I had, in the days following the clinic, been experiencing a constant hum of sorry underneath the waves of physical ache. And now here were these ineffectual, scripted wes, laid out in this machzor with our name and address stamped inside the front cover so I could conveniently exonerate myself via the universality of my sins. Not quite what I’d been looking for. It was a steady stream of sorry that no rote we was ever going to dam.
Next to me my father and mother were staring down at a machzor and off into space, respectively. There was a seemingly endless lot of standing and sitting then standing and sitting some more, and each time I had to delicately maneuver myself so as not to pass out from the scope of the ache and the vertigo of the sorry cadence rolling along underneath it.
I wasn’t sure where these sorrys were directed. At Peter? At Rainbow Lawn Chair? At the whatchamacallit, an ovulation-gone-wrong, my itty-bitty swamp thing? It had taken on mythic significance, my own personal golem, a partially formed magic sprouted bean, an unknowable implanted as if by some sort of sorcery within me. When I saw Peter around it seemed impossible that he had had an actual part in the creation of the bean, my golem, my teensy swamp thing. That it was, most likely, his bean, too. Peter, wearing a T-shirt that read “Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck,” high-fiving his new girlfriend on the steps in front of the administration building: It was his magic bean, too.
Could the bean forgive? Because according to the machzor (and why couldn’t this also have been John Travolta and Uma Thurman sitting in a retro diner, shooting the shit about Scripture?): “For transgressions between a human being and God, repentance on Yom Kippur brings atonement. For transgressions between one human being and another, Yom Kippur brings no atonement until the injured party is reconciled.”
Right-o:
Lexi, I’m sorry I somehow always seem to know less than you do when I’m supposed to be your guide, shining my big-sister light on the path before you.
Peter, I’m sorry that I mocked your ironic T-shirt collection and that I told my roommate about that thing you like me to do and that you’ll never have any clue about the existence and eradication of the bean.
Dad, I’m sorry I don’t shave my legs and that I wear jewelry in my face and that all around I’m probably not what you envisioned when you thought about having yourself a little girl.
Mom. Mom, I’m…actually, Mom, you are a really checked-out fucking bitch of a mother, and if you were nicer in any regard maybe your daughters wouldn’t have turned out to be, respectively, a filthy whore and a snotty anorectic head case. Okay, now: Mom, I’m sorry for having verbalized the above. Please forgive me!
Easy enough.
Magic bean, I’m sorry — well, here I choked on it. Here I fell back into sorrysorrysorry. The bean fell between the cracks — it was not God, so it did not automatically forgive me, and it was not a person, so it could not be asked. I was fucked in regard to the bean, and I knew it in a way even Rainbow Lawn Chair couldn’t have anticipated but would certainly have appreciated greatly.
You had to ask only three times. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. So why then were the sorries not stopping?
This was how I came to understand concretely that I would, most definitely, need to fast on this particular Yom Kippur.
It hadn’t even occurred to me until just then that I could fast, that I might want to fast, that fasting was exactly what I needed! Why, I couldn’t recall another instance wherein my needs and the dictates of my religious faith had coincided like this! It was totally the thing to do, and incidentally would add yet another dimension to what was shaping up now to be a pretty freaking awesome multidisciplinary term paper. Fasting was the only way. The bean was not God, and it was not a person.
And who knew more about fasting, not only about what it took to fast, what it felt like to really, really fast, but also about what fasting could do for you, where it could get you, how it could edify and fortify you and somehow empty you of everything at the same time?
I checked the two giant couches in the quaint and abandoned Bride’s Room, forever the go-to spot for everyone under the age of forty on the run from services, but Lexi was not among the Kol Nidre exiles lounging on either of them.
Ephraim, the rabbi’s son, however, was home from Wesleyan, playing gin with someone in the corner. Remember how I said I was 89 percent sure it had been Peter? Well. Ephraim, or E, as everyone called him (as much for his first initial as for his passionate relationship with Ecstasy) and I had had a sweet good-bye-and-good-luck-in-college bodily fluid exchange at the end of the summer.
“‘Man-DA,’” he said. “What is up? You cut your hair.”
I gave him a friendly hug and borrowed, at random, for lack of anything real I wanted to communicate, one of Peter’s lines: “Yeah, well, the Dude abides.”
“Totally,” he said.
At home I changed into blessed oversize flannel and jumbo pad number four and took a Vicodin left over from my father’s back surgery.
I knocked on Lexi’s door, the house as dark and quiet as if it were far underwater, as if someone in another dimension had pushed the mute button.
“What?” She was sitting up in bed, reading.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
She glared at me. “Fabulous.” I sat down on her bed. She looked pretty. Too thin, of course, but you couldn’t tell just yet that it was a really-too-thin kind of issue. At that point it just seemed as though she was just taking a typical crazy teenage girl thing one little step too far, emulating some fucked-up memoirs she’d read. I hated myself for not knowing what to say. An older sister is supposed to know things.
“You want a Vicodin?” I would hook her up. This would bond us.
“No,” she sneered. Painkillers were so last year, I guessed.
“I’m going to fast,” I said. “I’m fasting, I mean.”
She didn’t look up from her Vogue. “Awesome.”
“Got any tips?”
She paused and eyed me briefly. “What did you do to your hair?”
“I cut it.”
“Go away.”
I had no idea what I ever did to her. Truly, I didn’t. Why couldn’t we be friends? I had emulated some fucked-up memoirs in my day. If I had something to say, if I could help her somehow, if I had anything to give her, if I had some crystal meth maybe, then could we be friends?
“Lex, relax,” I whined. “I’m hungry.”
She raised an eyebrow and spoke impatiently. “It’s not that hard. You just have to not want it.” As soon as she said it I wasn’t sure she’d said it. She went back to her magazine. “You look better with long hair. Close my door.”
If I sat very still, which I did for a long time in front of the television after everyone had gone to sleep, I thought I could feel the evacuation of the bean, an emptying out, a slow, steady leak. I didn’t give up hope that Lexi might come downstairs, watch TV with me, share some of her secrets of starvation. I got up for a glass of water and gazed longingly at the contents of the fridge, a bag of dairy- and wheat-free cookies on the counter, the plump teakettle. An overwhelming desire for comfort from these things, as palpable as anything I could swallow, briefly wrestled ache to the mat.