Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,27

and quickly commenced a parade of them, dipping and crunching and dipping again. I didn’t remember them being so delicious. Then Miriam walked in. I licked my fingers quickly and waved.

She was twenty minutes late. But she seemed completely unconcerned with time as she walked languidly toward me, opulently corpulent in a floral yellow robe-dress with kimono sleeves, a smile on her pale face.

She really exists, I thought, as though up until this point I’d thought the yogurt shop were an alternate reality, which vanished along with everything in it when I left.

“This is kind of funny,” I said when she sat down beside me.

“What?” she asked.

“This,” I said, motioning to her, then to me.

“Have you looked at the menu yet?” she asked, ignoring my assessment of the situation.

“No,” I lied.

I was afraid to let her know that I had been anticipating our time together. But she seemed to find nothing awkward about the situation, because she said, in a cheerful voice, “Well, in that case, let me order for both of us.”

She snapped her fingers at the bartender in a commanding way. This seemed like an odd thing for someone who worked in the service industry to do. People must have been doing that to her all day.

“Two Scorpion Bowls,” she said.

The drinks were brought to us in giant green ceramic bowls shaped like half watermelons, filled to the brim with maraschino cherries, pineapples, chunks of orange. The calorie count in one bowl alone was probably more than I allowed myself in two days.

“Try it,” said Miriam, smiling.

I put the pink straw to my lips and sipped. It was exquisite, like drinking a neon airbrushed rendering of a fruit punch island. It was its own tropical cosmos complete with coconuts, sea, and sunset. The drink warmed my chest and stomach immediately. Suddenly, I was way more at ease.

“Well, Aloha,” I said.

She laughed. “Stick with me.”

“Gonna fuck me up.”

“That’s a blessing.”

“I do feel chosen,” I said, taking more sips.

“What kind of Jew are you again?”

“I was Reform,” I said. “But now I’m sort of nothing.”

“Do you like being nothing?” she asked.

“It’s not a question of like. I didn’t feel—connected to Judaism spiritually.”

“That’s funny,” she said. “I never thought about feeling it. Maybe because I’ve always felt it. You do believe in god, though, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

This was getting kind of heavy for a first date or whatever we were doing. I swigged the drink.

“You don’t?” she asked.

“I mean, how can I know? God isn’t, like, texting me Hi or anything.”

“What do you think all this is?” she laughed, pointing to the lights and the dragons and the mirrors and the lanterns and the other diners and her and me.

I was silent.

“It’s god,” she said, as though it were obvious.

“Is this god?” I asked, pointing to the Scorpion Bowl.

“Oh, definitely.” She giggled. “That’s maybe the most holy of all. Half of my family are lushes.”

“Really?”

“No. But everybody loves to drink. People come over on Shabbat and hang out, and we all have too much. Happens every Friday. You should come. You’d really like it.”

Why was she so certain about everything?

“Do you live with your family?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. “Don’t you miss yours so far away?”

“Definitely not,” I said casually, as though that were true.

“Oh,” she said softly.

I examined the shapes and shades of her face, studying her. Each feature was its own inhabitable world. Her hair was the color of cream soda, or papyrus scrolls streaked with night light. Her eyebrows were the color of lions, lazy ones, dozing in sunlight or eating butter at night with their paws by lantern. Her eyes: icebergs for shipwrecking. Lashes: smoke and platinum. Her skin was the Virgin Mary, also very baby. Her nose: adorable, breathing. Upper lip: pink peony. Lower lip: rose. The teeth were trickier, but her inner mouth was easy—Valentine hearts and hell.

I reached into my purse and got the lipstick I had bought for her. I wanted to bring that inner mouth out, make everything red.

“I got you something,” I said, handing it to her.

The lipstick was in a little bag with some tissue paper.

“Oh, how nice,” she said, the way a stuffy old tourist lady might say when coming upon a scenic hayfield.

This was getting weirder by the minute. I took another sip of my drink and watched her lick her lower lip as she opened the package. Her papyrus hair shone in the