Harris opened his messenger bag, removed a bottle of Coke. “You look ravishing.” He took a swig. “Not a winner,” he sighed, glancing at the underside of the cap.
“Fuck, Harris, I don’t think Coke is kosher for Passover.” But neither was she at the moment, with yeast multiplying exponentially in her crotch, maybe enough by now to bake a loaf or two of forbidden bread. Though she was half afraid to explain this particular aspect of the ailment, unsure she wouldn’t be sold out by gung-ho Harris and then hunted down with candle and feather by Marilyn, ejected immediately and unceremoniously from the house: revealed to be very, very unkosher for Passover.
He froze, mid sip, looked left and right. “Um. What do we do?”
“Just give it to me. Here.” She screwed the top back on and then put the bottle in the cabinet below the sink in her bathroom, with crusted hair defrizz and twelve-year-old sunblock.
“I’m sorry! Should I, like, shower or something?” He seemed to really want to be part of this thing, this random set of rules with no connection to him whatsoever.
“I think you’re okay, babe.”
“Or brush my teeth?”
“Harris. No one has to know. It’s fine. We’ll just keep this between us.”
“But I’ll know.”
She held her hand up in front of his face and waved it around a couple of times. “There, now I’ve absolved you. That’s how it works. You’re clean.” She crossed herself, did some half-recalled sign language from when that deaf lady with the perm guest-starred on Sesame Street, and flipped him the bird.
“I love you,” he said. They stretched out on her old trundle bed with white aluminum curlicue frame. He was huge, a bear. He enveloped her entirely, radiating warmth like clothes fresh from the dryer.
“Don’t,” she told him when he slid his hand from between her knees up under the skirt. “Problem in my pants.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “I forgot. Sorry. Me too.” He amiably directed her hand to his hard-on.
They lay there together, breathing slowly, listening to the doorbell ring and to Ron shouting “Elijah” and to Marilyn speciously chirping, “Hel-lo! Come in!” After a few minutes, Joanna untangled herself halfway to grab a felt-tip pen and illustrate Ron’s place cards. When she was satisfied with her appropriation and representations of blood (Aunt Barbi), frogs (Stacey), vermin (Kevin), wild beasts (Uncle Larry), pestilence (Jason), boils (Aunt Jackie), hail (Bob), locusts (Uncle Steve), darkness (Ron), and slaying of the firstborn (Marilyn), she reconstituted herself into Harris’s embrace and softly gnawed his thumb pad. There weren’t enough plagues to go around, and since Harris was a newbie and she herself was currently afflicted with one even the fucking Egyptians had been spared, Joanna had just drawn little fat balloon hearts on Harris’s place card and a little personified grinning sun on her own.
“Ready to face the enemy?”
He scowled. “My ancestors could’ve blood-libeled yours into oblivion.”
“Let’s go,” she said, opening her bedroom door. “We’re gonna get totally shit-faced on Manischewitz. It’s, like, mandated.”
Harris followed her down the stairs and into the living room.
“Here she is…,” boomed Ron, the opening of “Miss America.”
And there they all were, sitting or leaning on the beige L-shaped sofa: the sum total of Joanna’s familial relations. Marilyn was an only child, so that line dead-ended with Joanna. Ron’s three siblings, Barbi, Steve, and Jackie, were, respectively: a type-A bitch on wheels, a sociopathic loner, and a chronically ill codependent. And the next generation? Kevin and Jason, MIT grads who always referred to Joanna’s forte as “arts and crafts” and pretended to forget the name of the state school she’d attended; and Stacey, a developmentally disabled mama’s girl, living at home, thrilled to death at thirty-five with the possibility of getting licensed to do nails. Ten pairs of eyes fixed on Harris.
“Hi,” he said, like a champ, with a doleful wave it would be impossible not to love, Joanna thought.
“This is Harris,” she said. Everyone nodded politely and took note of Harris, the goy. For shame. And Joanna an only child. And Marilyn an only child. The Jewish people would die out, and whose fault was it? She handed the place cards (“plague cards,” he called them) off to Ron.
Harris didn’t quite get that upon meeting Joanna’s family he would indeed be defined solely by what he was not. He also didn’t get what so depressed Joanna about this gathering, this particular grouping of people. “As if their meager numbers weren’t sad enough…,” she’d explained. “It’s terrible. They’re all such losers, and there are so few of them.”
“This is Joanna’s friend, Harris,” Marilyn said, redundant, and then the whole room finally jumped to life with hello, how nice to finally, welcome, hey there. Kevin and Jason, smirking, caught Joanna’s eye from across the room and shook their heads unhurriedly, side to side, implied tongues clicking.
Joanna had to summon up every iota of social fear and control in her being to keep from reaching down the waist of her skirt and scratching, scratching, scratching some more. She plopped loudly and ungracefully down on the couch, hoping contact would alleviate some of the distress.
Dr. Brooks, her pediatrician, had once stuck a finger all the way up inside her during a routine checkup when she was, who knows, maybe nine.
“Don’t ever let anyone do that to you,” he’d said to her after a brief moment, making her look him in the eyes. “If anyone ever tries to do that to you, you don’t let them. You tell a grownup. Understand?” He kept staring at her, insistent, until she nodded, finally, slowly, mortified. But, she thought later, in the car with Marilyn, confused and still — still! — absolutely mortified, his words ringing in her ears and the feeling of his huge cold finger lingering, he had done it to her. Did that count or didn’t it?
She had sunk into the passenger seat next to her mother that day, blistering shame, positive that there was something different, something noticeable about her that would bring on castigation and exile. She was shocked (and lonely, oddly, a new feeling that threw a net over her and dragged her away from the girl she thought she was) when Marilyn had seemed not to notice a thing, and had only suggested blithely that they go get an ice cream cone.
Aunt Jackie came over and laid a loud smooch on Joanna’s cheek.
“Hey, Aunt Jackie.”
“He seems nice.”
“He is.”
An old painting of Joanna’s hung above them, a Chagall rip-off from grad school.
“Still painting, sweetheart?”
“Not really. Sometimes.”
“That’s a shame. You were so talented.”
“I’m still talented,” Joanna said. “Just not actively.”
“Candles!” Marilyn called. “Ladies.” Joanna and Jackie joined Barbi and Stacey by the buffet and they lit the candles. Jackie sang the blessing in a high-pitched vibrato, doing her best Joni Mitchell on the transliteration Marilyn gave her.
At the table everyone found their place cards and stood behind their chairs awaiting instruction. Joanna’s mismatched setting (so yellow, so overtaken by daisies a shade of pink last seen in the era of punk, so loud and unseemly) languished amid the stately, banded Grandma Bess’s, set her incontrovertibly apart. The travesty of the broken plate and its larger implications of wholeness defiled within the twelve-set dreams of her late grandmother, was further implicated in the raw and extraordinarily uncomfortable state of her genitalia. The maternal line, the whole fertility arena, the way, when Joanna clamped her thighs together, desperate for some friction, everyone else’s red poppies swam together like healthy Georgia O’Keeffe twats in miniature.