“You were late,” Dana says playfully to Alex, looking over his shoulder at the crowd still to be received.
Dorit leans over. “Yeah, Uncle Al — you guys showed up like halfway to the end, I saw you!”
“Gertie had an issue,” Erin chimes in, to the interest of no one.
“I know,” Alex says. “I know. I’m so sorry, Reetie. But we were just in time for your speech! You did such a great job. All that stuff about Abraham treating those strangers as well as he would treat God himself? Good stuff!” He insinuates himself into the receiving line and slings an arm around her. Dorit looks like she’s about to have an aneurysm, resting her pink-pillboxed head against Alex’s chest. Erin wanders away, stands off by herself. An ugly finger painting by little Dorit had adorned Alex’s bachelor-pad fridge when he and Erin first met; she remembers thinking it was “adorable” and “a good sign” that he was so beloved an uncle. He’d tell Erin elaborate stories about his time with his niece—“And so I told her that God made rainbows but he also made bunnies who had to stop living sometimes, which seemed to really sink in, you know, because I want her to understand that life and death are two sides of the same coin, really, and I think she got it”—designed to showcase his highly developed, compassionate Way With Kids. Among Erin’s coterie of husband-hunting girlfriends, this was a badge that ranked only slightly below Medical Degree or Paid Mortgage.
“Mommy! Mom-meeee! Mom! Me!” Gertie is atop the slide, a giant, flapping her arms gleefully like wings, her hands limp at the wrists. “Mommy!” You are my mother, she is saying. You! Are! My! Mother! like an accusation. “Mommy!” People turn, grinning, to look at her, then at Erin. It’s embarrassing, really. An unspeakably intimate, filthy relationship for all to see and think they understand. Erin wants to squirrel Gertie away, tuck her back into the womb where she’d again be a secret, aging in reverse peacefully right out of existence.
“What a shtarker,” Nadiv booms with a wink. Erin takes this the wrong way, an implication that Gertie’ll be a big fat dyke, someone Nadiv himself wouldn’t want to fuck, wouldn’t want as his trophy wife, a woman who won’t engender the empowering sexual desperation necessary for the purchase of a house with an eight-tone doorbell. Which is simultaneously a compliment and, Erin thinks, given the world we live in, not.
“She’s a terrible mother,” Alex said in therapy the week before (or was it the week before that?), itemizing Erin’s swearing, a stony if efficient response to a door-slammed finger, her (failed!) attempts to initiate sex while Gertie whimpered over the babycom.
Don’t talk about me in the third person, she wanted to say. “My mother recently died,” Erin had explained.
“That’s not a Get Out of Jail Free card,” Alex erupted. “She thinks that’s a Get Out of Jail Free card! Her mother’s been dying for years!” The therapist — her name is, no joke, Good-kiss — had had no clue what to say. She’s a bad therapist, truly, but they’ve been seeing her for more than a year; the thought of starting over with someone new is exhausting and pointless. Which, actually, sums up pretty neatly Erin’s reasons for having gotten married in the first place. Goodkiss just nodded, nodded, looked back and forth at them, nodded some more.
And Erin probably is a terrible mother. This is not to say that she doesn’t love Gertie; that’s hardwired — can’t help loving the little munchkin. But there is the feeling, the guilty, shameful, secret feeling, that she’s stuck with her, that she would give her back in a heartbeat if she could, or at least leave her permanently in the care of someone else; someone competent and capable and trustworthy. Lately Erin is seized almost daily with the urge to live out of a van. In Texas, or Nashville, New Mexico; somewhere earthy and warm, somewhere unexpected. She wants to become a massage therapist, live in a converted barn, become a vegetarian, try sleeping with women, learn the acoustic guitar and start a band called Sarah Laughs or Everything But the Torah.
One of Dorit’s contemporaries bounds up. “Omigod,” she says. “Your little girl is so cute!” She’s lanky and pretty and wearing too much lip liner.
“I know,” says a second, an ill-fitting push-up bra cutting her breast buds diagonally in half. “What a cutie!” Newly pubescent girls always do this: one-up their not-so-distant playing of house by fetishizing real live small children.
“What’s her name?” The first.
“Gertie.”
“I love little kids with old-lady names! Hi, cutie!” she calls at the bottom of the slide, holding out her arms to Gertie, who eyes her suspiciously, chubby hands holding the railing tight.
The rabbi, holding a plastic cup of sweet wine and about five cookies stacked in his palm, comes over smiling. “Very cute little girl.”
“Thanks,” Erin says.
“How old?” He swallows a cookie practically whole.
“Sixteen months. Eighteen months. Sorry.”
He chortles (indeed, with another whole cookie in his mouth; chortles). “Easy to lose track, huh?” Over in the receiving line Dana is Mwah, mwah, mwah-ing away, Dorit repeating “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”, Nadiv lapsing into fast, loud Hebrew chatter with his relatives.
“Yeah,” Erin replies, meaning it. She leans in. “I’m — was wondering,” she says, impossibly meek and not wanting anyone to overhear. “Can you tell me what the Torah portion for the beginning of February would be? Or some portions from around then?”
“Oh,” the rabbi says, third cookie inserted whole into the hole. “Well.” This sounds like Wow, because of the cookie. She’s holding her breath, she realizes, and slowly exhales, small increments of air, one at a time. “The Hebrew calendar doesn’t work that way, you know; it doesn’t correspond with the English calendar that way.”
“Shit,” she says, letting all the remaining air escape at once.
The rabbi laughs, jolly bastard. “What exactly do you want to know? I mean, what do you need to know?” He shoves another cookie into his face.
She looks over his shoulder, past his ear, which is sprouting little black hairs all along its rim. Alex is swinging Gertie in circles now, by her ankles, showing off for the girls. She’ll puke, Erin thinks, or at the very least get all riled up and be impossible to put down for her nap. So be it, though: She will not play bad cop here, not in front of the rabbi and Dana and the Cool Kids, not on your life. Is this what makes her a bad mother? The willingness to let her munchkin throw up so she can win a probably half-invented power struggle with her fucking prick of a husband? Well, this is what happened when things deteriorated thusly. This would be the least of Gertie’s suffering the consequences of Erin’s idiotic choices. The rabbi is giving her that nice-rabbi look, that patient, rotund, hirsute learned-guy look.
“I guess it was like nineteen eighty-four…,” she trails off. Gertie is laughing hysterically, the kind of laughter that will, in about fifteen seconds, turn to sobs.
“Nineteen eighty-four?”
“My bat mitzvah,” she tells him. And then — it feels kind of good to lay this down for him—“I forgot my parsha. I don’t know what my parsha was.”
“Ah,” he says, fifth and final cookie disappearing into the hole. Is there a trace of disapproval there? There might be. There should be, she feels. But the rabbi just munches on his cookie, sanguine, nods.
“And,” she adds, inexplicably, “my mother died last year.”
Sure enough there comes at that moment an earth-shattering wail from Gertie. Erin, exhilarated, darts over and snatches her up, away from Alex, cradling her, whispering, “Shhhh” and “S’okay, little munchkin,” smiling beatifically at concerned onlookers.