Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

“No, I had a feeling you’d be here,” I said, pretending to be psychic. I had no feeling.

—

LATER, AT THE SHIVA, the aunts shoved sponge cake at the fake boyfriend.

“We have too much cake,” they said. “Eat it, eat it. There’s too much.”

They liked that he was a large man. They needed another man around, with their only brother now a box of ashes next to the stereo.

“What’s your name again?” Aunt Sharon clawed his shoulder. He tried to shrug it off, but she held her grip.

“Robert,” he conceded.

“Like Robert Redford.” Sharon smirked like she had figured us out, then offered the fake boyfriend a macaroon.

“Aunt Shar, I didn’t know you were a fan.”

“Oh, I had it bad. Your father used to tease me.”

Robert, unaccustomed to the chewy sweets, took a bite, then spit it into his napkin.

“We have fruit salad,” Sharon said. She pivoted and sped toward melon.

“I want to meet Harriet Tieman.” Robert blockaded my ear with his hand, whispered, “Not these amateurs.”

Where was Harriet Tieman? She was surrounded by people reading transliterations of the Mourner’s Kaddish. It was hard to see her in there, five foot nothing, holding a Xeroxed prayer.

I pushed through the throngs of fruit salad makers, fruit basket givers. One woman had brought a fruit platter inside an old Scrabble box, and everyone kept saying, “It’s not Scrabble! It’s not Scrabble!” Was fruit better?

“Ma, this is my friend Robert.”

He stood above her, tall and blond and mostly gay, her new husband’s fake boyfriend. My mother looked up, clutching a lone kiwi, Mourner’s Kaddished out.

“Mrs. Jacobs, so nice to finally meet you.” He shook her hand and tried to make the eye contact they’d taught him at the so-you-think-you-might-go-to-law-school orientation. She looked at his suit. It would have been too big on my father.

“Robert knows your maiden name, too,” I said. “He memorized it.”

“Very nice,” said my mother.

How would she respond if I told her he’d put it in me? That when it was in me the third time, and no longer hurt at all, I understood everything for a second? That it could go back to its life outside me — get blow jobs in Oaxaca, intern at the ACLU — but I’d never go back to not understanding?

This maybe wasn’t the right time.

“He’s thinking about law school,” I said.

“Don’t sue us,” said my mother.

Robert laughed like he was looking for a laugh. She tried to give him her kiwi. It wasn’t nice, just a way for her not to be holding that fuzzy thing anymore. She told him she’d never be happy again, then offered to let him borrow my father’s ties for interviews.

“Who will he give them back to?” I said.

“You.”

He laughed again, declined the ties, squeezed the kiwi. Harriet Tieman was a riot. Harriet Tieman needed to lie down.

“She hates me,” he said. He seemed excited.

I led him by his middle finger to one of the sofas in our living room. Now that the worst was over, everything had gotten festive. The house was snowy bright and swarming with people holding plastic cups, fizzy with ginger ale. The rabbi was in a corner by himself, eating a sandwich. The men had taken off their jackets, leaving a sun-warmed pile, and I nudged it over so Robert and I would have room to sit. I crossed my legs, then wrapped one ankle around the other calf. I wanted the rabbi to think Robert was my boyfriend.

“Where’s the booze?” asked my fake boyfriend, an undergrad who had been away from home just long enough to realize that everything can be made into a joke.

“Ask the rabbi,” I panned. I was also an undergrad. I had pokey nipples and there was no such thing as bisexual.

“Rabbi Irwin says we can’t get drunk,” said Robert, when he got back to our sofa. “It’s not the custom.”

“Irwin? I don’t think that’s his name.”

But I felt drunk. I shut my eyes, leaned into some jacket scratch, slid my fist through a silky sleeve.

“Hey Robby, do you want to watch a video from when I was a kid? Do you want to watch my bat mitzvah?”

“You know that I would pay money to see that, but my French section meets at the butt crack of dawn.”

“I can show you my dirty paperbacks,” I said. “I think some of them were just meant to be educational about puberty.”

“That sounds hot.”

Robert led himself out the front door. He got into his car, turned on the ignition, and, after waiting a few seconds for the engine to warm, backed out of my family’s driveway in one smooth motion, his face already frozen into the terrible mask he wore when he thought nobody was looking.

—

THEN EVERYONE WAS GONE. Susan dust-busted the crumbs. She shook the tablecloth. She wedged herself between sofa legs, sucked away remains. She said, “I’m cleaning up to help your mother.”

The big theme now was helping my mother. All the aunts were saying it.

“I’m staying until Wednesday to help your mother.”

“I’ll put coffee on to help your mother.”

“It’s good that you’re here to help your mother.”

Did reading on the couch count as helping?

Dr. Alan Jacobs loved to lie on couches and read and ignore his family sometimes. He loved to mop the floor vigorously and ask, “Could you please hang up the phone? I’m on call.” But the man could be gentle. Cooking was something he liked to do.

Someone had mashed cake into the carpet and Susan plowed into it. Her legs stuck out behind her, stiff shins in poofed jeans. At some point she had changed — clamped her skirt to a hanger, flogged her jacket with a lint brush. I avoided her with a book about nocturnal emissions at tennis camp. I didn’t want to watch her struggle with a suitcase zipper or sink-wash her underwear, all of the ways she kept staying.

“I wish you could stay longer, for your mother’s sake,” she bellowed over the buster. “But your father wouldn’t want you to miss too much class.”

“I’m not sure he cares anymore,” I said.

She frowned. Of course he still cared. A father is a father. She went deeper with the little vacuum, pushing her divorced torso into its vrooms, over the sofa cushions, near my legs, through the cracks. Had she ever considered a fake boyfriend? I glanced at the stereo, at the white box parked in front of it. It looked like another cake.

“Lift your feet,” she said.

—

I WATCHED the bat mitzvah video late that night, sans Robert. If he had been in my French class in junior high, the teacher would have pronounced his name “Roh-bear.” I had been, for no reason, “Rosalie.”

Bonjour, Rosalie. Comment allez-vous?

Mal. Très mal. Mon père est mort.

Oui? Quel dommage!

That’s all the French I could remember. Not the girl in the video. The girl in the video knew French, and, apparently, Hebrew. Enough Hebrew to bleat out a passage about cleansing your house of leprosy, after a leper has lived in your house. First, you scraped the afflicted stones. If that didn’t work, you had to take the whole house apart. My parents and I met with the rabbi the week before to discuss my passage — poof, he was a rebbe and I was a scholar, not a flat-chested, staticky-haired midget. We were in the Talmud. My parents, in their work clothes, didn’t seem to fit.

The rabbi stood behind a giant mahogany desk. He lit a pipe and explained that cleansing the house of disease was really a metaphor for cleansing the self of moral decay.

“That plague does sound pretty nasty,” said my father, with a wink to remind anyone watching that he may have been in temple, but he loved knowing religion was irrational. He had a beeper, a teenage daughter, a wife batting pipe smoke away from her own face.