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.
“Hey,” I say. “Hey, you guys.” They look at me. “Have you guys heard about Weird Al Yankovic?” Blank stares all around. “You know, Weird Al? Weird Al! Remember him?”
“Yeah,” Batya says, finally, grudgingly. I feel triumphant for some reason, elated to have evidence that we all come from the same place: watching television in our pajamas in the early eighties. “What about him?”
“Yeah,” I say. “So Weird Al has been kind of off the radar for a while now, hasn’t he?” They don’t trust me. “He has! He has! So, you know why he’s been off the radar lately?” Nothing. “Seriously, do you know why?”
“No, Miri,” Batya says finally, deadpan. “Why has Weird Al been off the radar?”
“Because.” I pause. “Because…” I give them the old eyeball sweep. “Drumroll…He’s ba’al tshuva! I’m serious! He lives in the West Bank and he’s got like eight kids and he studies Torah all day long!” I turn to Ra-chel. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that.” The truth is I have no idea why Weird Al’s career is in the toilet. This just struck me suddenly as a totally believable and timely urban legend to start.
“Is that true?” Chava asks the others. They shrug but look intrigued.
I grab a massively shell-titted waitress passing by. “What can I have that’s nice and fruity and frothy and girly?” This is, lest we forget, a bachelorette party.
She thinks hard for a moment. “A Cool Breeze…?”
I make eye contact with Batya and pretend to contemplate deeply before turning back to the waitress. “Does it have pork in it?”
“Um, I don’t think so,” she says, looking around for someone with seniority.
“Fabulous,” I say. “Bring me one of those!”
The woman of the hour, meanwhile, looks miserable. I offer a small smile, fluff her veil. Her hair is long, thick, and bouncy as a shampoo commercial. She used to do disgusting things to it: mayonnaise, beer, raw eggs. And suddenly I can see what they mean about modesty or whatever, because I can hardly stand the sight of her familiar, beseeching face framed by that proliferate hair.
I grab her by the shoulders and lay a hard, loud smooch against her cheek.
She rolls her eyes and giggles. “You’re wasted.”
I forget for a second that I am, in fact, intoxicated, and take her statement to mean: I am a wasted soul, a free-floating neshama, an areligious husk of no use to my people.
“Yup.” I am, I suppose, wasted. I stand up slowly when the waitress comes back with my drink. “Where is the restroom, por favor?” She points to the back corner of the room and I curtsy, offer the girls a salute.
The room is fluid as I make my way toward the Ladies, like walking on a waterbed. Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers, something something something.
Peeing is cathartic, a relief, and when I’m done I feel calmed, heightened, a clarity of consciousness that comes close to revelation but doesn’t quite touch it. A-ha! Urination-as-religion. I sit directly on the toilet seat (a confirmation, if one was lacking, of my inebriation), relishing my empty bladder, the disgusting bar bathroom smells, the graffiti on the walls. Some people have these feelings of utter aliveness when they’ve reached the summit of a mountain, given birth, found religion, but they’ve got nothing on the first, overdue pee of a long, alcohol-fueled evening. I consider this as I peruse the chaos of “Ally is an a-hole,” “I like cocks,” “Eat me,” “Love is the answer!” Close to the back wall is one in small capital letters, in a straight, un-bar-bathroom-like line: NO JESUS, NO PEACE, KNOW JESUS, KNOW PEACE. How would it feel to embrace this statement wholly? Could I walk back out into the bar a believer?
I try and I try, but the longer I stare at the words, willing them to make some sort of a dent, the less sense they make. After a while the lines and curves of the letters look completely foreign, and there’s some chick banging on the door, asking did I fall in.
I linger, though, thinking about the time in elementary school when Rachel conspired to have me catch her chicken pox so we could stay home, watching TV and lounging in oatmeal baths together. She breathed in my face, licked my utensils, pressed her red-flecked arms against me, kissed me on the lips. But it didn’t work; I turned out to be immune or something and had to go to school without her for a week that felt like a month.
In the salon, I decide to take a new tack, reframe things: this is like some sort of a reality makeover show, and we’re its stars. I intone voice-over in my head: Watch Rachel Hassek become Ra-chel! Watch her prepare for a new life in which she fulfills the Covenant and learns to be true to her heritage! This is all postmodern fun and games, damn it. God damn it. When we’re done playing out this nutty scenario we’ll go back to being ourselves.
“Rachel?” A guy with a nipple ring poking through his black mesh muscle tee.
“Ra-chel,” she says to him, nodding, before standing up. He could give a shit about her newfound pronunciation, but I figure she’s got to be insistent for her own sake. When you adopt a radical identity change, it’s not just other people you have to remind, right? I gather up our bags and a few magazines from the rack and we follow him through the salon to the last in a row of swivel chairs in front of back-lit mirrors.
“Nikki will be with you shortly.” The guy pivots theatrically and walks away.