“Don’t be a baby,” she said. “We’re going to the Ackermans’ as soon as this is over.”
We had missed Yizkor, the memorial service, in favor of our naps, and I closed my hand into a fist and knocked it against my chest once, softly, for just that offense.
“So I guess this must have been like your favorite holiday ever,” I said to Lexi while people swarmed around the buffet. I was waiting for an insult or dismissal, but she did the unthinkable and sat down on the couch next to me, tucked her legs up under her, laughed the smallest of laughs.
I was taking my own sweet time before picking up a plate and filling it with food. I needed another few minutes of hunger on my own terms. Not because it was mandated, but because it was over and I wasn’t ready, like when it stops raining and you see people still holding up their umbrellas for a while. Now that the buffet was laid out before me, I could fast endlessly. I didn’t need a bagel now; I could wait another minute. And then a minute after that, too. I could change my pad, I could take a nap, I could wait still longer.
On the Ackermans’ coffee table was an enormous calendar: What Does Our Baby Look Like Today? Alicia’s, bookmarked on day 209, looked pretty much like a baby, but I flipped the pages back to earlier, reptilian stages.
“Pretty freaky,” Lexi said, looking over my shoulder at day 53, “Looks like a lizard.”
My mother came over with a loaded plate, a napkin-wrapped set of plastic cutlery. She thrust it all at Lexi.
“Eat.”
Lexi took the plate and set it on her lap. Her head held high, she glanced down at the plate as if it were China: far away and fascinating.
“Eat it, Lexi. Don’t make an issue here.”
“Great,” Lexi said to the food. “Fucking great.”
My mother stuck out a hip and stood there.
“I’ll make sure she eats it,” I said authoritatively, looking up from the book. My mother thought about that for a second, wondering if she could trust me. Then she nodded and high-tailed it back to the buffet to load up her own plate.
We looked at the quiche and bagels and cream cheese and noodle kugel. A cluster of grapes. A piece of babka.
I had expected to inhale food from the buffet like oxygen, to ply myself with it, to fall back into it as though it were the deepest, thickest cushion net in the world, saving me from impact, to float away on the luxury liner of that buffet and live happily ever after. But now that it was here, now that it was time to eat, now that it was, in fact, okay to eat, food seemed not quite so miraculous. The plate in Lexi’s lap was, in actuality, a simple plate of greasy quiche, a waxy, dense bagel, over-sugared babka, chemical-dusted grapes. What lay behind Lexi’s fast, I briefly — and not for the first time — asked myself. Why was she not eating?
I scooted closer to my sister and slipped off my shoes, arranged myself cross-legged on top of another omnipresent jumbo pad, a corner of my thigh touching hers. On day one of What Does Our Baby Look Like Today? I saw something that looked not unlike the grape cluster.
Then I casually reached over, tore the bagel in two, dragged it through the cream cheese, and stuffed it into my mouth. I could no more have borne the bean at nineteen than I could have willed myself smaller feet or heightened athleticism. It simply wasn’t possible. There was, as they say, no way.
Lexi gaped at me, surprised as I was.
“Really?”
The quiche was salty, and I chased it with more bagel, more cream cheese, more bagel. When that was gone I ate the babka, and then I picked at the grapes, stopping only to locate my parents in the crowd, long enough to see that they were over by the buffet, devouring their own break fasts and talking to their friends, laughing. I chewed and swallowed and chewed Lexi’s food some more, a bottomless pit.
Lexi was amused and incredulous and relieved and probably a little disgusted, too. Her voice was full of wonder. “Thanks.”
I nodded like it was nothing and continued to pick at the grapes, one by one, until they were gone.
The ache wouldn’t budge, though. The ache couldn’t be assuaged. The cramps just marched on, my head heavy as a bag of sand. There was no big victory in having fasted even this long, I could plainly tell. I should have fasted indefinitely. I should be fasting still.
Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose
October 2004
Dear Philip,
You must be aware of the intimidation factor inherent in anyone’s writing to you, but I wonder if maybe the paradigm is similar to what happens when a stunning woman walks into a room: No one approaches her, she’s simply too beautiful; everyone assumes they have no shot. Maybe you don’t get many letters. Maybe you haven’t received a truly balls-out, bare-assed communiqué since 1959.
You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it? The book was The Counterlife, but I had yet to read it when I presented it to you for signature. You were unsure of the spelling of my name, and so there’s an endearing awkwardness, a lack of flow, to the inscription. For E, you wrote, and the pen held still too long on the page, leaving a mark at the point of the lowest horizontal’s completion while you waited for me to continue spelling. L, you continued on, and then, again, a spot of bleeding, hesitant ink before the i and the s and the a, which proceed as they should before your slanted, rote, wonderful autograph. I remember being all too aware of the impatient line behind me, people clutching their copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, The Human Stain, the odd Zuckerman Unbound. I tried to meet your eye, I tried to communicate something meaningful. The others, of course, didn’t get it. I wanted you to know: I got it. Later, when I found my way to reading the book, I actually purchased a whole new copy so I wouldn’t sully my signed paperback. I cherish our moment of eye contact, your pen hovering over the title page, my name circulating in that colossal mind of yours.
But wait. This is no mere fan letter; no mere exercise in soft-core intellectual erotica constructed for your amusement. I have an objective. How old are you now, Philip? Early seventies, is it? You are, of course, notoriously private. I have the books, sure, like everyone else. And the reviews of the books, each of which mentions the notorious privacy. And there’s the Claire Bloom debacle, which I hesitate even to mention, given its complete disrespect of the notorious privacy (though you might be happy to know that I couldn’t find Leaving a Doll’s House in any of the four sizable bookstores I checked and had finally to order it on Amazon). And The Facts, which I made a point of reading after the Claire Bloom, for balance. A graduate-school friend of mine was your research assistant for a few years while we pursued our MFAs, and it took her almost a year of postworkshop drinking to confess slyly, to a rapt audience of salivating young writers, her association with you. (Otherwise, she was loyal; she professed total ignorance of your life, your private matters, even your address. She seemed, in retrospect, somewhat terrified of you. I half seriously offered her boyfriend a blow job if he’d get me your address. The table of young writers giggled madly and took big sips of beer.)
Yeah, so I’m a writer. Aspiring writer. And, could you have guessed…? I write fiction about Jews. Jews! Imagine that. When I queried agents I categorized myself thus: “A lobotomized Philip Roth writing chick lit.” They liked that. I had a lot of offers of representation. I’m almost done with my debut collection, which has yet to find a publisher. And as for the inevitable debut novel, well. That’s a bit of an issue. I had an idea, see. I spent almost a year fleshing it out, taking notes, outlining, writing scenes. It was going to be so fucking great, Philip; my God was it going to be great! It was a good idea for a novel, a truly good idea, literally stumbled upon and embraced immediately as worthy of however many years of toil it might take me, after half a dozen years crafting clever little ten-pagers featuring women sitting shiva for relatives who had molested them, women sucking their first uncircumcised cock (then going out for bacon cheeseburgers, natch!), women feeling left out and misunderstood at Jewish sleep-away camp, to write a novel. A Great American Jewish Novel.