder at day 53, “Looks like a lizard.”

My mother came over with a loaded plate, a napkin-wrapped set of plastic cutlery. She thrust it all at Lexi.

“Eat.”

Lexi took the plate and set it on her lap. Her head held high, she glanced down at the plate as if it were China: far away and fascinating.

“Eat it, Lexi. Don’t make an issue here.”

“Great,” Lexi said to the food. “Fucking great.”

My mother stuck out a hip and stood there.

“I’ll make sure she eats it,” I said authoritatively, looking up from the book. My mother thought about that for a second, wondering if she could trust me. Then she nodded and high-tailed it back to the buffet to load up her own plate.

We looked at the quiche and bagels and cream cheese and noodle kugel. A cluster of grapes. A piece of babka.

I had expected to inhale food from the buffet like oxygen, to ply myself with it, to fall back into it as though it were the deepest, thickest cushion net in the world, saving me from impact, to float away on the luxury liner of that buffet and live happily ever after. But now that it was here, now that it was time to eat, now that it was, in fact, okay to eat, food seemed not quite so miraculous. The plate in Lexi’s lap was, in actuality, a simple plate of greasy quiche, a waxy, dense bagel, over-sugared babka, chemical-dusted grapes. What lay behind Lexi’s fast, I briefly — and not for the first time — asked myself. Why was she not eating?

I scooted closer to my sister and slipped off my shoes, arranged myself cross-legged on top of another omnipresent jumbo pad, a corner of my thigh touching hers. On day one of What Does Our Baby Look Like Today? I saw something that looked not unlike the grape cluster.

Then I casually reached over, tore the bagel in two, dragged it through the cream cheese, and stuffed it into my mouth. I could no more have borne the bean at nineteen than I could have willed myself smaller feet or heightened athleticism. It simply wasn’t possible. There was, as they say, no way.

Lexi gaped at me, surprised as I was.

“Really?”

The quiche was salty, and I chased it with more bagel, more cream cheese, more bagel. When that was gone I ate the babka, and then I picked at the grapes, stopping only to locate my parents in the crowd, long enough to see that they were over by the buffet, devouring their own break fasts and talking to their friends, laughing. I chewed and swallowed and chewed Lexi’s food some more, a bottomless pit.

Lexi was amused and incredulous and relieved and probably a little disgusted, too. Her voice was full of wonder. “Thanks.”

I nodded like it was nothing and continued to pick at the grapes, one by one, until they were gone.

The ache wouldn’t budge, though. The ache couldn’t be assuaged. The cramps just marched on, my head heavy as a bag of sand. There was no big victory in having fasted even this long, I could plainly tell. I should have fasted indefinitely. I should be fasting still.

October 2004

Dear Philip,

You must be aware of the intimidation factor inherent in anyone’s writing to you, but I wonder if maybe the paradigm is similar to what happens when a stunning woman walks into a room: No one approaches her, she’s simply too beautiful; everyone assumes they have no shot. Maybe you don’t get many letters. Maybe you haven’t received a truly balls-out, bare-assed communiqué since 1959.

You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it? The book was The Counterlife, but I had yet to read it when I presented it to you for signature. You were unsure of the spelling of my name, and so there’s an endearing awkwardness, a lack of flow, to the inscription. For E, you wrote, and the pen held still too long on the page, leaving a mark at the point of the lowest horizontal’s completion while you waited for me to continue spelling. L, you continued on, and then, again, a spot of bleeding, hesitant ink before the i and the s and the a, which proceed as they should before your slanted, rote, wonderful autograph. I remember being all too aware of the impatient line behind me, people clutching their copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, The Human Stain, the odd Zuckerman Unbound. I tried to meet your eye, I tried to communicate something meaningful. The others, of course, didn’t get it. I wanted you to know: I got it. Later, when I found my way to reading the book, I actually purchased a whole new copy so I wouldn’t sully my signed paperback. I cherish our moment of eye contact, your pen hovering over the title page, my name circulating in that colossal mind of yours.