Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

Her intended’s name is Dov. He’s ba’al tshuva, like her. It means “returned.” (Don’t kid yourself: born again). There’s, like, a whole world of these people. You wouldn’t know it, they don’t tend to host telethons or anything, but they’re out there. Dov used to be Doug, for fuck’s sake. He’s from San Diego.

“Rach, you’re twenty-four,” I told her.

“So?” she said.

“So you’re too young to get married,” I said. Dov is thirty-one. He has a beard. He used to be a professional surfer. They met two years ago at Burning Man and bonded over Phish bootlegs.

“Miri,” she said. “Try and be happy for me.”

“I am,” I said, meaning I was trying. “I am happy for you.”

I’m to be Ra-chel’s maid of honor. I still have the half-a-heart charm split with her when we were nine that proclaims us “Best Friends 4ever!” (my half says “ends” and “ver!”). But even so the bride-to-be has new friends. Chava, Leora, Batya. Rachel met them on a religious weekend retreat with Doug/Dov, on her way to becoming Ra-chel.

It’s a week before doomsday, and we’re all sitting in a booth at a theme bar. The theme is a little muddled, but seems to have something to do with the tropics. This is made clear by the papier-mâché palm trees strung with lights and the waitresses in grass skirts and coconut shell bras.

The girls are drinking kosher champagne, which they smuggled in here themselves; I’m doing shots. Ra-chel is sporting a ridiculous tuft of white lace, meant to approximate a veil, tucked, via a comb, into the crown of her head.

I hold up a Black and Gold. “L’chaim,” I say, trying and failing not to sound sarcastic. When I toss it back, Chava and Leora exchange looks and Batya ptu-ptu-ptu s over her shoulder. These women know how to party.

This is my first ever bachelorette celebration, but to the best of my knowledge, they’re supposed to consist of drunken frolicking, the sort ostensibly verboten after marriage, aren’t they? Hairless, body-glittered men gyrating in your face, that sort of thing? So it’s something of a disappointment to be sitting here instead, watching Chava trying not to stare at the shell-titted waitresses, discussing the head covering Ra-chel will have to don as a married lady. Hat, cloth, or wig? These are her options. After she’s married, only Dov is supposed to see her hair.

Batya is holding forth on wigs made from human hair. “They’re beautiful,” she says dreamily. “My cousin Malka got one from France. It cost like two thousand dollars.” As an unmarried woman, Batya herself is still allowed to walk around uncovered. Hair, see, is erotic. Unmodest. Not tzniut.

“So you can cover your own hair with someone else’s, and that’s okay?” I ask. “That makes zero sense.” The axis of observance glares at me.

“It’s a loophole, sorta,” Ra-chel tells me apologetically. How on earth can she buy into this shit? Here she sits, daintily sipping her kosher champagne, the girl who was hospitalized freshman year of college after doing her own weight in Jell-o shots at a frat party.

“Well, it’s pretty fucking dumb.”

We sit in silence for a moment, shaking our heads, defining ourselves by what we’re not, the simplest thing to do. So definitive, so satisfying.

Batya changes the subject. “How’s the dress?”

Christ, the dress is huge. A real puff pastry. Up to her neck, down to the floor, hugging both wrists. Very modest indeed. Not quite what I’d pictured for her when we went through our Bride’s magazine phase the summer after sixth grade. I down another shot, dramatically tossing my head back and slamming the glass onto the table when I’ve emptied it.

“Good,” says Ra-chel. “Had my last fitting yesterday.” She winks at me, conciliatory. We’d spent the day together. First lunch at a kosher restaurant, then the fitting, then a matinee. I’d almost forgotten all about her transformation and impending marital imprisonment, I was so happy to be alone with her in that secular milieu. Though it was kind of uncomfortable when the movie, a supernatural romantic comedy, turned out to have a lot of sex in it. Rachel, back when she was still Rachel, was quite the whore. And I mean that as a compliment. Anyway, I kept glancing over at her out of the corner of my eye, wondering if it made her uncomfortable now, to have done all the stuff she did. And I would have asked her about it, but shit: There’s this opaque curtain that seems to have gone up between us, this unspeakable chasm between me and her, and I’m not at all entitled to her like I used to be.

The shots, meanwhile, are taking full effect. “Is this the little girl I carried?” I sling an arm around Ra-chel’s shoulder and force her to sway with me as I sing. “Is this the little girl at play?” She hates it when I reference Fiddler on the Roof, but honestly, it’s the closest I can get these days to understanding what the fuck is happening with her.

“Miri,” she says, wriggling out from under my arm and giggling despite herself, despite the curtain, then rolling her eyes for the benefit of the girls. But I’m still thinking about the wig thing, about Ra-chel covering up Rachel’s famous, gorgeous mane.

“Are you really going to wear a wig?” I ask softly.

“Miri.” She says my name with pity in her voice, like I’m so in the dark, so far behind. “My hair is only for my husband to see.” This stings, somehow. Another kind of club of which I am not a member.

“The thing is, okay, if your hair is so, like, dangerously enticing to the world, what’s different about a human hair wig that probably looks better than your own hair?” This must hit its mark with Leora, especially, whose scalp is visible beneath the lankest, mousiest excuse for a head of hair I’ve ever seen. “Hair that looks better than your own would be, like, even more erotic.” Do I imagine the girls squirming at the e word? Do I want them to squirm? I give my own hair a toss, feeling it fall across my neck, against the side of my face. I make bedroom eyes at Batya.

Somewhere above our heads, a vision of myself — in knee-highs and a red cape — dives down: avenger of religious absolutism. If only I could scoop Ra-chel up into my arms and carry her off into the parallel universe in which she is still Rachel, good old Rachel, where she would never in a million years wear a motherfucking wig, where we link arms and fly together through our postadolescence an unchanged unit, hair billowing behind us in the wind.

“I mean, have you guys thought about whose hair it is, anyhow?” The girls stare at the point where the wall and ceiling meet. “Fucking destitute cancer patients—”

“Miri,” says Ra-chel. “Come on.” She’s fairly used to my bullshit at this point and very magnanimously lets it roll off her back most of the time. Any day now I fully expect her to 86 me anyhow. My name is beginning to sound like a disease when she says it.

“Sorry,” I say, only slightly less sincere an offering than my Mazel tov or L’chaim. “It’s just weird.”

“You should try to be more respectful,” Batya tells me, chest all puffed out. I guess I missed the Wild Kingdom that illuminated fighting techniques of the Urban Fervently Religious.

“Go take a ritual bath,” I mutter, consumed with the effort it’s taking me not to cry.

“You act like you’re not Jewish,” says Chava. “It’s not some weird cult, you know.” Is there anything more condescending than being pitied for not having seen the light?

“Perhaps I should come along to a weekend retreat, hmmm? Learn a bit about my faith?” I realize as I say it that I am a child of divorce with one, two, three, four empty shot glasses in front of me: a perfect candidate for rebirth. Goddamm it, I hate when sarcasm bites itself in the ass. The thought silences me for a few seconds, and the triumvirate makes an instantaneous, unanimous decision to ignore me. They act this out by conversing among themselves in Hebrew, which, though I made it through six (count ’em, like rings around the stump of my psyche!) years in Sunday school, I can’t remotely understand.