On the way home Gertie snores softly in the back, green dress rumpled, face covered with crumbs and chocolate from the remnants of a cookie she’s still holding. The car has gotten extremely hot in the parking-lot sun, and Erin enjoys watching Alex sweat, enjoys watching him desperately futz with the AC.
“The rabbi said that there’s tons of info about parshas on the Web,” Erin says. “I gotta go online and figure out what mine was.”
“Mmmm,” Alex says after a second.
“It’s just so weird that that memory’s just gone, you know? Where did it go, you know?” She hates reaching out to him like this, but he’s who’s here.
“Mine was Toldot.”
There is no getting around, at moments like this, the enormity of the deadness between them.
“I know.” She looks out the window, watches as they pass a restaurant they’d eaten at once a few years ago and then never again. “What was Toldot about, anyway?”
Alex has both hands on the wheel, at ten o’clock and two o’clock, like they teach in drivers’ ed. “Jacob and Esau,” he says. His ever-expanding forehead is beaded grotesquely with sweat.
“No, I know,” Erin says, attempting a playful slap on his arm. It’s less playful than she intends. “But, really, I mean. What’s it about? Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
“So?”
“Jacob and Esau!”
“But what about Jacob and Esau?” she asks. He puts his hand over the vent, tries to turn to the AC knob higher than high. She starts to laugh. “You have no idea, do you? You dick.” She should refrain from name-calling; it’ll only get stockpiled in Alex’s arsenal of therapy ammunition, only get hauled out for Goodkiss on Wednesday, but it’s utterly worth it to her right now. The word, filling her mouth like a blunt object: dick. She laughs hard, from the gut. Wonderful, extended laughter.
“Leave me alone, Erin.”
After careful deliberation Erin chooses a black jersey wraparound dress with three-quarter sleeves for the party. She’d worn it last to Sheila’s funeral, and it still had, if she looked closely, pinholes from the small swatch of torn fabric they’d safety-pinned on to distinguish her as a mourner. She wishes she still had that ripped fabric, she wishes she could keep it pinned on, pass it off as nouveau fashion.
The dress deliberation is mostly an invented exercise; she has no other remotely appropriate party clothes that fit. Once upon a time she’d been a size eight; now, on the best of days, she’s a twelve. She runs her hands over other dresses, old dresses, dresses she had worked once upon a time, but Jesus, what a baby did to the body! It was undoable. You had to be lithe and taut to live with another chick in a converted barn, waitressing between band practices, didn’t you? You had to look cool not wearing a bra and not caring that you so happened to look hot. She is ineligible, now, she knows, for all of it. No matter, though; she’ll wear her push-up bra and look somewhat okay at least from the waist up. The waist down is another matter entirely, and one she can do nothing about. The light would be soft and there’d be no Gertie and maybe she’d have a drink or two, maybe she’d dance.
Both Alex and Gertie are fast asleep, she in her crib and he on the couch in front of the TV, both drooling. Erin goes online, searches for “Torah Portion,” and gets dozens upon dozens of sites. She starts with Chabad.org. This week’s portion, it says, is Vayeira. She scrolls through an alphabetized list of every portion in the Torah, scanning them indiscriminately. They look a little familiar, all of them. From her own year of bar/bat mitzvahs all those years ago? From the well of some sort of collective unconscious? Parsha in a Nutshell is offered, then Parsha in Depth. Commentary. Last week was Lech Lecha. Next week it’s Chayei Sarah, and then, what do you know? Toldot. She clicks on Parsha in a Nutshell. Jacob and Esau, indeed. Fighting in Rebecca’s womb for dominance, born into the world at odds. That striking image of wee Jacob gripping Esau’s heel as he follows his brother out of the womb. Bookish Jacob’s deception of old, blind Isaac while his strapping brother, Esau, is out hunting; two nations at odds evermore. It was true about the way people got set in their resentment and fury. Those things never go away, do they? They should make a movie out of this, Erin thinks; narratively it sure don’t get much better.
She looks at a couple more (Vayikra, Bamidbar, Shoftim—why do they all sound somewhat familiar?) but gets restless pretty quickly. So after furtively getting up and shutting the door against her dozing family, she goes directly to teamgangbang.com, her porno site of choice. A relief to escape from the long list of familiar/foreign Torah portions. Alex’s interest in sex had waned for a long time before dropping off completely to coincide with Gertie’s arrival, and looking back, Erin can see that, of course, the teamgangbang.com began in direct response to the waning. Strange, she thinks, how long it can take for these things, these facts about one’s own life, to take shape and assume a sensible form, incontrivable fact. For a good while, teamgangbang seemed an innocent enough (well, not in and of itself, obviously) substitute. It’s all clear only from this vantage point: her willful blindness in marrying Alex, in settling for someone who doesn’t love her, whom she doesn’t love, her pigheadedness in proceeding, then, to get pregnant, to have the baby. To have the baby before her mother bit it, to have the baby so she wouldn’t be so completely alone in the world. What vacuums these things were designed to fill. And how clear it all is to her now, only now, that they, the things, haven’t succeeded whatsoever in doing so. On the computer screen, with the sound turned off, three gigantic black men pummel away at a bleached blond with two oversized nipple rings and five o’clock shadow pubic hair.
Erin thinks about cute Zac, the boy who’d top her “to do” list were she to be magically transported backward, back into herself as a young bat mitzvah debutante. She crosses her legs, rotates hips in desk chair, wonders if Dorit’s friends are having sex yet. Erin certainly hadn’t been — the dictum over the majority of her pubescence had been “everything but.” Nothing else, nothing “but,” was supposed to have counted.
Sarah arrives promptly at 6:45. Comes into the bathroom where Erin is almost finished applying makeup, perches on the counter. It’s amazing, Erin thinks to herself, blowing on the blush brush, that she remembers how to do this.
Sarah grins. “What up, Erin?”
“Call me Mrs. Abrahms,” Erin scowls, playing.
“Can I call you Ms. Abrahms?”
“Certainly not.”
“Harrumph,” says Sarah, inspecting an eye shadow as old as she is.
“Hey, Sarah, do you by any chance remember what your Torah portion was?” Erin flips her head over, gives her hair a few sprays, flips back up, looks like a disco queen. She hasn’t gotten done up in forever, and the feeling is pretty nice. She once took this feeling for granted. Unbelievable.
“What, like, at my bat mitzvah?” Sarah is trying to dread her hair, which is blond and curly, but not quite kinky enough, so that a few months into the process it’s still just a huge, smelly knot. Erin could not love her more.